Excellent work is mundane

Excellent work is simply the outcome of doing ordinary things, with focus, for prolonged periods of time.

We often think of excellence as the product of something special. Either an extraordinarily gifted person with talent, or someone starting from a position of relative advantage. We find reasons for why those people are excellent, and why we are stuck with the mundane.

But anyone can do excellent work. What looks like excellence from the outside is simply a commitment to small, iterative improvements in practice over time.

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.

Daniel Chambliss (1989). The Mundanity of Excellence. Sociological Theory.