The Life-Altering Art of Compound Success

Have you ever heard of Compound Interest? Many of our more sophisticated readers may be familiar with the term. Compound interest (or compounding interest) is interest calculated on the initial principal, which also includes all of the accumulated interest of previous periods of a deposit or loan. [www.investopedia.com]

Clear as mud, right? Well, I’m going to explain it in a different way and I am hopeful you will apply this simple lesson to your life.

Just to be clear, I was taught this lesson years ago and it changed my life forever. What I am about to write could change your life as well. Could you use a positive life change? We are going to talk about Compound Success.

In the same way that money collects interest, so does knowledge, wisdom, experience, and effort. When you put a little bit in at a time, it will eventually become a lot. If you read 5 pages of a book each day, then at the end of the week, you will have read 35 pages. That means in 8 weeks (2 months), you will have read 280 pages.

Let’s just consider that for a minute:

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie – 291 Pages
Maximum Confidence by Jack Canifield – 277 Pages
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey – 381 Pages
The Oz Principle by R. Connors, T. Smith, and C. Hickman – 232 Pages
Who Moved My Cheese by Dr. Spencer Johnson – 32 Pages
Start with Why by Simon Sinek – 256 Pages
The Holy Bible – Around 1200 Pages

The average reading time for non-technical material is roughly 2 minutes per page. So this should take exactly 10 minutes out of your 1440 minutes you have each day. Not much, but consider the compound interest of knowledge.

Have you ever made it through a book that changed your life or outlook? I have. It stayed with me forever. It informs my decisions even today. So what if you could finish a book every 2 months with almost no real investment?

Consider positivity in your workplace. What if you wrote one employee or co-worker a positive note or email each day? Just one. That shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes. You can buy a stack of Thank You cards and thank them for being part of the team. Would that change your workplace? Can you think of a moment when a simple and kind word or compliment completely turned your day around? You could be creating that kind of environment at your office.

How about in your sales? If you made 40 sales calls every week and got 4 referrals, what difference would it make if you made just one more call a day? The numbers say you would get an extra referral every other week. Instead of having 16 referrals, you would have 18. Would that help your situation?

The trick is to follow Melanie’s favorite saying:

“With Structure comes Freedom!”

Don’t just try to read five pages today. That would be great of course. The better way, however, would be to set time aside every single day for reading and card writing. As for adding one more visit, the trick is to make the visit count. Everyone has an account they should give more attention to. If not, who is not referring that should be? Who had referred in the past that isn’t?

Plan an extra around the same time each day if possible. If you are using our 5-Step Selling Process from our High Performance Sales Academy (as all the cool, brilliant, and highly-effective salespeople are likely to do), then your survey visit should be perfect for this. You can qualify accounts and prospects to unlock new avenues of referral growth.

Ultimately, making a daily effort over a few months can change the trajectory of your life and create Compound Success. Making that same effort over a couple of years will literally change your life forever.

Have a great week!

– Jason