The Grand Gesture

In his book “Deep Work”, Cal Newport writes of The Grand Gesture:

“By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task. This boost in importance reduces your minds instinct to procrastinate and delivers an injection of motivation and energy.”

French club is taking such a grand gesture. We are going to Montreal to practice French. Genuine interest was shown by five out of the six members at my announcement. Budget, time conflicts, and a newborn baby shorten the list of goers to two. Me and Aisela. No surprise.

We are the most consistent with our practice and learning. Together, we just finished the book “The Berlitz Self-Teacher–French”. All 41 lessons. We started from simple vocabularies (such as table, red, and 34) and sentences to most commonly used tenses (perfect, imperfect, and future) and more complicated structures. Our French is still pretty rough and we are slow as tortoises, but I am proud of this milestone. We did not give up.

I used to practice by saying the house numbers in French on walks. My whole family protests. There are times when I lay down with David for his afternoon nap, I tried to name the objects I see in the room. With his eyes closed, David murmurs: “No French.” During those tech talks Chris gives once in a while, my mind wanders off and starts conjugating “aller”. He catches me: “can you pay attention?”

Learning a language is quite like doing research. Hours and hours of work seem to produce nothing. I forgot that word AGAIN. The results are useless because there is a bug in the code. I don’t understand a thing when a French major student tries to tell me his summer plan. The referee can’t look past a model specification and thus rejects the paper three times. In both activities, the input and output relationship is so not linear.

What I learned is this. Focus on the inputs. That is the only way I don’t get frustrated or lose patience. The reward is right around the corner.  It always catches me by surprise.

In preparation for the trip, Aisela and I are meeting every week now to practice and provide accountability. The grand gesture seems to increase our motivation and learning speed. Worst case scenario, we are not able to catch Canadian French and converse with the locals. We will still wine and dine fabulously.