
Image courtesy of Pawel Maciejewski
You’re stressed, overworked, and tired. You feel like you’re dropping the ball on so many things. You find yourself lying awake in the early hours, thinking about those items still on your to-do list, those emails not yet cleared.
One day, some little incident makes you blow up. For me, it was my printer malfunctioning and my stapler breaking in the middle of a very busy week, when I was trying to sort out some last-minute handouts for my post-grad classmates.
Have you ever heard the phrase “don’t sweat the small stuff”? There are so many things that we waste huge amounts of energy on (and worry is always wasted energy), which just won’t matter in a week, let alone ten years.
Here are ten examples of things you might be stressing about today that will not matter a jot in ten years’ time:
1. That embarrassing misspelling in the email you just sent Read the rest of this article »
2. The jerk who cut you up on your way into work
3. How clean your kitchen is when your mother-in-law comes to visit
4. One of your kids acting up
5. A nasty email from a stranger
6. Missing a deadline
7. Losing out on a job interview to a better candidate
8. Slipping up on grocery shopping and offering your family a choice of cereal or sandwiches for dinner, one night
9. Making a small mistake in a report – and being called up on it by a client
10. Your library books being overdue
Language learning is essentially fun, or should be, if it is done naturally, in line with how the brain learns. We learned our first language quite well, without explicit instruction. Unfortunately, the teaching of second languages has been turned into a complex classroom ceremony, consisting of obtuse grammar rules, annoying drills, rote memory and tests. The result is that many people are discouraged from learning languages. Maybe they would not learn their first language if it were taught in this way.
As a lifelong bookworm, I admit that I’m more passionate about books than the average guy or gal on the street. Even so, it shocked me when I first read that the average American never reads another book after college.

“You are what you eat” – popular saying
We all have the ability to learn to speak more than one language. Throughout history, whenever languages co-existed in close proximity, people managed to naturally communicate across the language divide. They had to. That is still true today. Where different languages brush up against each other, people have no trouble learning another language and using it, whether it be children selling souvenirs in the market, or business people in international meetings. This is true in Asia, Africa, America and Europe.
No matter what your age, throughout your life you will be learning. Your formal education ends with high school, but for many the learning never ends. You may attend a university, trade school, night school, community college or adult school. You may enhance your knowledge via business seminars, lectures, books, e-courses, and whatever else shows up in our information society. So wouldn’t it be helpful to have some good study habits and some tools to increase your ability to learn?