Doing the Best by Yourself

There’s a lot of self-help literature out there about how helping others is actually a good way to help yourself. One of our favourite mantras at ted Learning – one that is often forgotten in the workplace – works the other way around: ‘Doing the best by yourself in order that you can do your best by others’.

Managing yourself is surprisingly difficult. It’s easy to take the attitude that ‘where there’s a will there’s a way’; to assume that since you know you want to be successful, you can trust yourself to always  push your hardest to get there, without needing to think strategically about motivating yourself to work. As long as you make enough time, you tell yourself, and waste fewer hours on luxuries like, say, sleep, you can exceed everyone’s expectations.