Why only doing your best is terrible advice on its own.

“Do your best!” – Random guru.

Good advice turns into bad advice when it’s incomplete. And this piece of advice is very incomplete.

You need to do your best within a specific time frame. You’re better every new day, therefore, your best work is always tomorrow. If you wait until tomorrow, obviously, nothing ever happens and you can placate yourself by saying that you’re only doing your best.

You should absolutely do your best…within a specific timeframe that has a deadline. – Truth cake

If you don’t have the 2nd part of that advice, then you do your best, which means you actually will do nothing – because your best is always tomorrow.

This isn’t about being against perfectionism exactly as discussed in another post I made – it’s about TRYING to be perfect, to the best of your ability, giving it a deadline, and launching it even though it’s not perfect.

Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn founder) was reported to say that, “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” This isn’t good “advice” per se, since it could accidently lead people to just do awful stuff, but he’s not giving advice. Reid is explaining a scenario that happens when you’re:
1) Doing the best you can,
2) Launching before it’s perfect,
3) Getting better every day and sticking with something (this 3rd part is what creates the embarrassment he refers to since when you look back on something, you’ve gotten so much better over time).

What thing have you been putting off because of the fear of not doing your best but instead you should just do the best you can today and move forward?