The Slight Edge
- jacobspannagel
- Aug 31, 2021
- 9 min read
The following text is the notes that I have taken on the book called the slight edge by Jeff Olsen.
What most people do in their life is slowly oscillate between failure and survival, barely keeping their head above the water. It is the curse of the average. The sine wave of mediocrity.
The only reason our lives follow that roller coaster is that as soon as we get away from failure and pass the line of survival we quit doing the things that got us there.
This means that you already know how to do everything it takes to make you an outrageous success. That’s how you survived up to this point. And if you can survive, then you can succeed.
You don’t need to do some brilliant, impossible thing. You don’t need to learn some insanely difficult skills, or have some genius level brainstorm of an innovative idea.
All you have to do is keep doing the things that got you this far.
A secret ingredient that will allow you to achieve lasting success in any area of your life you choose is your philosophy.
“Do the thing, and you shall have the power.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Your philosophy is your view of life, something beyond feelings and attitudes. Your philosophy drives your attitudes and feelings which drives your actions.
The slight edge Is already working, right now, it’s either working for you or against you.
The slight edge is relentless, and it cuts both ways. Used productively, it carries you up toward success. Used carelessly, it pulls you down towards failure.
The difference between the 5% of people who are successful and the 95% of people who aren’t is they know how to use the slight edge to get what they want in life and they do it.
If slight edge habits are so easy to do, and will lead to phenomenal success, why doesn’t everybody do them? That is literally the $10 million question. And it has a few answers.
Reason #1: they’re easy to do
Reason #2: the results are invisible
Reason #3: they seem insignificant
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 fly wheel but the cumulative total of other sequential, unfailing 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.
Difficult takes a little time; impossible takes just a little longer.
Why do bank presidents never win the lottery?
They don’t buy lottery tickets.
Successful people have already grasped the truth the lottery players have not: success is not a random accident. Life is not a lottery.
“Luck is preparedness meeting opportunity.”
Quantum leaps do happen, but only as the end result of a lengthy, gradual build up of a consistently applied effort.
No success is immediate, no collapse is sudden. They are both the result of the slight edge accruing momentum overtime.
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.
Happiness is created by doing simple, easy things, and doing them every day…
In the past 15 years, science has learned:
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.
Success doesn’t lead to happiness — it’s the other way around.
Happiness comes first.
Happiness itself is a secret ingredient to something else. What else? Practically everything.
Extensive research since 2000 has shown that people who are happier also:
Have fewer strokes and heart attacks
Have less pain and inflammation
Have a greater immune function and more resistance to viruses
Develop more resilient personalities and handle adversity better
Have a better work performance and more professional success
Have more fulfilling and longer lasting marriages
Have larger and more active social spheres
Are more involved in their communities
Are more altruistic and have a greater net positive impact on society
Are more financially successful
Live longer
Only about 10% of people 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 15 years and happiness research, then suddenly the 10% becomes more like 50%.
The slight edge actions for happiness: happy habits
Each morning, write down three things you’re grateful for
Journal for two minutes a day about one positive experience you’ve had over the past 24 hours
Meditate daily
Do a random act of kindness over the course of each day
Exercise for 15 minutes daily
There is fascinating logic and powerful research behind all 5 but these are not the only happy habits that the research supports.
Other happiness researchers have different lists, including things like:
Make more time for friends
Practice savoring the moment
Practice having a positive perspective
Put more energy into cultivating your relationships
Practice forgiveness
Engage in meaningful activities
Practice simple acts of giving
Bonus: read at least 10 pages of a good book daily
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.
Everyone wants to know did they make a difference in the world – that their lives matter.
Greater success also creates a greater responsibility to share that success with others.
A single thoughtful, committed person can change the world.
We are all having a ripple effect on others; the question is, what kind of a ripple effect, negative or positive, do we want to have?
Great success often starts from a tiny beginning Dash but there has to be a beginning. You have to start somewhere. You have to do something.
If you add just one percent of anything — skills, knowledge, effort — per day, in a year it will have more than tripled. But you have to start with the 1%.
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.
Everything curves
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.
If you’re not increasing, you’re decreasing.
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.
Negative and difficult things happen to all of us; most of them are mostly or completely out of our control. It’s how we react, how we view the circumstances and conditions, that makes the difference between success and failure — and that is completely within our control.
Growing up we heard five times as many ‘NO’s as ‘YES’s. Life has a downward pull.
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.
Successful people do it unsuccessful people are not willing to do, and that often means living outside the limits of one’s comfort zone. When you're one out of 20, you’re always going to be going in the opposite direction from the other 19.
At the average funeral, about 10 people cry.
Once those 10 people had yanked their hankies and honked their schnauzers and my funeral was over, The number one factor that would determine how many people would go on from the funeral to attend the actual burial is the weather.
If that is the case, then why am I spending so much time worrying about what they are thinking now.
Who has long funeral processions? At whose funerals do thousands cry? For whom do the millions mourn? For those who will do what others are not willing to do. For the people for whom we erect statues. For Martin Luther King, for Gandhi, for Mother Teresa, for Lincoln. Gigantic funerals are held in great crowds, even entire nations mourn for those who spent their lives not worrying about what others thought.
Personal development, Your own personal growth, and betterment, is the greatest gift you could ever give yourself and also the wisest business investment you could ever make. It is also the most critical step in accomplishing any challenging task, it is the one step without which all other success strategies, no matter how brilliant or time-tested, are doomed to fail.
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four hours sharpening the ask.“
– Abraham Lincoln
Among high school graduates who do not go to college, 58%, more than half, never read a book again for the rest of their lives.
Of the 7 billion people on this earth according to the United Nations, more than 1 billion cannot read.
But consider this: if you are one of the 58% who never picks up a book once high school is behind you, what’s the difference between you and 1 billion souls around the world who couldn’t read that book even if they did pick it up? No difference at all.
Most of your life, 99.99%, is made up of things you do on automatic pilot. Which means it’s essential that you take charge of your Automatic pilot’s training.
There’s only one reliable, solid way to process, experience, and integrate your learning through studying and doing: find someone else who has already achieved mastery in the area you’re looking at, and model your behavior based on their experience.
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 then you may not even see in yourself.
The quickest insurance path raising the quality of your life is to start hanging out with people who have been there and done that.
The law of association:
Your level of health will tend to be about the average level of health of your five best friends.
Your degree of happiness will tend to reflect how happy your five closest friends are.
Your personal development will be at about the average level of personal development of your five best friends.
Your relationships, financial health, attitudes, level of success in your career, and everything else about your life will tend to be pretty close to the average level of each of these conditions in your five closest friends and associates.
Form a mastermind
Surround yourself with people of like mind and different talents and temperaments with the purpose of serving the goals of every member of the group. Associate with these people on a regular basis.
Becoming a mentor
Leadership is not something you do; there’s something that grows organically out of the natural rhythm of learning. When you start at the beginning of anything, you’re at the highest level of anxiety. As you learn — through study and doing, information and experience, book smarts and street smarts — you gradually lower your level of anxiety by raising your level of mastery.
Each and every incomplete thing in your life or work exerts a draining force on you, sucking the energy of Accomplishment and success out of you as surely as a vampire stealing your blood.
Every incomplete promise, commitment, or agreement saps your strength because it blocks your momentum and chokes off your ability to move forward, progress, or improve.
Incomplete things keep calling you back to the past to take care of them.
Use the power of reflection
At the end of the day write down what you did that day.
At the end of the week, look back on your list and take inventory.
Not only will it tell you a lot about the truth of your everyday life, chances are good that the mere act of recording this daily reflection will have already started changing what you do.
Ask yourself specific slight edge questions. “In each area of my life, what are the critical, simple little things that are easy to do, and easy not to do? Did I do them? Did I move forward? Did I ride the success curve?“
Use the power of celebration
People who feel good about themselves produce good results.
Keep your slight edge activities, your right choices and incremental successes, right out in the open where you can see them and celebrate them.
Acknowledge those steps, no matter how small or insignificant they seem at the time.
Nothing breeds success like more success.
Cultivating slight edge habits
There are two kinds of habits: those that serve you, and those that don’t.
Every one of those habits, the good and the bad, has its roots in choice – – in little decisions you make and over which you have complete control.
Your habits come from your daily activities compounded overtime. And your activities are the result of the choices you make in the moment. Your choices come from your habits of thought, which are the product of your thinking, which comes from the view you have of the world and your place in it – – your philosophy.
It’s tough to get rid of the habit you don’t want by facing it head on. The way to accomplish it is to replace the unwanted habit with another habit that you do want.
Seven positive, productive habits of attitude and behavior:
Show up
Be consistent
Have a positive outlook
Be committed for the long-haul
Cultivate a burning desire back by faith
Be willing to pay the price
Practice slight edge integrity
There are three simple fundamental steps you need to take for your dreams to turn into a reality.
You must make it specific, give it a deadline, and write it down.
You must look at it every day.
You must have a plan to start with.
Do one simple, daily discipline in each of the seven key areas of your life – – your health, happiness, your relationships, your personal development, your finances, your career, and your impact – – that forwards your success in each of these areas;
Make a habit of doing some sort of daily review of the slight edge activities, either through keeping a journal, a list, working with a slight edge buddy, a coach, or some other regular, consistent means
Spend high-quality time with men and women Who have achieved goals and dreams similar to yours; in other words, model successful mentors, teachers, and allies, and do it daily, weekly and monthly…
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