Doing Your Best
By John Bingham, Active.com, July 13, 2006

Doing one's best -- sounds like an easy enough concepts. "Just do your best, that will be fine," we are told by teachers and parents. But we quickly discover that doing one's personal best is not enough. If you were like me, you found out at an early age that simply doing YOUR best wasn't fine.

At least it wasn't fine if there was someone else who's best was better than yours. If someone else could say their alphabet faster or color inside the lines or sing a melody perfectly in pitch or hit a ball better. Suddenly it became a matter of your being able to do not YOUR best, but THEIR best. For many of us, an activity that had been great fun up until then -- singing, playing ball, reading -- suddenly became an opportunity for us to be "not as good as..."

Unless, of course, you were the one who's "best" set the standard. If you were the one who could do more, throw farther, or run faster -- it was different. If you were the one upon whom puberty descended first and changed your body from a boy's to a man's or a girl's to a woman's, while the rest of us suffered the indignity of being stuck in a child's body, you may not understand.

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