Jeremy Lixandre

30 days ago, I signed up for Dickie Bush & Nicolas Cole's cohort-based course, Ship 30 for 30.

In that time, I wrote & published 30 atomic essays, learned the fundamentals of Digital Writing, made friends, and started gaining clarity over what my niche might be. It has been a very rewarding (and challenging) journey, and I am more excited than ever to keep writing online.

Here are the 3 biggest things writing & publishing consistently every day for 30 days taught me:

1. Consistency is the key to success.

The person who shows up every day with average content will beat the one who posts once in a while with genius content. This statement, which I've observed in many domains, also holds true for writing.

My motivation and inspiration fluctuated over these 30 days. But when I didn't feel like writing, I forced myself to write at least a tweet today. By doing that, I started to establish a daily writing habit that I wish to maintain from now on.

2. I like writing about lifelong learning more than everything else.

At the beginning of my journey, I would write about many different topics : career, psychology, tech... But after this challenge I gained a lot of clarity about what I prefer writing about : lifelong learning as a way of life. I love learning about everything (with a huge focus on languages right now) and I am convinced that embracing lifelong learning can at the same time help you reach any goal and live a more meaningful life.

3. When faced with blank page syndrome, just answer a question.

I found out that trying to answer questions you see on social media is a great way to escape blank page syndrome. So when I didn't have any idea what to write, I would either use the Ship30 templates to give me direction or browse Reddit threads or X about my favorite topics and draft an answer to a question that looked interesting.

Reacting to content is much easier than creating new content. Moreover, when you answer a question, you're already helping someone, so you know your essay isn't totally useless.

If you have been thinking about getting started writing online too, let me know. I'm happy to share more about the experience and what I learned.

If you're serious about language learning, I believe you should dedicate at least 30 minutes a day to your target language, if not more.

But sometimes life gets in our way, and we have more urgent things to deal with.

So if I had only 5 minutes a day to learn a language, here's the one thing I would do :

5 minutes of flashcards with Anki or a similar app.

During this process, I would :

1. Make sure the cards I review aren't just simple "word -> translation" exercises, but contain audio, example sentences, and so on.

2. Try to be as slow as possible and not answer only in my head, but try to speak and repeat what I hear.

It seems to me like the best return on investment you could get in only 5 minutes a day.

There's a difference between speaking your target language with a teacher, a friend, or an AI and speaking in real life.

In the first case, you're with patient people who leave you all the time you need to express your thoughts.

In the second case, the people you speak with might not have the same patience, so let's say it adds a little bit more pressure to your interactions.

I wanted a simple exercise that would recreate the additional stress you might find in daily interactions.

Here is how it goes :

1. Listen to a 4-5 minute video/podcast, as many times as you need to understand it. This will help you work on your comprehension.

2. Record yourself summarizing it in less than 2 minutes. The 2-minute constraint is very important: it forces you to express your thoughts, knowing you don't have unlimited time to think about them.

3. Listen to Yourself and Write Down the Mistakes. People usually don't like listening to themselves, but it turns out that doing so is one of the best ways to adjust.

4. Repeat the Process of Recording and Reviewing Twice. By the end, you should have a third recording that sounds much better than the first.

This exercise will take you no more than 30 minutes a day, and I assure you it will improve your speaking skills quickly.