Why You Shouldn’t Try Your Best

“Just try your best.” – Every parent and manager ever.

If your business matters, if your product and service matters, if your clients matter, you’re invariably pursuing being “the best”. Each consequent action you take in your pursuit of that body of work will be an attempt to “just try your best”.

Trying your best has problems. Trying your best suggests “your best” is what everyone expects of you, all of the time. It’s the benchmark for every effort. We’re humans, not machines. We can’t give our best at everything, all of the time. When our best becomes the expectation for everything we do, we don’t do our best.

A better piece of advice could be, “Focus on what matters”. When we scope our attention to only that which matters, we inherently start to excel in direct proportion to our priorities. The parts of our important work and our lives on the whole that matter most, receive a much higher density of our emotional, mental and physical energy than the things we never should have “tried our best at”at all.

Great bodies of work require focus. Make that happen for your work by abandoning the pursuit of “Just trying your best” at everything, and instead pursuing the ability to “Focus on what matters”.