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[Music]
What if you could get paid to travel the world while learning new languages and teaching other people to do the same? That is exactly what my friend Benny Lewis accomplished when he transformed his original language learning struggles many years ago into an annual business that funded his nomadic lifestyle and did so for many years. I believe it still does in different ways. He created an early language hacking system called Fluent in Three Months, which became a digital product, a book, a course, series of courses, a community, whole bunch of Instagram accounts in different languages that he ran entirely on his own. He basically created this like wandering teachers, global classroom.
So let's look at that today. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This segment, Weekend Workshop, it's all about helping you learn the key steps to a new hustle, one step or concept per week. It includes activities, examples, and more.
Of course, it is all free 'cause that's how we roll. We are using the book Side Hustle from idea to income in 27 days, which is available wherever books are sold. That's our text. I encourage you to check it out, pick it up. And for the first half of the year, we went through the 27 steps in the book.
In the second half, we are looking at more detailed case studies, including some from that book. And this one in fact is from $100 Startup, a previous book I wrote. So you can understand how people apply this framework. All right, so Benny Lewis, this guy is from Ireland. He grew up speaking only English through his entire childhood, graduated with an engineering degree, but no apparent talent for foreign languages and no international experience, at least very little.
So after graduation, he moves to Spain, determined to learn Spanish. But six months into his stay there, he's frustrated. He's discouraged. Despite being surrounded by Spanish speakers, he was still struggling with basic conversations and spending most of his time with English speaking expats. And that's when he made a radical decision that would change everything.
He committed to speaking only Spanish for an entire month. No English allowed, no exceptions, no backup plans. Now, this was the thing that changed everything, but the first few weeks of Benny's Spanish only experiment were awkward and embarrassing. He couldn't conjugate verbs properly. So he used only present tense and would gesture to indicate past events.
But something remarkable happened when he eliminated English as a safety net. Within weeks, Benny was speaking comfortably in Spanish. The month-long immersion accomplished more than the previous six months of half-hearted attempts. He had discovered something powerful. Total immersion forces rapid progress in ways that casual study never can.
Benny became addicted to this breakthrough feeling. He moved to Berlin and learned German. He moved to Paris to learn French. He moved around the world. He learned some more stuff.
I think he learned Czech, one of the world's most difficult languages. Within two years, in fact, he had achieved fluency, at least near fluency, in seven languages. And he demonstrated this, improved it, and posted lots of videos for people who doubted him and such. As Benny traveled and learned, he kept encountering people who insisted they weren't gifted with languages or could never learn what he was accomplishing. And this, of course, revealed a massive market opportunity.
Benny realized his success wasn't due to special talent. It was due to a specific method that anyone could follow. His message became simple but powerful. Anyone can learn another language, even if they think they aren't gifted or only spoke one language as a child. And this insight transformed him from a language learner into a language teacher.
He had discovered not just how to learn languages quickly, but how to teach people to overcome mental barriers that prevent them from succeeding. So how did this become a business? What might you take from the story? How can you apply this lesson for your own ideas? Let's take a quick break when we return all of those things.
Stay tuned. [Music]
Benny spent months developing his language learning insights into a comprehensive course called Fluent in Three Months. I remember we actually had a conversation in Thailand. Benny and I, along with some others, at a group table when he was first formulating this idea, and it was so fun to see it come into action later. This was probably back in 2008, '09, '10, something like that.
The name captured both the promise and the urgency of his method, Fluent in Three Months. That's it, right? Fluent in Three Months, what a benefit. Now creating the course proved more challenging than learning the languages themselves. He struggled at first with organizing everything he knew into a teachable system.
He kept waiting for the content to be perfect before launching, but finally realized he's gonna have to let that go, give up on perfection, get the thing out the door. And the course launched in eight languages, all taught by Benny himself, naturally. This multilingual approach demonstrated his credibility while serving different markets simultaneously. He created YouTube videos, giving apartment tours in five different languages. He stood on street corners in various countries, singing in the local language while dressed in costume and offering free hugs.
All that points to his enthusiastic personality, of course. He developed a signature accessory, which is a pair of goggles worn on top of a hat. He had this instant conversation starter. So he's just very playful and authentic. And that created a lot of genuine interest in connections with potential students.
Now this business model perfectly matched his wandering lifestyle because everything was delivered digitally. He could serve students worldwide while continuing to travel and learn new languages himself. Before long, this was bringing in $65,000 a year. I think it went on to do much more than that. It was a lifestyle business that funded a lot of different things for him as he continued to roam about the world.
And Benny's still doing this. Like he is still out there traveling. He just spent a number of months in Indonesia, learning the language there. He was in Brazil for a long time, mastering his Portuguese. It's hard for me to keep up because he goes so many places and learns so many things.
So language learning is cool, but of course this is side hustle school. Like let's talk about the implications. This transformation worked because he solved his own problem thoroughly before teaching others. And his method wasn't theoretical. It was very practical.
It was proven through his own dramatic success. And he also identified this widespread limiting belief that prevented people from attempting what he had accomplished. And so he's really addressing the mindset as much as the practical, okay, here's how you learn a language. It's first like breaking through the belief that it's impossible for people. So maybe consider what this looks like for any skill where people believe they lack talent or could never succeed.
The key is proving that what seems like natural ability is actually learnable technique. And then, you know, teach both the method and the confidence needed to apply it. For Benny, he transformed from a monolingual engineering graduate into a multilingual entrepreneur who gets paid to explore while teaching others to break through their perceived limitations. Sometimes the best business opportunities come from proving that what people think is impossible is actually just a skill they haven't yet learned. Listeners, I'm gonna leave you with that today.
I hope it gets you thinking. I hope it encourages you on your path. And as always, it's better to have a simple idea you can start right away than a brilliant idea that never launches. You can access the complete archives of the podcast, all free at sidehustleschool.com. And check out Benny's work at fluentin3months.com.
He's also on Instagram, YouTube, everywhere else, but if you start there, you'll find him fluentin3months.com. Thanks for tuning in today. I'll be back tomorrow. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
