What I Learned From Losing my Duolingo Streak

One of my new year’s resolutions for 2018 was to do Duolingo French every day. I did awesome for 69 days straight, and then one day I missed and the streak was over.

This green crying owl accurately embodies the emotion I experienced when I realized my streak was broken. (This image is NOT mine. My streak was 69 DAYS, and it was French!)

So I was bummed for a bit, and I’ll admit I even considered paying $7 to repair the damage (as I mindlessly did the other day for Spanish, which is a language I’m already fluent in. #whatismyproblem). But I was able to put it out of my mind until the end of the day, when I called my dad to tell him all the horrible things that had happened that day.

I started telling him about how I’d gone to bed at 2:30 the night before because my friend got kicked out of her apartment by her evil roommates and she told me the whole story which took 4 hours, and by the the time she was done telling me the story it was waaaay past my bedtime and already a new day so my duolingo streak was broken and I couldn’t work out either so my goals were failed and I suck………

Then my dad cut in. He was like, “If I’m understanding you correctly, you didn’t do duolingo or work out because you were helping a friend.” Ummm yes… “So what do you think is more important? Meeting a personal, arbitrary goal? Or serving someone in need?

Obvi service. My only real goal is to become more like Jesus, and let’s be honest doing duolingo isn’t really getting me there. When it comes to good, better, and best, SERVICE and putting others’ needs before my own are the best things we can possibly do to become more like the Savior.

So now whenever I open the duolingo app and see my broken streak, I’m reminded that I broke it because I care more about people than numbers. I’d even go so far as to say that helping my friend would have been more important than my scripture study or other super important things I do every day. Mosiah 2:17.

Lesson learned: people first.