*This post is an excerpt from my book, 'Why Go There? 15 Reasons to Master the English Language.'*
REASON 14: TO REDISCOVER DISCIPLINE.
A master does her work every day.
You often hear people say, “if you wanna get good at something, you gotta do it a lot…”
I’ll take it one step farther.
Doing it a lot isn’t even enough. You gotta do it every day.
Every single day.
No sick days. No holidays.
The only reason you skip a day is because you are physically incapacitated, which is to say, you are dead, or close to it.
If you want to master English, and your BIG THING, you’ll want to do it every day.
This is not easy.
I have one thing in my life that I have committed to doing every day:
I write.
Mostly I write my books and blog posts. But if I get stuck with those, I’ll write a series of tweets about English language and culture. If that is making me sick, I’ll grab my guitar and write a song. Writing song lyrics takes me out of my ‘teacher’ mode and puts me in a more creative, less critical place. That’s my ‘artist’ mode. I can have fun there. Not that the other writing isn’t fun, but songwriting is like a kid on the playground during recess. Pure fun. Until of course a real song is almost done and then it gets harder to finish. When that happens, I go back to the other writing and return to the song later. Whatever. It’s just my little routine.
Most of the words I write will never be read by anyone. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I write them. Every day.
Same goes for your English.
You’ll want to speak it every day. You don’t need an audience or a conversation buddy. You can talk to yourself. The point is that you formulate thoughts and then actually speak them out loud. Over time, all the practice accumulates and you start to find a flow of unconscious speaking. That’s the speaking of a master.
How long will you have to practice?
About 10,000 hours. Approximately many years. I can’t say for sure because it’s different for everybody. I’ve been speaking Dutch for a part of every day for the past 18 years. That gives me about 13,000 hours. Am I a master? I’m certainly well on my way when it comes to speaking the language. Sometimes I can pass for Dutch, which is a good test. I have a long way to go when it comes to writing Dutch. But I’m not dead yet. I’ll keep at it.
Obviously, there are countless distractions, excuses, and procrastinations. For me, the biggest distraction is my phone. I have a tendency to be a compulsive phone checker. This never helps my writing. At some point I just have to bite the bullet, put the phone away and start writing.
It’s easy for you to find distractions so that you don’t have to speak English every day. Fight through it. Keep at it.
When you develop real discipline for studying English, this will spill over into the most important area: your BIG THING.
~ DAVE
PS - If you want top tips about American language and culture every Friday, click here.
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