e_dub_kendo on “Don’t Have High Standards, Have Wide Standards”:

Khatz, just to clarify, this applies to the “study aspect” like doing SRS reps, etc, but given any 86,400 second period one should be striving to be in a Japanized environment for as many of those seconds as humanly possible right?

I guess what I’m saying is, it doesn’t matter how many kanji you learn a day, as long as you learn some, or how many sentence reps you do, as long as you do some — that totally makes sense to me.

But is immersion different? I know that there have been times when I was tempted to get slack about immersion, to stay in English even after things I NEEDED to do in English were finished, but because I have deeply drilled into myself this instinct to constantly maximize Japanese exposure, I have been able to overcome those temptations to get sucked into the 24-hour NCIS marathon on USA [Network] that was playing in the other room, and etc.

If I’d been taking a less hardcore approach, and expected less of myself in this regard, I can easily see days passing with very little time actually spent in Japanese. Basically doing a small “token” amount of immersion and then saying, well, as long as I do some each day that’s good and then tuning into the Family Guy re-runs (when in the he## is this gonna get a Japanese dub, btw?).

And, I think if my immersion fell apart like that, my SRSing and what-not would follow quickly behind it. Generally, slippery slope arguments are fallacies, but in this case, the pull of English is so powerful it really does create a “slippery” condition, I believe, and we must be on guard.

I feel like I haven’t worded this very clearly, but hopefully what I am trying to ask/address is coming through. Thanks.

To put E-Dub’s question into 6 words:

Do “Wide Standards” Apply To Immersion?

They do, actually. In a weirdish way, though.

I currently practice what I like to call “leveraged immersion” (mixed with a technique called “multiplexing“). Leverage in the sense of pivots — using minimal effort to get maximum results.

I have “wide” standards in terms of the effort I am willing to expend. But I want to get big results from it.

What does that mean in practice?

When I was in college, doing the “original, 元祖 AJATT”, before there was a website or a name for what I was doing, when it was just a personal experiment, a little game, I had traction.

I wanted to see how far I could take it and what would happen if I did. Well, I came, I saw, I got used to. The whole of my world was in English and I was in danger of becoming monolingual for the first time in my life. I didn’t want that. So I playfully…very playfully…pushed against it.

Obviously, the experiment produced impressive results, and I wanted to extend it. Higher, further, faster, deeper. More Japanese. More of other languages. A lot of my writing can sound rather fruity and hippie-ish, but there is a side of me that loves the core ideas of organizations like McDonalds and Wal-Mart, that shares the American corporate penchant for massive-scale, plug-and-chug replication and systematization, that makes out with pictures of Ayn Rand taped to my pillow (don’t…don’t judge me).

But the trouble with saying “no English” is that it can feel like deprivation at times. It was fine when it was just a game — “let’s see what would happen if I said ‘no English'” — but now it feels more like oppressive prohibition than playful restriction. Before I was doing it just because. Now, I’d doing it because: “Khatz must practice what he preaches”. And you’d be doing it because “Khatz practiced it and now preaches it”. Well…screw that. That’s dogma. We don’t need that. We need pragma.

So I don’t say “no English”. I just don’t allow English media on any of my good — best — machines. I let English exist — there are business books I need to read that are untranslated — but I don’t allow it on my best/most convenient hardware. English can be around, but it has to settle for a second-class existence.

So it’s not “no English“, it’s…”no convenient English“. It’s not “no English”, it’s “no unaccompanied English”.

It’s sort of a Pareto principle thing. The machines and physical spaces on and in which I spend 80~90% of my time, and which account for the majority of my computing power, have no English going on — they’re reserved for Japanese and Chinese.

So I can watch Family Guy if I want, but it’ll have to be on my iPad (she’s been demoted to bi##hbox status), over a Wi-Fi connection, with chintzy speakers, in the kitchen, standing up. Meanwhile ¹, the nice Bose speakers and 90-inch projector screen right next door are playing a Stephen Chow movie. And I can hear the Stephen Chow movie. And there’s this obscenely comfy beanbag right there, right in front of Stephen Chow. There’s no competition.

I can watch Family Guy if I want, but there has to be Japanese/Chinese playing and audible at the same time. Maybe some reps going as well. In other words, the English has to be accompanied; it has to have a “chaperone”. Case in point: I’m playing Ghost In The Shell (Cantonese version) as I write this English post ².

What AJATT was and is…is total immersion in principle ³, but Pareto majority immersion in practice. It’s de jure totality and de facto majority. Now, it happens that:

1. In college, during the original AJATT process, I was always aiming for 100% total immersion, even though I only ever hit it a few times — Thanksgiving Break, etc.
2. In college, my apartment ⁴ was a 100% Japanese zone. It literally was Japanese soil. It was…I had…an AT field ⁵ around it and everything.
3. You (E Dub Kendo) and I have both grown into adults with almost total control over space and time — we can be wherever we want — at home — doing whatever we want almost 100% of the day. We’re time billionaires (although, as I’ve discussed before, this actually turns out to be a “lottery winner” perspective of our time wealth — because of overhead and “time taxes”, in actuality we have maybe 2~6 hours per day more than regular civilians; we’re not just rolling in time like Scrooge McDuck rolls in gold coins, and we can’t directly re-generate our time through savings and investments).

So we feel like we should go for “total”, and we feel bad when we don’t. The only reason we never went total before, the only reason other people don’t go total is because they don’t have the control that we do. But we have control. So shouldn’t we go total? Well, maybe not. Like I said, I have business books to read, seminars to watch.

It’s the critical frequency/probabilistic algorithm thing all over again. It’s engineering (imperfect functional perfection) over mathematics (abstract perfection). IMHO, we want to approach this like engineers ⁶, not mathematicians ⁷. We don’t need infinity, we just need…a really large number. And…that metaphorical dirt, that margin of error, that imperfection, that traction, that resistance, that English pimple on our otherwise-perfect Japanese skin, may turn out to be necessary for us to, I dunno, feel human or something. I sound like an old man now; I’m old at heart .

What about the slippery slope? Well, there is none any longer. We’ve literally inverted the slope. All convenient paths lead to Japanese. All our best gear is there. You can go English if you want, but it’ll suck. Who wants to stand up in the kitchen when Evangelion is on the big screen? I certainly can’t be bothered…

• × All Japanese All The Time
• ○ Some Japanese All The Time
• ○ All Japanese Some Of The Time

• × No English
• ○ No convenient English ⁸
• ○ No unaccompanied English

Don’t control yourself. Control your environment. Your environment will control you for you. And don’t control your entire environment, just control the leverage points: that is the wide standard.

PS: Should regular civilians — wage slaves, people at school, etc. try leveraged immersion? Yes and no — mostly no. Certainly not as much as say, housewives and freelancers and NEETs and NR people. For civilians — people who don’t have full control over all their time — their lifestyle already forces partial immersion on them anyway, so it’s not something they need to do consciously; they’d get better results with a deliberate focus on maximizing the immersion function at all times and in all places. So the “old ways” still apply. Having said that, things like sensory split (splicing) and multiplexing ⁹ are something anyone in any position could use and benefit from.

Lo! And Chagami sayeth:

It doesn’t matter how many kanji you do a day/how many sentences you’re learning/how much vocab you’re picking up, all that matters is that progress is being made. I know that sometimes it can feel like we’re lowering our standards by just striving to make progress, but then again, if you are like me, who had month long gaps in the initial stages of RTK study, maybe it isn’t a lower standard after all.

It’s all fun and games until it isn’t. That’s when you burn out.

Don’t get clever. Don’t make things painful with your “I must do a million kanji a day OR ELSE!”.

Or else what?

Progress is progress. Stop making up fake hard rules. Make easy rules. Make easy games. Winnable games.

Less heroics. More consistency. More sustainability. You need a pace you can actually keep. That means, yes, don’t have high standards. Instead, have wide standards.

“Wide standards? WTF?”

That means standards you can sustain. I don’t care how many kanji you do per day and  neither should you. What matters is how many days you keep coming back to the kanji. High standards say: “Do 100 kanji per day”. Wide standards say: “Do kanji, no matter how little, for 100 days straight”.

Area under the graph is what we want. We don’t need a lone, phallically-shaped, never-repeating spike on the left side: that’s binging and purging. You don’t want the Washington Monument. You want the Lincoln Memorial. Scratch that, you want…a lawn ¹. Do you think it’s an accident that grasses are the most successful plants on the face of the earth ²? Grasses have wide standards, bro ³.

High standards lead to pain and suffering. High standards lead to three-day monking.  Don’t have high standards, have wide standards. And guess what? Wide standards turned on their side…are actually high standards, just like the tortoise is the true fast runner. You don’t need to rush to be excellent, you just need to move, you just need to continue.

Wide goal

There’s another meaning for the term “wide standards”. Think of it in terms of a goal on a soccer pitch. If the goal is wide, then it’s easier to score, and from further away. On the soccer pitch of your Japanese life, you want to make the goal so wide that virtually any ball you kick can get in.

That means small stuff counts; precursor actions count. Rap music? Totally counts. Score. Doing 1 rep? Counts. Score. Playing Japanese podcasts while you do your homework? Counts. Score. Simply flipping through a Japanese book? Counts. The goal is wide. Kick and you’ll make it. Kick and you’ll score. Anything Japanese should count. Even stuff I personally think is lame .

Don’t aim high. Aim wide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do 1 rep. Just one.

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

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

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

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

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

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