FINAL DAY of The September Challenge: Learning Spanish & Performance (30/09/2022)
Reflections, lessons & announcing my October Challenge.
My report for Friday 30th September 2022 - the final day of my September Learning Spanish challenge.
This report structure will be a little bit different. I’ll start with my reflections & learnings from this challenge in the form of:
My lessons & reflections from carrying out this challenge,
My improvement points if I were to replicate the challenge,
My practical actions I’m taking into the future even after this challenge has finished.
I’ll then talk about my October challenge, and finish with my ‘experience’ of the day (as I do in all posts).
September Challenge Reflections:
My intention was to learn Spanish for 30 minutes a day through Duolingo.
Overall, I managed to do 29/30 days on Duolingo. Day 24 was the day where my ‘streak’ broke. However, as I was in Tenerife, I still spoke Spanish on that day at both the hotel and a pharmacy.
I managed to do 30 minutes + a day for approximately 15 days of the month. Around week 2, I had a few days where it dropped into the 15-30 minute range. By the end (in Tenerife), I was doing just a lesson or two a day, in the 5-10 minute range.
So, let me summarise 5 lessons from this challenge:
Duolingo is a brilliant tool for learning a language.
Honestly so pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to use, and how low the barrier to starting a lesson was.
The UX is superb.
Even doing 1 x 5-minute lesson a day can accumulate over time.
I found tracking the new words/phrases I learnt & my mistakes to be very beneficial.
As with all learning, the more we reflect on what we’re learning, the quicker it becomes ingrained.
And there is no better way to learn than through correcting a mistake we initially made.
Speaking a language is very different to learning how to read and write it.
I found myself getting quite tongue-tied when I was actually speaking some Spanish in Tenerife, especially when I had an actual conversation with someone.
Saying a memorised phrase isn’t hard, but actually just introducing myself, saying where I’m from, how long I’m there for, etc. was quite tricky!
Also the pace of speech is so different - it can be hard to
The busier I got, the harder it was to justify time to learn a language - be clear with your priorities.
I’m not upset about this at all - life is about prioritisation.
September started off a bit quieter for me, so I could dig into this challenge.
As my work accumulated, I shifted my goal from 30 minutes per day to 15 minutes per day.
Once in Tenerife, the focus was on the proposal and spending time with my family & fiancée, so again deprioritised it further.
The coolest thing I took from learning Spanish over this month was musing about the two different ways they express the verb ‘to be’ and how it may manifest in their collective mindset.
One verb for ‘to be’ is ser - which is used when describing ‘permanent’ things and locations.
Another verb for ‘to be’ is estar - which is used when describing impermanent or time-bound things.
I wonder whether Spanish people are on one hand more emotionally resilient as they’ve built impermanence of emotions into their daily language.
From a young age, you associate emotions like sadness, tiredness, anger, etc. as an impermanent thing.
This may allow us to accept those emotions more easily, and let them go with less resistance.
But I also wonder whether they are also more likely to have a fixed mindset, as they use the permanent form of ‘to be’ with character traits.
For example, if someone is lazy, or bad-tempered, whether they see it more as a ‘fixed trait’ given they associate permanence with it through their language.
What I would improve on if I were to do this challenge again in the future:
A specific time to do Duolingo daily. I actually did start with this initially, but as it was a low priority action compared to other work, I deprioritised it in my planner.
Perhaps identifying specific modules of interest to work on. Going through Duolingo in the order suggested has been great; however, I personally would have loved to do some past or future tense, as they’re very useful in conversations.
2 Action Points from this challenge that I will take with me into the rest of 2022:
One single Duolingo lesson a day! Why not? It literally takes 5-7 minutes, and I can easily do it with breakfast or while on the toilet!
If not daily, aim for a total of 30-minutes per week (so 3 x 10-minutes per day).
Where I am now with past challenges I’ve done in 2022:
January Challenge: Eating Whole-Foods Plant Based
Still eating plant-based and feeling strong. Mostly whole-foods. Some dark chocolate and olive bread. Include protein powders in my morning oats breakfast.
Body in good shape. Was in incredible shape pre-holiday. Post-holiday not bad, but not as toned as I was before. Didn’t train as intensely. Calories increased by about 500 per day, but movement didn’t increase to match it.
February Challenge: Sleep Optimisation
Not so good. Variable. However, as my partner begins work in her new role, the hope is to bring this back to a steady 11:30pm-7:30am routine (for me).
March Challenge: Reading
Did a lot of fiction reading this month while on holiday. Reading an epic fantasy series called the Frith Chronicles by Shani Stovall. Loving it. Hope to continue reading a bit daily as I return.
Also still reading Smart Growth. Will finish it off this month as I want to adapt some of the topics into leadership workshops I’ll be running.
April Challenge: Meditation
Has been happening, but less consistently than last month. 8 times this month meditating for more than 10 minutes.
But still been doing my 5-minute Wim Hof breathing practice daily. It’s not quite meditation though.
May Challenge: Running
Need to pick it up. Currently going to need to do 100km+ months from now until the end of the year to hit 1000km for the year.
Deprioritised in September due to lots of tennis matches.
June Challenge: Social Media
Very deprioritised. Will get back on it in October.
July Challenge: Stretching.
Still stretching daily. No more than 10 minutes, which isn’t ideal (20 would be much better), but body has been feeling good.
August Challenge: Curiosity Calls.
Did a few this month. But mainly inbound leads - not for curiosity. The leads were converted, for which I’m deeply grateful. This also means less time for curiosity calls haha!
So, what’s the challenge for October?
October Challenge: Daily Podcast Learning
Guys, I’ll be honest.
I’m going to be working at capacity over the coming months.
My schedule for October is already looking packed.
That’s why, for this month, I’m going to make it more realistic for myself.
I’m committing to listening to a podcast daily for at least 10 minutes.
And then I’ll share any of my learnings with you here.
The podcasts I’m going to be listening to are packed with information, so even 10 minutes will yield some cool insights:
Huberman Labs - Dr. Andrew Huberman offers a wealth of science-backed information around neuroscience and performance.
Diary of a CEO - Haven’t listened to Steven Bartlett’s podcast before, but curious to delve into it as it’s been recommended highly.
The Rich Roll Podcast - One of my favourites to listen to in the past - would be nice to pick it up again just to change things up.
I’m going to be listening to episodes where the guests are in the field of business, leadership, sports and psychology.
Will try to listen to more than 10 minutes per day, but this Substack is already taking up too much time that could otherwise be used more productively, so I want to reduce the barriers to consistency as much as possible.
(But hey, only 3 months left - have posted a blog here every day for the last 9 months! That’s a sweet win!)
So, that’s the October challenge. Let’s see how it goes!
Thank you as always for your continued support!
My Experience (Friday 30th September 2022):
Reflections on My Learning Spanish Challenge:
Doing Unit 2 lessons on Duolingo
Finished Lesson 4/4 on the ‘To Be’ module.
Time Spent on Duolingo: 3 minutes
Between 10am and 11am.
New words:
None - this module is all about refining my use of ‘ser’ and ‘estar’.
Mistakes:
Made one mistake as I was going through this lesson rapidly.
A stupid one - mistook a ‘we’ for ‘they’ so did the wrong verb conjugation.
We’ve made it to the end of the September Challenge! Thank you so much for reading - I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Hope that you have an amazing day ahead.
Until tomorrow,
Kam