How to Find Your Edge

If you want to leave the world better than you found it, you have a fundamental responsibility to find your Edge.

Kirra Michel is my favourite Peloton yoga instructor. She does these advanced classes that are just wonderfully challenging, and half the time I can’t manage most of them so I just watch in awe as she ‘floats’ her body from pretzel 1 to pretzel 2 and back again.

I love, love, love feeling like an amateur with potential.

One of the things Kirra preaches is Finding Your Edge. In yoga, she refers to your edge as the point where you’re pushing hard enough to challenge your body and mind, but not pushing so hard that you get injured.

Your edge is the point where you’re pushing hard enough to challenge your body and mind, but not pushing so hard that you get injured.

This concept translates beautifully into the rest of life: if you really want to make a positive difference in your corner of the universe, you have a finite amount of time to do it.

This means you’ll need to:

Take action
Fail, evaluate, try again
Repeat

Until you’re efficient at whichever processes are making the most difference you can make.

The bigger the impact you desire to have, the more streamlined this process must become, because really, there is no time to waste, right? Intentional action is much more powerful than haphazard action.

In yoga, Kirra speaks of ‘over-efforting’ and ‘under-efforting’ during a practice:

Too much effort and grace is lost, the breath doesn’t do its healing work, and the body breaks down. Too little, and you stay stagnant, not improving your focus, strength, or flow.

The same, same, same for life.

Let’s take some newly taboo words in society and re-calibrate them so you can use them to find your edge.

Hustle

Work hard, push those limits, test yourself. But be respectful enough of yourself to know when you need a break.

Grind

Do the boring, the mundane, the repetitive crap that you don’t love, but do it with moving past it in mind. Paying your dues with hard work is not meant to be a lifelong struggle. If you work smart and hard first, the smart will soon outweigh the hard.

Languish

There is a very big difference in being lazy and taking time to do nothing. Most achievers have a hard time stopping when they need to. But it’s necessary. Respect your body and mind enough to take good, juicy breaks and feel nothing but gratitude (not guilt) about them.

Expect

You are a worthy person regardless of how you show up in the world. But there is a sense of entitlement that has become apparent in those of us who haven’t earned the rights to success. Success happens when you work for it. Period. You aren’t entitled to it. But expect great things when you work for it.