The Most Broken and Most Fixable Thing In the Universe (Patreon)

"...no matter what quandaries we face...there is an idea that can enable us to prevail. Furthermore, we can find that idea. And when we find it, we need to implement it. My life has been shaped by this imperative. The power of an idea—this is itself an idea."
[Amazon.co.jp: The Singularity Is Near (English Edition) 電子書籍: Ray Kurzweil: Kindleストア] https://amzn.to/2PoL3Fn (archived at  https://goo.gl/YUv5n2)

Struggling and suffering and rushing and huffing and puffing are all signs of a broken method. Fix the method, not the person. Nothing is wrong with you; something, many things, perhaps even everything (lol) is wrong with the method you are using to achieve your aims.

Methods are simultaneously the most broken and the most fixable things that exist in the entire universe (and probably every other universe, too ;) ). Yet we, all of us, both as individuals and societies, stubbornly persist in trying to fix people. We talk about how awesome the world would be "if only [this person/]people were/did X". That's like wishing everybody had the same shoe size. That's like wishing your siblings had the same shoe size. That's like wishing you had the same shoe size all your life. Change the shoes, not the feet #bedofprocrustes.

And, I share this perspective with you because, well, I'm not (yet?) immune to this either*. Moralizing instead of moving. Fussing instead of fixing. Outside of immersion and SRS and kanji and stuff, I still default to berating myself instead of just trying to find a better way; I still look back instead of forward. But real life is like Mario, the arrow of time taking us forward rather than back. We need to bounce on new goombas, not the ones that scrolled by ten seconds, ten minutes, ten hours, ten days, ten months, ten years ago.

In any ordinary context, I might have opened up the preceding paragraph with something cute like "I speak as a fellow sinner", but the whole point is that there are no sinners: most contexts aren't moral or immoral but amoral and we need to be as well. Ironically, when we don't give up our morality bias, when we cling to morality over logic, strategy and experimentation, we suffer. That's like Greek tragedy level irony, bro -- doing the thing we think we're supposed to do (and will be punished for if we don't) is what actually punishes us. Super poetic.

Japanese isn't hard. Your method is hard. Fire your method and hire a new one. No moral opprobrium needed. No hand-wringing over the presence or absence of supposed talents or aptitudes. No wishing, no wailing, no gnashing of teeth. No cursing the stars. Just a cold, calm, rational even enjoyable movement forward, like changing out the dead batteries in a TV remote.