Feeling Like You’re Not Doing Your Best (And A Radical Solution)

Do you ever feel like you’re not doing everything you could to make your life the best it could be?  Do you get that lousy feeling that you should have read a book on investing your money instead of surfing the web, or called a friend to catch up instead of watching TV, or gotten out of bed an hour earlier?  I think I’ve been feeling that way for most of my adult life.

And, I actually think that this feeling is right — I think that very frequently I’m not in fact doing everything I could to make my life great.

So it seems like there are two problems here then:

Problem #1:  A bad feeling that seems to say we’re not doing our best

Problem #2:  Actually… not doing our best — resulting in lower productivity and behavior that is less than optimal for helping us reach our goals

Before we go on I want to clarify a few things that I don’t mean by “doing your best”:

• I don’t mean doing everything that other people think you should be doing.  This includes society, bosses, religion, parents, friends, moral rules, etc..  That is, of course, unless you happen to think that they’re right about something.
• I don’t mean being a workaholic.  I think the best life often involves working hard, but also enjoying yourself.  And even the best way to be productive sometimes is to take breaks.
• I don’t mean being successful.  We only have limited knowledge, we can’t predict the future, there are many things beyond our control, etc., so all we can do (obviously) is the “best” we can do, given our limitations and what we know now.  Doing the best that we can may be unsuccessful, and our “best” decisions may turn out badly.  But, they’re our best shot at success.

There are a couple of approaches we could take to addressing these problems.  A classic solution to Problem #1 is to suggest that we “stop being so hard on ourselves / cut ourselves some slack”.  I suspect that some variation of this could work — if you stop caring so much about “doing your best”, you might stop feeling bad about it.  I think some version of this may turn out to be a good idea.  However, I don’t think this addresses Problem #2 — if you just “cut yourself some slack”, you’ll still likely end up doing just what you’ve been doing, which is… not your best.

Another solution might sound ridiculous, but here it is:  Do your best.  Crazy, isn’t it?  This would work (duh) because it would  1) help you feel like you’re doing your best (because you are), and  2) mean that you’re doing everything possible to reach your goals, given what you know now.

Of course, this would be a simple solution if only doing your best were easy, which it is certainly not.  But I don’t think we should just dismiss doing our best out of hand, as if it were an impossible dream.  If it were possible, it might not only help us reach our goals, but also help us feel better about things even when they don’t work out the way we’d like.  I suspect that some version of doing your best is possible.  Here’s one (partial) idea about how you might go about doing your best, which is, admittedly, not easy either:

Conscious Decision Making + Discipline = Doing Your Best?

It might be that doing your best involves two components:

• Conscious Decision Making: Consciously thinking about and deciding on what the best course of action is, to the best of your knowledge (discussed in a previous post).
• Discipline: Being able to actually do what you’ve decided the best course of action is, even if it’s difficult.

Of these two, I think that discipline is by far the more difficult.  Discipline is also probably what most people think of first when they think about being productive.  However, I’ve been trying to do these two for a while now, and I’ve found that I frequently forget to consciously decide what to do (which often results in not doing my best).  As simple as it sounds, one of the biggest indicators of whether I end up doing something approximating my best, is whether I’m consciously asking myself what I think the best action is.  I’ve also found that conscious decision making seems to help with discipline — it’s hard to do the right thing when you don’t even know what the right thing is.

Of course, there are still questions such as What’s the best way to make decisions? and How do you get discipline? (big questions indeed).  But perhaps it’s a start.