The Mundanity of Excellence

My reflections

Excellence is mundane: accomplished through doing actions that are ordinary on their own but stack up over time

Every time a decision comes up, the qualitatively “correct” choice will be made. The action, in itself, is nothing special; the care and consistency with which it is made is.
Just increasing sheer time and hoping things will improve will NEVER lead you to excellence
In the pursuit of excellence, maintaining mundanity is the key psychological challenge

The mundanity of excellence is everywhere.

For e.g. in writing: First, writing consistently. Then, improving one thing at a time
Or for e.g, In working out: just doing the same thing for more time will not get you there. You need to make the qualitatively correct choices.
Or for e.g. in chess: me just playing a few games every day will not improve your game. Learn more puzzles, learn more openings, practice different variations. Find the things that will qualitatively improve your game and drive you to excellence.

Talent is useless. Finding motivation in “big dreams” is useless. Find the small wins, get them consistently.

All notes

What is excellence: the note defines it as “consistent superiority of performance”

What is not a source of excellence:

Not a product of socially deviant personalities (oddballs, loners etc)
Not a result of “quantitative” changes in behaviour. For e.g. increased training time does not make one swim fast. Simply doing more of the same will not make you level up
Not a result of some special inner quality of the athlete (talent/gift/natural ability)
- This one is specially important bcz these terms are used to mystify the process of achieving excellence and used as a shield for our lack of outcome.
- “To call someone divine means ‘here we do not have to compete’”

What, therefore, is a source of excellence:

Qualitative differentiation (could be technique, competing in different types of meet)
- One myth to break is that olympic level swimmers don’t just swim more hours or attend more workouts. They start doing this but only after say national level status is achieved, not a result of it.
- They just do things differently: Their strokes are different, their attitudes are different, their group of friends are different; their parents treat the sport differently, the swimmers prepare differently for their races, and they enter different kinds of meets and events.
  - “Their energy is carefully channeled”
  - “Never sloppy in practice, never sloppy in events”
  - Three things they do differently: Technique, Discipline, Attitude - they are not suffering. In fact they truly enjoy what others think suffering.

You will not “work your way up” to excellence by just accumulating sheer time in your field.

You don’t increase your amount of work, but rather change the kind of work
This typically happens by a step change in your life - change your coach, friend circle etc.

Climbing towards excellence is jumping in discrete steps, not a long continuous road of improvement. What that means is, same effort doesn’t just keep linearly increasing.

Excellence is mundane:
- The tiny things done consistently and mastered to perfection
Motivation is mundane too: you can feel inspired by the big goal for a few days but the day to day needs to be interesting/exciting for you. Similar to how, you can’t beat someone for whom work is play.
- And this then should lead to small wins. That is what keeps the momentum going
In the pursuit of excellence, maintaining mundanity is the key psychological challenge

There is no secret; there is only the doing of all those little things, each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit, an ordinary part of one’s everyday life.