The Amazing Power of Consistency
Though progress may appear to advance at a glacial pace, hindsight proves otherwise.
I used to be a really good student. I studies faithfully in high school to get straight As, and furiously in college to stay off of academic probation, and in both cases, the habit seemed second nature to me. Thirty years later, that’s not the case.
For the past several years, I’ve been trying to learn Spanish. I’ve tried myriad apps and audio programs, and they helped me pick up the most rudimentary basics, but traveling to Spanish-language countries has always demonstrated how much I really know: basically nothing. Whether I’m asking for directions to the bus stop at the airport, or looking for a particular item at the supermercado, the confidence I feel as I rattle off my perfectly-composed question vanishes immediately once the other person starts talking.
But last year, almost on a lark, I took a few lessons at a Spanish school for tourists when my wife and I were in Todos Santos, Mexico. I struck up a friendship with one of the instructors there — a wonderfully patient young woman named Alejandra — and continued my lessons online after I got home. For the past year, I’ve been meeting with her for an hour nearly every week. She patiently and slowly asks me questions or puts me through exercises via screen sharing, and shakes her head as I bumble through my attempts to answer. We end every lesson with me saying, “Necesito estudiar mas esta semana,” to which Alejandra always replies emphatically, “Sí!” She assigns me a short homework assignment, we log off, and I forget about the whole thing for the next six days.
At times, I’ve wondered why I keep taking the lessons if I’m not willing to do the work to really progress, or at least I used to, until two weeks ago when my sister sat in on our lesson to see if she might be interested in hiring Alejandra. Alejandra and I greeted one another and I introduced the two of them. Then we launched into our lesson, which went exactly like it always does — me not remember most of what I’d learned the last time, Alejandra patiently re-teaching that, then moving on to the new material. At the end of the lesson, I got a text from my sister: “You are very impressive! Is she good with beginners?”
The question caught me off-guard, because I naturally assumed that I was a beginner, would always be a beginner, unless and until I “got serious” about studying. But then I thought about the lesson I’d just done — the tricky conjugations of irregular verbs, the back-and-forth banter that I mostly understood — and it hit me: I am learning Spanish!
I’m quite certain that by any objective measure, I am still a total beginner with pretty poor skills. But seeing what just one hour a week has done over the past year, I was struck by the power of consistency to net progress over time. It made me so happy that I’d stuck with it, and it spurred a promise to myself to study more diligently. Because if I could learn that much in just one hour a week, imagine how much more I can learn if I study every day.
