• 「最も悩む局面が、最も面白い」 ¹
• “The parts of the game [situations] where you worry the most are actually the most fun and interesting parts”.
• 最も＝もっとも
• 悩む＝なやむ
• 局面＝きょくめん ²
• 面白い＝おもしろい

“The parts of the game where you worry the most are actually the most fun and interesting parts”. Now, on the face of it, this sounds very un-AJATTy, being as it is that our Prime Directive here is to “have fun”. It sounds like masochism, and not just the all-for-show, binge-in-private, wishy-washy, pseudo-Darwinian, Anglo-Saxon kind (ASM), but some of that hardcore, under-the-table, suffer-in-silence Yamato Japanese stuff ³.

But that’s where you’re wrong.

Wroang!

Yoshi Habs’ insight, the way I read it, that is, the way it hit me, actually relates to intermediate angst. And it’s basically saying this: the fact that you still have a lot of phrases to learn in order to reach the stage of “not sucking” ⁴ means that you need never be bored.

Being an intermediate learner, therefore, should not be a source of consternation, but rather one of relief. The relief of ALWAYS HAVING SOMETHING TO DO. You always have a newspaper headline you could be MCDing. You always have a YouTube video you could be watching. You always have a word you could be looking up — and it doesn’t matter what word it is; you can pick any one.

Retired people wish they had your problems. People at the top of their game ⁵ miss having your problems; they don’t miss sucking, but they do miss the purity, simplicity and clarity of purpose that you now enjoy (assuming, of course, that you are currently at some intermediate level). Because not only do you have a direction, a purpose, but you also have degrees of freedom. If you’re learning Japanese, virtually any and every direction you pick that contains Japanese ⁶ is good, will send you up, will help you improve. Seriously. Anything.

And that’s why enjoyment matters, because enjoyment leads to repetition. Repetition leads to continuation (habit). And continuation leads to unlimited power (muahahahaaa) #ItouMakoto. It’s a pretty sweet deal. Yoga said all these things in the prequel, but they got edited out so there’d be more Jar-Jar scenes #choices.

That’s all for now. More later!

• 「如何に深く考えるか」よりも、「如何に上手く見切るか」
• [I think that there are many times when] it’s more important to just give up and let go gracefully than it is to think deeply
• 如何に＝いかに
• 深い＝ふかい
• 考える＝かんがえる
• 上手い＝うまい
• 見切る＝みきる
• “to abandon;  to give up;  → みかぎる【見限る】 to sell at a loss;  to sell off” [見切る · Tangorin Japanese Dictionary] goo.gl/sNnCeU
• “みきる【見切る】 ⇒みきり(見切り) 1 〔見限る〕give up ((on)); abandon; ((文)) forsake; ((口)) ditch 2 〔安く売る〕sell a thing at a loss; sell off” [見切るの英語・英訳 – goo辞書 英和和英] goo.gl/1UgAiH

Is Yoshihabs preaching fatalism here? Is that what it’s come to? No. Not at all. He’s talking about timeboxing. Sometimes, you think and think and think and think and still can’t come to a decision. So what do you do? Well, if you’re smart and sensitive person, you curl up into a ball and fester in a state of permanent indecision that morphs into a multi-year bout of clinical depression. But if you’re even smarter and wiser than that, you cut your losses and make a decision anyhow. The GOAT of shogi does not waste his time overthinking. Which is not to say that he doesn’t think at all. He just doesn’t get lost in a thought quagmire. He doesn’t get embroiled in mental Vietnam/Afghanistan. He gets the heck out and moves the heck on.

Don’t overthink. Set a cut-off point. Let life go on (it will anyway, but you need to let it go on for yourself as well, innit). Make the game winnable, that is, make it finite; give it many internal end-points ¹ and “save-points”. Let there be an end to your fussin’, and let yourself be the one to decide that end: give yourself that authority.

OK, so, just so we’re on the same page, this is the book we’re talking about: [大局観 自分と闘って負けない心 (角川oneテーマ21) | 羽生 善治 |本 | 通販 | Amazon], and the unofficial English title we’re giving it is The Big Picture: How to Face Yourself and Win.

Go back up through the series if you need a refresher on what we’re even talking about. Cool? Cool.

Right. Brass tacks time!

• 将棋であれ、スポーツであれ、ビジネスであれ、「勝負にはミスが付き物」と言っていいと思う。勿論、誰だってミスをする積もりなど微塵も無いけれど、パーフェクトなパフォーマンスを実現するのは至難の業だ。《中略》「今日の将棋は完璧だった、ミスも無く、百点満点のパーフォーマンスだった」と思える事は、私には殆ど無い。一、二年に一度、あるかどうかだ。
• Whether in shogi, sports, or business, I think that making mistakes is a normal part of any game. Of course, nobody deliberately intends to make mistakes, but perfect performance is virtually impossible…It virtually never happens that I can think “I played a 100% perfect game of shogi today and made zero mistakes”, except for maybe once every couple of years, if that.
• 将棋＝しょうぎ
• 勿論＝もちろん
• 微塵＝みじん
• 至難の業＝しなんのわざ
• 百点満点＝ひゃくてんまんてん
• 中略＝ちゅうりゃく
• 思う＝おもう
• 無い＝ない
• 殆ど＝ほとんど

It’s one thing for your mate, Todd, the pothead with a hoarding problem and illegitimate children he never sees (lol) to tell you to chill and that “making mistakes is…normal”; it’s another thing altogether for the greatest shogi player of all time to say it. ¹ You’d think that a 9×9 board would be small enough of a world that you could reliably experience some perfection, but it isn’t and you don’t — not even if you’re the GOAT. Not even if you’re the Japanese GOAT of a Japanese game. No perfection soup for you!

You cannot dependably produce perfection, but you can dependably produce improvement. And I only keep telling you this because I need to hear it myself; it’s a lesson I keep “teaching” because it’s a lesson I need to keep learning. If perfectionism is a disease, then…you know, I mean, first of all, ewww gross (lol). Secondly, it needs to be handled with ruthless efficiency — failing to prevent it or leaving it untreated is even grosser than having it, just like failing to clean dirty toilets is even grosser than having them dirty. ²

Aaaand, that’s all for now. I was gonna go longer, but I figure it’s better to keep these parts short and frequent, rather than force you to wait indeterminate amounts of time for one big, long, dump ³.

Take care and bye for now!

• 負けたくなければ勝負をしない事。
• If you don’t want to lose, don’t play.
• 負ける＝まける
• 勝負＝しょうぶ
• 事＝こと

The only way to guarantee not losing at a game is to not play it in the first place ¹. But then, of course, you lose something else. The joy of playing. The camaraderie. Any and all chances of winning…

Now, it probably isn’t apparent right here and now, because this quote has been liberated from its original context ² but what it’s saying is this: shogi’s GOAT has freed himself from the need to not lose. He is free of desperation. He has accepted that loss is a part of the equation also. But this has not stopped him from being the GOAT. In fact, the relaxation, the calmness and sense of ease that this state of mind produces may, paradoxically, have helped him become the GOAT. It’s like a Greek tragedy in reverse: the things you do instead of caring about winning actually make you a winner.

This idea reminds me of the book Organize Tomorrow Today (OTT), which, despite its title, literally is not a book about personal organization or time management. You know how some books have awesome titles but then are just kind of “meh” inside? This book is the polar opposite of that. In many ways, relative to its quality, it’s possibly the worst-titled book in the history of human writing. And yet, I cannot myself think of a title that would do it justice ³. Anyway, in OTT, they talk about how both professional sportsmen (whom they’ve worked with as personal consultants) and professional regular adults (ditto), and even children, will do their best when they focus exclusively on the things they can control.

The irony is that ignoring the things we cannot control actually gives us more (not complete, but more) control over them than focussing on them does. And, if you’ve been paying attention more than I have (not a hard thing to do, BTW), then you’ll have realized that this is exactly what the late Stephen Covey was talking about it in 7 Habits with his concentric Circles of, respectively, Control (green), Influence (yellow) and Concern (red)).

Don’t run red lights. Or even yellow ones. It’s not impressive and it doesn’t make you a baller. At best, it merely puts you at risk of great suffering. Focus on your circle of control.

You know, I used to think all them Greek tragedies were stupid and negative and fatalistic and ignan’t — and maybe they are — but maybe they were actually trying to teach us something, and I’m only just now finally waking up to the lesson. After all, it’s not just in a Sophocles screenplay that the things you do to prevent bad thing X happening (e.g. your son murdering you and screwing your wife, who is also his Mom, because she’s literally a MILF) actually produce bad thing X: in water, being and acting afraid produces the very results that people who haven’t yet learned how to handle themselves in water are afraid of. Perhaps Sophocles and his colleagues in the Ancient Greek entertainment industry wanted us to learn about self-fulfilling prophecies and self-efficacy and directing our mental focus in productive directions.

Games involve winning and losing. If you don’t want to lose, don’t play. If you want to win, play against yourself. Come correct. Come prepared to lose and improve: paradoxically, this will make you a winner. Take that home and smoke it. It’s good for shogi, it’s good for SRSing, and it’s good for life in general.

So, it occurred to me that this series was never going to get started until it got started, so here we go. You’re never going to be 100% ready, but don’t let that be an excuse to take 0% action, right?

Right.

Um, right out the gate, let’s do a bit of a “Talebian disclaimer” with regard to what Nassim (Taleb) would call the “Ludic Fallacy” — using games, which are simple and calculable, to model reality, which is too complex to calculate. Chess is a turn-based game with unambiguous rules played on a board of limited scope. To be fair, it’s deep as all get-out, and the possibilities are too complex and numerous for even the best supercomputer to crunch out; this isn’t tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) — artificial intelligences, just like organic intelligences, have to give up on optimizing (finding the absolute best/perfect solution) and be content with satisficing (using the best solution that can be found within the constraints of the available time and resources, and not bothering with perfection). That is, they have to make a best guess based on limited, incomplete information. They have to, as it were, pick the best bad idea; there is simply no time to calculate every possibility. But chess, deep as it is, is not even a puddle compared to real life.

Real life is not equivalent to chess; casinos are not equivalent to stock markets; casinos (Mediocristan) aren’t even like stock markets (Extremistan). Real life is full of power-law distributions. Only our artificially simple games are Gaussian. But does that mean that we can’t learn any lessons from chess? Hail naw. I mean, of course not. Sorry, too much rap music. There’s probably enough depth in chess to keep us busy finding real-life applications for years, perhaps even a lifetime. It’s just that it’s never, ever going to be a 1-to-1 correspondence.

That was a lukewarm-a$$ disclaimer, wasn’t it? Barely seems worth having made. Oh well, it’s written now. Let’s move on!

Way back in 2005, computer scientist Jeff Hawkins produced…I’m not so hot with the adjectives but I’m just going to call it an unbelievably awesome book called “On Intelligence”. Although I only discovered it many years after it was published, it was and is way ahead of its time, and most researchers — including the great Ray Kurzweil, who’s usually the one out in front leading the pack — are only just beginning to catch up to its ideas. It really deserves its own course to plumb its depths with you. But today, we’re just going to cover the big ideas.

So, like, remember how earlier we talked about how language is a martial art (among other metaphors)? And how chess is a language because the neurocognitive architecture — the organic hardware and software — that creates and manipulates them is the same?

Well, this book is the source, spring and well-argued proof (? — not sure if that’s the right word…not too hot with the nouns either, innit) of that idea.

Jeff Hawkins wants to explain what “intelligence” actually is so we can use it to create more powerful artificial intelligences. As it turns out, his insights help us learn how to use our natural, organic intelligence as well.

Here’s the basic idea.

1. All memories are just (stimulus) patterns in the neocortex
2. All skill is memory boosted by automaticity and myelination. That’s why:
3. Learning one skill unlocks the “secret” to learning other skills

Or, to paraphrase John Medina of “Brain Rules”: if you want to become skilled, memorize. If you want to memorize, repeat.

If what I’ve just told you doesn’t sound amazing, that’s my fault, not Jeff’s. The scales will fall from your eyes when you get into his explanation of how everything is just a pattern. He also talks a lot about how memory/intelligence isn’t for “thinking” as much as it is for making predictions. Again, when we finally unpack this, it’ll blow your mind. I hate how I seem to make wonderful books sound bland lol.

• [On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines: Jeff Hawkins, Sandra Blakeslee: 9780805078534: Amazon.com: Books]
• [考える脳 考えるコンピューター | ジェフ・ホーキンス, サンドラ・ブレイクスリー, 伊藤 文英 |本 | 通販 | Amazon] 

It’s a set of symbols and patterns…

Experienced chess players (of all variants) can easily recall, produce and communicate in “words” and “phrases” — chunks and patterns of legal moves and board positions.

But they can’t remember gibberish (i.e. random arrangements of pieces that could never constitute real/possible/legal gameplay) any better than chess noobs.

So it could be that because the same human hardware — “neurocognitive architecture” — implements (creates and uses) both languages and shogi, the similarity is more a case of myelin-sheathing hammers making everything look like nails, rather than everything actually being nails.

Shades of Jeff Hawkins’ “memory-prediction framework theory of the brain”…

Also, check out Dan Coyle’s “The Talent Code” for more on myelination.

OK, so these are the HABU Yoshiharu books we’re going to cover:

• The Power of Intuition (ちょっかんりょく) [直感力 (PHP新書) | 羽生 善治 |本 | 通販 | Amazon]
• The Power of Making Decisions (けつだんりょく）[決断力 (角川oneテーマ21) | 羽生 善治 |本 | 通販 | Amazon]
• How to Keep Producing Results: The Secret Laws of Turning Luck, Pressure and Mistakes Into Your Friends (けっかをだしつづけるために、つき、ぷれっしゃあ、みすをみかたにするほうそく) [結果を出し続けるために (ツキ、プレッシャー、ミスを味方にする法則) | 羽生 善治 |本 | 通販 | Amazon]
• [The Big Picture | The Bird’s Eye View]: How to [Fight | Come Face-to-Face With] Yourself and Win (たいきょくかん、じぶんとたたかってまけないこころ）[大局観 自分と闘って負けない心 (角川oneテーマ21) | 羽生 善治 |本 | 通販 | Amazon]

The English titles I’m giving them leave something to be desired in terms of coolness, but they at least largely accurate in terms of communicating the lexical (?) meaning of the original, if not the emotional feeling. A good compromise leaves *everyone* unhappy, right? (lol)

Did I mention that HABU Yoshiharu is amazing? Coz he is. He writes nice, short books, with the economy and insight of a man who has something to say instead of a man who has pages to fill. Mad respect. Anyway, yeah, more later!

So, as you probably already know, all chess originated in, like, India. The Persian variant became Western (international) chess. There’s a bunch of regional variants; there’s a Chinese variant, an Ethiopian variant, as well as a Japanese variant. And that’s what shogi (将棋 (しょうぎ）) is — Japanese chess.

Shogi is all sorts of cool. For one thing, you can capture your opponent’s pieces and turn them against him — kind of like how 30,000 of 40,000 Indian POWs in Burma during a couple of the seasons of that rather unfortunate global reality show in the 1940s volunteered to fight for Japan.

Now, I don’t actually even like board games, and I especially don’t like chess of any kind– although I do love hanging out with my friends while we play board games and I do have a soft spot for Othello/Reversi, but — chess, as a game, to be played, has always bored me.

But then there’s this guy. His name is HABU Yoshiharu. And he makes me love shogi. Not love it enough to play it (lol), but still. I’m in love. I leave the go/shogi channel on in the background all day (yes, it’s a real cable channel; yes, it runs 24/7)

So who is Yoshi Habs? Well, he’s the best living (human? organic?) player of the game, and currently perhaps the GOAT. AFAIK, shogi AI hasn’t quite yet pwned all the best humans, although it no doubt soon will. Anyway, HABU’s been playing the game a long time, since he was a kid, although he started quite late, wasn’t a prodigy at all, and actually sucked hard early on.

He’s written many articles and at dozens of books — all of which appear to only be available in Japanese (certainly not in English) — on the game and the profound life lessons it contains. There’s depth and insight in there that you can apply to specifically to learning languages and more generally to learning about life and how to be awesome(r) and stuff.

So, I’d like to make you a course about his ideas, his insights and how they can help you. Maybe I’ll need to break it down and take it one book at a time. But, yeah, that’s the plan. Stay tuned!