I bet when you first decided to learn French, you were overflowing with motivation.

It’s not uncommon for people to get super excited when they start learning a new language and dive into a new culture. So much so that they’re ready to study for an hour a day or even more.

In the beginning, progress comes quickly, and you really feel a difference after each lesson, which is incredibly satisfying.

You feel confident that you can keep up the habit of studying an hour a day to reach your goal.

But unfortunately, that initial excitement doesn’t last forever.

Your family, work, or other hobbies start to take up a lot of your time and energy.

You begin to realize just how much work it’s going to take to achieve your goal.

Progress slows down, and you might even feel like you’re stuck.

It starts to feel like all your effort is for nothing, so on a day when you’re especially tired or busy, you might find yourself thinking the one phrase that could ruin everything: “It’s fine, I’ll do it tomorrow.”

But the next day, you’re not feeling any more motivated, so you push off that vocabulary list or the paragraph you promised yourself you’d write to the next day.

And then the next day, it’s the same story.

In the end, unless you get another burst of motivation that helps you get back into the swing of things for a few days, you end up studying only occasionally.

Your everyday worries have taken over your goal of learning French.

Because you set such a high goal for yourself from the start, the amount of effort needed now feels overwhelming. To your brain, it’s perceived as a real threat.

This is why you feel so much resistance when it’s time to start your task: your brain doesn’t want to suffer.

And this resistance can be so strong that you keep putting off your obligations, over and over, until you abandon them completely: that’s procrastination.

However, deep down, you know it’s not as difficult as your brain is trying to make you believe.

In fact, it takes a lot more motivation to start an activity than to keep going once you’ve started.

Once you’ve sat down at your desk and opened your notebook, it becomes much easier to continue.

It’s like getting into a lukewarm pool. It’s tough to get in, but once you start swimming, it feels fine, and you don’t want to get out.

This is where the 2-Minute Rule comes in:
“When you’re building a new habit, it should take less than 2 minutes to do.”

By limiting this habit to 2 minutes, the effort required suddenly feels much less daunting.

The idea is to make the habit so easy that you can’t say no to it.

• Instead of reading an entire chapter of a French book, read one page (or even just one sentence).
  
  
• Instead of learning the conjugation of all third-group verbs in the imperfect tense, learn one verb.
  
  
• Instead of memorizing an entire vocabulary list, learn one word.

The 2-Minute Rule is like dipping a toe in the water before you dive in.

It’s an initial commitment that makes the task less intimidating.

At first, focus exclusively on those two minutes. Resist the urge to do more. However, make sure to practice this regularly.

It’s crucial to firmly establish this two-minute study habit in your daily routine. Once this ritual is well ingrained, you can consider gradually increasing its duration, if you like.

But be careful not to rush things !

If your real goal is to study for an hour a day, don’t start there.

If you can’t study for 2 minutes a day, you won’t be able to study for an hour.

You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist.

The important thing is to start.

And the easiest way to start is by doing small things.

I implemented this rule a while ago to motivate myself to work on my Japanese pronunciation through shadowing.

At first, I would choose a short video each day to practice with.

After some time, when I felt like it, I’d allow myself to practice with an extra video.

But when I didn’t, it wasn’t a big deal because I had already met my goal of one video a day.

Over the weeks, I started to notice improvements in my pronunciation, and this exercise became more and more enjoyable, which boosted my motivation.

I gradually increased my practice time, and as I write this email, I’m doing between 20 and 30 minutes of shadowing every day.

Of course, there are tougher days when I only do 2 minutes.

But that’s okay because I’ve still met my goal for the day, and my habit remains unbroken.


If you’re also struggling to find the motivation to study regularly, I highly recommend giving the 2-Minute Rule a try!

I also recommend the book Atomic Habits by James Clear (where this rule comes from) if you want to learn more about motivation and habit formation.

À bientôt,

Tom

PS : Did you find this English version helpful? Let me know by replying to this email! 😄