Is there a ukulele outside your front door?

I bet there are a few

For a few weeks last year, there was a ukulele sitting right outside our front door. Some people have a welcome mat. We had a ukulele. It was a special kind of welcome sign, our way of saying, “Please feel free to learn how to play ukulele while you wait for us to open the door.”

Also, this ukulele was a no-longer-wanted toy on its way to the storage room in the basement of our apartment building. Only it took a four six nine-day week break on the way there.

The thing is, while I clearly intended to take this ukulele to storage, there was no particular reason for me to do so urgently.

In general, human beings (especially the dopamine-challenged among us, but maybe everybody) have trouble accomplishing things when there is no pressing need to accomplish them. We need structure to be able to deal with our ukuleles.¹

Now, if I were doing a challenge — say, “Take to Storage 12 Ukuleles in 12 Hours” — then it would have been a different story. Then you’d see me enthusiastically carrying ukuleles up and down the stairs all day.

It’s not an accident that I publish like a clock every Monday at 8:37 GMT. Because if I didn’t have this weekly deadline, this newsletter would not exist. And it’s not an accident that I’d imposed on myself a one-language-a-month structure last year: even if it made learning sometimes barely manageable, at least I was doing it rather than procrastinating or succumbing to my ingrained perfectionist tendencies.

There are ukuleles everywhere in my life, and probably in yours too. There is the clay pot that I started washing and never finished because I took a 15-minute break two months ago. There is the IKEA desk I bought for my teenager in October last year and haven’t assembled yet.

There is the unfinished baby cardigan that I started knitting exactly 16 years ago while eight months pregnant with my first baby (that baby is still patiently waiting for his cardigan AND his desk.)

But it’s the saddest when the thing we’re failing to accomplish is something that’s really important to us.

I, for one, really want to get to a conversational level in Arabic. At the moment, I can have a simple conversation with a very patient native speaker. I want more than that.

I want to speak effortlessly. I want to be able to go to the grocery store down the hill and have a casual exchange with its owner in Arabic as I pay for my bananas, without hyperventilating for 15 minutes before this exchange. I want to be able to talk to the kind grandfatherly man who works at the deli counter in another store and always recommends the best cheese. Yesterday he gave me two extra slices of smoked salmon, after weighing it, saying “Because I haven’t seen you in a while.”

I don’t know if I would speak Arabic to these people even if I could because maybe it would be weird, but I want to feel like I can.

But to get there, I need to set the right goal.

How to set the right goal

I hate feeling like I’m giving advice here. We live in an era of Toxic Advice. If I see another 5-step program to fluency / thinness / radical productivity / whatever else it is I’m missing in my life, I’m going to scream.

I’ve also developed an intolerance to imperatives.

BE PRESENT. EMBRACE THE UNKNOWN. SET THE RIGHT GOAL. WHATEVER.

I think imperatives should be banned. Maybe Trump should ban imperatives while he’s at it.

But I also want to be a force of good in this world and help everyone not leave their ukuleles by their front doors for an indefinite amount of time.

So I’m gonna go ahead and give you (and myself) one piece of advice: set the right goal.

“I want to be conversational in Arabic” is not a good goal to pursue because it’s too vague.

Your goal has to be ultra-specific and super-motivating (aka a USSM goal²) and it has to do something with language use, to get your brain into the mindset that this language you’re learning is a means not an end.

It has to be something manageable (doable in a week to two months max) but challenging. Something that would make you feel like you’ve arrived somewhere.

For instance, when I just started learning Finnish, before I knew what a USSM goal was, I intuitively chose one right from the start: I made it my goal to understand one episode of Peppa Pig by the end of two weeks.

And with the next 11 languages that I was learning last year, whenever I remembered to set a USSM goal, things would go much better than when I didn’t.

Then you reverse engineer it. You ask yourself, “What parts of the language do I need to know to achieve that goal?” And you forget about everything else. Of course, you’ll be learning a lot along the way but you won’t have the nagging and demotivating I-want-to-be-fluent-but-I’ll-never-get-there at the back of your mind, because you’ll be laser-focused on achieving just that one milestone.

And then you’ll move on to the next one. And the next one. Your whole learning journey should consist of jumping from one USSM goal to the next, without ever worrying about the bigger picture. The whole idea is to make the learning process less vague and daunting by creating these stepping stones.

Examples of good USSM goals include:

“Write a letter to my distant Italian cousin by the end of the week.”

“Place my order in Mandarin when I go to that Chinese restaurant next month”

“Learn enough Portuguese to read and understand one short story in it by the end of the month.”

“Learn enough Thai to talk to an injured monolingual Thai speaker by the end of the week.”

“Have a brief exchange in Swahili with that woman who just joined your fitness studio and who apparently had grown up in Kenya, next time you share a squat rack.”

Seriously, if there is someone in your life who you wouldn’t feel like a total idiot talking to in their language, even briefly, it would be the best USSM goal ever. Why?

Because talking to people, especially in a foreign language, is inherently stressful (and joyful, sure, but mostly stressful), and stress (if you have the right mindset) can really kick your brain into a learning mode (or an I’m-finally-going-to-take-that-ukulele-to-storage-because-I-don’t-want-the-cleaning-lady-to-yell-at-me mode.)

Please share in the comments: what is your next USSM goal?? I really wanna know. If it relates to unfinished 16-year-old baby cardigans I’d love to hear that too.

As for myself, I thought about it long and hard, and I decided that I’m not in the right headspace anymore to commit to going out there and talking to strangers. That was the craziness of the last year and it seems to be firmly in the past.

So my next USSM goal is going to be something else. I haven’t decided what exactly yet.

For now, I’m just gonna stick with “I want to be conversational in Arabic.”

I know, it’s against the rules. I’m not following my own advice.

Sometimes, when you procrastinate long enough on taking things to storage/recycling, someone might come along and make a unicorn costume out of them. So maybe let’s just all forget about goals and see what happens if we surrender to the flow.

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1. “Deal with your ukuleles” is a more polite way of saying “Get your shit together.”

2. Just think of the “USSR” and their five-year plans.