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.'
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