“How Do I Become The Best?”

I was recently asked during a radio interview about my book Navigating Chaos which highlights superior performance as it translates (seamlessly, I might add) from the military to business. The question posed by the host was, “How can our listeners become the best they can be?” My answer: they can’t. Here’s why.
In this article you’ll learn:

• Why striving to be the best is an act in futility
• What to strive for instead
• The two choices everybody has to do so

“Best” doesn’t exist. To call oneself the “best in class” or the “best quarterback to ever play the game” or the best in anything, for that matter, is to narrowly define the boundaries of potential and limit opportunity. In other words, nobody becomes the best in anything because to assume “the best” is also to assume there’s no room for improvement. And there is always room for improvement—in anything.

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No, aiming to become the best at what you do is a false aspiration and an inaccurate portrayal of success. What you can do, however, is become better. Better than your peers. Better than your supervisors. Better than the competition and better than the rest.

“The real key to excellence in both sports and business is not the ability to swim fast or do quantitative analyses quickly in your head; rather, it is mental toughness.”

An HBR article highlights just this:

Until 1954, most people believed that a human being was incapable of running a mile in less than four minutes. But that very year, English miler Roger Bannister proved them wrong.
“Doctors and scientists said that breaking the four-minute mile was impossible, that one would die in the attempt,” Bannister is reported to have said afterward. “Thus, when I got up from the track after collapsing at the finish line, I figured I was dead.” Which goes to show that in sports, as in business, the main obstacle to achieving “the impossible” may be a self-limiting mind-set.

Becoming better is a measurable success, and aspiring to do so connotes two things:

1. Failure is a choice. Rather, how you view failure is a choice. Failure is only determined by where and when you choose to stop. You can view failure in one of two ways: as a permanent state of acceptance, or a temporary state of learning that serves as a springboard toward betterment.
2. Becoming better is an intention, and intentions are malleable. When you look at Carol Dweck’s work about Fixed vs. Growth mindsets, people with fixed mindsets believe that their competencies are innate, that they’re just not good at math because that’s how they’ve always been and, subsequently, that’s how they always will be. In other words, they don’t believe they can improve. There’s no intention with the fixed mindset, only acceptance.

Growth mindsetters, however, believe that becoming better at math, or anything for that matter, is a direct result of effort. They believe that skills and competencies are not innate but rather developed and developable. They intend to improve at whatever they do because they recognize the temporary state that failure or learning implies—and it does not define them.

This is a long-winded way of highlighting the takeaway from the interview, which was answering the question, “How do you find certainty in uncertain situations?” Put it this way…

Who you are—your values—determines the choices you make and the subsequent actions or behaviors that ensue. Those actions determine your brand, your (in)effectiveness as a leader, and the perceptions that others have of you. The challenge is making the right decision amidst adversity; sticking to your guns when the tides turn. It’s not easy, but then again neither are decisions in chaos.

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