Inside Out Leadership

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Why I'm not going to be the best this year

I'm just getting back from a week in the Keys with Laura and the boys, during which time, between fishing, sleeping, and a dubious snorkeling adventure, I did some reflecting. And out of that I have fashioned a clear definition of success for myself in 2023. 

It's different than most resolutions I'm hearing, but it works so much better for me.

If you’re looking to do some reflecting of your own before jumping headfirst into the new year, we made this free reflection template to help you do it.

My definition of success in 2023

This year I’ve decided not to be the best.

Not the best coach. The best writer. The best creator. 

I know, I know. “If you’re going to do anything you need to aim to be the best or you will probably be mediocre.” I hear the same noise, and it tweaks my anxiety just like it tweaks yours. For a long time, that anxiety drove me. I needed to be the best like my life depended on it. 

But not this year. This year, my new year’s resolution is to give up being the best and instead focus on just doing great work.

Here’s why: 

Being the best, in my experience, steers you in the wrong direction. 

The only way to truly be The Best is to chase popular opinion. If you’re in the game of being The Best, it’s not enough to be the best according to yourself. You win based on others acknowledging that you won. But by targeting being the best in your niche, it’s too easy to anchor your sense of achievement to others’ opinions of your work. You could look to objective measurements like being the “biggest,” but the only way to do that is, again, by being the one who most thoroughly conforms to what others want. 

After two decades of that, I’m much more interested this year in doing the best work I can do and allowing that work to be weird. Allowing myself to take chances in the pursuit of creating something that only I can create. I don’t feel free to take those chances if I am compelled to be the best. Instead, I feel like I have to Work Harder and Be More Perfect. Nah. I don’t want to do the work you want me to. I want to do my work, well.

(Besides, ChatGPT will soon be the “best” writer on the planet based on a whole bunch of metrics. Being weird is only becoming more important.)

Being the best requires others to be worse

One of my favorite parts of serving as a coach is getting to meet and collaborate with other coaches. Coaches, generally, are some of the most self-aware, eclectic, and interesting humans in the world (up there with founders) and are definitely the nicest and most generous group of people I know. It’s always felt weird to me to be competitive with those people, but to be the best I’d have to want them to be worse than me. In order for me to be the best, I have to play a zero-sum game against every other coach/writer/creator. I’d need to root against them, and it feels wrong to do that. 

I’d rather be a great coach/writer/creator (albeit a weird one) and root for other coaches/writers/creators to be great, too. There’s enough room for us all to crush it, and the work we’re doing is too important to the world to do anything but support it, in all its forms. There are winner-take-all markets in which I might feel differently, but coaching is not one of them. Neither is writing, and certainly neither is creating. 

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I grew up in competitive sports and still play basketball nearly every day. I know the power of needing in your bones to be the best. I know how it can drive you to incredible heights, and I feel the urge to let that part of myself engage each time I read about all of your impressive resolutions to dominate your industry. 

I get it. 

It’s just, this year, it’s not for me. 

This year, I’m not going to even try to be the best. I’m going to do great work. According to my definition, not yours.  

And here's the bonus: even if you’re chasing #1 in your space, I’m rooting for you to do great work, too.


Things I read this week

One: The new Genius Grants (various)

One year, $100k, build your thing. No strings attached. 
A couple really cool funds are offering grants to high performers, like the MacArthur genius grants of old.

O'Shaughnessy
Emergent

Two: List of the most psychoactive books (Twitter convo)

This might be my favorite conversation on Twitter. My answer, so far, has probably been The Idea of the World by Bernardo Kastrup.

LINK >>


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I’m an executive coach and the founder of Inside-Out Leadership, a boutique leadership development agency supporting founders to rapidly scale themselves as leaders, so they can thrive professionally and personally as their company changes the world. Leveraging 15-years as a founder/CEO, along with deep training in mindfulness, psychology, Neurolinguistic Programming, psychedelic integration and more, I have helped leaders from some of the fastest growing companies and VC funds in the world design a more conscious life and make key changes to improve their performance and satisfaction.

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