Unexplained optimism. This is what the French buddhist was refering to in one of the previous posters comments.

you tell someone, “be positive man!” and then they fail and a nasty cycle of self punishment ensues.
What the French Buddhist in that story referred to then was that we are positive already. we are already beautiful, we are already equiped with everything we need. Optimism 2.0 is when you aren’t grasping for validation from the outside but are in sync with everything that is right about you on the inside. I’m going to do whatever is helpful for me to learn Japanese because I am good enough to learn Japanese. There is no barrier then. No, “I’m going to do 100 anki reps everyday because if I don’t I won’t learn Japanese”. You live in the moment because you are already the person you need to be.

We all know why pessimism sucks. cause… well, it’s boring and whiny and doesn’t get you anywhere….

I have always thought of AJAAT as a Buddhist world view. to me the connection is very easy to make:

take the 8 fold path for instance:

right view: good input, j-shows and j-songs,
right intention: the difference between likeing j-pop and the commitment to learn japanese
right speech: read that stuff out loud, practice it, copy it, mimic it, sing it loud and proud
right action: get a japanese girlfreind/boyfreind, take a all japanese kendo class, talk to the guy at the j-grocery
right livelyhood: getting a job really helps buying that plane ticket to narita. pretty practical stuff here.
right effore: If you study 10 cards a day, it will take you 300 years to know japanese… put a little elbow greace please?
right mindfulness: this is the immersion environement. most of what AJAAT for me is, is in this step
right concentration: this is what todays article was about. this is the philisophical nugget of buddhism. my concentration is on not being obsessed with any of the crap that i did before. concentrate on not being certain. on living in the moment and having fun.

(right concentration comes from sitting down and practicing not being certain about things. . . i.e. meditation)

I read some of the replies and someone disagreed with the fact you’re “quantifying” certainty by giving it a number. Completely missing the point … Zero Certainty, as you put it, is a goal. You *aim* for zero, and zero is more of a concept than an actual number… Logically, nobody would say that you’re going to reach it and stay there.

Scientific method works pretty much like that too (a real scientist cannot be too certain, he has to consider that he may be wrong). Critical thinking too (suspending judgment until enough evidence has been gathered). And you’re suggesting that we should try and apply this to other aspects of our life such as being optimistic/pessimistic about something. Really, you’ve made me think more in 30 minutes of viewing your site than the past few weeks together.

Considering how science has pushed us forward so quickly since we adopted it as a standard for knowledge gathering, I think applying it to our life in a broader sense has the potential to push us ahead even more.

Religions will fight this way of thinking because they’ll feel it threatens them, but eventually they’ll have to give up.

Great post! Keep it up 🙂

ブラック・スワン[上]─不確実性とリスクの本質 by ナシーム・ニコラス・タレブ t.co/Lju73mp

If not, you really should. It deals with this very subject. That is, we are far more capable of creating stories from nothing than we are at accepting what we don’t know.

And what we don’t know is what we should be doing anyways to find out. It’s easy to be pessimistic because we’re so damn dramatic about EVERYTHING.

alumni.mckinsey.com/alumni/default/public/content/jsp/alumni_news/20090908_Laurence_Shorter_Feature.jsp

> A noted French Buddhist tells him that “stupid optimism” is thinking that things will always go your way; true optimism is not attaching happiness to any external situation.

Stupid optimism is brittle. True optimism comes from the fact that you accept that you’re gonna fail with some probability anyway.[*] So you accept failure, even if you made conscious efforts to avoid it, without damaging your optimistic mindset.

[*] Related maybe? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

www.seduction.com/blog/showing-up-attractive-part-ii-the-right-kind-of-confidence-and-loving-uncertainty/

That said, I think the “having fun” aspect takes up a lot of slack here. (I think that “have fun” is one of the fundamental concepts of AJATT, more so than “kanji first” or even “SRS”.) I don’t feel I need any extraordinary optimism as long as I’m having fun with what I’m doing.

Michael Jordan may have been the basketball world’s biggest optimist, and for most of his life thought “if I practice for 23 hours a day I’ll be an incredible player!”. Or maybe he didn’t care so much about that, but would simply rather practice playing ball all day than do anything else. They both work, right? (The truth is probably somewhere in between.)

Maybe dorking around in Japanese stuff all day is going to make me a brilliant Japanese speaker, or maybe not, but it’s still a perfectly good and valid use of my time if there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing right now. Havin’ fun here!

I think different ‘brands’ of optimism work for different people. And while your brand is about rolling the dice, so to speak, I prefer the brand of optimism that does involve certainty. From personal experience, it works better.

As you said, it can be fickle. It can be crushed if something bad happens or if someone questions your optimistic attitude (Which will no doubt happen quite often.) but I firmly believe that it can be just as strong, if not stronger than the ‘Well there’s a 50/50 chance either way, so I might as well try’ take on things.

Being an optimist is like being an inverse paranoid. No matter what happens, you automatically assume it’s for your benefit, even if the event that has taken place appears to be catastrophic. Having taken this attitude in my own life, I’ve often been absolutely amazed at the results. A lot of the positive results I’ve experienced can no doubt be attributed to my positive attitude, in that when something bad happens I’m not beating myself up about it and thus am more prepared to deal with the events at hand.

The problem is that, as you said, there is no way to convey that kind of attitude or how to adopt it to someone. Sure, you can extol the values of that brand of optimism, but it’s hardly convincing. There’s no hard science behind it, no logical explanation that I’ve encountered as to how it works. Ironically, had I told my past self about the benefits of being optimistic about all outcomes, I would’ve laughed in my own face.

But it does work. I can say that with every fibre of my being. It does work.

Perhaps it’s better to make steps towards it, though. Take the attitude of Optimism 2.0 first. It’s much less of a leap– it requires much less faith in… whatever you want to attribute it to.

Great post, Khatz. You’re more than qualified to venture into the realm of philosophy.

He’s a very good theologian which I admire, He talks about True certainty, you wouldn’t agree with all stuff but without prejudice just read it!

zero-certainty…
do you imply that you can measure certainty?
we should think of something else….

I understand that you mean the absence of certainty, non-existence, nothingness (Buddhism). And this nothingness can not be described (with words).

Look up Ross Jeffries’ site (www.seduction.com/blog).

He calls it Acceptance Confidence.

I’m all for certainty with uncertainty, some people call it hope, I guess. I call it… well, I don’t call it anything. I just do something knowing the end result will be pretty close to what I want, and if it isn’t then I don’t fall into a spiral of despair, and instead just make some tweaks and try again, or dump the plan in the trash.

We could just call it the ‘Fark it, let’s give it a shot and see what happens’ principle of certainty.