What Does it Mean to Try? A Taxonomy
You will be triggered by this post
PART ONE
This post is going to trigger everybody. Being told that you are not really trying, when you think you are trying as hard as you possibly can, is one of the worst feelings you can feel. This is not what I will do here, but you may feel some of these feelings come up for you, anyway. Be patient with yourself, and know that you are okay.
Entire sects form around the idea of telling people that everything bad that ever happened to them is really their own fault, and that they would be a “victim” with a “victim mentality” if they do not take ownership over everything bad that ever happened in their life—including childhood horrors.
This post is not about this. This post is not about this, at all. This post is going to try to do something different.
WHY MAKE THIS TAXONOMY, THEN?
This taxonomy is for people who are tired. It is for people who have worked really really hard, and think that they should get a break, and do not understand why all of their hard work is not paying off in the way that they think it should be. This post is to try to give these people new tools to work with.
The is not to say that “if you had just had the right tools, you would not be so miserable.” Far from it. First of all, the question of having the right tool at the right time is a millennia-old question. Secondly, certain kinds of misery are just very hard. They would need very many tools, applied in the right ways. The “just” there in that sentence is doing a lot of work.
Rather, this taxonomy was made to acknowledge that working very hard without getting results would naturally exhaust a person completely. However, sometimes a person still wants or needs to get a certain result or reach an important goal. In this situation, a person would need to find either a new way to approach the problem or a new way to gain energy.
This taxonomy there is written up to show that there can be new things and ways to try, if some things hadn’t been working. It’s also meant to ease some strain; you are not bad for not trying hard enough. There is no one schema of what “trying hard enough” even means. There are different schemas.
Thus, here are some different schemas! Where they are used, what they are good for. In reading through them, you may recognize one that you had been using for a long time to judge yourself, and you be inspired to try out another one for a little bit!
What I like about having them outlined, is when you had gotten exhausted by ways you try in one system, you actually can get not just renewed creativity but actual renewed energy by switching to another system, even temporarily.
BOOMER MENTALITY: YOU TRIED IF IT WORKED
This is the harshest philosophy. I personally think it is too harsh, and erases too much. This is the philosophy that “You tried hard enough if you got the result you were going for.” This is the Boomer American philosophy, “You are sick and can’t pay your bills because you drink too many Starbucks,” or “Your aren’t making enough money, have you tried to get yet another tutoring gig?”
For relationships, you only tried hard enough if you ended up in a successful marriage, otherwise even if you really tried to make your partner happy, that wasn’t real trying.
Many people work extremely hard, and then do not get the exact thing that they were going for. This is especially true for 0/1 rewards (such as winning a scholarship, or getting a specific job, or getting that engagement ring). Shoot for the moon, and you’ll land among the stars, but if you landed among the stars it’s because you shot for the moon and just didn’t try hard enough.
I don’t buy it. Boomer man will have to sell this to me. I think that a conception of “trying” that is purely results-based really savages the concept of “trying,” and messes with many people’s heads. It is already messing with a lot of Americans’ heads—so many people believe that they are utter failures and that they should just give up. People turn to suicide and drugs. I think this is stupid and bad, and evil of the people responsible. I think we can do better.
What this is good for:
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Use this on other people as a form of psychological torture
Use this to hate yourself as much as possible
Use this as a tool for introspection, to notice spots in your life where you feel really bad for not having succeeded. In what areas, where people say you should have tried harder, does it hurt, versus just roll off? Then, for those goal areas, use one of the other techniques to make progress, discover knots to unravel, and track progress in a less all-or-nothing way.
Really trivial and straightforward things, where if you tried even a little bit, realistically you should have gotten the result.
When another mentality may be better:
Most of the time
NIKE MENTALITY: YOU TRIED IF YOU DID IT
This is a steel-man of Boomer mentality, and possibly the healthier, original version that the Boomer mentality may have corrupted. The Real thing that Boomers turned into a Sad thing.
Think, “Just do it.” If you wanted something badly enough, trying hard enough means, did you actually do it. I have a suspicion that some of this mentality comes from original, boy in the wilderness, wholesome Americanness. Boyish American Do-ism. Hard-headed wilderness taming.
You want to write a book? Just do it. Did you try? Well, do you have a book?
What this is good for:
When you understand when you Did something, versus not, and Doing it would make you happy. (Running a marathon, writing a book).
When Having Done something is more important than process (For example, sending out 100 resumes. Making Business Cards.)
When process can be winding and unpleasant, and you need a North Star
When you are doing something that has been done before, and challenges are understood
When another mentality may be better:
When you are not sure what you want, exactly, but do need to “get somewhere” and “do something”
When you want a less chaotic life. “Just doing things” can lead to a winding process that ends up being chaotic.
If you had “be careful what you wish for” outcomes, and you want to have less of this or focus more on process so that you can troubleshoot more during the process
DAGESTANI MENTALITY: YOU TRIED IF YOU FOLLOWED THE PROCESS
This is already far better, even though this is not that much more complicated. You tried if you followed the steps—if you followed the training regimen. This can still be pretty harsh, but this is already much more generous and has much more implicit coaching.
If you really wanted to get into a good college, but did not study for the entrance exam, even though study material is available, then you did not really try because you did not do the basic obvious steps to achieve your goal.
If you wanted to be a mathematician, but you did not even read the introductory math book, then you did not really try.
IMPORTANT: This language, “did not even—” is common in this philosophy. But it is important to note that the “did not even—” mentality does not have a lot of built-in-blame, that the above Boomer mentality has. The “did not even—” actually has a lot of hope.
Replace “did not even try” with “did not even start,” and say it in a smart, smooth, whispery Keanu Reeves voice, versus an obnoxious Thanksgiving Boomer Aunt or annoying Boomer Tenured Professor voice, and you will start to see the embedded hope in it.
The point of “did not even start,” under this mentality, means that you can still get the thing that you want if you just follow the process. You did not already fail. You did not already make a big mistake. You just haven’t gotten started yet with the degree of seriousness and discipline that it would take to get what you want.
And then you have a choice: Do you want it enough to follow the steps to get it, or do you actually want something different? If you want something else, this is okay!
The way that this ends up being harsh, is the “just follow the process” there can be really loaded. The process may be very difficult, and in this system you have tried only if you have followed all of the process, to the best of all your ability. If you have only done some of the process, but not all of the process, this does not count as fully trying still. What this means is that there is a long lifeline for having hope and keeping going, but also it can be trickier to get incremental encouragement or support for when you have to deviate from the process, for one reason or another.
This is a different mentality from a lot of American mentality. However it seems to be a reasonably common mentality in Dagestan.
Check out this video, from UFC champion Khabib. Notice what he is saying to the fighter he is coaching. He never insults the fighter. He never humiliates the fighter. He never raises his voice. He is simply asking about why the fighter is not sticking to the process, if he wants to compete. “Why do you come train for one month, then disappear for four?” He then says that if the fighter did not want to be competitive, that would be a different matter entirely.
Observe his face and body language. Notice the ways that Khabib is “clean” in what his priorities are. This mentality is often intense and sacrificial. Sometimes a lot of mess is made in one or several domains (in Khabib’s case, not being in a marriage, extensive travel, physical pain to his body) for cleanness and success in a high priority domain (for Khabib—becoming UFC champion).
Observe also that this mentality is already much more fair and nicer than Boomer mentality, even though it is very hardcore. This says a lot about the harshness and entitlement of Boomer mentality, which generally abandons people versus having paths for learning and mentorship.
This mindset is also used in civil engineering traditions. You know you followed the process correctly, if it ended up working. And you know that if it is not working, you likely did not follow the process correctly. This means you can debug yourself based on how closely you are following the process, actually, and checking if you secretly do not want to be following the process.
It is also pretty common in the sciences, where “trying to reproduce a result” means “following the reported protocol.” “Trying by following instructions” or “trying by doing standard heuristic actions” happens a lot wherever tech is involved, like “trying to turn something on” or “trying to fix something.”
What this is good for:
Keeping your hopes up, if something NEEDS to happen. You can almost always find something that would make sense to be doing that respects the process
Checking if you are following the rules of nature for something to happen
Checking if you are respecting the process, or if you are hoping to circumvent the process, or find a shortcut
Checking your level of commitment to getting an outcome you say you want, or if actually you have a commitment to a different thing
Having a pathway to Stopping and Debugging, in a systematic way, if you find yourself not being able to follow the process. Do you have a fear of getting what you want? Are you scared of what people will think, when you are successful? Are you scared of the responsibility that will come from success?
Identifying when your resistance to a process may mean that you have an existential kink, and actually you do not want to get the thing you say you want.
Sport
Science
Religious fervor
When another mentality may be better:
Situations where partial credit, does count, and many partial credits stack up to something.
Situations where there is no known process, or lots of pivots are likely to come up, such that a mentality that optimizes for handling pivots may be better
Situations where you need to check many things, with many different people
When counting “time” seems like it may be important for something
METROLOGIST MENTALITY: YOU TRIED IF YOU TOOK MEASUREMENTS
Now we are moving away from the, “you know you tried if it worked,” kinds of trying, into the “you know you tried if you put in effort,” kinds of trying.
These are naturally going to be less intense. This one here is already far more forgiving than the Dagestan mentality. You don’t have to follow all the steps to get something to know you tried. You just have to *take measurements.*
All the people who have a lot of trackers and apps, would be following this schema. They pick a thing they want or a thing they want to improve on, then take meticulous measurements to see if they’d actually improved.
Virtue here looks like being *actually honest* about your measurements. If you actually work out 0 minutes a day, you have to say that you work out 0 minutes a day and also are not losing weight. You cannot pretend that you are working out and handwaving your results “not being what you expected” after straight-up lying about your numbers to yourself.
If you want to improve at speed-reading but have picked up a book only 3 times this week, then you would “not even be trying” under the Dagestani system, but you would be under this system so long as you have a spreadsheet of how many times you picked up a book this week.
Taking a category of things you want to improve on from no even knowing the category exists, to [] empty set, to [0], is a big deal, and then going from [0] to [1,2,3,4] is a big deal. Thus, trying here entails having gotten up to [0] and then seeing if it starts turning into [1,2,3,4], and paying some amount of attention.
Trying here, is therefore, paying attention to the thing you want to improve at, to the fullest attention you have to spare for that thing.
You are also iterating when things go off track, noticing how much time something should take to get the result you want, checking changes or improvement across time. “Putting in the time and effort” usually means something like this Trying system. If you tried something 1000 times across 4 months, and are getting no results, trying would mean to change something versus trying another 1000 times — that would just be being stubborn and egotistical in this system and not real trying.
What this is good for:
Getting credit for trying even when you may not see results for a long time, while still feeling a sense of rigor and harshness that you need to “show” something before your trying counts.
Getting credit for setting up accountability systems in the first place
Having good “what to do next-s” inspirations built-in, as this system of keeping metrics means that you will have metrics that can help point you to what to do next
When another mentality may be better:
You may get discouraged, if you over index on “having tried and failed” with one set of measurements, from trying again with another set of measurements. Thus, if you are someone for whom moderation is weird, or you get discouraged easily, you may want to really really understand what parameters you are using before getting really into this system. You may end up unnecessarily discouraging yourself and not giving yourself enough credit.
If you generally have a bias towards negativity, you might end up in a situation where “the numbers are showing me that I am failing” no matter what is happening.
When you are relying in social accountability / social sanctioning on you being good based on your progress.
Effort expended on things that are hard to literally count, may be hard to count as effort! Invisible work thus can be undercounted. (Results-based systems, can be kinder here. “X happened. X was hard. Therefore a lot of effort was used to make X happen, and the person doing it did a lot of work and tried very hard. It happening was not an accident, because how could it have been an accident?”)
Creds to JD, LL, EW