Of all Stephen Covey's advice, this has to be the one that never seems to leave me. There are others, obviously, but this is the Habit that chimes in my brain like the three-note-notification in a Broadway theater lobby that announce the show is about to begin. As we round the final corner of 2023, I wanted to invite you to complete an annual exercise that I've been running for the past few years.
Keep, Kill, or Change
There is a very good chance that you've already knocked out your 2024 planning, so if you feel like you have a good grip on the coming year, you can skip this. But there is a chance that in your big picture planning, you might have missed something small that could give you a slight edge...
The Slight Edge
I only read a summary of this book (and should probably do it justice by reading it all), but the general premise revolves around adding compound interest to more than just your finances.Â
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It's not that the most successful people you idolize are orders of magnitude better, smarter, luckier, etc. than you are. It's far more true that they simply have a 1%-5% something extra that has compounded over time to culminate into a measurable milestone. The milestone is what we see, and often try to emulate (or just envy). Instead, we should focus on picking up that small percentage every day, and letting the compound interest do its work.