Try-harding at work
Few yeas ago I was playing quite a bit of CS:GO. It was casual gaming with friends, but we still wanted to win the matches. We created some simple strategies and tactics, and with those tried to gradually improve our skills. We were playing at a level were sometimes we were matched with the highest ranks and sometimes with some of the lowest ranks. Because of this some enemy teams would notice that we were “trying hard” to win, and because of this they latched on the insult of calling us “try-hards”. I remember how shameful and demeaning it felt to be called that. The enemy team were successful in making us (or at least me) feel bad about it. Of cooourse, if the enemy teams would have been trying as hard as we, they would have won! But they didn’t want to do that, because that is not as fun as just playing casually. And by playing just casually you can then call out others for “try-hards” when they beat you. Because it’s cool to be casual.
Try-hard is an adjective used to describe an individual who:
will try very hard to be good at something or fit in and eventually fails.
in videogames (such as Call of Duty or Halo) tries so hard to be good they end up losing sight of just having fun. This individual can become aggressive with other players if they are in a losing situation. In this sense the term can be used to describe players who are being relatively successful.
It must be noted that it is not uncommon for individuals to falsely accuse others of being a try-hard in order to make themselves feel better for their own inability to fit in or poor performance . If confronted by such an individual evaluate the accuser as well as yourself and remember there is a difference between trying and trying too hard.”
– Urban Dictionary
I read Danluu’s post Willingness to look stupid some days ago. In short, he strives to do things his own way and doesn’t care if that makes him look stupid in other people’s eyes. His mindset of being willing to look stupid, even if a bit extreme in some scenarios, is something that has brought him more positive than negative consequences. Because of that he has also decided to stay with that mindset. He doesn’t seem to have a problem with it, but a majority of his post is explaining how and why other people react to his way of doing things. And this is the biggest hurdle for me personally, and probably for many other people, to learn and to advance in whatever I want to get better at. It leaves me vulnerable, and all the people who know what I am doing can just call me out for a “try-hard”. By that they make themselves feel better about themselves by being more chill and cool, and make me feel bad about trying hard to achieve something that I am not capable of doing. Yet.
It is funny that we admire extraordinary people who we think haven’t put a lot of effort into becoming extraordinary. Sayings like “she’s a natural talent“ and “I could never be as good as him” are pretty common and easy to say. We admire those imaginary low-effort people more than those who we know have worked hard and achieved the same results. Why? Because if it is known that someone has put a lot of effort into something, it will be transparent that they haven’t been good at it at some point. This means that then we know that we have been at the same level as that extraordinary person at some point. This again means that with the same level of effort and work we could possibly achieve the same things as them. That is not a pleasant thing to hear, at all. That means that we should get up and go be productive and work hard. This is the reason why it is easier to tell these stories of natural talents that are out there achieving things that we never could. It hurts less.
I think that in work life there is a lot of opportunities and possible gains in being a try-hard. Because by being a try-hard you have to admit that you don’t know something. By trying hard and learning something new, or asking a question, or attending a course you admit to yourself and at the same time to others that you don’t know this thing, yet. But that you are ready to learn and to gain new knowledge. However more than often it is more comfortable to not try, or the worse, to pretend that we know what we are talking about or working on.