The Mundanity of Excellence
Episode Stats
Summary
40 years ago, now retired professor of sociology Daniel Chambliss performed a field study in which he observed an elite swim team to figure out what it was that led to excellence in any endeavor. As he discovered in a paper entitled The Mundanity of Excellence, the secret he discovered is that there really is no secret, and that success is more ordinary than mystical. As mundane as the factors and qualities that lead to excellence really are, they can still run contrary to what we sometimes think makes for high achievement. Today, on the show, I unpack the sometimes unexpected elements of excellence with Daniel. We discuss how desire is more important than discipline, the central role of one s social group in surrounding yourself with the best of the best, the outsized importance of the small things, why you need to make being good your job, and why motivation is mundane.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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40 years ago, now retired professor of sociology Daniel Chambliss performed a field study in which
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he observed an elite swim team to figure out what it was that led to excellence in any endeavor.
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As Chambliss shared in a paper entitled The Mundanity of Excellence, the secret he discovered
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is that there really is no secret and that success is more ordinary than mystical.
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As mundane as the factors and qualities that lead to excellence really are, they can still
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run contrary to what we sometimes think makes for high achievement.
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Today on the show, I unpack the sometimes unexpected elements of excellence with Daniel.
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We discuss how desire is more important than discipline, the central role of one's social
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group in surrounding yourself with the best of the best, the outsized importance of the
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small things, why you need to make being good your job, why motivation is mundane, and why
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you need to keep a sense of mundanity, even as you become excellent.
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash excellence.
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So you are a sociologist, and early in your career, you did a field study of Olympic swimmers
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to figure out what made excellent swimmers excellent.
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What was your interest in excellence, and why did you choose to study swimmers to crack
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Well, in my academic training, I'm a social psychologist of organizations, which means I'm
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interested in how people work in organizational settings and what produces high performance.
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And leadership and morale and issues like that.
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So when I finished my PhD at Yale, I was looking around for another project.
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And the 1984 Olympics were going to be in Los Angeles.
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Now, I had been a competitive swimmer myself in high school.
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I was not particularly good, but I was really, really into the sport.
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Like, I just loved it and loved working out and wanted to do better and so on.
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And I did reasonably well in the local context, but I never made the national championships
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So I had always been curious why these other people, including people I knew, were doing
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So when the LA Olympics came along, I thought, well, maybe I could go out there, out to Southern
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California, which is where the best people were training, and watch them for a while and
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I lived with a couple of coaches who were working with what was at that point the best team
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in the world, really, and tried to understand why they were better.
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Plus, I was also coaching in the same period of time.
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I was coaching a little local team in upstate New York, where I live.
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And the result of that, you wrote a book called Champions.
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And I picked up a copy, I was able to find a used copy.
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And you talk about what you observed with these swimmers, with the coaches.
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And then it also ended up being a paper that you wrote, The Mundanity of Excellence.
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Because I think a lot of people, they want to be excellent in whatever they're doing.
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Like, why is it like, I'm doing, I feel like I'm doing the things that I should be doing.
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And one of the conclusions that you got from this study that you did for several years
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is that different levels of the sport of swimming are qualitatively different from each other.
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Like, what are the differences between C-level and A-level swimmers?
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I think this is true in business or in the arts or any area you pick.
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They're not just doing more in order to be, say, an Olympic class athlete.
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And it's not even that they're just working harder, although that is probably true.
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I mean, people training for the Olympics want to win Olympic medals.
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People at the local level where I was coaching initially, that never even occurred to them,
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obviously, I guess, to try to be that good or even to try to be very good in particular.
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They were there more, frankly, it was more like a babysitting service, to be honest about it,
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And yeah, there was swimming involved and people kind of liked doing that.
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But they weren't going to put in anything like the effort needed to win a state championship,
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So, and again, I think that applies in all sorts of different areas of activity.
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And so, yeah, the qualitative difference is a big thing you found.
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Because I think a lot of people, when they think about how can I get better,
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I just got to practice, practice, practice more.
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Because what's left out of that, that idea, which Malcolm Gladwell used,
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actually comes from a guy named Anders Ericsson, who I knew a little bit, passed away recently,
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But Anders Ericsson found that, in fact, top level performers in all sorts of areas
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had to spend at least 10,000 hours practicing before they could get to that level.
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But what's left out, when most people talk about it, is it's not just the time.
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You have to pay attention during all those hours.
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It's deliberate practice, is the phrase he used.
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That is, you have to really concentrate on what you're doing while you're practicing.
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So you mentioned one of the things that makes elite level swimmers different from other
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Of course, elite level swimmers are very disciplined.
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They're more disciplined than, say, the rec league swimmer.
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But one of the surprising things you found in your study, in your observation,
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is that the discipline of elite swimmers, it doesn't seem to be the kind of white-knuckled
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type of discipline, where they're gritting their teeth and they're just, they're hating it.
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How does the attitude between A-level swimmers and C-level swimmers differ?
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One day when I was in California at Mission Viejo, this club I was studying,
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there were people on that team who were, well, there were eight people who wound up
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But one day we came into practice and a group of, it was guys, it was all boys who did this,
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They raced eight lengths of Lake Mission Viejo.
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Now, if I ever did such a thing, I would probably fall over dead.
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But a lot of people, that's not most people's idea of fun.
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And they did it and they came back and they were bouncing up and down and laughing and joking
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and just having the best time talking about what they had just done.
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They enjoyed not just swimming, which was certainly true, but swimming fast and pushing themselves
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That's a big difference from, again, you go to a much lower level team.
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You see, for instance, coaches who make kids swim butterfly to punish them.
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That's a terrible attitude because it's supposed to be an enjoyable thing.
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And you want people to feel like what they're doing is fulfilling and exciting and fun and
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So one thing I noticed right away was that these swimmers I was studying, who were all national
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caliber swimmers right from the beginning when they came to the team, they like swimming
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a lot and they do it all the time and it's not a tedious thing or, you know, it's not
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For the most part, there are exceptions, but for the most part, people love doing it.
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What others see as boring, swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours, they
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Coming into the 5.30 a.m. practices, many of the swimmers are lively, laughing, talking,
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enjoying themselves, perhaps appreciating the fact that most people would positively hate
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It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices to achieve their goals.
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Often, they don't see what they do as sacrificial at all.
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I think this is really a powerful idea because I think there's a popular idea amongst people
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if they want to improve themselves, whether they want to exercise more or whatever self-improvement
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habit they have, they think it's got to be unpleasant.
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And if it's not unpleasant and it feels like I'm enjoying myself, then I must be doing something
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Your studies, if it feels hard and unpleasant, then you're probably doing it wrong.
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And it's a real important point you've just made.
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And from the outside, it looks like, wow, that takes a lot of self-discipline.
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But a lot of folks, the key to this is getting together with other people who also like doing
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That is, if you're in a group where everybody's doing it, it makes it feel much easier.
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You know, like, yeah, we're laughing and joking or whatever, but this is something we're into.
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And it becomes a way of bonding with other people, not of separating yourself.
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And again, I think that's something you don't realize often as a spectator because the TV
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coverage of the Olympics, for instance, tends to glorify the individuals.
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And in swimming, swimming is an individual sport for the most part.
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I mean, there are relays, but mostly one, you get up on the blocks and you dive in.
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But I have never met an Olympic class swimmer who trained by themselves.
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They go in every morning and they're there with 50 or 70 other people all working towards
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very similar goals and thinking this is valuable and so on.
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So, yeah, if you're going to exercise, find a buddy.
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Well, two things that I've taken from that idea.
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So, first is for me, I find that I stick to things longer and do them more intensely when
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So, for exercise, I've been doing weightlifting for a long time and got really, I got pretty
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But the reason I did it is because I just loved it.
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If I was sick, I'd even try to find a way to train.
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And people would be like, oh, wow, you're so disciplined.
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You know, my son plays video games every day and I never say to my son, man, you are so
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It's like, no, he just, he likes playing Fortnite.
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So, I think a big takeaway is find something you like.
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With exercise, find a way to make it enjoyable and you'll stick with it longer.
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And then going back to this, doing it with other people, we had Bob Bowman on the podcast.
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And he shared, you know, so he did competitive swimming before he became a coach.
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And he talked about when he was in college, he was training to become an orchestral conductor.
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And then he had this moment where he had to realize, I had to choose one or the other.
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And he said he chose the swim team because he just enjoyed the camaraderie more.
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And that's how he, and I think it goes to what you were saying.
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If you want to stick with something, find people to do it with that you enjoy being around.
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Well, and I actually, when I heard that he felt that he had made that choice, I think
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Is I thought, you know, he is kind of an orchestra conductor.
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As a coach, that's what you're doing is you're orchestrating a group of people to work
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together to produce high-level performances and getting them to cooperate with each other,
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for instance, rather than have too much competition between them or, you know, planning out the
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practices or figuring it, well, figuring out where to get the swimming pool is a big part
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You know, is that sort of what conductors do as well, is help a group of different talented
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individuals, let's say, work together for something.
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So he's sort of probably got half his wish anyway.
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So do you see this qualitative difference in attitude in other fields, like education?
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I mean, education is a great example because, well, take myself as an example.
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I grew up in a home where my parents were both readers.
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Like my dad was just a voracious reader of anything.
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And that was something people did for fun when I grew up in our family.
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And my brother wound up being a newspaper editor.
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And another one was writing training manuals for the army.
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And, you know, we're academic, literate type people.
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And so when people talk to me about reading books, you know, well, you like in school,
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It was just I thought that's just what people did all the time.
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And a lot of the athletes I talked to, a lot of the swimmers came from very seriously
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athletic families, you know, in different sports.
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But they grew up in this in this frame of mind that sports is a good thing to do.
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And there are methods you use for doing it and so on.
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Oh, what a great musical genius and talent he was.
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But he also grew up in a family where his dad was a world-class composer and his sister
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I mean, you still have to work, but it gives you a big advantage if you grow up in an atmosphere
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Well, speaking about this idea of attitude towards what you do to be successful, you wrote
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an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal a few years ago entitled, Go Ahead, Drop My Course.
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And you talk about how you're actually happy when a student comes to you and says, hey,
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Well, it's not exactly that I'm happy about it, but I think it's a perfectly okay thing
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Usually, if students come and want to drop a class that I'm teaching, they'll make a lot
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of excuses and say, well, I have to do this other thing or, you know, and they want me
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But it's fine with me if they're not interested in sociology, the field that I teach.
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I want them to have good lives, and it's just not for everybody.
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And the op-ed I wrote because I had been coaching a girl in swimming who was 12 years old, and
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She had excellent technique, and she was big and strong and smart and knew how to compete
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And I kept trying to get her to train harder and aim for, you know, big championships, and
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And so, I didn't know what to do, and I called up a friend who has coached Olympians and told
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And he said, Dan, there's nothing morally wrong with not wanting to swim, you know?
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You can be a perfectly good person and not care about this sport.
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Just because I care about it, that doesn't mean she has to.
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A lot of people aren't interested in going to school, and that's fine, and they can live
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happy, productive lives and be good citizens and everything.
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And I hadn't thought about it quite that way before.
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So, again, when students want to drop my course, I'll try to find out why.
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And if it's something I'm doing wrong, I'll try to fix it.
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But if they're just not interested in the subject, and that's not going to change, I'm like,
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That's an interesting point, too, because I think a lot of people in organizations, you
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know, it could be teachers or managers or CEOs, they spend a lot of time thinking about
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How can I get people to want the same, the goals that I want?
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And there's a lot of books and courses you can do.
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So, but you were talking about, like, in the end, like, you can't control what someone
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Like, if they don't want to do it, then they're not going to do it.
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Now, having said that, I also think that there are frequently ways of motivating people that
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Because we all want different things, and some people, say, want to swim fast, right?
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And other people want to have friends, and other people want the coach to like them, and
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And there are different elements of a sport or an activity of any sort that can appeal to
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And as a coach, or a teacher, or a mentor, a lot of your work is figuring out what fires
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And I think that frequently works well, but not always.
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Again, sometimes they just don't want to be there, and that's fine.
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So, to excel at something, you have to want to excel at something.
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Is it innate, or is it something that you develop from your environment?
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Well, that's kind of a million-dollar question.
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I think there's the innate, and there's the developed.
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So, innate, I've got a couple of local grandchildren here right now.
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One's three, and one's eight months old, I guess.
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And these two little boys, you can already see they have very different interests and
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And one of them is very adept with his fingers, you know, and the other one isn't.
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And one's interested in music a lot, and the other one isn't real sure.
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And, you know, there are a lot of innate differences between people.
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There's no, I don't think there's any doubt about that.
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You know, if you're going to be a basketball player, it really does help to be tall.
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But that said, the desire is kind of a mystery.
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Now, maybe it's because you're good at something when you're young, and that's fulfilling.
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Although, again, I do think family and your immediate surroundings play a big role, because
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Like I said, I grew up in kind of an academic, bookish sort of family.
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And so, doing well in school was approved, right?
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My parents thought that was a nice, I mean, they didn't care about my grades exactly, but
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they thought it was good to study and learn things and so on.
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And I had plenty of classmates who just didn't care about school.
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But they're not likely to do well at it if their parents don't support it, you know?
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And you need, in sports, you're a little kid, you need somebody to drive you to all those
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practices and pay for them and live in a place where it's available.
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I mean, swimming, swimming pools are expensive.
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You've got to live in a neighborhood that's got, or a city or whatever, at least, that's
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got good swimming pools and be close enough in whatever way you can get to the thing.
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Because I've seen the same thing with my own kids that you see with your grandkids.
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They got the same parents, but they've got very different personalities, different interests.
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So I think it's important as a parent to expose them to different things so they can figure
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out, so they can find the things that they have a unique interest in, you know, an intrinsic
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And then also, I think also it helps develop that desire.
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Just putting yourself around people that have that desire too.
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What I've noticed in my life is I see a friend doing something that they enjoy and they're
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You observe people and you want to be like them.
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I'm curious in your study of Olympic athletes, did you encounter anyone who they were training
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for the Olympics, but they didn't really want to, you know, maybe they'd fooled themselves
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into thinking they wanted it, but they actually didn't want it.
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Well, yes, I don't think it's that common, but there are certainly cases.
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I mean, Andre Agassi in tennis was a famous case of this, that he didn't really like doing
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But what happens is if you grow up in an activity like that, which is what usually
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happens if you're going to be top of the world level, you grow up in it and you've
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Your friends are all there and your parents approve of it probably.
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And you've moved very likely, you know, geographically to be in a place where you can do it.
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And you've sunk a lot of costs into this thing.
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This is the old thing about how people never drop out of Harvard.
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And there's pretty good evidence that some of that is not that the students actually enjoy
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being there so much, although obviously a lot of them do.
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But, you know, by the time you've put in the effort to get there, you're like, oh my gosh,
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you know, everybody be disappointed or people would think I'm crazy if I left or something
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And so, they have a very high retention rate for a college.
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And some chunk of that is, again, because people have made commitments.
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So, the same thing certainly operates in sports is once you've spent, you know, 10 years trying
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to become really good at something or 20, it's going to be hard to leave.
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Even if you're not really interested in it anymore.
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We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
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So, you've been talking about this social world that elite level swimmers find themselves in.
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So, they're around other swimmers who are also really good.
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But also, in the book Champions, you talk about how the coach you follow, this guy named
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Mark Schubert, he created a social world at Mission Viejo that reinforced this idea of
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What did Mark Schubert do differently from other coaches?
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Well, he started out in Ohio, and he was very successful in a four-lane, 20-yard pool,
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a very small pool, not much of a facility at all, and in a location that's not famous for
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I mean, there are, I don't want to, okay, there are some great swimming teams in Ohio,
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But at the time and in the town he lived in, you know, there wasn't much there.
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He wanted to have the best program in the country, is what he said.
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He moved to Southern California, which was the mecca for top-notch swimming at that point.
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And he took with him several of his most serious athletes that he had coached in high school so
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that he would have a core of people right from the outside.
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And he got out to California, and well, long story short, he pulled together a group of
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top-notch athletes because what he did was, the way he put it, he built around the best.
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Most teams are not really built around the best athletes.
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They're built around the large group of athletes like that.
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Well, most of our kids are like this, and that's who I've got to please and aim for and keep in the program and stuff.
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And Schubert, he built around the top athletes.
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He built a program that satisfied teenagers who wanted to win world championships.
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And that's hard to do in various ways, but he was able to do it.
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And he pulled together this group, and there was a commitment from the people who owned the pool that that's what they wanted to.
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And you get together the people, and you can do it.
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I imagine it can be hard to do because rebuilding a team or an organization around the best,
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that requires excluding people, saying, no, you can't do it.
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It turns out people love watching the Olympics and talk about, oh, I want to win a gold medal.
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But it turns out in real life, there's some unpleasant things that go on getting there or difficult things.
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Right. Or they think they want to do it, but then they really don't.
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I think a lot of people, they like the idea of excellence, but they don't like doing the stuff that actually gets you to excellence.
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Yeah. I mean, great writers, you know, a lot of people say, oh, I want to write a book.
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You know, I'm going to write a book someday and so on.
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But they don't want to actually do the writing, which is the hard part.
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So that's what I mean by the mundanity of excellence, is if you want to be really good at something,
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you've got to treat it like an ordinary part of life.
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So, again, great writers, mostly, not everybody, but, you know, they get up in the morning and they work on their book for four hours.
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It's got to be built in and just, it's just what you do.
00:28:34.560
You can't just fiddle around with it and hope something great is going to happen.
00:28:38.740
Continue this idea of the mundanity of excellence.
00:28:40.720
At the time, Mission Viejo, where Mark Schubert was coaching, it was the best in the world, spitting out Olympic champions.
00:28:47.180
And so you'd have coaches from all around the world come to Mission Viejo because they want to be like,
00:28:50.900
I want to come in and watch what this guy's doing and see what they're doing differently.
00:28:55.600
And maybe we can do, you know, implement their training and their programming.
00:29:00.800
And you said that all these coaches, they'd come, they'd be there for a few days and they would leave disappointed.
00:29:14.580
Because I talked with Mark Schubert, the coach, about this at one point because some people had come and they come all the way from Hawaii, no less.
00:29:24.960
And they're going to watch these kids train and stuff.
00:29:31.120
I mean, you're just watching people go back and forth in a swimming pool.
00:29:36.100
And Mark said, they think we have some secret, which really struck me.
00:29:42.920
People would come and visit and think there's something magical going on here.
00:29:46.720
There's something we can't understand or don't know about.
00:29:50.100
Or they're using some tricks or techniques we don't know.
00:29:54.020
And I used to go to coaching clinics all the time and take a lot of notes as big time coaches talk about what they did.
00:30:01.100
And I realized after a while, we know what they do.
00:30:05.940
There are books and lectures and so on you can go to and learn what you have to do.
00:30:14.100
And what those coaches didn't see is that the whole trick, the whole secret is there's no secret.
00:30:22.080
You just have to be willing to do the stuff that actually makes you, in that case, fast.
00:30:28.080
I'll give you one easy example is one day I was out there and for a week, all the team did was work on push-offs.
00:30:36.560
That is the way you push off a wall when you turn in swimming.
00:30:43.660
That's like, yeah, you know, you can gain a couple of tenths of a second or something.
00:30:54.420
And every time they hit a turn, they'd gain a couple of tenths of a second.
00:31:00.000
And so it was the concentration, the detail, the relentless, consistent concentration on details.
00:31:06.540
And they're not just focusing on the details and doing more of it.
00:31:10.300
They're going to make sure they get it perfect.
00:31:14.820
And the coach, in part, what the coach does is enforce doing that every time all day, right?
00:31:22.420
You've got to not let your concentration lapse, in a sense.
00:31:27.460
And it's not that people are perfect at it or anything.
00:31:30.240
But enforcing, you know, proper technique all the time was a major part of it.
00:31:38.560
In talking about just like the small things making a difference and being, you know, fastidious about this, you talked about Rowdy Gaines.
00:31:45.620
One thing he did that gave him success at one meet was he would watch the guy shooting the firing, the starter, the starter pistol.
00:31:55.000
And every starter had a different timing, the way their body language let them know they're about to pull the trigger.
00:32:02.320
But because Rowdy Gaines was, he knew when he could make the jump so he could get in before everyone else but still be legal.
00:32:12.780
And you've got to, that's a significant amount of effort, right, to pay attention to the different starters who are in a sport.
00:32:22.340
I mean, a lot of, he's not the only elite athlete who does this.
00:32:25.780
But he hit it exactly right with that start in the 100-meter freestyle in the Olympics.
00:32:33.220
You know, he knew this particular starter had a tendency to fire the gun fast.
00:32:37.740
And so he just took a chance and he rolled with the start and he won the race because of it, basically.
00:32:45.320
Something else you talk about is, and this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, you not only say that success or excellence is mundane, but that the motivation that leads to excellence is also mundane.
00:33:02.140
I mean that the motivation doesn't have to be huge, okay?
00:33:06.580
Like to win an Olympic gold medal, in our example here, it's not like you have to have Olympic-size motivation.
00:33:14.480
You need to get up and go to practice in the morning.
00:33:17.020
You need to work hard on this thing or that thing.
00:33:20.120
You need daily interest, not just at the four-year span.
00:33:26.400
So you need to want to pay attention to what you're doing.
00:33:29.760
So a lot of that has to do with, again, the coaches and the people you're hanging around with, the people you're training with.
00:33:37.840
Having friends who are working on the same sorts of things, obviously, is big.
00:33:51.200
So when I was a kid and I was swimming, there were different pools, right?
00:33:55.500
And I could name for you half a dozen different pools I swam in.
00:33:58.900
I trained in, I mean, with teams really working out.
00:34:02.360
And one of them in particular was kind of grungy and not well-kept.
00:34:07.700
And they had way too much chlorine in it, which was a problem in those days.
00:34:11.380
And it burned your eyes and it sort of smelled bad and there was a draft, you know.
00:34:16.180
I didn't want to go to practice because the pool was gross.
00:34:21.020
Whereas others, you know, I go out to Southern California and there are palm trees and beautiful sunset
00:34:28.720
and these gorgeous 50-meter Olympic-sized pool that was meticulously clean.
00:34:42.000
And a lot of what coaches do is create those conditions.
00:34:46.100
So it's going to be pleasant, say, to be at the workout.
00:34:50.620
Or if it's not pleasant, that's for a real reason.
00:34:53.600
You know, they deliberately make certain things hard or something.
00:34:58.820
So, yeah, find ways to make it enjoyable on a daily basis on the short term.
00:35:03.880
Oh, and if you're coaching children, you have to do this.
00:35:08.160
You're not going to, I mean, you can tell them,
00:35:11.960
And maybe that gets them pumped up for a day or two.
00:35:14.760
But really, they need the day-to-day situation to be good.
00:35:18.400
I once asked a group of kids I was coaching, this was early in my career.
00:35:23.000
They were talking about some teacher they liked in school.
00:35:29.240
And they looked at each other and they said, he doesn't yell at us.
00:35:54.320
And you also talk about, not only is it important to, you know, as you're training for success
00:35:59.960
or training or trying to achieve excellence, keep your motivation mundane, keep the things
00:36:06.160
But you also talk about, you have to maintain that mundanity, even as you become excellent.
00:36:14.780
Well, that's just something I noticed with a lot of top performers is they would say things
00:36:20.480
before a competition, like before the Olympics, you know, well, it's another swim meet.
00:36:25.820
Now, they, don't get me wrong, they understand it's the Olympics and it's a big deal and a lot
00:36:31.640
But they would try to remind themselves that, hey, I've done this a million times.
00:36:41.100
And just keep it ordinary in the sense of, I can do this.
00:36:46.780
You don't want to be blown away by the situation.
00:36:50.020
You know, there's an example I gave in the article, I think, was Abraham Lincoln, you
00:36:57.260
And we now think, wow, that's a big deal and impressive and important and what a beautiful
00:37:03.100
But at the time, he even said in the speech, the world will little note nor long remember
00:37:09.880
In other words, he treated it like it's a speech.
00:37:15.000
I'm not freaking out over it or anything like that.
00:37:18.060
So you got to be able to keep things in perspective, I suppose, is the way to put it.
00:37:23.420
And again, top performers, they practice at a very high level of performance so that when
00:37:30.040
they get in a competition or a major performance or something, they can treat it as, here we
00:37:36.740
are and we're doing things and I'm doing this and yeah, I'm really good at it.
00:37:43.040
He'd actually relax more around the big meets, like right around the Olympics.
00:37:47.340
During the training season, he'd be really, you know, a stickler for things.
00:37:53.320
And then at the Olympics, he kind of let his hair down and he'd actually relax and make
00:37:56.740
jokes and have fun because he just thought, okay, well, we've done all we could, right?
00:38:00.840
So this is just another thing we're going to do.
00:38:04.340
And if you've done that preparation, you can do that.
00:38:06.940
And it's a big advantage because being uptight is not good for performance.
00:38:10.960
You don't want to be real nervous and self-conscious and stuff about what you're doing.
00:38:17.080
I'm trying to think there's a woman right now from Belgium, I think, who's a great 400
00:38:35.120
And staying relaxed is a large part of the race.
00:38:39.940
She comes into the final stretch, final 100 meters, and she's just as relaxed.
00:38:44.400
Looks like, hey, another day at the park, you know, just running right along.
00:38:48.900
But keeping that, and the commentators talked about it, at being able to stay calm under pressure
00:38:55.780
and focus on your technique and you know what you're doing, that's a valuable, valuable skill.
00:39:05.660
In other words, keeping it relatively ordinary, not like something you have to do superhuman
00:39:13.260
Well, Daniel, this has been a great conversation.
00:39:15.180
Is there someplace people can go to learn more about what you do?
00:39:19.060
You know, Brett, I would say the easiest, believe it or not, is just Google me.
00:39:23.340
Last name is Chambliss, C-H-A-M, and then bliss, like happiness, Chambliss, Dan Chambliss.
00:39:33.980
Or Hamilton College website, I think I've got a page on there.
00:39:38.960
I retired two years ago, so I don't know how up-to-date it is.
00:39:46.940
And I've written several books, and they're on different topics.
00:39:51.160
One's about hospitals, one's about higher education, but they really deal with a lot
00:39:58.520
Yeah, and the importance of being in a group that approves of what you're doing.
00:40:04.580
You know, the role of social support in performance, things like that.
00:40:18.340
He's the author of several books, including the paper, The Mundanity of Excellence.
00:40:21.960
Check out our show notes at aom.is slash excellence.
00:40:34.040
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.
00:40:36.920
Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives,
00:40:40.980
as well as thousands of articles that we've written over the years about pretty much anything
00:40:44.660
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00:40:51.820
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00:40:55.640
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00:40:59.300
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