That's Life

'If a man does his best, what else is there (to ask for)?' This quote from my tuition teacher's MSN nick got me thinking. Sure, we all hear things like 'just do your best and everything will be fine' and 'it's ok, just try your best'. Yet, it would be foolish to simply set 'our best' as our benchmark for whatever we do.

First and foremost, there is no way to simply define the term 'my best'. Take this for example. Saying 'I tried my best to do this project' might seem like a reasonable excuse for coming up with a model so bad a three-year old would have fared better. You could have sacrificed another hour of sleep to work on the project. And if you had done so, you could have sacrificed yet another hour. And so it goes on. Yes, it might be possible to argue that 'doing my best' involves making the optimum use of my resources (time, money, effort) under certain conditions. Yet no one is able to objectively determine in what way are your resources best allocated in a manner most beneficial and efficient to you. How many of you always feel that you could have done better even after spending a lot of effort on something. If you haven't raised your hand, you're either a liar or a person with expectations so low that an ant would be able to hurdle over.

Anyway, now that we've established that there is no way to objectively determine what is 'our best', (trust me your own belief that it is your best very often does not coincide with the views of those around you), it is more important to answer the question of what comes after doing 'your best'. Tough luck chump society is an unfeeling unsentimental uncaring system with fabric that's probably as cold as the infrastructure of those high-rise buildings in Shenton Way. See society doesn't condone 'your best'. Society condones 'his best or her best', where the 'his' and 'her' in question refer to the big shots above you in the corporate ladder whom you have a dying urge to push off but can't. Your boss ain't going to be weeping with tears when you submit your latest version of 'How To Acquire That son-of-a-bitch Company That's Poachinig Our Customers' with bloodshot eyes. No no the 'I did my best boss' template isn't going to tug at his heartstrings. It's going to tug at his vocal cards though and you can be sure of that when he sends you scooting back to your cubicle with his 'Redo this piece of crap' and the like derogatory statements ringing in your ears. 'Your best' counts for peanuts in the real world, and I'm talking about imaginary peanuts if 'your best' is not even good enough for you to poach a few dollars from someone else to purchase that bag of nuts.

What is my point, you may ask. Well my point is that the only place which condones 'i did my best' is probably in schools. Teachers, contrary to popular belief, aren't mercenary misers mooting for their next paycheck. I think some of them actually care about their studentes. Like how they give remedial classes to students who really tried their best but still failed and how they continue to encourage crestfallen children whose grades are all wet. (Below the C (sea) level, get it hahaha) Anyway I just want to thank all my teachers.

Happy Teacher's Day.