Everyone is Self Made. Only Successful People Admit It

Atomic habits, the Slight Edge, and more.

---

There’s a certain attraction to the idea of a “self-made man”.

We hear self-made, and we think of the guy who fought his way to the top, was never given any handouts, and everything he has he got it for himself.

More or less, we think of someone successful.

But the truth is, everyone is self-made.

The guy who’s struggling to pay his bills is self-made as much as the guy who’s a millionaire.

The athlete is self-made as much as the person that’s 50lbs overweight.

The person who failed out of college is just as self-made as the straight A, 4.0 Summa cum laude who was the top of her class.

You get the point.

Everyone is self-made, and we create ourselves every single day, with the choices we make, and the choices we don’t make.

That’s not an easy pill to swallow, but if you accept that you are where you are because of who you’ve been in the past, that means you can immediately change your trajectory in life by making better choices today.

I’ve been reminded of this principle lately while reading The Slight Edge, but it’s a reoccurring theme in many self-improvement books out there.

It’s the same message that’s in James Clear’s “Atomic Habits”, and the same message that’s in Darren Hardy’s “The Compound Effect” (all awesome books that are worth checking out).

What is that message?

That the aggregation of marginal gains is the key to success.

Said another way, it’s the small daily decisions that make or break us.

Think about it,

The super fit guy at your gym didn’t get that way overnight.

It took years of consistency, years of eating the right foods, and years of making the hard choice to get up early and workout, or to skip on the extra dessert.

Same goes for the guy with 50lbs to lose. He didn’t eat Mcdonald’s one day and wake up obese. No, it took years of things he did, and things he didn’t do, to compound into him gaining the weight.

Choosing to have that beer every night after work. Choosing to pick up fast food instead of packing a lunch. Choosing to sit on the couch and watch the game instead of go for a walk or hit the gym.

Every single day, with everything in life, we are faced with choices.

When we look at where we are, it’s nothing more than a sum of the choices we’ve made up until that point.

If you want to make the compound effect work for you, instead of against you, you have to decide where you want to go, (write it down in great detail), and then start moving in that direction.

Because if you haven’t chosen a direction for yourself, then someone else has chosen one for you… and you might not like where you end up.

After you know where you want to go, it’s about letting the small daily disciplines compound into something extraordinary.

You won’t see the results after a few workouts, or a few study sessions, or a couple days of healthier eating…

But stick with it, and you’ll start to make the progress you want, a lot sooner than you think.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Jim Rohn:

“the simple things that lead to success are easy to do, but they're also just as easy not to do”

The right things are easy to do, and easy not to do.

But it’s up to you to decide who you want to be.

Remember, for better or for worse, we’re all self-made.

Thanks for reading,

— Josh