Minutes of a Monday #37

#minutesofamonday

Brain Food > the mundanity of excellence

“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 flip turn 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 towear the best suits for racing, and on and on.

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 of a 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.”

Daniel Chambliss, The Mundanity of Excellence.

Soul Food

“Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.”

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

LOL

Julia Scotti talks bad habits:

Appendix

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it - it was all that had gone before.”

Jacob Riis, social reformer

AOB

Article #4 landing in your inbox later this week. Thanks for stopping by & have a great week ya’ll.