Your Best Work or Doing What Needs to Be Done?

One day in graduate school, I completely forgot about 5 page paper due that day in class.  So, I skipped chapel (actually, more correctly, I skipped shooting pool with my other chapel-skipping buddies, but that's for a different post!), ran home, whipped out a 5 page paper, and completed the assignment on time.  However that paper was definitely not my best work.
There are times in life when you do what you need to do in order to survive and advance.

We each need grace that every assignment, every paper, every presentation, every call, or every meeting isn't going to be our best.  If every thing we did was our best, then we'd need a different definition of "best".

Do that too often, though, and pretty soon you've accepted a different (and lower) standard for what qualifies as your best work.  We need to avoid that temptation too.