The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson: Summary

Hey, it's Joey and welcome to Better Ideas!

If you're like most people, you've had a vision of your potential future self: the richer, better looking, better groomed, happier version of yourself. Have you ever wondered if you can actually, you know, be that person?

I mean, sure, a lot of people do become rich. They drive nice cars, travel the world, and change the world. Most other people though, don't. What's the difference between people who succeed and people who don't? More important, what are they doing differently?

Jeff Olsen, the author of The Slight Edge, suggests that the road to success is actually pretty straightforward. There is a surefire way to achieve massive success and progress in your life, and it's not as hard as you might think.

You're probably thinking, of course there's a way to get successful. There are millions of self-help books out there, millions of business books that talk about startup companies, etc. etc., that teach you how to be successful in any given field. But I'm telling you right now that you can read all those books you want, but you're not going to get anywhere unless you understand the basic principles explained in The Slight Edge.

The Slight Edge is the idea that in order to achieve success, greatness, or any sort of improvement, you don't really need to take any sort of massive action. You don't need to take any giant leaps in the right direction or do anything remarkable at all. Rather, success is the result of doing healthy, unremarkable, relatively easy-to-do things every single day over a long period of time.

Say you had a really rich uncle, and he says to you one day when he's feeling really generous, "Look John, I'll give you two options: either A, I give you a bag of cash that is a million dollars, I give it to you tax-free, and you walk out that door a millionaire; or option two is that I give you 1 cent and I'll double that wealth every single day for a month." Which option would you choose?

You've probably heard this before, and you know that it's a trick question. Option one gives you $1 million, and option two gives you $5,368,712. The same basic principle can be applied to any area of self-improvement.

Say you're into bodybuilding. Sure, you can hit the gym super hard one day, you know, just pound it out barbarically, just go at it, have the workout of your life, come back home, have great amounts of protein, and have a good night's sleep. You wake up the next morning, and you look in the mirror; you'll pretty much be the exact same as you were before you worked out.

In fact, if you were to skip the gym that day, in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn't really make a difference at all. That's because you don't get to have huge muscles by going to the gym harder than everyone else the one day you're motivated to go to the gym. You get huge muscles by showing up to the gym, but showing up every single day for a long period of time.

This is true for every single area of self-improvement. Want to write a book? You can't think of it in terms of suddenly massively having this amazing inspiration to just crank out 200 pages of brilliant literature. You have to think of it in terms of writing half a page and then being done for the day. Then the next morning, when you wake up, you write the other half of the page.

But you do that day in and day out, and by the end of the year, you've written 180 pages. That's a book! Now, that may seem like a long time, but that's how success is built—not by doing anything tremendous, but by chipping away at your goals day in and day out.

Eventually, a year from now, two years from now, you look, and effortlessly, you've made something great. So if you want to achieve success in any given area of your life, break it down into little tiny simple actions you can do every single day.

But make sure you do it every single day, because it's relatively easy to do, but it's just as easy not to do. Doing it or not doing it is what separates the successful people from the not.

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I'm sweating! Catch you in the next video.