• As I said, all my life I had been no better than average at anything I’d done: average grades, average in athletics, average social skills. I knew that the only way I could ever become anybody was by working harder and being more persistent. If I wanted to have a prayer of a chance of getting on the team, I had to work harder in the practices. If I wanted to impress somebody in the social world, I had to work harder at it. If I was going to get good grades, I would have to study harder. So I did. That semester, for the first time in my life, I got straight A’s. I went on to business school and graduated in the top of my class—and the rest, you could say, was history.

• Honestly, it felt like I could accomplish anything I put my mind to. Like I’d learned the magic words, found the secret formula. So I struck out on my own and set my foot on the entrepreneurial path.

• Once I got a little way above survival and was starting to head up into the warmer waters of success, without realizing it or thinking about it, I would stop doing the things that had gotten me there. Naturally, I would then start sinking back down again, back down toward survival and beyond, back down toward the failure line. And I did that every time. Every time.

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

• Of course, I could lose it all tomorrow. It’s happened before; I’d survive. But there is something I cannot lose, and with that one thing I could start from scratch and build it all back up again, and do it in record time. That one thing is the slight edge.

• It wasn’t for lack of trying, and it wasn’t for want of desire. If you’ve ever been told, “You’ll get it if you just want it bad enough,” I’m here to let you off the hook: it simply isn’t true. Just wanting something doesn’t necessarily get it for you, not even when you combine wanting with trying really hard and working really hard. You can want all you want, and try yourself blue in the face. But it still won’t happen—not without the first ingredient.

• Your philosophy is your view of life, something beyond feelings and attitudes. Your philosophy drives your attitudes and feelings, which drive your actions.

• 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.

• Sure enough, by the age of thirty I had created a six-figure income. Today I am not only a millionaire but I also have five wonderful children and a beautiful wife to spend the rest of my life with.

• Not for everyone, of course. There are those for whom life somehow just seems to work. But they sure aren’t the majority. I’ve been looking at this for a few decades now, and my observation is that about 1 person in 20 is achieving a significant measure of his or her goals in life: financial, professional, personal, in terms of relationships, in terms of health, in whatever terms you want to look at. 1 in 20. Or about 5 percent. Which means that 95 percent are either failing or falling short.

• Here’s the most amazing thing about Steve Martin’s story: the things he did to develop his stage skills were not complicated or difficult. They just took practice. They also weren’t very exciting. The idea of being up on stage in front of millions may sound terrifying and exhilarating, but when you’re standing up in front of a nearly empty coffee shop, and nobody’s paying any attention, and you’re trying out a line you’ve tried thirty times already with maybe a few tiny tweaks to see if it works any better … not so terrifying, not so exhilarating, not so exciting.

• 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.

• And that’s the problem. 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.

• 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.

• It’s become axiomatic to say we live in a push-button, instant-access, fast-food world where we want and expect everything yesterday. It isn’t that we have more impatient temperaments than our great-grandparents did. It’s that as a culture we have adopted an entirely different way of thinking—an entirely different philosophy.

• There is a natural progression in life: you plant, then you cultivate, and finally you harvest. In the days when we were an agrarian society, everyone knew this. It wasn’t something anyone had to think about, it was self-evident: just the way things were. Plant, cultivate, harvest. But that’s changed. Today, we have to learn it.

• When the hero makes the right choice in a movie, it’s dramatic. The problem is, your life is not a movie. It’s real life.

• 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.

• 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.

• No matter what you have done in your life up until today, no matter where you are and how far down you may have slid on the failure curve, you can start fresh, building a positive pattern of success, at any time. Including right now. But you need to have faith in the process, because you won’t see it happening at first.

• Now suppose someone came along and asked, “What was the one big push that caused this thing to go so fast?” You wouldn’t be able to answer; it’s a nonsensical question. Was it the first push? The second? The fifth? The hundredth? No! It was all of them added together in an overall accumulation of effort applied in a consistent direction. Some pushes may have been bigger than others, but any single heave—no matter how large—reflects a small fraction of the entire cumulative effect upon the flywheel.

• Now suppose someone came along and asked, “What was the one big push that caused this thing to go so fast?”      You wouldn’t be able to answer; it’s a nonsensical question. Was it the first push? The second? The fifth? The hundredth? No! It was all of them added together in an overall accumulation of effort applied in a consistent direction. Some pushes may have been bigger than others, but any single heave—no matter how large—reflects a small fraction of the entire cumulative effect upon the flywheel.

• Successful people do whatever it takes to get the job done, whether or not they feel like it.

• Patience is a challenge for people who do not understand the slight edge.

• Sometimes the path of success is inconvenient, and therefore not just easy not to do but actually easier not to do. For most people, it’s easier to stay in bed. Getting on the path and staying on the path requires faith in the process—especially at the start. That makes you a pioneer.

• Obviously, it’s impossible for either of us to say exactly how long. But 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.

• Serene, I fold my hands and wait, Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea; I rave no more ’gainst time or fate, For lo! my own shall come to me.

• Serene, I fold my hands and wait, Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea; I rave no more ’gainst time or fate, For lo! my own shall come to me.

• Because in our lives, unlike the Grand Canyon example, remarkable change doesn’t take that long. 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.

• Slow down to go fast. In other words: you want big results? Good—then do the little things. Just do them consistently and persistently.

• There is a natural progression to success: plant, cultivate, harvest—and the central step, cultivate, can only happen over the course of time.

• To grasp how the slight edge works, you have to view your actions through the eyes of time.

• Have you ever noticed that when you read stories about lottery winners, they are hardly ever bank presidents, successful entrepreneurs, or corporate executives? That they never seem to be people who were already financially successful before they bought that winning ticket? Have you ever wondered why? It’s because successful people never win the lottery. You know why? Because they don’t buy lottery tickets. Successful people have already grasped the truth that lottery players have not: success is not a random accident. Life is not a lottery.

• There’s a popular expression you’ve probably heard, “Luck is preparedness meeting opportunity.” It’s a handy idea, but it’s not quite accurate. People who live by the slight edge understand how luck really works. It’s not preparedness meeting opportunity: it’s preparedness, period. Preparedness created by doing those simple, little, constructive, positive actions, over and over.

• Here is a great secret that holds the key to great accomplishment: both that “sudden flash” and that “overnight success” were the final, breakthrough results of a long, patient process of edge upon edge upon edge. 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.

• Over the past few decades it’s been amazing to me how many people I’ve been close to have persisted in making fun of my dietary choices, exercise habits, and personal development goals. The “insignificant” little things I’ve been doing every day for years have always struck them as funny, because they couldn’t see the point. They couldn’t see the results coming further on down the path.

• No success is immediate, no collapse is sudden. They are both the result of the slight edge accruing momentum over time.

• Happiness has a lot less to do with circumstances than we think it does.

• How you realize happiness is by doing some simple things, and doing them every day.

• Growing up, I never heard her say a negative word, not about anything or anyone. No matter how bad things were, she always somehow found something positive to see in the situation.

• And here’s the truly radical thing about it: 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.

• College was the first time I started to become consciously aware of how the slight edge works. Here I was, surrounded by other kids who all had 4.0 grade point averages and really high SAT scores. I knew I wasn’t necessarily the smartest person in the room, or the most talented, or the most intuitive. But even if I was surrounded by people who were more talented than I was, I knew I could surpass them just by consistently showing up and doing the work.

• With my ten-year high school reunion around the corner, it saddens me to see where some of my high school acquaintances have ended up. These were young men and women who had everything going for them, everything in place for them.

• They were smart, popular, and outgoing, had loving families and great opportunities—yet somehow they never grasped the true implications of their own everyday choices. They never saw the slight edge working in their lives—and never realized it was working against them. Small errors in judgment, repeated daily over time, had landed them far from where they wanted to be.

• If you do, will your life change on that first day you read ten pages? Probably not. And if you don’t read those ten pages, will your life start to fall apart? Of course not. But successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do—even when it doesn’t look like it makes any difference. And they do it long enough for the compounding effect to start to kick in.

• 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.

• It’s not hard to understand why so many people make that second choice. After all, when you’re standing here at point A, gazing off into the distance at point B, it’s easy to be intimidated by how far away it looks. People don’t even want to set foot on the path if they don’t think they can make it to the end. “Why even try? If the mountain’s that huge, why take the first step? I’ll probably never make it anyway.…”

• But remember, you have to go one direction or the other; you can’t stand still. The universe is curved, and everything is constantly changing. There are only two possibilities. Either you let go of where you are and get to where you could be, or you hang onto where you are and give up where you could be. You are either going for your dreams or giving up your dreams.

• The people on the other side are hanging with the masses, and their lives are often more comfortable during that long early stretch. But they become more uncomfortable later on. Suddenly they find they don’t have the finances, don’t have the health or the happiness, no longer have the relationships, and their lives become very uncomfortable. By contrast, those on the success curve end up ever more comfortable as their lives progress, because over the course of time they continue to have the finances, the health and happiness, the relationships, the successes. In fact, they have more of those things.

• You return again and again to take the proper course—guided by what? By the picture in mind of the place you are headed for.

• The wisest investment you can make is to invest in your own continuous learning and development.

• Learning by studying and learning by doing—book smarts and street smarts—are the two essential pistons of the engine of learning.

• Meanwhile, Clyde could see that I was working my way through school and just scraping by, and after a while he created a position called “night supervisor” and offered me the job. Being night supervisor meant I could stay there by myself at night and use the time to do my homework. The rest of the admin staff would get off work at five, so I’d show up at four and stay from then till midnight. There wasn’t really anything for me to do, other than be there in case some extra work came up (which was rarely). Essentially, it meant I was being paid to get my homework done.

• There’s another reason once a day for a week is better than seven times in one day, once a week: 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.

• When you talk with people who have achieved extraordinary things and ask them how it was that they accomplished whatever it is they’ve done, it is stunning how often they will tell you some version of this: I just decided to do it.