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What It Takes To Be The Best In Life

Can someone suggest the best school in the city?

Can someone suggest the best daycare around?

Can someone suggest the best place to buy this???

Can someone suggest the best shoes for this dress?

Can someone suggest the BEST of everything???

Ironically, I grew up hearing these

Can someone suggest a good school in the city?

Can someone suggest a good pediatrician around?

Can someone suggest a good place to buy this???

Growing up, the superlative degree was reserved for really important situations-

Can someone suggest the best hospital for this treatment???

Can someone suggest the best investments available?

Has BEST has become the recent obsession with the society?

Makes me wonder, when did we even transition from GOOD to BEST?

Today we have transitioned into a society that craves the BEST in everything; we have forgotten that it is okay to be content with something ‘GOOD’, which may not necessarily be the BEST!

We see real-life examples of our classmates who may not have been the BEST student in school/college but are doing really well in life.

In trying to be the BEST and get the BEST, are we sacrificing the personal goals that matter the most?

This obsession has added more stress to our daily lives. Even when we play a game for a stress buster, we want to have the BEST score on the leaderboard!

The term ‘BEST’ is relative in my opinion; someone else’s BEST is always BETTER than your BEST! So where does this mad rush for the BEST end? Why is ‘GOOD’ not enough anymore?

In my observation, most of the happy people don’t seem to be the ones who have the BEST of everything, they seem to be the ones who have personal goals that suit them and are meaningful to them, regardless of whether or not other people approve! They just seem to understand that there is no “ONE SIZE FITS ALL” and the term BEST is relative to an individual’s situations! Customise your life to suit your needs and not what someone thinks or approves to be the BEST!

There is no joy in working non-stop to afford the BEST things in life, only to have a heart attack at 45!

If someone has a problem with you having only the ‘GOOD ENOUGHs’, stop hanging out with them! Having friends or the society who judge you based on your recaps of the BESTs you had in the last five years is not worth it! For God’s sake, let’s live life like one and not treat it at par with a performance appraisal!

At this point, I feel the need to emphasize that being/having ‘GOOD ENOUGHs’ is not a deterrent to personal/professional growth! BEST is not the only scale of measure for progress.

Let’s take a back-seat and ask ourselves if given a choice we would trade the BEST for GOOD? My honest answer would be ‘Yes’ as long as it gives me more time and energy to enjoy the less important things in life.

This obsession for BEST seems to trickle down to our daily lives too. There have been times where I judged myself if I’m being the BEST at work, the BEST daughter, the BEST wife, the BEST mom that I can be to my child , am i giving my child the BEST food, the BEST care, the BEST education, the BEST exposure to extra-curricular at par with other parents??  Trading BEST for GOOD doesn’t always have to make me a bad person or mean that I give something bad to my kid!

Are we indirectly complicating the lives of our kids by teaching them that they have to/get the ‘BEST’ at everything? We seem to push them every day in pursuit of the BEST, be it academics, extracurriculars and the list goes on… In my opinion, kids should be allowed to experience the little joys of life- enjoying the rain, reading a newspaper at their own pace, visiting grandparents during the holidays, having a lazy weekend and more! It is experiences like these today that makes them better individuals tomorrow!!!

One can always argue about ‘Survival of the Fittest’; fittest doesn’t always have to translate into the BEST, it can also mean ‘Good Enough’. But what we forget is that there always has to be co-existence. If today we show our kids that life is all about being or having the BEST, we might inadvertently be creating an unhappy and depressed generation who are unable to secure a place in the league of the BEST.

Having said all that, I don’t expect this to be the BEST write-up, but it would still give me joy if it finds a place just among the GOOD ONES written 🙂

For more interesting articles from Lavanya, head over to her Blog.

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