Try your best. Give your all. Break past your limits. You’ll win, anyhow.

As conventional wisdom goes, that’s not a bad piece of advice. But lately, I’m tired of it. Any virtue pursued single-mindedly to the extreme will always end up being a vice. And no difference for this piece of advice.

Give your all. But give too much to one goal, you burn out. You forget to self-care. You forget that sleep and rest is just as important, if not more, for doing your best work. You forget that eating well and healthy is key to giving more of your all. Input, output. You only get the best output from what you put in. Give your all to your health too.

Give it your all, and develop tunnel vision and forget about all the other things in life that matter, that make up a good life, a life well lived. Family, friends, having fun, hobbies - all these always go, when you give your all to one thing. We human beings are innately complex creatures, and I dare say, we are more than our dreams, our goals, our achievements. And anytime one facet of ourselves is over-emphasized at the expense of others, people suffer. Give your all to loving others - and yourself - too.

I’m tired of this bullshit wisdom paraded as absolute truth.

Give it your all, to life as a whole. Not to one thing. Going for a balanced life doesn’t mean not trying hard at all. In fact, I dare say it’s way harder, because it’s not just a single profit bottomline now. It’s double, triple, quadruple bottomlines to manage. It’s easy when you have a single mission. But when you have a few missions at the same time, often with conflicting, competing objectives, it requires ingenuity and creativity. It sometimes needs compromise and trade-offs. And that sure is the harder thing to do. 

Now that’s worth giving it your all.