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.