Making good choices will set you on the path to success, but it may not keep you there. It takes continuous, lifelong learning by any and every available means for the slight edge to keep working in your favor.

Reading ten pages of an inspirational and educational book every day can greatly enrich your life. Doing so would mean that you could finish a 300-page book every month. You could also listen to 15 minutes of life-transforming audio every day or take a course or a seminar every few months.

While study is good, it’s what you do with the information you acquire that will have a lasting impact on your personal growth and development.

The key message here is: Continuous lifelong learning and practice will help you benefit from the slight edge.

Once you learn something, you need to put it into practice. This deepens your understanding of the knowledge you gain. As the Chinese philosopher Confucius said, “Knowledge without practice is useless, and practice without knowledge is dangerous.”

You can also learn from others. Once you identify a person who has fulfilled aspirations similar to yours, you can observe and copy them.

But this education will only have a transformative effect if you use it to train your mind. To do this, you first need to find out how the conscious and unconscious brain work.

The conscious brain is very powerful, but it can only focus on one thing at a time and is easily distracted. On the other hand, the unconscious brain runs virtually all of our brain processes. In fact, 99.99 percent of everything we do is our brain on auto-pilot.

For example, have you ever walked or driven a familiar route while your mind was completely engrossed in something else? Sure. We all have. Why does that happen? Your conscious mind has learned the route so well, it’s become embedded in your subconscious.

To keep making good choices, you need to train your unconscious brain. How do you do that? You use your conscious brain to identify a practice you want to adopt, then you do it repeatedly until it enters your subconscious and becomes automatic