“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.” — Michel Foucault

“When the person you could have been meets the person you are becoming, is it going to be a cause for celebration or heartbreak? ” — Seth Godin, This is Strategy

It’s been a couple of weeks since I stopped using Duolingo, and even though I grew dissatisfied with the app, I’ve grown more dissatisfied with not consistently working on being multilingual. And so I purchased a competing app, Babbel, to give that a go. I’ve evaluated it before, but at the time didn’t want to invest in a second app. So we’ll see how it goes.

This will not be a blog post about learning a language. It is (partially) about becoming the person we could be if we just applied ourselves to the task every day. I fancy myself a writer, and so I write. The blog isn’t quite enough for me, and so I’ve set daily goals beyond the blog that I must honor. As with Babbel, we’ll see how it goes, but we learn with everything we aspire to in our lives that it’s now or never.

There’s a reason that Planet Fitness sponsors the New Years Eve celebration in Times Square. They’re aware that we’re all looking at who we’re becoming as the year turns and deciding whether we’re going to be heartbroken by the encounter or have reason to celebrate. We all want this next year to be our best year ever, don’t we? The trick is in how we realize that. One resolution does not an identity make, but our incremental daily actions carry us a long way.

The thing is, that character we’re becoming is simply the course we set for ourselves. The character we live with every day ought to be interesting, productive and fun or we’ll inevitably back away slowly to find a better dance partner. Becoming is a daily reckoning of who we are with who we want to be. The key to a successful, joyful life is to make the character who is marching towards the future to meet our desired future self the kind of person we want to be around every day.