The Winning Edge
by Jeff Olson
One of the most highly anticipated
events at the Summer Olympics is the men's 100 meters.
The winner of this quadrennial event can lay claim to
being the fastest man in the world. At the 2004 Games
in Athens, American Justin Gatlin ran a blistering 9.85
in the final heat to win the gold. The silver medalist,
Portugal’s Francis Obikwelu, ran 9.86. Yes, that's one
one-hundredth of a second slower—a very
Slight Edge.
Do you know what makes the difference
between a .300-hitting baseball star with a multimillion-
dollar contract and a .260-plus player making only an
average salary? Less than one additional hit per week
over the course of the season. And you know what makes
the difference between getting that hit and striking out?
About one quarter-inch up or down the bat.
No golf fan who watched the 2004 Master's
tournament will ever forget how it ended: Phil Mickelson,
winner of more tournaments over the past ten years than anyone
else, with the exception of Tiger Woods, was left with a twenty-
foot putt on the eighteenth hole of the final round. Miss it,
even by one inch, and he would head into a playoff with the number
two player in the world, Ernie Els. Make it, and he would finally
silence the critics and win his first major. The putt rolled in and
Mickelson had his green jacket.
Over the course of the tournament's four days,
Mickelson shot a 279, six strokes better than two-time Master's
champion Bernhard Langer did. The difference? One and one half
strokes per day better than Langer does.
The Slight Edge.
And it's not just in sports. It's in
everything.
In 1998, a book called
The Millionaire Next Door, by Thomas J. Stanley and William D.
Danko, became a runaway best-seller. What so amazed readers was
the fact the people profiled in the book were incredibly ordinary,
everyday sorts of folks, with normal and even mediocre-level jobs,
who had created extraordinary wealth by a
truly remarkable, unexpected, amazing strategy. It consisted of—you
guessed it. Doing little, mundane, ordinary, insignificant, everyday
things with their
money.
If you had followed any of those people around for
the twenty or thirty or forty years during which they were amassing
their financial empires, I promise you, it would not have been
breath-takingly exciting—no more exciting than it would be to
follow an Olympic athlete in training every day from his 3:30 A.M.
wake-up call to his exhausted collapse into bed at night.
We love rags-to-riches stories and underdog-becomes-hero
stories, and we use them to motivate people because they are so
exciting and dramatic...aren't they?
Actually, no. The truth is they're not exciting
at all—when they're really happening. They only seem dramatic
in the retelling. But the reality is that the rags-to-riches
success story person
has gotten to where he is by making mundane, quiet,
little Slight Edge decisions and repeating simple
disciplines, day in and day out.
It's not exciting to read about: it's not exciting
to make a movie about. It's not even exciting to do.
But believe me, it sure is exciting
when you finally get to experience the
results.
No matter in what arena in life or work or play—the
difference between winning and losing, the gap that separates
success and failure, is so slight, so subtle, most never see it.
Superman may leap tall buildings at a single bound.
Here on earth, we win through the
Slight Edge.
Create your success,
Jeff
© 2008 by Jeff Olson. All Rights Reserved.
P.S. If you're ready to apply
The Slight Edge step
to your Network Marketing business and to your
life, The Ultimate
Success Pack contains everything you
need!
About the author:
Jeff Olson, author of The Slight Edge, has built
multi-million-dollar sales and marketing
organizations, hosted seminars in every major
city in the United States and produced over 900
television programs with such personal
development legends as: Les Brown, Jim Rohn, and Brian
Tracy. Over the past 20 years Jeff has helped
hundreds of thousands of individuals achieve
better levels of financial freedom and personal
excellence.
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