Darren Hardy Quotes

You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.

Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better.

You alone are responsible for what you do, don’t do, or how you respond to what’s done to you.

Small, Smart Choices + Consistency + Time = RADICAL DIFFERENCE

It's not the big things that add up in the end; it's the hundreds, thousands, or millions of little things that separate the ordinary from the extraordinary.

In essence, you make your choices, and then your choices make you.

The first step toward change is awareness. If 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.

Seek out positive people who have achieved the success you want to create in your own life. Remember the adage: “Never ask advice of someone with whom you wouldn’t want to trade places.

The (Complete) Formula for Getting Lucky: Preparation (personal growth) + Attitude (belief/mindset) + Opportunity (a good thing coming your way) + Action (doing something about it) = Luck

Your biggest challenge isn’t that you’ve intentionally been making bad choices. Heck, that would be easy to fix. Your biggest challenge is that you’ve been sleepwalking through your choices.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge.

A daily routine built on good habits and disciplines separates the most successful among us from everyone else. A routine is exceptionally powerful.

Unsuccessful people carry their goals around in their head like marbles rattling around in a can, and we say a goal that is not in writing is merely a fantasy.

Forget about willpower. It's time for why-power. Your choices are only meaningful when you connect them to your desires and dreams. The wisest and most motivating choices are the ones aligned with that which you identify as your purpose, your core self, and your highest values. You've got to want something, and know why you want it, or you'll end up giving up too easily.

Consistency is the key to achieving and maintaining momentum.

The real cost of a four-dollar-a-day coffee habit over 20 years is $51,833.79. That’s the power of the Compound Effect.

There’s nothing wrong with ordinary. I just prefer to shoot for extraordinary.

If you are not making the progress that you would like to make and are capable of making, it is simply because your goals are not clearly defined.

Losing is a habit. So is winning. Now let’s work on permanently instilling winning habits into your life.

The Compound Effect is the principle of reaping huge rewards from a series of small, smart choices

It’s time to WAKE UP and make empowering choices.

And as long as you’re making choices unconsciously, you can’t consciously choose to change that ineffective behavior and turn it into productive habits.

Knowledge is not power. That’s a myth. It is the potential for power, but it is not power itself. It’s not what you learn or what you know; it’s what you do with what you know and learn.

The dream in your heart may be bigger than the environment in which you find yourself. Sometimes you have to get out of that environment to see that dream fulfilled. It’s like planting an oak sapling in a pot. Once it becomes rootbound, its growth is limited. It needs a great space to become a mighty oak. So do you.

We can all make powerful choices. We can all take back control by not blaming chance, fate, or anyone else for our outcomes. It’s within our ability to cause everything to change. Rather than letting past hurtful experiences sap our energy and sabotage our success, we can use them to fuel positive, constructive change.

The person who has a clear, compelling, and white-hot burning why will always defeat even the best of the best at doing the how.

All winners are trackers.

Have you ever been bitten by an elephant? How about a mosquito? It’s the little things in life that will bite you.

Starting is not most people’s problem, staying, continuing and finishing is.

No matter what has happened to you, take complete responsibility for it—good or bad, victory or defeat. Own it. My mentor Jim Rohn said, “The day you graduate from childhood to adulthood is the day you take full responsibility for your life.

Since your outcomes are all a result of your moment-to-moment choices, you have incredible power to change your life by changing those choices. Step by step, day by day, your choices will shape your actions until they become habits, where practice makes them permanent.

It’s not getting to the wall that counts; it’s what you do after you hit it.

Don’t wait another day to start the small disciplines that will lead you in the direction of your goals!

If we want to succeed, we need to recover our grandparents’ work ethic.

you make your choices, and then your choices make you.

When you define your goals, you give your brain something new to look for and focus on. It’s as if you’re giving your mind a new set of eyes from which to see all the people, circumstances, conversations, resources, ideas, and creativity surrounding you.

Here’s the bottom line: You already know all that you need to succeed. You don’t need to learn anything more. If all we needed was more information, everyone with an Internet connection would live in a mansion, have abs of steel, and be blissfully happy. New or more information is not what you need—a new plan of action is. It’s time to create new behaviors and habits that are oriented away from sabotage and toward success. It’s that simple.

Newton’s First Law, also known as the Law of Inertia: Objects at rest tend to stay at rest unless acted on by an outside force. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, unless something stops their momentum. Put another way, couch potatoes tend to stay couch potatoes. Achievers—people who get into a successful rhythm—continue busting their butts and end up achieving more and more.

Earning success is hard. The process is laborious, tedious, sometimes even boring. Becoming wealthy, influential, and world-class in your field is slow and arduous.

A good question to ask yourself before doing anything you think you fear is, “If I do this, am I going to die?” If the answer is no, then your fear is made up, grossly overdramatic, and it should have no power over you.

As Jim Rohn put it to me, “Don’t let your learning lead to knowledge, or you’ll become a fool. Let your learning lead to action, and you can become wealthy. There’s nothing more pitiful than a guy who is smart and broke.

Are you willing to make the difficult choices? To do what’s unpopular? It’s not easy, but remember this: When people are calling you out and calling you names, they’re really just calling you a leader.

You get in life what you create. Expectation drives the creative process. What do you expect? You expect whatever it is you're thinking about. Your thought process, the conversation in your head, is at the base of the results you create in life.

WAKE UP and realize that the habits you indulge in could be compounding your life into repeated disaster.

The biggest difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people are willing to do what unsuccessful people are not.

The great danger of the media is that it gives us a very perverted view of the world. Because the focus and the repetition of messaging is on the negative, that’s what our minds start believing. This warped and narrow view of what’s not working has a severe influence on your creative potential. It can be crippling.

Look, if you’re going to get better, you have to push yourself. If you push yourself, you’re going to fall. If you’re not falling, you’re not pushing. Falling is part of getting better.

You reap what you sow; you can’t get out of life what you’re not willing to put into it. If you want more love, give more love. If you want greater success, help others achieve more. And when you study and master the science of achievement, you will find the success you desire.

You cannot see what you don’t look for, and you cannot look for what you don’t believe in.

If you want to have more, you have to become more. You have to grow into your goals.

Don’t miss the point. Spend your day pursuing the things you want said in your eulogy.

Everyone is affected by three kinds of influences: input (what you feed your mind), associations (the people with whom you spend time), and environment (your surroundings).

New or more information is not what you need—a new plan of action is. It’s time to create new behaviors and habits that are oriented away from sabotage and toward success.

When you're creating an environment to support your goals, remember that you get in life what you tolerate.

The magic comes from becoming the person you need to be in order to attract the people or results you wish to meet or achieve.

When you've prepared, practiced, studied, and consistently put in the required effort, sooner or later you'll be presented with your own moment of truth. In that moment, you will define who you are and who you are becoming. It is in those moments where growth and improvement live--when we either step forward or shrink back, when we climb to the top of the podium and seize the medal or we continue to applaud sullenly from the crowd for others' victories.

I have a serious challenge for you if you’re up for it. Want real feedback? Find people who care enough about you to be brutally honest with you. Ask them these questions: “How do I show up to you? What do you think my strengths are? In what areas do you think I can improve? Where do you think I sabotage myself? What’s one thing I can stop doing that would benefit me the most? What’s the one thing I should start doing?

In all areas of your life, look for the multiplier opportunities where you can go a little further, push yourself a little harder, last a little longer, prepare a little better, and deliver a little bit more. Where can you do better and more than expected? When can you do the totally unexpected? Find as many opportunities for 'WOW,' and the level and speed of your accomplishments will astonish you... and everyone else around you.

Everything in your life exists because you first made a choice about something. Choices are at the root of every one of your results. Each choice starts a behavior that over time becomes a habit. Choose poorly, and you just might find yourself back at the drawing board, forced to make new, often harder choices. Don’t choose at all, and you’ve made the choice to be the passive receiver of whatever comes your way.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, says that if we gave lottery losers each thirty seconds on TV to announce not, “I won!” but “I lost,” it would take almost nine years to get through the losers of a single drawing!

Courage is not the absence of fear—it’s feeling the fear and proceeding anyway. As Nelson Mandela said, “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

Consume those 'popular' things, and you'll be part of the common, average pack. But that's ordinary. There's nothing wrong with ordinary. I just prefer to shoot for extraordinary.

Effective sales is about finding a perceived need and helping someone fulfill it.

The day you graduate from childhood to adulthood is the day you take full responsibility for your life.

Your brain is not designed to make you happy. Your brain has only one agenda in mind: survival.

Your only path to success is through a continuum of mundane, unsexy, unexciting, and sometimes difficult daily disciplines compounded over time.

Lou Holtz, the famous football coach, knew it was what you did after you did your best that created victories.

The question we should be asking ourselves is: "Who do I need to become?

As Jim Collins said in our April 2010 SUCCESS feature, “If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.

If you want to have more, you have to become more. Success is not something you pursue

If you are not making the progress that you would like to make and are capable of making, it is simply because your goals are not clearly defined

you only hear stories about the one winner, not the millions of losers.

It doesn't matter how smart you are or aren't, you need to make up in hard work what you lack in experience, skill, intelligence, or innate ability.

The key to success is massive failure. Your goal is to out-fail your competition.

I want you to know in your bones that your only path to success is through a continuum of mundane, unsexy, unexciting, and sometimes difficult daily disciplines compounded over time.

So no more whining about the cards you were dealt, the great defeats you suffered, or any other circumstances. Countless people have more disadvantages and greater obstacles than you, and yet they’re wealthier and more fulfilled. Luck is an equal-opportunity distributor. Lady luck shines on all, but rather than having your umbrella overhead, you’ve got to have your face to the sky. When it comes down to it, it’s all you, baby. There’s no other way around it.

It doesn’t matter how smart you are or aren’t, you need to make up in hard work what you lack in experience, skill, intelligence, or innate ability. If your competitor is smarter, more talented, or experienced, you just need to work three or four times as hard. You can still beat them!

You have to be willing to give 100 percent with zero expectation of receiving anything in return,” he said. “Only when you’re willing to take 100 percent responsibility for making the relationship work will it work. Otherwise, a relationship left to chance will always be vulnerable to disaster.

The truth is, complacency has impacted all great empires, including, but not limited to, the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. Why? Because nothing fails like success.

I had always thought of sales as a way to get something, I could now see it as a tool for giving. For the first time, I began to understand the strange, wonderful irony that sales isn’t about selling at all.

If you want to have more, you have to become more. Success is not something you pursue. What you pursue will elude you; it can be like trying to chase butterflies. Success is something you attract by the person you become.

Right this moment: Pick an area of your life where you most want to be successful. Do you want more money in the bank? A trimmer waistline? The strength to compete in an Iron Man event? A better relationship with your spouse or kids? Picture where you are in that area, right now. Now picture where you want to be: richer, thinner, happier, you name it. The first step toward change is awareness. If 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.

Come again? Am I saying that your four-dollar-a-day coffee habit is going to cost you $51,833.79 in twenty years? Yes, I am. Did you know that every dollar you spend today, no matter where you spend it, is costing you nearly five dollars in only twenty years (and ten dollars in thirty years)? That’s because if you took a dollar and invested it at 8 percent, in twenty years, that dollar would be worth almost five. Every time you spend a buck today, it’s like taking five dollars out of your future pocket.

In that seminar I attended at eighteen, the speaker asked, “What percentage of shared responsibility do you have in making a relationship work?” I was a teenager, so wise in the ways of true love. Of course I had all the answers. “Fifty/fifty!” I blurted out. It was so obvious; both people must be willing to share the responsibility evenly or someone’s getting ripped off. “Fifty-one/forty-nine,” yelled someone else, arguing that you’d have to be willing to do more than the other person. Aren’t relationships built on self-sacrifice and generosity? “Eighty/twenty,” yelled another. The instructor turned to the easel and wrote 100/0 on the paper in big black letters. “You have to be willing to give 100 percent with zero expectation of receiving anything in return,” he said. “Only when you’re willing to take 100 percent responsibility for making the relationship work will it work. Otherwise, a relationship left to chance will always be vulnerable to disaster.” Whoa. This wasn’t what I was expecting! But I quickly understood how this concept could transform every area of my life. If I always took 100 percent responsibility for everything I experienced—completely owning all of my choices and all the ways I responded to whatever happened to me—I held the power. Everything was up to me. I was responsible for everything I did, didn’t do, or how I responded to what was done to me.

If you haven’t already clearly defined your values, you may find yourself making choices that conflict with what you want. If, for example, honesty is a big thing for you, but you hang out with liars, there’s a conflict. When your actions conflict with your values, you’ll end up unhappy, frustrated, and despondent. In fact, psychologists tell us that nothing creates more stress than when our actions and behaviors aren’t congruent with our values.

If the nose of a plane is pointed only 1 percent off course, it will ultimately end up about 150 miles off course. Such is the case for your habits. A single poor habit, which doesn't look like much in the moment, can ultimately lead you miles off course from the direction of your goals and the life you desire.

You have to dream, and you have to have some imagination to say, ‘Here’s a big goal, now let’s go conquer it.’

Our choices are often shaped by our culture and upbringing. They can be so entwined in our routine behaviors and habits that they seem beyond our control.

Want to sell more? Stop selling. Help instead.

There’s only one certainty in business: You can’t succeed if you quit.

Work is gonna suck 95% of the time. But that other 5% is freaking awesome!

No. Sales—effective sales—is not “finding a need and filling it.” Effective sales is about finding a perceived need and helping someone fulfill it. If the customer doesn’t perceive the need, there is no need.

When I asked Richard Branson if he felt luck played a part in his success, he answered, “Yes, of course, we are all lucky. If you live in a free society, you are lucky. Luck surrounds us every day; we are constantly having lucky things happen to us, whether you recognize it or not. I have not been any more lucky or unlucky than anyone else. The difference is when luck came my way, I took advantage of it.” Ah, spoken like a man knighted with wisdom. While we’re on the topic, it’s my belief that the old adage we often hear—“Luck is when opportunity meets preparation”—isn’t enough. I believe there are two other critical components to “luck.

Most people are operating at a fraction of what they are really capable of. As the leader you will need to find the unique seeds of greatness buried in each member of your team. You need to remove the weeds (fears, inhibitions, uncertainties), water and fertilize (invest in their personal growth), and provide the sunshine (your positive attitude, belief in them, and example) to transform that miraculous seed inside them into a bountiful harvest of results and productivity.

can all make powerful choices. We can all take back control by not blaming chance, fate, or anyone else for our outcomes. It’s within our ability to cause everything to change. Rather than letting past hurtful experiences sap our energy and sabotage our success, we can use them to fuel positive, constructive

On the Craft of Writing:  The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know by Shawn Coyne The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White 2K to 10K: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love by Rachel Aaron  On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing by Libbie Hawker  You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) by Jeff Goins Prosperity for Writers: A Writer's Guide to Creating Abundance by Honorée Corder  The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield Business for Authors: How To Be An Author Entrepreneur by Joanna Penn  On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark On Mindset:  The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan The Art of Exceptional Living by Jim Rohn Vision to Reality: How Short Term Massive Action Equals Long Term Maximum Results by Honorée Corder The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg Mckeown Mastery by Robert Greene The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer The Game of Life and How to Play It by Florence Scovel Shinn The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy Taking Life Head On: How to Love the Life You Have While You Create the Life of Your Dreams by Hal Elrod Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill In

For instance, have you ever been going about your business, enjoying your life, when all of sudden you made a stupid choice or series of small choices that ultimately sabotaged your hard work and momentum, all for no apparent reason? You didn’t intend to sabotage yourself, but by not thinking about your decisions—weighing the risks and potential outcomes—you found yourself facing unintended consequences. Nobody intends to become obese, go through bankruptcy, or get a divorce, but often (if not always) those consequences are the result of a series of small, poor choices. Elephants Don’t Bite Have you ever been bitten by an elephant? How about a mosquito? It’s the little things in life that will bite you. Occasionally, we see big mistakes threaten to destroy a career or reputation in an instant—the famous comedian who rants racial slurs during a stand-up routine, the drunken anti-Semitic antics of a once-celebrated humanitarian, the anti-gay-rights senator caught soliciting gay sex in a restroom, the admired female tennis player who uncharacteristically threatens an official with a tirade of expletives. Clearly, these types of poor choices have major repercussions. But even if you’ve pulled such a whopper in your past, it’s not extraordinary massive steps backward or the tragic single moments that we’re concerned with here. For most of us, it’s the frequent, small, and seemingly inconsequential choices that are of grave concern. I’m talking about the decisions you think don’t make any difference at all. It’s the little things that inevitably and predictably derail your success. Whether they’re bone-headed maneuvers, no-biggie behaviors, or are disguised as positive choices (those are especially insidious), these seemingly insignificant decisions can completely throw you off course because you’re not mindful of them. You get overwhelmed, space out, and are unaware of the little actions that take you way off course. The Compound Effect works, all right. It always works, remember? But in this case it works against you because you’re doing… you’re sleepwalking.

Luck, circumstances, or the right situation wasn’t what mattered. If it was to be, it was up to me. I was free to fly. No matter who was elected president, how badly the economy tanked, or what anybody said, did, or didn’t do, I was still 100 percent in control of me. Through choosing to be officially liberated from past, present, and future victimhood, I’d hit the jackpot. I had the unlimited power to control my destiny.

The earlier you start making small changes, the more powerfully the Compound Effect works in your favor. Suppose your friend listened to Dave Ramsey’s advice and began putting $250 a month into an IRA when she got her first job after graduating from college at age twenty-three. You, on the other hand, don’t start saving until you’re forty. (Or maybe you started saving a little earlier but cleaned out your retirement account because you didn’t notice any great gains.) By the time your friend is forty, she never has to invest another dollar and will have more than a $1 million by the age of sixty-seven, growing at 8 percent interest compounded monthly. You continue to invest $250 every month until you reach sixty-seven, the normal retirement age for Social Security for those born after 1960. (That means you’re saving for twenty-seven years in contrast to her seventeen years.) When you’re ready to retire, you’ll have less than $300,000 and will have invested $27,000 more than your friend. Even though you saved for many more years and invested much more cash, you still ended up with less than a third of the money you could have had. That’s what happens when we procrastinate and neglect necessary behaviors, habits, and disciplines. Don’t wait another day to start the small disciplines that will lead you in the direction of your goals!

If you’re soliciting applicants to fill one of the exclusive seats on your ride, the headline should talk about the opportunity to work with other extremely talented, fun, passionate, and high-character people who are fired up about the great mission, challenge, and vision you are trying to realize. Explain how you invest in your people to help them grow, develop, and achieve their goals—professionally and personally. Then (maybe) footnote the compensation package.