Practice does not make perfect; practice makes you a dumb repetitive robot.

Calibration is the key to any type of mastery.

It’s like learning how to use chopsticks. You can try using your toe to use the chopsticks, and keep telling yourself “practice makes perfect”, and practice 3000 times a day. At the end, you might be a pro master in using chopsticks with your toe, but you’re nowhere as efficient as the Asian kid who uses his hand to use chopsticks.

Practice has 2 functions:

1.Finding out the right method with trial and error from practice.
2.Internalize the right method with repetition.

Most people just think as long as they internalize something with practice, they are all good. This is like practice using your toe to use chopsticks; you sure are internalizing a method. But you are internalizing a wrong method.

This is where calibration comes in: Finding out the right method, so you don’t waste time “practicing” pointless stuff.

Learning can be separate into a 3 stages:

Stage 1 – Stone age exploration

This is when you don’t know anything at all, and you do not have any type of success. This is when you will try every possible method you find until you see a little bit of success. You are exploring new ideas.

Stage 2 – Analyze success

With all the trials and error from stage one, you finally got a bit of result. So you try to find out what the positive results have in common. And then you stick firmly to that idea.

Stage 3 – Internalize pattern

Since you somewhat found a formula to your success, you try to repeat the process again and again. This leads to you getting consistence results. It seems happy right?
But what if… you could have done better?

So you found out that you can somewhat control the chopsticks using your toe, and you just keep practicing using your toe to control the chopsticks. Eventually you are really consistence and you can finish a bowl of rice in 30 minutes using your toe to control chopsticks. Does that mean you are at your best potential?

To most people, they are very eager to learn at the start as they are in stage 1. Then once they found out 1 method that works for them in stage 2, they stick to it like there is no tomorrow. They proceed to internalize it will all their will at stage 3, then they internalize it some more…

This is problematic.

You are now so internalized with your old method; you start to build an ego around it. You are not open to new suggestion, because not only you don’t want your past practice to go wasted; your ego is also exposed to the risk of being proven “wrong”. You are having a large ego around the being the “toe chopsticks master”.

Calibration can help you become a true “chopsticks master”. And its unbelievably simple and easy to execute. You only need to ask yourself 2 questions:

1.What do I want?
2.How can I achieve it without using my existing method?

Know what you want is the first step to improvement. This has been said in two millions other articles about self improvement site and I will not go through this too deeply.

The most important part is, asking you “How can I achieve this goal without using existing method?”

You are the toe chopsticks master. One day you ask yourself “How can I finish a bowl of rice in 5 minutes?” You then start asking yourself “How can I do it without using the existing method?”After asking this, what do you think you will do? Probably start switching from using left foot to right foot, using your armpit, using your belly button, and maybe at some point you start using your hand! It might be just a slight possibility, but at least you have open up a possibility, comparing to rigidly sticking to your toe method. And hopefully you will find out using hand is actually more comfortable/efficient than using your toe.

It doesn’t matter if you are just doing slight change like “using left toe to right toe”, as long as you start getting out of your comfort zone, you will be getting different results. You will have more in depth understanding of the subject matter. You might be able to derive thought process like “Oh belly button doesn’t work because it got no joints to do small movements, oh and our hands have so many joints… maybe it worth a try”

You know “how” to do it, you are a great executor.

You know “why” you’re doing it, you are a grand master.

Calibration makes you finds out why.

Have fun finding your best “chopsticks method”.

Welcome... My Fellow Monkeys

Imagine seeing the world in a different perspective.

A perspective that is somewhat dehumanizing, morally-unconcern but somehow useful perspective.

I am standing in a huge party with light flashing all around and people getting high. Looking into the happy face of people. All in a sudden they start looking like monkey. That face that feature, you can't actually see much different the way people look from the monkeys from discovery channel. At this time on your whole perspective changed. You start seeing how social dynamic had govern us. And you wonder "Why the hell is everyone so happy socializing?" because evolution engineering told us to.

To be honest it is very depressing to see the world in this perspective where you think even yourself is just an animal that is governed highly by the force of evolution.

On the bright side. You see yourself and everyone else being so constrained to their gene. You will realize that stuff can be manipulated. Seemingly complicated social interaction can be decoded into easily replicable piece/theory. You find your own unpredictable emotion and motivation start to show a bit of pattern. And life seems easier.

This is how I come up with the idea of this blog. To contribute a bit of value to people who is devoted to self improvement (especially my fellow pick up artist) and simply providing some interesting read for people.

Zhu