The-Slight-Edge

The Quantum leap Myth 71
every day for years have always struck them as funny, because they couldn’t see
the point. They couldn’t see the results coming further on down the path.
Today I see these friends and ache for them: many now have failing health,
are languishing in poor financial conditions and seem to have lost their hopes
for the future. What they have a hard time seeing is that my good health isn’t
an accident, and their poor health isn’t a stroke of bad luck. We’ve all gotten to
where we are today the exact same way: the Slight Edge. They are victims of the
Quantum Leap Myth.
Our society is sliding rapidly into an ever-increasing economic crisis of poor
health including an epidemic of adult onset diabetes, heart disease, obesity and
a score of other chronic illnesses that have steadily fed a monstrously overgrown
health care system, tax system and social security system—and there isn’t a
single “cause” anywhere in sight. As I’m writing this, several of our most widely
used over-the-counter drugs have suddenly been found to make things worse.
There is no mystery for those who know how to recognize the Slight Edge at
work. Our entire health crisis is nothing but one set of little decisions, made daily
and compounded daily, winning out over another set of little decisions, made
daily and compounded daily.
We look for the cure, the breakthrough, the magic pill—the medicalscientific
quantum leap miracle our press has dubbed the “magic bullet.” But
the solution already exists. It always did. Is it magic? Yes—the same magic that
caused the problem: the power of daily actions, compounded over time. The
magic of the Slight Edge.
There’s a great line in the movie Bruce Almighty, when God (played by
Morgan Freeman) is leaving the all-too-human Jim Carrey character to solve
things on his own (and refusing to be a deus ex machina). He says, “You
want a miracle? Be the miracle.” Once you absorb the Slight
Edge way of being, you’ll stop looking for that quantum leap—and start building
it. You too can become the miracle.
The Winning Edge
The Slight Edge is the process every winner has used to succeed since the
dawn of time. Winning is always a matter of the Slight Edge.
One of the most highly anticipated events at the Summer Olympics is
men’s swimming. Going into the 2008 Beijing Games there was a lot of hype
surrounding Michael Phelps, who would be gunning for Mark Spitz’s 36-yearold
record of seven gold medals. The first seven medals came rather easily, but