3 Reasons Why Trying Is Never a Waste of Your Time

Wisdom to help you show up after you get shut down.

I’ve been attempting to be accepted by a prestigious Medium publication for almost a year to no avail. I’m not going to say which one because it’s irrelevant and not their fault for rejecting my work. Maybe my style isn’t a good fit, or likely my writing isn’t good enough yet.

I’m not saying that to be self-deprecating. I’m not a bad writer, but I’m not the best either. Entering into the professional writing world woke me up immediately to that truth. I’m a beginner, an amateur, a nobody. That might sound limiting, but it’s actually liberating.

Do you know how hard it is to have a constant need to be good at things? Do you know how counterproductive it is to think everything that doesn’t go your way was a massive waste of time?

I do know. I’m a perfectionist, and yes, I’m aware that makes me lame. It also makes me ridiculously good at doing one thing: trying.

From my lifelong career as a stereotypical try hard, I’ve learned not only that working hard is never a waste of time, but it’s also the secret sauce behind most highly successful people. No, not Lady Gaga, who was accepted to Julliard at age eleven. She was born that way, okay.

For the rest of us unlikely to ever become iconic pop stars but totally capable of blooming into fulfilled human beings, we must remember the immense value of effort, especially in the face of potential or actual rejection.

Here are three reminders of why trying is never a waste of your time to help you show up when you get shut down.

1. Practice Makes Progress. Persistence Produces Power.

Growing up in competitive sports, I memorized the line,

“Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.”

That’s a load of crap and probably explains why I spent my adolescence and early twenties terrified of trying anything new. Here’s the thing. Being a beginner at something means being bad at it. It’s literally in the definition:

“A beginner is someone who has just started learning to do something and cannot do it very well yet.”

If you ever hope to have the courage to step outside of your comfort zone and try something new, you will have to get used to being a beginner. When I first moved from California to Italy, I didn’t speak a word of Italian beyond grazie, which I pronounced wrong as most English speakers do.

I didn’t practice my Italian in public settings for a long time because I knew I would butcher it. I knew I would make mistakes, and I wasn’t allowing myself to make those yet. As a result, I spent the better half of a year in silence.

Do you want to know what eventually got me talking? Sure, it was partially a growing vocabulary and grammar skills from independent study; however, it was primarily an obvious and long overdue realization: I would never improve if I never tried.

So I started trying. The more I practiced Italian, the more I progressed, and the more I progressed, the more I grew into my power. I moved from beginner to intermediate to advanced, and although I have much more to learn in Italian, I no longer fear the process of learning it.

You will never be perfect, period, but especially as a beginner. Instead, adopt my new and improved motto:

“Practice makes progress. Persistence produces power.”

#2: Losing is a Privilege.

Some people think the worst thing in the world is losing. It’s not. The worst thing in the world is never trying out of cowardice. In a famous speech, Theodore Roosevelt once described cowards as,

“…cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Cowards are people who are too afraid to try because they can’t control the outcome; however, it’s important to note cowardice isn’t a fixed personality trait. No one is a coward, but anyone can act like one.

When applying to colleges, that’s exactly what I did by refusing to apply to schools I thought would reject me. I literally said, “What’s the point. I already know I’m not good enough.”

The truth was I didn’t know. That was the scary part. I had a high enough GPA to possibly have a chance and a big enough ego not to want to risk rejection.

The Stanford admissions rate for all applicants: 3.95%. The admissions rate for all wannabe applicants who were too proud to try: 0%.

The point is, we don’t often get to choose the outcomes in our lives, but we always get to choose our efforts. Even when the odds are against you, you have nothing to lose from trying — except for a little bit of pride you’re better off without — and everything to lose from giving up.

If you never pursue anything, you may not fail in the public eye, but you will always fail in private. Stanford didn’t reject me. I rejected myself. I have now learned one is much worse than the other.

Life often presents us with the choice to risk rejection or run from it. If you risk rejection, you might end up having to face it, but if you run, you’ll never find acceptance.

Losing is a privilege, an honor reserved only for those of us brave enough to try.

#3: Winning is a Mindset.

There are objective winners and losers in specific settings, such as sports games, political elections, awards shows, and petty popularity contests.

Luckily, most of life happens outside of those settings, and while society may try to teach us what winning looks like through traditional ideals, every person gets to decide what success looks like for herself.

Is your version of success working your way up the corporate ladder, getting married, popping out three kids, and retiring comfortably at age 65? Is it traveling to as many countries as you can while working in the gig economy and living out of Airbnbs? Or is success settling down in a tiny rural home with your partner, cultivating a thriving garden, and raising chickens?

There are limitless ways to live, which means there are infinite ways to succeed. Winning in life comes down to naming what you want and going after it. If you are willing to try, you are destined to win.

Winning doesn’t mean getting everything you want. It means doing everything you can.

Just as you determine what is success and failure, you define winning and losing. Here are my definitions.

To win means to attempt, to show up every day and do my best regardless of the results. To lose means to settle, to abandon what I genuinely desire for fear of never reaching it.

Allow people to reject you, but never reject yourself. It doesn’t matter how many times you get shut down. As long as you keep showing up, and as long as you are willing to try, you are never wasting your most treasured resource of all. Time.

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