You Just Need to Do Your Best

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten was many years ago from my mother who told me not to worry about someone else and just to worry about myself. As the mother of seven kids, my mom often had to hear us complain that one of us got to do something another one of us didn’t get to do. Or she would hear one of us trying to get another one in trouble for doing something he or she shouldn’t have been doing. My mom’s response was always the same: Don’t worry about your brother (or sister); you just worry about yourself. While that advice was frustrating at the time, it has proven invaluable to me as I navigate through life.

It’s very easy and tempting to want to compare ourselves to others, whether in school, in our careers, or in our personal lives. But every one of us has his or her own journey, and it isn’t fair to yourself or the other person to gauge your life against someone else’s. It distracts from the real goal in life, which is to always work toward self-improvement, while at the same time celebrating where you are in a particular moment.

Life is full of challenges. One person’s challenges may seem easier than yours, when you’re looking from the outside. But we can never know another person’s challenges, so we need to be careful not to judge others in comparison to ourselves or ourselves in comparison to others.

This advice ties well into one of my favorite sayings: We don’t need to be the best, we just need to do our best. And every day, each of us should try to be a better person than we were the day before. Measuring success against your own accomplishments and goals is truly the only way to live a happy and satisfying life. Admittedly, this is much easier said than done, but the older I get the easier it is to see just how important it is to not only reach your potential, but to help others celebrate and reach theirs.