The-Slight-Edge

50 The Slight Edge
The Slight Edge is like Lady Justice, the famous blindfolded statue. The
statue itself, of the woman holding the scales and sword, has been around since
the days of ancient Rome. The blindfold was added in the sixteenth century,
in the years leading up to that era we call the “Enlightenment” that gave birth
to modern ideas of representative democracy and universal human rights. The
blindfold is not meant to signify that justice is “blind,” as people sometimes
assume, but that true justice is impervious to external influence.
That also makes it a very good representation of the Slight Edge.
If you want to understand and apply the Slight Edge to create the life of your
dreams, you can’t make your choices based on the evidence of your eyes. You
need to make them based on what you know. On your philosophy.
Picture success and failure as the two sides of a pair of balance scales, like the
one held by Lady Justice.
Let’s say you’re in a tough place in your life. The scales are tipped badly,
the negative side tilted way down. Whether it’s your health, or your finances,
or your marriage, or your career ... whatever it is, you’ve reached a place where
many years of simple errors in judgment have compounded over time, and
you’re feeling it. You’re behind the eight ball. It sure would be nice if, somehow,
you could do something dramatic. If you just wake up tomorrow and have it all
turned around—snap your fingers and change it.
That might happen, in a movie. But this is your life. What can you do?
What happens if you add one small, simple, positive action to the success
side? Nothing you can see. What happens if you add one more? Nothing you can
see. What happens if you keep adding one more, and one more, and one more,
and one more ...
Before too long, you see the scales shift, ever so slightly. And then again.
And eventually, that heavy “failure” side starts to lift, and lift, and lift ... and
the scales start swinging your way. No matter how much negative weight from
the past is on the other side, just by adding those little grams of success, one at a
time (and by not adding more weight to the failure side), you will eventually and
inevitably begin to shift the scales in your favor.
Way back in the beginning, when you add the first few morsels of positive
action, if you judge your choices by the evidence of your eyes, you won’t see the
scales move at all and that will frustrate you. It frustrates nineteen out of twenty
people so much, they quit. And that is the saddest thing I can think of.