It's a statement one shouldn't be surprised to hear their Hindi teacher make. Yet I couldn't stop thinking about it during the auto drive home this evening.
Because it's so true.
My relationship with India fundamentally begun shifting from antagonistic to collaborative once I really started taking Hindi lessons in earnest. Rather than constantly getting frustrated, daily interactions became much more fun -- for each party involved.
I could finally begin to hear from our customers themselves why they chose LifeSpring -- rather than relying on a translator, who I always knew made the sentiment much more high-level, missing the intricacies of meaning and tone.
Humans are social creatures, and almost by its very definition, knowledge of a language moves one from an outsider to an insider.
Yet in the auto, I started thinking about language much more broadly than I ever have. I thought about my friend in business school, who was an actor on Broadway before he decided to apply to Columbia. I'll never forget his approach to corporate finance -- a class which definitely intimidated those without a business background. He said: "It's just like any other language. I just need to study the vocab and figure out how all the rules work." (he also approached his McKinsey interview like any other audition he's had, with high success).
Worlds away, a friend who was in a gang in high school said he was good at it -- "because I spoke the language well. I was good at all the slang and knew what to say to be persuasive and powerful."
And the more I thought about it, the more I realized this framework of "language" can really be applied to anything: venture capital, medical school, wine tasting, IT... we used to joke that consultants had their own language -- putting everything into "buckets", creating "decks" and adding "-ize" to just about every noun in order to implement key recommendations (as in, operationalize, systematize, etc). But much more than just industry jargon, this approach of seeing all knowledge as the pursuit of a language is empowering, in that it's demystifying. The Wizard appears from behind the curtain.
Before this, "language" was always bi-polar to me... Either I didn't speak a foreign language well enough, and it was a constant source of frustration... or I knew my own language too well that I was always noticing grammatical mistakes everywhere I looked (fewer vs. less has always been a pet-peeve, as well as Americans' refusal to use adverbs). The Indigo Girls' "Language of a Kiss" was always just poetry to me -- not an actual framework of thought.
But with that one three-word sentence in Hindi class, my worldview just got a whole lot more interesting. If only all teachers could do that.
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