Don't try

The first ground rule is never to worry about remembering, and therefore never to try to remember, because this is a method where the responsibility for you remembering is in the teaching, and not with you. – Michel Thomas

I've heard it said that to succeed you have to try hard. It's not sufficient to merely work at the thing, to do a series of steps diligently or to practice in a particular way, you have to try. But what is trying? In some cases it seems synonymous with doing: "if at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again". That seems pretty sensible. It can also mean to attempt, as in "I don't know, but I'll give it a try", which is a bit wimpy but fine. But it's the last sense, meaning to make a particular effort, to struggle or strain or toil, that I take issue with.

Character attacks are the last refuge of a bad plan. If a poor worker blames their tools, then a poor manager blames their people. When you deal with humans, including yourself, the realities of human behaviour are laws of the universe you work in as much as the laws of physics or economics. It's far too common to see plans that don't take motivation or engagement into account, or assume some kind of infallible superhuman will be the one executing the plan. But, much like machines, people have limitations and failure rates. If that brings your system to its knees, it's not bad people, it's a bad system.

I see trying hard as an early warning sign of that kind of failure. Getting good at something usually takes a long time, and to maintain your efforts through that period takes perseverence, but also takes a very robust system for working. If every day is a struggle then at some point, inevitably, you'll lose at that struggle and then presumably go find something less strugglesome to do. Success might not be easy, sure, but I don't buy that it has to be hard. Maybe in the sense of requiring a lot of work, but not in the sense of working at the edge of your ability.

But we have a culture that seems to paradoxically encourage that kind of brinksmanship. Working hard isn't measured in output or even hours spent, but in suffering. "Ugh, I spent all weekend fixing up our servers." – "Oh yeah? Well, I missed my kid's birthday for an emergency investor crisis." – "That's nothing, I got divorced and became an alcoholic just getting our product to launch." Damn, that's some hard work right there. Coming in and getting things done with no fanfare doesn't seem as impressive, but the endgame of competence is that it starts to look easy.

Instead of trying, I propose building systems you can trust, and then trusting them. If you know it's going to take four hours of sustained effort every day for the next decade to get good, then what's there to try at? Just do the hours. If you know you won't do the hours without timetabling them, then do that. If you know you'll lose motivation when you start to plateau, then come up with some cumulative effort trick or something. Go meta. Build defence in depth.

Just keep improving the system until it stops failing. And if you find yourself trying hard, recognise it for what it is: a stopgap covering up flaws in your system. Fix the system. Trust the system. Don't try.