The person determined to achieve maximum success learns the principle that progress is made one step at a time. A house is built a brick at a time. Football games are won a play at a time. A department store grows bigger one new customer at a time. Every big accomplishment is a series of little accomplishments. Eric Sevareid, well-known author and correspondent, reported in Readers Digest (April 1957) that the best advice he ever received was the principle of the next mile. Here part of what he said: During World War II, I and several others had to parachute from a crippled Army transport plane into the mountainous jungle on the Burma-India border. It was several weeks before an armed relief expedition could reach us, and so we began a painful, plodding march out to civilized India. We were faced by a 40 mile trek, over mountains in August heat and monsoon rains. In the first hour of the march I rammed a boot nail deep into one foot; by evening I had bleeding blisters the size of a 50-cent piece on both feet. Could I hobble 140 miles? Could the others some in worse shape than I complete such a distance? We were convinced we could not. But we could hobble to that ridge we could make the next friendly village for the night. And that, of course, was all we had to do. When I relinquished my job and income to under take a book of a quarter of a million words I could not bear to let my mind dwell on the whole scope of the project. I would surely have abandoned what has become my deepest source of professional pride. I tried to think only of the next paragraph, not the next page and certainly not the next chapter. Thus, for six said months, I never did anything but set down one paragraph after another. The book wrote itself.