@habits

I wrote the below paragraph as part of a longer essay about my first trip to Japan. Which was an incredible trip, one that changed my life. Still think about it often.

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When we finish shopping at our final store, and because such shopping requires an inordinate amount of getting lost and doubling-back and finding wifi to navigate and bothering strangers for directions, we are famished and it is almost time for dinner. So we set in search of food and soon, for in Tokyo the food is everywhere, come upon a ramen shop that obviously, just so obviously even to a non-gourmand like me, looks like heaven in a ceramic bowl. Why, you ask? In some ways it is like seeing good art, or hearing good music, or enjoying a good novel: the five senses take in their snapshots and the intuition immediately gets to work. Your eyes see the locals bent over their steaming bowls as if on a mission, chewing and scooping with their eyes fluttering in tasty ecstasy just-so. Your eyes see the chefs with their indescribable air of learned confidence and personal satisfaction from a noodle well-made, a broth well-boiled. Your ears hear the slurping noises of lustful customers both deep and long, an inhalation hard to fake. They pick up the quiet chatter of the waiting guests who can think only about the upcoming meal, talk only about the menu. Your nose smells the salted broth with its thousand unknowable seasonings, the frying fat of the pork slices cut so thick they could be mistaken for albino chuck roast, the fragrant simmering essence of twelve humans sweating, drooling, sighing. I’d only had two dining experiences so transcendent they were instantly imprinted in my largely vacant memory like a newborn duck imprints on his mother. This made it number three. The final stroke of blissful dining state was when we soon sit down at the bar, next to this roly mountain of a working sarari man, his extra-large white dress shirt glued to his sticky white undershirt by helpless layers of sweat, his face, his shoulders, his chest, even his stomach seemingly hunched over a Giza pyramid of chewy noodles piled high and defying gravity, alongside not one but two plates of gleaming white pork steaks dripping with fat and oil, the chef handing him the food slowly, methodically, sympathetically, with the solemnity of a royal banquet and the familiarity of an old friend, this poly giant nodding with controlled diplomacy, his aura screaming silently in impatient ecstasy, and then watching him, from the corner of my eye and with measured glances, destroy his meal like a reincarnated, vengeful Ramses come to annihilate Cairo.

The Mundanity of Excellence is a brief academic essay on the characteristics that separate world-class swimmers from the rest. It does a good job of mining a complicated topic for great anecdotes and advice.

Here’s a pdf download of the paper, although it’s not the original.

What follows are some brief notes, a skeleton outline of the paper, with excerpts.

Why study swimming? 

Within competitive swimming in particular, clear stratification exists not only between individuals but also between defined levels of the sport as well

Rowdy Gaines, beginning in the sport when 17 years old, jumped from a country club league to a world record in the 100 meter freestyle event in only three years. This allows the researcher to conduct true longitudinal research in a few short years

Excellence in swimming is about QUALITATIVE improvements, not QUANTITATIVE ones

• Quantitative improvements: doing more of the same thing
• Qualitative improvements: doing different kinds of things

What excellence is NOT:

• “socially deviant personalities”: champion athletes are not social outliers, loners, oddballs
• differences in talent
• simply training harder – although this seems to directly contradict Malcolm Gladwell’s 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. – Gladwell in Outliers

The main differences between less and more elite levels of the swimming world are:

• Technique – Not only are the strokes different, they are so different that the “C” swimmer may be amazed to see how the “AAAA” swimmer looks when swimming. The appearance alone is dramatically different
• Discipline – Diver Greg Louganis, who won two Olympic gold medals in 1984, practices only three hours each day—not a long time—divided into two or three sessions. But during each session, he tries to do every dive perfectly
• Attitude – The very features of the sport that 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 peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic. They enjoy hard practices, look forward to difficult competitions, try to set difficult goals

In this sense, athletic progress is more like punctuated equilibrium rather than gradualism (nerdy evolution simile):

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

Why are differing talent levels an insufficient explanation?

• Other factors are more clearly linked and explainable, eg, location – living in southern California where the sun shines year round and everybody swims; fairly high family income, which allows for the travel to meets and payments of the fees entailed in the sport, not to mention sheer access to swimming pools when one is young
• Talent is often recognized after the fact – conveniently after all the skill acquisition and hard work have already been invested . . . despite the physical capabilities he was born with, it took Peter several years (six by our estimate) to appear gifted. This is the predominant, though not exclusive, pattern found in our data on swimmers. Most of them are said to be “natural” or “gifted” after they had already devoted a great deal of time and hard work to the field
• The talent bar in athletics may be very low – Perhaps the crucial factor is not natural ability at all, but the willingness to overcome natural or unnatural disabilities of the sort that most of us face, ranging from minor inconveniences in getting up and going to work, to accidents and injuries, to gross physical impairments

Most importantly, labeling someone as talented is LAZY – it provides a simple and vague explanation for success, without digging into the training, the technique, the toil, the thousands of tiny details.

Finally, his bigger point, which is also the paper’s title:

• “People don’t know how ordinary success is,” said Mary T. Meagher, winner of 3 gold medals in the Los Angeles Olympics
• Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole
• Viewing “Rocky” or “Chariots of Fire” may inspire one for several days, but the excitement stirred by a film wears off rather quickly when confronted with the day-to-day reality of climbing out of bed to go and jump in cold water. If, on the other hand, that day-to-day reality is itself fun, rewarding, challenging; if the water is nice and friends are supportive, the longer-term goals may well be achieved almost in spite of themselves
• Lundquist gained a reputation in swimming for being a ferocious workout swimmer, one who competed all the time, even in the warmup. He became so accustomed to winning that he entered meets knowing that he could beat these people—he had developed the habit, every day, of never losing

In the pursuit of excellence, maintaining mundanity is the key psychological challenge

Finally, an interesting anecdote:

Every week at the Mission Viejo training pool, where the National Champion Nadadores team practiced, coaches from around the world would be on the deck visiting, watching as the team did their workouts, swimming back and forth for hours. The visiting coaches would be excited at first, just to be here; then soon— within an hour or so usually—they grew bored, walking back and forth looking at the deck, glancing around at the hills around the town, reading the bulletin boards, glancing down at their watches, wondering, after the long flight out to California, when something dramatic was going to happen. “They all have to come to Mecca, and see what we do,” coach Mark Schubert said. “They think we have some big secret.”

I highly encourage you to read the paper! You can download a version of it here.

I recently read Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table [Kindle], a memoir slash business book slash culinary tour de force from the creator of Union Square Cafe, Shake Shack, and like 18 more of New York’s most critically acclaimed restaurants.

Danny explains the power of a philosophy he coined “Enlightened Hospitality”, a sort of hospitality 2.0 that means to not only go above and beyond in satisfying your customers, but also to broaden and correctly prioritize your business’s complete universe of constituents:

Prioritizing those people in the following order is the guiding principal for practically every decision we make, and it has made the single greatest contribution to the ongoing success of our company:

1. Our employees
2. Our guests
3. Our community
4. Our suppliers
5. Our investors

Here are the rest of my favorite highlights from the book (all direct quotes):

• Within moments of being born, most babies find themselves receiving the first four gifts of life: eye contact, a smile, a hug, and some food. We receive many other gifts in a lifetime, but few can ever surpass those first four. That first time may be the purest “hospitality transaction” we’ll ever have, and it’s not much of a surprise that we’ll crave those gifts for the rest of our lives.
• I understood on a gut level that if I handicapped the location correctly, and could successfully play a role in transforming the neighborhood, my restaurant, with its long-term lease locked in at a low rent, could offer excellence and value.
• The discos of the 1970s had given way to the coked-up nightclubs of the early 1980s, which in turn gave way to stadium-size restaurants where the food was really nothing more than a prop in an ersatz nightclub scene.
• But hospitality, which most distinguishes our restaurants—and ultimately any business—is the sum of all the thoughtful, caring, gracious things our staff does to make you feel we are on your side when you are dining with us.
• Shared ownership develops when guests talk about a restaurant as if it’s theirs. They can’t wait to share it with friends, and what they’re really sharing, beyond the culinary experience, is the experience of feeling important and loved.
• I might just walk over to a table and say, “Thanks for being here.” That puts the ball in the other court. The encounter either does or doesn’t advance from there.
• Most important, I watch my staff members. Are they enjoying one another’s company? And are they focused on their work? If the answer to both questions is yes, I feel confident that we’re at the top of our game.
• My goal is to earn regular, repeat patronage from a large number of people—40 percent of our lunch business and 25 percent of our dinner business—who will dine at our restaurants six to twelve times a year.
• when she had previously worked for Mary Kay Cosmetics, Mary Kay would teach the sales people that everyone goes through life with an invisible sign hanging around his or her neck reading, “make me feel important.”
• Invest in your community. A business that understands how powerful it is to create wealth for the community stands a much higher chance of creating wealth for its own investors. I have yet to see a house lose any of its value when a garden is planted in its front yard. And each time one householder plants a garden, chances are the neighbors will follow suit.
• Starbucks took the notion of drinking good coffee (and standing in line to buy it) and figured out how to make the experience of drinking coffee with a community of other like-minded people become the real star of the show. The company also learned to superimpose its blueprint onto thousands of locations north, south, east, and west, while also conveying the sense that each Starbucks belonged to its particular community.
• In fact, it generally takes two to three years for our new restaurants to even approach their ultimate potential for excellence. And this is because it takes that long for a restaurant’s soul to emerge.
• It is not your job to get upset. You just need to understand: that’s what they do. Your job is just to move the shaker back each time and let them know exactly what you stand for. Let them know what excellence looks like to you.
• Every business needs a core strategy to be what I call always on the improve, and for us it’s constant, gentle pressure.
• And managers must learn to use the fire in their own bellies as a way to fuel and refuel their own ongoing passion for this business. If leaders lack fire, why would anyone want to follow them?
• With each year I’ve spent as a leader, I’ve grown more and more convinced that my team—any team—thirsts for someone with authority, and power, to tell them consistently where they’re going, how they’re doing, and how they could do their job even better.
• Nothing about being the CEO at a restaurant company had diminished my yearning to be in my restaurants all the time. The only way I can be effective is to remain a high-touch leader and stay involved with our staff, our guests, and our product. It’s rare that I’m in my office more than 25 percent of my day.
• As I always point out to managers and staff members, the single most powerful key to long-term success is cultivating repeat business, and ultimately regular guests. I don’t believe you even enter the competition for regulars until you get people to try your product for at least a third time.
• Stanley Marcus was absolutely right. By viewing mistakes as opportunities to repair and strengthen relationships, rather than letting them destroy relationships, a business is paving its own road to success and good fortune.
• It’s not genuine hospitality when the host fails to make eye contact, fails to smile, or fails to thank the guests for coming. It’s also inhospitable when a host rushes ahead of you while showing you to your table, making you feel like a dog being yanked along on a leash.
• When guests make reservations online using OpenTable.com, their two most frequent special requests are, “Quiet table, please” or “Romantic table.”
• In order to do a gut check on how much I really want to take a space or do a deal, I always ask myself whether I would do this deal if it were given to me for free.
• In hiring chefs, my goal is to do three things: develop a close, mutually trusting and respectful relationship; establish a shared vision of what the food should be; and encourage them to search their own heart and soul for inspiration, urging them to go further than they’ve ever gone before.

I’ve shared this book before, including a condensed 1-page summary, but I also find it helpful to re-read these kinds of notes because my memory is an oddly shaped – and increasingly rigid – sieve.

Here are the excerpts that stood out this time:

• The meaning of a tool is inseparable from the stories that surround it.
• As Smith further pointed out, technology’s connection to science is generally misunderstood: “Nearly everyone believes, falsely, that technology is applied science. It is becoming so, and rapidly, but through most of history science has arisen from problems posed for intellectual solution by the technician’s more intimate experience of the behavior of matter and mechanisms.”
• Much of North Africa, however, let the wheel fall into disuse after the third century A.D., preferring to transport goods by camel. This was a sensible choice. Maintaining roads for wheeled carts and supplying watering sites for horses and oxen was far more expensive […] Other civilizations, notably the Mayans and the Aztecs, knew of the wheel but never developed it for practical purposes.
• The technical experts, he found, performed only slightly better than others. In short, technological predictions, whoever made them and whatever method was employed, proved no more accurate than flipping a coin.
• predictions are so hard to make is that consumers, not scientists, often discover what is “the next big thing.” Most new technologies are market-driven. Viagra was not developed as a sexual stimulant, but the college students who served as guinea pigs discovered what consumers would like about it.
• In short, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, and the personal computer, surely four of the most important inventions in the history of communications, were initially understood as curiosities.
• Where once the telephone bill reflected a simple transaction between a customer and the phone company, now the technology of the telephone is the basis for a wide range of commercial relations that includes toll-free calls to businesses, e-mail, faxes, and SMS messages. Telephones enable people not only to speak to one another, but also to send photographs, texts, news, and videos. As with the electrical system, the telephone provided the infrastructure, or even the main platform, for many unanticipated businesses.
• The concept of technological momentum provides a way to understand how large systems exercise a “soft determinism” once they are in place. […] In the United States the automobile now is “less shaped by and more the shaper of its environment.”
• Judith McGaw examined the enormous variety of brassieres and found not only that there is “no convincing evidence that the breasts need support” but also that brassieres never quite fit.
• Rather than adjust to a single pattern, each cultural region creates hybrid forms, which Robertson calls “glocalization.” Even McDonald’s finds that it must give in to this process. In Spain it sells red wine to go with its hamburgers, and in India (where cows are sacred) it does not serve beef. More generally, an endless process of creolization is taking place, producing such novel combinations as Cuban-Chinese cuisine, Norwegian country music, and “Trini” homepages.
• Henry David Thoreau argued that, rather than constantly expand one’s desires, it was better to simplify material life to make time for reading, reflection, and close study of nature. In Walden (1854) he ridiculed the farmer who spent his life acquiring more possessions, arguing that such a man had lost control over his life. More generally, Thoreau questioned the value of slicing life into segments governed by clock time and suggested that the railway rode mankind rather than the reverse.
• It is easier to develop a “technological fix” that accepts “man’s intrinsic shortcomings and circumvents them…. One does not wait around trying to change people’s minds: if people want more water, one gets them more water rather than requiring them to reduce their use of water
• Wolfgang Schivelbusch presciently observed that “the more efficient the technology, the more catastrophic its destruction when it collapses. There is an exact ratio between the level of the technology with which nature is controlled, and the degree of severity of its accidents.”
• During World War I, both sides were shocked to discover that advanced technologies, when shared equally, led not to quick victory but to stalemate.
• Technological improvements have often been presented as antidotes to war. When each new form of communication was introduced, someone argued that it would increase international understanding by breaking down cultural barriers. Such claims were made for the telegraph, the telephone, radio, the motion picture, the television, and for the Internet.” In practice, however, each of these technologies also has become a tool of warfare.
• Leisure hardly existed as a concept for ordinary people in the nineteenth century, when farmers and factory hands worked as many as 14 hours a day. For most people, leisure only emerged as labor unions fought for shorter working hours. Likewise, privacy was not possible for many before the second half of the nineteenth century. Before then, most houses were small, with shared public rooms and shared sleeping rooms. The idea that children could and should have individual bedrooms is at most a few hundred years old.
• It required a generation for the public to find that it wanted the phonograph not primarily to dictate letters or preserve voices for posterity but to play music.