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

Self-help, self-improvement, and advice have been around since ancient times, and the invention of the printing press made them widely available. Their heyday began in the latter 1800s, fueled by the book Self-Help (1859) by Samuel Smiles, who preached the virtues of hard work and perseverance. Such books have only increased in popularity since then.

Self-improvement books cover all sorts of how-to topics—cooking, housekeeping, home ownership, sports and hobbies, dating, and etiquette, to name a few. One of the most successful subgenres contain inspirational books on how best to live one’s life. Some are religious in nature, while others dispense practical advice. Many extol the virtues of correct mindsets, and nearly all contain central, pivotal ideas on which the rest of the work is hung.

The Compound Effect is a recent entry in this category. Darren Hardy’s prescription for success centers on what he calls the Compound Effect, by which small, good habits, practiced consistently, result in huge payoffs. He researched the field in pursuit of supporting effective practices; much of his advice thus largely derives from ideas widely cited in other self-help books. Even his central idea gets support from elsewhere: The book Tiny Habits (2020) by Stanford professor B. J. Fogg makes a very similar claim about initiating small changes for big results.

A common practice in inspirational self-help books is to denigrate competing works. Hardy follows this approach, claiming that most recent self-help books promise get-rich-quick schemes that fail because they ignore the need for hard work. His book extols hard work and striving, a concept common among classic self-help volumes that’s lately been revived in published works. For example, the book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (2016) by Angela Duckworth cites extensive research that espouses hard work as a means of making breakthroughs.

Hardy stresses the importance of assuming responsibility for one’s outcomes instead of blaming others or circumstance. This concept, too, is very common among inspirational self-help books. Former United States Navy Officer Jocko Winnick, who led one of the most successful US platoons during the Iraq War, wrote the number-one bestselling book Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy Seals Lead and Win (2015), which elaborates on the life-and-death power of personal responsibility.

Hardy proposes that people energize their efforts by connecting them to their “why-power,” a principal goal or dream that inspires them. A similar idea comes from Peter Diamandis, founder of the XPrize, which awards large monetary prizes to innovative technological breakthroughs, and author of several books on how to create a purposeful life that helps to build humanity’s future. Diamandis encourages entrepreneurs and others to determine a “Massive Transformative Purpose” that will guide their life efforts (Diamandis, Peter. “Build a Massive Transformative Purpose.” Diamandis.com).

Hardy believes in the “law of attraction,” that what you think about manifests in your life. He quotes a mentor, Paul J. Meyer: “Whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe, and enthusiastically act upon […] must inevitably come to pass!” (65). The idea that our thoughts determine our outcomes is popular in the self-improvement genre. This approach has taken many forms over the decades, including New Thought, positive thinking, and creative visualization. Famous books in this subgenre include Think and Grow Rich (1937) by Napoleon Hill, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) by Norman Vincent Peale, The Magic of Thinking Big (1959) by David J. Schwartz, and Psycho-Cybernetics (1960) by Maxwell Maltz.

Another common tenet in self-help books is that, unless people diligently watch their behavior, they’ll naturally indulge themselves with food, TV, and wasteful activities. The Compound Effect joins the chorus with the refrain that many of our bad habits embed themselves when we aren’t paying attention. Underlying this theme is a belief, derived from Judeo-Christian religious cultures but widely accepted in secular Western societies, that people basically are flawed (or, in the Christian view, “sinners”) and must remain at all times vigilant lest they backslide and deteriorate. For this reason, books such as Hardy’s that are based on the law of attraction tend to stress that positive thoughts must constantly be injected into one’s mind to counteract the insidious effects of creeping negativity.

Overall, The Compound Effect finds a place among other self-help books, especially those that espouse positive thinking, hard work, and inspired goal-seeking.