The greater tragedy isn’t failure. It’s half-effort.
Shakespeare gave us the question: To be or not to be. Life keeps giving us another one: To try or not to try. You don’t know for certain if anything will work. You never do. So you have two choices.
You can commit: put in everything you’ve got and see what happens. Or you can hold back: protect yourself, test the waters, see if it’s “worth it” before you really go in. The first is scary. The second is comfortable. And the second is the one that kills you.
Here’s why. When you go all in, you might fail. You’ll have spent your energy. You’ll have nothing to show for it. That hurts. But you’ll know. You’ll have a clear answer. When you go half in, you also spend energy. You worry. You second-guess. You show up but not fully. And at the end you get the worst of both worlds: you’ve lost the time and the effort, but you don’t get the result.
You don’t even get the clarity of a real failure. You just get a slow fade. That’s the greater tragedy. Not that you tried and failed. But that you never really tried at all.
You Have to Want It to Work
This isn’t mystical. It’s practical. If you’re going to try, tell yourself you want it to work. Then act like it. Put in the hours. Make the ask. Send the email. Show up. You don’t have to be naive. You can still run the numbers, weigh the risks.
But once you’ve decided to try, don’t hold a finger back. Because the world has a way of giving you exactly what you’re signalling. If you signal “I’m not sure, I’m just testing,” you’ll get uncertainty back. If you signal “I’m all in,” you might still fail, but you’ll have a real shot, and you’ll know you didn’t lose because you were too scared to jump.
I’ve made big bets. I left Nigeria to study in Russia when the funding was uncertain. I came back when people said don’t. I built VarsityScape while finishing a medical degree. None of that was guaranteed. But I’d decided: if I’m doing this, I’m doing it. No half measures.
That doesn’t mean every bet will pay off. It means when they don’t, I won’t have to wonder if I could have done more.
Especially Now
We’re in an age of AI. Work is changing. The bar for “good enough” is rising. To stand out, to get the results you want, you need to be able to deliver at a level that’s hard to replace. That doesn’t happen when you’re hedging. It happens when you’re committed.
So ask yourself: am I in or am I out? If you’re in, be in. If you’re out, be out. But don’t linger in the middle. That’s where dreams go to die slowly.
So: to try or not to try? If you’ve thought it through and the upside is worth the risk, try. Fully. The rest is just noise.