If you ever sit next to me on an international flight
I speak a few languages. None of them very well, but well enough to get by.
In the process of racking my brain learning Russian, I came up with a neat way to teach another person to read the Russian alphabet.
I can teach it to anyone in under an hour, and they will never forget it.
Government officials, business executives, and even the U.S. Department of Defense have used my system.
In addition to spending many hours of my life developing this no nonsense and intuitive system, I have a few other hobbies.
One is talking to people, and another is traveling. When you have 10 or 12 hours sitting next to a person on an international flight, sometimes you get to talking to each other.
There have been a number of people who had the fortune (or misfortune, you be the judge) of sitting next to me on an international flight.
To this day, some of those folks can read the Russian alphabet because they happened to sit next to me.
It is not always the same, but this is approximately how the start of that process goes…
After my immediate neighbor and I have both boarded, I let us get comfy, but not too settled in. I order myself a drink with the flight attendant and before the flight attendant leaves, I turn to my neighbor and ask if he will be having one of the same. The answer is sometimes yes, or perhaps he orders something of his own.
We settle for a few more moments, then I say, “Do you happen to know Russian?” It will likely be a short answer and almost certainly in the negative. Then you have to seize the moment. Don’t stop and ask permission, you just get right into it. “It’s really much easier than you might think,” you say, with your phone already on its way out, opened to the right spot. “This word for example. . . this word. What does that say?” you ask as you extend your phone toward him.
He looks, humoring you, and then tells you.
“And how about this word. What does that say?”
He looks for a moment again and tells you. It is pretty obvious.
“That’s good. Now what does that one say?”
By this point, you have totally imposed upon him, but he humors you once more.
By the third or fourth word, he recognizes something. He feels a weird tingle in an unfamiliar part of his brain. He shakes his head for a second, rub his eyes and looks at the screen more closely. He does not understand the individual letters on the screen, but he is somehow able to read the entire Russia word in front of him.
About half the people in his situation say things out loud like “Wait!?!. . . No!? . . .What!?”
He realizes he is actually reading the Russian language, a skill he did not have literally 90 seconds earlier.
And then he is hooked.
Your drinks come and your neighbor is practically begging you to keep going with the Russian lesson. Do not make him beg. Just keep going. Be generous with this neat skill of yours.
I don’t know if you want to read the Russian alphabet. I don’t know if you want to read Ukrainian, Serbian, Bulgarian, or any of the numerous languages that use that same Cyrillic alphabet with tiny variations. I don’t know if you ever want to travel to Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Belarus, or many of the numerous countries where they use that alphabet.
I know this though — you will look like a massive stud to anyone who you teach the Russian alphabet to in under an hour.
And the learning totally sticks. Decades later they will still know how to do this.
You’ll have fun. You’ll be able to command their attention. You’ll be able to joke around about this thing that is both mysteriously erudite and playfully basic, and after a few minutes of that, that neighbor of yours will realize there is a lot more to you than meets the eye.
Men will want to be like you, women will want to spend time with you.
That will be true whether you are a man or a woman, because that just seems to be the way men and women each tend to react toward people they find admirable qualities in.
The people you teach Russian to will not be able to get enough of you. It may sound foolish, but I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
Really. I mean, answer this. . . How many random strangers, if given a chance to spend an hour with you, will impact the rest of your life positively because of that hour?
Not a lot.
But once in a while, you meet that person who takes an hour and fills it with sixty minutes worth of distance run.
That person can be you.
Allan Stevo