The Compound Effect: Make Your Habits Last

It has been scientifically proven that it takes ~66 days to solidify a habit. You might be thinking “that doesn’t seem like a lot of time”.

And you would be right, it realistically only takes 2 months to build a new habit into your life.

So why do most people fail to stick with new habits?

That’s because the gap between starting a habit and solidifying a habit, is massive. It requires us to make all these mini choices along the way to the final result.

Each one of these choices has 2 possible outcomes:

It creates and increases progress toward completion—or— it destroys and decreases progress toward completion

This illustration shows us the impact of stopping habits periodically. The more we stop, the more limited our outcomes are— but by simply showing up everyday regardless of how we feel, we can achieve the compounding results

The compound effect is the key principle that helps drive habit change over time.

This is the framework that outlines what momentum driven habit change looks likes:

We can see that once we decide on habit change, there is an initial requirement of “activation energy” that kicks the habit in motion.

This looks like:

• Getting that gym membership
• Starting that website
• Buying only healthy foods

This is the step that everyone gets excited about— the beginning hope of change.

But what follows is the difficult part: following through

Now that we have our gym membership, website or healthy foods— we are faced with a critical choice: actually doing the thing

We have to drive to the gym, start writing content for the website, and making healthy meals. These are the choices that people struggle with.

Now as I mentioned, the compound effect is what drives habit change, and compounding is a feedback loop.

This means that our choices reinforce decision making next time. In science and in life there are 2 types of feedback loops: Positive and negative.

In the positive feedback loop option, if we feel like doing a habit we continue to work on it.

This reinforces our choice and helps motivate us to continue the habit in the future.

In the negative feedback loop, if we don’t feel like doing a habit, we take a break and interrupt the progress.

This switches the momentum toward not continuing the habit in the future since we are no longer seeing the results.

The key determinant that decides which feedback loop we choose is our energy level at the time of the habit: whether or not we feel like doing it

Our energy is always going to vary and be unpredictable. So how can we guarantee habit change regardless of our energy?

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All we need to do is shift our perspective and commit to continuing the habit regardless of how we feel in the moment. This is the only way you can guarantee habit change.

I was able to create this framework based on personal experience and the learnings of two books:

The Compound Effect

Atomic Habits

I highly recommend you check both of these out if you like this posts.

I have seen this framework time and time again. Momentum is powerful, but it is up to us to show up everyday to our habits regardless of how we feel.

Lastly if you take nothing at all from this post, at least remember this quote from Ryan Holiday: