This is my parents’ backyard in Virginia.
Behind the barn and the mist, that’s Castleton Mountain.
These aren’t the Alps or the Rockies, so you won’t exactly need a Sherpa or an oxygen tank to get to the top.
But it’s still a mountain.
And I usually climb it every day when I’m visiting.
There’s a path to the top. It’s not too steep. Sometimes a tree falls across it, but no other major obstacles. Basically, it’s just an uphill walk.
But I don’t take the path – I go straight up.
It’s steep. There are big rocks to climb. And sometimes I get cut on thorns.
Why?
Because it’s difficult.
But if I do it every day, then it becomes less and less difficult and I get to the top faster every time.
A complaint I often hear from students is that their English is simple. They say they know and understand a lot of words, but when they speak they use the same simple words and sentences again and again.
Well, I’ve got a solution to that: take the hard way.
The book I’m reading at the moment is So Good They Can’t Ignore You, by Cal Newport.
In it, he tells the story of a guitar player named Jordan Tice who’s about his age and who also started playing when he was a teenager. The difference is, Jordan became a professional by the time he was 18 while the author had trouble getting people to his shows.
According to Cal, the explanation is something called “deliberate practice.”
Cal learned easy songs. And then he played the easy songs a lot. Because they were easy.
While Jordan, on the other hand, was always learning more and more difficult songs. As soon as he would learn one, he would challenge himself to learn a harder one.
It wasn’t easy. It was uncomfortable and hard and frustrating. But he did it every day, and now he’s a pro.
As Cal says, “I played. But he practiced.”
I know that sometimes when you’re speaking English, you’ll need to “play.” Maybe during a presentation or an interview you’ll need to say the words and phrases you’re comfortable with.
But there are other times you could be practicin: with a colleague, with a stranger at the airport, with a teacher…
This is when you can try the big word you heard in Game of Thrones or the nice phrase you read in “The Wall Street Journal”…
It’ll feel like a mountain at first. But then it’ll be a hill.
And then there will be bigger mountains waiting for you…