A commitment to do our best
ONE of the first things I often hear out of someone’s mouth after they have attempted to do something and failed is that they have tried their best.
It is good to know that even if we could not get what we wanted, at least we pushed ourselves hard to succeed. But what exactly does it mean to have tried our best?
I have observed many halfhearted attempts to attain something only to proclaim proudly at a later date that they had tried their very best but to no avail.
To me, trying our best means actually doing everything we possibly can do to make something happen. The question
is did we truthfully try our best?
It is difficult to argue with “Do your best,” and similarly it is not enough to simply say “Do your best,” and assume that people will know what it means.
In fact the common understanding shared by most people about “Do Your Best” is lacking clarity or distinctness and incomplete.
It leads to frustration and failure, which in turn contributes to apathy because many people come to learn - incorrectly - that their best is not good enough.
Understandably there are two elements of “Do Your Best”. Firstly we assume that being sincere about getting an intended result is a necessary condition of doing our best.
In other words we must really desire to get an intended result and we must be truthful about our purpose to apply the second component of doing our best, which is “giving our full energy”.
Let’s assume that we are sincere in our intent to give our full energy and that we actually do. The only criteria for giving our full energy seems to be that we try every avenue we can think of until we succeed or that we are very tired and felt exasperated beyond endurance when we eventually call it a day and give up.
This common understanding of what it means to “do your best” is fallible, incomprehensible and incomplete and without a strong framework for doing the best that can lead to a real failure.
That being the case, we actually need a more robust understanding of “Do your best”.
To get ahead in this unpredictable society we must leave behind common understandings of doing our best and take on a more sophisticated and rigorous view which includes knowing how to:
* specify conditions of satisfaction
* determine requirements to fulfill intended situations
* assess available competencies and resources
* fill gaps between requirements and availabilities * recover from breakdowns * ask for help and when to ask for help
* declare completion - including quitting * know when to not even try If we think doing our best was hard, we cannot be wrong. But it is not brute force; it is more like practice hard.
No one can fully describe what “do your best” means, because it applies differently for every person. We need to honestly trying our best, as Steve Prefontaine, an American middle and longdistance runner who competed in the 1972 Olympics and once amazingly held the American record in seven different distance track events from the
2,000 meters to the 10,000 meters, said “To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift”.
Doing our best is one of the hardest quantifiable factors of life.
Sports broadcasters love describing players as “grit players, hustle players, energy guys, and high motor athletes.”
But how does a player reach that distinction? What do they have other athletes do not? Doing our best is something only we can personally judge, and giving effort at all times is the most important thing we can do.
Do failures still happen when we are trying our best? Of course they do. But 100% self-motivation, where not a single opportunity is wasted and effort is at a maximum is uncommon.
Reaching the point of “trying your best” is the limiting constraint for most people. If we recognize that effort is a skill, then we can also try to figure out how it works. Learn the skills of self-motivation, instead of wasting years of effort on guilt over opportunities lost.
According to Mahatma Gandhi, if a person makes a commitment to try and complete a task and sees out this commitment, this is far more important than the result.
Even if the task is not a “success”, the greatest satisfaction should be in the knowledge that we have asserted our commitment to the end of the task. We are being true to ourselves.
The effort that we have paid out in the completion of the task is our private victory. We may be the only person aware of what we have achieved but the victory is ours to appreciate.
Some people suffer because they cannot deal with failure. Gandhi believed that it is okay to fail. It is alright to make the best effort and not achieving the success of our task.
The effort is still a “Full Victory”. It would have been different if we fail because we are lazy or lack of initiative, or because the project was affected by outside forces that could not have been factored into our business plan, like a recession.
Bringing it to a sporting analogy, we are competing to the best of our ability but because our opponent is having a better day than us, we cannot win. Then we just have to accept that and move on but not beat ourselves up. Sometime doing our best is not just for the final destination that counts, what happen along the journey do matter if you know what I mean. I wish you all the best.