You might find it strange, but I HATED English class in school.
In their quest to teach English, they forgot the most important step, how to captivate the reader and get your message heard.
You know how it was, essay after boring essay. Even if you enjoyed writing, it was tedious. But one day in 8th grade, I was told the next assignment would be a short story.
“Wait…what? You mean I can actually be creative?”
I was so excited that I still remember what I wrote. It was a story of a boy who ran away from home with the aspirations to become a professional soccer player.
I wanted to make the story longer, but I had to hand in the assignment. Either way, the teacher was impressed, since I had never shown enthusiasm for any other assignment.
I didn’t enjoy the essays, but there’s something about storytelling that just excites me.
Have you ever wondered how weird it is that we spend money to stare at a screen of flashing images for an hour and a half?
It’s all in our desire to hear a good story.
Story captivates. Story allows your message to be heard. Story is the missing element that schools rarely teach.
My passion for storytelling led me to ghostwrite a book for a well known internet personality.
I’m a self-improvement junky. I love learning new things which is how I found myself watching videos by a man named Dan Lok. I found out he was opening a copywriting course and, as a writer, I naturally decided to join.
Through the course, there were opportunities given to work on some of their internal projects. And you bet I jumped at the opportunity.
Since I spent countless hours training before I took the course, I found myself at an advantage. I even had the experience of self publishing my own book, “The Language Learner’s Pocketbook”.
In my mind, I was the only one who could produce the quality they were looking for in the time they were looking for.
The requirements: Take the lessons taught in Dan Lok’s Boss in the Bentley Series and craft a story to teach those lessons.
I watched every single video, took note of the most important lessons, ordered them in a natural way, and then completed the 10,000+ word story in a matter of weeks.
One of the full-time writers on his team even complimented me saying, “It’s a better story than what I could write.”
You can read the first chapter of the book here.
How my passion for foreign languages changed the way I viewed the world…and how I communicate.
I’ve always dreamed of seeing the world from another person’s eyes. Language learning is the closest thing I’ve found to actually do that. You literally have to become a different person.
Language is not only about the words, but about the culture. The culture is ingrained into the language itself. I found this to be especially true when learning Japanese.
Maybe you’ve known Japanese people to be very polite? That’s not only their character, it’s the entire language. You have to change the way you speak depending on the context.
This doesn’t even account for the difficulties to learn the language in the first place. Imagine being dropped into the middle of a foreign country with only a phrasebook. What would you do?
You would be forced to communicate in as few words as possible. The only way to communicate your message is to speak “their” language.
“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” – Nelson Mandela
This applies to more than just foreign languages, but also to the conversation going on in the person’s head.
We all have different goals, ideas and beliefs. If someone were to speak directly to those, we would feel heard; we would feel understood. That’s where trust is formed.
