The-Slight-Edge
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48 <strong>The</strong> <strong>Slight</strong> <strong>Edge</strong><br />
In a way, it would be a simpler matter if making the right choices were a big<br />
deal. If it were a dramatic, huge, difficult thing. Why? Because then it would be<br />
obvious. You wouldn’t need this book. <strong>The</strong> challenge is that making the right<br />
choices is not dramatic. When the hero makes the right choice in a movie, it’s<br />
dramatic, all right. Problem is, your life is not a movie. It’s real life.<br />
Deciding whether or not to kill Darth Vader with your light saber is a dramatic<br />
choice. Deciding whether or not to fasten your seat belt is an undramatic, boring,<br />
mundane little choice that nobody will even witness. But guess which choice has the<br />
power to take a few hundred thousand lives each year? Hint: it’s not the light saber.<br />
If making the right <strong>Slight</strong> <strong>Edge</strong> choices were a dramatic thing, you’d get<br />
immediate feedback. An entire movie theater audience applauding, cheering or<br />
screaming. But that doesn’t happen. And that’s the big challenge of it: no immediate<br />
feedback.<br />
<strong>The</strong> right choices and wrong choices you make at the moment will have little<br />
or no noticeable impact on how your day goes for you. Nor tomorrow, nor the<br />
next day. No applause, no cheers, no screams, no life-or-death results played<br />
out in Technicolor. But it is precisely those very same, undramatic, seemingly<br />
insignificant actions that, when compounded over time, will dramatically affect<br />
how your life turns out.<br />
So, where’s the drama? It comes at the end of the story, when the credits start<br />
to roll—which comes not in two hours but in two years. Or, depending on what<br />
<strong>Slight</strong> <strong>Edge</strong> and what particular story we’re talking about, perhaps twelve years,<br />
or twenty-two.<br />
Making the right choices, taking the right actions. It’s truly easy to do.<br />
Ridiculously easy. But it’s just as easy not to do. And if you don’t do them, there<br />
won’t be any big drama about it. It won’t kill you; it won’t hurt you; in fact, it<br />
won’t make any difference at all ...<br />
Not today, anyway. Not tomorrow. But over time?<br />
+<br />
Simple Disciplines<br />
L<br />
I<br />
F<br />
E<br />
_<br />
Simple Errors in Judgement<br />
TIME<br />
old<br />
p.39
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