The Mundanity of Excellence — There Is No Secret, and That’s the Best News You’ll Get Today

Well, hello there, my friend.

Jonathan Doyle with you.

Welcome once again to The Daily Podcast.

As always, I'm pleased you're here.

Some really great content this week.

I'm enjoying these episodes because when the content is good, I learn

as, just as much as anybody.

I've been in this game a long time, and the cool thing about doing this week's

content is that the things that we're covering, when I study them and share

them with you, I know that they are real, that they're accurate, that they

actually work, 'cause I've had long enough now to kinda test so many of, of

these ideas in the laboratory of life.

If you missed yesterday's episode, we talked about the fact that when things

are really terrible, they'll force you to act, but if they're not so terrible,

if they're just kind of a little bit bad, we tend to put up with stuff for ages.

That was a really interesting insight for a lot of people, that sometimes

when things are just a little bit awkward and unpleasant, you'll just

put up with them for way too long.

So I suggested yesterday that you do an audit of your life and look for

things that are just a little bit bad, just a little bit off, because those

are the areas where if you change them, you can see significant gain.

Today, we wanna talk about the mundanity of excellence.

The mundanity of excellence.

This is a topic I've been talking about for several weeks now, since I

finished Robert Greene's book, Mastery.

That book, as I said at the time when I did some episodes

on it, it's a tough read.

It's 300 odd pages, and there's a fair bit of repetition in there, but the

most powerful message of that book on mastery, if you, if I haven't mentioned

it to you before, you haven't heard me talk about it, it's kind of a, a long

historical study of some of the most influential figures in history and

whether or not talent kind of exists.

And today is gonna pick up on that because what we found in Robert

Greene's book, Mastery, was that talent really doesn't exist.

What I was teaching people recently at an event was aptitude

exists, an interest in something.

We have an aptitude or a kind of a proficiency or a

comfort doing a certain thing.

It might be public speaking or investment or car mechanics.

We've all got different things that from childhood we naturally

kind of had aptitude for.

And then in Greene's thesis, we go from that to mastery via the path of obsession.

So you start with an aptitude and interest, and then what we get

is obsession, a complete focus, and really channeling the entire

life project towards the aptitude.

And then after, you know, X number of years, people go, "Wow, look at this

talent." And I'm really fascinated by this because I actually think talent gives most

of us a… It lets us off the hook, right?

You don't have to be amazing because you might tell yourself you don't

have the talent of someone else.

You might see somebody doing something and you think, "Wow, they're

so talented," and we don't try.

Like, a lot of times people just don't, uh, just assume that talent is

this mythical beast that's out there somewhere, and if you weren't born with

this myth- mythical pixie dust thing that got dropped on your life, then

you're kinda stuck with mediocrity.

But I want to encourage you today that that is not what the data bears out.

What the data bears out is a very different story, and in today's

episode, we're touching on this thing called the mundanity of excellence.

You know, that when something's mundane, it is not surprising.

It is pedestrian.

It is day in, day out.

It's something that just happens over and over again.

And what's great about these ideas again is that they're ancient.

I'm gonna do an episode for you in a couple of days where I'm actually

gonna talk about that a bit more, how when you hear about the next big

thing, you should probably ignore it because the really great ideas

have been with us for a long time.

And as we talk about the mundanity of excellence, we can go back to Aristotle

in the fifth century BC, who famously said that, you know, we become what we do.

Ax- uh, excellence therefore, arete in the Greek, excellence therefore, Aristotle

says, is a habit, that excellence comes from doing specific things day in, day

out, time after time, and repeating them.

So today, I'm gonna just draw your attention to some fascinating research

by a guy called Daniel Chambliss or Chambliss, who was embedded for many

years with elite Olympic athletes and spent ages studying them, trying to

understand this mythical beast of talent.

And what he discovered, there was no talent magic anywhere.

There was dozens of small, I'm reading to you now from the research, dozens of

small ordinary skills, each learned or stumbled on, stacked and synchronized.

So what he discovered, he probably went in there like most of us expecting, wow,

these are these, these genetic freaks.

And let's be honest, there's, in, in something like Olympic sports,

particularly swimming, which was Chambliss' focus, you know, there is

a genetic component like, you know, this is the aptitude piece, right?

If you're five foot nothing and, uh, you don't have big hands

and feet, then Olympic swimming is probably not ideal for you.

But genetically, if you're kind of 6'4" and you've got big hands and

feet and you've got a big engine, then they're your basics, right?

That's the aptitude piece.

That's the proficiency piece, the kind of genetics that got handed to you.

But what he discovers in the research is that, yeah, that's the baseline.

But what he actually discovers then is these tiny, unique habits.

And he discovered that it wasn't just… He sort of, he, he

concluded that excellence wasn't quantitative, it was qualitative.

So it wasn't simply a case of these people just worked harder and did

more and went on and just that, you know, more quantity, right?

What he discovered was that their processes were of a very high quality,

so that when they discovered particular training habits and p- training

hacks, they just kept doing them.

So I play a lot of golf, and my handicap's pretty low, and I had a lesson again

recently, and there was just this simple process that the, that my coach was

taking me through, which, you know, it, it just hadn't occurred to me before,

and he kinda helped me understand it, and it was a qualitative improvement.

And then I just began to repeat that qualitative improvement for

the days and weeks afterwards, and you get a significant benefit.

And people look at you and go, "Wow, you're really hitting it well." And

I go, "Well, yeah, but it's, it's a series of stacked skills." It's not

that I'm talented, it's that I learned basic movement patterns and then a whole

bunch of other practice, and then these qualitative skills stacked over time.

So let me give you a direct quote here from Daniel Chambliss, who says,

"Superlative performance, superlative performance, is really a confluence,

coming together, of dozens of small skills or activities drilled into habit

and fitted together in a synthesized whole." One more time, listen carefully.

"Superlative performance" Would you like that?

D- I mean, is anybody gonna say, "I don't want superlative performance in my life"?

"Is really a confluence, coming together, of dozens of small skills or activities

drilled into habit and fitted together in a synthesized whole." So what we assume is

excellence is people learning a specific path of skills, stacking them together,

and bringing them into one whole.

I spoke at an event recently, and it was great.

You know, as I, I got a lot of travel coming up, a lot more speaking,

but it was great to be back on stage, and, and it was interesting.

People really appreciated it, and they're like, "You know, great speech." And I'm

like, "Thank you." But it occurred to me, talking to Karen on the way back

to the airport, at one point I spent a decade, a decade speaking to about 40,000

people a year for 10 years straight.

Stage after stage, from big events to remote outback Australian country towns,

I, I just kept doing it for a decade.

So now if you see me on stage, you're like, "Wow, he is so talented." Friends,

y- uh, uh, uh, it's aptitude and then 10 years on the road, and it's now 20, almost

25 years really that I've been doing this.

So all of this is to encourage you, because I want to disabuse

you of the talent myth.

I want you to stop thinking that your life is ever meant

to just be normal or mediocre.

I mean, do you believe in a God or a universe that would basically create

this tiny sprinkling of talented people, and the rest of us completely

just missed out and got overlooked?

I don't think that's how reality works at all.

So I wanna encourage you that whatever gift you've been given, and I'm really

big on this lately with people, all of us have a unique talent and gift.

All of us have a unique talent and gift.

And the mundanity of excellence is simply the decision to learn good qualitative

improvement in your particular area of excellence, and then form that into habits

that you practice regularly and bring those together in a synthesized whole.

But if you only take two things from this message today, number one, I

want you to surrender the talent myth.

I, I, I know your brain's going, "No, I don't, don't agree. I see these amazing

people on screen. They do this and they do that." You don't know the backstory.

You don't.

You don't know the, the, the-- they surely, they might have had some genetic

or, uh, um, you know, genetic blessings or they were born a particular place,

or then all they had was an aptitude and then some practice and then developing

the skills and bringing them together in a synthesized whole over time.

And if they can do it, you can do it.

And the reason I wanna sell it to you is because when you do it, when

you are living in your gift, you bless people, you bless the world.

Can you imagine a planet where everybody kinda was operating in their real genius

zone, their particular area of blessing?

Can you imagine what the world would be like?

I mean, how many of us surrender our lives to doing entire careers and lifespans

with things that we genuinely dislike?

And that is so driven, drilled deep into me that I wanna

rescue anybody I can from it.

So I guess the summary today is stop looking for the secret to growing your

business, to improving your relationships, to getting fit, to losing weight.

There actually isn't one.

There isn't a super secret, and that is actually the best news

that you're gonna get today.

The best news you're probably gonna hear today is that there is no super secret to

the thing that's most important to you.

It's just identifying the habits and patterns, putting them into practice, and

doing it over an extended period of time.

That's all you have to do.

All right, my friends, I hope that's helpful for you.

If you like what you're hearing, would you do me a favor?

Just subscribe to the podcast today.

Hit that subscribe button.

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I'm on Instagram every day @jdoylespeaks.

You can see me stacking what I do every day, uh, Instagram, jdoylespeaks, on

YouTube at Jonathan Doyle Speaks, and

everything else is on the website.

Booking me to speak, uh, private coaching is available, uh, on

the website, jonathandoyle.co.

God bless you, my friend.

This has been The Daily Podcast.

I'm your host, Jonathan Doyle.

It's been an absolute joy to talk with you today, and you and I

are gonna do this again tomorrow