Ep 183: Compounding Results

Marie is officially in August — aka her favorite month, aka the month she designed her entire life around so she could be fully present with her kids. She's headed to the Alicia Keys Hell's Kitchen cast party, a road trip up to Washington, Seattle, the Quillute territory, Portland, Bend, and Disneyland where her son will be dressed head-to-toe as Jack Sparrow (with a beard made from his own hairbrush — yes, really). But before she disappears into summer magic, she's leaving you with one of the most important concepts she teaches inside the Moxie: the law of compounding results.

Because here's what nobody tells you when you're in the middle of doing the work and not yet seeing the payoff: that's not failure. That's exactly how it's supposed to go.

What you'll learn in this episode:

• Why the ideas that actually change your life sound completely ridiculous at first — and why that's a feature, not a bug
• What the law of compounding results is and why the world does not work in straight lines, no matter how much our brains want it to
• Why expecting effort to produce a predictable, linear result is the exact thing that will make you quit before the waterfall comes
• Real examples of compounding results in action: raising kids, dating, marketing a business, learning to surf, learning a language, writing a book — and why every single one requires sustained effort before you see the payoff
• Why you are responsible for your results but never entitled to them — and what that distinction actually means for how you show up
• How to stay in momentum during the Sahara Desert stretch — that long, dry season where you're working hard and nothing seems to be moving
• Why collecting failures is just as valuable as collecting wins, and how to flip the script so every failure becomes evidence that you're getting closer
• How a weekly accountability group statistically takes you from 50% to 95% likely to achieve your goal — straight from the research
• What the book Grit by Angela Duckworth tells us about sustained effort vs. inherent talent — and why grit wins every time
• The reflection question to sit with: where are you expecting linear results and creating defeat where there actually is none?

Also in this episode:

• A sneak peek at Pocket Moxie — the AI companion Marie is building to give Moxie ladies 24/7 access to her full library of resources
• The Moxie Bots — Marie's AI backend team (yes, she named them)
• A new course called Finding Moxie — a preview of her upcoming book
• The Moxie Mastermind September cohort — seven months this time, with one-on-ones, a retreat, and a couple spots left

The Moxie Mastermind September cohort is almost full. Apply now at dothebloom.com

How to connect with Marie:

• On the Web | The Local Bloom
• Instagram: @the.bloom.coach
• All Things Marie on LinkTree

JOIN THE BLOOM ROOM!
We'll take all these ideas and apply them to our lives. Follow me on Instagram at @the.bloom.coach to learn more and snag a spot in my group coaching program!

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind Podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it. Well, hello everybody, and welcome to episode number 183 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast, where we're talking about compounding results. How are y'all doing? How are you doing out there? I wish I could hear what you're saying in response or thinking. I've been having such great calls with all of you. Welcome calls, welcoming a whole bunch of people into the Moxie Mastermind, which is so exciting, and other calls with women interested in joining the Moxie. Just lots of cool conversations happening. And this is August now, so I am off. I completed my last day of coaching calls, getting everybody coached up before I was off for a month with my kids. My favorite thing. And I've talked a couple times about how this idea was ridiculous when I first said it to my business partner years ago when I was talking about how I wanted to end my burnout cycle, work half as much for twice as much, and do what I love all day long, and be off in August with my kids and work three days a week the rest of the summer and four days a week the rest of the year. And I just remember sounding so ridiculous to myself at first, and now it's my life. And I've been sharing on social media just this concept of being ridiculous at first, which I've said in other episodes, but I just find it so helpful to remind ourselves that the ideas that really change our lives, really change the world, really change communities, really change ourselves, sound ridiculous at first. They have to. They have to sound a little bit wild. But if we stay true to those, which we're going to talk about today in the law of compounding results, we can change everything. And I'm about to go to Alicia Keyes' Hell's Kitchen performance next week on Monday. And then me and my kids are the only family that is non-cast that gets to go to the cast party and hang out with Alicia Keys, which is so fun. And after that, the next day, I take off on a road trip with my kids that I do every year. This year, we're going all the way up to Washington. We're gonna stay in Seattle for a bit, and then the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and then out to the Quilute territory, and then to our friends' houses in Portland, seeing some friends in Bend and ending up at Disneyland with other friends to celebrate my son's 10th birthday. My youngest is 10. What? Life is wild. And when we're at Disneyland, when we are in the Star Wars land, he will be dressed head to toe as the Mandalorian. I can't wait. This happens every year. But a new production here, a new edition, is that when we were at the Pirates of the Caribbean, he's gonna be dressed head to toe as Jack Sparrow. I love it so much. I cannot wait. I cannot tell you how much I love this experience of walking with my child dressed fully in these environments. I mean, dreads and beard and mustache included. So exciting. He's been practicing making mustaches and beards. And he came out the other day with one on that looks so realistic that my husband and I were like, Where did you get that? And he said, from the hair in my hairbrush. And we were like, What a brilliant idea! That's amazing. And it was the most perfect mustache and beard we'd ever seen. It looked very realistic, and I feel like now I understand what he's gonna look like when he's 25 and trying on a mustache for mustache March. So that trip's really gonna be great. And then school's gonna start pretty soon after that. So I have a couple people working on AI for the Moxie. This is super exciting. I have one woman creating an AI team for behind the scenes for my business to go through my emails and make some of the logistical things smoother and easier for me, doing other things as well, just comp making things everything everything easier on the back end without removing any human touches for from my clients, from any of my people, just making things easier on the back end. So my people still communicate with humans only, and all of it is just making the back side of the work more effective, more helpful, more on point by all of these ways that we're using building this team of these five supportive AI tools, an AI team who I am calling the Moxie bots. It's like backup dancers. Marie and the MoxieBots, do you like this? And we are also building an AI support system for all of my Moxie mastermind ladies that again does not ever replace any of the touch points with me. Just as much human contact and support, just more support, because this Moxie AI companion has the library of all of my resources and is available 24-7. So that AI companion is called Pocket Moxie. That's cute, huh? I really have fun naming these things. And Pocket Moxie can be like, oh, this, you know, this is what you're dealing with. Here are four episodes of the podcast. Here's a class to watch, here's this worksheet that Marie has, and then here's the question to ask Marie, or here's a model, a regenerative thought model that may not be visible to you. And here's one that you could look at, go talk to Marie, you know. So never replacing humans, but just accentuating the work, which feels very fun for me. But today, aside from Disneyland and Jack Sparrow outfits and Moxie bots, we are talking about the law of compounding results, which just really is a really helpful concept to understand. It's something we work on constantly in the Moxie. And just as women, we know we're pulled in a hundred directions at once. Everyone is asking for our attention. They all want a bit of our time. We know this, and we are not surprised. And what we do in the Moxie is we start a blueprint so that we can narrow down what we say yes to. In that blueprint, we have just two priorities. One is our impact priority, our contribution to the world through work, leadership, community, engagement, whatever that looks like for you. And to back up a minute, the reason we have just two priorities is this concept that if you have more than two, you have none, right? Because our energy is pulled in all these directions. So we want to narrow down our priorities. And I've talked about this on the podcast to the impact priority. And then the second is what's called our Masogi, which I've also talked about before. Jesse Itzler from the Big Ass Calendar introduced this to me. The one six-month goal for your personal life, that when you accomplish it, it makes you proud of who you're being in the world. I've talked about this recently, but stay with me. I'm just recapping here. So those two goals become your filter. Every habit, every request someone makes of you, every distraction that kind of asks for your time gets measured against these two priorities. Does this take me towards or away from success for my Masogi and my big contribution goal? I said before that my two for this past year were my family and the Moxie. So then we have these priorities. And in the Moxie, we have a blueprint, which I talked about on the blueprint episode, but this is to build on that. Then we get into massive action. We put in work, we take aligned action, right? So we already know our beliefs, we know the impact we're trying to have, we know that there's alignment in the two goals with who we want to be, with our values, with the vision for who we're becoming in the world. We know this is an authentic expression of ourselves, what we want, the change you want to see, the value we want to provide to humanity through either who we're being in our own lives or how we're impacting the world. But at some point, as we're taking action for a prolonged period of time, we look around and think, this is not happening yet. Our brain looks around and does not see evidence that we are making progress. We think I don't see results yet. And maybe that's again in a health habit in our body, in our business, in our funding, whatever it is that we're building. Now, I have another episode that I recorded way early on called Believing in the After, where I talk about how we have to believe in the after, in our vision come to life. We have to have so much belief and dedication and thought around that that outweighs all the evidence that the current world without our idea materialized will show us that our idea isn't real. Like, of course, it will not give us evidence that it's real, it's not real yet. So that is the belief part. But let's talk here about results because we expect that we're gonna see results aligned with effort. But that is not how the world works. And we're gonna talk about this in a moment. It's not always, it's not how the world works in a predictable way because of the law of compounding results. The world doesn't work in straight lines. We put in sustained, aligned effort, action after action after action, and for a while it looks like nothing's changing. Eventually it cascades all at once in a waterfall. That's often how compounding effort works. But in that moment where we're not seeing results, which often stretches out for a long time, if we default to thinking about our efforts as linear, as cause and effect, as a graph with an X and a Y axis, where we can chart results as directly predictable by each effort that we make. Like it's all going to be relative and consistent, right? We make an effort, we see a result, we make an effort, we see a result. We will stop our forward momentum if our forward momentum is dependent on that, because life is life. First of all, that's not how it works. Think of raising children. Just this one. There's this example, like cracks me up. I often will repeat myself over and over and over and over in the young years with my kids, and I will be like, nothing is changing. Then I will see years down the road, this beautiful human that was actually taking it all in the whole time, that actually has an incredible value system and morality and way of thinking and believing. I just didn't get to see results for years. And I still haven't seen all the results, right? Raising children is like a very poignant example of compounding results. Then dating, right? Like I talk to so many people that are like, I've been on five dates and I still haven't met my person. And I'm like, you wanna quit after meeting five people out of billions? Like you think you're gonna find I'm not, I mean, hey, this is a natural experience. I'm not making fun of that. I would feel the same. And when we really look at it logically, we probably should expect to go on like 300 dates before we're gonna find someone that's anywhere near our person person. It often doesn't take that long, but hey, there's a lot of people in the world, right? And so we every single date that we go on that doesn't match, that doesn't work out, it's gotta feel like a game if we're really gonna date to meet our person. If the more we date, the closer we get, the more people we know, the more people we might get introduced to, the more we know what we don't want, and the closer we get to who we do. What about marketing a business? If we think the first time we send an email, we're gonna have a bunch of people buy our stuff. It's not gonna work like that. People need like what, 15 touch points before they even buy one tiny thing or even get interested in a conversation about buying something, right? We need brand recognition, we need to know someone, like someone, and trust someone before we're gonna buy anything from them. Also, we need to get better and better, intimately familiar with our product, with whatever it is, our business, whatever it is we're doing in the world. And that comes through doing it. We're going to get better and better through every single email we send, every single person that we pitch our idea to. You know, if we're getting investment for a new uh investment for a startup, it's the same thing. The more we talk about it, the better we get. The more people we meet that know what we're up to, that might think of us when they hear someone else talk about needing our product or service or investment opportunity. It's compounding results, but it is not one for one. So we have to stay with it to have it come to fruition. What about writing a book or painting? Our first paintings are probably gonna be terrible. Our first writing is gonna feel all clunky and horrible. We're not gonna feel the result of like this incredible creative process if we expect it to feel great right away or be great at it right away. It's this like growth-oriented mindset. I like to think about I'm learning surfing right now. It is not cause and effect great results. It really is like the heart. My husband, who is a surfer, is like, this is the gnarliest, yes, surf term, gnarliest learning curve for any sport. I don't know if that's true, but that's what he says. Okay. And I can tell you, I can attest that it is a strong learning curve. I have been learning to surf for a while, not very consistently, but I've been putting some effort into it, and I I am not barreled yet. And you have to go through a lot of what's called purling, where your board like goes upside down and you crash really hard. You have to go through that a lot of times to understand how not to move on a wave before you know how to do it. You have to know that all your efforts are compounding to build the skill. Learning a language, it's like not that fun at first when you're like rojo, azul, amarillo, naranja. Like, no, anaranjalo. Naranja is an actual orange. Anaranjalo is the orange. Yeah, so like in the beginning, when you're actually just learning vocabulary words, it's not super rewarding. But then once you string them together and I can talk to someone when I go to Mexico and I can speak Spanish to them and have a whole conversation in an hour-long, you know, ride, a taxi ride, uh, it's so satisfying. But you have to put in a lot of compounding effort to get that result. Any role we're in, too. Leadership, parenting, entrepreneurship, we have to have this learning curve where we learn and learn and learn and learn, make mistakes, fall upside down, and the compounding results create a great leader, a great entrepreneur, a great parent, a great partner. If we're dependent on results to maintain momentum, we will not continue to act. Now, we do want to get some results because eventually we're gonna need to see some progress to keep going, right? We can maintain our momentum through mindset alone and through remembering that our efforts compound over time. We're gonna talk about that some more. That our efforts compound over time. We can maintain that momentum, and it feels way better when we get little wins. So celebrate the little wins and use an iterative approach to refine our actions over time to be more and more likely to get results. Little results, little results, little results, boom, big result. Iteration by looking at what is and isn't working every time. That is so different than expecting that we are entitled to a result from every effort. You with me? All right. So we don't want to be dependent on an expectation that we're entitled to results because we never are. We are responsible for our results, but never entitled to them. And the law of compounding results tells us that sustained action in line with our values, our priorities, inspired by our authentic self and our passion and our creative energy that is also in contribution to the world, adding value, helping fellow humans in a way that we're like, oh, I love this, I really care about this, I am into it, this doesn't even feel like work, combined with iteration and massive immediate action on our ideas, with openness to feedback, will get us there. Statistically, if you do that, if you create amazing stuff in the world that's like an expression of you and you keep going and you test and fail and redesign and test and fail and redesign, you iterate, you will statistically, you will most likely succeed, especially with a support system keeping you accountable. That's what the Moxie is all about. A group that you report to weekly makes you bounce from like 50% to 95% likely to achieve your goal. And the book Grit by Angela Dexwish, this is like an incredible book to show you how grit, sustained prolonged effort, and the development long-term of skill is more predictive of future success than inherent skill. So if we're born and we're like, man, I shred on piano and we're like naturally good at it or skiing or whatever, that person is less likely to end up being a concert pianist or an Olympic skier than the person who works at it year after year after year after year with grit and effort. So when you're in that Sahara Desert stretch where you're like, oh, I've been working on this thing forever and nothing's moving, all the dates, all the workouts, all of the marketing emails, all of the things, all the conversations with my kid. And it's like, I'm so thirsty, I'm in this desert. Just give me some results, baby. Why is this not working? Catch your brain. The reason it's not working is because that's not how the world works. We have to sustain our effort and keep going. And eventually the results compound. So stay true to your vision, to your why. Why are you doing this? Why did you start in the first place? The impact you want to have on yourself, on others, on the world, and then keep taking aligned action. Action from there, from that gut, from that, I love this, I love the world, I want to do this. Do the retros. Look at what's working and not working, tweak the approach and keep going. Collect failures as evidence that you're building compounding results. If you don't can't collect the results, collect the failures and use those as evidence that you're getting closer. Literally flip it on its head and say, every failure is evidence that I'm getting closer. And then a waterfall will happen. I have seen it again and again. One thing happens and then another and another. A door opens, a person you talk to that's interested in what you're doing, they're more interested because of your sustained activity that shows how legit you are, right? You've been working at this for so long, they take you seriously. You're able to talk about it with passion and clarity because you know your stuff, because you've been in sustained action for so long, compounding these results of talking about your whatever it is you're up to in such a clear and passionate and articulate, authentic way. You're able to not be all needy and like pick me energy because you've built belief in your mission and your impact, and you're like, hey, if you want in, get in. But like, we're going. So you don't have that neediness, that weirdness, that pick me-ness because you're authentic and compelling because you believe in it. And then that conversation leads to an opportunity that unlocks others. I have seen it happen again and again and again. This compounding results that then cascade. If you keep moving toward your dream, your results will compound. You will get there. So the reflection question for your bloom your mind groups that you talk about these episodes in, or just for yourself to talk about with some a friend at dinner, or just to write in your journal about is this where am I expecting results to be linear with efforts? Where am I expecting the world to be linear, right? And there to be this X, Y graph where every result is directly correlates with the effort I put in. Effort, result, effort, result, effort, result, effort, result. Where am I expecting that to happen and getting defeated when the world does what the world does? It doesn't give you a result every time, right? So how are you creating defeat where there is none? How are you entitled to results? None of us are entitled to any of it, not even one more day on this planet. We are not result uh entitled to win, to succeed. We are responsible for our actions and our success. And that responsibleness is the thing. Is that a word? Responsibleness. That sense of responsibility is the thing that will keep us moving forward so much that we take action, massive action, consistently over a prolonged period of time, coming from our heart and our gut and our brain, iterating, tweaking, staying excited about this world that we're creating and what we're putting into it. And then when you do that, you will see the results. The results will compound. So where are you expecting one-to-one effort result? Where can you switch that mentality to the law of compounding results? And how will that help you? All right, that's what I've got for you this week. This is the work we do inside the Moxie, not just building businesses or relationships or dreams, but healing our own lives and our communities with the ideas that can only come from you because you're unique. Your lived experience, your face, your voice, who you are is totally unique. Nobody else has your exact vision. Nobody else can think of what you can think. Bring what you can bring to your world. Nobody else is in your world. You're there. So bring your ideas to life, either with us in the Moxie or somewhere else. What's your Masogi? What's that goal alongside your contribution goal that's gonna make you feel like this was a year worth living? If you want to come into the Moxie, go to do thebloom.com, apply. We have a beautiful group, and there's a couple more spots. It's gonna be seven months this time, starting in September with one-on-ones. We have an awesome retreat, all kinds of good stuff happening. I have a couple new courses coming out, an idea lab, a course called Finding Moxie. That's a little preview for my book called Finding Moxie coming out next year, or that I'm writing next year. Who knows? Maybe it'll come out in 2028. I don't want to overpromise here. But all of that is coming your way, and we would love to have you in the Moxie with us. Just had a conversation with a woman from my high school today that reached out to me and is interested. So cool how the common experience of women, meaning expectations, running out of time, in positions of leadership, serving everybody but ourselves, is bringing us together to want to heal the world with our ideas from a place of joy and balance together, side by side. So exciting. This is a moment, y'all. This is a moment in history where more and more momentum is gathering around women who are like, this is enough. We understand how we've been socialized to just like sit back and meet expectations and do more and more and more and drain ourselves out, and we're not doing it anymore because we see that the world needs us, our ideas, our leadership, and we need each other. Exciting moment to be a woman. Exciting moment to be in the Moxie. Come on in if you want to. And if not, find your find your people around you and help them bring your Masogi and your contribution ideas to life. And remember the law of compounding results. Keep going, baby. You will get there. The world needs you. All right, that's what I've got for you this week, and I will see you next week. If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, you gotta come and join us in the Bloom Room. This is a year-round membership where we take all of these concepts and we apply them to real life in a community where we have each other's backs and we bring out the best in each other. We're all there to make our ideas real. One idea at a time.