I’ve had a strange week.

Last Thursday, after months of waiting, the Inc 5000 list came out. We applied earlier this year and were hoping to make the top 500, the companies featured in Inc magazine. We came in at #524.

I had to wonder how close we were to that magic #500. Looking it up, #500 was Image Solutions in Torrence, California. Their 3 year growth was 588.0%. Ours was 587.7%. Yes, that’s right, a difference of 0.3%, or just over $2,000 in revenue for 2006. Ouch.

This past weekend, I was playing Scrabble with my father-in-law, Ed. Ed’s very good at Scrabble. Not like those crazy dictionary-memorizing-anagram-obsessed guys in Word Freak (which is a must read), but he’s very good. Here’s the funny thing. We played two games and both games ended in a tie. What are the chances of that? In the second game, I blew a 20 point lead in the last few turns. And, Ed could have won if he would have made the word “Eng” with his last tile (Eng, we learned, is the name of the phonetic symbol used in words like “sing” and “finger.”) So we both had to settle for a near miss.

Here’s what’s strange. It seems that the obvious lesson here is that you always need to give a little bit more effort because you never know when 1 Scrabble point or 0.3% of revenue is going to make a big difference. But as it turns out, I’m thrilled to be #524 and I had a blast during both Scrabble games. So I guess the point really is to not get too caught up in what could have been. Sometimes near misses can also be pretty big wins.