A pile of small, bad ideas

This week started out like any other since my move to Tokyo. As usual, I did my best to make progress on probably too many goals, obstacles arose, I persisted, and looking back, it went alright.

Here’s what I realized though. The things that worked for me this week, whether it was in the land of language learning, nutrition, or sleep, they weren’t the best ideas. In fact, in some cases they were pretty much the scrappiest and least efficient option. But because something about them was sticky, they enabled me to make a small amount of progress in areas where I’ve been rather stuck recently.

Word of the day

Let’s use my newest study tool as an example. I found an app that will let me run a script on my computer and display the output in the menu bar. This week, I made a list of fifty Japanese words that come up often in meetings at work. Then I wrote a Ruby script to show me a new word each day, along with the sentence where I found the word. Now, when I check the time on my computer, I also sees a Japanese word I’m trying to learn up in the menu bar.

This wasn’t the most efficient way to spend what should have been my study time, since I was basically just coding instead of learning. One could even argue that the final result of all this puttering isn’t going to teach me a prolific amount of vocabulary, so was the point of putting in all that time?

But this is the exact kind of tool I’m talking about. A small, fairly bad idea, that, all the same, gets me a little closer to reaching one of my goals each day. My brain seems to believe that there are many, much better ideas out there, and I think that often leads me to self-sensor when I have small ideas that aren’t perfect yet. Looking back at the time since I moved to Japan, it’s clear that this approach of skipping the bad ideas and just waiting around for a better idea has resulted in very little progress indeed.

Let’s try something new

So, I’m going to try something different for the month of November. I picked three important areas where I’m trying to grow: Japanese language, photography, and writing. I’m want to see what I can achieve by stacking up a pile of small, bad ideas in these areas. My hope is that I’ll be able to make more progress in a month than I’ve made since my move, and in doing so uncover a new path forward.

If nothing else, I’ll know thirty-one more paths that don’t lead anywhere interesting in particular, which is also more than I know know.