It seems to reason that you do your best when you’re trying your hardest.
‘Go do your best’ has been around for a long time. And then when ‘best’ doesn’t happen, the follow up is ‘try harder’.
So more effort is put in as a means of ‘doing your best’.
But I venture to guess that when most of us have done our best…we’ve simply done our best. That we weren’t necessarily trying our hardest or straining like we’ve never strained before. We did our best when we showed up, did our work and the best happened as a result.
Maximum effort doesn’t necessarily yield maximum results. Especially in creative fields.
This is not to say you shouldn’t work hard or work till all hours of the night sometimes. But it is to say if you’re not getting the results you want, ‘trying harder’ might not be the ticket you need.
