S4E21: What numbers are you clinging to?
Full transcript:
Good morning, happy Monday and welcome to the Language Confidence Project, the daily dose of language courage for people who love languages, and those who really don’t, but have to learn one anyway. And as we start a brand new week, I want to just pop in with a really quick question about your language studies.
And that is, what numbers are you clinging to?
How many of us prioritise things that really don’t matter to our goal, just because it looks like an easier, simpler, more colourful route? Or maybe, it promises something really soon? A streak. Likes on a nice studygram photo. A mark out of ten?
When I’m feeling lost, when I’m feeling behind or ineffective in some way, one of the first signs I now notice is that I’m starting to put all these opportunities into my day for a false sense of achievement. It might be working really hard to tick off loads of tasks… on a video game. It might be fixating on walking a certain number of kilometres in a week. It might be that I suddenly decide that improving my podcast metrics urgently needs prioritising. I want numbers. But not just numbers… I want cute congratulatory animations. I want to be able to cover my diary in big theatrical ticks. To make up for all the uncertainty, I want success that can be contained in the shortest time possible… a few minutes, an hourlong workout, a seven day streak. And I’m not the only one. In their book Big Feelings, Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy cited the story of a school principal who was lost, drained and emotionally exhausted. “I became hooked on things like Peloton (a home exercise bike workout system) as a way to collect evidence that I was successful at something – even if I felt defeated in every other dimension”, she said. But I don’t think it is “even if” she felt defeated in every other dimension. I think it’s “especially because”.
Numbers can be so helpful when they’re telling us the information that we need. And hobbies and healthy food and exercise routines are invaluable for our overall wellbeing. Distractions from our main goal are a necessary part of life that help us to maintain our perspective and to recover from the work we’re putting in.
But sometimes, fixation on that stuff creeps in as a smokescreen to obscure, even from yourself, the fact that actually, you’re feeling a bit lost. I think at our core, we know when we’re doing something because we enjoy it and because it’s good for us, and when we’re doing it because we desperately need to feel a sense of achievement. And we know when we’re making real progress towards the things that matter to us, progress that contributes to our overall life goals, and when we’re getting those dopamine hits making progress in things that really don’t matter to us, like a mindless phone game. But as for the fuzzy bit in between, where you’re doing something that’s arguably making progress towards your language in some kind of peripheral way, you have to look really closely, and be really honest with yourself, to figure out where the line is.
So today, I’d really like to invite you to take a look at your numbers, your streaks, your targets on your to-do listfor today and for this coming week, and just do a bit of an audit. Are you putting tasks on your list that will help you reach that end goal, and collecting meaningful data that tells you what you need to know about your progress, or are you scheduling time into your day to build up unhelpful streaks and metrics that create illusions of progress?
If you’re putting the work in, you want to know that you’re definitely walking in the direction of your goals. And you deserve the peace of mind that it’s time and effort well spent. Have a wonderful day, and I will see you tomorrow.