My interest in language began during the two years I spent as a Peace Corps volunteer in Chad, Africa, from 1975 to 1977.

Chad is a French-speaking country. The other official language is Arabic. I spoke neither, but I lied on my application to the Peace Corps, claiming to have had two years of high school French. I don’t know why I did that. But it landed me in N’djamena, the capitol of Chad, in a six-week, total immersion training program that included, among other things, French language practice.

To determine our level of fluency when we arrived, they gave us a standardized State Department test that was scored from zero to 4.0. Getting a 4.0 meant you could speak French like a native. I scored a zero, which meant – well, exactly that: I could speak no French at all.

I’m certain that I would have been immediately dismissed, except that the Peace Corps had already taken the time and spent the money to fly me halfway around the world. Plus, I was slotted to be an English Literature instructor at the University of Chad, and that required no French because the classes were conducted in English. Plus, the Chadian liaison with the Peace Corps was head of the English department. Plus, there was another volunteer that tested as poorly as I had. And he had actually taken two years of French!

When the director saw our test scores, he had two choices: Send us both home (and be short two needed teachers), or give us a chance to quickly learn enough French to be able to function at our jobs.

He gave us the chance, presenting it as a challenge. “If you can learn French well enough to score 1.5 on the test at the end of the six-week training program,” he said, “you can stay.”

We accepted the challenge and committed to it by vowing that we would speak nothing but French during that time. Not even to the other volunteers. Not even between us. Not even a word of English.

There were, I think, five people that had scored 4.0 on the test. Four of them were native speakers. One, I think his name was Richard, had studied French at Princeton. That group was exempt from the mandatory language classes that had already been scheduled as part of our training. The rest of the group was divided into three classes based on the test results: those that had scored 1.0 or 1.5; those that had scored 2.0 or 2.5; and those that had scored 3.0 or 3.5.

Alas, they had to create a separate class for Gromo (my friend’s nickname) and me. We were ferociously determined. We paid strict attention in class, did our homework assiduously, and spent every spare hour learning how to conjugate irregular verbs and decline nouns and adjectives.

At the end of the six weeks, we were all tested again. Gromo and I both scored 3.0 – putting us at a level of fluency usually attained after at least three years of college-level French. Four weeks later, I took the test again. I scored 3.5.

Ours was an impressive accomplishment. It put us ahead of all but a few of the rest of the volunteers. (I’m still impressed by it!) We went from no French to being able to speak it comfortably in less than two months.

One unexpected outcome of this experience was the way it affected my personality. The personality I had developed by that time in my life was largely expressed through what I felt was a strong command of written and spoken English. I thought of myself as smart and clever and displayed my imagined wit by using the linguistic tools available to me for doing so. But for six weeks, stripped of the ability to say anything even remotely clever in French, I found myself in a dilemma: I could be the guy that hardly ever speaks… or speak as the guy that is not very clever.

Apparently I found it impossible to be the quiet guy. Within a few days, I was speaking my modest French to anyone and everyone that would talk with me. But in doing so, I had to humble myself and accept the fact that the person my interlocutors were talking to was not the clever guy I felt I was in English.

I was happy to discover that it didn’t bother me very much. In fact, it didn’t bother me at all. Since I didn’t have the capability of expressing a complex thought, I expressed the thoughts I had in very simple language. The personality I had for so long crafted in English was gone. The limits of my French afforded me another personality. As someone later said, I was like Joey in “Friends.”

Not a bad role to play.

That was the story I told Steve this morning. He wasn’t surprised to hear it. He said that he had heard similar stories over the years while he was doing his research.

After our walk, as I was sitting in the pool, trying to cool my aching joints, it occurred to me that something similar had taken place with my sense of myself as an athlete. Since I wrestle and lift heavy weights six days a week, I had come to view myself as an athletically advanced septuagenarian. That is why I had, without being fully conscious of it, insisted on keeping pace with Steve on those earlier walks. But now, recognizing that I was not at his level as a walker and because I wanted to keep walking with him, I’d had to humble myself and accept a different role as a walker.

In acquiring skills, humility is a critical quality for success. To become competent at anything, you must be humble enough to accept that you are incompetent. To go beyond competence – i.e., to attain mastery – you must be humble enough to admit that you are merely competent. Many people have difficulty with this aspect of learning.

The same thing happens with aging – but sort of in reverse. After becoming used to working and competing at a high level, it can be humiliating to realize that you cannot do it anymore. If you can’t humble yourself into accepting that truth, you end up not being able to compete at all.

Ego can block you on the way up. And it can stop you on the way down.