Motivation: how to learn any language and bench press 270 pounds ASAP

there are some things that nobody says
on the internet not because they're ignorant of these facts but because they have difficulty being a hundred percent honest with the audience and being a hundred percent honest with themselves let's go over the four things the four secrets that are hidden in plain sight for how you yes you can learn any language at any level as rapidly as possible and I'm not gonna give you any vague [ __ ] I'm gonna tell you how it really works all kind of coaches who are selling you ebooks and have hid videos here on YouTube about this they'll say some really vague and encouraging things about motivation well you know the most important thing is is your motivation let's get real people what do you mean by motivation the single most powerful motivating force for human nature is fear whether you want to learn a language or whether you want to increase your physical strength from lifting 200 pounds to 240 pounds from 240 pounds to 270 pounds when you go to the gym nothing motivates you more powerfully than fear fear for your life fear you're gonna get beaten up in the streets fear of whatever it is organized crime someone's out to get you no you know what and even if you talk to competitive athletes the desire to win is not that powerful the desire to earn money the desire to have Fame the desire to be achieved none of that stuff compares to fear for your life okay you will wake up and study Cambodian at 6 a.m. so goddamn hard if it's because you're terrified that you have to walk around in the streets of Cambodia and meet people face to face speaking in Cambodian to try to find a landlord and try to make sure your landlord isn't gonna rip you off and deal with petty Street criminals and all this look this is 2019 in some ways Cambodia is less rough than it used to be 10 and 20 years ago and you know what in some ways it's rougher some ways Cambodia sketchier and frankly if you want to be safe safe in Cambodia you probably need to speak three languages I just keeping it real I was never held at gunpoint in Cambodia or Laos I know a lot of people who were held at gunpoint in Cambodia Laos and I know one guy who was held at gunpoint with machine guns and managed to talk his way out of it to the gift of the gab man if you are afraid that you are living in a corrupt dictatorship where the police will take you in and interrogate you and charge you with crimes unfairly and hold you hostage like try to extort money from other people by holding you hostage or try to extort money out of you and I have been in that situation I have talked my way out of that when I was living in the capital city of Laos didn't happen to me in Cambodia it motivates you in a way no YouTube video possibly can Italy that no ebook ever possibly can okay that's point one fear live in fear okay point two a lot of people are gonna tell you BS about watching TV watching movies another's gonna tell you BS about flirt with girls flirt with boys dating love romance okay the relationship you can ever possibly have with a tie bar girl or a Japanese karaoke singer or your dreamy you know college friend or whoever it is you meet any kind of romantic relationship you can possibly have pales in comparison to the relationship you would have in terms of its value and language learning with a grandparent or some older person acting in the caring but authoritarian role of a grandparent okay anyone you seduce anyone who falls in love with you they're not going to correct you cajole you hold you higher standard and help you the way a grandparent will okay and you know why do I compare these three things okay people think they're just gonna whatever go to Japan go to Thailand go to Russia get a girlfriend and that's gonna solve their problem and again sorry doesn't matter switch the genders straight gay doesn't matter a romantic relationship is really looking for the solution in in the wrong places precisely because that person is gonna love you in a certain way and treat you as an equal answer with is all these complexities you know what sorry they might may not treat you as an equal you may be the boss you may be the dominant one in a sexual relationship and that's even worse for language learning right and in a sense it's like the next step into absurdity to think that watching entertainment like films that are just the most supposed to make you feel happy or make you laugh or present you with a sequence of explosions that titillate you and through to think that that is what language education is about is really a profoundly stupid misapprehension of how language education works okay so point what this fear point to was you're looking under the wrong Rock if you're looking for romance or you're looking for entertainment when what you should be looking for instead is somebody like a grandparent someone who's gonna care for you care about you hold you a higher standard look disapprovingly at your handwriting tell you that you're lisping ever-so-slightly you're pronouncing something ever so slightly wrong I forget points three and points later or not two thousand years later point three out of four is put yourself in a good sociolinguistic context and nobody wants to talk about this one because it's so hard to do right planning things out in advance and it's so hard to cope with after the fact if you somehow did it wrong if you found yourself in a bad situation there is a profound world of difference we're throwing aside the academic jargon here there is a profound difference between being in a context where people are apprehend and suspicious of you as a foreigner learning their language and where people are actually warm and giving and generous and helpful where they're happy and gratified that you're a foreigner learn their language okay I have been in situations where I was the white guy who spoke loshon suspiciously well and was studying Buddhism and had suspiciously good handwriting also my handwriting and lotion was great I could write the ancient language of Buddhism Pali and we're people dead serious regarded me as an American spy they regarded me as working for the CIA everybody got back to like oh yeah he says he's Canadian people who work for the CIA always say they're Canadian like it was more suspicious that I said I was an American that I was good citizen yeah they have fake passports all the time those guys right where people are like why are you learning our language why are you out here in these tribal villages by the border why are you doing this humanitarian work there must be some those people knew I wasn't there to get laid I wasn't ever my sex life I wasn't the usual kind of aging tourists in Southeast Asia you seem highly motivated to learn our language that's a bad thing that is a bad sociolinguistic context being in a context where people you know they don't feel comfortable or positive motivated to explain their own language to you but how do you put yourself in a good social linguistic context how do you put yourself in a context where more people behave towards you in that grandmotherly way that I've already described where people are really you know positively reinforcing what you're learning and challenging you and practicing the language with you in a way that's receptive and positive and hopefully not flattering you but they're they're really you know helping you to on the road to fluency how do you point that that's the answer that question you can't find in any PDF and you can't get it from this YouTube video it's really really hard and you know two different places in the same country like two different places in Laos totally different situation I'm sure two different places in Mongolia totally different situation Venus issue every people really apprehensive of outsiders you can be in a situation people are really positively inclined towards a foreigner learning their language for with whatever set of motivation and I think historically one of the big reasons nobody dealt with this is exactly that it gets into legenda and politics let's face it the history of translation the history of almost every obscure form of language research has been dominated by religious missionaries Christians translating in the Bible occasionally Muslims translating the Quran whatever it is religious fanatics have historically dominated advanced linguistic studies learning teaching if you just get into who wrote the dictionaries who published the materials design which is it's them and then they hand the baton to the hand the torch to you know colonial schools like French Empire and British Empire schools set up in those areas that again we're very often staffed by religious fundamentalists by priests and what-have-you all right so nobody wants to talk about that okay but it's crucial a good sociolinguistic context and finally economic desperation right nobody is really gonna be honestly about this either I think that economic desperation is a very distant fourth place compared to all the rest of these economic desperation will never really work for you in the same way that fear does and the other points I've mentioned but yeah I mean it's really funny you sir Jeremy Corbyn just lost the elections and I said look you know um I don't assume that you know rich people are bad people just because they're rich but you know it's it is funny in Western culture you know there are all these kind of defects of character that we associate with rich with people who are born rich people who you know don't have to work hard before I'm motivated in this way and there's no doubt that I mean economic desperation in every way whether it's just that it makes you really scrutinize what you're buying at the grocery store well it may stuff like the S but it's not that you're not just like Oh fine I'll just get some bananas so no I was in Taiwan and I took the time to ask which in Chinese which one of these bananas cost less per kilogram because one one would had the price by kilogram and the other had the price per banana you know and I went up and I had this conversation in Chinese with a woman and we figured out which was the better deal okay if you got money to burn you don't have that conversation in every way whether it's job applications and the interview actions that leads you into whether it's finding a place to sleep the way in which sleeping in a cheaper place forces you into the company of other poor people and mixing with those people the kind of economic interactions and what-have-you I look put it this way think about how different your experience is staying in a five-star hotel as opposed to staying in like a hostel in a dorm staying in a student dorm staying in a cheap youth also staying you know the poorer you are and it's not it's not just poverty it's that you're struggling against that poverty that you're going out and making that effort your own economic desperation could also drive you towards learning a language much better than others would and I think we see this again and again where even within the same ph.d program the kids who are in the idle rich and again maybe they can afford to pay a translator you know things as simple as that they have other ways to work around the problem because of their money they never seem to get away get ahead the same way as someone who's poor and specifically poor and motivated to struggle people like to disrespect my truth but the fact is that you know my name is I don't know