“No! Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.”
I must admit I never knew this quote existed to express what I have been saying this week to all of you, until a student mirrored this back in describing what he heard.
“Oh, I said, there is Yoda-speak for what I am trying to say?”
Yes, exactly this: “Do or do not. There is no try.”
You may have spent your life being encouraged to try, being rewarded in direct proportion to your effort. To show effort and to be willing, these are, in childhood, the qualities of goodnes.
And in the early part of your life, I would agree that we must wander around a bit and “effort” in the verb sense to figure out who we are and to apply ourselves against the world’s trials.
We must learn to see, after being tested, what matters to us. It may make sense then to have no full intention and simply mark all the places you tried as the thing itself.
The last age I remember myself in a state of acceptable trial was four. At four trying was enough. And at four, trying is before doing in the order of accomplishment. The trying itself was the first and most important thing. What came of that was secondary. That is not so here.
It’s not that the concept of intention is new. Metaphysicians have long pondered on the energetic power of intention, and in a less elevated way; Nike said, “Just Do It!”
But I am going a bit somewhere else with this, much more like the quote, which in its order of words says what I mean: you are going anyway; there’s nothing in between.
What happens with the “trying my best” energy is that is draws from your power and your intention by creating some other option than doing. Decide you are doing this, and if so, do not entertain trying. You can look back at the trying after the doing part and evaluate. Sure. You can recast your net. But there is not space for pause in action behind intentional movement if we are to accomplish great things.
Even all the not-so-great things require intention and action, but aimless redirection, pivot, doubt, in a not-so-great thing, has almost no consequence. Whereas here, right before this test, you must shave away all notions of trying. It gives your spirit options you should not have.
Trying at this point suggests an ellipsis between wanting a thing and doing it. In great endeavors trying and doing are not related concepts. Trying is on the other end of doing; it’s what happens after the “do” did not work; it’s how you characterize the unsuccessful doing: “I tried.”
So, before you go in there, take a minute and think about what you DID to get to this point, and how much of that prospered from trying.
If you tried to show up for an LSAT, apply to law school, answer your professor’s Socratic hounding, stand up to deliver oral argument, show up every semester, and even take this test, again and again, you would, in a word, still be trying.
Think even harder about how this profession will demand that you show up and do. You cannot try to represent a client, go to court, make an argument. You must do all of that with a certainty that you are in the moment with your best self. What comes of all of that, well those are results, another day’s “do.”
No. Try not.
