The Slight Edge

2- In the long run, the choices we make every day work either for us or against us.

When things happen to us, luck, circumstances or fate often get the praise, or the blame. In reality, it’s down to the choices we make – especially the little ones. Every choice we make leads to one of two destinations: success or failure.

The slight edge is not just a lifestyle that we may or may not choose to adopt. It’s always there, working in the background. If we don’t use it to our advantage, then it will work against us. We may not see the effects immediately, but the passage of time will eventually expose it. So how can we make the slight edge work in our favor?

This is the key message: In the long run, the choices we make every day work either for us or against us.

To benefit from the slight edge, we need to analyze whether we are on the path to success or failure.

One way to do this is to determine our predominant state of mind. While those on the path to failure tend to have a blame mindset, successful people take responsibility for their situations. Rather than dwell on their misfortunes, they place more emphasis on how to respond, even when treated unfairly.

Taking ownership of how we handle what life throws at us puts us in a better position to achieve our goals.

Another way to determine whether we’re on the path to success or failure is to examine our focus. Do we tend to be rooted in the past or concentrated on the future?

Some people use past regrets as a weapon to punish themselves and others. But to be successful, we need to learn from our past so we can build our future.

Why not do an honest self-assessment right now? Think about your health. Are you working to improve it each day? Do your daily eating habits and exercise schedule make you feel healthier? Or does it feel like your energy is declining? Is your health on the success or failure curve?

Why not do a similar analysis in other areas of your life, such as your happiness, career, and relationships?

Remember: there are only two destinations. If you’re not on track for success, then you’re heading toward failure.

3- People ignore mundane things in life because they are easy and seem insignificant – and because the results are invisible.

Only five percent of people achieve a significant number of their goals in life. So if being successful is just about doing simple things consistently, what stops the other 95 percent of people from following through?

Simply put, the five percent understand the power of the slight edge and put it to work in their lives. The other 95 percent do not.

It’s true that mundane things are very easy to do. However, it’s just as easy not to do them.

For example, saving a few dollars every day is very easy to do. But not doing it is just as easy. Doing fifteen minutes of cardio exercise every day is no bother at all. But it’s also very easy to neglect.

Unsuccessful people tend to choose what appears to be the easiest path through life. Eventually, though, it becomes clear that they’ve selected the hardest route.

Here’s the key message: People ignore mundane things in life because they are easy and seem insignificant – and because the results are invisible.

Everything you need to do to transform your life is easy. But aside from the fact that easy things are easily ignored, there’s another reason why most people don’t do them: they don’t appear to add up to success – at least not immediately.

For example, if you chose to save two dollars every day rather than buying a coffee, how much would you have saved by the end of the week? A mere 14 dollars. Not very impressive, is it? But these are the building blocks that create millionaires. The trouble is the results are so far ahead in the future that they are invisible in the present.

Think about your eating habits. We all know how to eat healthily. Yet many of us choose to eat poorly. Why? The negative impact isn’t instantly apparent. Imagine eating a cheeseburger and immediately suffering a near-fatal heart attack. Would you go near a cheeseburger again? Highly unlikely! Yet, that’s what could happen after 20 to 30 years of poor eating habits.

Success is gradual, just like failure. By the time your results are visible to everyone, your slight edge choices are history.

The mundane matters of life add up with the passage of time, but in the moment, they don’t really seem to matter. The difference between success and failure is so tiny that it’s very easy to miss.

Unsuccessful people may not realize it, but they are living by the philosophy of What I do right now doesn’t matter. But it does matter. Successful people know this and use it to secure their health, happiness, fulfilment, relationships, and future.

4- Continuous lifelong learning and practice will help you benefit from the slight edge.

Making good choices will set you on the path to success, but it may not keep you there. It takes continuous, lifelong learning by any and every available means for the slight edge to keep working in your favor.

Reading ten pages of an inspirational and educational book every day can greatly enrich your life. Doing so would mean that you could finish a 300-page book every month. You could also listen to 15 minutes of life-transforming audio every day or take a course or a seminar every few months.

While study is good, it’s what you do with the information you acquire that will have a lasting impact on your personal growth and development.

The key message here is: Continuous lifelong learning and practice will help you benefit from the slight edge.

Once you learn something, you need to put it into practice. This deepens your understanding of the knowledge you gain. As the Chinese philosopher Confucius said, “Knowledge without practice is useless, and practice without knowledge is dangerous.”

You can also learn from others. Once you identify a person who has fulfilled aspirations similar to yours, you can observe and copy them.

But this education will only have a transformative effect if you use it to train your mind. To do this, you first need to find out how the conscious and unconscious brain work.

The conscious brain is very powerful, but it can only focus on one thing at a time and is easily distracted. On the other hand, the unconscious brain runs virtually all of our brain processes. In fact, 99.99 percent of everything we do is our brain on auto-pilot.

For example, have you ever walked or driven a familiar route while your mind was completely engrossed in something else? Sure. We all have. Why does that happen? Your conscious mind has learned the route so well, it’s become embedded in your subconscious.

To keep making good choices, you need to train your unconscious brain.How do you do that? You use your conscious brain to identify a practice you want to adopt, then you do it repeatedly until it enters your subconscious and becomes automatic.

5- Momentum, completion, reflection, and celebration are the four slight edge allies.

Momentum is the irresistible force that can push us toward a goal. It takes energy and initiative to start a new activity. But once we get going, momentum takes over and keeps propelling us forward. Once we’re in motion, it becomes easier to make the positive changes needed to reach our goals.

To understand how momentum works, we can think about steering a car. While it’s stationary, it can be hard work getting the wheel to move. But once the car is in motion, steering the wheel is easy – no matter how slowly you’re moving.

However, momentum is not our only friend in our quest to master the slight edge.

The key message is this: Momentum, completion, reflection, and celebration are the four slight edge allies.

Momentum does propel us forward, but that progress can be choked if we don’t finish what we start. Having a pile of incomplete tasks like unpaid bills, unfinished projects, and unkept promises can deprive us of the sense of accomplishment that comes with wrapping up a task.

Incomplete tasks can pull us back into the past and off the path to success. If this is your challenge, why not let the force of the slight edge help you overcome it? Just like a toddler who’s learning to walk, tackle one project at time and you’ll soon experience the feeling of satisfaction that comes with completion.

If you struggle with completion, our third ally, reflection, can help you see where improvement is needed. Life is so busy that we often spend more time doing things than we do reviewing our actions.

To get the most out of reflection, we can choose to keep a daily journal, talk regularly to a friend with a similar mindset, or work with a coach. Whatever activity you choose, ask yourself pointed questions such as: What are the small-but-critical things that are essential to achieving my goals? Did I do them? Am I on the path to success, or failure?

The beauty of reflection is that it doesn’t just identify areas for improvement. It also highlights what we’re doing well. This then leads to celebration, our fourth ally. Celebration is important because when we feel good about ourselves, it moves us to do better. So celebrate your successes, no matter how small they may seem. After all, nothing breeds success like more success.

6- Cultivate positive, productive habits that help you cope in any circumstances and achieve your dreams.

We all struggle to break bad habits, despite our best efforts. So here’s a tip: The easiest way to get rid of a bad habit is to replace it with a good one.

Good habits are a vital ingredient in reaching our goals. But establishing good habits requires action.

No matter how much skill, knowledge, experience, or resources we have, they are no use unless we do something. That’s why the first habit we need to cultivate is to show up. As the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “Do the thing, and you shall have the power.”

This is the key message: Cultivate positive, productive habits that help you cope in any circumstances and achieve your dreams.

There are seven key habits that can help us to stay on the path to success: show up; be consistent; have a positive outlook; be committed for the long-haul; cultivate a burning desire backed by faith; be willing to pay the price; and practice slight-edge integrity.

While showing up is good, what’s more important is to do so consistently.

Showing up consistently can be enhanced by a positive outlook. Research has shown that those who are positive become more successful.

We also need to be committed for the long haul. Instead of expecting instant success, we need patience – like the farmer who knows that he has to wait a full season to reap his harvest.

Another good habit to cultivate is desire. But we don’t want the sort that fizzles out the moment we get what we want. Rather we want the kind of desire that is a deep, passionate longing intertwined with a conviction that a goal is within reach.

Nothing comes for free, so we need to be willing to pay the price to achieve our goals. It could be as simple as giving up a particular type of junk food that we love, or waking up early. No matter what price we pay for success, the price for failure is far worse in comparison.

Finally, we need to practice slight edge integrity. Ask yourself: Am I fulfilling my commitments when no one is watching?

7- There are three steps to achieving our dreams – write them down, look at them every day, and develop a plan.

We all have dreams. Sadly, few come true, because we don’t know how to pursue them. But there is a tried-and-tested formula that works. And it’s quite easy. The first step in the formula is making our dreams real.

To do that effectively, we need to use our senses. That means putting our dreams down in words, or creating a dream board by using pictures. Even better, we could talk to someone else about them.

But while envisioning our dreams is powerful, we also need to define them.

The key message here is: There are three steps to achieving – write them down, look at them every day, and develop a plan.

If your dream is to be financially free, try to define the amount of savings you’d need to achieve that freedom. Or if you want to be healthy, describe the kinds of activities you’d need to engage in and what they’d feel like. Making our goals specific and vivid will take us one step closer to living them.

According to the American author Napoleon Hill, a goal is a dream with a deadline. So when you write your dreams down, include dates. This is important because 80 percent of everything we do tends to get done in the last 20 percent of our available time. If we don’t set a deadline, our dreams may never become reality.

Writing down your dream means you can read it every day. Telling and retelling yourself what your goal is is powerful. Rather than drifting off course, you become more focused on what you want to achieve.

The more we absorb our visions, the more embedded they become in our subconscious minds. We then become more attuned to seizing opportunities that help us achieve our dreams. It also becomes easier to reject distractions that can divert us from the path to success.

This then opens the way to developing a plan. That plan doesn’t need to be an intricate map of every step from start to conclusion. Rather, it’s simply the steps that get us started. Remember the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson that we mentioned earlier: “Do the thing, and you shall have the power.” Much like a toddler taking her first step, we just need to start – and momentum will keep propelling us forward.

Final summary

The key message here

Time can be your best friend or your worst enemy. If we follow through on taking small, simple, positive actions every day, success will become apparent as time goes on. But if we ignore the mundane matters of life, we may fail to achieve our goals.

Actionable advice:

Time can be your best friend or your worst enemy. If we follow through on taking small, simple, positive actions every day, success will become apparent as time goes on. But if we ignore the mundane matters of life, we may fail to achieve our goals.

Actionable advice:

Surround yourself with successful people

You may have heard the saying, “Birds of a feather flock together.” They do that because they’re all heading in the same direction. Similarly, if you want to achieve success, look at the people around you and ask where they’re heading. Those around us rub off on us. So if your closest connections are heading for failure, you’ll end up there, too. But if they’re on the path to success, that will also be your destination.