Seeking Sneezers on Launch Day

This is pretty much exactly what I'm launching.

photo credit: uabnews.blogspot.com

I want to introduce two ideas I came across in the research I did while trying to promote this book.  Seth Godin is one of the absolute Titans (one might go so far as to call him the Prometheus) of the marketing world, and I have been reading his book, Ideavirus (which I highly recommend to anyone interested in, or not interested in, selling things).  The book is full of interesting concepts, but on this the eve of my book launch I want to talk about just two: hives and sneezers.

            The world we live in sometimes seems to be mostly noise.  There are so many people talking that a lot of the time it is difficult to understand what anybody is saying.  Nevertheless, when you listen closely you realize that the social realm is not an undifferentiated cacophony of sound waves, but rather is highly segmented into local colonies of like-minded people talking to each other about things they enjoy.  Seth Godin calls these communities of common-interest hives.  There are an uncountable number of hives in the world.  Take, for example, the hive of baseball fans.  This seemingly unitary hive is subdivided into 32 different mini-hives frequented by fans of individual teams, each of which is again subdivided into hives for fans of different persuasions (the casual fan occupies a hive which only tangentially interacts with fans interested in sabermetrics).  Once you start to think about minor league affiliates, college programs, high school teams, and local little leagues, you realize that the number of hives falling under the main heading ‘baseball’ is vast indeed.

I am trying to reach out to a number of different hives with this book.  At the most specific, I am interested in communicating with the hive of humans who have lived or currently live in Japan.  I think we have a lot of things in common, and I hope my book serves to link us together in relatable experience.  I also want to reach the somewhat larger hive of those who are merely interested in Japan, but have never lived there.  The denizens of that hive could be high school students, college students, young professionals, old professionals, or perhaps retired folks who bought Nintendos for their children thirty years ago and found themselves curious about the land those ugly gray bricks came from. 

I also hope to reach a hive still further removed, the theoretical community of people interested in travel, new experiences, personal growth, and adventure.  This is me at perhaps my most ambitious.  It is certainly the largest hive I could imagine accessing.  If my book finds its way into the honeycomb interior of that hive, my life gets a little bit more interesting (and complicated) than it already is.

In order to get into a hive, though, an idea needs a bee (or a swarm of them).  It needs what Seth Godin calls ‘sneezers’.  Sneezers are people who spread ideas that they find interesting.  He identifies two types of sneezer: the Powerful and the Promiscuous.  Promiscuous Sneezers are those who personally profit from spreading an idea.  Oftentimes they are paid per sneeze. There may be a time, place, and market for sneezers, but I am not interested in entering it.  That leaves the Powerful Sneezers.  These sneezers are powerful in part because of the influence they have on various hives (think Oprah), but more importantly (for me), they are powerful because they can’t be bought.  When they recommend something it is because it really means something to them.

I want to say thank you to everyone who has supported me in this effort, and I want to ask for another favor.  After you read the book, I’m hoping you’ll sneeze about it.  Amazon ratings matter.  Amazon reviews matter.  Word of mouth is (still) the most powerful influence there is.  I’m wondering if you’d be willing to sneeze my work on somebody.  Preferably without putting your hand over your mouth.

That said, I only want you to do so if you think my book is worth sneezing.  If you don’t think it’s very good, I don’t want you to tell anybody about it (unless you just want to tell them how much you thought it sucked, in which case fire away).  If you think it’s boring, or off-base, or inept, or ungrammatical, or otherwise a waste of time, I hope you’ll forgive me, and then go about forgetting that you ever read it.  I want only that which I deserve.  If you think I deserve support, then I will be forever grateful for your support.  If, however, you think I deserve derision, then I hope you will give me that, too (actually in all honesty I would prefer more or less respectful silence, but the choice is up to you (I reserve the right to ignore derision)). 

The day of reckoning (insofar as such a thing exists) is here, and I’m interested in hearing what you think.  Thank you, and enjoy the book!

A Free Sample

Chapter One

Grades Aren’t Everything

            I decided to take Japanese on a whim – or, more specifically, on my mom’s whim.  I was a freshman in high school that had to pick a language elective and had no idea what to do.  Summer vacation ticked away.  Back to School Night rolled around, and I still hadn’t decided.

            My mom had seen enough.

            “You have to choose something, Chad.”

            “I know.”

            “The school offers Spanish, French, German, or Japanese.  Which one are you going to take?”

           

            I shrugged.  None of them got my motor running.

            Mom sighed, “Japanese looks interesting.  Why don’t you give it a shot?”

            Japanese?  Why would I take Japanese?  I loved Pokemon, sure, but so did everyone else.  Still, I had even fewer reasons to take French.

            “Okay.  Yeah.  Sure,” I replied.  “Why not?”

            It didn't seem like a life-changing decision at the time, but I guess life-changing decisions don't make themselves known right away.

            I clearly remember my first class.  I entered the room and searched for a seat, entranced by the calligraphy and ukiyo prints on the walls.  The bell rang and a tall, young-looking white woman stepped to the front and started delivering instructions.  In Japanese.  I had no idea what was going on.  I looked around, hoping to pick up some cues from my classmates, but all I saw were wide eyes and slack jaws.  The teacher kept saying things.  It was clear she wanted us to do something, but it wasn't clear what.  We sat for a moment, leaking nervous giggles as we waited for the English to come.  It didn't.  She kept talking, eventually adding some gestures.  To this day I have no idea what she was saying.  Stand up!  Look at the board!  Sit down!  We just tried to follow her hand gestures and make it through the hour.

            The language was the most bizarre string of noises I had ever heard.  "Ohayo gozaimas[1]."  What the hell was "Ohio goes I mahss" supposed to mean?  Do that many Japanese people live in Cleveland?  I thought Japanese was the stupidest thing I had ever heard.

            Japanese would continue to sound strange to me for the next decade.  Fortunately, however, after a few months it ceased to be just a bizarre string of sounds.  It changed into a string of magic words, and I needed to learn them all[2].

            School was never very difficult for me.  I teetered on the edge of a nervous breakdown if I ever got less than 95% on a test.  I was essentially equally capable in every subject, but for whatever reason I (thought I) was particularly good at Japanese.  I learned the alphabet (the syllabaries to be exact (there are two)) right away, and memorized all of the kanji on the walls.  I listened to the teacher's pronunciation and practiced at home until I could copy it.  I worked out grammar patterns before she taught them to us, and all in all was pretty proud of myself.

            I got great grades and the big head that went along with them.  It was a trick, though.  My grades fooled me into thinking I knew things, when in fact I didn't know anything at all.

            My First Trip To Japan

            Every other year, Spann Sensei took a group of students to Japan.  When I was a sophomore, I was one of them.  I had never left America before – I had never even been out of state without my parents before - but I wasn't that nervous.  My Japanese was pretty good, after all, so I would be fine.  That's what I thought.  I had yet to realize that test scores don't mean anything.  I put on the group windbreaker, said my farewells, and got on the plane. 

Looking back, I wish I had spent the flight savoring my self-confidence because it was soon to disappear. 

            The trip was divided into two parts.  The first part was group sightseeing in Kyoto, which was amazing.  I'm not sure there's anything more exciting than exploring a foreign country with a group of friends.  Everything was strange, and I looked upon it all with wonder, even those things that today strike me as totally uninteresting.  If I could recapture the joy I felt upon learning that Japanese toilets have seat warmers, I would probably die on the spot. 

            I still have very clear memories from that trip.  Lines of tour buses.  The green wall of hedges leading to the precincts of a dark wooden temple called the Silver Pavilion.  Vending machines filled with unfamiliar drinks and coins of actual value rapidly disappearing into them.  We went to a shrine called Heian Jingu, where I had myself photographed pretending to meditate on a rock.  We went to a theme park called Nagashima Spa Land and had the entire place to ourselves because it snowed until mid-afternoon.  The Steel Dragon wasn't running, but we rode the White Cyclone about twenty times instead. 

            I went to my first onsen.  An onsen is a Japanese hot spring.  When Americans think of hot springs, they think of slimy, sulfurous pools of algae-infested muck hidden in the woods and patronized by otherwise unbathed, unshaven hippies.  Japanese hot springs are, thankfully, different.  Frequented by everyone, they are clean, reputable, well-maintained, landscaped, and occasionally located in the middle of the city.  People get naked, and just sort of sit around together.  It sounds weird, but it's not (seriously, it isn't).  Our school didn't allow us to get naked (and no one would have if they did), so we soaked in our swimsuits.  The Japanese people laughed at us, but we didn't particularly care.  Spann Sensei's husband received an unsolicited back scrub from a naked old man.  We freaked out.  It started snowing as we sat in the springs and I clearly remember thinking, "I could stay in this country forever."

            I loved Kyoto.  There was the good: the joy of staying in my first Japanese inn; and there was the terrible: the taste of my first Japanese breakfast.  I will never forget either.  I was in awe of the temples, and for a moment thought I might like to become a monk (thankfully I did not act on the impulse).  If the trip had ended in Kyoto, it would have been the most amazing trip ever.

            But the trip didn't end in Kyoto.

            Home School

            For the second part of the trip, the scene shifted to a small town in Saitama Prefecture called Kounosu.  We went there because a few years earlier Spann Sensei had been an ALT in Kounosu.  ALT stands for Assistant Language Teacher, a job held by native English speakers in public elementary, junior high, and high schools.  My high school classmates and I weren’t sent to Kounosu to be ALTs, however.  We were sent to Kounosu to make fools of ourselves in Japanese homes. 

            Before leaving America, I was excited for the homestay.  I got a hand-written letter from my host family, a father, mother, younger brother and younger sister - the exact same configuration as my own family.  I figured I would fit right in.

            After being in Japan for a few days, however, my feelings towards the homestay changed.  I started to realize how little Japanese I actually knew.  Kyoto was amazing, a steady stream of moving experiences, but that's because I was surrounded by people who spoke English.  I was in Japan, but it didn't feel like it.  As long as you're with friends you can easily get by in a place that doesn't make any sense.  You can laugh off the language barrier.  Sure, you can't read a menu, ask for directions, or understand what people are saying.  You don't know what's polite and what's rude.  You don't care because none of it applies to you. 

            We spent four days in and around Kyoto, visiting temples, going to hot springs, and eating sushi off conveyor belts, but the truth is that we didn't really interact with any Japanese people.  Sightseeing is great, but it isn't cultural exchange.  Getting thrown into the middle of a family would be.  It meant that I could no longer escape the fact that I was in a foreign country.  As the transition from simple sightseeing to actual cultural exchange drew near, my anxiety levels went up accordingly.

            The day finally came.  I said goodbye to my friends and got into my host family's mini-van, heart pounding in my chest.

The first conversation I had with real Japanese people went worse than I thought it would.  As I got into the car, they asked me something using words I had never heard.  I replied with something random.  Silence.  They asked me something else.  I grunted and nodded.  More silence.  After a minute I thought to ask my fifth-grade host brother something, but realized that I didn't know how to address him. 

In Japanese the proper way to address someone depends on a number of factors.  Are they older or otherwise more socially powerful than you?  Is this the first time you've met them?  What day of the week is it?  Have you eaten dinner yet?  What color shirt are they wearing?  Is Saturn in ascendancy or the house of Mars?  At the time, I knew there was system, but I didn't know how it worked.  Eventually I settled for a hesitant "Teppei-san..." (Not quite Mr. Teppei, but not how you normally address a ten year-old boy, either.).  The car lit up with laughter that quickly died out into more silence.

            Welcome to Japan.  The real learning starts now.

            My Poor Host Mother

            Japanese is notorious among foreign learners for its differing levels of formality.  There's 1) Casual Street Language, spoken with family or friends; 2) a more formal type of conjugation for, I suppose you could say, All-Purpose Politeness; and 3) the highest level of formality, Royal Court Speech, in which speakers alternately debase themselves and deify the people they are addressing (this sounds complicated, and it is, but not impossibly so.  You can figure it out in a decade).  In class, we learned All-Purpose Politeness, which is where you should start.  The last thing we need is a nation of American children learning to speak like Yakuza members.  Nevertheless, All-Purpose Politeness isn't the type of language used in the home. 

That posed a problem.

            We drove to the family's house and brought my luggage into the room I was to use, an immaculate Japanese-style room with a tatami floor.  Then my host mother started asking me things.  At that point, I had lost all confidence in my Japanese.  I had no idea what she was saying.  She repeated herself numerous times, to no avail.  Berating myself for not understanding her, I managed to move the conversation along, which is to say, I shrugged and nodded a lot, hoping she would stop talking.  Eventually, she pulled out a futon and sent me off to brush my teeth. 

            Later on I figured out what she was trying to say.  It wasn't anything terribly difficult.  Faced with the task of communicating with a 16 year-old boy who didn't even understand that, it's amazing the woman didn't pass out.  Maybe she did, just in a place where I couldn't see her.

            I was like a dog.  I remember at one point being taken for a walk in the park – I wasn’t leashed but probably should have been – as the family tried to find something this confused, mute kid they were stuck with could do.  I couldn’t say much, but eventually felt I had to say something.  Luckily, I was prepared.  There was a vocabulary list among the pre-departure material we received, and one item on the list was the word "Takahashi," which was translated into English as "a Japanese name". 

“Wow,” I thought to myself, “that's a really cool word.  I could use that.  I will memorize it.” 

So I did.  As I walked in the park with my host mother, I thought I would say something nice about my host sister's name, Mizuki. 

"Mizuki," I proudly said to her, "That's a great Takahashi."

            Mizuki, that’s a great Japanese name.  I thought I had made a clever sentence.  But the confused look on my host mother's face made it evident that something was wrong.  It turns out that "Takashashi" doesn't mean "a Japanese name," but rather is a Japanese name.  If a foreign child were to come up to you and say, "Jessica, that's a great Smith," you would probably be as confused as my host mother was.

            Of course, that wasn't the only stupid thing I did.  The house I stayed in had a peculiar bathroom.  After our walk, my host mother asked if I’d like to take a bath.  “Wonderful,” I thought, “I would love a bath,” and nodded enthusiastically.  She led me into the laundry room, past the washer and dryer, and up to a frosted glass door.  On the other side of the frosted glass door was a tiled room with a bathtub.  My host mother parked me in front of the frosted glass door, said, “Go ahead, take a bath,” and left the room.

            I had no experience with a bath room of this sort (because it really was a bath room; there was nothing in it but a tub and a shower head) and had no idea where to take off my clothes.  Should I take them off in the laundry room and just go into the bath room naked?  Or should I take them off inside the bath room?  I remembered from the orientation material that in Japan you are supposed to shower on the tile floor outside the tub before getting in, and so I worried that my clothes would get wet if I took them inside.  I sat there for a few minutes debating, kicking myself for not envisioning this situation at the pre-departure question-and-answer session.  Eventually, I decided to go ahead and disrobe in the laundry room.  Unfortunately, it took me about five minutes to come to that decision, so as I was in the process of pulling my t-shirt over my head, my host mother walked into the room with a basket of dirty clothes. 

She then quickly walked out of the room with a basket of dirty clothes.

            My host mother did all sorts of things for me.  She made me breakfast every morning.  I didn't eat it because I couldn't stand the idea of fish, seaweed, and pickles first thing in the morning, but I appreciated the effort.  When I was starting to get tired of Japan, she took me to Tsutaya (a bookstore/video rental store) and let me rent a copy of Jurassic Park.  She even washed my underwear.

            I couldn’t say anything, do anything, or understand anything.  Going to a foreign country made me feel like I had gone back to being a baby.  I was even worse-off than a baby.  Babies are cute, and everyone loves them because evolutionary instinct compels them to.  When babies are in trouble, all they have to do is cry and someone will rush to help them.  They aren't expected to know anything, and don't have any memories of the relatively independent life they were leading in America before coming to stupid Japan.

            What exactly was my host mother trying to say to me on that first night?  She wasn't asking for my opinion on modern Japanese politics.  She wasn't trying to tell me about the Japanese nationals abducted by North Korea, and she wasn't quizzing me on Tokugawa Ieyasu's rise to Shogun.

            "Did you eat dinner?"  That's what she was asking me.  "Did you eat dinner?"

The problem was that she wasn't using All-Purpose Politeness.  She was using Casual Street Language, and I hadn't learned that yet.  I suffered defeat at the hands of colloquial speech, and for a guy as proud of his intellect as I was, it was a painful one. 

    It was also inevitable.  And enlightening.  I didn't actually know everything and that meant I still had things to learn.  If I still had things to learn then it was time to get back to work.

            Othello and Futons

        My first attempt at international exchange was certainly full of false starts, but it wasn't all bad.  Let me tell you a success story.

            In addition to my hardworking host mother, I also had a host father, a host sister, and two host grandparents.  My host father was busy with work and didn't get home until what I deemed to be very late (although a Japanese teenager probably would not).  I don't remember much about the grandparents.  Mizuki, my host sister with the nice Takahashi, was cute, but was also about five years old. 

    That leaves my host brother, Teppei.

    A boy of few words, Teppei and I were well matched.  To be fair, I'm not sure if Teppei was actually a quiet kid or not, but I can't remember having a single conversation with him.  We must have had some sort of verbal exchange.  I'm sure I at least tried to ask him a question, and I'm sure he replied.  He probably tried talking to me as well.  We had no idea what the other was saying anyway.

            And that was fine.  That was, in fact, perfect.  I wasn't exactly in a position to be having riveting conversations with anyone.  Teppei knew that.  It wasn't a secret that I didn't understand Japanese.  It didn’t get in the way of our friendship, though.

           

Our friendship was built on a different language: play.

            We had baseball and we had board games.  I was on the baseball team, and brought my glove to prepare for the upcoming season.  Teppei was a baseball player, too, and we played a lot of catch in the street.  We did calligraphy together, and while I don't remember what I wrote (it was terrible and I threw it away as soon as I got home), Teppei's katakana rendition of "Seattle Mariners" would hang in my room for years to come.  Baseball was an important part of our friendship, but when I think of Teppei the first word that comes to mind is "Othello,” the board game he carried into my room one day.  He sat me down, taught me the rules, and then proceeded to beat me every time.  Mizuki came in and beat me once or twice.  They had a dog, and if we had played I’m sure he would have beaten me too.  I didn't represent America well, but I was fine with that.  It was enough to even be participating.

            When I arrived home from school, I noticed that there were two futons on the floor of my room.  One of them was Teppei's.  The last two nights of my stay were slumber parties. 

Teppei and I couldn't really communicate but somehow we managed to become friends.  On my last day, the whole family took me to the train station.  I can still remember watching Teppei cry.  My host mother might have cried too, but I’m sure it was out of relief.

            The Illusion of Fate

            What should come next is a confession.  That on that day – my last day - I truly fell in love with Japan.  That on the plane home I swore to myself that when I graduated from college I would move to Japan and live there forever.  That my future was set and it would be festooned with cherry blossoms.

            If I said that, though, I would be lying. 

            I loved Kyoto because it matched my expectations of what Japan would be.  My high school Japanese classroom was an incredibly appealing place.  The kanji on the walls together with the haphazard placement of a few rice-paper screens made me feel like I had gone somewhere.  Kyoto felt like an extension of my classroom, and I loved it.

            I wasn’t so sure about the rest of the country, though.  The rest of the country just made me feel dumb.

---

[1] “Good Morning”

[2] Or perhaps catch ‘em all.

How to Use Mistakes to Rebuild Yourself

    

        

                                                                        Photo Credit:  www. publicdomainpictures.net             

    Utilizing Mistakes to Make them Go Away

    Everyone makes mistakes.  Not everyone responds to them effectively, however.  Successful people mine mistakes for useful information.  Unsuccessful people despair at them.  

    Which strategy you take depends largely upon what you think about ability.  If you are willing to accept that you (and by extension all of your skills) are a work in progress, then it becomes easier to view mistakes as actionable feedback.  From this perspective, If I am tennis player who starts to consistently hits serves into the net, I can hypothesize that I am dropping my head too quickly.  If I correct the mechanical flaw, then my serves will start going in.

    If, however, I think that my abilities are more or less fixed, then mistakes convey no information other than a revelation of my own terminal ineptitude.  When my serves start going into the net, I have no choice but to think that I am a terrible server, which will assure that I continue to double fault.

    The point isn’t to intentionally make a lot of mistakes.  The point is to recognize that mistakes are inevitable, analyze them for data, and use that data for self-correction.  If you are able to pinpoint the reasons why you make particular mistakes, you will be able to eliminate them.

    This is the most effective technique for self-improvement I have come across, but it necessitates that one be willing to admit fallibility.  It can be frustrating when people refuse to acknowledge their mistakes, but you can rest easy if that person is a competitor; their obstinacy almost guarantees that they will have a hard time improving.

    Teasing Out Imperfections: What Tests are Good For  

    Few people have a positive impression of tests, but that’s because the way we use them is hard to love.  Most often we use tests as final evaluations. They tell you how good you are at something, and a positive outcome is contingent upon a passing score.  This understandably makes them stressful.  

    If tests are used as provisional evaluations, however, we can approach them very differently.  The authors of Make It Stick suggest we utilize tests in just such a fashion.  In their view, tests are the most effective way to ferret out what one does not know.  There is no way to fix a problem that you don’t know you have.  Well-designed, frequently administered tests are the best way to get an accurate evaluation of the state of one’s knowledge.

    You can easily incorporate informal testing into your everyday life.  You don’t need to sit down and write exams.  All you have to do is continually ask yourself, “Did I get that?”  Resist the urge to say, “I know,” because frequently you actually do not (at least I don’t).  When you read a book, continually stop and ask, “What did I just read?”  If you can’t answer that question, then you do not know.  Go back and read it until you do. 

  Obviously this requires a level of effort that is impossible to sustain at all times (at least for me).  But I suggest you pull it out of your toolbox when you really want to learn something.  There are no shortcuts.  Effective learning is hard work.  But it’s worth it when you see the results.      

From the Cutting Room Floor

            In the process of writing this book, I feel like I have deleted almost as many words as I have written.  I deleted some of them because they were bad, but I deleted others simply because they didn't fit.  Here is an example of something that didn't make the cut not because it was terrible, but because there was no place for it in the book.

            Hong Kong - Of Money Markets and Street Vendors
          
            Allow me to draw a back of the envelope distinction: Hong Kong is a coin with two faces.  The image of a bank is stamped on one side, the likeness of a pushcart scratched on the other.  If you stand on the wharf at Kowloon Bay and look out at the incandescent bar graph that is the city skyline, all you see is money.  White light coruscates off the glass trunks of skyscrapers by day, and runs down them in LED rainbows by night.  Yachts are moored at the quays, yachts circle the bay, yachts return from a day at sea back-lit by the setting sun.  “I feel like I’m in Vancouver,” Todd said as we walked past designer boutiques, through glass-enclosed sky bridges, and into a Starbucks.  One side of the bay is what the architectural avatar of wealth looks like.

            But there is another side of the bay.  Our hotel was located there.  Buildings were smaller.  Buildings were shabbier.  Buildings were held up by bamboo scaffolding that I was afraid to walk under - and not because I’m superstitious.  I’m going to betray one of my prejudices when I say this, but that side of the bay is what I imagined South East Asia would look like.  It's also what I thought it would smell like.  It’s some combination of sweat, soy sauce, unknown herbs, and roasting pork.  It’s a pleasant smell.  This is excessive romanticizing on my part, but it smells like hard work.  It smells like people of less than ample means making the most of what they’ve got.  It smells better to me than the metallic pheromones of money the skyscrapers secrete on the other side of the bay.

            I don’t want to wax lyrical on the dignities of poverty.  Poverty is not uplifting and we more fortunate should not keep people trapped in it by crowning them with the dubious laurels of the noble poor.  There is nothing desirable about a life of poverty, and giving people the tools to lift themselves from it should be a main societal goal. 

         (I don't know why but I can't change the formatting of the next paragraph.  The difference in font is just a glitch).
   

         But there is virtue in a life spent in the pursuit of something other than the trappings of wealth.  You don’t need a shiny car to be worth something.  You don’t need an expensive suit, or a flashy watch, or an alligator-skin briefcase to be happy.  I would suggest that those kinds of accessories are more of an impediment to happiness than a source.  Too many of us carry them around (or pursue them) without realizing that they can easily become glittery sets of shackles.  Poverty is not dignified (though many people do handle it with dignity), and neither is wealth necessarily a ticket to paradise.  I, for one, would like just enough wealth to be my own master, but not so much that I become its slave.

 Money.

 Still a lot of money.  But as good as I could do from my photo stock.

   

        A little sanctimonious perhaps, but then again I also cut it.  More from Make It Stick on Saturday.

How To Learn Better: Transmissions From the Realm of Cognitive Science

It took me over a decade of seriously studying Japanese before I was comfortable calling myself fluent.  Part of the reason it took so long is that Japanese is hard.  The rest of the reason is that I had never read this book:

                                          

This is an amazing book.  I think that anyone who is interested in learning anything should read it, which basically means that I think everyone should read it.  Learning should be meaningful.  Life is still short, which means that time is still precious, which means that nobody wants to waste it doing boring or painful things.  A waste of time is perhaps the worst kind of waste there is.  This is my main operating principle as both a student and an educator.  But what kind of learning is meaningful?

Learning that sticks.  What kind is meaningless?  The kind that is evacuated from memory as soon as you have been tested on it.  I don’t think you can even call that learning.  That kind of learning is like a Snapchat; you can only look at it for like ten seconds before it disappears.

I don’t know about you but I don’t want to waste time sending myself mental Snapchats.  When I lay down a memory, I want it to remain available for a while.

But how do you lay down a memory?  The authors of Make It Stick suggest that most of us have been doing it all wrong.  Are your textbooks streaked with highlighter?  Do you spend time reading and rereading the same passages of text over and over again?  Do you take notes in class or meetings, or download Power Point presentations and laboriously commit them to memory?  Do you repeat phrases in your head a hundred times until you’ve got them memorized, and never think about them again?  If you do, then chances are good you aren’t remembering nearly as much as you feel like you should.

Why?  Most of the above study habits end up doing one thing and one thing only: loading material into short term memory.  You may come out the other side of a study sessions able to fluently recite a passage or rattle off a string of vocabulary words, but you will run into (at least) two problems: 1) you might trick yourself into thinking you understand the material better than you actually do, and 2) if you don’t keep reviewing you will soon forget it all anyway.

The Fluency Illusion

The authors of Make It Stick point out something called the Fluency Illusion.  Once I learned about the Fluency Illusion, I realized I had been falling for it my entire life.  The Fluency Illusion boils down to this pithy phrase (which is not mine): fluency with the material does not necessarily indicate mastery of the content.  Just because you can recite something from memory does not mean you know what you are talking about.

    This realization was revelatory for me.  I don’t know how much time I wasted trying to accurately represent a given author’s phraseology in my mind when I didn’t actually understand what he or she was trying to say.  There are no magic words, merely more or less expressive ones.  Make It Stick taught me to stop worrying about memorizing other people’s words, and to start worrying about getting through them to what they were trying to say.

Incessant Forgetting

Everybody forgets.  Forgetting is (at the moment) a neurobiological inevitability.  Sometimes it is good.  You have to forget some things (what you ate for lunch yesterday, for example) to live a normal life.  Many times it is bad.  Forgetting is bad when you find yourself forgetting things you have spent hours slaving to learn.

How can we combat this kind of unwanted forgetting?  There are ways.  There are techniques to beat forgetting, and if you buy Make It Stick you can learn them.  Or, if you don’t read books (you should read books), then you can just keep an eye on this blog.  I will have some tips for you in the upcoming days.

What You're Missing if You Don't Have a Kindle

    When they first came out I was pretty down on e-readers.  Like technophobes everywhere, I was convinced that the aesthetics of a traditional book were a critical part of the reading experience.  The heft of the book, the feel of the paper on your fingertips, the swish of the pages when you turn them, the smell of ink and pulp and the printing press.  You can't recreate that on an electronic device!  I thought.  I'll never get one.

    Well, I got one, and the only bound books I read these days are new releases I feel very strongly about.  There are a number of different e-readers, but I have a Kindle.  The Kindle is light so I can take it anywhere; it's flat so I don't have to hold it open; the screen doesn't cut me; it has a built in dictionary; it includes clickable menus to quickly navigate through the text; books are delivered immediately over the internet; it recommends titles for further reading.  I've always read a lot, but my book consumption has exploded since I got a Kindle, mostly because it makes getting and reading books incredibly easy.

  

I couldn't do this with a traditional book.  

    It also makes publishing books incredibly easy.  All you need is a manuscript and the ability to click boxes and fill in fields.  The Amazon software and web architecture does the rest.  I've been incredibly impressed by the Kindle Direct Publishing service and would highly recommend it to anyone with a book who doesn't want to belly up to the roulette table that is traditional publishing.

    But let's get back to the Kindle itself.  There are a number of models ranging from grayscale e-readers to the full color Kindle Fire.  I personally use the Kindle Paperwhite, which rules.  It doesn't support color, but it's backlit, has a touch-activated dictionary (touch and hold the word you want defined and as long as you aren't reading highly experimental fiction it will show you the definition), and a battery that lasts for days.  It's also not that expensive: you can get it for - actually I just checked and the new ones are more expensive than I thought.  About $180.

    You can get an older model for cheaper, or you could just get the app for free.  You can use the app on your computer (PC or Mac), phone (Android or iPhone), tablet (iPad or whatever else there is).  It's color supported, and while not quite as easy on the eyes as the Kindles themselves, still makes for a pleasant reading experience.  You'l need either a Kindle or a Kindle App to read my book, but even if you don't decide to read my book I would recommend getting one anyway.  It's the easiest way to get on the reading rainbow, and once you're on I bet you won't want to get off.

    Oh, by the way my book is now available for pre-order.  Get it today!

Pre-Order Direct Translation Impossible

The Time I Walked a Japanese Street Dressed As A Hobbit

       I just finished an extensive edit of the book.  I would like to say thank you to super-reader Peter Johnsen for his honest and incisive criticism.  The more I rewrite the book, the more excited I get to launch it.  With a lot of very exciting books coming out in the next few weeks (Sam Harris’s Waking Up for one, Stephen Pinker’s The Sense of Style for another), it is a good time to be a reader.  My book won’t hold a candle to either of those, but maybe it will be able to hold a match to them.

Today I would like to give you a little taste of the things you will find in my book.  This particular story will not be in it, but there will be many others much like it.

                                       

    It might be a little hard to tell what’s going on in that photo, so let me explain: it's me a buying popcorn at a movie theater dressed like a hobbit.

   Let me tell this story right.  

    I love The Lord of the Rings.  At one point I was as big a Lord of the Rings nut as you could find.  I read the books multiple times.  I even read The Silmarillion multiple times.  The Silmarillion is essentially the Old Testament of Middle Earth, minus all of the nasty ethical injunctions.  It tells a creation myth.  It describes a Middle-Earth specific Angelology.  It contains an Edenic Fall, a genealogy of the elf, dwarf, and human races, a description of the origin of orcs and goblins, a backstory for Sauron, and the details behind the forging of the Great Rings.  It is a wonderful compendium of myths written by a historical person whose actual grave you can visit whenever you want.  It’s also very boring.  I read it twice when I was in high school.

    The books were good, but I was more about the movies.  I watched them dozens of times.  I must have seen The Fellowship of the Ring, specifically, fifty times.  There was a point when I could recite the majority of the three hour movie from memory (unfortunately I can’t do it anymore).  A few friends and I went to the premier of The Return of the King dressed as hobbits.  We were outclassed by a guy in chain-mail carrying a foam battle-axe, but it was downtown Seattle and I thought we held our own.

    I didn’t know what to do with myself when the movies stopped coming out.  Slowly, my love for the series faded, sinking into the sediment of my unconscious not unlike the One Ring in that one lake after that one battle.  The one where the guy cut the Ring from Sauron’s finger?  The guy refused to cast it into Mt. Doom, wore it around his neck and it made him crazy, then was waylaid by some orcs on his way back to Gondor?  He got shot with a billion arrows and dropped the Ring in a lake?  It sank to the bottom and sat there until Smeagol found it?  You know what I’m talking about.  My love for the series got buried like that.  It lay there, unnoticed, for three and a half thousand years - no, wait, for about six years - until, when chance came, it ensnared a new bearer – wait, I mean… what do I mean?  The Ring – er, my love - came into the hands of the creature Gollum –

    Sorry.  I got possessed for a second there.  It seems like I haven’t totally forgotten all the lines.

    At any rate, I didn’t think about The Lord of the Rings much after high school.  But then I heard they were planning on making movies out of The Hobbit.  I didn’t know how to feel about that.  Three movies?  Out of the Hobbit?  How are you going to get three movies out of The Hobbit?  What if they suck?  What if they turn out like Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III?  I decided not to get my hopes up.

    I ignored The Hobbit until just before the first movie was released.  One day, I saw a trailer and the opening bars of the Shire theme activated long dormant lines of code in my mind.  Old feelings rose from the muck of the past and I remembered what The Lord of the Rings once meant to me.

    I was in Japan when it came out.  A group of friends and I made plans to see it on opening night.  It had been almost ten years since a different group of friends and I dressed up as hobbits and were embarrased by a forty-year old man in a dwarf costume at the Cinerama.  I wanted to honor the memory of that fateful night, so I decided I would dress up this time, too.

    I scrounged the city for hobbit garb.  I had a white collared shirt and a tan vest.  I found a pair of baggy brown corduroys with an elastic waist-band at Uni-Qlo (the Japanese Old Navy).  I found a light brown shawl in the women’s section of Mu-Jirushi (another cheap Japanese clothing store) that I could use as a cloak.  I found a plastic sword at the Daiso (a dollar store).  I was ready.

    You’ll notice that I didn’t say anything about shoes.  That’s because I didn’t wear any.  Hobbits don’t wear shoes!  They have super hairy, heavily calloused feet.  I wasn’t going to ruin my costume with shoes.  

    It was December and bitter cold outside.  My feet were neither hairy nor heavily-calloused (enough), but my only choice was to pad along the frigid sidewalk to the movie theater.

    Going out without shoes in the middle of December is a very bizarre experience.  I recommend trying it at least once.  I don’t think I’ve every felt as acutely out of step with society in my entire life.  A voice in my head was screaming at me to go home and put shoes on, and not because my feet were cold.  I felt like a total wacko.  When people go out in the middle of December – when people go out during any month – they wear shoes.  It’s one of societies most basic rules: No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service.  Going out without shoes is not an option, unless you live on a beach.  I would have stuck out less with pink hair and a nose ring.  Add to my bare feet the fact that I was wearing brown corduroy capris and a woman’s shawl as a cloak, and you’ll understand how much courage it took to make the ten minute walk to the theater.

    But nobody said anything.  Nobody even looked at me.  I was worried that I might be denied entrance to the movie theater, but the guy at the ticket counter didn’t even blink.  (This practiced disregard to public aberrations is a theme of my book).  I got my ticket, bought some popcorn, and walked into the screening room as if I were a totally normal person.

    In America someone would have said something.  “Hey, sweet shawl, Jackass!” maybe, or, “Aren’t your toes cold, bro?”  Something.  Someone would have at least pointed and laughed.  But in Japan?  Nothing.  Maybe they’re just so used to people dressing up as anime characters they don’t even notice.