• A lot of people wonder how they can get a native-sounding accent. The real question should be how to stop yourself from suppressing it. #
• Nothing is more damaging to your reading than attempting “100% conversion” in terms of SRS entry. Even 1% conversion is pushing it . #
• The idea of secretly having some amazing skill to be suddenly busted out at cocktail parties is largely a myth. Dedication sucks at hiding. #
• AJATT is really all about screwing around…playing…
  But I didn’t have the guts to tell you that until recently: “PLAY?! HOW DARE YOU!” #
• “The art of any art is the art of obsession,”
  Study Hacks » Double Majors Don’t Publish Novels http://bit.ly/3L4zxi
  Thanks for the link, DP! #
• FASTER! STRONGER! THICKER! HARDER!
  http://bit.ly/1Xa5AU
  …wait… #
• If you have time to think of theories and metaphors for your suckiness, spend that time fixing the suckiness instead. #
• Remember that language is about the two B’s: beliefs and behavior. Display certain behaviors, and you win. #
• No confidence in yourself? No problem! Just go ahead and turn on the Japanese TV anyway…if you’re going to feel down, do it in Japanese #
• ヤバイ。ギルモア＝ガールズ好きに成ったかも・・・
  そして破滅への道が始まる・・・(笑）
  こんな自分は情けない！
  やっぱり嫌いで居ようか。 #
• カーーーーリフォルニア、来たぞ！始まりからだよ！カーーーーリフォルニアあああああああああ #
• Do you have the tools to bounce back from a brain fart?
  Recovering from failure is as valuable as succeeding outright.
  http://bit.ly/4jSfyR #
• Ironically, the kind of people who are all about “discipline” etc., are the ones least willing to sow language seeds before trying to reap. #
• “Why do you still SRS if you are fluent?”: Why does Tiger Woods still practice golf? You stop sucking. You don’t stop learning/maintaining. #
• “If I miss one day of practice, I know it. If I miss two days, my wife knows it. If I miss three days, the audience knows it.” #
• “Good musicians practice until they get it right. Great musicians practice until they cannot get it wrong.”…Misuse at will #

At the risk of stating the obvious, this post continues right where its predecessor left off. I enjoyed the mixed reaction to that previous post…it looks like maybe people who went through some flavour of the British school system have experiences closer to mine. Or, this may all just be a personal problem that I’ve overgeneralized. We’ll just have to see about that, won’t we?

Anyway, let’s go straight to the action! As promised…how to fix the problems with the sucky way we read.

Perhaps the most important principle is this:

SKIP More Than You Read. Skip MORE Than You Read.

Many people are aware that some skipping is a useful and valid reading technique. But most people are not aware of just how useful and in just what proportions they should be skipping. They think of skipping/skimming as side-dish.

Yes, you read it right, you want to skip MORE than you read. Your reading style needs to go from “reading with some skipping” to “skipping with some reading”. Skipping is the new main course. Skipping is the primary activity.

“But I won’t get the most out of the book”. Hehehe. Silly rabbit. First of all, you realize how many books there are in the world, right? And you realize more books are coming out every day, right? And you realize you’re not reading those because you’re busy slogging through this clearly past-its-prime-in-terms-of-both-information-and-entertainment-value book you’re so dutifully dragging your eyes through right now, right?

I mean, just because you pay for cable, does that mean you sit and watch only one channel per week, never switching until you’re “done”, in order to “get the most out of it” and “get your money’s worth”? I didn’t think so.

Play a little math (or, if you prefer, maths) game with me. Let’s say there are two boys — call them Akira and Tetsuo. Let’s say Akira now reads two 300-page books a month. 24 books, 7000+ pages a year. One book every two weeks — a little low, but not unreasonable in today’s world. And let’s say Tetsuo, using “skimming with some reading”, reads three 300-page books a day, for 328,000 pages a year.

“Objection, your Khatzumotoness — with skimming you only actually read 10~20% of the book!”
Sustained.
OK, so, docile, plodding Akira has 100% “read” read all 7000 pages of his 24 books, while Tetsuo has clocked in 32,000~64000 fully-read pages spread out across 1000+ books — average it out in the middle and call it 49,000 pages.

7000 pages versus 49,000 pages. Who has read more? Given that a minority of pages of a book hold a majority of the infotainment value who has learned more? Who’s more of an expert? Who can see more sides of the issue? Who has had the most fun?

And that’s what this is all about — fun. Reading the parts you like of the books you like, and leaving the rest out because life is short. Dude, you’re already skipping anyway simply by choosing to read one book over another. You might as well skip in an even more productive way.

Do you really think Akira’s half-asleep, semi-comatose, boredom-and-duty-and-just-get-me-outta-here-mode brain is taking in more information than Tetsuo’s alert, active, bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed, fun-and-flow-mode brain? (I really need to go get some new adjectives…）

Do you really think that there’s just one or two really good books in the world, and if you only read these two, you’ll never ever need to do any more reading again?

Tetsuo, by having fun and reclaiming his right to make real, significant decisions about his time and life, has managed to read more in one year than Akira does in seven. Tetsuo reads as much every 18 months as Akira does every decade. If knowledge is indeed power, who’s the one rising to power — and not just the cheesy “power over other people” kind, but the meaningful, “power in and over oneself” kind?

Avoid Marking/Highlighting/Stickers, etc.

• It’s laborious.
• You waste valuable time making thousands of tiny decisions like: “wait, is this important enough to mark?”
• It leads to page clutter. Even with the best of intentions, a page can soon become so underlined and highlighted that the unmarked stuff stands out more.
• It’s irreversible. This doesn’t just lower the resale value of your books (which is not something you necessarily need care about, since the information contained in the book should exceed its cash price anyhow) — it also makes it harder to tell where and whether or not you are “done” when it comes to “post-processing”, post-reading activities like entering small parts of the book into an SRS.
• You can get wrapped up in an escalating “battle of infinites” – always trying to find bigger, badder ways to make things stand out because you highlighted something you thought was important but actually this other thing is even more important, and all the marking’s getting in the way and…cetera…
• It requires too much equipment and too many hands — it’s bad enough that you have to handle a paper book, now you have to have the right writing implements, too?!
• Instead of marking by pen, just dog-ear the page. Dog-earing is quick, reversible and requires no extra equipment.

Accept Low Conversion

• Conversion = the percentage of a book read that is closely and/or SRSed. That is to say, “converted” from inert text into close reading and/or SRS cards.
• Only read the parts you really like of the books you really like.
  
• Only SRS the quotes you really like of the parts you really like of the books you really like.
• There is no “should”. The only “should” is the reading itself. What to read is all up to you.
• Ironically enough, a certain level of acceptance of failure is necessary for success. Once you let go of aiming for 100% success 100% of the time, you can start swinging like crazy and knocking out 95s and 90s.
• Accept that most of the book isn’t worth reading.
• Accept that most of what’s worth reading isn’t worth dog-earing.
• Accept that most of what’s worth dog-earing isn’t worth entering into an SRS.
• Accept that at least 5% and as much us 25~50% of the little that does get entered into the SRS, sucks and should be deleted. 25~50% is high, but for people who have not been in the habit of regular SRS card-culling, it is a perfectly normal number.

Generally, I dog-ear about 20% of the pages of a book. And I only pick up SRS items from a fraction (5%~50%) of the pages I do dog-ear. And each page generally only contains one sentence worth the trouble of SRSing.

Many things may seem or even be “worth” knowing, but they also have to be worth the TROUBLE of getting entered. So, if you’re SRSing even one sentence per book, then you’re doing more than okay…

Low conversion, meng.

Extensive Timebox Use

• We tend to have incredibly warped time perception of two general types — one optimistic, the other pessimistic. Both types lead to inaction.
• Over-optimism: We think we have all the time in the world when we don’t.
• Over-pessimism: We think we have no time at all, when we have plenty.
• Timeboxing helps us realize both how much and how little time we have. It cures both inaction-by-optimism and inaction-by pessimism.
• My favorite timebox size is 10 minutes. But I do make use of 2- and 3-minute timeboxes when my ability to focus is especially shot. It’s a great way to ease into deep concentration.
• There are only 1440 minutes in a day, and you’ll be awake for maybe 960 of them, and able to do active work for, at best, 480 of those. Think about it.

Throw Books Away

• Selling counts .
• Be honest — are you really ever going to look at that book again? I know you “should”, but do you want to? Come on, homeslice…we’re all adults here; there’s no need to beat around the bu… — get rid of it. What matters is the ideas in your head, not the flattened pieces of dead tree.
• Treat books as a disposable item. Again, the information needs to be in your head, ready to use. Not on Wikipedia, not on a bright-yellow-highlighted page in some funny book in some neglected corner of some overflowing bookshelf somewhere. In your head. Here. Now.
• A few bad apples ruin everything. Keeping books you don’t really like will, in my experience, lead you to read less overall.
• Do you own your books or are you being owned by them? When major life decisions are being made around the books’ welfare, this is a sign of problems.
• Of course, if you’re still building up a collection of, say, foreign language books, then “buy and hold” makes more sense .

Read Books Like You Read Websites

Our relationship with websites is much healthier, overall, than that with books. We seem to have much better reading practices online. People shift websites without any qualms.

No one would ever accuse you of “not really having read website X” just because you didn’t read every-single-word on it. I know I sometimes make fun of people who haven’t read all of this site, but, I’m just a jerk like that .

If in doubt, use your Internet reading habits as a reference.

Always Touch, But Don’t Always Touch Down

Unless the book sucks intensely, or the table of contents indicates a clear lack of relevance, more or less every page gets a look, but only a minority of pages get a close reading.

Interestingly, this puts some responsibility on authors to ensure that their work can get its point across very quickly. Lately, here in Japan, non-fiction authors [I only really read non-fiction in any quantity; I figure I can make up my own lies if I need to ] are getting really good at this — far better than their American counterparts.

In fact, I recently read some 40~60-year-old Japanese non-fiction books [you know I keeps it old skool] full of massive paragraphs and virtually no typographical variation whatsoever…and coming from reading more recent stuff, it was jarring, to say the least. Like: “Dude…bold type…use it sometimes”.

But If We Don’t Force People, They Won’t Learn Anything!!!

Yes, people are lazy. I am lazy. But they’re also curious. You don’t need duty/obligation to force or compel you to look up things you don’t know…Curiosity and Fun will do all the “forcing” you need. Your curiosity will draw you to know more, to learn more.

If they’re anything like me, then many people have become so stressed out by their existing reading practices, that It’s no longer a choice between reading 100% and reading 10~20%, but a choice between reading 100% and reading 0%. Or, more accurately, it’s a choice between:

1. Trying to read 100% and invariably losing steam after 10%, or
2. Actively accepting that only 10~20% of the pages of a book are even worth reading in the first place, and moving on, using that knowledge to our advantage.

But What About Books That Really Do Need 100% Coverage?

All that we’ve said about low conversion basically applies to books that need 100% coverage, too. You skim and skip more than you read, you just do it over more times — either by repeating multiple skip-heavy “passes” over the book, or by stabbing little non-linear, randomly sampled, Swiss-cheese holes into the book, or some combination of both.

Here’s what that Swiss-cheesing looks like in relation to other reading styles. Notice how The Ideal #1 almost always collapses into the bitter conclusion of #2; #3 and #4 are two enjoyable alternatives to what, for many, tends to turn reading into an exercise in suffering.

There’s a really cool proverb from China, apparently taken from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. In Japanese, you can read it as: “読書百遍義自ら見る” (ﾄﾞｸｼｮﾋｬｯﾍﾟﾝｷﾞｵﾉｽﾞｶﾗｱﾗﾜﾙ). In the language of Mordor, one says: “any book will make sense after a hundred readings”.  And any book swiss-cheesed enough, we might add, will eventually see the abyssal darkness of 100% coverage, if that’s what you really want and need.

A book, or rather, our experience of a book, can change quite radically upon multiple readings/passes. In any case, the key, I think, is many fast readings/passes rather than one slow reading/pass.

But What About Fiction? Come On, Homie?

Royal we have never cared much for fiction, but you can do all this with fiction, too, if you want — I have (all the novel-lovers are having little heart attacks right now…calm down; the world isn’t falling apart).

Fiction is the most arrogant supergenre out there; it’s so full of itself; it seems to think that it always deserves dutiful, close, linear reading. More often than not, it just doesn’t. A lot of fiction is so boring that the “adventure” you can get yourself into by swiss-chessing it is actually its own reward — it improves the story. There, I said it. Bring it, fiction!

Of course, if your preference dictates a more “traditional” approach, then be my guest. I mean, good grief, it’s not like I live with you and am in a position to force you to change .

Next Article: The Unified Reading Process

All you detailed-oriented lasses and man-lasses out there, get a change of panties ready!

In the next article in this series, we’re going to look at the process I currently use (I like to call it the “Unified Reading Process” or URP, for reasons to be revealed later, but mostly because I like to make up rather easy-to-mock acronyms), that ties all these ideas together into a bit of a mini-system you can use if you want. So…stay tuned!

There’s so much I want to say on this topic. But it would take too long to put it all together, so I’m going to do what we always do here at AJATT — give it to you piecemeal.

As with everything on this site, the advice here is just based on my personal experience. I’m not an expert. Take what works, leave what doesn’t — the overall principles matter more than the minutiae of technique. Your mileage may vary and all that (then again, I am quite confident that it won’t vary by that much — otherwise I wouldn’t be writing it, eh lads, eh?).

Also, an interesting thing happened. While I originally intended this advice to be specifically directed towards languages we suck at (i.e. early- and mid-stage foreign languages), I soon found that it applied just as well to reading languages where we have native-level skill. Yay!

Anyway, first, a little bit about:

The Sucky Way We Read

By “how we read”, I mean “how we are taught to read in school”. Fortunately for me, growing up, I did a lot (indeed, most) of my reading entirely outside of the school framework, so for a long time I wasn’t “infected” as much by the school disease — at the very least, I was asymptomatic for many years.

But over time, it did get to me as well. So much so that I had to reach back into my childhood and reflect on what I had been doing outside of school, why it was so much fun, and why it worked so well, in order to get my then-stalled reading habits back on track _{(in the early years of my adult life, I went through a stage where I was basically not doing any reading, despite having a strong desire to read and a history of reading)}.

The style of reading that is typically taught and/or encouraged in school is all about:

• Hitting every single word.
• No change of pace or shifting gears.
• No skipping unless teacher says so. Any self-directed skipping is “cheating”, and is to be punctuated by feelings of guilt and remorse (aren’t these, like, synonyms?).
• Zero or severely limited choice in terms of start time, stop time and duration.
• Zero or severely limited in terms of reading material, with no option to change after initial choice.
• The order in which the book is written and presented is the One, True and Only Correct Order. You have no right to permute it or ignore it. You earn the right to read page p+1 only after perfectly reading page p.

It’s no wonder that so many adults never pick up another real book once they leave school. If you’d never ever been allowed to set or change the channel on your TV, and never been taught that you even had the right or ability to make such a judgment call, then you’d probably hate TV, too — no matter how many “TV-worms” (think: bookworm) told you that TV was the shizzle and that there were tons of great channels and shows out there.

The above is a style of reading that is, on the surface, well -suited to an early-stage student. After all, does someone who can barely read or who barely knows the subject matter at hand, really have the ability to decide where and what to skip? (Actually my answer to that is “yes”, but, school’s answer tends to be a resounding “no”).

Why How We Read Sucks

My guess is that the core reason why this reading style came about in the first place is because, at one time, in many parts of the world, there simply weren’t that many books, period. So, reading one book a year was fine, since you only owned one book and maybe had access to a few more. Oftentimes, the books in question were these massive, dense, metaphor-laden sacred texts, which probably do lend themselves to a special style of reading _{(then again, judging by how few people of any religious persuasion actually read sacred texts, perhaps these too could benefit from techniques like those I’m intending to share).}

Of course, things have changed. A lot. At least in terms of the number of books available. But in most schools and classes, the reign of tyranny of a single source of information continues. Moreover, the semi-compulsive behavior of reading (or, attempting to read) every-single-word-on-every-single-page-so-you-get-exactly-what-was-said-and-don’t-miss-a-single-thing is exacerbated by the earnest student’s fear of “missing” something that might be “on the test”. In fact, many tests are designed to reward this one-tree-matters-more-than-the-entire-forest type of reading.

There’s just no sense of priority; everything becomes equally important. It’s as if the Pareto Principle never existed. Indeed, some people might argue that that was the point: it is said that most school systems in the world today are based on a design that aims to produce compliant, docile factory workers — people who unquestioningly obey pre-made decisions, not people who make them. Those who go on to be managers get let in on the secret that most decisions are arbitrary, but people lower down on the ladder are to be left in the dark, believing that the pre-made decisions are absolute, based on the perfect or near-perfect knowledge of their elders and betters (“experts”, “superiors”), and carrying all the weight of divine decree.

OK, social engineering, blah blah whatever. Let’s not get too worked up. The deeper problem is that to force yourself to read everything is to force yourself out of your growth/true-comfort zone and into either your boredom zone or your panic zone (both of which are places where you are just going to…wait for the pun…”zone out”).

This leads to stress. Stress makes you forgetful: short-term memory gets pwned. No short term memory → no long-term memory. No long-term memory → no learning new information. No new information → less intelligent choices, far less brilliant flashes of insight. Less intelligent choices → more stupid choices. In short, the way school typically teaches us to read, makes us stupid. As in, Republican Gilmore Girls the end of Prison Break running out of cheap jokes stupid. The phrase “dumbing down” starts to take on a whole new meaning..

And now that we’re done complaining and making sweeping judgments and dubious historical references, it’s time to talk about how to fix the problem! But for that, dear children of the AJATT, ye shall have to wait for the very forthcoming sequel to this article — part deux! Wherein shall be demonstrated reading techniques that can help you have more fun reading any language, including Japanese.

• The television is perhaps the most powerful language-acquisition device ever invented. #
• Don’t be hard on yourself. Ever. You have to treat yourself like a 5-year-old. Every little thing counts. Gold stars EVERYWHERE. #
• Often, rather than ask other people’s opinion on your idea, it’s better to shut up and just try it — let it fly or crash on its own. #
• Experimenting with watching 4 videos simultaneously. SUPER fun #
• More often than not studying gets boring not because of over-difficulty/overstimulation, but actually because of a lack thereof. #
• The more (extraneous things) you give up on, the more you let go, the more powerful you become. #
• As my friend Marcelle said all those years ago, your short/mid-term choice is painfully simple: either suck at two languages, or own at one. #
• 高音甜 中音準 低音勁 #
• An old favorite: “actions speak louder than words”. Oh snap, I just used words! Even if you win an argument, you haven’t proven anything. #
• 「我呢條命叫做『一將功成萬骨枯！』，不過我唔同意！」 #
• How Much Per Day? How Many Per Day? — As much as you can. As much as *you* can. You decide. You’re the only one who knows the right answer. #
• If you’re lazy like me, don’t set a goal to do the right thing (e.g. brush teeth), just set a goal to be in the right place (brush in mouth) #

• The television is perhaps the most powerful language-acquisition device ever invented. #
• Don’t be hard on yourself. Ever. You have to treat yourself like a 5-year-old. Every little thing counts. Gold stars EVERYWHERE. #
• Often, rather than ask other people’s opinion on your idea, it’s better to shut up and just try it — let it fly or crash on its own. #
• Experimenting with watching 4 videos simultaneously. SUPER fun #
• More often than not studying gets boring not because of over-difficulty/overstimulation, but actually because of a lack thereof. #
• The more (extraneous things) you give up on, the more you let go, the more powerful you become. #
• As my friend Marcelle said all those years ago, your short/mid-term choice is painfully simple: either suck at two languages, or own at one. #
• 高音甜 中音準 低音勁 #
• An old favorite: “actions speak louder than words”. Oh snap, I just used words! Even if you win an argument, you haven’t proven anything. #
• 「我呢條命叫做『一將功成萬骨枯！』，不過我唔同意！」 #
• How Much Per Day? How Many Per Day? — As much as you can. As much as *you* can. You decide. You’re the only one who knows the right answer. #
• If you’re lazy like me, don’t set a goal to do the right thing (e.g. brush teeth), just set a goal to be in the right place (brush in mouth) #

In “the literature” (a lot of it very good literature, like Talent Is Overrated and The Talent Code), it’s often said that, you know, we need to do “deliberate practice”, meaning stuff that’s actually a little hard and painful for us. Through deliberate practice, we grow. The reason pros get good and amateurs don’t is because they don’t do enough of this deliberate practice.

Apparently, the amateurs stay in their “comfort zone”, doing easy things, and so never grow. The pros, meanwhile, “stretch themselves”, by working effortfully in their “growth zone”; leaving their comfort zone makes them stronger, faster, longer, thicker and harder.

Um…How do I put this politely…

Bollocks.

OK, “bollocks” is a strong word. It’s just, the thing is that these ideas are well and good in principle, but in practice they only hurt people. In practice, they will not get anyone to independently do what they need to do to reach pwnage. In practice, they boil down to a re-affirmation of a pattern of behavior that I rather prejudicially like to call ASM: “Anglo-Saxon Masochism” _{(here we go again)} — what many often call the “Protestant/Calvinist work ethic”: no pain, no gain, bee arch; suffering breeds character, mofo.

Unfortunately, in the absence of violence, fear and/or coercion (preferably all three), these ideas aren’t going to help anyone.

Don’t get me wrong: if you have someone there in your life who’s constantly ready and willing to beat, scare or otherwise force you into working, then ASM will be effective. Very effective _{a few people may die or suffer nervous breakdowns, but we usually just call that “natural selection”}. Many of the very best-regarded sports teams, schools and military organizations use it all the time.

But I can’t work like that — not independently. And I know you can’t, either. And I don’t want to live with fear, violence and coercion. Indeed, as soon as the apparatus of violence/fear/coercion is removed, many (former) sportsmen and soldiers become, well, fat people with lots of funny stories to tell about the good old days. And many former students become, well, fat people who used to know calculus.

We who speak English natively — and are therefore participating in the same wider society — have probably had some degree of ASM culturally ingrained in us; we’ve been indoctrinated pretty well. That’s why you and I have had so much trouble doing things you otherwise want to do — like acquire some form of knowledge or skill, or produce some kind of product or performance.

OK, let’s review. Simplistic cultural generalizations aside, here’s the deal:

1. Because of our training, our default pattern is to use fear, coercion and violence on ourselves.
2. The idea of comfort zone, growth zone and panic zone is probably accurate.
3. But, because of (1), too many of us think our panic zone is our growth zone. Put another way, we suck at measuring the distance between the comfort zone and the growth zone. In fact, it turns outs that the comfort zone and the growth zone are incredibly close together. What you think is your comfort zone is probably your growth zone; sustainable “deliberate practice” is much easier and much more enjoyable than most people are currently led to believe. Yes, as simple as a cloze deletion or a sentence recognition card is, you are actually learning. In fact, just for kicks I would like to rename the zones, as follows:

• Comfort Zone → Boredom Zone
• Growth Zone → Enjoyment Zone (aka The True Comfort Zone)
• Panic Zone → Panic Zone (aka Pain Zone)

I don’t like this “no pain, no gain” crap. And we don’t need it. Comfort and growth are not mutually exclusive. Discomfort and growth are not the same thing — if they were, people with ill-fitting shoes would be the happiest, most successful, most productive in the world . Growth feels good. Or, at least, it can. Amateurs don’t fail to get good because they stay in their “comfort” zone, they fail to get good because either:

1. They stay in their “boredom” zone, and this leads them to put in less time, or
2. They never feel right about spending more time on the activity because it’s so much fun — I have friends who could be professional writers who actively choose to avoid writing because “it’s fun”, or
3. Constant reboiling and three-day monking. They do eventually put in enough time, but it’s dissipated over far too many years to reach “critical mass“. All human skill is depends on memory in some form. Think of this memory as, to mix metaphors, a puddle of radioactive material. We need to add to this puddle faster than decay or evaporation can do away with it.

Anyway…

So, how do we get to that true comfort = enjoyment = growth zone? How do we get so that we’re consistently doing something? I’d give you a complicated formula, but neither you nor I would remember it, and what good is a good idea that you can’t keep in your head, ready to use, right? So here is what I do:

Set appearance/situational/environmental goals rather than action/completion goals. Rather than setting a goal to do the right thing, set a goal to be in the right place. Set a goal to show up. No more. NO MORE. Don’t get clever. Don’t try to achieve. As soon as you start getting clever and adding stuff, your body will rebel.

You don’t have to run tomorrow morning. You just have to have your shoes on and be standing outside. You don’t have to eat healthy food, you just have to have (only) healthy food in your house. Once you’ve fulfilled the situational goal, you can go back inside to eat potato chips (oh, wait…none in the house — better run to the grocery store to get some) and watch Robot Chicken (oh wait, I only have Japanese versions…) if you want.

You may think just “being there”, standing outside with your shoes on, doesn’t do anything, and doesn’t achieve anything. And you’re right. But you’re also wrong. Because by being there you have done some incredibly profound scale-tipping — you have made it easier to do something, than to not do it. You have turned an uphill mountain hike into a playful, downward slide. You are now working with gravity, instead of against it.

This is how and why I “executed” and continue to execute my Japanese project so well. I never set a goal to even listen to a specific number of hours of Japanese. That’s far too mendokusai. Count? Are you joking? This isn’t effing Sesame Street. I simply set a goal to be in a position/location such that there was Japanese entering my eyes and ears. My goal was to either be in a room where Japanese sounds could be heard, or to have my headphones on and Japanese playing in them (my music player only had Japanese things on it, so this was cake).

This is also why it was actually easier for me to go “all Japanese” than “some Japanese” — “all Japanese” requires no management overhead whatsoever. The only “management” I did and do was shopping for more Japanese stuff. And we all love getting new stuff .

Can you see the difference?

Situational/environmental goals are actually very powerful. And people already recognize their negative power; they just don’t realize that they also have positive power. Do you know why your parents didn’t let you hang out with the bad kids? Not because you were actively going to do bad stuff, but because simply being with the bad kids was enough such that the situation would almost inevitably take itself in a bad direction, with or without your intervention and good intentions.

Don’t work to achieve something. Let the environment do the work for you.

Don’t do the right thing. Just be in the right place.

Don’t change yourself. Just change your surroundings. Your surroundings will then change you — always.

OK, let’s hit out some more examples:

• Bad goal: Do/finish something.
• Good goal: Be where things (really) get done.

• Bad goal: Listen to Japanese.
• Good goal: Have (only) Japanese to listen to.

• Bad (action) goal: Read Japanese.
• Good (situational) goal: Have (only) Japanese books to read. _{Every-freaking-where — bag, bookshelf, bedroom, bathroom, car.}

• Bad (action) goal: Do SRS reps.
• Good (situational) goal: Have (only) SRS window open.

• Bad (action) goal: Go somewhere.
• Good (situational) goal: Be in car. Be outside with shoes on.

• Bad (action) goal: Write book.
• Good (situational) goal: Be at desk with writing tools.

In short, set up the right system (this does require some effort, but very little — we have a lot of economic/technological infrastructure that makes this very easy for us), and then let the system’s inertia carry you all the way to your goal. The other cool thing is that you get you get an instant “win”, you don’t have to wait to get something “right” or “finished”, to feel good.

There are no guarantees in terms of quantity and speed, but “little and often” is more than good enough in most situations. As I always say: no project ever dies of malnutrition, only of complete-and-absolute starvation. Most things fall through not because someone was doing too little, but because he wasn’t doing anything at all. Most people don’t fail at scheduling because of being bad at scheduling, but because they never even look at the schedules they so lovingly made.

Each of us is like a river. We want to take the proverbial path of least resistance. Trying to use our willpower all the time — trying to “do” and “finish” things — is like trying to get the cooperation of every molecule in the river at every turn: tiring. By changing our environment, we basically tweak the path in small, simple but significant ways. And then we can go back to being our lazy selves for the remaining ~99% of the time, sliding down a path that we have altered to lead us right where we want to go.

Be your river-like self. Don’t climb up to Japanese. Slide down into it. Don’t know how? Think something up, try something out. That 1300 grams of meat inside your skull isn’t for decoration and it isn’t for slogging; it’s there for making your life simpler, easier and happier .

If you identify and take care of the preconditions, then goal achievement can happen as a side-effect, as an afterthought — as if you weren’t even trying (and, in truth, you won’t be).

Anyway, that’s my two cents. You guys always give great feedback, so I’m excited to hear your stories and advice .