Seven years ago today, I landed at Narita Airport an overweight and exhausted 25-year-old American.

I had hatched a plan to attend a Japanese language school for three months. I seem to have forgotten to purchase a return flight.

The Cafe

Like any reasonable adult, my first order of business in Japan was to obtain caffeine. Having spent the previous weeks energetically memorizing a myriad of Japanese characters along with a smattering of vocabulary, I reasoned that ordering some coffee was well within my abilities.

Kōhī. Got it. Or maybe an Americano? Perhaps I’ll just ask the barista for a recommendation.

And so, upon arriving in Shinjuku, as (for some reason) most of us gaijin do, I cracked open Google Maps to discover a quaint cafe not half a block away.

I waltzed in buzzing with confidence. Unfortunately, the menu was entirely in Japanese and my reading speed was not up to the challenge. No problem. I’ll just order “coffee”. I’m sure they have a usual thing called “coffee”.

I approached the counter, opening my mouth to speak. But no sound was made. I could not form a simple sentence! I could not say it - not, in Japanese. I instinctively recoiled as I came to the sudden, exquisite precipice of that immense gulf known only as “experience”, uniquely partitioning “knowledge” and “ability”.

As a mutt may tuck her tail to show embarrassment, I too tucked tail to mumble the English, “Coffee, please…”. The damage was done. I had wittingly signed up for this thing, an adventure to learn an entirely new language, which even the most cursory inspection reveals to be profoundly insurmountable.

Balancing a cup on a wooden tray, I moped to the second floor to bemoan my imminent demise in humble solitude.

Teaching Your Children

I don’t think I want to have children - most definitely not now, and then maybe not at all. Yet occasionally I find myself considering a relatively odd question: if I did have children, what would I teach them first?

I really enjoy this question. It’s not about children, and it’s not about teaching. It’s about introspection. Do you know how you got here? Do you know, can you say out loud, what principles have manifested your reality?

The single most impactful concept in the last seven years of my life has been spaced repetition. Spaced repetition is the idea that the more often you encounter something, the more easily you can recall it. With the help of technology, spaced repetition can guarantee deadlines for problems requiring the often scary-sounding task of “memorization”.

Want to be a doctor? You’ll have to memorize quite a bit of raw information. Lawyer? Same deal. A foreign language? Absolutely. In fact, these subjects aren’t even particularly difficult at the ground level; instead, it’s the sheer volume of information, and the requirement to have it completely and entirely on the tip of your tongue, that produces the illusion of a challenge.

But what if you had “solved” memorization? These goals are no longer difficult - at least, not in the traditional sense. Instead, they simply take time. There is virtually no stress involved. Moreover, if you have been blessed with a passion for the subject matter, your brain is just along for the dare-I-say enjoyable ride. It’s beautiful.

Spaced repetition is how I reached Japanese competency. Undoubtedly there are other ways to do it, but this one is reliable, trackable, sustainable… you get it. I’m a fanboy. And if I had a child, his or her first words would be, “Spaced repetition! WAH!!”

Well, probably not.

An Adjacent Concept

If you’ve ever watched even five minutes of an introductory weight training video on YouTube, surely you were introduced to “progressive overload”. In short, you lift ever-so-slightly more than you did last time, and your body adjusts to it accordingly.

It sounds silly, but you can literally trick your body into squatting an impressive multiple of your body weight by just adding a kilogram each week and hitting the gym for a year or two.

I think the concept is even more fascinating when we bring it full circle to spaced repetition. Both ideas break down an initially impossible goal into bite-sized goals over an extended duration. If you can progress through the smaller goals, you will inevitably arrive at the final one. But there’s something that pushes them past mere goal-setting frameworks.

Both spaced repetition and progressive overload have the additional property of being simple to understand at any level; you can hold the entirety of a plan in your head at once, and yet also know clearly what to do next. That mythical state of twin visibility, simultaneously observing the forest and its trees.

It’s as if spaced repetition is the “mental” solution and progressive overload is the “physical” solution to a particularly rewarding class of human problems. With both in hand, there are few long-term goals that cannot be achieved given habituation, patience, and perhaps an initial spark of inspiration.

So I imagine the kids’ first words are more along the lines of, “Spaced repetition! Progressive overload!! WAH!!!”

Present Day

Today, I’m an overweight and exhausted 32-year-old American. Not much has changed there.

But now I speak Japanese, have a decent squat, and my beautiful wife periodically yells at me to do the dishes. The present situation is infinitely more satisfying.

I don’t know if the next seven years will be in Japan, the United States, or somewhere new altogether. But I’m confident that no matter what goal I get obsessed with next, I have a strategy to get through it.