It’s a better alternative to bookmarks. Instead of storing those cool L2 sites you come across (e.g. via recommendations on the AJATT Twitter feed) in your bookmarks folder, where they will simply be forgotten, store them in the URL shuffler

The URL shuffler will pick a random page for you each time you click the “shuffle!”/”shuff!” link. Make the “shuffle!” link your homepage and you can flip through the web like flipping through TV channels. Shuffling gives a perfect balance of turnover (mixing) and conversion (actual visitation).

Note: like SRS cards, the websites are all added by you. This way you get a customized mix of just the websites you love.

Why include it in an SRS?

Because contact is the basis of content. There’ll be no fun SRS content without fun immersion. Instead of disciplining yourself to build the habit of visiting L2 websites, let URL shuffler handle it for you. Plus, you’re not bound to your main computer. Whether at home, school, wage slavery place, a friend’s house or on your iPad, you can enjoy the same rich variety of cool L2 web content.

How Do I Use It?

Use the supplied links and bookmarklets to add, remove and visit websites.

“Cantonese is a difficult language to learn — not because of its sounds or syntax, but because it’s hard to find good learning resources”

– Eldon

Well, let’s remedy that one mini-transcript at a time, as has been the custom established by Edwin and CanteHK!

Situation: Obi-Wan “surrenders” to the Clone Army as part of a ploy to buy time.

歐比王·肯諾比 大師：我投降哩！
{ngau bei wong·hang nok bei daai si} ngo tau hong le
Obi-Wan: I surrender!

• Audio: StarWarsCloneWars- 200

Note: I’ve never seen Star Wars: Clone Wars in English, so…I don’t know what the original lines were. These are my re-translation back into English from Cantonese.

Belief

• What if I were Japanese?
• What if I had been born and raised in Japan?
• What if I were Jared in The Pretender and I had to fool people into believing I was Japanese, or else be killed?
• What if I just tried X out? What would happen?
• What if it were possible to be native-like? How could I make it possible? What would a native do? What would a native be doing right now?
• What if I were smart enough?
• What if it didn’t even take smarts?
• What if I gave myself the chance?
• What if I gave myself the time?
• What if I refused to give up until I had won?
• What if I am a natural winner who just needs to step up to the plate to prove it?
• What unquestioned advantages do I have over other people? What resources and skills do I take for granted?
• How would a winner think of herself?

Immersion

• What if I could only speak Japanese?
• What if Japanese were my only language?
• What if I just turned Japanese on and left it on forever? What would happen?
• How can I add Japanese to this situation? How can I Japanize this situation?
• Is there a Japanese version of this?
• If I were a Japanese kid, what would I be doing now?
• What do Japanese kids do?
• How would a winner use the time, cash and equipment that I have at my disposal?
• How many Japanese movies has a Japanese kid watched by her twelfth birthday?
• How many Japanese books would a Japanese kid from a proper home own?
• How many minutes have I heard Japanese this past hour?
• How can I touch Japanese more frequently?
• What if I made it impossible for myself to not come into contact with Japanese?
• How can I make it so that Japanese just gets inserted into my life?
• How many minutes does a Japanese kid hear Japanese by her fifth birthday?
• Where and how can I get more Japanese books/movies/music?
• How can I make sure that I look at more Japanese websites?
• What kind of Japanese stuff can I put on my walls?
• Where’s my dead time? How can I Japanize it easily?
• How can I get Japanese into my life for free? Effortlessly? What and where are my “freebie” activities?
• What’s a time that I’m doing something manual but my eyes and ears are free?
• Where am I not listening to Japanese that I could be listening to Japanese?
• Where’s my empty wall space? What Japanese stuff could I put up there?
• What Japanese stuff can I put on my fridge? What about the toilet? What about the kitchen sink? What about the bathroom sink?
• How can I be useful to Japanese people? What can I give them? How can I make myself an asset to Japanese people? How can I make myself fun to be around? What can I help with in their lives?※
• Outside of Japan: What would a highly insulated Japanese immigrant be doing/watching/reading right now?
• Inside Japan: How do I get premium cable? Where can I put this TV so that it’s always on? Can I get a cheap mini-TV for the kitchen? Where’s the remote?
• What are some unexpected things that I can eat with chopsticks?
• What’s an easy and fun Japanese thing that I can do right now?
• What books and authors do I like in English? Is their stuff in Japanese? Where can I get it? Where can I read about it?
• Is there a Japanese embassy nearby?
• Is there a Book-Off nearby?
• Where can I get free or second-hand Japanese books?
• Are there Japanese people around needing to get rid of stuff?
• Are there any Japanese/Asian stores around?
• Is this helping me learn Japanese?
• How can I make this so that it helps me learn Japanese in some way?
• What can I do that at least helps?
• How can I make it so that this activity increases the probability that I will build and maintain Japanese fluency?
• How can I wangle and maneuver Japanese into my job?
• How can I get paid to learn and use Japanese (my way)?
• Where can I find recordings of single-digit age children speaking?
• Do I know more today than I did yesterday?

Kanji

• How can I make this fun?
• How can I make this easy?
• What does this remind me of?
• SRS: Would I feel relieved if this card were deleted? Would it be a load off?
• SRS: What if I just tried X out? What would happen?
• Do I know more today than I did yesterday?

Kana

• How long does it take a Japanese toddler to acquire these?
• Am I going to allow myself to be beaten by Japanese five-year-olds?
• Surely I can out-smart Japanese toddlers?
• What’s an easy and fun way to do this?
• Do I know more today than I did yesterday?

Sentences

• What would be funny to say?
• What have I heard that made me laugh?
• What are my favorite movie lines in English?
• Where’s that simple “kid vocabulary”?
• How can I make this fun?
• How can I make this easy?
• What are some cool Japanese quotes?
• SRS: Would I feel relieved if this card were deleted? Would it be a load off? Am I bovvered?
• SRS: What if I just tried X out? What would happen?
• Do I know more today than I did yesterday?

Output (Writing/Speaking)

• How are native kids doing who were born the day I started learning Japanese? Have I put it as many minutes as them? Have I logged the “flying hours”?
• What’s the shortest way to say this?
• What do Japanese kids say?
• Where’s that simple “kid vocabulary”?
• How would I explain this to a 5-year-old?
• What would a Japanese person say?
• What do I hear/read Japanese people say?
• Does this sound Japanese? Have I heard a Japanese person say/use this before?
• How can I say this using as few words as possible?
• How can I communicate 80% of this idea using just the words I already know?

※True story: In college I had a female friend from Japan who often took me out on her errands. Example: going to the garage to get her car fixed. She didn’t need me to speak English for her, but she says that my mere presence made her seem stronger — less vulnerable; she was concerned about being ripped off due to being both female and Asian.

Anyway, the plus side for me was, the whole time, in the car, we’re speaking Japanese.

Japanese people need you as much as you need them, especially when they’re far away from home. Don’t be afraid to be helpful. Think about it: I was able to help by just having a useful phenotype and a pulse…I do those things quite effortlessly.

Foreigners in Japan often complain that Japanese people just want them for their English skills. OK, fine, maybe so, but is that really so bad? You instantly have a quality that people want — that’s not something you can say about “back home”. Most of the time, actually, the English thing is just a pretext Japanese people use to hang out with you; because it’s just freaking embarrassing to say things like: “I like the cut of your jib, son — let’s be bosom buddies forever”. And if there’s one thing Japanese people don’t do, it’s “embarrassing”. In any case, a relationship has to start somewhere. Most (all?) love and friendship has its roots in the ground, in the practical and concrete (“he was there”); once it grows, then the leaves do end up in the air.

Who you think you are matters more than who you actually are. Who you actually are only describes your immediate present position (P) — the sum of all your previous directions. But who you think you are will determine your direction of motion, and your direction of motion over time will determine all your future positions ([P']).

Simple example: a car sitting at a traffic light 2 blocks from the Wal-Mart is in a great position to get to Wal-Mart. But if it suddenly tells itself that only geniuses can visit Wal-Mart, pulls a U-turn and heads home all dejected, then no matter how close it was, it’s not going to get an Always Low Great Value price on pistachio nuts. All because of a change in direction. Your “car” is always moving because time is always moving.

• Who you are = Position
• Who you think you are = Identity
• Identity = Direction
• Direction → New Positions
• New Position(s) = Actuality

It’s all a simple matter self-fulfilling prophecy. Auto-suggestion. You become it because you said so. Muhammad “I am the Greatest” Ali did this kind of thing all the time; we forget that he was actually kinda scrawny for his line of work. But then again, he never said he was bigger or stronger than George Foreman. He just said he was better-looking and would beat him.

You’re Japanese. What could be more natural than…doing stuff in Japanese? And you know what happens to people who do stuff in Japanese? They get in a position to do even more stuff in Japanese. Soon enough, like tar in a smoker’s lung, they get these pieces of Japanese left in their head. They’re scarred for life.

Go scar yourself . Go cause changes in the structure and contents of your brain. Everyone’s doing it. You don’t have to change your hardware. Just your software.

Then again, all this may not be necessary any longer. Back before this website existed, there were few places online that told you flat out: “you can and will do it”. The general attitude was so violently negative that I personally needed to swing the psychological pendulum in an equally extreme opposite direction. So maybe you don’t need do think this way any more.

But, what the heck…if you’re looking for some fun, you might as well. The cool thing is, you don’t even have to totally believe it for it to work; I don’t think any of us totally believe anything. You just have to believe it enough for your behavior to be affected. Pretend. What if it were true? What if you were Japanese? Give it a whirl. Go be Japanese. It’s fun. And legal.

Today’s book review is about, pertains to and is brought to you buy Geoff Colvin’s ultra magnum opus, and underrated book about how Talent is Overrated. I don’t know if this book is actually underrated in the literal sense of the word, what I mean is that it’s not nearly as widely known and celebrated as it deserves to be.

This book, like Bill Burr and Ben Stiller, deserves to be a household name. Remember how big 7 Habits was when we were kids? And how everyone owned and quoted it, but neither read nor applied it? This book should be that, except read and applied.

So today, children, watch and read, as I, Khatzumoto, sing unto thee the praises of this…this tome among tomes.

Let mortal book reviewing begin!

Title/Author/Info	Pros	Cons
Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from the Rest of Us Geoff Colvin Senior Editor-at-Large, Fortune magazine Good thing he’s not an editor-at-small, eh, lads? Eh? Knee. Slap. Where do I come up with these?	Great writing style. Very readable. Clear, concise, direct. Colvin lays off the story sauce and sticks to the facts. No attempts to weave a gripping/emotionally immersive narrative or any other such pretensions to novel-writing. Just the facts. Wham, bam, thank you facts. Colvin is very measured in his tone; he writes with the careful, removed, inconclusive objectivity of an academic paper. Minus the passive voice. No pushiness, no hyberbole. Not from Colvin, at least – there’s plenty of that from me! First book written by a WASP male in the last 300~500 years to discuss African-American athletes as if they were human beings. There’s a Japanese translation out (finally!): 究極の鍛錬. The UK English edition (which is the one I have) is all nice and cheap and softcover. Just so we’re clear: it doesn’t use “UK English”, it’s just…for the UK market and in English. I’m just sayin’. I’m just…putting that out there so you don’t get confused. No stupid, irrelevant war stories from his past. A lot of writers conflate telling tall tales of their past with giving their books a human touch. Oh, wait, that’s me. ! No political agenda either way. Which is impressive, because this topic is nine months pregnant with opportunity either way to complain about the state of “our values”, whatever you presume those values to be. Audiobook also available. Yeeeah. And not just a regular CD audiobook (as if anyone effing plays CDs any more), but an MP3 audiobook. Someone deserves hugs and kisses from beautiful women. I mean, think about it: why the Fargo, North Dakota would I be buying books online but still listening to audio CDs? No, really…think about it.	Colvin is obsessed with ASM. For him, everything has to come back to pain and suffering. This is a major blindspot in his otherwise stellar work and brilliant mindset. Too many pros Not enough people know about this stuff There’s no movie of this Japanese translation took way too long to come out No bullet points/bold type and other helpful formatting that you typically find in any Japanese business book of recent years. Colvin (and I can’t really blame him) has never heard of SRS. Which is too bad, because it’s perfect for a lot the practice activities he proposes. AFAIK, no Kindle edition yet (at this writing). There is a program, and it needs to be gotten with. No Japanese audiobook version. This is common enough, so, it’s not a problem with this book specifically. But I’ma rant about it anyway!
Comments
Origins Like many (all?) great things, this book started small. It was originally an article in Fortune magazine that seems to have more or less organically expanded into an entire book. It still retains the wonderful readability of an article, but combines it with the depth and breadth of a book. It’s just good effin’ writing, people. Gems, Gems, Everywhere This book is full of gems. As I hinted at earlier, I read this book both before the Janslation (Japanese translation) came out and before I had “developed”/hacked together the Unified Reading Process, so my copy was underlined to kingdom come. Kingdom actually came, and they were like: “wow…that’s a pretty heavily underlined book. Is…is this a bad time?”, and I was like “No, Ki­ngdom, you can come, just…leave the book”, and they were like… OK, I digress. Where were we? Oh yeah – this book is full of gems, some of which I found quite moving, actually. Rather than listen to me ramble on and on here, we’d better just let Geoff speak for himself [bold type added by me]: “…great performance is not reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and everyone.” “our view that intelligence necessarily produces better performance is so deep that it may occasionally even blind us to reality…in many fields, the relation between intelligence and performance is weak or nonexistent; people with modest IQs sometimes perform outstandingly while people with high IQs sometimes don’t get past mediocrity.” Khatzlation: don’t complain about “not being smart enough”. In truth, we don’t even know what “smart” is. “Endurance runners, for instance, have larger than average hearts, an attribute that most of us see as one of the natural advantages with which they were blessed. But no, research has shown that their hearts grow after years of intensive training; when they stop training, their hearts revert toward normal size” Khatzlation: You don’t quit practicing because you suck, you suck because you quit practicing. You don’t play because you’re good. You’re good because you play. You don’t run because you’re good at running, you’re good at running because you run. “Memory seems clearly to be acquired”. Khatzlation: Didja hear that, SRS fans? “Rice was the greatest because he worked harder in practice and in the off-season than anyone else…In team workouts, he was famous for his hustle; while many receivers will trot back to the quarterback after catching a pass, Rice would sprint to the end zone after each reception. He would typically continue practicing long after the rest of the team had gone home. Most remarkable were his six-days-a-week off-season workouts, which he conducted entirely on his own.” Khatzlation: Yeah, but he was a big, black man. They’re born that way, you know. Big,strong, runners. Kind of like deer. “The roadblocks we face seem to be mostly imaginary”. Khatzlation: Hear that, intermediate slumpers? Chill. You’re getting better, you just can’t see it. On Autodidactism “[Benjamin] Franklin…did not have a teacher to guide him…Ben in effect created his own teacher by finding examples of prose that were beyond his own abilities” *Cough* SRS. *Cough* Sentences. *Cough* cloze deletions. *Splutter*. “While supported by others, [Jerry Rice] did much of the work on his own…most of Rice’s work was in the off-season…he did most of his football-related work by himself” On SRS It’s unforuntate that Colvin hasn’t heard of SRS, because if he had, he’d see it for what it is and recommend it profusely. SRS is one of the most powerful training tools ever invented, perfect for the type of deliberate practice he describes in places like page 114: “Conditioning…can take various forms. It can mean getting out those old textbooks and handbooks and reviewing the fundamental skills that underlie your work, becoming faster, more facile, and more confident with them”. That there is exactly the kind of thing that SRS can handle for you, all the time, and with potentially half the review load, to boot. “After all, what good is a ton of knowledge if you can’t remember it and bring it to bear at the critical moment?” Best reason to SRS personal development books I have ever heard. On Jerry Rice Again, Talent is Overrated appears to be the first book written by a WASP male in the last 300~500 years to discuss African-American athletes as if they were human beings. I’m being facetious, but only slightly so. Colvin devotes 4 pages – that’s about 2% of the book, kids – to discussing Jerry Rice’s work ethic and the details of his self-made training program. Not once, not once, does Colvin even attempt to give Rice the Big Black Magical Negro Man-Beast treatment. Maxwell Maltz himself, in all his greatness, couldn’t entirely see past magical blackness. This, folks, is history. If I were a chick, I’d be having Geoff Colvin’s illegitimate children right now. In fact, if you’re a chick and looking for something to do today, then stop reading this, board a motor vehicle, report to Geoff Colvin’s residence immediately, and start having children out of wedlock with him. Yeah…it’s that good. On Bullet Points and Bold Type Perhaps Japanese people have bullet points in their business books for the same reason that there are very silly, slapstick moments in even the most serious of anime: Japanese people aren’t as concerned with being serious; they’re not afraid that helping readers out will be misconstrued as condescension. Or not…I could just be orientalizing. In fact, I know I’m oritentalizing; I just made all that up because it sounded cool; I don’t actually think there’s a common cause behind these two phenomena (textual relief through formatting und comic relief in anime), although it is kind of cool to pretend that there is…makes you feel all deep and quasi-scientific and insightful and stuff. Hehe. Softcover Love I have the softcover edition. I’m just sayin’, dawg: hardcover books smack of arrogance to me. “Look at me, my words are so important that they have to be heavy , too!”. I’m trying to carry books around here, chief – not lift weights.

Due to popular demand, I, in my…my magnanimity, my boundless graciousness, using my unequaled copy-and-paste skills, have added an option for you, my public, to receive AJATT posts by email. Now you can, like…not bother with RSS and all that jazz.

You’re welcome .

PS: I haven’t tested it yet, so let me know whether or not it actually works! Hehe.

The original post was about using the SRS to remember the best parts of the best examples of personal development literature.

Anyway, enjoy!

SRS Addict said,
November 24, 2009 @ 00:40 · Edit

This is a LONG comment, here it goes:
I find this post very interesting. Here’s why:

About 3 1/2 years ago I began to use the SRS program “Supermemo” (which I will refer to as “SM”). Since I began using SM, other programs have emerged that specialize in language study, but since I’ve been using SM for so long and have so much time invested in it, it is far too late to think about jumping ship. No doubt the other SRS programs out there work great, so don’t think that I’m knocking them. In the end, use SOMETHING: it’s better than nothing.

Anyways, I began to use SM about 3 years ago to retain Japanese vocabulary. Despite living in America, uncommon words that one does not use very often (such as “round-trip”) continued to remain in my memory, and it required very little thought to recall them. This feeling of satisfaction was very addictive, and I began to integrate more and more of my intellectual life with Supermemo.

I can now speak, read and write Japanese fluently. I passed the JLPT 2Q a couple of years ago without even going to Japan. And the reason that I’ve progressed this much has little to do with my abilities (I am really quite average, I think), but I believe that it is purely because Supermemo has helped to augment my abilities and to focus my efforts so that as little time and effort as possible is wasted (at least when that time and effort is being spent on Supermemo). Here is why:

Humans need a variety of food to remain healthy. Similarly, no SINGLE specific method will gain you fluency in a language. Language study requires a balance of different methods and inputs.

SM seems to have become my intellectual equivalent of a video game “save point.” While up until that time, I might have seen/read/heard many interesting or useful things, but until I “save” my intellectual progress, such information only occupies a temporary place in the mind. While SM is not the only thing I use, it is part of my ‘balanced diet.’

I began by putting Japanese sentences into SM, with the word I wanted to memorise written in English (It was easier than trying to describe the word in Japanese). This created context and usage hints. I would usually enter at least two flashcards for each word (like firing multiple bullets to ensure I hit the desired target), thus ensuring that unless I made a big mistake in structing the material (Poor word choice), the algorithms would ensure that I would remember the word in due time (After about a week or two it would stick very well in my mind).

This worked for vocabulary words, so I thought “Would this work for idiomatic expressions, also?” So I began to experiment, and as time went on, when the appropriate time to use such an idiom presented itself, it required as little time as it took to remember a simple vocabulary word. Now it was easy to rack up idioms (As well as 4-character idioms) in my head. Using James Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji volumes one and two (Although I went my own way with book two), I learned all of the ON yomi for the kanji, which made learning most vocabulary words much, much simpler (Most being a combination of two kanji using the ON yomi). In the end learning Japanese simply came down to shooting fish in a barrel, racking up more and more vocabulary that was easily accessable and would be forever retained using SM.

Japanese has now passed on from the “I need to study” phase to the “I speak it fluently” phase. If I were playing World of Warcraft, my Japanese character would be at level 80 (Although I do not play that game, as I want to defend my time from such bandits). I still add Japanese words to SM, but it is like killing low-level monsters at this point, although I would like to eventually take JLPT 1Q, the “final boss.”

But since Japanese is, for all intents and purposes, done, I am moving onto Chinese.
Knowing the kanji has helped out a great deal, and the ON yomi bears a strong enough resemblence to the actual Chinese reading of the character that it is helpful. But each language poses a different set of problems, and I am always experimenting with variations of methods to try to make it a step further in my Chinese progress. Like you mentioned, keeping a foreward thinking, open mind about how to do things helps to ensure progress. Once you find something that works, exploit it until it stops working or you find something better. Currently I’m experimenting with the flashcard format used by the web site “Smart.fm.” I’m trying to impliment it in SM to see if I learn words better than my present flashcard format for Chinese. You might want to give that site a try, if you haven’t already.
We soldier on.

About a year after I began using SM to learn Japanese, I began to expeirment with using SM on non-Japanese desirable knowledge. To learn something FOREVER required such a SMALL investment of time (Less than a minute for the next 30 years of retention). Therefore, one hour of “entertainment-consumption time” could be converted into “self-enrichment through knowledge” time; the long-lasting benefits are so obvious that it makes many other tasks and pursuits seem trivial by comparison (But one must find balance in life, you have to eat some candy every now and then). But rather than simply being a useful study tool, SM has opened up a new way of life for me, where tangible knowledge consumption and retention is well within the grasp of everyone, regardless of anything else. All that is required is a small amount of time and motivation.

As another commenter mentioned above, the process you describe is very similar to incremental reading, a feature advertised on the SM web site. Traditional reading is very much the equivilent of listening to a long speech by someone, and your ‘input’ is limited: Start, stop, or highlight. Incremental reading is basically a process of taking raw electronic reading material, extracting the useful information, and processing for long term retention (Making something into a flashcard is the end-goal of this process). It is the same as digesting food; take food in, extract neutritious parts, get rid of what you don’t need. Since the world has yet to go “fully digital” when it comes to reading material, it seems that we must suffer for a while without having “buy/borrow as a .txt document” as an option for our local libraries or book stores. On the bright side, books are very small compared to mp3s, and music is pirated very often. Therefore, the potential to download books that you buy is very possible, although spotty. For example, I purchased “Atlas Shrugged,” but found that reading it incrementally on SM was more fun than carrying the big book around with me. I was able to find Atlas Shrugged online with little trouble, now I’m currently reading it through SM.

Where traditional reading is more of a lecture, incremental reading is more of an organic dialgue. Granted, the text no longer retains its form, it gets “chopped up” rather quickly (Like clipping out parts of a magazine article that you like), but we want knowledge in our head, not pretty looking words on paper. This philosophy has made me enjoy reading much, much more. (I recommend you read more about incremental reading, it echos the sentiments expressed here. Also, I don’t want to write what has already been written).

But another expriment that I started about a year ago (That I believe conclusively works) was to see if semi-knowledge put into Supermemo could create subtle changes in my personality and thought-process. You mention putting inspirational quotes into Supermemo, and this is pretty much what I did, but I went about it in a different way. Everyone makes decisions based on principles. Someone might see someone else in need, if they are raised as a Christian, they might think “Do unto others…” so they decide to help that person out. Others might operate on a different principle, which would lead to a different action. The question was “could I take those different principles, put them into SM, and just like the idiomatic expressions, when that principle would come into play, would such principles come to mind, and give more options when making decisions?” I believe that the answer is ‘yes.’

For example, one could take key phrases from various philosophy or religious books (That are deemed useful and beneficial by the user, of course), put them into SM, and over time would have such views of the world at their disposal; whether or not they are adopted is up to the user. Therefore you do not have to adopt the philosophy to undersatnd it and have it at your disposal. For example, I have a number of quotes from Hitler in SM because his twisted mind demonstrates a certain cunning and manipulative evil, which it does good to recognize when seen elsewhere (Even in subtle ways).

So basically SM has become a tool with which I program myself. It has grown to encompass my entire life, and has become my primary means of retaining information about the world around me. I spend about one hour using SM every day. Right now I have about 33,000 active flashcards in my big flashcard “deck.”

Series starts here. Previous post is here.

I can’t find the original comment, but back in one of the preceding timeboxing posts, a kid asked a very pertinent question. It went something along the lines of:

“How can a 60-second timebox have any meaning or motivational value if you know you’re just going to have another one?”

Great question. Excellent question. Let me answer it very simply.

1. First, you’ve got go get out of the mindset that a 60-second timebox has no intrinsic value. Or, more accurately, you’ve got to get into the mindset where you can see the intrinsic value of 60 seconds. And what mindset is that? It’s this one. It’s the probabilistic algorithm mindset: it’s the mindset that says: “I’m not going to a lot of work; I’m not going to do perfect work; I’m just going to do something that helps [for 60 seconds]“. So a short timebox is saying to your numerically: what you do doesn’t have to be big, it just has to help.
2. Once you understand that 60 seconds can have value, you are then in a position to begin to appreciate nested timeboxing. Because the whole point of nested timeboxing is to bring form to the formless. 60-second timeboxes are great, but an endless succession of them can seem, well, endless. That’s where nested timeboxing comes in. It puts these useful microtimeboxes (which I’ll arbitrarily define as any timebox of size < 300 seconds) into a larger framework of meaning. Nested timeboxing gives bigger meaning and structure to the small-but-useful microtimeboxes.
3. Finally, there’s no rule that says you have to use 60 seconds as your timebox length. That just happens to be a length that appeals to me personally. That’s just how I play the game; it’s how I roll. Remember, though, this is all a game, i.e. it is something you play at. For fun. The rules only exist to make things fun. Change, interchange and ignore at will.

So that’s the basic idea there. Keep your questions coming, they’re top stuff .

“It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little.
Do what you can.”
~ Sydney Smith

When I first came to Japan, I hated how people wouldn’t take a stand. In the West, you’re taught that you have to have an opinion and it has to be a strong one, and if you don’t have strong opinions, you’re weak, stupid or both. In my first few weeks and months here, I was shocked at how often people simply wouldn’t take sides on an issue; they wouldn’t take a stand. They were neither apathetic nor passionate. They were simply…impartial.

And it bugged the heck out of me. I’m all for being undecided, but not for being decidedly impartial. That just seems wishy-washy. I mean, people in the West love to say ridiculous things like: “if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything”; that used to mean something to me…now it feels more like a hollow, idiotic threat (“Oh, crap! I’d better hurry up stand for something!”).

As time has gone on, I’ve come to love Japanese impartiality (plus, I mean, it’s not like people are impartial on everything — I am being a bit simplistic here). And I’ve come to dislike opinionated people who think they know everything. Even when they’re right. Ironically, though, that itself as a form of…opinionatedness. So it’s not like I’ve become toadly acculturated. Because if I were toadly acculturated, if I really did 「以和為貴」 (value harmony), I’d be all: 「人それぞれですね」(“well, everybody’s different, and that’s mmm kay”)。

Anyway, back on topic. The point is: we plan and (attempt to) act with too much certainty – not in ourselves, but in the environment. We act as if the environment were full of certainty, as if we were cogs in a giant machine in which everything has already been decided. And that’s stifling. In many ways, we humans don’t like certainty. Boring jokes, boring people and boring movies are all called “predictable” – too certain.

We’ve all written to-do lists before…
…And then proceeded to do nothing that’s on the list.
Why?
Because we’re dumb?
No, because we’re smart.

Those lists of things to do (or, more accurately, the way we use them), rob us of the freedom to exercise our creativity. There’s too much certainty. Certainty of having to be stuck doing a specific thing in a specific place in a specific (read: boring) way. There’s this idea that there’s this One True Best Optimal Correct Method of Doing X, and our only job is to find it and then execute. If we find it, we succeed, if not, we just kind of suck.

But let’s take a step back here. You have to realize that your certainty is false. It feels real, but it doesn’t exist. Are you freaking Nostradamus? Can you tell the future? How do you even know – when you write the list – that those things actually need doing? I mean they probably need doing, but there’s no certainty. Heck, most of the time, you don’t even do the things on the list after about the second item, so why do you even bother write them in the first place?

We are oppressed by a false certainty – a false certainty of method, boredom and location.

So the first thing to do is free yourself of the notion that you know how, where or when anything should or will happen. Because you don’t.

Now we’re having fun. We’re unpredictable now. We’re like an early M. Night Shymylan movie, or a good-looking but mentally unstable woman, or homemade cookies. No one knows what the heck’s going to happen next.

But a part of you counter-rebels against this rebellion: “Isn’t that just irresponsible? I mean, we simply throw our hands up and let things go to the wind?! Isn’t the goal for us to work like clockwork, acting with perfect reliability and precision? OK, maybe not perfect, but isn’t it at least our goal to be somewhat reliable?”

There you go pulling words out of my mouth again.

The keyword is, indeed, “somewhat”.

So, that false certainty we discussed earlier might be described as a deterministic action model. A part of us knows that this model is flawed, but we still try to force it to work, and the result is usually analysis paralysis – we just don’t do…anything. We procrastinate; we spin our wheels; we stare into space; we go to Facebook; we check our email. Anything but deal with the lunacy of trying to make a deterministic action model work in a world where we can’t even predict next Tuesday’s weather with certainty.

Think about this for a moment – we can look into deep space, but we don’t know for sure whether or not your picnic next weekend is a go.

What I’m suggesting is that we embrace the holes in our knowledge, embrace our flaws, embrace our imperfect human nature (even as we strive to continuously improve), and adopt a more probabilistic action model.

Don’t try to get things done. That’s too hard. Too painful. Too annoying. Too prone to failure.

Don’t try to get things done.

But…

Do try to increase the probability that they will get done.

Don’t try to get things done. Do try to increase the probability that they will get done.
Don’t ask if you’re doing the right thing.
Do ask if what you’re doing increases the probability of having what you want to happen, happen.
Do ask if what you’re doing increases the probability of you getting what you want.

Don’t work with the certainties; it hurts too much; it’s too painful. Work on pushing up those probabilities.

Next time you feel so overwhelmed in your quest to become fluent in Japanese, that you just sit there and do nothing, sit there and watch English-language shows on Hulu to try to drown out the guilt you’re tripping on (just like Maddie used to), stop yourself, wake up and smell the probabilistic coffee.

Watching a Japanese anime instead of running off to Hulu may not be as “perfect” as doing your SRS reps, but it demm </SouthAfricanAccent> well increases the probability of your actually learning Japanese, more than some English escapism ever could.

Doing just one SRS rep may not make it so that all your SRS reps get done, but it demm sure raises the probability that that will happen, more than sitting there doing nothing does. (The wording on this blog is getting weirder and weirder).

Ditto for listening to Japanese music while you read English-language documents..

Or doing your Japanese SRS reps on your iPad while you sit in on an English-language meeting.

It’s not perfect; it’s not certain. But the probability that you will (1) learn some Japanese now and (2) get back into doing more Japanese later is infinitely higher than it would be if you were doing nothing.

You catch my drift? If you can’t do the so-called right/perfect/correct thing, whatever you fantasize that thing to be, at least do something that helps. Something that moves you forward. Something that gets you in the ballpark. Something that’s somewhat right. Size doesn’t matter. Details don’t matter. Only ballpark. General direction. General area. All up in there (literally waving my right hand in vaguely circular, kinda conical way). That’s the basic idea. That’s AJATT immersion. It’s also what the situational goals thing is about.

Maybe you can’t do the 100% certain, perfect, ideal, Platonic thing that gets you The Desired Outcome. But if you do so many fun, easy, simple, short, quick, little things that The Desired Outcome has a 97% probability of happening, then, well…call it a win. It’s the difference between a deterministic algorithm that you don’t have the time or energy to execute, versus, small, short, simple, easy, lazy, ad hoc (=random) methods – probabilistic algorithms – that, while imperfect, will actually get done, because it’s just so easy.

100% * 0 action is still 0%. 0.485% * 200 tiny actions is 97%. An action that has a 50% chance of not helping you with your Japanese (i.e. that has only half a chance of helping you with your Japanese), repeated enough times can give you a 99.99% probability of success in Japanese.

OK, I’m getting a bit carried away here. Fake math facts, real math truth. You get the idea. You know who you are. Make your choice.

“Nothing” is the only too little; “not now” is the only too late.

EOF

PS: Paradoxically enough, I am finding that it’s important that you (1) abandon certainty in the environment, while simultaneously (2) embracing certainty in yourself. But we’ll leave the details of that for another time…

Let the opinionating begin…

“Cantonese is a difficult language to learn — not because of its sounds or syntax, but because it’s hard to find good learning resources”

– Eldon

Well, let’s remedy that one mini-transcript at a time, as has been the custom established by Edwin and CanteHK!

The situation this time around is a high-ranking clone soldier (Rex?) speaking to Anakin and Asoka after a battle.

做得好呀，Skywalker將軍！你都係呀，小妹妹
jou dak hou a，Skywalker jeung gwan！nei dou hai a，siu mui mui
[To Anakin] Well done, General Skywalker! [To Asoka] And you too, little Miss Thang — you weren’t so bad either .

• Audio: StarWarsCloneWars- 260

Note: I’ve never seen Star Wars: Clone Wars in English, so…I don’t know what the original lines were. These are my re-translation back into English from Cantonese.

Then do 50%.

There’s nothing wrong with a half-a**ed job. Do half an a** now, half-an a** later, and pretty soon you have a nice, round a**. J-Lo would be proud.

What’s that? You can’t do 50%?
Then do 50% of that.

1. Still too much?
2. Cut in half again.
3. Return to step 2 as many times as necessary.

Keep cutting until you get to something so small, that you start tilting your head to one side, curling the corner of your mouth, and squinting your eyes in a sort of “That’s it? Are you kidding me?” pose. Sort of like the face Pope John Paul II made when I told him about this idea.

You have found a cell. A unit so small, you don’t care any more. A few years ago, this one cell actually split up so many times that it became Jennifer Lopez’s derrière. I hear the same thing happened to you, too. I’m guessing it was more mitosis than binary fission, but…same difference, really — it’s all cell division.

Can’t do your SRS reps today?
Do half of them.
Still too much?
Do half of that.
Too big? Keep dividing.
Maybe you’ll end up just doing one.
And that’s fine.

Just keep dividing those cells. Just keep cutting things in half. You basically never have to feel like you’re doing anything, you just focus on division. The addition and multiplication will take care of themselves.

“easy and hard are nothing more than words to describe how much you resist doing the work”

There is no “hard”. There is only “needs smaller steps”. Cut. Slice. Dice. Make things too small to resist. That’s most of what timeboxing is about. It’s what our “cell division” is about. It’s what Maurer’s Kaizen Way (改善道 hmmm…sounds like a martial art  ) is about.

You already know how to do this. You’ll have trouble regularly eating whole tomatoes, but if those same tomatoes are simply sliced up and placed between strips of bread, suddenly there’s no tomato left. And this is all happening despite the fact that you’re probably eating more than before.

The same thing goes for apples. You see a whole apple and you’re like “meeeh, I’m not feeling so apply”. Until, that is, a sliced apple is placed in your sphere of influence. Pretty soon, you’re running out of apples.

It’s not the “appetite” (ability), it’s the presentation. If you’re in charge of something (like learning a language on your own), you’re in charge of the presentation, too. Make it look nice for yourself. Make it appealing. Make it fun. Probably, your mother used to do this kind of thing for you. Now, no one does it for you. No one gives you colorful books and sweet-tasting medicine. Why? Because you don’t need it? No — because you can do it for yourself. You still need help, you’re just not helpless.

Do half-a**ed work. Make it so small and tasty that you cannot resist. Work from the most simple to the most complex tasks. And chill. Our actions compound whether we worry or not. Our actions produce effects of their own accord. We just have to do our part on the cause side. We often cannot directly control effects and it’s generally a huge waste of energy to try. But we’re always in charge of a bunch of causes. And that turns out to be more than enough. We already control all the causes we need to control.

Do your little, half-a**ed part. Let nature — biology, physics, whatever — take care of the rest.

Remember, it starts with one cell. The roundest buttocks…all used to be one cell. And no matter how big they get, they’re still nothing but a bunch of cells.

Rhetorical question.

Anyhoo, while previous AJATT products have tended towards the large, this one’s small but beautiful. That’s right, kids. It’s the AJATT work.jp Starter Pack. You get:

• 1 real Japanese resume, complete with
• 1 real Japanese cover letter

That’s it. Simple. Both documents have been checked to gleaming perfection by real Japanese people. They also both take into account the specific needs of non-Japanese people/residents.

The price is a throwaway $9.95 if you buy the package alone, or you can have it for free when you join AJATT Plus by August 19. Or, I can execute these hostages. Wait…baby steps…baby steps. Anyway, this is one of those things I wish I had had back in the day; it should definitely speed up your learning curve and actually save you some time and money. But then…you can always get a Japanese friend to help you for free, so…don’t spend too much time thinking of whether or not to get it. It’s kinda useful, but it’s not OH MY GOSH THIS WILL BRING WORLD PEACE…useful.

100% Refund Guarantee

Some people love a product, some people just want to be friends. So, as always, the AJATT Fo’ Shizzle Refund Guarantee remains in effect. If you don’t like, you can get a refund any time. Just be like: “Refund”, and I’ll be like: “Take your money! But tell me it was real…tell me you loved me…”. Emotionally charged, but brief .

It sometimes seems like a lot of people get upset when:

1. I remind them that Heisig said it was OK to give yourself the keywords and story as a hint, and
2. I tell them to continue doing their kanji SRS reps until the kanji cards fully mature, i.e. until the intervals extend beyond their lifetime.

I mean, what am I supposed to say?

“Learn kanji in the most painful way possible and then quit before any of it sticks in your memory” ? :)

I’m just saying, dawg: if you have an answer of your own you like better already…then there’s no need to ask, right?

</rant>

I wanted to pull a Seth Godin and do a short one for a change