Always underdo. Conserve your energy. Save your strength.

Hard left swipe on the advice of people (most often women — yes, this is blatant gender stereotyping, but this isn’t a “Family Guy” moment either; we’re not doing this for laughs: we’re fighting a worthy cause) who overdo, overdecorate, over-try, who insist on maximum effort for minimum gain at minimum speed, who live that “hostess with the mostest” life.

Done is better than good. Run through your SRS reps quickly. Don’t do a good job, do a job, and let “well” mostly take care of itself.

Do not kill the golden goose that is your energy. Save some. People will make fun of you, accuse you of being lazy. But, I kid you not, of the nine or ten people (eight girls and two guys) that I can think of who’ve made the most fun of me for being an energy miser, one had a heart attack, another contracted cancer in her twenties, and six of the remaining eight had nervous breakdowns within a couple of years of mocking my “slow burn” methods.

Anecdotal? Sure. Not a controlled experiment? Definitely. Look, I’m not out here trying to prevent people vaccinating their children (a painfully bad idea if ever there was one), I’m just saying, if you try too hard, if you make it so that nothing you do is good enough, then nothing (i.e. project abandonment, burnout, illness and other more or less universally undesirable things) is exactly what you’re gonna get.

Am I saying that depriving yourself of quantity (not just quality, but quantity) of sleep, and abusing your time, your body and your mind will make you ill? Not in so many words. We needn’t come down that hard. Some people no doubt thrive on pain and suffering. Let’s just say that, all else being equal, the probabilities will be tipped in a bad direction.

Have low standards. Have wide standards. Breathe. Stay in the game. Stay alive. Don’t be good. Just show up. It’s far more important to practice writing hiragana at all, than it is to write them well! Again, don’t be good. Just show up. Good will take care of herself; she’s a big girl. She a strong, independent woman what don’t need nobody.

Don’t be good. Just show up.

Doing matters more than doing well. It’s about progress, not perfection. Improving yourself, not proving yourself. Progress is a real thing that real people can do. Sufficiently accumulated progress is excellence. Excellence is the natural result of the concatenation of progress. We should all desire excellence; it is possible for all of us. Perfection, on the other hand, is death. Perfection is death. Perfection is only for things and people that are dead or died trying.

Only dead things are perfect. We fuss over the “correct” way of wearing a kimono because kimono-wearing is no longer a living, breathing, changing, flexible, dynamic cultural practice. It’s a gesture now. Pure performance art. Kimonos don’t get dirty any more; they just get dusty and moth-eaten. That may change, but not as long as we seek perfection.

Don’t let the moths eat away at your perfect projects. Get them dirty and used. Bring them to life; wear them like comfy shoes.
#immersion #SRS

“You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.” [Emphasis added] Pablo Picasso

Stop trying to do the best possible.

Just stwop it. Stwop it. Mmmkay?

It’s not working. You know why I know it’s not working?
Because if it were working, it’d be working.

And you wouldn’t be here.

Stop trying to score metaphorical three-pointers. Just go for the lay-up instead. Go for two instead.

Or — shoot 10,000 practice balls a week or a month first…
And then come back and try that surgical strike nonsense.

But until you are a surgeon, don’t do surgery. Do simple, easy, amateur things instead. And don’t do them well. Do them well enough. Like government work.

“But government work is schyte-ballz!”, you say. No, it isn’t. Depends on the government. Japanese government work is pretty awesome. It gets done. I can think of some other gubmits that also do good work, and some that recently started doing good work. Is it perfect work? No. But since when did you start demanding such ridiculous standards of human beings? If you’re living in a country where you can read this, your gubmit is prolly doing pretty decent work. Having lived around the world, I notice that one of the differences between a good country and bad one (to live in) isn’t how well certain things are done but whether they are done at all. It’s not 1 to 100. It’s 0 or 1. Binary. And more than 0 is 1.

Done at all beats done well. Kinda sorta done beats perfect 0. The only perfection is 0% and 100%. Both tend to be bad for you. In most situations, simply assume you will never reach 100%; you’ll reach 78%, you may reach 95%.

Does that mean speak and make mistakes? No. It means don’t even bother speaking. It means you focus on putting the words in, and let the words come out by themselves. When you don’t know what something means or how to say something, you look it up.

Stop trying to score holes-in-one. Just move the ball closer to the hole. We went from basketball to golf there. Keep up.

Pile up mediocrity. Why? Where’s the dream in that? Where’s the vision in that? Where’s the beauty in that? Where’s the art in that? Why just do a bunch of easy things that are good enough? Isn’t that lazy? Isn’t that the unlived life? Isn’t that dying with your music still inside you? Why not go testicles to the wall with overwhelming force? (You could, but you run out of testicles rather fast — most human beings have two or less, so you need to oscillate and recover like a motherlover).

“A twenty-minute walk that I do is better than the four-mile run that I don’t do.”

Why pile up mediocrity?

Because a pile of mediocrity isn’t mediocre. Mediocrity accumulated is transcendent. Perfectionism is the siren path to nowhere but pain and perdition. And even excellence is not the path to excellence. You don’t get to excellence by being excellent, you get to excellence by moving. Mediocrity is the path to excellence. I would even go so far as to say that it is the only path(set) worth your consideration because, while all paths may end in death, this one doesn’t contain death. People who are willing to shrug off mistakes don’t kill themselves.

Just because we can conceptualize perfection, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. It’s an idea that needs to go. Lest you think this is age mellowing me out and softening me up, it’s not (not that mellowing out wouldn’t be a good thing for me — it totally would). Perceptions notwithstanding, it is only this kind of mellowness that even makes the apparent extremeness of AJATT possible (trivial example: if you’re going to be doing Japanese all the time, you can’t be choosy about its “quality” or difficulty or “educationalness”). I had to mellow out to get here in the first place, and I have to mellow out to stay “here”. AJATT may be a hot-headed philosophy, but it’s very much a controlled heat: it’s stoves and pilot lights, not fire and brimstone.

Verily, I say unto you, it was the rejection of perfection that led me to such great heights so fast in Japanese, that took me out of “100 kanji hell” and to an imperfect knowledge of thousands of kanji. It is the rejection of perfection that created and keeps this site alive, because if I’d insisted on perfect (which is what I wanted), it’d be either undone or deleted, like so many great websites of friends, acquaintances and strangers, like so many unwritten books that are being “worked on”; I see many of these and I want to scream: “Let it out! Let it go! Let it be mediocre!”

What about Apple? What about the iPhone? Wasn’t Steve Jobs a perfectionist? Didn’t perfectionism in his work kill him (it was prolly perfectionism in his diet, but we’ll leave that argument to the experts and people willing to court controversy) — but also lead to perfect devices?

Oh yeah, ’cause no SD card slot, no Ethernet port, iTunes music transfer so bad it made me get an Android Sony Walkman for mp3s, and constant upgrade/connectivity issues? Real perfect.

Don’t get me wrong: I love my iOS devices and they’ve changed my life — the iPad is the only ereader that really seems get the job done for me, not any of the Kindles, not the Surface, not any Android tablet (their touchscreens are just too unreliable; software UIs too fiddly) — they allow me to be an avid reader without the burden of lugging books across the planet (or being forced into sedentarism in order to be near my books). But they’re not perfect, never have been and never will be. No doubt they’ll improve, though. Protopia not utopia, and all that.

The only reason there are new things is because old things can be improved. And the reason they can be improved is because they have things that sucked about them. Everything human beings have ever made — and many things we didn’t — has something that sucks about it. And the reason why is because that’s all we can do in finite time — produce things that are imperfect, that are better than nothing. As Dan S. Kennedy often says, the deadline is the greatest of all human inventions, because it made all other inventions possible.

Sure, if we had infinite time we might do infinitely well — perfectly. But that would also mean things would take infinitely long. And so, quite literally, nothing would ever get done or made. And that’s exactly where perfectionism leads: to nothing and nowhere.

Show me a failed author and I’ll show you someone who tries to write masterpieces, instead of just writing. Show me a failed programmer and I’ll show you someone who tries to write good programs, instead of ones just work. Show me a failed salesman and I’ll show you someone who tries to break sales records instead of just prospecting. Stephen King writes like a factory worker, man. Like a bricklayer. He’s not a hipster on a Mac at Starbucks with a “creative process” and 50 social media tabs open in his browser.

Our universe is made up of pieces so small that they do not matter. They’re not even mediocre. They’re sub-microscopic and sub-mediocre. We can’t see them and we don’t care about them. What’s an atom between friends, right? Even particle physicists don’t care about them — they care about the principles that govern their interactions; they don’t care about actual, individual atoms, and neither should you.

But a pile of these pieces of our universe matters a great deal. Mediocrity wants you to focus on these pieces (focus, that is, but not care), largely ignore the pile ¹, and use their natural properties and laws of interaction to let them come together on their own, rather than simply forcing them together in a fit of futile rage, like you’re wanting to right now.

Mediocrity is not your enemy. Stopping is your enemy. Zero-ocrity is your enemy. Perfection is your enemy. Mediocrity means sustainable, doable progress, and progress is your friend. Mediocrity is your friend. Mediocrity wants to cut you some slack. Mediocrity wants to allow you to be human.

Will you let her in? Will you let her be your friend? Will you let her take you out on the town?

Or are you going to sit around, doing nothing, hating yourself, waiting for Perfect like she’s Godot?

Your call.

PS: Something broke so I can’t link this post to other posts that I wanted to. And now I’ve literally had to take my own advice. Cool, huh?

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• Mediocre Excellence: How To Achieve Greatly By Doing Almost Nothing

“What would be really interesting to see…is how beautiful things grow out of s##t. Because nobody ever believes that. Everybody thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head—they’d somehow appeared there and formed in his head—before he, and all he had to do was write them down and they would kind of be manifest to the world. But I think what’s so interesting, and what would really be a lesson that everybody should learn is that things come out of nothing, things evolve out of nothing.

If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have these wonderful things in their head, but you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life, where you can say, ‘well, I know that things come from nothing very much, and start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.’

You know, the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest, and then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. And I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that that’s how things work.”

Brian Eno [Emphasis Added]

“We take greater pains to persuade others we are happy than in trying to think so ourselves.”
Confucius (supposedly)

“You can do anything if you stop trying to do everything”
Oliver Emberton

“We are more interested in making others believe we are happy than in trying to be happy ourselves.”
François de la Rochefoucauld

The idea I’m about to share with you, like pretty much every idea I’ve ever shared with you, sits on that fine line between profundity and obviousness. So, either it’s going to sound really deep or too obvious to go without saying. My own personal experience is that, in many contexts, obvious things need to be said. “Common sense isn’t common”, as one AJATTeer once put it. And even if we “know” something, we need to hear it many times in many ways until we actually start to live it.

If you think about it, that’s why parents worry so much about their kids running with a bad crowd. You’re not gonna…well, you’re highly unlikely to pick up any bad habits from just one outing with a bad crowd. Or even two. Or even three! In fact, you’ll probably have fun. But over time, you’ll become desensitized to their attitudes, to their behavior. Their worldview will become yours and their behavior will become yours. This is not simply true of bad behavior; it’s true of all behavior. The process is subtle and gradual but inexorable. You become like the people and ideas you spend time with.

Crap! Two paragraphs in and I already said something obvious! And it’s not even the thing I want to talk about today. OK, back on topic. Don’t take parenting advice from me, by the way, I only have cats.

In my life so far, I’ve tried many things. Projects. Initiatives. Schemes. Experiments. A lotta experiments. And I’ve found that there is one mindset, one way of doing things that always (despite appearances) seems to work best. For want of a better name, I call this mindset “mediocre excellence”.

“Mediocre excellence” (mediocrellence? lol); I love how oxymoronic it sounds. At the same time, it’s hard ¹ for me to explain what it looks like, let alone what if feels like, but I know when I’m doing it and I know what it is and I know what it feels like. It’s just…hard for me to put into words. I’m going to use words to try to describe it to you, but these words will not work 100% because this is something that transcends description, or at least my powers of description.

Another name for mediocre excellence would be “functional excellence“ ². Mediocre excellence is about doing what works. Not doing what’s perfect, or even what’s good, or even what’s “right”, but what works. It’s about doing what’s good enough. Mediocre excellence is about executing simple, concrete, obvious actions and processes, perhaps best encapsulated in the famous Jim Rohn maxim: “[Success is easy…but] the things that are easy to do are easy not to do”.

The word “mediocre” has negative connotations. This is a deliberate word choice on my part because it is essential that you disabuse yourself of the notion that doing difficult things or doing wonderful things or big things will get you results. No, doing not-nothings is what gets you results. All those other things just get you tired.

mediocre  (md–kr)
adj.
Moderate to inferior in quality; ordinary. See Synonyms at average.

“Mediocre”. It’s usually used as an insult. This is good. Things need to be so small, so easy that you insult your intelligence; they insult your sense of scale, your sense of propriety; they even insult your aesthetic sense. People should look down on you a bit. If people aren’t looking down on you, there’s probably a problem.

The mediocrity is in doing things that are so easy, that they cause you no pain. So easy that they cause you no strain. So easy that you can’t believe they count. So easy that you almost (or totally) doubt that they even help. Here are some examples, although there exist many more ³:

• 10,000 sentences (when it was the core method): (“What? All I do is read them aloud?! But that’s TOO EASY!!!”)
• Turning on a Chinese cartoon and leaving it on (“but I’m not even paying attention!”).
• Using only one earphone instead of two (because you can’t be bovvered)

It’s about taking actions that are so far within your ability to take that you…yeah, you get it. So there’s basically no comfort zone departure. You are working fully within your ability. No stretch. You stretched when you chose a language you weren’t born into. No more stretching required. I’m reminded of an article I once read, an interview with the coach of Japan’s national synchronized swimming team, and she said (I paraphrase): “I train my girls to give 80%. Because you’re not going to be able to give 100% in a real match, so we train at and for 80%”. Maybe that quote doesn’t hit you like it hit me, but…in world where people say things that “110%”; it was freightrainful of fresh air . My muscles relaxed just reading it.

So, where does the excellence come in? Well, it turns out that the “magic”, if I might be so bold, is in the process. It’s kind of like how digging ditches gives you Greek god statue muscles; you weren’t trying to look statuesque; it just happened. You just wanted, I dunno, beer and comics and tuition money for the summer. The process made it happen. The process made you(r body) beautiful. The magic is indirect and imperceptible. You don’t force or control it directly; you guide it; you influence it. So it’s not like scoring a try in rugby where you’re there and you’ve got the ball and you take the ball over the line and you put it down all nice and firm.

Now, this may seem at odds with all the AJATT talk of going “all out” and” in it to win it” and “do moderation in moderation“, but I assure you, it works…kinda. More or less. It hangs together. The trick in all this is sticking around long enough for Nature to do its work, to work its magic.

You don’t have to have to work to make your heart beat or digest your food or even grow hair/taller. It’s not a conscious process. You don’t have to work but you do have to help. You support the process by, well, making sure you don’t die. You do that by not stepping into traffic, not jumping off buildings and not going into rooms where you can’t see or hear Japanese . It’s so easy that you don’t even think about it, but that doesn’t mean you’re not doing anything.

Hmmm…I still don’t feel like I’ve communicated it to you yet and we’re kinda treading old ground all over again. Let’s try again…

Mediocre excellence is all about:

• Obvious — doing the obvious
  • What’s staring me in the face?
  • What opportunities are available to me?
  • What can I think of to do?
• Easy — doing the easy
  • What’s would be easy for me to do now?
  • What would be fun to do right now?
  • What wouldn’t require much effort/energy?
• Convenient — doing what’s convenient, what’s at hand
  • What’s do I have the tools to do right now?

It escapes me now who said it or where I read it, but there was this guy, I think he may have been French and old school (pre-20th century) and he said, basically, that ordinary people try to do what they can’t do but heroes just do what they can do. And, again, that’s the mediocrity part. You’re always doing things within your ability to do. You only do things you have the tools, energy and desire to do at the time. And so on the surface, this is incredibly mediocre. Nothing earth-shattering is happening.

You only do things you have the tools, energy and desire to do at the time. You don’t try to surf the Internet when you’ve got no Internet connection. You don’t try to read books in the shower. You don’t try to do kanji reps in your sleep. You don’t try to concentrate when you’re tired. You don’t try to pick up ice with chopsticks. You don’t try to thread proverbial needles when you’re too sleepy to focus. You do only what is easy, convenient and obvious at the time. Steven Johnson would call this working within the “adjacent possible“. It’s so small and incremental, like climbing up and down steps, that you have no sense of difficulty or effort or amazingness or even progress. It’s just the thing within arm’s reach. It’s just the next step.

mediocre (ˌmi diˈoʊ kər)
adj.
of only ordinary or moderate quality; barely adequate.
[French médiocre, from Latin mediocris : medius, middle]

Mediocre excellence is all about identifying and then choosing these ridiculously easy, ridiculously doable things. Mediocre excellence is also about avoiding the temptation to fly up the steps because it would look cooler. In my personal experience, this is the biggest pitfall, bigger even than a failure to appreciate that small things add up, that dust can pile up into a mountain (to quote a Japanese saying), is the desire to look cool by doing big, hard, complex things flawlessly. To “show” “the world” that you’re “trying”.

Don’t be fooled by my scruffy clothes and soft voice. It’s all a front. I am positively plagued by a desire to look cool; there is a part of me that is still trying to impress people from first grade (not to mention high school and second grade and total strangers in the street)! It’s there. And it’s stupid. And I’ve learned to suppress/ignore/avoid/bypass it in certain contexts but not yet in all situations and certainly not at all times. Which is not to say that you should hide your practice (i.e. do your reps, shadowing and CCSing in private), because that’s the same coolness desire in a different form; it’s just the countersignaling version of the same thing.

Mediocre excellence is about getting off your own back and letting it go because good enough is good enough. And more than 0 is good enough. Don’t try to be amazing, just be. There. Doing It. Showing up. You won when you showed up. There’s nothing left to prove.

Mediocre excellence is about recognizing that:

1. Most things in life aren’t important, and therefore don’t need doing
2. A few things in life are important and but (new word )
3. The important things are better done badly — mediocrely — than left undone. A bad or half-buttocked job beats 0 every time. Better to drink tap water than no water. Better to breathe even stuffy air than no air.

And, yes, “they” might laugh at you. You might become a laughingstock. But what of it? We’re all maggot food anyhow. What do you care what other maggot food thinks? ⁴ Most likely people will be indifferent. More importantly, don’t make the situation worse by giving yourself difficult things to do. Enjoy the mediocrity. Don’t try so hard to be cool that you end up hating your own life.

I’m totally still talking about getting used to Japanese, by the way . Don’t try to take a “life lesson” or some other such scrap away from this. I won’t let you!

Um…yeah…still doesn’t quite get it across. I haven’t…ugh. The feeling of mediocre excellence. How relaxing it is. How liberating. How easy. From what I’ve been able to observe of him, I think B. F. Skinner (my favorite psychologist of all time) was a mediocre excellence type of guy. Just running simple, straightforward experiments (mediocre — anybody could do it; anybody could understand it) and then seeing and getting profound results (excellence — his name lives on etc.). But you know what? Whatever. This is good enough.

Mediocre excellence doesn’t get it right and doesn’t get it done; mediocre excellence gets it started. Mediocre excellence never tries to get it right the first time. Mediocre excellence never tries to get it done in one shot. Mediocre excellence just tries to get closer with each shot ⁵. Mediocre excellence whips up a temporary solution and improves it gradually.

Since mediocre excellence isn’t about doing big, hard things, it shouldn’t surprise you that it’s not about doing clever, brave things either. So you don’t need to be or act like your favorite movie heroes, Captain Kirk (brave) and Khan Noonien Singh (clever). At best, you get to be cheeky. Yeah, that’s it. Mediocre excellence is “cheeky”. Bravery and cleverness are finite and domain-dependent. Cheekiness goes everywhere. Cheek is perhaps brave, but in a cowardly, understated way; it’s sometimes clever, but in a dumb, non-self-conscious way. That’s what you want. Or not, I dunno — I haven’t really thought this part through ⁶ .

If you were to ask me: “what is the guiding philosophy of AJATT in two words?”, I would say “mediocre excellence”. Not because I woudn’t like to to be more perfect or more impressive, but because mediocrity is sustainable. ⁷ And what’s sustained, grows. And what grows, well, gets big. And big things — big vocabularies, for example — look like excellence, look like magic, look like genius, look like skill. And maybe they are but, all you’re ever doing is what’s obvious, easy and convenient at the time.

No push. No harshness. Never break a sweat. Don’t let your conscience be your guide; your conscience is a crap guide: it’s been co-opted; it’s been compromised; it’s been socialized; it’s been ASMized ⁸. It will only lead you to self-loathing and struggle for the sake of struggle. You accomplish the great thing, an “everything” (a functional approximation of “everything”), not necessarily by doing nothing (although…there’s certainly a place for that), but by doing things that feel like nothing.

The biggest hurdle is not quality but quantity ¹. Specifically the quantity known as 0. It’s not doing things badly that’s the problem, it’s not doing them at all.

So stop trying do things well. Stop trying to do things better. Stop giving a fucare about how well you’re doing the thing (I’m thinking of language immersion here, but perhaps the idea applies somewhat more widely). You weren’t even gonna do it five minutes ago, now you’re worried about doing a good job?! No. It’s too early for that.

And by the time it’s not too early for it, you’ll be so good that you don’t have to worry about quality. So there.

“Well” will do itself. All you need do is the “do” part. Do something badly, do anything, timebox it for like a minute and then be done, because there are worse things than bad. Sure, 1% isn’t as awesome as 100%, but 0% is even worse. 0 is even worse.

0 is insidiously evil; it’s like an asymptomatic rot invisibly eating away at your life and projects, because when you do 0 you can convince yourself that you’re holding an ace up your sleeve and it’s just a matter of you haven’t played it yet. 0 gives the illusion of infinite possibility, where 1 is clearly a 1; the wave function has collapsed and it can’t be more, it can’t even coulda been more; it just is what it is.

Say no to 0. Do something. Anything. Any. Thing. Now. Play that Japanese. But don’t play Japanese that’s good for you. Don’t play something you “should” learn. Don’t should all over yourself — you do not have mental or physical bandwidth to do the right thing, let alone a right thing or even a good thing, all you can do is something. Don’t even bother to make sure the volume is up all the way; don’t bother make sure it loops forever; just play it. Now.

Most if not all human beings are good. Especially women; I say a lot of mean things about the wenches ², but women are great. It seems to me that women and nice men always want to do the morally right thing. All the women I interact with on a regular basis, from Mormons to Buddhists to atheists, practice the same moral philosophy: relentless niceness. Always afraid to do something easy or fun or that would make someone else feel bad; always doing things the hard way; always with the busywork.

A German kid named Albert once said that: “[i]t has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” Well, what he neglected to mention that was that our humanity, our morality, long ago exceeded our energy. Your sense of righteousness is writing cheques that your body can’t cash. Stop trying to do things right, start doing them at all. The “right” thing may be the hard thing, but only the easy and fun thing actually works because you’re only gonna actually (consistently) do the easy and fun thing.

“Much mischief results from our taking a moral position on matters which are not basically moral matters at all.” ~ Maxwell Maltz

“More defeats and failures are due to mental blindness than to moral deviations.” ~ Raymond Holliwell

「不管白貓黑貓，能抓到老鼠就是好貓」 “It doesn’t matter whether it’s a white cat or a black cat; a cat that catches mice is a good cat.” ~ Deng XiaoPing ¹

“Dude. Enough quotes already.” ~ Imaginary Quote Complaint Guy

Within the narrow sphere of learning (getting used to) a language…

…any plan that requires you to become a better person in order to work is a bad plan.

Now, this may sound strange coming from someone who reads so much personal development (“self help”) literature and says such self improvementy things on his Twitter, and tells you to believe in yourself. But the more I read and the more I live, the more I’m convinced that it’s true. Looking back, anything I’ve ever done that worked fabulously, did so because I chose a better process. I never rose to the occasion, I simply boarded an elevator. The elevator did the rising: I was just there.

Don’t improve yourself. Stop trying to become a better person. It won’t work; it’s not worth it and you don’t need to. Perhaps you are bad person ². But even if you are, you’re still good enough. Not good. Good enough. Adequate. You’ll do. Just like how any decent stainless steel fork is good enough as a fork. Is it sterling silver? Can it make phone calls? No. But can you eat food with it and do anything that a fork needs to do? Most certainly. It’s even a respectable weapon. I don’t think this fork needs to sit around hating itself because it’s not silver.

The proverbial hole will take any shape and you’re any shape. You don’t improve yourself. You improve your processes. A better process, or method or sequence of choices and environment settings. You’ll stay the same. All your flaws will still be there, visible under the microscope you insist on looking through. But you’ll get amazing results. And it won’t be luck and it won’t be chance and it won’t be magic. It’ll be good processes. Good systems.

And the best part is, you don’t even have to make your own system. You can just buy, borrow or remix other people’s. That’s the beauty of something like Neutrino; you don’t become a better person; you don’t become more “disciplined” in the common sense of the word; you start here, you shuffle an atom‘s distance over there. That’s it. Start where you are, work with what you’ve got. Repeat. End of story.

Let’s let Earl Nightingale get a word in edgeways here:

“The problem is that our mind comes as standard equipment at birth. It’s free. And things that are given to us for nothing, we place little value on. Things that we pay money for, we value.

The paradox is that exactly the reverse is true. Everything that’s really worthwhile in life came to us free — our minds, our souls, our bodies, our hopes, our dreams, our ambitions, our intelligence…All these priceless possessions are free.

But the things that cost us money are actually very cheap and can be replaced at any time.” [Emphasis added]

You haven’t dropped the ball: you are the ball. Without you, there is no game. $500,000 will get you a Rolls Royce Phantom or a particularly nice watch; it can’t even get you a prosthetic pinkie ³ that works as well as a so-called “regular one”. You come with built-in machinery that learns languages and heals itself; Siri can’t even reliably do computer stuff for you. ⁴

And you’re prepared to call yourself a loser and a failure and a bad person because what? Over what? Because you missed a move in someone else’s game? Really? You’re going to throw your king — you — under a bus to save a pawn…from a different game on a different board with a different chess-set?

Good move.

Method over morality. You don’t suck. Your processes suck. Don’t improve yourself. Improve your processes. Do not become a better person. Stay the way you are. Just make slightly better choices each time. ⁵

“if you’re reading a book that’s killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren’t enjoying a television programme”

“if you don’t read the classics…nothing bad will happen to you; more importantly, nothing good will happen to you if you do)”

Thus spake Nick Hornby.

If the method you’re using to learn (=get used to) a language makes you feel righteous, it’s a bad method.

Your language-learning method should make you feel guilty. It should make you feel bad. It should make you feel a little dirty. Like learning English by watching Jersey Shore. 

Will you end up talking weird? Yes, you might. I went through a phase where I could only speak Japanese like the juvenile delinquent high schoolers in Gokusen＝ごくせん＝極先（→極道（の）先生）, who are more or less equivalent in verbal sophistication to the Jersey Shore kids. . It was little things like 「マジかよ」…" id="return-note-7407-1" href="#note-7407-1">¹

Why is that OK? Because my speech was native-like. Did it need fixing? Yeah. But fixing aesthetically displeasing, native-like speech takes all of 2 weeks. Fixing non-native-like speech is much harder. And Fixing a total inability to speak brought about by “source perfectionism” — the whole “I will only speak the Japanese of sushi-eating virgins who were born on the foothills of Mount Fuji between dawn and sunrise on January 1 during a solar eclipse in a lunar leap year” that a lot of schooled people get into? Well…you can’t fix a car that doesn’t exist.

If you’re proud of yourself for the book you’re reading, if you’re proud of yourself for getting through so many pages, then it’s a bad book. You shouldn’t be proud of getting through the book, you should be feeling bad that you’re running out of book. You shouldn’t be proud of yourself for watching “classic” 黒澤明/KUROSAWA Akira movies…you should be getting titillated by the sex and violence ². In fact, you should be fast-forwarding to the sex and violence.

Why should you feel naughty? Why should you feel like you’re getting away with something bad — like cutting class…you know, skiving school? Well, there are many reasons, including (but not limited to) efficiency, effectiveness, sustainability. I won’t cover them all ‘coz I can’t be bovvered but I will tell you talk a bit about the ones that are easy to explain. Basically, it goes like this (I feel like Paul Graham waxing techno-philosophical here ):

Effectiveness
Work that looks and feels hard pays in personal and social recognition; you get gold stars from yourself and society simply for being seen doing it. But work that looks and feels and is generally indistinguishable from play has to earn its keep; it has to (ultimately) get results. Any wageslave can walk into a swanky restaurant well-dressed, but it takes a real wealthy person with real charm to turn up in sweatpants. No one will fault you for taking a boring Japanese class even though they never freaking work, but if all you do is watch Samurai Champloo and eat Pocky all day, you will almost certainly have to answer for your playtime with some mad skillz.

Sustainability
Simple story, bro:  Guilty → Fun → Addictive  → Continue → Pwn

Efficiency
No decorative towels here. Since you’re focussed more on your fun than on social convention, you both shed and also outright avoid all kinds of dead weight. This means that all your tools have to earn their keep (you can tell I’m loving this phrase) — they actually have to contribute by making you want to use and interact with them. No boring textbooks for showing off to strangers at Starbucks. So, yeah, pretty much a rehash of the effectiveness argument. You get what you pay for, playa. Lay off me!

In closing! You shouldn’t feel guilty when you’re not doing Japanese ³. No, you should feel guilty when you’re doing Japanese. Right during the act. And not that “oh no I suck” guilt. You want “OMG I can’t believe I get to do this I hope nobody sees me and I totally skimmed through these manga without looking up any words and oh crap I have a final project to do but I’ve spent the whole day in bed watching Samurai Champloo instead” guilt. If you’re feeling righteous, you’re doing it wrong.

“…beautiful things grow out of s##t”
~Brian Eno, Composer

Adults focus too much on technique and too little on volume. Too much on technique and too little on frequency. Too much on technique, too little on consistency. Too much technique, too little exposure.

There’s a word for this in Japanese (isn’t there always?). Well, a phrase: それ以前の問題(それいぜんのもんだい/sore izen no mondai). It means: “Dude, that’s not even your freaking problem”. It means: “Dude, you don’t even have the precursors to be having that problem”.

You go to the rink. Everyone’s freaking out about skating right, knee bend, not falling, going backwards. Good. Great. That’s nice. But you know what? None of that is an issue because most people — adults and children — simply have not skated enough ice kilometers, have not been on the ice enough times, for their technique to be an issue. It’s それ以前の問題.

You go to any discussion about how to “learn” (i.e. get used to) Japanese. Real life or online, take your pick: they’re equally asinine. There’s always a sizeable faction of richardheads waiting to whip out their junk and mind-molest you with the idea that “anime is bad for your Japanese”.

‘TF? Yeah, and maybe yellow isn’t a good color for that homeless guy’s skin tone, but you know what? That’s not even his freaking problem.  Sore izen no mondai, son. First, he needs a coat. You can go all Queer Eye on him later.

A recklessly adventurous Frenchman has been lost in the North African desert for five days without water. You find him in his car, lips chapped. Sunburned beyond French recognition. He’s been drinking  his own urine since Wednesday. He turns to you and goes “please, water, s’il vous plaît”. You reach into your bag and hand him a bottle of Volvic. And he looks up, smiles and goes “Mmmmyeah, I’m more an Evian man. Volvic’s kinda bitter.”

Crazy, right? Insane, right? Impossible, right? Madness ¹, right?

I wish it were. The truth is, crap like this happens every day. Thirsty, pee-drinking Frenchmen rejecting Volvic left and right.

You are a pee-drinking Frenchman. Yes, you. I am a pee-drinking Frenchman. We are all pee-drinking Frenchmen. Even chicks. You’ve been living in a Japaneseless desert your whole life until now. No water — no Japanese — to drink. Not a drop. But now you’ve reached this massive oasis. It’s called Japanese pop culture. It’s got all kinds of flavors — manga, anime, videos of your Mom, I dunno.

And some faggot ²fellow of questionable awesomeness on the Internet is telling you not to drink the water because “it’s got sugar in it; it’s fattening”. And you’re going to listen to him?

Do you know why kids get good at things? I’ll tell you why. Because they don’t know how to get into their own way yet. And adults — parents — are generally so happy to have the “rugrats” ³ out of sight and out of trouble that they just leave them alone; they don’t interfere. They don’t start teaching technique unless and until the kids have a foundation of play and raw exposure.

Yukio FURUICHI puts it best. Apparently, he’s really good at English. He learned AJATT/AntiMoon style — by watching Friends. A lot of Japanese adults come to him for advice on how to learn (i.e. “get used to” English). They want methods and tools and techniques and tips and pointers and hacks. He tells them (I’m paraphrasing): your problem isn’t technique. It wouldn’t matter which method you used: none of them would work, because you simply physically have not been and are not being exposed to enough English. Your raw exposure time[, volume and frequency] is pitiful.

First of all, anime is fine for your Japanese. Trust me. Ask my friends who are learning Hebrew: they wish they had anime. If you’re into anime, watch the heck out of it. But even if anime were bad for your Japanese — which it isn’t — but even if it were…you are that homeless guy freaking out over wallpaper colors. Beige or off-white? Who PHEQUING cares? それ以前の問題だろ！Get a house first. Get exposed to Japanese first. Be a jerk about wallpaper later.

Does this make sense? Am I making sense? I’m still standing here with my keyboard on my lap (standing with my keyboard on my lap, yes…crazy anatomy here). I’m still sitting here with my junk in my hand, because…because I know I haven’t quite gotten across to you what’s in my head here. And I don’t know that I can; I don’t know if I can, but…I’m gonna try anyway.

Are you going to willingly starve to death unless you get caviar? I mean, does it have to be slimy, salty fish eggs for you or nothing else (!!!)? Because that’s what most people who are rejecting anime and showing up and passive listening are doing. Please, at least consider this tuna sandwich. Consider this bottle of Evian.

Supposedly, there’s some form of “real”, “proper”, “correct”, “gourmet”, perfect, inhumanely slaughtered veal/foie gras/Fendi-mink-chinchilla-rabbit-mix-fur-stole version of Japanese that exists somewhere, and nothing but this form of Japanese will do, and anime definitely the HECK isn’t it and if you don’t have that exact Fendi stole then you might as well freeze to death; you might as well kill your Japanese baby; you might as well let Japanese die for you.

That kind of junk is what grown-ups do every day.

Stop trying to skate right. Just go to the rink. Quality comes from quantity, not the other way around. Quality is the cream that bubbles up from quantity. Awesomeness comes from mediocrity — mediocre- and even crap-looking regularity and showing up. Cream comes from milk.

Don’t do well. Don’t do it right. One is better than none. Just show up.

“All failure comes from trying too hard.” / NAKATANI Akihiro

1 is bigger than 0.

Obvious, I know. Common sense, I know. But common sense isn’t common. Common sense is the least common of the senses, as other people have pointed out.

1 is bigger than 0. How often we forget this simple fact.

You know how it is. We all learn about mathematical concepts like negative numbers — which were probably considered a wild and crazy idea at one time, and perhaps for good reason — so we tend to think of 1 as only being slightly bigger than 0.

But it’s not. ¹

In RL ², 1 isn’t just slightly bigger than 0. 1 is infinitely bigger than 0. That means it’s not just a matter of 1 > 0 (1 is greater than 0). 1 ≫ 0 (1 is much greater than 0). Because 1 is the start of everything. While 0 is the path to nothing. No matter how many 0’s you string together, you get nothing. But a bunch of 1’s adds up. A bunch of 1’s, multiplied by a bunch of time, adds up. And it doesn’t just add up — it even compounds, like interest.

0 is a white shirt. 1 is a blue stain. 100 is a red stain. 1 is much closer to 100 than it is to 0. No, 0 isn’t even a shirt. It’s a transparent Ziploc bag. No, it’s not even that. It’s a vacuum. 0 is the total absence of existence. Add 0 to anything and…you get the same anything. Add 0 (nothing) to 0 (nothing) and you get…nothing.

The current evidence from places like Swaziland suggests that humans have had math for some 35,000 years, give or take. Yet for most of human history, we didn’t have the number 0. Apparently, mathematicians in Greece and Egypt were like: “Dude, how the FXXX can nothing be something?!”. The entire Roman empire ³ started, rose, declined and fell all without the number 0. Engineers in ancient Rome implemented public works projects — roads, aqueducts, indoor plumbing, massive buildings — on a scale and to a standard that was not equaled in Europe until about last Tuesday ⁴…without 0. We’re talking about people who had to write the number “2347” as “MMCCCXLVII”.

Here — count to 0. Where’s your zero finger? 0 is a very weird number-slash-concept. It sits next to ⁵ 1 on the real number line ⁶, but the real number line, names notwithstanding, isn’t “real”. In content and character, 0 is nothing like 1 or any other number. 0 is not of this world; it is of the math world.

So when you do 0, you’re not just doing slightly less than 1. Doing nothing is of a fundamentally different character than doing something. And doing something is of a fundamentally different character than doing nothing. Something (1, etc.) and nothing (0) are not the same; they’re not friends; they’re not neighbors; they’re not cousins; they don’t know each other; they don’t even live in the same universe.

It’s not doing too little that kills you(r projects). It’s doing nothing. No need to hit home-runs. No need to hit 100. Go easy. Take it easy. No need to swing with all your might. Screw that. Just bunt it. Just do 1. Right here. Right now. No big deal. No fanfare. No parade.

Don’t listen to Japanese. Just play a Japanese song and turn up the volume.

Just do 1.

Don’t do a good job, do a job.

Don’t get it right.

Don’t get it done.

Get it started.

It’s not surgery. Yes, you can be this lax and still win. I did. Nice, huh?

Don’t aim for perfection. Don’t even aim for excellence. Just aim for “better than nothing”. Aim for “not nothing”. Do “not nothing”. The time-averaged sum of “not nothings” will give you the excellence you seek.

As my good friend Jang Mi once said the other week: “two wrongs don’t make a right, but two halves make a whole” . And a trillion millionths make a million.

“The only time you mustn’t fail is the last time you try.” ~ Charles Kettering

Stop trying to finish things.

The reason you have trouble getting stuff done is because you’re always trying to finish things.

You even write it down: “Finish X”. “Get X done”.

Why does trying to finish things, ironically, lead to failure — and not the good kind of failure (high-momentum, growth-directed failure), but the “yeah, one of these days I’m going to write a novel but until then I’ll keep reading blogs about it and watching Hulu just like I have been for the past 3 years, because last time I tried I wrote 10 pages but they all sucked” kind (do-nothing, zero-momentum, neglect-failure)?

Because when you say “Finish X”, you start to conflate starting it with finishing. Since finishing is what’s on your to-do list, you start to think that doing = finishing. And since the project is big, the doing is big, and if the doing is finishing, well, then, you’d better get some rest now before you even try. Better get in some Hulu. Better relax before the pain. Better have some calm before the storm. Classic avoidance behavior (procrastination).

But you see, the thing is, you can’t finish. It’s not physically possible. “Finish” is not actionable. “Finish” is not an action that you can do. It’s a verb, and verbs are “doing words”, but you can’t do it. The English language is lying to you; it’s obscuring the reality of the situation.

“Start” is an action.  Start you can do.

“Finish” just happens. In that sense it is a verb, but it should really be intransitive — unable to take a direct object. You start something, but it finishes itself. Finishing just happens.

So don’t finish stuff any more. Don’t even try. You never have and you never will.

Instead, start. Start on stuff. Start on it. And then start again on it. And then start again. Start. Put a timebox on it. Start, rest, start again. The more times you start, the more you win.

Start often. In language acquisition, it’s called “play” — there’s actually a button on your iPod for it. Try it. Start. But leave finishing to nature.

Ultimately, I think it comes down to a matter of momentum. What most of us (us = people with running water, electricity and literacy, i.e. the richest people in the world) lack is not vision, skill or resources. It’s momentum. A body at rest tends to stay at rest. You only have momentum by (and when) moving, and you can only be moving if you start. And, generally speaking, you can only start small.

Start. Start early. Start now. Start little. Start often. You’ll win.

“Start little” really doesn’t make sense in this context…anyway, you get the point!

I’m not the first guy to ever write about this kind of thing, not the best, and not the last. But, let’s give it a shot.

I don’t know if that comes out in this blog, but I can actually be a bit of a perfectionist. And this is a bad thing. I have over 300 drafts in my Gmail inbox that are “not quite right” and therefore not sent. I have about 40 long posts for this blog that have yet to see the light of the Internets. There are pages upon pages of comics that have not been put up because they’re “not good enough”.

Are we seeing the pattern here? The problem with perfectionism in all its forms is that…it creates this incredibly high standard, whereby you either meet the standard or you do not do the job at all. Or something like that. And, like, you know, you see the entryway to perfectionism in statements like “do it properly or not at all”. I used to love that phrase but now I freaking hate it. No, now I say “do it”.

When I look at how most of my projects were failing, it wasn’t from half-donkeyedness. No, it was from sadness brought about by standards that were functionally impossible to meet in anything but ideal conditions. My projects weren’t dying from chronic malnutrition, they were dying from outright starvation (preceded by some guilt-induced starve-binge cycles). And when I say project death, I mean everything starting from the daily level to the long term (since a long term project is nothing but a sequence of daily tasks and sub-projects anyway, but more on that later).

One of my largest continuing projects is the Japanese/Chinese project. And part of that involves doings my daily SRS reps. I noticed that I generally either did 0 reps or all my reps, but rarely anything in between. Multiple consecutive days of 0 reps were starting to eat away at my conscience and no doubt my skill. Why? Because I always set out with the goal to do…all my reps. Listen to Chinese every available waking hour. This is a good goal in terms of being noble. But sucky in terms of fragility. Because stuff happens.

Stuff happens. And when it does, people (well, I) tend to throw in the towel. “All or nothing”, remember? And…this is bad. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Some days you’re tired, the end is so far, yeah, you do your reps but you’re not fluent yet. So what do you do?

Do 1 rep. Just one.

Lower your standards. As Tony Robbins once said, make it easy to make you happy; lower the threshold at which you will say “yes, I am pleased”. Why? Because the more you relax the conditions for you to be happy, the more of the time you will be happy. And, ironically, by extension, the more productive you will be.

Think of when you do something bad, something that wastes time. No one ever goes “right, I’m going to smoke 37 kilograms of crack today”. Or “right, I’m going to spend the next 72 hours surfing the Internet with no sleeping or showers”. No. It’s always one more game. Just one. One more hit. Click on one more link. One more round. One more bottle of whatever it is people drink. One more round.

When you decide to do one of any small thing, inevitably you find it’s easy. In the case of things like drugs and gambling, it doesn’t seem to hurt, maybe it even seems fun. So you go on. In the case of something good, like doing your SRS reps…it’s exactly the same. So rather than say “I’m going to do x00 reps today”, just say “I’m going to do one. And take it from there”.

I was standing at a train station the other day. And the overhead announcement goes: “間も無く、2番線に、快速電車成田空港行きが到着します。” [“the rapid train to Narita Airport will be arriving soon”]. And I went, “だったら、到着しろよ。” [“well then, ARRIVE already!”] just to be funny. And it struck me right then that generally, at an everyday level, in terms of the small things we succeed at every day, we don’t so much talk about arriving somewhere as we do about going there. We don’t write down in our daily planner “ARRIVE at the supermarket”, we write “GO to the supermarket”. But in terms of the bigger things that we seem to fail at — like doing our language practice or making a kajillion euros — the goal statement is often too big and not backed by the baby steps that compose our entire lives.

So don’t say “exercise today”. Say “step outside the door” (computer geeks know what I mean: if you’re not careful, outside just doesn’t happen some days — sit in front of the computer one bright and sunny marnin’, and get up about two minutes later and think “what the DARK?!” — especially if there’s enough milk and Frosted Flakes in the house). Don’t say “do homework”. Say “solve one problem”. Don’t say “make a kajillion euros”. Say “make 1 euro”. Don’t try to arrive at your goal. Just try to go there — and congratulate yourself for it: give yourself credit for only getting it partially right, partially done. And I think you will find that the arriving will take care of itself. ‘Cause, think about it, you can’t only give yourself credit for when you get things completely right, or, well, you can and many people do, but that’s a recipe for sadness, especially since most of your life will be spent in the state of working on incomplete projects. So don’t wait to praise yourself for the whole or you’ll be waiting too long, praise yourself for the small, incomplete things you’re doing right here and now.

I’ve often said that someone learning a new language is a baby. Now that I think about it, so is someone doing anything new: and by “new, I mean “for the first time today”. You’re a baby, man. And you were born this morning! Haha. No one yells at a baby trying to walk, telling her that her posture sucks and if she has the audacity to call that bipedal locomotion then well she’d better think twice, Missy, because the Jones’ baby started walking when she was only 6 months old and at this rate she’ll be in the bottom percentile of walkers and she’ll never get into a good kindergarten or good elementary school or high school or college or job and she’ll end up getting pregnant at 11 and marrying an abusive biker and serving jail time for an escalating spiral of antisocial behavior from shoplifting to drug peddling to armed robbery all because she didn’t walk straight when she was a baby! So, give yourself credit for only getting it half right, especially since no one else will. Be your own mother — the loving kind rather than the beauty pageant kind. Goooood! Look at you!