The-Slight-Edge

Mastering the Slight Edge 117
So here you are, just completing your very first step. Now, you know that
the big people you’ve been watching go around taking one step after another.
You’ve watched them do it: right foot, left foot, right foot, left ... so you try. You
complete that first, tentative, epic-making step and get ready to swing into the
next one—and then, Crash!
Try again. And again. And again. After days of side-stepping around the
coffee table, awkwardly bringing one little foot out from behind the other while
you hold onto Mom’s or Dad’s fingers, you eventually take your first sequence of
two steps ... then three, and four, and ... all alone ... all by yourself ... and to the
encouraging cheers and applause of your proud family—baby steps ... one at a
time ... and you’re walking!
In the process of learning to walk, did you spend more time falling down or
standing up? If you were anything like most babies, you failed (fell) far more than
you succeeded (walked). It didn’t matter: you were on the path of mastery.
Did you ever have the thought of quitting? Did you ever say to yourself, You
know, it looks like maybe I’m just not cut out for walking ... oh well. I guess I’ll just
have to crawl for the rest of my life—which really isn’t all that bad, when you stop
and think about it. I’m sure I’ll get used to it ... ? Of course not. You were on the
path of mastery. You were already a master—now it was only a matter of your
walking skills catching up.
Constantly falling down was really uncomfortable—it hurt!—and you probably
looked pretty silly lying there on the floor like a beetle on its back ... but you kept
at it anyway. Why? Because successful people do what unsuccessful people are not
willing to do—and all babies are successful. All babies are masters; we’re designed
that way. All babies instinctively understand the Slight Edge. We only let go of our
natural pull towards success, our mastery, over the course of those 40,000 no’s.
Are there any situations in your life today where you’ve given up and decided
to keep crawling rather than go for what you really want, what you truly deserve?
Have you lost the ability to make up a goal, go for it and get it? Why don’t you do
what you did when you were just a year old?
The answer is both simple and sad: somewhere along the way, you lost
faith. You became too grown-up to take baby steps,
too sure you would never succeed to let yourself fail
a few times first. You gave up on the universal truth that simple little
disciplines, done again and again over time, would move the biggest mountains.
You forgot what you used to know about the Slight Edge. You stepped off the
path of mastery.