Success largely boils down to a simple distinction. It’s glaringly obvious once you see it, but also easy to find ingenious ways of ignoring it: do the real thing and stop doing fake alternatives. Consider one person who wrote to me saying she turned down a job working in French. She didn’t feel her French […]

Two weeks ago I began a new project to learn my wife’s native language, Macedonian. To do that, we’ve been avoiding speaking English at home, to mimic the approach I used previously with my language learning trip. So far the project has been going quite well. I’m already pretty comfortable with the functional day-to-day communication […]

Easily the best habit I’ve ever started was to use a productivity system. The idea is simple: organizing all the stuff you need to do (and how you’re going to do it) prevents a lot of internal struggle to get things done. There’s a ton of systems out there. Some are elaborate, like Getting Things […]

Last week, I shared my goal to learn my wife’s native language, Macedonian. Today, I thought I’d give a quick update for anyone following along, as well as some tips in case you’d like to attempt something similar with your spouse or roommate. How is Learning at Home Different from Travel? Listen to this article […]