It’s been a really, painfully hectic January – a repeatedly sick toddler (and a nagging, low-level but just won’t go away head cold for me), a mountain of work deadlines, not to mention all of the other responsibilities of life – and I’ve neglected Global Maverick in a way that I wasn’t expecting to ever do (I really like writing here!). On a good note, though, this post – which I was planning to write at the beginning of the month – has taken on even more significance for me, as I’ve gone through my own little sustainability / resilience crisis.

Back in late December, I was scanning through the various TED Talks available online when I found “Transition to a world without oil” by Rob Hopkins. It’s a good talk, and I encourage you to watch the whole thing, but the part I want to talk about now is his point about difference between sustainability (making what we do have less impact on our resources, so we can keep it going for longer) and resilience (making what we do flexible so that it can survive resource shocks).

And I think, in many ways, the idea of resilience is a more useful concept than the idea of sustainability. The idea of resilience comes from the study of ecology. And it’s really about how systems, settlements, withstand shock from the outside. When they encounter shock from the outside that they don’t just unravel, and fall to pieces. And I think it’s a more useful concept than sustainability, as I said.

When our supermarkets have only two or three days worth of food in them at any one time, often sustainability tends to focus on the energy efficiency of the freezers and the packaging that the lettuces are wrapped up in. Looking through the lens of resilience, we really question how we’ve let ourselves get into a situation that’s so vulnerable. Resilience runs much deeper: it’s about building modularity into what we do, building surge breakers into how we organize the basic things that support us.

I think one major trap that learners fall into (and by this, I mean that I fall into, and I’m just extrapolating onto the rest of you) is making plans for the best of times, with absolutely no consideration of what will happen when those plans hit the worst of times. When major external resource shocks (normally in the form of other, plausibly more important things that demand our time) occur, those plans, to use Hopkins’ word, unravel. Once they unravel, it’s very hard to get them going again.

What we need are more resilient ways to learn languages. I’ve outlined some of them here – the foreign language listening environment is one of the best, because most things you can do while listening to something else. If you’re SRSing, take care to not burn out, set your software up in a way that minimizes the pain of reduced study time, and stop caring so much if you can’t get to it as much as you’d like. To be totally honest, though, I’ve found SRS to be much more sustainable than resilient – you can do a lot to reduce the workload to a level that you can maintain pretty easily, but as soon as there is some external pressure that absolutely crushes your available time, it tends to not survive (of course, unlike peak oil, time pressure should eventually relieve itself, and you’ll be able to get back on the horse).

One thing that has become more and more obvious is the need for games as part of my study. While things like SRS can (and should) be reduced to the level of a game (instant gratification, variable reward, etc.), I’m talking about explicit games. There’s a reason I was able to finish several Madden seasons with my friends in college each semester while maintaining a full course load. Games are fun – even repetitive little puzzle games, so long as they have a decent dose of challenge and can be easily replayed (<hint>there aren’t many options out there right now for Mandarin, but if you own an iPhone, my company and I are going to change that situation over the next couple of months.</hint>).

What I’m really interested in is how you, my readers, have handled situations like this. What strategies do you have for getting back on the horse after a serious time crunch, or never falling off the horse in the first place?

Related posts:

1. Maintaining one language while learning another
2. Success → Confidence → More Success
3. Heisig, SRS, and my experience with learning Chinese characters
4. Taking your learning out into the wild
5. Interview with Steve Kaufmann

Tagged as: games, languages, learning, qingxi labs, resilience, rob hopkins, sustainability