Image courtesy of Svilen Milev
The Case for Self-Help Literature
The Slight Edge is an American self-help book written by a guy called Jeff Olson. In the UK we’re extremely sceptical about this type of book and for good reason: there’s a lot of obvious, empty and probably counter-productive advice out there.
I do like reading them though, all the Rich Dad Poor Dad and Anthony Robbins stuff. It’s usually pretty self-evident: save money, work hard, seek failure to grow etc. But I enjoy the positivity and there’s something about reading a message, no matter how obvious, which seems to make it sink in.
The Slight Edge: Little And Often
The Slight Edge has a simple message: small things done consistently lead to success. Olson talks about reading ten pages of a good book every day or doing a few minutes of exercise. He uses the example of compound interest: exponential growth may be frustratingly slow at first, but it soon yields enormous reults.
The style is very cheesy self-help, but on some level it’s definitely helped me take action. Until a few months ago, I don’t think I’d ever gone running more than three or four times in any week. Since reading this book I’ve run every day for the last ten days.
The message is so simple, so clear and so blatant that you can’t ignore it: do the right stuff regularly and succeed, or do the wrong stuff and fail.
The Slight Edge and Approaching Women
It isn’t difficult to link this to meeting women. If you go and say hello to one woman a day – every day – you’ll introduce yourself to 365 women this year. One date per twenty approaches is a decent estimate; if you approach one girl every day, that’s fifteen or twenty dates a year – from something that costs you a couple of minutes!
You don’t need a degree in Computer Science to realise how many dates you could go on if you approach two or three women a day.
Olson hypothesises than most people fail by not taking action, not because there’s anything wrong with them. His book is also full of ways of promoting the Slight Edge, and has some good arguments about how employ it, although it’s mainly motivational. Highly recommended.
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