The Illusion of Doing Your Best

This week I got good news: I’m up for a job at a big publishing company. This couldn’t have come at a better time—the wave of rejections and isolating silence was starting to crush me, and this small victory is assurance that I’m on the right track. The congratulatory message came with an attachment, a screening assignment meant to test my knowledge. I abandoned my plan for the day, brewed an enormous pot of coffee, and dialed in.

It was all I thought about for the next 48 hours. I read the instructions once, twice, and a dozen more times. I read everything I could about the company, their books, and their employees. I went to the bookstore to make sure I hadn’t missed a bestseller. I checked out an impossible pile of books from the library and read one a day. My retinas burned. I worked through the nausea I get when I stare at my laptop too long. I put off meals and then ate ferociously at my desk. I sacrificed sleep. When I was sure I’d done everything I possibly could for my response, I hit submit. Leaning back in my chair, releasing the tension in my shoulders, I asked myself if I’d done my best.

It's not a question to be answered lightly. To declare that I did my best and then get another rejection would also be to declare that I’m not good enough. That’s what the word “best” means: the highest degree possible. It is also the limit.

And yet, that’s all we can do: our best. It’s both logical and infuriating at the same time, especially in its vagueness. How do we know when we’ve done our best? There’s no device we can push up against our performance and read like a ruler. No mathematical formula like age / time x agony. No bell that announces we’ve reached it like in a strongman carnival game. “Your best” is calculated, to my understanding, by putting your current effort and your maximum effort side by side, and if they match, you’ve succeeded. But what is maximum?

I assume the purpose of the “best” metric is to remind us to measure our performance against our own merit and not against the merit of others. This is why we heard it so much as kids when auditioning for a play or running a charity 5K. Whether you made the team or not, all that matters is that you tried something new and worked hard at it.

But for adults, survival is at stake. I don’t just want this job to feel good about myself, I need this job, or one like it, to afford food and housing. And to get it, I have to forget everything about self-assuredness and do the opposite. I have to find out what the others are doing and be better. Doing my best isn’t good enough anymore. I have to be the best.

Having been throwing the mallet for a while now, it seems like I’m always finding ways to swing faster and climb higher. Every rejection is a reminder that someone else dazzled where I didn’t, a sign I can try harder. Or maybe I’m missing the target altogether. Sometimes striving for my best feels less like reaching for a bell and more like chasing a laser pointer.

It seems the competitiveness of doing one’s best in adulthood has stained my solo endeavors as well, where there aren’t clear winners and losers. My daily hiking challenge, for example, is mine alone. I have yet to miss a day, and I feel the results in my muscles. Why then, instead of feeling accomplished, do I question my capability to set adequate goals? If I’m succeeding, I find myself thinking, I must not be challenging myself enough. Tara Dower hiked the Appalachian Trail in fewer than 41 days, for crying out loud! I can always be faster, pick steeper trails, or go a little farther. The extra mile is literally always right in front of me. Every time I don’t take it, it feels like surrender.

But when does doing my best become too much? I could run up and down mountains until I vomit, collapse, and faint. Would that finally evoke the sense of accomplishment promised to me in childhood? I could spend all day and night reading, writing, and building a portfolio, doing away with eating and sleeping. Would that be my best? Should I decimate my body until I have nothing left but a 5-minute mile and a job offer?

Maybe doing your best is knowing when to stop.

For this, our bodies offer a clue. Fatigue is extreme exhaustion and can be mental, physical, or even emotional. Angelo Mosso, a nineteenth century physiologist, wrote that fatigue, while “at first sight might appear an imperfection of our body, is on the contrary one of its most marvelous perfections.” He theorized that the feeling of burnout or weariness is a signal that homeostasis is at risk and enough is enough. When it comes to pushing our limits, fatigue is protection from injury rather than an obstacle to our success. Maybe it’s also the ringing bell that signals we’ve hit our max.

But I learned in my pursuit of the best assignment that I can conquer fatigue by sheer determination, so this can’t be true. Mosso proposed that fatigue is the perception of exhaustion rather than the inevitable result of depleted resources. In other words, it’s an illusion. If this is true, then fatigue is better described as an emotion. Tim Noakes, a physiologist known for his research in sports physiology, clarifies that fatigue is designed to stop us long before we truly run dry. The brain tries to keep an energy savings account, an emergency fund of sorts, but we can tap into that store at any time if we want it badly enough. In an article published by Frontiers in Physiology, Noakes writes, “My unproven hypothesis is that in the case of a close finish, physiology does not determine who wins. Rather somewhere in the final section of the race, the brains of the second, and lower placed finishers accept their respective finishing positions and no longer choose to challenge for a higher finish.” In other words, the eventual winner is determined not by the strongest physique, but the strongest mind.

It's true—fatigue didn’t convince me I’d done my best. No, I wanted success so much that I ignored my brain’s warning and worked through the misery. It was something else that pulled me out of the revision cycle and permitted me to cross the finish line.

Confidence.

I was proud of my work. I’ve been learning about books my entire life, and I’m good at this stuff. I attacked my challenge with courage, precision, and enthusiasm, and I maintained my vigor the whole way through.

Once it was gone from my inbox, too late to dot an i, I read my response again. There was no doubt: I had achieved my goal. And even if I lose this competition, I still made it further than I ever have, and that’s proof enough that I can make it even further next time.

With the assignment behind me, I ran a new trail with 1,500 feet of vert. It was hard. I was within a mile of the peak when I had to walk, an act I usually consider an immediate disqualification.

This time, I turned my shame into brain appreciation. Just because we can override fatigue, doesn’t mean we should. I’d only just started adding runs into my hiking routine, after all, and I could use some more practice. Now that I know the trail, I know how to pace myself. Maybe next time, I’ll make it a little farther. And the time after that, maybe I won’t have to walk at all.

While your best and fatigue are often at odds, they do share a crucial trait: they’re both illusions. Your best is merely an idea, a construct to measure the unmeasurable, a mirage meant to manufacture a satisfaction that’s otherwise elusive. As such, standardizing it is impossible. Your best can be a bell bolted x feet in the air if you want it to be. Or, if you’re not careful, it can be a red dot on the wall, one you know you’ll never catch because you’re holding the pointer, too.

But the good thing about illusions is that once you know you’re dealing with one, you can control how you perceive it. Here’s my version: My best is a scratch of pencil on a wall. I set a goal, work hard, and draw a line above my head like my parents used to do. There it is. Then I set another goal and do it all over again, and this time, the mark will be a little higher. As for knowing when to pull out the pencil? It’s about trust in myself. I intended to do my best, and so I did.*

vert tracker : 7,232 FT.

June 11 2025–June 19 2025