Prime (noun)
the state or time of greatest vigour or success in a person’s life.

Hi, I’m Jason. This is where I share openly about the challenges, insights and lessons from my own journey. My hope is that these thoughts spark reflections that help you navigate your own path to living better and leading better. 

Jason Leavy
Founder

Prime Perspective:
Reflections on Leadership and Growth

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

- Bruce Lee

We live in an era of ‘quick fixes’ and promises that the latest cool piece of tech will solve all our problems.

Life is tough and leadership is tougher, as you’re carrying the burden for others as well as yourself. This means that the lure of easy solutions to hard problems will always be seductive. 

Here's the reality: there are no shortcuts when it comes to high performance.

I’m going to take you back to the 1980s briefly, to the Mission Viejo training pool in California, where a number of Olympic champions trained.

Other coaches from around the world would fly in, expecting to discover some revolutionary training secret they could take back with them, but invariably they ended up disappointed. 

"They think we have some big secret," coach Mark Schubert observed. "They all have to come to see what we do."

But there was no secret. Just swimmers going back and forth over a black line for hours, working on turns, refining technique, building endurance. The mundane work that transforms ordinary into extraordinary.

The Mundanity Of Excellence

This was revealed in Daniel Chambliss's groundbreaking research, ‘The Mundanity of Excellence’, where he studied Olympic swimmers for six years. 

In it he states: “The visiting coaches would be excited at first, just to be here; then soon - within an hour or so usually - they grew bored, walking back and forth looking at the deck, glancing around at the hills around the town, reading the bulletin boards, glancing down at their watches, wondering, after the long flight out to California, when something dramatic was going to happen.”

The visiting coaches expected drama. They found discipline. They sought secrets. Instead they witnessed that most unrated of values… consistency.

This mirrors what I see in the fields of human and leadership development. Biohackers promoting the benefits of the latest supplement stack, productivity gurus pushing the new piece of AI-driven tech that will transform your workload. 

They’re trading off the fact we want the shortcut. We want the secret sauce. 

But excellence doesn't work that way.

Chambliss discovered that: “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.”

Quality Over Quantity

Chambliss made another crucial distinction: excellence comes from qualitative differences, not quantitative ones. The elite swimmers he studied weren't training more hours - they were training with intention and purpose.

In other words, they didn’t switch to ‘auto-pilot’ and go through the motions when it came to what many would regard as the boring stuff, they were able to stay focused and constantly strive for incremental improvements. If there was any magic, this was it. 

This really struck a chord with me, as while those Olympians were putting in the work in California, I was a teenager training in Taekwondo in smalltown Somerset. The irony is that my mindset was the same.

It took five years to earn my black belt. Five years of repetitive kicks and punches, patterns practiced hundreds of times, sparring sessions that built reflexes through constant drilling.

In that same time period I saw a lot of students come and go, some more talented than me, but so many wanted to do the flashy stuff before they’d learnt the fundamentals - and without the right focus and discipline they drifted. 

Back in the 1980s it was far easier to stay focused - now you’re bombarded by the false promises of gurus who claim they have simple fixes to your complex problems.

This is my ask of you: don’t drift. 

The Compound Effect of Small Actions

Chambliss’s research provides a clear framework for developing mastery that is as relevant today as it always was:

• Focus on the fundamentals

• Practice with purpose

• Choose routine over novelty

• Build habits through repetition 

Those coaches left Mission Viejo disappointed because they expected to witness something extraordinary. Instead, they saw the truth: excellence is built through thousands of ordinary moments executed with extraordinary consistency.

The same applies to your life and your leadership:

Drown out the distractions. 
Focus on the boulders not the pebbles. 
Keep showing up. 
Be authentic. 

The big secret? There is no big secret.

There's only the choosing to do the small things correctly, consistently, until they compound and define who you are.