Ever notice how it barely registers in your mind as long as everything goes smoothly?

It’s like that with my students.  Sometimes I feel slightly anxious thinking that there are literally hundreds and hundreds of people reading, applying, adjusting, working on their eyesight based on the BackTo20/20 lessons.

And I don’t hear from 90% of them, more than maybe once or twice a month.

Sure, the program based on a decade of direct experience, besides fixing my own eyes.  The original version even was a serious collaboration, several years ago, with a brilliant practitioner.  It’s been tweaked using the collective experience and progress reports from hundred of students.  It’s been reviewed, updated, and improved with the input of optometrists and ophthalmologists from more than a dozen countries.  Based on forum feedback I’m always looking at where it could be even better, easier, more effective.

The work that went into the program (and still goes into it), I barely even mention it in the sign-up.  It sounds too much like a sales pitch.  But it’s true, I might never work this hard and this long on any one thing again in my life.

Why all this talk?  Because, success and failure.

There’s no guarantee that any one person will get back to 20/20, despite the program’s name, just from applying it.  But the odds are pretty great.

Those odds change, pretty immediately and drastically, once an individual starts deviating from the action items in each session.  Especially early on, the first month, it’s critical to do exactly as suggested.  It’s also the easiest way to do it, and by far the most effective.  But you know what?  There’s always that one person (or two or three or five), who know better.

Or maybe they just get impatient.  Or they didn’t log in for a week and are now binging on sessions, cherry picking suggestions, having selective memory on things to be done.

I’m not mad at them.  Actually, I empathize.  I’m the worst when it comes to any sort of instruction.  Last week I bought a rice cooker , fancy thing with seven zillion modes and buttons and features.  All the buttons are in Thai.  It looks like the alien script you’d seen in some science fiction movie’s UFO control center.  But never mind that.  Jakey is fine with filling the thing up with rice and water and pushing buttons.  How hard could it be.  It’s a kitchen appliance.

So, I get it.  I’d take BackTo20/20, say yup yup, got it.  Lower prescriptions.  I’m gonna buy some right now.  Good to go.

But that’s the question to ask, that will determine success and failure.

Will you do everything exactly as the program advises?

Because it’s already set up for maximum simplicity.  Things that you don’t really need, are already cooked out of it (or at least moved further down the line, to the optional sections). Anything you remove from there, is getting into the structural support.  Turning BackTo20/20 into JengaMaybe20/20.

There are two, maybe three of those in the forum right now.

Great.  The fact that they’re in the forum, as posts and threads, means those students are going to get a handle on things.  The problem is never in whether you mess up, it’s how you deal with it from there.  Silently quitting, that would be less than ideal.  But the posts are good news.  “Hey, looks like my experiment didn’t quite work.  Time to take a step back.”

I say “maybe three”, because I see things cooking where clearly someone isn’t following the guidelines.  Is it just a few days of a little over excitement or willful going of in another direction?  We’ll see.

But there it is.  A quick post, in case you’re like me, inclined to throw away the manual.  Remember that this whole thing was created by the no-manuals type.  I’m on your side, I’m all about the shortcuts, all about making it as instant and easy as possible.  This is already that, I took care of the minimizing for you.

And good job posting in the forum, whenever things don’t go quite as planned.  As long as you don’t give up, failure is just another interesting learning experience.

Cheers,

-Jake