How To Be Ridiculous - Reloaded

in #steemit7 years ago

I'm not a native English speaker. As a matter of fact, I never had an English lesson in my entire life. Not even once. In high school, we were taught French and Russian. So I learned English by watching movies and browsing the internet.

9 years ago, I decided to launch a blog in English. Like I said, I was barely speaking English at that time, but I thought: "how hard could it be?". So I jumped in.

As you can imagine, it wasn't long until I got my first ironic comments. Boy, my English really sucked. My story telling had the grace of an axe, my grammar was random, at best, and some of my phrases were just irresistibly funny. The unintentional kind of funny, if you know what I mean.

But I stayed there. I kept writing and started to learn grammar, to enrich my vocabulary, to read other blogs, to practice the game. During the next 9 years this happened:

  • wrote more than 1,000,000 words on that blog only
  • got featured on high profile websites, from lifehack.org, to the front pages of digg or reddit
  • got on the world top 100 self-improvement blogs for 4 years in a row
  • wrote and self-published 9 books in English, 2 of them being translated in Korean and Farsi
  • contributed to high profile websites, with articles shared more than 500k times

What helped achieving all this was a thing called "accepting being ridiculous". I even wrote a full article about that, an article which very soon became very popular: How To Be Ridiculous. Here is the most important part of that article:

Have you ever saw an infant learning to walk? Noticed how he stumbles, fall, crawl and then get back on his feet again and start over? Everybody admires that. But what happens if you see a grown up doing the same thing? Suddenly, the stumbling, the falling and the crawling are ridiculous.

Being ridiculous means creating an unexpected and violent contrast between what you’re doing now and what you are generally expected to do. As a grown up you’re expected to walk steadily. Stumbling, falling and crawling will generate a huge contrast to this expectation. If you do that, you will be ridiculous. Similarly, an infant is expected to stumble and crawl, so he does not create any contrast at all between what he does now and what he’s expected to do. He’s just natural.

Every ridiculous situation is created from this contrast: you’re doing something surprisingly different from what you’re expected to.

Well, whenever you learn something new, when you’re trying to acquire a new skill or implement a new habit, you’re in fact bridging a huge gap between the actual you and the next you, the one who’ll have that habit, skill or ability. When you learn something new, you create an unexpected and sometimes violent contrast between the current you and the future you. Starting to get my point? Glad you do.

When we learn, when we grow, when we evolve, we are ridiculous. We are so different from the person we want to become, that we simply cannot avoid being ridiculous. Remember when you first started to learn a foreign language? Or cooking? Or some sport? Remember your hideous accent, your tasteless, ugly meals or your clumsy, mechanical moves? Well, my friend, you were ridiculous. Really ridiculous.

Truth is, we all are. We’re all becoming better, we’re all evolving and each time we’re aiming at something much better than we are now, being ridiculous is absolutely mandatory. It means we’re getting there. We’re creating the contrast. We’re leaving behind something familiar and we’re stumbling upon a new tertory. The biggest the gap we want to bridge, the highest our ridiculous meter.

So, why did I brought this up?

Well, because 75% of the comments I get right now on my Steemit blog are, according to the blog post above, ridiculous. The language is horrendously tormented, the wording is painfully skewed and almost all of them sound like an alien who learned English from Borat.

Please be aware that I'm not talking about spammers, and "follow me, I'll follow you" type of comments. These are just stupid and I ignore them.

I'm talking about people who are genuinely interested to make a name for themselves. Who want to connect, to contribute, to be useful. And, obviously, to make a buck or two in the process.

I brought this up to tell them to keep going. Yes, most of the time their comments are ridiculous. But I salute the intention behind all those comments.

Just stay there. Don't give up. Stay in the game. Perfect your grammar. Keep reading. Interact.

And accept that you are ridiculous now. That means you're evolving, that you started a journey towards a new you.

Try not to stop before reaching that destination.


I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.


Dragos Roua


You can also vote for me as witness here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses


If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform):

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I really enjoy your postings @dragosroua. Your English is perfect in my book. What you bring to STEEMIT is Honesty and Consistency. People that take the time to read and follow you will be pleasantly surprised that your native language was not English. I am grateful that you are here and that you have been very kind to me and many others by taking the time to interact with your commenters.

Yes I will my Brother.............

As far as I'm concerned, it's not easy to decide what is "perfect" English, but in my book, you're perfectly fine.

Outstanding and encouraging points. I hope that many who struggle with English will read this...

Although I was quite sure that you are not a native English speaker, you have surprised me with this because overall the quality of your English is excellent.

On the other hand, I'm not that surprised because you are a very enterprising and energetic person. Steem on, friend!

😄😇😄

@creatr

Thanks and nice seeing you steeming again!

Thanks, Dragos...

I wish I could devote more time to it, but have been working on survival! ;)

That's just ridiculous!! You've done an amazing job in just 9 years!! This is a great motivational post, not just for improving comments, but for anything you want to excel in. The more you practice, the better you'll get at it. Thanks for sharing your personal growth experience with us.

Thanks for the nice words, appreciated it :)

Their poor English is like my French.
Bonjour monsieur, je trouve votre travail très interessant. Did I mess up something over there?

Non, pas du tout :)

Quite a snowball you started for yourself from just learning English by blogging - congrats! You write excellent content. Looking forward to every post in the SMT series right now

Thanks! I think the SMT series is quite done, but if you have a specific request, let me know and I'll do my best to translate from Geek to English.

I guess if there are any good practical use-cases you see that emerge or even bad ones, that could be something to explore.

Ok, will think about it.

That was a nice inspiring post. Good lesson learned.
Thank you

A ridiculously poignant article @dragosroua! I've been here just over a month and sometimes I am certain to make myself the fool without meaning to. I think we all do, especially as you say, when we are trying to learn something new.

When you make yourself the fool, just remember the kid trying to learn how to walk.

@dragosroua,
This article gave me enough inspiration to continue my works! My mother language also a native one! But I learnt English (Anyway, I am a poor student for it) But now I have to deal with this language rather than my native language! So, sometimes you might seen a lot of grammar mistakes! And sometimes I can't express my real feeling via English too! (Don't know words to express it) With those limits, I do my best! Great work you did and now you made it happen!

Cheers~

Keep on at keeping on. :)

My biggest challenges with writing replies like this one are; using a mobile phone keyboard and stopping the auto-complete from thinking it knows what I want to way, day, a decent gaming machine istheand

SAY!

You write English very well now and I can see your progression from that older article. I'm teaching myself Python programming and I know my code is ugly but it works, so that's alright for now :) I'll get better with practice, I hope to achieve equivalence with your competency in English one day.

Love to see and read what you have to share today, I get a lot of information and see ha-new. Thanks a lot.

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