on Actually Trying

The wonderful Cate Hall recently posted about Actually Trying. You may tell yourself that you are Actually Trying in one sphere of your life when using much less effort and resourcefulness than you apply in other spheres of your life. In this tricky sphere, you feel the friction and resistance of Something Difficult and if you don’t see results when you strive despite that friction, you stop. Or attribute your failure to context. Or quickly write a story of yourself as not the kind of person who is cut out for this kind of thing.

I felt a spark of recognition when I read Cate’s take. When I started teaching at Carver High, my performance was poor. My classroom was a mess and kids weren’t learning. I cried a lot at home during the week and near the end of breaks, when I stared down a new stretch of tough teaching ahead.

In This Is Strategy, Godin reminds you to look at the assets you’re using to attack the problem. There should be some parity there, a correspondence at least between resources and objective. In these early teaching days, I was using tablespoons of a finite resource (willpower) and a fickle one (charm) to fill ten gallon barrels. There wasn’t enough of those resources to match the size of the challenge. Harder to see and learn: they weren’t even the right resources.

Actually Trying in this case meant, paradoxically, LESS raw self-reliance - the thing I had gotten away with a lot in school and my first jobs. I was drowning trying to swim across the ocean solo. I had to watch master shipbuilders and imitate them, using their tools on my materials, building something bigger than and less contingent on lil ol’ me.

-eric