The-Slight-Edge

72 The Slight Edge
his eighth medal was one for the ages: the 100 meter Butterfly. When he came
down the final stretch, it looked like he was going to fall just inches short. After
touching the wall, the world was stunned when the clock showed Michael had
edged out Milorad Cavic by 1/100 of a second. Yes, that’s a very slight edge. But
it’s all he needed to secure a record eighth gold medal, perhaps becoming the
greatest Olympic athlete ever. What if he had lost by 1/100 of a second, would
we be calling him the greatest Olympic athlete ever? Probably not.
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 will ever forget the Master’s tournament where Phil Mickelson
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 his competitor. The difference? One and one half strokes per
day better. 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 breathtakingly 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