“Genius is…the eventual public recognition of dozens (or hundreds) of failed attempts at solving a problem”
Seth Godin

Babe Ruth Was A Big, Fat German Failure

If you read enough personal development books, you will eventually come across mention of one of the most profoundly meaningful statistics in the history of sports. That statistic being that for many years, Babe Ruth simultaneously held both the career home-run [714?] and strikeout [1330?] records.

Crazy, huh? It’s almost as if he were trying to become a living object lesson. Remember, he didn’t have “a lot of strikeouts“: he held The Strikeout Record; he failed More Than Anyone Else at hitting, not just for a couple of months but over his entire career — we are talking about a professional, by the way, a person whose job it was to play baseball. Notice how he had a 3-digit homerun count and a 4-digit strikeout count; he struck out almost twice as many times as he hit a touchdown…wait…He was the best because he was the suckiest. He succeeded the most because he failed the most.

What does this mean? It means, to paraphrase Anthony, son of Robbins, that: massive failure is the key to success. Michael of Jordan said it himself:

The Ring cannot be destroyed, Gimli, son of Glóin, by any craft that we here possess. I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

Even some random guy from some random organization called International Business Machines said it:

If you want to succeed, double your failure rate. The ring was made in the fires of Mount Doom. Only there can it be unmade.

Now, I’ve heard all these quotes so many times that they don’t really grab me any more when I read them, but let me illustrate using my favorite person — me — as an (yes, I am that narcissistic) example.

I Am A Failure

At this writing, my KhatzuMemo stats indicate that since New Year’s Day 2007, I have done about 58000 flashcard reps with a retention rate of about 91%, where retention = a rep score of 3 or above. Sounds respectable enough. But, you realize that what this means is that I have failed to correctly read and/or comprehend a Japanese sentence item at least 5200 times over the course of two years and change — can you imagine tagging those end to end to end to end in a video (that would make a pretty cool “lowlight reel”)?!

More than five thousand failures. I’ve been wrong more times than there are stars in the sky visible to the naked eye [someone please check this]. I’m just saying: that’s a lot of fails. And if we (royal “we”) were to start counting from 2004, it would be about 100,000 reps with a similar 90-95% retention rate — that means something on the order of ten thousand failures. That’s ten thousand times I couldn’t correctly read or understand a sentence or phrase in Japanese: I am a failure.

And yet, I am very comfortable with both written and spoken Japanese. I can read, write, understand or say whatever I want or need to. I just got done doing all my taxes without a hitch. Clearly, this scale of failure helped. You’ll forgive the focus on SRSing, it’s just that it’s something that’s easy to measure and therefore compare quantitatively.

Errybody Awesome Is a Failure

Robbins goes on to discuss the number of times Walter Elias Disney was rejected by banks when he wanted funding for some goofy idea about a studio making full-length cartoons, and the number of times Sylvester Stallone was rejected when peddling the script for some kind of adult-oriented movie involving interracial pairings of sweaty, half-naked men touching each other with leather gloves in front of excited crowds of people. Most people would have given up.

Of course, it goes beyond Hollywood…I have friends who won’t go ice-skating with me because they’re afraid of falling. They have fallen 0 times. 0 failures. They have never failed at skating. But they also can’t skate…at all. In fact, I imagine the best skaters have also fallen the most times.

Arguably, a lot of our fear of failure most likely stems from how schools punish it. Schools promote avoidance of failure. This is a recipe for mediocrity. No meaningful success seems to come without hearty doses of failure. Failure needs to be celebrated. It needs to be sought actively. Failure is what needs to be for dinner.

I love blaming everything on school. But then, most of us did spent the greater part of our waking lives from toddlerhood to early adulthood either in school or in preparation to go to school or travelling to and from school or doing homework for school; schools have plenty to answer for; they can’t bait with compulsory attendance and then switch to learner-parent responsibility forever; they can’t keep waiting until someone gets killed and then feign shock at the “discovery” that they’re a breeding ground for violence. I mean, am I the only one who thinks that school shootings are actually surprisingly rare? Off topic. Anyway…

So how can you start failing? I think the thing is simply to find something you can crank at. Find or build a mechanism that allows you to fail a lot. Perhaps three figures minimum, possibly and preferably 4, 5, 6, maybe even 7+. Chances are, this mechanism will also allow you to succeed — in fact, it’s more or less guaranteed to bring you success…eventually.

You’re Not A Surgeon, So Don’t Strike Surgically

In life, whether it’s learning a language, building a blog, doing research, applying for jobs (if that’s your thing), trying to get good at shooting basketballs or even doing whatever it is people do to get into…romantic entanglements, many people — especially beginners — go for the surgical strike, because they’re so afraid of screwing up. There’s just one flaw with the surgical strike plan: only a surgeon can do surgery — only a highly trained expert with a matured skillset can even hope for a decent result on such paltry time resources. How do you get a matured skillset? By failing.

Generally, it would seem that only someone who’s missed tons of shots gets to hit consistently. Also, at the risk of adding too many parenthetic asides, actual surgeons of the medical persuasion obviously deal in situations where, how you say in the simple English, failure is not cheap. Then again, I did see something once about robotic “practice patients” for medical students, so clearly there are efforts being made to make failure cheaper for them, implying that they are also, in essence, trying to fail into success.

As a beginner, trying to go for that surgical strike is akin to giving a newborn baby an NES controller and saying: “you have 15 minutes to beat Mario…or else you will never amount to anything, you lachrymatory ball of fat!”. It’s as if beginners were a novice sniper trying to hit a single target using their first and only bullet; that’s how most people right now tend to operate. But that’s only a viable option if you’re statistically a really good shot, which, almost by definition, a beginner is not [no statistics to go off of].

Middle School, AKA Gattaca Lite

Unfortunately, failure to recognize the value of failure happens in sports all the time: too many people judge and are judged based on their first performance — how many egos have been crushed (not mine, but…people I know) because of using such a ridiculously small and downward-skewed sample? How many doors have been closed to figurative newborn babies? How many Michael Jordans get cut from high school teams?

In middle school, I can remember how in both P.E. classes and inter-school sports teams, the time, attention and resources were disproportionately concentrated on boys and girls who were hitting puberty at 11, and the rest of you kids with your slow-growing bodies could just bugger off, even though our parents were all paying the same tuition (the sports was not a business — no TV revenue or scholarships like NCAA, not even an effect on enrollment).

Now, why this middle school business still bugs me more than 10 years after the fact, is because the deafeningly loud silent lesson it taught was that effort didn’t matter and there was no such thing as meaningful development and improvement over time; only genetic predisposition mattered; only being 11 years old and having facial hair mattered. It was Gattaca Lite.

At some level, I can understand the school coaches’ problem — they needed to make a winning team as quickly as possible…but, again, that’s not really doing school any more, if only because nothing profound is being learned; that’s more of a professional/club thing where the focus is on execution.

As a compromise, a dual sports system might work, with a “we’re gonna use you now” short-term competition-centered section for freakishly large children, and a “build your skills now for the future” long-term training-centered section for children who like sports but aren’t yet big enough to be “useful”. Kind of a “separate but equal”…waitaminute!!

They did kind of try something like that by having multiple teams per age group, but the resource distribution was insulting; remember: everyone was paying the same overpriced tuition and the sports teams neither made money nor contributed to name-brand recognition…yet somehow the “lower” teams were invariably put on The Fields That The Groundskeeper Forgot, using equipment that had been oh-so-delicately aged to perfection by the finely tuned athletic machines of the Higher Teams. Where’s Linkin Park and a razor blade when you need them…

Cheap and Quick

Anyway, in less violent/jocky terms, letting go of the surgical-strike philosophy means: don’t try to write a magnum opus if you can’t even write an opus yet. Don’t try to write a novel if you can’t even write a short story yet. Don’t try to run a marathon when you can’t even run around the block yet (whoops…got jocky again).

It doesn’t take too much perceptiveness to see that the key with failing this much is you need to make it cheap. Time-cheap, money-cheap, effort-cheap and emotion-cheap. So each round needs to be short, not cost a lot, not take too much energy, and not be too crushing to the old dignity ¹. Maybe this cheapness is another reason why small, short, winnable gamesare so good: A short game can be played many times → many failures → lots of success

According to the man himself in The Mindscape of Alan Moore, Moore, the best comics writer in the English language before me (why are you making that face?! wot iz that face?) — started out writing 4-page comic stories. Said he:

“I learned my craft doing very short stories, 3 or 4 pages each, which is an excellent way to learn writing of any sort.”

Even Moore-sensei’s early stories were likely unbefitting what we’ve come to expect of the Alan Moore legend. Knowing what we now know it would probably be easy to see or trick ourselves into seeing, the Moore mojo unfolding, but if we were to look at them “blind”, my gut tells me we’d be somewhat rather unimpressed.

Anyway, my point is, he had something he could crank. He had something he could fail at over and over and over again. He had a mechanism he could grind himself on until he got to razor-sharp perfection. He practiced with 4-page stories but matured into a graphic novelist just as you practice with phrases, sentences and pages as you gradually grow into a fully-fledged reader of your L2.

Mojo is made rather than born. I remember one time, I was at a gaijin friend’s house, arranging Internet service for him over the phone in Japanese, and then I hung up, and he and his roommates, having heard the entire exchange, decided that I had a “talent” for the language. And, frankly, I think I do, too; in fact, if you ignore minor details like how I once turned my entire life into a Japanese camp and spent all my disposable income on Japanese materials and severed any human relationship that significantly conflicted with doing Japanese and ate cake with chopsticks and slept with headphones on just-to-make-sure, then…yes…it was pure talent.

Case In Point: Why Spam Works

Not a positive example, but this massive failure business, by the way, is why spam works. Spam has found a mechanism that allows it to fail on a massive scale, this mechanism is called: “email is fast and free, motherlovers”, and what a wonderful mechanism it is. Can you imagine the indignity of paying for email? Forget them apples.

Now, most people aren’t going to buy into those…how can we be delicate about this…”organ enhancement” medications they sell in spam, even if I, I mean, my friend, needed them, which he doesn’t, but IF he did, he wouldn’t buy them. But someone somewhere always does. When you send out, what, a million emails a day — 365 million emails a year, son — you’re bound to get someone to bite, as long as the probability isn’t 0 (and in life, the probability is almost never 0 or 1), then you are guaranteed that you’ll get someone to buy your spam product even if I, I mean, my friend, were just buying those pills as a joke and didn’t really need them and was just testing the system.

For our theoretical spammer, even if 99.99% of these 365 million theoretical emails fail, that’s still 365,000 theoretical customers in the bag. That’s 365,000 people willing to pay ca$h money for the pills they need to (theoretically) bliss her out with their weapon of mass expulsion.

All this talk about massive failure = success…is exciting when we’re talking about it here in the squeaky-clean, theoretical Lalaland we can create for ourselves in the brief window of time where we’re reading and writing a post, but back in the real world, when you actually fail you don’t necessarily feel so good; we’re not trained to be excited by that sort of thing. And perhaps it’s for the best that we aren’t — what a bitter, Greek-tragedy-on-steroids irony it would be to instantly dislike or fail to recognize the success you had worked for.

My personal solution is to largely ignore the immediate failure-point at hand, and get excited about the overall process-function [of failing massively]; that’s how I stay excited and keep going. Individual failure-points are easy to feel bad about; as soon as they pass, ignore them. Let go of them and focus on the next round. You don’t think MS are still having crying fits and sleepless nights over “Microsoft Bob“, do you?

…Laughing fits, maybe.

There Are Exceptions

Having said all that, AntiMoon’s advice to “shut up before you hurt yourself” (which morphed into my advice to “shut up until it comes out correct and naturally by itself”) still holds. Personal developmenty advice of the kind that is the subject of this post can seem to run into contradictions because it’s so broadly applicable that nobody bothers to provide more rigid domain definition; suffice it to say that significant exceptions and counter-examples of virtually every principle exist; they may be rare, but they do exist; try not to go emo when you run into one. Think of these ideas as one of many tools in your toolbox; they work really well in some cases and not so well in others.

In Closing

Anyway, enough talk! 問答無用! Time for you and I both to hurry up and get failing. And when people tell you to stop it because it won’t work and you’re crazy, as they probably will, you can think of Thomas Watson’s words:

[Dude.] A [homie] flattened by an opponent can get up again. A [homie] flattened by conformity stays down for good.

Oh yeah — I would love to read your suggestions for little games to fail at, or links to similar discussions, so please feel free to share them.

Again in response to this post, I received the following email from a very handsome reader named santayana.

working hard in the proper direction as the one and only method to achieve success and to be hailed as a genius? sounds good, after all everyone can do it if they’re really bent to stop being lazy… but sadly, i don’t really think it’s the way things are… just look up the story of capablanca… without basically no experience in the upper echelons of tournament competition, he wiped out the best chess players of the time (all but lasker, the world champion) in san sebastian, 1911, the first important event he took part in… sure, some other top players like botvinnik had probably no real genius and could be cast in the people-who-just-worked-very-hard-and-in-the-proper-direction category… but then you think about capablanca and realize that he developed the same strenght of botvinnik by studying and playing chess one-hundredth of the latter’s time…

It raised some interesting points, and I wanted to address them here.

the one and only method to achieve success and to be hailed as a genius

I don’t know about one and only…there could be any number of exceptions and magic pills, etc. One day we may be able to directly stimulate the brain.

basically no experience in the upper echelons of tournament competition

That’s like saying “Khatzumoto’s a genius! He had no experience ever writing a Japanese novel until he wrote one!” Yeah, but by then he had read like 3000 books in Japanese, and had a Japanese blog. Capa had experience in chess…that seems like more than enough.

1911, the first important event he took part in…

According to the Pedia, Capablanca was born in 1888 and started demonstrating chess knowledge at the age of four, meaning that he probably had been observing (his father playing) chess for about 6-12 months before that. So his chess career can be said to have started in 1891. By 1911, this kid has already been playing twenty years of chess. Even his big wins as a teenager all come after 10 odd years of experience. He easily had 10,000+ hours under his belt. It doesn’t seem that magical to me at all.

Also, four year-olds and newbies of all ages tend to say some really amazing-seeming, supposedly prodigy-like things [like pointing out violations of chess rules, as Capa did] for at least four reasons that come to mind:

(1) They don’t yet have full social training in shutting up and sitting down — self-editing/self-inhibition.

(2) They tend to have a healthy, natural, carefree confidence in themselves and their own opinions — a lot of adults with the same brief chess experience might observe the violation but assume they were wrong because adults have learned to give precedence to authority over logic. Do you have the guts to stand up and tell Stephen Hawking that the numerator and denominator on his little equation are switched around? At your next Pentagon briefing, is your colonel self going to tell the four-star general that his satellite photos are upside down and of the wrong province? More likely than not, you’ll shut up and/or give him the benefit of the doubt.

(3) They (small children and newbies) tend to apply rules with a logic and uniformity that is untempered by exceptions and the aforementioned social conformity.

(4) Small children especially get treated better emotionally. Their egos are protected as a matter of social custom. In general, a small child learning an “advanced” or “complex” skill is highly likely to receive rapt attention and ecstatic praise, even for only partially correct execution. Furthermore, unless life and limb are at risk, she is unlikely to be scolded for a blatant error, because, after all, “he’s just a kid”. At the other extreme, adults and older children face mockery and derision for even the slightest error; when they do execute correctly, praise is neither readily forthcoming, nor particularly effusive. The difference in resulting confidence is like night and day; it’s the difference between becoming a pro chess player and…not becoming a pro chess player.

Speaking of untempered logic, at many points throughout my life, I have personally had the experience of pointing out blindingly simple, obvious things to experts who should (and generally do) know better. I once had an antiques expert explain to me the history of an old plate and how this very plate had been made in the 1700s and used by Napoleon’s uncle’s baby momma’s cousin or something, and then I looked at the underside of the plate and asked her “how come it says ‘1922’ on the bottom?” Does it make me an antiques genius? Am I the next karate kid of French crockery? I think it’s just common sense at work.

It sounds to me like Capablanca was just another example of a guy who just had lots of fun and thereby put in lots of time…double-digit years of time. I love his relaxed attitude to the whole thng: “[chess is] not a difficult game to learn and it is an enjoyable game to play.” No doubt there are exceptions to everything, but he doesn’t seem to be one. Nor is Mozart (to whom Capa apparently gets compared a lot), according to Gladwell:

Mozart, for example, famously started writing music at six. But, the psychologist Michael Howe writes in his book Genius Explained, by the standards of mature composers Mozart’s early works are not outstanding. The earliest pieces were all probably written down by his father, and perhaps improved in the process. Many of Wolfgang’s childhood compositions, such as the first seven of his concertos for piano and orchestra, are largely arrangements of works by other composers. Of those concertos that contain only music original to Mozart, the earliest that is now regarded as a masterwork (No9 K271) was not composed until he was 21: by that time Mozart had already been composing concertos for 10 years.

Right now seems like as good an excuse as any to share the words of Alexander “I am the best-looking Founding Father” Hamilton:

Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this; when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort that I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.

I don’t know, though…what do you think, everyone? Be kind and friendly! No English drama or acrimony allowed!

Hey. Remember that last rambling train wreck of a post [you think you can make fun of me better than me? huh? BRING IT!]? There was a comment made on it by Terry of this Yahoo Group that was just so super-cool and lucid, I felt compelled to share it with the world. So here it is [this was put up without permission, so…if there’s a problem, someone let me know]:

I would put it like this.

Anybody and Everybody can get from point A to point B.

Say you want to get from Miami to Atlanta. Anybody and Everybody can get from Miami to Atlanta. Maybe some go by plane, some by train, some by automobile. MAYBE some walk. But Anybody and Everybody can make it to Atlanta.

Problem is most people leave Miami for Atlanta and lose track of where they are going. Next thing they know they are back in Miami. And they will venture out again and stop moving in the direction of Atlanta and WHAM they are back in Miami.

They will do that over and over and over and come to conclude that only The Great ever make it to Atlanta.

“Atlanta is some magical place that only excepts the special few.”

And all they had to do is keep moving in the direction of Atlanta until they got there.

Problem is most people leave Miami for Atlanta and lose track of where they are going…all they had to do is keep moving in the direction of Atlanta until they got there.

I did not put it better myself…

Howdy! Is not a word that I usually use.

By now you’ve probably heard about this already, but just in case you haven’t, let’s talk about it here. Malcolm McDowell, who once tried to destroy the galaxy so that he could re-enter an energy ribbon in space where he could experience Paradise for the r…

OK, not Malcolm McDowell. Malcolm Gladwell. Done gone written a book enbenamed Outliers: The Story of Success. About, basically, what makes the top people the top. What makes them the greatest of all times! What makes the l33t hax0rs of every field pwn so hard.

Executive summary: It isn’t talent. It’s time. 10,000 hours, to be exact. Where have you heard this before? Maybe, I dunno, a little blog by a random Kenyan boy…

I haven’t read the book yet; I’ll probably wait for the Janslation. But I’m already loving what I read about it in the The Guardian (via this post by Golem):

“If you put together the stories of hockey players and the Beatles and Bill Joy and Bill Gates, I think we get a more complete picture of the path to success. Joy, Gates and the Beatles are all undeniably talented…that “talent”, however, was something other than an innate aptitude for music or maths. It was desire.”

“a key part of what it means to be talented is being able to practise for hours and hours — to the point where it is really hard to know where “natural ability” stops and the simple willingness to work [long and consistently] begins. “

But my favorite part is where he discusses a little boy band from northern England that was popular back when our Mums were young:

“The Beatles ended up travelling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962…All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, they had performed live an estimated 1,200 times, which is extraordinary. Most bands today don’t perform 1,200 times in their entire careers [emphasis added]…

“They were no good on stage when they went there and they were very good when they came back,” Norman says. “They learned not only stamina, they had to learn an enormous amount of numbers — cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock’n’roll, a bit of jazz, too…when they came back they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.”

I don’t even like the Beatles; I find their music very hard to listen to. But, I cannot help but respect them for being so diligent. From this description, it seems that their acclaim was well deserved.

What all this is showing is that the path to success, to greatness, to excellence, to ownage in any field is so straightforward, so simple, as to be almost anticlimactic. What I love about Gladwell’s book and the ideas it contains, is how we are seeing the complete removal of all the magic, the mystery[1], the sickening hero-envy and the even more sickening hero-worship[2] that have, up until now, been associated with, you now, people who are l33t.

So if you want to be l33t at anything, you can. All you have to do is show up. If you want to be fluent in a language, cut off your wuss glands and just get on with being in the language. If you want to learn how to draw, get out some paper and start scribbling. If you want to know how to skate, go down to the rink and get on the ice.

And you will suck. For a long time[3]. You will be terrible. Children will be better than you. “Mere” toddlers will talk and skate and draw circles around you. But if you just keep going, you’ll get better. You just will. It’s that simple. It really is…that. freaking. simple.

OK, fine, so, here I am saying how simple it is and “just do it”, and “cut off your wuss glands” [sounds ridiculously painful], but…if it’s so simple why are so many people still not succeeding? Why are there still so few people, you know, owning? And why does it feel so difficult?

Well, there are many reasons. One of them is the fact that that long part in the beginning where you suck, really is long and really does suck. And lots of people — especially adults — lose both hope and face there. This is why adults appear to succeed less than children: adults have the linguistic power to make elaborate excuses and the legal power to choose what to do where and when; kids don’t get that luxury. Britney Spears couldn’t tell her Mum to freck off and stop pimping her to Disney. Even if she could, she was going and that was final, young lady! Regardless of age, it’s hard to see how you’re going to one day be amazing when you clearly are so lame right now: the effort-versus-improvement ratio is just so low in the beginning. My way of coping with that feeling is this:

Forget your position, remember your velocity (at least, that’s what we’ll call it). Forget where you are. It doesn’t matter. All you need to focus on are the two components of “velocity”, in order of priority:

(1) The direction in which you are heading. In plain terms this means showing up: if you are a would-be skater, then actually get on the ice every day; if you are a would-be artist, then actually create art every day. Do something. Anything will do. No quotas, no rules, no plan, no system, no method, just do something. Skater? Don’t even have a goal to skate, just get on the ice with skates on. Want to be a drawing person? Draw a line on paper. Japanese? Turn on the TV. Don’t even try to pay attention, just turn it on. Runner? Put on your shoes, and step outside. Don’t even try to run.

(2) The speed at which you are getting there. Here, the unit of speed is the hour — the magnitude of time you spend each day. So what we effectively mean by speed is “average number of hours per day put in”. In other words, how quickly you are racking up those 10,000 hours.

And forget everything else. First, forget the past; forget it — it’s gone. Secondly, 99% of the time, you should pay no attention to how quickly you are or aren’t progressing; it’s fine — even good — to notice that you’re progressing, just ignore the rate of progress, because no matter how fast it is or isn’t, for most of us post-modern, television-raised kids, it will be longer than 23 minutes, which means it’ll be too slow and therefore too depressing = discouraging = makes you want to quit. Thirdly, more or less let go of the future: don’t worry about ETA (estimated time of arrival), i.e. when you will be good; don’t worry about POS (probability of success), i.e. whether you will ever get good — neither of these are useful pieces of information, and worrying about them won’t help you get there any quicker.

In short, what I do is just treat it like a job (clarification: on the ground, the physical actions that lead to becoming great are as simple as any menial job, but the mindset is a self-/curiosity-/interest-directed one, not one of resignation to victimhood and suffering, nor one of abdication of personal responsibility)…just punch in, punch out. Clock in, clock out. Put in the time. It’s a complete no-brainer — like flipping burgers or eating jelly beans or assembling widgets or sticking lego blocks together. Ever wonder why flight hours are often used as a measure of how good a pilot is? Because the pilot people knew this all along. If you just punch in, success, greatness, “ownage”…will all take care of themselves.

What we call “talent” is merely a phenomenon that naturally and inevitably occurs when someone has done something for a long time — so long that they can observe and manipulate patterns with a speed, accuracy and finesse that are impossible for the untrained eye/hand/mouth/foot. Don’t be intimidated — rack up those hours and you’ll be the man now dawg, too.

By the time you visibly, externally, publicly succeed, it’ll have been so inevitable for so long, so much a part of you and your daily life, so much a fait accompli, what the French call an “accomplished fact”, that only other people will be surprised. This happened to me with Japanese. I never set out to learn Japanese in a specific amount of time. At least initially. I merely said: “I’m going to act Japanese and I’m going to keep acting Japanese until it’s not acting any more”. I no longer cared how long it took, who died, whether Bush actually won the election the first time, I was just going to do it for as long as was necessary to get good.

In a sense, I succeeded because I gave up. I gave up trying to force and control the process. You see, what had happened before with, for example, my kanji study (pre-SRS), is that I would start, and then lose steam and give up for 3 to 6 months at a time. Then after several months I’d be like: “Mother of Bush! If I had been working on it all this time, even just 10 characters a day I would know like 1800 characters by now!!!” I felt worse than that guy who got shot by Dick Cheney, the Vice-President of the United States of America, in the face. I came to the point where I realized that any daily progress was better than no progress. Anything was better than zero. And it was such a low standard (“just do something“) it was such a “come on, man, just try one — it grows out of the ground, it can’t hurt you, maaan, come on, man, you’re black, I heard they do this all the time in Jamaica”[4], that it just naturally expanded to take over my life; I didn’t have to force it; I didn’t have to struggle.

My only goal at the daily level was to just be there (i.e. have listened to even 1 second of Japanese) — that was enough. I didn’t really compare myself to anyone or anything. At the daily level, I didn’t really wish or hope or yearn or despair; that would be as idiotically futile as trying to grow; most of the time, you don’t see kids clench their fists, close their eyes, and try to squeeze out a few inches on their leg bones…they just eat food, run around and sleep. Like a kid, I just…was. I ate my food (Japanese materials), ran around with my Japanese friends [when they weren’t too busy], played on the jungle gym (SRS), and fell asleep to a Japanese “lullaby” [the news]. Just being myself, in Japanese.

I wanted to remove that whole “if only I lived in Japan” excuse from the equation. That whole “yeah, if you really wanna learn it, you’ve got to visit the country, man” myth. Anyone who knows English teachers in Japan knows that “living in the country” doesn’t mean jack bollocks all squat[5]. Back in the day, I did not have the money (nor the knowledge of how to make money) to go to Japan, but I had access to Japanese audio, video, text and people. Could I not do something with these? I didn’t know for sure, but I had a hunch that something would happen after a lot of repetition[6], so I gave it a try. Ever noticed how kids watch the same few movies over and over again? Is this coincidence? Or are they trying to figure something out — without their even knowing it? Are kids trying to teach themselves their own language, in some way?

Anyway, let’s wrap up. Remember that the pathetic-seeming things you’re doing right here and now in your vegan pizza-stained sweatpants[7] are the very steps that make up the journey to greatness and therefore are essentially equal to success itself[8]. They are the private victory that necessarily precedes the public victory. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:

“Why all this deference to [Bill Gates] and [The Beatles] and [Tiger Woods]? Suppose they were [l33t], did they wear out [l33tness]?…As great a stake depends on your private act today as followed their public and renowned steps. [You can own, too, be-arch]”.

So keep going. Keep sucking for now. Don’t worry: it’s working…

[1] Are part of their history, along with the secret of GUMMY BERRY JUICE!!!!

[2] During the Olympics this year, I told Momoko (mi esposa), only half-jokingly, that viewers should be legally required to first watch all the thousands of hours of practice that athletes put in, before being given the privilege to watch any actual competition. Then, even Michael Phelps would just be a young man who swims a lot. No one’s performance would really be a surprise [“well of course he can swim fast, my gosh, if I swam that much I ‘d be all over that podium; all this fool ever does is swim!”, would cry the spectators], and there would be far less B.S., athlete-worship and dodgy racial theories. But then, the dodgy racial theory sports book industry might come crashing down, and all those authors might be forced to do proper research…and we wouldn’t want that.

Seriously, though, without denigrating anything the work of people like Phelps, the reason people make so much noise out about him and other athletes stems from a desire — a need — on the part of the mass media industry to manufacture stars, heroes, and people to sell sugar water. Furthermore, white people rather badly needed a homeboy to fill the gaping void Lance Armstrong left, because…damn. Hey, I understand. Like, for me, Star Wars is basically the story of how James Earl Jones led Samuel L. Jackson to his death and then double-crossed Billy Dee Williams. Also, there was a kindly little Japanese man with a skin disease, and a massive space station exploded. Two…massive space stations. Way to go, James Earl Jones.

Back on the topic of watching practices as a prerequisite for watching real performances…I’d love to sit it on the rehearsals of great performers like Michael Jackson.

[3] Yes, longer than the 5-minute montage. Longer than the whole movie. Longer than many movies in a row. There’s no drama and easy-to-see improvement in real life. Just punching in and out. It’s invisible to you, just like growing taller. You’re only aware of it indirectly — either other people tell you, or you look back over time.

[4] I know…WTF?

[5] The same goes for Mormon missionaries — yes, a good number actually plug in, get really good and grow up to be Kent Gilbert — but plenty of them suck; they have no interest in Japan or Japanese and just wanted to get over this two year hump and back to courting girls called Emily Sorenson. Their pronunciation makes babies’ ears bleed and they are illiterate, which means that if you say anything remotely non-biblical to them, like “solar system”, they will crash faster than Windows 95. I know. I went to a Mormon university and even programmed at the Missionary Training Center. In general, a lot of Mormon missionaries aren’t so much good at languages as they are better-than-most-Americans, which is good enough for government work (NSA, CIA, TLA) but not good enough to even read a newspaper. Which is fine, I guess, because it seems that when the American intelligence community needs information about another country, they just make it up anyway (“I dunno, dude…they’re brown people, right? Just say they were planning to bomb something, I dunno…we need this NIE out today, man, come on…”). Oooo…someone’s getting his phone tapped today.

Having said that, I still love Mormons: kindest, sweetest people ever…girls called Emily Sorenson are always baking cookies…Mmm. Sugar, refined flour, Crisco.

[6] Ever notice how you’re often easily able to remember the chorus of a pop song word for word, but not so much the other verses? Hmm…I wonder if it has anything to do with the chorus getting repeated anything from 3 to 10 times more than any other part of the song, naturally leading to 3 to 10 times the exposure. I’m just saying, man…I’m just saying.

[7] The uniform of champions!

[8] Take climbing a mountain. Which step matters most? The first? The last? That one right in the middle? The odd-numbered ones? Weren’t they all necessary?

I’m not sure how directly this relates to AJATT. I mean, it relates. But I’m not sure that it relates to everyone doing AJATT. In fact, I know it doesn’t. But, it is an issue that affects me and that affects some AJATT readers. In fact, now that I think about it, it affects everyone who ever has longish stretches of free time that just seem to slip through their fingers despite the best of intentions going in. So, yeah, it’s relevant.

The Big Question

OK, enough introductizing…the question at hand is this: “Why Do People Who Have All the Time in the World Get Nothing Done?” Why is it that you had a whole week to do catch up on your classwork over Thanksgiving Break, but not only did you not finish it, you didn’t even start it?! You didn’t even crack open the book! WHY? All you did was sit on your butt, eat dead, rotting bird and watch every episode of Robot Chicken released to date. And when you ran out of that, you reached for Gilmore Girls. Wow, this post is going to sound sooooo dated in 15 years.

Do we need management? Do we need bosses? Do we need stress or at least eustress to get anything done? Do we need the threat of pain and suffering to get our butts in gear? Do we need something to fear? Is an idle mind Dick Cheney’s workshop? I say yes and no.

If we had been left alone as kids, this would not be an issue. Young kids who have not yet undergone that much processing, and unschooled kids seem to do fine getting stuff done.

OK, but forget about kids. Stupid kids thinking they’re our future. I’m the future, you vertically challenged motherlovers! Let’s bring it back to us. So, why do people who have all the time in the world never get anything done? Why…do people who have all the time in the world never get anything done? WHY do people who have all the time in the world get absolutely nothing done? Chris Rock’s stand-up style is affecting my writing.

Lottery Winner/Windfall Syndrome

I don’t freaking know why. But I have a wacky Khatzumoto hypothesis about it. I call it lottery winner syndrome hype o’thesis.

We all know those stories of lottery winners who, like, were totally poor, and then they won the lottery and overnight became decamillionaires, but then overnight became po’ again. The New Age PD people will spin you a tale about the “Law of Attraction” and how they weren’t a “vibrational match” for the money.

Mmmmyeah. This is what is known in linguistics as “bollocks”. It’s a special kind of bollocks, though, because it’s actually correct at many levels, but it’s bollocks because it’s the same as saying “the Sky Deity is urinating” instead of “it’s raining”, or “Remote Desktop hates me” instead of “I forgot to open port 3389”, or…yeah…or that.

What I mean is, we can accurately describe and predict the same phenomena (effect of attitude and knowledge on life experience) without going all southern California about it and trying to sell people a seminar. Did I mention I hate personal development seminars? Yeah, but that’s just my two cents. PD books are cool, though.

Dang, dude, far too many asides. Where were we? Oh yeah — lottery winner syndrome. Yeah, it totally happens, man. Totally. In fact, it happens so often I want to give it a new, more general name: the “windfall syndrome hypothesis“, whereby:

People who have been in a state of impoverishment with respect to a given resource, are very likely to completely misuse and exhaust the resource if and when they abruptly come to have it in plentiful supply.

Corollary: People who gradually acquire more of the resource tend not to do so.

I and two Japanese friends of mine who live nearby have left the so-called “normal” company life that most adults currently live. We work from home. We set our own hours. We are basically free to do whatever we want whenever we want. In the common parlance, “we have a lot of free time on our hands”. We are timewealthy. We timerich, be-arch.

But, for a while there, we weren’t nearly as productive as we want to be. In fact, we had become less productive when free than when we were company serfs (and everything but company work was a side project that had to be done on the commuter train). Dude, there are only three podcasts up right now. I haven’t produced a Dick and Jane comic since my Sony days. KhatzuMemo went a year almost untouched. Fortunately, that’s changing now, due to reasons and discoveries I’ma going to a-discuss-a a-here.

OK, so the windfall hypothesis so far is saying what happens and when it happens but not why. Like so many things, it does come down to psychology, to philosophy, to state of mind, baby (I’m doing the touching-my-temples-with-both-index-fingers thing, and I’m saying “mind” in a near-whisper). State of miiiind, maaan.

Innumeracy

Why? Because of a subtle subspecies of a disease called innumeracy (a great book, by the way). Innumeracy can affect even people who otherwise like numbers and math of the matics. Innumeracy is the reason people will drive across town to Kroger to save 50 cents on roasted peanuts, but will not blink at a $50,000 difference in house price because their being semi-conned into focussing on the low/no-down-payment and the monthly cost of the mortgage (another great book). As if the $50,000 somehow matters less because it’s being siphoned off over time (plus interest, son!).

The innumeracy at work in the windfall syndrome can actually be expressed verbally — without numbers — it is already in the title of this post:

“Why Do People Who Have All the Time in the World Get Nothing Done?”

Can you see it? I’ll point it out for you: “all the time in the world“. This is the innmueracy of large numbers — innumeracy of infinites. Governments use it all the time, wangling a billion dollars here and there. Regular, schooled-and-therefore-innumerate taxpaying folk are so bamboozled that they swallow all these budget tricks.

So, in short the problem is: we (tend to) have a very poor understanding of the concept of infinity: we fallaciously conflate it with any sufficiently large-seeming number. Just like those rags-to-riches-to-rags lottery winners who think that the money is infinite — it could never run out — only to discover that, yes, one hundred million dollars can, in fact, be exhausted.

It’s not just the fault of the lottery winners. The people around them play a role, too. Get considerably richer than your friends and watch their behavior change. You don’t even have to wait for it to be six figures…just start making about twice as much money as your friends and watch them act differently; watch them act as if your money is inexhaustible.

Like Cuba Gooding, Jr. once said on Oprah, when you become a millionaire, and an old friend/acquaintance asks you for $10,000 and you say no, and they say that you suck and wealth has changed you…it’s not you that has changed; it’s them: they never would have asked you for that kind of cash before, but suddenly they act as if you’re a never-ending fountain of no-strings-attached grant money. In fact, they more or less believe you are. (Similar things happen where people who have less steal from people who have more, thinking “it’s so little; they won’t notice”).

Timewealth and Timepoverty

OK, let’s bring it back to time. People  who have a lot of free time certainly have a lot more than most. Many salarymen (サラリーマン) in Japan have, on a good weekday, maybe two hours of discretionary time — if that. In contrast, someone not living the reeman (リーマン/salaryman) lifestyle — even a housewife — arguably has 24 hours a day free, right? Which means they have, say, 12 times as much time as a reeman (リーマン). Right?

Wrong. As with money, there is “time tax” in a sense. First of all, we all need to sleep maybe, I dunno, 6 to 10 hours a day to stay healthy and sane. Some people more, some less. So, strike off 8 hours for sleep. That leaves 16 hours. SIXTEEN FREE HOURS! That’s still 8 times more than our fictional reeman (リーマン), right?

Wrong. Personal maintenance — eating, showering, getting ready, let’s give it two hours. Which leaves 14 hours, right?

Wrong. Let’s say exercise and travel combined take 2 hours, leaving 12 hours. And then let’s just say “various” other tasks involving care and maintenance of things other than one’s person — housework, childcare, petcare, and play-breaks (since (1) virtually no one can work on something without breaks indefinitely, (2) many people have these kinds of maintenance responsibilities). That leaves 8 hours for some real work.

Eight hours is still a good amount of time. But you know what? It certainly isn’t infinite. My figures are all kind of fudged and estimated and made-up; it’s probably hard to be truly general since except maybe Japanese housewives, people are going to have very unique life patterns. Maybe with some timehacks people can squeeze out an extra two hours, bringing us back to 10.

So, this person with “all the time in the world” is really only 4 to 5 times timericher than a reeman (リーマン). In the US, where I’d hazard a guess that regular-a$$ employees have 4 hours a day of truly discretionary time, this means that the timerich are only maybe twice as rich as “regular” folk.

Unlike money, time can’t be created; it can only be “reallocated”. And there’s a hard limit — the day is only 24 hours long for any of us. Add in all that natural overhead (“tax”), and a timerich person just isn’t that rich.

Now, the problem is that not only do many of the timerich think they’re far richer than they actually are, so do the timepoor cling-ons. You know, those people who ask you to do something because “come on, maaan, it’s not like you don’t have the time”. “Why don’t you respond to every email that ever comes into your inbox, be-arch? Come on, man — YOU HAVE THE TIME”. “Back up my files for me! Come on, maaan! You have a terabyte!”. “Buy me a house, Bill Gates — come on, man — YOU HAVE THE MONEY” (actually, he doesn’t: a lot of that net worth is stock and there are rules preventing him from selling it…plus, if he were to sell it, it could be taken reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally badly).

So, the timerich are not only bombarded by infinite requests for their “infinite” time, they also put infinite demands upon themselves. (And, like I said, a timerich person is anyone who has considerably more discretionary time than the so-called norm; many people experience sudden temporary timewealth in forms like Thanksgiving Break and summer holidays, even public holidays). Not because they are stupid but because they are in fact following a code of ethics. By this simple, invisible code, it would be wrong for an infinitely wealthy person to be stingy. It would be wrong for a person who has infinite time to not do infinitely good work: one’s fundamental sense of morality would not allow it.

According to David Allen of Getting Things Done, this is why people who already have too much to do often keep taking on more stuff — without some kind of management system to tell them otherwise, they may feel busy and burnt-out, but they have no way of telling for certain that they have far too much going on and they need to start saying no outright — so they keep taking on more projects, often until they fall apart from the strain of it all (i.e. go physically/mentally bankrupt, like unto a lottery winner). Those projects can be as simple as taking on too many books to read. Only when you have something like a single, (visibly jam-packed) “to read” box do you realize that, in fact, you have too much to read and this pamphlet’s just gonna have to go suck it. Without a visible spillage, they may just think that their glass is heavy but that they should keep pouring in more water.

I, my friends, and everyone who’s ever put off coursework for the weekend or Thanksgiving Break “when I’ll have a whole week to catch up” (as if all 168 hours could be spent lump sum, en masse, nonstop on the work you hadn’t been doing all semester), all thought we had infinite time. So we tried to do infinite work. And we didn’t just end up only doing “a leetle bit of work” — we did virtually no work. No manga produced, no website put up, no KhatzuMemo updates. Because we were paralyzed. We’d spend days and weeks just THINKING CRAP UP, because we (subconsciously) felt we had to because, after all, we had the time. And, yeah, if you had an infinitely long life, then 70 years spent just playing with ideas for your Great American Novel would be no problem. But you know what? Not only do you not have an infinite life, you have pretty durn short days.

So, yeah…this is why short, winnable games work…they bring us back into finite reality. This is why giving a kid a dollar and teaching her not to spend all of it will help her if she ever suddenly has a kajillion of them. In short “a lot” of anything, really isn’t that much.

The 80-20 Principle

Remember when I hinted at “discoveries I’ma going to a-discuss-a a-here.”? My big “discovery” was the 80-20 Principle. In fact, I’m reading a whole book about it. It is fascinating stuff, man. And liberating. These kind of ideas used to upset me, kind of like how certain people (hippies) always lament at the rich growing richer — it’s called feedback, motherlover; wouldn’t it suck if getting more of something made you lose it? The idea that the vast majority of effects stem from a minuscule minority of causes can seem unjust…but think about it — the next time you make a to-do list at your computer, know that for every 10 items about 2 will actually be really worth it. Rather than stress out about all 10, focus on those 2, and then, if there’s still time, try to fit in some of the other 8. It’s like that object lesson about trying to fit pebbles and rocks into a jar. If you put in the pebbles, there’ll be no room for the rocks. Put in the rocks, and let the pebbles fit around them.

I used to try to get everything done. I was the perfectionist. And it was killing me; I was getting symptoms of all those middle-class neuroses (what “pretty white kids with problems” collectively refer to as “issues”) — panic attacks, OCD-like behavior, watching Gilmore Girls. OK, it never quite got that bad, but you see what I mean.

Many days, I would avoid doing anything, just so I could evade the self-imposed duty to be perfect, complete and infinite. But thanks to all these books, I have a whole box of tools to help me work with that. Eat That Frog and Getting Things Done taught me how to slice up my work so small that even complex, dirty duties (who likes filing their taxes?) could be as emotionally neutral as the proverbial flipping of burgers.

This was a major step forward, but by itself it was not enough. The Now Habit taught me to let go of being perfect and just get on with it. And the 80-20 Principle taught me to look for and zero in on the very least — the one or two widget-making/burger-flipping tasks — I could do to achieve the very most. I feel good. I knew that I would, now.

Example from Real Life:

Yesterday I had a list of changes to make on AJATT. And I started making the changes, then I thought  up yet more ideas and I started working on them. In about two minutes I was literally working on ten things at once (those books, as good as they are, don’t won’t can’t change your behavior for you, rather, they lead you to observe it and show you what to do, then you change it). I was trying to be at all points in space and time at once, kind of like in Star Trek: Voyager (buy the Japanese version, motherlover!) when Tom Paris went to warp 10; I was flying at warp 10 with no inertial dampers, shields down, broken deflector…I was going to get crushed by the enormity of my own thoughts.

Then I stopped. First, I wrote down what I wanted to do. Writing it down is something many of the PD peepz recommend — it helps you judge things in their true context, against everything else that needs to be done (when it’s just in your head, everything can seem important). As David Allen has hinted, the purpose of a list of tasks is not necessarily to do all of them, indeed a lot of it is a matter of choosing tasks to not do.

Anyway, I wrote down all the tasks. Then I numbered them in order of “easiest to do and greatest long-term benefit”; I like easy. I noticed one of the tasks wasn’t a task at all, but a nebulous, amorphous, undefined, unwinnable project: “update/streamline Table of Contents”. I deleted it and went with “add recent (= October/November) articles to Table of Contents”. Oh yeah — like the pebbles fitting in around the rocks, I also picked up some of the lower-numbered tasks “on the way”, quite unintentionally. Which, funnily enough, led to an overall update/streamlining of the Table of Contents.

Which all seems very petty, but…if you’d been there, you’d have felt the realness.

Like the SRS once taught me about memory, 90-95% right is good enough. The remaining 5-10% is almost never worth going for (pretend for a moment that the long tail doesn’t exist; I don’t know how to fit it in) — too much work, too much pain, too little gain.

In Closing

So do you need a boss? Only if you don’t know this stuff. That’s what bosses and editors and producers do for employees/writers/artists — they make these task-splitting, get-‘er-done, 80-20 decisions. This work is valuable, but most of it wouldn’t be necessary if more people were (allowed and placed in a position to learn) to do this for themselves.

Anyway, I don’t know if I’m actually right or not about any of this but…it seems to explain what I’m seeing. What’s your experience? Share!

One day, I’m going to make an acronym for everything. Like, that last sentence will turn into: “ODIGTMAAFE”, and people will be all: “OMG!? AAFE?! LOL!”.

Also, a little warning — there are going to be a lot of links. Break yo’ self!

So, I’m sitting there, eating my curds and whey, when yet another good-looking reader (Gav) sends me a link. You know, one of those external links that comes up every once in a while, and just so resonates with the kind of things you read here, that it simply has to be brought to everyone’s attention. CNN Money/Fortune Magazine, way back in October 2006, put up this sooper harticle entitled What It Takes to Be Great.

Wait, before I go into that, the Gav himself is a pretty amazing guy. Right before the JLPT fiasco, kids were saying things like:

Making an [sic] random English penpal sounds like quite a task and scares me more than a little. Making a random Japanese one seems absolutely impossible. [WC]

and

For someone like me the very idea [of making Japanese friends] is terrifying [ren]

To which der Gavinator replies:

Feel the fear and do it anyway! If you wait for fear to disappear before you do anything new, you will never do it. [Gav]

So you already know this guy is going to be sending you good articles.

Anyway, What It Takes to Be Great is pretty great. It’s definitely got its fair share of gems of wizduum, like this:

In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice…It’s the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance.

You like that? 10,000 hours?! Sound familiar?

Next time you feel like throwing out your SRS altogether [an ill-advised course of action, IMHO], feel this instead:

[Practice] regularly, not sporadically. Occasional practice does not work.

But I think the most important line comes here:

…talent has little or nothing to do with greatness…It’s nice to believe that if you find the field where you’re naturally gifted, you’ll be great from day one, but it doesn’t happen. There’s no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice.

Talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. Everybody sucks at the start. Write it on your liver. Practice, son. But the process doesn’t have to be, as the Fortune article at one point suggests, “painful”. Remember what Julie Poppins said in Terminator: “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, Mr. Frodo!”. Dude, forget a spoon — make a whole freaking smoothie, get a bag of sugar. Get as much sugar as you need, do whatever you need to do to make the process fun. And be sure to divide it into tiny little i+1 chunks so you can get a lot of cheap wins and feel great. Timeboxing, sentences, whatever it takes. Remember, you want to be doing:

activity…that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

So, baby steps. Anyway, enough from me. Go check it out for yourself. And if anyone finds other sooper harticles like this, feel free to share.

Did you see that? I just went a whole post without making a single disparaging comment about CNN and how they generally suck.  “The New Economy: Boom Without End?“…yeah freaking right, Willow Bay and Stuart Varney! Your former employer’s policy of making you pretend to turn breathless declarative statements into cooly considered interrogatives by merely adding a question mark fills me with the liveliest of disgust?

糞ォ・・・

Don’t Believe the Hype

A lot of people say a lot of nice things about me on this site. I’ve been called “insane” (I consider this a compliment), strong-willed, full of “willpower”, “obsessed”, determined, “Naruto-like”, even a “genius”. Sometimes it goes to my head and I start to believe that I might actually be a special person. But I know it’s not true.

Don’t believe the hype. I am none of these things. I’m just as unique as all the other n billion people in the world, which is to say not at all :D. For starters, did you know I wear dark boxers so the pooh stains don’t stand out? Where’s the genius in that? I’m writing this on a massive 8-foot-long beanbag lying almost vertical (look who can’t even get “vertical” and “horizontal” right!) because I’m too much of a bum to sit up. Where’s the determination in that? I have a really, really, really, hardcore peanut-eating habit — “just one mo’, baby!” Where’s the willpower in that? This isn’t me in my “off time”; this is me all the time. Forgetting to pay his power bill, wanting-to-write-more-manga, trying to train his cats in Confucian values, peanut-eating, pooh-stain Khatzumoto. This is the real freakin’ deal, and it’s neither smart, nor pretty, nor goal-oriented. I tell people “I have a lot of the same clothes”, but the fact is, I just don’t shower or change that often.

Pooh stains. No showers. Smells like victory.

So, why did I put together a method of learning Japanese that’s so…hardcore? So, extreme and “all the way”? So, willpowery-sounding?

Because it didn’t take any willpower.

What? WTF? Yeah. Permit me to elaborate.

Winnable Games

Lately, I’ve been doing some listening to David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I actually read the book in college, and tried to apply the method, but it didn’t really work for me. The reason, as it turns out, wasn’t the GTD wasn’t a good fit for me; my hunch tells me that virtually anyone who lives in a text-based society could benefit from GTD; the problem was that I had let some crucial, qualifying sections of GTD slip in my reading. I had seen the forest but missed some really important trees. This time around, I just listened to the audio in snippets (generally, not even in order), and applied as I went along. This, by the way, was one of the few times in my daily life where I was listening to recorded audio that wasn’t Cantonese or Japanese. But I digress. Anyway, David Allen said something really interesting in describing his method, something that really stuck with me. I can’t be bothered to go find the audio and transcribe it, so I’m going to phrase the para phrase the para paraphrase.

Basically, it goes like this. The world has gotten a bit complicated; lots of people no longer do manual/physical labor. Their work is mental. It is also — typically — large, fuzzy and unclear in scope. They don’t have the simple satisfaction of “making widgets”. They aren’t getting the “win” that comes built into the completion of a small physical task. Think about it — you put food in the microwave, you input the cooking time, you start the cooking, DONE — you win! Boom, boom, boom, boom, WIN!

And this doesn’t just apply to jobs, it applies to daily life. How do you win out of “Get taxes done”? “Learn Japanese”? “Finish manual translation”? “Write dissertation”.

The answer is you don’t. And this is why so many people procrastinate on these things and never get them done — or only get them done at the last minute, with lots of pain, weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth and oaths to self of “never again!”, or “but I only work well under pressure!”.

It’s not that they suck; it’s not that the majority of humans are unfit to “think” and “ponder” and “lead” and be “masters of their own affairs”. It’s that they can’t win, or they can’t win soon, at “Get taxes done”? “Learn Japanese”? “Finish manual translation”? “Write dissertation”. Not being able to win soon is the same as not being able to win at all. And if human beings hate anything, it’s un-winnable games. Or, to phrase it more positively — humans love short, tangible, winnable games. If you give them these, you can get them to do anything. And I mean anything. Let’s take some examples (or, maybe just one):

Case Study: Custodial — Cleaning Everyone’s House But My Own

I worked as a custodian in college. “Custodian” was the nice word for “janitor”, which was the nice word for “cleaning boy”, which was the nice word for “filthy peasant”, which was the nice word for filthy peasants. I think the nice word for “custodian” these days is “facilities management engineer”. But I digress. My first custodial job was cleaning the university bookstore. I vacuumed that sucker nice and clean. The bookstore was friggin’ beaurifoo.

One day, I go home, to my college apartment, which was a messy heckhole. There, my earthy, rustic, country-music luhvin’ Texan roommate C-star (contemporaneous with The Other Other White Meat, by the way), who was not a clean-freak by any stretch of the imagination, but who was definitely a man of order, asked me this question: “you clean the bookstore, but you don’t clean your own house?”

Those words have haunted me to this day. I would clean the bookstore but I would not even clean my own home. What kind of human being was I? Was I just unfit to control my own destiny, doomed to be someone’s stooge? Is that the kind of human being I was? Is that the kind of human being most of us are?

My answer to that is an emphatic “no”.

OK, fine — but why didn’t I clean my apartment? I mean, I didn’t even like cleaning the bookstore. I mean, for crying out loud, I was waking up at 4:30 in the ante meridian marnin’ on a day other than Non-Denominational Winter Solstice Festival Day (you know that sleepless, childhood adrenaline rush that comes with NDWSF…yeah, I didn’t have that) to wear a stupid blue vest and clean my overpriced college bookstore, all for money which I would promptly use to buy overpriced textbooks — that I was never even going to read — from said store. Or pay rent for conveniently-close-to-the-bookstore lodgings. Talk about cyclical. And I couldn’t even clean my apartment? Why?

Because I couldn’t win at cleaning my apartment. There was no starting time; there was no ending time; there was no goal state. When would my apartment be clean? What would constitute “clean”liness? What conditions would need to be fulfilled such that I could say “we’re done”. Well, it would have to perfect, wouldn’t it, because the opposite of dirty is perfectly clean, right? Which parts of my apartment? Were my roommates’ bedrooms in the deal? What about the fridge? The toilet? The back of the couch where all the clutter collected? The couch itself, under the cushion, where the remote and the Nintendo controllers liked to hide? What about my homework? And even if, by some act of Gates, I managed to get the apartment clean after hours, no, days, no, years, of work, how would I keep it clean? What if my roommates just messed it up in 5 minutes? How would I get it clean when I felt so bad for letting it get dirty? Did I mention homework? And classes? And flirting — I had flirting to do. And Ultimate Frisbee…In fact, screw cleaning the freaking apartment — let’s go flick some disc.

And so the apartment remained dirty. That and every other apartment I lived in thereafter. Oh, I wanted perfection; I wanted cleanliness; I wanted it baaaad, baby. But…I simply couldn’t see a path to it. However (and, while it seems obvious now, I never made the connection at the time), I always managed to at least get the place in shape for cleaning inspections. The cleaning inspections split the entire apartment into smallish jobs (sucky, but smallish), assigned each job to a roommate, and had a hard deadline. Cleaning inspection would end at the deadline. After inspection, enjoying a clean apartment, with no microwave grime, no table rings, and (most of all) no rancid, “there be cholera here” air about the toilet, I often found myself wishing cleaning inspections were conducted more often. But at the same time, I found myself worried at what this meant for me and many other people, because that wish of mine implied that I needed management and supervision. That I could not be master of my own affairs (do you get the feeling I’m in love with this phrase? Well, I am. IS THAT SO WRONG???)

Anyway, so my apartment never got clean except for inspection. But I continued to do my custodial work quite loyally. As obvious as it seems now, it never fully dawned on me that the fact that the custodial job had fixed, guaranteed start time, end time, tons of winnable subtasks, fun (I got to laugh and hang out with coworker-friends) and rewards ($$$!!) might have some motivational effect. It didn’t occur to me that my whole “let me just do my best in the time available, and if time runs out, well, screw it, it’s not like I won’t be cleaning again tomorrow” attitude had anything to do with it. It never occurred to me that the fact that I treated cleaning my house like some massive, Picasso’s-got-nothing-on-me, OCD-fuelled, lifelong magnum opus instead of just a job to be done piecemeal, quickly, painlessly and repeatedly, might be the issue here.

The Magic Equation aka Temporal Motivation Theory aka TMT: The Grand Unifiying Theory of Getting Stuff Done

I’ve been thinking and talking about bits and pieces of this article for quite a long time, with anyone who’ll listen, in any language I can explain it in. One of those pieces dropped out in the form of this article about keeping SRS items short, and a comment I added to said article. That comment led a reader named munashi to point out this newspaper piece summarizing a young chap named Piers “Brosnan Remington” Steel‘s research. This, I might as well tell you, led me to wet my panties rather profusely. Quite simply, this guy’s research is the shizzle in the fizzle within and beyond the dizzle, with a cherry on top.

Because it deserves repeating, here’s the deal:

U = EV / ΓD

• U = Utility. How much ya wanna do it. How much fun it is.
• E = Expectancy. How much confidence you have you can get it done.
• V = Value. How important (and/or how sucky) it is.
• Γ = (Proneness to) distractions, based on environment, habits or whatever. Uppercase gamma, just to be cool.
• D = Delay. Deadline. Due date. How long you have to do it.

Get it? Are you excited as I am? Do you see why this Piers’ research is the shizzle in the fizzle within and beyond the dizzle, with a cherry on top? Dude, this is moè; this Akihabara maid café level excitement! No? OK, permit me to elaborate.

The higher U is (Khatzumoto! Stop perpetuating ethnic stereotypes of English usage!), the more likely you is (no, really, stop it!) to get the job done. So, the key here comes in getting that numerator (Expectancy x Value) high and keeping that denominator (Distraction x Delay) low.

In my not so humble opinion, just about all of personal development can be explained by this equation. That doesn’t mean that the PD industry is a waste of time; I happen to think it’s totally cool and useful. It just means that it all boils down to tweaking these parameters.

Things like The Secret (yes, I know it features that charlatan obaasan who thinks she has visions; and I know that the probability she’s for real is slightly less than…the probability that Julia Roberts will invite me to her house this weekend to lick her armpit hair — but don’t let that get in the way of this discussion!) are trying to get you to focus on doing stuff you want — this is tweaking the U directly.

Tony Robbins most frequently wants to get your confidence up; he wants to take your E parameter sky-high.

Brian Tracy, in works like Time Power and Eat That Frog!, is working on your V — getting you to do valuable tasks first and most.

Decreasing Γ is where stuff like Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s (yeah, I don’t know how to pronounce it either…freaking East Europeans bringing their names into my country…oh, wait, I’m foreign and long-named, too — never mind!) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience excels.

Timeboxing, a technique that Brian Tracy and his disciple Steve of the Pavlina discuss, is one of the most powerful tools for minimizing the D component, which, of course, drives up the power of the numerator, and by extension U. Other D-minimizing techniques include “salami-slicing”, “swiss-cheesing” and “oil-barrelling”, all of which are explained in Tracy’s Frog book up there.

You might say that AJATT works by increasing U (doing fun stuff in Japanese), by increasing E (confidence), by decreasing Γ (Japanese-only environment), and by decreasing D — reducing the process to a short, winnable game by way of SRS.

Environment + SRSing = Game

A while back, a reader named quendidil, whom many of you will know, talked about learning Japanese in general, and SRSing in particular, being addictive — especially when he had big, looming projects like final exams going on. Truth be told, I have experienced the exact same phenomenon.

And I totally don’t think that’s a bad thing. It is the potential “addictive” quality of the method of learning language that you’ll find on this site, that led me to learn Japanese to such a high level in such a relatively short amount of time.

Using an SRS reduces Japanese to a game: a very short, very winnable game. You are constantly winning. The reward isn’t months away — it’s right here and now. It’s practically a slot machine experience. Find kanji/sentence: win. Enter it into the SRS: win. “Bet” on your ability to remember it through a spaced, somewhat randomized repetition: win. Click, win, click, win, click win. No worrying about your memory because the SRS has got it all taken care of, scheduling things for you like a personal secretary.

And it’s not just the SRSing, the environment is a win, too. Put music/anime/video game/whatever on = win. You just have to plug in, turn on, and plug yourself in. Rake up your “flight hours” until they get into five figures. Every moment literally brings you closer. Every moment is its own victory. You get so busy winning you might forget that you’re getting more and more comfortable with real Japanese. Suddenly you can read huge tracts of real text without any trouble. Suddenly you can say stuff. Suddenly your Japanese friends of the opposite gender ask you to leave the room because they want to talk about their periods (this actually happened to me), and they know you’ll understand.

Keeping the Game Alive: Playing with Equation Parameters

But just because SRSing/AJATTing is intended to be fun and short, that doesn’t mean that, left untouched, it can’t get long and boring. It totally can. Just like playing even the funnest video game made by Funnites from the Planet Fun, while eating Fun-Flakes and drinking milk laced with fun nanomachines.

So, you need to help things along — to help keep U high.

Lowering D

Like I said, timeboxing has been my favorite tool for pumping up utility. I have two identical egg-timers in my household — one for the kitchen, and one at my desk. I use them all the time.

SRSing feels like a burden? Timebox it! Don’t wanna wash the dishes? Timebox it! 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever you’re comfortable with. So, keeping it short, mimimzing D, is our secret weapon here. This is what cults and crappy jobs do — they give you tasks that are short, simple and rewarding, even if the only reward is that they end.

What should you do if you still feel like going on after the time limit is reached? Well, a well-chosen timeboxing time should, of course, make you feel like starting at the front end, and feel like continuing at the back end. My old answer to this would be “keep going!”, but now I’ m not so sure. Now I say “stop anyway, take a break, then do another short session”. Pushing yourself too hard, even with timeboxing, risks killing the golden-egg-laying goose. There are almost always more SRS reps to do and dishes to wash, so keep it to “many small sprints”. Keep starting many, many, times. And savor the “enjoyment dividend” — that “I could have gone on for more” feeling. Don’t use it up by continuing — that dividend is what’ll keep you coming back for more…Then again, I do sometimes continue (but still with a timer). Like many things, this is something you’ll just need to judge and tweak for yourself.

So, timeboxing keeps the game short and gives you a win. It teaches you to enjoy the journey — to enjoy the small, partial victory. And, in that way, it teaches you to enjoy life itself. Reaching major goals — finishing RTK1, getting a PhD, getting fluent in Japanese — these are few. But the small, simple, widget-making tasks that get us to those goals, are many. Enjoy the small tasks, and let the big things take care of themselves. Pick the game to play, then focus only on enjoying the game; forget the result; it’ll come when it comes.

Some people don’t like seemingly mindless factory metaphors. But I love them. Yeah, factory workers get pwned; yeah, you don’t like flipping burgers. But something about burger-flipping and widget-making is obviously effective, otherwise you and I simply would not be caught doing them for so long. I’m shooting in the dark here, but I think the developers of these undesirable jobs must have recognized that virtually all work can be divided into (or is naturally made up of) almost meaninglessly small tasks that are distant from the whole (and can even be split between people). This is how you get people to burn other human beings alive — a bomber pilot isn’t thinking “little Ahmed there is going to watch and hear his mother scream in pain as she is immolated”, no, to the pilot it’s “fly to target coordinates, match crosshairs, push button, confirm change”. There’s no meaning, no ethics, at that level of perspective. To see the meaning, the value and the ethics of an action, you have to go ask about the intentions and consequences of an action. You have to ask: “why are we doing this?”, and “what happened because we did it?” But at the action level, there is only now; there is no intention — it’s in the past; there are no consequences — they are in the future; there is just the action. This is why a lot of propaganda and misinformation work to prevent people from accurately considering intention before action, and consequences thereafter. Scary, huh? So use your powers for good, OK?

Use your powers — these tools — to fulfill your dreams and make happy smilies. Want to write that book? Break it down into pieces (“widgets”) so small that you don’t even realize you’re writing it until it’s too late and the book is written! That kind of happened with me and this site. If I’d set out to write it all nice and in order and crap, it never would have gotten done. But just one itty bitty post at a time, as it came to me, as I felt like it, and before I knew it I had, like, stuff written. The same thing goes for daily repetitions, or for the acquisition of any detailed skill or knowledge (language being but one example), or for the accomplishment of any large thing. It all comes down to little moments.

You can play with the other parameters, too. It’s just a matter of figuring out stuff for yourself, or looking at tweaks that other people have come up with.

Keeping the Game Alive: Self-Abuse Ruins Everything, So Be Nice To You

Hmm…somehow I got sidetracked into ethics and employment. That’s not really the point of this post. What I’m trying to say is: “use that equation to help you figure out ways to get stuff done”.

There is one other thing I’d like to share, still on the subject of “keeping the game alive”. It is this: stop berating yourself for not being done yet. Stop berating yourself for not have started sooner. Stop worrying about finishing. Stop trying to finish. The truth is, you CAN’T “finish” a task; it is physically impossible to do so… You can START a task. You can START a task many times. That you can do. But “finishing” isn’t something you do, it’s something you experience — it’s a result, an effect caused only by starting so many times that one of those starts happpens to be the “last start”.

I don’t think this is quite covered in TMT, but it’s crucial if you want to avoid negating TMT benefits. And it is part of the reason that doing Mandarin became a chore for me — and why I switched to doing Cantonese. Of course I actively like Cantonese, but there were other issues involved, to. When doing Mandarin, I kept telling myself things like “if only you’d known X before”, “if only you’d done Y before”, “wow, you suck, you can’t even follow the news yet?”, “why aren’t you fluent YET?”. My whole deal was about what I couldn’t do. Every time I learned something new, I didn’t congratulate myself for making progress, I put myself down for having made progress so “late”. All the TMT application in the world can’t save someone who’s doing this to themselves. So, learn from my mistakes: don’t do that. Just focus on doing and enjoying what you’re doing right now. The 10,000 sentences, the n000 kanji, they’ll all come, but you can’t force them. So fuhgeddabout it — you don’t need to worry about them. Just focus on the one you’re one now. Just focus on this step, here, now. You’re exactly where you need to be.

Why I bring this up now is because, for a while there, I started doing this with Cantonese, too. “Dude, you’ve been doing Cantonese since November 15, 2007, and you STILL don’t X?”. I stopped just enjoying “being” and started freaking out about missing fake goals — goals that I had never actually set.

Realizing that I was repeating an error, I quit the mental self-flagellation and now I’m back to just enjoying myself. I think of what I can do, what I have achieved and what I am doing. For one thing, it occurred to me that I watch Stephen Chow movies and GET JOKES — verbal jokes! Dude, methinks that’s a big freaking deal. Treat yourself like a baby — always looking out for the tiniest achievements to praise. You’ll be surprised by how far you’ve come, if you actually take a look back and start to give yourself some credit.

So, remember: just do your part here and now. You did all the worrying and planning back when you decided to get your equipment, buy movies, buy music, get an SRS, get RTK, get sentences and use this method. Now you’re executing. And that’s all that matters, you don’t need to do anything but focus on execution. All you care about is how to make this widget that’s right in front of you. Maybe you’ll figure out some tweaks to the process, but that will come to you naturally, with time, as you get used to widget-making; you don’t need to pay it any active thought or concern. You’re just doing this one thing. One kanji in. One sentence in. One page in. One definition in. One repetition in. Repeat…

In Closing

Remember, these are all just tools. Not philosophies, not ideologies. Even the philosophies are just mental tools. Use them as long as they are both fun and effective. They’re your toys, you play with them; they serve you — not the other way around. So try it, use it, keep it lose it, whatever. Remember, you’re always supposed to be having fun, and you’re always supposed to be in control. So, in truth there’s nothing you’re supposed to do: there’s just what you want and ways to get it.

Anyway, this article is getting far to long and probably should be split up, but I wanted to try my hand at throwing a long ball. Maybe I’ll write more about this stuff another time.

Laters.

In college, I worked as a janitor. Supposedly because all the TA spots were filled up. Looking back, I should have been more enterprising. But more on that later. Whatever it is about janitorial work from 10pm at night to 6am in the marnin’, it brings out something in people. In my case, it was arguments about the randomest crap ever. My favorite kid to argue with was dark-haired, buff, belligerent, French-looking and French-speaking Chris.

He was a 400m runner on the track team, but had quit because he thought he would never get good. Specifically, he said he had quit running because he could never be as quick as the Africans on the team; they had “fast-twitch muscles”. I told him that he was spewing 24-carat B.S., and that the real reason he could never be good was that he had given up on it. So, I guess the bullet point you can take away from that is persistence matters and never give up. My good mate Calvin Klein put it best:

“Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”

Which is nice, and we could talk about Calvin Coolidge all day. But enough of designers and dead presidents; back to me. So, later, still in college, at a nicer job, I worked with yet another dark-haired, bellicose, French speaker. His name was Peter. He also argued that because he wasn’t African, he could never be good at basketball; he could never be Michael Jordan; he could never be 6’8” (or however tall MJ is), look good with a bald head and have “fingers as long as bananas”…He must be right, right?

Rhetorical question. Peter was wrong. Handsome, but wrong. If his goal was to look like Michael Jordan, then that was one thing (cosmetic surgery). If his goal was to play exactly like Michael Jordan, then that, too, was one thing (acting). And if his goal was to score as many points as Jordan, or play in the NBA like Jordan, then that was yet another thing (practice).

In my own roundabout way, what I’m trying to explain is that Peter thought that playing as well as Jordan meant the same as being Jordan; he was failing because he had conflated Jordan’s appearance with Jordan’s skill; he was trying to be too many things: to be tall, to be black and to be good at basketball. He should have just picked the one: becoming good at basketball. Practice would get him there. He has a nice body on him, and could teach that body basketball. At the end of the day, Michael Jordan is a human being; he breathes air and his pooh smells; he taught himself an advanced skill just like every other human being has; he became the best in his field through extensive practice and dedication — he and Larry Bird are famous in the NBA for being particularly dedicated to practice, with the habit of always starting it earlier, doing it longer and harder than all their teammates. As Calvin Klein said, talent won’t get you anywhere, nothing is more common than talented people who are failing in what they do.

Now, unfortunately, in order to be like Mike, Peter might have to scale back on things like school, candy and hanging out with ditzy girls with names like “Kimberley”. But if he really wanted to do it, he could get into the NBA and break Jordan’s records. But therein lies the problem: Peter probably wasn’t willing to do those things. He wanted it all. Sorry, Peter, no dice.

You can have be or do ANYTHING. It’s not just something the nice teacher at school told you; it’s the truth. But you cannot have, be or do EVERYTHING.

You can learn Japanese to fluency. But it will cost you. Not much money; I must have spent less than $1000 directly on Japanese over a period of 18 months. But time, friends, attention; these things are a form of wealth, too. And Japanese demands them.

Your parents may have told you, when you were a kid, “nothing in this world is for free”; “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”. They were probably angry at you, or themselves, when they said this, so it has a bad association for you. They were probably giving you the “don’t flirt with pedophiles” talk…

What your parents meant to tell you is this: everything in this life is acquired in exchange for something. Whether or not that medium of exchange is money is inconsequential. It’s kind of the “Law of Conservation of Stuff”: all things being equal, stuff is neither created nor destroyed, but is traded for other stuff, one way or another. Even if someone gives you something for free, they are exchanging the loss of that thing, for the gain of extra space, or your friendship. Our parents may have made it all sound like a bad thing (“nothing is free”), but it’s actually a good thing; it’s wonderful. Because the fact that everything has a “price” (an exchange rate) means that everything can be “bought”. All you need do is make the exchange.

In terms of learning Japanese, there is essentially one thing to exchange: your language. And that means everything that is in your language. The people, the literature, the food, whatever. You have to want to know Japanese better than whatever your native language is. You must desire Japanese so much that you would be willing give up (exchange) your native language for it. As it turns out, this exchange is only temporary. But, if you do not have the desire to make the exchange, if you desire to hang on to a non-Japanese life, to non-Japanese friends, and to non-Japanese books/movies/songs, while you’re trying to learn Japanese, then, I am by no means telling you that you will fail, but don’t be surprised if you do. And if you do fail, don’t blame it on your ability. Your ability was never insufficient. It was your desire that was lacking; your desire for Japanese was insufficient, it simply didn’t outstrip your desire to see Pirates of the Caribbean 4: Black People in the Lagoon are Cursing with your friend Matt, before the Japanese dub came out. You wanted it all; you wanted both the non-Japanese life and the Japanese life. Well, guess what — those two things tend to cancel each other out.

Let me say it again: you can have, do or be ANYthing, but you cannot have, be or do EVERYthing. As long as you want it enough to do something about it, then you will have native- fluency in Japanese. So, if Japanese is what you want, then get ON it. ALL OVER IT. STICK TO IT. Live Japanese. Breathe Japanese. Drink it. Sleep it. Everywhere. Everything. All the time. Ignore other languages; push them out of your life like small children that get in your way when you’ve been standing in line all night waiting to buy a PlayStation 3; hey, those kids had it coming ;).

And why do all this? Well, because you want to. You want Japanese, that’s why. You want to function in Japanese society; you want to read the newspaper, go to the bank, write the book, watch the anime, read the manga, make the friends….whatever. And you’re willing to make this exchange in order to get it.

Right?