Living by myself, I have the opportunity to allocate just about every minute of my non-work time for whatever purpose I want, with very little interruption or distraction that I don’t seek out myself. This allows me to juggle a lot of projects and self-improvement efforts at once, but it can also allow me to be very focused on a single task for as long as I’m motivated.

A few weeks ago, I set aside 14 days to teach myself as much Italian language competency as possible. I’d been wanting to start learning the language anyway, and I found myself feeling very motivated toward that goal. I was curious to see how much progress that motivation was worth, so I blocked out a period of time to completely indulge it. As an added bonus, this period of fast learning would give me a solid foundation of knowledge to build on going forward—there would never be any question that I already knew some Italian. And indeed, I’m continuing to learn it now, in a more moderate volume, and I feel pretty good and confident about it.

I took video throughout those two weeks, mostly in my downtime after work. I did this for three reasons: to help stave off the boredom that I knew would creep in, for the entertainment value I thought it would have, and to advertise ideas that are important to me (more on that below). Watch the video here:

Now, to the important ideas:

I’ve always considered myself to be resourceful; I try not to leave anything on the table if it could potentially be of use to me. That’s why I had a “craft shelf” in college for my friends to joke about—it was a pile of scrap materials and electronics that I’d picked up from all over, from which I sometimes built lamps, decorations, or other hardware projects. When I started at my current job, I took a lot of time to read up on all the benefits so that I’d be sure to get the most out of them. These days, I save all my mason jars because I like the way they look in my window sill (and to have a few to drink out of). I have three credit cards that I use regularly because I’ve spent a good bit of time looking at and comparing cash-back reward programs to figure out the best plan.

Occasionally I’m reminded of what is by far the greatest source of value that I fail to capitalize on—the Internet. Here, we have just about the entirety of human knowledge, available immediately at all times, for a small fee that we’re most likely paying anyway. On paper, it looks like such a tool ought to have made humans godlike after a couple of years of perfectly executed information sharing. But in reality we’re not so different; we’re not growing so fast.

I find that, day-to-day, I tend to use the Internet for many things that will not make me better off except in the extremely short term. I’d like to write more about why I believe we tend to use the Internet in the ways that we do, but I have a lot to say about it so I’ll save it for a future post of its own. Here, it is enough for me to say that I know the Internet can be a tremendous aid in many of my aspirations, but at the same time I know that I often use it for completely unfulfilling tasks. And so, I feel the same kind of uneasiness as when I forget to use coupons or fail to buy plane tickets at the right time—that I’ve left something on the table. So in this case, I committed myself to using the Internet for an end that I’d find very fulfilling. I wanted to see how much the Internet could do for me in that limited span of time if I really focused on a single, difficult goal.

—Because, as you may have noticed, just about all of my learning materials for those two weeks were obtained through the Internet. There was the app, the podcasts, the instructional YouTube channels, textbook-like content on various learning websites, and the subtitled Netflix movies. There was so much content, in such variety of media, that whenever I got bored of one thing I could just switch to another. There were even resources I’d picked out that I never got around to using. This utter abundance of free content was exactly the thing I wanted to take full advantage of. 

By documenting this effort, I hoped to inspire other people to try and do the same, for whatever information or skills they’re wanting to learn themselves. Consider this project a reminder of how much assistance is available to you if you can make the time and effort to use it.

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