Chapter 17: Create a Daily Habit of English
“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.” – Jim Ryun
Even though you are learning much faster now than you ever thought possible, it will still take some
amount of time to reach your desired level. This is why it’s so important to do two things. One, create
a real joy in yourself for learning English as we spoke about earlier. Two, make it a daily habit.
When your English-learning activities become true habit, you cannot fail. Even 3 or 6 months of study
will require some habit. This means making it a part of your daily life.
I had to talk about this point because I see that this is where so many students fall down. Truly, it is
always hard to put a new habit into our lives, even one as exciting and fun as learning English rapidly.
One of the keys to learning English very fast is to study it with some intensity. This means doing
something every single day.
Many students improve a bit, then stop for a while. Then begin again and improve a bit, and then stop
for a while. Don’t learn English this way. If you follow this ‘2 steps forward, 1 step’ back approach
to English it will take you two years to make 20 steps forward.
Instead, just do it every day. Take 20 steps forward in 3 months. This habit-forming intensity is a key
success-trait of the best learners in the world.
To help you, there is a very powerful method to implement a habit into your life. I first learned this
from Eben Pagan. The concept is called ‘habit gravity and escape velocity’.
Please imagine a rocket, about to take off and fly into space, then travel to the moon. The rocket
requires a huge amount of fuel in those first few seconds and minutes. It must travel 384,000 km to the
moon. But 85% of its fuel is used up in those first 2 km as it fights against gravity and leaves the
Earth’s orbit.
Then, as the rocket gets further and further away it needs less and less fuel to fly, until it is just flying
automatically and easily, all the way to the moon. By then the rocket has great forward momentum,
and it would actually need a lot of fuel to stop, or to change direction.
All the fuel is used up in just that first little bit of the journey.
Now, putting any new behavior into your life is like making a rocket take off. Your rocket fuel is
willpower. And you will need a lot of it in those first 30 or 40 days. A lot. Especially if you have not
studied English or any language before.
The thing is you only have a small amount of rocket fuel to use every day. You only have a little bit of
will power to use every day. The best way you can use this willpower is by forcing yourself to focus
only on this new action – learning English. Don’t waste your daily willpower on anything else. Make
learning English the only new thing you are doing for this month. So you won’t need to spend your
willpower on anything else. Make your life as easy and simple as possible for this month, apart from
English.
Then every day for the first 30 or 40 days, make an English-learning ritual. Early in the morning is
best. And every day make sure you do it. Before anything else. After the first one or two months you
will see that it becomes strangely easy to keep doing. Your rocket is now flying through space.
But first, you have to take off and get there. So prepare for some daily effort in those first few weeks.
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