Key to the City: Managing the Mundane

You know what masters are excellent at? Amongst other things, masters of their craft have settle into embracing the mundane. Whether they love it, like it, or simply tolerate it, peak performers log hours and hours of seemingly unremarkable repetitions, mental drills, and touches with their craft. By definition, we know that accomplished individuals need to accumulate a large body of work. If we can agree on that, it would be fair to assume that at some point playing G cords on the guitar, memorizing lines of a script, or circling laps on the track lose their luster. Sooner or later, the novelty wears off and there’s plenty of work to be done.

Looking at the alternative to peak performance, we can assume that many who are satisfactory or worse at their craft may lose interest in their body of work as the novelty wears off. It doesn’t pay to be a front runner when you’ve got remarkable goals, people.

Think about your first day in the gym. Everything was new. The movements, the language, the training atmosphere, and, hell, even the people in the room were novelties. Well, I’ve got news for you. Liking that part is easy. Unfortunately, the goals you have for yourself in the gym are likely going to be reached somewhere beyond the excitement of DEUCE Gym’s newness wearing off.

When Daniel Chambliss wrote his paper in sociological theory called, “The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers” he found that remarkable athletic stars were built on incredibly boring training. While I wouldn’t call myself a “remarkable athletic star” I did reach a certain level of excellence in my sport, and let’s just say you wouldn’t want to watch a reality show about my training entitled, “Real Sports: A Quarter Million Swings Off the Battle Tee.” I promise. Hilariously, Chambliss finished nearly three years of field work for his research paper and gave the paper to a friend to review. His response?

“You need to jazz it up,” he recommended, “You need 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.”

While his friend thought it was a hefty critique, Chambliss was thrilled because as he said himself, “That’s the point.”

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach