An couple interesting phrases you’ll hear tossed around from time to time are, “We’ll have to work our hardest to accomplish this,” and “We’ll need to do our best to accomplish this.” From the outside these two seem very similar; however, when you start to break them down the only two words of difference are hard and best. Curious, are these two words the same? For fun I am going to provide the relevant definitions.

hard: requiring a great deal of endurance or effort.

best: of the most excellent, effective, or desirable type or quality.

It’s normally pretty great when you can work hard and do your best, but it’s not all to fun to work hard and create sub-par quality. Always focus on best over hard. It’s hard to have the first without the second, but don’t automatically assume there is some magical ratio between them.