Chaos and Order

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Intro — I Was Only Good at English Inside My Head

For a long time, I was only good at English inside my head.

On my morning commute, earbuds in, I would listen to an English podcast, chuckle quietly at the host's joke, and think, "Hey, I'm actually following this now." At night, lying in bed, I would picture myself a quarter from now, running a meeting in fluent English with a foreign colleague. In that mental image I never stumbled, my pronunciation was clean, and I even cracked jokes. Just replaying that scene felt good.

The problem was that the good feeling had nothing to do with my actual ability.

One day, while I was working at LINE, I suddenly had to take a short call in English with an engineer from the Japan office. Having "succeeded" in hundreds of imaginary meetings, I got tangled up right after the opening line, "Hi, can you hear me okay?" I was building sentences in Korean in my head, translating them into English, fixing the word order, and checking the tense, and the silences kept stretching out. The other person was kind, but after the call I sat at my desk in a daze for a long while.

What I realized that day was simple. I had not been "studying English." I had been "imagining a version of me who was good at English." Those are completely different activities. One is growth; the other is an impression of growth.

This post is about that difference. About why facing reality first, instead of covering it with a pleasant fantasy, is the real first step of growth. And about how that honest look can lead to small actions and feedback without sliding into self-loathing. These are the things I learned the hard way, by colliding with the world.

1. The First Step of Growth Is Seeing Reality Clearly

Articles about growth usually start with goal setting, motivation, or persistence. But in my experience there is one step that must come before all of those: **knowing exactly where you are standing right now.**

A navigation app makes this easy to see. No matter how precisely you enter the destination, if the starting point is wrong, the entire route is off. Facing reality is the act of placing your "current location pin" exactly where it belongs. Every plan built on a misplaced pin goes more wildly astray the more elaborate it is.

I learned this expensively with English. My "current location" was not "a person who can laugh along to a podcast" but "a person who can speak on prepared topics yet cannot form a sentence within three seconds in spontaneous conversation." Only after placing that pin correctly did a useful plan emerge: not "listen more" but "train the speed of spontaneous speech."

Here is why facing reality comes first.

- **It sets the direction.** Only when you know your weakness can you decide where to pour your effort. Vague effort mostly makes your strengths stronger while never touching the cause of your plateau.

- **It makes measurement possible.** Only with a known starting point can you measure progress. You get a baseline to compare against yesterday's self.

- **It strips away false comfort.** Fantasy gives you dopamine, not skill. Facing reality removes that fake comfort and lets you start the real work.

Psychologist Carol Dweck's idea of a "growth mindset" points to the same place. It is the belief that ability is not fixed but grows with effort, and for that belief to work it needs one precondition: **you must first admit that your current ability falls short.** Without admitting the shortfall, there is no room to grow.

2. Two Things That Deceive Us — Self-Flattery and Optimism Bias

If seeing reality is so valuable, why do we keep escaping into fantasy? Because the human brain is wired to see itself as better than it is. Let us look at two of the main culprits.

2-1. Self-Flattery — The Above-Average Effect

Most people rate themselves as above average. Driving skill, sense of humor, ability to collaborate, even code quality. Statistically everyone cannot be above average, yet that is what people report. This is called the "above-average effect," or the "Lake Wobegon effect."

There is a scene familiar to every developer. Before a code review, you think, "This is pretty clean." Then a colleague's comments land, and gaps in naming, exception handling, and edge cases surface. The code never changed; only your self-assessment was inflated.

2-2. Optimism Bias — The Illusion That I, At Least, Will Be Fine

The "optimism bias," well known from neuroscientist Tali Sharot's research, is the tendency to systematically overestimate that negative future events will happen to us less and positive ones more. Changing jobs, starting a company, dieting, side projects: at the start we all believe "I'll see it through," but the statistics tell a different story.

Overlapping with this is the "planning fallacy" that Daniel Kahneman described in 'Thinking, Fast and Slow'. We almost always underestimate how long things will take. That is why "this feature will be done in two days" becomes a week. When optimism bias meets the planning fallacy, the plan in your head is always rosy and reality is always rougher.

2-3. The Trap of Fantasy — Tasting the Arrival Drains Your Drive

There is a subtler trap. You would think that vividly imagining a goal raises motivation, yet psychologist Gabriele Oettingen's research often shows the opposite. When you only paint the successful future too vividly, the brain processes it partly as if it were "already achieved," and the energy to actually move can drop. At the very moment I lay in bed feeling good about an imagined English meeting, my drive was quietly leaking away.

In short, our default setting is "see ourselves as better than reality." So facing reality is not something that happens on its own if you sit still; it is a state you barely reach with conscious effort.

3. Metacognition — Looking at Yourself From One Step Back

So how do we correct an inflated self-assessment? The core tool is **metacognition**, the ability to think about your own thinking. It is seeing, from one step back, what you know and what you do not.

When metacognition is weak, you cannot tell "the feeling of knowing" from "actually knowing." You nod along to a lecture and assume you understand, but when asked to write it on a blank page, your hand freezes. This gap is called the "fluency illusion": it reads smoothly, so it feels like you know it.

Here are a few concrete ways to build metacognition.

- **Try to explain it (the Feynman technique).** Pretend you are explaining what you learned to someone, with nothing in front of you, and write it out. The point where you get stuck is exactly the point you do not know. If the explanation is not smooth, that is familiarity, not understanding.

- **Predict, then score.** Before a test or a presentation, write down "what score will I get," then compare with the result. The bigger the gap between prediction and reality, the more your metacognition is off.

- **Record and rewatch.** Record your English speaking, your presentations, your table tennis swing, and watch them back: the difference between the image in your head and reality is shockingly clear. The first time I saw my table tennis forehand on video, it was so far from the form I imagined that I laughed for a while.

- **Borrow other people's mirrors.** Metacognition has limits, so your blind spots ultimately need someone else to see them. A colleague's code review, a coach's feedback, a native speaker's corrections are those mirrors.

The goal of metacognition is not to put yourself down. It is simply to **place the current location pin accurately.** That is all.

4. The Most Powerful Tool — Colliding Through Small Actions

What shows reality most accurately is not analysis but **action**. Mental simulations always flow in my favor, but reality does not. So the fastest way to face reality is to collide with it directly, even on a small scale.

I learned this in English by moving from "imagining" to "calling." Making one genuinely awkward call taught me my true level a thousand times more accurately than a hundred imaginary meetings. It hurt, but it was accurate.

Why are small actions so powerful?

- **Reality grades you instantly.** Action is followed by a result. That result does not flatter your hypothesis; it grades it.

- **It exposes variables that imagination cannot reach.** When you actually do it, friction shows up that was never in the fantasy: nerves, network lag, an unexpected question.

- **There is no room for self-flattery.** "I think I can do this well" turns, in front of action, into "here is how it actually went."

The key is "small." If you wait for perfect preparation, you will never collide with anything. The trick is to lower the cost of colliding as much as possible and collide often.

[Fantasy loop — drive is consumed, skill stays flat]

Recall the goal -> Imagine the success scene -> Feel good -> Postpone action -> Imagine again

[Action loop — it hurts, but skill grows]

Recall the goal -> Try something very small -> Real result -> Spot the weakness -> Adjust -> Try again

Here are a few examples of colliding small.

- English: Before signing up for an hour-long conversation class, send one English sentence to a colleague on Slack today.

- Side project: Before writing the perfect spec, build the smallest single feature and show it to one friend.

- Writing: Before planning to publish a book, post one short piece somewhere public.

- Table tennis: Before studying form in your head, just play one game and lose.

The moment that losing, that awkwardness, that shortfall becomes visible is exactly where growth begins.

5. Feedback — The Device That Turns Collisions Into Growth

Colliding alone is not enough. You have to read what went wrong in the collision so the next attempt improves. The device that reads it is the **feedback loop**.

A good feedback loop has three conditions.

1. **It must be fast.** The shorter the gap between action and feedback, the faster the learning. One line of code review today is more powerful than a performance review six months from now.

2. **It must be specific.** "Good job" feels nice but carries no information. "This function has two responsibilities, so it would be better to split it" creates growth.

3. **You must receive it without defense.** If you take feedback as an attack, the information is blocked. Feedback should be received as data about the output, not as a verdict on you.

The third is the hardest. When you hear criticism, an excuse instinctively comes first. I too have often had "well, the reason it's like this is..." rising to my lips during a code review. In those moments I pause for a beat and ask myself, "Am I trying to win, or trying to learn?" Trying to win produces excuses; trying to learn produces questions.

Let me recommend one small habit that turns feedback into an asset: jot down each piece of feedback in a single line. When the same comment repeats twice, three times, it is not a coincidence; it is the coordinate of my weakness. Gather the scattered feedback and a pattern appears, and that pattern becomes the priority for the next round of learning.

6. Practicing How to Face Uncomfortable Truths

On the road of growth there is always a truth or two you would rather not see. Things like "my English is far weaker than I thought," "no one actually wants this side project," "the thing I believed was my strength is actually ordinary." Because such truths hurt the moment you face them, we naturally look away.

But a truth you ignore does not disappear; it comes back as a more expensive bill. The sooner you face it, the smaller the loss.

When I deal with uncomfortable truths, I think of the "Stockdale Paradox." It is a concept Jim Collins introduced in 'Good to Great', drawn from the attitude of Admiral Stockdale, a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He held two things at once: "the faith that it will work out in the end" and "facing the most brutal facts of the reality I am in right now." Interestingly, the ones who only optimistically said "we'll be released soon" were the ones who broke down first.

The lesson of this paradox is clear. **Hope and facing reality are not an either-or choice.** You should hold both. Believe that in the long run you will prevail, while refusing to prettify the brutal facts in front of you. This is what decisively separates it from happy daydreaming.

Here are a few small practices for facing uncomfortable truths.

- **"What is one fact I am avoiding?"** Once a quarter, ask yourself this question and write the honest answer.

- **Deliberately seek the opposing view.** Instead of evidence that your decision is right, deliberately collect evidence that it might be wrong.

- **Become someone who welcomes bad news.** When someone tells you an uncomfortable truth and you do not get angry, people will keep telling you. Those people are the lanterns of your blind spots.

7. Balance — Facing Reality Is Not Self-Loathing

Here we have to draw the most important line. Facing reality is not self-loathing. Confuse the two and the effort to see reality ends up sitting the person down instead.

The difference can be laid out like this.

| Aspect | Facing reality | Self-loathing |

| --- | --- | --- |

| Focus | The action and the result | The person itself |

| Expression | This presentation was under-prepared | I am just a hopeless person |

| Time | Limited to this one task | Expands endlessly into past and future |

| Outcome | The next action follows | Helplessness and avoidance follow |

| Premise | I can change | This is just how I am |

Facing reality says, "I fell short this time, so let me fix this part here." Self-loathing says, "I am inherently a deficient person." The former produces action; the latter stops it. They look alike in admitting a shortfall, yet they point in opposite directions.

A habit that helped me hold this balance is **separating "fact" from "judgment."** "There were three-second silences in the call" is a fact. "I have no talent for English" is a judgment. The fact becomes material for the next round of training, while the judgment is just a phrase that chips away at me. I consciously write only facts, and when a judgment slips in, I strike it out.

One more thing: it matters not to mistake self-compassion for cowardice. Psychologist Kristin Neff's research shows that people who, after failure, treat themselves the way they would treat a friend, rather than berating themselves, actually recover better and try again. Being kind to yourself is not the same as ignoring reality. Kind, but honest. That is the balance.

8. Practice — Planting Reality-Awareness in Daily Life

Now let me turn the abstract talk into concrete routines. Below is the framework I actually use.

8-1. Weekly Reality Check (15 minutes)

Once a week, spend just 15 minutes writing these three things.

1) Fact: What did I actually do this week? (actions only, not imagination)

2) Result: What was the result of that action? What feedback? (no nice packaging)

3) Next single step: So what is the smallest single thing I will collide with next week?

The key to this check is writing "imagination" and "action" separately. "I meant to study" is not an action. "I solved problems for 30 minutes" is an action.

8-2. Collide-First Principle

When learning something new, I make it a rule to collide at 50 percent preparation. Perfect preparation is usually a mask for procrastination. Make a result, however small, and learn from that result.

8-3. Feedback Inbox

Gather feedback in one place. Code review comments, English corrections, a coach's single remark. The repeating items become the priority for the next round of learning.

8-4. Quarterly Uncomfortable-Truth Check

Once a quarter, write down "What fact am I avoiding?" The single line you least want to write is usually the most important line.

Reality-Awareness Checklist

- Am I, right now, "imagining" or "acting"?

- Can I describe my current location based on facts?

- Have I recently collided with something directly, even on a small scale?

- Is there a repeating pattern in the feedback I have received?

- Is there an uncomfortable truth I am avoiding?

- Does my assessment point at "the action" or at "me as a person"?

- Am I honest, yet kind to myself?

9. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

**Q. Facing reality keeps making me depressed. Should I keep doing it?**

If it makes you depressed, that may be a sign your facing has slid into self-loathing. Reread "separating fact from judgment" in section 7. "I fell short this time" is facing reality; "I am inherently hopeless" is self-loathing. Stop at the fact and continue from there into the next action. If your mind feels truly heavy, seeking help from a professional is also a good choice.

**Q. Are you saying positive thinking is bad?**

No. Positivity itself is not the problem; positivity that covers reality is. Like the Stockdale Paradox, holding long-term hope and short-term reality together is the strongest stance. Believe it will work out in the end, but do not prettify today's facts.

**Q. I want to collide but I am afraid of failing.**

Shrink the size of the collision. Fear usually grows when the stakes are large. Start at a size where failure costs almost nothing, like a one-sentence Slack message, a single feature, a short post, and colliding itself becomes easy.

**Q. There is no one around me to give feedback.**

Recording and self-scoring become your first mirror. And if you post a small output somewhere public, reality's feedback comes back faster than you expect. No response is also a piece of data.

**Q. If you had to pick one fastest way to build metacognition?**

"Try to explain it." Write out what you learned with nothing in front of you. The point where you get stuck is the point you do not know. If it does not write smoothly, that is familiarity, not understanding.

**Q. My test scores keep rising but my real-world skill does not. What's wrong?**

There is a good chance your measuring tool is pointing at the wrong place. That was my Japanese. My JLPT score rose, but my dinner-table conversation did not. The ability the score measures and the ability you actually want to grow are different things. Change the kind of measurement to something closer to the real situation, like "how many times I got stuck in an actual conversation today" instead of a score.

**Q. My eye for quality is high but my skill cannot keep up, and it's painful.**

That is perfectly normal, and actually a good sign. My table tennis coach told me, "The eye that sees grows fast, the hand that does grows slowly." That your eye is ahead of your hand means you know what to fix next. That gap is not a defect; it is a direction sign. Give your hand time to catch up.

**Q. Every time I collide, an excuse comes out first. How do I stop it?**

Same here. In those moments I ask myself just one thing: "Am I trying to win, or trying to learn?" Trying to win produces excuses; trying to learn produces questions. And write down the feedback you received in one line, right there. The act of writing itself presses down the defense and turns the information into data.

**Q. You say collide small, but my goal is inherently big and won't break into small pieces.**

It is not about breaking the big goal into small pieces; it is about finding the "smallest first signal" toward the big goal. A whole book does not break small. But "post one paragraph somewhere public and watch the reaction" does. Think of it not as shrinking the size of the goal, but as lowering the cost of getting reality to grade you.

10. Common Traps — Patterns That Wreck Facing Reality

Finally, here is a collection of common traps where people slip while trying to face reality.

- **Analysis paralysis.** You do not stop at placing the pin; you analyze endlessly. The purpose of facing is action. Once the diagnosis is done, you have to move.

- **Degrading into self-loathing.** The trap covered in sections 6 and 7. If facing turns into an attack on the person itself, stop.

- **Escaping into someone else's reality.** You ignore your own weakness while seeing others' weaknesses precisely. Turn the mirror back on yourself.

- **Facing once and calling it done.** Reality-awareness is a habit, not an event. The location keeps changing, so the pin has to keep being re-placed.

- **Confusing imagination with a plan.** A success scene in your head is not a plan. A plan must be written down all the way to the smallest action you will collide with next.

11. More Stories From the Field — Japanese, Table Tennis, and Code

It would have been nice to learn this lesson once and for all from a single English call, but reality made me pay the same tuition several times. Only the domain changed; the pattern was always the same. The version of me who was great inside my head, and the version of me who fell apart on the ground.

11-1. Japanese — The Gap Between a JLPT Score and a Dinner Table

While working at LINE, I studied Japanese on the side. I memorized vocabulary, worked through grammar books, and felt proud watching my mock test scores climb. Because the number went up, I assumed my ability went up with it. But the moment I sat down at a dinner with my Japanese colleagues, almost none of the sentences I had memorized were of any use. People used contractions that no textbook contained, the timing of jokes was faster than my translation speed, and I laughed half a second late at the spots where I was supposed to laugh.

That day I realized, once again, that my pin had been in the wrong place. My "current location" was "a person who solves JLPT problems," not "a person who holds a living conversation in Japanese." The measuring tool, the test score, was failing to measure the thing I actually wanted to measure. When the measurement itself points at the wrong place, no matter how hard you raise it, you climb the wrong peak.

So I changed the kind of measurement. Instead of a score, I started counting "how many conversations at dinner did I fail to join tonight." It was an uncomfortable number, but that number was honestly attached to the ability I truly wanted to grow.

11-2. Table Tennis — The Form in My Head and the Form on Video

It was the same when I learned table tennis. I had watched pro players' forehands hundreds of times on YouTube. While watching, in my head I was already performing that swing. So when I actually picked up the paddle, I thought, "I can probably do this well too."

The moment my coach filmed my swing on his phone and showed it to me, I was speechless. The smooth arc I had been picturing in my head and the awkwardly hesitating arm on the screen belonged to two completely different people. Between watching and doing, there was a valley far deeper than I had assumed.

What my coach said stayed with me a long time. "The eye that sees grows fast. The hand that does grows slowly. That's why people mistake their hand for being as grown as their eye." This was not a story about table tennis alone. The eye that recognizes good code grows fast, but the hand that writes good code grows much more slowly. If you do not accept that gap, you will only ever be disappointed in yourself.

11-3. Code — The Difference Between "It Works" and "It's Well Made"

The same trap existed in development. As a junior, I thought the job was done once a feature worked. When I hit the test button and a green light came on, in my head it was already complete. But once a senior colleague's review landed, I learned anew every time that "it works" and "it can be maintained" are completely different dimensions.

Once, a PR I had submitted with confidence got this comment: "This code works now, but will the us of six months from now be able to fix it?" That single sentence widened my field of view by one level. I had been seeing only the narrow reality of "does it work now," while the senior was seeing the larger reality of "does it survive into the future." Even facing reality has a resolution, and that resolution rises the more often you borrow good mirrors.

11-4. A Table Tennis Match — The Me in Practice and the Me at the Match Table

Table tennis held another moment of facing reality. When I rallied with my coach in the practice room, my forehand looked fairly decent. So when I entered a club match, I thought, "I'll perform at least as well as I practiced." But the moment points were on the line, the ball that landed so well in practice caught the net and sailed past the line.

The me in the practice room and the me at the match table were different people. Practice was a frictionless environment; a match was an environment full of friction. Variables like nerves, the pressure of the score, and the opponent's tricky serves did not exist in practice. That day I realized I had mistaken "practice skill" and "match skill" for the same thing. After that, I deliberately turned part of my practice time into "practice games with the score on the line." Even fake friction, set up in advance, softened the shock of a real match a little.

The lessons from these four fields converge into one: the me in a frictionless environment almost always overestimates the me in friction-filled reality. So the most accurate mirror is to bring myself, as soon as possible, to a place with real friction.

12. Case Study — The Conversation on the Day I Shut Down a Side Project

Sometimes a single scene stays with you longer than an abstract principle. Let me transcribe a conversation from the day I wound down a side project I had clung to for a long time. The other person was a friend who had listened to me for ages, and a fellow developer.

> Friend: That project, have your users grown lately?

> Me: Hmm... honestly, apart from the friends who signed up when I first built it, it's pretty much the same.

> Friend: So how many new people came in?

> Me: Three over the past two months. But they all used it for a day and never came back.

> Friend: Why do you think that is?

> Me: I think it's because I haven't done any marketing. If people just knew about it, they'd surely use it.

> Friend: Hold on. Even those three who came in left within a day. Doesn't that mean it's not "they didn't know," but "they tried it and weren't impressed"?

I could not speak for a while in front of that question. I had been escaping into the comfortable story of "no one knows about it," while my friend was pointing at the uncomfortable fact that "even the people who know don't use it." The former is not my fault, but the latter meant I had to re-examine the very thing I had built.

When I got home, I did the "separating fact from judgment" from section 7, exactly as written.

Fact: 3 new users in two months. None returned after day one.

Fact: Hours I spent each week, about 6. User interviews conducted, 0.

Judgment (strike it out): "I don't have what it takes to build products" -> not a fact, just self-loathing

Next single step: Ask one of the three departed users directly why they stopped using it

I ended up shutting that project down. But I do not think shutting it down was a failure. The real failure would have been spending another year inside the fantasy that "I just need to market it," while knowing no one was using it. Because I faced the uncomfortable fact within two months, I saved a year. That year went into my next attempt.

What I learned from this conversation was two things. First, being near someone who asks good questions shrinks your blind spots. Second, the more an explanation makes you want to flee, the more likely it is the real core.

13. Step by Step — A Facing-Reality Execution Checklist

To make everything so far actually roll forward, it helps to lay it out as an ordered procedure. These are the steps I follow when I start something new.

[The Facing-Reality 6-Step Loop]

Step 1 Place the current location pin

- Write, in one sentence and as fact only, "Where do I stand right now?"

- Not imagination/hope/plan, only actions and results that already happened

Step 2 Choose the smallest collision

- At a size where failure costs almost nothing

- At a size you can finish today or tomorrow

Step 3 Actually collide

- Execute at 50 percent preparation

- Perfect preparation is usually a mask for procrastination

Step 4 Record the result as fact

- No nice packaging

- Write "fact" and "judgment" separately

Step 5 Leave one line of feedback

- External feedback or self-scoring

- Star the items that repeat

Step 6 Re-place the pin

- Your location has changed, so return to Step 1

- Facing is not an event but a repeating habit

The key to this loop is that one lap must be as short as possible. If one lap is six months, you learn only twice a year, but if one lap is a day, you learn hundreds of times a year. Your rate of growth ultimately depends on how fast and how often you run this loop.

14. Seen by Comparison — The Dreamer, the Self-Blamer, and the One Who Faces Reality

Placing three people who handle the same situation differently side by side makes the spot of the one who faces reality much clearer. Take the example of a presentation that went badly.

| --- | --- | --- | --- |

The dreamer skips reality and jumps to a nice future. The self-blamer expands reality to the whole person and sits down. Only the one who faces reality narrows reality to "this time, this segment, this action," and from there produces the next step. All three botched the same talk, but a month later their positions diverge completely.

15. Not Making Fantasy the Enemy — WOOP as a Bridge

I have torn into fantasy a lot so far, but fantasy itself is not the crime. The problem is when fantasy steals the seat of reality. If imagination becomes fuel for action it is good; if it becomes a substitute for action it is bad. There is a bridge that separates the two: "WOOP," proposed by psychologist Gabriele Oettingen.

WOOP is an acronym of four letters.

W (Wish) one thing you want to achieve

O (Outcome) the best result when it is achieved

O (Obstacle) the real obstacle inside you that blocks it

P (Plan) a predefined if-then plan for when that obstacle appears

The key is the third O, the "obstacle." An ordinary happy fantasy stops at W and the first O. You paint only the good future and feel good. WOOP refuses to stop there and forcibly inserts the facing-reality question, "But what actually blocks me in reality?" Then you decide a concrete response to that obstacle in advance.

I applied WOOP to English like this.

W: hold spontaneous English meetings with foreign colleagues comfortably

O: state my opinion right away in a meeting without getting stuck

O: the real obstacle - I can't form a sentence within three seconds in spontaneous speech

P: every day before work, record 60 seconds of self-talk English on a random topic

When fantasy stayed at W and O, a year would pass with nothing changed, but once I faced the obstacle and wrote down P, my hand finally moved. WOOP did not set fantasy and facing reality against each other; it was a bridge that pulled fantasy down into facing reality. It is not that happy fantasy is dangerous, but that fantasy which skips the obstacle is dangerous.

The conclusion of this section is this. Facing reality is not about forbidding fantasy; it is about forcing every fantasy to attach an "obstacle" and an "execution plan." Keep the dream, but honestly see what stands between that dream and the present you. That is this entire post reduced to one sentence.

Now, when I catch myself in bed imagining a splendid future, I ask myself: "Did that fantasy just now contain an obstacle, or only the good scene?" If it was only the good scene, that is a sign it was escape, not fuel. In that case I switch off the fantasy and move one smallest collision onto that day's to-do list. That small act of moving it over is how I return to the spot of reality every single day.

Closing — Starting From the Painful but Accurate Spot

Let me return to that awkward English call. The call wounded me, but it also gave me a gift. Instead of a fake meeting I had succeeded at a hundred times in my head, it told me my real location. Only after starting from that accurate spot did my English, for the first time, begin to grow slowly but for real.

Happy fantasies are sweet. But sweetness is not skill. Growth only ever begins from a slightly uncomfortable spot, namely "the spot where I actually stand right now." Looking at that spot honestly, yet kindly. And taking the smallest step from there to collide.

If you do just one thing today, I suggest this: instead of the splendid future scene you keep painting in your head, pick one smallest, most awkward action you can take right now, and collide with it. That awkwardness will grow you a thousand times more accurately than any fantasy.

References

- Carol S. Dweck, 'Mindset: The New Psychology of Success' — the source on growth mindset. https://www.mindsetonline.com/

- Tali Sharot, 'The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain' — research on optimism bias. https://www.ted.com/talks/tali_sharot_the_optimism_bias

- Daniel Kahneman, 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' — the planning fallacy and judgment biases. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374533557/thinkingfastandslow

- Jim Collins, 'Good to Great' — the Stockdale Paradox. https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/Stockdale-Concept.html

- Kristin Neff, 'Self-Compassion' — research on self-compassion and resilience. https://self-compassion.org/

- Harvard Business Review, 'The Feedback Fallacy' — how feedback actually works. https://hbr.org/2019/03/the-feedback-fallacy

- James Clear, 'Atomic Habits' and related essays — small actions and systems. https://jamesclear.com/articles

- Gabriele Oettingen, 'Rethinking Positive Thinking' — the trap of positive fantasy and WOOP. https://woopmylife.org/