A Brazilian friend posted something in a WhatsApp group this week, and I had to read it twice.

He’d written about how it’s been a struggle his whole life to learn English as a second language.

How as a kid it was all the “the book is on the table” journey, that one sentence every Brazilian of my generation can still recite in our sleep, and somehow the only one that ever stuck.

He wrote about the years going by. That quiet voice that shows up around a certain age: this isn’t for me. I missed the window. He’d started courses, spent real money, gotten excited, lost steam, quit. Started again. Quit again. You know the loop.

Terrified of the Telephone

I remembered being twenty-something, fresh off the plane in America, terrified of the telephone. Not the conversation itself, but the telephone barrier.

Because on the phone there’s no pointing, no smiling, no hand gestures. Just my voice, my broken sentences, and that long pause on the other end while somebody decided how patient they felt like being that day.

I lost count of how many times I hung up terrified after a minute or two. I couldn’t carry the conversation, whether I was trying to schedule a doctor’s appointment or pay a bill.

And at the drive-thru, more often than not I’d pull up to the window and get an order that had nothing to do with the one in my head, because I couldn’t get the words out right.

Stopping the Fight Against Imperfection

But here’s the thing that finally shook my friend loose: he stopped waiting to be perfect.

He accepted he’d speak wrong. With an accent. He accepted that at 40-plus the learning comes slower. And the day he stopped fighting all of that imperfection? That’s the day he actually started learning.

Read that again. Because it’s not really about English.

He described getting on a flight and flipping straight to the back of the airline magazine. Past the ads, past the duty-free, straight to the one article printed in English. And reading it. Not understanding all of it, but understanding enough to get the main idea.

Baby steps, he called it.

I love that picture. A grown man at 30,000 feet, quietly reading something he only half understands. Because half is how you get to whole.

The “Flaw” That Became My Fingerprint

Here’s what I wanted to reach through the phone and tell him.

The thing you’re most afraid of—speaking wrong, not being perfect at your trade, overcooking the steak—might turn out to be the best thing you’ve got.

I’ve now lived half my life in the US. I learned English as an adult. I’ve built a whole life in it. Wrote a book in it. I stand on stages and talk to rooms full of people in it. And I still say things a little sideways.

My sentences carry an accent you can hear in the punctuation. People still ask me to repeat myself all the time.

For years I thought that was the flaw I had to work on. It was the opposite. It’s the thing people remember.

For years I said “pretty good” thinking I was handing out a compliment. In my head, pretty good is two words, so it had to beat plain old good, right? Lol.

The “wrong” English became my fingerprint. You don’t lose your accent to earn the room. You keep it, and it becomes how they know it’s you.

Giving Yourself Permission to Start

So I keep coming back to my friend’s words. The key turned inside me.

Most of us have a version of this:

The thing we’re “too old” to start

The skill we’ve quit five times

The dream we’ve quietly decided already passed us by

We keep hunting for the right app, the right course, the right community, hoping there’s a tool out there that’ll finally do it for us.

But maybe the tool was never the problem. Maybe we’re just waiting on permission we could’ve handed ourselves years ago.

So what’s your “the book is on the table” excuse? What is the thing you keep almost starting?

Baby steps, baby. That’s the whole secret: letting yourself be bad at it, out loud, until one day people look at you and go, “Hey, you’re pretty good at this.”

And trust me, coming from me, that’s the highest compliment there is. Lol.

I’ve got a whole book full of these: the embarrassing, funny, only-an-English-as-a-second-language-speaker-could-tell-you kind of stories.

Get your copy of Nobody Told Me That here

Warmly,

About Roger Magalhães

Entrepreneur | Speaker | Storyteller | Author
Different brands. Same high standard.

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