Reality: Do Or Not, No Middle Ground

2023.12.12 | #40

Happy Reality Day! Here is your weekly dose of reality to help you live 1% happier↓

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❤ 1 Insight From Me

Do you know what is the level of learning Chinese in 4 months?

Yesterday, a new German student came to the Chinese school where I recently teaching in. He is 22 years old, tall, young, and very handsome. (Not important, of course.) What is important is that only after 5 sentences, I realized that his Chinese proficiency is very high, he can have conversations, with almost no foreign accent. If you closed your eyes and listened, you would think he is your boyfriend.

So I asked him how long he had been studying and how he learned it.

He said he came to China to learn Chinese four months ago and only knew more than 100 Chinese characters when he came.

My head was buzzing and paused for a second because there was too much information and it was a bit blocked.

“You only studied for 4 months? How did you do that?”

“Yes, I only do one main thing every day, that’s study Chinese, for at least 8 hours a day.”

For 4 months, only did one thing every day, which was to learn Chinese.

Chinese is recognized as the most difficult language in the world, especially for people from Western countries. It generally takes at least 2 years to be fluent. You can be more intense, but think about it, when we were in school, although we had 8 hours of classes a day, there was one English class followed by one math class, many subjects were alternated. If you were asked to take English classes for 8 hours straight, maybe you would want to use tape to tape the English teacher’s mouth.

On the other hand, I have learned German by myself before, but I stopped learning it after one book, and I have totally forgotten it by now.

Either you do it or you don’t do it, there is no middle ground. The gap between doing something and committing to doing it is huge. We often say that we want to do something, such as exercising every day, reading a book, or learning to write. But the reality is that you either do it or don’t do it. “To do” is not an option at all.

If you want to really accomplish something, you have to make a decision and put in at least 100% commitment.

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❤ 1 Insight From Others

“If you care about something enough, you’ll find a way to make it happen.”

― Roy T. Bennett

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❤ 1 Small Step To Take

“At least 100% commitment”

Decide whether you want to do something or not. If you decide, commit at least 100% until you see the results.

Even if you just decide to try something new, have a clear goal (such as finding out whether you like it or not), and then commit to it until you achieve it.

Otherwise, you will be like me, wasting time doing it and only to forget it all in the end, leaving nothing but a negative case in a newsletter

PS: What does “mentally strong” mean?

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Until next week,

Ted Wild

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