Post 10: Baby Steps to a Foreign Language: Setting Mini Goals

Last week you learned how to create a 90 day plan to fluent Italian, or any language you plan on learning. Today I will show you how Mini Goals will make learning easy and fun.

In the extremely funny movie What About Bob?, Dr. Leo Marvin, with his huge ego, convinces Bob Wiley, a man who carries a gold fish and who is mysophobic, thantophobic, achluophobic, dermatophobic, albuminurophobic, bacteriophobic, catapedaphobic and probably any other phobic'al word, to read a book Baby Steps. Bob learns the importance of making small goals which helps rid him of his phobias, while Dr. Marvin ironically becomes insane.

Bob shows Mini Goals are very important in everything from health, learning, business, entertainment, and social connections. Mini Goals are what create prosperous businesses, excellent movies, lasting friendships, and most importantly, easy and effective learning.

I guarantee, if you follow along and create your own mini goals, you will be able to do almost anything! Here are the 3 pieces of Mini Goals, [each has a one sentence summary]:

Piece 1 - Creating a Mini Goal:
I often don't know where to begin when creating goals. Where do I start? Will this be too hard? Or will it be too easy? But I often find the easiest, most effective, and most fun answer to be:

"Shoot for the Moon. Even if You Miss, You'll Land Amongst the Stars."

Why make a goal too easy? Why have low expectations? Why limit yourself? What's the fun in having a goal to learning 10 words when I can shoot for 100! You may ask, "what if I land in a black-hole or get hit by a meteor?" Well, in reality, that would suck. But this is your imagination, you decide if a situation is a failure or a learning experience.

You decide whether you've lost or won. You decide whether you failed the business and lost a job, or you've learned valuable information and created new opportunities for yourself.

Summary: If you don't know what your Mini Goal should be, shoot for the moon! Exaggerate the possibilities!

Piece 2 - You can never fail:
The best part about Min Goals is you can never fail! Say you want to become the president, but only become the vispresident. Or you want to travel the world, but you only travel to the next town. Or better yet, you want to win $1,000,000 in the lottery, but you only win $10. Have you really lost?

It's YOUR opinion. That's what winning and loosing and fail and success are: opinions.

Summary: You can never loose: it's only an opinion.

Piece 3 - Changing your Mini Goals:
Mini Goals are like clear water flowing down a small stream. They twist and turn and speed up and slow down as they flow through the ups and downs, twists and turns of the stream. Mini Goals are most efficient and helpful if they can change their form to fit the situation.

When you exaggerated by 'shooting for the Moon', you may have set a really high goal, but now, after working towards your goal you feel more knowledgeable about your capabilities, so you can lower your expectations.

For example: this week I set a goal to memorize 100 of the most common Italian verbs and their conjugations on top of 150 more words. If I can only memorize 10 verbs in the first 3 days, I know I wont be able to memorize all 100 verbs. Now if I can memorize 10 verbs in 3 days, then I can probably memorize 20 in 6 days. So, there's my new goal! Likewise, if 20 in 6 days is too easy, I just raise it back up. Savvy?

Summary: Constantly change your Mini Goal: if too easy, raise it. If too hard, lower it. If too easy, raise it again. If too hard…

One last note, Mini Goals can also be extremely short, such as 20 minutes, or even only 1 or 2 minutes. The point of these goals is to use your time most effectively. If you want to memorize a few words, set aside 5 to 20 minutes, but if you need to write an essay give yourself 60 minutes. It's good to set a reasonably low time limit, this will motivate you to achieve your goal faster and more efficiently. After a break, you can always create another 5 minute session to finish memorizing the words [this is related to Spaced Repetition and SRS programs, we’ll talk about this later]


Now that you know the basics of Mini Goals...

1. Exaggerate when creating them
2. You never fail
3. Constantly change the goal

... Go have fun! Go create some goals, whether they are 1 week goals, or if they are 20 or 30 minute goals, go explore! And when you've done that, write a comment, I'm interested in what you're trying!