(Visa: Full text available here. I edited this one a little for readability. Left out the footnotes.)
“Olympic sports and competitive swimming in particular provide an unusually clear opportunity for studying the nature of excellence. In other fields, it may be less clear who are the outstanding performers: the best painter or pianist, the best businessperson, the finest waitress or the best father. But in sport (and this is one of its attractions) success is defined more exactly, by success in competition. There are medals and ribbons and plaques for first place, second, and third; competitions are arranged for the head-to-head meeting of the best competitors in the world; in swimming and track, times are electronically recorded to the hundredth of a second; there are statistics published and rankings announced, every month or every week.
By the end of the Olympic Games every four years, it is completely clear who won and who lost, who made the finals, who participated in the Games,and who never participated in the sport at all. Within competitive swimming in particular, clear stratification exists not only betweenindividuals but also between defined levels of the sport as well.
At the lowest level, we see the country club teams, operating in the summer-time as a loosely run, mildly competitive league, with volunteer, part-time coaches. Above that there are teams that represent entire cities and compete with other teams from other cities around the state or region; then a “Junior Nationals” level of competition, featuring the best younger (under 18 years old) athletes; then the Senior Nationals level (any age, the best in the nation); and finally, we could speak of world- or Olympic-class competitors.
At each such level, we find, predictably, certain people competing: one athlete swims in a summer league, never seeing swimmers from another town; one swimmer may consistently qualify for the Junior Nationals, but not for Seniors; a third may swim at the Olympics and never return to Junior Nationals. The levels of the sport are remarkably distinct from one another.
Because success in swimming is so definable, we can clearly see, by comparing levels and studying individuals as they move between and within levels, what exactly produces excellence. In addition, careers in swimming are relatively short; one can achieve tremendous success in a brief period oftime.
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. This report draws on extended experience with swimmers at every level of ability, over some half a dozen years. Observation has covered the span of careers, and I have had the chance to compare not just athletes within a certain level (the view that most coaches have), but between the most discrepant levels as well. Thus these findings avoid the usual problem of an observer’s being familiar mainly with athletes at one level.
The Nature of Excellence
By “excellence” I mean “consistent superiority of performance.” The excellent athlete regularly,even routinely, performs better than his or her competitors. Consistency of superior performances tells us that one athlete is indeed better than another, and that the difference between them is not merely the product of chance. This definition can apply at any level of the sport, differentiating athletes. The superiority discussed here may be that of one swimmer over another, or of all athletes at one level (say, the Olympic class) over another.
By this definition, we need not judge performance against an absolute criterion, but only against other performances. There are acknowledged leaders on every team, as well as teams widely recognized as dominant. To introduce what are sources of excellence for Olympic athletes, I should first suggest saving the demonstration for later—what does not produce excellence.
(1)Excellence is not, I find, the product of socially deviant personalities. These swimmers don’t appear to be “oddballs,” nor are they loners (“kids who have given up the normal teenage life”). If their achievements result from a personality characteristic, that characteristic is not obvious. Perhaps it is true, as the mythology of sports has it, that the best athletes are more self-confident (although that is debatable); but such confidence could be an effect of achievement, not the cause of it.
(2)Excellence does not result from quantitative changes in behavior. Increased trainingtime, per se, does not make one swim fast; nor does increased “psyching up,”nor does movingthe arms faster. Simply doing more of the same will not lead to moving up a level in the sport.
(3)Excellence does not result from some special inner quality ofthe athlete.“Talent” is one common name for this quality; sometimes we talk of a “gift,”or of“ natural ability.”These terms are generally used to mystify the essentially mundane processes of achievement in sports, keeping us away from a realistic analysis of the actual factors creating superlative performances, and protecting us from a sense of responsibility for our own outcomes. So where does excellence — consistent superiority of performance—come from?
I. Excellence Requires Qualitative Differentiation
Excellence in competitive swimming is achieved through qualitative differentiation from other swimmers, not through quantitative increases in activity. I should clarify what is meant here by “quantitative”and “qualitative.” By quantity, we mean the number or amount of something. Quantitative improvement entails an increase in the number ofsome one thing one does.
For example:
- An athlete who practices 2 hours a day and increases that activity to 4 hours a day has made a quantitative change in behavior.
- Or, one who swims 5 miles and changes to 7 miles has made a quantitative change. She does more of the same thing; there is an increase in quantity.
- A freestyle swimmer who, while maintaining the same stroke technique, moves his arms at an increased number of strokes per minute
Quantitative improvements, then, involve doing more of the same thing.
By quality, though, we mean the character or nature of the thing itself. A qualitative change involves modifying what is actually being done, not simply doing more of it. For a swimmer doing the breaststroke, a qualitative change might be:
- a change from pulling straight back with the arms to sculling them outwards,to the sides
- a change from lifting oneself up out of the water at the turn to staying low near the water
- competing in a regional meet instead of local meets
- eating vegetables and complex carbohydrates rather than fats and sugars
- entering one’s weaker events instead of only one’s stronger events
- learning to do a flipturn with freestyle, instead of merely turning around and pushing off
- training at near-competition levels of intensity, rather than casually.
Each of these involves doing things differently than before, not necessarily doing more. Qualitative improvements involve doing different kinds of things.
Now we can consider how qualitative differentiation is manifested:
Different levels of the sport are qualitatively distinct. 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. What makes them faster cannot be quantitatively compared with lower-level swimmers, because while there may be quantitative differences and certainly there are, for instance in the number of hours spent in workouts—these are not, I think, the decisive factors at all.
Instead, they do things differently. Their strokes are different, their attitudes are different, their groups of friends are different, their parents treat the sport differently, the swimmers prepare differently for their races, and they enter different kinds of meets and events. There are numerous discontinuities ofthis sort between, say, the swimmer who competes in a local City League meet and one who enters the Olympic Trials.
Consider three dimensions of difference:
(1)Technique: The styles of strokes, dives and turns are dramatically different at differ-ent levels. A “C” (the lowest rank in United States Swimming’s ranking system) breast-stroke swimmer tends to pull her arms far backbeneath her, kick the legs out very wide without bringing them together at the finish, lift herself high out of the water on the turn, fail to take a long pull underwater after the turn, andtouch at the finish with one hand, on her side. By comparison, an “AAAA”(the highest rank) swimmer, sculls the arms out to the side and sweeps back in (never actually pulling backwards), kicks narrowly with the feet finishing together, stays low on the turns, takes a long underwater pull after the turn, and touches at the finish with both hands. 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, as is the speed with which they swim.
(2) Discipline: The best swimmers are more likely to be strict with their training, coming to workouts on time, carefully doing the competitive strokes legally (i.e.,without violating the technical rules ofthe sport), watch what they eat, sleep regular hours, do proper warmups before a meet, and the like. Their energy is carefully channeled. 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. Louganis is never sloppy in practice,and so is never sloppy in meets.
(3) Attitude: At the higher levels of competitive swimming, something like an inversion of attitude takes place. 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.
Coming into the 5:30 AM. practices at Mission Viejo, many ofthe swimmers were lively, laughing, talking, enjoying themselves, perhaps appreciating the fact that most people would positively hate doing it. It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices to achieve their goals. Often, they don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it. These qualitative differences are what distinguish levels ofthe sport.They are very noticeable, while the quantitative differences between levels, both in training and in competition, may be surprisingly small indeed.
Yet very small quantitative differences in performance may be coupled with huge qualitative differences: In the finals of the men’s 100-meter freestyle swimming event at the 1984 Olympics, Rowdy Gaines, the gold medalist, finished ahead of second-place Mark Stockwell by .44 seconds,a gap of only 8/10 of1%. Between Gaines and the 8th place finisher (a virtual unknown named Dirk Korthals, from WestGermany), there was only a 2.2% difference in time. Indeed, between Rowdy Gaines, the fastest swimmer in the world that year, and a respectable 10-year-old, the quantitative difference in speed would only be about 30%.
Yet here, as in many cases, a rather small quantitative difference produces an enormous qualitative difference: Gaines was consistently a winner in major international meets, holder of the world record, and the Olympic Gold Medalist in three events.
Stratification in the sport is discrete, not continuous. There are significant, qualitative breaks—discontinuities—between levels of the sport. These include differences in attitude, discipline, and technique which in turn lead to small but consistent quantitative differences inspeed.
Entire teams show such differences inattitude, discipline, and technique, and consequently certain teams are easily seen to be“stuck”at certain levels. Some teams always do well at the National Championships, others do well at the Regionals, others at the County Meet.
And certainly swimmers typically remain within a certain level for most of their careers, maintaining throughout their careers the habits with which they began. Within levels, competitive improvements for such swimmers are typically marginal, reflecting only differential growth rates (early onset of puberty, for instance) or the jockeying for position within the relatively limited sphere of their own level.
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 (movements through levels) will take place. This is really several worlds, each with its own patterns of conduct.
If, as I have suggested, there really are qualitative breaks between levels of the sport, and if people really don’t“work their way up”in any simple additive sense, perhaps our very conception of a single swimming world is inaccurate.I have spoken of the “top”of the sport, and of “levels”within the sport. But these words suggest that all swimmers are, so to speak, climbing a single ladder, aiming towards the same goals, sharing the same values, swimming the same strokes, all looking upwards towards an Olympic gold medal.
But they aren’t. Some want gold medals, some want to make the team, somewant to exercise, or have fun with friends, or be out in the sunshine and water. Some are trying to escape their parents. The images of the “top”and the “levels” of swimming which I have used until now may simply reflect the dominance ofa certain faction of swimmers and coaches in the sport: top is what they regard as the top, and their definitions of success have the broadest political currency in United States Swimming. Fast swimmers take as given that faster is better—instead of, say, that more beautiful is better; or that parental involvement is better; or that “well rounded” children (whatever that may mean) are better.
So we should envision not a swimming world, but multiple worlds (and changing worlds is a major step toward excellence), a horizontal rather than vertical differentiation of the sport. What I have called “levels” are better described as “worlds”or“spheres.”
In one such world, parents are loosely in charge, coaches are teenagers employed as lifeguards, practices are held a few times a week, competitions are scheduled perhaps a week in advance, the season lasts for a few weeks in the summertime,and athletes who are much faster than the others may be discouraged by social pressure even from competing, for they take the fun out of it. The big event of the season is the City Championship,when children from the metropolitan area will spend two days racing each other in many events, and the rest of the time sitting under huge tents playing cards, reading, listening to music, and gossiping.
In another world, coaches are very powerful, parents seen only occasionally (and never on the pool deck), swimmers travel thousands of miles to attend meets, they swim 6 days a week for years at a time, and the fastest among them are objects of respect and praise. The big event of the season may be the National Championships, where the athletes may spend much time—sitting under huge tents, playing cards, reading, listening to music and gossiping.
Each such world has its own distinctive types of powerful people and dominant athletes, and being prominent in one world is no guarantee of being prominent in another. At lower levels, the parents of swimmers are in charge; at the higher levels, the coaches; perhaps in the Masters teams which are made up only of swimmers over 25 years old, the swimmers themselves.
Each world, too, has its distinctive goals: going to the Olympics, doing well at the National Junior Olympics, winning the City Meet, having a good time for a few weeks. In each world the techniques are at least somewhat distinct (as with the breast-stroke, discussed above), and certain demands are made on family and friends. In all of these ways, and many more, each so-called “level”of competitive swimming is qualitatively different than others. The differences are not simply quantifiable steps along a one-dimensional path leading to the Olympic Games. Goals are varied, participants have competing commitments, and techniques are jumbled.
II. Why “Talent”Does Not Lead to Excellence
“Talent” is perhaps the most pervasive lay explanation we have for athletic success. Great athletes, we seem to believe, are born with a special gift, almost a “thing” inside ofthem, denied to the rest of us—perhaps physical, genetic, psychological, or physiological. Some have “it,”and some don’t. Some are “natural athletes,”and some aren’t. While an athlete, we acknowledge, may require many years of training and dedication to develop and use that talent, it is always “in there,”only waiting for an opportunity to come out. When children perform well, they are said to “have”talent; if performance declines, they may be said to have“wasted their talent.” We believe it is that talent, conceived as a substance behind the surface reality of performance, which finally distinguishes the best among our athletes.
But talent fails as an explanation for athletic success, on conceptual grounds. It mystifies excellence, subsuming a complex set of discrete actions behind a single undifferentiated concept. To understand these actions and the excellence which they constitute, then, we should first debunk this concept of talent and see where it fails. On at least three points, I believe, “talent”is inadequate.
Factors other than talent explain athletic success more precisely. We can, with a little effort, see what these factors are in swimming:
- Geographical location, particularly 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;
- One’s height, weight, and proportions; the luck or choice of having a good coach, who can teach the skills required;
- Inherited muscle structure—it certainly helps to be both strong and flexible;
- Parents who are interested in sports.
- Some swimmers, too, enjoy more the physical pleasures of swimming;
- Some have better coordination;
- Some even have a higher percentage of fast-twitch muscle fiber.
Such factors are clearly definable, and their effects can be clearly demonstrated. To subsume all of them, willynilly, under the rubric of “talent”obscures rather than illuminates the sources of athletic excellence.
The concept of talent hinders a clearunderstanding ofexcellence. By providing a quick “explanation”of athletic success, it satisfies our casual curiosity while requiring neither an empirical analysis nor a critical questioning of our tacit assumptions about top athletes. At best, it is an easy way of admitting that we don’t know the answer. But the attempt at explanation fails. 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.
III.The Mundanity of Excellence
“People don’t know how ordinary success is,” said Mary T. Meagher, winner of 3 gold medals in the Los Angeles Olympics, when asked what the public least understands about her sport. She then spoke of starting her career in a summer league country club team, of working her way to AAU meets, to faster and faster competitions, of learning new techniques, practicing new habits, meeting new challenges.
What Meagher said—that success is ordinary—in some sense applies, I believe, to other fields of endeavor as well: to business, to politics, to professions of all kinds, including academics. In what follows I will try to elaborate on this point, drawing some examples from the swimming research, and some from other fields, to indicate the scope of this conception.
A: Excellence is mundane.
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. 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, produce excellence.
When a swimmer learns a proper flipturn in the freestyle races, she will swim the race a bit faster; then a streamlined push off from the wall, with the arms squeezed together over the head, and a little faster; then how to place the hands in the water so no air is cupped in them; then how to lift them over the water; then how to lift weights to properly build strength, and how to eat the right foods, and to wear the best suits for racing, and on and on (see Maglischo, 1982; Troup and Reese, 1983).
Each of those tasks seems small in itself, but each allows the athlete to swim a bit faster. And having learned and consistently practiced all of them together, and many more besides, the swimmer may compete in the Olympic Games. The winning of a gold medal is nothing more than the synthesis ofa countless number of such little things—even if some of them are done unwittingly or by others, and thus called “luck.” So the “little things” really do count.
We have already seen how a very small (in quantitative terms) difference can produce a noticeable success. Even apparent flukes can lead to gold medal performances:
In the 100-Meter Freestyle event in Los Angeles, Rowdy Gaines, knowing that the starter for the race tended to fire the gun fast, anticipated the start; while not actually jumping the gun, it seems from video replays of the race that Gaines knew exactly when to go, and others were left on the blocks as he took off. But the starter turned his back, and the protests filed afterwards by competitors were ignored. Gaines had spent years watching starters, and had talked with his coach (Richard Quick) before the race about this starter in particular. (Field notes; see Chambliss, 1988, for full description)
Gaines was not noticeably faster than several of the other swimmers in the race, but with this one extra tactic, he gained enough of an advantage to win the race. And he seemed in almost all of his races to find such an advantage; hence the gold medal. Looking at such subtleties, we can say that not only are the little things important; in some ways, the little things are the only things.
In swimming, or elsewhere, these practices might at first glance seem very minimal indeed: When Mary T. Meagher was 13 years old and had qualified for the National Championships, she decided to try to break the world record in the 200-Meter Butterfly race.
She made two immediate qualitative changes in her routine:
- She began coming on time to all practices. She recalls now, years later, being picked up at school by her mother and driving (rather quickly) through the streets of Louisville, Kentucky, trying desperately to make it to the pool on time. That habit, that discipline, she now says, gave her the sense that every minute of practice time counted.
- She began doing all of her turns, during those practices, correctly, in strict accordance with the competitive rules. Most swimmers don’t do this; they turn rather casually, and tend to touch with one hand instead of two (in the butterfly, Meagher’s stroke). This, she says, accustomed her to doing things one step better than those around her—always. Those are the two major changes she made in her training, as she remembers it. Meagher made two quite mundane changes in her habits, either one of which any-one could do, if he or she wanted. Within a year Meagher had broken the world record in the butterfly.
B: Motivation is mundane, too.
Swimmers go to practice to see their friends, to exercise, to feel strong afterwards, to impress the coach, to work towards bettering a time they swam in the last meet. Sometimes, the older ones, with a longer view of the future, will aim towards a meet that is still several months away. But even given the longer-term goals, the daily satisfactions need to be there. The mundane social rewards really are crucial.
By comparison, the big, dramatic motivations—winning an Olympic gold medal, setting a world record—seem to be ineffective unless translated into shorter-term tasks.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. Again, Mary T. Meagher:
“I never looked beyond the next year,and I never looked beyond the next level. I never thought about the Olympics when I was ten; at that time I was thinking about the State Championships.When I made cuts for Regionals [the next higher level of competition], I started thinking about Regionals; when I made cuts for National Junior Olympics, I started thinking about National Junior Olympics. I can’t even think about the [1988] Olympics right now. Things can overwhelm you if you think too far ahead.”
This statement was echoed by many of the swimmers I interviewed. While many of them were working towards the Olympic Games, they divided the work along the way into achievable steps, no one of which was too big. They found their challenges in small things: working on a better start this week, polishing up their backstroke technique next week, focusing on better sleep habits, planning how to pace their swim. Many top swimmers are accustomed to winning races in practice, day after day. Steve Lundquist, who won two gold medals in Los Angeles, sees his success as resulting from an early decision that he wanted to win every swim, every day, in every practice. That was the immediate goal he faced at workouts; just try to win every swim, every lap, in every stroke, no matter what.
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. The short-term goal ofwinning this swim, in this workout, translated into his ability to win bigger and bigger races. Competition, when the day arrived for a meet, was not a shock to him, nothing at all out of the ordinary. This leads to a third and final point.
C: In the pursuit of excellence, maintaining mundanity is the key psychological challenge.
In common parlance, winners don’t choke. Face with what seems to be a tremendous challenge or a strikingly unusual event, such as the Olympic Games, the better athletes take it as a normal, manageable situation (“It’s just another swim meet,” is a phrase sometimes used by top swimmers at a major event such as the Games) and do what is necessary to deal with it. Standard rituals (such as the warmup, the psych, the visualization of the race,the taking off of sweats, and the like) are ways of importing one’s daily habits into the novel situation, to make it as normal an event as possible.
Swimmers like Lundquist, who train at competition-level intensity, therefore have an advantage: arriving at a meet, they are already accustomed to doing turns correctly, taking legal starts, doing a proper warmup, and being aggressive from the outset of the competition. If each day of the season is approached with a seriousness of purpose, then the big meet will not come as a shock. The athlete will believe “I belong here, this is my world”— and not be paralyzed by fear or self-consciousness.The task then is to have training closely approximate competition conditions.
The mundanity ofexcellence is typically unrecognized. I think the reason is fairly simple. Usually we see great athletes only after they have become great—after the years of learning the new methods, gaining the habits of competitiveness and consistency, after becoming comfortable in their world. They have long since perfected the myriad of techniques that together constitute excellence. Ignorant of all of the specific steps that have led to the performance and to the confidence,we think that somehow excellence sprang full grown from this person,and we say he or she “has talent”or “is gifted.” Even when seen close up, the mundanity ofexcellence is often not believed:
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 atthe 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.”
But of course there is no secret; there is only the doing of all those little things, each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit,an ordinary part of one’s everyday life.
Conclusions
The foregoing analysis suggests that we haveoverlooked a fundamental fact about Olympic class athletes; and the argument may apply far more widely than swimming, or sports. I suggest that it applies to success in business, politics, and academics, in dentistry, bookkeeping, food service, speechmaking, electrical engineering, selling insurance (when the clients are upset, you climb in the car and go out there to talk with them), and perhaps even in the arts.
Consider again the major points:
(1)Â Excellence is a qualitative phenomenon.
Doing more does not equal doing better. High performers focus on qualitative, not quantitative, improvements; it is qualitative improvements which produce significant changes in level ofachievement; different levels ofachievement really are distinct, and in fact reflect vastly different habits, values, and goals.
(2)Â 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 create outstanding performance; they avoid the work of empirical analysis and logical explanations (clear definitions, separable independent and dependent 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 high performers and other people.
(3)Â Excellence is mundane.
Excellence is accomplished through the doing of actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, added up over time. While these actions are “qualitatively different” from those of performers at other levels, these differences are neither unmanageable nor, taken one step at a time, terribly difficult.
Mary T. Meagher came to practice on time; some writers always work for three hours each morning, before beginning anything else;a businessperson may go ahead and make that tough phonecall; a job applicant writes one more letter; a runner decides, against the odds, to enter the race; a county commissioner submits a petition to run for Congress; a teenager asks for a date; an actor attends one more audition. Every time a decision comes up, the qualitatively “correct”choice will be made. Theaction, in itself, is nothing special; the care and consistency with which it is made is.
Howard Becker has presented a similar argument about the ordinariness of apparently unusual people in his book Outsiders (1961). But where he speaks of deviance, I would speak of excellence. Becker says,and I concur: “We ought not to view it as something special, as depraved or in some magical way better than other kinds ofbehavior.We ought tosee it simply as a kind of behavior some disapprove of and others value, studying the processes by which either or both perspectives are built up and maintained. Perhaps the best surety against either extreme is close contact with the people we study.”
After three years of field work with world-class swimmers, having the kind of close contact that Becker recommends, I wrote a draft of some book chapters, full of stories about swimmers, and I showed it to a friend. “You need to jazz it up,” he said. “You need to make these people more interesting. The analysis is nice, but except for the fact that these are good swimmers, there isn’t much else exciting to say about them as individuals.” 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.
The Mundanity of Excellence, by Daniel Chambliss
(Visa: Full text available here. I edited this one a little for readability. Left out the footnotes.)
“Olympic sports and competitive swimming in particular provide an unusually clear opportunity for studying the nature of excellence. In other fields, it may be less clear who are the outstanding performers: the best painter or pianist, the best businessperson, the finest waitress or the best father. But in sport (and this is one of its attractions) success is defined more exactly, by success in competition. There are medals and ribbons and plaques for first place, second, and third; competitions are arranged for the head-to-head meeting of the best competitors in the world; in swimming and track, times are electronically recorded to the hundredth of a second; there are statistics published and rankings announced, every month or every week.
By the end of the Olympic Games every four years, it is completely clear who won and who lost, who made the finals, who participated in the Games,and who never participated in the sport at all. Within competitive swimming in particular, clear stratification exists not only betweenindividuals but also between defined levels of the sport as well.
At the lowest level, we see the country club teams, operating in the summer-time as a loosely run, mildly competitive league, with volunteer, part-time coaches. Above that there are teams that represent entire cities and compete with other teams from other cities around the state or region; then a “Junior Nationals” level of competition, featuring the best younger (under 18 years old) athletes; then the Senior Nationals level (any age, the best in the nation); and finally, we could speak of world- or Olympic-class competitors.
At each such level, we find, predictably, certain people competing: one athlete swims in a summer league, never seeing swimmers from another town; one swimmer may consistently qualify for the Junior Nationals, but not for Seniors; a third may swim at the Olympics and never return to Junior Nationals. The levels of the sport are remarkably distinct from one another.
Because success in swimming is so definable, we can clearly see, by comparing levels and studying individuals as they move between and within levels, what exactly produces excellence. In addition, careers in swimming are relatively short; one can achieve tremendous success in a brief period oftime.
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. This report draws on extended experience with swimmers at every level of ability, over some half a dozen years. Observation has covered the span of careers, and I have had the chance to compare not just athletes within a certain level (the view that most coaches have), but between the most discrepant levels as well. Thus these findings avoid the usual problem of an observer’s being familiar mainly with athletes at one level.
The Nature of Excellence
By “excellence” I mean “consistent superiority of performance.” The excellent athlete regularly,even routinely, performs better than his or her competitors. Consistency of superior performances tells us that one athlete is indeed better than another, and that the difference between them is not merely the product of chance. This definition can apply at any level of the sport, differentiating athletes. The superiority discussed here may be that of one swimmer over another, or of all athletes at one level (say, the Olympic class) over another.
By this definition, we need not judge performance against an absolute criterion, but only against other performances. There are acknowledged leaders on every team, as well as teams widely recognized as dominant. To introduce what are sources of excellence for Olympic athletes, I should first suggest saving the demonstration for later—what does not produce excellence.
(1)Excellence is not, I find, the product of socially deviant personalities. These swimmers don’t appear to be “oddballs,” nor are they loners (“kids who have given up the normal teenage life”). If their achievements result from a personality characteristic, that characteristic is not obvious. Perhaps it is true, as the mythology of sports has it, that the best athletes are more self-confident (although that is debatable); but such confidence could be an effect of achievement, not the cause of it.
(2)Excellence does not result from quantitative changes in behavior. Increased trainingtime, per se, does not make one swim fast; nor does increased “psyching up,”nor does movingthe arms faster. Simply doing more of the same will not lead to moving up a level in the sport.
(3)Excellence does not result from some special inner quality ofthe athlete.“Talent” is one common name for this quality; sometimes we talk of a “gift,”or of“ natural ability.”These terms are generally used to mystify the essentially mundane processes of achievement in sports, keeping us away from a realistic analysis of the actual factors creating superlative performances, and protecting us from a sense of responsibility for our own outcomes. So where does excellence — consistent superiority of performance—come from?
I. Excellence Requires Qualitative Differentiation
Excellence in competitive swimming is achieved through qualitative differentiation from other swimmers, not through quantitative increases in activity. I should clarify what is meant here by “quantitative”and “qualitative.” By quantity, we mean the number or amount of something. Quantitative improvement entails an increase in the number ofsome one thing one does.
For example:
Quantitative improvements, then, involve doing more of the same thing.
By quality, though, we mean the character or nature of the thing itself. A qualitative change involves modifying what is actually being done, not simply doing more of it. For a swimmer doing the breaststroke, a qualitative change might be:
Each of these involves doing things differently than before, not necessarily doing more. Qualitative improvements involve doing different kinds of things.
Now we can consider how qualitative differentiation is manifested:
Different levels of the sport are qualitatively distinct. 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. What makes them faster cannot be quantitatively compared with lower-level swimmers, because while there may be quantitative differences and certainly there are, for instance in the number of hours spent in workouts—these are not, I think, the decisive factors at all.
Instead, they do things differently. Their strokes are different, their attitudes are different, their groups of friends are different, their parents treat the sport differently, the swimmers prepare differently for their races, and they enter different kinds of meets and events. There are numerous discontinuities ofthis sort between, say, the swimmer who competes in a local City League meet and one who enters the Olympic Trials.
Consider three dimensions of difference:
(1)Technique: The styles of strokes, dives and turns are dramatically different at differ-ent levels. A “C” (the lowest rank in United States Swimming’s ranking system) breast-stroke swimmer tends to pull her arms far backbeneath her, kick the legs out very wide without bringing them together at the finish, lift herself high out of the water on the turn, fail to take a long pull underwater after the turn, andtouch at the finish with one hand, on her side. By comparison, an “AAAA”(the highest rank) swimmer, sculls the arms out to the side and sweeps back in (never actually pulling backwards), kicks narrowly with the feet finishing together, stays low on the turns, takes a long underwater pull after the turn, and touches at the finish with both hands. 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, as is the speed with which they swim.
(2) Discipline: The best swimmers are more likely to be strict with their training, coming to workouts on time, carefully doing the competitive strokes legally (i.e.,without violating the technical rules ofthe sport), watch what they eat, sleep regular hours, do proper warmups before a meet, and the like. Their energy is carefully channeled. 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. Louganis is never sloppy in practice,and so is never sloppy in meets.
(3) Attitude: At the higher levels of competitive swimming, something like an inversion of attitude takes place. 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.
Coming into the 5:30 AM. practices at Mission Viejo, many ofthe swimmers were lively, laughing, talking, enjoying themselves, perhaps appreciating the fact that most people would positively hate doing it. It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices to achieve their goals. Often, they don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it. These qualitative differences are what distinguish levels ofthe sport.They are very noticeable, while the quantitative differences between levels, both in training and in competition, may be surprisingly small indeed.
Yet very small quantitative differences in performance may be coupled with huge qualitative differences: In the finals of the men’s 100-meter freestyle swimming event at the 1984 Olympics, Rowdy Gaines, the gold medalist, finished ahead of second-place Mark Stockwell by .44 seconds,a gap of only 8/10 of1%. Between Gaines and the 8th place finisher (a virtual unknown named Dirk Korthals, from WestGermany), there was only a 2.2% difference in time. Indeed, between Rowdy Gaines, the fastest swimmer in the world that year, and a respectable 10-year-old, the quantitative difference in speed would only be about 30%.
Yet here, as in many cases, a rather small quantitative difference produces an enormous qualitative difference: Gaines was consistently a winner in major international meets, holder of the world record, and the Olympic Gold Medalist in three events.
Stratification in the sport is discrete, not continuous. There are significant, qualitative breaks—discontinuities—between levels of the sport. These include differences in attitude, discipline, and technique which in turn lead to small but consistent quantitative differences inspeed.
Entire teams show such differences inattitude, discipline, and technique, and consequently certain teams are easily seen to be“stuck”at certain levels. Some teams always do well at the National Championships, others do well at the Regionals, others at the County Meet.
And certainly swimmers typically remain within a certain level for most of their careers, maintaining throughout their careers the habits with which they began. Within levels, competitive improvements for such swimmers are typically marginal, reflecting only differential growth rates (early onset of puberty, for instance) or the jockeying for position within the relatively limited sphere of their own level.
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 (movements through levels) will take place. This is really several worlds, each with its own patterns of conduct.
If, as I have suggested, there really are qualitative breaks between levels of the sport, and if people really don’t“work their way up”in any simple additive sense, perhaps our very conception of a single swimming world is inaccurate.I have spoken of the “top”of the sport, and of “levels”within the sport. But these words suggest that all swimmers are, so to speak, climbing a single ladder, aiming towards the same goals, sharing the same values, swimming the same strokes, all looking upwards towards an Olympic gold medal.
But they aren’t. Some want gold medals, some want to make the team, somewant to exercise, or have fun with friends, or be out in the sunshine and water. Some are trying to escape their parents. The images of the “top”and the “levels” of swimming which I have used until now may simply reflect the dominance ofa certain faction of swimmers and coaches in the sport: top is what they regard as the top, and their definitions of success have the broadest political currency in United States Swimming. Fast swimmers take as given that faster is better—instead of, say, that more beautiful is better; or that parental involvement is better; or that “well rounded” children (whatever that may mean) are better.
So we should envision not a swimming world, but multiple worlds (and changing worlds is a major step toward excellence), a horizontal rather than vertical differentiation of the sport. What I have called “levels” are better described as “worlds”or“spheres.”
In one such world, parents are loosely in charge, coaches are teenagers employed as lifeguards, practices are held a few times a week, competitions are scheduled perhaps a week in advance, the season lasts for a few weeks in the summertime,and athletes who are much faster than the others may be discouraged by social pressure even from competing, for they take the fun out of it. The big event of the season is the City Championship,when children from the metropolitan area will spend two days racing each other in many events, and the rest of the time sitting under huge tents playing cards, reading, listening to music, and gossiping.
In another world, coaches are very powerful, parents seen only occasionally (and never on the pool deck), swimmers travel thousands of miles to attend meets, they swim 6 days a week for years at a time, and the fastest among them are objects of respect and praise. The big event of the season may be the National Championships, where the athletes may spend much time—sitting under huge tents, playing cards, reading, listening to music and gossiping.
Each such world has its own distinctive types of powerful people and dominant athletes, and being prominent in one world is no guarantee of being prominent in another. At lower levels, the parents of swimmers are in charge; at the higher levels, the coaches; perhaps in the Masters teams which are made up only of swimmers over 25 years old, the swimmers themselves.
Each world, too, has its distinctive goals: going to the Olympics, doing well at the National Junior Olympics, winning the City Meet, having a good time for a few weeks. In each world the techniques are at least somewhat distinct (as with the breast-stroke, discussed above), and certain demands are made on family and friends. In all of these ways, and many more, each so-called “level”of competitive swimming is qualitatively different than others. The differences are not simply quantifiable steps along a one-dimensional path leading to the Olympic Games. Goals are varied, participants have competing commitments, and techniques are jumbled.
II. Why “Talent”Does Not Lead to Excellence
“Talent” is perhaps the most pervasive lay explanation we have for athletic success. Great athletes, we seem to believe, are born with a special gift, almost a “thing” inside ofthem, denied to the rest of us—perhaps physical, genetic, psychological, or physiological. Some have “it,”and some don’t. Some are “natural athletes,”and some aren’t. While an athlete, we acknowledge, may require many years of training and dedication to develop and use that talent, it is always “in there,”only waiting for an opportunity to come out. When children perform well, they are said to “have”talent; if performance declines, they may be said to have“wasted their talent.” We believe it is that talent, conceived as a substance behind the surface reality of performance, which finally distinguishes the best among our athletes.
But talent fails as an explanation for athletic success, on conceptual grounds. It mystifies excellence, subsuming a complex set of discrete actions behind a single undifferentiated concept. To understand these actions and the excellence which they constitute, then, we should first debunk this concept of talent and see where it fails. On at least three points, I believe, “talent”is inadequate.
Factors other than talent explain athletic success more precisely. We can, with a little effort, see what these factors are in swimming:
Such factors are clearly definable, and their effects can be clearly demonstrated. To subsume all of them, willynilly, under the rubric of “talent”obscures rather than illuminates the sources of athletic excellence.
The concept of talent hinders a clearunderstanding ofexcellence. By providing a quick “explanation”of athletic success, it satisfies our casual curiosity while requiring neither an empirical analysis nor a critical questioning of our tacit assumptions about top athletes. At best, it is an easy way of admitting that we don’t know the answer. But the attempt at explanation fails. 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.
III.The Mundanity of Excellence
“People don’t know how ordinary success is,” said Mary T. Meagher, winner of 3 gold medals in the Los Angeles Olympics, when asked what the public least understands about her sport. She then spoke of starting her career in a summer league country club team, of working her way to AAU meets, to faster and faster competitions, of learning new techniques, practicing new habits, meeting new challenges.
What Meagher said—that success is ordinary—in some sense applies, I believe, to other fields of endeavor as well: to business, to politics, to professions of all kinds, including academics. In what follows I will try to elaborate on this point, drawing some examples from the swimming research, and some from other fields, to indicate the scope of this conception.
A: Excellence is mundane.
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. 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, produce excellence.
When a swimmer learns a proper flipturn in the freestyle races, she will swim the race a bit faster; then a streamlined push off from the wall, with the arms squeezed together over the head, and a little faster; then how to place the hands in the water so no air is cupped in them; then how to lift them over the water; then how to lift weights to properly build strength, and how to eat the right foods, and to wear the best suits for racing, and on and on (see Maglischo, 1982; Troup and Reese, 1983).
Each of those tasks seems small in itself, but each allows the athlete to swim a bit faster. And having learned and consistently practiced all of them together, and many more besides, the swimmer may compete in the Olympic Games. The winning of a gold medal is nothing more than the synthesis ofa countless number of such little things—even if some of them are done unwittingly or by others, and thus called “luck.” So the “little things” really do count.
We have already seen how a very small (in quantitative terms) difference can produce a noticeable success. Even apparent flukes can lead to gold medal performances:
In the 100-Meter Freestyle event in Los Angeles, Rowdy Gaines, knowing that the starter for the race tended to fire the gun fast, anticipated the start; while not actually jumping the gun, it seems from video replays of the race that Gaines knew exactly when to go, and others were left on the blocks as he took off. But the starter turned his back, and the protests filed afterwards by competitors were ignored. Gaines had spent years watching starters, and had talked with his coach (Richard Quick) before the race about this starter in particular. (Field notes; see Chambliss, 1988, for full description)
Gaines was not noticeably faster than several of the other swimmers in the race, but with this one extra tactic, he gained enough of an advantage to win the race. And he seemed in almost all of his races to find such an advantage; hence the gold medal. Looking at such subtleties, we can say that not only are the little things important; in some ways, the little things are the only things.
In swimming, or elsewhere, these practices might at first glance seem very minimal indeed: When Mary T. Meagher was 13 years old and had qualified for the National Championships, she decided to try to break the world record in the 200-Meter Butterfly race.
She made two immediate qualitative changes in her routine:
B: Motivation is mundane, too.
Swimmers go to practice to see their friends, to exercise, to feel strong afterwards, to impress the coach, to work towards bettering a time they swam in the last meet. Sometimes, the older ones, with a longer view of the future, will aim towards a meet that is still several months away. But even given the longer-term goals, the daily satisfactions need to be there. The mundane social rewards really are crucial.
By comparison, the big, dramatic motivations—winning an Olympic gold medal, setting a world record—seem to be ineffective unless translated into shorter-term tasks.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. Again, Mary T. Meagher:
“I never looked beyond the next year,and I never looked beyond the next level. I never thought about the Olympics when I was ten; at that time I was thinking about the State Championships.When I made cuts for Regionals [the next higher level of competition], I started thinking about Regionals; when I made cuts for National Junior Olympics, I started thinking about National Junior Olympics. I can’t even think about the [1988] Olympics right now. Things can overwhelm you if you think too far ahead.”
This statement was echoed by many of the swimmers I interviewed. While many of them were working towards the Olympic Games, they divided the work along the way into achievable steps, no one of which was too big. They found their challenges in small things: working on a better start this week, polishing up their backstroke technique next week, focusing on better sleep habits, planning how to pace their swim. Many top swimmers are accustomed to winning races in practice, day after day. Steve Lundquist, who won two gold medals in Los Angeles, sees his success as resulting from an early decision that he wanted to win every swim, every day, in every practice. That was the immediate goal he faced at workouts; just try to win every swim, every lap, in every stroke, no matter what.
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. The short-term goal ofwinning this swim, in this workout, translated into his ability to win bigger and bigger races. Competition, when the day arrived for a meet, was not a shock to him, nothing at all out of the ordinary. This leads to a third and final point.
C: In the pursuit of excellence, maintaining mundanity is the key psychological challenge.
In common parlance, winners don’t choke. Face with what seems to be a tremendous challenge or a strikingly unusual event, such as the Olympic Games, the better athletes take it as a normal, manageable situation (“It’s just another swim meet,” is a phrase sometimes used by top swimmers at a major event such as the Games) and do what is necessary to deal with it. Standard rituals (such as the warmup, the psych, the visualization of the race,the taking off of sweats, and the like) are ways of importing one’s daily habits into the novel situation, to make it as normal an event as possible.
Swimmers like Lundquist, who train at competition-level intensity, therefore have an advantage: arriving at a meet, they are already accustomed to doing turns correctly, taking legal starts, doing a proper warmup, and being aggressive from the outset of the competition. If each day of the season is approached with a seriousness of purpose, then the big meet will not come as a shock. The athlete will believe “I belong here, this is my world”— and not be paralyzed by fear or self-consciousness.The task then is to have training closely approximate competition conditions.
The mundanity ofexcellence is typically unrecognized. I think the reason is fairly simple. Usually we see great athletes only after they have become great—after the years of learning the new methods, gaining the habits of competitiveness and consistency, after becoming comfortable in their world. They have long since perfected the myriad of techniques that together constitute excellence. Ignorant of all of the specific steps that have led to the performance and to the confidence,we think that somehow excellence sprang full grown from this person,and we say he or she “has talent”or “is gifted.” Even when seen close up, the mundanity ofexcellence is often not believed:
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 atthe 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.”
But of course there is no secret; there is only the doing of all those little things, each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit,an ordinary part of one’s everyday life.
Conclusions
The foregoing analysis suggests that we haveoverlooked a fundamental fact about Olympic class athletes; and the argument may apply far more widely than swimming, or sports. I suggest that it applies to success in business, politics, and academics, in dentistry, bookkeeping, food service, speechmaking, electrical engineering, selling insurance (when the clients are upset, you climb in the car and go out there to talk with them), and perhaps even in the arts.
Consider again the major points:
(1)Â Excellence is a qualitative phenomenon.
Doing more does not equal doing better. High performers focus on qualitative, not quantitative, improvements; it is qualitative improvements which produce significant changes in level ofachievement; different levels ofachievement really are distinct, and in fact reflect vastly different habits, values, and goals.
(2)Â 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 create outstanding performance; they avoid the work of empirical analysis and logical explanations (clear definitions, separable independent and dependent 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 high performers and other people.
(3)Â Excellence is mundane.
Excellence is accomplished through the doing of actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, added up over time. While these actions are “qualitatively different” from those of performers at other levels, these differences are neither unmanageable nor, taken one step at a time, terribly difficult.
Mary T. Meagher came to practice on time; some writers always work for three hours each morning, before beginning anything else;a businessperson may go ahead and make that tough phonecall; a job applicant writes one more letter; a runner decides, against the odds, to enter the race; a county commissioner submits a petition to run for Congress; a teenager asks for a date; an actor attends one more audition. Every time a decision comes up, the qualitatively “correct”choice will be made. Theaction, in itself, is nothing special; the care and consistency with which it is made is.
Howard Becker has presented a similar argument about the ordinariness of apparently unusual people in his book Outsiders (1961). But where he speaks of deviance, I would speak of excellence. Becker says,and I concur: “We ought not to view it as something special, as depraved or in some magical way better than other kinds ofbehavior.We ought tosee it simply as a kind of behavior some disapprove of and others value, studying the processes by which either or both perspectives are built up and maintained. Perhaps the best surety against either extreme is close contact with the people we study.”
After three years of field work with world-class swimmers, having the kind of close contact that Becker recommends, I wrote a draft of some book chapters, full of stories about swimmers, and I showed it to a friend. “You need to jazz it up,” he said. “You need to make these people more interesting. The analysis is nice, but except for the fact that these are good swimmers, there isn’t much else exciting to say about them as individuals.” 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.