@@CHAP@@ INTRODUCTION
This book is about success and what it really takes to earn it. It’s time someone told it to you straight: you’ve been bamboozled for too long.
There is no magic bullet, secret formula, or quick fix to success. You don’t make $200,000 a year by spending two hours a day on the internet, lose thirty pounds in a week with a “Hollywood diet,” rub twenty years off your face with a cream, fix your love life with a pill, or find lasting success with a get-rich-quick scheme. It would be great if you could buy your success, fame, self-esteem, good relationships, health, and well-being in a nicely clam-shelled package at the local Walmart, but that’s not how it works.
We are constantly bombarded with increasingly sensational claims to get rich, get fit, get younger, get sexier… all overnight with little effort for only three easy payments of $39.95. These repetitive marketing messages have distorted our sense of what it really takes to succeed. We’ve lost sight of the simple but profound fundamentals of what it takes to be successful.
I’m tired of it. I won’t sit back and watch these reckless messages derail people any longer. I wrote this book to take you back to basics. I’m going to help you clear the clutter and bring focus to the core success fundamentals that matter. You can immediately implement the exercises and time-tested success principles in this book to produce measurable and sustainable results in your life.
I will teach you to harness the power of the Compound Effect—the operating system that has always been running your life, for better or worse. Use this system to your advantage and you truly can revolutionize your life. You have heard you can achieve anything you set your mind to, right? Well, only if you know how. The Compound Effect is the operator’s manual that teaches you how to master the system. When you do, there is nothing you can’t obtain or achieve.
How do I know that the Compound Effect is the only process you need for ultimate success? First, I have applied these principles to my own life. Although I hate it when authors beat their chests about their fame and fortune, it’s important you know I speak from personal experience. I’m offering you living proof, not regurgitated theory. As Tony Robbins mentioned, I’ve enjoyed significant success in my business endeavors because I’ve made it a point to live by the principles you’ll read in this book.
For the past forty years, I’ve been intensely studying success and human achievement. I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars testing thousands of ideas, resources, and philosophies. My personal experience has proven, no matter what you learn or which strategy you employ, success comes as the result of the operating system of the Compound Effect.
Second, for more than twenty-five years, I have been the central curator of the success media industry. I’ve worked with almost every respected thought leader, acclaimed speaker, and bestselling author you can think of. As an advisor to CEOs and high-performance achievers, I’ve trained and mentored tens of thousands of business leaders. From all these case studies, I have extracted what works—and what doesn’t.
Third, as the executive producer of three success-focused television networks and as the publisher of SUCCESS magazine, my job was to vet, curate, and distill the ideas, resources, and profiles of the most successful people in the world to determine who to feature on our television shows or inside the pages of our magazine. Each month, I interviewed a half-dozen top experts on a multitude of success topics and drilled down to their best ideas. All day, every day, I combed through an ocean of personal and business achievement ideas, information, and strategies.
Here’s my point: when you have such an exhaustive view of this industry and wisdom gained through studying the teachings and best practices of some of the world’s most successful people, an amazing clarity emerges. The underlying fundamental truths become crystal clear. Having seen it, read it, and heard most all of it, I can no longer be fooled by the latest gambit or self-proclaimed prophet with the newest “scientific breakthrough.” Nobody can sell me on gimmicks. I have too many reference points. I’ve gone down too many roads and learned the truth the hard way.