69 Awesome Quotes from The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson

The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson is one of my favorite books.Even though it discusses and teaches the same concept that you can find in The compound effect .But the information is presented in a much different way and you need to read both these books to fully comprehend the concept of consistency and taking small steps that lead you to success.This is a precious book!

Here are the Quotes I Love:

''When people are looking down the barrel of failure in their lives, they will do whatever it takes to get themselves moving, something, anything, to start climbing upward toward the point of survival. And then, once they get to the point where they’re keeping their heads above water, they start heading back down again. As they start getting close enough to the failure line that they can see it coming, they go, ‘Whoops, I’m headed towards failure!’ and then they do whatever it takes to turn their trajectory around and start heading back up…and the cycle repeats….As I began examining my successes and failures, what I gradually realized was that the very same activities that had rescued me from failure, that had carried me from the failure line up to the survival line, would also rescue me from average and carry me from the survival line to the success line—if I would just keep doing them.''
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple disciplines into massive success and happiness

''If we would just keep doing the things that got us from failure up to survival in the first place, the things we already know how to do and were already doing, they would eventually carry us all the way to success.''
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple disciplines into massive success and happiness

''The things that take you out of failure and up toward survival and success are simple. So simple, in fact, that it’s easy to overlook them. Extremely easy to overlook them. It’s easy to overlook them because when you look at them, they seem insignificant. They’re not big, sweeping things that take huge effort.They’re not heroic or dramatic. Mostly they’re just little things you do every day and that nobody else even notices. They are things that are so simple to do—yet successful people actually do them, while unsuccessful people only look at them and don’t take action.''
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple disciplines into massive success and happiness

''Things like taking a few dollars out of a paycheck, putting it into savings, and leaving it there. Or doing a few minutes of exercise every day—and not skipping it. Or reading ten pages of an inspiring, educational, life-changing book every day. Or taking a moment to tell someone how much you appreciate them,and doing that consistently, every day, for months and years. Little things that seem insignificant in the doing, yet when compounded over time yield very big results.You could call these ‘little virtues’ or ‘success habits.’ I call them simple daily disciplines. Simple productive actions, repeated consistently over time.That, in a nutshell, is the slight edge.''

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''You already know how to do everything it would take to make you an outrageous success. All you have to do is keep doing the things that have gotten you this far.''
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''You have complete control over the direction that the rest of your life takes.There is a beach bum and a millionaire inside each one of us. What makes the difference in how things turn out? You do.''
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''No matter how much information there is, and no matter how good that information is, if the person consuming it doesn’t have the right catalyst, the catalyst that will allow them to apply that information effectively, then success will still elude their grasp.''
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’If you don’t change how you think about these simple everyday things, then no amount of how-to’s will get you anywhere or give you any true solutions. Because it’s not the hows that do it, it’s how you do the hows. The reason diets and self-help courses and weight-loss programs and other how-to’s don’t work for most people is the same reason most how-to books and courses don’t work for most people. It isn’t that the actions are wrong. It’s that people don’t keep doing them.Focusing on the actions, the what-to-dos and the how-to-do-its, is not enough, because it’s the attitude behind the actions that keep those actions in place. ‘’
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''The formula for success is quite simple: Double your rate of failure.''

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’These days we aren’t often taught that the key to success is to double our rate of failure. On the contrary, we’re taught to avoid failure like the plague. You’ve probably heard the expression, ‘Failure is not an option.’ Oh, really? Well, here’s a reality check: failure had better be an option, because whether or not you consider it an option, it’s going to happen! If you go through life with the philosophy that ‘failure is not an option,’ then you’ll never have any good opportunities to learn.’’
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''Successful people fail their way to the top.''

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''By and large, people are looking in the wrong places. They are looking for a big break, that lucky breakthrough, the amazing 'quantum leap' everyone keeps talking about. I call it the philosophy of the craps table and roulette wheel, and I don’t believe they’ll ever find it. I’ve seen an awful lot of remarkable successes and colossal failures up close, and in my experience, neither one happens in quantum leaps or 'breaks,' whether the lucky or unlucky kind.They happen through the slight edge.''
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’There’s a reason those lottery winners lose it all again, a reason those shining stars plummet to those dark places: they may have had the big breaks, but they didn’t grasp the slight edge. Their winnings changed their bank account balance—but it didn’t change their philosophy.’’
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’Diets do work. Gym memberships do pay off. Solid business plans can make you a wealthy person. And there’s a great deal of personal development material out there that will make you a happier, more productive, more successful, more fulfilled person. Just not without the slight edge.’’
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''It’s easy to assume that ‘just how things are’ is how they’re always going to be.''
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''The single most important thing I can tell you about the slight edge is this: it’s already working, right now, either for you or against you. So don’t wait. My hope for you—my request for you—is that before you reach the last page of this book you will have put in place a slight edge financial plan for yourself so that you are consistently building your equity. Some simple daily, weekly, or monthly discipline that over time will buy your financial freedom. Easy to do? Surprisingly so. Easy not to do? Tragically so.''
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’During those times when I was slipping from survival back toward failure, I had stopped doing those simple daily disciplines. That was the reason—and the only reason—that I kept slipping back into failure. I was making little everyday choices that seemed harmless and innocent enough, but without my realizing it they were pulling me back down toward failure. That’s why my life had felt like that agonizing lament from The Godfather, Part III, when the Al Pacino character says, ‘Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!’ ‘’
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''Most people don’t stick with the simple daily disciplines it takes to get where they want to go, because they don’t know how to look ahead far enough along the curve to see the results they are creating. But see it or not, those results are coming, as surely as a million dollars in the bank—or a train coming down the tracks heading our way.''

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''The father’s gift held a lesson. About money, yes, but it was really a lesson about leverage, growth, and geometric progression. About the fact that the simple little actions you take today can look very different when you see how they play out over time. About the tremendous potential of something as seemingly powerless as a water hyacinth or insignificant as a penny.About patience and the understanding that little steps, compounded, do make a difference. That the things you do every single day, the things that don’t look dramatic, that don’t even look like they matter, do matter. That they not only make a difference—they make all the difference.About having faith in the process of simple, positive actions repeated over time—the faith that miracles do happen, if you know when to trust the process and keep churning the cream.''
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''Little steps, compounded, do make a difference…The things you do every single day, the things that don’t look dramatic, that don’t even look like they matter, do matter…They not only make a difference—they make all the difference.''
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’The choice the wealthy man offered his two sons is the same choice the world offers every one of us at every moment of our lives. A rich and growing circle of friends, or deepening loneliness and alienation. Vibrant and abundant vitality, or progressively declining health. Success or failure, happiness or misery, fulfillment or despair. Millionaire or beach bum.You are making that choice, every day, every hour, and the impact of those choices—for better or for worse—will spread out over the surface of your life like a thick blanket of water hyacinth.’’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’What if, rather than sinking into the pages of those forgettable novels during the fifteen- and twenty-minute gaps tucked in between customers, she had spent the last five years reading books that were genuinely life-changing? What if that little stack of books had included Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, or Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness? What would her life be like today if five years earlier she had changed just that one simple thing? Would she still be shining shoes for tips—or be managing her own chain of shoeshine stands?’’
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''About 1 person in 20 is achieving a significant measure of his or her goals in life….Which means that 95 percent are either failing or falling short. Which prompts a question: What’s the difference between the 5 percent and the 95 percent? What are the 5 percent doing that the other 95 percent are not? I’ll tell you what it’s not. It is not heredity, education, looks, talent or inheritance. It isn’t chance, blind fate, or dumb luck, and it isn’t ‘preparedness meeting opportunity,’ either.It isn’t karma. And it isn’t an abundance of sincere wanting and wishing.The 5 percent don’t want success more than everyone else. They don’t wish for it more, pray for it more, envision it more, or hope for it more. And it isn’t that they deserve it more. Hey, we all want our lives to be successful. We all hope for it and wish for it, and you know what? We all deserve it, too.But the 5 percent get it, and the 95 percent don’t. Why is that? There is only one difference: the slight edge.''
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’The slight edge is the force behind the amazing power of compound interest. It is the force that allowed the delicate water hyacinth to conquer the pond, that allowed the persevering frog to escape with his life while his brother did not…It is the steady, repeated action of water that can wear even the hardest rock to a smooth surface. Whatever you’re after, whatever you want to create in your life or whatever kind of life you most passionately want to live, the slight edge is the way to get it.That is the difference between the 5 percent and everyone else.’’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’If you apply the slight edge consistently in your life, you will find yourself among the 5 percent and see the goals and aspiration in your life coming to pass—and you will achieve those aims, goals, and dreams by doing mundane, everyday, simple things. That sounds outrageously oversimplified, I know. But it’s the truth. I’ve seen it happen again and again. If you learn to understand and apply the slight edge, your life will become filled with hundreds of thousands of small, seemingly insignificant actions—all of them genuinely simple, none of them mysterious or complex. In other words, you have to master the mundane. And those actions will create your success.’’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’Those simple things, the things that spell success? They are not only simple, they are also easy to do. So simple and so easy, in fact, that anyone could do them.So by now you’ve probably got a question burning in your brain. If these things are so simple and so easy to do, how come only 5 percent do them? Why don’t more people do them?In fact, why doesn’t everyone do them? The world of finances is one of the easiest places to see the power of the slight edge in action. Everyone knows about the power of compound interest, right? Wrong. Everyone thinks they know about the power of compound interest.But most people don’t, not really. If they did, they’d be using it. And clearly, most people are not.’’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''The simple things that lead to success are all easy to do. But they’re also just as easy not to do.

It’s easy to save a few bucks a day. And easy not to.

It’s easy to do fifteen minutes of cardio a day. Walk a brisk mile or two.Truly easy to do. Or not.''
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’Everything you need to do to transform your life is easy to do. It’s easy to become healthy, fit and vibrant. It’s easy to become financially independent. It’s easy to have a happy family and a life rich with meaningful friendships. It’s just a matter of mastering the mundane—of repeating simple little disciplines that,done consistently over time, will add up to the very biggest accomplishments.Of course, it’s just as easy not to. But that simple, seemingly insignificant error in judgment, compounded over time, will ruin your chances for success.You can count on it. That’s the choice you face every day, every hour: A simple,positive action, repeated over time. A simple error in judgment, repeated over time.So easy to do. So easy not to do.’’
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’The things that create success in the long run don’t look like they’re having any impact at all in the short run. A penny doubled is two cents. Big deal. Take two bucks a day and stick it into savings instead of into an expensive coffee drink, and at the end of a week you’ve got…fourteen dollars. Big deal.’’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. 'Progressive' means success is a process, not a destination. It’s something you experience gradually, over time. Failure is just as gradual. In fact,the difference between success and failure is so subtle, you can’t even see it or recognize it during the process. And here’s how real success is built: by the time you get the feedback, the real work’s already done. When you get to the point where everyone else can see your results, tell you what good choices you’ve made, notice your good fortune, slap you on the back and tell you how lucky you are, the critical slight edge choices you made are ancient history. And chances are, at the time you actually made those choices, nobody noticed but you. And even you wouldn’t have noticed—unless you understood the power of the slight edge.''

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’The difference between success and failure is not dramatic. In fact, the difference between success and failure is so subtle, so mundane, that most people miss it. They may not realize they have a philosophy, but they do, and it goes like this: What I do right now doesn’t really matter. It’s not hard to see how people come to this understanding of life. I don’t blame them. It’s completely understandable. It’s just not the truth. The truth is,

what you do matters.

What you do today matters.

What you do every day matters.

Successful people are those who understand that the little choices they make matter.’’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''The secret to the 5 percent’s success is always in mundane, easy things that anyone could do.People don’t consistently do those simple things for three reasons: 1) while they’re easy to do, they are also easy not to do; 2) you don’t see any results at first; 3) they seem insignificant, like they don’t matter. But they do.''

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''One of the amazing things about the slight edge is that it’s a very generous process. It requires only a minuscule contribution from you, and yet it offers you a gigantic return. It demands of you only a penny, and gives you back a million dollars. Starting with a penny is your part of the deal. The universe around you supplies the rest of the equation. And the force it uses to do that is time.You don’t need millions of years to see the impact of time. It took only thirty-one days for the water hyacinth to cover the pond and the boy’s penny to grow into a fortune. And only an hour or so to save the little frog’s life by turning cream into butter.''
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’The secret of time is simply this: time is the force that magnifies those little, almost imperceptible, seemingly insignificant things you do every day into something titanic and unstoppable.

consistently repeated daily actions + time = inconquerable results.

You supply the actions; the universe will supply the time. The trick is to choose the actions that, when multiplied by this universal amplifier, will yield the result you want. To position your everyday actions so time works for you, and not against you.’’
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’Successful people form habits that feed their success, instead of habits that feed their failure. They choose to have the slight edge working for them, not against them. ..,Every decision you make is a slight edge decision.’’
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

 ''You just need to stay in the process long enough to give it a chance to win.''

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’your life exists only in the moment. But you can’t really absorb or live that truth through reading a book; you absorb and live that truth simply by being fully in the process of living your life—not regretting the past, not dreading the future.’’
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes a little longer.’’
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’Success takes time, yes, more time than most people are willing to wait. But not as much as you’d think. And once the momentum of the slight edge starts to kick in it becomes unstoppable, and you reach a point where results do indeed start to happen very fast indeed.’’
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

“Some day my prince will come.…” Good old Walt Disney. Well, that may have worked out for Snow White. Back here on Earth, it’s a recipe for disappointment. In flesh-and-blood life, waiting for “some day” is no strategy for success, it’s a cop-out. What’s more, it’s one that the majority follow their whole lives.

Someday, when my ship comes in …

Someday, when I have the money …

Someday, when I have the time …

Someday, when I have the skill …

Someday, when I have the confidence …

How many of those statements have you said to yourself? Have I got some sobering news for you: “some day” doesn’t exist, never has, and never will.There is no “some day.” There’s only today. When tomorrow comes, it will be another today; so will the next day. They all will. There is never anything but today.

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''You’re looking for the breakthrough, the quantum leap. You’re looking for the winning lottery ticket in a game that isn’t a lottery…Successful people have already grasped the truth that lottery players have not: success is not a random accident. Life is not a lottery. The truth of breakthroughs and lucky breaks is that, yes, they do happen—but they don’t happen out of thin air. They are grown, like a crop: planted, cultivated, and ultimately harvested. The problem is,that in our culture we’re trained to think we can skip over the middle step and leap directly from plant to harvest. We even have a term for it. We call it a quantum leap. And it’s a complete, utter myth.''
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''Any time you see what looks like a breakthrough, it is always the end result of a long series of little things, done consistently over time. No success is immediate or instantaneous; no collapse is sudden or precipitous. They are both products of the slight edge.''
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''A real-life quantum leap is not Superman leaping a tall building. A real quantum leap is Edison perfecting the electric light bulb after a thousand patient efforts—and then transforming the world with it.''

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''And it’s not just in sports. It’s in everything. No matter in what arena, in life or work or play, the difference between winning and losing, the gap that separates success and failure, is so slight, so subtle, that most never see it.Superman may leap tall buildings at a single bound. Here on earth, we win through the slight edge.''

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’No success is immediate, no collapse is sudden. They are both the result of the slight edge accruing momentum over time.’’
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’Hoping for ‘the big break’—the breakthrough, the magic bullet—is not only futile, it’s dangerous, because it keeps you from taking the actions you need to create the results you want.’’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’It isn’t that people who have greater success, more money, and better marriages are happier as a result of those things. The research is very clear on this: the greater states of happiness precede all these outcomes. ‘’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''slight edge + happy habits = success''
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''happy habits.

1. Each morning, write down three things you’re grateful for. Not the same three every day; find three new things to write about. That trains your brain to search your circumstances and hunt for the positive.

2. Journal for two minutes a day about one positive experience you’ve had over the past twenty-four hours. Write down every detail you can remember; this causes your brain to literally re-experience the experience, which doubles its positive impact.

3. Meditate daily. Nothing fancy; just stop all activity, relax, and watch your breath go in and out for two minutes. This trains your brain to focus where you want it to, and not get distracted by negativity in your environment.

4. Do a random act of kindness over the course of each day. To make this simple, Shawn often recommends a specific act of kindness: at the start of each day, take two minutes to write an email to someone you know praising them or thanking them for something they did.

5. Exercise for fifteen minutes daily. Simple cardio, even a brisk walk, has a powerful antidepressant impact, in many cases stronger (and more longlasting) than an actual antidepressant! ''
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''Every day, in every moment, you get to exercise choices that will determine whether or not you will become a great person, living a great life. Greatness is not something predetermined, predestined, or carved into your fate by forces beyond your control. Greatness is always in the moment of the decision. But you have to start with a penny.''

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’Semmelweis made a radical proposal: before operating, surgeons should wash their hands. He was widely ridiculed. Surgeons kept delivering babies dirty-handed, and women kept dying. The medical establishment just couldn’t see how something as insignificant as washing your hands could make any difference, and because of it thousands of people died unnecessary deaths. But Semmelweis kept washing his hands anyway, and his idea eventually was accepted—which led to the saving of untold millions of lives. ‘’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’You’ve probably heard of the ‘butterfly effect.’ This is a famous proposition of chaos theory, which says that when a butterfly flaps its wings in South America, it can set off a chain of events that ends up causing a typhoon in Southeast Asia. The truth is, you create your own butterfly effect, whether you know it or not, and you do it all the time.’’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''Where you end up in life isn’t about whether you are a good or a bad person, or whether or not you are deserving, or your karma, or your circumstances. It’s dictated by the choices you make—especially the little ones. I know it doesn’t seem like it. It seems like you’re just choosing how to spend the next hour, not the next forty years. But you are choosing how you’ll spend the next forty years.''

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’Time will be your friend or your enemy; it will promote you or expose you.It depends purely upon which side of this curve you decide to ride. It’s entirely up to you. If you’re doing the simple disciplines, time will promote you. If you’re doing the few simple errors in judgment, time will expose you, no matter how well you appear to be doing right now.Life is a curved construction; time is its builder, and choice its master architect.’’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’People on the failure curve tend to focus on their past—and it pulls them down. People on the success curve focus on their future. And you can guess what happens: it pulls them up.’’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’People make two lists about their spouses and carry these lists around in their heads. The long list is a detailed accounting of what’s wrong with their spouse, and the short list is a summary of what’s right.The long list they consult every day. And the short list? That’s the one they read at the funeral.’’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''One of the quickest and most direct routes to getting yourself up and onto the success curve is to get out of the past. Review the past, but only for the purpose of making a better plan. Review it, understand and take responsibility for the errors you’ve made, and use it as a tool to do differently in the future.And don’t spend a great deal of time doing even that—the future is a far better tool than the past.The future is your most powerful tool and your best friend. Devote some serious, focused time and effort into designing a crystal-clear picture of where you’re going.''

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’You are building toward greater happiness and fulfillment, or deeper unhappiness and dissatisfaction. Your relationships are growing deeper and richer, or growing more stale and distant. You are learning more and more about the truths of life, or slipping deeper and deeper into denial about the truths of life. You are building your long-term security and financial freedom, or dismantling it. And your health is building day by day … or ebbing slowly away.’’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’If you are having a hard time making progress in one area—say, in business —take action to make a small positive change in an unrelated area. Start taking a walk around the block, organize that junk drawer that has been haunting you.Feeling successful in one area will provide you with renewed confidence and energy to continue on your journey of attaining that other big goal. Success in one area breeds success in every area.The key is, start somewhere. Wherever you can take action and begin creating little successes, do it. Don’t wait. The rest of your life is waiting.’’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness 

''Constantly falling down was really uncomfortable (it hurt), and you looked pretty foolish lying there on the floor like a beetle on its back. But you kept at it anyway. It is sad: somewhere along the way, you lost faith. You became too grown-up to take baby steps, too sure you would never succeed to let yourself fail a few times first. You gave up on the universal truth that simple little disciplines, done again and again over time, would move the biggest mountains. You forgot what you used to know about the slight edge.You stepped off the path of mastery.''

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''The first time you give up, it’s painful. The second time it’s still painful but now it feels a little familiar, and there is some comfort in familiarity: it is the silent sleepy comfort of carbon monoxide. And the more you give up, the easier and easier it gets, and the sleepier and sleepier you become to the wakefulness of genuine accomplishment … and success recedes ever further from your grasp. Can you guess why? That’s right: it’s the slight edge—working against you. Before you know it, life has become heavy. Welcome to the 95 percent.''

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’The size of the problem determines the size of the person.You can gauge the limitations of a person’s life by the size of the problems that get him or her down. You can measure the impact a person’s life has by the size of the problems he or she solves. If the size of the problems you solve is,’Do I put the cans in the bottom of the bag, and then put the bread on top?’ as a grocery store bagger, that’s the level of your problem solving and that’s the level of your pay. If you can solve big problems, you can graduate to big pay—because the size of your income will be determined by the size of the problems you solve, too.’’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’People who live with huge, vivid, clearly articulated dreams are pulled along toward those dreams with such force, they become practically unstoppable. What made people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, or Mother Teresa, Edison or IBM’s Thomas Watson, Wilberforce or Lincoln such forces of nature that nothing could stand in their way, no matter what the odds or obstacles? It was not some magic in their character, though they certainly became people of exceptional character along the way. It was the power of their dreams. The vision each of these men and women held created a magnetic force against which no opposition could stand.’’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’It means embracing living uncomfortably in order to attain a life that is genuinely comfortable—not deceptively comfortable.’’
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

''Find out what the majority is doing and do the opposite—which can be uncomfortable. At least at first, when the 95 percent are ignoring you, laughing at you, or fighting you. But in the end, you win.''
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness 

''Wanting is uncomfortable, yet wanting is essential to winning.''

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’ ‘Give me six hours to chop down a tree,’ goes the quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln, ‘and I will spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.’ Which left just two hours to do the actual chopping. In other words, he would spend twice as much time working on the tools of the job as he would on the task itself. And in the task called your life, what are the tools of the job? They are simply you: you are the axe. And no one knew that better than our sixteenth president, who poured enormous effort during his half-century of life into making himself into the sharpest, strongest, truest axe he possibly could.’’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’When I say ‘learning,’ I don’t mean simply learning from school, although schooling certainly has its place. And I don’t just mean learning from books or from a teacher—though you already know that I revere the knowledge to be gained from good books, and I feel the same way about great teachers, too. I’m also not just talking here about learning from the example of others, or from advice from your friends, or from your own mistakes and the ‘school of hard knocks.’ When I say ‘learning,’ I don’t mean any particular one of these things —I mean all of them. Once you’ve grasped the philosophy of the slight edge and set foot on the path of mastery, educating yourself through any and all means available is the critical process that will keep you on that path and make the slight edge work for you.’’
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’The problem is not that people read too little, but that they fill their brains with stuff that ain’t doing them no good.’’
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’Invest in yourself. Sharpen your axe. Read just one chapter of an information-rich, inspiring book every day. Listen to fifteen minutes of a lifetransforming audio. Take a course or seminar every few weeks or months. Are these things easy to do? Sure. And those simple disciplines compounded over time, like a penny doubled every day for a month, will send you up to the top. Are they easy not to do? No question. And if you don’t do them today, right now,will your life be destroyed? Of course not. But that simple error in judgment, compounded over time, will pull you down the curve of failure and take away everything you’ve hoped for and dreamed about.’’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’There are two kinds of learning: learning by study—which includes reading, listening to audios, and attending classes and seminars—and learning by doing. As passionate as I am about improving yourself by studying with great teachers, through great books, audios, and workshops, I also know that all the study in the world won’t build your business, establish your health, create a rich and fulfilling family life, and make you a happier person. That takes your getting up and out of your chair and doing it. Book smarts is not enough: all true success is built from a foundation of study plus street smarts. If you want to stay grounded and move ahead at the same time, you need a balance.’’
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

‘’Book smarts, street smarts. Learning by study, learning by doing. Read about it, apply it, see it in action, take that practical experience back to your reading, deepen your understanding, take that deeper understanding back to your activity… it’s a never-ending cycle, each aspect of learning feeding the other.Like climbing a ladder: right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. Can you imagine trying to climb a ladder with only your right foot?Not only do the two work better when they work together in a rhythm, each amplifying the other, but the truth is they really cannot work separately at all. At least not for long. You can’t excel based purely on knowledge learned through study; and you can’t excel purely through knowledge gleaned through action.The two have to work together. You study, and then you do activity. The activity changes your frame of reference, and now you are in a place where you can learn more. Then you learn more, and it gives you more insight into what you experienced in your activity, so now you re-approach activity with more insight.And back and forth it goes.’’

― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge:Turning simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness