Levels of Excellence

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1) Excellence comes from qualitative changes in behavior, not just quantitative ones. More time practicing is not good enough. Nor is simply moving your arms faster! A low-level breaststroke swimmer does very different things than a top-ranked one. The low-level swimmer tends to pull her arms far back beneath her, kick the legs out very wide without bringing them together at the finish, lift herself high out of the water on the turn, and fail to go underwater for a long ways after the turn. The top-ranked one sculls her arms out to the side and sweeps back in, kicks narrowly with the feet finishing together, stays low on the turns, and goes underwater for a long distance after the turn. They’re completely different!

2) The different levels of excellence in swimming are like different worlds, with different rules. People can move up or down within a level by putting in more or less effort, but going up a level requires something very different—see point 1).

3) Excellence is not the product of socially deviant personalities. The best swimmers aren’t “oddballs,” nor are they loners—kids who have given up “the normal teenage life”.
4) Excellence does not come from some mystical inner quality of the athlete. Rather, it comes from learning how to do lots of things right.

5) The best swimmers are more disciplined. They’re more likely to be strict with their training, come to workouts on time, watch what they eat, sleep regular hours, do proper warmups before a meet, and the like.

6) Features of the sport that low-level swimmers find unpleasant, excellent swimmers enjoy. What others see as boring – swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours, say – the best swimmers find peaceful, even meditative, or challenging, or therapeutic. They enjoy hard practices, look forward to difficult competitions, and try to set difficult goals.

7) The best swimmers don’t spend a lot of time dreaming about big goals like winning the Olympics. They concentrate on “small wins”: clearly defined minor achievements that can be rather easily done, but produce real effects.

8) The best swimmers don’t “choke”. Faced with what seems to be a tremendous challenge or a strikingly unusual event such as the Olympic Games, they take it as a normal, manageable situation. One way they do this is by sticking to the same routines. Chambliss calls this the “mundanity of excellence”.

Source: John Carlos Baez, "Levels of Excellence," Azimuth, September 29, 2013