The cutting that won't stop

Xunzi opens his essay by describing what learning is actually like.

Blue comes from the indigo plant, he says, and is bluer than the plant. Ice forms from water and is colder than the water. Wood bent into a wheel becomes round, and after the shaping is done, it stays round.

Then the two lines that Chinese children have recited for two thousand years. To carve and keep carving, and you hollow a hole in wood. To carve and then stop, is to hollow a hole in sand.

The image is deliberately unpoetic. There's no breakthrough, no moment of revelation, no inner transformation. There is one tool and whether you keep moving it.

A wren in the forest makes a nest out of one twig, and if you knock it down, it makes another one the same size. Xunzi uses that as the insult for people who start over politely every year.

The problem with most self-improvement is that it optimizes the start. Bold plans, new notebooks, clean calendars, and then the tool stops moving in week three.

Nobody gets better in one day. People get better on the day they notice the stopping point, and pick the tool up again the next morning.

MOJOWAY keeps the record across months, which is exactly what this requires. Awakening isn't the lightning. It's the second attempt on a Tuesday.