Small Shifts, Big Changes

09 Jun, 2025

I always thought that creators - YouTubers, bloggers, anybody that does any creative output, etc. - were coping when they said that it just felt kind of overwhelming to make a video or write a post. Now that I’m the one making the content, I am slowly starting to understand and sympathize with the feeling.

Last post I was complaining about my non-existent Japanese study / practice. Well, that problem has now been (temporarily) solved. I was watching a video¹ that went over how one of the reasons why goals, particularly new year goals, don’t get completed isn’t due to laziness or lack of self discipline. It’s just that most people simply forget their goals. The video gave some solutions to the problem such as writing your goals and saving it as your phone wallpaper or putting a sticky note on something you see everyday but for me, just the idea that I was simply forgetting my goals rather than me being unable to achieve them due to some character flaw was a nice reminder. I haven’t done anything to figure out how I want to consistently remind myself but one step at a time right?

As for the Japanese practice, it’s fairly straightforward goal of listening to an hour of japanese everyday. I always hated listening because it felt that it required more focus and I would always want to make sure that I could hear every word and then search that word up to make sure I understood the video 100% and that would make things extremely tedious. My fear was that if I don’t do this, then it becomes way too easy to “white noise”² what I was listening to and then I’d end up getting no benefit. A mindshift that recently occurred to me was to simply just listen and not do any of the tedious searching and pausing. Very ground-breaking I’m sure³. But it definitely felt like it took a load of my shoulder. Changing my mindset from “I need to understand everything” to “I’ll just listen for an hour to hit my quota and if I understand great if not it’s fine” makes everything just feel more relaxed. After doing Japanese for this long and still not being able to fully understand stuff, I always feel like I have to go extra hard and make sure that I get maximum language gains from whatever I’m listening to but ironically as a result, I just end up doing no Japanese. The fear of whitenoising is simply stopping me from consuming any content and is an invalid fear anyhow. Assuming I understand no new words through context or search up anything, just the fact of coming across words I already know or words I know in new contexts makes the listening valuable and educational. This new approach should hopefully lead to a healthier consumption of japanese media and a more sustainable japanese habit. Only time will tell.

Haven’t been reading much though. I do need to finally get back to ONE PIECE. I said end of last year that I’d be done by middle of next year and yet here we are…