The Mundanity Of Excellence

As part of my year-end break, I had the time to catch up on some reading that had been sitting on my list for a while. One piece I read was titled The Mundanity Of Excellence.

It’s a sociological research paper that studies elite swimmers, not to analyse talent, but to understand how excellence actually shows up in everyday life. It’s not light reading. The paper is dense and analytical. At its core, it asks a simple question: what does excellence look like from the inside, through the eyes of those who live it every day?

The answer is almost underwhelming.

For top swimmers, excellence isn’t a feeling. It isn’t a heroic moment or a burst of motivation. It’s not something they talk about or celebrate. It’s a way of life built around repetition.

Same early mornings. Same training blocks. Same drills that would feel mind-numbing to most people. They treat the basics—laps, breathing, posture, recovery, diet, sleep—as non-negotiable. Not because it’s exciting, but because it works. Their edge isn’t a secret technique. It’s sticking, relentlessly, to what most people already know but fail to sustain.

The central idea of the paper is uncomfortable and straightforward: high performance isn’t rare because the method is unknown. It’s rare because the method is monotonous.

That insight lands close to home when I think about personal growth and day-to-day work.

Much as I’ve written about this before, the article reinforces—almost uncomfortably—what it really takes to become good at something. Most of us say we want progress, but what we want is for it to FEEL like progress. We look for visible change, quick feedback, and the occasional surge of excitement that reassures us we’re moving forward.

But the work that actually moves the needle is almost always under the hood, usually quiet and repetitive.

• Finishing what you start
• Doing the preparation before the meeting.
• Writing the follow-up note.
• Reviewing the numbers properly.
• Having the difficult conversation early.
• Choosing sleep over scrolling.
• Showing up to do the mundane work even on days you don’t feel like it.

None of this looks impressive in the moment. That’s precisely why it’s so easy to skip.

If your personal development plan depends on motivation, it will fall apart the day motivation doesn’t show up. If it depends on structure and habits, it becomes boring in the best possible way. It becomes reliable.

The older I get, the more this feels true: excellence is not an event. It’s a set of ordinary behaviours performed with unusual consistency.

There’s nothing glamorous about doing great work.

Paradoxically, it’s built by being willing to be boring, and by doing the same repeatable things well, over and over again.