Have you ever done something hard… on purpose?
Last year, my daughter was in Germany. I decided that I wanted to learn German, as a way to honor her. Besides, I like to stretch my brain, and I don’t enjoy Sudoku.
German was the sixth language I had studied, so I wasn’t starting from scratch. At the beginning, I knew NO German except how to count to ten (badly)…
…but I knew something about how to go about learning a language.
The Key To Success…
The main thing I knew was that it took a lot of work.
Author Unknown
“Success Is The Sum Of Small Efforts, Repeated Day In And Day Out”
Usually it takes several thousand hours of practice to develop advanced fluency.
Since I wasn’t in Germany and wasn’t surrounded by the language and forced to speak it day and night, I had to come up with a creative plan to immerse myself from a distance in the spare time I had.
I had just over a year to learn as much as I could before she came back home.
So I made a plan…
…and scheduled an appointment with myself and a tutor at 6AM almost every morning.
And I kept it… every day for more than a year.
Progress seemed brutally slow.
From day to day, I couldn’t even tell I was making any kind of progress.
Sometimes it was even hard to tell if any changes were happening over the course of a week.
In a year, I logged about 500 hours with tutors speaking German and reviewing flashcards and grammar.
And change was slow. Basically imperceptible to me.
But when my daughter came home, she invited me along to a local friend who was German. We had dinner and the conversation was completely in German.
Much to my delight, I was able to both fully understand and participate in the conversation through the whole evening.
It was after that dinner that I realized how far I had come… even though day by day it was hard to even detect the progress I was making.
Success in any area of life is rarely the effect of one day’s effort.
Success works like compound interest: you make small daily investments and over time you reap incredible rewards.
It is the sure path to success in your relationships, your health and in reaching your complex goals.
So, tell me…
…what kind of investment are you going to make in your success today?
