With AJATT, your body learns to play the sport.

Try not to have opinions. Opinions are for politicians and voters. Try not to have beliefs. Beliefs are for religions.

You’re an engineer. You’re a tinkerer. Tink. Tink. Tink. You have tools. You use tools to construct inevitable fluency — engineered inevitability.

There is nothing to believe in or opine about. Not in this game. If you want to believe, join a major religion. If you want to opine, go to a town hall meeting. If you want to have arguments, join a debate club.

And if you want to get used to a language, gather and play with tools. Tinker. Mix and match. Throw some away. Pick them up again. Change them. Mod them. Share them. Sell them.

Kids often ask me “Khatz, what’s your opinion on X?”. “What about this app?”
F### my opinion. My opinion can eat a dionions. Onions. Raw. Arngh. Bite into them like apples.
Either the tool works or it doesn’t. I’m handsome, but I’m not G-d. I’m not the Buddha. No, wait, no use being humble: I am the Buddha…’s younger brother, who stayed at home, in the palace, with the hookers and blow. Nirvana? I already live there. It’s called: “the palace” .

My buddhacial status notwithstanding, my opinion is just so much verbal flatulence, at the end of the day. And so is yours. All we have are the facts. Either the tool works or it doesn’t. Try it or don’t try it. Use it or don’t use it. Facts speak for themselves. There is nothing to believe in. Don’t be a believer. Don’t be a debater. Be a tinkerer.

Here’s my point. I’ve finally got the off-color religious humor out of my system. So here’s my point: you’re going to, at some point, run into an idea that people around you will think is crazy. One of these ideas might literally change the world of getting-used-to-languages. At the very least, it could change your life. But you’re not going to get to see this change if you’re always running to some authority to ask their opinion. I’ll give you my opinion, but…

Just…don’t be obsequious. Don’t be humble. Be courteous, but…inside, in your heart of hearts, don’t be humble. And this why I hate the JLPT.  I hate the attitude people. have toward it. I actually like tests; I (almost) love tests. But I don’t value tests above myself. I don’t think tests tell me anything about who I am. Indeed, tests are a better learning tool than an evaluation tool. Tests are just tools. Tools are not to be worshipped.

• Don’t learn: get used to.
• Don’t improve: suck less.
• Don’t binge: nibble often.

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.

Although all forms of murder basically amount to suffocation, immolation, stabbing (direct organ and tissue damage) or “overwhelming the immune response”, there are an infinite number of variations within that.

So to say “only method X works!”, “method X is the correct way” is like saying “human beings can only be killed using a Glock 17″ — which simply isn’t the case.

What if you don’t have a Glock?
Shouldn’t you use that Magnum? Or that cheesewire? Or that bottle of arsenic?

1. Do what you like.
2. Use what you have.
3. Repeat.

Yes, this kind of gratuitously gruesome blog post is what happens when you watch too much CSI.

“Average ones compete with others. Great ones compete with themselves.”
Vadim Kotelnikov

「我々は、どちらかといえば、幸福になるためよりも、幸福だと人に思わせる為に四苦八苦しているのである。」
ラ・ロシュフコー

“There is nothing noble about being superior to some other man. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.”
Hindu Proverb ¹

“people experience more anxiety and perform worse when they purse performance avoidance goals — when they try to avoid comparing poorly to others, as opposed to just doing their best”
Stereotypes and the Fragility of Academic Competence, Motivation, and Self-Concept
Joshua Aronson and Claude M. Steele

There’s an idea going around that competition makes us stronger. It doesn’t. Competition comes from and produces weakness, stupidity and laziness.

However, I’m not going to come out and say that competition is a bad thing. It’s not. Not for third parties. Competition is almost always good for third parties, because third parties get to (1) be entertained and (2) enjoy the fruits of the competing parties’ labors. For example, when companies compete ², the consumer gets to see awesome commercials, use better products and and enjoy lower prices. ³

But competition is bad for the people competing. And it’s actually a sign of the emotional weakness and laziness of the people competing. People compete because they could think of nothing better than to put themselves in boxes and measure themselves by standards that they themselves did not create. People compete because they lack the strength of character to judge themselves by their own standards. People compete because they were too lazy ⁴ to do something as simple as track their own stats and compare themselves to themselves, so instead they just casually look around and try to rank themselves.

Competition is for the stupid and easily duped.
I know that that sounds harsh. It’s kind of supposed to.

You’re never going to truly win by competing in a game you don’t own or control. If you’re not a ruler, a rule maker, you’re a pawn. At best you’ll be used and then thrown away when a newer, shinier pawn comes along because — surprise! — it’s not your game. Do you think most movie stars lead good lives? No, movie financiers lead good lives; most movie stars are pawns. Do you think most professional athletes lead good lives? Again…mostly pawns. Do you think most authors and artists lead good lives? Most of them are so stupid, so misinformed, so distracted, that they’re desperately trying to become pawns.

OK, let’s reel this in before it spreads itself too thin and collapses from the weight of over-generalizations, internal contradictions and non-existent fact-checking. What’s that? All my posts already do that? Yeah screw you .

Um…

• Collect your own stats
• Compare your stats against your stats
• Compete only against yourself…and newborn babies

I’m not asking you to re-write society. I’m not even suggesting it. I am suggesting that you rule by being the one in charge of the ruler (as in measuring device; I’m being punny here). That you be the one making the standards. Even if you’re playing someone else’s game (which you inevitably will be in at least some or even most parts of your life), even if you’re playing with other people, play by yourself for yourself.

Do you think Michael Jordan was playing basketball with other people? No. He was there on the court with them; he talked to them; he would use the ball with them, but he was playing alone, against himself. Whose records do you think he was breaking? Only his own ⁵. Michael Jordan wasn’t really in the NBA, he was more just at the NBA, doing his own thing.

Call it solipsistic competition. It’s more fun. You’ll be happier. And those are just the subjective points. Solipsistic competition is also more objectively accurate. Yeah, I said it. I said it in Tokyo, I said it. The only way you’re ever going to do a meaningful comparison is by doing one against yourself. Any other kind of comparison is just gay. Gay as in entertaining, like musical theater, but ultimately a waste of time, money and energy. Except for the people who sell tickets to musical theater, that is. OK…I’m losing focus and trying to cloak discrimination in humor here. And it’s not working.

Say you’re with a group of people, in…I dunno…a Japanese class. Look at you go, comparing yourself to the others and despairing (or — almost as bad — comparing yourself to the others and thinking you’re awesome: yeah, congratulations on being better at Japanese than other gaijin: here is your Bugger All Award).

You idiot. Stop doing that.

They didn’t start playing Japanese at the same time as you; they weren’t born at the same time as you; they’ve had life experiences completely different from yours. So what the heXX are you doing comparing yourself to them?

It’s like…it’s like freaking taking a roomful of people who’ve been doing completely different things all day, and then comparing how sweaty and smelly they are, and then saying that the person who’s been doing nothing all day is more hygienic because they smell better. It’s a meaningless, arbitrary, unjust, stupid comparison exercise.

If you can’t accurately compare two people who’ve been doing different things all day, how can you compare people who’ve been doing different things for their entire lifetimes? No, how? Tell me. I actually want to know…

Competition is for the weak, stupid and lazy. Competition is for pawns playing ⁶ on other people’s chessboards.
Competition is not about setting yourself apart. Competition is not about difference. Competition is about sameness. To be competing with others, you have to be the same as them, to be comparable to them.

You aren’t comparable.
You don’t want to be comparable.
You want to be incomparable.
You are incomparable.
The only person it’s fair or even possible to compare you to is yourself.

Man up. Grow down. Return to your pre-social awareness toddler state ⁷. Stop comparing yourself to other people. Collect your own stats on yourself and see how you’re doing against other versions of you. That’s the only game in town. Worth playing, anyway. Subjective enjoyment and objective accuracy, all in the same package…you can’t beat that .

Whether on the Internets or in RL, if Japanese is the topic of discussion, there always seems to be a kind, intelligent, well-meaning buck futter waiting in the wings to tell you: “Don’t learn Japanese from anime yada yada yada ¹“. It’s like Towelie from South Park, but pretentious and lame and unanimated.

• “Anime is bad for your Japanese” = “Futsal is bad for your soccer”
• A non-native-level user of Japanese worried about sounding like anime = a person in the desert, about to die of thirst, insisting on Evian.

“The Japanese” have a word ² for this foolishness: 贅沢な悩み ³. Luxurious worries. High-quality problems.

You are not in a position to be worrying about this kind of thing. You are literally covered in ignorance. You are in the ignorance toilet and need to wipe. Who cares what color the toilet paper is: wipe your behind first.

I mean, this is madness. Thus us Sparta. This is like getting a on baby’s case because she puts the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABle when she says her first word. I mean, for the love of milk and cereal, man.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Let go. Let it go. Let it all go. Watch anime and talk like an anime character. It’s fine. ‘Coz guess what? Anime is Japanese! By Japanese people, for Japanese people. So saying you “sound like an anime” is just saying you sound Japanese, which is kinda sorta generally considered a good thing when you’re (get this…wait for it…hold…hold…) speaking Japanese.

Plus, you’re just a kid ⁴, Japanesewise. Talk like an anime. It’s a phase you need to go through . You’ll outgrow it and be able to talk proper — just like a stuck-up jerk on the Internet — later. So let’s review:

1. Childhood now.
2. Soul-deadening gayness ⁵ later.

End of rant. Now go back to your Ergo Proxy.

“I would rather learn from and speak like an anime character than spend so much time worrying about my source of learning that I don’t learn anything at all!”
May

Nor for murdering either, titles notwithstanding.

They’re for surpassing.

Don’t worship your heroes. Absorb them. Imbibe them. Imitate them. Become them. Then, exceed them. 追いつき追い越せ ¹ and all that.

You want to get to the point with your heroes that you have internalized so much of their repertoire — of their essence — that you no longer respect them. You no longer look up to them. You look down or at least across at them. You think: “if this ugly idiot could do it ², so can I”.

Do this one hero at a time, and then move on to the next, bigger, better hero. Like a snake shedding her skin.

A language is sort of like a person. A hero, if you will ³. Those of us who learn a language by choice (rather than by accident of post-birth environment), we tend to love our chosen language (“L2″) too much. We tend to deify it. We put it up on a pedestal.

This is bad.

We want to be more…predatory. We want to be like a vampire or…or…one of those hardcore spiders that…that liquefy the insides of their lunch and then suck it up ⁴? We want to literally consume our L2. To take it inside us. To suck the life out of it.

It’s great to like or even love your L2, but it doesn’t help to adore it. It doesn’t help to worship it. Never. Not at any point in the process. Worship is not a place we can work from. Worship is not a place we can learn or grow from. The worship mindset doesn’t allow for touching, and without touching, there is no meaningful contact, no experimentation, no mixing, no matching, no prodding. And worship definitely doesn’t allow for surpassing. Almost by definition, we are forever beneath, different from and separate from the things we metaphorically worship. We can never equal, surpass or dominate that which we worship because the worship mindset will not allow it.

Keep worship to your religion or whatever if that’s how you roll. But don’t worship your heroes.

People who over-value (worship) books don’t read them ⁵. People who over-value chicks can’t talk to them. People who over-value (worship) Japanese won’t learn it: it’s too freaking precious to be “soiled” by your gaze, your hands, your impure gaijin mouth ⁶.

Not cool, yo. This isn’t going to help us; this is not what we want. You don’t want to be that guy with the unopened toys and unread comic books. With the unopened language. You want to like Japanese enough that you’ll touch it a lot, but never so much that you won’t lay a finger on it for fear of messing it up. That’s lame. And unsatisfying. Don’t turn your life into a museum, filled with look-but-no-touch artifacts. Be the artifact-maker. Be the artifact-user. Be the artifact ⁷.

Does that even make sense? I dunno…what I’m trying to say is…Alexander the Great was too busy killing people and banging Persian boys ⁸ to…like…his toys and ambitions weren’t for looking at? He was the artifact-maker, not the curator of the Museum of Alexander the Great’s Crazy Adventures. I mean…I guess all I’m saying is that decorative towels are lame – towel worship — and you want to start using the figurative decorative towels in your life for actual wiping.

Japanese is not a decorative towel. Don’t save it for looking at. Don’t save the fun parts for later.

Food is for eating. Fun is for having. Tools are for using. Go wear them out. Wear your heroes out.

Stop being a worshipper. Become a farmer. Become a predator.

Kill your heroes ⁹.

“Do what you love and not be hated? Now you’re just being greedy!”
NAKATANI Akihiro

“Better, I think, to make a difference and run the risk of failing sometimes, of being made fun of, and yes, appearing arrogant. It’s far better than the alternative.”
Seth Godin

“You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.”
James M. Barrie

Being liked is not the most important thing in the world.
Being hated is not the worst thing in the world.

Not even G-d, whether you believe in that idea or not, gets liked by everyone.
If this G-d character doesn’t get unanimous praise…what chance do you have?

Allow yourself the freedom to be hated. Allow other people the freedom to hate you.

Which is not to say that you should let people get in your face/blog/home.
People who want to get in your face can talk to the police/secret service/security/hand/taze-me-brothers/delete button.

But you must allow them to exist. Out there. Sort of in the abstract.
You must allow them to hate you in their hearts.
You must allow them to speak ill of you in your absence.
You must allow them to look at you funny.
You must allow them to mutter under their breath.
You must allow them to laugh at you.
You must allow them to think you’re a weaboo, an idiot, a wannabe, someone who’s forgotten “who he is” and “where he’s from”.
You must allow them to think you’re a misguided idiot who will never get good at that language and even if he does WTF good will it do him?

Why? Because for a good reason?
No, because for selfish reasons.
Because setting them free will set you free.

Once you allow other people the freedom to hate you, you become free of the restrictions, distractions, distortions and contortions involved in trying to make them like you. You become unstoppable. It’s kind of scary, actually. The power.

Allow yourself the freedom to be hated.
Allow other people the freedom to hate you.

Here are the names of some people who tried to make perfect countries where everyone looked and thought about the same, where no one was allowed to hate them:

• Adolf “Godwin’s Law” Hitler
• Pol Pot
• Idi Amin
• Hendrik Verwoerd
• Mao Zedong (after, like, season 50, when he jumped the shark)
• Lord Farquaad

It never went well and someone always had to come and clean up after them.

For your own personal life to be good, it’s important that you be a bit of a benevolent dictator in terms of information control, just like an athlete needs to remain supremely self-confident at all times.

But take a page from the Dutch playbook. For a people to be good, for a country to be good, for the world at large to be good — for everything outside your personal bubble to be good — it’s very important that idiots-that-aren’t-you be given a long leash.
Because while most of those idiots are just that — idiots — a few of them might do something truly amazing.
As a matter of fact, to the world at large, you might actually be one of those idiots, in the middle of doing an amazing thing.

Let unspoken, unactioned hate and misunderstanding run rampant.
Being hated is not the worst thing in the world.
Hating yourself, is.
Hating yourself and realizing that The 4400 is never coming back.
These are the worst two things in the world .

Mind your own business. Live in and work on your own reality. Compare yourself to yourself.

Counting language acquisition in years makes us think that we’ve been playing way harder than we actually have.

It’s not the years, it’s the minutes. It’s the seconds.

You can’t compare a stack of dollar bills to a stack of Benjamins and call them the same, playa.

Don’t tell me how many “years” you’ve been at the language.
Tell me how many seconds.
That’s seconds on task. Seconds on the bike, whether pedaling or coasting.

And, no, the time you spent being emo but not doing anything does not count.

1. Practice time
2. Game time.

I’m not just pointing this out in order to create filler content here. I’m not doing this for my health. I’m making this distinction because far too many people get practice time and game time confused.

They come to practice with the haughty, cagey, know-it-all, calculating self-assuredness that works best in the game, and then when it comes to game time, they’ve suddenly changed their legal surname to Humble.

These are the people who, during practice time, are too good to seek advice, to listen to it, to try out new ideas and techniques that might help their sorry behinds ¹, but when it comes to speaking to real Japanese people about real Japanese stuff where real time and real money are on the line, they clam up. They have a conveniently scheduled panic attack. They’re far king helpless. They go fetal. “Intense face” gives way to puppy dog eyes. They run to mommy-girlfriend — they’re hiding behind her skirt; they want an interpreter; their once-wheelbarrow-sized unisex ovaries shrivel up.

The time to be humble is during practice time. The time carry your cojones in a wheelbarrow is during game time.

Practice time is where you go to find your weaknesses. Game time is where you go to hide them, to work around them, to win, to score at all costs.

Practice time and game time can be fluid; they aren’t necessarily set in proverbial stone. Even a relationship with the same person can shift from practice to game and back depending on time, place and occastion.

Whenever the person you’re with has both the time and the will to correct you, it’s practice time. Whenever they lack either of these, it’s game time: it’s time to use what you know and what works to get the job done; it’s time for surgical strike.

Both practice time and game time require courage, but a different kind of courage. Practice time requires inner courage — the courage to eat humility and drink shame in public. Game time requires poker-faced outer courage — the courage to act as if the world belongs to you and you have the right to walk anywhere you want in it.

Just to make things clearer for you, let’s compare and contrast ² some more practice time / game time distinctions in terms of direction, attitude, core concepts and questions:

So, practice time and game time. Get them straight. Keep them straight,

When you’re trying to get stuff done, it’s game time. Don’t be clever for the sake of being clever, don’t try out that new word you don’t quite know yet, work well within your repertoire, go for the goal, get the thing done. Get the package/email sent; get the ticket bought; win the negotiation; settle the deal; get on the right train.

Practice joyfully, lavishly, with childlike abandon, so that you can rightfully hold your head up high and get things done like an adult during game time. Put your baby face on during practice, so you can wear a true poker face during the game. Earn the right to be serious by first being playful.

[Update: 2011/9/10: AJATTeer Neoglitch suggests better terminology -- I prefer his word choice to mine. Executive summary.

• Practice Time = Game Time
• Game Time = Show Time

I personally don’t like Khatz’s wording on this one.
I would rather name “practice time” (or the training grounds) as Game Time, the time where you just goof around, enjoy yourself to the max, learn (and practice) like crazy, make mistakes, learn from them… and you just play mainly to have fun, whether you “lose” or not.
And I would name Khatz’s “game time” (the boss battles!) as… Show-Time! The time where you actually show-off what you have been learning and practicing, and stick strictly to the language “moves” that you need to “win” (instead of trying to be fancy).]

1. Yourself in the past.
2. Yourself in the future.
3. A baby who was born on the same day you started playing.

End of story.

“In psychology, procrastination refers to the act of replacing high-priority actions with tasks of low-priority, and thus putting off important tasks to a later time.”
Wik The Pedia

“No human thing is of serious importance.”
Plato
The Republic

Procrastination is putting off important things.

But Japanese isn’t important.

Why do you have to know it? You already know English. There’s tons of music in English. Tons of books. Tons of English speakers. Stuff gets dubbed and translated into English. Every flavor of human being in the world speaka the English.

You don’t have to know Japanese. You’ve come this far without knowing it. Most people go their whole lives without knowing Japanese. And they do fine. Most of the world’s billionaires are monolingual.

Japanese isn’t important. Eating your vegetables is “important”. Looking both ways before you cross the street is “important”. Filing your taxes is “important”. Drinking enough water is “important”. Getting hugs is “important”. Japanese? Who?

Honestly, who cares?

Don’t bother. Stop raking yourself over the coals as if you “should” learn Japanese or you’re “supposed to”. You’re not. It’s just a game. It’s a just a silly game some people play for fun. **** it. Go do something important.

The world will not end because you didn’t learn Japanese. Your life will not end. If you don’t want to learn Japanese, then don’t. Stop making it something you “have to” do and “should” do and “would do”, but don’t do, but guiltily do, but run away from and feel like a pile of pooh about all day.

You don’t have to learn Japanese. You can quit any time. Save your money. You can quit right now. Today. Game over.

You can be free! FREE! Free to move on. Free to play something else. And you’ll never have to see or hear anything Japanese again and no one will blame you for it. No one will hate you for it. No one will cry. No one will yell. No one will miss you. No one will be angry.

Your well-developed, quasi-religious sense of guilt is useless. It’s useless to you and it’s useless to the human race. I have never once benefited from the fact that you feel bad about yourself. No animal was ever saved because some stupid girl called Stacy went “awwwwww”. The world will not be a better place because you go about perpetually feeling like a schmuck.

Try it. Kill yourself. No improvement. Cut yourself. Take a whip and hit yourself on the back until you bleed (“It’s a plague! Let’s beat ourselves!”…No, kid). Nothing will get better. You’ll just make a mess that someone else has to clean up. You selfish bastard. Oh, now you’re crying. Yeah, crying really helps — let’s waste some Kleenex. Oh, now you’re wiping snot on your shirt — good plan, now we have to clean your shirt. Really constructive there, champ.

If you care about something, either fix it or forget it.  I am here to tell you, in the case of learning Japanese, to forget it. **** it. Dude, you’re probably going to die one day, and your brain will be eaten by maggots and it won’t matter whether it contained Japanese or not.

Don’t go around making long faces as if that’s somehow a meaningful contribution. The plague was cured by playful minds, by people having fun, not by gangs of weepy emo kids with whips.

Procrastination is putting off important things. But Japanese isn’t important. So don’t put it off any more. Just stop doing it. You have that power. It’s your time. It’s your money. Don’t wanna do Japanese? Don’t! It’s that simple. It really is.

Sure, it was fun while it lasted, but now it’s boring. Now you’ve got yourself pretending it’s important. Let go. Get up, get out and get on with your real life. Vegetables to eat, streets to cross, air to breathe.

Don’t force yourself to do things that aren’t important.

Japanese is not important. Japanese does not matter. You don’t have to know Japanese. You don’t need to know Japanese. And you clearly don’t want to learn Japanese, otherwise it wouldn’t have turned into this quagmire of emotions and good intentions gone awry. Sure, you “want” to know Japanese, but…whatever…come on. We all having passing wants. I “wanted” that guy, I mean, girl at Starbucks the other day. Screw it. Let’s play something else.

Stop the madness. Stop whipping yourself. Stop wasting your time.

Stop learning Japanese.

“There is no such thing as discipline. There is only love…You are the result of what you love most.”
Charles Poliquin
The Myth of Discipline

• Bad goal: Skate for N hours/day
• Good goal: Show up at rink
• Even better goal: Put on skates
• Better still: Leave house with gear

• Bad goal: Practice puck-handling for N minutes
• Good goal: Touch stick ¹

• Bad goal: Write N words per day
• Better goal: Write N sentences per day ²
• Good goal: Open writing program.
• Extra goal: Mash keyboard.

So, if time “is” anything at all, it is at best a force multiplier. By itself, it’s powerless. Time multiplied by 0 gives you, well, 0. To mean anything, time needs to be crossed with choice.

Choice is where the real power is.

I think I’ve waxed pop philosophical enough for one day. Let me wrap it up and bring it home.

Don’t “do” Japanese. Don’t “set aside time” for Japanese. Choose Japanese. Show up to Japanese. Then, just to be safe, lay down some suppression fire — make other choices difficult, inconvenient, or impossible.

What we call time (in the sense of “you’ll get better with time”) is not time, it’s really the sum of our choices. It’s the sum of things we showed up to. The sum of our showings up?  They don’t have to be big choices. Not at all. They’re just choices. The simplest choice, the atomic choice, if you will, is a choice of direction. The sum of your directions determines your destination…your “destiny”.

So, again, time will not make you better or worse. It’s not the time, it’s the number of times, the number of times you choose to show up to Japanese – you will get as good at Japanese as this number is high.

Choose fun. Choose kanji .

1. Do nothing.
   • “I’m tired”
   • “I’m burned out”
   • “I can’t”
2. Do something hard.
   • “It’s good for me!”
   • “Suffering builds character!”
   • “I need discipline!”
   • “I have to”
   • “I should”
3. Do something easy.
   • “No way!”
   • “This counts?”
   • “But it’s so much fun!”
   • “This is so easy!”

You’re like, “but wait, that’s three things!”

No.

Because 1 = 2. Telling yourself to do something hard is the same thing as telling yourself to do nothing at all. Why? Because either:

• You never do hard stuff, or
• You do do hard stuff (like, once), but you don’t keep doing it

So again: telling yourself to do something hard is the same thing as telling yourself to do nothing at all.

Stop kidding yourself. You’re not gonna do that hard thing. You’re just not. It’s not going to happen, and even it does happen, it won’t keep happening. It’ll happen once, and it’ll hurt so much that it’ll never happen again.

So do something easy instead. Do something small. The smaller the better. The easier the better. The choice is not all or nothing: it’s easy or nothing.

The sooner you start hearing Japanese, the sooner you’ll start understanding it.

It is because the thing takes time, it is precisely because the result is not instant that we must start now.

The longer a thing takes to do, the sooner it must be started on.

A thing that can be finished instantly can be started on at any time.
You can microwave a cup of hot chocolate right when you want it.
But you have to start on that pizza long before you want it. Even if you order delivery, it’ll take like a half hour to get to you.

Japanese will take time to get used to, therefore we have to start getting used to it now — long before we need it.

Paradoxically, then, it can be said of any task that urgency is inversely proportional to duration.
Will it only take 2 minutes to do? Then do it later.
Will it take years to do? Then start this instant!

“If you’re going to spend most of your time experiencing rather than accomplishing, then perhaps it makes sense to focus on the quality of your daily experiences and not merely on the heights of your accomplishments. ” | Steve Pavlina

“The key to strategy… is not to choose a path to victory, but to choose so that all paths lead to a victory.” | Cavilo, The Vor Game

“…you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.” | Friedrich Nietzsche

We’re often told to go after what we want.

But what if what we want is far away? What if it’s not within our control? What then? Are we just SOL? Do we just give up?

Yes.

Kinda.

If you want to get what you want, stop trying to get what you want.

Confusing?

Stick with me for a bit.

If you desire certain effects, stop desiring them. If you love certain results, stop loving them. If you want to achieve something, some goal, some aspiration, then stop trying to achieve it.

Wanting to know Japanese, doesn’t get these ↓
漢字は、古代中国に発祥を持つ文字。中国語を表記するための伝統的な文字である。また古代において中国から日本へ伝えられ、その形態・機能を利用して日本語の表記にも使われている（これについては日本における漢字を参照）。人類史上、最も文字数が多い文字体系であり、その数は10万文字をはるかに超え他の文字体系を圧倒している。近代以降、異体字を整理したり使用頻度の少ない漢字の利用を制限しようとする動きは何度もあったが、現在でもその数は増え続けている。
into your head.

Wanting to get there doesn’t get you there. Trying to get there doesn’t get you there — it just gets you tired. Trying to reach just makes you pull muscles. Motion in the general direction of “there” by whatever means of locomotion is available…that’s all that gets you there. Motion causes a change of position.

If you want certain favorable effects, do not fall in love with those effects. Fall in love with their causes.

Now, there are good reasons for finding this logic suspect:

• False Causes
  • In the past, through malice or ignorance, we have come to believe in false causes. No, eating your vegetables will not turn you into a fighter jet like Michael Jackson in Moonwalker. I speak from painful experience.
• Means/Ends Confusion
  • It’s possible to get so wrapped up in means that the ends become confused or even forgotten. For more on such pathological obsession with process to the detriment of meaningful results, see “Japan, Employee Life In” for details
• Urban Living
  • Not growing stuff divorces us from opportunities to observe long-term causal chains in nature. This leads not just to an ignorance of such causal chains but to a thoroughgoing disbelief in their very existence. I wanted to use the word “thoroughgoing” at least once in my lifetime. And look at me now. All grown up.
• Bad Science
  • Deterministic proclamations from fields like evolutionary psychology and genetics, fields where talk too often outpaces actual hard knowledge, lead us to self-fulfilling beliefs that things are more fixed than they actually are. It used to be old men with beards in the sky. Now it’s molecules in cells. Conjecture and BS remain conjecture and BS, regardless of whether they come dressed up in cassocks or labcoats. Or jeans. Or sweatpants.
• Desire Works…Sometimes
  • Strong desire can often lead to massive action on causes. But it’s a bit of an unreliable vehicle. It’s too vague. Why bother with the hit-and-miss mind job of maximizing desire, when we can more directly and coolly play the cause card? Right? Right.

So you do need to think a bit to avoid certain pitfalls of the the cause-centered path…the path-centered path…the journey-centered journey. Fortunately for the intellectually lazy (yours truly included), you don’t need to think that hard. The common sense of the average toddler will do. It’s that unvarnished, unsocialized frankness that can say that the emperor is naked, caviar just tastes of salt, and only a fraction of classical music is actually any good. It’s your inner pipsqueak. Listen to that voice.

Back on topic. You can’t control too many effects. But, as it turns out, you don’t really need to. The trick is to control the causes. Grab a hold of those causes and never let go. Squeeze them. Milk them for all they’re worth. Max out the cause card.

You can’t control whether you’ll make any friends or not. But you can control the number of people you meet and how humane you are to them. That’s enough.

You can’t control whether or not you’ll win a Stanley Cup. ¹ But you can control the number of hours you spend on the ice, messing around with puck, net and cones. That’s enough.

You can’t fully control when exactly you’ll become awesome at Japanese…not in an immediate, satisfying way. But you can control how much and how often you expose yourself to Japanese. That’s more than enough.

You can’t control the results, but you can control the things that produce the results. And that’s more than enough. You get to control the journey, where most of the time is spent anyway. That’s freaking awesome. Imagine if you couldn’t control the journey? Imagine if you could only control the fleeting arrival moment. You could go anywhere you wanted, but you couldn’t choose how to get there. That would suck.

Hold on a sec, though. Stop the irrational optimism train before it runs over that gaggle of schoolchildren: what if your life sucks so much that you can’t even control the causes? Easy. Give up.

…and run up the causal chain. If you can’t control the causes, control the causes of the causes. Max out the causes of the causes. Max out quaternary causes and reap their effects, which are tertiary causes. OK, now you have tertiary causes. Max them out and reap secondary causes. Max out secondaries and reap primaries. Now you’re at primaries. Max these out and you’re at your precious effect destination.

“All Japanese all the time”. AJATT is all about maxing out the cause card. It’s too stupid and straightforward to fail. It’s based on the childlike realization that Japanese people, the people who are the best at Japanese, also spend the most time in contact with Japanese. In fact, the average Japanese person spends as many hours in contact with Japanese as she does breathing air.

You can’t be born in Japan. You can’t have Japanese parents. You can’t control who your parents were. You can’t control how or where they raised you.

But none of that matters. That’s first quarter stuff. Don’t waste your time trying to control the first quarter from the second. Play the game now. Realize that you’re a member of the global elite. You have literacy, electricity and home comforts. I know you do, because you’re reading this.

You can cast aside the false causes (first quarter excuses) and pick up the real cause card. You can spend all your available (“free”) time in contact with Japanese. You can Japanize anything and any moment and any place that can be Japanized. You can max out the Japanese fluency cause card. You can rip these remaining three quarters a new one.

Because there are always three quarters available .

In a cause-effect universe, precursors are just about omnipotent. And guess what? In all likelihood, you already control more precursors than you need to to reach your destination…

So, now, giving up on something far too early, which is when most people give up, becomes not a question of “lacking moral fiber”, but one of poor arithmetic. You’re pronouncing your own death from dehydration when you have unfettered access to a fridgeful of water two feet away. It’s just unnecessarily premature. You can always give up later. You have all of the time you’ll be dead, practically all of eternity, in which to give up.

Before you worry about what you can’t do, do everything, and I mean everything, that you can do. Before you worry about the resources and abilities you don’t have, first exhaust the resources and options that are immediately at your disposal. You haven’t “paid your dues” ² as it were, until your cause card — time, energy and productive thought invested in practice, in things that cause desired effects — is maxed out.

Baseball legend Ted Williams was one in a million, widely considered the most “gifted” hitter of his time. “I remember watching one of his home runs from the bleachers of Shibe Park,” John Updike wrote in The New Yorker in 1960. “It went over the first baseman’s head and rose meticulously along a straight line and was still rising when it cleared the fence. The trajectory seemed qualitatively different from anything anyone else might hit.”

In the public imagination, Williams was almost a god among men, a “superhuman” endowed with a collection of innate physical gifts, including spectacular eye-hand coordination, exquisite muscular grace, and uncanny instincts. “Ted just had that natural ability,” said Hall of Fame second baseman Bobby Doerr. “He was so far ahead of everybody in that era.” Among other traits, Williams was said to have laser-like eyesight, which enabled him to read the spin of a ball as it left the pitcher’s fingers and to gauge exactly where it would pass over the plate. “Ted Williams sees more of the ball than any man alive,” Ty Cobb once remarked.

But all that innate miracle-man stuff—it was all “a lot of bull,” said Williams. He insisted his great achievements were simply the sum of what he had put into the game. “Nothing except practice, practice, practice will bring out that ability,” he explained. “The reason I saw things was that I was so intense … It was [super] discipline, not super eyesight.”

Is that possible? Could a perfectly ordinary man actually train himself to be a dazzling phenomenon? We all recognize the virtues of practice and hard work, but truly, could any amount of effort transform the clunky motions of a whiffer or a chucker into the majestic swing of Tiger Woods or the gravity-defying leap of Michael Jordan? Could an ordinary brain ever expand enough to conjure the far-flung curiosities and visions of Einstein or Matisse? Is true greatness obtainable from everyday means and everyday genes?

Conventional wisdom says no, that some people are simply born with certain gifts while others are not; that talent and high intelligence are somewhat scarce gems, scattered throughout the human gene pool; that the best we can do is to locate and polish these gems—and accept the limitations built into the rest of us.

But someone forgot to tell Ted Williams that talent will out. As a boy, he wasn’t interested in watching his natural abilities unfurl passively like a flower in the sunshine. He simply wanted—needed—to be the best hitter baseball had ever seen, and he pursued that goal with appropriate ferocity. “His whole life was hitting the ball,” recalled a boyhood friend. “He always had that bat in his hand … And when he made up his mind to do something, he was going to do it or know the reason why.”

At San Diego’s old North Park field, two blocks from his modest childhood home, friends recall Williams hitting baseballs every waking hour of every day, year after year after year. They describe him slugging balls until their outer shells literally wore off, swinging even splintered bats for hours upon hours with blisters on his fingers and blood dripping down his wrists. A working-class kid with no extra pocket change, he used his own lunch money to hire schoolmates to shag balls so that he could keep swinging. From age six or seven, he would swing the bat at North Park field all day and night, swing until the city turned off the lights; then he’d walk home and swing a roll of newspaper in front of a mirror until he fell asleep. The next day, he’d do it all over again. Friends say he attended school only to play on the team. When baseball season ended and the other kids moved on to basketball and football, Williams stuck with baseball. When other boys started dating girls, Williams just kept hitting balls in North Park field. In order to strengthen his sight, he would walk down the street with one eye covered, and then the other. He even avoided movie theaters because he’d heard it was bad for the eyes. “I wasn’t going to let anything stop me from being the hitter I hoped to be,” Williams later recalled. “Looking back … it was pretty near storybook devotion.”

In other words, he worked for it, fiercely, single-mindedly, far beyond the norm. “He had one thought in mind and he always followed it,” said his high school coach Wos Caldwell.

Greatness was not a thing to Ted Williams; it was a process.

This didn’t stop after he got drafted into professional baseball. In Williams’s first season with the minor league San Diego Padres, coach Frank Shellenback noticed that his new recruit was always the first to show up for practice in the morning and the last to leave at night. And something more curious: after each game, Williams would ask the coach for the used game balls.

“What do you do with all these baseballs?” Shellenback finally asked Williams one day. “Sell them to kids in the neighborhood?”

“No sir,” replied Williams. “I use them for a little extra hitting practice after supper.”

Knowing the rigors of a full practice day, Shellenback found the answer hard to swallow. Out of a mix of suspicion and curiosity, he later recalled, “I piled into my car after supper [one night] and rode around to Williams’s neighborhood. There was a playground near his home, and sure enough, I saw The Kid himself driving those two battered baseballs all over the field. Ted was standing close to a rock which served as [home] plate. One kid was pitching to him. A half dozen others were shagging his drives. The stitching was already falling apart on the baseballs I had [just] given him.”

Even among the pros, Williams’s intensity stood so far outside the norm that it was often uncomfortable to witness up close. “He discussed the science of hitting ad nauseam with teammates and opposing players,” write biographers Jim Prime and Bill Nowlin. “He sought out the great hitters of the game—Hornsby, Cobb, and others—and grilled them about their techniques.”

He studied pitchers with the same rigor. “[After a while], pitchers figure out [batters’] weaknesses,” said Cedric Durst, who played on the Padres with Williams. “Williams wasn’t like that … Instead of them figuring Ted out, he figured them out. The first time Ted saw [Tony] Freitas pitch, we were sitting side by side on the bench and Ted said, ‘This guy won’t give me a fast ball I can hit. He’ll waste the fast ball and try to make me hit the curve. He’ll get behind on the count, then throw me the curve.’ And that’s exactly what happened.”

Process. After a decade of relentless effort on North Park field, and four impressive years in the minors, Williams came into the major leagues in 1939 as an explosive hitter and just kept getting better and better and better. In 1941, his third season with the Boston Red Sox, he became the only major league player in his era—and the last in the twentieth century—to bat over .400 for a full season.

The next year, 1942, Ted Williams enlisted in the navy as an aviator. Tests revealed his vision to be excellent, but well within ordinary human range.

Excerpted from the book The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong by David Shenk

Worrying about whether or not you’re getting good is simply a sign that you still suck.

So go suck less.

No, shut up.

And go suck less.

You’re not especially dumb or smart. You’re just wasting your time and mine.

Things tend to start going well once you quit worrying about whether or not things are going well.

Now leave us the crap alone and go watch some cartoons .