the days fall beside us

Excellence is not the product of socially deviant personalities.
Excellence does not result from quantitative changes in behavior.
Excellence does not result from some special inner quality.
Excellence requires qualitative (what is actually being done…the character or nature of itself…doing things different from before) differentiation.

Talent does not lead to excellence; talent ≠ excellence.
The concept of talent hinders a clear understanding of excellence…it satisfies our casual curiosity while requiring neither an empirical analysis nor a critical questioning of our tacit assumptions…
At best, it is an easy way of admitting that we don’t know the answer…but the attempt at explanation fails…through the notion of talent, we transform particular actions that a human being does into an object possessed, held in trust for the day when it will be revealed for all to see…

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 a habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There s nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence.

Motivation is mundane, too.
…the daily satisfactions need to be there. The mundane social rewards really are crucial.

In the pursuit of excellence, maintaining mundanity is the key psychological challenge.
…winners don’t choke.
Usually we see great [individuals] only after they have become great—after years of learning new methods, gaining the habits of…consistency, after becoming comfortable in their own world. They have long since perfected the myriad of techniques that together constitute excellence. Ignorant of all the specific steps that have led to the performance and to the confidence, we think that somehow excellence sprang full grown from this person, and we say he or she “has talent” or “is gifted”. There is no secret; there is only the doing of all [these] little things, each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit, an ordinary part of one’s everyday life.

Excellence is a qualitative phenomenon. Doing more does not equal doing better.
Talent is a useless concept. Varying conceptions of natural ability tend to mystify excellence, treating it as the inherent possession of a few; they mask the concrete actions that create outstanding performance; they avoid the work of empirical analysis and logical explanations (clear definitions, seperable independent and dependent variables, and at least an attempt at establishing the temporal priority of the cause); and finally, such conceptions perpetuate the sense of innate psychological differences between high performers and others.

Excellence is accomplished through the doing of actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, added up over time…..these differences are neither unmanageable nor, taken one step at a time, terribly difficult. Every time a decision comes up, the qualitatively “correct” choice will be made. The action, in itself, is nothing special; the care and consistency with which it is made is.