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.

Why You Should (or Maybe Should Not) Buy My Book

                                      

    I’m going to admit that there are tons of things I don’t know.  I’m not even going to begin listing them because then this paragraph would never end.  One particularly topical thing I don’t know, however, is how to effectively promote myself and my wares.  Part of the reason is that I have never before had any wares.  Now, though, I do.  I have a book!  It’s (tentatively) titled Direct Translation Impossible – Tales From the Land of the Rising Sun.  It’s a short (115 page – with pictures) memoir filled with (hopefully) amusing anecdotes from the 14 years I have spent studying Japanese and the 5 years I spent living in the country.  It will be available for purchase on October 1st, through the Amazon Kindle Store (but you don’t need a Kindle to read it (!).  More on that later).

    Now that I have wares, I’m interested in learning how to promote them.  As such and because trying and failing at things is perhaps what I do best, I started this blog.  Feel free to laugh at any and all of the stupid things I do here.

    Making a ton of money isn’t the reason I wrote and am now selling this book.  If I made a ton of money writing and now selling this book, would I be unhappy?  No.  I would be ecstatic.  But is that honestly a goal of mine?  No.  It (the book) is going to cost like $2.99 and I’m not anticipating selling 100,000 copies (or even 1,000 copies (or even 500 copies ( or even 250 copies ( or even 100 copies (or even … OK, I’ll stop))))).

    The question then becomes, what is the reason I wrote and am now selling this book?  Well, it occurs to me that there are different reasons for those two things, but a) because I wanted to, and b) because it is both easy and free to do so.

    Alright, sorry, that was a little flippant.  I am doing it because I want people to know what my life in Japan was like.  It was amazing.  It was at times hilarious, at other times challenging, at times very fulfilling, at still other times somewhat awkward and uncomfortable.  It was a whole lot of things that living in America is not (for me).  And it (in part) made me who I am today.

    I’m assuming that almost everyone who buys this book will know or at one point have known me personally (though if the book achieves the sort of velocity necessary to escape those spheres, then things get interesting (and frightening)); if you don’t read this book, you don’t know me as well as you think you do.  And that’s a shame, right?

  It occurs to me that that might be a terrible sales pitch.  It occurs to me that I might not be cut out for this.  I hope I am, but that’s what this is all about, right?(!)(?)  Making mistakes and learning from them? (?) Right?  

    Maybe my next book will sell better.