Majicman Notes

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.

Daniel Chambliss

 “The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers,” Sociological Theory, Spring 1989.

https://www.hamilton.edu/academics/our-faculty/directory/faculty-detail/daniel-chambliss