Following up a citation in that Andy Abbott book I read a piece that I guess is an old chestnut for others but was new to me — Daniel Chambliss’s article “The Mundanity of Excellence”:http://www.jstor.org/stable/202063, which examines how championship swimmers become championship swimmers. The answer: they do dozens of little things right each and every day, and enjoy doing it. Chambliss’s article reminds me Sennett’s discussion of craftwork and the rhythm of practice and increasing fascination that he says it engenders.

The obvious thing to do is read the Chambliss article and then figure out how to become mundanely excellent in your own way — ethnographic sociology as self-help literature. When it comes to teaching, you could do this either by “thinking about the mundanity of excellence in teaching”:http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=6BxLIN_7EoYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA422&dq=mundanity+of+excellence&ots=ztby3HHKPE&sig=GVsiljyylP4TiLw6KxzdDSiDS1w or else “teaching the article to students to teach them how to become mundanely excellent”:http://www.jstor.org/stable/1319298. I am definitely trying this second exercise the next time I teach introduction to anthropology.

Finally, Chambliss has a paper on “how to hire departmental faculty”:http://www.asanet.org/galleries/default-file/hiring%20departmental%20faculty%20oct06.pdf. For various strange reasons my department did four job searches in my first two years on the job, and as a result I have thought long and hard about this part of the job since it sort of marked my initiation into the professoriate. I must say that while I haven’t exactly done a literature review on the topic, this is the best thing I have read how to hire new faculty, ever. Down to earth, frank, wise, well-written. Might even be a good read for job candidates.