#064 – Mundanity & Excellence

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read time 3 minutes 

#064 at a Glance:

• Quote: Can you be patient enough?

• Podcast: Simon Squibb x Mike Thurston.

• Deep Dive: The Mundanity of Excellence.

• Article: Letter to a friend who may start a new investment platform.

• Tweet: 9 Free AI Courses.

Quote I’ve been thinking about:

Podcast I listened to:

First Things THRST E043 – Simon Squibb

Simon Squibb is a veteran entrepreneur and start-up expert with more than a decade of experience founding 19 companies.

You might have seen his viral videos on social media where he stops random people in the street and asks, “What’s your dream?” and tries to provide the audience to help make it happen.

Some of my favourite insights from the pod:

• You can’t just want success, you need to need success.

• Never underestimate the lessons you learn from running a ‘shitty little service-based business’ like lawn mowing or window washing.

• The origins of the education system and ‘breeding workers’.

• The tribal undertones of the world around us.

• It’s not ‘the harder you work, the luckier you get’, it’s ‘the more calculated risk you take, the luckier you get’.

• Why it’s easier to run a bigger company compared to a smaller one.

• Everyone is an entrepreneur; it’s a structural thing, not an ability thing.

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

[Podcast Length: 1 hour 54 minutes]

Deep Dive I went down:

The Mundanity of Excellence 

Sociology professor Daniel Chambliss spent years researching the qualities of elite swimmers, on what creates excellence.

This is what he found:

"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 to wear 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 little things really do count."

Brilliant.

You can read his study on The Mundanity of Excellence here.

(h/t James Clear)

Article I read:

Letter To A Friend Who May Start A New Investment Platform

I recently came across a fantastic article by investor Graham Duncan.

A friend of his was thinking about starting a new hedge fund and came to him asking for advice.

This is the letter he wrote to him.

Some of my favourite takeaways:

• “An angel investor recently told me that he now only backs people whose spouses are completely supportive of the venture because he noticed a disproportionate number of failures involved founders with spouses who had not signed up for the venture implicitly or explicitly.’”

• “While hard work is obviously required, good decisions take form in a separate realm. Naval Ravikant has a great line: “if you’re leveraged with capital, code, or people, and own equity, then good decisions have a much larger earning impact than hard work.” Your primary objective should thus be to maintain the right filters for people and ideas so that the delicate ecosystem in your head is as resilient and flexible as possible.”

• “Novak Djokovic said in an interview with the Financial Times that “I can carry on playing at this level because I like hitting the tennis ball.” The interviewer replied in surprise: “Are there really players who don’t like hitting the ball?” Djokovic answered “Oh yes. There are people out there who don’t have the right motivation. You don’t need to talk to them. I can see it.” If you can find the thing you do for its own sake, the compulsive piece of your process, and dial that up and up, beyond the imaginary ceiling for that activity you may be creating, my experience is the world comes to you for that thing and you massively outperform the others who don’t actually like hitting that particular ball. I think the rest of career advice is commentary on this essential truth.”

Hands down one of the best pieces of writing that I’ve come across this year.

Tweet I liked:

There’s a tonne of free value out there.

We’ve just gotta know where to look.

Thanks for reading! Grateful for your support.

Stay hungry, stay humble, stay curious. ⚡

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