When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson (or so I’m told — ‘coz you never quite know with these Internet quotes, do you?)

In life, oftentimes, the real choice isn’t between success and popularity, but between success and immediate popularity. It’s a toughie. Tougher, in fact, than the actual success path (“a day of worry is more exhausting than a day of work” and all that). Which is both good and bad, depending on how you look at it .

To me, that’s the real meaning of “delayed gratification” — the lonely gap between when the old social grouping rejects you and you’re again gratified by the acceptance of some new group.

I think we all have the power to establish and maintain good habits, but when threatened with the withdrawal of the camaraderie, admiration or love of our peers, that’s the real fork in the path; that’s where we make or don’t make ourselves. I imagine it’s where people who did keep on keeping on came the closest to cracking.

We can console ourselves with the knowledge that real camarederie wouldn’t have turned sour so easily. Although, that can feel quite hollow in the face of what seems to be the end of the world. And it is the end of a world, just not the world.

Maybe all the noise that adults make about teenagers and peer pressure is really adults projecting their own challenges with social resistance. Who knows? Anyway, enough psychobabble from me; I don’t really know what I’m talking about.

My point is…if you can either insulate yourself from or completely break through social resistance, then you’re well on your way to becoming unstoppable. For good or ill.

So, if in doubt? Screw ‘em. They’re replaceable. As callous as that may sound, it’s really no more callous than the open derision of people making feeble attempts to put you in what they presume to be your place. A place that’s invariably insultingly low. If anything, breaking social resistance is an act of charity, an act of love for at least one person — you — which is more love than your would-be detractors are showing anyone at the moment in question.

Social resistance is…it’s almost like a prank. I’m speaking purely in a metaphorical sense, but it does seem as though it’s all this sort of Zen-like episode of Punk’d on a massive scale, and the joke is on you. Mmm…Punk’d isn’t really the most apropos comparison; I was just feeling nostalgic about that show.

What I mean is this: it’s almost as though social resistance is difficult-seeming and difficult-looking by design, because once you can ignore, deflect or otherwise transcend social resistance, everything is, relatively speaking, a walk in the cake.

Maybe mental state alters behavior, and behavior alters mental state. And maybe the behavior of rejecting social resistance has profound effects on one’s mental state. And maybe these effects bleed into other areas and help us be more effective. And maybe that’s why we sometimes over-esteem celebrities and other people who have succeeded in one field: since experts can seem superhumanly good, we assume that they’re all-round superhumans.

I remember one time, writing out for an English friend, some of the various alternates of the sword (劍) character: 劍・劒・劔・釼・剣 … and she went “you see, I’ll never be able to do that [you must be magically talented]“…and it was kind of mini-heartbreaking because my intent had been to prove that any fool can learn kanji, not that I knew kanji. Daniel Coyle of Das Le El The Talent Code calls this the “HSE/Holy [Crap] Effect”.

Social resistance is like a matte painting of a formidable fence separating the worlds of those who do succeed (in many senses), and those who don’t. Once you realize the fence is fake, you simply walk off the set of the little Truman Show that had been going on and oh crap another pop culture reference. Thereafter, you may not become instantly unstoppable, but it will certainly take a heckuva lot more to faze you. By the way, “heckuva” sounds…Slavic if you read it a certain way.

So, it can pay to be a bit detached and solipsitic about it all. Like when your friends tells you about their drama and all you can do is laugh — you care for your friends, you’re just not taken in by the drama because you have the mental removal to watch it as farce. That kind of bemused detachment can be a great asset. And people may call you on it, and get upset at your lack of emotional abandon, but…more detachment will probably solve that as well.

The funny thing is, though, all of these ideas can be used to justify anything, good or bad. Then again, trains can be used for suicide, but we’re not outlawing them any time soon.

AJATT is often described as cultish. And it is, because I have carefully laid plans to whisk you all away to a compound in South America where we can watch anime and drink colored sugarwater. But really, what it is is that many paths, religious or secular, requiring significant investments of self, time and resources, are likely to at some point bring one into some level of conflict with common behaviors and levels of self-management that are considered “normal”.

Case in point: one or two of my Japanese friends sometimes make fun of me learning Chinese, yet these same kids — the same ones doing the mocking — also wish they knew Chinese, and even make half-hearted attempts (book purchases) in that general direction. Whenever we’re geeking out by my bookshelf, and things go quiet for a while, and the dust settles, they invariably sigh something we might loosely translate as: “dag, yo…I wonna know me some Chah-nese”.

If and when these conflicts occur, sometimes, compromise and negotation work. Other times, resolute boldness is called for. I don’t know which will be which for you. For example, I don’t object to people suggesting that my daily life be composed of a variety of activities. But I will happily walk, run and fly over, around and through people who think they have the authority to decide or even suggest the details (time, place and content) of those activities. Those are my “rules”, if you will. Yours may differ.

Let me give you a little story from the halcyon days of when AJATT was just me being me in Utah. My friends wanted us to watch Pulp Fiction together…in the living room. I like hanging out with people while not doing the same thing, so I was like…yeah, cool, whatever. I didn’t want to watch something in English, but I was willing to watch it with them, so I was going to read Japanese on my laptop while they watched. I often read and watch at the same time.

This compromise upset them. They wanted the movie to be watched in their way (laptopless) on their timetable (now). These were hardcore computer geeks; they knew about geeking out; they should have known better. In the end, after about 90 seconds of failed explanation, I simply went and did something else in Japanese. They got even more upset. About eighteen months later, one of the people who had been there apologized for the entire incident; in his own words, I had been right and he wrong; he hadn’t realized what I was trying to do; he now knew that I had needed to do what I did.

Rarely is all this drama an issue; usually, it doesn’t even come up. But sometimes you do have to choose between something you really want and like, and just being liked. Fortunately, when you choose the former, you do tend to get new likers. Either completely new people, or the same old people post-change-of-heart.

Do what you need to do. Do what makes you happy and comfortable. Getting the job done? Well, that counts as part of “comfort”. Sucking at Japanese made me uncomfortable. So, go become great at Japanese or whatever .

In response to this article on binging and purging, I got this really cool comment from Maya, one of AJATT’s best link-suppliers:

Just out of curiosity, does anyone have any examples of when they started to fall behind in something and they eventually caught up by making it more fun/changing their style? I’m not doubting that this is the way to go; it’s just that I’d like a concrete example.

Lately I’ve fallen behind with my sentence reps (whereas I have no problem maintaining an immersion environment)… I think the problem is that I’ve come to look at the reps as “work/studying” (whereas as anime is always “recreational”)… even after deleting a decent chunk of sentences, the problem seems to persist. I’m currently almost a week behind in reps, and still can’t motivate myself to get around to doing them. I’ve obviously been doing something wrong, but I can’t figure out what.

Here is my response:

@Maya

Just one idea here (I’m looking forward to hearing what everyone else has to say):

Delete even more.

Don’t go to your SRS to do reps any more.

Go to delete.

Go for deletions. Deletions are your new “target metric”. Delete until you hit a sentence that you give a crap about. Then delete until you hit the next one like that.

You’re probably overloaded with “should-learn” sentences — “shoulders“, like I was in Cantonese. Or maybe you have cool sentences, but they lack the punch they had when you entered them. Those are now “shoulders”, too.

Get rid of anything even remotely sucky. Delete. Delete. Delete. Don’t worry. You obviously don’t need them. You’ve been off the SRS a whole week, right? That’s a sign. A big, freaking sign.

Delete boring things from your SRS, otherwise they will “delete” you — they will “make” you never want to touch that SRS again.

Basically, Maya, you great discoverer of all things Disney and Japanese, you have two choices.

a) Delete bad sentences, however many there may be, so that you can do at least *some* SRSing.
b) Never SRS again for the rest of your life.

Right now, you’re on a collision course with (b).

Don’t get rid of the whole deck in one go. A lot of people do that. I personally think that’s ill-advised. Delete. One by one. There will be some leftover items — “keepers“. The keepers will be the seeds of a renewed deck, a deck of keepers (mostly), a deck that makes you actually want to do reps. The keepers will have a pattern to them — format, length, source, content, whatever — that will guide you in acquiring more keepers.

If you’ve got a really sucky deck, you could end up literally halving your cardcount — I once did. In the extreme, you could end up with only 10% of your original deck. No biggie. Let it go. Fuhgeddaboutit. Remember what’s at stake. Sentences are interchangeable. Motivation to learn is not.

Let me share some of my Japanese sentence deck stats for today with you, to give you a quantitative perspective on the whole thing:

• Repcount: 135
• Added: 2 cards
• Deleted: 100 cards.
• Total: ~235 cards processed, ~42% deleted.

135 reps and 100 deletions is infinitely better than 0 reps and 0 deletions. Now let’s extrapolate — assuming about the exact same daily performance over the course of one week, that comes to nearly 1000 reps and 700 deletions. 1000 to 0. That’s not 1000 times better, M-star. That’s  “even more infinitely better” than 0 reps and 0 deletions.  ∞:0 ratio.

So, go break some eggs and make that omelette .

We all have such noble intentions with our sentences. We all want to be good kids; we want to do the right thing; we want to eat everything that’s given us. But being an obedient doormat and being an effective learner are not, repeat, not the same thing.

Know your “rights”. The right to enjoyment (= the right to veto boredom) is one that school — my favorite scapegoat for everything — would tend to try to discourage you from exercising, so we often forget that we even have it; we equate exercising it with being “lazy”, unproductive, irresponsible. But now you know to say no to uninteresting sentences.

You can keep being liberal about what enters your SRS deck, just be liberal about what leaves it, as well. Garbage in, garbage out.

Written from painful and rather embarrassing-to-share experience,

Khatz

Epilogue

Through the magic of deletion, Maya has since turned SRSing from a chore, back into a game and now lives a full, happy, besentenced life . In her own words:

Thanks to everyone for their advice!

To sum things up, I’ve gone through my deck and deleted ~450 or so cards that were boring/unpleasant/so easy that they had become useless. I’m not quite done yet; I can still realistically see myself deleting another 50-200 cards, but I think I’m getting much closer now.

I’ve also decided to change the pace at which I add/learn sentences. When I started doing sentences, I wasn’t actually done with RTK; I was just impatient, and I figured that I could “pick up” the remaining kanji on the go. This never happened/isn’t likely to happen, and my incomplete knowledge of kanji is creating problems for me, so I want to go back and finish learning them properly. I’ll still add/learn sentences, but at a much slower rate (at least temporarily); I actually see this as a really good thing, because it will encourage me to only add a small quantity of really good sentences, instead of adding tons of nonsense, as I seem to have been doing the past while. Needless to say, my overall immersion environment won’t change.

Thanks to everyone for your advice/anecdotes/encouragement!

…

Today was my first day doing reps anew – I went through a hundred of ‘em in under half an hour. This definitely wouldn’t have been possible a couple weeks ago

Everything felt fresh and simple <3

hatever your goals this year, you will fall off the horse at some point. Probably. Perhaps you already have.

If and when you do fall off, get back on it like nothing happened. Redraw. New point.

Because the temptation will be to purge the binge or binge the purge. But the binge-purge cycle is as dangerous as it is unproductive.

When you’ve been inconsistent with a behavior you want to instill, the socially-trained response (“instinct”) is to punish yourself by giving yourself more to do — stricter rules, extra work, “catch up” work. A bit of self-flagellation, you know. A nice crack of the old flagellum. WHAPEW!

Basically, you say to yourself “OK, I’ve been binging on bad things for a while now, so let me purge for a little while and THEN go back to a normal flatline”.

But that just feeds the cycle. Because, you see, purging is just another form of binging. Purging is just binging on good. Which seems like a good enough idea, certainly the intent behind it is good, but the effect is to teach yourself that:

“Binging is how we solve problems”.

It’s kind of like racism. On the surface, white supremacists seem to hate darkies and Jews. But really what they’re saying is:

“Division, hate and violence is how we solve problems”.

So what happens is that white supremacists can end up scaring up, beating up and killing up almost as many white people (“race traitors”) as they do darkies and Juden and Irish and whomever the heck else. They even write books about crucifying “their own”. Their paradigm demands it. Any movement based on division, hate and violence tends to self-destruct in this way, because while its members may think that their hate has specificity, in truth they are operating under a more general principle that inevitably begins to dictate their actions and responses to anyone of any ethnicity in any adverse situation.

_{[Verily, if you look at something like the two "World" Wars, what you see is essentially Western European slander, hatred and violence, which had been successfully exported worldwide in the form of colonialism, finally coming home to roost. Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon was a similar deal: the Romans had tried to put a firewall around Rome proper -- in fact, the whole Italian peninsula -- essentially saying "aw'right, lads -- we impose order through military conquest out there but not in 'ere". It worked well enough for a while. Eventually, though, a Gaius called Caesar came along and was like: "Roman, puh-leeze! Screw dat noise, I'ma conqua anda bringa da orda all over dis Appian muthafarquad!", because "military conquest is how we solve problems and impose order" was the real, core lesson of Roman politics. And the rest really is history. Live by the gladius, die by the gladius, if you will. Baseless Remarks About Complex Social Phenomena, baby...you know you loves it!]}

Similarly, binging and purging demands more binging and purging. Binge-purge is just a manifestation of a “binge meta-behavior”. _{The more I make up these words, the more I start sounding like Bucky Fuller — you know, insightful, but obviously self-educated because he uses all these neologisms and compound words that aren’t in mainstream academic literature. Maybe I should go to grad school and finally earn my professors’ unconditional love and respect…’Fill that surrogate dad-sized hole in my heart…}

_{You’re all: “Khatz, you’re nowhere near as cool as Bucky Fuller”. Well, neither are you, so SCREW OFF the bottle cap!}

_{Where was I…}

_{Oh yeah.} In fact, it’s more than a behavior — it’s a way of life. It’s almost like a conditioned reflex whereby as soon as you “hear the bell” of a certain type of situation, you almost unconsciously, involuntarily start binging and purging.

So we say: “one last purge(=’good’ binge), and then I’ll go back to flatline”. But flatline never comes. Just like the day you’re going to use all that cool stuff you have locked up in the attic…never comes.

Binge-purge, or, more accurately, “binge-binge” or “plus-binge-minus-binge” is like the Ring of Power in Lord of the Maori Actors with Ridiculously Manly Thighs and Dreadlocks. It cannot be used for good — at least not by you or me. It’s just that unwieldly. Once you pick it up and put it on, any valiant attempts to direct its power in space and time tend to fall flat.

Even using it against itself as some form of punishment, tends to fail. Generally speaking, the binge-binge cycle cannot be used to break itself any more than a tangled power cord can be used to untangle another tangled power cord. It cannot take you to your goals because the violence of the cycle will destroy you before you reach them — maybe not the very first time, but somewhere along the way.

Large individual goals are only healthily reached by consistency over time. By habit. Really, the only way to teach yourself this gradual behavior is by engaging in it. You can’t get yourself to be gradual and go at a manageable pace by removing the privilege of moving at this pace as soon as you slip up. Accept the slip-up as a natural part of the process. The way to get over those violent pendulum movements is to stop hitting the pendulum so violently…get a hold on it and guide it gently.

You will probably run off course a little bit this year, at some point. But that doesn’t mean all is lost. Far from it. I hear aeroplanes spend the majority of their flying time technically off-course (is that true?). They just correct quickly and often.

Redraw. Correct. New point. New day. New nano-action. Continue. Yes, it is that easy. Yes, you can let go of punishment and still excel – what, you think I got my cats to come to me when I call them by beating them over the head? “OI! I’M TALKING TO YOU, MAMMAL! LOOK ON MY WORKS, YE FELINE, AND DESPAIR!”. Naw, dude. They hate Shelley.

Be nice to yourself. When you fall, just get up and keep walking. Make small corrections if necessary, but emotionally, let it be like nothing the heck happened. Like you meant to do it. It’s not like you killed someone (_{right?…right? wait, what? oh my…OK…No it’s NOT okay!}). Take the energy you were going to use for feeling guilty, and put it into moving forward.

It’s New Year’s.

So freaking what? It’s just another day. We all need to calm down a little. Even me telling you to calm down is probably just fueling the excitement, isn’t it?

Are you going to make a resolution? Good luck with that. I doubt you’ll even remember it by early March.

Screw resolutions. I’m going to show you how to actually get things done.

_{And while we’re ranting: I hate my writing. I hate this whole website. I even hate people who hate my writing because they remind me of all the hate I already have. If this site were a piece of paper, I’d have burned it long ago. Fortunately, the blog medium has largely prevented these perfectionistic tendencies coming out and destroying whatever little good some of you may gain from reading this.}

_{The reason I hate this mother is because it almost never comes out the way I’m thinking of it. There are these beautiful and rather tingly constructions in my mind and they come out so…bland. So tingleless.}

In “The Fork, The Choice and You“, I was trying to write something that it might perhaps be better to draw. So I went ahead and drew it.

Behold! The following paths of achievement (or lack thereof): the pothead, the planner and the player.

The Pothead Model

“Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…whoa…yeah”.

Problems: Single, discrete point — a fantasy, a dream — which is a good start, but no path, no granularity, no action, no nothing.

The Planner Model

Problems: Has goal (point) and path (line), but the path lacks granularity and elasticity. It is conceptually beautiful and perfectly smooth, but unworkable except under perfect (i.e. rarely fulfilled) conditions. The planner’s inability to stay on the line is frequently a cause of stress, pain and ultimately failure.

At this time of year, society at large offers us the path of the planner. And those of us who take it tend to suffer so much that we fall off the graph. I submit to you that we should reject this model.

The Player Model

• The player has fun because it’s all a game.
• Unlike the planner, who has this perfect, smooth, continous line she’s trying to force herself onto, the player deals in tiny, discrete, individual points (AKA choices/forks). The player’s path is digital. Over time, she causes the points to form a trend, but there is no actual line.
• At every point, she makes a choice that is both fun and takes her closer to the goal.
• There are thousands of these points.
• The player has a goal but the focus is on the immediate next action.
• The player does not allow the goal to overwhelm her with its vertical or horizontal distance.
• The player does not allow “imperfections” and deviations to perturb her. She accepts deviations, and then corrects or even exploits them.
• The player may often actively seek new, advantageous deviations through playful experiments. She’s on for the ride.

Beyond immediate necessity, the player forgets about both the past and the future. There is no burden of regret, no crushingly grand aspirations (there are grand aspirations, she just doesn’t let them get in the way). The real question is: Right here, right now, what do we do next? What do we play next?
_{[By the way -- this idea of using time rather than being used by it is one suggested by Eckhart Tolle in his "The Power of Now" -- don't be deterred by all the shady quasi-religious hype; between the covers is actually one of the best books about focus and concentration ever written].}

Japanesewise the key is this: there are gaps. Gaps in your immersion. Gaps in your implementation. Gaps in…I dunno…your teeth? You may make mistakes, you may fall off the horse. Fine. Big deal. What matters is what you do next. Every moment is New Year’s. Every moment is a chance to reset. Every moment, pretend the entire world has just been recreated and redrawn from scratch.

It is a game. If you’re not having fun, it’s because you’re doing it wrong. Which is not to say that there’s only one right way — there isn’t. But if you’re bored, then the way you’re doing it clearly has problems. Make it fun. You will know when you’re having fun. Don’t, don’t, do not be anal retentive and start asking what “fun” is. You know what it is. And if you don’t, then you’re gone in a way far beyond my ability to help you . I officially refuse to define fun.

When you touch something hot, you feel pain: this is your body trying to save your hand from being hurt. Boredom is intellectual pain. Boredom is your body’s way of telling you to change the situation. Ignore it to your own detriment. If you try to just fight through the boredom, your brain is just going to puke it all up anyhow. Your brain is trying to help you out by telling you: “Hey!…Nothing’s getting remembered or learned right now”.

Be A Player: Poke Dots Into Reality. There Is No Line

As you read this website, I do not want you to follow my advice. I do not want you to take my advice. I want you to use my advice. You cannot be me, nor would you want to. You can be much better than that. Much better. You will be faced with situations that I never faced; you may have preferences that I do not. Follow my trend — I think I offer a good one — but pick your own points: there is no line.
_{[Case in point: my least favorite type of question is "how many kanji/sentences should I do per day"? As many as you pleasantly and consistently can. Stop asking to be commanded (ironically enough, if you were to stop asking to be commanded because of that last sentence, you would in fact be obeying a command...but anyhoo). Do what you want. Try a few "points" and see which ones work for you.]}

The planner’s path is goal-focussed. Contemporary personal development literature is awash in goalism. It’s well-intentioned, but it’s not working. When’s the last time a goal got someone to stop smoking? You can goal it up up the wazoo and nothing will change. The goal part is trivial. You can make up a goal half-asleep. I think we already set goals naturally — whenever we want something, that’s a goal. And don’t give me this “a goal is a dream with a deadline” crap, because if it’s a cool enough goal, there’s probably no way you’re going to know enough about the domain to set a real final deadline, so now you’ll just be scaring yourself with images of death (deadline).

Timeframes, yes; timeboxing, yes; deadlines, no. What you really need is (1) a new identity which can produce (2) simple guidelines _{(I’d say one guideline is enough, three is the max — you have to be able to recall them instantly)} for point-by-point behavior, “rules of engagement” if you will — the simple AJATT algorithm in “The Fork, The Choice and You” is a good example.

On the player’s path, each of those points/forks/choices is a chance to change the future — to alter reality itself in a small way. Be a player. I’m not saying “abandon all thought of goals” — never let ideology get in the way of something truly useful — but I am saying let it go; leave well enough alone; it’s not helping like you think it is. Stop massaging these great big “mission statements”; that crap is nothing but empty prose. Stop getting aroused, confused and intimidated by all these “goalistic rituals” that are taking over our society and start poking tiny, pin-sized holes into reality. No one fails for lack of a goal, only for a lack of dots. Dot, dot, dot, dot…………………………

Playing The Meta-Game of AJATT

A lot of what we call personal development was and is actually made for corporate and military training.  Stephen Covey? David Allen? Those boys are just manual writers for corporate soldiers, especially ones at or aiming for the “colonel” level. And maybe stuff like that works in large armies and corporations, who struggle just to communicate intentions and keep everyone singing from the same songsheet. But individuals and tiny groups aren’t like that.

We don’t have the sheer man-hours to waste writing impressive plans that are just going to be thrown out anyhow. But we can be nimble. We can be ad hoc. We can be point-by-point. We may appear to have less and be less, but we end up using it far better and thus accomplishing more and becoming more. We — individuals and tiny groups — can fail more because failure is cheaper for us; we can correct and exploit any situation — failure or otherwise — almost instantly.

Have you ever seen those big, round magnifying mirrors that chicks use to do their make-up? You know, the kind that show all your skin’s pores and tiny blemishes and make you depressed to be alive — even if you’re a guy who thought he was decent-looking? I finally understand why women use foundation — it’s the only thing that makes looking at yourself in one of those things bearable. Anyway, a large organization is like one of those. A large organization is like a huge magnifying device. And since a large organization magnifies everything, it also magnifies screw-ups.

A large org can make 10 million good things, but if it makes a mistake, it now has 10 million c-r-a-p things! Result? Large orgs (schools, companies, etc.) are defensive — they don’t try to be good, and they definitely don’t try to have fun, they just try to not-screw-up, not-make-misakes, follow-the-manual. This means that a large org has to suppress both success and failure for its own safety and indeed for the safety of the world at large. We couldn’t well afford to have elephants tripping up all over the place. When 10 million Firestone tires blow up, we have a freaking problem. And a giggly little: “Whoops! Haha – I meant to do that!“, will not cut it.

All of which explains why big companies keep buying up little ones — the little ones are able to think and twist and spin and pivot and maneuver and act and react and fail and deviate and correct and exploit far better and far faster. A big company is just happy to be alive and walking straight. A big company has to kill its creativity, because creativity is all these messy points and a big company wants — needs — a perfect, straight line. When working at full scale, a big company cannot safely and continuously invent and refine cool processes, it can only execute them. _{Even the great Sony purchases more of its technology than meets the consumer eye, despite having 100,000 incredibly smart employees and dedicated R&D labs.}

And that, my war-oriented friends, also explains why a regular army can essentially never win against guerilla tactics. The flexibility and speed of adaptation does not even compare. Guerilla tactics are why America has a President and not a Queen, why Mao came to rule China, why Vietnam is a single country, why I can live wherever I want in Kenya, why even Alexander the Great and Napoleon got royally pwned (in Afghanistan and Russia, respectively) and why an AJATTeer can absolutely d-e-s-t-r-o-y someone who depended on Japanese classes. Because even if the raw AJATT process weren’t better, the meta-process — make it fun, iterate lots, fail lots and tweak to win — is virtually indestructible.

This is also why school sucks for learning, because it kills your maneuverability in order to get you to follow someone else’s plan that’s easier to grade. Schools couldn’t give a pygmy shrew’s buttocks whether you learn or not; they’re just happy to be alive and walking straight. Schools just want you to look good, sit still and shut up so they can push you down the conveyor belt and yell out “next!”. They may not be intentionally callous, but they certainly end up being about as warm as Ann Coulter on a December evening in Minnesota _{(Minne-freaking-sota winters…oh my gosh…MOMMY, WHY DOES IT HURT MY LUNGS WHEN I BREATHE? And why do shrill, somewhat racist, slightly anti-Semitic women…turn me on? It’s like: “if you wanna get with me, Khatzumoto, you have to alter my fundamental beliefs about humanity! *Diagonal* *Finger* *Snap*!”)}. Good for the school. Not good for you.

So don’t treat AJATT like school and try to mold yourself to fit The Plan^TM, because even AJATT will suck if you do it like that. Mold the plan to fit you as you go along. I didn’t make this so you could be a cog in the machine, I made it so that you would own the machine, use the machine, customize the machine. You don’t need a license, just open the box and fiddle with it. _{[I think we'll see an explosion of learning and invention when more concrete and abstract "boxes" like this -- creation, discovery and execution processes -- are open for us to see. In that sense, and that sense alone, people's questions about AJATT minutiae are legitimate, if not necessarily important.]}

You know, I’m always amused that people are impressed that I learned Japanese without classes. I say, I want to meet the guy who did get fluent because of classes; that shiitake mushroom would impress me!!! If that guy writes a book or blook, listen to HIM! It never surprises me any more that people like Edison, the Wright Brothers and young William Kamkwamba had little or no formal education; it would surprise me if they did.

Anyway, that’s it. That’s the basic idea. Kinda. Sorta. It still doesn’t read the way it actually looks in my mind, but hopefully this all makes things a little clearer. I don’t know if what I’m saying applies that widely. But it applied for self-directed learning/acquisition/becoming Japanese. If you have any questions or insights, feel free to share them with the whole gang.

What deserves your closest attention is neither your ultimate goal, nor your track record, nor your overall plan, but your next choice.

What are you going to do next?

Ultimate goals are heavy; they weigh on the soul. They’re useful and everything, but you can’t have them in your head all the time because the difference between that ultimate goal and your current state can be quite heart-crushingly large.

Track records can be depressing. You’re just going to be seeing all you haven’t been doing. I wouldn’t say never look at these, but if you don’t keep your exposure down, it will make you sick.

Overall plans are similarly crushing. The thought, the sight of all that’s still left to do — that long, empty, open road — is not exciting.

Which leaves your next choice. Your immediate next action.
It’s just one thing.
It’s simple.
It’s practically instant gratification.

Let’s say your ultimate goal is Japanese fluency.
Your track record is spotty or non-existent.
Your overall plan is to follow something along the lines of AJATT/AntiMoon.

What is your next choice?
Simple: Do something. Anything. In Japanese. Anything counts.
ANYthing.
Any. Thing.

One simple choice. Through this one simple choice. you’re bringing yourself closer to the ultimate goal; you’re building a new, better track record and you’re following the overall plan.

That’s all there is to it.

When I say I am not smart, have no talent, and have no willpower, a lot of people think I’m being modest. Trust me. I am neither smart nor talented nor “disciplined”.

With Japanese, I just made simple, local choices. At every fork in the road, I chose Japanese. That is sum total of “the plan”. If there is truly no choice, then it’s obviously not a fork. But you would be surprised how many opportunities there are to fit Japanese in some crack somewhere somehow (because concurrency counts).

This is an incredibly dumb algorithm. It is so dumb that a computer could do it. Even a lazy, good-for-nothing boy from Kenya who forgets to shower all the time — such a boy could execute this algorithm.

Observe, a pseudocode implementation of the basic AJATT algorithm.

while ( breathing )
    if ( anyOpportunityExists )
        doJapanese(anything)
    else takeNextOpportunity(asap)

It’s that simple. Make the big plans if you want. Keep the logs if you want. But know that the forks in the road are where things actually get decided.

I hate writing long articles. Which is funny, because a lot of the articles on this site are long. So, I guess it would be more accurate to say that I hate setting out write long articles (in fact, faced with the prospect of a long article, I’m liable to not write anything at all), and that my articles grow long organically. That, and I only ever prune them for logic (no, I really do — Don’t laugh! Don’t make that face! Wot iz tha’ face?), grammar and spelling, not for length. It’s not like there’s a page limit…

“Too many pages, dawg”.

In Part 1 of this open-ended, multi-part series, I’d like to discuss with you, in my signature casual, opinionated, poorly-sourced and screw-you-if-you-disagree-with-me-because-I’m-right-and-you’re-wrong-mofo way…what the deal is with personal development. So…

What is the deal with personal development anyway?

Aren’t they all a bunch of hacks?

Is it worth your time?

No, really, though, aren’t they all a bunch of hacks?

Isn’t it stuff we all know already, anyhow?

Isn’t it “unscientific”?

Aren’t they just making money telling us what we want to hear?

Aren’t they just trying to sell us stuff?

And, perhaps most constructively:

How does a sane, “open-minded” person (just as an aside: “open-minded”, to me, means “people who agree with me, or are open to agreeing with me, or say things that I agree with, or am open to agreeing with”; I told you this was going to be hard-hitting stuff, man….I’m pointing a long, thick, juicy central digit in the general direction of feigned objectivity) navigate the treacherous waters of what is, admittedly, a comically B.S.-filled field (case in point: Esther “Multiple Personality and Dissociative Identity Disorder” Hicks. Channeling? Negro, please. She and virtually every other author who publishes through Hay House is a delusional charlatan who has an at-best tenuous relationship with fact and logic. James Randi was going to wipe the floor with them, but he didn’t want to get his hands dirty. Or the floor.)

If personal development is fugu, that poisonous, Japanese seafood delicacy, how do you get at the tasty meat without (literally) dying? That perhaps is the core question that this series will seek to answer. Along the way, in future posts, I may share some of my own guidelines, recommendations and disrecommendations.

I’ll tell you right now. I’m just one person. I don’t have all the answers. In fact, I don’t have the answers, period. I’m not saying this to be humble. I’m saying this because it makes me look good. I’m saying this so that even if I turn out to be wrong I can be like: “yeah, dude, I totally saw that coming”; I can act like I anticipated the whole deal and it was all part of the contingency plan.

Maybe I should start some of that editing…Anyway, without further ado:

My Story

Since this is all anecdotal anyway, perhaps it makes sense to share with you, the story of my journey towards rather carefully and selectively “embracing” personal development.

I grew up watching Blackadder, Animaniacs and Tiny Toons. We’re not just reminiscing about old TV shows here; this is important information. You see, what I’m trying to demonstrate is that I grew up soaked in irony. Indeed, I grew up so soaked in irony, that I didn’t even know what I was being ironic about: my exposure to irony tended to precede my exposure to the actual phenomenon in question. Think about it — Animaniacs and Tiny Toons had all those sarcastic references to Don Knotts. Yet but…how many kids growing up in the early 1990s actually knew who Don Knotts even was, really (perhaps that was part of the joke…I dunno)? Yet but ([I'm liking this new word]) we all yucked it up.

Bottom line; I used to think that personal development was all a bunch of crap. Grade A B.S. I had never really read any. I had never been exposed to any — not in a meaningful quantity. But I knew it was a bunch of crap. I ate blasé for breakfast, sarcasm for lunch and whatever passed for acerbic wit for dinner. Personal development, good or bad, is an inherently….naïve, innocent, hopeful field. There was no room for that in my life.

Let me be clear, though: personal development mostly is a bunch of crap. But the teeny, tiny little bit of good that is there is, arguably, too good to ignore. Too. Good. To. Ignore. Kind of like how air is mostly not oxygen, or how it’s the micronutrients (rather than macro-) in our food that really swing our health one way or another. Not quite the same level of importance to life, but you get the idea — value can sometimes be inversely proportional to size.

So, one day when I was about 14, I was watching televisory pictomatograms (yes, TV) with one of my sisters. Upon the tele-vision, Oprah Winfrey was interviewing Arnold Schwarzenegger. Don’t worry, I already knew Oprah was lame. I’m hip.

At one point, Oprah asks Arnold if he, an unknown young man from a small country in central Europe, had ever imagined himself being a Hollywood movie star. Arnold replies that he had always known he was going to be a star; he had always pictured himself being in Hollywood, being the dude. And you know he was being frank, because he’s Austrian. Sarcasm isn’t big in Austria (Austrians: “yeah it is!”).

My 14 year old self let out a triumphant: “yeeeeah, right”. To which my sister retorted: “No, [Khatzumoto], some people do have a clear vision of themselves”.

Women are stupid. Even the president of Harvard said so. And you can’t argue with Harvard — it’s a top-tier university. So screw you.

Knowing that all the schooling, suffrage and Steinem was going to her head, I paid my sister’s remarks no serious attention (“Ha, women…better get a Y chromosome before you start running that mouth!”). But, somehow, the memory of her gentle, feminine words remained with me. I am, after all, half woman on my mother’s side.

By the way, last time I made jokes about women here, someone took it seriously. So I’m going to make things clear right here and now: I am not joking; I am actually a misogynist. Women reading this: Why are you even online? Is there no kitchen where you are? Does your husband/father know you’re reading unsupervised?

Now that we have that out of the way…

My sister’s words stayed with me…blah blah…To this day yaddah yaddah…But it’s not like I had acted on them.

Fast forward to college, and I started collecting inspiring quotes. Tons and tons of them. I became a magnet for pithy aphorisms encouraging diligence, perseverance, and general pursuit of ownage. As time has gone on, I’ve developed my own “lazy” style of goal achievement, that renders a lot of the stuff I used to read quite quaintly obsolete, but those things served their purpose when they did.

College in the US was the first time I had to actually study on a regular basis; my earlier, British-style school experience had all been about end-of-term exams, so you could goof around until the eleventh hour, at which point you would invariably pull a Frosted Flakes-fueled feat of short-term memory (“this is grrrrrrreat!” No? Not funny? No? Anyone? No?). Also, your parents would suddenly become incredibly religious. _{I kid you not — one time, when I was 13, my mother drove me to a convent (a massive facility full of women, so far so good), and there were these Maltese nuns and they started touching me (but they’re women, so it’s okay) and my Mum’s all: “pray upon this child by the laying upon of hands”, and I’m like “mother, ok, (1) you don’t believe in freaking anything — you’re so cynical you don’t even believe in cynicism — and (2) you are not and have never at any point in your life been Catholic — you don’t even like these people; you’ve been slagging off the Catholic church my entire life, always calling them mafiosi and…” and she’s like: “(shrug)”}.

The requirements of my new American environment led me to seek and find gems like Adam Robinson’s What Smart Students Know. I read many other books about studying, and they all had their moments, but WSSK definitely stood out the most. WSSK silently and wordlessly impressed upon me this most wonderful idea: that I could independently read a book about how to get something done, and use it to get that thing done better.

Meta-learning — learning about learning — was a huge revelation for me. They don’t teach meta-learning at schools. Not even at the handsomely-priced ones that I was sent to. Everything’s either “hard work” or “talent”. It’s either struggle or innate ability. WSSK showed me a third way. WSSK is, for all intents and purposes, a personal development book.

AJATT the process, as I executed it while at college, was not directly inspired by ideas in the personal development/human performance/self-help/whatever the heck we’re calling it movement; it was just a childish game I played and got amazing, socially-significant results with (“look, Mom! I watched all this TV and now I can speak Japanese!”). But, of course, as I have come to write AJATT the site, it’s become clear to me that there were a lot of ideas that I used or otherwise independently arrived at, that the personal development people have been talking about for years.

Somewhere in there, it occurred to me that (1) success with Japanese could perhaps be generalized, not just to other languages but to other areas of life, and (2) a lot of those people with the inspiring quotes had written entire books filled with their ideas. And this is what led me down the slippery path of collecting and applying ideas to increase happiness and productivity. Coz, gosh, heaven forbid one should actually make a direct, intelligent, conscious effort to improve one’s life.

What has personal development done for me, really? Apart from “just” help me get stuff done and feel better about myself? Well, I think it can actually be hard to clearly quantify what good personal development does. Because, at the end of the day, it is your actions that make the change — books, videos and seminars are just inert ink, bits and air vibrations. We all love a clear, unambiguous: “Tony Robbins saved me two million dollars” type testimonial, but real-life causality is a bit murkier; maybe a lot of contributing factors form a web, rather than a simple, linear, hopscotch-like A-then-B chain; you’re smart enough to know that.

So action takes the day in the end. Having said that, it is the ideas in personal development books that can encourage thoughts that encourage those actions in the first place. _{(Also, sometimes you have ideas that are “in-process”, and you don’t want to share them before they’ve reached maturity, because people’s idle comments can be unnecessarily distracting, and threaten the open-mindedness and patience that is necessary in experiments on one’s life — a good deal of what I’m doing falls into this category)}.

In any case, suffice it to say that PD’s done a lot for me, does a lot for me, and will continue to do a lot for me. I’d definitely say that personal development is why you have an AJATT site to enjoy — assuming you enjoy it, that is . Many adults have learned Japanese before me (in fact, I’ve met some of them), faster than me, funner than me, further than me, better than me. But few have had the confidence, consistency or follow-through to record and present their ideas and experiences to the world. And that’s a darn shame. The world always has room for another success story. In fact, there’s a neverending shortage. I love a good role model; I love a narrative I can aspire to: I was desperate for such a narrative back in the day. Hopefully, I can be a shining, well-lotioned example for you.

Where were we? Oh yeah…

The PD industry is full of crap. But you know what? So is the food service industry. Many children die of food-poisoning in the US because it is apparently acceptable to feed them crap, as in actual fecal matter. And not just any children — blond, white children — you know, the valuable kind, that actually contribute to society and make the world a better place to live. So, should we not abolish food? Right now? Today? I mean, it’s killing people. We can all take sterilized, nutritionally-balanced pills, and no children, valuable or ethnic, need ever die again. Aren’t those children’s lives worth the effort? We could save them, if we just abolished food for something better. Peer-reviewed, shrink-wrapped, “nutro-pills”^TM. Think about it.

Call straw-man all you like. Children are dying. And you’re letting them die.

But AJATT is a language blog. Why are we sitting here making yet more off-color jokes about white people _(clever) and writing outside of the blog’s core topic? Well, because, the sweet thing about PD books is that you can read them and then feed the ideas and techniques back into your language study. Language-learning method produces ideas; ideas feed language-learning method. Now, if that isn’t sexy, cyclical and self-referential, I don’t know what is. Positive feedback: taste the rainbow.

Thus concludes the first part of this series. Stay tuned for more baseless remarks about this complex social phenomenon.