The Mundanity of Excellence

Read this on victoriaprew.com​

Read time: 1.5 minutes

Hey!

Firstly, do you want to join me for a walk in Central London? I'm putting together a founder walk in Central London on Saturday 8th August. A 5k loop, good conversation, a chance to meet each other and to get our steps in. You don't have to be a founder, you can have an idea too!

If you read this newsletter, chances are we share an outlook on life and ambition in business. This is a way to put faces to that and swap ideas in person.

Reserve your place here (tickets are limited) I'll send the meeting point and time.

[what nobody says out loud]

Excellence Is Not What You Think It Is

I read an absolutely wonderful paper from 1989 called The Mundanity of Excellence – An ethnographic report on stratification and Olympic swimmers.

The author breaks down (in a very readable but rigorous fashion) the differences in daily habits, practices and mindsets between swimmers in different fields of competition (from local club competitions all the way up to Olympic level).

[the three traps]

What the Paper Actually Says

I’d recommend making the time to read the whole thing (it took me around 30 minutes) but here’s a quick summary of the main points:

1. Quality over quantity. More effort within the same approach produces more of the same result. The swimmers who moved up levels did so by changing what they did, not by doing more of it. A better coach, a different environment, a more precise technique. For founders: the answer to a plateau is rarely more hours. It is usually a qualitative change in how you are spending them.

2. Talent matters less than you think. Chambliss argues that calling something talent is often a way of saying we cannot explain it. Beyond a baseline level of aptitude, what separates good from great is a specific set of practices and habits compounded over time. Most things that look like extraordinary talent are just ordinary actions repeated correctly for long enough that we can no longer see the individual steps. The word talent lets us off the hook. It converts a process into a myth.

3. Excellence is mundane. There is nothing extraordinary about what high performers do on any given day. They make their stroke cleaner. They show up on time. They sleep properly. They find satisfaction in the repetitions that others find boring. It is the accumulation of those ordinary actions, done correctly and consistently, that produces the result we observe from the outside. As Olympic champion Mary T. Meagher put it: "People don't know how ordinary success is."

[the action]

Pick one area of your work or life where your instinct is to do more. Write down what doing it better would actually look like instead. Not longer. Better. What is the qualitative change available to you right now that you have been ignoring in favour of adding volume?

That is where the next level is.

Good things take time. But only if you are doing the right things.

I find that both deeply reassuring and mildly terrifying. Reassuring because it means excellence is available to anyone willing to work on the right things. Terrifying because there is nowhere to hide. The ceiling is almost always a reflection of the quality of your current habits, not the quantity of your current effort.

Have a good week,

Victoria