For much of my life my parents brought me up with the mantra that it doesn’t matter if I fail, as long as I tried my best. That’s how I always lived my life.
What I’ve learned in the past year is a totally different approach. I learned that saying we’ll try our best is not just helpful but can be a prelude to failure. Here’s why:
1) The Mind is a powerful thing
When we tell someone that I will “try my best”, we are managing expectations that we might fail but we would have our best. Worse than the expectations we set for people is what we set in our own mind. That before we try something we are already subconsciously accepting that we might fail.
In the past year I’ve tried a different approach. Instead of saying “I will do my best”, I said “I’ll do it”. A much shorter phrase a lot more powerful. I said “I’ll do it” for things like completing a 160KM race to difficult goals to achieve as a company where some things may fall out of my control.
The truth is that sometimes things did fall out of my control but I noticed that because I already conditioned my mind that failure is not an option, I acted on it immediately and got us past the finish line.
I’m sure if I keep to this approach long enough there will come a time where I might not be able to get something done even though I said I will. That hasn’t happened yet so far in the past year (fortunately) though and I find that this thinking has made me fight harder for things that I said I will do. Not accepting no for an answer and not giving up.
2) What if your best isn’t good enough?
If you tried your best and you still fail what does that mean? Does it mean your best is not good enough? Then does it mean you’re not good enough? That’s a hard reality to admit that we’re not good enough because nobody wants to ever admit that. We want to believe we are capable of doing anything we want.
There is one worse thing you can do than admit that you’re not good enough though. That’s blaming someone else or blaming the people around you for not helping you get to where you need to go. People who do that tend to not see the problems in themselves and if we can’t see our own problems we can’t fix it. Then we will always fail.
As a leader in our company I can’t blame my staff if the company fails to achieve something. I can only blame myself for having them there in the first place. Or not acting on it if I knew they were going to fail.
I wanna end this thought-piece with a video from one of my favorite movies.
So lets stop trying our best. Lets just do it.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space