Yoda is wrong.

One quotation from the Star Wars movies bugs me. Yoda's "Do. Or do not. There is no try." may be well meant as a call to action, but is ultimately wrong. Of course there is a try! If people lived by "Do. Or do not." there'd be no significant progress of any kind. It's the try that changes people, changes history, changes the world. Should Edison (or anyone else) have "done not" rather than try? He went through how many failed filament materials before finding one that was usable? That's an awful lot of try, there. Should a kid keep crawling rather than try to walk? Of course not. The idea is absurd. Should the Wrights not have bothered trying to fly? It wasn't as if they were born with wings. "Do. Or do not." suggests not bothering to attempt anything unless it's a sure thing. There's a word for that sort of thing: stagnation.

A world of tries is, true, also a world of failures. But which world would you rather live in: A world of thousands and even millions of tries and failures, before any eventual success, or a world with no successes at all?