Good is relative

I did a 21K trail run on a certain amount of time. I finished the trail in pain but under the time I had planned to. I was, nevertheless, unhappy because I felt I could have done better. I lost time by taking a wrong way and used energy to climb, and the end I had cramps.

With this negative perception, I felt that my performance was not good enough.

But, I read on the Shape Up book that :

there’s no absolute definition of “the best” solution. The best is relative to your constraints. Without a time limit, there’s always a better version.

So I did understand that finally my performance was not that bad because I did half my training program and the cramps I suffered at the end were certainly due to a not sufficient amount of training volume.

And the true reason is: Without a time limit, there’s always a better version.

You can achieve a lot of things. And you can achieve them in a different way. You can be good at several things but you cannot be an expert, at the same time, in different things.

Being an expert (or to perform in something) requires work, training, or whatever is needed to perform. You cannot be a champion without working hard.

These are « well-known » things. But I felt disappointed because I thought I could do better. But actually, I had so much constraints (work, family, side projects, ,…) that I think I was finally quite good to run a 21k trail in this period.

This situation helps me to understand that when we are evaluating ourselves, we need to do this from a big picture. We have to be objective about our performance evaluation. Does this work seem good enough? Does this writing seem good enough? Actually, you can always be unsatisfied by the quality of what you are doing.

For writing, you can always do more or better work by polishing your text, removing unnecessary things, etc… but if you evaluate your performance or your work, you have to take the context into account. It’s a part of the equation. Running faster is also always possible: you can train more, pay attention at what you eat, etc… but at the end of the day, except if you are a pro runner, you don’t have always the time to have this as your number one priority.

But you can say that some people, who are not pro runners, can perform in sport, and it’s true, but, for the vast majority of them, they perform because they decide (or they have the possibility) to perform and they focus on it .

My point is to force our-self to accept that we cannot be excellent in everything we do and we have to accept that for some things :the best is relative to your constraints