THE LEAFLET

May 29 2025

on actually trying, grandmothers in caves, no try - only do

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

Read the rest here.

GRANDMOTHERS IN CAVES (ON ACTUALLY TRYING PART 2)

One of the best coaches I ever had introduced me to a thought experiment that he used with many of his protégés. I was a teacher and aspiring school principal at the time. I had a freshman history class that was tying me in knots. Adam asked me, « If your grandmother was trapped in a cave and the only way she could get out is your kids learn today’s lesson … what would you do? »

When I was at a loss and feeling self-pity, this hypothetical didn’t make me feel better. It did help me get honest about whether and how much I was Actually Trying. It helped me get resourceful and creative. And strategic, too - when you take the hypothetical seriously, you’re willing to do anything AND you want to do The Thing that you think will make the difference. You won’t pat yourself on the back for good effort if grandma is still in that cave. You have to get her out of there.

-eric

Read the rest here.

NO TRY, ONLY DO FALLACY (ON ACTUALLY TRYING PART 3)

In Star Wars, Master Yoda swats young Luke Skywalker and tells him - there is no try, there is only do.

I have some beef with Yoda. Some of the best doing is trying. Experimenting. Testing. Almost none of us is possessed of a telekinetic birthright. We can’t move X-wings with our minds, no matter how many times a grandpa troll in a bathrobe hits us with a stick. We have to attempt a bunch of different approaches and see what works. We probably have to recruit other people and use better tools and then use those tools better.

I have respect for Yoda, too. The line would be less pithy and iconic if he had said « Trying is for suckers. Actually Trying is for pros. » but it would still hold water. Relatedly, in a kung fu training sequence in The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo « stop trying to hit me and hit me! »

Here’s what I think the deal is for these teachers and their protégés: trying is no good if it’s hopeless pretending. If you don’t think the problem can be solved and you’re just clocking in futilely at Solveproblem, Inc. And if you think the solving depends on something innate and immutable in you, some special stuff that you either have or you don’t, rooted in genetics or The Force or luck.

Trying is just the thing, when you believe the problem can be solved and you’re committed to solving it, without clinging to a fragile story of yourself as The Cosmically Endowed Solver. You’re just a channel for ways the thing can happen. The things you’re endowed with are a head and a heart that make you pay attention to the problem in the first place and then can shut the heck up while you sort out the problem.

-eric

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Novelist Miranda July on different experiences of sexism in All Fours:

Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it.

Writer Maggie Nelson on precarity:

For those steeped in the belief that great calamity should not, cannot, be our lot — or that, if we work hard enough or try hard enough or hope hard enough or are good or inventive enough, we might be able to outfox it — it can be a relief to admit our folly and rejoin the species, which is defined, as are all forms of life, by a terrible and precious precarity, to which some bodies need no reintroduction.

Investor Charlie Munger on tech:

The great lesson in microeconomics is to discriminate between when technology is going to help you and when it is going to kill you.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric