When people say they did their best, they reveal something about themselves.
What does it mean to do your best?
Doing your best is about the standards you set for yourself. When expectations are high, and standards are low, “doing your best” becomes an easy excuse to avoid accountability.
Consider my youngest son. At the start of grade seven, he came home and handed me a test with one of the lowest grades he’d ever received. I looked at him as he shrugged his shoulders and said, “I did my best,” and walked away.
Did he? or was he lying to himself?
When I sat down with him later that night, we discussed what it means to do our best.
Easy Mode or Hard Mode
Doing your best is as much about the position you put yourself in as the result you get.
I asked him what it meant to put himself in a good position for success on a test. He listed factors like sleeping well, eating a healthy breakfast, avoiding arguments with his brother, and studying effectively.
Too often, when people say they did their best, they mean they did their best at the moment with little regard for all the things within their control that came before. My son gave his best on the hour of the test, but by not preparing, he inadvertently chose to play on hard mode.
Doing your best means putting yourself in the best position for success.
If you don’t prepare for a meeting and someone asks you a question that you should know the answer to but don’t, you put yourself in a poor position for success. Sure, you might luck out, but you didn’t do your best. If things don’t work out, it’s easy to walk away and tell yourself (and others) you did your best, given the position you were in. Had you really done your best, you never would have found yourself in such a poor position.
Doing your best isn’t about the result. But when you do the things within your control, you put life on easy mode. Sometimes you’ll still get your butt kicked. It happens.
You know you did your best before you know the result. Doing your best is as much about the position you find yourself in when you show up as it is about making an effective decision.
In life, there are no points for difficulty.
Over the long term, the average person who constantly puts themselves in a good position beats the genius who finds themselves in a poor position.
What looks like talent is often nothing more than good preparation.