The Mundanity of Excellence (1989)

> He was right, of course. What these athletes do was rather interesting, but the people themselves were only fast swimmers, who did the particular things one does to swim fast. It is all very mundane. When my friend said that they weren't exciting, my best answer could only be, simply put: That's the point.

This article (and its conclusions) reminded me a lot of the stuff David Foster Wallace wrote about the world of professional tennis. Wallace portrayed the life of a professional athlete as a kind of modern monasticism. From his Esquire article "The String Theory" (2008):

> Note the way "up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit [...]

> Sex and substance issues notwithstanding, professional athletes are our culture's holy men: They give themselves over to a pursuit, endure great privation and pain to actualize themselves at it, and enjoy a relationship to 'excellence' and 'perfection' that we admire and reward (the monk's begging bowl, the RBI guru's eight-figure contract) and like to watch, even though we have no inclination to walk that road ourselves. In other words, they do it for us, sacrifice themselves for our redemption.

Point being, the life of a professional athlete in the making is (mostly) not glamorous or exciting, but rather a very narrow existence comprised of pure persistence and dedication to a small set of very specific movements and activities, repeated over and over.

Lots of witty quotes in this article, such as:

... the true tests (such as the dissertation requirement) in graduate school are really designed to discover whether at some point one is willing to just turn the damn thing in.

The willingness to do hard, mundane work may be the most under-rated quality in all of modern life.

I think too little is made of the how the Internet and its various forms of instant entertainment make it all too easy to sidestep the mundane nature of most valuable work. It's worth considering the many long-term consequences.

Speaking of which, it's time to get back to work.

This research paper packs a wisdom of a great book in 16 pages. Very accessible and highly recommended. Some of my favorite quotes:

"What we call talent is no more than a projected reification of particular things done: hands placed correctly in the water, turns crisply executed, a head held high rather than low in the water. Through the notion of talent, we transform particular actions that a human being does into an object possessed, held in trust for the day when it will be revealed for all to see."

"The features of the sport which the “C” swimmer finds unpleasant, the top-level swimmer enjoys. What others see as boring—swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours, say—they find it peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic."

"Olympic Champions don’t just do much more of the same things that summer-league country-club swimmers do. They don’t just swim more hours, or move their arms faster, or attend more workouts. … Instead, they do things differently. Their strokes are different, their attitudes are different, their group of friends are different."

There are many more gems like that, but I can't find a text-only version of this paper anywhere.

> Talent is a useless concept. Varying conceptions of natural ability ('talent' e.g.) tend to mystify excellence, treating it as the inherent possession of a few; they mask the concrete actions that produce outstanding performance; they avoid the work of empirical analysis and logical explanations (clear definitions, seperable dependent and independent variables, and at least an attempt at establishing the temporal priority of the cause); and finally such conceptions perpetuate the sense of innate psychological differences between top performers and other people.

+1

An interesting idea from the paper is how low achievers often mistakenly think that "working harder" is all that's needed to move up to the next level.

> Having seen that "more is better" withing local situations, we tend to extrapolate. If I work this hard to get to my level, how hard must Olympic swimmers work?

> It is not by doing increasing amounts of work that one becomes excellent, but rather by changing the kinds of work. Beyond an initial improvement of strength, flexibility and feel, there is little increasing accumulation of speed through sheer volume of swimming. Instead, athletes move up to the top ranks through qualitative jumps: noticeable changes in their techniques, discipline, and attitude, accomplished usually through a change in settings, e.g. joining a new team with a new coach, new friends, etc, who work at a higher level. Without such qualitative jumps, no major improvements will take place.

I made this mistake when I was younger. All I wanted was to be good at drawing. The stock advice given out to budding artists online, and which I ate up at the time, is "draw every day". Just draw. Draw anything. Set a timer and draw what's in front of you. Make it a habit. It's assumed that more quantity is all that's missing. I did this for years and only improved slightly. Then, many years later, I returned to drawing, but with a different approach. This time, I studied other artists and tried to mimic their techniques, and in doing so improved significantly over the course of two months. That experience alone taught me the value of deliberate practice. Unfortunately, most people have become indoctrinated into the School of 10,000 Hours, and it's hard to convince them otherwise.