Stop Trying, and Start Doing

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1:33There's no safe like SimpliSafe. From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

1:59Anyone with even a passing familiarity for pop culture will know the end of this sentence. Do or do not. There is no try. That wasn't a clip from Star Wars. That was just my bad Yoda impersonation. But yes, do or do not. There is no try. It's Yoda. And that was a classic line in a movie, but I have never heard somebody take it as seriously and turn it into such a powerful philosophy as this person. I am Carla Andrasik, and I am coming out with a book about all the benefits of not trying and only doing in our lives. Now, that phrase, coming out with a book, is actually funny because usually when people come on this show and they have a book, it's because book is out and you can buy the book.

2:48That's not actually true with Carla. I happen to be introduced to Carla through a mutual friend and Carla is just working on this book. So it'll be a while. But we figured, you know what, let's talk now because we're having fun talking. And this is a really interesting subject and really useful to people. So anyway, who is Carla exactly? She is someone who built a very impressive career by not trying. I have been in the music publishing world for the past 25 years. And we'll get back to not trying in a second, but to understand and appreciate Carla's career, we also have to take a little interesting detour into how the music industry works.

3:25Like, for example, Carla will say things like, I gave songs to Mariah Carey. I gave Christina Aguilera her big breakout song. And maybe you're like, what does that mean? What does that mean that you did that? That's what I wanted to know. Okay, we're just going to back up a little bit here and learn about Carla and the music industry. So I, just a crazy start in that business. I met somebody who had a song on the radio and my boyfriend at the time was writing music in his living room. And I said to myself, I want his music on the radio. And I literally marched myself into music publishing companies and said, I want to do what you do.

4:07Got a job as a secretary. and shortly thereafter started pitching songs myself. I started my own company and then got a formal job and then a better job and a better job all the way up to vice president of creative writer development for EMI. I worked with everybody from the oldies but the goodies, Johnny Mathis, Barbra Streisand. I gave songs to Mariah Carey. I gave Christina Aguilera her big breakout song, Jeannie in a Bottle. For people who don't understand how music works, what did that sentence that you just said mean? I gave Christina Aguilera her breakout song. What does that mean? Okay.

4:48So when a new artist is signed to a label, if they're not a songwriter, they need hit songs. And as a publisher, I had a staff of songwriters. And I literally put two writers together and said, you guys go off and write something. And they came back to me with the song, Do You Need a Bottle? And I gave it to the record company, a guy named Ron Fair, who was working with Christina. And they heard the song and said, this is for her. And it became a huge hit. And by the way, if you love the group Five for Fighting, then you should know. Five for Fighting is a guy named John Andrasik. And John Andrasik is married to Carla, who you're listening to right now.

5:28So Carla knows how to go and get it. That is what she does. And she doesn't try to get it. She just gets it. That is basically the story of building her career. And it is now the thing that she helps people do because she has this very deep conviction that we hold ourselves back by thinking about trying to do something instead of actually just skipping to the part where we do it. Trying, the dictionary definition is an attempt or an effort to do something. But really, it's a half-hearted attempt or an effort to do something. First of all, when you say, I'll try to do something, you're putting failure right up front as an option.

6:10If your specialty is making lasagna, you don't say, I'm going to try and make the lasagna because you can make it. But if you've never made it before, you're putting failure. It may not work. I'm going to try to do it. It's coming from a place where there's a lack of confidence, a lack of conviction. Trying is bad because when you try, you can rely on excuses and blame. Oh, I didn't do it because of this. Oh, I didn't do it because of that. So you just have this safety net under you. And when you try, there's no accountability. So it really creates this half-hearted attempt and an effort. And now you really, this is Carla breaking down the problem of trying.

6:53What is trying? Trying is a separation between your ambitions and your actions. It's this little hesitation. It's this belief that maybe just the effort alone or the idea of the effort of the effort is by itself good, is by itself the solution, is by itself the accomplishment. But it's not, you don't get anything for trying. What you get is a lot for doing. So that is what we're going to talk about today on Problem Solvers. It is how to actually do. Carla is going to erase try from your brain and get you more action-oriented. And it's all coming up after the break. Okay, we're back. I'm talking with Carla Andrasik about do or do not.

7:40There is no try. When we left off, she was really dismantling the word try. And now it's time to move on to the do or do not part. And to start, here's what I asked Carla. I said, look, I wonder what you would say to someone who hears you and says, yeah, but I don't know if I'm gonna be good at something. So I'm going to try it. Isn't it okay to not fully throw myself at every single thing? Isn't it okay to just give it a try? I would say that's doing. You're doing it. If you're going to try it, it's try the piece, okay? I'm not sure I'm going to like it, or I'm not sure I'm going to like this career.

8:21I'm not going to sure I'm going to like whatever it is, what you just said. When we say try, we are, try the peas is you're barely tasting it. You're taking hesitant, tiny little barely tasting it. You've already decided you may not like it. So you're not really tasting them. You're not experiencing it. So when we try, I'm going to try to do that. You're half-heartening it. You're not seeing if it's really for you or not. You're not giving yourself the chance. and that holds us back. It reminds me of what you just said there is, I was just listening to Lenny's podcast from Lenny's newsletter and he was interviewing the chief product officer or whatever at LinkedIn who has this line that he's become famous for inside of LinkedIn among his team, which is, we may be wrong, but we are not confused.

9:17And the idea behind that is that when teams have to pick a direction or they have to try a new thing or try, here, there's the word, they have to do a new thing, that oftentimes people don't know if it's the right decision. They don't know if the thing that they are talking about doing is going to work out. And so oftentimes what happens is a team start hedging and they'll start to do lots of different things. They'll start to spread their resources thin and try to attempt a couple things at the same time. And he says, no, if we are not all focused on the same thing, then we will never put ourselves in a position to see whether that thing is the right thing.

10:01So we are not going to be confused. We are going to pick a direction and we are going to attempt our best to make it work. And it might not. We might be wrong. The decision that we're pursuing right now might be wrong, but at least then we will know. It's better to do something and be wrong about it than it is to be confused and have do it. Can you apply that to somebody making an important decision and what you advise them to do? Look, it's easy. We're still in the place of language right now, the difference between try and doing. But practically speaking, what does it mean? Maybe there was a moment in which you had to make a decision between trying something and just doing something.

10:52And what does that look like? And how do you make the decision? Or how do you even figure out which is the right decision to take? Okay. The first thing is, the way you decide what is the right decision to take is by experiencing it and doing it and seeing if it works or not. Statistically, when people try to do something, whatever it is, I'm not sure I'm going to like whatever this is. I'm going to try this out in my business. When they try and fail, and maybe they try again and fail, they just give up. But when they have the mindset of I'm doing this and they fail, They stand up straight again.

11:36They learn the lesson and they do it again. And they stand up again when they fail and they do it again until they come to the conclusion of this isn't going to work. They definitively know. Leaders do not use language of I'll try and get back to you. I'm going to try and turn this report in. It's strong. It's conviction. It's strength. It's powerful. My advice is if there's something for anybody in any business that you want to decide whether it's the right thing for you or not, dive in headfirst. Do that thing. Fail at that thing. Don't be afraid. Don't take hesitant, half-hearted steps to see if it's something.

12:21We think that trying is brave. Going back, what do we think trying is? We think trying is a brave first step, but it's not. It's a hesitant step. We think when we're trying, we're doing, but we're not. We are trying is a mental exercise. We're thinking about it. We're talking about it. Oh, I'm trying to do this. I'm trying to do that. And I'll prove it to you right now. We're going to experience trying. So hold the finger out in front of you. Okay. I'm holding my pointer finger out in front of me. The first direction is touch your nose. Okay. I am touching my nose. Perfect. Now remove your finger.

12:59Okay. Second direction, do not touch your nose. You're not touching your nose. Okay. Now. Okay. I'm not, I haven't moved my fingers. The third direction, you already touched your nose. You're not going to do that. And you've already not touched your nose. I want you to try physically with all your might, try to touch your nose. Try it. I want to like, try it right now. Like physically try. Okay. This is interesting. This is going to lead me into a semantic argument over the word try. But what I'm going to do is that I'm going to take my pointer finger and I'm going to touch it to my nose because I am going to try, which I did.

13:42And it turns out I succeeded. There's a chance that I could have had a stroke right now and my finger wouldn't have touched my nose. But I tried and it worked. Well, you touched your nose. That was a very concrete action and you didn't touch your nose. But there was that moment where you're like, wait, what am I doing here? What's my finger supposed to do? And your brain reacts much the same way. It doesn't know when you tell it to try. Am I doing this or am I not doing this? Sometimes it is a matter of semantics. If you're standing there with a golf club and you're at miniature golf and you say, I'm going to try and get the ball in the hole.

14:18The odds are you're probably going to make contact with the ball and it's going to move. OK, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about big picture items where we fool ourselves into thinking we're doing when we're not doing. And and it really matters. I have seen this change a person's life overnight. It's that instant the minute you get the language out of your head and you realize that trying is not in action. I met a guy at our local park. I'd see him every morning and he had these giant headphones on his head. And I was in the music business. I'm always curious, what's he listening to?

14:58And one day I stopped him and I said, Hey, what are you listening to? And he said, Oh, I listened to these motivational podcasts. There's so much stuff I'm trying to do, but I'm not very motivated or focused. And I hear the try word. And I just looked at the guy and I said, what are you trying to do? And he said, I'm trying to go swim. I'm a swimmer. We have the new YMCA. I've been trying to get myself to go swimming. And I just looked at him and said, why don't you stop trying to go swim? Just stop trying to swim and go swim. And I thought this guy's never coming back to this park. I've just ruined the park experience.

15:41But 24 hours later, I opened the car door, let the dog out. And this maniac is screaming across the park. I didn't try. I did it. I swam. And that guy. So there was a 24 hour turnaround for him. He's changed his life. He quit his job. He stopped trying. You get stuck in that cycle of trying and believing you're doing. It holds us back. We think we know what it means. And there's reasons that we try. We've been taught to try our whole lives. We've been taught, try your best, try harder, give it a try, try again. There's so many reasons. We try because we'll offer to try to do something because we're so afraid to say no.

16:28Okay, I'll try and do that for you. Or it's easy. We want that safety net. We don't want the accountability. We don't want the responsibility. So we try and it holds us back on those big ticket items. And if you think about you're in a marriage, what if you said, what if your wife said, I'm going to, I'm going to try and work on our marriage. You want to half heart that? I think that deserves so much more effort and attention and energy than a try. So the speaking or the speaking. So the swimming example is a really useful one because as you were talking about it, and of course, whenever anyone hears a story like that, they just start to think of their own version of it, which for me is taking a walk.

17:14I spend the majority of my day in front of my computer. I would love to go out and just stretch my legs. And then, so I often think to myself, I'm going to try to do that today. And then I don't. And then I'm very unhappy that I didn't do it at the end of the day. So what is happening? What is happening is that you are creating what we might call, and I'm just making this up right now, a bucket of intentions. And in the bucket of intentions goes all the things that you in an ideal world would like to do, but that you are not actually going to prioritize to the point where it's going to happen or it's going to happen regularly.

17:52That's the thing with my walks. What I could do is I could block off time in my day and say, that's walk time, and then do it. But that's not what I do. Instead, what I do is I prioritize all sorts of other things. And then if I have a window of time available, maybe I peer into my bucket of intentions and I yank one out. And maybe one day it's taking a walk and maybe another day, it's, I don't know, it's calling a friend and catching up or something. So to put something into the bucket of intentions is not the same as putting it into the action item. And that's a really important point that you're making.

18:31Let me ask you though, let's, the swimming, the walking, that feels really clear and simple and easy. It's a thing that you are simply not prioritizing, but you are saying that you're prioritizing in some kind of half-hearted way. Let's try something else though. Let's say making a change in your business, making a change in your career, pursuing something that is somewhat binary. You either do it or you don't do it. You can't do a whole bunch of them. You have to pick one. You had said, do it, you might fail. That's okay. Then you do another one and you might fail. What's your advice for how long to do it?

19:12Or how to know whether you have learned whatever you needed to learn about doing it? Are you setting some kind of benchmark? Are you setting some kind of kill criteria? I shall do this for three months and if it doesn't yield me this, then I shall stop. How do we know when we have learned whatever there was to learn from doing? Setting a benchmark is a really great tool because it's a measure of your success. when you set a timeframe so you can measure. And absolutely, there's nothing wrong with take out the try. Okay, so I'm in a job that I can't stand and I wanna get a new job. So the person that's trying to find a new job, I just wanna really crystallize what that looks like.

19:57They're complaining about where they are, okay? They're going out to lunch with their friends after work and having martinis. They're shopping on the weekends. they're sleeping a lot because they're probably depressed and not looking forward to going to work on Monday they're just conjuring up all these bad feelings that's the person that says god I'm going to try and find another job I'm really not happy but the person that actually says I'm going to change careers they are not going out to lunch with their friends they're scouring the want ads they're going online they're checking LinkedIn they're going on social media they're calling all their friends.

20:33They're on the weekends. They're maybe taking a class. They're bettering their abilities to apply for jobs. They're hiring a headhunter. They're doing the action necessary to find out what that looks like. The trying is easy. The trying part is easy and it keeps you stuck. The doing is very different. And look, we all need a steady paycheck. We all need some security. So setting a benchmark, setting a timeline. And if that fails, then you go to another plan. But you're not just thinking about it, talking about it, complaining about it, and remaining stuck in an inaction. Okay. So a lot of times people say, gosh, I'm trying so hard, but it's not happening for me, whatever it is.

21:21I'm trying so hard. The problem isn't that you aren't trying hard enough. It's that you're trying in the first place. Get out of that. That's, as you said it, I was processing it. What would you say to someone next? I like that as an example. I'm trying so hard. Here's an example. I am trying so hard to get this business off the ground. I'm trying so hard to get this business off the ground and I cannot get anyone to buy my product. I cannot get anyone to take me seriously. Now, Carla, if you were to say to that person, stop trying and just do it, they would say, I have no idea what the difference between these two things is.

22:13I'm going out every day. I'm trying to sell this thing. It's not selling. telling me to sell it isn't changing any of the way in which I act. How do you apply this principle to someone who is speaking like that? I can probably guarantee that the person that says I'm trying to get this business off the ground or trying to sell my product, they're coming from a half-hearted effort. I would say to them, what are you actually doing? Are you calling everybody and returning? Are you just leaving messages to try to reach somebody to try to reach somebody? Or are you sending them an email and following up with a letter?

22:58Are you calling and calling back? You have to be taking strong, determined action. When someone says they're trying, it's they're already putting themselves in second place, they're already putting it in a half-hearted attempt and effort frame of mind, I would ask them, what are you doing and what could you be doing more? And I guarantee you, there's more that person can be doing. I am going to offer a slightly different version of that answer and I want to see what you think of it. I think the answer is that there is another part of the sentence that they're not saying. so what they're saying is, I'm trying to get this business off the ground.

23:44What they're really saying is, I'm trying to get this business off the ground in the way I know how. And I think that they are, I think they are pouring a lot of energy into it. Not everybody, but let's just take, as the benefit of the doubt, let's take someone who is out there pounding the pavement. They're doing it. They're putting 100 % into a thing that is not working. But the problem is that their focus is actually on the unspoken part of the sentence in the way I know how. They are continuing to do the same thing over and over again that isn't working. Whereas if you really focus on the first part of the sentence, or I guess the second part of the sentence, the first part of the sentence is the I'm trying.

24:30The second part of the sentence is to get this business off the ground. To get this business off the ground requires whatever it takes to get this business off the ground. So possibly there is something wrong with your product. Possibly there's something wrong with the way that you're talking about your product. Possibly you don't have any idea who it is that your product is actually for. And you just keep chasing the wrong people and you haven't stepped back and asked yourself, who actually wants this? And how do I reach those people? It is the very difficult work of reinventing what you're doing to try to get to the ultimate goal.

25:00But that starts actually with knowing what the hell the goal is. And the goal isn't often, when most people end up thinking that the goal is to accomplish a thing in the way that they had originally envisioned, because they're not even considering that there are other ways in which it could be a success. But if we were to say, look, you're just not doing it, I don't know, I think that to say that is to require another part of that sentence as well, right? It's to say, but you're just not doing it is also leaving a part unspoken. And the part is, you're not doing it to the degree that is required.

25:46Because to do it to the degree. Yeah, because you're trying, you're hapharting it. Doing it, you have to be able to pivot. If what I'm doing isn't working, Elon Musk is the ultimate doer, okay? If something he tries, you could say he's trying really hard. He's doing really hard. And when something fails spectacularly, he pivots and he does it another way. Okay. Now, look, how long can you chase something that's never going to happen? That will reveal itself. But it depends on how many billions of dollars. How long can you go? But it will reveal itself. but you are setting yourself up out of the gate like a racehorse in first place.

26:34When you have the doing mindset, you will learn to pivot. You will pick yourself up. You will learn from mistakes. Trying allows us to just say, oh, it didn't work. I tried. It failed. Whatever. And I just feel like too many people, they don't begin or they stay stuck because they're in the trying mindset. that they don't even realize that's what's holding them back. It could be one word. And it affects our relationships, our careers, our health. Think about, do you know someone that's been trying to quit smoking for five years, 10 years, try to quit vaping? Okay. You know what that looks like?

27:16A person that's trying to quit vaping or smoking, maybe they've cut back to one cigarette instead of a pack a day. They're still smoking. Okay. they're going to be trying to quit smoking for a long time. It's reality. If you want to quit smoking, you're not smoking anymore. You're doing that thing. If you want to try to quit smoking, you can have a cigarette and continue to try to quit whatever it is. There's a definite difference between trying and doing. Yeah, it's almost... I don't know why this was the image that popped into my head as you were talking because it doesn't make any sense, but I'll just say it, which was, I thought, what would it mean for me to say I'm trying to flip over this car?

28:02I'm going to go over to a car. Maybe it's because there's been some jerk has parked a car out in front of my house in Brooklyn for the past three months and they're not moving. I would love to go out and flip this car over. Look, I could go over to this car and I could put my hands underneath it and I could put my absolute full force of my body into flipping over this car. Technically, I am trying to flip over this car. The thing is that it's not going to flip over. I'm doing, but I'm not sure. I'm doing everything that I can. I'm not working, which means what would it actually mean to say, I'm going to flip over this car.