Colin Sprake spent twenty years resisting his father's push to learn languages, then moved to Uzbekistan at 24 for a gold-mining job and couldn't read the local script. He finally understood why his dad was right: the advice we resist most from people we love often matters most.
I spent 20 years resisting this piece of advice from my father, and one day I woke up and I realized how powerful it was. And I was sitting in Uzbekistan, Russia at the time, in the USSR. Let me tell you a little bit about this. It was a great piece of advice I wish I'd taken sooner. One thing my dad always said to me, it's always good to learn other languages, be fluent in other languages because it helps you get around in the world. Of course, at the time I was at school and I was doing English, I was doing Afrikaans, which is a South African language. I was doing German as well, which I took to grade 12. And I did these languages because my parents thought it would be be good for me. And you know what? I resisted all the time and I didn't want to do it. I resented them for forcing me to do languages. And then of course I traveled at the age of 24. I went to Uzbekistan to live there for a while to help to work on a big gold mining project. And then I realized I don't even understand. I can't read the language, can't write the language, don't know how to learn a language. Yes, I learned English, try to learn the other languages, but I resisted so hard with Afrikaans and German that I just really didn't really understand the process of learning a language properly. From there I started to actually realize my dad was right. I should have learned languages. I should have taken much pride in learning languages, learning the cultures of other people. I actually love that now. I wish I'd learned that sooner. And you know what? Sometimes that stubbornness, we resist that information coming from the person we care about the most, who cares about us and wants us to get ahead. And when we learn it, it's not that we were silly or stupid at the time. It's just a process of catching up in growth, which is really important for us. So make sure you're learning, catching up in growth, and doing the stuff that you resist the most is often the thing that you need the most.
