Select Page

Hard work doesn’t have to feel hard

Comic books are for serious learning. No, really.

There is something counterintuitive about language learning that presents a roadblock to students: when done correctly, it doesn’t feel difficult.

I’m a huge fan of a manga called Attack on Titan. Last week, the latest volume of the manga was released. Of course, I had it preordered on my Kindle Fire (an excellent gift from my wife a year or so ago). That means that it was downloaded and ready to go in the morning, well before the book stores opened, and I finished reading it before any had opened.

Of course, the manga is in Japanese. The good news for me is that the Japanese in Attack on Titan is about mid-level in difficulty. What that means is that I can read it quickly, and I meet a new or rare word only once every few pages. Usually I can guess the meaning of the word without looking it up. Depending on the amount of text, I may not need to look up any words to understand the plot like a Japanese person would. Reading it isn’t difficult for me.

Some people might think that consuming material of such low difficulty will prevent me from progressing in my Japanese learning. That’s where they are wrong.

Language learning is a numbers game. You will never be able to memorize a word the first time you hear or read it (unless you are a rare kind of genius). You need to be repeatedly exposed to the word, and then recall the word after some time has passed, for you to successfully memorize it. There is no shortcut.

While reading the latest volume of Attack on Titan, I came across a word that comes up semi-regularly in the series: 彷徨う、samayo, wander. It’s not a word I hear used often in daily conversations. Typically, if teachers come upon a student wandering the halls during class time, they get angry and yell, 「うろうろするな」。They don’t like it when students うろうろ, uro-uro。 But, I never hear them say 彷徨う、which essentially has the same meaning. There are many words that are written, but not really spoken, in Japanese, and 彷徨う is one of them.

As far as I can recall, Attack on Titan is the only source of the word that I’ve encountered. The first two or three times I read it, I looked it up in a dictionary. But, when it popped up again in the latest volume, I didn’t need to look it up. I read and understood it the first time.

To be clear, I learned a fairly unusual word from an easy-to-me source of Japanese that the average teacher would never consider using in a classroom. Classrooms are for serious material, like textbooks and Powerpoint presentations, not comic books.

There is meaning in that.

Do what feels good, baby.

People are constantly told by our environment that valuable, real things, only come with significant effort. That’s usually true. However, the mistake we make is believing that the effort to get those things must feel difficult.

Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes we need to make special efforts to find time, make plans, and meet with a man or woman that we like. We are often forced to confront menial, mind-numbing tasks in order to get to the good stuff. Or maybe we have to do the exhausting, messy work we hate after doing the stuff we like.

But when we work hard, it doesn’t always have to feel hard.

I was, unfortunately, a victim of the hard-work-means-bad-feelings mind virus for a significant portion of my life. Even now, I have to regulate that feeling. For much of my life, I wanted to learn how to program. However, I had the dumb idea that I needed to be a real programmer. I needed to be able to take on the biggest challenges and do the most difficult kinds of programming. My dad advised me to learn a programming language called Visual Basic. It was almost an insult to ask me to learn anything basic. Basic wasn’t for me because easy meant fake, useless, not worthy of respect. So instead of learning Visual Basic (perhaps one of the more useful programming languages to know), I tried to learn Lisp, a niche programming language that was said to be good for programming AI. That sounded hard, so it was obvious to me that Lisp was a real programming language.

And yes, it was hard. In fact, it was so hard that it perhaps was the final straw, after many years of trying to learn to program, that made me decide to abandon programming altogether. Instead, I decided to focus all my energy on learning Japanese.

My experience learning Japanese has taught me that learning isn’t about the feeling of effort, only the effort itself. If we can find an activity that is valuable to ourselves and others, and it doesn’t feel like it takes any effort or energy for us to practice and master that activity, we are in the ideal place. That’s the place that dreams come true.

The hard work of learning languages is exposing yourself to sources of input for long periods of time, trying to understand, and then using what you’ve repeatedly exposed yourself to.

“Repeat after me” for more brain damage

But, there’s a problem: Teachers understand that repetition is the key to learning language, but they often fail to understand or act upon the more important principles: energy and attention.

I will never feel exhausted after reading Attack on Titan. I could read it over and over and never feel bored. Reading it doesn’t take energy from me; it gives me energy. Proof of that is that I can focus all of my attention on it without being distracted. In fact, thoughts of Attack on Titan distract me while I’m doing other activities.

I have yet to preorder a Japanese textbook.

During a class last week, one teacher I work with made students do a repetition activity that I can only describe as inhumane. Imagine that the students were reading the previous sentence for this repetition activity. The activity went like this:

Teacher, reading out loud from a textbook: “During”.
Students, repeating out loud: “During”.
T: During a.
S: During a.
T: During a class.
S: During a class.

T: During a class this week…inhumane.
S: During a class this week…inhumane.

After a couple of sentences, the teacher asked me to take over. I had to hold back laughter when I saw one of the high-level, serious students being put to sleep by the activity. A young man that is usually active and well-behaved in class was forced unconscious. The other students were no more eager to follow along. However, they did, because the teacher is notorious for his short temper and strict enforcement of order and student participation. As he forced me to participate in the mass torture of 30 innocent students, I couldn’t help but feel a sick amusement. It was like watching those compilation videos of people falling and hurting themselves, except I was the guy putting the banana peel on the ground and making them slip. And I knew it. I knew this was the worse activity any teacher had made me conduct. I looked at that young man and thought, “Oh shit, this has to be causing brain damage.”

And it does cause brain damage. People are programmed by years of unrelenting torture in the classroom to believe that learning, like you get in school, must feel difficult and that you have to simply push through the torture. Then they try learning something like Japanese and think that if they are having too much fun and everything is too easy, they aren’t really learning.

Mass self-torture can be prevented if teachers understand that attention and energy from students must be earned. You can’t demand it without negative consequences. They absolutely fail their students and set them on a bad path by using their authority to force order and participation.

But, I don’t blame teachers for not understanding. The culture of education encourages them to conduct their classes the way they do. They have no great need to please their students when they can demand their attention and obedience.

The situation is further complicated by the individual interests of all the students. Even if teachers want to make the class interesting for the students, how can they possibly do so for all of the students? Won’t there simply be a few who never will be interested in the subject they teach?

Nobody cares…why should I?

It’s difficult to understand the challenge that teachers face. Let me paint a picture.

In a seventh grade class, there are two students that have tapped out very early in their educational careers. The boy and girl both consistently nod off during class. Long ago, they gave up even trying to follow along. They don’t see the value of English, and are completely unintimidated by any fear-mongering from the teacher about how much they’ll regret not studying later in life. The problem was bad especially at the beginning of the school year because students were still a bit rowdy, unaccustomed to life as junior high school students. They were more chatty and a greater number of students were showing early signs of giving up.

It was a dangerous time. Unproductive behaviors, if repeated, are called bad habits. Further, behaviors are contagious. Habits spread, whether good or bad. When they spread, they become what we call culture. And for many reasons, bad habits are more contagious than good ones.

If the boy who isn’t interested is talking and the teacher doesn’t do anything, that feels like permission to lose interest and to chat during class.

If the teacher doesn’t care if he does that, why should I care? If my friends wanna chat, why shouldn’t I chat? If they nap during class, why shouldn’t I? If English doesn’t matter to them, why should it matter to me?

Classrooms have their own culture, but students are members of the broader cultures of family, neighborhood, and nation. If mom and dad don’t care about my English test scores, why should I listen to the teacher? Why don’t mom and dad care? Because they notice that their neighbors, their friends, and their coworkers all speak Japanese and don’t need English. Is English really necessary?

Teachers are often at odds with very large, powerful forces that they are unprepared to challenge. Teachers can’t keep the attention of their students because their students are focused on their friends, family, and their nation’s cultural values. Students feel like their English teachers are wasting their time. Teachers demand attention and respect, but we direct our attention only at things that we think are interesting. Other ways of saying interesting are valuable, important, thought-provoking, or entertaining.

The Japanese word 面白い、omoshiroi, has two meanings. It often is used to mean “funny”, as in funny-haha (not funny-weird). However, it can also mean 興味深い、kyomibukai, “thought-provoking”.

If teachers don’t make their subjects 面白い, then they will always be forced to use fear and punishment to demand grudged attention and participation from their students.

But, each student has their own interests. How are teachers supposed to cater to all of their students’ interests? It seems like an impossible task. Much easier to simply beat their students over the head with fear and punishment for being bad students.

Bad habits are contagious preciously because they are usually easier than the alternatives.

I think I have a solution to the problem. Nothing changes for the better if we don’t first change our mindset. I have painted a dark picture of the situation, but there is hope. That hope can be expressed in three words.

You are important.

I have one teacher who makes her students repeat the same mantras at the beginning of every class.

Help each other
Be Original
Learn from your friends
Express your ideas
Hole in one

Keep smiling
English only
Eye contact
Pronunciation
Compliment
High five
Action
Reaction
Gesture
Energy
KEEP CHARGE

However, I think she would be better off with just one sentence.

You are important.

She learned the mantras from some other source that probably told her that reminding the students to do all those nice things can actually influence them in a good direction. It also reminds the students what the teacher expects from them.

Or maybe she learned that ideal classes express the above behavior. Asking students to express that behavior would lead to the ideal classroom environment.

Here is the problem: That’s a lot of words, and they become hypnotizing, meaningless noise if the students aren’t reminded of the importance of them. How can the teacher remind them? Well, she can model the behavior. Challenging, but doable. She can remind them of the mantras. But what if they don’t buy what she’s selling?

She has a difficult class that these mantras have no effect on. The class culture is very bad. Students laugh at each other when they make mistakes. They love sarcasm. They talk constantly and are easily distracted from class material. It’s unsafe for the teacher to introduce any interesting information or encourage discussion of the material because students immediately get sidetracked. They roll their eyes when she scolds them. They show little respect for the teacher or the system they are in.

They are absolutely obsessed with each other, though. Certain students are clearly the leaders of the classroom. They take the teacher’s scoldings directly and laugh them off. Other students support the leaders so that they don’t have to take the scoldings themselves. They feed off each other’s energy and behavior.

How does the teacher handle them? Fear and punishment. Does it work? Not so far.

One time, she was absent from school. The next day, she said that she went to the doctor. She “joked” that it was due to work stress. Just a joke, she assured me. As the school year has dragged on, her words have become more aggressive and adversarial towards the students. She is a teacher at war.

She has reminded them repeatedly that their ability to get into good schools will be affected by their test scores. If they don’t pay attention to what she teaches, then their test scores will suffer. As a result, they won’t get into good schools and their futures may suffer. They need to “feel nervous” (she literally said that) and to take studying more seriously because what they do now will effect their future. Further, if they talk, they aren’t only hurting themselves. They are hurting the serious students, their friends, too.

In other words, she is saying that the hard work of following her lessons might feel hard, but there’s no choice unless they want to ruin their lives.

Those mantras aren’t working. The teacher’s actions are like holding up an “Applause” sign, being ignored, and then getting angry at the audience.

But how can you be angry that people don’t pay attention? How can you be angry that people are easily distracted by things that they see as more important than what you are doing?

There is a better way. As I was observing this class, I remembered something I learned from one of Dale Carnegie’s books, How To Win Friends and Influence People. In one section titled “How to Make People Like You”, Carnegie writes:

Philosophers have been speculating on the rules of human relationships for thousands of years, and out of all that speculation, there has evolved only one important precept. It is not new. It is as old as history. Zoroaster taught it to his followers in Persia twenty-five hundred years ago. Confucius preached it in China twenty-four centuries ago. Lao-tse, the founder of Taoism, taught it to his disciples in the Valley of the Han. Buddha preached it on the bank of the Holy Ganges five hundred years before Christ. The sacred books of Hinduism taught it a thousand years before that. Jesus taught it among the stony hills of Judea nineteen centuries ago. Jesus summed it up in one thought—probably the most important rule in the world: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”

 

You want the approval of those with whom you come in contact. You want recognition of your true worth. You want a feeling that you are important in your little world. You don’t want to listen to cheap, insincere flattery, but you do crave sincere appreciation. You want your friends and associates to be, as Charles Schwab put it, “hearty in their approbation and lavish in their praise.” All of us want that.

So let’s obey the Golden Rule, and give unto others what we would have others give unto us, How? When? Where? The answer is: All the time, everywhere.

People want to feel important. So, make them feel important!

Carnegie then gives an example of how a school teacher applied this philosophy.

The life of many a person could probably be changed if only someone would make him feel important. Ronald J. Rowland, who is one of the instructors of our course in California, is also a teacher of arts and crafts. He wrote to us about a student named Chris in his beginning crafts class:

 

Chris was a very quiet, shy boy lacking in self-confidence, the kind of student that often does not receive the attention he deserves. I also teach an advanced class that had grown to be somewhat of a status symbol and a privilege for a student to have earned the right to be in it. On Wednesday, Chris was diligently working at his desk. I really felt there was a hidden fire deep inside him. I asked Chris if he would like to be in the advanced class. How I wish I could express the look in Chris’s face, the emotions in that shy fourteen-year-old boy, trying to hold back his tears.

 

“Who me, Mr. Rowland? Am I good enough?” “Yes, Chris, you are good enough.” I had to leave at that point because tears were coming to my eyes. As Chris walked out of class that day, seemingly two inches taller, he looked at me with bright blue eyes and said in a positive voice, “Thank you, Mr. Rowland.”

 

Chris taught me a lesson I will never forget—our deep desire to feel important. To help me never forget this rule, I made a sign which reads “YOU ARE IMPORTANT.” This sign hangs in the front of the classroom for all to see and to remind me that each student I face is equally important.

Although the situation in that story and the situation in my English teacher’s classroom are very different, I think that You are important is a simple idea with deep meaning. It means:

You have my attention.
You are worthy of attention.
Others are watching what you do.
Others are counting on you.
What you do matters.
Your life matters.
I and other people expect great things of you.

Tool of Persuasion: Pacing

I thought a lot about whether in modern society, telling students You are important might be counter productive. Especially in the US, students often appear to have over-inflated egos. As a former young person, I can say with confidence that many young people think they are important. Is it really responsible for teachers to feed their students’ egos? Shouldn’t students feel humbled by their teachers and pay attention to the very important things the teacher has to say?

The great students of persuasion will say no.

Before leaders can change minds, first they have to synchronize with the people they wish to lead. Scott Adams calls it Pacing. Pacing means using the same words, body language, and expressing the things you have in common with the people you want to lead. Once you pace them, you are in a good place to lead them by expressing different opinions.

Why Pace first? Because by Pacing, you build trust with those you wish to lead. People like and trust those with whom they share something in common. Once someone likes and trusts you, you are in a position to change their mind. Your disagreement doesn’t pose a threat because they believe you have their best interests in mind.

Do students in my teacher’s English classroom think they are important? Yes. Much more important than the teacher and the study material. They and their friends are #1. Before any teacher can lead them, first they need to know that the teacher agrees with them on that point. In fact, if the teacher doesn’t express a genuine appreciation for the importance of her students, her students will not trust that she has their best interests in mind.

She doesn’t care about us. She only wants to torture us with boring questions, activities, and robotic busy-work. She wants us to shut up because that makes her job easier. She’s just mad that our bad grades make her look like a bad teacher. She knows English isn’t important, so she’s just wasting our time. It’s all about her.

If I’m being honest, I’m somewhat sympathetic to that line of thinking. She comes off very robotic and disinterested in making students enjoy English. She plays music at the beginning of class, but then cuts it off—for time—at the end, then sucks the fun out of it by making the students read it again and record how many words they read. She doesn’t seem to even pay attention to the students much of the time. (As an example, it took her about 20 minutes into one class to realize that a boy in the front row had drawn a somewhat clownish design on his face with marker.) She has even told me that she tries to keep students busy so that they don’t have time to goof off.

What she says often appears to the students to be attacks on them and what they think is important. She tries to persuade them with fear and punishment, but that only serves to entrench them further. It makes it more difficult for students to look like “good” students because they then appear to ally themselves with the enemy. They see comfort and unity together—against her. To them, she looks angry, weak, and out of touch.

You are important can help fix that.

It tells the students what they want to hear. It is what they really believe about themselves. And if all of them are equally important to the teacher, then whether active or passive in class, what the student does matters to the teacher. The teacher is paying attention.

The teacher knows I’m capable of great things. She wants us all to succeed. She wants to see us do great things. This class, English, school, and life have meaning. If she gets angry, it’s because she cares about our future, not because we are making her look bad or making her job more difficult.

What do you do?

She might also take some more advice in Carnegie’s book. A world famous magician once told him that other magicians, before going out on stage, would say things like, “Well, there is a bunch of suckers out there, a bunch of hicks; I’ll fool them all right.” But, the magician said something else. Every time, before going out on stage, he said to himself:

“I love my audience.”

How about, “I love my students”?

You are important and I love my students reminds the teacher that the class isn’t about her, it’s about her students. Finishing the material before the tests come up isn’t the goal. Getting from A to B in the curriculum isn’t the goal. Serving the needs of the system isn’t her goal.

Helping turn weak students into strong, free adults is her goal. The Very Important business of English is secondary to teaching them how to live and learn.

What is the best way to live and learn?

Well, follow where your attention and energy lead you. Learning English, or Japanese, or anything, needs to be interesting to you. Don’t torture yourself like others have tortured you. You can work harder and longer and get better results when you enjoy what you do.

Because, you see, hard work doesn’t always have to feel hard.

Japanese School Girls, Poetry, and Consciousness

Japanese School Girls, Poetry, and Consciousness

This week, I had an interesting English lesson in which I taught a Japanese junior high school girl about human consciousness.

I was at Mister Donut, sipping coffee and reading a heavy book called I am a Strange Loop when her mother called me. She said that her daughter wanted to translate a well-known set of a hundred Japanese poems into English. Since I’ve done a large amount of translation work myself, I knew that the innocent request from my cute little student was not so simple. It is monumental task that long-time professionals spend years and get paid highly to do.

So I said, “Sure, no problem.”

 

I am a meaning-creating machine.

I am a Strange Loop is a book about human consciousness. The author believes that human consciousness is strange because it appears that the abstract “I” has more power than the physical universe. Humans, thanks to our thinking abilities, appear to create meaning. The more meaning we create, the more we are able to manipulate the physical universe.

The author is especially interested in the fact that humans are reminded of things. We draw conclusions about seemingly unrelated things by analogy. When someone eats a piece of cake and says that the piece they are eating is disgusting, we draw the conclusion that the whole cake must be disgusting, too.

Sometimes, we use our ability to find so-called “hidden meanings”. Storytellers may have certain events happen in their stories that have a simple, level-1 meaning, but that event is meant to hint at a deeper, level-2 meaning. In fact, the truth that they wish to communicate is often the level-2 meaning which can only be understood by analogy.

However, as I said, humans create meaning. When a farmer looks at gray clouds in the distance, what does he see? Does he see something different from what his cow sees? Yes, he does. The cow sees gray blobs in the sky. The farmer sees future food. He “connects the dots” which he himself creates through simulations in his mind. After all, clouds don’t mean future food if you don’t plant seeds.

It’s that ability to create meaning from context that is very interesting to the author because that ability can be directed towards ourselves. The learning machine can direct its attention toward itself. The “I” is a meaning-creation machine that can look at itself and express its own meaning.

The important thing to understand is that the ability to find and create meaning from context is an essential quality of human thinking.

After struggling to understand the secrets of human consciousness and reality, I finished my donuts and coffee and went to help a girl translate a masterpiece.

 

Poems and card games

My student is a Japanese junior high school girl who enjoys Japanese literature. She especially likes a game called karuta. Karuta is a card dueling game. To win at karuta, players need to be extremely familiar with a set of 100 famous Japanese poems. Here’s how a karuta game is played:

  1. Two players sit on the floor and face each other.
  2. Between them are a set of cards from a selection of 100 Japanese poems, face up on the floor.
  3. An announcer recites a poem.
  4. At any point during the recitation, players grab the card with the poem on it.
  5. The player who grabs the most correct cards wins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTh2cj2xkEU

 

As I said, my student wants to translate those poems into English. At the beginning of our lesson, she asked, “Can we just replace all of the Japanese words with English words?”

Oh, if only that were true.

I explained that translating is complicated. There are several layers of meaning to words. Words not only express ideas, they also express feelings. They have a flow and rhythm. And as I said above, we often use words to express several layers of meaning. When translating any text, especially ones with several layers of meaning intended by the author, we need to be very familiar with the text we’re translating or we may lose important meaning in the process.

The freshman junior high school girl was understandably overwhelmed by even my simple explanation.

So instead, I decided to show her.

She pulled out a book of poems and opened it to the first one. We translated it together.

In a small shack standing on the edge of the autumn fields, the straw roof’s seams are coarse, so the sleeve of my clothing is getting wet from the trickling down night dew.

I asked my student to explain the meaning of the poem to me. She said that the author was an emperor who slept in a poor person’s house. The experience taught him the difficulty of life as a poor person.

During my lesson, I wanted to do two things:

  1. I wanted to draw attention to two sections: “the edge of the autumn fields” and “the straw roof’s seams”.
  2. I wanted my student to try to read and guess the meaning of some of the words.

For number one, in Japanese, the grammatical structure of the two expressions is the same.

The choice of using “edge of” and “roof’s”, rather than “field’s edge” and “seams of the roof” is mine to make. The alternatives express essentially the same idea. Well, at least at one level of meaning. But I’m not intimately familiar with the text, so it’s possible that one translation more accurately expresses the author’s intended meaning. Furthermore, this is poetry. The flow and rhythm of a poem may be just as important to understanding the meaning as the words themselves.

As for number two, the word I wanted her to guess was “roof’s”. I taught her the meaning of “straw” and “seams”. Given that she knew the meaning of the poem in Japanese, and given that I had taught her the meaning of the surrounding words, I believed she had a fighting chance of guessing the meaning of “roof’s”.

 

Learning from context with sudoku

To help her understand what I was asking her to do, I used another Japanese game as an example: sudoku. Sudoku is a logic puzzle game involving numbers. A 9 x 9 board is divided into 9 separate large boxes with 9 smaller boxes inside them. The puzzle begins with some of the squares filled in with numbers. The rules are as follows:

  1. The small boxes in each large box need to be filled in with numbers 1-9.
  2. The large boxes can only have one of each number. There can be only one 1, one 2, one 3, etc.
  3. Similarly, vertical and horizontal lines of boxes spanning across the large boxes can only have one 1, one 2, one 3, etc.

 

 

Following those rules, players need to guess which number goes in each blank box. They guess based on the numbers that are filled in at the beginning, the rules above, and logical rules of deduction. I showed her a sudoku board and I showed her how we could figure out the possible numbers in a box based on things we already knew (rules and the numbers already on the board).

Learning new words from context works exactly the same way. Grammar rules are like rules of the game. English is left to right, subject-verb-object, etc. Words you know around words you don’t know is context.

There is no end to the amount of vocabulary that you have to learn in a foreign language. Learning from context is absolutely necessary because we can’t constantly refer to a dictionary. And even if we could, it would be slower than learning from context much of the time.

Learning and making meaning from context is not only essential for language learning, it’s essential for life. We constantly have to make sense of things that happen in objective reality. We have to look at events large and small and answer the question, “What does this mean? Is it important?”

 

Combing through the wreckage

Unfortunately, my student couldn’t get the meaning of “roof’s”. But, what did she get?

  1. She learned that translating complex thoughts is an imprecise and challenging effort.
  2. She learned that learning from context is the essential quality of language study.
  3. She learned a bit about deductive reasoning.
  4. She learned about the many different ways words express meaning.

After a long journey, we ended with a bit of reading practice. When we were all done, she still seemed full of energy and ready for more. I look forward to helping her develop her essential human qualities through English.

Music to my ears・耳に音楽

Music to my ears・耳に音楽

Personal development material, old and new, deals with a central challenge facing everybody: happiness. How can we be happy? On Facebook, you might see pictures circulating that say things like, “True happiness comes from within.”

Has a more unhelpful truism ever been uttered?

The problem is the question. It’s too high-level. What is “happiness”? The mystery that exists in that one word is enough to make any equally high-level answer to the question totally unactionable. We can think at the level of “happiness”, but we live the level of “go here and do that.”

Wise people have come across a simple technique for finding happiness. People are typically unhappy because they can’t have the things they want. It’s hard to stop wanting. It’s part of what makes us human. How do we embrace our humanity yet find happiness?

The wise people say this: the first step to undoing the unhappiness is to observe our lives and ask: What do I have? Instead of focusing our attention on the things we want but don’t have, refocus on what we do have. Reconnect to the things we are taking for granted.

That’s what people call gratitude. Gratitude is a way to check in and stabilize our emotions. When our emotions are starting to take over, when stress and worry about the future start to overwhelm us, the best thing we can do is simply change our focus to the things closest to us.

Recently, I was experiencing a lot of irritation when I got home from work. I would be upset, seemingly for no reason, and avoid contact with others. I just wanted to be alone.

But, I knew I had to change. The first thing I did was begin fixing some problems in my environment. After I started getting my environment under control, I decided I needed to purposefully counteract my desire to be alone or “disconnect”. So, I made a new rule for myself:

When I get home, as soon as possible, I give my wife a kiss.

It’s been a successful technique for boosting my mood when I get home.

Then, a couple days ago when I got home, something happened. After I put my things down by my desk, I gave my wife a kiss before going to change my clothes. As always, she said, “Welcome home!”

Something about her beautiful voice echoed inside my head, like I had just heard music for the first time. I felt a deep sense of connection with her, and strangely, the world. I also felt proud for changing myself and creating that moment. While walking up the stairs, I almost cried.

There are a lot of things I want: a new camera, new lenses, new house, a new chair, etc. But, that’s okay. I’ll get those things. The good news is that I have something really important to me already.

They say true happiness comes from within. Maybe. But having someone to come home to and kiss everyday doesn’t hurt, either.

パーソナルデヴェロップメントの取材は古くても新しくても、みんなが向かっている挑戦について語る: 幸せ。私たちはどうやって幸せになれる?フェースブックでは、こういうことが書いてある写真をよく見る:「本物の幸せは中から」。

これより役に立たない自明の理があるのだろうか?

問題は質問だ。レベルは高すぎる。「幸せ」ってなんだ?その言葉の中に入っている謎のせいで、同じレベルの答えが使えなくする。「幸せ」のれべりに考えられるけど、「行ったりやったり」のレベルに生きている。

知恵のある人は幸せになる簡単な方法を見つけた。何か欲しいけど、手に入れられないことで憂鬱になることが多い。欲しがることを辞めることが難しいな。それは人間性の一つだしどうやって人間性を保ちながら幸せになれるんだろう?

知恵のある人はこういう:その憂鬱をなくする初めの一歩は自分の人生を検察して、自分に聞く:何を持っている?ほしいけど持っていないものに集中するより、持っているものに注意をする。無視していることと再接続すること。

それは感謝と呼ばれることだ。感謝は自分に確認して、気分を安定する方法だ。気分に支配されそうな時、将来の不安で圧倒されそうな時には、一番いいことは一番近い物事に注意することだ。

最近、仕事から帰ったらイライラしていたことが多かった。理由なしで何となくイライラしていて、他の人と接触することを避けた。一人になりたかった。

しかし、僕は変わらないといけないと思った。まず、環境を整理しないといけないと思った。周りの環境を整理し始めた後に、一人になりたい、つまり接続を切りたい意欲を直すことにした。なので、自分に新しいルールを作った。

帰ったら、できるだけ早く、妻をキスすること。

気分を直す効果的な技になっている。

そして、2日間前帰った時に、何か起こった。僕のものを机に置いたことと着替えたことの間に、妻をキスした。いつものように、「おかえり」と言ってくれた。

なんでかわからないけど、初めて音楽を聴いたように、妻の美しい声は僕の頭の中に響いた。彼女と深くつながっていることも、変に世界につながっていることも感じた。自分を買えたことに自慢していた。階段に上っていた時に、泣きそうだった。

ほしいものが多い:新しいカメラ、レンズ、家、机、などなど。でも、それはいい。いつの日か手に入れる。でも今もすでに大事なことを持っている。

幸せは中からってよく言われる。それはそうかも。でも、帰った後にキスできる人がいることも悪くない。

ローンチ:影響力の武器

ローンチ:影響力の武器

よし、リストがあって、お客さんになりそうな人たちと一緒にコミュニケーションができている。でも、どうやって「なりそう」を「なった」にできるのでしょうか?

僕はまだ自分でしたことがないけど、ウオーカーさんは「影響力の武器」をお勧めしてくれる。どういうことでしょうか?

「影響力の武器」という本の中に、6つの主な武器が書いてある。それらの武器で人を動かせる。その「武器」をある程度に悪く書いてあるけど、本当はよくも、悪くもない。人間は基本的に、いつも情報を一生懸命探す時間がないので、心理的な近道が必要なんだ。高いもののほうが価値がある、希少なもののほうが価値がある、みんながよく評価しているものが価値があるとかの心理的な近道になる考え方が、一般的に役に立つだろう。逆に、完全に使わないほうが大変だろう。

もちろん、武器として悪人がいるけど、自分が持っている価値のあるものを売るために、使っても何も悪くない。逆に、お客さんを手伝っているってことになる。

じゃあ、その6つの影響力の原則は何でしょうか?

  1. 相互
  2. 一貫性
  3. 好み
  4. 権威
  5. 希少さ
  6. 総意

でも、ウオーアーさんはそれらの原則しか書いていないわけじゃない。なので、上の6つの原則を少し説明した後に、ウオーカーさんは追加で書いた原則についても話す。

1.相互
人は子供の頃から「何かもらったら、何か返す」という原則が教えられる。本能になる。相互はとても役に立てて、基礎的な原則なので、相互をしない人はいろんな悪口で言われる。

人の相互性を発揮する方法:

価値のある物事をあげる。
価値のある物事を諦める。

2.一貫性
人は意見・意思を公開したら、その意見・意思と一貫した行動を取る強い傾向がある。電話で「選挙で投票するでしょうか?」と聞いたら、「はい」という人が多い。それで、投票する人数が確実に増える。なぜなら、「はい」と言った人たちは自分が嘘つきや偽善者だと考えたくない。

人の一貫として行動したい心を発揮する方法:

自分の意思を公開してもらう。
小さなお客さんにしてもらう。
どんな素晴らしい人になりたいことを思い出させる。

3.好み
人は誰でも信用するわけではない。誰を信頼する?好きな人。どんな人が好き?

  1. 自分と同じような人。
  2. 魅力的な人。
  3. 自分をほめる人。
  4. 一緒に協力した人。
  5. 自分が好きなことと関係がある人。

人に好かれる方法:

誠実な関心を寄せる

4.権威
人は権威を持っている人を信頼する必要がある。みんなは無限な時間がないので、いろいろな業界の専門家を頼るしかできない。

人に自分の権威を示す方法:

証明書を飾る。
自分ができた商品を見せる。
制服を着る。

5.希少さ
なかなか手に入れられないものは価値があると思う人が多い。ある物事のことに詳しくなかったら、値段を使って買うかどうか決める人が多い。現在にざらにあるものは将来に希少になって、手に入れるチャンスがなくなりそうだったら、買う!ってあまり考えずに決める人が多い。

希少さを利用して、人を選ばせる方法:

自分の時間を高く売る。
時間限定のセールを行う。
いろんなレベルの商品を出す。
お客さんを努力させる。

6.総意
みんながしていることは間違いだってことが少ないだろう。人気な商品は価値があるだろう。自分の業界の中に人気な道具を使えば、誰も文句を言えない。

総意を利用して、人の選択をしやすくする方法:

人気な商品をアピールする。
過去のお客さんの意見を示す。
ブランド品を出す。
自分のお客さんをアピールする機会を作る。

以上は「影響力の武器」という本の中に書いてある原則。でも、ローンチのウオーカーさんは以上の原則を含めて、他の原則を紹介してくれる。でも、このブログで以上の原則の説明だけで足りると思う。

じゃあ、リストに、どうやって影響力の原則を利用すればいいのか?

ローンチ:準備

ローンチ:準備

ローンチするために準備しないといけない。第一はリストだな。でも、ただ広告するためのリストではない。あなたのリストは本物の力がある。リストに入っているみんなは読者しかいないわけがない。みんなの声は力になる。

どういうこと?

あなたが作る商品をローンチする前に、何を考えたらいいでしょうか?

たぶん、あなたが一番不安なのは「誰かが私の商品を買ってくれるかな」って。

その不安を確実にぶっ潰そう。このブログを読み終わったら、あなたは完全に安心する。逆に、わくわくするようになる。リストの力を見せてやる!

ローンチする前に、まず「お客さんの助けを求めよう」と考えたらいい。えっ、どういうことって?

お客さんはあなたが出す商品を作ってくれるよ。まあ、完全に作るわけじゃないけど、お客さんとの直接なコミュニケーションでお客さんが商品の完成した姿に影響を与える。

ソーシャルメディアでお客さんが何を求めているか、どんなことが好きなのか、何にワクワクさせられるのかとか理解できる。あなたと同じような趣味とか持っている人と会話しているでしょう?いろいろ共有しているでしょう?一方通行じゃないよ。みんなはあなたに大事な情報を教えてくれる。まあ、直接に言わないかもしれないね。

具体的なシナリオを考えよう。あなたはDIYに興味がある。よくDIYのビデオをYoutubeで観る。観ても観てもたまらない。自分もDIYをしたいと思って、ビデオでいろいろ想像する。可能性が広がっていくよね。特にいいDIYのビデオを見つけることがあるね。もしかして自分が実際に使ってよかったとおもうチュートリアルとかアドバイスが入っているビデオがあれば、どうする?

自分が参加しているDIYのコミュニティーに共有させていかがでしょうか?それだけじゃない。自分の話も共有して。ほら、ビデオを撮ったでしょう。せっかく自分がやりたかったDIYをしていたので、ビデオを撮ろう!と思ったでしょう。そのビデオも共有したら?あ、でも、問題にぶつけたよね。その問題はどう解決したかな?その話はもしかしてみんなの助けになるかもしれない。それも共有しよう。

あれ、参考として使ったビデオが作ったYoutuberはあなたのコメントに返事してくれた。なんかうれしいな。うわー、いいねが増えたな!嬉しい!

それだけじゃない。DIYはスタイルがあるよ、スタイル!そのスタイルに興味がある。いろいろな素材がある。あるDIYのスタイル・素材が流行っているなって思う。その流行っているスタイルが好き。

よし、DIYをしよう。ちょっと大きいプロジェクトをしよう。なんか「DIY空間」を作りたいな。そのDIYの良さを見せたい。自分の腕も見せたい。でも、それより、DIYを楽しめたい。みんなも一緒に楽しんでくれるかな?

プロジェクトを進めながら、その進展をソーシャルメディアで見せる。みんなは応援している。でも、なんか決めないといけないことがあるけど、どうしたらいい分からない。壁の色、床の模様や天井の素材、何か決めないといけない。じゃあ、投票を出そう。みんなはどっちが好きかな・・・なんで好きかな?

ああ、そっちが好きなのか。なるほどなるほど。おお、かわいいから好きって。そっちにしようっか。

理解できたかな?

ローンチ:リストを作る方法

ローンチ:リストを作る方法

じゃあ、物語を語ったら、どこで誰に話すか?

結末から始めよう:メールイングリスト。

えっ、どういうこと?って?

そう、メールで物語を語るのだ。リストの中に、自分のお客さん、もしくはお客さんになるかもしれない人たちが登録しているので、そのリストで物語を語る。

僕はおかしいと思った。僕はメールマガジンの登録を避けるか、消す。お前らのメールは要らん!っていつも思う。みんなもそうでしょう?誰が誰も知らない人のメールリストにとろくするのか?誰が迷惑メールを求めるのか?まさか、ね?

ん、でも、違うね。僕はほとんどのメールマガジンをアンサブスクライブするけど、登録するやつもある。

ミスタードーナツ。

僕はもともと太っている人で食いしん坊なので、ドーナツを毎週のように食べていた時がある。新しいドーナツがあれば、すぐに食べたくなっていた。まあ、普通にそんなに印象的なドーナツが出なかったけど、見た目はおいしそうで、普通においしかった。コーヒーと一緒に食べたらもっとおいしくなるやつもそんなに変わらないやつもある。大体、クリームは要らない。僕は重い奴が好きなので、一番好きなのはオールドファッショングレイズだね。チョコはいいけど、日本のチョコのスイーツはアメリカと違って、軽い甘さがあるので、日本のチョコはあまり食べたくない。逆に、日本風のほうを食べたい。お茶味のドーナツとか、ね。アメリカではジャムドーナツがあるけど、知っている?イチゴやベリージャムが中に入っているやつ。あ、プリンドーナツもある。アメリカのプリンは日本のプリンと違うけどな。

おっと、何の話ていたっけ?

あ、そうだ、メールマガジン。

みんなは僕のようにドーナツが好きでドーナツのメールマガジンに興味ないだろう。でも、僕はミスドファン。ミスドのドーナツでもコーヒーでも大好き。このブログの投稿をミスドでミルクが4個を入れたコーヒーを飲みながら書くことが多い。

僕はただの人ではない。ミスドにとっては、大事な繰り返すお客さんだ。

あなたも僕のようなファンを探している。簡単ではない。だけど、世界が大きい。大事なファンが絶対にいる。探せ!

あっ、でも、リストがないよ!どうしたらいいの?って?それは大変だな!しょうがない、初めの一歩を教えてあげよう。

リストを作るために以下の作戦がある:

  1. 宣伝。GoogleAdsとか使って、自分のサイトに人を集めて、サイトでリスト登録フォームで登録者を集める。
  2. 実際な宣伝キャンペーンをする。知っているでしょう。ポースター。パンフレット。ティッシュを配る人。
  3. ソーシャルエディア。ツイッターとかで会話で参加する。自分のオリジナルコンテンツを共有(!)する。世界に自分が持っている価値を広げる。

どちらにも利点と弱点がある。GoogleAdsはターゲティング広告できるので、使えば、サイトを見てくれる人は多くなるだろう。お金がかかるけどな。実際な宣伝キャンペーンは安いけど、ターゲティングしないので、いっぱい出さないと、自分のお客さんに接触しないな。

でも、ソーシャルメディアは興味深い。最初にあまり役に立たない。ネットワークを作らないと、なにも役に立てない。しかし、あなたは自分を世界に見せている。自分が作られる価値のあることを共有している。会話で参加している。小さな会話でも、大きい会話でもな。それで、注意を引いて、あなたに興味を持ってくる人が増える。

うまくフォロワーを増やしたら、一番有効なファンを集める方法になるかも!みんなは口コミがすごくいいマーケティングを知っているでしょう?自分のファンがフォローして、リツイートしたりしてくれたら、お客さんがもっと増える可能性が高くなる。

利点はまだまだある。ソーシャルメディアで、お客さんやお客さんになるかもしれない人と直接にコミュニケーションができる。それはなかなか強力な機能だよ。僕はザ・ローンチを読む前に、ソーシャルメディアが作るポテンシャルが分からなかった。お客さんとうまくコミュニケーションができるようになったら、お客さんを味方にできるようになる。

どういうこと?なんでそんなにすごいと思っているのか?メーリングリストはどうなったんだって?