The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

books had included Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, or Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness?

Essential Points from Chapter 14
On the path of mastery you have four powerful allies:

The power of momentum:

steady
wins the race.

The power of completion: clear out your undones and incompletes.

The power of reflection: facing the man or woman in the mirror.

The power of celebration: catch yourself doing something right.

Sow an act, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny.”

Be not afraid of going slowly; be afraid only of standing still.”
—Chinese proverb

Show me where you fish and I’ll show you what you catch

Knowledge without practice is useless,” said Confucius, but he added a second line: “And practice without knowledge is dangerous.”

The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”

Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.”

—Abraham Lincoln (attrib.)

The trouble with the world,” wrote Mark Twain, “is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.” Or as Mr. Twain might have put it in assessing the state of literacy in today’s media-crazy world: the problem is not that people read too little, but that they fill their brains with stuff that ain’t doing them no good

All truth passes through three stages,” the great German philosophy Arthur Schopenhauer reportedly observed. “First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” Gandhi put it this way: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”