Expanding your potential and acquiring important new skills requires passion, commitment and, most important, believing in yourself
Since I moved to Asia almost two years ago, one of my goals has been to learn to speak Mandarin Chinese. Learning Chinese is hard work. I don’t really get to see the value of it as there aren’t too many Mandarin speakers in Hong Kong who I can practice with and the progress is very slow. Every week, I consider giving up, but every now and then I get a glimpse of the progress I have made and it keeps me going.
This isn’t the first time I have tackled difficult learning objectives. I have achieved two black belts in different martial arts and have learned to Salsa dance, to surf and to play the guitar. (I won’t be joining a band any time soon, but I can bang out a mean “Puff the Magic Dragon” for my kids.) And Chinese is actually the third foreign language that I took on, after Spanish and French, both of which I speak with some proficiency.
I am proud of these accomplishments, particularly in language. It is unusual to find an American who is multilingual, but even more unusual that I have learned these languages as an adult. Most multilingual people (certainly in the U.S. and perhaps worldwide) are those who had significant exposure to their other language(s) during childhood.
The question you may be asking (and the one I ask myself as I tackle my next learning challenge) is, how have I been able to succeed at learning these difficult subjects? The overwhelming majority of adults who set a goal to learn a language or a musical instrument or a martial art never actually fulfill it. What makes me different?
I believe that learning something difficult requires maintaining three critical ideas at the forefront of one’s mind. These mindsets are sometimes at odds with one another, so it is not always easy to maintain them simultaneously, but they are the key to success.
1. Believe that change is possible. Only if you believe that it is possible to learn the thing you are trying to learn, can you muster up the motivation necessary to do the work and to stick with it over the long haul. Reminding myself of the challenging things I have learned in the past inspires me to stick with Mandarin, even when it is difficult.
2. Acknowledge that change is hard. If you buy a book with a promising title like Conversational Chinese in Minutes you are likely to get frustrated quickly. Learning a language is possible, but it is not easy. You have to be willing to put in the hours studying, and make a fool of yourself from time to time (as has happened to me on numerous occasions when I try to use my Chinese in a social setting)!
3. One bite at a time. Like the old “how do you eat an elephant?” analogy, learning a language (or a musical instrument or a martial art) is about the accumulation of tiny incremental improvements. Learning Chinese is frustrating because it is a slow grind. The progress is not easily seen daily, weekly, or even monthly. It is only now, after studying it for a year, that I can look back and say, “Wow, I really have come quite far!” But the progress made invariably pales in comparison to how much more there is to do. So I go right back up to #1 and remind myself that change is possible.
Will I ever learn Mandarin? It is hard to say. The other interesting aspect of difficult undertakings is that they are never truly finished. When it comes to learning a language or music or a martial art, you can always get better. It becomes more about the journey than the destination. And that may be exactly what makes the endeavor so worthwhile.