The-Slight-Edge

58 The Slight Edge
Some of the largest companies in the world started out as nothing. Take
Facebook, for example. Mark Zuckerberg started with just a concept—a
penny—in his small Harvard dorm room, and today it has become the largest
social networking site on the Internet, with over half a billion users. But in the
beginning stages, when it was just a penny, Mark Zuckerberg believed in it
enough to continue to take consistent action in building his vision, no matter if
people believed in his penny or not.
A dead-broke, struggling young English teacher named Steve had started
writing a story about a troubled high-school girl. Within a handful of pages, he
realized the story wasn’t working out and tossed the pages in the trash. Why add
yet one more to his large and growing stack of rejection notices?
The next day, as Steve’s wife was doing some straightening up, she bent
down to empty his trash basket and happened to notice the curled little sheaf of
papers. She straightened them out, dusted off the cigarette ashes, read them and
took them to Steve: she thought he maybe had something worth finishing.
She was right. He did finish it, and the paperback rights sold for nearly a
half a million dollars. What’s more, his story of the troubled school girl named
Carrie launched Stephen King’s career: he became the most successful writer in
the twentieth century.
What Tabitha King recognized in the trash may have been a tarnished
penny, but still, it was a penny.
One chilly day in December 1955, an unknown forty-two-year-old
seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, decided she’d had enough. She was tired
after a long day’s work. Most of all, she was tired of being treated the way she
was—and tired of every other person of her color being treated that way, too. So
when she was told to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, she refused—even
when the bus driver threatened her with arrest.
It was no idle threat; she was arrested, then convicted and fined for violating
a city ordinance. Her case was the catalyst for the formation of a new civil rights
organization. On the same day of the woman’s hearing, the newly formed
Montgomery Improvement Association elected a young and relatively unknown
minister named Martin Luther King Jr. to be its spokesperson, launching a
movement that over the next decade abolished legal segregation and radically
transformed the face of the nation.
Rosa Parks was a penny.