When I mention to people that we’re minimalists the responses tend to fall into one of two categories. The first category involves people giving me looks like I just told them I habitually stomp on kittens and wondering aloud how can I live without item X, usually television.

The second group involves haughty scoffing and being told that we’ll never be True Minimalists ™ until we can fit all our worldly possessions into a single carry-on bag.

Both of these groups suffer from the same problem. They just don’t know what minimalism really is – at least not to us. I’d like to fix that.

I’ve always been a big fan of Couchsurfing as a language learning resource for finding native speakers of your target language without having to leave your own city. A few weeks ago though we finally got to use it for its original intended purpose – travel – and for anyone who hasn’t heard of it yet I wanted to introduce you to it and share a bit about out own experience.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s feeling like I’ve wasted time.

Now that doesn’t mean I have to be productive 24/7, I consider having fun or relaxing valuable uses of my time in most cases – I just hate working hard toward a goal and feeling like I have nothing to show for it.

When it comes to language learning that trait used to make me a huge perfectionist. If I was going to spend a few hours on Anki trying to learn 30 new words for the day I needed to really know them at the end of it or I would feel like all that time doing SRS reps was a waste. To be fair I understand it wasn’t, but it was still kind of discouraging nonetheless setting out to learn 30 words and only remembering 20 or so the next day.

Then I figured out the trick to learning more effectively and keeping myself motivated – short, targeted study sessions.

“If you fall in love with the process, the results come easy.” – Unattributed

I’m not sure who said that first – I’ve heard it attributed to about 50 people including Arnold Schwarzenegger – but it really doesn’t matter because it’s good wisdom. If you stress out over the results too much reaching your goal becomes more difficult, but if you can fall in love with the process that will get you there you’ll find yourself reaching your goal without even thinking about it. So how do we make ourselves fall in love with processes? Easy.

By redefining our identities.