You Can't Do Better Than Your BEST — So Stop Trying!

As a kid, one of the lifelessons that was repeatedly pounded into my head was that we should "always do our very best."

There are lots of lessons from growing up that I definitely did not take with me into adulthood, but doing your best is one that has stick with me.

The part of the lesson — which is really more of a lesson about reality — that I was never taught was the fact that sometimes even your BEST is not good enough. Just ask someone who has spent 10 years training for some sport in the Olympics, get to go and represent their country, do their very best and still not come home with a gold medal.

The real lesson here is that we can only do our BEST, but not more than our best!

Of course, that's not some kind of invitation to stop trying to better ourselves, it's actually an invitation to not beat ourselves up because our very best turned out to not be as good as someone else's very best.

This doesn't just apply to things like sports and the Olympic Games; it applies to our everyday life where we get to experience things like being passed over for a promotion, or the boy/girl choosing to marry someone else.

There are few places where this is more evident than the highly competitive field of writing. As writers, we tend to try to give our very best every time we write an article or even a blog post... and most of the time we are faced with the reality that what we felt was truly excellent gets rewarded less than 1% of what certain other posts are getting.

"But I did my BEST!"

I suppose the lesson I have learned over the years is that "doing your best" is a concept that is best treated as something that stands by itself. Once we get into comparisons, we invariably can find ways in which "our best" wasn't nearly as good as we thought!

I will never be as successful a writer as Stephen King... but that doesn't stop me from doing my best, every time I sit down at the keyboard.

So why am I writing this article? Well, because I was having an online conversation with a friend and fellow writer about the way it feels like we increasingly live in an "all or nothing" world. Either you WIN... or you're nothing; forgotten.

I just can't support that tendency! As long as we genuinely try our best at whatever we're undertaking — and we're enjoying ourselves (that matters, too!) — we're still "in the game," and our efforts matter!

So keep right on doing your best... but remember, you can't do better than your best, so don't beat yourself up for not getting that gold medal!

Thanks for reading, and have a great week ahead!

How about YOU? Do you always do your best? Have you encountered situations where you DID do your best, but it still wasn't good enough? How did that make you feel? Do leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — NOT A CROSSPOST!!!)
Created at 20210913 00:02 PDT
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