Growing up and watching The Empire Strikes Back, I had heard the Yoda saying of "Do or do not; there is no try", which I didn't care for and just wrote off as just being some interesting philosophical rhetoric. However. having taken a real estate course called BOLD in the fall of 2019, I had a very different insight into using this Yoda line.
One of the most powerful lines I heard was, "You can have either reasons or results, but you can't have both." This was so deeply fascinating for me because I had always valued effort, but this positioned effort in a different light: trying is good, but you're not trying something simply to try it, you want to accomplish something. While it comes to real estate, yes, results are ultimately what matters, but this is more broadly applicable far beyond simply real estate.
So now I've got into a place where who cares about trying anything, it's not actually accomplishing something. Did you actually do something or not? And if you don't, you're merely left with excuses, which shows a lack of responsibility. Ever since being exposed to this idea, I have realized that it's been about understanding my responsibility and not just generating excuses. It's about results.
Ultimately, that's my reflection back on that Yoda line from The Empire Strikes Back, which is that it's about getting something done, it's about results, it's not about having simply exerted some effort, but it's ultimately about what you are actually accomplishing. What are you actually getting done? And that is why I have been working on removing "try"/"trying" from my vocabulary for over the last year.
