The Rehabilitation of Trying

It’s time to redeem the public status of trying: a willing, persistent curiosity in the face of not knowing.

'Do or do not. There is no try.'

The Stoics thought it. Master Yoda immortalised it. Nearly every burn ‘n earn author and self-help guru has echoed it. For over 2000 years, there has been an intense war waged on the word ‘try’.

One of my early mentors would describe it as the most dangerous three-letter word. His reasoning was plain: if you’re trying to achieve something, don’t bother with the trying part. It gets in your way. Just focus on doing it as fully and deliberately as you’re able.

There’s very little to quibble with about this logic. Moving with crystal clear intention and a keen eye for the outcome you want is always a good idea. However, along the way, we’ve lost sight of the hidden value of trying. To try has become all but synonymous with low effort and insufficient preparation. If you try, you’re just waiting to fail. Why bother with anything if it looks as though you’re merely trying?

To be clear, this is not a defense of half-hearted attempts or meandering through life without commitment or grit. Both Master Yoda and my mentor were right to single out trying as the step before the actual thing that needs doing. But to dismiss it completely would be rash, not to mention pointless, as we’re always going to be trying new and old things anyway.

It’s easy to dismiss trying when your direction is clear and your willpower is endless - except when they aren’t. What happens when we have no idea what should happen next? Most of the real stuff of life likes to live in those uncertain, hard-to-reach places. In those situations, the most rational (and probably only) thing you can do is to try your best.

It’s time to redeem the act of trying as something natural, normal and necessary. To relegate it to a dirty word that distracts from focus and takes the glory away from hard work obscures why human beings opt to try anything in the first place, which is to discover the willingness to try, fail and get up again.

To try is to embrace a willing, persistent curiosity in the face of not knowing. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a quality worth striving for (or trying to).

Starting a business. Saving a marriage. Discovering a cure.

Let’s face it: big things often don’t work out exactly as you’d planned the first time around.

That’s why we use phrases like ‘beginner’s luck’ or ‘one hit wonder’. It’s not because we don’t believe overnight success is possible, but because real trying rarely looks smooth from the inside. It looks like fumbling towards something you can’t yet see clearly. We’re suspicious of the ones who seem to skip that part, because we know, deep down, no one starts out knowing.

It’s not unfounded. After living on this planet even for a few years, you quickly realise that hard things usually take time and shedloads of persistence. You can make modest progress with brute force, but brute force alone won’t get you through the messy bog of figuring out what you don’t yet know. We may learn, after some time and experience, that we’re being asked to rethink our path, not because we didn’t try hard enough, but because we didn’t yet know enough to try in the right direction, sometimes subtly, other times fundamentally, not only once, but perhaps seven, eight, twenty or thirty times.

But there’s also a deeper truth to wrestle with: to be open to trying is to reassess our tenuous relationship with failure. Failing sucks, no matter which end you’re looking at it from. There’s no route to the end of your life without screwing things up, losing out or getting your heart broken. At the same time, very little worth having or doing comes easily or without some level of failure, because failure is often the only way of finding out what you didn’t know going in. There’s a fine line between decrying the art of the attempt and refusing to face failure. To keep trying is to fully take on what life is teaching us to see more clearly, especially when we have no idea what we’re doing.

In other words, you must try until you know what to really try. You don’t know what good looks like yet, that’s why you’re trying. If you knew, you’d already be doing it.

Think about when you’re trying new books or places to eat. We are willing to bear potential disappointment for the chance of being totally surprised and delighted. You never know how good that little Korean place on the corner of the street is until you go and order their $11 special.

It’s not just that their food happens to be delightfully tasty because of the talented maestro from Seoul behind the pass: it’s because that $11 special could easily have been a total disappointment. But even if it was, would it have put a total stop to our love for finding great Korean restaurants? In fact, it would strengthen our resolve to stay curious and keep trying new places, until we find that ultimate $11 bargain, one brothy bowl of beef at a time.

To try is to play

Curiosity is the spiritual predecessor to trying. Experimentation and openness don’t only apply to restaurants, but also how we balance persistence with excitement and vigour.

The best physicists, poets, philosophers, mathematicians, comedians and chefs would all be hopeless at discovering new forms of art, science, wonder and creativity if they didn’t see the value in trying well beyond the point of initial failure or disbelief. Become afraid of trying and you become afraid of everything you will never bother to know or seek out. Persistent curiosity makes you wonder about what’s possible and also impossible. These are the playgrounds of geniuses and madmen: all the places no one ever thought to try.

Not needing to try is easy when the outcome or question is clear or relatively knowable from the outset. That’s going through the motions, as there are no rogue circumstances or variables to contend with. In a perfectly ordered universe, there would be no trying: no genetic drift or evolution, no art or scientific discovery, no variation or dissent or discussion of any kind. All action and outcome is inevitable and crushingly deterministic.

So, why try when you already know? That’s a good question. There’s just one tiny catch: that’s not the universe we inhabit. We have no idea about how much we don’t know. The only reasonable, least insane option is to play around and see what gives.

Despite not being fans of the word, we’re always trying anyway, every single day. And it reveals an important data point about reality: the world shapes us through currents and flows we can’t map out in advance. Each individual must learn to persist not just in trying something new or different but, critically, getting up again if they fail, paying attention to what the last attempt just taught them, whether it be once, twice or a hundred times.

It’s not enough to summarily dismiss first or second time failure as ‘you didn’t try hard enough’ or ‘you were planning to fail all along’. Rather, the current may have been too strong, or the wind was blowing in the opposite direction. Now that you are aware of these conditions, you are in fact in a stronger position to try again until a different, better outcome appears. Absolutely none of this is possible without embracing repeated persistence and curiosity. Eventually even the fiercest rocks are worn down into smooth puppies by soft endless caress of rushing water.

To try is to bear up to the level of willingness needed to survive in the world as it is, rather than a template or parody of itself.

So the next time someone chews you out for giving wakeboarding or counselling a try, you can tell them that you’re staying curious and committed to new results. You can say that failure is a teacher to be befriended, rather than a devil to be feared.

It’s a sign that you’re alive, well and still in the game, and despite the blows or unexpected turns, you’re OK with dusting yourself off, getting up and having another go.

I’ll let the inimitable Captain Jean-Luc Picard close with one of my favourite quotes of his from Star Trek The Next Generation:

‘It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.’

I hope you enjoyed reading.

Humble Mind is a facilitation and social learning practice building communities, human skills and the conditions for real learning.

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All the best for now,

Alex