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.
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):