Not trying so you can say “I didn’t even try” is protecting your ego by sacrificing your results.

Holding back gives you a permanent excuse, and the excuse is what you are really after. If you never go all in, no result can ever be a verdict on you, only on how little you bothered. It works, in the sense that your self-image survives. The cost is everything you could have found out about what you can actually do.

Pick one thing this week and do it at full effort, where a bad outcome would genuinely mean something. Tell nobody, so there is no audience to perform the not-trying for. Whatever happens, you will have one honest data point instead of a story.