Do Your Best… Always
As kids, many of us were told “do your best”. Do your best in school, on the basketball team, at your dance class, on your paper route, cleaning your room (I never did well in that area!), etc. While it made sense, many of us kids discarded it as a nice thing that parents say, but didn’t really mean that much.
In the current world, where we are often overloaded with inputs from every possible direction, where excuses are tolerated, and victim-hood has been elevated to a way of life, societal standards often don’t include “Doing your best”. Perhaps it’s seen as just another “nice saying”, with no true application in today’s world, either on the business side or the personal side of life.
However, I disagree. Strongly.
As adults, in business and in the real world, I would argue that “doing your best” is more important than ever.
Let’s look at several aspects of doing your best, and why it matters so much:
1. Doing your best is not perfectionism. It does not guarantee the perfect outcome. In fact, perfectionism is often the enemy of doing your best, as we are all sometimes caught on the treadmill trying to ensure perfect result… And it never (or rarely)comes.
2. Your best varies according to the situation. When you’re sick, your best is simply not as good as when you’ve well. Maybe the best you can do while sick is just to take care of yourself, with no significant contribution. Regardless, do your best at that time, even though it pales to your standard best.
3. Doing your best does not guarantee the outcome. It doesn’t guarantee you’ll hit a home run every time you step up to the plate. Rather, doing your best means you will step up to the plate and take your best swing at the ball.
4. Don’t confuse “I did my best” with an excuse. People with low standards often give excuses for their poor behavior or performance, sometimes even citing “I did the best I could”. In these instances, these are people that clearly didn’t do their best, and just want to give excuses.
People with high integrity are wary of “Being that guy that always has an excuse”. And as such, often shy away from the domain of “I did my best”. However, even though others may manipulate the phrase, using it as a justification for poor performance, the value of doing your best is undiminished.
An exercise to assess if you’re “Doing your Best”
One good exercise you might perform in terms of assessing whether you did your best on any given day is as follows:
Every night, prior to bed, ask yourself the question “Did I do my absolute best today? “.
Please be clear that you are not asking…
Did I do everything perfectly, without errors?
Did I solve every problem/issue that came up today?
Did I check off every single item on my to do list?
What you’re really asking is simply “did I do the best I could, given the situations that occurred today?”
The answer is a digital “yes“ or “no“.
Your job, in assessing how well you did your best on a day-to-day basis is to continually increase the number of “yes’s” that you give yourself. Furthermore, on the nights that you truthfully answer “No”, your job is to wake up tomorrow, and work just a little bit harder so that tomorrow night your answer will be “Yes”.
In the business world we often see small business owners, leaders and managers that work very hard but in the end don’t do their best, in many instances.
Why? I’s not because they don’t care, or are not capable. In most cases they absolutely care, but they are focusing on the wrong things, and often wasting time going down useless “rabbit holes” of information and analysis. Too often, business owners waste their time and focus, acting as a referee for their employees, instead of holding them accountable for their behavior and performance.
Finally, remember that doing your best does not guarantee the outcome. It just means that you’ll step up to the plate and take the swings you need to take… Independently of whether you hit a home run, or strike out.
In summary, your job is to do your best. Period.
