Advice from an (almost) centenarian

[jrineakter]

Hello everyone! Thanks for joining me for this new episode of Walk with Johan. It's a pleasure to have you with me today. Today, we're going to see the advice of a centenarian. So a centenarian is someone who is 100 years old. In this case, this person is currently 99 years old, and we're going to see one of his pieces of advice.

Before that, I invite you, if you haven't already done so, to join the free Authentic French course. You will discover the 7 rules of Authentic French and you will be able to gradually learn to use a natural learning method. If you know the 7 rules, I invite you to listen to them again or follow the link to register again because we have greatly improved them, we have made a new version and it is worth it, in my opinion.

So today we're going to talk about a topic that I've talked about several times in this Walk with Johan podcast and it's also a topic that we've talked about very recently, a little bit last week, but several times in the months leading up to it. It's about "simplicity", doing simple things. Often, it's the simple things that work best.

And you've probably noticed that I've talked about lebanon whatsapp number data this quite often in the last few months because I realize that every time I complicate things in my life or in the context of Authentic French, well I don't get good results or I don't get the best results. Making things more complex, making them more complicated, very often, it gives less good results.

And I'll give you an example. I could have given you many others, but this is the first one that came to my mind, when I created Français Authentique Maroc in 2019. In fact, at the time, the idea was commendable. I wanted to help the Moroccan community, which was very present in the population of Français Authentique members, I wanted to help them join us. They had problems paying in euros, because the currency was controlled, the dirham was controlled.

And so, what I said was, "well, it doesn't matter, we're going to create Français Authentique Maroc to serve the Moroccan audience." And once again, the idea was commendable. We wanted to help more people and make sure to develop Français Authentique there with... I already had ideas about going to other countries. We had a lot of Algerian members who had contacted us. So there were lots and lots of other ideas.

But as time went on, what we saw was that having two academies, having two communities and having two different audiences, having two groups that have different expectations, already created more than twice as much work. Often, when you duplicate something, well you don't just have twice as much work, you have more than that. And that created a lack of clarity.

The members of the Moroccan academy, for example, did not understand why they were not accessing certain things that others were accessing, etc., so it created a lack of clarity, it created a loss of focus for the whole team, a loss of coherence and, of course, frustration. As a result, in 2023, we closed Français Authentique Maroc. In the meantime, we have many more Moroccan members joining the Académie Français Authentique, but we have a global academy and not a global academy, a Moroccan academy.

Even though the idea was good and commendable, again, because we really wanted to help people, the execution was probably not the best. Maybe we could have done it differently. But in any case, the fact of having made things complicated was not a good idea, really. This is one example among many others. There are many smaller and larger things that I have done in my life that were not the right choices because they complicated things.