> Katie Ledecky didn't put in a huge amount of effort in her training before her world-class swimming performances.

Although the training takes lots of energy and time, it needn't be driven by striving towards abstract goals. Rather the training can be a playful/fun practice for the sake of doing it well in the moment. This makes it feel easier to practice a lot, and also makes the practice more "productive" by freeing up attention from distractions of purpose and self.

It's hard to say if most elite athletes are able to do this all the time, but they probably don't have as bad a time of it as normies when it comes to physical exertion.

Reminds me of when I first tried to learn guitar. I tried doing fingering practices. It was so boring. I gave up after like a week.

I thought that playing music just wasn’t for me.

Many years later, I picked up a friend’s guitar next to me and just tried to play one of my favorite songs just by ear. I got enough right that it was fun and I got hooked.

I've noticed that for most hobbies, there comes a point where to improve you need to do the boring part. Yes, to a certain extent, practice can be play, but unless you're the one-in-a-million prodigy who's just obsessed day and night, it's not going to be much fun drilling scales, or practicing your serve, or crimping on a hangboard, or whatever.

Once you get to a certain level, you stop being able to just easily add new skills and capabilities and have to cycle between adding skills and polishing skills. And once you get far enough, adding skills becomes a much smaller portion of time you spend on the activity than polishing, until one day you've mostly added all the skills you're going to and the only thing left to do is polish them to perfection.

And that's why I don't strive for excellence in most any of my hobbies -- they stop being as fun when I'm no longer getting to do new things and only ever pushing against my limit to improve things I'm already doing.

Sounds like a "train the motivation" approach.

If a person wants to do a thing then they will engage with it on their terms. But getting that initial "hook" and then growing it is the trick.

I will never go to any physical training that involves a trainer shouting "pain is gain!". If it hurts, why would I do that? Why are we focusing on how much it hurts?!

Get me hooked on the Gain, let the pain happen naturally depending on how hard I want that Gain.

Well yeah, it helps to become a good (even world-class) swimmer if you actually like swimming and do a lot of it from an early age. Same as you are more likely to become a good developer if you actually enjoy programming rather than just thinking "I want to be a developer someday because I want to earn $$$".