Don’t Blame the Ingredients, Fix the Recipe (Patreon)

None of us is infinitely powerful. None of us has infinite time, infinite money, infinite labour, infinite computing power*. Literally, none of us. 

But you wouldn’t think it, given the way people procrastinate (“I can start later”) or discount the achievements of modern entrepreneurs (“I’d be able to do that too if I had his money”) or ancient African civilizations (“of course they built that stuff, they had infinite free labour!”). Or, easily worst of all, the way we all discount our own potential by comparing it to the achievements of others.

Now, I’m not saying that you, the only ingredient you have to work with, the only person you can work on, don’t suck. Maybe you do suck. Maybe you are “poor quality goods”. But so what? Some of the most awesome products in the world are made of “waste” products — sausages, bread-and-butter pudding, charcoal, anything recycled.

In fact, I’ve heard (and, yeah, this is hearsay, but it still counts) that some Japanese chefs don’t respect people who use good ingredients — true “chefery”, as they see it, is to make great food from apparently inferior or useless ingredients.

[It could be that I just saw it on an episode of the TV drama "Bambino!", starring MATSUMOTO Jun, but the sentiment is no less profound for having come from our contemporary pop culture rather than, say, the pop culture of two centuries ago (Dickens) or five centuries ago (Shakespeare)].

[バンビ〜ノ! - Wikipedia] https://goo.gl/h4kBLA 

What you lack is resourcefulness, scrappiness, not raw awesomeness. For our purposes, really there's no such thing as raw awesomeness: all awesomeness is a product or by-product of processes. You need to cook and process yourself, like we do with all our food — we boil it, cut it, mix it, cool it, freeze it, ferment it, roast it, bake it, fry it, spice it, salt it until it’s just right. And that’s what personal development is — cooking yourself: cooking up a great human being, a tasty life. (Yes, this metaphor has "autophagic" implications; be a grown-up and ignore them (lol)).

Interestingly enough, none of the preceding paragraphs is the main thing I wanted to talk about today. The main thing I wanted to share is this: force concentration is your friend. Not focussing our energies is like trying to open a door with only your pinkie finger. Good luck with that knob! Ain't no leverage, mate. 

Your potential is infinite, that is, unbounded — we can turn soy into sausages — but your resources are finite, and if you misuse them, don’t blame the resources, don’t blame your ingredients. Blame your technique. Blame the recipe. Improve your technique and the results — the final dish — will be much better.

It’s not what you have, it’s how you use it.

Get this fatalistic gene/destiny B.S. out of your head. It’s not a straight line. Reality isn’t dumb and boring like that. And nature hates straight lines. Wheat doesn’t just turn into cookies. People don’t just become alcoholics or authors or engineers or businesspeople or Japanese speakers There’s a process. There is no magic, only process. Process is magic. Focus on process. Fix and tweak your processes, your algorithms, and you will find, as if by magic, that your results change for the way better.

None of us is infinitely powerful. None of us has infinite time, infinite money, infinite labour, infinite computing power*. Literally, none of us. So we have to use what we do have well. No wasting it in on regret, overreach, despair or YouTube comments. At any given time, we use our energies narrowly and well. Rinse and repeat.

AJATT may seem to be the ultimate ADD/ADHD learning method, but it really isn't. It's all about freebies (like background immersion) and force concentration (like SRS reps, shadowing and kanji first).

*Re: infinite computing power, many green software engineers are guilty of this — assuming that better hardware (ingredients) will improve the speed of their crappy algorithms (recipes). You could literally have ten or a hundred or a billion times faster hardware and your algorithm will still run slow if it’s crappy enough. Zero hyperbole here, just speaking from shameful personal experience (hahahaha). Like, it's not like I tried to solve the halting problem or anything, but it was purty bad.