The other day, a good cishet male friend of mine, Dexter Kent (which, and I cannot stress this enough, is not his legal name; and he hasn’t told me what his preferred pronouns are, so, Phuket like Thailand, I’m goin’ in raw) asked me:

“Khatzumoto, no homo, but you are a beautiful man. Your eyes shine like balls of obsidian. Your thighs aren’t big; they’re just the right size — after all, you were just #bornthisway #bodypositivity #lovetheskinyourein #becauseyoureworthit…”

And he actually said the word “hashtag” each time, which, like, weird. Anyway, so he continued:

“But tell me, Oh Khatzumotian one, do you think it’s possible that a person could do all his immersion and all his reps and still not be fluent?”

Dexter is a perfectionist. A killer of SRS decks. A man guilty of deleting entire SRS decks (rather than single bad cards) multiple times. What he was really asking is: “what if I do everything right, everything I’m ‘post [supposed] to do; what if I eat Jhene Aiko’s booty like groceries, and I still don’t become fluent?”

And I told him: first of all, stop making facile rap references in our conversations. It leads to stereotyping. And then I preceded to channel the wisdom of our Lord and Savior, Sean Corey “Jay Z” Carter, consort to the Her Creolic Majesty the Queen Bee, and said this:

“If you’ve got a language problems, I don’t feel bad for you, son. But you don’t actually have any big problem(s). You just have tens of thousands of small ones. Don’t solve big problems. Solve small ones.”

Everybody has problems. Everybody. From Elon Musk to children who stay slumdogs and don’t become millionaires. Everybody has problems. Perhaps even very serious problems.

But nobody actually has big, giant, insoluble problems. Nobody. What they actually have is an abundance, a profusion, a proliferation of teeny, tiny little — and more or less soluble — problems.

Depending on how you count them, these problems number from the high five figures all the way to low eight figures. It just depends on how granular(ly?) you want to go.

Overwhelm comes when we use abstraction (abstract thought) — an ability that is not unique to but is highly developed in humans — against ourselves. All overwhelm is due to a bunching up, a rounding up our problems.

• I’ve got to get my life together
• I’ve got to learn this language
• I’ve got to be neater and cleaner
• I’ve got to wash these dishes
• I’ve got to do the laundry
• I’ve got to write to this person
• I’ve got to write to that person
• I’ve got to write to all these people
• I’ve got to get better at communication

No. Stop. Stop it. Get some help.

Slice. Salami. Your problems may be Xerxes’ Grand Army, but you need to filter them through the Pass of Thermopylae so that you’re only hitting one at a time. Let’s just forget that Thermopylae was actually a Persian victory: historical accuracy be damned straight to heck if it gets in the way of one of my silly metaphors. The point is, a tiny army held off a much larger one because the former thought of a way to negate the latter’s numerical advantage. The lesson is: don’t be an idiot and face your problems head on in a grand field battle. Harass and skirmish them like the wily guerrilla/lone sniper you are.

Guerilla. Small war. Your problems don’t nag you; you nag and nibble at your problems. You booby trap cars and run nighttime sneak attacks under cover of fun against your problems.

Sniper. Ingress. Action. Egress. One man (or woman). One mission. One rifle. One target. One round (hopefully)…at a time. Then you move on to the extraction point.

Do not solve any big problems any more. You are out of the Big Problem game. Retire your jersey. You’re never coming back. Solve teeny tiny problems. Learn the one word (phrase) that is in front of you right now. Nothing else. Here. Now. This problem. Nothing else exists. Nothing else matters.

It is good to think big. We can. We probably should. But remember that we can only act small. We have big brains, but tiny hands. Heavy brains, but light hands. Big lungs, but tiny hands. So think bigly, breathe deeply and do one small thing.

You do not have a big problems. You just have a huge number of tiny, easy problems. A gigantically (but not infinitely) long string of fun, small, easy problems. And what do we call that? A game.

Now go play.

“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad” so said Prometheus, in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Masque of Pandora” (1875).

For AJATT purposes, I would change that to read: “whom the gods would destroy, they first prevent from timeboxing“, or, more generally, “whom the gods would destroy, they first prevent from obeying the principle of proportionality“. The principle of proportionality is more or less the central dogma of John Lewis Gaddis‘ thesis in his more-than-awesome book “On Grand Strategy“, an audio review (by me!) of which you can find here at this link.

Let’s not beat around the bush like a 1970s blue movie: I get overwhelmed easily. Very easily. Painfully easily. I used to think it was just me, but lately I’m beginning to think it’s quite widespread, if not common. It’s definitely not just me. The personal is universal, and all that.

Think of the people — often women, because I love me some casual misogyny lol — whom we describe as drama queens. These people are real. These people exist. These people treat the soiling of a decorative towel with the same gravity as finding out that someone has molested their child — indeed, sometimes, they seem treat them in inverse proportion. These people violate the principle of proportionality on the daily: that is why they’re mad; that is why we mock and dislike them.

So, back to me, I feel overwhelm really easily: I am the drama queen that I mock ¹. Like a tyrant, a mad caesar, I try to command myself to be instantly awesome, to have it all done and perfect right now in fact yesterday or else I’m going to cry and throw a tantrum, motherlover. But when I get that way, I say to myself “remember you are human; even caesar must budget”. There’s a rich history behind that phrase, but I really super duper can’t be bothered to explain it to you myself so I’m going to have someone else explain it to you for me:

“After every major military victory in ancient Rome, a “triumph,” as it was called, was celebrated in Rome. It was a ceremonial procession granted to victorious generals…The victorious general who drove throughout the streets of Rome in the chariot, decorated with gold and ivory, was followed by his troops and preceded by his most glamorous prisoners and spoils, taken in war. The triumph for the victorious general offered extraordinary opportunities for self-publicity and therefore popularity with the people of Rome. The victorious general was seen as, in some way, divine, representing the god Jupiter…One of the most interesting parts of the triumph was that behind the victorious general in the chariot stood a slave, holding a golden crown over his head, and whispering to him throughout the procession, ‘[Memento te hominem esse (remember you are human)]’…reminding him that he is a man even when he is triumphing.”

[In Ancient Rome, a slave would continuously whisper ‘Remember you are mortal’ in the ears of victorious generals as they were paraded through the streets after coming home, triumphant, from battle] [Emphasis Added]

Dr. Mary Beard, of SPQR fame, even has a whole-a$$ book about it:[Amazon.com: The Roman Triumph (9780674032187): Mary Beard: Books]

Even caesar must budget. Even Rome must budget her time, her energies, her resources, her gold, her men. Everybody is a balling on a budget — even if they don’t realize it yet — the only difference is where the decimal point goes. Some budgets are bigger than others, but they are all finite.

Our modern analogue to Roman military power is the United States and its armed forces — easily the most powerful in known human history. But even these are not immune to the laws of physics, of war, of logistics, of proportionality, of time and resource management. Even the American military can lose, would lose, will lose, has lost when it(s civilian leadership) has failed to apportion its goals according to its resources. Even America(‘s military) has to focus, has to narrow down its working target list. Even America must budget.

What is true of the world’s mightiest fighting force, a million men strong, pricier than the ten nearest combined, is darn well true of us as individuals as well. In many essential ways, the folly and wisdom of organizations is just the folly and wisdom of individuals writ large.

The genocidal bigots of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party may have been right ² — the Teutons may well have been the master race — but even master races have to obey higher laws — again, the laws of physics, of war, of logistics, of proportionality, of time and resource management. You can’t just stand around wearing Hugo Boss outfits and flossing about how masterful you are while committing all the textbook errors of Eurasian warcraft.

Even so-called “geniuses” (assuming they exist at all), are subject to these higher laws, are created and destroyed by them. In a very real, direct and brutal (if still highly metaphorical) sense, these laws are our “gods” — everybody, of all religions and none, submits to them and more or less knows that they must submit to them. And if they don’t know, they are “punished”, not for their “sins”, but by them.

Even master races must budget. Budget time, budget money, budget resources, and (most importantly) budget mental and physical energy. Hubris comes for us all, like a cougar in tasteful lingerie, offering drama-free, no-strings-attached…interaction. Be not tempted. You will never be too good for the fundamentals. You will never be too good for the basics. You will never be too good to need to practice Japanese. Nobody is.

I say “even” a lot, don’t I?

We’ve brought up the concept of “sin”. We don’t want to get too moral, though. For best results, strategic calculations should be conducted amorally. The less we moralize, the clearer we think and the better we do. Generally, we want to be amoral in our ratiocination but not in our implementation. ³

So focus. Narrow down. Be here now. Do one and only one thing (even when you multiplex). Wash one dish. One. One thing. One target. Don’t get caught up in wars so long that some of the people now fighting them were not even born when they started. Don’t invade France and Russia at the same time, in fact, don’t invade Russia, period (lol), there is clearly nothing to be gained and everything to be lost by doing so. Don’t be that dog, dawg: you know how some dogs will try to fit gigantic sticks into tiny doorways? Well, that’s us when we don’t focus: we try to fit multiple things into singular moments.

You don’t need to be a “genius” — just marginally smarter than your average dog.

You are, were and will always be human. When you were a child, you were just human. When you did that awesome thing ten years ago, you were human. You are human now. Should you live be ten thousand years old and own your own planet, you will still be human. Still bound, still finite, still fallible. So you need not be nostalgic for a past when you were great, or yearning for a future when you will be great. You need not feel regret for some counterfactual whereby you could have been great. You need not blame yourself for your failings and failures. You are here, now. Live here, now. Work here, now. Play here, now.

You can be, do, have and learn it all. But you can only be, do have and learn one thing right now.

You are real and you are powerful. Your ideas are infinite. Your mind is infinite. But your hands are finite. Ya only got two (hopefully). And only one even writes (typically). So…act like it. Narrow it down. You can do it all, but you can’t do it all now. You can only do one thing now ⁴. Eliminate. Focus. Repeat.

1. Baal, give me strength. German is a beautiful language. What is so wrong with German that the thought that we’d be speaking it (if the wrong public school thug had been Prime Minister of Britain) is a threat? Fundamentally, English is German. Oh no, a different European dialect, hide yo’ wife, hide yo’ kids, kill me now!
   • It’s such an empty threat, it’s like when parents “punish” an introvert by sending him to his room where he has a computer and Internet access not speaking from experience or anything.
2. Conquering imperial powers have forbidden the acquisition of their language and culture as often as they’ve forced it. Back in the first millennium CE, Arab elites didn’t want foreigners to convert to Islam because that would dilute both their exclusivity and their tax base ¹. Similarly, the Dutch made it illegal to teach Dutch in Indonesia.
3. If you want to hunt lions successfully, you’re going to need to become a lion expert. All else being equal, you’ll do a lot better against an opponent that you understand fully than one of whom you know little or (worse) nothing ². And you’ll understand a people a whole lot better if you can speak their language than if you can’t. American elites did not understand the Vietnamese, who they were, or what they truly wanted — and paid dearly for that ignorance in blood, gold and goodwill; Vietnam’s popular leaders were proud, hardy nationalists first and last — Communists by convenience, not conviction. So, the more you hate a group of people, the more time you should spend learning their language and culture.

Invincible opponents only exist in our nightmares. They are the stuff of imagination. No real opponent is invincible. And so that means that for any opponent to defeat you, not only must they do significant things right, but you must also do significant things wrong. Both these things have to maintain.

No nation ever fell purely due to external causes. There was always something inside, some set of flaws. This is liberating — you are free from fear, free from any sense of inferiority. But also sobering — you’re on the hook to win. Freedom comes at the price of responsibility, I guess.

No human language is closed off to you because it’s just too much for your mind and muscles. Will it take time? Hail yeah. But that’s true for all learners; everybody sings for their supper; everybody pays the toll to enter and remain in Languageland. Besides, time’s going to pass anyway. So the real question becomes how you want to orient yourself, how you orient your sails to catch the gusty winds of time as you traverse the ocean of existence. Or something like that.

You can’t control the opponent’s thoughts or actions, but you can control essentially all of your own. Don’t be perfect, just screw up less on the things that matter.

The “opponent” may be a person, project or task. Even an idea. It can be quite metaphorical. The lesson remains the same; concrete ideas scale into the abstract and vice versa — that’s part of what’s so cool about being a human in this universe.

Every language has “weak points”: words and phrases that are easy for you to memorize. These are what you “attack”. You win there and use your newly acquired “weapons” to attack even juicier targets; you always aim for ones that are weak, but because you’re growing stronger, your definition of “weak” also evolves. And it all works to your advantage, like a snowball, like how those dastardly Communists took over mainland China. Communism sucks, but they did win. Winners win for reasons and it behooves us to learn and imitate them.

You have to fight right now. But you don’t have to win right now. Not right this second.

You don’t have to become the god emperor of Japanese right this moment. There’s no way of tidying your room so well that it never needs tidying again. You could brush your teeth for three hours straight today (…shouldn’t take a DDS degree to realize that this is a bad idea…) and they would still need brushing tomorrow.

There is no final boss, no conclusive battle, no last stand. There is no girl to get, no princess to rescue — you male chauvinist patriarchal cishet bastard, you (lol)! All there is, is another day, another hour, another minute, another second, another reset, another skirmish. And that’s beautiful. No drama, just fun and games — strategy.

All you need to do and all you can do are the same thing: make some progress. Gain some ground. Skirmish. Reset.

To quote Marianne Williamson: “The top of one mountain is always the bottom of another.”

What is an entropy bomb? It’s basically this, recast, reimagined and placed on a rigorous course steroids : [Three Minutes Of… | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time] goo.gl/rTK8BN

No plan. No thought. Just set the (timebox countdown) timer and fight back entropy, more or less violently and indiscriminately, for three minutes.

While I did just say “indiscriminately”, I do tend to focus the bomb in space — narrow down the “blast radius”, so to speak — because focus is power, but the point is to think less and do more, because that is how productivity, happiness and success happen.

The trick with entropy bombs (which, strictly speaking, should perhaps be called “anti-entropy” bombs), is to not be the Soviet Union, which is to say, don’t try to make one big entropy bomb (one big timebox): instead, hit your targets with multiple, smaller bombs — hence the 3-minute temporal yield limit. Entropy bombs are, fundamentally, a tactical weapon, not some deterrent for decoration or strategic posturing. They’re for raiding and skirmishing, not laying waste to cities. Put another way, they are a theater weapon, not a theatrical weapon.

So, that’s more or less the “how” of it. But what about the “why”?

Why do we, humans, do the things we do? Why do we seek the experiences we seek? Why do we (or many of us, at least) pursue sex, pursue orgasms, join cults, consume mind-altering substances, go drinking, go to nightclubs and discotheques, go to music festivals?

There are many levels at which you could answer that. There’s the Bob Sapolsky dopamine level, which is super awesome but not the one we want right now. Instead, I’ma go for the Thích Nhất Hạnh-level answer: we do the things we do because we want to experience, well, moksha. We want to be free of fear, worry and even thought itself. Perhaps even life itself — that’s the attraction of suicide: the freedom. Perceptive as always, the French call orgasms “la little death” — the petite mort, if you will.

But seeking that kind of freedom, that kind of release, can be both dangerous and counter-productive; I certainly wouldn’t want to live in the kind of society where we’re all dissipated druggies or spaced-out saddhus or both. We are all better off because Steve Jobs became an entrepreneur instead of a monk; hippies promise heaven but always produce chaotic hellholes; I want water that runs and trains that come on time. Fortunately for us, we don’t have to choose between happiness and success: entropy bombs in particular, and timeboxing and force concentration in general, are a powerful and productive way to both channel and realize that healthy and legitimate desire for flow, for peak experience, for moksha, for freedom, for release.

Don’t be an irresponsible hedonist. Don’t be a dutiful masochist. Be an entropy bomber .

The Forever War is a 1970s military science fiction novel by Joe Haldeman. I actually found out about it in Japanese first, when it was referenced by 岡田斗司夫 (OKADA Toshio) under its Japanese title, 終り無き戦い (おわりなきたたかい, The Endless War / The War Without End / The Unending War).

Briefly, The Forever War is a work of hard science fiction that accepts and incorporates the relativistic effects of high speed motion, namely time dilation (or, as it’s known in Japanese, 浦島太郎効果, うらしまたろうこうか, The URASHIMA Tarou Effect) . If I recall correctly, the book inspired OKADA when he was writing the anime トップを狙え (Aim for the Top Gunbuster) back in the 1980s, with the same team that would go on to create Neon Genesis Evangelion, at Gainax, the studio he founded.

The Forever War was inspired by the author (Haldeman)’s real-life experiences as a conscript in the Vietnam War, participating in a conflict he rather rapidly discovered to be meaningless — both morally and strategically bankrupt — while also feeling ill-at-ease with the hedonistic hippie youth culture back home. Both the real-life Haldeman and his semi-autobiographical protagonist (Mandella) know that the war is B.S., a total racket — but the only people who can understand him and how he feels are his fellow grunts in the military.

And literally none of that is the point here. The point is this. You are in a forever war, an endless conflict, a continuous engagement, a cyclical relationship. Your opponent is entropy. Physicists currently believe that entropy is likely to win the overall war, at least in this Universe, but that doesn’t matter. This war doesn’t have to suck or be meaningless. Because we get to choose and enjoy every battle in it.

You will never stop needing to tidy your room. You will never stop needing to brush your teeth. You will never stop needing to improve your Japanese. There is no final goal state: the only alternative to progress is decay. But you can enjoy the living heck out of every moment. There is no true finish line except death, but there is a new start line every day (every hour, every minute, every second), and we can timebox us some useful milestones and virtual finish lines and create winnable games within games within games.

We can help little pockets of beauty and order to blossom in a Universe somewhat tending to disorder [I know that associating entropy with disorder is a slightly shallow, immature and pop-sciencey interpretation of the concept, but I rike it rike that, so there ] . We can help and let ourselves experience joy and laughter and wonderment.

We are here not to “win” but to enjoy a sense of wonderment, not to defeat but to dance, not to “reach” but to move, not to sneer but to smile, not to reign but to rule, not to finish but to continue, not to dominate but to increase, not to stand but to rise, not to gloat but to grow, not to despair but to improve.

That is the point. That is the AJATT way.

• [終りなき戦い (ハヤカワ文庫 SF (634)) | ジョー・ホールドマン, 風見 潤 |本 | 通販 | Amazon] amzn.to/2TohIha
• [トップをねらえ! – Wikipedia] goo.gl/oEVK2F
• [終りなき戦い – Wikipedia] goo.gl/rn8w2C
• [特殊相対性理論 – Wikipedia] goo.gl/cfjSmY
• [War Is a Racket – Wikipedia] goo.gl/ZAD352
• [浦島効果(ウラシマコウカ)とは – コトバンク] goo.gl/3k79s4
• [岡田斗司夫 – Wikipedia] goo.gl/lfKyfx
• [ガイナックス – Wikipedia] goo.gl/vT7JFc

First, let’s review what the principle of proportionality, as elucidated by John Lewis Gaddis (“Grand Strategy”), teaches us:

1. Never expend unlimited resources pursuing a limited gain.

2. Oversize your dreams and undersize your goals.

3. Align your goals with your dreams.

All failure stems from mis-sizing and/or misalignment of goals. All success comes well-sized goals that align or are aligned with dreams. Even serendipity is subject to this principle, because only a well-aligned individual can even appreciate and exploit the serendipity that comes her way.

You don’t fight wars. You plan wars.

Heaven help us, I do sound awfully bellicose, don’t I? Again, this is war as metaphor; I’m a pacifist and a coward to boot. I’m literally afraid of the dark (still sleep with all the lights on) and I still have my blankie from when I was a toddler — it’s sitting not three feet away from me right now. This isn’t comical self-effacement; these are facts.

Back on topic.

One plans wars, but one does not fight them. Wars are up there with strategy; battles are down in tacticistan. This statement may seem like another example of why I won the Nobel Prize for Obvious Studies, but it’s not. Too many people are confused; they think that their tactics are their entire life purpose, which makes them both situationally stupid and emotionally brittle; they become focused on protecting some tactic rather than winning the war; their tactics become their religion and they hate themselves whenever they have a little tactical dust-up. This is sick and wrong.

New Year’s resolutions are a tactic and a decidedly crappy one at that. You need better tactics, tactics that can be executed more frequently than once every 365.24219878 days (google it); that’s almost the definition of a craptastic tactic; WTF are you doing using a tool you can’t even control? Aren’t there already enough things you don’t control? You need to add one? Come on, man.

Your war is about what you actually want, but it’s always an abstraction, and I mean that in a very neutral way; being theoretical is not an insult, it’s just a categorization; I don’t store dry beans in the fridge but that doesn’t mean I respect them any less than milk.

Your battles and skirmishes are where things happen; these are real and concrete and tangible. This is where to you want to get crazy and creative. Tactics aren’t about making or keeping, stupid, grandiose annual promises, they’re about making things happen with minimum effort from and damage to yourself. They’re not always by-the-book; there’s a great deal of innovation and improvisation; you use what’s at hand; you do what you can, not what you “should”. Musically speaking, it’s very, well, jazzy. Wars are Wagner, battles are Miles Davis.

So you’re learning Japanese. Great. You can stay fixed on that. Everything else? Go nuts. No promises, just lots of fun and games and maybe even some explosions .

You are always moving. You never stand still. You’re always either getting better or worse. Even “staying the same” requires input. You’re always either going uphill or downhill. Forward or backward. Progressing or regressing.

Entropy wants to take your Japanese away from you; however little or much you have, it wants it. No matter how much you have accumulated and assimilated, entropy will not hesitate to throw those memories away if they’re not constantly renewed, teased, touched.

Entropy is the flow of the river, and it wants to take you back over and under the waterfall of ignorance.

Entropy is the only thing that has the power to stop you. All you have to do to keep it from winning is touch some Japanese. Here. Now.

Fight the power. #SRS #immersion #exposure

Sometimes our worries are too luxurious. But this is not the only worry failure mode. There are other forms of irrelevant worry. The kind we’re going to talk about today is perhaps even more pervasive and more pernicious than your garden variety luxurious worry. That kind is: the vague/abstract worry. The VAW (rhymes with “WOW”). Sounds like a word you shouldn’t be allowed to say, doesn’t it? Lol

Prince Siddharta Gautama, AKA the Awakened One, AKA The Notorious B.U.D., already done told you this shizzle some 2500 years ago: there are certain questions, no matter how deep they are (or seem to be), that are not worth asking and not worth answering because there is no friggin’ answer for them.

Nobody can answer your abstract worries. There is no answer for them. They will waste your time and your life. Abstract questions are quagmire questions: they will suck you in and suck you dry of time and life. They are the Vietghanistan of mental engagement. Trust me: I speak as a veteran of the VAW wars .

Interestingly, the Vietnam War itself, the quintessential quagmire of modern military history, became the utter gong-show that it did because US policymakers were asking abstract questions and trying to solve abstract problems (「containment」, 「Red Scare」), all while knowing less than nothing about who the Vietnamese people actually were and what they really wanted, what they really really wanted.

It was the ultimate victory of abstract over concrete. And in the Coke-and-Pepsi bipolar world that was the Cold War, Washington policy wonks’ radical incuriosity pushed many Vietnamese nationalists into the waiting arms of the Soviet Union, whose agents knew all the right things to say. That’s what happens when you support colonialism: you make Communism, the dumbest economic system ever devised, seem palatable. Economic freedom, which is literally my favorite thing ever, can be a hard sell when your country is being invaded, occupied and humiliated.

Capitalism is the natural enemy of prejudice, racial or otherwise, in no small part because greed is not only good, it’s also stronger than hate ¹. People can hate you, but they’ll take your money. Green is the great equalizer. And capitalism is resilient; it doesn’t need a perfect world to function; it functions not merely despite imperfection but because of it. Capitalism is so awesome that even communist countries do it. ² Capitalism doesn’t need to be encouraged, it just needs to not be rooster-blocked by governmental overreach — overregulation, overtaxation, and willfully stupid foreign policy. Reagan and Thatcher didn’t need to fight apartheid, they just needed to not go out of their freaking way to protect it. Ditto Truman and Eisenhower on naked imperialism.

Reading and loving the writing of someone like Bill Bonner [whose work I won’t link to here, but you can google him] only to find out that he’s a…how you say in the simple English…a cultural chauvinist with a strong hint of “rayciss”, a wearer of “eau de racisme” cologne, if you will, it struck me: this must be what it’s like to be Jewish. As a Jewish person, one probably has to like the people one likes without worrying about whether or not they’re anti-Semites, because that would drastically reduce one’s scope for enjoyable reading and finding intellectual heroes.

Bonner’s ideas for US domestic policy are so right (and those for foreign policy so wrong) that it’s almost amusing. He’s like a real-life version of Two-Face from Batman: “people need to be free” / “F### Vietnam! You ungrateful g##ks! France gave you people civilization and sidewalk cafes!”.

What?

Motherlover. Dude. Seriously? This bumclown is why so many people can’t have nice things. This chucklehead is why communism ruined so much of the world for over a generation. Bill “NAMBLA member forever” Bonner is why cats like Ho Chi Minh and Castro couldn’t become like Lee Kuan Yew. Because it takes almost superhuman levels of psychological strength (or an overwhelming amount of compensating experience) to appreciate the ideas of a person or group of people who openly despise and condescend to you.

And I’m not exaggerating about the cafe thing; this pantstreak of a man actually used restaurants as a justification for the rape and pillage of a nation. By that logic, Vietnam should rule all the universes, because Vietnamese food produces mouthgasms in all humans. It’s fine to steal a house as long as you put in nice furniture, right? Geez Louise.

You know, at the risk of stereotyping (although I happen to think positive stereotypes aren’t such a terrible thing, but, whatever, you didn’t ask me), Asian people have such great attitudes. They don’t seem to get bent out of shape over all the abuse that they take from chuckleheads like Bonner (a man whose public career would be taken out back and shot like a golden retriever if he had pulled this kind of stunt on any other ethnic group) because they’re too busy winning at life. Personally, I aspire to that kind of self-control and untouchable dignity.

In a way, the typical Asian (immigrant) reaction to discrimination is the ultimate example of correct worrying. Instead of striving for abstract fairness, justice, love or even being treated with basic decency, Asians as a group stick their heads down and get to work on solving small, local, concrete problems: making that coin, learning that lesson. The indignities they face are legion, but they bring more than enough dignity of their own to get by. It’s not romantic or pretty or exciting, but it, well, works.

It’s unfortunate that many of capitalism’s staunchest defenders have also been racists. But that abstract worry (“this person who has good ideas also has very bad ideas”) mustn’t distract us from the prize. (Keep your eyes on, etc., etc.).

And you thought all this political crap was just a detour. Betchyour sorry now, huh? Hehehe.

Anyway.

This no-abstract-worries thing is a lot like how you ask questions of the Internet. Basically, you want to solve small, specific, local, concrete problems, not big, global abstract ones. Don’t ask whether or not a problem can be solved, ask how to solve a specific problem and be prepared to pay for high-quality answers. Don’t learn “how to cook”, make one (and only one) dish for dinner tonight. Don’t solve “world hunger” (a stupid phrase if ever there was one). Feed and love this one kid — and only this one kid — now.

Do what you can right now — no more. Ask real questions. Ask concrete questions. Worry about real things. Do real things. Don’t ask if Japanese “is hard”; don’t wonder if you’re good enough or smart enough; don’t ask if you’re “doing enough” (if you have to ask, you’re probably not ). Never ask if you’re “good at” Japanese. Just go learn a new word. Just move. Just turn on the (Japanese) TV. Just timebox. Just get things rolling. Just inch things forward (it’s a cinch!). Ask what you can do in the next three minutes. Then do it. Use your hands. Try stuff out. Generate light, not heat.

The original title of this post was “Don’t Be Germany”, but praising or insulting entire groups of people (as this post, frankly, does) never sat well with me. Too much individualism isn’t the problem, rather, the lack of it is. Failure to treat people as individuals is what caused so many problems in the 20th century especially. Nations are just convenient legal fictions that seem real because we believe in them so unquestioningly. So I changed the title a bit to reflect the two actual individuals whose respective behavior as commanders-in-chief we’re actually trying to reverse-model (i.e. avoid): Kaiser Wilhelm II and some Austrian politician who did Charlie Chaplin cosplay.

Don’t be Germany in the 1910s or the 1940s.

Until almost the halfway point of the 20th century, Germany was unquestionably the world’s premier scientific and engineering nation and yet lost both ¹ of her major 20th century military conflicts, flirting with famine at least once. This is Greek theatre-level irony: the country that produced the man who literally wrote the book on war lost its most important wars.

How do you go from being a nation of geniuses, insofar as it’s fair to make broad characterizations like that, to being unable to do what any decent subsistence farmer, caveman or animal can do, namely, feed yourself?

That’s like being the smartest, most diligent, most perfectionistic student in the class and still failing academically (it can happen by the way…I’ve seen it happen).

The Wehrmacht should have pressed on at Dunkirk. The Luftwaffe, specifically, should have seen the Battle of Britain through. Because if they had, they would have won. Instead, their leadership divided their attention between the Brits and the Russkies. Which is all the more ridiculous given that the Soviet Union lacked both the will and the skill ² to attack Germany — they’d just signed a non-aggression treaty FFS!

Do I claim to truly know what Germany did or should have done? No. I know enough history to know that none of us know what we’re talking about — especially me. Still, even this simplified, Mickey Mouse-ified analysis of the situation contains valuable life lessons for us. Fiction can teach us many lessons. There’s no reason that history — even misrecorded, misremembered and/or misunderstood history — can’t either.

The point is this:

Ability and intelligence are great and you should develop both. But they alone will not save you, that is, they will not earn you an exemption from certain higher, deeper, more fundamental, more universal laws, like those related to common sense and tenacity. Common sense tells us that if we’re doing one hard (i.e. big) thing already, we shouldn’t start doing a second. The “laws of tenacity”, such as they are, tell us that tenacity matters more than “talent”. Ability gets you in the door, but only tenacity will get you over to the other side.

We can get so lost in interesting, powerful and counterintuitive tools, techniques and concepts that we lose track of good old common sense ³. We ignore her. And she, attention whore that she is, goes apeshizzle when we do that.

Yeah, I said it. Common sense is a bee arch.

If common sense is a boring, generic-looking forest, then our awesome techniques are distractingly sexy trees (getting a woody for wood, amiright? No? Too gross? #MeToo). The trees keep changing but the forest stays the same. One of the things that stays the same is this: resources are always limited and must be used judiciously creatively. The more limited the resource, the more carefully creatively it must be used ⁴. Are there exceptions to this? Yes, but they’re not important enough to concern yourself with. One twig, one weed, does not cancel the forest.

It doesn’t matter how rich you are if you waste your money. It doesn’t matter how strong or smart you are if you waste your time and energy ⁵. Richard Koch has argued that Einstein wasn’t that smart. He wasn’t dumb, but he wasn’t off-the-charts-smart, what he was was focused on memes — ideas and lines of inquiry — that were themselves very powerful. ⁶

Common Sense is a default position that should be given up only reluctantly and returned to frequently. She doesn’t mind if you screw around on her a little, but she expects you to show up and fly straight most of the time. She’s not an “attention whore” at all. If anything, we’re the unethical sluts who leave her hanging while we chase down the Next Big Thing just because the media/zeigeist says it(the NBT)’s hot. But Common Sense stays at home waiting for us, always ready to welcome us back and give us good results. She’s a kind and permissive partner who only ruthlessly enforces boundaries when people get seriously out of hand. Like when a nearly-landlocked, resource-poor country lets itself get sandwiched by multiple powerful enemies because of fights it picked.

Are you tired? Are your burnt ⁷ out? Are you stressed? Well, then, stop doing so much. You can’t decisively solve the problem of doing too much by working harder or even smarter (more efficiently). You literally need to do less. Get out of whatever metaphorical “wars” you’re involved in by simply stopping. You can’t multiply yourself. And if you divide yourself across multiple tasks simultaneously, then, well, you’ll be early 20th century Germany, the one thing you don’t wanna be. You need subtraction, not addition, not multiplication, not division.

Fight one war, one front, one battle, one opponent, one dish, one tabletop, one countertop, one drawer, one kanji, one SRS card at a time.

It’s a cliché, but it’s true: the sun’s rays are warm, but they only burn when brought into focus on a single point, as by a magnifying glass. Force concentration is your magnifying glass. Force concentration is itself a force multiplier. With it, you win. Without it, you fizzle out.

Start winning. Start being the one doing the burning, not the one burning out ⁸. Yeah, you’re smart. Yeah, you’ve got potential. But you can and must ⁹ and will go beyond that. Don’t just be bright. Start burninating. Be a laser, not a lightbulb. Be a fire, not a spark. 

#timeboxing #forceConcentration

P.S.: If you’re German and reading this, please don’t be offended. I’m actually a huge Teutonophile and feel that Germany doesn’t get the respect it deserves. In the late nineties and early aughts, my German friends taught me how to be punctual in meatspace; they changed my life for the better, and for that I will always be grateful. But this doesn’t make Germany infallible — Germany, as a nation, has made mistakes and has, from time to time, come into the thrall of bad ideas (to put it mildly), and this is all the more interesting and paradoxical given the great ideas that have come out of that country and culture.

A better title for this post might be this: Be German (productive, punctual, practical) but Don’t Be Germany At Its Worst (self-destructive, angry, irrational). ‘Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, though . The events of 1900-1945 do not by themselves define Germany ¹⁰. They are just a great example of what not to do in life.

One who moves to the country with his playlist first and with his body second is at ease.
One who moves to the country first and then tries to learn the language is at labour.
Thus, one skilled at learning languages summons the language to themselves, and is not summoned by it.

One skilled at learning languages seeks it in immersion and does not demand it of people.
Thus one can dispense with people and employ immersion.

The ultimate in giving form to learning methods is formlessness.
The form of the learning method is like water.
Water in its movement avoids the high and hastens to the low.
The victorious learning method avoids the difficult and strikes the easy.

To be able to transform with the terrain is what is meant by “spiritlike”.
The terrain comprises matter, energy, space and time.
Of the four seasons, none has constant rank.
The suns shines short and long.
The moon dies and lives. ¹

Many thanks to the Denma Translation Group
[Amazon | The Art of War: Complete Text and Commentaries [Kindle edition] by Sun Tzu | Philosophy | Kindleストア]

Recently, I was doing SRS reps in my Japanese STEM deck, and a card based on this paragraph came up:

“3歳までに教育を開始しないと手遅れという考えは、3歳までの家庭環境が人格を左右するという三歳児神話の一種である。” [早期教育 – Wikipedia] goo.gl/mXBH3G

It’s from a section of the article where they talk about critics of early accelerated education (which is where you teach toddlers reading and algebra using flash cards, instead of letting them waste (all) their time on whatever it is toddlers do). I actually agree and disagree with the criticism in equal measure.

Let me explain.

Learning a language is a bit like conquering a country. Any idiot can do it and most idiots do (at least once). It’s holding onto it that’s the trick — that’s where most conquests fail: anybody can win the war, it’s winning the peace that’s the real trick.

In what many historians recognize as the only successful slave revolt in the entire history of mankind (and the only one to result in the founding of a state) Toussaint “Spartacus” L’Ouverture freed the people of Haiti, but was singularly unable to prevent his new country being raped financially for the next two centuries by France and its allies.

(North) Vietnamese forces lost just about every field engagement of the Vietnam War but decisively won the war itself, only to lose the peace by way of economic sanctions (not to mention massive environmental destruction). Only now can the country said to be finally winning, in Charlie Sheen terms .

Statecraft — indeed, life itself — is not a Hollywood movie. You don’t win when you blow up the boss at the end. You don’t throw Alan Rickman off the Nakatomi building, make out with a woman with ridiculous Eighties hair, and then call it a day. The climax — becoming free, ceasing to suck at Japanese — is not the end. If anything, it’s just another beginning. Every day, every hour, every second is a new beginning.

Always think of yourself as always both beginner and expert. You are a beginner — you need to do the basics every day. You are an expert –you are Japanese; Japanese is your language; it belongs to you.

It takes just as much energy to maintain a language as it did to acquire it in the first place (it may not feel like it, but it does). It’s a system that requires constant input of energy: yours. You can delegate conquering a country; ya can’t delegate getting used to a language. Fortunately for us, the skills and behaviors that get you good at a language are largely the same ones that’ll keep you good and keep you improving.

Your memory is like a permanently minimalist mother: she wants to come into your room and throw away anything that looks useless. And she’s totally clueless, so she keeps throwing away stuff that matters to you (in addition to stuff that is actually useless). And sometimes, she gets emotional over dumb sheet and insists on keeping it.

Wouldn’t it have been nice if your parents had exposed you to Japanese as a toddler? Maybe. Maybe not. Probably. But that doesn’t matter because even if you’d been born under a full moon, your mother’s red natal blood spattered on the milky, virgin snow of Mt. Fuji itself, you would still need to put just as much effort into the game as you do now. You really would.

That’s a very long-winded way of saying “use it or lose it”. But it needed to be said.

Toddlers should get the crap educated out of them. And so should children. And so should adults. And so should anyone who’s breathing. And so should animals — we rarely bother training our animals and then we wonder why they misbehave. It takes hours of daily instruction over decades to get a human being to act right and fly straight; if a dog or a cat needs a few years, so be it.

The first three years of a human being’s life are very important. And so are the next three. And the next. Every three-year period matters #AllThreeYearPeriodsOfOurLivesMatter. Every second counts. It may not seem like it, but trust me, we would amaze ourselves if we realized that and acted on that realization.

No child’s mind should be neglected, abandoned, left to lie fallow. And nor should any adult’s either. Both need constant care and cultivation. Perhaps agriculture, not war, is where we need to look for lessons.

Intelligence is malleable. Skill is malleable. It grows, shrinks, thrives and dies in proportion to how much and how well we nurture it. One doesn’t stop watering plants because “they’re big now”.

For starters, let me put this out there, just so we’re clear: I am a pacifist. I think armed conflict is almost always some combination of immoral, unnecessary and/or stupid ¹. True, literal self-defense would be the only exception, which is why, in the modern world, most countries try to falsely ² dress up offensive actions as defensive ones: indeed, as the second half of the twentieth century kicked off, what were once (during simpler, franker periods of history) called ministries of war turned into ministries of defence ³.

The object of any rational, offensive war is not die for one’s country and it’s not even to get other people to die for theirs. The object of such a war is not to destroy one’s enemy (this is wasted effort — waging war costs all sides lives and money): it’s to take away their stuff, their treasure. As it turns out, though, the one treasure that is more valuable than all the land and minerals in the world, in the entire Solar system, is ideas. And you don’t have to kill or burn for those.

But human capital is a tree of slow growth. Physical resources — land and minerals — are worth money right now, so the temptation to go for them directly remains understandably strong.

So, yeah, I’m a pacifist. War is stupid. And so, to a lesser extent, is sports. But both are big sources of valuable analogies and metaphors that we can profitably apply to our small lives and actions.

Learning a language is like cleaning a room is like climbing a mountain is like fighting a war is like any “adversarial” interaction where you’re juxtaposed with a real or virtual external agent: for one thing, if done right, the exercise should be fun, easy, short and bloodless — kind of like that time when Slovenia broke free of Yugoslavia (I love how much this seems like the setup for a Family Guy cutaway gag). If done wrong, however, the results are too horrible to describe in words and too disturbing to display in pictures (even carefully framed and heavily sanitized ones). ⁴

Right now, you’re going: “what the actual f— is Khatzumoto talking about?”

Chill, Winston. Let me ‘splain.

You see, war isn’t actually about combat. War movies are about combat. War in history class is (mostly) about combat…and borders. Actual war, however, is about logistics ⁵…and boredom. From the Bronze Age to the Smartphone Age, we consistently find that about 90% of military personnel are non-combatant support staff, and about 90% of field deaths ⁶ are due to infectious disease, not combat ⁷. Logistics make and break every fighting force. This is one of those things that’s probably going to be true forever; the closest thing to an eternally true statement outside of mathematics. Not even cosmology can compete. Logistics and arithmetic are it, mate .

The US military isn’t the biggest in the world. Pound for pound, dollar for dollar, it probably isn’t even the best ⁸. But it is, overall, the best — by far and without question. Why? Not because it’s good at making things or people blow up, but because it’s the best at getting things to where they need to be — moving the right things to the right place at the right time. ⁹

OK, I’m getting a bit out of my depth here (you’re all: “getting?! You STARTED out of your depth”), because I know even less about this kind of stuff than your typical reader of Armchair General Magazine (which is an actual magazine, BTW, just so you know (lol))

My point is this.

When faced with a language, a mountain, an opponent, or a dirty room, it’s tempting to do two things:
1) Feel crappy and overwhelmed by the sheer size and scale of the project, of the “opponent”.
2) Try to fight the opponent everywhere all the time at once ‘coz you gottagetitdonenow — to spread your forces and energies across the entire “battlefield”, as it were

These are both bad things. And they belong to that class of bad things that are bad not only because they’re ineffective but also because (whether for biological or cultural reasons) we seem to have a tendency to default to them.

No matter how deep or wide the ocean, you can only swim it one stroke at a time. Even if you’re one of those butterfly meatheads. One at a time, bro. It thus behooves you to focus almost exclusively on the tiny cuboid of ocean you’re dealing with right now. No past, no future: now.

This is a form of force concentration: “establishment of a…[“]base area” by concentrating resources on a single geographical area until dominance [is] achieved…After this…carefully define…regions to be individually attacked again with…more focused allocation of resources.” [Emphasis Added] [Force concentration – Wikipedia]

Force concentration. You amass your “soldiers” and “supplies” at pivot points that matter, and let them go to town. Have them fire at Will Smith (this is an old Independence Day joke from the 1990s…you kinda had to be there).

If you think about it for more than ten seconds, this is essentially what a timebox is: a temporal force concentration (as opposed to a spatial one). When we timebox, we give up on the idea of total war and total victory and settle for partial victories and limited objectives. Partial victories are, in my estimation, the only kind that are possible, especially for the small and the weak, that is, individuals like you and me. Partial victories are all we have. As it turns out, though, partial victories are all we need.

So we’re “settling” for less than perfect; we’re exchanging tabletop optima (机上の空論) for true, real-life good-enoughization. “Good enough” is better than nothing. Infinitely better. Not only that, it’s actually pretty awesome in its own right. Is it perfect? No. Nothing ever is. In the end, though, we’re actually getting a way better deal than if we’d held out for perfection (estimated arrival date: two thousand and never).

Your victories are partial and your objectives are limited, but that doesn’t stop them being interconnected or interrelated (not simultaneous, just mutually reinforcing). For example, I have learned from bitter personal experience that it never works to try to “bunch” errands together for efficiency. It just doesn’t. On paper, it makes sense, but raw, lived reality has other plans. Do one thing at a time. Win one victory at time. Let one victory feed into the next.

Do things that are fun and important enough that quality can beat quantity. You shouldn’t need to watch thirty movies simultaneously to enjoy yourself; you shouldn’t need to accomplish three things at once to be productive. Just as one good movie at a time should be enough to entertain you, one worthy errand at a time should matter enough (should contain enough significance) to warrant doing on its own. All by its lonesome.

Instead of hitting two birds with one stone, or chasing two rabbits and catching neither, chase one rabbit, catch one rabbit, eat that rabbit and then use that energy to catch more rabbits. Maybe make you rabbit farm. Or maybe you go catch a bison, because nobody wants to suffer rabbit starvation.

Do less. Do more of less. Spend more energy on fewer things.

You don’t try to have good sex simply by maximizing the surface area and cavity volume you cover and occupy.

You don’t try to win by covering the battlefield (or, if you do, you shouldn’t; you should stop doing that). Instead, you concentrate overwhelming amounts of power on small places that count, and you win there (because you’re so overwhelmingly awesome) and then you move on.

You don’t win street fights by hugging people (“cover more surface area!”). You win by avoiding plebs and not getting in street fights in the first place. Then, if you somehow got in, you win by getting out as fast as possible — preferably by running away: running is the ultimate martial art. And if that doesn’t work and you’re still involved, then you win by going for weak points. Crotches, joints, knees, angles, eyes, ears, elbows.

You don’t hit your opponent where he is strong (that’s a stupid but all-too-common way of doing things): you hit him where he is weak. Look for the weakness; everything has one; no system is perfect. In learning languages, the (friendly) opponent is the language; his weak points are any words that are easy enough for you to learn and understand given your immediately available tools and knowledge. Pick one — and only one — of these weakpoints and fire everything at it. Light him up. Empty out your entire complement of photon torpedoes.

In other words, it should be like shooting fish, not in a barrel, but in a teacup. The opponent may be bigger and stronger than you, but you only need to be bigger than the opponent’s weakpoint. You only need a local imbalance of force, not a global one. At the weakpoint, you outgun the “enemy” so badly it’s not even funny. Maybe no one can learn Japanese, maybe it’s “impossiburu”, maybe you have to born and raised within visual range of Mount Fuji and eat nothing but onigiri and misoshiru all your life to “truly” acquire it — but anyone can learn one word. Literally any fool (no matter how busy or lazy or depressed) is equal to the task of learning one Japanese word. Corner one of them words and overwhelm it. Repeat enough times and you win the “war”.

You don’t clean a fridge. You clean one shelf as if it were literally the only surface in the entire Multiverse. Then you win. And you use this base and momentum to move on to another battlefield, against another opponent that you similarly overwhelm. Rinse, repeat.

If you want to get “there”, you need to be here now. You can’t be everywhere and win. The only way to be everywhere is to die and be turned to dust. You need to be here now, and play here now, and win here now. And if being here does not appeal to you, then I got news for ya, bub — you won’t get there. “There” is just a sequence of “heres”.

If you love Japanese/whatever language so much, you need to love each individual word you come across. You need to love every moment and every word you’re learning. Love each word MORE than you love the language as a whole. If you can’t do that, not only will you not enjoy yourself, you won’t make consistent, long-term progress and you won’t win. If you can’t love each little piece of Japanese you’re doing, then you don’t really love Japanese — perhaps you love the idea of being considered knowledgeable or intelligent, but you don’t love Japanese. ¹⁰ And that’s okay; just admit to yourself you don’t love it (to thine own self be true, right?), so you can go do something else. The world is full of other things to love. Go love them instead. Go love yourself, motherlover (lol).

What is the point of playing a game you hate every moment of? So you can get some gold stars? What’s that — they don’t even give medals for Japanese?! So you’re selling your life (which is what time is: life) away for nothing? And you don’t even get to enjoy the journey? What are you, the Donald Trump of making deals on opposite day?

You like that lame, Buzzfeedy title? Yeah. You know you do.

Based on that title, you may be thinking that you’re about to read an answer to the question of “which language should I learn (in order to maximize socioeconomic returns)?”. And, if that’s what you’re thinking, you would be wrong.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Stick with me.

So, as you may or may not know, I don’t read or watch the news. I quit in 2005 and haven’t looked back. Even Jon Stewart admitted it — following the news, especially the political material of which it mostly consists, just makes you sad and angry. But I do still know “stuff” from back then. And I still have thoughts. And I still read books. In fact, not watching or reading the news gives you space to have more “big picture” thoughts.

And one of the thoughts is this — why is the US military, easily the most powerful in the known history of the world, so frequently unable to win decisive victories and unambiguously impose its nation’s will on the vanquished?

That is a question I will not answer today, the “answer”, such as there is one, doesn’t really matter. It’s like asking why the Roman Empire fell — it’s as interesting as all get-out, and I own copies of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and SPQR in multiple languages (Chinese, Japanese, English) — but the process of researching and weighing and thinking through answers matters more than the final answer. The journey is the destination.

What’s the best part of making out? All of it, really. Lol.

So, why are these big ideas relevant to little people like you and me? Because we are the US military. We are in the possession of the most powerful machine in the known Universe — the human mind. And we got ours for free. No pork barrel spending. No defense contractor corruption. For free, playa! Unbelievable, isn’t it? And it runs on groceries! ¹.

Just like Jhene Aiko’s booty.

Wait, what?

Our brains — our minds ² — and the world’s strongest military are both powerful, but neither is omnipotent. So it simply won’t do to behave like a lottery winner ³. Being strong, smart or otherwise “full of potential” does not exempt you from the laws of our mathematical universe. If anything, it holds you to a higher standard of behavior — pedestrians can walk and use their smartphones with relative impunity, but the laws of the land and of physics will mercilessly punish the driver of a car for doing the same. With great power comes, unfortunately, great Spider-Man quotes.

So, there’s a lot of discussion out there about America’s military paradox — unprecedented power mixed with shocking ineffectiveness. ⁴ Much of it silly, some of it insightful. One recurring key phrase, though, really hit me in the nuts. And it is this:

“limited objectives”

The US military has tended to do well when it has had limited objectives ⁵, based on “clearly articulated and achievable goals“.

You and the US armed forces are limited. No person or group of people has infinite time, money, energy or other resources. This is not a bad thing, it is a good thing, because the limitations, if you know how to use them to your advantage (instead of whining about them and wishing they weren’t there), actually set you free ⁶. If you want to succeed, you must use your resources judiciously. You must learn to say “no” pre-emptively. You must timebox.

Say “no” to languages other than the one you want to focus on. Yes, other languages are “useful”. Yes, seeming multilingual will impress strangers you don’t even like. But if you want to win hard at anything — at any language at all — you’re going to have to concentrate your forces. That, or, you can go be like Germany and fight on two fronts like an idiot. Your call.

Trying to Bo Jackson it will not make you twice as happy. Two languages doesn’t double the happiness. Three doesn’t treble it. I’m not saying to go monolingual, but I am saying that, pound of pound, joule for joule of effort, depth is probably more rewarding than depth. Just puttin’ that out there. Limited objectives. Limit your objectives. Say “no”.

Say “no” to trying to do more than you have energy to do.

Say “no” to ideas and feelings and actions that do not help you reach your goal.

Say “no” to trying to do and achieve everything all at once, really fast.

Do the little you can, with the little you have, a little at a time, on the little that matters and you will, paradoxically, achieve much.

Concentrate your forces. Don’t clean the whole house ⁷. Divide and conquer. Make your bed. Win that battle. Then move on to another (small) battlefield. Your desk, perhaps. Don’t clean the whole fridge. Cleaning the whole fridge is not a limited objective — you will choke on something that big; you will get sucked into a personal quagmire. No. Pick one shelf. One. ⁸ Fight there. Clean there. Win there. Then, with decisive victory secured, move on again. Rinse, repeat. The principle applies widely if you let it.

Even in a field as apparently vast and infinite as language acquisition, playing it as a longish series of short, winnable games with, again, limited objectives, turns out to be a winning strategy.