Rinsing Your Cottage Cheese

The analogy comes from a disciplined world-class athlete named Dave Scott, who won the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon six times. In training, Scott would ride his bike 75 miles, swim 20,000 meters, and run 17 miles – on average, every single day. Dave Scott did not have a weight problem! Yet he believed that a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet would give him an extra edge.

So, Dave Scott – a man who burned at least 5,000 calories a day in training – would literally rinse his cottage cheese to get the extra fat off. Now, there is no evidence that he absolutely needed to rinse his cottage cheese to win the Ironman; that’s not the point of the story. The point is that rinsing his cottage cheese was simply one more small step that he believed would make him just that much better, one more small step added to all the other small steps to create a consistent program of super discipline.

I've always pictured Dave Scott as running the 26 miles of the marathon - hammering away in hundred-degree heat on the black, baked lava fields of the Kona coast after swimming 2.4 miles in the ocean and cycling 112 miles against ferocious crosswinds - and thinking to himself: "Compared to rinsing my cottage cheese every day, this just isn't that bad."

An extract from Jim Collins' "Good To Great"