I’m going to keep it short, because today is the big day that I go to the Money Cultivation Course.

I want to pick up on a sentence from 1日３０分 that I copied as part of my ongoing process of learning Japanese.

「別に勉強といっても堅苦しく考える必要はありません。」

My dash of soy sauce interpretation:   You don’t have to think of studying as something formal, ceremonious, or stiff.

The key word is 堅苦しい (katakurushii) which means formal, stiff, literary, proper, and ceremonius.  The first character 堅 means hard, rigid, stiff, uptight.  The second character, 苦, means trouble, worry, difficulty, pain.

In other words when you think about the word study from now on, don’t get your undershorts in a bunch.   Change your mind or change what and how you are studying.  (Change your undershorts regularly too–you never know when you might be in an accident.)   Study can have a heavy connotation to it, but maybe the most effective studying happens when you become captivated by an issue or a process.

School isn’t something that just happens in school.   College dropouts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs didn’t stop studying.   They changed the focus of what they were studying and created new possibilities and technologies by doing so.

Of course, you don’t have to be the next Bill Gates.   Follow your interests, take little bits of time throughout the day for the subjects and skills that make your heart sing.  Don’t worry, study.  Be a samurai at play.