What To Do When Trying Your Best Isn’t Good Enough
When I was first learning how to swim, I moved my body through the water with the same physical effort as if I were trying to move my body through wet cement.
Needless to say, I was fighting. Hard.
And needless to say, unnecessarily. And to no avail.
As a recurring theme in my life–or in my mindset, rather, that affects every area of my life–I’ve noticed that when I’m not getting the results I want, the first thing that I think to change is intensity.
This usually means additional self-imposed exertion in the form of increased force or increased quantity, often to my detriment, and almost never to my success at achieving my goal.
In reality, there are many things that could be tweaked if you’re not getting the results you want–timing, strategy, environment, people you’re connecting with…just to name a few.
Yet, I always find myself resorting to more, faster, or harder, as a means of trying to compensate for any shortcomings in moving the needle in the direction I want it to go.
I think there is a subconscious part of me that believes that everything has to be difficult, so I unconsciously add additional physical and mental strain to the things that I do.
Sometimes this manifests itself as literally holding physical tension in my muscles and in my body unknowingly when I’m doing things, and sometimes it manifests itself as perfectionism and obsessively worrying about details that ultimately don’t make much of a difference.
Either way, these unconscious behaviors are indicative of believing the idea that you have to try hard to make things happen. Emphasis on the words try and make.
Try implies that there is no guarantee of success. Trying implies a possibility of unrequited toil, effort without result.
Then there’s the word make. In this context, it is synonymous with the word force. There is friction required, there is something we will have to fight against.
But what if everything is not supposed to be so hard?
What if things can be easy?
What if you don’t have to force things to happen?
What if you don’t have to swim upstream?
What if you don’t have to push the rock up the hill?
What if things are difficult, not because they inherently are, but because we unconsciously make them more difficult because we refuse to accept the idea that things can be easy?
What if things are difficult because we’re not doing the right thing or not doing it in the right way?
What if the one thing you need to change is not how much you’re doing something, or how hard you’re doing something, but simply how you’re doing something?
We tend to naturally think that if we go harder, it will automatically yield better outcomes.
We tend to think that extra effort and force equate to better or faster results.
But the next time you’re not getting the result you want, resist the tendency to just “dial it up” or “put the pedal to the metal.”
Pause. Rethink.
Doing more may not be your answer. Doing different may be your answer.
Less effort on the right thing will always beat more effort on the wrong thing.
Sometimes it’s a matter of technique, or a matter of execution.
It doesn’t have to be strenuous.
And in my experience, the more strenuous, the more likely it’s not going to work.
With swimming, the less I tried, the easier it was.
The problem was not that I needed to swim harder or faster, I needed to relax, do less, work less hard, and change my technique.
It was only then that I started to achieve success.
Life lesson quotes to avoid burnout and work smarter not harder
Less effort on the right thing will always beat more effort on the wrong thing.
What if things are difficult, not because they inherently are, but because we unconsciously make them more difficult because we refuse to accept the idea that things can be easy?
Pause. Rethink. Doing more may not be your answer. Doing different may be your answer.
