You Probably Haven’t Even Tried To Succeed

I recently came across a tweet about dating struggles from someone who has advised many people on finding a strong partner:

“One of the first things I ask people is “what have you tried?” Would you be surprised to learn that most have tried nothing?”

What a delightfully clarifying question. What have you tried? And then a simple truth, that most of us barely try. Yet again I am reminded that the obvious is often overlooked.

It strikes me how easily one can trick oneself into being despondent about a goal or life pursuit when in reality one hasn’t even tried to succeed. It is very easy to equate “effort exerted” with legitimate attempts at succeeding. And then losing hope having done a lot of the former with little of the latter.

Indeed this has happened to me more than once. With the first version of the Printernet app, I realized months after abandoning it that I was mentally considering it a failure. It wasn’t until I sat down and wrote about that experience that I exposed the fact to myself that I literally never launched it. I shared it with a handful of friends, but that’s it. And yet I’d mentally filed it away as a failed project.

I worked very hard on it, encountered and solved many problems – yet eventually I found myself unsatisfied with the app and abandoned it. Only later did I realize that the failure was not the project, the failure was giving up on the project I still believed in, not giving it a chance to succeed.

The other example where this strange self-deception has happened is with my fiction writing. I often find myself overwhelmed about not “succeeding”, but I have only submitted or shared 2 or 3 pieces of fiction with editors, readers, etc. And one of the times I did submit a short story to a literary magazine, it was indeed published and made available in Barnes & Noble nationwide!

In both of these examples, I exerted a ton of effort and took them very seriously. I spent months programming the first Printernet app. I wrote 15+ short stories in a period of a few months. But these things aren’t even close to being equal to “trying to make them succeed”. Hard work is merely the first step. Hard work is table stakes (necessary but not sufficient, you know the drill).

Giving your work a chance to succeed, actually trying things, is entirely distinct from the effort exerted on it.