Great piece John. Japan and South Korea are on my bucket list.
“So don’t worry about feeling stupid. It’s the only way to ever really get smart.”
I am a recovering IT executive. Early in my career in the early 80s we used a software development methodology that we called the “waterfall method”. We identify the change stakeholder and collect requirements. The requirements become design specifications that we use to develop the system. Then we test the system based on the requirements. The last step is implementation.
This generally resulted in systems that were not designed well enough.
The remedy was “rapid development” methodologies where changes were done in smaller “releases” within a constant improvement loop. Within this change process is a concept called “estimate to completion”. ETC is basically connecting the change project to the stated goals and objectives and at each major milestone (each release) ask “what is the estimate to completion?” With that information each milestone includes a “go” vs “no go” decision.
This latter methodology is the current standard. In practice in the business world it facilitates the decision process to take bold moves without betting the farm. All the assumptions are made upfront to confirm the feasibility; but, if later lessons are learned that prove a lack of feasibility, the project should be scrapped so that good money is not wasted on bad outcomes.
The people with their anuses puckered up with risk aversion… the fear of making mistakes or failing… they love to tag the people that take these bold moves as losers if the project is eventually canceled. However, they also rarely acknowledge the success of anyone else making bold moves… they will just call it luck while they make excuses for why they did not support the project in the first place.
Getting this back to Democrat vs Republican, in general there are talkers and there are doers. Democrats tend to be talkers… and doing a lot of talking to deflect from having to actually do anything because doing something risks making mistakes and failing. Republicans tend to be doers… and often lack the verbal skills to do much talking while they are doing.
Lastly, there is a point about shared goals. I think because Japan is very culturally homogenous the people as stakeholders to all public policy are more apt to share the goals of the project. That facilitates decision making in a democracy. In the US we have little acceptance of there being a unified culture, and we have a mess of multiculturalism. NIMBYism is rife in the US. In my liberal college town every peripheral development project has been voted down by the electorate… even as there is a lack of property and rents have skyrocketed to some of the highest in the state. These voters pay lip-service to the plight of homeless and people having their budgets slammed by the too high cost of housing. But there is a low feeling of community belonging and the related care that would come from it. It is a bunch of strangers living among themselves and each man for himself. Contrast that to Japan where the voter would more likely feel a kinship connection with the other community members.
When you ad up the prevalence of people that talk and don’t do with a population of NIMBY stakeholders, that explains why states like California cannot build a bullet train and cannot rebuild Pacific Palisades. And when you give power to someone that makes decisions, that is why Trump has secured peace in the Middle East.
Making mistakes certainly is a path, and it's rarely a comfortable one, is it? As I age, I do attempt new projects but never with the sort of "blind confidence" that I had in my youth. I sometimes feel stupid because I made a mistake and curse myself because I have to fix my mistake that I feel like I should have got right the first time. It's frustrating and chisels down my self-confidence, but eventually I just chalk it up to: 1) the older you get, the more you realize how much you don't know, and 2) live and learn. Thanks for posting this essay, John. I've been an admirer of Japan for a long time based on the quality and reliability of the cars they build...
We live in a culture that continually bombards us with fiction full of geniuses who instantly comprehend the most profound & complex ideas, whose photographic memories allow them to recall every detail with perfect clarity and who think faster than computers. Which is fine when it's just fiction, but not when it forms a significant part of the informal education of your formative years. You hit age 10 and you're subconsciously locked into thinking this is how life works.
We pick up all kinds of ideas due to Pop-Cultural Osmosis...
...and if you encounter them when you're young, they STICK as emotional concepts, which are more primitive and congealed than mere intellectual ideas like math or physics. And as an American, you're not allowed to make uncool mistakes, you're not allowed to be bad at being social and you're not allowed to have to learn these things.
They say there are no stupid questions but if you don't get something because your teacher doesn't really understand the subject matter, and you keep asking questions, you're the one who looks like an idiot. Because you and everyone your age around you have spent your whole lives marinating in a culture where only retards have to ask the same question more than once.
Maybe it's not objective reality but for humans, perception IS reality.
I'm glad you had a good time in Tokyo. We lived in Japan for nearly 8 years, and all our kids were born there. I made lots and lots and lots of mistakes learning Japanese and I never got close to what I consider fluent. It remains a struggle to understand TV shows without subtitles. There was a day maybe the second year I was there. It was raining, like buckets of rain. Of course we had no umbrellas, so I went down the block to the local convenience store to buy an umbrella. All they had left were fancy, expensive ones. I decided just to pay for it and use it, but the clerk tried to explain that it wasn't an umbrella, but a parasol. I didn't know the words he was using and only after he pulled the plastic off it did I realize my mistake and backed away, red-faced and embarrassed for being an ignorant nuisance. I remember another incident several years later where, when talking to some other teachers in the teachers' room, I mixed up the words for "yet" and "anymore."
I don't think I did too bad as a foreigner there. Towards the end I was able to walk into a store and, when a clerk made what he felt was a huge mistake of eye contact with a blue-eyed foreigner, speak Japanese with enough fluency that he would smile and relax, especially in the little place we lived. But yes, I did start out pretty hopeless, the same way everyone starts out at anything.
I feel stupid so often, I wonder if I might actually be a genius🤣. But seriously, I tackled a project this week that made me feel awful stupid until I actually got it accomplished and then I felt like the smartest I've ever been. Nice article about something we all need to be reminded of once in awhile.
You make a great point here. There is never anything bad about trying to do something and failing is fine, too. Failing usually teaches but if you only ever succeed, do you ever really learn anything about life? The best hitters in baseball strike out...a LOT. But they keep on refining their swings and going. They get to look foolish in front of millions of people which has to sting sometimes. But then again, when they hit a homerun in front of millions, they know it's all worth it. Great post, John.
Making mistakes is integral to learning. I was working as a Registered Nurse at an insurance company when they laid us all off. The company was starting a new Programmer Development Program to train employees in computer programming. It was something I had always been interested in, so I applied. I did get the job. They sent us to Minnesota for 12 weeks for training. I was 40 years old and was the oldest person in the class. As an RN I knew nothing about coding. Needless to say, I made many mistakes. I felt pretty bad about this until one day the instructor said to the class, "It's okay to make mistakes, it's how you learn to fix mistakes. If you never make a mistakes, you never learn how to fix mistakes." I felt a lot better after that. I worked as a Programmer Analyst for 2 years until they laid most of us off again. I went back to a nursing job because the insurance industry changes with the wind. But, it was a great experience.
Great piece John. Japan and South Korea are on my bucket list.
“So don’t worry about feeling stupid. It’s the only way to ever really get smart.”
I am a recovering IT executive. Early in my career in the early 80s we used a software development methodology that we called the “waterfall method”. We identify the change stakeholder and collect requirements. The requirements become design specifications that we use to develop the system. Then we test the system based on the requirements. The last step is implementation.
This generally resulted in systems that were not designed well enough.
The remedy was “rapid development” methodologies where changes were done in smaller “releases” within a constant improvement loop. Within this change process is a concept called “estimate to completion”. ETC is basically connecting the change project to the stated goals and objectives and at each major milestone (each release) ask “what is the estimate to completion?” With that information each milestone includes a “go” vs “no go” decision.
This latter methodology is the current standard. In practice in the business world it facilitates the decision process to take bold moves without betting the farm. All the assumptions are made upfront to confirm the feasibility; but, if later lessons are learned that prove a lack of feasibility, the project should be scrapped so that good money is not wasted on bad outcomes.
The people with their anuses puckered up with risk aversion… the fear of making mistakes or failing… they love to tag the people that take these bold moves as losers if the project is eventually canceled. However, they also rarely acknowledge the success of anyone else making bold moves… they will just call it luck while they make excuses for why they did not support the project in the first place.
Getting this back to Democrat vs Republican, in general there are talkers and there are doers. Democrats tend to be talkers… and doing a lot of talking to deflect from having to actually do anything because doing something risks making mistakes and failing. Republicans tend to be doers… and often lack the verbal skills to do much talking while they are doing.
Lastly, there is a point about shared goals. I think because Japan is very culturally homogenous the people as stakeholders to all public policy are more apt to share the goals of the project. That facilitates decision making in a democracy. In the US we have little acceptance of there being a unified culture, and we have a mess of multiculturalism. NIMBYism is rife in the US. In my liberal college town every peripheral development project has been voted down by the electorate… even as there is a lack of property and rents have skyrocketed to some of the highest in the state. These voters pay lip-service to the plight of homeless and people having their budgets slammed by the too high cost of housing. But there is a low feeling of community belonging and the related care that would come from it. It is a bunch of strangers living among themselves and each man for himself. Contrast that to Japan where the voter would more likely feel a kinship connection with the other community members.
When you ad up the prevalence of people that talk and don’t do with a population of NIMBY stakeholders, that explains why states like California cannot build a bullet train and cannot rebuild Pacific Palisades. And when you give power to someone that makes decisions, that is why Trump has secured peace in the Middle East.
Making mistakes certainly is a path, and it's rarely a comfortable one, is it? As I age, I do attempt new projects but never with the sort of "blind confidence" that I had in my youth. I sometimes feel stupid because I made a mistake and curse myself because I have to fix my mistake that I feel like I should have got right the first time. It's frustrating and chisels down my self-confidence, but eventually I just chalk it up to: 1) the older you get, the more you realize how much you don't know, and 2) live and learn. Thanks for posting this essay, John. I've been an admirer of Japan for a long time based on the quality and reliability of the cars they build...
Here's the thing about being an American, though.
We live in a culture that continually bombards us with fiction full of geniuses who instantly comprehend the most profound & complex ideas, whose photographic memories allow them to recall every detail with perfect clarity and who think faster than computers. Which is fine when it's just fiction, but not when it forms a significant part of the informal education of your formative years. You hit age 10 and you're subconsciously locked into thinking this is how life works.
We pick up all kinds of ideas due to Pop-Cultural Osmosis...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PopCulturalOsmosis
...and if you encounter them when you're young, they STICK as emotional concepts, which are more primitive and congealed than mere intellectual ideas like math or physics. And as an American, you're not allowed to make uncool mistakes, you're not allowed to be bad at being social and you're not allowed to have to learn these things.
They say there are no stupid questions but if you don't get something because your teacher doesn't really understand the subject matter, and you keep asking questions, you're the one who looks like an idiot. Because you and everyone your age around you have spent your whole lives marinating in a culture where only retards have to ask the same question more than once.
Maybe it's not objective reality but for humans, perception IS reality.
I'm glad you had a good time in Tokyo. We lived in Japan for nearly 8 years, and all our kids were born there. I made lots and lots and lots of mistakes learning Japanese and I never got close to what I consider fluent. It remains a struggle to understand TV shows without subtitles. There was a day maybe the second year I was there. It was raining, like buckets of rain. Of course we had no umbrellas, so I went down the block to the local convenience store to buy an umbrella. All they had left were fancy, expensive ones. I decided just to pay for it and use it, but the clerk tried to explain that it wasn't an umbrella, but a parasol. I didn't know the words he was using and only after he pulled the plastic off it did I realize my mistake and backed away, red-faced and embarrassed for being an ignorant nuisance. I remember another incident several years later where, when talking to some other teachers in the teachers' room, I mixed up the words for "yet" and "anymore."
I don't think I did too bad as a foreigner there. Towards the end I was able to walk into a store and, when a clerk made what he felt was a huge mistake of eye contact with a blue-eyed foreigner, speak Japanese with enough fluency that he would smile and relax, especially in the little place we lived. But yes, I did start out pretty hopeless, the same way everyone starts out at anything.
I feel stupid so often, I wonder if I might actually be a genius🤣. But seriously, I tackled a project this week that made me feel awful stupid until I actually got it accomplished and then I felt like the smartest I've ever been. Nice article about something we all need to be reminded of once in awhile.
You make a great point here. There is never anything bad about trying to do something and failing is fine, too. Failing usually teaches but if you only ever succeed, do you ever really learn anything about life? The best hitters in baseball strike out...a LOT. But they keep on refining their swings and going. They get to look foolish in front of millions of people which has to sting sometimes. But then again, when they hit a homerun in front of millions, they know it's all worth it. Great post, John.
Failure is a step in the process of success. Too many people don't understand that, and live in fear of failure as a consequence.
Great piece. Thank you
Know what the most amazing thing about Steve Jobs was?
Not his supposed vision or intellect, but merely the fact that he wasn't beaten bloody on a regular basis by those around him.
Though, I suppose that says more about THEM than him.
Thanks for sharing your Japan adventure with us.
Making mistakes is integral to learning. I was working as a Registered Nurse at an insurance company when they laid us all off. The company was starting a new Programmer Development Program to train employees in computer programming. It was something I had always been interested in, so I applied. I did get the job. They sent us to Minnesota for 12 weeks for training. I was 40 years old and was the oldest person in the class. As an RN I knew nothing about coding. Needless to say, I made many mistakes. I felt pretty bad about this until one day the instructor said to the class, "It's okay to make mistakes, it's how you learn to fix mistakes. If you never make a mistakes, you never learn how to fix mistakes." I felt a lot better after that. I worked as a Programmer Analyst for 2 years until they laid most of us off again. I went back to a nursing job because the insurance industry changes with the wind. But, it was a great experience.