This morning LinkedIn pointed me to an article in a business magazine entitled 3 Words That Guarantee Failure, written by one Geoffrey James. What are the words that, according to this article, guarantee failure? They are “I will try”:
People who say “I will try” have given themselves permission to fail. No matter what happens, they can always claim that they “tried.”
People who hear “I will try” and don’t realize what it really means are fooling themselves, by thinking there’s a chance that the speaker will actually succeed.
People who really and truly achieve goals never say “I will try.”
Instead, they always say “I will do” something–or, better yet, “I must do” whatever the task is.
As a wise (though fictional) guru once said: “Do, or do not. There is no ‘try.'”
The “guru” quoted at the end, of course, is Yoda. And the wisdom of this advice is also fictional, for the advice relies on believing a falsehood. The advice is nevertheless all too pervasive – I recall some New Age-inclined family members of mine in the ’80s trying (and usually failing) to purge the word “try” from their vocabulary, even snapping their wrists with an elastic band as a mild punishment when they said it.
What I’ve always found a far more helpful and important piece of business advice is “Underpromise and overdeliver”. To say “I will try” is to underpromise; and to underpromise makes it possible to overdeliver. By contrast, what happens when you refuse to say “I will try” and instead say “I will do”? Well: Human beings are not perfect. Every human being fails at stated tasks, and fails frequently. I guarantee you that that is true of Geoffrey James as well. If Geoffrey James follows his own advice, there will be many times when he says “I will do” something and does not do it. That means one of two things. One, he is delusional, even megalomaniacal: he sincerely believes in his own capacities so much that he genuinely does not recognize the possibility of failure. It does not take much practical wisdom to know that it is bad business advice to believe oneself a deity. Two, and more likely, he is dishonest: he says “I will do” when he knows that he might not succeed at doing it. In other words, he has told a deliberate lie.
Now Geoffrey James’s bio tells us that he works in sales, and writes about sales. This is no surprise either – for all too typically, sales is a profession built on deception. The figure of the slimy salesman who tells all manner of evasions, half-truths and bald-faced lies to sell a product is a cliché, and is one for a reason – such people often succeed at sales, at least in the short term. Honest selling is a real possibility, and a good and noble thing, but its success comes in the long term, making it much more difficult to measure. When one’s job description is selling, it is all too easy to focus on the short term. Former Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith recently made waves with his resignation letter published in the New York Times. He bemoans a corporate culture where the question most frequently asked is “How much money did we make off the client?”, and the employees most promoted are those who persuade their clients to invest in “the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit” – the ones that they do not themselves believe in.
They are, in short, relying on deception to sell. And when one deceives others regularly, it becomes very easy not only to deceive oneself regularly, but to pass off this self-deception as good advice – which is exactly what Geoffrey James does here. But the problem with self-deception is the biggest problem with all deception: those you deceive learn not to trust you. And it is a terrible fate to be unable to trust oneself.
As with most questions of philosophy or practical wisdom, there is a flip side to the issue. There is a truth in what James says. Especially: when one believes that one can and will succeed at a goal, that very belief typically makes one more likely to succeed. A false belief in one’s inevitable success does not make the success inevitable, but it may well make the success more likely. In that sense, James may turn out to be right: the people who acknowledge the truth of the situation – which is to say, the possibility of failure – are the ones most likely to fail.
Then, I think, we are dealing with another case of a problem I discussed before: where lying to oneself produces good consequences. I’ve often spoken of such a problem in the case of childrearing – even if having children makes one less happy, it would seem that a good parent should not believe that.
And I have waffled a little bit on the question of what one should do in such circumstances. I proclaimed that one should never lie to oneself, but then retracted the claim a few weeks later. I have regularly noted that truth has an intrinsic value independent of its consequences, and would continue to claim this; the question is what that value implies.
I suspect that the answer to this question is not something that can be resolved in the general case. Like so many cases of right action, it is a matter for discernment, for practical wisdom – for judgement based on a deep familiarity with the particulars of the current case. With respect to children, it does seem that most often the effects of one’s belief may well be more important than its truth. Whether one’s children actually make one happier or not, as a parent one should strive to believe that they do.
But is the same true for achieving goals? I don’t think so. Children’s effect on happiness is general. When your children make you unhappy, you can still think of those times when they did make you happy, and keep up the belief that in general they do make you happy. But each given goal is specific, particular. When you tell yourself “I will do it” and you fail to do it – and this is a matter of when, not if – there is no resolving it into the more general issue. The evidence is too obvious. You told yourself you would do this, and you didn’t. You lied to yourself, and if you think about your actions at all, you know you lied to yourself. It’s even worse if you told someone else “I will do it”, as James recommends. You lied to them; you let them down. Even if you do succeed at your goals more often, that success is purchased at the cost of dependability and reliability, to the point where your words cannot be trusted. As far as I can see, that is too high a price to pay.
The salesman and the guru (even Yoda as guru) are two different things.
The advice of the salesman is that to succeed one must puff oneself up, bluster and convince oneself that one will succeed. This approach is a false kind of conditional confidence.
When the spiritual teacher says “Don’t try, do”, he or she is speaking of something entirely different. When you are trying, you are separate from the task at hand and are engaged in measuring your performance against an abstract standard — and likely consumed by hope and fear. The advice to just “do” is to be present. If you hit the target, you hit the target. If you miss the target, you miss the target. In either case, you fully engage with the experience.
That thing about children seems to this reader a sophism. If you want children and most couples do, not having them is a great unhappiness. Think of the lengths they will go to adopt etc. To tell them that they might be unhappier if they had children is to tell them something which is neither true nor false. It is a pure speculation. For those who have had children to tell them that they might have been happier not having had them is again pure speculation. Here I think the verifiability criterion i.e. what would make this statement true is put beyond the bounds of application. The situation whose truth has to be assessed is by definition one that cannot be the case.
Speaking in terms of possible worlds; if by stipulation a world is not possible for you then it ought not to enter into any rational consideration . It is not a world that is near to you in any way.
An interesting take, Michael. Would you apply the same reasoning to analytical thought experiments like the trolley problem? We should only think about the situations we are actually in and could potentially face, not mere hypotheticals?
A no-hypotheticals approach seems to raise its own problems, though. What about fiction? It’s often said, by Nussbaum and others, that learning about fictional characters helps us think through the good life better even when (maybe even especially when) their situation cannot be one we will ever face. Are you suggesting we should not enter fictional worlds because they are not near to us?
I prefer the quandaries of literature to trolley problems. However in this case where there a stipulated condition, a world so to speak that one is excluded from then the open-ended aspect of moral rumination is limited. It is quite impossible to say once one has children whether one would be happier without them, that door is shut. Likewise vice versa. Positions that exclude each other bring in their train vis a vis each other benefits and harms that cannot be weighed and measured against each other.
Even if on the whole one inclines towards either condition then it is still not certain that they are sure of greater happiness in that condition. Of course the lack of initial commitment as you move from the state of not having to having children may militate against happiness. On the other hand people grow into their roles.
Comparisons are invidious.
The original post discussed achieving a goal not completing an activity. Somebody who “must” achieve a goal will TRY different activities in order to achieve that goal.
Knowingly underpromising with the expectation of overachieving is simply lying to cover your butt. You can try to dress it up as business wisdom, but it’s just what people do who are afraid to make real commitments.
You can chuckle at the use of Yoda as an example, but try to remember that authors and filmmakers use fictional characters to express their philosophical opinions. In this case, Yoda is the mouthpiece for one of the most successful filmmakers in the world.
BTW, you might say to yourself “I will try to read a bio” before commenting on it. My bio does not say that I worked in sales; it says that I write about sales.
In any case, there’s a handy little word for people who believe that everybody in defined group or profession share the same characteristics. The word is “bigotry.”
You might want to “try” to look it up in a dictionary. That is, of course, if you’re not too busy overperforming for the people you’ve handed a line of manipulative BS.
Hi Geoffrey,
Thanks very much for your reply! I appreciate your comments. There are clearly a few things I should clarify, and respond to as well.
First of all, sorry about the mistake on your bio; I should have been more careful about that.
Re bigotry, I didn’t mean to imply that there are no honest salespeople. I think sales is a profession that tends naturally to lead one in the direction of dishonesty, and in many ways encourage it – as military service might lead one in the direction of callousness, and academia in the direction of indecision. There are honest salespeople and gentle soldiers and decisive academics in the world, but they’re exceptions and not the rule, and there’s a reason for that in each case. I don’t think it’s bigotry to think that different professions encourage people to have different qualities, and that those qualities are often not good ones.
Now having said that, it’s clear we still disagree over the substantive content of your post – and I’m glad to hear that disagreement.
I don’t think the distinction between achieving a goal and completing an activity is particularly important. I doubt that you are going to tell me you have successfully achieved every goal you have ever set yourself. If you had, all that that would mean is that you set the bar for achieving those goals extremely low – which seems to me the exact same thing as underpromising, maybe more so. For any human being who sometimes fails to achieve reasonable goals – as every human being who sets those goals does – my comments still apply to achieving goals as much as they do to completing activities.
What does strike me as an important issue here is the question of underpromising. You have a good point that knowingly underpromising with the expectation of underachieving is a way of covering your butt. I don’t think it’s lying; saying “I will accomplish at least x” when you know you can accomplish x+10 is telling the truth. It is holding something back, though; you could argue that it’s a form of lying by omission, and that’s a fair qualifier.
But the big issue here is that we typically don’t know in advance exactly what we can and can’t accomplish. Those are the cases in which someone is likely to say “I will try”. Cases in which, to the best of our knowledge, we might wind up achieving a goal of x+10 but might only succeed at achieving x, whatever activities we try in order to get to x+10. If we just say “I will accomplish at least x”, we’re holding something back, perhaps lying by omission. But if we say “I will accomplish at least x+10”, we are explicitly lying outright, for we have said something is true when we know it could be false. The whole truth is “I will accomplish at least x, but I will try to accomplish x+10.”
Source:http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/3-words-that-guarantee-failure.html
The neglect of semantics invariably leads to confusion in thought and communication.
The relevant senses of “try” in this context include “make an effort with a view to success”
and “make an effort to achieve or accomplish something”.
Geoffrey James writes: “People who fail to achieve goals almost always signal their intent to fail by using three little words:
“I will try…”
There are no three words in the English language that are more deceptive, both to the person who says them and the person who hears them.”
It’s a non sequitur to infer that deception is at work merely because someone said “I will try”. It’s also a distortion of the meaning of “try”, and, hence, an abuse of the English language, to foist this reading on it.
Someone may be insincere in saying “I will try”. He or she may say “I will try” to mask a lack of commitment to achieving a given goal. From this, it does not follow that anyone who says “I will try” is insincere and masking a lack of commitment to achieving a given goal or objective.
The fallacy of hasty generalization is at work here.
Geoffrey James writes: “People who say “I will try” have given themselves permission to fail. No matter what happens, they can always claim that they “tried.””
Again, nothing in the meaning of “I will try” implies, or even makes it likely, that the person saying it has “given themselves permission to fail”.
One may be sincere or insincere in saying “I will try”.
The evidence of sincerity here lies in the effort actually put forth by the person who said “I will try”.
There is absolutely nothing in the plain meaning of “I will try” which rules out, or makes it unlikely, that the person saying it will put forth effort to the best of his or her ability.
Geoffrey James writes: “People who really and truly achieve goals never say “I will try.”
Instead, they always say “I will do” something–or, better yet, “I must do” whatever the task is.”
Again, the plain meaning of “I will do” or “I must do” does not entail or make it likely that the person saying it is invariably sincere, or committed to achieving a given objective or goal, or that she will put forth her best effort.
In fact, the categorical, assertive, and confident character of “I will do” lends itself, for this very reason, particularly well to deception or manipulation. Therefore, there is actually a greater risk of being fooled by someone who says “I will do”.
Confucius said:
“Formerly my attitude towards others was to hear what they said and give them credit for their deeds. Now my attitude towards others is to listen to what they say and note what they do.” (Analects, Book V 9.2)
Thus, whether someone says “I will try” or “I will do”, the best approach is to “listen to what they say and note what they do.”
This is definitely the best precept for navigating safely the piranha and shark infested waters of today’s sales and business world.
I think the issue with “try” might be part of a larger trend in American popular wisdom (and maybe in other countries, too, although I imagine to a lesser extent). I’d call the larger trend “Mind Over Matter.” I suspect this is especially attractive to Americans, since it ties in with our cultural values about rugged individualism, personal choice, control over one’s destiny, etc.
When I was a kid, I played lots of sports. My coaches used to say things like, “The team that wins is the one who wants it the most.” But I thought that sometimes the other team just had better players. Certainly sports, much like sales, is partially about attitude. But this idea that your attitude or mental fortitude or whatever is going to win the day is way over done in American popular culture (look at the hoards of Hollywood movies on this theme).
Especially for Americans, the idea that in fact we’re not completely in control of our natural talents, abilities, economic status, relationships, etc. is probably the worst fear we can imagine. So we go around trying to eliminate “try” from our vocabularies, or buying into New Age hocus pocus like “The Secret” that tells us we can get whatever we want just by thinking about it hard enough. And I’d imagine this basic attitude feeds into the way we think about income inequality – “I could be rich if I wanted it bad enough, so let’s not tax them too much!”
But then again, maybe the “Mind Over Matter” attitude (along with Europe destroying itself and our abundant natural resources) is why America became the most powerful country in the world after WWII.
Certainly there’s something to “Mind over Matter”, but not as much as some people think!
I think I agree with the intentions of the original article, though it was worded in kind of a slapdash way. Uncertainty can never be done away with in any endeavor, but I think there’s a failure in planning and communication if “try” is the operative word in a plan. It’s better to focus on what you think you CAN do, and make others understand the risks of the rest.
Underpromising and overdelivering is a common theme in engineering (my field), but it’s usually to compensate for the fact you’re liable to run into problems you couldn’t have anticipated during the planning stages. If you’re lucky enough to avoid those problems and can use your “reserve” budget for other things, then you get to overdeliver.
I don’t think that Yoda meant that Luke wasn’t allowed to fail. To my mind, he was telling Luke that you’re either fully engaged in a thing… or you aren’t. If you “try”, then your very words are acknowledging a lack of commitment to the task at hand.
“there’s a failure in planning and communication if “try” is the operative word in a plan.”
How on earth does one infer that from the use of “try”? Or is it supposed to be obvious that the use of “try” suggests “failure in planning and communication”? Beats me!
“It’s better to focus on what you think you CAN do, and make others understand the risks of the rest.”
“Try” presupposes and, therefore, implies “can”! If I didn’t think that I CAN achieve X, it would make no sense for me to say “I will try to achieve X.”
Again, it is unwise to take a holiday from semantics if one wants to propound theses.
>> If I didn’t think that I CAN achieve X, it would make no sense for me to say “I will try to achieve X.”
Sure it does. English-speaking people frequently use the word “try” in connection with actions that they consider to have a limited probability of success (“I will try to hit the ball”). On the other hand, they usually don’t use “try” when success seems very likely (“I will wash the dishes”).
>> How on earth does one infer that from the use of “try”?
We’re talking about promises. The kind people make in the business world, which is what the original article was concerned with.
In that context, a plan is something meant to produce definite results. “Try” implies uncertainty about an outcome. You certainly CAN have a plan that produces an unknown outcome, but that’s only appropriate if you promised your client an unknown outcome.
It’s a failure in communication if you imply one level of certainty with the word “try” but your client thinks you implied another. Consider where an engineer would be coming from on that.
Thanks for these comments, Ryan. If I’m reading you right, I think you’re getting at the point I conceded to Geoffrey above: if you are confident that you will successfully do something and you still say “I will try”, you’re misleading people. Which is well taken.
I think there are still many situations where the level of success must be unknown – and that’s as it should be. One of the reasons we still hire people and not computers is that people can do new and uncertain things, things that haven’t been tried before where success is uncertain. And in those situations “try” is the right word to use.
If I were a manager, I would really hate to have employees who followed the approach Geoffrey recommended in his article. I would want to be able to trust my employees, rely on them, depend on them – and that means that they only say “I will do it” when they actually know they can and will achieve the goal. If they never say “I will try”, then there will be many times they say “I will do it” and then fail. That’s pretty much the definition of unreliable.
Ryan: “English-speaking people frequently use the word “try” in connection with actions that they consider to have a limited probability of success (“I will try to hit the ball”). On the other hand, they usually don’t use “try” when success seems very likely (“I will wash the dishes”).”
The point I made had to do with the logical relationship between “try” and “can”. The point was that “try” presupposes and implies “can”.
Now, “can” is ambiguous. It could mean logical possibility and/or capability.
The former sense is at work in “I can walk up to and hug a grizzly bear”. It is certainly logically possible, but I don’t think I am capable of doing it (unless, perhaps, I am in the throes of “cosmic consciousness”!)
“I can” could also mean capability (which, of course, entails logical possibility). “I can play double stops on the violin pretty fast” implies both my capability, and, obviously, the logical possibility of doing so.
However, the use of “can” in the sense of mere logical possibility does not entail capability.
Now, which of these two senses of “can” is presupposed by “I will try”?
Both. “I will try to finish my paper by 6 pm today” certainly presupposes and implies that it is logically possible to do so. It also presupposes and implies that I have the capability to do so.
On the other hand, it makes no sense for me to say, in the literal sense, “I will try to become a married bachelor” or “I will try to be present and absent at the party at the same time” and so forth because, obviously, it is not logically possible, and hence, not within the bounds of my capability.
There is an abuse of “can”
and a peculiarly American one at that. This use of “can” is meant to convey to others not only that something is possible, and/or within the bounds of my capability, but also achievable with certainty.
In this idiosyncratic American sense “We can do it” means “We will accomplish it”.
If you are thinking of this American and “Obaman” bombastic misuse of “can”, then certainly “try” does not presuppose and imply “can”.
Notice, also, that either “can” or “will” or “must” can precede “try”:
1. I can try to play double stops on the violin faster.
2. I will try to play double stops on the violin faster.
3. I must try to play double stops on the violin faster.
(1) and (3) are obviously more expressive of commitment than (1).
The message may just be this simple: One ought to say “I will try” instead of “I can try” if one is serious and sincere about trying!
I am, of course, assuming that these are also contexts in which it is entirely appropriate to use “try” given the uncertainty in achieving the outcome or goal.
There are plenty of examples of the planning of military campaigns in which “try” is an operative word, e.g. “We will try to take the bridge leading to town X by sunset failing which…..etc”.
“1. I can try to play double stops on the violin faster.
2. I will try to play double stops on the violin faster.
3. I must try to play double stops on the violin faster.
(1) and (3) are obviously more expressive of commitment than (1).”
It is, obviously, (2) and (3).
Ryan: “We’re talking about promises. The kind people make in the business world, which is what the original article was concerned with.
In that context, a plan is something meant to produce definite results. “Try” implies uncertainty about an outcome. You certainly CAN have a plan that produces an unknown outcome, but that’s only appropriate if you promised your client an unknown outcome.”
A promise must eschew “try”??? Why?
“I promise that I will try my best to do x” is an entirely legitimate example of a promise.
Uncertainty is a commonplace fact in the world of business. So, if there is a significant degree of uncertainty in achieving a desired outcome X, then it is honest to say “I will try my best to achieve X” rather than “I will achieve X”.
Otherwise, it is deception, and this, of course, is also no stranger in the world of business!
As I said in a previous post, whether someone says “I will try” or “I will do” what matters is the actual record of effort. “I will do” CAN be more deceptive than “I will try” even if the latter sounds less assured or less confident.
But in the contemporary scheme of values in America a lack of 100 % confidence may be a greater evil than conmanship.
Amod, I guess my real point is: be honest. Don’t say “try” if you know you can probably do it — stop making excuses and do it. And if “try” really is the best word, then it’s time to break the problem down and identify the certain parts versus the uncertain parts.
For instance, if I say “I’m going to try to make an iPhone game”, that’s just a daydream and not a plan. How does anyone, including me, know when I’ve started or finished the “trying” phase? If I say, “first I’m going to learn Objective C, then I’m going read this book on the iPhone SDK, then I’m going to make an experimental prototype of my idea, then I’m going to refine it, then I’m going to seek out an artist, (and so on)…”, then I’m following Master Yoda’s philosophy. Obviously, failure is always a possibility — the game might not be fun, unanticipated stuff in my life might derail my time commitment — but if someone invests in my project, the risks are as well-defined for them as is possible. Managers, of course, have a responsibility not to make unrealistic demands.
I’m sure you guys get the idea. :)
Yeah, I think that’s fair. The example is a very good one. “I’m going to try to make an iPhone game” is likely the kind of thing that the original article was concerned about: it signifies the attempt is half-hearted, because it is something you know you COULD do if you really made it a priority. “I’m going to try to make an iPhone game that sells a million copies” is a very different story. You don’t know that you will accomplish that, so “try” is the right word. (Or even “I’m going to try to make an iPhone game within two weeks from now.”)
Ryan: “Don’t say “try” if you know you can probably do it — stop making excuses and do it.”
The key word here is “probably”. Probability implies varying degrees of uncertainty. Hence, “try to achieve x” ought to be the operative expression even in situations in which the outcome x is highly probable!
The use of “try” implies an intention to do something, to make an effort.
What if I fail to achieve x? Does this mean that I was insincere in saying that I will try to achieve x? Not at all. What counts is my actual record of effort to achieve x.
Could I evade responsibility by saying “I only said I will try”? I could, but whether I am blameworthy depends again on my actual record of effort. And I may, in fact, be justified in saying “Look I said I would try and here is the actual record of my effort to show that I tried very hard.”
Thus, neither the use of “try” nor an appeal, after failure to achieve the outcome, to having tried makes a person necessarily irresponsible or lacking in conscientiousness.
Ryan: “English-speaking people frequently use the word “try” in connection with actions that they consider to have a limited probability of success.”
Do any of these English-speaking peoples ever say “I will try to travel back in time” in the literal sense?
Why not?
This may shed light on the intimate relation between “try” and what lies within the bounds of capability and feasibility.