If there is one unfortunate truth that crops up in every area of my life, year after year, it’s that most of what creates success and excellence is showing up and doing the daily drill. That’s both good news and bad. Good because there’s no crazy prodigy requirement, no secret formula, no mountaintop guru that can give you the one true answer. The part that sucks is actually showing up and doing the grunt work to become excellent. We love the idea of an innate genius that lets us surpass everyone and rocket to first place.

Some people have that inclination or gift. For them to make anything of it, they have to show up and practice, just like the people who aren’t especially gifted. There’s no escaping work. For every human gazelle at a marathon, there are a dozen normal people who worked their way up from a morning run to a 5k to being able to go all 26.2 miles. The difference between them and me is that they were out pounding the streets while I slept in. There’s a fascinating paper by Daniel Chambliss, The Mundanity of Excellence, that deals with this phenomenon in Olympic swimmers.

Doing the mundane work to master something is hard. It’s not glamorous. It’s not exciting. It’s mostly tedious and woefully short on instant gratification. We always explain that search marketing is iterative improvement over time. You show up, you keep working at it a little bit at a time, and you’ll see extraordinary results. Just like your once great results will slip further and further if you don’t do the work to keep them. I wish that weren’t the case (mostly because of how much I hate to work out!), but it is.

Where are you failing to do the mundane work to become excellent? What’s suffering because of it? What would happen if you started putting in the time — even just a little bit — on a regular basis?

This just in from the Yahoo! and Bing websites:

August 24, 2010

“Yahoo! Web, Image, and Video search experiences on both desktop and mobile devices are now powered by the Microsoft platform in the US and Canada (English), with more markets to come.”                                                      –Yahoo!

“Today I am happy to share that Bing is powering Yahoo!’s search results in the US and Canada…”                                                                                                        –Bing

Well, friends, that means there are now two players instead of three, and only one is really interested in providing the best search experience for users. Google is merit-based, and clients who want to be #1 for a particular search phrase have only to build the best page on the web for that term. Bing seems to be driven to sell consumers in a mass-media way, knowing that the megabucks of advertisers will follow a company that muscles its end users. We’ll have to see how that affects the 99% of websites which are small, specialized, and not heavily capitalized.

Speaking of which, we’re having some annoying and identical problems on PCs running XP…which has always been rock solid. Hmm, do you think they want us to upgrade and so are easing back on supporting the existing base?