It is the little greater care of the extra hour, the additional effort
that constitutes the margin of advantage of one man over another.
President Garfield said:
When I was in college, a certain young man was leading the class
in Latin. I couldn’t see how he got the start of us all so. To
us he seemed to have an infinite knowledge. He knew more than
we did. Finally, one day, I asked him when he learned his Latin
lesson. “At night,” he replied. I learned mine at the same time.
His window was not far from mine, and I could see him from my
own. I had finished my lesson the next night as well as usual,
and, feeling sleepy, was about to go to bed. I happened to
saunter to my window, and there I saw my classmate still bending
diligently over his book. “There’s where he gets his margin on
me,” I thought. “But he shall not have it for once,” I resolved.
“I will study just a little longer than he does to night.” So
I took down my books again, and, opening to the lesson, went
to work with renewed vigor. I watched for the light to go out
in my classmate’s room. In fifteen minutes it was all dark.
“There is his margin,” I thought. It was fifteen minutes more
time. It was hunting out fifteen minutes more of rules and root
derivatives. How often, when a lesson is well prepared, just
five minutes spent in perfecting it will make one the best in
the class. The margin in such a case as that is very small, but
it is all-important. The world is made up of little things.
(Text.)
(1971)