Thoughts on Not Having Done Your Best Work Yet

There’s something to be said for believing you haven’t done your best work yet. It’s one of the most freeing perspectives you can have.

After all, there are plenty of reasons to hold back from taking positive action.

And one of those reasons can be the fear that the idea that you have is a real winner. It’s actually a dangerous thought. Because then you hold on too tightly. You don’t let it out there for the world because it’s not ready. It’s not perfect yet. It has too much potential and you don’t want to squander it.

But there’s something blissfully relieving to have the belief that the best work you’ll ever create, is not something you’ve created yet. 

You wouldn’t have, because it takes all the failed attempts to hone and sharpen that star idea. You don’t skip stairs. There’s only one way to get there and it’s through lots of failed attempts, terrible stories, flops on your face, and embarrassing outputs you’ll cringe at years from now. But that’s the only way. The obstacle is the way.

The more you hear from successful people in their own rights, the more commonality you notice in their reflections of their journey. They didn't just come up with a great idea that the world caught onto one day. No. They had hundreds and hundreds of no good, bad, terrible ideas. And they just kept going.

As Stephen McCranie says, “The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.” But no one really looks at that. They just see the tip of the iceberg and then claim it was like that all along, from the moment it was birthed into existence.

It’s like the opposite feeling that Olympians get when they get a gold medal or smash a world record. In a sense, there’s a huge downfall from there. This huge depression, of what will I ever do that’s THAT great ever again?

Or consider Buzz Aldrin, who when he came back from the moon fell into a sink of a depression. After all, it’s not like he’ll ever be going back. That’s the “highest” point (no pun intended) he’ll ever reach in his life. Everything else is just mediocre. 

It’s like being a high stakes poker player that goes to play for pennies at the neighborhood game. It’s going to take a lot more to get your blood going in just the same way.

So what do you do?

Well, speaking for a non-moon traveling non-Olympian: you gotta believe your best work, your best contributions, are still yet to come. That gives you hope that fuels the drive to continue on. And even if it’s a different kind of work than what you’ve made in the past, you have to believe in your ability to uniquely contribute to the world. Or to your community. Or to your friends or family or dog or neighborhood cashier at the market. 

You have to believe that as big of a puddle as you feel like you’re in, or as small of a pebble as you feel like you are, that you create ripples just from being. The question, and responsibility, is to choose what kind of ripples you want to create.