There's an old joke. It goes like this: A tourist is wandering the streets of New York. He spots a musician getting out of a cab and hurries over to ask him, "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" Without missing a beat, the performer answers back, "Practice, man. Practice."
Classic humor based on misunderstanding. Clearly the tourist simply wanted directions, where as the musician responded by telling him how to be successful enough to perform there. Bing bada boom—cue laughter.
The joke tells a lesson that we all know but yet we also often forget or overlook: In order to get good at something, you have to do it. There's no other way. You can read scores of books about a thing, you can watch hours of instructional videos, you can talk to others, you can sit through class after class. These things might teach you about a thing, but the only way to learn to actually do that thing is to do it.
I was reminded of this simple rule the other day in class. For those who don't know, I own a school in Japan. We teach a lot of things here, one of which is English. Anyway, the other day we had a new student and I was talking with him. He was in his 60s and said that he had been seriously studying English for 40 years, but was ashamed that he still couldn't speak much higher than an elementary level. During our conversation it came up that he's terrified to speak in English because he worries about making mistakes and being embarrassed. So he never uses it. So he's never learned it.
This is probably the most common reason pretty much everyone gives for not speaking a second language. I hear it not just from Japanese people about learning English, but also from countless foreigners in Japan about learning Japanese. I know a guy who's been living in Japan close to 50 years now. And he doesn't speak a word of the language. Why? Because he never speaks it. You can't learn without doing. Oh he goes through books and now online lessons in the privacy of his home, but you'll never get much above a beginner without actually going out and using the language with other people.
When a baby is learning how to talk what do they do? Do they keep completely silent until they are sure they are perfect in the language? No... they speak constantly. At first just trying to mimic the sounds they hear and the cadence of the speech they hear, then trying to repeat random words, then trying to use those words together. They constantly make mistakes and we constantly correct them and this process is how they learn to actually speak, which takes years. Yet kids are brave. They don't get embarrassed about making a mistake. They just do it. But somehow between then and now we grow into being afraid of looking foolish and so we never try. And therefore we never learn.
Image by Nathan Legakis from Pixabay
I've written before about Larry Bird. Still one of the most amazing players who have ever played the game and probably the best shooter of all time. You might remember an old series of commercials he did with Michael Jordan where they challenged each other to a very chaotic game of horse which involved increasingly insane shots, such as shoot again the wall, bounce it over against a chair, then up to the basket and nothing but net. They were silly and kind of stupid, but the entire premise of those commercials was because Bird has an amazing ability to hit almost anything he threw up. Did he just walk out on the court one day and play this way? Hell no. He practiced and practiced and practiced. For most of his childhood years he would shoot 300 free throws every day before school, then after school shoot even more. He practiced more every single day than most of us armchair fans practice in our entire lives. He got his amazing ability by practicing it every single day. He learned it by doing it.
I remembered there being more than two of the commerials, but maybe not.
A few years ago there was a fairly popular book by Malcolm Gladwell called "Outliers: The Story of Success". In this book he introduced the 10,000 hour rule. This rule stated that you need to do something for at least 10,000 hours before you could be good at that thing. And he cited many famous people in the book, like Mozart who spent his entire childhood learning and practicing music. Gladwell has often been criticized for over simplifying things and in this case giving an actual number may be doing that, but the basic idea he gives is right on: if you want to be good at something, you have to do that thing. Ichiro is another one that comes to mind. He was the best singles hitter in baseball. Some might put him second to Pete Rose. Hmm... it'd be close. But anyway, how do you think he got so good? By practicing hitting the ball pretty much constantly as a kid.
Anyway, none of us are superstar athletes. I just mention Bird and Ichiro as examples of the extreme. But we can all benefit from practicing. It doesn't have to be a lot. If you want to me a master it does, yes, but if you just want to develop a working ability in something, you don't have to be obsessed with practicing every moment of every day, but you do need to do it at least once a day.
This is why I like DuoLingo and I recommend it to my students. A lot of people poke fun at DuoLingo because their lessons are so easy as to be mindless. But to me that is their power. By making the barrier so low they are making it easy to do every single day. There are other programs and exercises that are better, don't get me wrong, but doing something easy every single day is much better than doing something more challenging only once per week. Also if it's too challenging then people tend to burn out, so not only are they only doing it once per week but they might have a few weeks (usually much more) off due to burnout. A perfect analogy to this situation is the Tortoise and the Hare, which I'm sure all of you know.
Well I'm starting to muddle my point. Depending on the thing you might be able to do that practice in relative privacy, such as with Bird shooting his free-throws everyday, or you might have to get out and talk to people, as in language learning. But even in the former case, you still will eventually need to do your thing in front of others in order to continue your learning. In fact most athletes and other masters usually have horror stories about how nervous they were at their first publis performance and how much of a fool they made of themselves.
Will you look foolish? Probably. But that's the price we pay for learning to do something new. Get you ego out of it and don't worry how you look, just realize you are getting better.
So try something, look foolish, laugh at yourself, and get better!
(title graphic made from this image by Antonika Chanel from Pixabay)
| David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. |
