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Self-Sabotage
Why You Shouldn't Aim to Be Your Best Self Every Day
Performance variation isn't just normal—it might be necessary.
Posted March 19, 2025 Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
Imagine this: You're an athlete on a new team of runners. Your first day, the coach asks you, "What's your 5K PR?" You tell them. The coach says, "OK, go run that." The next day, they say the same thing, "Go run your 5K PR again, or a little faster." You're confused. Of course, you don't achieve it. You haven't peaked or tapered. It's not a race day with race day conditions.
Professional athletes don't aim to hit their personal record every day. It's not realistic or strategic.
Yet, we sometimes attempt that in our work and personal lives. We aim for every day's performance to emulate our best ever performance. Just like our athlete, we fail. And, we feel like a failure.
But it's not just because performing at one's best every day is impossible that we shouldn't attempt it. It's also because it's an unhelpful aim. Let me explain.
The Normal Distribution of Our Performance
When we attempt to achieve more consistency in performance, we end up in the fat middle of a performance bell curve—the monotone middle. We miss out on the really great and really terrible tails of the curve.
When scientists are in their most productive periods, they typically produce both their best work and their worst work.
When it comes to creative thought, it's only by encouraging "dopey" ideas that great ideas are allowed to emerge.
Stanford Professor Jeremy Utley describes it this way: When we attempt to cut off the left side of the distribution (i.e., "no 'bad' ideas, please"), we unwittingly eliminate the right-hand side (where the genius lies!) as well.
Not every painting can be your Mona Lisa. Not every newsletter can be your best ever. Not every business deal can be your most profitable.
When We Attempt to Replicate Our Best Performances, It Restricts Experimentation
Human behavior involves exploit vs. explore trade offs. We constantly choose between using proven strategies (exploit) and testing new approaches (explore). When we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to achieve ultra-consistent high performance, we will default to exploit strategies. We will default to what we know works. For example, you're a YouTuber and you crank out another variation of a video that follows the same format that has worked for your already successful videos. Or, you're a real estate developer who rehabs properties, and you source your next deal the same way you sourced your last one.
When we put performance pressure on ourselves to equal or exceed our best performances every day, we become less willing to explore and experiment — to try new behaviors and choices where we're uncertain of the outcome. To excel, we need to be willing to try experiments that have uncertain outcomes.
We can still improve every day without achieving our best performance every day — for example, if we learn something new through our experimentation. But, hustle culture doesn't present achievement this way. We're accustomed to seeing it presented linearly, as something we can follow along as if it were a tutorial. But, you can't achieve your best success by directly copying anyone else, including your past self.
To Tolerate Variation in Our Performance, We Need Psychological Skills
One reason people gravitate to consistency is because inconsistency is psychologically challenging. Inconsistent performance involves a lot of cognitive-emotional ups and downs. To reach our highest maximum levels of performance, we need to develop psychological skills that help us tolerate day-to-day variation in our outcomes. We need to learn to meet ourselves where we are.
In particular, we need skills for coping with rumination and doubt that arise on days when our outcomes are below par. We also need skills for combating certain human tendencies, like acting more controlling when we feel uncertain. This controlling response can lead to the overthinker's paradox, where overthinking limits our success more than failure.
If We Limit Ourselves Only to What We Can Do Consistently, We Limit Ourselves
Let's return to our athlete example, because we can learn from it further about why attempting perfect every-day consistency should be avoided: Professional runners typically do around two hard workouts a week. Outside this, they generally do easy runs plus one longer, steady run. A marathoner might only race a marathon twice a year because of the recovery demands and the necessity of strategically peaking and tapering to reach their highest performance.
Imagine if a runner only attempted workouts they could consistently pull off every day. They don't do this. They accept that their best performance will come from training nearly every day in some form (showing up and doing something) but that their most intense sessions can only occur a couple of times a week, or else they will jeopardize the consistency of being able to show up and run, say, 6 days a week.
Non-athletes who are attempting to reach their peak overall performance in their lives and careers can learn from this approach.
Don't Make the Mistake of Trying to Consistently Perform at Your Best
When we're motivated to excel, we often mistakenly believe that consistency at our highest level is the goal. But as we've seen—from athletes to scientists to creative professionals—true excellence emerges from embracing the bell curve nature of human performance. Just like an athlete doesn't try to PR every day, neither should you.
Here's a simple way to experience how allowing for "bad" performance actually leads to better outcomes overall:
Try it yourself: ChatGPT and other AI Chatbots replicate human thought in a variety of ways, including the way in which they generate and filter ideas. Try asking your favorite AI Chatbot for 15 ideas on any topic you like. Then, re-roll. Ask it again, but explicitly ask it for diverse ideas, and to include some dopey ones. See if you make the same observation I have: When you encouraged it to include some dopey ideas, were the ideas you got better overall?
