The-Slight-Edge
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
108 <strong>The</strong> <strong>Slight</strong> <strong>Edge</strong><br />
Is the number of friends in your life, people with whom you stay in<br />
touch, with whom you share meaningful exchanges and mutually enriching<br />
experiences, growing larger every year? If you are married, and you were to<br />
describe your marriage as a plant, would it be a plant that is growing taller,<br />
riper, fuller and richer with each passing year? What about your family—<br />
children, parents, brothers, sisters and others? Are they growing deeper and<br />
richer or more distant and shallower?<br />
Are your relationships on the success curve or the failure curve?<br />
Let’s take an honest look at your finances.<br />
Are you building assets and putting money into a long-term plan that will<br />
create true financial freedom? Is your net worth growing larger each year?<br />
Are you living within your means and investing a portion of your income<br />
into a program that will build equity for you over the years, growing dollar by<br />
dollar and picking up momentum through the power of compounding interest so<br />
that, like a snowball rolling down a wintry hill, it will have gathered tremendous<br />
financial mass in the years when you need it most?<br />
Or are you living on credit, on borrowed money as well as borrowed time,<br />
running your coffers empty and storing up debt instead of equity, digging<br />
yourself deeper and deeper into a hole that grows only harder to escape?<br />
Are your finances on the success curve or the failure curve?<br />
Let’s take an honest look at your life itself.<br />
What kind of impact is your life having on the world around you? How is<br />
the world different as a result of your being here? After you leave this world,<br />
what will you leave behind as a legacy and how will people remember you? When<br />
you add together your career and all your professional accomplishments, your<br />
relationships and all your personal accomplishments, your sense of connection<br />
with nature, humanity and God, how would you describe the overall value or<br />
meaning of your life? And is that sense growing stronger, deeper, richer, more<br />
powerful every day, month and year?<br />
Is your life on the success curve or the failure curve?<br />
Be honest about all of this. Do as Shakespeare’s Polonius tells his son<br />
Laertes to do:<br />
This above all, to thine own self be true; and it must<br />
follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be<br />
false to any man.<br />
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3
Change language