Also, just like, as a practical mater, you physically at some point in your life will not be able to give 100% to everything you are doing. Learning how to “do the bare minimum” is a life skill.
To bring in another law school example, due to scheduling weirdness back in the day and a total lack of necessary research, one of my profs in law school ended up taking the MPRE two days after the he finished taking the bar exam. Understandably, he did not put much time into actually preparing for the MPRE. No studying ahead of the bar and only like a few hours across the two days after. And he scored one point above what he needed to pass the MPRE. His lesson: “I don’t recommend the timing, but I’m glad I didn’t study more. It would have been a waste of time.”
To give another example from my life, I studied PR/marketing in college. Creative types are notorious perfectionists. My prof routinely reminded us that part of what we were learning was how to allocate our limited time and resources (including mental energy, creativity, etc) amongst all of the things we had to do. Because part of being a creative professional is being able to tell the difference between a project you should only spend an hour on–like, say, an internal company flyer for a required employee information session–and a project you should spend lots of time on–like an annual public report. Sure, you could make that flyer look *stellar* but is it a good use of your time? Is that the best use of your talents and limited resource? Is all of that work “worth” anything in the long run? Probably not. The difference in impact between an adequate flyer for the event and an incredible flyer is very very low; the employees have to come regardless.
At some point in school/work/life, you will hit a point where you physically cannot do your “absolute best” on everything you have to do. At that point, your only option is to admit that the goal isn’t to do the same level of amazing work on each thing, but to figure out what level of work each practically needs to achieve what’s needed.
If two students both get a good grade in the class and get good jobs after graduation, but one had to put in 50% more work because they wanted to go above and beyond what was necessary to achieve that outcome, they don’t win any rewards at the end for having expended more effort.* And that attitude of “I have to do my absolute best” rather than “What do I need to do here to achieve my goal, and is the likely outcome of putting in more work worth the cost?” is what leads to breakdowns and burnout. Of course what’s “worth it” is highly subjective and dependent on the circumstance and person, but if you’re not asking yourself the question, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage.
What some call “doing the bare minimum,” I call assessing costs and benefits of putting in more effort on an one project compared to all the other things I need to do and then making an informed allocation of my time, energies, and resources.
*Of course, there are plenty of reasons a person might genuinely just have to work harder to get the same outcome. Lack of privilege based on background, education, race, gender, health, etc. can have a very real effect on how hard one has to work to accomplish any given goal, and I’m not diminishing that at all. My point is that, as an individual, it’s important to figure out how/when to do the “bare minimum” based on your personal abilities, circumstances, and goals.
