Yoda was very wise, he gave us all sorts of very wise sayings and thoughts!

One of the things he told Luke was -

"Try not. Do or do not. There is no try."

A book I just finished said the exact same thing. Wipe TRY out of your vocabulary. Try implies you don't really know if you can do it.

Instead, say you are LEARNING to play the guitar, LEARNING to drive. You are WORKING ON finishing the project. That way it's not about a "try". It is about an active progress where the progress itself is of value.

Is there something you are learning to do?

When I was a youngster, I took dancing lessons. The teacher always said, "Yes, you can," which translates to "Yes, I can." She had the same feeling about the word, try. She was always expected positive results.

Of course I think there are times in life that we don't know if we can accomplish something.

If one of my kids asks me to pick up something from the store for them on a day when I already have a mile long list of chores to do, I have learned not to tell them "OK".

I have to quite distinctly say, "I will try to get to it, but I can't promise that it is going to get done today."

But back to your original question; I am learning to develop a website. I am in the veeeeeerrrrrry early stages of learning, LOL! But I actually have a registered website that I am working on to make a family project - eventually.

Web pages are fun. I created one for our historical society and kept that going for years. Last year we hired a professional to update it and put it on his server. But, although mine wasn't as crisp as his, mine was easier to update and manage. I sort of miss doing it.

One of the engineers in my department has a son who was learning to do web pages (at the time he was probably 11 or 12 years old - 1998) and I said if he could do, so could I and so can you.

I also had family pages on AOL. Without warning they pulled the plug on all webpages. Fortunately, I used FrontPage and still had copies of my pages. A lot of people used their tool and created on line. What a shock they had.

That is awesome that you are learning to code web pages! Our HTML site here is very helpful - I definitely recommend going through it!

I had that same type of question about "try" - what if it is a scheduling issue and you are not sure how time will work out? What the books say is that using the word "try" implies that you could fail. It gives a negative connotation that you "didn't put enough effort into it". I know it sounds like just using different wording but it actually affects how people view the issue. The requester will say "well try harder!!"

Instead, make it more clear that the schedule is the situation - not your ability to try. Say "the schedule is full for today. If the schedule frees up, your task may get done. But if the schedule stays full, it will NOT get gone."

That makes it clear that it's not about you trying and failing. It's about the schedule of time - which we all only have 24 hours of in a day - having an actual set limitation.

Does that make sense? Again I know it sounds like psychobabble but it is raising the kids to have a certain way of looking at things and at how people manage their time.

I love old Ben and Yoda's saying and use them ALL the time, lol.

"luminous beings are we; we are not this crude matter..."