The-Slight-Edge

invest in Yourself 141
everything else. The Slight Edge will either promote you or expose you for who
and what you really are—and who and what you are comes from your philosophy.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus spoke of two types of foundation. He
spoke about the “wise man” who built his house upon the rock: “And the rain
descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and burst against that
house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded upon the rock.”
And then he told of a second character—a “foolish man” who built his house
on sand: “And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and
burst against that house; and it fell and great was its fall.”
The foundation upon which you are building the house of your life is what will
determine the nature of the house itself. Will the house stand? Will it fall apart?
Will it leak, or will it withstand whatever weather nature throws at it? What results
will your life produce? It’s a critically important question—because by the time
the results are in, the outcome will already be pretty well determined. You can’t
wait for your results to judge your actions. You can’t wait to see what kind of house
you’ve got before you judge whether or not it had a sturdy foundation!
Your success will always be the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.
Your philosophy comes first; your results come last. And this brings us to the
most important Slight Edge strategy of all.
Continuous Learning
The trouble with the world is not that people know too
little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.
— Mark Twain
We’ve talked about all sorts of forces you can harness to help power your path
through life. The most important force of all, the force that drives the whole process
of living with the Slight Edge, is the power of continuous learning.
When I say “learning,” I don’t mean simply learning from school, although
schooling certainly has its place. And I don’t just mean learning from books or
from a teacher—though you already know that I revere the knowledge to be gained
from good books, and I feel the same way about great teachers, too. I’m also not
just talking here about learning from the example of others, from advice from your
friends, from the “school of hard knocks,” or learning from your mistakes ...
I don’t mean any one of those ... I mean all of them! Once you’ve set foot
on the path of mastery and grasped the philosophy of the Slight Edge, educating
yourself through any and all means available is the critical process that will keep
you on that path and make the Slight Edge work for you.