The-Slight-Edge

The Secret of Easy Things 37
Everything you need to know to be successful—every how-to, every
practical action—is already written in books like these. Here’s a Slight Edge
action guaranteed to change your life: read just ten pages of a good book, a book
aimed at improving your life, every day.
If you read ten pages of a good book today, will your life change? Of course
not. If you don’t read ten pages of a good book today, will your life fall apart? Of
course not.
I could tell my shoeshine friend that if she would agree to read ten pages
of one of these good books every single day, over time, she could not help but
accumulate all the knowledge she’d ever need to be as successful as she ever
wanted to be—successful enough to send her daughter to that cheerleading
camp and hey, to send her to the best college in the country if she wanted. Like
a penny over time, reading ten pages a day would compound, just like that, and
create a ten-million-dollar bank of knowledge in her.
Would she do it? On day 1, sure. And day 2. And maybe day 3. But
would she still be doing it by the end of the week? If she did keep reading,
over the course of the year she would have read 3,650 pages—the equivalent
of one or two dozen books of life-transforming material! Would her life have
changed? Absolutely. No question. But here, back in week 1, all that’s still an
invisible result.
And that is exactly why most people never learn to recognize or understand
the Slight Edge, the reason most people never learn how to make the Slight Edge
work for them, and why the Slight Edge ends up working against them:
When you make the right choice, you won’t see the results. At least,
not today.
We live in a result-focused world. We expect to see results, and we expect to
see them now. Push the button, the light flicks on. Step on the scale, look in the
mirror, check the account balance online 24/7. Give me feedback, trip a sensor,
hit a buzzer, tell me, tell me, tell me it’s working!
But that’s not how success is built. Success is the progressive
realization of a worthy ideal. “Progressive” means success is a
process, not a destination. It’s something you experience gradually, over time.
Failure is also just as gradual. In fact, the difference between success and failure
is so subtle, you can’t even see it or recognize it during the process. And here’s
how real success is built: by the time you get the feedback,
the real work’s already done. When you get to the point where
everyone else can see your results, tell you what good choices you’ve made,