My Biggest “I Never Thought of It in that Way Before!” Realization

How I Redefined Success

Thoughts And Ideas
Published in
8 min readNov 21, 2017

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I wolfed The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson in something like 4–5 hours, and the realization finally sunk home…

Up to that moment, I was convinced that you need to be a superhero to succeed in life.

You know, success is winning a gold medal at the Olympics, living in a multimillion dollar home, driving expensive cars, traveling the world in first class and living in 5-star hotels, being a saint whose compassion, miracles and acts of mercy immediately spell sainthood, finishing two PhD faculties within three years and so on.

Those are BIG things. A common mortal cannot reach them, can he? If he reached any of those, he had to possess a lot of talent, luck or both.

Success Wasn’t for Me

Before I had read The Slight Edge, those were my thoughts about success. Hence, I never really tried to be successful. I’m blessed with many talents, solid health and relatively high IQ, so I had some successes under my belt, but at 18 years old I decided in my heart that success is not for me. I just was not good enough.

“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.” — Jim Rohn

And then I read that book, and it challenged my beliefs about success. There is also another accompanying piece of the book’s message:

“Failure is simple errors in judgment repeated over time.”

I examined my life against those two statements. I found a small discipline behind every success in my life.

Old Wins

I was admitted at a university as third to last on the list. I didn’t crush it on entry exams. I struggled immensely the first year. I had a few re-sits. At the fourth year, I was (barely) among the top 25% of students and got a small scholarship.

The discipline: I attended almost every single lecture and classes. My peers, who were much brighter — didn’t.

I finished high school with flying colors. I was a good student, but I didn’t prepare myself especially hard for the final exams.

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Michał Stawicki
Thoughts And Ideas

Authorpreneur. Progress fanatic. I help people change their lives… even if they don’t believe they can. I blog on http://ExpandBeyondYourself.com/