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

© 2010 by Jeff Olson. All Rights Reserved.

P.S. If you're ready to apply The Slight Edge to your MLM business, The Ultimate Success Pack contains everything you need to create the massive success you deserve! Here's why >>>

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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