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by
Jeff Olson
Read between
August 21 - September 1, 2017
what you know, how you hold what you know, and how it affects what you do.
Your philosophy is your view of life, something beyond feelings and attitudes. Your philosophy drives your attitudes and feelings, which drive your actions.
Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. There is a natural progression to everything in life: plant, cultivate, harvest.
mastered the mundane.
you learn to understand and apply the slight edge, your life will become filled with hundreds of thousands of small, seemingly insignificant actions—all of them genuinely simple, none of them mysterious or complex. In other words, you have to master the mundane. And those actions will create your success.
“Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”
If slight edge habits are so easy to do, and will lead to phenomenal success, why doesn’t everyone do them? That is literally the $10 million question. And it has a few answers.
The simple things that lead to success are all easy to do. But they’re also just as easy not to do.
while anyone could do these successful actions, most won’t, simply because it’s so easy to skip them.
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.
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 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.
things that create success in the long run don’t look like they’re having any impact at all in the short run.
When you make the right choice, you don’t see the results, at least not today. And that is a problem in our push-button, mouse-click, 24-hour-news world. 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 ti...
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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.
Only 5 percent—1 in 20—achieve the level of success and fulfillment they hope for. The other 95 percent either fail or fall short. The only difference is the slight edge. The secret to the 5 percent’s success is always in mundane, easy things that anyone could do.
People don’t consistently do those simple things for three reasons: 1) while they’re easy to do, they are also easy not to do; 2) you don’t see any results at first; 3) they seem insignificant, like they don’t matter. But they do.
The secret of time is simply this: time is the force that magnifies those little, almost imperceptible, seemingly insignificant things you do every day into something titanic and unstoppable.
You supply the actions; the universe will supply the time. The trick is to choose the actions that, when multiplied by this universal amplifier, will yield the result you want. To position your everyday actions so time works for you, and not against you.
There is a natural progression in life: you plant, then you cultivate, and finally you harvest.
If making the right slight edge choices were a dramatic thing, you’d get immediate feedback.
no immediate feedback.
Making the right choices, taking the right actions. It’s truly easy to do. Ridiculously easy. But it’s just as easy not to do. And if you don’t do them, there won’t be any big drama about it. It won’t kill you; it won’t hurt you; in fact, it won’t make any difference at all … not today, anyway. Not tomorrow. But over time?
Picture a huge, heavy flywheel—a massive metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle, about thirty feet in diameter, two feet thick, and weighing about 5,000 pounds. Now imagine that your task is to get the flywheel rotating on the axle as fast and for as long as possible. Pushing with great effort, you get the flywheel to inch forward, moving almost imperceptibly at first. You keep pushing and, after two or three hours of persistent effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn. You keep pushing, and the flywheel begins to move a bit faster, and with continued great
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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.
“If I stay on this road long enough, I’ll get the result I’m seeking.” It’s not a question of your mood or your feelings. And it’s not a question of will power. It’s a question of simply knowing.
The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes a little longer.
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.
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
No matter in what arena, in life or work or play, the difference between winning and losing, the gap that separates success and failure, is so slight, so subtle, that most never see it.
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.
Quantum leaps do happen, but only as the end result of a lengthy, gradual buildup of consistently applied effort. No success is immediate, no collapse is sudden. They are both the result of the slight edge accruing momentum over time. 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. 7.
Happiness doesn’t come from genetics, luck, or chance. Happiness has a lot less to do with circumstances than we think it does. Happiness isn’t the result of some big, out-of-reach event or attainment. Happiness is created by simple, easy things we do every day. And unhappiness is created by not doing those simple, easy, everyday things.
How you realize happiness is by doing some simple things, and doing them every day.
when it comes to understanding how to achieve happiness, most of us have it backward. We believe, “Once I become successful, then I’ll be happy.” Or, “Once I become healthier … once I find that relationship … once I’m living where I want to live … once my income is high enough to manage my life without stress … then I’ll be happy.”
“Be happy, and the reason will appear.” I love that.
From what I’ve observed, within the general population only about 10 percent of people (10 percent at most) are genuinely open to working on personal development. When you bring the dimension of happiness into it, when you show them what has been happening in the last fifteen years in happiness research, then suddenly that 10 percent becomes more like 50 percent.
the right philosophy → the right attitude → the right actions
Happiness is created by doing some simple, easy things, and doing them every day. Success does not lead to happiness, it’s the other way around: more happiness creates more success. Elevated levels of happiness create elevated levels of health, performance, social involvement, marital fulfillment, financial and career success, and longevity. Greater happiness is key to making the slight edge work in your life. Shawn Achor’s five happy habits: Every morning write down three new things you’re grateful for. Journal for two minutes a day about a positive experience from the past 24 hours.
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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.
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.
“Be careful what you wish for—you just might get it.” But it’s not even a question of wishing: take care with what you think. Because what you think, multiplied by action plus time, will create what you get.
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 size of the problem determines the size of the person. You can gauge the limitations of a person’s life by the size of the problems that get him or her down. You can measure the impact a person’s life has by the size of the problems he or she solves. If the size of the problems you solve is, “Do I put the cans in the bottom of the bag, and then put the bread on top?” as a grocery store bagger, that’s the level of your problem solving and that’s the level of your pay.
“First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” Gandhi put it this way: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
find out what the majority is doing and do the opposite—which can be uncomfortable.
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.
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.
