Sometimes we find that the price of victory is not the hours of labor and toil that it takes to win, but rather that tiny bit of extra effort that we exude at the finish line.

In race after race, the difference between victory and not-so-distant second place was ever so slight.

Just ask Blaine Lindgren as he came off the last hurdle, racing toward a sure gold medal in the 1964 Olympic Games in Rome. The only problem, Lindgren went in straight up at the finish line while America's Hayes Jones, in the outside lane, leaned ever-so-slightly at the final second to touch the tape first and to take away the gold medal, barely nipping him by a hundredth of a second.

Can you imagine how minute a hundredth of a second is? Do you know how many hundreds of gold medals have been won by a hundredth of a second? Perhaps no one does, but in almost every race, it is the difference between the first and second place winners. It's the tiny bit of extra effort that often spells victory and defeat on the oval, and it's the same tiny difference that often makes the difference in life. In Innsbruck, Austria, the gateway to the Brenner Pass and the capital of the Tyrol, seven gold medals were won by less than one one-hundredth of a second.

Do you know that you can't even see that on the electronic scoreboard? There's hardly anything you can do with your hands to illustrate just how little that is. A blink of the eye is a fifth of a second. Can you imagine training ten years of your life and then loosing by that small of a difference?

In Munich, Germany, one athlete lost an Olympic Gold Medal and a World Championship by just two one-thousandths of a second. You can't even illustrate it. No move you can make, no device that is available to the human eye can illustrate how minute a thousandth of a second is.

When it comes to life, just the slightest lean toward the positive can make the difference. It can change your life if you'll only give it a try. But most of us don't want to pay that final price to gain the ultimate satisfaction.

We go through life, and then we cause it all to collapse because our attitudes aren't right. But we can change all that if we'll begin today by leaning toward the positive.

One of my twin sons, Jason, has spent the last three of years at the US Olympic Training Center on the campus of Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Michigan. He has been there for two reasons: (1) to try to make the US Olympic Team in weightlifting, and (2) to earn his graduate degree in microbiology. I can assure you the latter is more important than the former.

Jason tells me from time to time about some of the many athletes he meets in Michigan. NMU trains weightlifters, boxers, speed skaters and wrestlers, to name a few. One of the most astute observations he makes is that the difference between the top ranked Olympian in the world and the guy who is ranked tenth is the minutest amount of weight or speed. The difference between greatness and mediocrity, many times, is infinitesimal.

Just like in life, the difference between the great and the average guy is only three or four inches, the width between their ears.

As my friend Zig Ziglar, CSP, CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame is fond of saying, "It's your attitude not your aptitude that's going to determine your altitude in life."