The Compound Effect Book Summary

The compound effect is a great book when getting started into self-development because it lays the foundation for understanding how your small choices can end up making very large impacts on your life so the first big idea I want to talk about is something he calls the magic penny in the book Darren Hardy explains. I am gonna break down the methodology of compound interest with the help of magic penny idea.

The basic idea is that when looking at these two options which one looks more attractive:

1. Three million dollars right now

2. Penny that doubles in value every day for 31 days

You might have heard this before and if you haven't, you probably would have picked the three million dollars just because you don't know the power of compounding interest. After 31 days the penny choice is now worth five point three million dollars which is almost double the first option. 

We can compare this growth to ourselves. For example, let's say you eat a small chocolate bar every morning for around three years if the chocolate bar is around 125 calories and you do nothing extra to your diet or your exercise program then you would gain an extra thirty-nine pounds in those three years because 125 calories times 365 days times three years then you take that and you divided by three thousand five hundred calories per pound you get 39 pounds. 

Now it's really crazy to think about it but this principle is at play in every minute of our lives. Imagine if you write small ten pages a day for three years what would that be? That's around forty-three books in three years by only reading ten pages a day and that is life-changing, in fact, some experts say that the minimum amount of books to read to become more knowledgeable at a topic more than 90% of the general public is just for books. After reading forty-three books you'll be ranking with the experts in less than three years and the problem is that it's easy to do it means it's also easy not to do right. 



So the next big idea I want to talk about is about owning 100% now. This is a kind of paradox since these small daily choices are easy to do. They're also easy to skip, hey I'll read 10 pages tonight or workout tomorrow morning and burn off this donut. I'll get that project done next week. We say stuff like this all the time. Our brain overestimates how long tasks will take and because of this we will procrastinate and put it off. Darin, the author says “we're all self-made men and women but only the successful people take credit for it if you're dead broke with no friends it takes a lot of character to say I'm here because of my choices and the decisions that I've made up to this point.” Well, when you have the humility to actually admit that and say since I've got here I can get myself out of this hole then you can start to get back on the right track that you were aiming for once. You own a hundred percent of your responsibility and your situation. You can start to understand that you have more control of your life than you actually think and your decisions will matter more to you. 

So big idea number two is to own 100% the idea number. These are small choices and once you have accepted that your life is 100% your responsibility, you can start to commit to small easy choices. I'm talking about stuff like I'm gonna save $120 every month until the end of the year. I'm gonna have dinner with my father once a month. I'm gonna go to the gym twice a week for a month. These small choices really help 120 dollars every month for 20 years with an average interest rate compounds to over $50,000 and also imagine how many more memories you'll have with your family members and the loved ones if you commit to seeing them at least once a month. 

For a lot of people it's just around the holidays and also imagine how much longer you will statistically be able to live if you go to the gym twice a week? Opposed to never the next big idea I want to talk the law of attraction and how it really works now in the self-development niche. People ask me all the time about my own personal opinion about the law of attraction. And most people understand it its kind of like if I sit here and think about it all the time then I'll get it like if I sit on the couch and think about a million dollars then I'll get a million dollars I'll win the lottery or something. 

Well, that's not true. It's not how it works so your brain is a highly sophisticated organ that consumes billions of sensory data groups every day and to prevent it from going insane and to make your life easier to live it forgets a very large amount of all of that information. However, your brain will pick up on lookalike things. if you've been thinking about getting a new job, it'll pick out information that it thinks is relevant to getting a new job, for example, you might see an advertisement for job recruitment that you would have otherwise dig Nord but your brain picked it out and made you look at it. Have you ever learned a new word and you hear it four or five times the next week even though you've never heard that word? This is the reason why? if you want to put the law of attraction to work or rather your brain to work for you fill it with things that you want more of in your life. Make sure that if you're trying to lose weight you write down your goals, you start listening to people who talk about how to lose weight, and you read books on the same topic. Once you start applying this new information, your brain will remind you next time you're about to have Italy, eat some candy so the law of attraction is just a little trick to help your brain make living your life and getting to your goals easier it's not some magic thing that you can sit in your house and wish up something you have to go and put in the work but the law of attraction makes the work more important. 

The last idea is garbage in garbage out another huge idea I found in this book which actually takes up a couple of pages is something called garbage in garbage out. It basically means if you're consuming negative information, you're eating low-quality food and you're hanging around toxic people, your life quality is going to suffer. Does it make sense? instead pick carefully what kind of information that you consume daily. Cut back time with those talks and friends and educate yourself about your diets, your macronutrients, and food quality. Remember that the compound effect will magnify what you consume over time so 30 minutes of dramatic news each night will drastically change your thoughts but so will 30 minutes of reading a new book so the big idea here is to choose carefully.