I call them simple daily disciplines. ==Simple productive actions, repeated consistently over time. That, in a nutshell, is the slight edge.== — *location: 357* ^ref-56032 --- As I began examining my successes and failures, what I gradually realized was that the very same activities that had rescued me from failure, that had carried me from the failure line up to the survival line, would also rescue me from average and carry me from the survival line to the success line—if I would just keep doing them. And that was exactly the point: that was exactly what I wasn’t doing. Once I got a little way above survival and was starting to head up into the warmer waters of success, without realizing it or thinking about it, I would stop doing the things that had gotten me there. Naturally, I would then start sinking back down again, back down toward survival and beyond, back down toward the failure line. And I did that every time. — *location: 331* ^ref-57863 --- ==The things that take you out of failure and up toward survival and success are simple. So simple, in fact, that it’s easy to overlook them.== — *location: 349* ^ref-41538 --- 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. — *location: 353* ^ref-62814 --- ==The same activities that take us from failure to survival would also take us from survival to success—if we would just keep doing them.== — *location: 387* ^ref-40703 --- You already know how to do everything it would take to make you an outrageous success. All you have to do is keep doing the things that have gotten you this far. — *location: 389* ^ref-36834 --- ==By “your philosophy,” all I mean is changing the way you think about simple everyday things. Once you do, then you will take the steps you need to take, to lead you to the how-to’s you need.== — *location: 469* ^ref-31379 --- The secret ingredient is your philosophy. — *location: 465* ^ref-19911 --- If you don’t change how you think about these simple everyday things, then no amount of how-to’s will get you anywhere or give you any true solutions. Because it’s not the hows that do it, it’s how you do the hows. — *location: 471* ^ref-46019 --- A positive philosophy turns into a positive attitude, which turns into positive actions, which turns into positive results, which turns into a positive lifestyle. A positive life. And a negative philosophy turns into a negative attitude, which turns into negative actions, which turns into negative results, which turns into a negative lifestyle. — *location: 490* ^ref-17775 --- The formula for success is quite simple: Double your rate of failure. — *location: 506* ^ref-30617 >Philosophy --- Do the thing, and you shall have the power. — *location: 496* ^ref-5453 >Philosophy --- Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. — *location: 540* ^ref-35734 >Philosophy --- Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. — *location: 540* ^ref-38576 >Philosophy --- There is a natural progression to everything in life: plant, cultivate, harvest. — *location: 541* ^ref-6608 >Philosophy --- The Slight Edge will help you apply all the information you learn from the health book, the sales book, the investment book, the positive attitude book. The Slight Edge is the book you need to read, highlight, and reread along with your fitness class, your career planning, your continuing education, and pursuit of new skills. — *location: 558* ^ref-11755 --- The Slight Edge will prepare you to be able to absorb all that other information, guidance, and education from all those other books, classes, situations, and experiences. — *location: 561* ^ref-54215 --- 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. — *location: 580* ^ref-2966 --- ==Your philosophy creates your attitudes, which create your actions, which create your results, which create your life.== — *location: 582* ^ref-9262 --- Successful people fail their way to the top. Do the thing, and you shall have the power. — *location: 583* ^ref-50896 --- The slight edge is the first ingredient, the catalyst you need that makes all the how-to’s work. — *location: 585* ^ref-63927 --- The Water Hyacinth Once there was a little water hyacinth that grew near the edge of a big pond. It had dreams of seeing the other side of the pond, but when it murmured to itself about these dreams, the water just laughed and lapped at it dismissively. The other side indeed … for a tiny plant that couldn’t even move? Impossible! The water hyacinth can typically be found floating on the surface of ponds in warm climates around the world, and it is a beautiful plant, with delicate six-petaled flowers that range from purplish blue to lavender to pink. This particular plant was a perfect specimen: very beautiful, very small, and very delicate. However—and this was something the water didn’t know—the water hyacinth is also one of the most productive plants on earth, with a reproductive rate that astonishes botanists and ecologists. A single plant can produce as many as five thousand seeds, but its preferred method for colonizing a new area is not to cast its seeds to the vagaries of wind and water, but instead to grow by doubling itself, sending out short runner stems that become “daughter plants.” The first day this little water hyacinth appeared, nobody but the water even noticed it was there. Nobody noticed it on the second day either, as it doubled, nor on the third or the fourth, as it doubled again and then once more. It was so insignificant, in fact, that for the first two weeks, even though it doubled in size every day, you would have had to search hard to see it at all. By day 15 it had reproduced to cover barely one square foot of water, a tiny dollop of lavender-pink dotting the pond’s glassy green surface. On day 20, two-thirds of the way through the month, one person passing by the pond noticed the little patch of foliage floating off to the side, but mistook it for a lost bath towel or perhaps a discarded piece of wrapping paper. More than a week later, on day 29, half the pond’s surface was still open water. And on day 30, just twenty-four hours later, the water’s surface had totally disappeared. The entire pond had been overtaken by a rich blanket of purple-pink water hyacinth. — *location: 613* ^ref-43481 --- It’s never too late to start. It’s always too late to wait. — *location: 756* ^ref-34996 --- Simple daily disciplines—little productive actions, repeated consistently over time—add up to the difference between failure and success. — *location: 824* ^ref-62612 --- There’s a principle called Parkinson’s Law, after the man who coined it, Professor Cyril Northcote Parkinson. Parkinson’s Law goes like this: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” — *location: 940* ^ref-31144 --- ==The simple things that lead to success are all easy to do. But they’re also just as easy not to do.== — *location: 957* ^ref-26414 --- The things that create success in the long run don’t look like they’re having any impact at all in the short run. A penny doubled is two cents. — *location: 989* ^ref-317 --- ==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. — *location: 1022* ^ref-1271 --- 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. — *location: 1025* ^ref-51307 --- 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. They may not realize they have a philosophy, but they do, and it goes like this: What I do right now doesn’t really matter. — *location: 1032* ^ref-63660 --- ==What you do today matters. What you do every day matters.== — *location: 1035* ^ref-40451 --- Successful people are those who understand that the little choices they make matter, and because of that they choose to do things that seem to make no difference at all in the act of doing them, and they do them over and over and over until the compound effect kicks in. — *location: 1036* ^ref-58377 --- We quickly developed something we called The Ten Core Commitments, which was a list of basic actions people could take to move their business forward. Little things that were easy to do and just as easy not to do. Things that wouldn’t really seem to make any difference if you did them or didn’t do them. Things that, if you did them, nobody would even notice. — *location: 1056* ^ref-21351 >How Olsen instituted The Slight Edge at work. Maybe pick 10 habits to start? Be judicious about what is allowed in. My first attempt in 2020 was too broad. --- 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. — *location: 1090* ^ref-19710 --- Will power is vastly overrated. — *location: 1101* ^ref-35049 --- ==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.== — *location: 1130* ^ref-37782 --- ==consistently repeated daily actions + time = inconquerable results.== — *location: 1131* ^ref-46421 --- In a world filled with instant coffee, instant breakfast, instant credit, instant shopping, instant information, and 24/7 news, we have come dangerously close to losing touch with reality and believing we have access to instant life. But life is not a clickable link. — *location: 1160* ^ref-13636 --- And that’s the big challenge of it: no immediate feedback. — *location: 1184* ^ref-62825 --- You need to base your choices on your philosophy—on what you know, not what you see. — *location: 1221* ^ref-10171 --- There is a passage in Jim Collins’ classic business book, Good to Great, that beautifully describes the way the slight edge is so often invisible and can seem so insignificant—that is, until they build to the point of escape velocity. 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 effort, you move it through a second rotation. You keep pushing in a consistent direction. Three turns … four … five … six … the flywheel builds up speed … seven … eight … you keep pushing … nine … ten … it builds momentum … eleven … twelve … moving faster with each turn … twenty … thirty … fifty … a hundred. Then at some point—breakthrough! The momentum of the thing kicks in your favor, hurling the flywheel forward, turn after turn … whoosh! … its own heavy weight working for you. You’re pushing no harder than the first rotation, but the flywheel goes faster and faster. Each turn of the flywheel builds upon work done earlier, compounding your investment of effort. A thousand times faster, then ten thousand, then a hundred thousand. The huge heavy disk flies forward with almost unstoppable momentum. 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. —From Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t, by Jim Collins, HarperBusiness, N.Y. (2001); 165–6. — *location: 1223* ^ref-20779 --- But in my experience, in three to five years you can put virtually anything in your life solidly onto the right track. — *location: 1265* ^ref-65445 --- How long will it take? Chances are it will take longer than you want it to—and that when the time arrives, you’ll be astonished at how quick it seemed. — *location: 1267* ^ref-4620 --- The reason Ekhart Tolle’s modest little 1997 book on enlightenment, The Power of Now, took the marketplace by storm, selling over five million copies in thirty-three languages, is that his core message is one that everyone knows they need to hear: your life exists only in the moment. But you can’t really absorb or live that truth through reading a book; you absorb and live that truth simply by being fully in the process of living your life—not regretting the past, not dreading the future. — *location: 1280* ^ref-20985 >How does this philosophy integrate with a focus onthe present? --- The Slight Edge is about your awareness. It is about you making the right choices, the choices that serve you and empower you, starting right now and continuing for the rest of your life, and learning to make them effortlessly. — *location: 1284* ^ref-1910 --- The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes a little longer. — *location: 1299* ^ref-2112 --- 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. — *location: 1327* ^ref-32748 --- Time is the force that magnifies those simple daily disciplines into massive success. — *location: 1363* ^ref-56847 --- To grasp how the slight edge works, you have to view your actions through the eyes of time. — *location: 1367* ^ref-49499 >Related to ethics but with yous through time rather than other people right now --- Someday, when my ship comes in … Someday, when I have the money … Someday, when I have the time … Someday, when I have the skill … Someday, when I have the confidence … How many of those statements have you said to yourself? Have I got some sobering news for you: “some day” doesn’t exist, never has, and never will. There is no “some day.” There’s only today. When tomorrow comes, it will be another today; so will the next day. They all will. There is never anything but today. — *location: 1384* ^ref-7620 --- Have you ever known of someone who became an “overnight success”? 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 edge. Any time you see what looks like a breakthrough, it is always the end result of a long series of little things, done consistently over time. No success is immediate or instantaneous; no collapse is sudden or precipitous. They are both products of the slight edge. — *location: 1459* ^ref-29015 --- 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. — *location: 1546* ^ref-61358 --- “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.” —Albert Schweitzer — *location: 1549* ^ref-5218 --- The other day I saw a piece of graffiti that I thought put it perfectly: “Be happy, and the reason will appear.” I love that. — *location: 1668* ^ref-25042 --- In June 2013 I attended the Third World Congress on Positive Psychology and heard Dr. Seligman present some amazing evidence that showed a direct correlation between attitude and health. He showed the audience a map showing incidence of atherosclerotic disease, county by county, throughout the northeastern United States, as reported by the CDC. Then he put up on the screen a second map, right next to the first, this one showing the incidence of atherosclerotic disease, county by county, throughout the northeastern United States—only this time, as predicted by analysis of the words people in those counties used on Twitter. The two maps were practically identical. It was stunning. The study had analyzed some 40,000 words in over 80 million tweets, and when the results were overlaid with a county-by-county analysis of heart attacks, it was a nearly exact correlation. — *location: 1672* ^ref-55041 --- Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, is the happiness researcher and author I’ve worked with most. I have brought him into my company to conduct three-hour workshops on how to be happy as I am committed to spreading happiness! Shawn teaches a set of five simple things you can do every day that, if you do them consistently over time, will make you significantly, noticeably, measurably happier. They are slight edge actions for happiness: happy habits. 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 get distracted by negativity in your environment. 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 know praising them or thanking them for something they did. Exercise for fifteen minutes daily. Simple cardio, even a brisk walk, has a powerful antidepressant impact, in many cases stronger (and more long-lasting) than an actual antidepressant! — *location: 1750* ^ref-15671 --- Success does not lead to happiness, it’s the other way around: more happiness creates more success. — *location: 1817* ^ref-55660 --- 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. — *location: 2147* ^ref-24883 >Redo this math with 1 percent compounded daily --- At the Vienna General Hospital, where a Hungarian obstetrician named Ignaz Semmelweis worked, the mortality rate was more like 1 in 3. Semmelweis made a radical proposal: before operating, surgeons should wash their hands. He was widely ridiculed. Surgeons kept delivering babies dirty-handed, and women kept dying. The medical establishment just couldn’t see how something as insignificant as washing your hands could make any difference, and because of it thousands of people died unnecessary deaths. But Semmelweis kept washing his hands anyway, and his idea eventually was accepted—which led to the saving of untold millions of lives. — *location: 2180* ^ref-32839 >How did he come up with this before knowledge ofbacteria? --- 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. — *location: 2232* ^ref-49575 --- In his landmark 1994 book Word-of-Mouth Marketing, Fortune 500 consultant Jerry Wilson describes how he based his revolutionary “exceptional customer service” strategy on a single earthshaking statistic he’d discovered in marketing research: 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. — *location: 2304* ^ref-48612 --- As the American naturalist John Burroughs put it, “A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.” — *location: 2335* ^ref-41208 --- You’ve heard the expression, “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. — *location: 2346* ^ref-22150 --- It seems most people live with one foot in the past, saying, “If only things had been different, I would be successful.” And the other foot in the future saying, “When this or that happens, I will be happy and successful.” And they completely ignore the present—which is the only place where life actually occurs. — *location: 2378* ^ref-24399 --- Everything is always in motion. Every day, every moment, your life path is either curving upward, or curving downward. — *location: 2490* ^ref-59357 --- Mastery is not some vaunted, lofty place that only the elite few ever inhabit. The pursuit of any aim, goal, or dream—personal, professional, spiritual, in any area—is a slight edge journey of continuous improvement, learning, and refinement. But mastery is not an exalted state that lies at the end of the path; it is a state of mind that lies at the very beginning. Mastery is in the act of setting your foot on the path, not in reaching its end. — *location: 2515* ^ref-8108 --- Are there any situations in your life today where you’ve given up and decided to keep crawling for the rest of your life, rather than go for what you really want, what you truly deserve? Have you let go of the capacity to make up a goal, go for it, and get it? If so, you have to ask yourself, why is it so difficult, so impossible, to do something today that you had no trouble doing when you were less than a year old? — *location: 2538* ^ref-47001 >(... and learning to walk) --- Letting yourself become aware of what it is that you desire but do not presently have means experiencing the lack side of the wanting coin as well as the desire side. It means becoming more fully aware of what you don’t have. — *location: 2565* ^ref-6888 --- The size of the problem determines the size of the person. — *location: 2600* ^ref-11359 --- If you don’t close the gap by moving your present circumstance (A) constantly toward your goals and dreams (B), how else can you let the tension resolve? Quit dreaming. Just let go of all your dreams, goals, ambitions, and aspirations. Settle for less. Make point B disappear, just delete it, and—poof!—the tension is gone. And that, sadly, is the choice that the 95 percent who travel the failure curve eventually make. — *location: 2619* ^ref-27034 --- “All truth passes through three stages,” the great German philosophy Arthur Schopenhauer reportedly observed. “First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” — *location: 2643* ^ref-40361 --- Gandhi put it this way: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” — *location: 2645* ^ref-16861 --- ==Mastery begins the moment you step onto the path. Failure begins the moment you step off the path.== — *location: 2728* ^ref-5672 --- Wanting is uncomfortable, yet wanting is essential to winning. — *location: 2729* ^ref-13953 --- 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. — *location: 2730* ^ref-48777 --- Continuous, lifelong learning is the material from which you continually build your philosophy and your understanding of how it plays out in real-life situations and circumstances, which is also critical in mastering the slight edge. — *location: 2763* ^ref-43434 --- “The trouble with the world,” wrote Mark Twain, “is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.” — *location: 2775* ^ref-64540 --- Once you know the slight edge, you know that in getting from point A to point B you’ll be off track most of the time. And you know that it’s the adjustments—those little, seemingly insignificant corrections in direction—that have the most power in your life. — *location: 2906* ^ref-50155 --- ==John McDonald, author of the classic book The Message of a Master, wrote a beautiful description of this internal gyroscope and how it works: You return again and again to take the proper course—guided by what? By the picture in mind of the place you are headed for.== — *location: 2908* ^ref-17058 --- You don’t just make that choice once and then say, “Ahh, I’m finished, now I’m all set.” You make that choice moment to moment to moment—and keep making it, every month and every day, for the rest of your life. At first, it requires your constant awareness. In time, your internal gyroscope learns the drill so well that it becomes automatic. — *location: 2913* ^ref-63978 --- The principal aim in self-investment is to train how you think and what you think. — *location: 2932* ^ref-13129 --- Here lies the key to our destiny that most people don’t grasp. We think of our conscious functions—our will, our conscious decisions, our conscious thoughts—as what is “us,” and our subconscious as something vaguely going on under the surface that’s maybe not so important. The truth is, the subconscious runs virtually everything. — *location: 2947* ^ref-60429 >See Everything is F*cked --- So, how do you program that life route? How do you determine the choices and decisions that your subconscious makes for you in carving out your life path? The same way you learned to tie your shoes: you create it first with intention, with your conscious mind, and then repeat it over and over, in slight-edge fashion, until it is handed off to your subconscious—at which point those three magic words kick in: It becomes automatic. — *location: 2964* ^ref-36192 --- Learning by studying and learning by doing—book smarts and street smarts—are the two essential pistons of the engine of learning. — *location: 2989* ^ref-42179 --- On the path to a goal you will be off-course most of the time. Which means the only way to reach a goal is through constant and continuous course correction. — *location: 2991* ^ref-14147 --- Most of your life—99.99 percent—is made up of things you do an automatic pilot. Which means it’s essential that you take charge of your automatic pilot’s training. — *location: 2993* ^ref-5168 --- Throughout human history, and long before there were such things as books, universities, or continuing ed programs, there has been one tried and true path for learning a skill, craft, art, trade, or profession: go study with a master. All the great learning traditions say the same thing: if you want to learn how to do something well, go find someone who has already mastered that skill, and apprentice yourself. — *location: 3002* ^ref-46075 --- If you want to learn how to do something well, find someone who has mastered that skill and apprentice yourself. — *location: 3186* ^ref-60513 --- Choose your heroes carefully: are they genuine role models you want to emulate? — *location: 3187* ^ref-23213 --- Form and use a mastermind: two minds are better than one, and five are even better. — *location: 3191* ^ref-3011 >See Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich --- 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. — *location: 3209* ^ref-57548 --- Part of learning the slight edge is finding your own “intrinsically optimal rate of growth,” and it is always served best by a step-by-step approach of constant, never-ending improvement, which lays solid foundations and builds upon them over and over. The slight edge is your optimal rate of growth. Simple disciplines compounded over time. That’s how the tortoise won; that’s how you get to be a winner, too. — *location: 3217* ^ref-12704 --- what is the real point of the story of the tortoise and the hare? All together now: Slow and steady wins the race, right? But notice something here: the point is not that there’s any special virtue to moving slowly. There’s nothing inherently good about slowness, and it’s just as possible to move too slowly as to move too quickly. The key word in the Aesop moral is not “slow.” The key word here is steady. Steady wins the race. That’s the truth of it. Because steady is what taps into the power of the slight edge. — *location: 3221* ^ref-22564 --- 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. — *location: 3258* ^ref-17541 >Getting Things Done]] --- Approaching that stack of undones with the slight edge in hand is not only the best way to deal with them, it’s the only way you’ll ever deal with them. Take on those incompletions in your life just as you took on learning to walk. Baby steps, one at a time, letting the force of the slight edge work for you to help you complete whatever needs completing. — *location: 3270* ^ref-15323 --- Here’s a powerful exercise: Instead of writing down what you’re going to do (chances are you’ve been doing that your whole adult life anyway, and it doesn’t make you any better at doing them), write down at the end of the day what you did do that day. — *location: 3300* ^ref-4881 --- On the path of mastery you have four powerful allies: The power of momentum: steady wins the race. The power of completion: clear out your undones and incompletes. The power of reflection: facing the man or woman in the mirror. The power of celebration: catch yourself doing something right. — *location: 3366* ^ref-44225 --- 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. — *location: 3431* ^ref-3602 --- In his remarkable book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell traces the actual amount of time that goes into the eventual “overnight success” of superstars from all sorts of fields, from the Beatles to Bill Gates, and documents what he calls the 10,000-hour rule: the key to outrageous success in any endeavor is to put in about 10,000 hours of practice. Seriously. No kidding. Ten thousand. (Gladwell is a pretty good example of that himself, and the book not only debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, but also stayed there for eleven consecutive weeks.) If you put in eight hours a day, forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, for five years, that’s 10,000 hours. — *location: 3533* ^ref-22519 --- No matter what you are trying to accomplish, you need to ask yourself, am I willing to put in 10,000 hours or more to get what I want? — *location: 3540* ^ref-56620 --- Here are seven powerful, positive slight edge habits: Show up: be the frog who jumps off the lily pad. Show up consistently: keep showing up when others fade out. Cultivate a positive outlook: see the glass as overflowing. Be committed for the long haul: remember the 10,000-hour rule. Cultivate a burning desire backed by faith: not hoping or wishing—knowing. Be willing to pay the price: sometimes you have to quit the softball team. Practice slight edge integrity: do the things you’ve committed to doing, even when no one else is watching. — *location: 3670* ^ref-36868 --- For a goal to come true: 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. — *location: 3686* ^ref-34455 --- Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian economist who promulgated this theory around the start of the twentieth century, actually arrived at his formula (which is a bit more complex than a simple 80/20) to describe the tendency of wealth, innovation, and initiative to concentrate in a self-selected elite, no matter what the external social or economic system. — *location: 3718* ^ref-42893 --- It’s easy to assume that you need to put together the plan that will get you there—in other words, the right plan. The plan that will work. No. The point is not to come up with the brilliant blueprint that is guaranteed to take you all the way to the finish line. The point is simply to come up with a plan that will get you out of the starting gate. It’s not even that your starting plan doesn’t necessarily get you there—it for sure won’t get you there, at least not the exact plan you conceive at first. Nobody has that degree of perfect precision in long-range planning, and there are too many variables and surprises along the way that will require adjustments to the plan. You have to start with a plan, but the plan you start with will not be the plan that gets you there. In fact, just for emphasis, I’m going to say that once more: You have to start with a plan, but the plan you start with will not be the plan that gets you there. — *location: 3757* ^ref-34598 --- The power of a plan is not that it will get you there. The power of a plan is that it will get you started. — *location: 3770* ^ref-19197 --- In fact, if you put too much energy into the plan and fuss around trying to make it perfect, you’re likely to squelch all the life, spontaneity, intuition, and joy out of the doing of it. — *location: 3774* ^ref-7227 --- You start with a plan, then go through the process of continuous learning through both study and doing, adjusting all the time like a rocket ship on the way to the moon, off track 97 percent of the time, your gyroscope feeding information to your dream computer to bring you back on track, and continuing on the path of mastery toward your passionately dreamed-for objective. — *location: 3777* ^ref-37629 >Philosophy --- This is why you need to have a plan to start with—but you cannot start with the plan that will get you there. You have to start with the philosophy that will take you there; with the right philosophy, you’ll find the plan. — *location: 3791* ^ref-58809 >Philosophy, vision, objectives --- The unerring way a simple plan works, when coupled with the earnest pursuit of slight edge habits and disciplines, was beautifully expressed in this famous passage from The Second Himalayan Expedition, by the Scottish mountaineer W. H. Murray: Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a great respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!” — *location: 3870* ^ref-29027 --- There are three simple, essential steps to achieving a goal: Write it down: give it a what (clear description) and a when (timeline). Look at it every day: keep it in your face; soak your subconscious in it. Start with a plan: make the plan simple. The point of the plan is not that it will get you there, but that it will get you started. — *location: 3912* ^ref-14059 --- Earlier in this book you walked through a brief exercise where you assessed your life as being on the success curve or failure curve in these seven specific areas. Now let’s revisit them, only this time I’m going to ask you to make a simple roadmap for each one, consisting of three elements: 1) your dreams for that area, expressed as goals—specific, vivid, and with a timeline; 2) a simple plan to start (and when I say simple think: “find Germans”); and 3) one simple daily discipline that you will commit to doing each and every day from now on. — *location: 3934* ^ref-31977 >Do this for my 12 focal areas --- I usually say that the slight edge does not work quickly, but the truth is, when it comes to your health you often will get positive results fairly quickly. — *location: 3949* ^ref-5827 >This is why fitness is so often shared focus of productivity bros --- Your happiness is affected by 1) your outlook, that is, how you choose to view the events and circumstances of your everyday life; 2) specific actions with positive impact—things like writing down three things your grateful for, or sending appreciative emails, doing random acts of kindness, practicing forgiveness, meditating, and exercising; and 3) where you put your time and energy, and especially investing more time into important relationships and personally meaningful pursuits. — *location: 3971* ^ref-38039 --- The world of finance is one of the easiest places to see, objectively and logically, the power of the slight edge in action. — *location: 4033* ^ref-13002 --- Write out your goals and dreams, a simple starting plan, and a single daily discipline: For your health For your happiness For your relationships For your personal development For your finances For your career For your impact on the world — *location: 4110* ^ref-15381 --- Abraham Lincoln spoke about taking twice as long to sharpen the axe as to hack at the tree. In your life, you are the axe; the slight edge is how you sharpen it. — *location: 4122* ^ref-51849 --- Do one simple, daily discipline in each of these seven key areas of your life—your health, your happiness, your relationships, your personal development, your finances, your career, and your impact—that forwards your success in each of those areas; and Make a habit of doing some sort of daily review of these slight edge activities, either through keeping a journal, a list, working with a slight edge buddy, a coach, or some other regular, consistent means; and 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… — *location: 4127* ^ref-57736 --- Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do; they put the slight edge to work for them, rather than against them, every day. They refuse to let themselves be swayed by their feelings, moods, or attitudes; they rule their lives by their philosophies and do what it takes to get the job done, whether they feel like it or not. Successful people don’t look for shortcuts, nor do they hope for the “big break.” They are always open to quantum leaps, knowing that such opportune moments do present themselves from time to time, but they focus on sticking to their knitting and doing what they’ve put in front of themselves to do. They step onto the path of mastery and, once having set foot there, they stay on that path for the rest of their lives. Successful people never blame circumstances or other people; instead, they take full responsibility for their lives. They use the past as a lesson but do not dwell in it, and instead let themselves be pulled up and forward by the compelling force of the future. They know that the path that leads to the success curve and the one that leads to the failure curve are only a hair’s breadth apart, separated only by the distinction of simple, “insignificant” actions that are just as easy not to do as they are to do—and that this difference will ultimately make all the difference. Successful people know how to use the natural tension to close the gap from point A, where they are, to point B, where they want to be. They understand why the tortoise beat the hare and why the one frog lived while the other died; they know that “steady wins the race,” and that the slight edge is the optimal rate of growth for them. Successful people practice the daily disciplines that are assured to take them to their final destination. They show up consistently with a good attitude over a long period of time, with a burning desire backed by faith. They are willing to pay the price and practice slight edge integrity. Successful people focus on having a positive outlook. They understand that the funk gets everyone, and when it comes for them they embrace it, knowing it is refining them and deepening their appreciation of the rhythm of life. They take baby steps out of the funk and step back into positivity. Successful people use inertia to build momentum, making their upward journey of success easier and easier. They know how to identify habits that don’t serve them and replace them with those that do. They understand the powers of reflection, completion, and celebration and they harness them constantly, using their radar for unfinished business to propel them forward rather than being sucked backward and downward. Successful people acquire the three kinds of knowledge they need to succeed. They create an ongoing support system of both book smarts and street smarts, learning through study and through doing, and they catalyze and accelerate that knowledge by finding mentors and modeling their successful behavior. Successful people are always asking: “Who am I spending time with? Are they the people who best represent where I want to be headed?” They form powerful relationships with positive people; they carefully build mastermind groups, work with those groups regularly, and take them seriously; and they do not hesitate to disassociate themselves, when necessary, from people who are consistently negative and threaten to drag them down. Successful people read at least ten pages of a powerful, life-transforming book or listen to at least fifteen minutes of educational and inspirational audio information every day. Successful people go to work on their philosophy first, because they know it is the source of their attitudes, actions, results, and the quality of their lives. They understand that they can increase their success by doubling their rate of failure. They understand activity and because they do the thing, they have the power. They understand the power of simple things. They understand the power of daily disciplines. They understand the power of the water hyacinth, and know how to use it. They know how to keep paddling when others give up and sink. They know when they are being offered the choice of wisdom. Successful people understand the slight edge, and they put it to work for them. So, where do you go from here? Find your penny. And then start doubling it. — *location: 4139* ^ref-3959 ---