You can’t Try too Hard

From  Chapter 7 of my forthcoming book,  The Myth of ‘Just do it’: Thought and Effort in Expert Action:  

We’ve all experienced times where our seemingly best efforts lead to suboptimal or even disastrous results. You are cooking dinner for your in-laws for the first time and the pie crust falls apart, the sauce doesn’t thicken, and the kale comes out of the oven burnt. Or consider the business executive on his way to clinch that all-important deal. Why, on this morning alone, does he appear with a shred of toilet paper on his chin sopping up the blood? Could it be that trying is interfering with doing? Somerset Maugham said that “in each shave, lies a philosophy.” What can philosophy tell us about the relationship between making and effort to do something and doing it?