— Lao Tzu
I’ve presented the story of the penny doubled every day to hundreds and hundreds of audiences, and often I hear a comment like this:
Wow, that’s amazing ... to think that you could start with nothing and build a fortune!
That’s not quite accurate:
you don’t start with nothing. You start with a penny.
No big deal, I mean, of course, you start with a penny, but, you know, it’s basically starting with nothing.
No, it’s not: it’s starting with a penny. It may seem like an insignificant difference (although you’re probably starting to have a little bit different view of the word “insignificant”). The truth is, it makes all the difference.
To accomplish anything worth accomplishing, to create success, to achieve your dreams, you don’t have to do impossible, extraordinary, superhuman things. But you have to do something. You have to start with a penny.
Success doesn’t come from nowhere; it can’t be conjured up out of thin air. It comes from a very small, tiny beginning—but there has to be a beginning. That beginning is the thing people miss, the thing they don’t see. And they don’t see it because it’s so tiny, it’s almost invisible.
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.
The Slight Edge reader James Paris of Daytona Beach, Florida, knows the power of the penny.
Six years ago I learned that my accountant had embezzled $2 million from our company. I ended up in bankruptcy and languished in depression for five years. About six months ago I purchased The Slight Edge and I was able to find the motivation to just take a small step every day toward rebuilding my life.
Now I am back on TV and radio and writing again. I have rebuilt my website ChristianMoney.com and have had multiple financial breakthroughs. I realized that I could not change my past but that I could rebuild a new future by taking just a small step every day in the right direction, just like the power of the penny. In just a few months I am well on the way to regaining the success I had prior to losing everything.
Let’s do one more bit of time travel. There was a time, a certain number of years ago, when a tiny blob of gelatin began to pulse with hidden potential. It was barely more than a speck of matter, about the thickness of a dollar bill, at the very threshold of human sight: any smaller and it would have been invisible to the naked eye.
Though tiny, this insignificant little dot of matter (you could have fit about twenty of them on the head of a pin) contained chemical instructions that, if printed out, would have filled more than 500,000 pages; in fact, it was among the most organized, complex structures in the universe. Over the next nine months of Slight Edge compounding, this little blob of gelatin would blossom into over thirty trillion cells before being born into the open air ... and letting out a wail as it took its first breath.
It would become you.
You started as a penny.
A Penny for Your Thoughts ...
Now imagine that instead of a penny doubling every day, it’s your health that you’re increasing by one penny’s worth ... and then by two pennies, and then four.
If you could come up with something that would make you feel one penny’s worth better, could you do that every day? Of course. A little moderate exercise, a brisk one-mile walk, a quarter of an hour on a treadmill, not going that fast. Get your heart rate up slightly, no big deal.
And your reward? When you get up the next morning, do you feel better?
Not really. I mean, not noticeably. Maybe just a little ... say, a penny’s worth.
Hardly seems worth the effort. And after a week, you’re feeling sixty-four cents’
worth better. Big deal! You’ve had to put up with some rainy weather, walk through a few stiff muscles, and miss your favorite news program ... hey, it’s really not worth it.
But what if you kept doing it anyway? Would you eventually feel like a million bucks? No—you’d feel like ten million.
But you need to start with the penny.
Now imagine that penny is your knowledge.
If I told you that reading Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich would change your life, would you sit down and read it, cover to cover, today? Mind you, that’s a 256-page book, and those aren’t lightweight pages. Or another classic, Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. That’s a 358-pager, and it’s not easy reading.
Would you read either one in a single day? I doubt it. I wouldn’t—I can’t spend the entire day reading, and I’ll bet you can’t either.
But could you read a penny’s worth—say, ten pages? (Actually, at current used-book prices on amazon.com, ten pages of the Hill book would cost about fifty cents, and ten pages of the Covey book would run about ten cents—but I’m using the penny here as a metaphor!) I don’t know how much you would get out of ten pages; maybe a lot, maybe nothing. Let’s say you get nothing. But if you could read ten pages today, could you read ten more tomorrow? Of course you could—anyone who can read could do that.
And if you do that, and you keep it up every day for a year, you will have read about a dozen brilliant, life-transforming classics. Your mind will be filled with the strategies and know-how to create a startling new level of success. You will have thoughts of millionaires—all from a penny.
But you need to start with the penny.