hey everybody! welcome back. now recently we've been talking a lot about habits
and I really really like this topic just because I think it's so crucial for
language learning but it's also so helpful in other areas of life so I feel
like these videos are kind of like a multi-tool that you can use for all
kinds of stuff. the other reason why I really like talking about this now is
that you know I've always been someone who found it relatively easy to sort of
develop really good healthy habits and I think it's just because I'm always so
inspired and excited and motivated pretty much all the time but earlier on
in my career sort of trying to help people learn languages and in general I
found that it was actually kind of difficult because lots of people don't
operate like that and I think actually the majority of people it's really
difficult to form new habits and break bad ones so this video it's not so much
about what has worked best for me although it has been important but this
is sort of my biggest tip for successfully building new positive
habits in language learning and in general that has worked for like
everyone that I have personally worked with over the last ten years so in my
opinion the absolute biggest and best thing that you can do to build a new
habit is essentially to commit to any amount of time at all every day now let
me explain when I'm working with someone that's trying to learn a new language
and they are struggling to sort of make this a daily activity what I tell them
to do is commit to just 10 minutes every day now the reason for this is that very
often people have a tendency to sort of shoot for the stars right so they say
well in an ideal world I would like to study languages for one hour per day or
I'd like to learn piano for one hour a day one hour feels like a really sort of
round number it's a nice metric to go by but then what happens is very quickly
people realize that oh jeez like one hour is quite a lot of time and I think
people get overwhelmed and especially when starting something new there is
often this sort of like inertia right this resistance something holding you
back from just getting started so in my experience ten minutes is a much much
easier number for somebody to commit to just about everybody can admit that okay
no matter how busy I am if this is something that's important to me that I
want to do surely I can find ten minutes to sit down with myself and
to do this thing but the secret to this ten minutes is it's rarely ever ten
minutes and by the way this is not like you're lying to yourself so ten minutes
is a perfectly valid amount of time to sit down every day and do something it's
a hell of a lot better than zero and in my opinion it's also better than doing
one hour of something like once in a while so it's great because even if you
actually do ten minutes every day that's really gonna add up over time and you
can definitely make massive progress in any kind of skill or endeavor over time
accumulating ten minutes every single day however I have found that what
really happens is that this ten minutes it's it's enough to sort of break that
inertia it actually gets you moving and very often you end up in the zone right
so ten minutes actually goes by really quickly and often times before you even
realize that you've done 20 minutes or 30 minutes and so I have tried this with
literally hundreds of students and clients that I had when I was doing
language coaching and teaching and it's actually very rare people actually just
do ten minutes I found that between 20 and 30 minutes is sort of average and
very often especially after this really does become a habit
it's very common of people to actually sort of voluntarily increase this time
increment to one hour but the point is at that point you've already established
the habit it is much easier you don't really have the inertia anymore
you kind of look you look forward to it you're excited to sit down and do
whatever it is you want to do so just to recap the reason why I think this may be
my biggest secret to sort of building and forming positive healthful language
learning habits is it a committing to even just 10 minutes it ensures that you
at least do something every day which truly is valuable and be very often 10
minutes ends up being 20 minutes 30 minutes and this sort of accumulates
into a much larger impact than you imagined and it also still becomes a
habit that you can then sort of increase as you want and you'll be able to sort
of find new times in the day maybe you'll start actually using dead time
and experimenting with that before you know it you can actually end up finding
several hours a day between sort of dedicated study time and lots of dead
time and that's really it this is a pretty you know short snappy video
I'm really excited to get your feedback because this really actually has been
pretty instrumental in my own life for me it's particularly because I do so
many things and very often it sort of seems overwhelming to add another thing
to my day another thing to my life and so I very often sort of trick myself by
just committing to 10 minutes and it could because it always seems like well
I can fit 10 more minutes of something else in and then I end up somehow just
fitting it in and next thing you know I'm doing it for 30 minutes a day or
maybe even an hour sometimes I don't even know how I get all the time to keep
doing all these things but it really works very well but again this is less
about me and it's more about sort of my experience with working with different
people around the world and different cultures and environments and it seems
pretty universally successful that just getting people to commit to that small
time every single day it's easier for them to do and it really does lead to
success so please let me know if this is something you've already tried and if
this is new information I'd really love to sort of know in the comments you know
what is the daily habit that you're gonna try to commit to today for just 10
minutes every day and please keep me updated on how that habit goes