Do or do not. There is no try.

There words from Jedi master Yoda are among the most quotable in the Star Wars saga. But in a world without the force, do Yoda’s words hold water? Judging by the title I clearly don’t think so, so here’s why.

It’s reminiscent to me of a certain type of interaction I have seen many times before. Consider a hypothetical teacher and student. The student is struggling to complete homework and gets a talking to from the teacher. “I’ll try to do better,” the student says, to which the teacher responds, “I want to hear that you will do better.” This has always struck me as an empty assurance. Without addressing the root cause of the problem, there is no way to be confident that things will change. It is obviously the case that people can only ever attempt to do things (at which they subsequently succeed or fail). It is also generally impossible to predict attempts’ outcomes with certainty. So it is literally nonsense, but it’s just rhetorical. The teacher doesn’t like that “try” sounds wishy-washy. What the teacher wants is essentially an assurance of the student’s determination to succeed or expectation to succeed, either of which may or may not actually be correlated with improved homework completion.

This is also related to the sentiment that you can accomplish anything if you believe hard enough that you can. It’s like the law of attraction from The Secret; all it takes is believing something will happen. Alternatively, a lighter version is that self-confidence is a primary factor in people’s ability to do things. Like toxic positivity, this is a situation where something that is generally helpful has been taken to unreasonable extremes.

So why is Yoda right in the context of Star Wars but wrong in the real world? The problem is that telling someone to do something they just failed at doing doesn’t take into account the factors that led to failure, and as a result can’t mitigate those factors. Unless the sole impediment is self-doubt. The kicker is that, in the film, self-doubt is the sole impediment in that moment for Luke. He believes the X-wing is too heavy to lift, which prevents him from being able to use the force to lift it. What has happened is that Yoda’s quote, which is extremely pithy, has been generalized inappropriately.