I read The Slight Edge after hearing it recommended by Sean Spooner in his podcast.
It is a really powerful book with an important message:
Your philosophy creates your attitude, your actions, your results and these create your life. 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. That they not only make a difference – they make all the difference.
The book describes the power of good habits and how quickly bad habits form. A message that really resonated with me is, “It’s more effective to take one business-building action every day for a week, than to take seven… all at once and then take the rest of the week off… The daily rhythm of the thing starts to change you. It becomes part of your routine, and as it does, it becomes part of who you are. That doesn’t happen with a once-in-a-while, all-out effort.”
Towards the end, I felt that the book became a bit preachy. This idea of doing something every day to improve became quite draining. I was reading the book in bed and was lying there feeling very guilty for all of the things I hadn’t done that day. The fact that I was reading this in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and all routine I had had been cancelled out in the lockdown made the guilt even worse!
What have I learned by reading the book?
I need to try to find ways to create habits and do things regularly to improve. These things matter and will add up over time.