The Seven Slight Edge Principles by Jeff Olson

The Seven Slight Edge Principles can be used every day for your personal and business life.  

The things we do or don’t do every day move us closer or father away from our goals.

1. Show Up:  

Director Woody Allen said “80% of success is showing up.”  Most people won’t take the steps to just get started then learn the skill necessary to follow-through and overcome the obstacles.  Stop thinking about it get busy.  Commit and show up.

2. Be Consistent: 

Consistency and showing up work together. 

Consistent effort over time produces results. 

How do you measure effectiveness if what you are measuring isn’t performed consistently?  

Be consistent.

3. Have a Good Attitude:  

Jim Rohn said;

“Each of us has the ability to put our unique human potential into action and to acquire a desired result. But the one thing that determines the level of our potential—that produces the intensity of our activity and predicts the quality of the result we receive—is our attitude.”  

Enough said.

4.  Be Committed for a Long Period of Time:  

Showing up, commitment and consistency is critical for long-term success in any venture. 

Jim Rohn also relates to the Biblical story, The Parable of the Sower.  The sower committed to sowing seed regardless of the outcome. Keep sowing, sowing and sowing and you’ll eventually reap the harvest.

5.  Have Faith and a Burning Desire:  

Napoleon Hill wrote; 

'There is one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, and the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it’.  

Most important be specific about what you want and write it down!

6.  Be Willing to Pay the Price:  

Jeff Olson says, “Anything worth having is worth working and paying a price for.”

Zig Zilar said; “You do not pay theprice of  success, you enjoy the price of success.”  

Following the Slight Edge Principles will keep you on track.

7. Practice Slight Edge Integrity:

Integrity and character are demonstrated as by what you do when no one’s looking.  Be true to yourself first. 

The compounding effect of the Slight Edge Principles works both ways.  

What’s easy to do is also easy not to do.

 Success is a compilation of small daily decisions.  Missing a day or two or three might go unnoticed for a while but the compounding effect of good and bad decisions eventually work for you or against you.

By Mark Petticord

Being productive and being busy are not necessarily the same thing. Doing things won’t create your success; doing the right things will. – Jeff Olson

One of the great things about the slight edge philosophy is how it can be applied to any area of your life. It can be in fitness with exercise vs eating , or in finances when it comes to investing or paying down a debt vs paying the interest on a debt. 

I also really like what Olson says about its effects spreading:

Success in any one of these areas begins to affect all the others too. Improve your health and you improve your relationships; work on your personal development and you have an impact on your career. Everything affects everything else.

In the end, it all comes back to personal development and getting the right information, as Olson points out quite well.

The greatest gift you could ever give yourself is also the wisest business investment you could ever make. It is also the most critical step in accomplishing any challenging task, and is the one step without which all other success strategies, no matter how brilliant or time tested, are doomed to fail.

What is this mysterious gift? It is your own personal development.

Ben Franklin basically said the same thing; in a shortened version. I love this quote so much that it’s the signature to all my emails.

If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

95% of people don’t succeed as they would like to in their life, and that is mainly because they focus too much on results. Focusing on results is important, as I point out in my page on my goals. But the people who have the drive to succeed yet remain in that 95% category usually ignore what is going to get them the results. It’s going to take the right information; the right philosophy.

Olson goes through the different ways of acquiring the right information like books and CDs, but he also covers one more important medium. This is about having mentors and being part of a group or community to support you.

It’s easy to quit something, or not do something you should be doing, if no one is watching. When you’re around a group of people it’s harder not to do those easy things that everyone else around you is doing. It’s about the power of association. Jeff Olson points out how this principle works for everything.

I was just at a LIFE meeting with Mike Rocheleau speaking, and he made the following great analogy which I feel fits nicely with this subject.

If someone backed up a dump truck onto your lawn and emptied its contents all over the place, you would be out of your house and letting the person know how unhappy you were with the situation and would make sure it was cleaned up. But we let garbage into our mind all the time, and welcome it.

It’s time to make the decision to do something about it. Stop letting the garbage in, and start putting in pieces of gold instead.

Source: https://leadershiptofreedom.com/2013/04/04/the-slight-edge-principle/