A journey of thousand miles begins with a single step

Lao Tse

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Hello everybody. It's time to introduce you another interesting non-fiction book! Today our topic is Slight Edge by Jeff Olson. Book that introduce us to the idea that may be obvious to many of us, the idea is: "take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves" or in other words "everyday small decisions are important, and overtime they will accumulate to something big". When the main topic, or main idea in the book treats about obvious things, then it is usually a red flag for me when it comes to self-help books, many of that kind of books are just written to earn some money and they have no value. Too many empty words, not enough actual important content. But here I have reasons to suspect that this is one of more important self-help books, it is different. You will find later what those reasons are. So... let's begin.

Jeff Olson has built several multi-million-dollar sales and marketing organizations according to the book itself. Jeff also earned an "industry-wide reputation as a top distributor, earner, CEO and more since he first joined the industry in 1988" according to entrepreneur.com. He created livehappy.com and wrote some books, including "Slight Edge". He seems like an average self-help author, and I'm usually suspicious of people that are CEOs, millionaires and self-help authors - the fact that someone is successful financially and is good at selling things doesn't mean that his ideas will be good for other people too. Maybe this book is just another product that he want to sell us, and it is not valuable? So let's rate the book and idea behind it instead of delighting ourselves over the fact how successful he is :)

The general idea

I already revealed something about general idea of Slight Edge - small steps will accumulate over time to something big, provided that those small steps are regular and that we persevere in doing those steps, we do not skip them. Below is very important scheme, that is presenting general Slight Edge idea, let's see it first:

Let's stop for a while and look at this. On this graph we can see our lifestyle, that affects our health, money, relationships, and we can see where this lifestyle can lead us, up or down. There are three things here that I marked with colours - the norm marked blue, the success marked green (this is where we want to be, the upper part) and the bottom marked red (where you don't want to be, down). As you can see my graphic editing skills are bad. ;)

Above the line representing our lifestyle, up, on the "success" part of the graph we can see "easy to do" caption. It is representing things that are easy to do, they are small and good for us, can lead our lifestyle to "success". When we do something that is good for us, small things, like skipping unhealthy meal, deciding to not go out for a smoke with friends, not skipping our planned gym workout etc, then... usually we will not see positive results of those things at the beginning. Look at the first part of that scheme that I marked red:

did I mentioned that my graphic editing skills are amazing guys? ;)

There is no big change. But they key is that "easy to do" things are easy to do, but need to be done regularly. After some time, if we stick to our good habits, then they start to accumulate more and more, we can observe first positive results of our habits, then more and more of them. Here is the part that I marked red, where you can see that after time our small steps are acting like a compound interest:

It's "the success". But, let's see what is below line representing our lifestyle, there is other caption that is saying "easy not to do". This is representing situations where we gave up and told ourselves that we will skip the gym today, eat that unhealthy food this evening etc. "It is only one time" we usually say, "I will not be fat if I will eat this meal once", or "I will not have a problem in school if I will not learn this today, it's only one day", and as we can see at the beginning, we are right (marked red):

But after some time, those things also accumulate! In best case scenario that "exceptions" will keep us from going up in that scheme, to "the success", from observing our positive, compound results that we saw above. In the worst case scenario, if there will be too much of those exceptions, we will experience reversed compound positive results, that is, negative compound results, we will experience "the bottom" as shown below, we will "go down":

That is the main idea, we have the norm, the success, and the bottom. Most people are somewhere near the norm, and have no motivation to keep up good habits, to keep up doing small things to go to the "success" part. We only start doing work when we are in the "bottom", until we will come back at the norm, then we don't give a damn - if it's normal then I am fine with it, let's be lazy. The danger of "the bottom" is gone, so we lost the motivation, we are idle. We are oscilating somewhere near the "norm", as someone who is drowning is trying just to stay above the water to have some air - and that's all.

I think it's quite obvious - let's do good small things on a regular basis, and after some time and a bit of patience we will show positive results, we will "go up". But if you will let excuses take over and do exceptions, start doing bad small things "because it is just one time", then you will fail. So this is the simple idea, to many it's obvious, it's about persistence, and you may want to ask me right now:

So why you said that this is one of more important self-help books?

Let me write it in points, I will explain why despite that this book is not as brief as it could be, it may be worth reading it.

1. Sometimes we need to be reminded about obvious

We know that eating unhealthy will lead us to being unhealthy, we know that we should be persistent. But there is a difference between knowing and acting according to that knowledge. Between knowing and internalizing that knowledge, that is "accepting it as our way of doing things". And this book does great job at reminding us that we need to be persistent with our goals. There are many examples of how this is mapped to our lives, and I do not want to sound like a salesman, but it is really worth reading just because of that.

2. It's great not only at reminding us of simple important truth, but also at having this truth stick with us

After reading this book I was tempted to write in my review that it was too long, that the idea may be presented in much much shorter way, that the author filled the book with too many "fillings", parts that are not so important, but are still in the book, so it will be longer. It's true for many self-help books, but I realized that when it comes to Slight Edge it's worth reading whole book, not only understanding basic simple idea of Slight Edge. Why? Because with examples of how Slight Edge works, with many points of view from which author is explaining this idea, it is more probable that it will stick in our heads, that we will internalize it. And idea of persistence is something that needs to stick with us, if it will not, it will be not useful, since persistence is about... being persistent. So we need to constantly remember about the fact how important it is to not make exceptions. And I believe that Slight Edge does great job at making us really remember that the most important thing is to act, and to act persistently. When it comes to this it is more a motivation to change something in our lives once and for all, than a book about some idea.

3. It is universal launchpad for every other "self-help" ideas

That is the big reason why I think that it's important book, more than many other self-help books. Because if we will include persistence, "Slight Edge" in our life, then we will be able to better execute any idea. Because all ideas needs the persistence, patience, strong will. Do you want to read book about money management, and then manage your money better? Then it will be good for you if you already know Slight Edge, because you will stick to those money management rules better, knowing that there is no space for exceptions if you want to execute something successfully. Do you want to change your diet according to book about healthy food? Then it's good that you know Slight Edge, because it will help you to be efficient in your changing of eating habits.

Author of this book is also giving a big emphasis on how important practice is. It is good, because it will keep you from falling into the trap of reading books after books, without acting. You may read 100 "self-help" books and it may just waste your time. Those books may be good or bad, it doesn't matter - someone who read just one book but act upon information from that book, and is acting persistently, as presented in Slight Edge, will have great returns out of this one book, in contrast with someone who waste time and money, reading books like "Another Easy Great Way How to Be Successful" and not acting.

The End

Because the idea is simple, this post is not very long. I just wanted to introduce to you basic idea, and help you make decision about reading the whole book, or skipping it. As I stated in my previous posts, thanks for reading and hope that you enjoyed it and find it helpful! Hope to hear some comments from you if you want to express your opinion :)