On Doing My Best

“It doesn’t matter what the results are,” my father often told me. “What matters is that you do your best.”

Wise people with beards and chariots have stressed this idea since human beings first started being wise. The Stoics were always banging on about figuring out what is in your control, and ignoring the rest. When Arjuna is being a dithering ditherer on the battlefield, Krishna tells him, just shoot your cousins already, but don’t be attached to the outcomes of shooting your arrows. Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer is about exactly this - God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

And it is wise. It allows you to focus on controlling the controllables. It means that you don’t stress about the result or blame yourself if things don’t go as you wanted - do the best you can, and the rest is in the lap of the Gods.

Yesterday, however, I had a bit of an epiphany. I’m a little bit shocked by it, so I’m kinda going to have to whisper it.

So, like … umm …

I don’t actually care all that much about doing my best?

Shit don't tell anyone!

Honestly, though. I actually don’t. I’m very happy to phone it in.

I didn’t think I was a phoner-inner, but the epiphany consisted of involuntarily liberating myself from the internalised norms of my parents and my cultures, and once this had happened, I realised that deep down, my true, authentic self is a lazy motherfucker who just wants to talk shit, laugh, play squash, hang out with my kids, my wife, and my friends, and drink beer. And eat. And watch YouTube videos.

Just to be clear, this isn’t one of those reverse productivity hacks you read about. You know - the best way to do your best is to convince yourself you don’t care about doing your best. Nu-uh. This is the real deal. I am pure in my devotion to mediocrity. I intrinsically value doing as little as I can get away with.

It feels extremely transgressive to confess this. It would be easier (I think) to say that I like fucking goats.

Now, as it happens, and just to be clear, I do not at all like fucking goats. And not because I’ve tried it and decided I don’t! This isn’t like not being excited for a year about Kill Bill and dragging your girlfriend to the cinema the day it comes out and then sitting there and gradually realising, fuck me, this is just three hours of people having sword-fights.

I haven’t actually fucked goats. I have just decided a priori that I don’t like it.

Which raises an interesting point, and a rather important parental issue. You see, when Rahi looks at something he has never tried and says, I don’t like it, I tell him: Rahi, try it, and only then are you allowed to say you don’t like it. Don’t say you don’t like it before you’ve tried it. Ok?

Well, he’s now got a zinger, hasn’t he? “Why don’t you go and fuck a goat, Papa?”

How did we get here again?

Let’s bracket what historians will no doubt call The Great Goat Debacle of 2025 and move on to matters more pressing. When I look into the limpid depths of my eternal soul, what I see blinking back is Being that is absolutely certain about not wanting to do its best.

YOU do your best, says Being. I'mma chill for a bit.

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Let us investigate this a little.

Why do we think it’s good to do our best?

Honestly, I suddenly do not know. It has been such a basic and unquestioned belief of mine for so long that now that I’m finally questioning it, I have absolutely no answers stored up.

The English paediatrician and psychiatrist Donald Winnicott had the notion of “good-enough” parenting. According to him, parents (he spoke mainly of mothers, but I am writing for a more enlightened age) did not have to be perfect. They simply had to be good enough.

He went further, in fact, and argued that it was better for parents to be good-enough rather than perfect. If you always met your infant’s needs perfectly, it would never learn to deal with frustration, to get things itself, to operate in a world that was not constantly giving it what it wanted. Being good-enough - what he also called “unreliably reliable” - was essential to developing independence in the infant and then the child.

If good-enough is good enough for parenting, why not for living?

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Look, there’s more to write about this. I could investigate the concept of doing one’s best, of what “best” might mean and who’s doing the measuring.

I could think about self-realization and about fulfilling one’s potential, and I might ask what the goal is here, and how much of it is people beating themselves with sticks that their parents, teachers, and societies handed them, and how much of it is freely, truly theirs.

And suddenly, rather than words, I see sunflowers on stalks, smiling as they lift and open, reaching up to the warmth and the light.

Are they trying to do their best, I wonder?