February 26, 2026 at 3:59 PM
How many times have we been told in life that the most important thing is to “try our best?”
How do we really know how to measure our best? When you think about your best, does it come with a competitive edge and achievement that exceeds others? Is it something that you feel internally—where you know you’ve outwitted or outperformed your past measures and others? To do our best can really be just another way to say we tried. It can also be our way of saying “we’re at capacity.” To lament, that’s all I can give.
The Olympics really give us a sense of what the human body is capable of. We watch people in feats that they make look effortless and easy, that even the slightest hiccup is so costly. When you really look at all of the competitors in a certain event, so many times their level of output is incredibly similar. An entire race and all of its participants are within seconds of one another at the end.
A time period that really means nothing in day-to-day activity becomes the decider of the worst and first in the most important event of their sports career. Some people will name “they’ve reached their best,” while others never believe they do. I tend to fall in the later category. So many times, I see more out there to achieve, gain, understand. I sense that I’m doing well, but often not naming it as “my best.”
Even an achievement that lands above the norm might not be something I see as “my best.” I was always taught you have to be pretty full of yourself to say you’re the best at anything. After getting solo after solo after solo in school, I would chalk it up to luck when asked about it. We all knew it “wasn’t luck” but it also wasn’t always easy. I had to work to sing well and to be the best consistently. Effort and dependability often fall in line with being the best at something. Glorifying how much work and effort you put into becoming the best is often look down upon too.
Malcolm Gladwell helped out a bit there though. He really addressed the idea that “people aren’t born with greatness.”
They start with some level of competency that they then utilize to foster exceptional qualities with repetition and saturation of skill. The other day one of the therapists told me that a client referral would only see me. When I said “why?” she immediately said “because they only want to work with the best.” I said she was “sucking up” but know that really isn’t her style.
I appreciate that she sees me that way, but it struck a nerve. I have taken years and years to develop a craft and believe I have a high level of competency as a therapist. Yet there is soooooo much I don’t know.
It can be considered a measure of intelligence when someone recognizes that they really don’t know much. Socrates shared that “the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know much.” I wonder if Socrates thought he was “the best.” At the time, he probably had imposter syndrome and there definitely were people that just thought he was a “know-it-all.”
