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61. Excellence Is Fun

Christopher Govender

• 1 min read

I reviewed The Mundanity Of Excellence again this morning. It is a study of extraordinary performance, “excellence”, using swimming as a medium to understand its general principles. I first learned about it from Josh Waitzkin, someone I admire deeply. He completely changed how I view life from his first episode on The Tim Ferriss Show. Daniel Chambliss, the author, tells us early on that:

  • Excellence does not result from doing more of the same
  • Excellence is not the result of oddball-type personalities
  • Excellence does not result from some special inner quality mystifying success

He then goes on to show us what I believe is the key aspect that separates top performers from the rest.

“What others see as boring - swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours, say - they find peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic. They enjoy hard practices, look forward to difficult competitions, try to set difficult goals. Coming into the 5:30am practices at Mission Viejo, many of the swimmers were lively, laughing, talking, enjoying themselves, perhaps appreciating the fact that most people would positively hate doing it. It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices to achieve their goals. Often, they don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it.”

What I discovered this time reviewing this research paper was the following.

Great performance is the result of:

  1. Learning small skills while having fun
  2. Carefully drilling them into habits while having fun
  3. Fitting all the small skills, now habits, into a coherent whole and still having fun
  4. Having fun is the constant factor so much so that even major performance events seem normal

It may seem like I am suggesting we only do what is fun instead what I am saying is if what you are doing is not fun then it is a bad way of doing it (see The Fun Criterion). To walk down the path of excellence we need to be having fun and fun is much more malleable than we think. What activities can you transform into fun?

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