The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

by Jeff Olson

Because none of that matters. The truth is, whatever other factors may or may not be there, the only reason we keep following this roller coaster of almost-success and nearly-failure, this sine wave of mediocrity, this curse of the average, is that we’re missing one simple point.

To find the path to success, you have to back up one more step. It’s the understanding behind the attitudes that are behind the actions. It’s the philosophy. That’s the missing ingredient, the secret ingredient. The first ingredient. Yes, you have to know the winning how-to actions, and you have to possess the winning attitudes—but what generates all that and keeps it all in place is your philosophy. Your philosophy is what you know, how you hold it, and how it affects what you do. How you think about simple, everyday things. That’s what this book is about. A positive philosophy turns into a positive attitude, which turns into positive actions, which turns into positive results, which turns into a positive lifestyle. A positive life. And a negative philosophy turns into a negative attitude, which turns into negative actions, which turns into negative results, which turns into a negative lifestyle.

There are two prevalent types of attitudes: entitled and value-driven. A value-driven attitude says, “What can I do to help you?” An entitled attitude says, “What have you done for me lately?” An entitled attitude says, “Pay me more, and then maybe I’ll work harder.” A value-driven attitude says, “I’ll work harder, and then I expect you’ll pay me more.” Which of these attitudes is driven by Emerson’s philosophy, “Do the thing and you’ll have the power”? Your philosophy is what you know, how you hold what you know, and how it affects what you do. You can look at anyone’s actions and trace back, through the attitudes behind those actions, to their source: the philosophy behind the attitudes. Show me what a man does, and I’ll show you his philosophy.

Successful people fail their way to the top.

Why Lottery Winners Lose Your philosophy is your view of life, something beyond feelings and attitudes. Your philosophy drives your attitudes and feelings, which drive your actions. By and large, people are looking in the wrong places. They are looking for a big break, that lucky breakthrough, the amazing “quantum leap” everyone keeps talking about. I call it the philosophy of the craps table and roulette wheel, and I don’t believe they’ll ever find it. I’ve seen an awful lot of remarkable successes and colossal failures up close, and in my experience, neither one happens in quantum leaps or “breaks,” whether the lucky or unlucky kind. They happen through the slight edge.

You’ve probably heard the stories about lottery winners losing it all. They’re not urban legends; they really happen. The depths people fall to after big lottery winnings are heartbreaking and mindboggling. And it isn’t only lottery winners. You’ve also heard the stories about famous movie stars, recording stars, or star athletes who make incredible fortunes, literally hundreds of millions of dollars, and somehow manage to wind up broke and in debt. And when you heard those stories, you probably thought the same thing I did: “Man, I don’t know how they pulled that off, but if I made that kind of money I sure wouldn’t squander it all like that!” But let me ask you a tough question: are you sure about that? Speaking as one who’s made it to the top and then seen it all evaporate, all I can say is, you might be surprised. There’s a reason those lottery winners lose it all again, a reason those shining stars plummet to those dark places: they may have had the big breaks, but they didn’t grasp the slight edge. Their winnings changed their bank account balance—but it didn’t change their philosophy. The purpose of this book is to show you the slight edge philosophy, show you how it work...

There is a natural progression to everything in life: plant, ...

That the things you do every single day, the things that don’t look dramatic, that don’t even look like they matter, do matter. That they not only make a difference—they make all the difference.

About having faith in the process of simple, positive actions repeated over time—the faith that miracles do happen, if you know when to trust the process and keep churning the cream.

Simple daily disciplines—little productive actions, repeated consistently over time—add up to the difference between failure and success.

The slight edge is relentless and cuts both ways: simple daily disciplines or simple errors in judgment, repeated consistently over time, make you or break you.

Without the slight edge, you can start with a million and lose it all. With the slight edge, you can start with a penny and accomplish anything you want.

What if that little stack of books had included Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, or Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness? What would her life be like today if five years earlier she had changed just that one simple thing?

Which prompts a question: What’s the difference between the 5 percent and the 95 percent? What are the 5 percent doing that the other 95 percent are not? I’ll tell you what it’s not. It is not heredity, education, looks, talent or inheritance. It isn’t chance, blind fate, or dumb luck, and it isn’t “preparedness meeting opportunity,” either. It isn’t karma. And it isn’t an abundance of sincere wanting and wishing. The 5 percent don’t want success more than everyone else. They don’t wish for it more, pray for it more, envision it more, or hope for it more. And it isn’t that they deserve it more. Hey, we all want our lives to be successful. We all hope for it and wish for it, and you know what? We all deserve it, too. But the 5 percent get it, and the 95 percent don’t. Why is that? There is only one difference: the slight edge.

There’s a principle called Parkinson’s Law, after the man who coined it, Professor Cyril Northcote Parkinson. Parkinson’s Law goes like this: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” Here’s how that looks when you apply it to the world of personal finances: Whatever I have, I spend. Actually, in today’s world it usually means something more like this: Whatever I have, I spend that—plus a little more. How hard is it to put aside a few dollars a day, or a little each week? Ridiculously easy. Yet most of us don’t do it. The United States has one of the highest per capita income rates in the world—and one of the lowest savings rates. Why is that?

Because the slight edge is always working. Whether for you or against you, the slight edge is already at work in your life and always will be, every day, every moment. The purpose of this book is to help you become aware of it—how it is working in your life, every day, every hour, every moment, in every step you take and every choice you make.

Reason #2: The Results Are Invisible The second reason people don’t do the little things that add up to success is that at first, they don’t add up to success. The doomed frog quit paddling in the cream because he’d been doing it as hard as he could, and it obviously wasn’t having any effect. At least, not one he could see. And that’s the problem. The things that create success in the long run don’t look like they’re having any impact at all in the short run. A penny doubled is two cents. Big deal. Take two bucks a day and stick it into savings instead of into an expensive coffee drink, and at the end of a week you’ve got … fourteen dollars. Big deal.

Of course, that was exactly how my mother became a millionaire. But most people wouldn’t do that—because you don’t see the million in front of you when you do the saving. The results are too far in the future. They’re invisible. That is, unless you know how to look through the lenses of the slight edge.

We expect to see results, and we expect to see them now. But that’s not how success is built. Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. “Progressive” means success is a process, not a destination. It’s something you experience gradually, over time. Failure is just as gradual. In fact, the difference between success and failure is so subtle, you can’t even see it or recognize it during the process. And here’s how real success is built: by the time you get the feedback, the real work’s already done. When you get to the point where everyone else can see your results, tell you what good choices you’ve made, notice your good fortune, slap you on the back and tell you how lucky you are, the critical slight edge choices you made are ancient history. And chances are, at the time you actually made those choices, nobody noticed but you. And even you wouldn’t have noticed—unless you understood the power of the slight edge.

The difference between success and failure is not dramatic. In fact, the difference between success and failure is so subtle, so mundane, that most people miss it. They may not realize they have a philosophy, but they do, and it goes like this: What I do right now doesn’t really matter. It’s not hard to see how people come to this understanding of life. I don’t blame them. It’s completely understandable. It’s just not the truth. The truth is, what you do matters. What you do today matters. What you do every day matters. Successful people are those who understand that the little choices they make matter, and because of that they choose to do things that seem to make no difference at all in the act of doing them, and they do them over and over and over until the compound effect kicks in. Those little things that will make you successful in life, that will secure your health, your happiness, your fulfillment, your dreams, are simple, subtle, mundane things that nobody will see, nobody will applaud, nobody will even notice. They are those things that, at the time you do them, often feel like they make absolutely no difference. Things that are ridiculously easy to do—but just as easy not to do. Things that don’t seem to bring you any visible results—at first. Things that seem so insignificant, they couldn’t possibly matter. But they do. Things that, when you look at them as single occurrences, don’t seem like they’d have any impact at all—yet when compounded over time they add ...

Another good image for the slight edge is Lady Justice, the blindfolded statue. The statue itself, of the woman holding the scales and sword to represent the idea of justice, has been around since the days of ancient Rome, but in those days it didn’t wear a blindfold. That part wasn’t added until the sixteenth century, during the renaissance in thinking that eventually gave birth to our modern ideas of representative democracy and universal human rights. The blindfold doesn’t imply that justice is “blind,” as people sometimes assume; its point is that true justice is impervious to external influence.

No matter what you have done in your life up until today, no matter where you are and how far down you may have slid on the failure curve, you can start fresh, building a positive pattern of success, at any time. Including right now. But you need to have faith in the process, because you won’t see it happening at first.

Successful people do whatever it takes to get the job done, whether or not they feel like it. They understand that it is not any one single push on the flywheel but the cumulative total of all their sequential, unfailingly consistent pushes that eventually creates movement of such astonishing momentum in their lives. Successful people form habits that feed their success, instead of habits that feed their failure. They choose to have the slight edge working for them, not against them. They build their own dreams, rather than spend their lives building other people’s dreams, and they achieve these dramatic results in their lives through making choices that are the very antithesis of drama—mundane, simple, seemingly insignificant choices. Every decision you make is a slight edge decision. What you’re going to do, how you’re going to act, what you’re going to read, who you’re going to chat with on the phone, what you’re going to eat for lunch, who you’re going to associate with. How you’re going to treat your fellow workers. What you’re going to get done today. Simply by making those right decisions, or making more of them—one at a time, over and over again—you will have enlisted the awesome power of the slight edge on your behalf. The unwanted circumstances, the poor results you’ve produced in the past, and the evidence of failures in your life, may all continue for a time. There may be no light at the end of the tunnel, or at least none you can see today. But by putting time...

Patience is a challenge for people who do not understand the slight edge. Often, in the beginning, the success path can be uncomfortable, even scary. Especially if you’re the only one around who’s on it. And with only one out of twenty people ever achieving their goals, it’s quite likely that you will be the only one around on the path—at least for a while. Sometimes the path of success is inconvenient, and therefore not just easy not to do but actually easier not to do. For most people, it’s easier to stay in bed. Getting on the path and staying on the path requires faith in the process—especially at the start. That makes you a pioneer. 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. Once you are aware of and understand how to use the slight edge, you will naturally have both—purpose and the strength of heart to stay on that purpose. The important point is to start on the path and to remember that no matter what has gone on before, you can begin fresh and new anytime you choose. You can start with a clean slate. How long will it take? How long before you will actually see and feel (and smell and touch and be able to spend and enjoy and appreciate) the results? How long before you will have the experience of the success you’re seeking?

Time is the force that magnifies those simple daily disciplines into massive success. There is a natural progression to success: plant, cultivate, harvest—and the central step, cultivate, can only happen over the course of time. No genuine success in life is instant. Life is not a clickable link. To grasp how the slight edge works, you have to view your actions through the eyes of time. Difficult takes a little time; impossible takes just a little longer.

Successful people have already grasped the truth that lottery players have not: success is not a random accident. Life is not a lottery.

There’s a popular expression you’ve probably heard, “Luck is preparedness meeting opportunity.” It’s a handy idea, but it’s not quite accurate. People who live by the slight edge understand how luck really works. It’s not preparedness meeting opportunity: it’s preparedness, period. Preparedness created by doing those simple, little, constructive, positive actions, over and over. Luck is when that constancy of preparedness eventually creates opportunity.

Year after year, bill after bill, Wilberforce spent his entire career introducing an endless series of legislative proposals to his colleagues in the British Parliament in his efforts to end slavery, only to have them defeated, one after the other. From 1788 to 1806, he introduced a new anti-slavery motion and watched it fail every single year, for eighteen years in a row. Finally the water wore down the rock: three days before Wilberforce’s death in 1833, Parliament passed a bill to abolish slavery not only in England but also throughout its colonies. Three decades later, a similar bill passed in the United States, spearheaded by another man of conscience who had also spent much of his life failing, a patient Illinois lawyer named Abraham. Deus ex machina? Far from it. These weren’t solutions that dropped out of the blue sky. They were the “sudden” result of long patient years of tireless repeated effort. There was no fictional deus ex machina happening here; these were human problems, and they had human solutions. But the only access to them was through the slight edge. Of course Wilberforce and Lincoln were not the sole figures in this heroic struggle, and even after their bills were passed into law on both sides of the Atlantic, the evils of slavery and racism were far from over. Rome wasn’t rehabilitated in a day, or even a century. But their efforts—like Mother Teresa’s efforts to end poverty, Gandhi’s to end colonial oppression, or Martin Luther King’s and Nelson Ma...

Have you ever suddenly understood something in a “flash of recognition”? Have you ever known of someone who became an “overnight success”? Here is a great secret that holds the key to great accomplishment: 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. No success is immediate or instantaneous; no collapse is sudden or precipitous. They are both products of the slight edge. Now, I’m not saying that quantum leaps are a myth because they don’t really happen. As a matter of fact, they do happen. Just not the way people think they do. The term comes from particle physics, and here’s what it means in reality: a true quantum leap is what happens when a subatomic particle suddenly jumps to a higher level of energy. But it happens as a result of the gradual buildup of potential caused by energy being applied to that particle over time. In other words, it doesn’t “just suddenly happen.” An actual quantum leap is something that finally happens after a lengthy accumulation of slight-edge effort. Exactly the way the water hyacinth moves from day twenty-nine to day thirty. Exactly the way the frog’s certain death by drowning was “suddenly” transformed into salvation by butter. A real-life quantum leap is not Superman leaping a tall building. A real q...

Every January in every gym across America, hundreds of thousands of people start over in a process that they will soon quit. And the only reason they’re going to quit is that they haven’t set themselves up with the right expectation. They aren’t looking for incremental progress; they’re looking for results they can feel right now. They’re looking for a breakthrough. They don’t have a whisper of a chance. Easy to do, easy not to do … and in that tiny, seemingly insignificant little choice not to do, so many people quit the effort and then go on to live out lives of quiet desperation. 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. It can even be lethal. Think of the poor frog that gave up and let himself drown because he couldn’t see a breakthrough on the horizon. He was wrong, of course: there are miracles, even in the life of a frog. It’s just that the breakthrough didn’t come down out of the clouds; it came at the end of a series of consistent, determined, compounding-interest foot-paddlings. What’s the greatest gift you can give to an inner-city kid? An understanding of the slight edge. Because that’s not the answer he’s getting from the world around him. He believes that the only way out of his world of poverty, violence, oppression, and fear is to become a sports superstar—because that’s what we tell him. That’s the quantum leap ans...

Our society is sliding rapidly into an ever-increasing economic crisis of poor health stemming from an epidemic of adult-onset diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and a score of other chronic illnesses that have steadily fed a monstrously overgrown health care system, tax system, and social security system. The cause of all this is no mystery, and neither is the solution—not to those who know how to recognize the slight edge at work. Our entire health crisis is nothing but one set of little decisions, made daily and compounded daily, winning out over another set of little decisions, made daily and compounded daily.

Shawn teaches a set of five simple things you can do every day that, if you do them consistently over time, will make you significantly, noticeably, measurably happier. They are slight edge actions for happiness: happy habits. Each morning, write down three things you’re grateful for. Not the same three every day; find three new things to write about. That trains your brain to search your circumstances and hunt for the positive. Journal for two minutes a day about one positive experience you’ve had over the past twenty-four hours. Write down every detail you can remember; this causes your brain to literally reexperience the experience, which doubles its positive impact. Meditate daily. Nothing fancy; just stop all activity, relax, and watch your breath go in and out for two minutes. This trains your brain to focus where you want it to, and not get distracted by negativity in your environment. Do a random act of kindness over the course of each day. To make this simple, Shawn often recommends a specific act of kindness: at the start of each day, take two minutes to write an email to someone you know praising them or thanking them for something they did. Exercise for fifteen minutes daily. Simple cardio, even a brisk walk, has a powerful antidepressant impact, in many cases stronger (and more long-lasting) than an actual antidepressant! According to Shawn, if you do any one of these things faithfully for just three weeks, twenty-one days in a row, it will start to become a...

You’ve probably heard of the “butterfly effect.” This is a famous proposition of chaos theory, which says that when a butterfly flaps its wings in South America, it can set off a chain of events that ends up causing a typhoon in Southeast Asia. The truth is, you create your own butterfly effect, whether you know it or not, and you do it all the time. One of my favorite butterfly-effect stories is the film It’s a Wonderful Life. A small-town businessman named George Bailey reaches the edge of despair, and decides his life has no meaning and makes no difference. On the brink of suicide, he’s visited by an angel improbably named Clarence, who walks George through an experience of what the world would look like if he had never been born. (Which is exactly why we quoted a great line of Clarence’s for the epigraph of the last chapter, “The Ripple Effect.”) George gets quite an eyeful. And so would you, if you had a Clarence come along and take you on the same tour of your life. But outside Hollywood, there’s no Clarence to provide that clarity. It’s something we need to learn to see with our own eyes.

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. If you add just 1 percent of anything—skill, knowledge, effort—per day, in a year it will have more than tripled. But you have to start with the 1 percent. 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.

Greatness is always in the moment of the decision, and so is fate. The wealthy man’s gift to his sons, the wisdom to recognize the slight edge, shows up in the mundane little choices we make every day, not in some big dramatic moment with the orchestra swelling in crescendo behind us. And those private, unseen, everyday moments are what determine the path your life will take. Where you end up in life isn’t about whether you are a good or a bad person, or whether or not you are deserving, or your karma, or your circumstances. It’s dictated by the choices you make—especially the little ones. I know it doesn’t seem like it. It seems like you’re just choosing how to spend the next hour, not the next forty years. But you are choosing how you’ll spend the next forty years. The reason this is hard to see is that it looks like your actions move in a simple straight line. You write down three gratitudes, or you get ten more minutes of snooze time, do twenty push-ups or catch the bad news on TV. Either way, you end up in the same place, on the other side of the next ten minutes, right? Only you don’t. You end up in different places. Because your actions don’t move in a straight line. They curve.

The truth is, everything is curved. There is no true straight line. Everything is always, constantly changing. Including your life. You are on a journey called your life path, and that path is not a straight line, but a curve. As you walk your path, it is always, every moment of every day, curving either upward or downward. It may seem to you that today is much like yesterday. It isn’t. It’s different. Every day is. Appearances can be deceiving; in fact, they almost always are. There may be times when things seem to be on a steady, even keel. This is an illusion: in life, there is no such thing as staying in the same place. There are no straight lines; everything curves. If you’re not increasing, you’re decreasing.

Most people hold time as their enemy. They seek to avoid the passage of time and strive to have results now. That’s a choice based on a philosophy. Successful people understand that time is their friend. In every choice I make, every course of action I take, I always have time in mind: time is my ally. That, too, is a choice based on a philosophy. Time will be your friend or your enemy; it will promote you or expose you. It depends purely upon which side of this curve you decide to ride. It’s entirely up to you. If you’re doing the simple disciplines, time will promote you. If you’re doing the few simple errors in judgment, time will expose you, no matter how well you appear to be doing right now. Life is a curved construction; time is its builder, and choice its master architect.

Responsibility is declaring oneself as cause in the matter. It is a context from which to live one’s life. Responsibility is not a burden, fault, praise, blame, credit, shame, or guilt. All these include judgments and evaluations of good and bad, right and wrong, or better and worse. They are not responsibility… Responsibility starts with the willingness to deal with a situation from and with the point of view, whether at the moment realized or not, that you are the source of what you are, what you do, and what you have. It is not “right,” or even “true,” to declare oneself as “cause” in the matter. It’s just empowering. By standing for yourself as cause, “what happens” shifts from “happening to you” to “just happening” and, ultimately, to “happening as a result of your being cause in the matter.

A friend of mine says that people make two lists about their spouses and carry these lists around in their heads. The long list is a detailed accounting of what’s wrong with their spouse, and the short list is a summary of what’s right. The long list they consult every day. And the short list? That’s the one they read at the funeral. People on the success curve don’t wait for the eulogy. They rip the long list to shreds, scatter its pieces to the wind, and spend every day reading from the short list. They make themselves experts in “what’s right,” and let go of “what’s wrong.” They never hold a grudge—not because it’s morally wrong (although they may agree with that reason, too), but because it simply gets in the way of the curve their life is taking. It slows them down. They’re too busy moving toward the future to be gazing into the rearview mirror. One of the quickest and most direct routes to getting yourself up and onto the success curve is to get out of the past. Review the past, but only for the purpose of making a better plan. Review it, understand and take responsibility for the errors you’ve made, and use it as a tool to do differently in the future. And don’t spend a great deal of time doing even that—the future is a far better tool than the past. The future is your most powerful tool and your best friend. Devote some serious, focused time and effort into designing a crystal-clear picture of where you’re going. Toward the end of this book we’ll take some time to ...

Let’s take an honest look at your level of happiness. Do you take time every day to notice those things you’re grateful for? Do you make a habit of looking at things in a positive light, rather than a negative light? Do you practice savoring the moment and regularly expressing your appreciation of others? Do you engage regularly in activities that are meaningful to you, things you do not because you have to but because you want to? Are you building greater happiness every day, or is day-to-day happiness drifting further away?

Everything is always in motion. Every day, every moment, your life path is either curving upward, or curving downward. Growing up we heard five times as many nos as yeses. Life has a downward pull. People on the success curve live in responsibility. People on the failure curve live in blame. People on the success curve are pulled by the future. People on the failure curve are pulled by the past. No matter where you are, at any moment you can choose to step onto the success curve.

The answer is as simple as it is sad: somewhere along the way, you lost faith. You became too grown-up to take baby steps, too sure you would never succeed to let yourself fail a few times first. You gave up on the universal truth that simple little disciplines, done again and again over time, would move the biggest mountains. You forgot what you used to know about the slight edge.

There is something treacherous about letting go of that childlike willingness to try and try again. Something insidiously dangerous about buying into the idea, “That’ll never work for me.” It is this: settling for less, giving up on the power of baby steps and embracing failure, soon becomes a habit. The first time you give up, it’s painful. The second time it’s still painful but now it feels a little familiar, and there is some comfort in familiarity: it is the silent sleepy comfort of carbon monoxide. And the more you give up, the easier and easier it gets, and the sleepier and sleepier you become to the wakefulness of genuine accomplishment … and success recedes ever further from your grasp. Can you guess why? That’s right: it’s the slight edge—working against you.

Have you ever wanted something so badly that it hurt? Of course you have. Everyone has. Sometimes it’s a sweet sort of ache, sometimes not so sweet, but either way it is a powerful force. I call it the ache of wanting. Having a dream, a goal, an aspiration, is not always a matter of all roses and sweetness; ambitions, aspirations, and desires can be uncomfortable, even painful. The word “want” has two meanings. It can mean you desire something; it can also mean you lack something. (That second sense of the word, by the way, is its original and far older definition.) And in a way, those aren’t really two meanings; they’re two sides of the same meaning. We tend to desire what we lack, and lack what we desire.

That pain of wanting, the burning desire to possess what you lack, is one of the greatest allies you have. It is a force you can harness to create whatever you want in your life. When you took an honest look at your life back in the previous chapter and rated yourself as being either on the up curve or the down curve in seven different areas, you were painting a picture of where you are now. This diagram shows that as point A. Where you could be tomorrow, your vision of what’s possible for you in your life, is point B. And to the extent that there is a “wanting” gap between points A and B, there is a natural tension between those two poles. It’s like holding a magnet near a piece of iron: you can feel the pull of that magnet tugging at the iron. Wanting is exactly like that; it’s magnetic. You can palpably feel your dreams (B) tugging at your present circumstances (A). Tension is uncomfortable. That’s why it sometimes makes people uncomfortable to hear about how things could be. One of the reasons Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech made such a huge impact on the world and carved such a vivid place in our cultural memory is that it made the world of August 1963 very uncomfortable. John Lennon painted his vision of a more harmonious world in the song Imagine. Within the decade, he was shot to death. Gandhi, Jesus, Socrates … our world can be harsh on people who talk about an improved reality. Visions and visionaries make people uncomfortable. These ...

But remember, you have to go one direction or the other; you can’t stand still. The universe is curved, and everything is constantly changing. There are only two possibilities. Either you let go of where you are and get to where you could be, or you hang onto where you are and give up where you could be. You are either going for your dreams or giving up your dreams. Stretching for what you could be, or settling for what you are. There is simply no in-between. Remember, this is the slight edge—and doing nothing means going down. It’s your choice.

Mastery begins the moment you step onto the path. Failure begins the moment you step off the path. Wanting is uncomfortable, yet wanting is essential to winning. There are two ways to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be: 1) you can let go of where you are and be drawn to your goal, or 2) you can let go of your goal, hit the snooze button, and stay where you are. Chances are good that when you step out onto the path of mastery, you will step out alone.

Here’s a statistic that may blow your mind: among high school graduates who do not go on to college, 58 percent—more than half—never read a book again. I mean, for the rest of their lives. When I first read that figure I was shocked, but not all that surprised. It’s just one more reason the 95 percent stop paddling, slide down the failure curve, and drown in the cream. They spend their lives building someone else’s dream, not because they aren’t capable of building their own but because they never gained the knowledge they need.

Here’s the more extended version of Watson’s statement: Would you like me to give you the formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.… You’re thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure—or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that’s where you’ll find success. On the other side of failure. Remember, Armstrong and Aldrin did walk on the moon, and the only reason they did is that the rocket got there. And so can you. Why? Because of continuous course correction.

It’s amazing the impact one person can have on your life, just from the influence of how they see you, and what they see in you that you may not even see in yourself. Clyde Share believed in me. And because he believed in me, I started believing more in myself. It was as if he believed me into existence.