1,475 days of Duolingo

For the last 1,475 days I've opened Duolingo and done a Spanish lesson. That's almost four years without missing a single day, which is a strange thing to be proud of, but here we are. The streak is older than anything I've built. I started it before I started any company, back when a daily lesson was the most ambitious project I had going.

I want to be upfront about what the streak isn't. It's not fluency. My Spanish sits at limited working proficiency, which means I can get things done in the language and still have a long way to go. A streak measures showing up. It doesn't measure mastery, and I try not to confuse the two, especially when the number starts sounding impressive.

The streak has outlasted a lot at this point. It survived product launches, a fundraising campaign, finals, travel to Austin, and mornings when I had to be up early for TV. A few of those lessons happened half asleep, tapping through with one eye open. They still counted.

The thing a long streak teaches you is that motivation is mostly irrelevant. Nobody claps for the middle of a streak. There's no launch and no announcement, and the next day looks exactly like the last one. You do the lesson because it's what you do, and then you get on with your day.

That turned out to be the useful part. Building a company is mostly unglamorous daily reps. Answer the emails. Fix the thing you already fixed once. From the outside people see launch days. From the inside it's a long chain of ordinary Tuesdays, and the streak was my first evidence that I could do a small thing every single day for years. The muscle transfers.

There's also a plainly practical reason to keep going. I live in San Antonio, and Spanish here is not a hobby language. It's on menus and in half the conversations around me. I get real chances to use it every week, which is more than I can say for most of what I memorized for school.

So no, 1,475 days didn't make me fluent. But tomorrow is day 1,434 either way. The owl knows where I live.