I was listening to the audiobook Rising Strong, a spiritual practice by Brené Brown and one of the questions worth pondering about the book is Do you think everybody is doing their best?

My answer, I think so.

Why? I’ll try to summarize it in 3 points.

  1. Whatever our definition of “best” is different from the rest, so we cannot judge a person’s best using our standards.
  2. At any point in time, we do what we know to do, at the level we know how to do it. We don’t know what we don’t know, so at any given time, we do our level best.
  3. Being the best is not an endpoint, it is a stopover and should we decide to be better, we can always proceed to the next stopover.

If you’ll ask a younger version of me, my answer will be a big NO!, but imagine if we can give everybody the benefit of the doubt that they are in fact doing their best, we’ll for sure see other people and even ourselves in a different light.

Do your best and most importantly, try to see the best in others as well.

Be happy!

Share