Retire the Word ‘Try’
A business partner once pointed out that I said “I’ll try” a great deal, and that he’d started mentally filing anything I said it about under “not happening.” I was offended for about a day. Then I started listening to myself, and he was right. “I’ll try to get that to you by Friday” meant I might not. “I’m trying to get back to the gym” meant I wasn’t going. The word was doing a specific job: letting me sound committed while keeping the door open.
What the word actually means
Try is a hedge. It announces an intention and a pre-written excuse in the same breath. If the thing happens, you did it. If it doesn’t, well, you tried. Nobody can hold you to it, including you. That’s precisely why it’s comfortable and precisely why it’s useless.
Listen to the people around you who reliably do what they say. They don’t say try. They say “I’ll have it to you Friday” or “I can’t commit to Friday; Monday is realistic.” Either a yes with a date or an honest no. The hedge isn’t in their vocabulary, because they’ve learned it costs more than it protects.
Replace it with a decision
Every time you catch the word, force a choice. Either “I will,” with a specific when, or “I won’t,” said plainly. “I’ll try to call my mother more” becomes “I’ll call my mother Sunday at four.” Or it becomes “I’m not going to call more right now, and I should stop pretending otherwise.” Both are honest. The second is uncomfortable, and it’s still more useful than the hedge, because an admitted no can be revisited. A permanent “trying” can’t; it just floats.
Watch for its cousins
“I’ll see what I can do.” “I’m hoping to.” “Let me look into it.” “I’d love to, if I can.” Each one sounds like movement and commits to nothing. They’re socially smooth, which is the problem; they let you avoid the brief discomfort of a real yes or no by spreading a vaguer discomfort over weeks.
With yourself it’s worse
Hedging with other people costs you credibility. Hedging with yourself costs you the thing. “I’m trying to write the book” was my sentence for about six years. The book got written in the eighteen months after I changed the sentence to “I write from six to seven every morning.” Same man, same book. The difference was a sentence with no exit in it.
How to catch it
Ask one person who’s around you a lot to flag it for a week. You’ll be surprised. Or write down every commitment you make for a few days and underline the hedges. Then go back through the list and make each one a yes-with-a-date or an honest no. It takes ten minutes and it’s an unusually clear picture of where you’ve been fooling yourself.
What changed
People started trusting my yes, because it was rarer and it meant something. My no got easier, because I’d stopped disguising it. And the things I actually wanted got done, because they no longer had a trapdoor built into the sentence I used to describe them.
This week
Notice the word. Each time, choose: will, with a when, or won’t, out loud. Retire the hedge. Keep the decisions.
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