Blog - Leisa Michelle

On Being Great vs Becoming Great

April 27, 2016 by Leisa Michelle Leave a Comment

This post is a part of my Personal Development Project for May 2016.

The world will allow you to follow your dreams once it realizes that it's too late to stop you.

-TK Coleman

I recently came across this video by TK Coleman on “Being Great vs Becoming Great”.

Basically, being great means that you produce tangible things of value. TK uses JK Rowling as an example of someone who is great. When she has a new book published, everyone flocks to the store to buy it. Her greatness is tangible — it’s a book on the shelf. We can touch it and read it and learn from it and pass it on to others.

Becoming great, in contrast, isn’t tangible. Becoming great is a long process that you have to commit to day after day. It’s not glamorous by any means. People will get on your case while you’re in the process of becoming great. They may tell you to grow up or stop being so boring.

TK says that when you tell someone you can’t hang out because you’re in a concert the next morning, they go, “Ahh, yeah cool! No problem! Next time then.” When you tell someone you can’t hang out because you want to practice your guitar, then they say, “Come on, man. Don’t be that way. Come out and have fun with us.”

People react positively to greatness that’s already established, and they’re less understanding of the actions required for becoming great.

The Paradox of Dreaming: You get the most support for your dreams when you least need it.

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Diversity: The Thing I Love Most About Language Learning

April 26, 2016 by Leisa Michelle Leave a Comment

This post is a part of my Personal Development Project for May 2016.

I’m a polyglot. That is, I speak a couple foreign languages. I’m not perfect, but I speak Russian, Portuguese, and a livable amount of Polish in addition to English. I’ve spent lots of hours studying other languages like Japanese, Esperanto, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Turkish, and Nigerian Pidgin too just for fun.

My goal in my personal language learning is just puzzle solving. Plain and simple. Languages are like puzzles to me. I choose a language to learn with the intent to pick it apart and see how it works. If I remember enough to order dinner when I go to a Thai restaurant or if I solidify my knowledge enough to maintain a discussion on the Ukrainian civil war with a stranger on the train, that’s cool. If not, I don’t really care.

Truth be told, the thing I love about language learning the most isn’t even the language learning itself. Most of all, I love the diversity of the language learning and polyglot community that exists because so many people happen to share my weird hobby. The diversity of the community has made language learning invaluable for me.

I’ll bet that when I say the word “diversity”, you think of race or ethnicity or nationality or maybe socio-economic class. This is usually the context in which we hear this word. But I think that it’s hard to really understand what diversity is when we always look at it in these contexts. The word loses its power (if it has any) because it’s vague and impersonal and charged.

So I’m actually not going to talk about diversity in any of these contexts at all. I’m going to talk about it in a way that’s more real and meaningful to me in my life. I’m going to share five polyglots who I think represent the diversity of the language learning community. They’re diverse in their skills, their depth of knowledge, their breadth of knowledge, their approach to learning, their field of learning, and their goals. And these areas of diversity are what has made language learning so meaningful to me.

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A Hint of Italy

April 25, 2016 by Leisa Michelle Leave a Comment

The photos in this collection were taken in Malta (in Sliema and Valletta, specifically). There was an obvious Italian flair in the architecture, food, culture, atmosphere, and even wildlife of the island. I found it to be quite charming, so I attempted to capture this Italian essence in a set of photos. All shots are candid — unplanned and unposed. Enjoy.

The Streets of Sliema

April 10, 2016 by Leisa Michelle Leave a Comment

These photos were taken in March 2016 in Malta. All are candid shots that I snapped as I roamed the streets of Sliema.

While walking around and enjoying the atmosphere of the island (and the food!), I kept an eye out for interesting angles, dynamic shapes, and brilliant combinations of colors. And as it often happens in street photography, a lot of these photos are stories in themselves. So the power of this collection comes from the angle, shape and form, color, or story of each individual piece.

Together

On the Unconscious and Empathy

April 6, 2016 by Leisa Michelle Leave a Comment

The following stream-of-consciousness style essay is inspired by The Charisma Myth by Olivia Cabane. You can read my summary and review of the book on Goodreads.

The point of The Charisma Myth was to help the reader adjust their body language to reflect their interests and desires. And it was interesting for me to read not just as a means of self-development, but also as a means of self-awareness and interpersonal awareness.

Obviously, people don’t always mean what they say. But the opposite is true too. Sometimes people do mean what they say, and if you read too deep into the language used or body language exhibited (even if the assessment is completely subconscious), then you can easily misunderstand people.

To use an example from the book: You scrunch your face after I say how important personal privacy is in the context of government surveillance. I can assume that you reacted that way because you don’t like what I said. But maybe the sun is just in your eyes. Another example: Someone asks you how long you’re going to be “stuck” in your current job. You can assume that they think you’re powerless over your situation, or that they disapprove of the work you’re doing. But maybe they’re just trying to be funny, or maybe they didn’t give their word choice much thought. It’s easy to misunderstand people when we delve too deep into things.

And it can be hard to say exactly what you mean. You don’t think in words or language, so speaking involves several encoding and decoding processes. Things quickly get lost in translation. And everything gets more complicated when you yourself don’t even know what you mean.

Unconscious Processes

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