I think many people imagine the difference between trying to try and actually trying involves something like Additional Effort or Additional Willpower. It's easy to imagine someone trying to try to (say) cure aging. Maybe they flounder around a bit and talk about how they want to join a biology startup, or start a biology startup, or get a biology degree, all while really deeply wanting to find some way to cure aging. It's also easy to imagine that the person "actually trying" to cure aging is doing something similar, but with more determination and a bit of pixie dust that makes things work out. The actually-tryer does the same things, but for them, the startup works through dint of sheer willpower; or they get a biology degree while winning so many accolades that they get to set up their own laboratory.
This isn't how I imagine "actually trying." It's not trying-to-try with extra gusto. Actually trying looks like solving small subproblems, with the more ambitious target no longer the focus of attention, but rather a background task. Actually trying to cure aging doesn’t look like a person getting a biology degree with especially grim determination, it looks like Aubrey de Grey wading through a mountain of mundane tasks while scraping together enough money to keep SENS running.
Imagine someone who plays recreational soccer, sprinting up and down the soccer field up till the brink of exhaustion. Now imagine them not playing soccer, but just trying to sprint up and down the field up to the brink of exhaustion. They probably push themselves a lot less in the latter case. If "sprint up and down the field a lot" is the main goal, then at each possible stopping point, part of them starts trying to convince the rest that they've exercised enough for the day, and they must spend willpower to continue. In a soccer match, by contrast, the focus is elsewhere.
[…] This is not novel advice, of course, but it is perhaps a generalization over a few different common types of advice.
If you want to tackle a big problem, like "finding a job", then if you ever find yourself saying "I'm currently trying to find a job", be wary.
(BTW: a second problem that afflicts finding a job is my ugh field)
If you're working on Problem 27 and think of yourself as "I'm currently trying to solve Problem 27"… that's not what occupies the mind of someone trying! Assume all your actions will be pointed that direction anyway; what's next?
This is a quick and easy way to put success in the background, as discussed last week. For example, compare these two responses to “what are you doing?”
> I’m trying to solve this math problem.
versus
> I’m pursuing a promising line of inquiry on this math problem. If it doesn’t lead anywhere, I have two others to pursue next. If all three are fruitless, I’ll ask for help.
For the first person, “failure” is either first or second on the list of things they expect to happen next: they’re trying to solve the problem, and either they’ll solve it, or they’ll fail. If they fail, they can say “well, I tried”, and move on. And because failing and moving on is such a prominent option, they must struggle against it each time they pause; they are like the person trying to sprint up and down a soccer field as much as they can, rather than the person playing soccer.
Imagine that I’m in the middle of flossing my teeth, when someone knocks on the door and asks what I’m doing. I wouldn’t answer “trying to floss,” I’d just answer “flossing” — unless I had been interrupted so many times that I was beginning to doubt my ability to complete the task.
Although don't fake it—
(Some self-help books and professionals advocate always saying that you are “doing” rather than “trying,” but this often seems dishonest to me: when I’m trying to win a race, and I’m currently in tenth place, and you ask me what I’m doing, I have a hard time saying “winning a race” with a straight face.)
When removing ‘try’ and its synonyms from your vocabulary, you may find that you can’t honestly say you’re “solving a math problem,” because you have no idea whether you’ll succeed. And saying you’re “working on a math problem” is only slightly better; it’s mostly just using “working” as a synonym for “trying.”
In these cases, if you want to remove the word ‘try’, I suggest not finding a near synonym, but increasing the granularity of your descriptions. Don’t say “I’m trying to solve this math problem,” say “I’m transforming the problem into a programming problem so I can see it from a different angle”, or “I’m gameifying the problem so that my intuitions can get a better handle on it,” or “I’m producing random algebraic manipulations of this equation in desperate hope that one of them happens to be the answer,” or “I’m staring at the problem waiting for my gut to say something for enough time to pass that I can give up without losing face.” Describe what you’re doing on the level of granularity where at each step you describe, it would be silly to say you were “trying” at that step, […]
Often, when I get down to the level of granularity where I’m doing rather than trying, I find that I’m doing something pretty silly — as in, I’ll start out by saying “I’m trying to write the opening paragraph of this paper”, and then I’ll notice the word ‘trying’, and I’ll introspect a bit and rephrase a bit and I’ll eventually figure out that I was doing was “sitting in front of a screen holding the subject of the paper in my head waiting for my gut to figure out what to write”.