S5E5: Let yourself call it finished today
Full transcript:
Good morning, happy Friday and welcome to the Language Confidence Project, the daily dose of language courage for those who love languages and those who really don’t, but have to learn one anyway. And all this week and next week on the podcast, to celebrate the launch of the Be Your Own Best Teacher sprint, we’re going to be asking some questions to help us look back on our school experiences of language learning, bring what’s useful along with us into the present day, and leave all the rest behind.
Yesterday, I talked about how I never knew when to stop when it came to “going the extra mile”. We talked about clearly defining when a task was done, so you knew when to stop without feeling like the correct thing to do would be to add a bit more, go a bit further, imbue it with a little more brilliance.
And today’s episode is about a very similar message, it’s another one I’m sure we’re all used to hearing: which is “do your best”. Because so often, it was meant to be reassuring, “no, don’t worry, don’t get stressed, just do your best” and yet I wonder for how many of us it’s actually done the opposite: it made us feel like nothing was ever finished. Its vagueness sparked our imagination to run wild as to exactly what our best should look like. It actually fed our perfectionism and made us feel like we’re always falling just a little bit short of what the task was meant to be. It made us draw out the last 5% in the hopes that our best would materialise on the final stretch.
I was always the kid that wanted to do my best at school. But what did that even mean? So I just kind of internalised it as “best means ‘better than whatever it is right now’”. And I really struggled to know what my best was without looking at my classmates to see what they were doing… so very quickly, “my best” became “the best”.
So nothing felt good enough. And everything took far, far too long. And I would dread starting things, because even for quite simple task I anticipated a stressful, drawn-out ordeal and most importantly, I knew that at the end, I still would not be able to accept my own work.
But it doesn’t need to be like that, it really doesn’t.
Last year, I heard the title of Jon Acuff’s book title: Finish: Give Yourself The Gift of Done, I had this realisation that actually there were two battles at play here. One is, as he says, giving yourself the gift of done. Preparing that gift of done, you know, doing the work and getting that task to the finish line. But the other is receiving the gift of done. Accepting that it’s done, appreciating the work that went into it, and allowing it to be what it is without nitpicking or criticising.
Some work needs your best. Some work just needs to be done. And for some work, it’s fine if it’s a bit messy. If it’s hastily scrawled with notes in the margins and you underlined but you didn’t even use a ruler. For some work, it’s fine if you’ve made mistakes so there are crossings out everywhere. You don’t live in a studygram. It’s not saying, get used to mediocrity. It’s saying, go into your work knowing where your priorities are. Knowing what needs to be at 100%, and what can be brought down while still giving you the same return.
That might look like setting really clear criteria: I’m prioritising accuracy of these types of verbs in this tense, but I’m less worried about neatness. Or as we point out a lot in this podcast, the more you focus on ideas, the more in general your accuracy will take a hit, and the more you focus on accuracy, in general, your originality and self-expression will take a hit, so define which one of those two things this assignment or task most calls for. And that means you have a binary yes-or-no way to confirm to yourself that you’ve done your best. It might also look like putting a container around the task: a clear time limit, a clear word limit, so that you have to get the task done before the stopping point and you can’t just keep playing with it and tweaking at the end or get caught up in overthinking in the middle as your mental image of it gets grander and grander.
Don’t let the fear of your work not being the best, or the best you can do, stop you from getting started. And don’t let it stop you being proud of the work you’ve achieved today. Let yourself accept the gift of done.
Have a wonderful day, have a wonderful weekend, and I will see you on Monday.