Just to get us all started, here’s one of my favorites. I even have it as a magnet on one of my file drawers:
“There is no use trying”, said Alice, “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” - Lewis Carroll
“Do or do not. There is no try.”
Yoda
Nothing personal, Sheldon, but “Do or do not. There is no try” is as a good example as any of the blatant nonsense that some take for truth or wisdom, even though it was supposedly said by a fictional–yea, a fantasy–character.
Many years ago, I was severely admonished by an employer for using the word “try,” citing a variant of this “maxim”; it was evident that she had accepted it as a fundamental truth.
It may indeed be one, for those lucky few with perfect prescient knowledge–a great advantage; knowing in advance an attempt would fail lets them avoid attempting altogether, so they can strike the word “try” from their vocabulary. Saves a lot of time, too.
However (to paraphrase Solomon), there is a time to try, and a time to give up. IMNSHO, in a few special cases, it may even be good to keep on trying, as long as it takes–even if one never succeeds…
LOL, Bob, you seem to miss the point. The point in what Yoda is saying (LOL!), is that you are to try with the intent to succeed, instead of trying with merely a hope to succeed. It is commanding you to have faith in your efforts.
It has very little to do with actually succeeding or not. It is all about the attitude in which you make the attempt.
“No problem is so big or so complicated that it can’t be run away from.”
Linus Van Pelt (Peanuts)
“How can we lose when we’re so sincere?”
Charlie Brown (Peanuts), speaking of his baseball team
“Get over it” - James Ray (Inspirational speaker)
“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
Trying = Persistence
Since we seem to be on a try/Peanuts vein, how’s this:
Life is like a ten-speed bike. Most of us have gears we never use. - Charles Schulz, cartoonist (1922-2000)
As to what Yoda really meant, we’d have to ask him (or it); that’s not what was said. I think my former employer took it at face value.
Some things may in fact be worth trying, even if one has little faith in one’s efforts; the intent is still embedded in the word “try.” If not, it’s not really trying, it’s pretense–going through the motions to produce the illusion of trying in order, perhaps, to please someone else (or even to please oneself, in which case it would be self-delusion).
On the other hand, if one keeps trying with an unrealistic belief of success, may that not also be self-delusion?
It’s interesting that so many favorite quotes tend to be from the workd of fantasy.
May the force be with you…
Edison’s statement “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration” has been one of my favorite quotes for a long time–ever since I realizd that, if he’s right, Houston (where I live) has the perfect atmosphere for genius.
“If you don’t know where you’re going…any road will take you there.”
-George Harrison
“If you can’t make your documents be right…at least make them look right!”
-Herbert Anson
“Well done is better than well said.”
-Benjamin Franklin
“Discovery is seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.”
-Albert Szent-Gyoigi
“Whatever you are…be a good one.”
-Abraham Lincoln
“…Don’t think - it can only hurt the team.”
-Kevin Costner in “Bull Durham”
I don’t mind trying and trying … as long as I’m being paid by the hour.
Abandon the search for Truth. Settle for a good fantasy. Unknown
A woman drove me to drink and I didn’t even have the decency to thank her. W.C. Fields
All things are possible, except skiing through a revolving door. Unknown
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would have destroyed civilization. Unknown
Anything not worth doing is not worth doing well. Unknown
Anytime things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something. Unknown
Become a perfectionist; just lower your standards. Unknown
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. Unknown
Everyone is entitled to be stupid, but some people abuse the privilege. Unknown
“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.”
Cyril Connolly, critic and editor
Apologies to Cyril, but had he known of our profession, he might have gone a step further:
“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once; specifying what will not be read until too late.”
Mark Twain could have been a specifier; he apparently had little use for needless modifiers.
“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
Twain
That Twain quote is one of my favorites, too, Sheldon. And how’s this on spec writing?
A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit. - Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)
“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” W. Edwards Deming
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote…except for money.” Samuel Johnson
Specifications Writing is to Writing as Military Music is to Music
“The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”
~Author Unknown