#80: Three (recycled) Things that got me thinking
💎Vonnegut + ✍🏽 Bagieu + 🌍 language wizard
Bonjour,
This is the first of my (Northern-hemisphere) summer re-runs, where we revisit or discover old favourites. Here are three things that made me think about intrinsic motivation, and that I had already shared in previous posts:
experience becoming
creative process
connecting people
Shall we?
1. Finding out (from post #38)
This Vonnegut quote, shared in Shaun Usher’s wonderful Letters of Note newsletter:
Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.
Kurt Vonnegut Letter to Xavier High School 5th November 2006
2. Process vs. result (from post #43)
In post #40, I shared a wonderful quote by Tove Jansson, from Pénélope Bagieu’s graphic book Brazen. I then enjoyed (re-)listening to a few interviews with Bagieu, who is consistently smart and funny. This quote on (perceived) failure, from a 2021 interview on French public radio France Inter, resonates with our theme:
[Failure] pushed me to ask myself what was really important. Was it the result, and its being validated? Or was it the creative process, which makes me happy? Doing things makes me very happy, and the end result, less so.
So even if someone says in the end: “It’s not so great, what you’ve done,” I say: “Yes, but I spent four amazing hours drawing it.” That is the right calculation. Because then it doesn’t matter so much if we’re not successful later on.
3. Connecting (from post #49)
In April, the Washington Post published a fascinating profile of hyperpolyglot Vaughn Smith, a man who speaks 24 languages and has some basic knowledge of another 21. (It’s a moving and informative read, enriched with sound clips and videos.)
He’s not interested in impressing anyone. He only counted his languages because I asked him to. He understands that he seems to remember names, numbers, dates and sounds far better than most people. Even to him, that has always been a mystery. But his reason for dedicating his life to learning so many languages has not.
Smith’s main motivation, writer Jessica Contrera explains, is to connect with other people. In a world where learning certain languages—the “worthy” or “useful” ones—is often seen as a necessity or a mark of status, Smith’s pleasure and curiosity warm my heart.
As a child:
… he overheard a Russian woman in a grocery store. “Здравствуйте, как поживаете?”. Vaughn asked. Hello, how are you? He explained that he was trying to learn Russian.
He liked the look he put on that woman’s face. “Like she was hit with a splash of happiness,” Vaughn remembers.
As a teenager:
There was a clique of Brazilian students, so he started to learn Portuguese. He befriended a brother and sister who would write him lists of phrases in Romanian, and watch as Vaughn memorized them all. When he noticed a shy Ethiopian girl, he asked her to teach him Amharic. […]
In an environment where he never felt like he fit, he was connecting in a way that no one else could.
As an adult:
… every language is really a story about the people it connected him to.
He learned American Sign Language from Gallaudet University students at a club called Tracks, which had a dance floor known for its vibrations.
He picked up some Japanese from the staff at a restaurant where he volunteered to clean the fish tank once a week.
When his niece liked the way the word chicken sounded in Salish, they started studying it together, befriended leaders of the language school on the Flathead Indian Reservation and road-tripped to Arlee, Mont., twice.
On the way back from Boston, where MIT researchers scanned his brain with an fMRI machine:
He’s bouncing as he talks about all the connections he made in a single day with the researchers and the strangers he’d introduced himself to in a coffee shop. All the people who were, as he would say, “hit with a splash of happiness.” This is what I’d discovered getting to know Vaughn: By putting in the effort to learn someone’s language, you’re showing them that you value who they truly are.
I’m wondering if Vaughn will ever see that same value in himself.
(Right after reading this piece—and now that I have a functional phone!—I finally downloaded a language learning app and am having fun with it. I thank Smith and Contrera for the prod 🌱.)
—August 2022 update: One month after I started playing Greek on DuoLingo, I wrote about my frustrating experience using the gamified app in post #56. After a 106-day streak on the app, I am glad to be taking a break from all the scorekeeping.—