For the Birds: swift letters for busy people
#2: against doing your best
Thanks for reading For the Birds. Holy cow—it’s 2024! Let’s dive right in.
Dear readers: Cutting through the noise of new year’s resolutions and opening 2024 with a message about NOT STRIVING makes me wanna pump my little heart in the air like a fist. Bear with me as I talk about business a tiny bit—but only at first, and only because it will help me to then talk about living.
One of the hardest aspects of building a small business, especially for a sensi-weird soul like me, is marketing. It turns out, just having gifts + skills, and making them publicly available, isn’t enough: you have to actually tell people, and with some consistency, about what you’re doing and how it might help them.
So I’m in the midst of figuring out what ethical, creative marketing looks and feels like in my body, and because one thing tends to lead to another, I find myself wondering: What would doing my best look like?
It’s common language to talk about doing and being our best. But it’s language I struggle with, not because I don’t want to do and be good, but because I want my best to account for all the iterations of me. I want my goodness to be an inclusive quality, not an exacting one.
If I’m exhausted, and having a low day, and maybe my left foot hurts a little, and my enthusiasm, normally bright, is a little less so, can I still hold space for a client? Work on a project? Offer a service? If I do these things when I’m genuinely not at my best, does it mean what I’ve done isn’t worthy? Isn’t good? Isn’t good enough?
A best that evaluates everything against its 100% version is too easy. And if you think I’ve lost touch with the reality of words and their meanings, I’d counter by saying that the only way to use language authentically is to acknowledge its arbitrary origins and slippery nature from the get go.
I don’t like the language of best-ness because it pretends that 100% Sarah is better than 65% Sarah.
100% you is not better than 65% you! It’s not a competition. Your life is whole, varied, complex. (For my tarot friends out there, see The World card.) That means your best can carry nuance and account for context. Your best doesn’t have to mean “optimized,” nor demand consistency. It can simply mean, “wholehearted.” It can allow for the ebb and the flow; we can fold fluidity into the metrics themselves.
What if your “best” is the all of you that includes each iteration of you? That would mean your “best” isn’t something you can fall outside of or stop being. It’s not an outfit. It’s the color of your eyes.
Notice your best-ness. Notice what it looks like today, which might be very different than what it looks like tomorrow. Keep noticing. It’s still there.
All that’s left is to let the data skew the picture: skew it in the direction of a much bigger, more inclusive vision of your own excellence, and how you’re definitely going to achieve it, because you already have.
Thank you for writing! This is an easy theme for me; that is, it seems to have worked the past 27 years with the SECRETS program and life. I am also impressed when someone is ailing physically and/or spiritually and they are called upon to do something. With the SECRETS staff, my request was to always bring your best effort when you entered the classroom. If someone thought they just couldn't do that, I asked them to call me or someone else to sub, because I believed and still do that the 5th. graders deserved our best. It is pretty easy to do our best when we're at 100%, pretty amazing to attempt to surmount our woes when we're not. In sports I remember a baseball pitcher in the World Service pitch the game of his life despite pain and blood oozing from his ankle. Or the famous Kurt Gibson pitch-hitting for a home run despite him having only one healthy leg. People going on stage and performing their heart out despite fevers, trauma, or other deep challenges confronting them. How did Beethoven overcome his near total deafness to create the world's greatest classical music? How did Diana Nyad swim from Florida to Cuba (100 miles!) at age 60 when she couldn't accomplish that feat at age 28? Our minds, our spirits can compensate for physical ailments. And a writer's Soul can overcome severe adversity to write words of greatness, and perhaps that's when the most significant writing occurs!