Excellence Is A Qualitative Phenomenon
In the early 1980’s, the sociologist Daniel Chambliss spent five years studying swimmers at every level of ability. He visited learn-to-swim programs, coached a regional swim team, and traveled with the U.S. Olympic Team. He was interested in what separated the good from the great—the habits, training regimens, mindsets, physical traits, and daily practices that contribute to the reason some swimmers reach the highest level while others, despite similar ambitions, don’t. Then in 1989, he published his research in a paper titled, The Mundanity of Excellence. Essentially, Chambliss found that Olympic champions don’t train more than the average swimmer. Instead, they train differently. To use the technical terms, the difference is “qualitative,” not “quantitative.” “Excellence,” Chambliss writes, “is a qualitative phenomenon.” “Not only in swimming,” he adds. “This is true for success in business, in academics, in sales, in the arts, in the sciences, in any area you pick: people who excel do things differently from those who don’t. It’s not that they just do more. It’s not even that they just work harder. It’s that their techniques are different. Their attitudes about their profession are different. Their goals are different.” “Excellence,” he reiterates, “is achieved through qualitative differentiation from others, not through quantitative increases in activity.”
Excellence achieved through doing things differently—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Doing What Others See As Boring
In particular, a way that the best athletes qualitatively differentiate themselves, Chambliss writes, is that they do “what others see as boring.” Take the three-time Olympic gold medalist, Mary T. Meagher. When Meagher was 13 years old, after she clarified her goal of one day breaking the 200 Meter Butterfly world record, Meagher made two mundane changes to her routine. First, she decided she would never again arrive late to a practice. Second, she decided that during every practice, she would make every turn as if it were an Olympic race. Where most swimmers allow themselves to swim more casually in practice than in competition, Meagher didn’t. This, she said, habituated her to being a little bit better than those around her. On any given day, these two changes—showing up on time and making every practice turn as if it were a competition turn—would have little to no noticeable impact. We can imagine there were days where Meagher felt the frustration of putting in work that doesn’t immediately pay off. But over time, doing the kind of boring, technical work few others bothered to do, she created a qualitative difference that compounded into a glaring competitive edge. In 1981, at the age of 17, Meagher had one of the great performances in competitive swimming history: at the U.S. Swimming National Championships, she set world records in both the 100- and 200-Meter butterfly. At the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, still just 19, she took gold in both the 100m and 200m butterfly. She also swam the butterfly leg of the women’s 4x100m medley, earning a third gold medal. In addition to her three Olympic golds, Meagher won two gold medals at the World Championships (and nine World Championship medals in total) and was crowned U.S. champion 24 times. She is widely regarded as the greatest female butterfly specialist of all time, affectionately nicknamed, “Madame Butterfly.”
They Focus On The Wrong Things
Jerrod Carmichael has excelled across a range of creative fields—from stand-up comedy and acting to creating sitcoms and directing feature films. Asked if he’s noticed any common mistakes people make when they struggle in those fields, Carmichael said, “They focus on the wrong things. There are a lot of aspiring comedians, for example, who aren’t funny or don’t have stage presence, but they have excellent websites. They have excellent websites and the shiniest business cards and their head shots are impeccable. And who gives a fuck about those things. You know what I mean? They focus on the wrong things.” As for the people who excel—they do things differently: “They focus on the work. I think that’s all it is: they focus on the work. On the content. On creating something of substance.”
I Gotta Train Differently
In the elimination game of the 1997 NBA Semifinals, Kobe Bryant shot 4 airballs late in the game. His team lost 98-93. After the humiliating season-ending performance, Kobe said he asked himself, “Why did those air balls happen?” Kobe was then a rookie, drafted straight out of high school—the year before, he played thirty-five games with plenty of rest time in between games. In the NBA, there’s 82 games just in the regular season. So by the playoffs, he said, “I didn’t have the legs. If you look at those shots—every shot was on line, but every shot was short.” It was clear what he needed to do: “I gotta train differently,” he said. “I gotta get stronger. The weight training program that I’m doing—I gotta tailor it for an 82-game season, so that when the playoffs come around, my legs are stronger and that ball gets there.” Once he saw the improvements that came from training differently, Kobe started looking for other ways to qualitatively differentiate himself from other players. He started analyzing the core movements of the game—jumping, changing direction, cutting, sliding side to side, pivoting, decelerating to pull up for a jump shot—and realized how much depended on ankle strength and foot speed. It struck him that no one really trained their ankles. It wasn’t a focus in practice. It wasn’t part of a typical weight training regimen. No one stayed after practice to work on their ankles. “I realized,” Kobe writes, “that I needed to be proactive about strengthening my ankles. After researching the matter, it became apparent that tap dancing was going to be the best way to build up my ankle strength while simultaneously improving my foot speed and rhythm.” So he hired an instructor and started going regularly to a tap dancing studio, “and I benefited from it my entire career.” It was the question, Kobe said, he returned to again and again to differentiate himself throughout his career: “What can I do differently?”
Seeing Beyond The Numbers
In 1984, every sneaker brand was competing to sign 21-year-old Michael Jordan. The front-runners were Converse and Adidas. Jordan wore Converse in college and during the 1984 Olympics. And in high school, he said, “My favorite shoes were Adidas.” George Raveling, an assistant coach for the 1984 U.S. Olympic basketball team, had a long-standing relationship with Nike, having coached college teams sponsored by them for years. Throughout the Olympics, Raveling repeatedly told Jordan that Nike was the best fit. At the time, Nike was a scrappy upstart, while Converse and Adidas were established giants with rosters stacked with superstar athletes. Signing with Converse or Adidas, Raveling argued, would mean that Jordan would be just another name in a long lineup of athletes, but at Nike, he’d be the guy. Still, every time Raveling brought up Nike, Jordan said he was “fixed on Adidas 110 percent.” “Coach,” he’d say, “I’m telling you, man, it’s a waste of time…Whatever contract Nike offers me, Adidas will match it, and I’m going with them.” Despite Jordan’s resistance, Raveling kept at it. Among other things, Jordan writes in his forward to Raveling’s book, What You’re Made For, “George is the one who convinced me to take what is now an infamous meeting at Tony Roma’s in Los Angeles.” At the Tony Roma’s meeting, Nike executive Sonny Vaccaro would present the proposal that fundamentally altered the course of sports-marketing history. While Jordan and Adidas were assuming the contract to match would come down to a quantitative dollar amount, Nike had been preparing something that would qualitatively differentiate them from their competitors. One of Adidas’ biggest selling points was its roster of endorsed athletes—stacked with many of the greatest athletes in all of sports. Seeing a way to turn that strength into a weakness, Nike proposed a revolutionary concept: the creation of a signature shoe line built entirely around Michael: the Air Jordan. “I went back to Adidas,” Jordan would later recall, “and said, ‘Look, this is the Nike contract. If you come anywhere close, I’ll sign with you guys.’” Even if they wanted to, Adidas couldn’t match Nike’s offer to build a brand around Jordan, a rookie with an uncertain future—not without stirring resentment and blowback from the dozens of superstars they were already investing in. “In the end,” Raveling writes, “Michael’s decision was easy. He signed with Nike merely because of Adidas’s inability to see beyond the numbers.” The Nike Air Jordan 1 was released on April 1, 1985, generating $126 million in sales by the end of the year.
The Secret Of Everyone Who Has Ever Excelled
At the National Association of Life Underwriters annual convention in 1940, a man named Albert Gray delivered a speech titled The Common Denominator of Success. “The common denominator of success,” Gray said, “the secret of success of everyone who has ever been successful—lies in the fact that they formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do.” Excellence is a qualitative phenomenon: people who excel do things differently from those who don’t.