Hi, there. I'm Drew Badger, also known as the English Fluency Guide, and I am the founder
of EnglishAnyone.com. It is a pleasure to welcome you to another video. This is just
an interesting thought I had that I would share with you all today because one of the
things I like to do is explaining to people, number one, stories, so helping them to connect
different ideas and certainly learn English through stories rather than just giving them
lists of vocabulary or grammar rules or things like that to memorize, but I also help people
make connections. This is really important for you when you're
trying to especially remember a new language, you want to remember words in a new language,
you want to communicate without forgetting words or feeling nervous and your mind just
going blank in the middle of conversations, which I've had happened to me many times,
especially when I was just learning to speak Japanese. But I had a conversation... Actually,
I did a presentation yesterday, two presentations where I was talking about our app Frederick,
and explaining to people why they should be using it, why the education system actually
makes them just struggle with their speaking. I was explaining all these things, and I was
talking to someone there about business. This is just an interesting thing. Again, we have
these connections. I had not planned on talking about that, but I was talking to some people
about that. One of the things that I was explaining, because this person was interested in both
language learning and business, I was making this interesting connection I thought you
might like to know about. Now, in business, what you're trying to do
is make a connection with a customer, so this is... or a client or a patient if you're a
doctor, a hospital, that kind of thing. It doesn't matter. Basically, you're trying to
get some person to be in your universe so they can learn more about what you do, and
then you're able to provide some service or courses or whatever that thing happens to
be. Now, what often people are trying to do in
a business, and most people don't really do this very well. This is why a lot of businesses
fail, but trying to have a focus on new customers all the time. Many businesses, they're always
thinking about new customers, how can we get new customers, and they spend a lot of their
time and energy on that. But the smart businesses, they, of course, are thinking about how to
get new customers, but they're spending a lot more energy on how to retain and get more
out of those particular customers that they already have, so whether these are clients,
again, customers, patients doesn't matter. What I was explaining to this person... so
we were talking about that and just talking about business in general and language learning,
and I was saying the same thing that these business owners are doing where they're thinking
more about trying to find new people, they're spending lots of energy on that but very little
on, well, what did you do with the people you already have because the most difficult
thing to do in business is to get a customer, and it becomes a lot easier when you already
have someone who knows, likes, and trusts you and you're able to help them and they
know that you can help them. All of the selling, all of that, providing
of the goods or services becomes much easier once you have that relationship already. It's
much more difficult to get a new customer. You spend all of your money trying to get
a new customer if you're advertising, whatever that thing is, but once you have that customer,
that's where the real value can develop, the real strong relationship that you can have,
and you start getting really great results with people from there.
While most people are spending their time trying to get new customers, language learners
in the same way are trying to spend their time learning new words. What they should
be doing is trying to have a better relationship with the words they already know. Does this
make sense? It's kind of an interesting idea, but while I was talking about these two different
things, it just seemed like an interesting thing and an interesting connection that I
had not heard before, but you'll notice in life it doesn't really matter. People are
mostly the same, and doesn't matter if you're teaching a language or teaching piano or teaching
whatever, other things. People mostly struggle with the same kinds of problems. If you find
those connections or if you see a solution to something in one area, you can often apply
it somewhere else. As a kind of interesting business idea connected
with this, Henry Ford, who created the Ford motor company and he created the assembly
line, so he was thinking about how can we mass produce the automobile, how can we make
many cars for many people and do so cheaply and efficiently? The assembly line idea's
you basically have like a car body. The thing is moving down like this, and then somebody
comes up and takes a piece off of it or puts a piece on or fixes something or does something
like that. Each person along the line, the assembly line does something different, and
then by the end, they've created a car, so each person can focus on their own particular
task. Now, a lot of this is done by machines, but it's the same basic idea.
Now, he got this originally from looking at meat processing plants. In that case, you
take a cow, and you're moving that cow through the same kind of thing, but one person cuts
off the legs, another person cuts off the whatever, however it works. I've never been
in one before, but this is a de-assembly or a disassembly plant. He took that same idea,
and instead of having people move to different cars, he would have the car move to different
stations where people were working, so instead of a disassembly line, you have an assembly
line. He was thinking it's almost like you put the cow back together over time.
Here he is. He's taking an interesting connection from one thing and applying it someplace else,
and it's the same idea for learning something. It's really hard for you to try to learn a
new word. You notice that? Whenever you learn a new word, you learn it once, and then you
forget it a little bit. Then you say, "Ah, I got to go back and remember this word again."
If you're diligent, if you really try, if you spend some energy to do this, usually,
you can remember things. I actually spend a lot of time helping people with memory.
I have a whole course about this called How to Remember Any English Word. It's with the
Fluency course. It's also with Fluent For Life if you're in that program as well. But
this is where I show people how to make, again, interesting connections that help them make
words much more memorable. Anyway, this idea about focusing on new words,
trying to grow your vocabulary more and more all the time, it's really wasteful. You're
wasting your energy when you can develop fluency with the words you already know. This is one
of the most exciting things that I explain to people when I'm talking to them about fluency
is you can actually become fluent without learning any new words or grammar if you just
spend more time with the words you already know.
Does that make sense? In the same way, many businesses could actually stop looking for
new customers or just spend a lot less time doing that and spend a lot more time focusing
on the customers they already have, and they would probably make a lot more money, so that's
actually what I do for English Anyone. I spend a lot less time trying to bring in new people
and a lot more time trying to really help the people I have and develop a much better
relationship with them. The people I can help get fantastic results. They tell more people,
and my process of getting new customers becomes a lot more, really, just easier as a result.
Does this make sense? The main idea here, spend less time trying
to learn new stuff and more time focusing on the things you already know. Develop a
better relationship with the words you know. Don't look at something and think, "Well,
I already know that word." Do you really know that word? If you're forgetting that word,
maybe you don't really know that word. Remember these ideas, and if this has been interesting
for you, and hopefully you have found this valuable, click that Like button and leave
a comment down below letting me know if you have any similar ideas or if you've made some
kind of connection in your own life or your own learning, especially with your English
that's been helpful, and maybe other people can benefit from discoveries you have made.
Well, that's it for this video. If you'd like to learn more about how to improve the kinds
of things I do helping people make better connections and actually remember what they
do, remember what they learned, you can click on the link in the upper right of this video
or on the link in the description below this video. If you'd like to continue learning
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