The Highlight Reel is a blog series where I share passages that I’ve highlighted on my Kindle during my commute to and from work each day.
The selections are mostly from self-help and work/marketing-related books. I’m sharing them because I don’t believe we get enough advice about how to try hard, build self confidence, discipline our minds, and stop worrying about things outside of our control.
The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success & Happiness
“When people are looking down the barrel of failure in their lives, they will do whatever it takes to get themselves moving, something, anything, to start climbing upward toward the point of survival. And then, once they get to the point where they’re keeping their heads above water, they start heading back down again.”
“And that’s what so many people do, living their entire lives like this, oscillating between failure and survival, striving toward success and maybe even reaching the level of success, but then invariability turning back and heading downward again. We do this in our finances, in our health, in our relationships, and in our lives as a whole.”
“The things that take you out of failure and up toward survival and success are simple. So simple, in fact, that it’s easy to overlook them. 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.”
“The same activities that take us from failure to survival would also take us from survival to success—if we would just keep doing them.”
“Successful people are those who understand that the little choices they make matter, and because of that they choose to do things that seem to make no difference at all in the act of doing them, and they do them over and over and over until the compound effect kicks in.”
Brian Burns 