The key ideas

The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success

Darren Hardy, 2010

Three million dollars today, or a penny that doubles every day? On day twenty-nine, the penny is still losing. Darren Hardy explains why big results are built from steps too small to notice, and why harmful little things pile up just as quietly.

Who it is for

For anyone who has started a new life on a Monday many times, only to give up a couple of weeks later, and who wants to understand why small daily steps are so hard to stick with.

Small, smart choices + consistency + time = radical difference.

What the book is about

Which would you choose: three million dollars right now, or a single penny that doubles every day for a month? Darren Hardy, publisher of the American magazine SUCCESS, opens with this question to explain why big results so rarely look like big actions.

His book, The Compound Effect, came out in 2010 and rests on one formula: small, smart choices plus consistency plus time equal a radical difference. It sounds boring, and in the author's view, that is the trap. The helpful steps are so small that they are easy to skip, and the harmful ones are just as small and just as easy to miss.

To be upfront: this is a motivational book by a practitioner. It persuades with arithmetic, parables and the author's own experience, not with research. Ahead are three friends, a playground merry-go-round, a plank between skyscrapers, and a notebook the author hid from his wife for a whole year.

Idea 1. The penny that loses until day twenty-nine

Most people, Hardy notes, take the millions. By day twenty, the penny has grown to only about five thousand dollars. Even on day twenty-nine it is still losing, at around 2.7 million. Only on day thirty-one does it become roughly 10.7 million.

For Hardy, this is a model of any long-term goal. For most of the way, the result looks tiny, and that is exactly when you want to quit.

A note from Livria: habits do not double every day. This is an image, not a calculation. But it captures the author's point: judging a path by its first few weeks can be a mistake.

You are in your third week of learning a language for fifteen minutes a day, and you still cannot follow a show without subtitles. By the logic of the penny, this may not be failure. It may just be day twenty.

In Hardy's logic, the middle of the road is an especially misleading place: you have already put in a lot, and there is almost nothing to show for it. A decision to quit there may rest on an incomplete picture.

Read in Livria

About the author

Darren Hardy is an American entrepreneur, the publisher of SUCCESS magazine, and the author of books on personal effectiveness. The Compound Effect is one of his best-known books.

All books by this author: Darren Hardy

The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success Quiz

Terms from the book

  • Compound Effect: Hardy's principle: small choices, repeated many times, can add up over time to a big result, for better or for worse. It is the author's idea, not a scientific law.
  • Tracking: The author's advice: for a while, write down every action in one area of your life, so you can see the habitual little things you usually miss.
  • Big Mo: Hardy's image for momentum: after a hard start, regular actions build up inertia, and keeping going gets easier. It is an image from the book, not a scientific term.
  • Three Influences: The author's model: your choices are shaped by what you feed your mind, the people around you, and your surroundings.

All terms

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