We are obsessed with "talent" and people that have the "special something". This is just a way of avoiding thinking about what it takes. Excellence is real. There are people that get ahead nine times out of ten. Olympic swimmers, repeat founders, bestsellers... But, if you watch excellent people there is nothing magic about what they do*. It's just the multi-dimensional set of skills, character, and ways of life playing out. To give one example: Fortune 500 CEOs don't have a magic gift — maybe they are more likely to win if they are born in certain countries and have a slightly above average IQ and stamina but nothing otherworldly — instead what they have are: a willingness to have difficult conversations, a set of mental models to read a balance sheet fast, a mental model of the business they are running, mental models of how other businesses run, an idea of the psychology of their biggest rivals company, a strong motivation to increase profits, private drivers, expensive suits, intense time boxing, public speaking coaches, favourite restaurants they go to every time they are in a city, how well they celebrate after a win, keeping up the right kind of health routine to keep them sharp, spouses that do not create demands on their time.... and so on These things are essentially mundane. There is no invisible special sauce. Pretty much all of it are choices that can be made, skills that can be learned, character that can be developed and more. The key — the reason not everyone is a Fortune 500 CEO — is that these things are not arbitrary. The collection of things that need to be done to get to this level are vast and if the person is missing any of them they simply won't be excellent enough. In other words to be part of the world of Fortune 500 CEOs you need to be perfectly optimized for that world. Sometimes the collection of skills etc. can look arbitrary but this is usually because you are comparing different games. The list of what's needed is different for a software startup founder, a car dealership owner, a university dean, or even in the case of the example perhaps other Fortune 500 CEOs in different industries etc. Even between companies at a similar scale in similar industries the list of what's needed can be different at the margin because of contingent facts about how those particular organisations are constructed. In the same way, while there may be a lot of overlap, being world-class at swimming will not make you world-class in football. If nothing else you will have to live in very different places (swimming pools vs. football pitches). So achieving excellence is like solving of a hyper-dimensional problem. Each level requires a new bundle and a new way of life. It's similar to the way Christopher Alexander describes building a house in Notes on Synthesis of Form. You need to constantly adapt to resolve these internal tensions and enter the next world of skill. So if you're interested in excellence you need to ask: What world do you want to be part of? And what do you need to change? What disciplines do you need to take on? There are probably more transformations that are needed than you expect. But if you're willing to do it there's nothing stopping you. Perhaps if there is something that the most excellent people have it's a willingness to connect with what's real. To be humble before what it actually take to succeed in their given field. *All reflections on the paper: The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers by Daniel F. Chambliss