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.