Russell Fisher sent me the following and I liked it so much that I’m posting it here:
From the book, Methods of Discovery, I found an interesting anecdote.
“Daniel Chambliss wrote a paper called the “Mundanity of Excellence.” He spent five years studying competitive swimming. He coached from the local to the national levels, interviewed dozens of swimmers, and traveled with the best teams in the country. His core research problem was to discover the nature of “talent” and “excellence” in swimming. His central conclusion was that talent was a complete fabrication, a meaningless construction designed to cover and romanticize what he called “the mundanity of excellence”:
“Superb performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habits and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions: only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produced excellence.”
Great champions are people who work on the details and make sure they do all of them right all of the time. Their motivations were also “mundane.” They didn’t aim to win the Olympics as much as to polish up their backstroke next week, improve their sleep habits over the next month, and eat more carefully. In short, their goals were nearby, not far off. Indeed, Chambliss argued, the great champions try to turn the big meets into mundane occasions by making every single day a big meat, winning every single race in practice. The big ones then meant nothing more than the others.” Abbott, Andrew. Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences. New York, 2004. page 189-190. (Actual paper citation is: Chambliss, D. F. 1989. “The Mundanity of Excellence.” Sociological Theory 10:103-105.)
