Weekly newsletter
I. Prompts for motivation
Can you think of someone in your life who manages to deliver and give it everything they’ve got in a consistent manner? What kinds of habits or practices do you think contribute to this level of drive?
Do you ever find yourself looking back on a certain task or project and feeling like you could have done a lot better? Are there any roadblocks or mind patterns that affect your ability to give something your absolute best?
II. Thoughts for intention
One of the biggest mistakes in approaching the idea of doing your best happens when you mix up the concept with being the best. It’s easy to fall into the trap of a competitive approach that involves outperforming others, winning arguments, or focusing solely on holding the number one spot. However, doing your best is much more about staying self-driven, mastering your skills, and improving every single day. In this way, you attain much more control and direction over your growth and progress in the long run.
Setting the intention to do your best is such an empowering way to keep yourself motivated and fully devoted to your lifelong passions and dreams. When your goal is to simply unlock your fullest potential, it gets easier to enjoy your process every step of the way. This creates a robust form of intrinsic motivation that you can pair with other external conditions and goals you are aiming to accomplish at the same time. Over time, you begin to see how doing your best generates amazing results in which your precision accelerates exponentially.
III. Ideas for preparation
As simple as it might sound, making sure that you are actually doing your best is a common thing others can forget about. It’s not unusual for certain tasks to become routine and tedious over time. In such cases, it can be challenging to retain engagement and excitement over anything that we have already done plenty of times before. Nevertheless, all it takes to give it your all is to show up with the best effort that you can contribute to any team. This allows you to rest assured, knowing that as long as you are giving it all you’ve got, then you are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing.
If you ever find yourself stuck on a certain problem, making space for self-reflection allows you to get the most out of each and every attempt. You gain so much insight into how you can do better next time with more information about potential strategies, mishaps, and feedback. While moments of failure can temporarily feel negative, they actually point you forward in the direction that you want to be heading. You learn the most from these experiences and attain much more knowledge, which might be extremely useful in the future.
IV. Quotes for inspiration
“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning
“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”
― Elinor Smith, Aviatrix
