Tag: education

Episode 44: Education Doesn’t Mean More Knowledge, with TK Coleman

The podcast is back and better than ever!

Happy 2016.  Let’s get this mutha rollin’.  Time to dive in to an exploration of ideas about education, entrepreneurship, freedom, self-knowledge, self-honesty, progress, and whatever other words make you feel more alive and intrigued.

We kick off season two with my most frequent guest, my good friend and colleague TK Coleman.  We intended to discuss why education is more than knowledge but, true to form, we couldn’t resist delving into several other topics.  We talked about the value (or not) of New Year’s resolutions.  We examined the concept of conflict of interest and whether it matters.  We made bad jokes and made fun of each other.

Huge shout-out to the production intern, Lav Kozakijević, for his editing, posting, and show-noting on SoundCloud!  We have a new logo, courtesy of Julia Patterson’s awesome design work.  We have new intro music, courtesy of Tim LeVan Miller.  We have new show sponsors, Praxis and FEE.  The season is just getting started.

You can submit questions for me anytime via the Ask Isaac form and I’ll try to answer them on future episodes.  As always, this and all episodes are also available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.

Letter from a Praxis Participant

Praxis participant Nick Tucker is killing it.  At age 19, he’s working with a successful entrepreneur at a great company and building the life he wants.  Here’s what he had to say in a recent email:

“During my senior year of high school, I had questions coming in from dozens of different people about what my plans were for the following year. It seemed like the only right answer was to attend a solid college. But my heart wasn’t in it. Even when I was just applying for colleges I could barely force myself to sit down and fill out the applications.

Growing up in a college town, I had a pretty good idea about what a typical Freshman year was like in college. It had virtually nothing to do with preparing for real life and establishing a career. I wanted more, but I was stuck. It didn’t seem like there were any other legitimate options available. Then I discovered Praxis.

Now just 4 months into the program, I’ve developed many different skills that have made me valuable in the workforce. I’m working in sales on a very large scale which has been a dream of mine since I got my first job as a server. I’ve grown intellectually every single month since this last September. I have access to an incredible network of amazing people who I know are rooting for me to succeed. The program has surpassed my wildest dreams and I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.”

Nick has the most important qualities for success: confidence and work ethic.  The rest can all be learned, and he’s doing it now.

Feeling the itch to get into the world and do something awesome?  Intrigued by the adventure and challenge?  Been thinking about it but not ready to pull the trigger?  Why wait?

Apply today.

Praxis or not, don’t just do what you’re “supposed” to do because you can’t think of anything else.  Take the reins.  Be in the driver’s seat of your education, career, and life.

Getting Started on Entrepreneurship While You’re Young

In “The Future of School” I share my biggest regret:

“I wish I had more confidence, and earlier, about going my own way.”

It took me a long time to realize that all the things I thought and did differently weren’t things I should try to shut down, hide, or change.  They were my greatest strengths.

When you’re 14, 16, or 18, all the world seems to be screaming at you to look like the average of some aggregate.  Well-meaning teachers, parents, coaches, relatives, and friends want to know how you stack up on a series of “normal” indicators of status and ability.  They want you to know the stuff everyone else your age knows, and do the stuff everyone else your age does.

But the reality is that it’s the “Crazy Ones” who change the world.  It’s those who gain the courage and confidence to not suppress their unique take; their hacks and workarounds; their weird approaches and unconventional interests and solutions.  These are the makings of an entrepreneur.

And let’s be clear: entrepreneurship is the greatest single skill needed for the present and future marketplace.  Machines and software are taking off like never before, and they can follow rules and obey orders and perform rote tasks better than humans.  This is not cause for concern, but a huge opportunity.  It frees up humans to do what only humans can: creatively problem solve, innovate, experiment, and adapt.

But it does mean that the vast majority of what’s taught in traditional education settings is of little and decreasing value.  Knowledge of facts is nearly obsolete.  We have Google.  Memorization is silly when we have unlimited digital storage.  Following the crowd kills the best instincts and opportunities for value creation.  We need to re-ignite the entrepreneurial spark that everyone is born with.

That’s why we’ve built a 60-day entrepreneurship eCourse for teens.  It all begins with a mindset.  The mindset I wish I would have found sooner.  The mindset that says your best assets are your most unique attributes.  It’s about turning your creativity into a discipline.  It’s about becoming a self-directed, perpetual learner.  It’s about experimentation, trial and error, and approaching life like a game.

This course is hard.  You could easily scan it and gain a few bits of wisdom.  But that’s not what it’s built for.  It’s built for an intensive 60 days.  It’s built to make you a little uncomfortable as you learn to explore your own strengths, weaknesses, and passions, build a basic website, and share your ideas and lessons learned along the way.  If you go through it – really go through it and complete every part – you will absolutely walk away a different person, closer to your goals and the life you want to live.

If you complete the whole thing we’ll be impressed.  In fact, we’re giving you a free coaching session with course creator and Praxis Education Director T.K. Coleman if you do.  You think you can do it?

You don’t need to have that big business idea to begin on the entrepreneurial journey.  It starts by becoming the type of person who is ready and able to seize the moment when that big idea comes.  It starts now.

Are you ready?

Praxis Teen Entrepreneurship Course

Praxis on the Local Level: Pittsburgh

As I mentioned at the end of 2015, Praxis is launching some exciting new things this year.

In addtion to the Teen Entrepreneurship eCourse, we’ve also launched a local version of the full Praxis program, starting with Pittsburgh, PA.

It’s awesome.

This is the same 12-month experience – paid work at an amazing company, intensive personal and professional development, hard and soft skills, and liberal arts education – but with a local cluster of business partners and participants.  This allows those in a particular region to get all the benefits of the program AND stay close to home and have more time interacting in person with their fellow participants.

Zak Slayback is the director for the Pittsburgh program.  I couldn’t think of a better person.  A PA native and Ivy League dropout, Zak has done nothing but crush it since he left the confines of the academy to join Praxis nearly two years ago.  He’s a great example of exactly the kind of work ethic + bold thinking we look for.

The cool thing about this model is that Zak can really put down some roots and connect with local networks of young people – high schools, colleges, clubs, homeschool groups, etc. – and local businesses over the long term and offer an amazing opportunity for them to get out of the classroom for a year and learn entrepreneurship from successful Pittsburgh entrepreneurs.

It doesn’t stop there.  This model can be replicated in cities across the country and the world.  It takes a network of young mold-breakers and great companies with the power of the unique Praxis coaching and education process.  Stay tuned as we continue to grow.

Check out Praxis Pittsburgh, and reach out to Zak if you have any connections in the area or want to learn more!

The Future of School & Entrepreneurship: Interview on Practice of the Practice with Joe Sanok

I had the distinct pleasure of joining my old friend Joe Sanok on his podcast Practice of the Practice to talk entrepreneurship, education, productivity, happiness, and much more.

Joe and I were in a band together in college (someday we’ll put the band back together, I swear) and we also started an international humanitarian project, among other hijinx.  We’ve barely kept in touch over the years but hit it off like old times.

Joe started a successful counseling practice and realized quickly how many counselors could benefit from learning business basics, hence PoP was born.  He’ll be coming on an episode of my podcast very soon to talk about growing his business and his business to help others grow business.  Until then, enjoy this conversation on PoP!

The future of school and entrepreneurship

Announcing the Praxis Teen Entrepreneurship Course

Praxis Teen Entrepreneurship Course

It’s here!

After considerable demand from young people and parents of young people (primarily homeschoolers and unschoolers) not quite ready for the full, year-long Praxis experience, we’re now offering a 60 day course for teens.

Praxis Education Director TK Coleman guides you through this intensive two-month experience as you learn to adopt mindsets and habits conducive to the entrepreneurial life.  This course is awesome.

Entrepreneurship is a mindset.  It requires deep, philosophical thinking.  It requires ridiculous levels of commitment and work ethic.  It requires genuine self-knowledge and self-confidence.  It requires big, crazy ideas.  This course is designed to help young people begin the journey.

I want to emphasize that this isn’t something that will be successfully accomplished as a casual daily dalliance.  It requires more than just consuming information.  It’s full of activities and ways to engage the real world and put knowledge to the test.  You can’t learn to ride a bike by reading about it.  You can’t learn to be an entrepreneur sitting back in your chair.

From the course intro,

“Information is only one small aspect of a good education. Anyone with an internet connection can find tons of information – it’s the easiest thing to find in today’s world.

So if you want to set yourself apart from the crowd, the key element is learning how to think about information critically, creatively, and practically. This course will help you do all three of those things by giving you daily challenges, exercises, and questions designed to help you engage the materials at a high level.

Don’t limit yourself to just being a reader or a listener. There’s no value in scanning your eyes over the words on a page just to say “I finished the article.” Learning isn’t about impressing other people or chasing after rewards. It’s about opening your mind, unlocking your potential, challenging yourself to think outside the box, and figuring out ways to use information to create value.”

One of my favorite sayings is, Agere sequitur credere.  It’s Latin for, “Action follows belief.”  Entrepreneurship is about action, but a precondition to action is belief.  Belief in the opportunity around you.  Belief in your vision of something better.  Belief in your ability to execute on it.  Belief and the actions that flow from it are not inborn qualities.  You can train yourself to see things differently, to habituate creativity and productivity, and to act on what you discover.

Are you ready?

*For the month of January, we’re kicking the course off with a 20% discount.  Signup now and get started on the journey!

I’m Not Qualified

I don’t have a high school diploma.  I’ve never taken the ACT, or SAT, or GRE.  I can’t even type properly – I used one finger on each hand.  Who do I think I am to write books and blog posts, give talks and podcasts, and run a business?

I don’t think I’m anybody.  The thing is, I don’t think anyone else is anybody either.

I’m not qualified.  Neither are you.  No one is.  That’s the big secret.

I’ll never forget the day I first realized that no one knows what they’re doing.  I was sitting in a classroom at Western Michigan University and feeling stressed about how I was going to get a job and figure out how to survive in the world.  I had imposter syndrome.  I’m a fraud!  I don’t know how to do anything.  I’ve faked my way through everything.  I BSed essay answers on tests.  I pretended I was reading music during my piano lessons when I was really playing from memory.  I took shortcuts and found the quickest ways to avoid pain and boredom.  How could I gain enough mastery of anything to navigate the world?

The professor droned on. (It was a particularly boring political science class where the professor, who must have been at least at old as the Declaration of Independence, wrote the $150 textbook and taught word for word from the chapters he had written.)  I looked up from my desk and around the classroom.  It looked like the biggest bunch of half-witted, half-sober, half-pajama’d, half-serious degenerates I’d ever seen.  Kids talked loudly to each other over the oblivious professor about how “schwasted” they were, where they puked the night before, and where to go do it again today.  They scrawled incoherent sentences on essay questions I had to decipher when it came time to “trade and grade”.  They chuckled and bragged about who they knew in the infamous “Crime Beats” section of the college newspaper.

If I’m worried about how I’ll cut it in the world, what will these kids do?  How will they survive?  I recall one of them said he wanted to be a dentist.  How could he possibly?

Then I remembered a dentist whose office I had worked in recently, installing a telephone system.  They guy made good money and ran his own little small town office, but he was a big goofball.  He snuck into the back room every few minutes, making patients wait mouth agape, to day trade stocks.  He was clearly an addict and a thrill junky without a serious bone in his body.  He joked constantly and loudly and always wanted to get lavish lunches with alcohol….

Holy crap, this kid is going to be a dentist!  And that girl is going to be a lawyer.  And that other guy will probably be a government bureaucrat.  Most of the rest will end up teaching middle school (Western had a lot of future public school teachers.  It was common after flunking out of majors like “Communications” to switch to elementary education).

I realized in that moment I was going to be fine.  More than fine.  Not because I had any special ability.  It hit me that everyone is making everything up.  The bar isn’t actually that high.  No one knows how to be a proper adult, or worker, or parent, or researcher.  There’s no magic permission slip or grant of expertise that makes you qualified for anything.  You just have to do it.

If you find a way to create value for people, you’ll be fine.  And there are a surprisingly vast array of ways to create value for people.  The demand for human minds and hands is so great that even these party-loving students would be gainfully employed.  They’d probably be doing my taxes or taking an X-Ray for me some day.

Don’t worry about your lack of qualification.  You’re not qualified for anything really.  Neither is anyone else.  You are, however,  more qualified than anyone else in the world to do the things that are uniquely you.  Go for it.

———————

*If you are a teen or you have a teen that’s interested in entrepreneurship, creative thinking, and out of the box living, check out the Praxis Teen Entrepreneurship Course!

Praxis Teen Entrepreneurship Course

Interview on the Free Cities Podcast

I popped in (virtually) to the Free Cities Podcast to talk Praxis and the ideas behind it.  FCP is all about decentralized alternatives to top-down command and control institutions.  Education is obviously full of standardized, cartelized, centralized institutions and part of our mission at Praxis is to break that down and bring the power back to the individual.

Don’t Give Up Your Power for Attention

My friend has a theory.  He thinks when people ask unbelievably dumb questions it’s not because they don’t know the answer or couldn’t find it themselves.  They’re capable.  It’s that they want the attention that comes from being answered more than they want their own power to independently get the answer.

There are a lot of examples of playing dumb as a way to get attention.  Emailing questions that are already answered on a website.  Asking how to listen to a podcast that’s already linked in the post being commented on.  Pretending to not notice when someone does something nice for you just so you can demontrate your surprise later in a more attention-grabbing way.

It’s a weird thing, and disempowering.  It’s actually kind of gross to observe.  I think a big part of it comes from the schooled mindset.  When you spend the first twenty or so years in a system based on pats on the back and ribbons and Dean’s lists and other forms of manufactured recognition by authority figures you learn to seek that kind of psychic and emotional reward.  There are few things teachers and experts and authorities with official sounding titles like more than being reminded that they know more than you.  They love an eager, pliable pupil.  When you ask them how to do things, raise your hand for clarification, ask them to expand on a point, or request a refresher on their material, you get positive attention.  So you develop a kind of learned helplessness.

It’s stupid and you should identify and shed it right away.  Operate at full power.  If you can discover or do something without anyone else’s assitance, do it.  If you can achieve goals without appealing to experts and authorities, all the better.  If you can create your product, start your business, write your song, or publish your book, do it.  You don’t need to focus group your supposed betters or ask every person you look up to to coffee for feedback.

It’s great if people like you and what you create.  It’s great to learn from others.  But get their attention by being the most you you can be.  Create something new and powerful, don’t pretend to be powerless in hopes of luring them in for a quick hit of, “She talked to me!”.  This is why mentorship can be dangerous.  Spend all your time seeking awesome mentors and you’ll forget to master what’s uniquely you and just build things.

Don’t play dumb.  The attention isn’t worth the loss of power.

Why My Wife and I (and Our Three Kids) are Spending Six Weeks in Ecuador

Sticking with an important theme in my life the better question might be, “Why not?”

Still, given our stage in life, our kids ages, and our work and financial situation, it does raise some eyebrows when we tell people of our Ecuadorian excursion planned for early 2016.  There are several reasons we chose to do this, not least of which is the fact that there are far, far more reasons we can come up with not to do this.

That’s the thing.  The reasons not to will only ever pile up.  Screw that.  Perfect timing is a myth.  If we waited for the right time we never would have gotten married, had kids, adopted, taken new jobs, moved, moved again, started a business, unschooled, and all the other things we cherish most about our life.

The Idea

It began a little less than a year ago.  I was flying home from a business trip and listening to an episode of the Tim Ferriss Podcast.  It was an excerpt from a book called Vagabonding by Rolf Potts.  I knew in my gut I wanted to get out into the broader world with my family.  Not out of nowhere.  The podcast was just a nudge.  My own experience had me jonesing for international adventure for me and my kids already.

Between ages 12-20 I spent at least a few weeks, sometimes a few months, every summer in another country.  Mexico, Peru, Kenya, Honduras.  These were the most important and formative experiences of my youth.  I loved it.  It was really hard sometimes.  I learned so much and gained so much perspective.  Perhaps I’ll write more another time about what these trips did for me, but one of the things was to teach me forward orientation.  The first few times it was crushing to make deep connections to dear friends across the world then leave, never to see them again (and pre-Facebook, never to talk to them in most cases).  It made me learn to live in the moment and not hold on too tightly to past experiences.

My wife and I have always wanted to travel with our kids and let them experience the world outside the suburbs.  Not because we think it’s somehow morally superior or because we want to be international do-gooders.  Just because it’s really fun, and the best kind of challenge.  We both know how hard it was for us to move from the small-town Midwest just a few states away, and how good it was.  It’s too easy to assume your current geography is the best fit for you simply because you’ve never ventured out.  We want our kids to feel like the world is small and not be afraid of exploring all of their options.  We don’t want the exit option to feel so daunting to them.

The Decision

I got back from that trip and told my wife to listen to the podcast episode.  She did.  She knew right away what I was going to suggest and she wholeheartedly agreed.  Let’s spend some time abroad with the kids.  Not a vacation.  Not as visitors touring the sites.  Just normal, day to day life in a different place.  We knew this required more than a few weeks and a location that wasn’t just for popular attractions.  Don’t get me wrong, I love popular touristy stuff and we aren’t the type to go searching for the “too cool for the travel guide” spots when we travel.  But this wasn’t about travel.  It was about living.

I wanted two months, she wanted one, we settled on six weeks.  It seemed long enough to make us both uncomfortable and wonder if we’d get bored and restless and homesick.  We couldn’t just distract ourselves with novelty for six weeks.  We’d have to establish a daily routine.  Perfect.

The Timing

It seems weird to try to spend time abroad at this point in our lives.  Our kids are 4, 6, and 10.  That’s still pretty young.  We are not in a place to put money into anything besides day-to-day expenses.  I launched my company, Praxis, just two years ago and every ounce of material and mental resources go into building it.  We moved here to the Charleston, SC area just four years ago and we love it.  It’s beautiful, we’re not bored, and we’re beginning to make very deep and rewarding social bonds.  My wife and I are young, so it’s not like the clock is running out on us.

But we don’t want perfection.  We don’t want some experience that’s been planned and built up for years or decades.  We don’t want to overthink it.  We don’t want it to be that big of a deal.  We just want to try living somewhere else for a bit.  That’s it.  When will we be in a better situation?  Realistically, never.  There will always be something more pressing to spend our energy on.

Besides, there are several ways in which we’re in a perfect position to do this.  I own my own business and all of my colleagues work remotely.  Besides travel season, all I need is WiFi.  I live and breathe Praxis, but where I live and breathe it from is of little relevance most of the time.  We unschool our kids.  We have no schedule or obligations.  One of the reasons we chose to unschool was so that we could do stuff just like this.  How many kids get to do that?  Our kid aren’t wasting away in cinder block cells all day, so why should we follow the same routine as those that are?

We know it will be really, really hard.  Especially for me in the most intense phase of growing a business and trying to revolutionize the world.  But everything we do at Praxis is about living life on your terms.  If we preach it, we can live it too.

The Details

We had several constraints and preferences, but a lot of play room.  I travel a lot to conferences and events to speak and promote my company and the ideas behind it.  We couldn’t go in late spring/early summer, or in the fall.  Speaking season.  We also needed this to be really, really affordable.  As in, all-in, this six weeks in Ecuador needs to cost the same or less as if we had stayed home for the same six weeks.  We also needed reliable, solid WiFi.  (One of the first things we did was have our AirBnB host run a test and verify the speed, which is the same as what Comcast gives me in SC.)

We weren’t ready to fly more than 4-5 hours with kids as young as four, so South  and Central America were the target.  We searched around on AirBnB for a few days and found a place that looked crazy cool.  A bamboo beach house like something out of Swiss Family Robinson.  It was gorgeous, large enough, and well-rated.  No A/C and open, so mosquito nets, but otherwise not primitive.  Good price, good WiFi.  Why not?

The Act

Never the type to dwell too long on a matter, we booked it.  Was there something better?  Probably.  Would it be worth the agonizing and the time and energy to find it?  Probably not.

Once our non-refundable house was booked, the rest had to happen as a matter of course.  We’ve been alternating between excitement and terror since then, but that’s exactly what we want.  Just a little fear to overcome, mixed with the thrill of overcoming it.

We’ll set out just after the Super Bowl (what, you think I’m going to miss the NFL season?) and return around the Ides of March.  If all goes to plan it won’t be noticeable from the outside.  I’ll be working most of the day most days of the week as usual.  The kids will be doing what unschoolers do, which is precisely what drives their curiosity and interest, and we’ll be grocery shopping, going for walks, cooking, cleaning, reading, meeting with people, and enjoying the beach.

We’ll also be sweating, struggling to communicate in a village of Spanish speakers, adapting to new foods and smells and sights, and probably in many moments fighting homesickness.

This may be the first of many experiences living abroad.  It may be the last we ever do.  That’s why we’re doing it.  We need to know.  Will we love or hate it?  No amount of analysis can answer the question.  We’ll go find out for ourselves.

New Blogs to Check Out

Praxis participants and alumni are pretty prolific and I love reading their stuff.  Check out some of their posts and other projects.

Some Current Participant Blogs

Mitchell Earl

Startups and Caffeine

Nick B. Tucker

The Nonconformist Playground

J. Taylor Foreman

Brad Matthews

Ryan A. Ferguson

James Bumanlag

 

Some Praxis Graduate Blogs

Derek Magill

Nicole Rene Lough

Laurie E. Barber

James Walpole

Kristina F. Miller

The Situation Network

 

*Interesting observation: The ladies are far more likely to give their blog a name other than their own.  Maybe men are more narcissistic?…

Email From a Praxis Graduate

I got an email yesterday from Mitchell Broderick, a Praxis graduate from our very first class.

I distinctly remember Mitch’s decision to abandon college and step up to the challenge of Praxis.  He had to move across the country.  He had to build a new network.  He had to enter a professional environment with far more responsibility (and opportunity) than any he’d experienced.  He had the chance to start doing work immediately that he hoped he would someday be ready for after four years of college.  It wasn’t easy.

He rose to the challenge.  He took a chance on Praxis and on himself.  In his email, he recalled the difficulty of the decision, and the challenge of making this personal investment.

   Mitchell Broderick

“The return on that investment and struggle has been incredible.”

 

The reason he emailed me was to let me know that, exactly one year after completing the program, he hit his ambitious sales goal for the year and cleared six figures (working as a VP of business development for the same company he spent his Praxis apprenticeship with).

No degree.  No college debt.  No hoops to jump through.  Mitch became the person he wanted to be and is living a life he assumed he’d have to wait a decade or more to live.  And he’s just getting started.

There is an experimental, exploratory element of the program.  You can take a year to get out into the world, test yourself, engage in personal development projects, be challenged by advisors and coaches, take charge of your own education, build better habits, and see what entrepreneurship is all about.  But Mitch is a great example of the fact that this isn’t just a one-year good time.  Praxis isn’t just about a short-term experience.  It’s about building the career and life you want in the long term.  You get an amazing job with the program that can be the first step in your career.  As Mitch put it,

“Praxis isn’t something that contrarians do to be different for a year. They do it because it works. They get awesome jobs making great money.”

And Mitch is the first to tell you, it’s not about money.  It’s about becoming the kind of person that can create value and achieve your own personal goals, material and otherwise.

I shudder at the thought of an ambitious grinder like Mitch languishing in a cinder block classroom somewhere under fluorescent lights.  He’s worth more than that.  He was ready to engage the real world and create his own path, not sit on someone else’s conveyor belt.

How many Mitch’s are out there, ready to break the mold?  This is why we do what we do.

Discover Praxis if you think you have what it takes.

15 Minutes a Day is Better than Two Hours a Week

I took several Spanish classes in my teens.  I hated them all and didn’t do that well with anything besides the pronunciation.

I also took half a dozen trips to Spanish speaking countries in my teens.  I did incredibly well making basic conversation in Spanish.

I got to thinking about this while listening to an episode of Praxis participant Ryan Ferguson’s The World Wanderers Podcast.  Language is one of those things that is really dumb to try to learn in a classroom.  The incentives are all wrong.  When you really want something – to get to know a person, or to find a bathroom – you’ll engage your cognitive capacity at a high level.  Learning to navigate another country is a great way to grapple with the language and gain some proficiency.  When your only incentive is a test, how will you rewire your brain to say “The apple is green” in another language?  More important than how is why?  Why would you want to say that anyway?

Here’s the thing.  It’s not always easy to get to another country and learn a language by necessity.  You can try other hacks, like pick a day of the week where everyone in your house is only allowed to speak Spanish, but this can be pretty tough too.  So if classroom learning is subpar and you can’t immerse yourself, what can you do?

I downloaded the free Duolingo app on my iPhone.  I love it!  Yes, it’s basically glorified flash cards, but it’s very fun, quick, has cute animations, easy progress tracking, and lets you practice pronunciation (my favorite part) using the phone’s mic.  I also love it because it works well with a breakthrough discovery I’ve made about other aspects of my personal growth in the last few years: tiny daily challenges work better than big goals.

I blog every day because there’s no excuse to not push out at least something.  I do one form of exercise every day because there’s no excuse to not do at least a few push ups.

Since my family is embarking on an Ecuadorian adventure early in 2016, I decided I wanted to brush up on my Spanish.  I added an activity to my daily tasks spreadsheet that just says, “Spanish”.  I do 10-15 minutes a day on Duolingo.  Some days I do a lot more, some days I barely hit it.  I’ve done it every day but two in the last 60 days.

For me, this pattern is vastly superior to taking a one hour class twice a week.  By getting Spanish bouncing around in my brain every day I find weird things happening.  I’m beginning to have a few random thoughts in Spanish.  Just a word or phrase, sometimes apropos of nothing, but it means my brain is being primed.  It’s like listening to a song every day.  Pretty soon it just comes out all the time.  My ears are being trained to hear things and my tongue to form new words associated with old concepts.

Of course, upon arrival in Ecuador I will realize how little Duolingo prepared me for fast-paced real world conversation, but I can’t realistically do anything about that.  The daily Spanish is fun, totally doable in my schedule, and it’s making some kind of progress.  The power of the compounding effect comes in to play.  If I improve my Spanish by only a fraction of a percent every day, it begins to get serious before long.

In case you’re wondering, Duolingo tells me I’m currently 10% fluent.  On the one hand, that’s probably a huge exaggeration.  I’d fail any Spanish test.  On the other hand, that’s probably a huge understatement.  I know from experience that once I get into a place where I need it, I’ll get where and what I want more like 2/3 of the time.

What other things might you learn better by doing a little every day instead of setting some big huge goal or taking some formal class?