The 20mile lesson is all about discipline. You do business or grow your company in a steady manner without compromising your values, culture, etc for business opportunities. So in good economy, when you have multiple opportunities, you only take the ones which fit your company’s strategy. And in bad years you work 3 times harder just to maintain your strategy.
A good example is Southwest airlines: at every given year they get requests from 10-20 airports/cities to open hubs there. Southwest will only do 3 or 4. The reason is maintaining their unique strategy (fun culture, operations, etc.). If they would open 10 hubs for example they will have to, by definition, compromise on several attributes of their strategy. That might give them short term advantage but over the long term it will hurt their business.
A Learning a Day 