how your little everyday choices can make or break your life

“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure.”

— Jim Rohn

As glamorous as it is assumed to be, success — I mean, true success — is pretty simple. 

There’s only one formula: you have to stay consistent over time. 

Here’s something interesting to ponder upon: 

How can one person start with nothing on his name and then not only finish grad school, but build a string of multi-million dollar businesses? And on the flip side, how does an established millionaire not only lose everything in a matter of a few years, but also ends up accruing hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt?

Both these scenarios have actually happened countless times in real life. 

In his book The Slight Edge, Jeff Olson gives numerous examples of how the slight edge — the principle of doing (or not doing) simple things consistently over time — can work both ways. It can yield incredibly positive outcomes, but it can also bring you terribly negative results as well. 

Doing simple daily disciplines was the main driving factor behind Olson’s graduation from business school at the top of his class and attaining huge early success in management. However, there were also times later on when he completely stopped doing those simple disciplines that eventually took him from survival back toward failure. 

The slight edge is constant and relentless — and it cuts both ways — your little everyday choices can make or break your life. 

Simple constructive actions, repeated consistently over time, carry you up towards success. Simple errors in judgment, repeated consistently over time, pull you down towards failure. 

I told you, success is simple. And where you want to go is absolutely your choice. 

The sad truth is that most people want instant rewards and “overnight success;” they don’t want to take the long, boring and mundane route of doing insignificant, little actions every day, and hence, as a result, they never end up experiencing extraordinary outcomes in the long run. As Jeff Olson writes in the book, “Most people don’t stick with the simple daily disciplines it takes to get where they want to go, because they don’t know how to look ahead far enough along the curve to see the results they are creating. But see it or not, those results are coming, as surely as a million dollars in the bank—or a train coming down the tracks heading our way.”