About The Slight Edge

Excerpts from The Slight Edge…

The Beach Bum

I was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My dad died when I was ten; I remember being handed the flag from his casket. My mom held everything together; she was a great, loving mom. But it was still a rough way to grow up: a fatherless, blond-headed kid in a Hispanic neighborhood, who didn’t fit in. I really didn’t know what to do with it all, so I turned my energy into mischief and misbehavior: I blamed everything and everyone.

In third grade, my teachers informed me that I had a low I.Q. I quickly gained a reputation for mischief and trouble making. While my mom worked her way through the years, I struggled my way through school. By age nineteen, it was clear to anyone who knew me that I didn’t have much of a future.

I begged my way into the University of New Mexico. At college, I built on my previous academic career and succeeded in taking my C average to a D average. I did learn one thing, though: I learned that when spring break came, all the students went to Daytona Beach for a week. I thought I could do one better—I quit school and moved there.

At Daytona Beach, I pursued my first profession: I became a beach bum. I lifted weights and chased girls. I let my hair grow long and curly. People started calling me “Gorgeous George” after the wrestler.

I got a job at the Orlando Country Club cutting the grass on the golf course. One day, as I was cutting the greens in the hot Florida sun, I paused to watch the wealthy club members playing golf on the grass I had cut. As I watched them hum to and fro in their zippy golf carts, in dapper fine golf outfits, with their classy golf bags filled with expensive golf clubs, I felt a burning question simmer up inside.

Why is it that they’re over there riding in carts, and I’m over here working? I’m as good as these people are. How do they get to have it ten times better than me? ARE they ten times better than me? Are they ten times smarter? Or do they work ten times harder? Or … ?

“You’re lookin’ good, sir, lookin’ good.”

The shoeshine woman was grinning at me. Another customer lost in his early morning thoughts. And another job well done. I looked down: I could see my reflection in my shoes.

Indeed I am. Lookin’ good … thank you. Thanks very much.

I paid her, gave her as big a tip as I could without (I hoped) having her feel I was being patronizing, and walked away with clean shoes and a heavy heart.

It had taken many years, but I was fortunate enough to have found my way out of my beach bum career. I was no longer cutting the greens of other people’s leisurely pursuits. I had found my way to a good life.

She was right; for me, things were lookin’ good, sir, lookin’ good.

But why the beach bum and not the shoeshine woman?

The problem, I shouted out in my head, is that you don’t have a way to process the information. There’s no framework in place for you to take in all the extraordinary insight that’s out there and put it to work in your life.

If only you were aware of the Slight Edge. If only you knew what it was doing in your life and how easy it is to have the Slight Edge working for you—instead of against you.

If only you were doing those simple, little disciplines that would change your life for the better forever … where would you be five years from today?

If only you learned to recognize the Slight Edge ...

That day, on the plane, I started writing this book.

The Slight Edge is not just more good information. It’s not another self-help success book packed with some revolutionary “new best way” of doing things. You don’t need that. Nobody needs that. All the “new and better” information is already available and has been for years.

This book will help you take whatever information you want, whatever how-to’s or strategies or goals or aspirations, and turn them into the life you want. This book is what I wish I could have put into that sweet and sad shoeshine woman’s hands.

There are millions upon millions of people, everywhere I go, everywhere I look, whose lives are not all that they wish, not all that they yearn for. Not even close.

And yet they could be.

So I dedicate this book to that shoeshine woman, to her daughter, to her daughter’s cheerleading team ... and to everyone else in the world who wants more.

I dedicate this book to you.