September 2026 at MAKE Wellness: Summit Week and the Compound Effect

May contain affiliate links; I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Everything here is my opinion. Full disclosures

Every month the company I build with picks a book and the whole affiliate community reads it together. September's pick is The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy, which is about why the choices that decide how your life turns out are almost always too small to feel important on the day you make them. I wrote on this site for months before anything came back, so the argument had my attention before the book did.

Key Takeaways

What September looks like from the inside

New customers get $10 off their first order of $99 or more, applied automatically when you shop through my link. It stacks with the 10% Subscribe and Save discount, and there is no date on it, no countdown, no code to remember.

The month has one date on it that everyone inside MAKE has been counting toward. MAKE Summit 2026 runs September 17 to 19 in Dallas, with a VIP welcome dinner on the 16th for the affiliates who qualified during the August window. Three days, four sessions, three parties, and the first MAKE merch shop the company has ever run at an event. Awards Night opens with a pre-show of trivia, giveaways, 360 photo booths and new product sampling, then moves into the awards show, where the year's rank advancements get called out by name in front of everyone.

I have not been to a Summit yet, and I am not in Dallas this month.

The other thing that happened on the way here: MAKE was named a Gold Stevie Award winner in the 23rd International Business Awards for its Natural Bioactive Precision Peptides. It is an outside body looking at the science and finding it worth an award.

Around all of that the ordinary machinery keeps running. Monday Night Calls run September 14, 21 and 28 at 6PM Mountain Time, open to anyone on the team. There is no call on the 7th; the office is closed for Labor Day. The Science Training Calls with the Peptide PhDs run September 3, 10 and 24 at the same hour, and they are the ones I actually make time for, because they are the closest thing to being taught the chemistry by the people who formulated it.

The MAKE Memories leaderboard toward the Waikoloa, Hawaii trip is still running in the background, and Builder Academy 2027, an immersive leadership event, is open to anyone who reaches Builder 2 for the first time before the qualification window closes in April. I have zero trip points.

Book club, weekly science calls, an awards show, a leadership academy whose qualification window runs eleven months. A company builds that much scaffolding when it expects the same people to still be here in three years.

The book: The Compound Effect

Darren Hardy spent years as the publisher of SUCCESS magazine, which meant a career of interviewing people who had done remarkable things and asking them how. The Compound Effect is his report on the answer, and the answer is boring on purpose.

His opening move is a question. Someone offers you three million dollars in cash today, or a single penny that doubles in value every day for thirty-one days. Almost everyone takes the cash, and almost everyone is wrong. On day twenty the penny is worth about $5,243, and the person holding three million dollars is still laughing. On day thirty-one the penny is worth $10,737,418.24.

Nothing about days one through twenty-five suggests the ending. The whole result is loaded into the last stretch, and every single day before that looks like proof you chose badly.

The book turns that into a story of three men living nearly identical lives who each make one tiny adjustment, some good, some bad, so small that none of them would call it a decision. For months they are indistinguishable. Then the gap opens, and once it opens it never closes again.

Hardy's instruction is to spend a week watching the behaviour before trying to change it.

Pick the one you already suspect is quietly deciding things for you. What you spend without noticing. What you eat standing up. The hours the phone takes. Then, for one week, write down every single instance of it, every coffee and every scroll and every twenty dollars, and change nothing yet.

Those choices survive because they happen below the level where you are paying attention, and a pen drags them up into the light. Most people find the behaviour starts changing partway through the week, before they have decided to change anything, purely because it became impossible to keep not noticing.

It also links straight back to August's book. Clason's whole system in The Richest Man in Babylon rests on keeping a tenth of what you earn, and the reason almost nobody does it is that the tenth does nothing visible for years. It is a penny on day four. Hardy explains why that feels like failure and why it is not.

That is the part I recognised. Nothing came back here for a long time, and then two people, one customer and one affiliate, over a stretch that included a month in Brazil where I published almost nothing. The money in this is modest and slow. If a paycheque is what you need by Friday, this is not that. But I can point at the compounding now, and I could not have pointed at it in month three.

The part where I invite you

I came into direct selling carrying every stereotype you probably carry now. What I found at MAKE Wellness was closer to a gym membership for building a small business: products people reorder month after month, training on a schedule, a reading list, and a room full of people cheering for effort. I wrote about how this industry changed if you want the longer version.

If any of this pulls at you, two doors. Try the products as a customer, the standing discount still applies. Or, if the building side is what caught your attention, here is how I work with people. Most affiliates in direct selling earn modest or no income, MAKE itself guarantees nobody an income, and the only good reason to start is that you already love the product and want to own a piece of what you spend. The book club is free either way.