The

EXTRA
MILE
A Guide to Walking the Winner’s Road

JAMES SKINNER
MARK VICTOR HANSEN
ROICE KRUEGER
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The Extra Mile

A Guide to Walking the Winner’s Road

James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger

“The Extra Mile” will show you where to find your

greatest excellence and your greatest rewards.

___________________________________________
Give this book to everyone you know who desires to
excel!
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The Authors
JAMES SKINNER is the founder of two global financial
groups that manage billions of dollars of assets. He is
also recognized as one of the world’s foremost business
thinkers and appears regularly on Japanese television.

MARK VICTOR HANSEN is the co-creator of the Chicken

Soup for the Soul empire and is the best-selling nonfiction
author of all time. His goal is to make the planet work
for all humanity!

ROICE KRUEGER co-founded Franklin Covey, the

world’s largest training company, and has supervised
consulting projects for 80 percent of the Fortune 500.

NOTE: Ideas That Can Change Your Life™ is a

collaboration of three of the world’s most amazing
authors, speakers, and thinkers. The first person “I” may
refer to any of the authors.

To contact the authors for keynote and other

speaking engagements:
[Link]

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The Road to Legendary Living

The Road to legendary living is found not in the first
mile, but in the extra mile—in going beyond what others
do, beyond what is demanded of you, beyond what can
be reasonably expected.

Let’s start with a really good story that will help you
understand exactly what going the extra mile means.

Most of you know that Itzak Perlman is one of the

greatest violinists in the world, and one of the greatest
who ever lived.

On one particular occasion he was performing at

Lincoln Center in New York. Itzak Perlman suffered
from polio as a child, so he came out on stage using
crutches, which made his progress haltingly slow. It was
actually quite a painful thing for the audience to watch,
but they continued to applaud his entrance.

When Perlman finally reached his seat, he put his

crutches aside and started to play.

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Then, all of the sudden: “SNAP!” One of the

violin’s strings had broken.

As the sound reverberated throughout the great hall,

everyone in the audience had the same thought: “Oh,
my God! He’ll have to pick up his crutches again and
walk across the stage to get a new string.”

But that’s not what Itzak Perlman did, because he

knew how to go the extra mile. He said, “Ladies and
gentlemen, please give me a moment. We’ll soon be
ready to start again.”

Then Perlman removed the broken string, and he

began to play. It might seem impossible to play a piece
composed for a four-string violin with only three
strings, but that exactly what Itzak Perlman did. He did
it perfectly, and flawlessly—and with only three strings.

At the close of the performance, there was a

standing ovation that lasted half an hour. And it wasn’t
just for the music that Perlman had played, great as that

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was. It was because Itzak Perlman had gone the extra

mile.

He had come to perform, so he did perform. He

could have stopped, but he didn’t. He did it with three
strings instead of four. He did it with less than most
people would need, and he did more than most people
could do.

As my spiritual mentor puts it, “Any one can go the

first mile. It is those of us that go the second mile that
get the reward.”

Minimal Effort
Many people try to go through life with the least
possible effort.

But I propose that you should try to live life with

maximum effort all the time.

Once, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was at the peak

of his bodybuilding career, a magazine writer asked him,
“When you do ten repetitions of weights, which one of

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those gives you the most gain?” Arnold replied,

“Number twelve.” That’s why Arnold is a star and will
always be a star: he goes the extra mile. He was a star as
a body builder. He was a star as a film actor, and now he
is a star as a governor.

Let’s start using the principle of maximum effort in

our personal lives.

Are you pushing yourself beyond what you think

that you can do?

“Going the Extra Mile,” means pushing harder and

going further than ever before. Pushing yourself beyond
your self-created limits literally creates a new you.

Throughout my study of human nature, I’ve learned

that we have a phenomenal propensity to achieve what
we set out to achieve.

When I was 19 years old, I moved to Japan where I

lived for 22 years. Naturally, I spoke with many other
foreigners who had come to Japan. I made it a habit to

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ask them what their goal was in learning the Japanese

language. Usually they would say that they wanted to be
able to have normal, casual conversations—but rarely
anything more than that.

Well, I had a different goal. I wanted to be able to

speak Japanese on the telephone so well that people
would not know that I was a foreigner.

When I thought I had achieved my goal, I told

myself that I had gone the extra mile. But then I
translated a book into Japanese. The Japanese editors
told me that my Japanese was “completely inadequate
for a published book.” The truth was, I had not even
begun to be able to speak and write Japanese well
enough to satisfy my real goals.

That’s when I redefined what my “extra mile” really

was.

I finally studied Japanese to the point where I was

able to write best-selling books, and widely distributed
newspaper columns.

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All the rewards go to those who will step up to walk

the “extra mile.”

Sometimes it is easy to go the extra mile. When it

came to eating, I certainly found it easy. I overate so
much that I gained 50 extra pounds. Then I decided to
do something about it. I began by reading a book called,
How to be Younger Next Year. After reading the book, I
got a watch that could monitor my heart rate. I then
found my target heart rate and started exercising to
reach that rate. Soon I was pushing the limit. I ran on
elliptical machines and attended spin classes, forcing
myself to go harder and faster. The weight just melted
off. I lost 37 pounds because I went the extra mile.

Michael Jordan is another great example of going

the extra mile. When Michael first started playing
basketball, he couldn’t even make his high school team.
When he did make the team, he spent his first year on
the bench. Finally, he became a good basketball player
and then a great basketball player, which got him into
the NBA.

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As soon as he started in the NBA it was apparent

that he was a great shooter. Michael read the newspaper
articles about his high scoring, and he got very angry
about it. He wondered, “Why aren’t they writing about
my defense?”

The next year he became the number one defensive

player in the NBA. At that point the papers were writing
about how he was a “double threat,” and again, Michael
Jordan became angry: “How come they aren’t writing
about my teamwork?”

A year later he was number one in assists. To really

succeed and become a Michael Jordan, you have to go
the extra mile.

The Power of Focus

Michael Jordan learned to score from anywhere on the
court. If he was guarded on the right, he could go to the
left. If he was guarded on the left, he went to the right.
If he seemed stopped at mid-court, he could literally
“fly” to the basket and make an underhand lay-up. He

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became so focused on going the extra mile that he

practiced eight to fifteen hours a day instead of the usual
three or four hours. If you get one percent better each
day for a year, then you will have gotten 365% better.
This is exactly what Michael Jordan did.

The United States Olympic Nordic Ski team once

approached my organization about helping to build
teamwork. Usually Olympic athletes focus on their
individual performance, but here they needed teamwork
to be successful. I had only two or three hours to work
with them. So we went outdoors and did trust falls and
other team-building drills.

From this experience I learned something about the

mind of Olympic athletes. With every activity I gave
them, they did it five or six times better than I’d ever
seen. When I asked them to hold each other by the
arms, blindfold each other, and have one person guide
them through some rough terrain, they weren’t satisfied
with just shuffling along. They ran! They pushed
themselves. I asked them to do some trust falls and they
got themselves up on seven, eight, nine foot ladders and

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would drop themselves off into the arms of the team,

while others would do it from two or three feet. They
pushed themselves well beyond what normal people
would think possible—which is the mindset of going the
extra mile.

I’d like everyone to have the Olympic athlete’s

mindset, in business, in family, and everywhere else as
well.

I was recently in the dressing room of an Olympic

gold medalist for synchronized swimming from France.
She had a back injury, which was incredibly painful, but
she was about to go on for a two-hour performance in
front of fifty thousand people in Tokyo. Her warm up
was harder than the hardest workout that I have ever
been through in my life (and I’m preparing for the
Ironman race this year). This was her warm up while she
was injured, and for an event that was not even a
competition. This is a perfect example of going the extra
mile.

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There are several elements to consider in going the

extra mile. We’ll look at them in the pages that follow.
But first and foremost, you must raise your standards to
achieve an Olympic mindset.

Your thoughts create your reality—so when you are

an Olympic thinker your reality expresses those
thoughts and you become and Olympic achiever.

In his great book As a Man Thinketh, James Allen

wrote, “Mind is the master power that molds and
makes. Man is mind and evermore he takes the tools of
thought, shaping what he wills bring forth the thousand
joys a thousand deals. He thinks in secret it comes to
pass, environment is but his looking glass.”

Very simply, it’s all about the quality of our

thoughts.

Quality of Your Thoughts

One hundred percent of your results come from the
quality of what you think. One hundred percent! It’s not

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someone else; it’s you. Your thinking causes your

behavior, and behavior creates those results.

If you think poorly or you think you are weak, you

will get poor, weak results.

So, if you want to have excellent results, if you want

the billion versus the million, you have got to think
billion.

You have got to de-weed the garden of your mind.

It concerns me that so many people I work with

read low-quality books, listen to low-quality music,
watch low-quality movies, look at low-quality magazines,
have low-quality conversations with other people, and
then they want a high quality life.

You simply can’t do it!

When I started to prepare for the Ironman race, I

studied the people that have actually won the world
championship in the Ironman competition. When one

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of the champions was asked what he thought was the

ideal weekly training schedule, he said, “As much as my
body can absorb.” So, basically, his life was organized
around exercise, sleep, exercise, sleep, eat, exercise, and
sleep. He became a legend!

Going the extra mile really starts when you de-weed

the brain.

You have to fill your brain with the most uplifting,

inspiring thoughts possible. You need to read Chicken
Soup for the Soul, you need to read Ideas That Can Change
Your Life . . . You need to read whatever wisdom,
literature, scriptures, or biographies that are in your
culture that are going to lift you and inspire you.

Your brain needs to be completely filled all the time

with the highest quality Olympic thoughts.

Everyone forgets that the world “Olympic” comes

from Mount Olympus. Your thoughts need to be on the
peak of that mountain all the time.

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Raise Your Standards

You need to have better goals and dreams than you have
ever had before. You can never have too many of them.
Most people in the world have too few, and there is only
one other person beside myself that I know of that has
six thousand of them!

You need to have goals in all dimensions of your

life—health goals, family goals, financial goals,
emotional goals, mental goals, spiritual goals, and
physical goals.

It’s actually very easy to do.

You just need to realize that you can have anything

that you want in your life.

Take out a piece of paper and write down everything

that you would like to achieve, receive, have, do, get,
see, or experience in your life or in the world in which
you live.

You just write them all down.

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I tell people, “Imagine that all you need to do to

achieve this goal is to write it down. If all that was
needed was for you to write it down, would you do it?”
You need to remove the limitations from your mind
about what is possible if you are going to go that extra
mile!

By focusing on the various dimensions and different

areas of your life, you can create a powerful synergy. As
you build your health, you will build your mind. By
being proactive in your thinking, you can rebuild your
whole self.

Add a Zero
Here’s another challenge I want to put to you: add one
more zero.

My mother used to work for one of the most

influential men in the state of Oregon. He managed a
power company that provided electricity for everywhere
from the state of Washington to the state of Utah.
When she first went to work for him, she was having a

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little bit of trouble comprehending her role there and

feeling comfortable, because here boss and the people
around him were so wealthy and powerful.

One day she woke up and said, “It’s just a matter of

zeros. And anybody can add an extra zero.”

So if you want to become a millionaire, just think

about becoming a deca-millionaire, which means you
would have ten million dollars.

If you want to sell a hundred thousand copies of

your book, start thinking about selling a million copies.

If you want to sell a million books, start thinking

about selling ten million books.

If you want to sell ten million books, start thinking

about selling one hundred million books.

I once called up a friend of mine in Tokyo and said,

“How would you like to have a hundred million
dollars?” He was driving to work at the time and almost

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had a traffic accident. He said, “I would love to have a

hundred million dollars! I’m not stupid!”

I said, “Okay, that’s great. How many projects have

you got going on right now that even have a remote
possibility of giving you a hundred million dollars?” He
didn’t even have one.

He stopped his car and couldn’t move for ten

minutes.

He set an extra zero on his goals, gave away the

company that he had at the time, and set up a new
company that now moves billions of dollars.

As soon as your goals expand, your capacity expands

to achieve your goals.

If you think hundred dollar thoughts, you get

hundred dollar results. If you think thousand dollar
thoughts, then you get thousand dollar results. So think
million, billion, trillion!

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Optimize Your Health

If you want to go the extra mile, you need a body that
can take you there. If we don’t take care of our health,
we sub-optimize everything else.

You need to have Olympic levels of energy in every

area of your life and that means taking care of your body
at an Olympic level.

Notice the connection we made between health and

energy, because health is all about creating energy.

If you have weak energy, you have poor health.

To optimize your health, you have to exercise.

That means both aerobic exercise, for breathing and

heart rate, and anaerobic exercise for strength and
muscle mass. You should also include some form of
flexibility training, such as yoga. I personally do yoga
three times a week.

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Nutrition is another necessity for optimal health. It’s

not only what you take in, but what you absorb. You
need to take in nine fresh fruits and vegetables a day, at
a minimum. It’s easy, if you just take a close look at
what you eat. The green in your food is the energy in
your life. Life on the planet comes from the green of the
planet. What could be simpler?

Basically, you need to go to your supermarket and

you need to shop primarily in one section of the
supermarket, the section with fruits and vegetables. You
need to be looking for the highest quality, most organic,
most richly colored fruits and vegetables.

What about protein? The truth is human beings

have no need to ingest protein whatsoever. Protein is
not actually absorbed through the intestinal walls. So,
whenever you take a protein into your body, it needs to
be broken down in the stomach into its component
amino acids. What we really need are the essential amino
acids that are used to create all the proteins in the body.

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All the amino acids that we need can be acquired

from fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes—and you
might also want to add a little fish to your diet.

Most people are worried about not getting enough

protein. They really need to worry about getting too
much. You can’t absorb more than 32 grams of protein
a day anyway unless you are pregnant. And a small
hamburger at the most popular fast food chain has over
40!
So you need get into fruits and vegetables and cut
everything else down to a minimum.

Maximize Your Career

How can you go the extra mile in work?

Most of us are trying to get by with whatever the

customer has asked or whatever the boss has demanded.

I teach people that service is not doing what the

customer has asked for. Service is doing what the
customer didn’t have the courage to ask for, or know
how to ask for.

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I checked into the Ritz-Carlton this morning. Sitting

there on the table is something that I love very much.
They know this; they discovered this. Very few people
know that I love strawberries dipped in chocolate. They
are a divine gift to me. It was very special. They had four
of them sitting there waiting for me. They exceeded my
expectations. The hotel went the extra mile for me by
exceeding my expectations.

I always want to go the extra mile. I always want to

do everything that is required—and then that little extra.

This is what made the Chicken Soup series go so well.

We tested every Chicken Soup title. When we did our
third book, Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, we sent it out
to twelve thousand teenagers and said, “What do you
like, what do you not like?” Unequivocally, they all
wanted a story about how to handle abuse and where to
go. So, Jack Canfield and I found the right 800 numbers
to call. We helped eliminate hundreds of thousands of
child abusers. Little things like that make such a big
difference.

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Little hinges move big doors.

I remember my first job with the U.S. Embassy in

Tokyo. Do you think an embassy is a glamorous place?
Do you think you have opportunities to meet with the
prime ministers and such? My boss would come into the
room and say, “I need someone to help count the
inventory in the warehouse. But nobody that works in
the Foreign Service wants to help count the inventory in
the warehouse, and nobody that works in the state
department sees that as their job.” So, I would raise my
hand and say, “Hey I’ll help.” The next day, the boss
would come in and say, “I need somebody to do this
job, anybody interested?” I would say, “I’ll do that.”
Then the next day I have another dirty job. My overtime
pay every month I worked at the Embassy exceeded my
normal pay, but the big benefit came when the Emperor
of Japan came to visit. My boss had to decide who could
be trusted to take him around. That job and others like
it came to me.

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In any organization you will see people that go the

extra mile. They are the ones who do their work and
then help someone else do theirs. We had a great person
that we used to work with that always went the extra
mile, Dr. Dee Groberg. When we first brought Dr.
Groberg over to Japan to give a seminar, he’d flown all
day and all night. When he arrived in Tokyo, we figured
he was going to want to go to the hotel and get some
sleep. No, not Dr. Groberg. He said, “Let’s go to the
seminar room, I want to check the room out.”

So, he went to the seminar room and made sure the

chairs were set up just right. He checked the projector.
He checked that the markers wrote and would be visible
from the back of the room. He checked every single
detail. He asked what we were going to be serving for
lunch. He checked to make sure the water was going to
be available for all the participants. Then, after all of
that, he finally said, “Let’s have dinner, because I want
to talk to you about your organization and see how it’s
going for you.”

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So we went out to have dinner and he made sure it

would be a successful event for us. And finally he went
up to his room.

The next day, when Dr. Groberg came out on stage,

he had already gone the extra mile. Then he did it again
by giving the best seminar anyone in the audience had
ever seen!

Another man that goes the extra mile and is a lovely

guy in Australia named Bryce Courtenay. He wrote a
hugely successful book called The Power of One. It is a
movie as well. His book signings attract so many people
that the line wraps around the store, but he won’t start
signing until he has shaken every person’s hand. It could
be 800 or 900 people, but he does it anyway. When he
sees old ladies, he takes them aside and asks for a chair
to be brought out. It’s a little thing but nobody forgets
it.

At the Osaka International Exposition, there were

long lines in front of the most popular pavilions, but
none longer than the pavilion sponsored by Matsushita

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Electric (Panasonic). People would wait two or three

hours just to get in.

One day someone on the staff of the pavilion was

looking at the video monitor showing the guests lined
up outside and said, “I think that’s Mr. Matsushita right
there!” But how could that be? He owned the whole
company (the largest electronics conglomerate in Japan);
he could come in through the back anytime he wanted
to.

But it was indeed Konosuke Matsushita.

The staff all ran outside and invited him to come in.
He quietly explained, “I’m just out here experiencing
what it is like for the customer.”

When you own a multi-billion-dollar enterprise and

you’re standing in line finding out what it is to be a
customer, that’s going the extra mile!

The Extra Mile Comes From Love

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I have another good friend in Japan named Teiichiro

Hori, who created and built Tokyo Disneyland. He
shared this story with me.

A young married couple had their first child, but the

child died shortly after birth. The woman had been told
she could never have another child. Their dream had
been to take their child to Disneyland and now they
were never going to have an opportunity to do so.

A year after the child had died, the couple decided

to go to Disneyland while remembering their child. It
was a kind of memorial ceremony for them.

When it was lunchtime, they went into a restaurant

and ordered a children’s meal for their child that was not
able to be there with them.

There was only one problem: you had to be under a

certain age to order a children’s meal.

The woman at the counter explained that it was

company policy only to sell children’s meals to children.

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But when they explained their situation to the young

girl at the counter she said, “I understand. We will
provide the meal.” She came out from behind the
counter with the three meals (two adult meals and one
children’s meal) and said, “May I escort the three of you
to your table?”

That is going the extra mile!

The Best People

This brings us to our last point.

You need to have an Olympic standard for your

peer group and the people that you spend time with.
This includes people that you work with, people that
you play with, and your family.

You should spend time with people you enjoy being

around because they nurture you and you nurture them.

I was once with best selling author Robert Kiyosaki

in Yokohama giving a presentation. We were back stage

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and he said to me, “Look at the seven people that you

spend the most time with. That’s your future.”

I encourage you to make a list of the seven people

whom you spend the most time with, get a clear picture
in your mind of who they are. Look at that image and
decide whether or not that is what you want your future
to look like.

Thomas Edison used to work ten weeks, and then

he took ten days off. Once he went down to Florida
with Henry Ford, who used to work for him. They
argued about whether in the future there would be gas-
powered or electric powered cars.

When Edison and Ford went fishing, they came

back without have caught anything.

Edison’s wife said, “That’s impossible. Everybody

catches fish around here.”

Edison replied, “We don’t have any hooks and we

don’t have any bait.”

© 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger, All rights reserved. 29
[Link] Ide as T h at C an Ch an ge Yo u r Li fe ™ in S ucc ess

The Extra Mile

“Then what are you doing out there?”

Edison answered, “We’re fishing for ideas.”

Whether it’s the people you work with or the people

you play with make sure you push each other to go the
extra mile. Hold each other to a higher standard.

It is your choice. You can go half a mile, part of a

mile, a full mile, or you can go the extra mile. In that
extra mile you will find your greatest excellence and your
greatest rewards.

With best wishes,

James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, Roice Krueger

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For additional copies:
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[Link] Ide as T h at C an Ch an ge Yo u r Li fe ™ in S ucc ess

The Extra Mile

© 2007, James Skinner, Mark Victor Hansen, and Roice Krueger, All rights reserved. 31