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

by Jeff Olson

Yet we live in a world where most everyone has come to expect instant this and instant that, and if we don’t get the results we’re after fast and faster, we quit. Get rich quick. The fast lane. One-click ordering. That fellow standing in front of the microwave muttering, “Hurry uuuup, hurry uuuup.…” We’ve come to expect fast results, to demand them—but fast, faster, fastest is a strategy that will eventually take you down the slight edge curve to the unhappy life. There’s a reason I titled an earlier chapter “Slow Down to Go Fast.” The Aesop fable was dead-on accurate: fast is not always optimal, and often does not win the race. Here’s how MIT professor Peter Senge put it in his business classic, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization: Virtually all natural systems, from ecosystems to animals to organizations, have intrinsically optimal rates of growth. The optimal rate is far less than the fastest possible growth. When growth becomes excessive—as it does in cancer—the system itself will seek to compensate by slowing down; perhaps putting the organization’s survival at risk in the process. You’ve seen all kinds of examples of things that grow too fast for their own good. The business that expanded too rapidly and then self-destructed. A rock star, movie star, star athlete, or star politician who became a shooting star and came crashing and burning down. The housing bubble of the mid-2000s—and where it ended up in the late 2000s. Going ...