Last week I wrote about the concept of being the best, surpassing everything that anybody has ever done in your particular field of endeavour. And why it was not the best way to succeed in business. That article is here.

I want to differentiate trying to “be the best” from “doing your best”. Don Miguel Ruiz, in his outstanding book The Four Agreements, talks about always doing your best. But it is a very different concept.

Not your best in the sense of beating your lifetime best each day. Rather, doing your best from the moment you are in.

Roger Bannister was the first person to break the four-minute barrier for running a mile. This took years of training. And for a short while he was the fastest runner in the world over that distance. It wasn’t long before he could not equal that feat. Time takes it’s toll and he moved on to slower things.

If Mr Bannister had flu on what turned out to be his fastest day, or had a blister on his left big toe, or if his girlfriend had told him the night before that she was of child by another man, his best on the day would have been a lot slower.

“Life” flows around us. James Watson (one of the two fellows who first concluded that DNA was shaped the way it is) in a recent video talking about his life back then said that he did not remember much of it because he was having issues with his girlfriend at the time.

“Our best” depends on all sorts of things and changes by the hour. How much sleep we had last night. How well our relationships are going. When last we ate. How fit we are. The traffic en route to the office…

We are called to do the best we can in the space that we are in now. For instance, in my case, I suffer from . That is a self diagnosis. Whenever there is work to be done that I don’t want to do I fall asleep.

I find that the best I can do at that specific point is little more than to get onto the elliptical trainer for five minutes to get my heart pounding. It sometimes works to get me back to my desk.

Once I’m at my desk things kind of happen.

You don’t have to be the best in the world in your genre. You just need to be a little better than your local rivals on the day for this particular prospect. If it were not so, most of us would be unmarried and lonely. I am grateful each day that my rivals were not very strong on the day that I met the prospective future Mrs Carruthers