Stop Trying to Do Your Best
Why one of our most common pieces of advice may be causing more harm than good.
Stop trying to do your best.
That sentence probably made you uncomfortable.
Good.
It was supposed to.
Nearly every one of us has spent our lives hearing exactly the opposite. Parents tell us to do our best. Teachers tell us to do our best. Coaches tell us to do our best. Employers tell us to do our best. We tell our children to do their best.
It’s one of the least controversial pieces of advice in our culture.
I think we’ve misunderstood it completely.
“Just do your best.”
The phrase is almost universally accepted as good advice.
I’ve begun to wonder if it deserves a second look.
Not because effort isn’t important. It is.
But because somewhere along the way, doing your best became confused with giving everything you have, every single day, in every single circumstance.
That isn’t wisdom.
It’s exhaustion waiting to happen.
The Impossible Standard
Imagine going to the gym with one rule:
Every exercise must be performed with the maximum amount of weight you can possibly lift.
Every set to failure.
Every workout.
No exceptions.
You wouldn’t become stronger.
You’d become injured.
Ironically, the people who understand strength training the best almost never train this way. Elite athletes manage effort. They understand recovery. They know when to push and when to hold something back because they understand that performance isn’t measured by a single workout. It’s measured over months and years.
Life works the same way.
Yet many of us expect ourselves to approach every conversation, every work assignment, every parenting decision, every household chore, and every relationship with maximum effort.
We would never train our bodies this way.
Why do we train our lives this way?
Michelin Star Expectations
Imagine preparing every meal as though inspectors from a Michelin Guide were about to arrive.
Every ingredient perfectly sourced.
Every sauce homemade.
Every plate beautifully presented.
Every meal unforgettable.
It’s absurd.
Some nights dinner is elaborate.
Some nights dinner is leftovers.
Some nights dinner is cereal because you’ve had a difficult day.
None of those meals make you a better or worse person.
They’re simply different responses to different circumstances.
Yet somehow we expect our lives to be Michelin star performances from the moment we wake up until the moment we fall asleep.
Every email.
Every meeting.
Every workout.
Every interaction.
Everything deserves our absolute best.
Nothing can sustain that.
We Confuse Effort With Virtue
This may be the most dangerous misunderstanding of all.
Somewhere along the way we began believing that the harder someone appears to work, the better they must be.
But effort and virtue are not the same thing.
Sometimes extraordinary effort reflects discipline.
Sometimes it reflects passion.
Sometimes it reflects genuine commitment.
And sometimes it reflects fear.
Fear of disappointing someone.
Fear of not being enough.
Fear of slowing down.
Fear that if we stop producing, people might discover we’re ordinary.
Psychologists have long recognized that perfectionism often isn’t about excellence at all. It is frequently rooted in anxiety, insecurity, or a belief that love, acceptance, or worth must be earned through performance.
The person staying three hours late every evening may be deeply committed.
Or they may believe they have no value unless they are indispensable.
The parent who never rests may be extraordinarily devoted.
Or they may be terrified of making a mistake.
From the outside, those two people look exactly the same.
The motivation makes all the difference.
Effort, by itself, isn’t evidence of psychological health.
Sometimes it is evidence that something deeper is hurting.
Your Best Is Not a Fixed Number
One of the greatest flaws in the phrase “do your best” is the assumption that your best is constant.
It isn’t.
The best of someone who slept eight hours isn’t the same as the best of someone who spent the night comforting a sick child.
The best of someone grieving isn’t the same as the best of someone celebrating.
The best of someone recovering from depression isn’t the same as the best of someone at the peak of their health.
Human beings are not machines.
Our capacities fluctuate.
Our energy changes.
Our circumstances matter.
Holding yourself to yesterday’s standard when today’s reality is different isn’t discipline.
It’s self-punishment.
The Mathematics of Energy
Every day you wake up with limited resources.
Time.
Attention.
Emotional capacity.
Physical energy.
Every ounce you spend somewhere cannot be spent somewhere else.
This is true financially.
We understand that if we spend every dollar we have today, tomorrow becomes much more difficult.
Yet many of us attempt exactly that with our emotional lives.
We spend every ounce of ourselves before noon.
Then we wonder why we have nothing left for our spouse.
Our children.
Our friends.
Ourselves.
Sustainability isn’t laziness.
It’s stewardship.
A Better Question
Perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question all along.
Instead of asking:
“Did I do my best?”
Maybe we should ask:
“Did I give this moment what it actually required?”
Some moments deserve everything you’ve got.
A medical emergency.
A difficult conversation.
Protecting someone you love.
A meaningful opportunity that may never come again.
Other moments simply require competence.
Not brilliance.
Not perfection.
Just enough.
Knowing the difference isn’t laziness.
It’s wisdom.
The Irony
Ironically, people who insist on giving one hundred percent to everything usually discover they have nothing left when life finally asks for one hundred percent.
The parent who never rests eventually burns out.
The employee who never stops eventually loses perspective.
The perfectionist eventually becomes paralyzed.
The person who refuses to recover eventually has recovery chosen for them.
Your life was never designed to be one continuous sprint.
It was designed to be lived.
Perhaps the greatest act of maturity is realizing that your value has never depended on maximizing every moment.
You do not become a better person because you exhaust yourself.
You become a wiser person when you learn what is worthy of your fullest effort, and when you have the courage to let the rest simply be enough.
Shameless Plug
If you’ve followed my writing for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed that these articles aren’t really about productivity, psychology, relationships, or even philosophy.
They’re about perspective.
More specifically, they’re about the subtle assumptions we carry through life without ever stopping to examine them.
That is exactly what counseling often looks like.
Very few people come into therapy because they don’t know what they’re doing.
Most already know.
They’re exhausted because they don’t understand why they keep doing it.
Together we examine the stories, beliefs, and expectations that quietly shape decisions long before we’re aware we’re making them.
Sometimes the greatest change doesn’t come from working harder.
Sometimes it comes from seeing the same life through an entirely different lens.
If you’re a Pennsylvania resident and have been considering counseling, I’d be honored to be part of that conversation.
A Perceptual Shift
Advocacy. Purpose. Sustainability.
For clinicians. For systems. For you.
What follows isn’t really part of the article.
It’s simply where my mind wandered after writing it.
Epilogue
Writing has become a strange experience for me.
By the time I finish an article, I often sit in silence for a while, almost detached from what I’ve just written. Most of these essays begin with an observation about the world, but if I’m being honest, they’re usually about me.
This one certainly was.
The idea of “doing my best” has occupied more of my life than I’d like to admit. In fact, it kept me awake the night before I finally decided to write this article.
For most of my life, I believed marriage deserved my best. My children deserved my best. My career deserved my best. My friendships deserved my best.
Maybe they do.
But I hope I’ve made the case that “our best” is less about perpetual maximum effort and more about knowing how to regulate ourselves well enough to still have something left tomorrow.
I’ve trusted effort for as long as I can remember.
If I just... God, I feel embarrassed even saying it... did my best, everything would somehow work itself out.
Maybe even more delusionally, I believed that doing my best would make things work out in my favor.
Forty-one years have offered a different lesson.
I’ve poured an incredible amount of effort into my career.
I still don’t own a Porsche.
I’ve poured an incredible amount of effort into my marriage and raising my children.
Neither is perfect.
I’ve poured tremendous effort into countless goals that never materialized the way I imagined.
After forty-one years of seeing the same evidence over and over again, you’d think I would have learned that effort and outcomes aren’t the same thing.
Apparently I haven’t.
And I’m increasingly convinced that most of us haven’t.
I went to college with a guy named Tim.
Tim was one of the funnier people I’ve ever met.
His signature move on Facebook was commenting one word beneath almost everyone’s posts.
“So?”
Someone got engaged.
“So?”
Someone had a baby.
“So?”
Someone landed their dream job.
“So?”
Someone lost a loved one.
“So?”
It didn’t matter what someone posted.
“So?”
For some reason, that has lived rent-free in my head for nearly twenty years.
I’ve been thinking about Tim throughout this entire article.
Because eventually every belief has to survive one simple question.
I did my best...
So?
That question isn’t meant to diminish effort.
It’s meant to reveal whether effort was ever the point.
If your answer is simply, “Because that’s what good people do,” I’d encourage you to think a little deeper.
Effort matters.
Discipline matters.
Character matters.
But effort alone does not define us.
So what does?
That’s a much harder question.
If someone forced me to answer, I’d probably say this:
We are defined by our ability to match our ambitions to our abilities.
We are defined by our capacity to regulate ourselves instead of simply exhausting ourselves.
We are defined by our willingness to acknowledge our limitations without allowing them to become excuses.
And perhaps most importantly, we are defined by our ability to find peace with the fact that being human has never required perfection.
Not because our shortcomings don’t matter.
But because they were never the exception.
They’ve always been part of the deal.
What defines us?
Ultimately...
We do.
I love you.
I love you all.
I truly do.
Take care of yourselves.
Dedication
At the risk of sounding ironic, I’d like to dedicate this article to the people in my life who encouraged me to do my best.
They weren’t wrong.
They were trying to teach discipline, responsibility, perseverance, and pride in one’s work. They were trying to prepare me for a world that rarely rewards indifference. Those are lessons worth passing on.
If I’ve challenged the phrase throughout this article, it isn’t because I’ve stopped believing in effort. It’s because I’ve come to believe that effort without wisdom eventually becomes exhaustion.
High standards are a privilege.
Responsibility is a privilege.
Consequences are a privilege.
Even the problems we spend so much time wishing away are often evidence that we’ve been entrusted with something meaningful to lose.
A difficult marriage means someone chose to love you.
The stress of raising children means you’ve been given the opportunity to shape a life beyond your own.
The pressure of meaningful work means someone believes your contribution matters.
Those burdens aren’t punishments.
They’re signs that life has asked something of you.
May we continue to strive for excellence, but may we also learn that excellence isn’t measured by how completely we exhaust ourselves.
Sometimes the wisest thing we can do isn’t to give more.
It’s to recognize that enough can also be an act of love.
Continue Reading...
The article ends here.
The conversation doesn’t.
For paid subscribers, I always include what I call Afterthoughts.
They’re less polished, more personal, and often where I wrestle with the parts of an idea that don’t neatly fit into the article itself. Sometimes they reinforce the argument. Sometimes they challenge it. More often than not, they’re simply where I think out loud.
Today, I want to explore the difference between maximum effort and misplaced effort, why extraordinary lives rarely look balanced while they’re being built, and one lesson I’ve learned from people who knew they were nearing the end of theirs.
If you’d like to continue the conversation, I’d love to have you there.
