40 pages • 1-hour read
The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success
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Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Momentum”
Building momentum begins with small steps, like a kid pushing a playground merry-go-round loaded with friends. The first steps are slow and plodding as the kid pulls hard on the merry-go-round, but soon it’s going faster and faster until she jumps on and joins the whirl. Now and then, the kid steps off and pulls for a few steps on the ride until it’s back up to speed. Thus, once the initial effort gets the ride going, it’s relatively easy to keep it in motion.
Likewise, the Space Shuttle spends most of its fuel simply getting to orbit. Once there, though, it’s on an easy glide. Apple struggled for years until its iPod finally caught on and became the biggest-selling music device. Once that happened, “Big Mo”—momentum—took over, and Apple products, including the iPhone, continued to dominate the market.
Momentum happens when consistent habits are embedded into routines. Golfer Jack Nicklaus worked the same routine before every shot so precisely that he never varied its timing by more than a second. Pros like football kickers and pilots use exacting routines to help guarantee their performance and put them into the correct head space for maximum performance: “Of all the high-achievers and business leaders I’ve worked with and observed […] each has developed consistent routines for carrying out their daily disciplines” (99).
Morning and evening routines help establish one’s day. Hardy performs a strict routine every morning: He rises at 5 o’clock in the morning, thinks about abundance and gratefulness, sends loving thoughts to someone he knows, starts the coffee machine, does stretches, watches his own online video service “DarrenDaily,” reads something inspirational for 30 minutes, works for one and a half hours, plans his day, then processes the morning’s email. The rest of the day, in all its variability, follows.
In the evening, Hardy does a “cash out” where he looks back on the day, notices what worked and what didn’t, updates his journals, then reads 10 pages of an inspirational work before sleep. From time to time, Hardy shakes up his other routines: He tries new foods, joins a group, visits a new place, alters his exercise routine, thereby refreshing his habits so they don’t become dull.
Friday night is a night out with his wife; Saturdays are for family. Sundays at 6 o’clock at night, he and his wife do a “Relationship Review.” Once a month, they go on an adventure together—a new restaurant, a mountain drive, a sailboat ride—and once per quarter they go on a three-day retreat. These pre-scheduled events, plus holiday and vacation plans, help create momentum in their lives.
It can be inspiring to start a new project of self-improvement, Hardy says, but consistency is the vital ingredient. It’s like pumping water from a well: It takes a long time to get the water up the pipe, but, once there, it stays if pumped regularly. People who get some results with a new project but slack off find their momentum pump goes dry, and they must start over.
Chapter 4 Analysis
“Momentum” is Hardy’s way of describing the power of habitual consistency, and this chapter delves into ways to generate the energy of forward motion. Hardy revisits the book’s central theme, Success Through Consistency. In some respects, this chapter augments Chapter 1, with examples of how consistency leads to big results. It compares forward motion to machines that expend large amounts of energy to gather speed but then require only minimum input to maintain that speed.
Self-help books posit ideas on how changes in attitudes lead to improvements in life outcomes. Insights and common sense comprise most of the evidence offered by authors in the self-help genre. Some authors use science to support their ideas. By connecting science to their self-improvement theories, authors use the rhetorical technique of an “appeal to authority” in support of their arguments.
Such an appeal is formally considered a fallacy: Just because a person or idea is widely respected doesn’t mean it’s correct, and attaching that idea to another idea doesn’t prove the latter. In Quantum Healing (2015) Deepak Chopra cited quantum mechanics in defense of his notion that people can vary their own physiologies through thought. Chopra claimed that, because subatomic particles have an element of uncertainty about their location and energy, humans can use their minds to alter or reverse physical aging. Scientists squawked in protest, pointing out that, at the scale of the human body, the Uncertainty Principle doesn’t function at all.
Hardy, too, appeals to hard science, but he does so using humor. He brings up Newton’s Law of Inertia, by which physical objects maintain their momentum unless acted on. He says: “Put another way, couch potatoes tend to stay couch potatoes” (92).
Hardy also uses the analogy of a railroad steam engine, which gains momentum through a continuous application of force until it’s roaring down the tracks at a good clip. Much as a train must expend great energy to reach traveling speed, people must employ a lot of psychological effort to attain the “momentum” of strong forward motion with new habits. Like the train, once we’re “up to speed” on a new behavior, we require much less energy to maintain that “speed.”
Hardy draws comparisons between psychological and physical inertia and momentum to inspire readers to make greater efforts in their own lives. He aims to open readers’ minds to ideas about psychological momentum and how to harness it.
One way to remain in motion on the track of one’s life, suggests Hardy, is to routinize positive wake-up and late-evening rituals. He details his own practices to show how habits, embedded in routines, can keep one’s attitudes at a consistently high level. His point is that people can begin and end their days in a way that helps them deal with whatever life throws at them. An entire day needn’t be equally punctilious: “The rest of the day can take a million different shapes” (102).
By embedding new habits into routines, we no longer need to struggle with our willpower to accomplish things. Instead, good habits happen automatically, and our forward momentum continues with relatively little effort. This is the chief argument of the chapter.
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