The Father Who Tried his Hardest

 There once was a father who tried his hardest to achieve his goal of teaching his son to always try his hardest to achieve his goals. But the father was not successful in achieving this goal, for the son grew up to be a man who did not always try his hardest to achieve his goals. That isn’t to say, by the way, that he didn’t achieve them: by all accounts, he achieved several. Yet, the fact that he achieved all of these goals in no way contradicts our earlier assertion that he did not always try his hardest to do so, for it is, obviously, just as possible to succeed at achieving one’s goals without having tried one’s hardest to achieve them as it is to try one’s hardest to achieve one’s goals and not succeed in achieving them nonetheless, this latter being the fate of the aforementioned father. Then again, perhaps we’ve been a bit too hasty in our assessment of the aforementioned father. For isn’t it possible, after all, that despite not having always tried his hardest to achieve his goals, the son had always tried his hardest to always try his hardest to achieve his goals? If so, and if – as the writer of these lines suspects – trying one’s hardest to try one’s hardest to achieve one’s goals can be considered merely a different form or mode of trying one’s hardest to achieve one’s goals, it would follow that the father had, in fact, succeeded in achieving his goal of teaching his son to always try his hardest to achieve his goals. While this would make for a happy ending, there unfortunately remains a third and, I suspect, still more likely possibility, this being the possibility that regardless of how hard one tries to achieve one’s goals (or, for that matter, anything), one could always have tried just a little harder, in which case, precisely inasmuch it would consequently be impossible as such to ever truly try one’s hardest (or try one’s hardest to try one’s hardest, etc.) to achieve one’s goals, we would be obligated to conclude that while none of the individuals presently under consideration – neither the father, nor the son, nor, for that matter, the writer who has endeavored, here, to shed light on the knotty problem of trying one’s hardest to achieve one’s goals – ever really tried his hardest to achieve his goals, only the father, because of the specific nature of the particular goal he was trying to achieve, can, on these grounds, definitively be deemed a failure.