CHAPTER FIVE
SLOW DOWN TO GO FAST
“Rome ne s’est pas faite en un jour. (Rome wasn’t built in a day.)”
— ancient French proverb
If you want to direct your life on a path of continual positive change, then you need to tap into the most powerful force for change in the universe. Fortunately for you, that force is always with you, ready to lend a hand if you just ask. That force is time.
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.
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. Position your everyday actions so time works for you, and not against you.
There is a natural progression in life: you plant, then you cultivate, and finally you harvest. In today’s world, everyone wants to go directly from plant to harvest.
The step we’ve lost touch with, the one where the real (though invisible) power lies, is the step of cultivating. And that step, unlike planting and harvesting, takes place only through the patient dimension of time.
In a world filled with instant coffee, instant breakfast, instant credit, instant shopping, instant information, and 24/7 news, we have come dangerously close to losing touch with reality and believing we have access to instant life. But life is not a clickable link.
“Time is like water: it gives life to everything, and flows in places most people just don’t get.”
The slight edge looks boring at first, when you’re oblivious to the results that are coming down the road apiece.
If making the right slight edge choices were a dramatic thing, you’d get immediate feedback. An entire movie theater audience applauding, cheering, or screaming. But that doesn’t happen. And that’s the big challenge of it: no immediate feedback.
The slight edge can carve the Grand Canyon. It can do anything. But you have to give it enough time for the power of time to kick in.
The right choices and wrong choices you make at the moment will have little or no noticeable impact on how your day goes for you. Nor tomorrow, nor the next day. No applause, no cheers, no screams, no life-or-death results played out on the big screen. But it is exactly those same undramatic, seemingly insignificant actions that, when compounded over time, will dramatically affect how your life turns out.
Making the right choices, taking the right actions. It’s truly easy to do. Ridiculously easy. But it’s just as easy not to do. And if you don’t do them, there won’t be any big drama about it. It won’t kill you; it won’t hurt you; in fact, it won’t make any difference at all … not today, anyway. Not tomorrow. But over time?
If you want to understand and apply the slight edge to create the life of your dreams, you can’t make your everyday choices based on the evidence of your eyes. You need to make them based on what you know. You have to see through the eyes of time. You need to base your choices on your philosophy — on what you know, not what you see.
Successful people do whatever it takes to get the job done, whether or not they feel like it. They understand that it is not any one single push on the flywheel but the cumulative total of all their sequential, unfailingly consistent pushes that eventually creates movement of such astonishing momentum in their lives.
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. They build their own dreams, rather than spend their lives building other people’s dreams, and they achieve these dramatic results in their lives through making choices that are the very antithesis of drama — mundane, simple, seemingly insignificant choices.
Every decision you make is a slight edge decision. What you’re going to do, how you’re going to act, what you’re going to read, who you’re going to chat with on the phone, what you’re going to eat for lunch, who you’re going to associate with. How you’re going to treat your fellow workers. What you’re going to get done today.
But by putting time on your side, you’ve marshaled the forces of the slight edge. Your success becomes inevitable. You just need to stay in the process long enough to give it a chance to win. It starts with a choice.
In my experience, in three to five years you can put virtually anything in your life solidly onto the right track. Think of what you were doing three years ago: it seems like yesterday, doesn’t it? Well, three years from now, the things you’re doing right now will seem like only yesterday, too. Yet this brief little period of time can change your life. How long will it take? Chances are it will take longer than you want it to — and that when the time arrives, you’ll be astonished at how quick it seemed.
The Slight Edge is all about living in the moment. For me, this is perhaps the hardest lesson to learn about the slight edge: you can’t find it in the past or the future, only right here, right now.
The Slight Edge is about your awareness. It is about you making the right choices, the choices that serve you and empower you, starting right now and continuing for the rest of your life, and learning to make them effortlessly.
The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes a little longer.
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.
You want big results? Good — then do the little things. Just do them consistently and persistently.
Sometimes you need to slow down to go fast.
Essential Points from Chapter Five
* Time is the force that magnifies those simple daily disciplines into massive success.
* There is a natural progression to success: plant, cultivate, harvest — and the central step, cultivate, can only happen over the course of time.
* No genuine success in life is instant. Life is not a clickable link.
* To grasp how the slight edge works, you have to view your actions through the eyes of time.
* Difficult takes a little time; impossible takes just a little longer.
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