The Second Mix Podcast - Reflect, Revise, and Remix Your Life
Jan. 30, 2023

Book Jam - The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson - A short book summary about goals and habits

Book Jam - The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson - A short book summary about goals and habits

A Second Mix Book Jam on The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson! Do you have goals that you really want to accomplish, but your habits aren't taking you there? You might need a tiny shift in your philosophy. This book will help you get it. Listen to the summary and review, and decide for yourself if you should read this. I would encourage you to do so. 

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This is the Second Mix Podcast - a dose of personal development leading to personal growth. My philosophy is that personal development is business development and that mindset, especially a success mindset, is the primary factor that leads to self-improvement. I like to talk about things that matter with people who care as well as bring you some old-school motivation and valuable information from the original masters of inspiration Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, and more. These guys helped me turn my life around in just a couple years, I've 5X my income, improved my relationships with my wife and kids, and I've completely changed my entire network - and so much more! I use this podcast to tell you how I did it, the thinking behind it, and as a way to get to meet great new people who are all moving forward by helping people become more than they are. 

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Transcript

Matt: All right, so today we're doing a book Jam on the Slight Edge by Jeff Olson. It is, in the category of, I would call it Habits Personal Development. It's similar to the Compound Effect by Darren Hardy, Atomic Habits by James Clear, the Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and countless other personal development books that talk about habits.

The next second mix Book Jam is The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson, and that's coming up in 5, 4, 3. Two, one. 

Welcome to the second Mix podcast where we talk about things that matter with people who care. My name is Matt Bennett and it's my mission to help make you better, stronger, and wiser with the old school personal development that helped me become something new.

To briefly summarize the book, Jeff Olson teaches that failure is a few small errors in judgment practiced every day. Success is just a few simple disciplines practiced every day. We already know all that it takes to be successful. We just have problems continuing the disciplines that lead to success and removing the disciplines that lead to failure.

The success disciplines are easy to do. But they're also easy not to do. There are many times that we see we're about to fail and we climb from failure back towards survival .Once we hit survival. . We stay there until we begin to fail again. And we wonder why success eludes us.

And according to Jeff Olson, all we have to do 

 is keep doing the things that we did to climb from failure to survival and continually doing those things will bring success. So in other words, after we have climbed from failure back to survival, Don't drop those disciplines that got you to survival. 

Keep doing those disciplines and eventually they're gonna bring success.

let's dive into the book a little bit. The book starts off talking about philosophy. Your philosophy is the most important ingredient in your success. It all begins with this not having a healthy philosophy about money and work, and success and wealth. This is why many people that win the lottery are in ruin not too long after they get the money because they never had the philosophy that allowed them to hang onto the money. 

The philosophy that you need to be able to hang on and use money and keep it and make it grow. That philosophy needs to be paired with the money. In order for that to happen. You can't just get the money because pretty soon it's all gonna be gone. So people everywhere, and this is a, this is a quote from Olson.

People everywhere are clamoring for the formula, the secret, the path to improving their lives. If how to do it were the answer, it would be done. I, I wanna drop a note in here to avoid paying tons of money out there for so-called gurus who say that they have the secret, some new way to be successful because there's nothing new out there.

 So for, by all means, buy classes to learn or join a mastermind to get personalized help, but don't expect that you're gonna learn. , a new secret to success out there. There's nothing new under the sun. Everything you need to know is out there for free. With a library card and internet access, you already have everything you need to succeed.

You just have to keep taking the next steps. And a lot of that does include learning, but it doesn't include some new secret.

So to get back to Olsen's quote, people everywhere are clamoring for the formula, the secret, the path to improving their lives. But how to do it is not the answer. We all know how to do it. We just don't take those daily actions consistently. 

Now, one of my favorite quotes that Olsen pulled in was from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

"Do the thing and you shall have the power.". 

And I love that you do it, and then you have the power to do it. Simple, productive actions repeated consistently over time are going to lead to success. And simple errors in judgment repeated consistently over time are going to lead inevitably to failure and the things that are easy to do to gain success are also easy not to do, and that came straight from a Jim Rohn seminar.

In fact, a lot of this stuff in this book, uh, has obviously, uh, bled into Olsen's mind from Jim Rohn because I, I see a lot of similar language even to all the Jim Rohn seminars that I've taken, everything that I've listened to, his books and everything.

There are almost word for word quotes in the book. Uh, I don't blame Olsen. I probably do that too. Uh, just say something that is in my mind because Jim Rohn said it first.

 Let's talk about why things are easy not to do. Why is a success habit easy not to do? Olsen says in the book that for a while the results of successful habits are completely invisible. The little things that add ups to success don't seem to have any impact, and the things that lead to failure don't have any impact.

Let's start with failure. If you ate a Big Mac and it immediately gave you a massive near fatal heart attack that landed you in the hospital for a month, would you ever eat one again? I'm sure you wouldn't. Unfortunately, that's not how it works. It's 20 or 30 years of eating a Big Mac that's gonna cause the heart attack.

 We need to be smarter in our philosophy. Just because it doesn't kill us today doesn't mean that it's not gonna kill us. A simple error in judgment compounded over time. If you don't exercise today, is that gonna kill you? No. But years of that will - and it works the same in the opposite direction. If you ate a healthy salad today or worked out today, are you immediately in peak physical condition?

Of course not. Will reading 10 pages of a book today change your life immediately? Probably not. We have to trust the compound effect. We have to trust the slight edge philosophy. Olson says, here's the problem back. In the present on day one of week one, all of these results are way in the future. It's hard to do in a society that works hard to produce immediate results with Amazon and, and everything happening so quickly, it is hard to do work that doesn't produce immediate results.

But Earl Nightingale said, "success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal." And the keyword here is progressive. It's a process. Success is not a destination. It's something that you experience gradually over time, and this is probably my favorite chapter in the book and the one that I gained the most insight from the one actually in this book that gave me the biggest shift in thinking.

And I'm gonna quote Olsen, if you want to keep yourself on the upward path, the path of the building growing, improving, positively compounding effect of the slight edge, rather than deteriorating, disintegrating, draining, negatively compounding effect of the slight edge, then there's something you need.

You need an ally.

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. . It's a very generous process. It only requires a tiny little contribution from us, and yet it offers a gigantic return.

Time is the force that magnifies those little, almost imperceptible, seemingly insignificant things you do every day into something Titanic and unstoppable. So you supply the actions, the universe supplies the time, and the trick is to choose the actions that when multiplied by this universal amplifier, you're gonna get the results you want.

To position your everyday actions so that time works for you and time is not working against you. The natural progression in life. You plant, you cultivate, and then finally you harvest. This used to be something everyone knew. In the agricultural world that we grew up in, you plant, you cultivate, you harvest.

In today's world, everyone wants to go from plant to harvest. In like three minutes, we've lost touch with cultivating, but planting and harvesting happen almost immediately. I can go out and plant right now. In the fall. I can go out and harvest right now, but cultivating takes place only through the patient dimension of time.

We're a culture that's motivated by movies and tv, which can be pretty powerful to teach us valuable lessons about life, but it definitely doesn't teach us valuable lessons about time.

And, and this is for me, really where the mind shift kicked in because. Until you get where the slight edge leads you, it's very boring, making the right choices. It's not drama, it's not jumping off a building onto a helicopter. It's a boring choice and it doesn't feel heroic at all. But every decision you make is a slight edge decision.

What you're gonna do, how you're gonna act, what you're gonna read, who you're gonna chat with on the phone, what you're gonna eat for lunch, who you're gonna associate with, how you're gonna treat your fellow workers, what you're gonna get done today simply by making those right decisions or making more of the right decisions one at a time.

Over and over again, you will have enlisted the awesome power of the slight 

edge. Or time on your behalf, the unwanted circumstances, the poor results you've produced in the past. The evidence of failures in your life may all continue for a time, right? If you started off overweight, you're not gonna lose that tomorrow.

So that's gonna be continue with you for a time, and there may be no light at the end of the tunnel, or at least none you can see today. But by putting time on your sides, 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.

The slight edge is just a tiny. Little shift in philosophy. My key insight in the book was that success is not some grand gesture with fireworks in an inspiring soundtrack. The little things really do make a difference in. If you do them, just a few simple disciplines, you get massive success, A few small errors, massive failure.

So be patient and let time go to work for you instead of going to work against you. 

Thanks for listening to the Second Mix podcast. Please subscribe, leave a review where you can, and visit secondmix.net for more content like this. If you want to get in touch with me, you can email me at matt@secondmix.net or go to the website and leave me a voicemail.

Make it an amazing week, and I'll see you soon.