One of Our Biggest Self-Defeating Beliefs: Doing My Best

by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan, Organisational Provocateur

How often do we catch ourselves saying "I'm doing my best". Let's just explore why doing our best is just not enough. Using the English poet Somerset Maugham's "It's only the mediocre that are at their best all the time." My interpretation is that they are doing only their best, and as a result they are merely mediocre.

Do you remember that scene from the baron Munchausen story when the famous baron and his horse are sinking into the swamp, then, driven by a brilliant idea, the baron grabs his own hair and pulls himself and his horse out of the swamp. This ingenious strategy of doing his best may have worked for the mind-bendingly clever baron, but may not work for us, ordinary, garden-variety mortals.

The basic flaw of "doing our best" is that there is no objective - external - measuring stick besides our own imagination, and we tend to mislead ourselves. So the question is whether we are satisfied with "our best", or move towards reaching certain goals.

When we look at this "doing my best" stuff, it is pretty meaningless, is it not? What exactly does that mean? Nothing really?

Think of Olympic athletes. If they were doing only their best they would never go beyond jogging around the stadium until they feel tired. They have to do more than their best if they want to achieve serious results.

What we perceive as our personal best is far behind what our real personal best is. Just think of Roger Bannister when he ran the four-minute mile. He knew he had four laps to go. He selected four spotrunners for one lap each. When you know you have only one lap to run, you automatically run - significantly - faster than as if you were running four laps.

So, can you imagine how Roger felt when each spotrunner was running in front of him as fast as a turbo-charged V8 racehorse. Did Roger do his best? No way! He did much more than his best. He "simply" kept up with the spotrunners and that made all the difference. He knew if he could keep pace with the spotrunners, who were pacing themselves for one single lap only, he could perform miracles. And he did. But, and this is important, he had an external goal, an objective target: to keep up with the each of the spotrunners.

So, with this fact in mind we know that "doing our best" is just a myth really. And when we let our clients do only their best, we are doing a great disservice to them.

I learnt a lot about this "my best" thing in the military. I served in a so called "First Step" unit, meaning that if the "Evil Western Empire" - this was during the cold war era in the communist Hungary - had attacked us, we would have been the first to prepare for war. So, I can say everything was taken pretty seriously. For example I did not know if I could do a 20-mile forced march with 60 lb. of stuff on my back at such a speed that my hair was blowing. Stop laughing! Believe it or not, at that time I had hair. I got "follicularly challenged" - all right, this time only you can call it bald - after my army service.

So, I learnt there that I was not measured against my own ability, but against an objective standard. And that allowed me to go beyond my own perceived limitations.

The commanding officer did not just tell us to walk around until we get tired, or march as fast as we can for a while. He just told us to follow him. And we did. We got pretty tired pretty quickly, some of the guys got sick, some fainted, but we revived them and moved on, or more accurately, our officer was pushing us on. He would not accept this "doing my best" bullshit. He knew we could do more, and kept pushing us.

While I was in the military, and went trough the kind of training most civilians could not even imagine. I know I was pushed beyond my "doing my best" several times, but it did not kill me. It gave me a unique perspective about how far people can be pushed and I use it in business with my clients.

So, when we say we do our best, or we accept this feeble excuse from our clients we are assisting them to quietly fail, fall back into the quagmire of the status quo, and fade into oblivion. As advisors, we work with our clients as objective observers, and it is our duty to push them beyond their "doing best" points.

There is no doubt, some of them may get pissed off with us, and we may even get thrown out of the room and lose the gig, but at least we did not become just another yesperson most companies are infested with. We have the courage either to improve the client's condition or get the hell out of there.

When you assist your clients to achieve big audacious goals, that will stretch both them and you, and you both can find resources inside yourselves which otherwise would have gone unexplored, then you start writing a new chapter both in the client's and your own history.

So go out, rattle cages, rock boats, stir shit, and make sure neither you, nor your clients ever give in to "doing your best" only.

Copyright 1997-2010 Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan. All rights reserved. You are free to use this article in whole or in part. One favour though: Can I ask you to you include complete attribution, including a live website link. Also, can you please let me know where you plan to publish the article.

The attribution: This article was written by Organisational Provocateur, Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan of Dynamic Innovations Squad, a firm specialising in helping consulting firms to sell their expertise at the highest margins. Get Tom's free Practice Management Black Paper when you sign up for his monthly newsletter, Commando Consulting: Lessons And Practices From The Ultimate Professional Service Firm, The Military. Visit Tom's website at http://www.di-squad.com.

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