Happy New Year

At Thanksgiving I started learning a new language: French. Simultaneously I started refreshing my Spanish. I used Duolingo to do so. One of the great things about the site is that they reward you for keeping up the daily practice with Lingots--an online currency you can use to buy bonus lessons, tests, or extensions on time to complete your lessons without breaking your streak.
My streak made it up to 36 days. Which was just amazing. I even maintained it over Christmas with limited internet access and having to work from my phone through the mobile site (it was not fun, let me tell you).

Unfortunately, something went wrong communicating with Duolingo on the last day of my vacation. Before going to bed I did my required number of lessons and earned my reward for building my streak. Logging on the next day from home and my streak mysteriously vanished. Some of my work from the day before had not logged properly (apparently).

Needless to say, I was a little broken hearted to see my streak vanish into nothing.

Here's the worst thing--I let it get to me. I walked away from the program and haven't reached my goal since. That's a shame, and it's all on me. It's just a silly little thing on the internet, but I let it rile me and affect my progress.

And I can't help but think about how many times I've let small disruptions in my habits break me apart and set me back to zero. How many times has a single day of missed exercise thrown me off exercising for months at a time? How many times have I stopped writing, because I missed a blog post?

I'm only failing if I let myself fail, and I've been letting myself fail a lot.

So here's the resolution for the New Year: Don't let little misses become major setbacks. Keep getting back up. Do it again. Get better. Keep trying.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go practice my French.