Here’s the bottom line: You already know all that you need to succeed. You don’t need to learn anything more. If all we needed was more information, everyone with an Internet connection would live in a mansion, have abs of steel, and be blissfully happy. New or more information is not what you need—a new plan of action is. It’s time to create new behaviors and habits that are oriented away from sabotage and toward success. It’s that simple.

“It doesn’t matter how smart you are or aren’t, you need to make up in hard work what you lack in experience, skill, intelligence, or innate ability.”

 

The most challenging aspect of the Compound Effect is that we have to keep working away for a while, consistently and efficiently, before we can begin to see the payoff.

 

 

The Compound Effect is always working. You can choose to make it work for you, or you can ignore it and experience the negative effects of this powerful principal. It doesn’t matter where you are on this graph. Starting today, you can decide to make simple, positive changes and allow the Compound Effect to take you where you want to go.

 

Write out the half-dozen small, seemingly inconsequential steps you can take every day that can take your life in a completely new and positive direction.

 

Write down the small, seemingly inconsequential actions you can stop doing that might be compounding your results downward.

You make your choices, and then your choices make you. Every decision, no matter how slight, alters the trajectory of your life.

 

It’s the little things that inevitably and predictably derail your success. Whether they’re bone-headed maneuvers, no-biggie behaviors, or are disguised as positive choices (those are especially insidious), these seemingly insignificant decisions can completely throw you off course because you’re not mindful of them.

 

One Thanksgiving, I decided to keep a Thanks Giving journal for my wife. Every day for an entire year I logged at least one thing I appreciated about her—the way she interacted with her friends, how she cared for our dogs, the fresh bed she prepared, a significant meal she whipped up, or the beautiful way she styled her hair that day—whatever. I looked for the things my wife was doing that touched me, or revealed attributes, characteristics, or qualities I appreciated.

 

We are self-made men and women, but only the successful take credit for it.

 

You alone are responsible for what you do, don’t do, or how you respond to what’s done to you. The empowering mindset revolutionized my life. Luck, circumstances, or the right situation wasn’t what mattered. If it was to be, it was up to me. I was free to fly. No matter who was elected president, how badly the economy tanked, or what anybody said, did, or didn’t do, I was still 100 percent in control of me. Through choosing to be officially liberated from past, present, and future victimhood, I’d hit the jackpot. I had the unlimited power to control my destiny.

 

The (Complete) Formula For Getting Lucky

Preparation (personal growth) +

Attitude (belief/mindset) +

Opportunity (a good thing coming your way) +

Action (doing something about it) =

Luck

 

“What’s simple to do is also simple not to do.” The magic is not in the complexity of the task; the magic is in the doing of simple things repeatedly and long enough to ignite the miracle of the Compound Effect. So, beware of neglecting the simple things that make the big things in your life possible. The biggest difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people are willing to do what unsuccessful people are not. Remember that; it will come in handy many times throughout life when faced with a difficult, tedious, or tough choice.

 

Did you know that every dollar you spend today, no matter where you spend it, is costing you nearly five dollars in only twenty years (and ten dollars in thirty years)? That’s because if you took a dollar and invested it at 8 percent, in twenty years, that dollar would be worth almost five. Every time you spend a buck today, its like taking five dollars out of your future pocket.

 

It’s the littlest disciplines that pay off over time, the effort and preparation for the great triumph that happened when no one was looking. And yet the results are exceptional. A horse wins by a nose, but gets 10 times the prize money. Is the horse 10 times faster? No, just a little bit better. But it was those extra laps around the track, the extra discipline in the horse’s nutrition, or the extra work by the jockey that made the results a slight bit better with compounded rewards.

 

The difference between the No. 1 ranked golfer and the No. 10 golfer is an average of only 1.9 strokes, but the difference in prize money is five times. That’s the power of the Compound Effect.

 

That’s the power of little things adding up. It’s not the big things that add up in the end; it’s the hundreds, thousands, or millions of little things that separate the ordinary from the extraordinary.

 

Start tracking at least one behavior in one area of your life you’d liked to change and improve (e.g., money, nutrition, fitness, recognizing others, parenting… any area).

“We are what we repeatedly do.”

 

A daily routine built on good habits is the difference that separates the most successful amongst us from everyone else.

 

You can condition your automatic and unconscious responses to be those of a developed champion. This chapter is about choosing to make up for what you lack in innate ability with discipline, hard work, and good habits. It’s about becoming a creature of champion habits.

 

If you failed to make that tenth call today and were immediately fired and bankrupted, suddenly picking up the phone would be a no-brainer. And, if that first forkful of cake instantly put fifty pounds on your frame, saying “no thank you” to dessert would be the true piece of cake.

 

The problem is that the payoff or instant gratification derived from bad habit ofter far outweighs what’s going on in your rational mind concerning long-term consequences.

 

A single poor habit, which doesn’t look like much in the moment, can ultimately lead you miles off course from the direction of your goals and the life you desire.

 

 

Forget about willpower. It’s time for why-power. Your choices are only meaningful when you connect them to your desires and dreams. The wisest and most motivating choices are the ones aligned with that which you identify as your purpose, your core self, and your highest values. You’ve got to want something, and know why you want it, or you’ll end up giving up too easily.

 

“If you are not making the progress that you would like to make and are capable of making, it is simply because your goals are not clearly defined.”

 

“Whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe, and enthusiastically act upon… must inevitably come to pass!”

 

You only see, experience, and get what you look for. If you don’t know what to look for, you certainly won’t get it. By our very nature, we are goal-seeking creatures. Our brain is always trying to align our outer world with what we’re seeing and expecting in our inner world. So, when you instruct your brain to look for the things you want, you will begin to see them. In fact, the object of your desire has probably always existed around you, but your mind and eyes weren’t open to “seeing” it.

 

In reality, this is how the Law of Attraction really works. It is not the mysterious, esoteric voodoo it sometimes sounds like. It’s far simpler and more practical than that.

 

We are bombarded with billions of sensory (visual, audio, physical) bites of information each day. To keep ourselves from going insane, we ignore 99.9 percent of them, only really seeing, hearing, or experiencing those upon which our mind focuses. This is why, when you “think” something, it appears that you are miraculously drawing it into your life. In reality, you’re now just seeing what was already there. You are truly “attracting” it into your life. It wasn’t there before or accessible to you until your thoughts focused and directed your mind to see it.

 

“Who do I need to become?”

 

“If you want to have more, you have to become more. Success is not something you pursue. What you pursue will elude you; it can be like trying to catch butterflies. Success is something you attract by the person you become.”

 

Habits and behaviors never lie. If there’s a discrepancy between what you say and what you do, I’m going to believe what you do every time.

 

For a short while it can feel excruciating, or at least quite uncomfortable. But just as the body adjusts to a changing environment through a process called homeostasis, we have a similar homeostatic ability to adjust to unfamiliar behavior changes. And usually, we can regulate ourselves physiologically and psychologically to the new circumstances quite quickly.

 

“You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.”

 

The truth is, you can change a habit in a second, or you can still be trying to break it after ten long years.

 

The key is staying aware.

 

There is one thing that 99 percent of “failures” and “successful” folks have in common—they all hate doing the same things. The difference is successful people do them anyway. Change is hard.

 

What excites me about this reality, however, is that if change were easy, and everyone were doing it, it would be much more difficult for you and me to stand out and become an extraordinary success. Ordinary is easy. Extra-ordinary is what will separate you from the crowd.

 

Personally, I’m always happy when something is hard. Why? Because I know that most people won’t do what it takes; therefore, it will be easier for me to step in front of the pack and take the lead. I love what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said so eloquently: “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge.” When you press on despite difficulty, tedium, and hardship, that’s when you earn your improvement and gain strides on the competition. If it’s hard, awkward, or tedious, so be it. Just do it. And keep doing it, and the magic of the Compound Effect will reward you handsomely.

 

Identify your three bad habits that take you off course from your most important goal.

 

Identify three new habits you need to develop to put you on track toward your most important goal.

 

Identify your core motivation. Discover what gets you fired up and keeps you fired up to achieve big results.

 

Find your why-power. Design you concise, compelling, and awe-inspiring goals.

Objects in motion tend to stay in motion.

 

The space shuttle uses more fuel during the first few minutes of its flight than it does the rest of the entire trip. Why? Because it has to break free from the pull of gravity. Once it does, it can glide in orbit. The hard part? Getting off the ground.

 

Nothing kills Big Mo (momentum) quicker and with more certainty than a lack of consistency.

 

Miss only a couple weeks of anything—workouts at the gym, affectionate gestures toward your spouse, or the phone calls that are part of your prospecting routine—and you don’t just lose the results those two weeks would have produced. If that’s all you lost (which is what most people assume), not much damage would be done. But by slacking off for even a short time, you killed Mo. It’s dead. And that’s a tragedy.

 

Build your bookend morning and evening routines. Design a predicable and fail-safe world-class routine schedule for your life.

 

List three areas of life in which you are not consistent enough. What has this inconsistency cost you in life thus far? Make a declaration to stay steadfast in your new commitment to consistency.

If you want your body to run at peak performance, you’ve got to be vigilant about consuming the highest-quality nutrients and avoiding tempting junk food. If you want your brain to perform at its peak, you’ve got to be even more vigilant about what you feed it.

 

You get in life what you create. Expectation drives the creative process. What do you expect? You expect whatever it is you’re thinking about. Your thought process, the conversation in your head, is at the base of the results you create in life. So the question is, What are you thinking about? What is influencing and directing your thoughts? The answer: whatever you’re allowing yourself to hear and see. This is the input you are feeding your brain. Period.

 

Who do you spend the most time with? Who are the people you most admire? Are those two groups of people exactly the same? If not, why not? Jim Rohn taught that we become the combined average of the five people we hang around the most. Rohn would say we could tell the quality of our health, attitude, and income by looking at the people around us. The people with whom we spend our time determine what conversations dominate our attention, and to which attitudes and opinions we are regularly exposed. Eventually, we start to eat what they eat, talk like they talk, read what they read, think like they think, watch what they watch, treat people how they treat them, even dress like they dress. The funny thing is, more often than not, we are completely unaware of the similarities between us and our circle of five.

 

You cannot hang out with negative people and expect to live a positive life.

 

So, what is the combined average income, health, or attitudes of the five people you spend the most of your time with? Does the answer frighten you? If so, the best way to increase your potential for whatever traits you desire is to spend the majority of your time with people who already possess those traits. You will then see the power of influence work for you, rather than against you. The behaviors and attitudes which helped them acquire the success you admire will begin to become part of your daily routine. Hang around them long, enough, and you’re likely to realize similar successful outcomes in your life.

 

Decide how much you can “afford” to be influenced, based on how those people represent themselves. This is difficult, I know. I have had to do this on several occasions, even with close family members. I WILL NOT, however, allow someone else’s actions or attitudes to have a dampening influence on me.

 

Take a look at your relationships and make sure you’re not spending three hours with a three-minute person.

 

Identify people who have positive qualities in the areas of life where you want to improve—people with the financial and business success you desire, the parenting skills you want, the relationships you yearn for, the lifestyle you love. And then spend more time with them.

 

You’re never too good for a mentor.

 

Successful people, the truly top performers, are the ones willing to hire and pay for the best coaches and trainers there are.

 

The dream in your heart may be bigger than the environment in which you find yourself. Sometimes you have to get out of that environment to see that dream fulfilled. It’s like planting an oak sapling in a pot. Once it becomes root-bound, its growth is limited. It needs a great space to become a mighty oak. So do you.

 

When I talk about your environment, I’m not just referring to where you live. I’m referring to whatever surrounds you.

 

You will get in life what you accept and expect you are worthy of.

 

If you tolerate disrespect, you will be disrespected. If you tolerate people being late and making you wait, people will show up late for you. If you tolerate being underpaid and overworked, that will continue for you.

 

It’s amazing how life will organize around the standards you set for yourself.

 

Identify the influence the input of media and information is having on your life. Determine what input you need to protect your glass (mind) from and how you are going to keep your glass (mind) regularly flushed with positive, uplifting, and supportive input.

 

Evaluate your current associations. Who might you need to further limit your association? Who might you need to completely dissociate from? Strategize ways you will expand your associations.

 

Pick a peak-performance partner. Decide when, how regularly, and what you will hold each other accountable to, and what ideas you will expect the other to bring to each conversation.

 

Identify the three areas of your life you are most focused on improving. Find and engage a mentor in each of those areas. Your mentors could be people who have accomplished what you wish to and with whom you have brief conversations, or they could be experts who have written down their ideas in books or recored their ideas on CDs.

When you’ve prepared, practiced, studied, and consistently put in the required effort, sooner or later you’ll be presented with your own moment of truth. In that moment, you will define who you are and who you are becoming. It is in those moments where growth and improvement live—when we either step forward or shrink back, when we climb to the top of the podium and seize the medal or we continue to applaud sullenly from the crowd for others’ victories.

 

Every time I hit one of those mental and emotional walls, I recognized that my competitors were facing the same challenges. I knew this was another moment that, if I kept going, I would be strides ahead of them. These were the defining moments of success and progress.

 

Hitting the wall isn’t an obstacle; it’s an opportunity.

 

“Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better.”

 

When you hit the wall in your disciplines, routines, rhythms, and consistency, realize that’s when you are separating yourself from your old self, scaling that wall, and finding your new powerful, triumphant, and victorious self.

 

Viewing yourself as your toughest competitor is one of the best ways to multiply your results. Go above and beyond when you hit the wall. Another way to multiply your results is pushing past what other people expect of you—doing more than “enough.”

 

Where in life can you do more than expected when you hit the wall? Or where can you go for “WOW”? It doesn’t take a lot more effort, but the little extra multiplies your results many times over. Whether you’re making calls, serving customers, recognizing your team, acknowledging your spouse, going for a run, bench pressing, planning a date night, sharing time with your kids, whatever… what’s the little extra you can do that exceeds expectations and accelerates your results?

 

Find the line of expectation and then exceed it. Even when it comes to the small stuff—or maybe especially then.

 

No idea is worthwhile if it doesn’t start with “WOW!”

 

It takes very little extra to be EXTRAordinary. In all areas of your life, look for the multiplier opportunities where you can go a litter further, push yourself a little harder, last a little longer, prepare a little better, and deliver a little bit more. Where can you do better and more than expected? When can you do the totally unexpected? Find as many opportunities for “WOW,” and the level and speed of your accomplishments will astonish you… and everyone else around you.

 

When do you hit your moments of truth (e.g., making prospecting calls, exercising, communicating with your spouse or kids)? Identify so you know when to push through to find new growth and where you can separate yourself from others and your old self.

 

Find three areas in your life where you can do “extra” (e.g., weight lifting reps, calls, recognition, sentiments of appreciation, etc.)

Learning without execution is useless.

 

Motivation without action leads to self-delusion.