Do your best

Do you ever mentally ask, "Is this my best?"

Doing our best creates better life outcomes and teaches us to do hard things.

Doing our best doesn't mean being the best in the world, the best in the country, or even the neighborhood.

It also doesn't mean being better today than yesterday.

Doing our best means performing at our highest level, given our current constraints.

Different goals for running

I love using exercise to talk about doing our best because it is often quantitative and competitive, giving us less room for deceiving ourselves.

In the gym one morning, I was running alongside this tall guy in his 30s who was walking on the treadmill. 10 minutes in, he started a quick run for 1 minute before returning to walking. A few minutes later, he pushed again for another minute.

When my run was over, I told him "hey man, pretty cool you pushing yourself with the run in between walking; keep it up!" He said he appreciated it.

We met again the following day and introduced ourselves; he said he was recovering from an ankle injury.

So we talked about our running and our different goals. He was trying to rehabilitate his ankle; I was training to run as much as possible in 30 minutes.

He complimented my running, but I politely declined. Many hobbyist runners do much better than I do; I'm a novice.

But I'm training the best I can, given my goals and constraints.

And that is what matters.

It's easy not to do our best

Every day in the gym, I see people working hard. I also see people who seem like they could be working harder.

Sure, it means they're wasting their time on the treadmill and weight room by marginally improving their strength and conditioning. But there's something else even more important:

By being distracted in the gym, they're also forfeiting the opportunity to do their best, given their current constraints.

It is tempting not to do our best:

• We save on effort.
• It is easy.
• It doesn't hurt.
• It's comfortable.

But the only way to shape life is through our actions, and that means that what we do matters more than anything.

A weak effort leads to a weak impact in life. It also leads to negligible growth in our ability to influence it further.

In the gym, as in life, the change we create depends on our ability to do work that is effortful, hard, painful, and uncomfortable for us.

It's okay if "our best" is not yet "the best"

We all have a set of constraints preventing us from having world-class outcomes, and sometimes even good outcomes, when we do our best.

We should be careful not to judge whether we're doing our own best by how our outcomes compare to others.

In the book Spark, they talk about how a little girl running a bad time was running at her heart rate limit: someone doing something challenging and performing at their best but at risk of being misjudged because of poor outcomes.

During the weekly mile, he tested the device on a sixth-grade girl who was thin but not the least bit athletic. When Lawler downloaded her stats, he couldn’t believe what he found. “Her average heart rate was 187!” he exclaims. As an eleven-year-old, her maximum heart rate would have been roughly 209, meaning she was plugging away pretty close to full tilt. “When she crossed the finish line, she went up to 207,” Lawler continues. “Ding, ding, ding! I said, You gotta be kidding me! Normally, I would have gone to that girl and said, You need to get your ass in gear, little lady! It was really that moment that caused dramatic changes in our overall program. The heart rate monitors were a springboard for everything. I started thinking back to all the kids we must have turned off to exercise because we weren’t able to give them credit. I didn’t have an athlete in class who knew how to work as hard as that little girl.”

Spark (p. 17). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

Of course, that doesn't mean others must (or will) judge you on the intensity of your efforts instead of your outcomes.

While the PE teacher will give an A to the little girl who did her best in track class, the Olympic gold medal still goes to the fastest runner.

The fastest runner who, by the way, is also doing his best.

Living life to the fullest

Doing our best allows us to fully embrace our life opportunities. Most differences in life's outcomes, not to mention life's journey, come not from whether we're doing something but from how we're doing it.

The difference between a weak effort and our best matters for how we live.

In the book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami phrases it as "Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits":

Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life — and for me, for writing as well. I believe many runners would agree.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Vintage International) (pp. 82-83). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Start today: ask yourself, "Is this my best?"

We'll improve our life outcomes and grow our ability to expand it further by doing our best. We become better at doing hard things and living life to its fullest.

We can start today since we face daily opportunities to do our best: family relationships, friendship, work, exercise, hobbies, and even chores.

Doing our best is hard, and if we start by trying to do our best at everything at once, we'll likely fail. I suggest you avoid this.

Instead, choose a single area, such as time with family, work, or exercise, and when you're at it, ask yourself, "Is this my best?" Answer truthfully, don't fool yourself.

The habit of asking ourselves, "Is this my best?" raises the bar of our expectations of ourselves. It helps us put into practice our inherent desire to become better at things we care about.

By doing our best, we live a more deliberate, impactful, and fulfilling life.