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

by Jeff Olson

When people are looking down the barrel of failure in their lives, they will do whatever it takes to get themselves moving, something, anything, to start climbing upward toward the point of survival. And then, once they get to the point where they’re keeping their heads above water, they start heading back down again. As they start getting close enough to the failure line that they can see it coming, they go, “Whoops, I’m headed towards failure!” and then they do whatever it takes to turn their trajectory around and start heading back up … and the cycle repeats.

That’s the only reason our lives follow that roller coaster. It’s that simple. As soon as we get away from failure and up past the line of survival, we quit doing the things that got us there.

I began to realize that there was a profound success secret hidden within that roller coaster: if 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.

Things like taking a few dollars out of a paycheck, putting it into savings, and leaving it there. Or doing a few minutes of exercise every day—and not skipping it. Or reading ten pages of an inspiring, educational, life-changing book every day. Or taking a moment to tell someone how much you appreciate them, and doing that consistently, every day, for months and years. Little things that seem insignificant in the doing, yet when compounded over time yield very big results. You could call these “little virtues” or “success habits.” I call them simple daily disciplines. Simple productive actions, repeated consistently over time. That, in a nutshell, is the slight edge.

No matter how much information there is, and no matter how good that information is, if the person consuming it doesn’t have the right catalyst, the catalyst that will allow them to apply that information effectively, then success will still elude their grasp.

The secret ingredient is your philosophy.

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.

“Do the thing, and you shall have the power.” Here are a few more examples that you’ll come across in the following pages: 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.

No matter how good the information is, it won’t do you any good unless you have the right catalyst that will let you apply it effectively. Your philosophy creates your attitudes, which create your actions, which create your results, which create your life. Successful people fail their way to the top. Do the thing, and you shall have the power. The slight edge is the first ingredient, the catalyst you need that makes all the how-to’s work.

If 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.

The simple things that lead to success are all easy to do. But they’re also just as easy not to do.

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.

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 third reason most people live out their entire lives without ever grasping how the slight edge is working in their lives it that is just seems like those little things don’t really matter.

What you do today matters. What you do every day matters.

For most people, will power ends up looking and feeling like some sort of grim self-tyranny propped up by an arbitrary, artificial reward-and-punishment system.

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.

consistently repeated daily actions + time = inconquerable results.

Now suppose someone came along and asked, “What was the one big push that caused this thing to go so fast?” You wouldn’t be able to answer; it’s a nonsensical question. Was it the first push? The second? The fifth? The hundredth? No! It was all of them added together in an overall accumulation of effort applied in a consistent direction. Some pushes may have been bigger than others, but any single heave—no matter how large—reflects a small fraction of the entire cumulative effect upon the flywheel.

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.

These included things like be real, be determined, pursue constant self-development, and dream big—and act on it daily. Among the ten, the principal value was this: Slow down to go fast. In other words: you want big results? Good—then do the little things. Just do them consistently and persistently.

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.

You just can’t see it. Why not? Because you’re looking in the wrong place. You’re looking for the breakthrough, the quantum leap. You’re looking for the winning lottery ticket in a game that isn’t a lottery.

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.

One of the most radical and remarkable things about the happiness research is the discovery that doing things that make you happy doesn’t just make you happier. It also makes your life work better.

And here’s the truly radical thing about it: it isn’t that people who have greater success, more money, and better marriages are happier as a result of those things. The research is very clear on this: the greater states of happiness precede all these outcomes.

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. The more you raise your own happiness level, the more likely you’ll start achieving all those things you want to achieve.

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 ...

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 kno...

Exercise for fifteen minutes daily. Simple cardio, even a brisk walk, has a powerful antidepressant impact, in many cases stronger (and more long...

An interesting thing is that you don’t have to do all five at once—in fact, Shawn actually recommends that you don’t even try to do that, but instead start with just one and keep repeating it until it becomes a habit, then add another, and so on.

Read at least ten pages of a good book daily.

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.

Small errors in judgment, repeated daily over time, had landed them far from where they wanted to be.

With children it is often so much easier to take the path of least resistance—to let them eat that fast food they love rather than cook something healthy, to let them watch TV rather than read to them, to let them play video games rather than interact with them. But making the extra effort is so worth it.

But successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do—even when it doesn’t look like it makes any difference. And they do it long enough for the compounding effect to start to kick in.

If your little actions—your happy habits, kind words, practice or study sessions, workouts, reading times, and the rest—each represented a 1 percent improvement in that area, your level of achievement in a year’s time would be not doubled but more than tripled.

Here’s what that looks like when it’s actually happening. The first day you’ll improve by a factor of 0.01, so little it will probably be impossible to notice. The second day, your improvement will be 0.02; the next day, 0.03. So little, still, that it’s almost invisible.

And how do you accomplish this? By trying twice as hard, three times as hard? No. Besides, you’re already trying. We all are. It’s not a matter of trying harder. Well, maybe a little harder: just by 1 percent.

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. 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.

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.

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.

the average customer will tell three people about a positive experience with a business or product, but will talk about a negative experience to thirty-three people. Eleven bad-experience stories to one positive; eleven reasons an idea won’t work to one reason it will.

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.

Taking responsibility liberates you; in fact, it is perhaps the single most liberating thing there is. Even when it hurts, even when it doesn’t seem fair. When you don’t take responsibility, when you blame others, circumstances, fate, or chance, you give away your power. When you take and retain full responsibility—even when others are wrong or the situation is genuinely unfair—you keep your life’s reins in your own hands.

“If it’s going to be, it’s up to me.”

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.