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The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness by Jeff Olsen
Buy this book here: http://amzn.to/2yb1hgC
Buy “Slight Edge” Here
My Review
I totally love this book.
Jeff Olson has been there. He has been broke, poor, mediocre corporate, raving entrepreneur, wealthy guru. Now he shares his knowledge with you. Here’s the message in brief:
- There is lots of self-improvement information out there
- Information is not enough
- There are no quantum leaps in personal development
- You must do a little every day
- These little insignificant steps are the SLIGHT EDGE
- The Slight Edge (consistently applying true principles) can help you accomplish anything in life
This is so true in my life and has been the key to any accomplishment I have … accomplished. This is a great book to help you get the most out of any personal improvement advice.
My favorite Slight Edge Quotes:
- Philosophies > Attitude > Action > Results => Lifestyle
- If something is easy to do, it is also easy not to do
- Slight Edge = Take Information => Make it work (apply the philosophy)
- Do the thing, you’ll have the power” – Emerson
4 Simple and Fundamental Steps to turn your Dreams into Reality
- Write it down, make it specific, give it a deadline
- Look at it every day (visualize)
- Understand and pay the price
- Have a plan to start with
Questions To Breathe Life Into Your Dreams
- What are your dreams for… (wealth, career, health, relationships…)
- Be specific, be vivid, and give yourself a timeline
- What price will you have to pay?
- What is your plan to start?
- What is one simple daily discipline that you will commit to?
5 Areas in Life
- Health
- Personal Development
- Relationships
- Finances
- Life (purpose of life)
My Notes
Download my notes: The Slight Edge – Ben Balden’s Notes.docx
Exlcusive with Jeff Olson – Available in the Audiobook Version
- I’m taking notes on an abridged version, but I also have the print and eBook edition for reference
- Jeff Olson has been there and has seen many people find success
- His history
- Jeff was able to Manage a TV Chanel to produce things that help improve your life
- Their goal was to produce things to help people and give them all the INFORMATION they need
- Question: If information and technology was the answer, would there be any more problems?
- This is not the case, there are still so many problems in society
- Information alone IS NOT the answer
- There is something that makes INFORMATION and TECHNOLOGY work
- If you give information to some people, it STILL DOESN’T work
- PROBLEM
- Most people talking to these people are talking about a QUANTUM LEAP
- You can’t plant your seeds and then harvest, there is a cultivating harvest
- The answer is doing the simple things over and over to prepare for the harvest
- Solution
- If something is easy to do, it is also easy not to do
- Doing things simply and consistently over time, is the stuff that will lead to the results
- Foundation
- Good Philosophies – everything you know {I think he is talking about beliefs}
- Good Attitude comes from good philosophies
- Philosophies > Attitude > Action > Results => Lifestyle
- Slight Edge is a Philosophy
- Take Information => Make it work (apply the philosophy)
- Application
- Different people take the same information and the same opportunity but have DIFFERENT results
- Good results person – good attitude/ beliefs, actions and lifestyle
- Exercise successful disciplines and repeat over and over and over
- Bad results – bad attitude – bad results and lifestyle
- People trained overtime to look for the Quantum Leap
- Good Decisions
- The Slight Edge is about making good decisions
- The Foundation is good knowledge (information)
- 4 Step Process to Move Knowledge up and your Anxiety down
- LEARN KNOWLEDGE – learn about what you are trying to do (information)
- ACTIVITY KNOWLEDGE – “Do the thing, you’ll have the power” – Emerson
- “The key to success is to double your rate of failure” – Watson, Founder of IBM
- Learn knowledge must be transformed to Activity Knowledge
- Why it doesn’t happen – because people live in fear and their comfort zone – stop fearing rejection and failure
- This goes back and forth between learn and activity knowledge
- Example: reading a book you read many years before and learning new stuff
- MODELING KNOWLEDGE – seek out the people that are truly having success
- You can’t have positive philosophies or attitudes when everyone around you is negative
- TEACHING KNOWLEDGE
- Ability to inspire other people
- Definition of Leadership – get people to do things they would not otherwise do
- Must have success to be worthy of being modeled, then you become the teacher
- Bring it all together
- Having a process to increase your knowledge and make it happen
- RESPONSIBILITY
- People who end up being successful take responsibility for what happens in their life
- Even when it seems like it is unfair, they take the responsibility for what happens to them
- Opposite: Blame – whenever you blame, you give up control (you give that power to the other person)
- COMFORT
- Successful life – uncomfortable at first, but then extremely comfortable
- Unsuccessful – stay in comfort zone and then later on live an uncomfortable life
- DECISOINS COMPOUNDED
- Small decisions don’t seem significant at the time, but compounded over time, they are extremely important
- No real difference with one choice
- Thousands of small choices add up – compound
- Master the Mundane
- Master those decisions that don’t seem to matter in that moment
- EXAMPLES
- Exercise daily
- Eat right
- Read 10 pages a day (anyone can do this)
- Simple slight edge effort over time compounds on itself
- Can create a massive shift in your life
- Every single decision you make is a slight edge decision – It all matters
- There is no quantum leap solution
- Success is just a stack of tiny choices in the right direction
- Embrace & Apply Consistently
- Every day you are making hundreds and thousands of decisions
- Make it all work
- Good Philosophies – everything you know {I think he is talking about beliefs}
Forward
- What is the difference between those who succeed and those who don’t
- The Slight Edge
- This is what will help all the other self-help books work as well
Intro: Shoe Shine Woman
- Met a woman at a shoe shine stand
- Her talked to her about her life and daughter
- Wanted to send her daughter to cheerleader camp, but she didn’t have the money
- She had shined shoes for 5 years
- She was reading romance books in between customers
- WHAT IF she read self-help books instead
- She had talent, personality, and life skills to accomplish so much more
- She spent her life building the dreams of others
- If only
- What was missing
- What does this woman need to have a happier life?
- This reminded Jeff of a person he knew before
The Beach Bum and the Millionaire
- Born in New Mexico
- Dad died, he was fatherless white in a Hispanic neighborhood
- He was labeled as mischievous and not talented
- He went to college and went from C’s to D’s
- He quit school and moved to Daytona Beach
- He lifted weights and met girls
- He cut grass at the golf course – he watched the wealthy play golf
- He asked himself why was he working and those rich people were playing?
- He found his way out of his beach bum life and had found his way to a rich life
- Why?
- You must have a way to process the information
- Take the insight and put it into work in your life
- Apply the wisdom – in a slight edge fashion
- Now
- All that information is available
- This book helps you take that information and profit from it
Two Stories
- The Water Hyacinth
- Water plant with pretty flowers that floats on plants
- The most productive plants on Earth – it grows by doubling itself creating new daughter plants
- It will cover the entire pond in 30 days
- In the beginning, you will hardly notice it
- On day 29, half of the pond surface will be covered
The Choice
- A wealthy man summoned his sons to his bedside as he was dying
- He told his sons he had three treasures
- Easy to give and never runs out – Love
- Has been giving it them their whole lives
- Easy to give but not always easy to have – Money
- Gave, but whether they keep it is up to them
- Impossible to give can only be gained – Wisdom
- Will give it now
- To give this last gift, he gave each of the boys a PURSE
- For a month, they can take a million $ or take a penny that will double every day
- The boys have a choice to make
- Doubling penny
- Million dollars
- The boys decide
- First boy took the million and sought the best advice to invest the million
- Ended the month with less than one million
- Second boy took the penny then read from his books
- The second day, he got 2 pennies
- 4, 8,16,32,64,
- Half the month $81.92
- …
- After the month – $10,737,418.24
- First boy took the million and sought the best advice to invest the million
- Easy to give and never runs out – Love
- He told his sons he had three treasures
A Question
- What will your water be covered with
- What will your future be?
Part I:
Ch. 1 The Slight Edge
- Do the thing and you shall have the power
- People are all looking for the right answer
- How to do it is not the answer
- It’s only information
- Another How To book is not what you need
- You need the missing ingredient
- Your Philosophy
- Change the way you think
- Is Attitude what you need?
- No
- Entitled Attitude
- What have you done for me lately
- Pay me more and I’ll work harder
- Value Attitude
- What can I do to help you?
- I’ll work harder and then I expect you’ll pay me more
- Key: Understanding behind the attitude: philosophy
- Philosophy
- What you believe
- What you know
- Why you do
- How to do it is not the answer
Philosophy
- People are looking for a breakthrough
- They will never find it
- Failures and Successes
- All happen through the Slight Edge (little steps compounded)
- Success is progressive realization of a worthy idea
- Simple positive actions repeated over time
Ch. 2 The Secret of Easy Things
- Why do some people make dream after dream come true?
- What’s the difference?
- Observation: 1 person in 20 are achieving
- What are those people doing?
- Only one difference: The Slight Edge
- Guarantee: if you understand and apply the Slight Edge, you will achieve what you want
- Learn to understand and apply the slight edge
- All of the actions easy to do
- Those actions will create your success
- All your success is 100% in the small actions you choose
- The Slight Edge is ALWAYS WORKING
- It either works for you or against you
- Every action that is easy to do is also easy not to do
- WHY
- If you don’t do the small insignificant action, it will make very little difference today
- It is when these are added up that they make the difference
- Result focused
- We expect to see results and we expect to see it now
- We look to see if it is working – and may easily dismiss things that don’t seem to work
- You don’t notice the difference each choice makes, so you may decide not to do it
- WHY
What You Do Matters
- Your health is the most prized possession
- People already know what to do to have great health
- Why do they make bad choices? – because the results seem so marginally small
- Easy to eat well, and it’s easy not to
- Even if the things you do seem small and that they don’t matter, they do
Ch. 3 The Secret of Time
- You may do something simple over and over and not actually see the results for a while
- The most powerful force for change
- Not willpower
- It is time
- Time will either promote you or expose you
- The secret of time is the power of the slight edge
- Do a little each day – why
- Because you know that those small things WILL make a difference (over time)
Instant Life
- Would you choose the millions of dollars or the doubling penny?
- Right now
- Seductive words – instant gratification
- People want to get there immediately – quantum leap
- Just plan then harvest – keep skipping the step of cultivating
- Different way of thinking – different philosophy
- Law of harvest
- Plant, cultivate, harvest
- Cultivating takes place in the patient dimension of TIME
- In movies, it may skip the stage of cultivation, the hundreds of “slight edge” insignificant actions that lead to a big result
- Law of harvest
- Seductive words – instant gratification
Where’s The Drama
- Making the right choices would be simple if they were dramatic
- You making the right choice may seem very undramatic
- What you see vs. What you know
- Don’t base your choices on the dramatic effects
- Base your choices on what you KNOW – your philosophy
- Knowing and using faith will get you to your goal
The Power of Compounding Effort
- Fly wheel example
- Pushing with great effort only has a small effect on the fly wheel
- For each push, it doesn’t seem that it changed, it was all the pushed together
- Which push gets it going fast
- None of them individually
- Each of them together added made the cumulative total of consistent pushes to keep it going
- Put time on your side by
- Being consistent
- Staying with it
- Exercising patience
- Exercising Faith in your Knowledge
- Truth
- In 3-5 years, you can put virtually everything or anything in your life on the right track
Ch. 4 The Secret of The Penny
- The secret of the penny
- Some say, “To think you can start with nothing and build a fortune!”
- The truth is, you didn’t start with “nothing” you started with something seemingly insignificant
- Yet the insignificant thing has a beginning, some small amount of substance
- You were just a small cell
- You started as one cell which doubled over and over and eventually formed a human
- It is like the penny
A Penny For Your Thoughts
- If you could start with one thing and do it consistently, could you do it
- You have to put up with some problems and get yourself to a place where you are building momentum
- Knowledge
- Reading 10 pages in a book a day
- Could you read the “Think Rich” or “7 Habits of …”
- If you read just a few pages a day, you will have read SO MUCH over a short time
Let’s Get Real
- No one gets a penny to double over and over, that doesn’t happen
- Question: what if you could improve your health 0.03% for today.
- The first day, you will improve so little, you will not even notice
- Second the same
- But at the end of a year, you would have doubled whatever it is that you are working on
- ALL you need to do is improve 0.03% each day
- Greatness is not predetermined
- It is in the moment of the decision
Ch. 5 Someday When I Have…
- Someday when I have…
- The money
- The skills
- The confidence
- The truth: there is never a someday
- Your ship is already here
- You already have the money, skill, and confidence to achieve whatever you want
- Why not?
- You are looking for the quantum leap breakthrough
- Life is not a lottery
- Success is not a lucky accident
- Real World Problems
- William Wilberforce introduced bill after bill to parliament to abolish slavery to see it fail over and over
- Three days before he died, the bill passed, and then a few decades later it also passed in the US
- This was a slight edge story, where people kept taking these actions over an over even when they did not see the progress that day
- One Small Step
- The idea that it was just one man taking a step
- The truth it there were millions and millions of steps that people took over and over to make that happen
- Hundreds of things
- Quantum leap
- Term comes from science that energy appears at another level without us being able to observe how it got there
- Things don’t happen in quantum leaps
- Problems in society
- Several of the most widely used drugs are revealed to show how things actually get worse
- Entire health crisis is just a lot of little decisions happening over and over.
The Wining Edge
- Difference between 300 and 260 player earning much less?
- There is just a small difference in their paying
- Millionaire Next Door
- People profiled were ordinary people
- They just did mundane tasks over and over
- We love dramatic rags to riches
- But they are not exciting when they are happening
- They get there by mundane, little, slight edge decisions day in and day out
- It’s excited to experience the results
Ch. 6 Two Life Paths
- Some convinced the sun revolved around the Earth
- A few people risked the life to do this
- Everything is curved – no straight lines
- Your life is curved
- The upper curve are those 5% that are happy about their lives
- The lower curve are those 95% that are unhappy about where their live ended up
- Time is your friend
- Every choice has time to help add things up to get you to where you want to go
- It will promote you or expose you
- Ride the upper curve
- Doing the simple disciplines, time will promote you
Blame & Responsibility
- A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he blames someone else – quote
- Predominant state of mind
- Blame – failure curve
- Those who live on the losing edge of the curve
- Focus on failure
- Responsibility – success curve
- Taking responsibility for things that happen to you
- Even when the situation is wrong
- Even when the situation is genuinely unfair
- Focus on success
- Too busy moving to the future to be thinking of the problems in the past
- Focuses on the future – the most powerful tool and your friend
- You can’t change the past, you can change the future
- Our Reaction
- Difficult things happen to all
- It’s how we react to what happens to us that makes us successful
- Be a master of taking responsibility for what happens
- Choose
- Choose to be a victim or a victor
- What happens to you … blame or responsibility
- Responsibility
- Declaring oneself has cause in the matter
- Not burden, fault, praise, blame, credit… (these include judgment)
- Deal with it. You are the source of what you are, what you do, and what you have
- What happens
- Shifts from happening to you to
- Just happened to
- Happened because of some influence you had
- Take full responsibility in how the slight edge works in life
- Accepts that you CAN change the future and CAN’T change the past
- Blame – failure curve
Where Are You Headed?
- Alice in Wonderland
- If you don’t know where you are going, it doesn’t matter which way you go
- You are moving, but in which way
- You are in motion, but in what direction
- The slight edge means that you are always going somewhere
- How to move in the right direction
- Awareness of how the slight edge happens
- Make those small simple choices
- You may not be able to do everything right now, but you can make a small move in that direction
Part 2:
Ch. 7 Mastery of Your Life
- Mastery
- Available to everyone who can stay on the path
- Don’t need exceptional abilities or talents
- Don’t even need an early start
- Just need day by day progression
- Example – a baby learning to walk
- You kept at it even if you fell down over and over
- Why did we change
- Change in beliefs – fear and failure
- Settling for failure – giving up again and again
- Easy to turn it around
- Start returning to success through the slight edge
- Getting up again and again and keep on trying
- Wanting
- Two meanings
- Lack something – being aware of what you don’t have
- Desire something
- Wanting hurts (this can make you a little uncomfortable)
- Important to be
- A gap is an open space between two places
- You can resolve the gap
- This tension WILL resolve itself one way or another
- There are only two possibilities of how this will resolve
- You have a choice (two ways)
- Move one side closer to the other
- Pull yourself along closer to your dream
- Let the VISION or the power of your dreams to get you closer day by day
- Let the gap become bigger and bigger
- Quit dreaming
- Let go of your dreams and goals
- This is the easiest choice and the one made by most people
- Comparison
- Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do
- They are living life outside their comfort zone
- Do what is comfortable
- Unsuccessful people start out comfortable, but end up uncomfortable
- They start by making choices that will limit their choices later on
- They will lack the finances, health, and relationships that bring comfort
- Only ten people cry at funerals
- We often worry about what others think
- All that worry for nothing
- For those that have thousands mourn for them
- They are the people who spend their lives
- Not worrying what others think
- Live outside the comfort zone
- They are the people who spend their lives
- Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do
- Move one side closer to the other
- You can resolve the gap
- Two meanings
Ch. 8 Faces of The Slight Edge
- Four faces (each represents a power you can harness in pursuit of your dreams)
- Momentum
- Completion
- Habit
- Celebration
Harness the Power of Momentum
- Who won the race, the tortoise or the hare
- Slow and steady wins the race
- Nothing good about slow
- Steady is the key word
- This fable is about the remarkable power of momentum
- Slow and steady wins the race
- Get going
- Once you can get going, it will take energy to change direction or speed
- It’s hare to change from start to go
- Chinese proverb: Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid of standing still
- Build large organizations one person at a time
- Easy to take simple actions every day for the entire week every day
- Work on the slight edge activities every day
- Once a day is better than once a week – it becomes part of who you are
Harness the Power of Completion
- Completion
- Are there any things that are uncompleted in your life?
- Expressions to others
- Projects
- Things you need to do, vacation, relationships,
- Take care of incomplete things
- If they are thing that need to do
- Truth
- It keeps the past alive
- Don’t be pulled by the past
- Successful people are pulled by the future
- Easy to do?
- Not always
- Not especially if there are so many things to do
- Why you don’t complete things
- Fear
- Intimidated
- Overwhelmed
- False beliefs
- Harder to do as time goes on
- Apply the slight edge
- Approach all these incompletions one at a time
- Find some initial step you can take today
- Kill it off and let it go forever if it is not important, or take it on and do it
- A little bit of time
- Are there any things that are uncompleted in your life?
Harness the Power of Habit
- Saying
- Sow an act reap an habit
- Sow a habit reap a character
- Sow a character reap a destiny
- We are often aware of habits
- Habits are something we do without thinking
- Two kinds of habits
- Ones that serve you
- Wields the slight edge on your behalf
- Ones that don’t
- Pulls you slowly away from what you desire
- Creation of habits
- Pure slight edge
- Simple repeated actions repeated over time
- They begin to become habits
- Where habits come from
- Actions, yet
- Daily activities come out of time
- Choices
- Your product of thinking – what you choose to think about
- Your philosophy
- THE KEY
- You philosophy >> Your thoughts >> Your Actions – repeated over and over >> Habits
- Habits take you naturally
- Up or down
- Replace habits
- Take down old ones
- Put up new ones
- Do it one step at a time
- You already know how to do this, because you built all your current habits
- Actions, yet
- Ones that serve you
Harness the Power of Reflection
- Being productive and being busy are not the same things
- No one sets out to be far from their goals
- They want to get forward
- They think they had a productive day, but they just reinforced the place they are in
- Questions to ask
- Were the actions productive?
- Were they the right actions?
- Did your actions today propel you forward, backward, or keep you in the same spot?
- Take a searching and fearless inventory
- Keep your progress or lack of it in your face
- Action
- At the end of the day, write down what you did that day
- Questions
- What did you do that day?
- What actions did you take that made you successful?
- Healthy food? Exercise?
- Business tasks to move it forward?
- The mere act of recording your successes will change you
- This will help you become more motivated
Harness the Power of Celebration
- Reflection is important
- Points out to you all the right steps you are taking
- Keep your successes in the open where you can see them and celebrate them
- Acknowledge those steps – no matter how small of insignificant
Ch. 9 Mastering Yourself
- The greatest gift
- Wisest business investment, critical step in any task, one step that dooms anything else to fail
- The step: Personal Development
- “Give me six hours to chop down the tree, and I will spend the first 4 hours sharpening the ax.”-A. Lincoln
- Start with you
- Results come last
- Easy to be seduced by the results
- Many people focus too much on the results
- There is a flaw in this thinking – 90% of most people end up in failure
- The Flaw – how can you judge the course of action by its results when the results come last (after you have already spent the effort
- Jesus’s parable of building a house on a rock
- Will the house stand or fall?
- YOU CAN’T WAIT UNTIL THE RESULTS TO JUDGE THE ACTION
- Your philosophy comes first, the results come last
Continuous Learning
- The most important force of all is the power of continuous learning
- Personal and Professional Growth
- You must continually acquire knowledge
- You must build your awareness
- When was the last time you attended a personal development seminar because you wanted to?
- Are you developing yourself?
- Are you building your dreams or your bosses?
- Read books, attend seminars, and get ahead…
- Be here actively immersed in the process one year from now
- If you are not doing, you are dying
- You can read a book, then return to it later and you will learn something new
- Learn by book, by doing, by observing…
- Course Correction
- There are no straight lines in the universe
- Driving a car down even a straight road requires slight adjustments continually
- The space shuttle to the moon is only on course 2% of the time and needs to continually correct its course
- Thomas Watson’s expression on failure
- If you want success, double your rate of failure
- You will find success on the other side of failure
- Teach yourself to make these adjustments automatically
Plan, Do, Review
- Approach to learning used in schools
- This is a slight edge strategy
- Students make a plan, carry it out, then review the results to learn …
- Doing actions and correcting those actions
- Japanese Industrial Leaders
- The system is the solution
- Total Quality
- Slight Edge applications compounded over time
- Japanese made little seemingly insignificant improvements
- Other automakers were looking for breakthroughs
- Plan, Do, Review
- Creates a strategy for continuous course correction
- Keep making these choices every day that you review your progress
- When you first begin, this will require your constant awareness
- Go Study with A Master
- The mentor/apprentice model
- Information alone is not enough
- Experience alone is not enough
- You need to process the information (to integrate it)
- Seek out people who have achieved what you are looking to achieve
- Find a way to connect with these people, associate with them
- Camp on their doorstep
- Hangout with people who have been there and done that
- Spend time with these people who have been there
- Spend lots of time with these people who have mastered these things
- Can you emulate them
- Convert your admiration into constructive modeling
- Take a look at your heroes
- Are they doing the things you are aspiring to do and living the lives you want to live
The Law of Association
- Your income tends to mirror the income of your 5 best friends
- Works for health, personal development, and relationships
- It will be very close to those who you have out with
- Birds of a feather flock together
- Look at the people you hang out with
- Are they heading in the direction you want to head in?
- What do your conversations focus on?
- Blame or responsibility
- Forward looking or (past circling)
- This can be tough to understand and accept
- Disassociating yourself from people who don’t help you
- Degrade them to casual relationships
- You are not judging those people – just responding to whether those relationships are empowering you
Leadership
- People want to go straight to leadership – but it doesn’t work that way
- Work on it one step at a time
- Keep your eyes on worthy mentors
- Study, do, model with slight edge mastery
- Then someday, you will discover that others are modeling you
- THEN YOU ARE A LEADER
Ch. 10 Turning Your Dreams Into Reality
- 4 Simple and Fundamental Steps to turn your Dreams into Reality (4 Universal Truths)
- Write it down, make it specific, give it a deadline
- Look at it every day (visualize)
- Understand and pay the price
- Have a plan to start with
- Write it down
- Most critical skill – identify the goal (envisioning something)
- Create a vivid picture of something and make it feel as real as possible
- Make it become physical
- Write it down, make a vision board, speak it out loud
- Dreams
- House
- Car
- Marriage
- Career
- It doesn’t matter how big or small
- ACTION: Write down 3-5 dream
- Add two descriptors: What and When
- Make them vivid and specific
- Look at them every day
- Keep them in your mind
- Counteract the force of mediocrity
- Constantly remind your mind were you are headed
- Your subconscious is always working on this – when it is in front of you
- When you set your goals, life has a way of re-arranging itself
- Understand and pay the price
- Here comes the big sacrifice
- Chances are the sacrifices are not entirely dramatic, just tiny baby steps
- The price you pay works the same way
- Just understand what you DO need to DO, and then pay it
- Giving up stuff
- You might have to give up certain foods
- You might need to give up purchases, etc…
- Take your time or resources and invest it in your dreams…
- Here comes the big sacrifice
- Have a plan to start with
- Some people are thrown off with this
- Not come up with the entire plan
- Just to get going
- The plan you start with will not be the plan that gets you there
- There is no perfect plan, you must change course along the way
- Plan, do, review – adjust and repeat
- You need a first plan, so you can get to your second plan
- Keep planning, doing, and reviewing
- That is how you gain momentum and move from one place to another
- Don’t try to figure out the whole race, just get a starting line
- It is the simple things you do to get you there
- Every single thing you do is a slight edge decision
- Some people are thrown off with this
Ch. 11 Living the Slight Edge
- Vince Lombardy – “Gentleman, this is a football.” – starts with the absolute basics
- Small steps
- Every long journey begins with the basic, simple, easy steps
- What simple things can you do day in and day out
- We will look at the next 5 areas of your life one by one
- Health
- Personal Development
- Relationships
- Finances
- Life
& Your Health
- Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
- Health impacts your life almost more than anything else
- Simple disciplines
- Exercise for more than ½ hour
- It may take a bit to work up to the goal
- It may take time for these things to come together, but it will come
- Start now
- Get it going
- And then take some time to review and re-adjust your course
- Questions
- What are your dreams for…
- Be specific, be vivid, and give yourself a timeline
- What price will you have to pay?
- What is your plan to start?
- What is one simple daily discipline that you will commit to?
- What are your dreams for…
- Exercise for more than ½ hour
& Your Personal Development
- As a man thinketh – become as small as your limitation or as big as you grow
- Your only limiting factor: YOU
- Application
- Read at least 10 pages of a Personal Development Book EACH DAY
- Also listen to a Personal Development audio every day
- Turn your down time into up time (drive your productivity)
- The slight edge will take you up or down
- Questions
- What are your dreams for…
- Be specific, be vivid, and give yourself a timeline
- What price will you have to pay?
- What is your plan to start?
- What is one simple daily discipline that you will commit to?
- What are your dreams for…
& Your Relationships
- The relationships you choose
- A means to an end
- An end in themselves
- Relationships build up a little at a time (slight edge)
- It is the little things, day by day that add up over time
- Little things remembered
- Spending a few moments together every day
- Expressions of love and belief
- Tiny thoughts and gestures
- Questions
- What are your dreams for…
- Be specific, be vivid, and give yourself a timeline
- What price will you have to pay?
- What is your plan to start?
- What is one simple daily discipline that you will commit to?
- What are your dreams for…
& Your Finances
- The story of the doubling penny
- Compound interest
- Not everyone knows about this
- Very few put it into place
- Millionaire Next Door
- How normal people are becoming rich the slight edge way
- Rule: Always live below your means
- Parkinson’s Law
- Work expands to fill the time allotted to it
- Questions
- What are your dreams for…
- Be specific, be vivid, and give yourself a timeline
- What price will you have to pay?
- What is your plan to start?
- What is one simple daily discipline that you will commit to?
- What are your dreams for…
& Your Life
- What would you like your life to mean?
- Don’t spend too much time on it – keep it simple
- What do you want your life to be like?
- Questions
- What are your dreams for…
- Be specific, be vivid, and give yourself a timeline
- What price will you have to pay?
- What is your plan to start?
- What is one simple daily discipline that you will commit to?
- What are your dreams for…
Ch. 12 It’s A Wonderful Life
- The Beach Bum
- Met a Day of Disgust
- Faced his circumstances and decided to change
- Had it up to “here” with where he was
- Could never go back to who he was
- Left Golf Course
- Went to business School
- Worked at Texas Instruments went to the top
- Started a solar energy company
- 5th largest energy company
- Lost everything
- Sat in despair – more broke today than Gorgeous George
- Seemed unfair
- Met a Day of Disgust
The Lesson
- Was this unfair
- He had been many things
- Poor and lazy
- And grew to richness
- Proved simple daily disciplines
- Began to discover and explore the slight edge
- Began to discover and explore lots of success
- Slight edge power of water Hyacinth
- Could start from scratch and build it all back up again
- The key
- The slight edge
Where to Go from Here
- Someday
- Someday is not the future
- It is a lie
- It is distracting
- The danger
- We give life to the fantasy
- And take some sense of enjoyment
- Therefore, take no practical action
- You must go claim them
- Do one simple daily discipline in each of the five areas of life
- Health
- Personal Development
- Relationships
- Finances
- Life (purpose of life)
- REVIEW
- Make a habit of doing some sort of daily review of each of these areas
- ASSOCIATE
- Spend quality time with those who have achieved success in these areas
- Model their behavior
- Successful people do what it takes to get the job done
- RESPONSIBILITY
- Take hold of their future
- Take full responsibility
- Past = lesson
- Pulled up and forward by compelling force of the future
- MOMENTUM (Use Inertia)
- Identify habits that don’t serve them and replace them with those that do
- Understand
- Reflection
- Completion
- Celebration
- Harness these constantly
- KNOWLEDGE
- Consistently acquire the knowledge they need
- Book smart and street smart
- Mentors
- Find mentors and model their successful behavior
- Where do you go
- Find the penny and start doubling it
- Consistently acquire the knowledge they need
About the Author
- Loves personal success and health
- Helps people achieve financial freedom and personal excellence
- …
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