The Slight Edge

“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. Extremely easy to overlook them. It’s easy to overlook them because when you look at them, they seem insignificant. They’re not big, sweeping things that take huge effort. They’re not heroic or dramatic. Mostly they’re just little things you do every day and that nobody else even notices. They are things that are so simple to do—yet successful people actually do them, while unsuccessful people only look at them and don’t take action.

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 nut shell, is the slight edge.”

“Through a great film, you can experience the triumph of the human soul over adversity, the drama of a struggle between doing what’s right and succumbing to the temptations of the world, a moving encounter between generations, the flowering of a powerful romance, the struggle and birth of a nation….

But it all has to be finished in two hours.

Can you imagine a nation being born in two hours? Meeting the person who will become the love of your life—the dating, courtship, romance, struggle, triumph, wedding, and happy life thereafter—in two hours? Of course not. We expect to put out the effort of a thirty-second falling-in-love sequence, or fighter-in-training sequence, and get that same heroic ending. 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.”

“There’s a popular expression you’ve probably heard, ‘Luck is preparedness meeting opportunity.’ It’s a handy idea, but it’s not quite accurate. People who live by the slight edge understand how luck really works. It’s not preparedness meeting opportunity; it’s preparedness, period. Preparedness created by doing those simple, little, constructive, positive actions, over and over. Luck is when that constancy of preparedness eventually creates opportunity.

One reason the slight edge is so widely ignored, unnoticed, and undervalued is that our culture tends to worship the idea of the ‘big break.’ We celebrate that dramatic discovery, the big breakthrough that catapults the hero into a new place. In other words, we buy lottery tickets.

The truth of breakthroughs and lucky breaks is that, yes, they do happen—but they don’t happen out of thin air. They are grown, like a crop: planted, cultivated, and ultimately harvested. The problems is, as I mentioned last chapter, that in our culture we’re trained to think we can skip the middle step and leap directly from plant to harvest. We even have a term for it. We call it a quantum leap.

And it’s a complete, utter myth.”

“‘Give me six hours to chop down a tree,’ goes the quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln, ‘and I will spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.’ Which left just two hours to do the actual chopping. In other words, he would spend twice as much time working on the tools of the job as he would on the task itself. And in the task called your life, what are the tools of the job? They are simply you: you are the axe. And no one knew that better than our sixteenth president, who poured enormous effort during his half-century life into making himself into the sharpest, strongest, truest axe he possibly could.”

“On its way to landing astronauts safely on the surface of the moon, the miracle of modern engineering that was an Apollo rocket was actually on course only 2 to 3 percent of the time. Which means that for at least 97 percent of the time it took to get from the Earth to the moon it was off course. In a journey of nearly a quarter of a million miles, the vehicle was actually on track for only 7,500 miles. Or to put it another way, for every half-hour the ship was in flight, it was on course for less than one minute. And it reached the moon—safely—and returned to tell the tale.

How was such a thing possible? Because modern space travel is a masterful example of slight edge course-correction in action.

If this machine, at the time one of the most sophisticated, expensive, and finely calibrated pieces of technology ever devised, was correcting its own off-course errors twenty-nine minutes out of every thirty, is it reasonable to expect that you could do better than that? Let’s say you were able to match an Apollo rocket’s degree of accuracy in the pursuit of your own goals: that would mean that you’d be perfectly on target and on course no more than ten days in any given year. The next time you’re giving yourself a hard time because you feel like you’ve gotten off track, think about the Apollo program, and give yourself a break.”

“You may think I’m exaggerating. I’m not. You are capable of great things. I know this, because I’ve observed the human condition, and every soul alive is capable of great things. Most will never achieve them or experience them. But anyone can, if they only understand how the process works.

Show up. Show up consistently. Show up consistently with a positive outlook. Be prepared for and committed to the long haul. Cultivate a burning desire backed by faith. Be willing to pay the price. And do the things you’ve committed to doing—even when no one else is watching.”

“There are many definitions of integrity. Honesty. Truthfulness. Congruence between words and deeds. The aspect of integrity that is most applicable to the slight edge is this: what you do when no one is watching….

It’s in that moment’s decision, when nobody else is watching and no one will ever know, when your choice is so slight, so subtle, so insignificant … it’s at that moment that you find out whether or not you have slight edge integrity.”

“This is the point where people are often thrown off track. 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.”