DuoLingo

"Dad, we're doing DuoLingo," Elliot told me.  "Anna started on it and she is learning Spanish, but I've started too."

"Really," I said.  "What language are you learning?"

"Chinese!"  Elliot told me proudly.

"Mandarin or Cantonese?"  I asked my seven year old son.

"What?"  He said.

"Never mind," I replied.  "Have you learned any yet?"

"Ni Hao!"  He said.  "That means hello.  And I learned 'Wah' too, but I am not totally sure what it means."

"I guess it will be handy to know Chinese," I said.

"Yes," Elliot said.  "I'll just start talking to Chinese people in Chinese and they will be so surprised that I know it.  Once I finish learning Chinese then I'm going to start on Japanese.  I'll have to decide what other languages to learn after that."

I didn't really know what to say.  My experience is that it takes a while to learn new languages -- even if you have an amazing app that speeds the process.  I've lived long enough to know that many things are harder than they seem.

At the same time, it is awfully easy to shoot down the plans of others as not reality based.

Norman Vincent Peale said "Shoot for the moon, even if you miss you will land among the stars."  Of course, this is a crazy quote.  First of all, the magnitude of difference in distance between the moon and the stars is phenomenal.  Beyond that, the stars are actually farther away than the moon.  If you fall short of the moon, you are more likely to end up some where in orbit around the earth rather than close to Alpha Centauri.  It is like saying shoot for London because even if you miss, you  might end up on Neptune.

The point that Mr. Peale was trying to make was that we should set our sights high.  It is generally a bigger problem that we set their sights too low than that we aim too high.  As we get older, we see our limits far more easily than our abilities.

We need to encourage others to attempt great things, even if maybe they seem beyond their abilities.  You may be surprised at the things they can do.  You may be surprised at the things that you can do once you try.