Eric Tian

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon an article called The Mundanity of Excellence: An enthnographic report on stratification and Olympic swimmers. It examines the question of ‘What makes people excellent?’ by assessing the differences in practices, habits and mindsets of swimmers at different levels. The general message is that everyone can be excellent with the right set of practices, rather than some obscure notion of ‘talent’, an encouraging message for all. Here are 3 key takeaways.

1. Excellence comes from qualitative, not quantitative differentiation.

World-class swimmers don’t necessarily train longer or work harder than average swimmers. What differentiates the best from the rest, the author argues, is differences in quality. The best swimmers tend to be more mindful of their technique, rock up to training on time, sleep regular hours and watch what they eat.

This idea makes sense. There’s no use training 5 hours a day in a pool with incorrect technique: you’d be training the wrong thing, engraining the wrong skills. However, I suspect there is a balance here between quality and quantity. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell notes this observation for classical musicians:

Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

2. Excellence comes from differences in attitude.

The features that an average swimmer finds unpleasant, the top swimmer enjoys. What others see as boring – swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours, say – the top performers find peaceful, even meditative. Those that are excellent enjoy hard practices, look forward to difficult competitions and set difficult goals.

From a running perspective, this idea is familiar. Some of the top runners at my Uni running club do 30km long runs on the weekend. Once, I asked them how they do it every week and if they get bored of it. I remember their confused faces staring back at me. “We don’t do it for work,” they said. “We do it because it’s relaxing and it’s fun.”

3. Excellence is mundane.

This is the main point of this article – that there’s really nothing ‘special’ about high achievers. They just have this set of practices, habits and mindsets that when added and compounded together over time, result in the phenomenon of excellence. The notion of ‘talent’ is essentially meaningless and is just a lazy way of saying, ‘we don’t know how they did it.’ The author argues that if we took the time to investigate what makes a top performer excellent, we’d find a set of practices that if we wanted to, could apply to our own lives for similar results. It’s really quite mundane. In his conclusion, he writes:

But of course, 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. 

Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.

– Ben Okri

When I was a kid, I used to obsess over this type of Lego called Bionicles. It was more than just blocks and pieces, there was this whole universe about it – movies and comics with heroes and villains and twists and turns, and 5-year old me devoured it all. When I went to Big W with my parents, I would always beg them to buy me a new Bionicle to play with. And usually, out of what I now suspect was a ploy to get me to pipe down, they complied. Little did they know how much these toys would take over my time, thoughts and obsessions.

From the ages of 5 to 7, hours each night were spent on my bedroom floor with swarms of Bionicles pieces in front of me. During these hours, I’d create epic battle scenes, new ‘hybrid’ Bionicles and a complex story with my figures which I thought was honestly pretty good. At the peak of my obsession, I even created a card game out of Bionicles. For each card, I would give each unique Bionicle a name, a ‘description’, some attack/defence stats and draw its face on a piece of paper like a Yu-Gi-Oh card. Looking back, it was absolutely ridiculous but as a kid, I was in my own little world and I loved it.

This strange phase of my life illustrates how my inputs directly influenced my outputs. It was only through my constant input of Bionicles: the movies, comics and buying new figures, that I was able to fuel my ideas of storylines, new figures and even a card game. If I had never taken any of these ‘Bionicles inputs’ in, there is no chance any of these weird ‘Bionicles outputs’ would’ve ever transpired.

Of course, this concept applies to almost all domains. If you want good grades, you’d better learn the lectures. If you want a healthy body, you’d better eat right. And if you want to be an epic Bionicles producer, you’d better have some interest in what the Universe and characters are like. Our outputs are directly influenced by our inputs.

This seems obvious. But due to the enormity of the information available on the internet these days (let alone podcasts, movies or books), there is huge potential for our ideas about ourselves, the world or other people to be radically altered. Whether it’s a subtle Facebook comment or an alarming news headline, the amount and diversity of stimuli out there that we can interact with is astronomical. This means negative and unproductive stimuli can hurt us, inspiring and exhilarating stimuli can build us up, but on unprecedented levels.

Which leads to the idea of the importance of developing ‘intentional inputs’. Whether it’s reading good books, avoiding unproductive pieces of information or having a stronger filter, controlling the ideas and products we input can help make dramatic changes in our outputs, whether that’s ideas, physique or anything in between, illustrating the ever-increasing need to defend our inputs.

I’ll admit, this can be uncomfortable as it creates responsibility on us to decide how we want to see things, and responsibility can be scary. But at the same time, this notion of defending inputs is also remarkably liberating, as the ideas that shape how we see the world can be slowly but surely moulded into something new, if we only decide to choose so. The potential for this is enormous.

So what you need to do, if you really want to broaden your horizons as a listener, is to get exposed to new things. Pick somebody. It doesn’t have to be me…. Find somebody who you trust as a guide, and let them open your ears to these new experiences.

If you do that, you will be rewarded infinitely…

– Ted Giota, from a podcast episode on Conversations with Tyler.

On another note, I’ve been enjoying writing recently and so I’ve decided to write more during this Easter break. Starting today, I’ll aim to write 2 thoughts a week on this online journal: probably on a Sunday and a Thursday. I’ve absolutely no clue how long this’ll last, but we’ll see how it goes. As always, any feedback or comments are always appreciated!