3.36 Why you shouldn’t always do your best

If you are bored of being told “just do your best” and not knowing what that means, then this is the episode for you. We are gonna talk today about why you shouldn't be trying to do your best all the time, what the problems are if you do try and do your best all the time, and most importantly, what you should do instead.

Links:

Why perfect plans fail

Client Q&A – getting it done when you don’t feel like it

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

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Transcript

If you have been told, don't worry. Just do your best. It'll be okay as long as you do your best and you feel like you have been absolutely trying to do your best, and it is absolutely not feeling like it's okay. Then you are in absolutely the right place. We are gonna talk today about why you shouldn't be trying to do your best all the time, what the problems are if you do try and do your best all the time, and most importantly, what you should do instead.

Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. I'm Dr. Vikki Wright, your coach here for any PhD students or academics who want this all to feel a little bit easier and a little bit more fun.

There's a real virtuousness around doing your best. You know, ever since we were kids, don't worry how you get on in the test. Just do your best. What does that mean? I don't know what that means, but if you did your best, then people will be kind to you. You can be kind to yourself, except somehow it just doesn't work like that, right? We end up with these weird definitions of what doing your best even means and means we get praised for getting high marks when we didn't try that hard or we get praised for working really hard and burning ourselves out in a way that's not particularly helpful. And I want us to question this. I want us to ban the phrase, just do your best.

There's no, just about it. Just implies it's easy. Whereas our best should be like challenging. And if we don't know what it means, then it's a pointless thing to say. Delete it. Delete it from your brain. And today I'm gonna explain exactly why that is and what we're gonna think instead.

The first thing, and probably the most important is it's completely undefinable. ,What do we even mean by doing your best? Is it do the best work you could ever do, given unlimited resources, unlimited time, all the support in the world? Is that best? How are we gonna be doing that all the time? Is it best within the constraints of this specific context? How do we know what that is? How are we even choosing what we mean by our best?

What does our best mean if we're unwell? Are we using the same definition of best as we were when we were well? Or are we gonna define a new version of best? What if we're doing a new task that we haven't done before? What does our best look like? The first problem with doing our best as a goal, as a kind of reassurance is it's a completely moving target, and therefore we never know if we've done it, and we never know what we're aiming for.

That leads to the second problem. The second problem is that if we never know what our best was, if we don't have a clear definition of that, then afterwards if we didn't get the result we wanted, let's say, you know, we submitted to a journal and it got paper got rejected, or something like that. How do I know we did our best?

It leaves so much space to come back afterwards and be like, oh, maybe I didn't do my best. Maybe I should have pushed a bit harder. Maybe I should have started earlier. Maybe I should have spoken more to people. Maybe I could have done a bestier version of best because it's so vague, it's so ill-defined, we don't know if we've done it, and therefore it's impossible to reassure ourselves from that perspective. It reminds me a little bit of doing VO two max test. So if you're not a sports scientist like me, you might not know what that is, but they're these maximal tests where you get put on a bike or a treadmill or something and it gets incrementally harder and harder and you have to keep up with it until you physically can't anymore and they're measuring your oxygen uptake and all this kind of stuff.

We do these in sports science degrees, they do them to test athletes and stuff. So we used to have to participate in them in the lab, and they always say, you just gotta go for as long as you can go. And afterwards, the awful thing with a VOT max test is it feels horrific. You feel like you're gonna vomit while you're doing it, and then within two minutes of recovering, you get your breath back, and you're like, oh, I reckon I could have done another 30 seconds every single time, even though you thought you were doing your best. When you come out of it, the other side, you're like, yeah, maybe I could have pushed a little harder. Maybe I could have just stretched out a little more at the end there. And the same is true with your task. If we don't have a clear definition of what our best even means, then afterwards we can still always beat ourselves up for not having done enough of our best.

The third downside that I wanna raise with you is that always believing you need to do your best makes it really hard to experiment with things that you don't know. Okay? I'm gonna give you another sporting analogy. I used to do gymnastics, and I remember one girl, a lovely girl that I used to train with when I was at university. She would only do moves that she could do. Always, and she was already doing them beautifully. So it wasn't even like she was perfecting them. But she would only do moves that she could do. And it was because she felt stupid if she didn't moves that she couldn't do. And it's like fair play. You're an adult doing gymnastics. You can do whatever you wanna do. Right? But she didn't make anywhere near as much progress as everybody else because she wanted to be able to do her best in a move. And that for her meant doing the moves she's best at. Whereas I'm over there crashing out of everything, right, and learning all these new things, and none of them were as beautiful as hers, but I was throwing myself in enthusiastically and trying different things out because I wasn't worried about doing my best. I was there to learn to do cool stuff.

When we tell ourselves we have to do our best, we avoid things that make us feel like we're not at our best while doing them. We don't take risks about how to do something in case it turns out that that wasn't the best way to do it. Always wanting to do your best is an incredibly conservative way of expressing yourself.

It sounds dead ambitious, right? It sounds like, oh, I'm doing my best. I'm so good. But it often keeps you within your comfort zone so that you can always be comfortable that you are doing your best. And I, ironically, that means often we are not stretching ourselves into things that we can't yet do, but that we can learn.

The fourth one is even worse. The fourth one is that trying to do our best can send us into paralyzing perfectionism where we don't do anything at all. All of us have had that issue where we've got a paper to write or a presentation to give, and we simply can't start it because we're so convinced it has to be really good. I will feel better tomorrow. I'll start when I've done more reading. I'll start when I know exactly what I'm doing. I'll start when I'm clear on my story.

Telling yourself you have to your best on everything can take you to a place where you literally can't even start at all.

The fifth one is that weirdly, sometimes telling yourself to do your best can actually lead to mediocrity, because if you've got quite a fixed idea of what you are capable of and what your best looks like, then sometimes you won't push yourself past that because your goal is just to do your best and you think that this is your best.

There are times when actually setting yourself a more specific goal. There's a bunch of research done about this in like factories and productivity and all that kind of jazz that if you give people a specific goal to aim for, they end up doing better than if you just tell them to do their best. So we kind of have different extremes here, right? That sometimes telling yourself to do your best, if you are a very perfectionist person, you're a very ambitious person, you have high expectations, can lead to burnout and paralyzing perfectionism. And other times telling yourself to do your best, if you're somebody that's doesn't necessarily think that you're brilliant at things, sometimes telling yourself to just do your best. Actually keeps you trapped at a level that you could exceed with a little bit of support and a more ambitious target.

Number six is it's completely implausible to do your best all the time. Even top athletes. Think of the sports people that you admire the most. They are not at their best all the time. They train to peak at competitions. They do not expect to be running world record times or to be at the absolute top of their game all the time. They have off seasons. They have on seasons. Within their on seasons, there are some things they're doing to the best of their ability, and there are other things that they're not doing at all. It is completely implausible to expect yourself to be at your best all day, every day for your entire PhD and academic career. It's just not realistic. No one. Does it So you are holding yourself to something that is just completely unachievable.

Even if you set yourself, this is gonna be the best year ever, which I also think it's slightly problematic if we don't define it better. But let's say you do best year ever, it still doesn't mean you have to be at your best every single day. Best is not meant to be a steady state. Best is meant to be something that happens intermittently when you need it.

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My seventh reason is maybe controversial, but I stand by it and I think you should too, which is that not all tasks deserve your best. Okay. If you are somebody who is like eager to please, always worried that you're not quite good enough, that people are gonna realize you don't deserve to be there and all that kind of jazz.

You might be trying to do your best at every single task you have. You might be trying to do your best research and doing your best writing, and being the best teacher, and being the best administrator, and being the most helpful colleague and being all these other things. And probably in your private life, you're also trying to be the best partner and the best parent and the best friend and the fittest person and the whatever else, right? Some tasks do not require you to be at your best. It is gonna be great for your health if sometimes you exercise when you are not going to be at your best, but you have a little walk anyway.

There are other things that simply don't deserve your best. There are no prizes for fixing the fonts in a form that somebody has sent you. They don't deserve your best. They deserve to be filled in and returned. One thing that my members keep asking me for merchandise, they want t-shirts, they want stickers, they want all sorts of things.

And one thing that I think we should get on a t-shirt is fit for purpose. You do not have to do your best at everything. You just have to do it in a way that is fit for purpose. Your PhD needs to be fit for purpose. Its purpose is to get you through the Viva and get you a qualification. It needs to be fit for purpose.

If you can do other things too, where you get some publications, happy days, but it needs to be fit for purpose. Completing some pointless form about some course you went on or whatever needs to be fit for purpose, needs to be completed, needs to be handed in. That's all. It doesn't need to be beautiful. Doesn't need to be extensive. Certainly doesn't need the formatting. Fixed needs to be fit for purpose.

Need to give a presentation needs to be fit for purpose. Not all tasks deserve your best. Not all tasks need your best. We get to save our best for the stuff that really matters.

The eighth one is similar to that, but not all elements of any task deserve your best. So let's take that presentation example. It needs to be fit for purpose. So you need to decide, why am I doing this presentation? What's the point of it? Remember, there's different points, right? Sometimes presentation might be about sharing preliminary data to get feedback from people. Sometimes a presentation might be about sharing your final results with end users who might use it. Sometimes the presentation might be to get a job, okay? You need different things depending on what the purpose is. It needs to be fit for purpose, and within that different elements of it need your best, more or less. So if you are sharing preliminary results in order to get initial feedback, does it need to be your best analysis ever?

No. It needs to be sufficient analysis to enable people to comment on it. Does it need to be the most beautiful slides ever? No. In fact, it's probably better if it's not the most beautiful slides ever. 'cause that's not the purpose of what you're doing. You are pulling together something that you can clearly share data with others so that they can comment on it. It doesn't need color coding, it doesn't need Google images, it doesn't need animations. It needs to be fit for purpose.

You know, we, going back to forms. If you've got like progress review forms to fill in or something, some elements of that deserve whatever best efforts might mean, but deserve effort, right? Actually sharing what you've been doing, making a good case for why you've made sufficient progress. Great. Let's put our efforts into that.

Does it matter if this is the most elegant language ever? Does it matter if you repeat the same word three times in a paragraph? Does it matter if the bullet points are all the same? No. Those things don't matter. So even within tasks where the overall task matters, some of the details don't matter. They don't deserve your best.

Number nine is we have to remember that some bests are mutually exclusive. Let's take the example if you're interdisciplinary . I was right at the intersection between psychology, neuroendocrinology, and immunology, right? And so I knew stuff across all of those disciplines. Was I giving my best to psychology the way if I was a psychologist, oh, was I giving my best to immunology the way if I was an immunologist?

No, the things were mutually exclusive. There was only so much time I had, so much effort I had and expecting to be able to give my best to all of these elements was just not realistic.

If you've got responsibilities at home, then some fixed definition of what doing your best as a researcher means may be in contradiction to what your best as being a parent is. Expecting yourself to do your best in all domains of your life, in all tasks within a domain is completely unrealistic because sometimes these things are in direct contradiction to each other. You can't do your best at being the most focused academic there ever is and be the most available academic there ever was.

The 10th reason is it's not even necessary to do your best at every element of it. To have an academic career, to succeed in an academic career. I've never met anybody who can do their best in all elements of their career. And most of the time, and I've talked about this on the podcast before, most of the time, your seniors, the people that wanna promote you, the people that wanna support you, will be encouraging you to focus a little more.

If you are someone who tries to do your best across the board and burns yourself out because of it, you'll almost always receive the advice to focus more, to accept which things you're doing less well so that you can excel in some of them. And I found that really hard. I really wanted to be a balanced academic, as I called it, and I think you can do that to some extent, but it doesn't look like doing your best at absolutely everything.

So what does it look like? What does it look like to be somebody who wants to succeed, who wants to show up as a version of themselves that they like, but who accepts that maybe this narrative of do your best, do your best is not helpful. Well. The most important element for me is to define what we actually mean by doing our best? What are the constraints we've got around that at the moment, and how much is this particular task worth? If we can get super specific about what doing our best looks like, it's a lot easier goal to actually aim for and hit, and it's much easier to know afterwards that you actually did do what you had defined as your best.

So one way that I like to think about this is doing my best is putting in the amount of effort that this task is worth within the constraints of my other priorities. Okay, I'm gonna say that again. It's putting in the amount of effort that I think this task is worth within the constraints of my other priorities.

That is very different than expecting a hundred percent from yourself across the board. If I don't think the task's important, then the amount of effort I'm gonna put into it is gonna be less, and I'm not gonna tell myself that I didn't do my best because my best was the amount of effort that task is worth, and I gave it as much as it's worth.

Within the constraints of other priorities, I will put in my best to my business, for example, but not at the expense of my sleep, not at the expense of time with my family, not at the expense of not exercising. So I get to decide and you get to decide what are the constraints and what's the amount of effort that this thing is worth.

And interestingly, this can also really help you to progress tasks because actually if you are telling yourself I have to do my best, I have to do my best. It's really easy to procrastinate 'cause if you feel like you're not on perfect form right now and you are not gonna do your best, then it's easy to convince yourself that what you should do is come back later.

Right? When I can do this at my best. 'cause it's really important I do my best. Whereas if you have defined doing my best at this project as I'm gonna do 10 hours work on this over the next two weeks, and it's gonna have to get done. That's how much time it's worth. That's how much time I'm willing to give it.

Then suddenly that becomes much more focused and instead of, I just need to do my best on it, you need to figure out, no, what am I gonna spend these 10 hours doing? What is the best way to spend those 10 hours? How can I get it from here to there within those 10 hours? Not how long will it take, but how am I gonna progress it as far as I can within the time I'm willing to give it?

Suddenly you approach it much differently. You don't need to be at your best now. You need to do the work that you said it needed in order to be done, that you said it deserved, that you said you were willing to give it, given your other priorities and constraints. And that, my friends, is how we do our best at life as a whole, rather than telling ourselves we have to be our best all the time.

We give tasks the amount of effort that they're worth within the constraints that we have, so that overall things aggregate out as the best version of the life we can have within the constraints we have at the moment. We have done our best on average. We have done our best, given our circumstances, we have done our best within the context of what we are willing to give and what these tasks need and deserve.

Lemme know what you think. What do you get caught up on when you tell yourself you've gotta do your best? Where does it maybe help you? Where does it not help you? Let me know what you think of today's episode. If you are not already on my newsletter, please do join. That's how you get to message me. Join the newsletter. You can reply to any of my messages, um, and tell me what you think. Tell me how you are gonna implement these ideas in your life. Thank you all for listening, and I will see you next week.

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