Quote 57: "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." Maya Angelou

There is a quote that has been sitting in my head for a while now, and I keep coming back to it not because it is comforting, but because it is quietly demanding. Maya Angelou said it, and like most things she said, it sounds gentle on the surface and cuts deep once you actually think about it.

"Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better."

Most people read that as a permission slip — a warm reassurance that you are doing okay, keep going, be kind to yourself. That is only half of what she meant. The other half is the part that should make you uncomfortable.

Who Was Maya Angelou, and Why Does It Matter That She Said This?

Maya Angelou was not a motivational speaker who built a career on making people feel good about where they were. She was a woman who grew up in Stamps, Arkansas, during the Great Depression, was raped at eight years old by her mother's boyfriend, stopped speaking for nearly five years after that, worked in a brothel as a teenager, and still managed to become one of the most celebrated writers and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. She was friends with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom she outlived. She recited a poem at Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993, the first poet to do so since Robert Frost appeared at JFK's in 1961.

When she said "do the best you can until you know better," she was not speaking from a life of clean decisions and straightforward opportunities. She was speaking from a life built mostly from wreckage and revision. That context changes the weight of the words entirely.

The Part Everyone Skips

The quote is not just about self-compassion, and it is definitely not giving you permission to stay where you are.

The first half — "do the best you can until you know better" — is a genuine release from guilt. Every decision you have ever made was made with what you had at the time: the money in your account, the information available to you, the people around you who shaped what you thought was even possible, the fear you were carrying that you probably didn't have a name for yet. The job you took at twenty-two that felt wrong by twenty-five was the best option you could see from where you were standing. The relationship you stayed in too long, the degree you chose to make your parents proud, the investment you made on advice from someone you trusted — all of it was the output of every input you had received up to that point. It was not stupidity. It was not weakness. It was the best available response to your circumstances at the time.

But the second half is where the actual work begins: "when you know better, do better." Not someday. Not when the conditions are perfect and all the variables align and the risk feels manageable. Right now, with what you now know. The quote does not say wait until you are ready. It says when you know better. And most of us, if we are honest, already know better than we are currently acting on.

The Myth of the Perfect Moment

In 2002, Elon Musk had no background in aerospace engineering whatsoever. He had made his money from an internet payments company, read a stack of textbooks on rocket propulsion, and decided he was going to start a company that would get humans to Mars. The engineers he recruited told him the rockets would almost certainly fail. The first three launches of the Falcon 1 did fail, each one spectacularly and expensively, and by 2008 SpaceX was roughly three months from going completely under. The fourth launch succeeded, and the rest is the kind of history that gets written about in business schools.

Musk did not wait until he understood orbital mechanics the way a thirty-year veteran NASA engineer understood them. He moved with what he had, built what he could, failed, learned exactly what he had done wrong, and then did better. The failures were not interruptions in the journey — they were the journey. Every exploded rocket told his engineers something they could not have learned any other way, and that information was what eventually made the fourth launch work.

The people who wait for certainty before they move do not get certainty. They get a longer and longer list of reasons why this particular moment is still not quite the right one, while the world continues moving around them.

Nothing You Use Was Invented Once

Think about aspirin. Willow bark has been used for pain relief since ancient Egypt, around 1500 BC, documented in the Ebers Papyrus. The ancient Greeks knew about it. Hippocrates used it. But it took until 1897 for Felix Hoffmann, a chemist at Bayer, to synthesise acetylsalicylic acid in a stable enough form to be produced commercially. Then it took another fifty years before researchers began understanding that it also reduced the risk of heart attacks, which led to an entirely new wave of dosing recommendations and medical guidelines that are still being refined today. Aspirin is over three thousand years old and scientists are still figuring out new things it does.

Or consider the chair you are sitting on right now. Someone built a genuinely bad version of it first — probably a flat rock, then a log, then a crude wooden frame that was terrible for your back. Over centuries, someone added a backrest, someone else added cushioning, an industrial designer in the mid-twentieth century figured out lumbar support, and then an ergonomics movement in the 1980s rewrote the whole conversation about how humans should be sitting at all. Every version was someone doing the best they could with what they knew, followed by someone else knowing better and doing better. The chair is not finished. In twenty years someone will look back at what we currently consider good office furniture and find it laughable.

You are not a one-time product either. You are a version, and versions are supposed to be updated. The question is not whether you will change — you will, because the world will make sure of it. The question is whether you are doing it intentionally or waiting for circumstances to force it on you.

The Generation With No Excuse

Something is genuinely different about the moment we are living in, and it is worth saying plainly.

Salman Khan, who founded Khan Academy in 2006, started by making YouTube videos to tutor his cousins in New Orleans while he was working as a hedge fund analyst in Boston. He had no teaching credential, no education technology background, and no particular reason to believe anyone outside his family would watch. Within a few years, millions of people on every continent were learning mathematics, history, biology and economics through his platform, for free. Bill Gates called it his favourite site on the internet. Today, Khan Academy serves over 150 million registered users, and a student in a small town in Kerala with a phone and a data connection has access to the same calculus instruction as a kid in an elite private school in London.

That is not a small thing. For most of human history, access to quality education was the single biggest determinant of what you could become. It was rationed by geography, by wealth, by family connections, by what language you happened to be born into. A person in a rural village in 1970 who wanted to understand how a nuclear reactor worked had essentially no practical path to that knowledge. Today, MIT publishes its actual course materials online, for free, including the lectures, the problem sets and the exams. You can watch them in your bedroom at midnight. You can email the professor. You can find a community of people obsessed with the same thing you are obsessed with, wherever in the world they happen to be.

We are the first generation in human history where the primary bottleneck is not information, not access, not the availability of teachers, and not the cost of learning. The bottleneck is action. Angelou said what she said in a world where "knowing better" was genuinely difficult — where knowledge was scarce and access to it had to be earned or inherited. That constraint no longer exists in the way it once did, which means her second instruction lands with considerably more force for us than it did for any previous generation.

Failure Is the Method, Not the Obstacle

What school consistently gets wrong is the relationship between failure and progress. It treats failure as evidence that something went wrong, as a mark against you in the record, as something to be avoided and, if unavoidable, minimised and explained away. That framing is almost exactly backwards.

James Dyson, the British inventor, spent fifteen years and went through 5,127 prototypes before arriving at the bagless vacuum cleaner that made him a billionaire. He went bankrupt once during that period. Every single one of those 5,126 failed prototypes was not a mistake — it was a narrowing of the possibility space. Each one eliminated a design that did not work and generated information about why, which made the next attempt slightly more informed than the one before it. He was doing the best he could with what he knew. Then he knew a little better. Then he did a little better. Five thousand times.

Thomas Edison ran somewhere between one thousand and ten thousand experiments before arriving at a working incandescent lightbulb, depending on which account you read. When a reporter asked him how it felt to have failed so many times, he reportedly said that he had not failed at all — he had successfully identified ten thousand ways that did not work. Whether or not he actually said that in those words, the logic is sound. He was not failing his way toward success. He was doing science, which means generating information through systematic experimentation, and each negative result was data.

The problem is that most of us have been taught to treat our past decisions as permanent character judgements rather than as experiments with outcomes. The business that didn't work is evidence that you are not an entrepreneur. The relationship that ended badly is evidence that you make poor choices in people. The missed opportunity is evidence that you are not smart or brave enough. None of that follows. All of it was information, and the only real failure is treating information as a verdict instead of as input for the next attempt.

What Momentum Actually Looks Like

There is a meaningful difference between moving and waiting to run, and most people confuse the two.

J.K. Rowling was a single mother living on welfare in Edinburgh when she was writing the first Harry Potter book, using a typewriter because she could not afford a computer, finishing chapters in cafés because her flat was too cold to sit in comfortably. She had a degree in French and Classics, had recently gone through a divorce, had just come out of a period of clinical depression severe enough that she described herself as having contemplated suicide, and had no publishing credentials of any kind. The manuscript was rejected by twelve different publishers before Bloomsbury picked it up, and only then because the eight-year-old daughter of the chairman read the first chapter and demanded to know what happened next. Rowling was not ready. She was not in the ideal circumstances. She did not have a clear plan or a publishing deal or any particular reason to believe it would work. She moved anyway, with what she had, and figured out the rest as she went.

Moving generates data. Data generates direction. Direction generates the kind of confidence that does not come from sitting still and thinking about doing a thing — it comes from doing the thing badly, understanding why it went badly, and doing it slightly better the next time. There is no shortcut to that process and no way to think your way through it in advance. You get in and you learn by being in.

The Thing Angelou Was Not Saying

She was not saying: keep learning indefinitely, and act only when you are fully prepared and all the risks are understood and the outcome is reasonably assured. That is the comfortable misreading, and it is the version people use to justify inaction for years at a time.

Learning without doing is procrastination with better branding. You can read every book ever written on swimming — biomechanics, breathing technique, stroke efficiency, competitive training regimens — and still be entirely unable to swim, because swimming is a physical skill that can only be acquired by being in the water and doing it wrong repeatedly until your body figures out how to do it less wrong. The learning happens in the doing. The improvement happens in the iteration. There is no version of this process that works from the shore.

So get in. Do the best you can with what you have right now. Pay attention to what happens. Learn from it honestly, without defensiveness, without blame, without the story that what went wrong was someone else's fault. And then do better. Not someday. Now.

Before You Close This Tab

Whatever decision is nagging at you right now — the one you keep turning over at two in the morning, the one where you wonder if you made the wrong call or stayed too long or moved too early — you made it with what you had. The information available to you, the options you could actually see from where you were standing, the fear you were carrying, the people telling you what was and wasn't possible. That was your best. It genuinely was.

You are not that version of yourself anymore. You know things now that you did not know then, which is exactly the point. That is not a reason to stay in regret about the past. It is evidence that you have been paying attention, and paying attention is the whole prerequisite for doing better.

So now do better. Not when you are ready, because you will not be ready. Not when the circumstances improve, because the circumstances will always have something wrong with them. Now, with what you know today, which is more than you knew yesterday.

That is the whole instruction.