Do your best: What does it really mean?

[RAFox]

Hey guys! I hope you're all doing well.

"Do your best" is a phrase which I can't really wrap my head around. I get the general idea, but it just doesn't seem to make sense to me.
"How can I do my best if I could always do better?" I keep thinking. "How can I give it everything I have if I don't completely know what I'm capable of, where my limits are? Are there any limits at all?"

"I could have studied harder, or started working a lot earlier. I could have taken less breaks, or I could have slept better. I could have learned things to get things done a lot faster.
"I can always increase my performance or knowledge!", is what I keep thinking. I always find some sort of mistake, something I could improve or could have done better.

What do you think? How do you "do your best?". I'm very interested in your point of view.

Cheers!

 

[Nova]

To truly do your best you have to exercise the maximum of your current capabilities. Your right, most people never actually do their best as most people always leave room for improvement somewhere along the line, and in hindsight can usually always look back and say 'ahh, I could have done better there' - So I think to actually physically and mentally do your best is a rare thing. Of course when people tell you to do your best they are really asking you to 'give it a good go, and try hard'

 

[Drck]

A good way to look at it is to divide you effort into short and long term goals.

What's your goal? I don't know, maybe you want to run 5 miles nonstop, lift 300 pounds weight, finish college degree, or just seduce couple of girls.

If you never ran before and you are overweight, you won't be able to run 5 miles today. But if you put an effort to it, you'll train several times per week, you could do it in a couple of months. Do you have to run as far as you can (doing your best) every time you exercise? No, you just have to run, even slower than your average is good enough to make progress.

Maybe you can't lift 200 pounds today no matter what you do, but if you train regularly for some period of time, you could lift 300, easily even more. Does it mean that you have to lift the heaviest weight every single time you are working out, do your best every single time? Nope. Doing "your best" is persistence, systematic approach to accomplish your goal, sticking to your plan. You could be lifting 75% of your best and still making a great progress. Here and there you want to test your best, so you load the weights as much as you can.

Can you finish university in one semester? One year? Nope, even the best students need years. But you could take some classes in the summer to speed it up, and study extra 3-5 hours every week. The extra effort accumulates over time. Do you have to get straight A's all the time? If you want to doctor, lawyer, engineer or so, you better. If not - who really cares? No one will ever ask you if you got C from biology or A, nobody simply cares...

Do you have motivation to seduce a couple of hot girls? Great. But it's the same, you won't be able to do it in one day or week. It might take you months of persistent effort, most likely even years to get good. Do you have to seduce all the time your 8/10 or 9/10? Well, good luck with that. But you could be quite happy with 6/10, or 7/10...

 

[Thedoctor]

Sean Connery said it best:

http://m.youtube.com/?#/watch?v=qD5GtohtRYU

-John

 

[Ross]

If we're talking truly your best... Then not a second of your time would be used doing anything other than fulfilling work, and such work would be done with the most efficiency to truly be the best. Sounds exhausting.

Doing my best, therefore, is not something I really buy into. I prefer to do whatever makes me happy and not worry too much about gaining arbitrary skills (which, theoretically, there are an infinite amount of). Instead I spend my time doing things that matter, and learn through exposure.

"I could have studied harder, or started working a lot earlier. I could have taken less breaks, or I could have slept better. I could have learned things to get things done a lot faster.

Consequently, worrying about the fixing the past doesn't really matter, so not much time is spent on it. Just study now. Or work now. Or take less breaks now, or get better sleep now. Now is always the best time to start.