There is only try

Photo by Jimmy Nguyen on Unsplash

In Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda tells Luke Skywalker:

Do or do not.
There is no “try”.

This is terrible advice.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned from all the startups I’ve worked on is:

There is only try.

Until we try we just don’t know. Once we try then we find out.

It’s alluring to anticipate the potential magic moments of a startup. Those days are great but fleeting. The practical reality is much less magic spark and much more repeatable hard grind.¹

And there is an obvious reason for this. Curiously it’s also Yoda who puts this into words (he contains multitudes and is full of contradictions). Later in that same scene he says:

Always in motion is the future.

That’s why startups are hard. We’re attempting something that may or may not be possible. And we’re doing it in an environment that is constantly changing. We’re surrounded by uncertainty.

But we can always try.