Focus On Trouble
“The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was.” – Walt West
Finding failures to focus on brings us to the next point… why it’s worth focusing on failures.
According to the talk you watched, those that focus on the things they can’t do (or the things that give them trouble) end up being the winners in the end. This is totally obvious, I think, but it’s also something that’s worth bringing up (since it’s easy to forget). People enjoy working on the easy stuff, the things they’re good at… The problem, though, is that you won’t get better this way. The key, I think, is to change the way you think about trouble spots. Instead of thinking of them as trouble spots, you have to think of them as the key to getting better. Enjoy them as challenges to overcome, not things blocking your way, you know?
Once you’ve figured out your failure spots (and I say that in a positive, awesome, “omg I know what I need to do better to get better” sort of way) you can then focus on them. You can spend more time on them.
If you figure out your problem spot is kanji, then focus on kanji for a while. Figure out what part of kanji is giving you the most trouble, and then figure out how you can fix that. It won’t go away if you ignore it, so you might as well make everything else better by making this one thing better.
Think of it this way – if the problem is on’yomi reading of kanji, it’s affecting a lot of different things. It affects your ability to read vocab properly. It also affects your ability to know what kanji means (at least a little bit). On top of that, it will affect your ability to figure out meanings of words too. One problem affects a lot of different things – if you fix that one thing, you’re making multiple things better, not just the one trouble spot.
Spend some time right now trying to figure out what you can do to help your trouble spots and make them into strong spots. Eventually, your “trouble spots” will get smaller and smaller, until they barely exist at all. That’s why people who focus on their trouble spots get better than those who try to make their strong spots better. Everything affects everything else, and when you fix these, everything gets better.