The-Slight-Edge

120 The Slight Edge
Tension is uncomfortable. That’s why it sometimes makes people uncomfortable
to hear about how things could be. One of the reasons Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech made such a huge impact on the world and
carved such a vivid place in our cultural memory is that it made the world of
August 1963 very uncomfortable. John Lennon sang his vision of a more peaceful
world in the song “Imagine”; within the decade, he was shot to death. Visions
and visionaries make people uncomfortable.
These are of course especially dramatic examples, but the same principle
applies to the personal dreams and goals of people we’ve never heard of. The
same principle applies to everyone, including you and me.
Let’s say you have a brother, or sister or old friend, with whom you had a
falling out years ago. You wish you had a better relationship, that you talked more
often, that you shared more personal experiences and conversations together.
Between where you are today, and where you can imagine being, there is a gap.
Can you feel it?
Or let’s say you are a hard worker and make a pretty good income, but have
no solid retirement plan and don’t know how you’ll be able to live comfortably
when you reach your late sixties. There’s how you’d like to be living at age sixtyeight,
and how you’re worried you may end up living at age sixty-eight if things go
the way they’re going. Between those two, there’s a gap. Can you feel it?
Do you have any health or fitness goals? Career goals? Goals for your kids?
Dreams of living somewhere else, of doing something else? Each of those images
you have, of how things could be but at the moment are not, creates a gap with
your present reality.
Most people, when confronted by problems larger than or of a different sort
than they’re already handling, immediately feel defeated or thrown off course.
Most tend to see larger or different problems as negatives, and infect their own
lives with negativity. What they don’t realize is this philosophy: The size of the
problem determines the size of the person.
You can gauge the limitations of a person’s life by the size of the problems that
get him or her down. You can measure the impact a person’s
life has by the size of the problems he or she solves.
If the size of the problems you solve is, “I put the cans in the bottom of the
bag, and put the bread on top,” as a grocery store bagger, that’s the level of your
problem solving and that’s the level of your pay. If you can solve big problems,
you can graduate to big pay—because the size of your income will be determined
by the size of the problems you solve, too!