Best is relative to your environmental variables
4 years ago by victoria · 251 Likes · 12 comments · Trending
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changetheworld
· 4 years ago
· FIRST
While I understand the supportive/loving sentiment behind these statements, they really drive me crazy. Some standards really need to be upheld, and if your* best doesn't meet that standard, there is a problem.
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Edited 4 years ago
guest_
· 4 years ago
There is a realistic point there- airline pilots are judged not on their best but on landing planes at their destination safely, and wether it was the “best” they could do or not- if a police officer murders an unarmed person by mistake or otherwise- we can’t shrug and say “that was their best TODAY.” But also being a realist- it’s a self evident truth. One cannot exceed whatever ones maximum capacity is at a given moment. If your best speed run of Mario 3 is 20 minutes and today you can’t break lower than 30- that’s what reality is. I think the overarching point is it does no good to “beat yourself up” if you are giving your absolute all and did the most honest and comprehensive preparation that could be expected.
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guest_
· 4 years ago
It’s an extreme example- but if most people without experience in the field were forced to land a plane or manage a nuclear reactor or even survive lost and alone on the remote and hostile wilds- all they could do is their best. They’d most likely succeed or die. The logical results of a success or failure are pretty set- one can only try as absolutely hard as they can to succeed. If the result isn’t death for them, they can learn from the experience to be better suited to success next time. If one dies, they tried their best.
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changetheworld
· 4 years ago
I agree with pretty much everything you said. I just hate the "your best is good enough" mentality because it is not always true (as some of your examples show). Also, I feel like people use the saying to excuse crappy behavior. For example, it's the kind of thing you see a parent post on social media with a pic of empty wine/beer/liquor bottles, in their pajamas, with some kind of caption that they barely attended to their kids and let them have a device all day. If you want to take a lazy day or something, fine, just don't say "it's the best I could do." Idk, personal pet peeve I guess, and I already spent way more time talking about this then I meant to lol.
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guest_
· 4 years ago
Lol. No worries. I get where you’re coming from, and that’s the catch right? A person can only do their best- but doing your best and SAYING, even to yourself, that you “did your best” or put in your “best effort” isn’t the same as actually doing it. Plenty of folks just lie about it, even to themselves. Sometimes we don’t give it our best. Not everyone is the type of person that stands out as all around all time excellent and it’s a lie of society, a great pressure on people- to claim they are. Some people are just not cut out to be the example of humanities “best” and that is fine.
jd1984
· 4 years ago
tl:dr Don't judge yourself by yesterday, judge yourself on what you can do today. That goes for good or bad.
guest_
· 4 years ago
Not really no. That’s actually sort of the opposite of the point. What you can do at any given moment, providing you gave your best effort- is simply that. What you can do at any given moment. There is a question of wether a person should be judged by what they can do at all- but that’s philosophical. We can however say that short of a very transactional view of life that we any judge a person in their entirety on one moment, although that moment can shape a judgment of them or allow judgment on a single aspect of them.
guest_
· 4 years ago
Eg: a person who does terribly at a test may not be bad at the subject- they could be nervous or any range of possibilities. Without more information, we can’t judge them as incompetent- or even inconsistent or unreliable as we do not know the cause of that single failure. Likewise, a person who steals once under a certain set of circumstances may never steal again- it would be naive to think because they have a demonstrated potential to steal that defines them; or that because a person hasn’t demonstrated their capacity to steal that they cannot steal from us under the right circumstances.
guest_
· 4 years ago
What was said is that a person can quite literally only do their best in any given moment at any given task. The judgment of performance is largely results based- how hard you tried to resuscitate a person is irrelevant to the result after the fact- they live or die. If they die and you tried your hardest, that doesn’t bring them to life. If they live and you barely tried to save them, your lack of effort doesn’t change that they lived.
guest_
· 4 years ago
In general however, giving ones “best effort” increases the odds of success- were you to barely try to save a life and they die, it could be argued that with better effort they would have lived, so your best odds of success at most any given task, as should be self evident, is the best effort you can give towards success.
nelson
· 4 years ago
Best is literally the best on that chart
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guest_
· 4 years ago
Yes. But the point is that your capability to meet that standard can change over time or daily. Anyone can correct me if I am wrong, but I do not believe there has been any athlete who set a record every single time they played or practiced their sport- or even one which matched their own personal record each time they practiced or played. As a more common example, you’re probably not going to do your best in daily activities if you have the Flu or got 2 hours of sleep because you were consoling a bereaved friend etc- but you can still do the best you are able in your particular circumstances.
