For a few years in my 20s I was determined to learn French. This endeavor began one day when a friend and I were camping, and our campsite was sandwiched between those of two German backpackers and a French tourist.
Sitting around a fire with our new friends that night, they told us to visit them if we ever came to Europe, and we said we would. My friend and I promised each other that he would learn German, I would learn French, and we’d make a trip there a few years later.
My friend did not learn German and to my knowledge never gave it another thought. (In hindsight I remember one of the Germans saying, “Oh, but you won’t be able to learn German! It’s too hard!) I did try in French though. I attended classes for a few years, bought flash cards and Michel Thomas CDs, and joined whatever mid-2000s language-learning websites there were. I was really into it.
I studied regularly and with great passion for the language, and also for my vision as a person who spoke impeccable French and maybe lived in Paris half the year. However, I didn’t do most of the things language teachers say to do, such as reading French news articles, or having conversations in French with native speakers. That stuff seemed a little extreme to me, or at least a little messy. I would do it later perhaps.
I remember believing I had some special insight into the language-learning process. My French teachers said my accent was impressive, and I knew that I knew some things many people didn’t. The accent is part of the language, first of all. It is to be worked on as much as the vocabulary. Also, you can’t depend on translating from English — you need to connect the real-world thing directly to the French term, marrying in your neurons the concept of cheese with the sound and mouth-feel of the word fromage. You must be able see a dog as un chien; you can’t first go to “dog” in your mind, because there’s no time for that.
Because of my special insights, I was making progress without doing the other stuff the teacher recommended. Maybe if I got stuck I would try those other things.
Needless to say, twenty years later I do not speak French at all. Looking back, it’s clear that I didn’t learn the language for a simple reason: I didn’t do the things that the people who actually learn languages do. At the time, though, I did believe I was headed somewhere, despite my unorthodox (and admittedly unrigorous) approach. I really thought I was going about it in a particularly smart and insightful way. Which in hindsight sounds very dumb.
I think I’m prone to this particular kind of self-deception, where you believe there’s a shortcut or compromise that works for you and not others. It seems so, because you are making progress. You’re learning things and feeling pretty cool. It feels every bit like you’re really getting somewhere, yet you’re vaguely aware that other people undertaking the same endeavor would probably not consider your strategy adequate. Years later, when the thing you were trying to make happen did not happen, you may or may not reflect on why.
There have been times I’ve recognized this mistake in others, at least. A few years before my French campaign began, I had a guitar teacher who was an excellent player and a horrible teacher. He would cancel every other lesson a few hours before, and take fifteen-minute phone calls in the middle of my 30-minute lessons. He was also very overweight and said he was determined to lose a hundred pounds. During my lessons (and perhaps those of other students) he would often drink a 32-ounce protein shake, and he recommended to me a kind of “high protein bread” that he said was really working for him. I didn’t know much about macronutrients back then, but I sensed he would not achieve his goal.
I’ve always been a regular gym goer, about 50% of the time at least, but even during my regular stints I never quite stuck to the recommendations. I would select a popular program, immediately make substitutions for the harder lifts, not do quite as many sets as recommended, and miss a day here or there, once or twice a week.
Yet — I made progress! My way worked. I was definitely healthier and stronger. The fact that my progress was relatively slow and intermittent didn’t occur to me, because I had nothing to compare it to. Meanwhile others around me were dutifully doing their three to five sets with heavy weights, and staying in the gym for much longer. Why were they so obsessed? You don’t need that many sets! I don’t, at least.
After employing one of these “I am a special case” shortcut strategies for a long time, you may or may not attribute your eventual failure to achieve your vision with the fact that you insisted on not doing it the way the successful people told you to. It may just feel like you organically lost interest, or “shifted priorities”, or that the real breakthrough is still on its way.
Part of the problem with these unorthodox strategies is that they do often give you initial positive results, and that can make you feel like it’s going to take you somewhere. You do feel better when you add some vegetables to your diet, even if you change nothing else. You will get stronger if you start lifting weights randomly at the gym, and you will learn some measurable quantity of French if you do flash cards a few times a week for a month.
But you probably began with the desire for a real transformation, of the type you see others achieving, and it can take a surprisingly long time to notice that that isn’t happening. “Progress” may be happening, but your goal isn’t.
Recently I’ve begun experiencing a pattern of epiphanies in various areas — productivity, health, learning — wherein I finally stop doing a thing in my special shortcut way that “works for me.” Instead I start doing it the way people successful in those areas do it, and suddenly I experience strong and consistent results, for the first time in my life.
Oh! It turns out that if you wash the floor with a bucket and cloth regularly, your floors always look great. If you try to get by with Swiffering and spot-cleaning, they look ok, at least half the time, ignoring a few trouble spots.
Oh! It appears that if you lift weights with high intensity for a moderate number of sets, and you don’t skip workouts, you keep getting stronger and fitter, like all those strong and fit people. If you just get your couple of sets done, most of the time, a good part of the year, you feel fitter than you otherwise would have, much of the time.
It’s like a gold mine, this secret of actually doing things the recommended way. I highly recommend it. Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?
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Photos by Romain Virtuel, Pauline Loroy, Sam Solomon, Bruno Kelzer and Bermix Studio
