The-Slight-Edge

The Quantum leap Myth 67
another man of conscience who had also spent much of his life failing): Abraham
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
Deus ex machina? Far from it. These were human problems, and they had
human solutions. But the only access to them is through the Slight Edge.
Of course, Wilberforce and Lincoln were not the sole figures in this heroic
struggle, and even after their bills were passed into law on both sides of the
Atlantic, the evils of slavery and racism were far from over. But their efforts—
like Mother Teresa’s efforts to end poverty, Gandhi’s to end colonial oppression,
or Martin Luther King’s and Nelson Mandela’s to end racism—are classic
examples of what “breakthrough” looks like in the real world.
All of these real-life heroes understood the Slight Edge. None of them were
hypnotized by the allure of the “big break.” If they had been, they would never had
continued taking the actions they took—and what would the world look like today?
One Small Step...
Our cultural mythology, the philosophy our society subscribes to as a group,
worships the breakthrough even when we don’t realize that’s what we’re doing.
“One small step for a man ... ”—nonsense! That wasn’t one small step—the
guy was on the moon! That was one gigantic step for man, a genuine breakthrough.
The small step was when some guy—someone you and I never heard of—
first started tinkering with design ideas for how a rocket ship might withstand the
intense conditions of space flight. There were thousands, hundreds of thousands,
millions of “one small steps” for years and years beforehand that all went into that
epic 1969 leap of Neil Armstrong’s that was televised throughout the world (and
is still played over and over in our culture as one of the most deeply ingrained
news bites of history).
But we don’t celebrate any of those real “small steps.” We don’t even know
what they are, or who made them.
The myth of our culture is the giant step, the larger-than life leap, the heroic
effort. “Faster than a speeding bullet, able to ... ” Wait, how does that go again? Is
it, “able to take small, insignificant, incremental steps, consistently, over time?”
No, it’s “able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!” I mean, what kind of
Superman would take tiny steps?
The kind who wins. Like Edison and his light bulb.
There’s a popular expression these days, “Luck is preparedness meeting
opportunity.” It’s a nifty little saying, and it’s close, but in my experience, it
isn’t quite accurate. Luck is preparedness—period! Preparedness through doing