The Mundanity of Excellence Revealed

Having been successful in many pursuits, I’ve always understood the mundanity of excellence behind the high-octane, show-stopping, manufactured moments on TV and social media.

I’ve always felt that people have misunderstood my excellence, treating me like a “genius” or a “prodigy” or a “freak of nature”. They ask about my level and my achievements, choosing to avoid the matter of how I reached them.

It has slowly become clear to me that most people don’t grasp the reality of high performance. And as someone who is both a serial autodidact and psychology buff, this bothers me.

When we don’t understand success, not only do we limit our perspective on the world and other humans, we limit our own possibilities in life. I want to show you that success and excellence are not a product of luck or talent, but of a well-understood and replicable process, one that is shockingly effective yet quite mundane.

Having gone from zero to hero many times, I’ve repeatedly lived the mundanity of excellence, and I want to share the journey with you.

In short, being excellent isn’t instant, sexy, and explosive. Just the opposite: it’s gradual, it accumulates slowly, almost imperceptibly, and most of all, is rather mundane.

Let’s explore why, starting with the famous study called the Mundanity of Excellence.

The Mundanity of Excellence: It Accumulates Slowly

My first encounter with the concept of the mundanity of excellence was when I read Angela Duckworth’s book Grit, which I highly recommend if you want to prime your psychology for excellence.

In her book, Duckworth talks about the findings of the Mundanity of Excellence study, carried by Dan Chambliss over a six-year span as he studied studying swimmers and swimming coaches at all levels. He studied how the greatest reached the peak of the sport, and compared their methods with lesser swimmers.

Commenting on Chambliss’ findings, Duckworth tells us: “the most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is, in a sense, ordinary.”

There is a concept in learning theory, called patterning or chunking, that explains why many separate elements combine to produce excellent performance.

Past a certain point in our training, we master all the individual elements of the pursuit and come to gain an intuitive feel for it. All the variables criss-cross and multiply, giving us remarkable competence. Duckworth speaks to that in the above quote.

She also quotes Dan Chambliss, who said when reflecting on his study, “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 into a synthesized whole.”

I’ve found that this happens in all areas, from maths to languages to sport to meditation. The little learnings, unremarkable on their own, add up over the years to create supreme competency.

As for talent, Chambliss says: “Talent… is perhaps the most pervasive lay explanation we have for athletic success”. He adds that it seems that athletes are adorned “with a special gift, almost a ‘thing’ inside of them, denied to the rest of us—perhaps physical, genetic, psychological, or physiological.”

Remember this: success and high performance are reached by slow, long-term accumulation, not by immediate, explosive, short-term mutation.

The problem is that this isn’t sexy, so we don’t talk about it. It doesn’t sell or get eyeballs, so we don’t show it. It’s mentally easier and more attention-grabbing to claim that someone is “talented” and believe they came pre-built as a great, so we gloss over it.

The Process of Mastery

This is one of my other favourite concepts related to the mundanity of excellence, and George Leonard documents it beautifully in his short book Mastery.

One of Leonard’s key concepts is that of the Mastery Curve, which shows us how excellence develops gradually over time, in fits and starts.

According to this model, though progress increases over time, it doesn’t happen linearly. Instead, it comes in little jumps separated by long stretches of minimal improvement:

Those flat periods, which Leonard calls plateaus, can last for weeks, months, even years. He describes the plateau as “the long stretch of diligent effort with no seeming progress.”

After a certain stretch of time on the plateau, suddenly you notice that you’ve reached a new level, as if by magic. This is simply the accumulation or outward result of all the practice you’ve been doing.

Just as accumulation isn’t obvious, neither is the Mastery Curve. Neither you nor those who watch you every day can see it unfolding. You’d have to deliberately record your progress over time to notice how it works.

But you can see it in retrospect: think of any field or pursuit in which you’ve attained excellence, and you’ll realise that this graph is a good approximation for your journey.

Leonard’s work fits nicely with Chambliss’ finding. In fact, you might think of the Mastery Curve as a visual representation of the slow, almost imperceptible accumulation process.

And like the accumulation process, it’s pretty mundane. These plateaus consist of repetitive practice, setbacks and doubt, sprinkled with occasional fireworks. Notice that the plateaus comprise the lion’s share of the mastery curve: most of the journey to excellence is mundane!

To take the master’s journey, you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so… you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere.

To love the plateau is to love what is most essential and enduring in your life.

george leonard

The Mundanity of Excellence: Decades and Icebergs

So you might now agree that success and excellence accumulate slowly over time. But it’s also nice to know how long it takes to reach a high level. That way, we know roughly when all our effort will come to yield fruit.

I learned the Ten-Year Rule from Matthew Syed’s book Bounce, and it gives us a great ballpark figure for when we’ll reach excellence through the mundane process of skillbuilding.

Matthew Syed says: “How long do you need to practise in order to achieve excellence? Extensive research, it turns out, has come up with a very specific answer to that question: from art to science and from board games to tennis, it has been found that a minimum of ten years is required to reach world-class status in any complex task.”

This has been found repeatedly, and it even led Malcolm Gladwell to propose the fabled 10,000-hour rule. He observed that most top performers do around 1000 hours of deliberate, skillbuilding practice per year. 10 years of practice at 1000 hours each time means 10,000 hours.

Let’s be very honest: practicing for 10 years doesn’t entail constant climaxes but mostly mundane repetition. So we have yet more clear evidence for the slow pace, long accumulation and mundanity of excellence.

people dismiss their own potential with statements like ‘I am not a natural linguist’ or ‘I don’t have the brain for numbers’ or ‘I lack the coordination for sport’. Where is the evidence for such pessimism? Often it is based upon nothing more than a few weeks or a few months of half-hearted effort.

Matthew syed

The Iceberg Illusion

Syed also introduced me to Anders Ericsson’s concept of the Iceberg Illusion. Ericsson is one of the world leaders in the study of success and competence, and this concept goes a long way to explaining why we ignore the mundanity of excellence.

Syed describes this illusion beautifully: “When we witness extraordinary feats… we are witnessing the end product of a process measured in years. What is invisible to us – the submerged evidence, as it were – is the countless hours of practice that have gone into the making of the virtuoso performance: the relentless drills, the mastery of technique and form, the solitary concentration that have, literally, altered the anatomical and neurological structures of the master performer.”

The core themes continue: practice, mastery, concentration, repetition, all sustained over years. In a performance all we see is the tip of the iceberg.

You might like my episode on how nothing is inherently difficult to learn.

The Three-Step Process to Mastery

Robert Greene studied the process of mastery in greats from various fields, professions and pursuits, including da Vinci, Napoleon, Darwin and Edison, and came up with a three-stage model (Apprenticeship, Creative-Active, Mastery) that applies to everyone who has achieved excellence.

I love this quote from Greene:

“The basic elements of [Darwin’s] story are repeated in the lives of all of the great Masters in history: a youthful passion or predilection, a chance encounter that allows them to discover how to apply it, an apprenticeship in which they come alive with energy and focus. They excel by their ability to practice harder and move faster through the process, all of this stemming from the intensity of their desire to learn and from the deep connection they feel to their field of study. And at the core of this intensity of effort is in fact a quality that is genetic and inborn —not talent or brilliance, which is something that must be developed, but rather a deep and powerful inclination toward a particular subject.”

His three-step model shows us that mastery is a replicable process that applies to us all. The fruits of the process are Mastery itself, which Greene describes as so:

“The keyboard is no longer something outside of us; it is internalized and becomes part of our nervous system, our fingertips. In our career, we now have a feel for the group dynamic, the current state of business. We can apply this feel to social situations, seeing deeper into other people and anticipating their reactions. We can make decisions that are rapid and highly creative. Ideas come to us. We have learned the rules so well that we can now be the ones to break or rewrite them.”

Excellence, the end product of the mastery process, is indeed sparkling. Yet Greene repeatedly reminds us of the mundanity of excellence:

“The initial stages of learning a skill invariably involve tedium. Yet rather than avoiding this inevitable tedium, you must accept and embrace it. The pain and boredom we experience in the initial stage of learning a skill toughens our minds, much like physical exercise.”

Exponential Excellence

To finish, let’s look a little closer at the accumulation effect: how small acts repeated regularly eventually add up to excellence.

I love how James Clear uses the analogy of compound interest to explain this phenomenon in his book Atomic Habits.

He invites us to imagine an improvement of 1% and how it might accumulate over time. When compared to dramatic shifts, Clear says that “improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful in the long run.”

Imagine getting 1% better at your favourite hobby every day for one year. On New Year’s Day you make the commitment to improve by that amount every day, and you diligently practice every day.

How much better are you by the time Hogmanay comes around again? Two times better? Three times better? Ten times better? Somewhere in between? You might think that you’d only get 3.65 times better (365 x 1% = 3.65).

Well, if you think it’s any of those numbers, you’re very wrong.

“Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.”

That’s right, 1% daily improvement is equivalent to 37 times yearly improvement.

You can check this yourself: 1.01^365 = 37.8. You’d actually be closer to 38 times better by the next Hogmanay (sorry, James!).

If you prefer a money metaphor, that’s like investing £1000 on New Year’s Day and watching it accumulate to £37,800 by the following Hogmanay. Quite an investment.

If you thought that was impressive, check this. Get better every day by 1% for two years, and you’ll be over 1400x better than when you started.

Extend that to three years, and it’s 54000x. Beyond that, the numbers quickly become mind-boggling, much too large to plot on the graph above.

The moral of the story remains the same: small improvements accumulate explosively over time, eventually producing remarkable results.

You might think this contradicts the Mastery Curve, which is stepwise. But I think the two fit together, and I’ve seen that the journey to excellence has both traits. The Mastery Curve captures the unavoidable fact that we don’t really improve by a set amount every day. The process is far more imperfect than that.

But at the same time, we do experience exponential, dramatic results over time. George Leonard also recognised that too: even the word “mastery” implies that.

Why Does Excellence Seem Extraordinary?

So I hope you’re on board with me here, and I want to leave you something to ponder.

Ask yourself this question: with all this evidence collected from the greatest writers on this topic, why do you believe excellence is extraordinary, orgasmic, inherited, innate? Why does anyone believe it? It simply doesn’t stand up to the evidence.

For what it’s worth, I think the Iceberg Effect has a lot to say for this. We rightly admire the remarkable end result and level of performance that the greats reach. Those certainly are extraordinary.

But when we’re pushed to seek the cause of it, it’s simply easier to assume that the process was as instant, seamless and awe-inspiring as the final result.

So we throw our hands in the air and declare that the person is a genius, or talented, or a prodigy. It’s a kind of shortcut so that we can move on and not have to think deeply about the gruelling process they went through or about the cold, hard mundanity of excellence.

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