You cannot get out of life what you are not willing to put into it. In case you want more love, give more love. By and large, when you study and grasp the science of great achievement, you will access success. Destiny is a matter of choice, not chance.
William Jennings Bryan put it aptly, “Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.” Then, it is those small decisions that shape your life. From what to eat and where to work, to the people you spend your time with. Every choice shapes how you live today, but more importantly, how you live the rest of your life. The unique technique is finding a plausible plan, the good guide, the true map; that shows you where that home is. How to get there. How to stay on the path.
Darren Hardy the brilliant author of The Compound Effect submits: No matter what you learn or what strategy and tactic you employ; success comes as a result of the operating system of the Compound Effect. Earning astronomical amount of success is hard. Tiresome. The process is laborious, tedious, and onerous in nature — sometimes even boring. Becoming wealthy, influential, and world-class in your field, is slow and arduous. Ideally, The Compound Effect is the powerful principle of reaping huge rewards from a series of small, smart choices. Most people get tripped up by the simplicity of The Compound Effect. For instance, they quit after a few attempts of running because they are still over-weight. Yet, these small seemingly insignificant steps completed consistently over time, will create a radical difference.
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For instance, reading 10 pages of a good book per day, or listening to 30 minutes of something instructional or inspirational, can make you grow in leaps and bounds. The wonder-working power of the Compound Effect is simple like a dimple. You only need to take a series of tiny steps, consistently, over time, to radically improve your life. Meaning, it is evolution, not revolution. The most challenging aspect of the Compound Effect is that we have to keep working for a while, consistently and efficiently, before we can begin to see the payoff. Or begin reaping bountiful benefits. Understanding the Compound Effect will rid you of ‘instant results’ expectation. Or the wrong belief that success should be as fast as your fast food. When you understand it, you will not start looking for the quick fix, silver bullet, or magic wand. So, do not fool yourself that a mega-successful athlete did not live through regular bone-crushing drills, and thousand hours of persistent practice. Actually, the elite athlete rose up before the sun in order to practice — and kept doing it for long when others had stopped. He faced the sheer agony of frustration and failure, loneliness, hard work, and spate of disappointments.
Moreover, this is the formula of getting lucky. Preparation (personal growth) + attitude + opportunity (a good thing coming your way) + action (doing something about it) = luck. The luck comes when opportunity meets preparedness. Luck is all around us. It is in the area like bacteria. It is simply a matter of seeing situations, conversations, and circumstances as fortuitous. Jim Rohn sagely said: “The day you graduate from childhood to adulthood, is the day you take full responsibility about your life.” That means that the first step towards change is awareness and awakening. In case you want to get from where you are to where you want to be, you have to start by becoming aware of the choices that lead you away from your desired destination. What is simple to do, is also simple not to do. The magic is not in the complexity of the task, but doing of simple things repeatedly, and long enough to ignite and wrought the miracle of the Compound Effect. In the distant past, the Athenian thinker called Aristotle advised, “We become what we repeatedly do; excellence is not an act but a habit.”
Therefore, do not dodge simple things that can make big things happen. For the biggest difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that the latter are willing to do what the former are shunning. It is the small disciplines that pay off over time, the effort and preparation for the great triumph that happened when no one was looking. A horse wins by a nose, but gets 10 times the prize money. Is the horse 10 times faster? No, just a little bit better. But it was those extra laps around the track, the extra discipline in the horse’s nutrition, or the extra work by the jockey that made the results a slight bit better with compound rewards.
In the whole scheme of things, big things add up in the end. It is the hundreds, thousands, or millions of little things that separate the ordinary from the extra-ordinary. Consider the prefix ‘extra’. To be one stroke better, requires little things that do not get accounted for when you are putting on the green jacket. A daily routine built on good habits is the difference that separates the most successful amongst us from everyone else. Meaning, successful people not necessarily more intelligent, or more talented than anyone else. But their habits take them in the direction of becoming more informed, more knowledgeable, more competent, better skilled, and better prepared. In actual sense, whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe, and enthusiastically act upon, must inevitably come to pass. Napoleon Hill put it aptly: “Whatever the mind can conceive, and believe, it can achieve.” If you want to have more, you have to become more. Success is not something you pursue. What you pursue, will elude your grasp. It can be like chasing butterflies. Success is something you attract by the person you become.
Finally, you will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine. According to research, it takes 300 instances of positive reinforcement to turn a new habit into an unconscious practice — that is almost a year of religious practice. I read somewhere. Psychologists talk of 21 days. Splendid indeed, science shows that patterns of thoughts and actions repeated for the umpteenth time, create what is called a ‘neuro-signature’, a ‘brain groove’, or a series of inter-connected neurons that carry the thought pattern of a particular habit. Life is simply a collection of experiences. Therefore, our ultimate goal should be to augment the frequency and intensity of good experiences. You begin to win when you take the right steps day in, and day out. Conversely, you set yourself up for failure by accomplishing too much, too soon.
By Victor Ochieng’
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