Counterintuitive advice, I know, but I think it’s the best advice I have ever gotten.
Let me paraphrase a quote I heard somewhere. If you’re always doing your best, then it’s no longer your best, it’s just your normal.
I really struggle with small starts. I know they work. They have worked in my life on numerous occasions, and I have seen them work in my clients’ lives as well. But maybe it’s the fact that we sometimes offer more grace to others than ourselves, or maybe it’s the fact that we have such high expectations of ourselves. Or maybe it’s the echoes of so many people telling me, “I have so much potential.”
But I always have this fight inside my head: whether I should push myself to do more than the bare minimum, or whether just a little really is enough
The worst part is, I have seen what I can do if I allow myself to start slowly. One of my longest and most intense exercise streaks of my life started with sun salutations only. If you’ve never heard of sun salutations, it’s a cyclical series of movements that start and end in the same pose and that can be done in as little as 3 minutes.
But I did that for a while and kept adding exercises bit by bit, and I remember that by the time I was 23, I was the fittest I had ever been in my life. I was somehow going to the gym at 5am some mornings (anyone who knows me knows how miraculous this is), I was doing karate, and according to some medical tests I had done, I had the metabolic age of a 20-year-old.
Fast forward to now, and life happened and I fell off, which, if you have ADHD, you know is one of the worst things that can happen to our habits. It’s been a struggle to get myself to that level of fitness, but I am realizing now that that has been my problem. I have been trying to get back to my best when I should be getting back to the smallest, simplest version
Whenever someone asks us to do our best, they forget that the goal is sustainability. James Clear talks about this in Atomic Habits, about how getting 1% better over time can eventually compound into significant change, yet we somehow still want ourselves to do more. We still think that it is only by doing our best that we can be our best, when you can get there all the same by doing the thing enough times. Think about it like the expression about eating the elephant. If you eat it spoon by spoon, finishing the elephant is an eventuality.
There’s something to be said, of course, for the fact that some of our goals aren’t the type to end. Something like exercise is a never-ending goal. It’s supposed to be about lifestyle, but that’s an entirely different conversation.
The point of this piece today is to reorient myself more than anything, and to externalize an internal conversation. I don’t need to be my best or to do my best. That goal is a fast track to burnout, frustration, and giving up again. For now, maybe my goal is to locate the bare minimum and see if I can stick to it for as long as possible.
So, in conclusion, don’t do your best. Do what you can sustain. Regardless of how little it is.