Small is beautiful, start small
Look at this scenario let’s pretend someone offers you money say 10 dollars a week to put in 30 minutes a day with a 10% weekly compound raise at the end of each two weeks, same time every day to push your skill and show improvement. And then offers another person, say your friend $5000 a month flat rate zero compound growth for putting in the same amount of time, but may not be under any consistent basis, he does not need to improve his skills, to use existing skill set.
You start putting a small amount of consistent work each day, after a full month, you have only made 51 dollars. Meanwhile, your friend is quickly cashing a cheque of $5000. As if that is not annoying enough, he made $10,000 a month, notwithstanding that you both put in the same amount of time, while you got only $126. But he earns more.
Your family begins to suggest you go ahead and take the other kind of offer your friend has because it is more comfortable. You don’t get discouraged, you continue doing what you are doing one skill per day, and growth incremental is showing as you work to increase your ability, you know the hard work will pay one day, they think you are making a stupid decision. Your friend is making $15,000 while still crawling into a paltry $235 in month three. Now your family is getting distraught and wondering what manner of a decision this is, they think you are making a stupid decision, in 12 months if we fast forward your earnings, you will be making $15,541, and your friends still leads consistently even now earning $60,000. It is only in the 16th month you will make the same amount of money with your friend. At this point, you are getting $86,762 while your friend gets $80,000. This increased growth might seem surprising, right? By the time you continue this for another few years of compound interest payments at the end of just the second year, you have accumulated over $2.2 million or an average of $1.1 million a year to your friends’ $60,000-a-year consistent earnings. Can you match that with rational thinking?? Family and friends are dumbfounded.
Small unsexy, but smart decisions consistently made every day can produce incomprehensible and incredible results that you can indeed be proud of one day. Such incremental growth is called the compound effect and espoused by Darren Hardy in his book compound effect. Most successful people use this formula. The small changes you make every day offers no big win, nothing fascinating. The compound effect is the principle of reaping huge rewards from a series of small, smart choices. The idea is that the benefits of little, consistent action over a long period have higher payoffs than intensely significant but short changes. We saw how a single penny that doubles by some percentage within periods has a higher payoff than a considerable chunk.
Conscious actionable decisions
We have understood how small choices that one could make daily compound into positive changes in the future. One practical way to do this is to choose simple skill-increasing tasks daily. It is better not to take huge chunks, make it steady and consistent, create a checklist to cross off daily, write out a journal, and do it well. Include that aspect of your daily activity regularly with the original plan. To achieve and see results, one must be diligent and consistent. The most challenging aspect of the compound effect is that we have to keep working at something continuously to experience growth for a while, consistently and efficiently, before we can begin to see results. Consistency is a result of the daily choices we make.
It is a conscious effort to be consistent. Henry David Thoreau captures this in his quote, “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate himself by conscious endeavor.”