We start on a learning journey and then we quickly get lost. Why is this the case?
We might have systems in place, reminders that keep going off, but we still don’t have a clear understanding of what will get us to a level of fluency. This level of fluency is called “Base level of success”.
Unless, you and I know the base level, we simply practice, and while we get better, we don’t get very good at a skill. Well, it’s about time.
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You've probably heard of the 10,000-hour principle.
It's not even a principle. It's been called the 10,000-hour rule in a book called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The problem with the 10,000-hour rule is that it's flawed. It's not a rule, and it doesn't take 10,000 hours to acquire skills.
But there is an excellent side to this whole concept of 10,000 hours.
It gave people a precise figure for which to aim. We can call that figure the base level of success. A base level of success means you must put in X amount of time and effort or do something that would guarantee a certain level of success.
Take, for example, the fact that I'm learning French right now.
I've gone through 100 days of learning French and spent about an hour every day. How am I doing? It's almost impossible for me to know the answer to that question. It's because languages are complicated.
Not only do you have to understand the grammar and the vocabulary, but you also switch between the present, past, and tense, and that's just the school kind of work, just the boring stuff. In reality, you have to speak or write whole sentences, just like I'm doing.
Only when you can write or speak reasonably fluently can you be said to be fluent in a language.
To get to fluency, I must know my base success level. If I don't remember my base level of success, then all I will do is wake up every day and spend an hour learning the language, and that'll be another hour that I have to find in a hectic day.
But as I was going through this particular software, I ran into one piece of information.
It said that kids learn about a million sentences by the time they're five years old. That figure seemed very intimidating. First thing, five years is a long time. Secondly, a million sentences seem a bit over the top.
However, another piece of information said that if you want a reasonable level of fluency, you have to finish at least a hundred thousand repetitions.
I've got to about thirty thousand repetitions in the last hundred days.
That kind of gives me something to work towards. And maybe it's going to take me another six months or nine months, but I know that within that time frame, I'm going to reach the hundred thousand repetitions.
There are many ways to learn a language.
Some say you can learn it through singing, and others say you can learn it through storytelling and podcasts, speaking to AI, and speaking to a person. But that's not the point.
The point is understanding when you will reach a specific destination, just like driving. When will I get from A to B? When you're getting on a train, when will I get from A to B?
Understanding that concept becomes crucial to sustain your motivation to get to your destination.
Because as the saying goes, if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. The problem is any road doesn't take you there. You usually get lost.
I started learning Spanish when I was probably nineteen years old.
I can easily read a book in Spanish. I can hold a conversation for thirty minutes. I'm not fluent, and I don't even know if I'm speaking in the correct tense, but I get by.
But it's not fluency.
This confusing area I find myself in is because I did not have any parameters when I was learning Spanish. I did not have that benchmark I had to shoot for.
It was: Let's just practice, practice, practice!
Practice is monotonous, and you spend an enormous amount of time without getting results. If you want to learn or impart a skill, then you have to make sure that you create this base level of success.
In the cartooning course, for example, we tell students that if they start in August by November, they will be able todraw their own characters. Most students are utterly sceptical because they can't draw a straight line.
And yet, twelve weeks later, they're drawing their own character. To reach that base level of success, they must do weeks one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve. And then we get to our destination. That's the base level of success.
Not every course and not every system will tell you what you require.
Instead, they'll just throw the boring practice, practice, practice concept at you. Which is not good enough. It's not good enough if you got on a plane and they said, “We'll get there when we get there.”
And I'm not saying that you or I will have an answer to this problem.
As a teacher, you might not know when your students will get there or what will be required, but somehow, you have to figure out if they do A, B, and C, then they will get to D, J, or K. However, we somehow have to figure out our base level of success, or we can quickly lose our motivation to keep going.
To finish off, let me tell you a story about Alexandre Couillon.
Couillon runs a Michelin-star restaurant called La Marine on the island of Noire-Moutier. Now, the fact that it's an island is important because it is separated from the mainland. His restaurant used to get visitors only when the sun was shining, and the weather was nice and warm.
But he made a seven-year pledge with his wife, Celine.
The pledge seemed necessary at times because they had very little success. Things were not going well, and there were multiple obstacles in the first five years. In the sixth year, a journalist came in and conducted an interview. The journalist could feel that sense of isolation and desperation and asked Alexandre, “How do you do it?”
And Alexandre just said, “We made a seven-year pledge. We were going to stay in the business, and it was going totake seven years, after which we would decide what to do.”
Three months passed.
It was the depth of winter. Not a fly moved on the island. Alexandre and Celine were returning home when they turned on the car radio, and they heard an announcement. They had just won a Michelin star.
Their base level of success was based on years. Mine is based on repetitions. Some people might decide to do 10,000 hours. Whatever it is that you are trying to achieve, don't just get stuck into it. Set yourself a base level of success, and that's the fire; that's the motivation you need to get from one point to another.
Side note:
When I first started out, I was struggling to write articles. I used to take over two days to write an article. I decided to write an article every day to improve my writing skills. That's how we started out the membership site at 5000 BC. I promised the members that I would write a daily article on marketing.
I don't know whether they signed up because of that reason. I mean, it's excessive, isn't it? Who wants to read an article every single day of your life? But I was tired of taking two days to write every single article. My benchmark was one article every single day.
And that's how I got better.
It's this formula that helped me create a new product and improve my podcasting. When we conducted the storytelling course a few months ago, I promised to create a podcast every day, five days a week.
The podcast duration was just about seven or eight minutes in length. Yet, I had to create a new one every single day. I can tell you that my tone, pace and podcasting skills have improved.
But more importantly, I created this base level of success.
In order to become better, I need to create one podcast a day, even if it is just seven minutes long. I'd be tired after going through all the assignments on the storytelling course, but I'd still come to the office at four o'clock in the evening and record the next episode. That's how you do it.
You create a base level of success. It's the fire under your bum. 🙂 It keeps you going.
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