Do your Best and Forget the Rest

We wake up every day. Well then, what’s next? We can choose not to do anything for the remainder of the day, or we can choose to do the best we can with something, given the circumstances. At my present state, I choose the latter. My arms and legs still work. My brain is ok. So, yeah, why not make the best out of them? Just ask Jackie Chan and his body parts.

 

Was there a time when we get depressed to a point where we don’t want to do anything? For example, “what’s the point of doing all this? Nobody will see what I do. People in society probably don’t want me anyway.” Or, was there a time when we just need this to be ‘perfect?’ A tweak here, a tweak there, but at the end, the project ended up unfinished because of unreachable expectations of ourselves. Or even, was there a time when we do something only to seek another person’s approval, and we have to do something that’s different from what’s in our hearts? In this instance, we did our best, but we didn’t forget the rest (i.e. another person’s expectations).

My self-made solution, after many years of trying and failing, is this: aside from social etiquette, I will not let society limit what I can do in my life.

I remember in my adolescent days and well into the late twenties, I was very concerned with how to make sure others are happy. I would unconditionally help others, without questioning the motives behind their requests. It’s great for customer service and being ‘popular,’ but bit my bit I sensed my own soul wither away. This feeling is actually normal. Apparently, getting stuck at this point as a soulless individual is also normal.

Therefore, I don’t do that anymore – not as much, anyway. I still would like to believe that the world is fair, but I do question sometimes that by doing my best, I don’t know whether it is okay or not to show little mercy towards people who are ungrateful to others. But then I realized something – for as long as they’re locked within their societal ladders, there’s not much I can do to enlighten them spiritually. That’s my version of ‘forgetting the rest.’

Your version may be different than mine, but the common denominators are: just be yourself, reach to the limit in your own terms, and do that over and over.

That said, there is one thing that must be cleared up: it matters not if we believe that we can fully control our own destinies, or if there’s a higher order that watches over us. What matters is the amount of effort that we give into doing certain things, and we cannot let others’ opinions influence our efforts.

I’ll end this post with the video below from Tony Horton, the founder of the super-duper popular exercise program P90X.

-Sam

 

P.S. There are variations of this phrase:

•                 Do your best and let heaven do the rest (A popular Japanese quote. 人事を尽くして天命を待つ/ romanji: jinji o tsukushite tenmei o matsu)
•                 Do your best and let God do the rest. As long as you are making progress God is pleased. (Not exactly from the Bible, but derived from well-known people such as Joyce Meyer and Ben Carson)
•                 The planning lies with Man, the outcome with Heaven.  (A Chinese idiom. 謀事在人，成事在天。 pinyin: móushìzàirén，chéngshìzàitiān. From Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a historical novel by Luo Guanzhong)