There is no try, only do | HBR Talk 348

The first big life-changing philosophy lesson I had that didn’t come from a family member or a paid educator revolved around one of the simplest of tasks, and it took me years to recognize that I’d already heard it in a movie when I was a kid: There is no try, only do.

It was my first retail job, a cashier in a dinky little corner convenience store that sold a very little bit of a crapload of different things. I was given very little on the job training, thrown in and expected to swim with no experience, and then browbeaten by the manager of the store about everything I did, as if the store was going to crumble around us at any moment from the monstrous pressure of my sheer incompetence.

Often it was as simple as insisting that I had started mopping on the wrong side of the room, but sometimes it had to do with more complicated stuff, and I learned something new every time.

Then she got mad at me for being too obvious about taking mental note when what she explained was new to me. There came a point in time where I just knew, without question, that I was going to get fired. In the middle of berating me for making a mental note out loud, “cut the bread first,” after she berated me for making the egg sandwiches and then cutting them diagonally instead of cutting the bread first and then making the sandwiches, she asked “Why do you have to repeat everything I say?”

I said, I have a lot to learn from you. This is very different from photography, and I just want to do a good job.”

She said, “There’s your first mistake. That’s a platitude. What does it even mean?”
And I had no answer.

The job got a lot easier when I stopped focusing on that platitude, and started focusing on the details of my tasks. For example, my manager explained, when I was cutting the sandwiches instead of the bread, filling was squishing out. It made the container look messy, and the sandwich look less appetizing. It made it less likely that a customer would pick that sandwich to buy for lunch. It made my work space messy, and also interrupted the flow of my work.

When the manager had initially gone over the task with me, she had pulled out a container of bread, sliced each piece, then pulled out the filling and the containers. She took the price gun and priced and dated the containers. Then, assembly line style, she tidily manufactured & packaged the sandwiches, and put them in the cooler. When she showed me, I hadn’t paid attention to her order of operations. I had paid attention to the speed of her work. My sandwiches looked awful, like brutalist architecture dropped into the midst of an old, beautifully designed section of a city.

She wanted me to mop from across the room from the utility sink to the part of the floor that was right next to it, so that when I picked up the non-rolling bucket of dirty mop water, I wasn’t carrying it across the room, dribbling it on the clean floor, to go dump it out.

She wanted me to cut the bread first so my sandwiches would sell instead of going bad and being wasted.

And I was getting a lot of training that I hadn’t thought of as such.

I wasn’t going to figure that stuff out by “wanting to do a good job.” I’d only do a good job if I paid real attention to what I was being shown, gave consideration to what I was learning, and then focused on the tasks at hand instead of worrying exclusively about the image I was presenting to the manager.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is putting too much energy into trying to be a type of person; trying to be a good person, a strong person, a smart person, etc., instead of focusing on what is right in front of them, taking in all of the information, and giving it full consideration before drawing and acting upon any conclusions about it.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with valuing virtue and trying to embody it and center it in one’s dealings with other people. It’s that in focusing too hard on that one detail of the journey, one can fail to notice sudden turns or obstacles in the road, as well as important resources. It is a shortsighted outlook when the destination, the answer to the question “what kind of life did you live” involves a sprawling complex of rooms and hallways containing a variety of mini-answers about behaviors, conditions, decisions, habits, gained knowledge, relationships, and many other aspects of your development, your treatment of yourself, and your treatment of others. Trying to be a type of person oversimplifies the journey, as if every little decision you make can be standardized, duplicated, and automated. Human beings weren’t made for that, and it has very limited useful application when we’re dealing with other human beings.

This is readily apparent to me whenever I see someone respond to criticism of someone’s shenanigans by whipping out Hanlon’s razor to shave the criticism down, not because it’s wrong, but for the sake of trying to be fair, or trying to be nice, or trying to be diplomatic… in other words, ignoring the evidence for the sake of trying to be a good person.

You forget about the actual evidence that is before you in the moment because you’re so focused on “being a good person,” or “doing the right thing,” that you don’t have any focus left for an analytical examination of the person who is trying to sell you some lovely beachfront property in Arizona, along with a heaping load how feminism helps men, too. And while you’re trying to educate her, her colleagues in the movement are getting another law past that will give them another in-road to your wallet and another way of throwing you under the bus to serve their needs.

I’ve often seen Hanlon’s raozr getting used to cover for malice that the wielder doesn’t want to acknowledge, often because it has meaning they don’t want to deal with. This is common in discussion threads between MRAs and feminists on social media.

Some MRAs start discussing a men’s issue, and they hit a point where they have to acknowledge that the snag holding up reform they’re discussing stems from feminism – (like public policy that stems from feminist ideological training of public employees, that is funded by federal grants created by federal law that feminists lobbied for.) So they assess that the pathway to reform has to start at the point where feminist influence gendered everything (legislative reform, funding) to stop the effects that are causing anti-male discrimination downstream.

Or, some feminist posts bait – some bit of anti-male or anti-masculinity rhetoric laying blame, shame, or devaluation upon men, and MRAs respond with information about the claim showing that the issue is more complex than she has described, and in that context, feminism’s contribution to anti-male discriminatory law & policy comes up.

In jumps Fluffy Bunny The Nice Feminist Who Understands Some Men’s Issues to tell the men that they’ve got it all wrong – their enemy is Patriarchy, not feminism. They should be working with feminists, or just stepping back to let feminists do the job for them. After all, feminism is about equality!

This is the point where the thread derails. Instead of being about the original topic, it will now be a debate on the merits of criticizing feminism, in which the entire history, ideological & academic background, legislative influence, and social influence of feminism will be questioned and all related information must be presented for Fluffy Bunny’s approval, after which it will be promptly glossed over, dismissed as irrelevant, entangled with rhetorical fallacies, or tossed into the misogyny bin. Fluffy will maintain her stance throughout, regardless of how badly its foundation is damaged, and eventually will start playing victim of the conversation, deeming people misogynistic and mean for presenting facts she doesn’t like, and accusing them of blaming and attacking her personally by criticizing feminism.

This is where MR movement long-timers will start pointing out the malice in Fluffy’s behavior. She’s been given the facts and is denying the undeniable, while asserting that which has already been debunked, all in defense of the indefensible. At the same time, Fluffy’s victim signaling will ramp up, often reaching a hysterical level, with allegations of misogyny and meanness flying like debris in a tornado.

At some point after this, almost inevitably, someone will start white knighting for Fluffy, talking to the thread as if the order of events was Fluffy posting the OP, and getting attacked as a misandrist snake-in-the-grass promoting malicious feminist discriminatory law & policy and denial of her experience of the movement without hearing her “side” of the story. When corrected after falsely accusing the MRAs in the thread of attacking fluffy, then the white knight pulls out Hanlon’s razor. “Maybe Fluffy just didn’t know any better (about feminism.)”

Except Fluffy was given a wealth of evidence, and instead of incorporating any of it into her assessment of the ideology she was defending she freaked the fuck out on everybody and started flinging poo.

And now she’s got MRAs at each others’ throats, arguing over her. The original topic is dead and the they will never get back to it. She has not only successfully derailed a productive thread, but caused a rift and damaged unity and goal-oriented cooperativeness among the men in the thread.

And all she had to do was play dumb.

This week on HBR Talk, we’re going to discuss how the earnestness, goodwill, and good faith of normal men gets used by feminists, women, and oligarchs to undercut their ability to defend themselves against malicious exploitation. This ties in with the complex systems of exploitation and machinations against men like the funding we’ve been examining during the last couple of months.

We have not finished with our dungeon crawl through the rabbit warren of federally funded international feminist programs, not by a long shot. However, we have to talk about one of the reasons why it has been so easy for grifters to pull that particular grift on men, and why you should not use Hanlon’s razor to determine how you judge their actions. The discussion streams at 7PM on Thursday, March 27, 2025, or you can find other viewing and listening options at honeybadgerbrigade.com in the dropdown menu at the top of the page.

Additional resource:

https://youtu.be/AkDqw3Tu9iM

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Hannah Wallen

Hannah has witnessed women's use of criminal and family courts to abuse men in five different counties, and began writing after she saw one man's ordeal drag on for seven years, continuing even when authorities had substantial evidence that the accuser was gaming the system. She is the author of Breaking the Glasses, written from an anti-feminist perspective, with a focus on men's rights and sometimes social issues. Breaking the Glasses refers to breaking down the "ism" filters through which people view the world, replacing thought in terms of political rhetoric with an exploration of the human condition and human interactions without regard to dogmatic belief systems. She has a youtube channel (also called Breaking the Glasses), and has also written for A Voice For Men and Genderratic. Hannah's work can be supported at https://www.minds.com/Oneiorosgrip