What makes for long term, sustained academic and life success?
As I have been conversing with students who desire to make the most of the education they have been afforded, much vivid conversation has been had about what makes for sustained, long term academic and life success.
I agree with the great many educational psychologists and those who know what real academic and life success looks like, who name this transformative sustained daily effort, as the ‘The Compound Effect’. The compound effect has three elements to it. Consistency, intensity and momentum.
At the heart of The Compound Effect resides the understanding that the small, seemingly inconsequential choices we make daily have an astonishing cumulative impact over time. Small daily actions, or decisions, like routinely dedicating time to learning a new concept, revising the days learning, crafting responses to practice questions, planning or any positive life habit, when compounded, creates an incremental, but monumental, shift towards our goals. Professor James Clear insightfully notes that, “Being faithful to the daily habits of success isn’t particularly notable, sometimes it isn’t even noticeable, but it can be far more meaningful – especially in the long run.”
When you add small daily choices to move you forward in learning each day, small daily habits, you will have element number one… consistency. There is great power in consistency in our journey towards success.
Adding bursts of intensity at the right time fuels our consistency and turns it into ‘high end’ success. For example we encourage students in their learning to aim for consistency and then add to it bursts of intensity, like placing themselves under pressure to complete tasks under exam conditions at least once a week for frequent intense, focused study sprints. This has a compounding effect on the value of consistency. This means getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. Doing hard things. This will also build their character.
The third element of the compound effect is harnessing the value of momentum. Small successes create a force that propels us forward. Go looking for growths and wins, and record them, literally with a scoreboard. Each achievement, however modest, adds to the momentum, gradually building strength over time and making it easier to tackle larger goals. By harnessing the compound effect of consistency, with the right dose of intensity, we can ensure our trajectory is always moving from strength to strength in our learning.
