David’s Articles

David has been writing and publishing since 2006.  

Embracing mundanity through focus and practice

Jan 7, 2025 | Reflections

“The little moments of life are profoundly important precisely because they are the little moments that we live in and that form us.” Paul David Tripp

silhouette of people standing on hill
Photo by Baim Hanif on Unsplash

Can you feel the stress permeating the air? It is college season right now. Seniors frantically finishing applications and essays. Some have already heard the news – good or bad. The parents of one recently highlighted to me how their 18 year old had already begun to exhibit the symptoms of the perennial affliction, senioritis.

The spring of senior year is marked by many other traditions and celebrations, all leading up to Commencement – a clear line in the sand between childhood and emerging adulthood. Commencement is aptly named as it is the beginning of a new chapter.

Yet behind the scenes, all this flurry of activity is setting up the biggest head fake of young person’s life.

Senior year and the following years are punctuated by massive moments. Choosing a school, a major, football games, spring break trips, maybe finding a spouse. There are even classes to attend in there as well. A young twenty-something moves from mountaintop experience to the next.

And we want this for our young people – these are all good things.

Four (hopefully) years later, there is a second commencement. Thereafter, a move, an apartment, and a job/grad school.

And then…life actually begins – the real world.

By this point, we have become accustomed to the amount and frequency of these peak experiences. We think that life is going to be the same – moving from one amazing thing to another.

But it’s not.

The actual reality – each day looks pretty much like the last.

Sure there are massive moments that await – marriage, birth of a child, loss of a parent, etc. But on any given day, it is most likely that your life will not change. This Monday is probably just a Monday – neither more nor less

The reality is that life is actually exceedingly mundane. Or as Macbeth phrased it, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.”

What do we do with this?

Despite this being the way the world works, our brains desire the new, the novel. This is especially true in America – a country populated by those daring enough to leave home and seek their fortunes elsewhere, whether by boat or covered wagon.

Subscribed

Perhaps like me, you have a love hate relationship with mundanity. Or perhaps it is just hate. Boredom of any sort is your antagonist. You run from dopamine hit to dopamine hit – whether in the real world or through the magic of smart phones and social media.

Novelty is a pursuit without destination. There is never a finish line.

We simply cannot outrun the mundane.

Fear not – there is comfort in predictability.

Large portions of our lives occur subconsciously – through the use of habits and heuristics. How many times have you realized that you do not remember driving somewhere? Often the things we do the most, we think about the least. We just simply know what to do and do it – no thought required.

The challenge is with the other stuff – the stuff that matters – jobs, relationships, etc? 

These things require our focus. We do them day in and out. How do we find enjoyment then? Do we have to do entirely new things? 

Or can we begin to see the new in each moment?

For example – I could try and play golf a couple of times. It will be highly frustrating, interspersed with a couple of good moments. The way to improve is clear though. To learn, a golfer needs to be on the driving range, hitting balls with regularity to develop their swing.

But the common refrain about time on the driving range is that it is “boring.”

But is it? Does it have to be?

Yes – the action is repetitive – hitting the ball over and over again. But each swing of the club is a new thing. 

If we can see it as such, there is a newness in the action itself.

It is our acute lack of focus keeps us from seeing it this way. It is hard to concentrate enough to see each swing as purposeful. It is far easier to swing and swing and swing – without being deliberate.

Here is how Bill Pennington described it in the NY Times in 2010. “Every teaching pro I talked to on the subject said recreational golfers should hit only a small bucket of balls, about 30 minutes’ worth, at the range. In that time, they should be working on improving just one thing…a small, specific goal.” He makes the case that a smaller amount with great focus is far more impactful than pointless repetition.

How do we apply this to the rest of life?

First, it is impossible to find joy in the mundane without a clarity of purpose. Full stop. I have written before that our work is most enjoyable to us, when we are being useful in the service of others. When we can take our skills and align them towards delivering a tangible blessing of others (whether direct or indirect), we are on a path of great meaning. 

With clarity of purpose, we can begin to reframe our experience of everyday.

If we are doing something we care about, we will naturally want to improve at it. If service is our common purpose, growth is our common goal. Things cared for and done well want to grow.

While our days may have lots of repetition, there in lies the opportunity for growth. There is the opportunity for a ‘craftsman mentality’ learning to do a singular thing exceedingly well, and finding joy in the simple pleasure of doing so.

This suggests a path forward then – the path of practice.

As Daniel Coyle highlights in his excellent book The Talent Code, “Every human skill, whether it’s playing baseball or playing Bach, is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse—basically, a signal traveling through a circuit.”

Each time we do an action, we are teaching our brain out to accomplish the task. “Because the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and over.”

As Coyle highlights, as we do something again and again, we are actually wrapping a substance called myelin around the nerves involved in the action. This myelination of the nerve speeds up how fast a nerve can accomplish a task.

Educator and master teacher Doug Lemov explained it this way, “If you want to unlock creativity at certain critical moments, you might identify skills required at those moments and automate them in order to free up more processing capacity for creative thinking.”

The more we practice something – the more capacity it gives us in the moment.

So point 1 – our cognition experiences repetition differently than our biochemistry. Our brains need repetition to get really good at something. Our consciousness may feel bored even if changes are occurring at a cellular level.

Point 2 – achievement is best thought of by breaking down something into smaller parts, and consistently working on those to improve. In The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers, Daniel Chambliss highlights “Excellence is accomplished through the doing of actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, added up over time.”

After studying Olympic calibre swimmers, Chambliss found that high achievement is largely a mundane task – doing the next thing well, consistently, over time. In fact, he was highly skeptical of ‘talent’ and its impact. Lemov explained it this way, “repetition gave rise to meditation and then to wisdom.”

Point 3 – repetition requires practice and feedback. If you are like me, practice comes easily in some things. I know how to go out and hit golf balls or shoot baskets, etc.

But some domains are really hard to practice and get feedback in. For example, let’s say you are a therapist and want to get better, but you are new in your career and don’t yet have a full client roster. It is hard to get better at something you only get to do infrequently.

What then?

Here I would suggest a two step process. First, atomize the skill you want to master. A successful therapy session has a number of differently elements – from the welcome, to the initial question, to deeper questions, and finally the conclusion. With whatever you are trying to master, can you break it down into its component parts. Do you understand what top performers are doing in each of those steps?

The second step is a linear move. If you have a limited number of ‘at-bats’ to practice, can you replicate those key steps in a tangential space? For example, my executive coach shared with me once that she encouraged new coaches to periodically pause movies/tv shows they were watching and come up with 3 questions they would ask the character in that moment.

Executive coaching is highly contingent on the skill of question asking – so this is an elegant way to practice developing questions, but doing it in new and novel scenarios.

We cannot avoid repetition in our lives, hard as we may try. Instead, the path forward is the path through. The opportunity is to increase our focus, to grow our capacity and capability. 

Over time, 2 things will occur. First, we will derive great pleasure from doing something exceedingly well – even if we have done it before. But secondarily, new avenues are likely to open as a result of our growing expertise – creating new pathways from novelty. 

At the start of a New Year, whether for yourself or for a senior in your life, understanding these long range dynamics are of critical importance, and likely to be much more impactful than any short-live resolutions.

Topics

Subscribe Today

Join 5,000 other followers of David's thinking and insights

Contact

Nashville, TN

Email

info@davidcwellsjr.com