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found myself staring squarely at a fork in the road, a point I now refer to as my day of disgust: that moment of impact we sometimes hit in our lives when we come smack face to face with our circumstances and, without having a clue to the what or how of it, make a decision to change.
Once I got a little way above survival and was starting to head up into the warmer waters of success, without realizing it or thinking about it, I would stop doing the things that had gotten me there. Naturally, I would then start sinking back down again, back down toward survival and beyond, back down toward the failure line.
And if you can survive, then you can succeed. You don’t need to do some brilliant, impossible thing.
we would just keep doing the things that got us from failure up to survival in the first place, the things we already know how to do and were already doing, they would eventually carry us all the way to success.
Or taking a moment to tell someone how much you appreciate them, and doing that consistently, every day,
Just wanting something doesn’t necessarily get it for you, not even when you combine wanting with trying really hard and working really hard. You can want all you want, and try yourself blue in the face.
It’s how you do the “hows” that’s most important.
The secret ingredient is your philosophy.
“your philosophy,” all I mean is changing the way you think about simple everyday things. Once you do, then you will take the steps you need to take, to lead you to the how-to’s you need.
Successful people fail their way to the top.
Successful people fail their way to the top. Do the thing, and you shall have the power.
The single most important thing I can tell you about the slight edge is this: it’s already working, right now, either for you or against you. So don’t wait.
Let’s
You’re never too old, and it’s never too late, to start applying slight edge tactics to achieve your dreams, financial and otherwise. In fact, best-selling author David Bach has written an excellent book titled Start Late, Finish Rich,
It’s never too late to start. It’s always too late to wait.
Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, or Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness?
If you will learn to understand and apply the slight edge, I will guarantee you that in time—and chances are, less time than you would imagine—you will have what you desire. You will be among the 5 percent. You will be successful.
they mastered the mundane.
if you apply the slight edge consistently in your life, you will find yourself among the 5 percent and see the goals and aspiration in your life coming to pass—and you will achieve those aims, goals, and dreams by doing mundane, everyday, simple things.
Jim Rohn: The simple things that lead to success are all easy to do. But they’re also just as easy not to do.
So what’s the difference? The difference is their awareness, understanding, and application of the slight edge in their life and work.
Everything you need to do to transform your life is easy to do. It’s easy to become healthy, fit and vibrant. It’s easy to become financially independent. It’s easy to have a happy family and a life rich with meaningful friendships. It’s just a matter of mastering the mundane—of repeating simple little disciplines that, done consistently over time, will add up to the very biggest accomplishments.
The truth is, what you do matters. What you do today matters. What you do every day matters.
consistently repeated daily actions + time = inconquerable results.
If you want to understand and apply the slight edge to create the life of your dreams, you can’t make your everyday choices based on the evidence of your eyes. You need to make them based on what you know. You have to see through the eyes of time.
Way back in the beginning, when you add the first few tiny, insignificant bits of positive action, you won’t see the scales move at all and that will frustrate you
by putting time on your side, you’ve marshaled the forces of the slight edge. Your success becomes inevitable. You just need to stay in the process long enough to give it a chance to win. It starts with a choice.
Pioneers don’t know what’s out there, but out there, they go anyway. That’s why being a pioneer takes such courage. Courage means to have a purpose and to have heart.
The Slight Edge is all about living in the moment. For me, this is perhaps the hardest lesson to learn about the slight edge: you can’t find it in the past or the future, only right here, right now.
Luck is when that constancy of preparedness eventually creates opportunity.
both that “sudden flash” and that “overnight success” were the final, breakthrough results of a long, patient process of edge upon edge upon edge. Any time you see what looks like a breakthrough, it is always the end result of a long series of little things, done consistently over time.
Believing in the “big break” is worse than simply being futile. It’s actually dangerous, because it can keep you from taking the actions you need to take to create the results you want.
Once you absorb the slight edge way of being, you’ll stop looking for that quantum leap—and start building it. You’ll stop looking for the miracle, and start being the miracle.
Hoping for “the big break”—the breakthrough, the magic bullet—is not only futile, it’s dangerous, because it keeps you from taking the actions you need to create the results you want.
It’s not something you pursue, it’s something you do. Or to be more accurate, it’s a lot of somethings you do. A lot of little somethings. Simple things you do every day, in fact. Or, as the case may be, don’t do every day.
Once you do what it takes to raise your everyday level of happiness, then you will become more successful, then you’ll become healthier, then you’ll find that relationship.
Happy habits don’t just make you happier. They also create exactly the attitude you need to make that synaptic leap from the slight edge philosophy to slight edge actions. In other words, now those actions start working for you. In every aspect of your life.
I want the world to be better because I was here. I want my life, my work, my family to mean something. If you are not making someone else’s life better you are wasting your time. Your life will only become better by helping make other lives better.
The Ripple Effect When you create positive improvements in your life, you create positive ripples that spread out all around you, like a pebble of positivity dropped in a pond. Those ripples may not all be visible; in fact, they may be mostly invisible. But just because you or others may not see them doesn’t mean they’re not there.
We are all having a ripple effect on others; the question is, what kind of ripple effect, negative or positive, do we want to have?
Greatness is not something predetermined, predestined, or carved into your fate by forces beyond your control. Greatness is always in the moment of the decision.
Little things, things that might seem like they have no power at all, can make all the difference in the world. Sometimes, they can even change the course of history.
Great success often starts from a tiny beginning—but there has to be a beginning. You have to start somewhere. You have to do something.
There are no straight lines; everything curves. If you’re not increasing, you’re decreasing.
there are only two ways to make their building the highest structure in town: build an even bigger one, or tear down all the others. Since the odds are against them building
For things to change, you’ve got to change. For things to get better, you’ve got to get better. It’s easy to do. But then, it’s just as easy not to do.
The predominant state of mind displayed by those people on the failure curve is blame. The predominant state of mind displayed by those people on the success curve is responsibility.
People on the success curve live a life of responsibility. They take full responsibility for who they are, where they are, and everything that happens to them.
“A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.”
Don’t complain about what you allow.
