A lot of people think that the way to learn English is to study, study, study. And then one day they’ll be perfect. Work, work, work. And then one day, far in the future, they will be successful. They will be 100% fluent and speak just like a native speaker. 100% Perfectly.
What a sad way to live your life. Waiting for some day in the future, when you will be perfect is a fool’s goal because you will never be perfect. Yeah, that’s right. You will never be perfect.
Don’t feel bad. Being successful is not the same thing as being perfect.
Some of the most successful people in the world say that you should fail and fail often. Why? Because through failure, you learn and grow.
Stop waiting to be perfect and start using English. You already know more English than you think. Listen, speak and use the English you know and your speaking and listening will improve.
Life is short. Don’t miss the joy of using and growing your English because you’re so focused on some magical end goal of being perfect some day…
In this short video, the great philosopher Alan Watts talks about how music is similar to life. The purpose of music is not the end. The purpose of music is to sing and dance and enjoy the song. Watch this video and remember, you don’t need to understand every word of the video perfectly. Try to understand the main points and then use that information. Talk about it with a friend. And post a comment below.
“In music, one doesn’t make the end of a composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest; and there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to concerts only to hear one crashing chord, because that’s the end.
But we don’t see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct. We’ve got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression. It’s all graded. And what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system, with a kind of “c’mon kitty kitty kitty…” and you go to kindergarten, and that’s a great thing, because when you finish that, you’ll get into first grade. And then c’mon, first grade leads to second grade, and so on…
And then you get out of grade school you go to high school, and it’s revving up, the thing is coming… then you’re going to go to college, and by jove then you get into graduate school, and when you’re through with graduate school, you’ll go out to join the world.
And then you get into some racket where you’re selling insurance. And they’ve got that quota to make. And you’re going to make that. And all the time, this thing is coming, it’s coming, it’s coming, that great thing, the success you’re working for. Then when you wake up one day about forty years old, you say “My God! I’ve arrived! I’m there!” and you don’t feel very different from what you always felt.
And there’s a slight letdown, because you feel there’s a hoax. And there was a hoax. A dreadful hoax. They made you miss everything.
Because we’ve simply cheated ourselves, the whole way down the line. We thought our life by analogy was a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end. Success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you’re dead.
But we missed the point the whole way along.
It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing, or to dance, while the music was being played.”
~Alan Watts
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