The Compound Effect is what happens when something small occurs regularly over a long period of time. Eating an extra cookie every day will add 24 pounds in two years. Spending daily slightly more money than one earns can lead, in time, to bankruptcy. On the positive end, drinking one less soda per day will remove, over two years, those 24 pounds; regularly investing a small amount of one’s earnings at interest eventually builds up into a life-changing sum.

Establishing small, consistent good habits that change the course of one’s life applies the Compound Effect: By moving in a slightly different direction, a person arrives at a completely different, and better, place. As Darren Hardy writes, “profound success [is] the result of small, smart choices, completed consistently over time” (10).

Several techniques help to amplify progress. These include keeping journals of one’s behavior regarding the activities to be changed, using “why-power” to replace long-established bad habits with good ones, and avoiding negative influences—especially among acquaintances and media—that change habits for the worse.

Like a steam train that uses a lot of energy to get up to speed but requires much less power to maintain that velocity, new habits take time and energy to launch.