Winning and Doing Your Best

It is funny how people associate doing your best with winning. But why When someone says try your best, people assume that if they do their best they will win. Well that's not always the case. Today we(as in the marching band members) had a Marching Band competition. Mr. Lemen, the director, told us as all that matters is that we do our best. I'm sure many people, including myself thought,"hmm... yeah we'll win." Well come time for the awards, we didn't end up getting one single award. Everyone was so depressed and didn't want to talk about it. Everyone said they made tons of mistakes and how terrible that performance was. Which is funny because before they announced the awards almost everyone was saying it was their best performance, and how well they had done. I just don't understand the whole thing of, well we didn't get an award so we must have been bad. Many thing factor into scoring and such. Yeah ok, we weren't perfect, but that doesn't mean we didn't try hard and do our best. The fact of winning doesn't have to do with our best. I think some people get so worked up in their mind that winning is everything, and just doing your best isn't good enough if you don't get a trophy. Doing your best means doing all you (you as in general, man I sure need to work on that) can do to make it the best ever. It seems as though when a person puts there whole heart and soul into something, they expect to get something back. It is kind of like the whole thing of doing service just to get a cookie or something really exciting. If we at least get something for our efforts than it has to have been worth while. What happened to doing something just for the satisfaction of doing a good job? Who cares if you win some plastic thingy that sits on your shelf? Its going to do no good, except collect dust on your shelf. Is the human being really all about getting awards for their efforts? It seems as though humans tend to judge you by awards you have gotten. If I get an award, and say Sam doesn't, then who is better? Who had more talent? Who has worked the hardest? And who has done their best? Now I am all confused and have been sitting here for quite sometime thinking about how to answer my initial question, but its really not coming so maybe I should just stop.