
The Mundanity of Excellence (1989) - micaeloliveira
https://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-mundanity-of-excellence-an-ethnographic-report-on-stratification-and-olympic-swimmers
======
bootsz
> 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.

~~~
madeuptempacct
"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."

Same as most professionals. But more reward. More risk. More need for innate
qualities.

"...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."

They "sacrifice" for fame and a comfortable lifestyle, just like everyone
else.

~~~
jonnybgood
> They "sacrifice" for fame and a comfortable lifestyle, just like everyone
> else.

There are those who stop sacrificing once they attain fame and a comfortable
lifestyle. But what of those who attain the fame and comfortable lifestyle but
continue to sacrifice themselves?

~~~
sooheon
Sacrifice more for greater fame and success. People will still make the
distinction that they are _even_ greater for having done so, like you are now.

------
apo
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.

~~~
cbdumas
I don't think this is underrated at all. Primary and secondary education is
largely intended to train people to sit still doing mundane work all day IMO.

~~~
dorchadas
I think it is, at least nowadays. In my experiences as a teacher, most just
_aren 't_ doing it anymore. They're not doing _anything_ besides playing on
their phones. I'd love to have students who would just do their work. And I
think it was true in the past, even before the curse of smartphones. Kids
would find other ways to avoid doing their work, and the ones who succeeded
were the ones who did it.

------
shubhamjain
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.

------
conjectures
> 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

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
This is nonsense. Sprint athletes are selected on the basis of being
physically optimised for sprinting. Basketball athletes are optimised for
height. Aspiring ballerinas are excluded from ballet school if they don't have
the right physique.

Other skills - spatial awareness, verbal acuity, musical sensitivity, basic
cognitive speed - are all on a bell curve, with an upper limit that is
genetic.

Hard work is needed to develop talent, but isn't a substitute for it.

Being born with a genome that makes your body short and dumpy means your
chances of a career in professional basketball are not high. Likewise, if you
have no feel for rhythm you're going to be a terrible drummer. No amount of
practice is going to improve that. At best with years of world-class tuition
you can aspire to competent mediocrity.

If you have some native ability, hard work can help you outperform someone who
has plenty but hasn't developed it. But their ceiling of potential is still
going to be higher level than yours.

Business has more of a problem with talent, because the ability to succeed in
business is spread across many more variables.

I used to know someone who had _unbelievable_ social and emotional
intelligence. He had an astounding ability to read people for character and
motivation and predict the moods and future actions of individuals and groups.
That's not usually considered a key business skill, but it was absolutely
essential to his promotion to board level.

The problem in business is that "excellence" is as often a combination of
class privilege and bluster, perhaps with some sociopathy, as it is any
genuine indication of competence. Or talent.

~~~
conjectures
> Sprint athletes are selected on the basis of being physically optimised for
> sprinting.

Tell that to Usain Bolt. If you feel like maybe Bolt was optimised, reflect on
the fact that this was not predicted before the fact, "This range in height
appears to exclude people who are very tall or very short in stature."

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3899678/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3899678/)

------
dorkwood
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.

