The Compound Effect for Career Success

I just got my copy of a great life and career success advice book, The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy.  Darren is the publisher of SUCCESS Magazine – my favorite periodical.  The subtitle, Multiplying Your Success, One Simple Step at a Time captures the essence of the book.

Darren lays out a simple formula in the first chapter…

Small, Smart Choices + Consistency + Time = RADICAL DIFFERENCE

According to Darren, “Small, seemingly insignificant steps completed consistently over time will create a radical difference” in your life and put you on the road to the career success you want and deserve.  I agree.

The next five chapters of The Compound Effect are dedicated to five simple success strategies.  If you apply these strategies you can’t help but creating your life and career success

  1. Choices
  2. Habits
  3. Momentum
  4. Influences
  5. Acceleration

Darren discusses each of these strategies in depth and then provides several action steps at the end of each chapter.  Below, I’ve listed the action steps that meant the most to me and to which I’ve committed to doing for each of the five success strategies.

Choices

Where in your life are you not taking 100% responsibility for the success or failure of your present condition?  Write down three things you have done in the past that have messed things up.  List three things you should have done, but didn’t.  Write out three things that happened to you but your responded poorly.  Write down three things you can start doing right now to take back responsibility for the outcomes of your life.

Habits

Identify your three best habits – those that support your most important goal.  Identify your three worst habits – those 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.

Momentum

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

Write down a half dozen key behaviors relevant to your new goals.  These should be behaviors ou want to establish a rhythm with and eventually create momentum.

Influences

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

Evaluate your current associations.  With whom might you need to limit your association?  With whom might you need to completely dissociate?  Strategy ways you will expand your positive associations.

Acceleration

Identify those times you hit moments of truth, so you know when to push through to find new growth, and separate yourself from others and your old self.

Identify three areas in your life where you can do more.  Identify three areas of your live where you can beat your own expectations.  Identify three ways you can do the unexpected.  Where can you differentiate yourself from what is common, normal or expected?

These are all great action items to help you create the life and career success you want and deserve.  You can begin working on them now.  Or you can do a really smart thing and get and read a copy of The Compound Effect to help you really understand the importance of taking these actions.  You can purchase a copy on Amazon.com.  Here is the url: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_15?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=compound+effect+darren+hardy&sprefix=compound+effect

I like The Compound Effect because it is based on simple common sense principles.  I make many of same points as Darren in my career advice book, Success Tweets.  I also like it because it asks you to take a hard look at yourself.  Many self help and career success books skip this important step.  I believe that before you can get better, it’s important to acknowledge the mistakes you’ve made in the past.

For example, when it comes to choices, Darren suggests, “Write down three things you have done in the past that have messed things up.  List three things you should have done, but didn’t.”  This was tough for me.  I had to acknowledge that I’ve made some pretty poor choices in the past.  However, acknowledging  these poor choices made it easier for me to apply the rest of the advice, “Write down three things you can start doing right now to take back responsibility for the outcomes of your life.”

The career success coach point here is simple common sense.  As Darren Hardy points out, small smart actions repeated over and over again, will yield big results when it comes to your life and career success.  If you consistently make smart choices, engage in positive habits, build momentum, spend time with the right influencers and accelerate your progress you will become a life and career success.  Buy and read a copy of The Compound Effect.  Download and complete the free worksheets.  Put the common sense ideas to work in your life and career.  Reread it when you find yourself getting off track.

That’s the career advice I found in The Compound Effect.  I hope you buy a copy, read it and put its wisdom into action.  When you do, please take a minute to share your experiences with us in a comment.  As always thanks for reading my daily musings on life and career success.  I value you and I appreciate you.

Bud

PS: If you haven’t already done so, please download a free copy of my popular career advice book Success Tweets and its companion piece Success Tweets Explained.  The first gives you 140 bits of career advice, all in 140 characters or less.  The second is a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail.  Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy.  You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.

PPS: I opened a membership site on September 1.  It’s called My Corporate Climb and is devoted to helping people create career success inside large corporations.  To celebrate the grand opening, I’m giving away a new career advice book I’ve written called I Want YOU…To Succeed in Your Corporate Climb.  You can find out about the membership site and get the career advice in I Want YOU… for free by going to http://www.mycorporateclimb.

 

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