Doing Our Best
Dear reader,
I have a question for you:
Do you equate the saying “do your best” with your best work?
Or, do you equate doing your best with reaching the point where you feel like you can’t do it anymore and you just need permission to stop working?
From our earliest years in school we are told when we’re frustrated, when we don’t know the answer, when we can’t finish in time to just “do your best”. And you have to hand it in anyway even if it isn’t exactly the way you wished it were. It’s probably not the actual best work but it’s the best you could do under these circumstances. And thus begins a life of doing your best as a means of finishing something without a sense of guilt that you could have worked harder.
A few years ago I decided with a dear friend that our next film project was going to be “fun and easy”. We’d done a number of stressful (re: no budget) shorts and music videos and we were trying to remember why we had gotten into production in the first place. Fun and easy was going to be our ethos through which we looked at the whole project. This is kind of funny because production can hardly be described as fun and easy even when things are going well. In this specific iteration it just meant that we played with a camera and some props and hit record. There was no client and no deadline which took the pressure off, it was fun and easy. While I don’t feel that it was time wasted because we were practicing our art, nothing ever happened with the fun and easy project. By the way, the props we played with were pink and white pom-poms that fell out of a skirt and hit the floor in slow motion, landing square between a pair of brand new white Keds… I think the pom-poms were supposed to resemble pubes somehow (lol).
There are a couple of times in the past decade or so that I feel I truly could not have done better with this working definition of doing your best. Both were grueling projects that left me exhausted and a shell of myself. One was my final assignment for college which did in fact turn out to be very good A+ material, but I remember when I handed it in I thought to myself this is seriously the best work that I am capable of doing and it is what it is at this point. Another time was the most ambitious production I have led to date for major advertisers with a very small team on a tight deadline. I thought I was going to break many times throughout the process and perpetually felt like I was dropping the ball but I also knew that I couldn’t do any better than I was already doing. I was using all of my mental faculties, tapping all of the resources I had available to me and I was literally losing sleep, plus my usually good skin was breaking out. I was able to label these experiences as my best work because I was beyond the point of exhaustion.
Why is it that we have to hit the point of extreme exhaustion to consider something our best work?
To think you’re doing your best is a kind of surrender. Permission to stop and rest. You’ve given it all you’ve got. There’s nothing else. Under capitalism we are hardly allowed to rest at all and certainly not until the work is done well. I think as creative people we have to tell ourselves we’ve done our best otherwise we’ll never finish anything, never hit publish, never share our work. It’s so deeply engrained in my mind that you don’t stop until it’s your best and this applies to everything. This results in a lot of unfinished and unpublished projects along with a chronic feeling of fatigue.
I’ve never thought my best work was something that is fun and easy. My best means there was suffering involved. There was pain, the work bled into other areas of my life. What if it doesn’t have to be like this though?
What if my best meant connecting to the joy inherent to the process of creating, connecting to the joy of being alive, instead of grinding myself to the bone in search of perfection?
Also, why do we need to be the best which by definition means there is literally nothing better. Can we just be good? Can we be really, really, really freakin’ good? What is wrong with being good or even great which is still not the best? All of this is another example of the insidious growth at all costs mindset that has penetrated my entire way of thinking.
Brb, gonna go update my definition of doing my best.