Let me take you back for a moment to spring 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, when many people were at home and trying to figure out what to do and how best to use their time. For many people, it was overwhelming and disorienting to anticipate how long the situation would last and how to make the most of it. For many commuters with busy schedules and out-of-home activities, the lack of routine, connection, and stimuli was frustrating.

At that time, I had already been working from home and teaching online since 2016, but I did anticipate the surge in distance learning and requests for online lessons. I also had 3 years of experience running the 30-Day Speaking Challenge, so I had many tools for self-guidance and discipline, but what I lacked was a long-term strategy for keeping speaking practice going. Previously, I had managed sprints of 90-100 days in 2016 and for 6 months in the second half of 2018, but the idea of doing something for 5 years never crossed my mind.

In other language challenges in 2015 and 2016, I had set goals and imposed self-punishments when I failed to achieve them. I spent all of 2015 coffee-free and from mid-2016 to mid-2017 without a drop of alcohol. (Many people have told me that those aren’t punishments, and instead are beneficial for one’s health. I don’t disagree.) Those 2 separate year-long periods actually taught me quite a lot about discipline, more so than the previous periods of trying to keep a learning streak going.

For example, consciously choosing to be caffeine-free or sober was a daily task with a limited scope of 24 hours, and perhaps even for just 1 hour, but multiplied by 24 hours. At the beginning, when I stopped cold turkey, but without a plan, things felt sudden and hard to transition into. Many people had lots of questions about why I was doing this or how I was going to stay disciplined or how to handle temptations. I didn’t have a complicated strategy; I was just going to focus on one day at a time, and trust that little by little, it would get easier to keep going, and I would learn and develop better strategies for handling temptation and not giving in.

Bizarrely, when I gave up coffee, nobody felt bothered it I instead drank tea or water, yet when I said that I was giving up alcohol, suddenly, it was awkward when someone else wanted to drink or I was the only one not drinking at an event or on a special occasion. That was quite revealing about the nature of personal goals, personal discipline, and how it may only affect ourselves or may involve and affect other people. Understanding how we interact with other people and how they influence our goals and behavior can either help or hurt our goals.

On a podcast episode of the Fluent Show with Kerstin Hammes and Lindsay Williams, I discovered Gretchen Rubin’s book called The Four Tendencies. Depending on how people respond to external and internal commitments, people tend to fall into four archetypes:
Upholders can satisfy both their own goals and fulfil commitments with others.
Questioners can satisfy their own goals, but question and possibly reject other people’s expectations.
Rebels tend to reject both their own plans and other people’s requests. They prefer to be a free spirit.
Lastly, Obligers may struggle to stick to their plans, but respond well to other people’s expectations, likely now wanting to disappoint them. There is a quiz to discover your tendency. The podcast dives into how to apply it to language-learning habits.

Personally, I identify with the Obliger tendency, and it makes complete sense to me why I have loved organizing the 30-Day Speaking Challenge for over 8 years to write daily emails and encourage learning to keep practicing as much as possible. At some point, it started to get to me that I wasn’t exactly practicing what I preached. I started strong each month, but at some point during the month, despite my best intentions, my streak would falter. I questioned at times if maintaining a 30-day goal was impossible, but now that I’ve reached 1,900 days, I know that it is indeed not impossible to accomplish.

If the problem wasn’t necessarily the feasibility of the goal, then what environmental factors were involved? As an Obliger, there were fellow challenge participants to help keep me accountable as I was holding them accountable. Then I discovered other self-help books from James Clear, Atomic Habits, and Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit. I realized that habits can rely on environmental triggers, internalized programs of how we react to stimuli, the rewards we receive, and the anticipation we develop for the next iteration. James Clear emphasizes the importance of designing our environments to enable positive habits and friction to discourage negative habits that we wish to avoid.

How does motivation affect our habits?
I’ve had many, many discussions about motivation and discipline with students and fellow language enthusiasts. I believe the simple answer is that motivation is the fuel that gets you started, but discipline is the strategy that keeps you going. You could be highly motivated to cram for an upcoming exam, but that routine is unsustainable in the long term. However, you could have a minimum level of motivation to get started, then stop paying attention to fluctuating levels of motivation in order to stay disciplined for a longer period.

I often ask students whether they brush their teeth every day, take a shower every day, or eat food every day. They usually respond that, of course, they do that daily. When I ask why and whether it depends on their level of motivation, they often mention doing those things as a force of habit. They don’t rely on motivation or discipline to take care of hygiene or nutrition, yet when it comes to learning another language, they believe that motivation and discipline are essential factors. I disagree, actually. I believe that if we ignore motivation and keep things minimally feasible and easy, then motivation is not necessary, and if we do something long enough, over and over again, it becomes a force of habit. If we adopt an identity-mindset, eventually a habit can become who we are.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” -Aristotle

Throughout history, there are accounts of military leaders ordering their soldiers to burn their ships upon landing on enemy shores. What this did was remove from the soldiers’ minds, was the possibility of retreat or failure. There was only the possibility of initiative, taking action, and relentlessly pursuing success. Before I managed to reach a 6-month streak back in 2018, I gained insight from reading The Power of the Habit, which was that I was actually quite good at failing my own 30-Day Speaking Challenge. So what might happen if I intentionally set out to fail… at failing? Somehow, the Jedi mind trick and reverse psychology worked because I managed to fail at failing for 6 months straight. During that time, skipping was not an option. It just didn’t exist. That ship was burned and sunk.

Why did those 6 months come to an end, though? I was on a family vacation, and it was hard to be in control of my free time or quiet spaces, and busy travel days. Those are excuses if I am honest because I recently came back from a 2-week family trip in June 2025, but I took my computer and webcam with me, and every morning before breakfast, I made a 10-minute recording because it was a priority for me and because I was not going to interrupt my 5-year streak!

There have been busy days of teaching, and there have been days when I have been sick, tired, or not feeling like practicing, but no matter what, I still made the effort to speak and record myself for 2-4 minutes, saying in 6 languages that I was sick, tired, and not feeling motivated. I just accept that not every day is a perfect day, but every day is a perfect opportunity to practice. There is no ideal month, ideal week, ideal day, ideal hour, so that means that all months, all weeks, all days, and all hours are equally great opportunities to practice.

I like to give myself more than one opportunity to practice. If I procrastinate and delay practicing all day, then that becomes a burden that weighs on my shoulders until the last few hours of the evening, but if I make an early-morning recording just like an early-morning gym session, then that is a check mark I carry with me throughout the day to feel good about. So, I prefer to give myself multiple opportunities throughout the day in order to have options and not feel tempted to skip, which I won’t.

Why keep going for so long?
Once you start to see the fruits of your labor and taste their sweetness in your mouth, you want more. Nurturing this habit, like watering a plant and giving it the right amount of sunlight and hydration, is a rewarding process. Language learning is an investment in yourself, in your future, and your future self is proud of you for not giving up. I have had wonderful opportunities being able to reflect on personal development questions, discover the latest behavioral neuroscience research, listen to podcasts with leading experts, and read their books. As Socrates encouraged us to do, “Know thyself” is a great daily reward and self-fulfilling motivation to keep going sustainably. The process is the reward. Fluency is not the goal, but it becomes a byproduct of the process. The path is the journey, not the destination. The beautiful landscapes, the memories shared with fellow travelers are the reward.