The slight edge by Jeff Olson

The slight edge is one of the more popular and well known books in the self help sector and rightfully so as it was an amazing read. The book discusses the idea that doing the little things each day is what makes you successful. It's not the 80 hour weeks, the difficult tasks, it's the consistent, habits that make you a happy, healthy and successful. These daily habits of eating well, doing a little bit of exercise each day, reading 10 pages of an educational book are what compound over time to make you highly successful. Olson talks about the compounding effect of self improvement, much like books written by Brian Tracy with his 1000% formula he speaks highly of constant, consistent self improvement each and everyday, if you can get 1% better each day, then you will over long periods of time become magnitudes better than you were before. However, unlike Tracy he is a lot more aggressive in his formula of 1% each day, rather than 1/10th of a percent like Tracy talks about. Furthermore, this 1% is in my opinion at least, is way too high to much to improve by each and everyday, I don’t think it is possible to improve by this much each day as 1% is let's be honest, a lot. This is my only real concern with the book, other than that it is a fantastic read and I would highly recommend it to anyone. The book is fantastically well written, each chapter being short enough to keep you engaged with the topic. The stories that he uses and the stories he has collected from others are quite inspirational, really getting his point across on such things as incremental improvement. If you haven’t read this before you honestly should, the main take away from the book is that it takes time to become successful, there are no overnight success stories. It takes years upon years of consistent work and improvement to become highly successful. Do yourself a favor and read this book today, it’s a classic for a reason.

By Errol Hassall