I just finished The Inner Game of Tennis [ad] by Timothy Gallwey, which has been on my reading list for over a decade. I happened to see a copy featured in a bookstore and bought it as a plane read. It’s short and sweet at under 200 pages, which I love.

I should say to start that it’s not about tennis. Well, it is, but everything in this book is applicable to every sport and possibly every physical activity. I’m not sure if it applies to mental activities yet, but it might. I definitely think it applies to language learning. The thesis is that your inner self judges you while you try to do something and causes you to do it poorly. The “Inner Game” is a set of techniques to quiet this voice (he calls it Self 1) so that the body (Self 2) can play and get into a flow state.

I think it works for language learning because you should just be engaged in the conversation or content, not judging your accent or fretting over whether you got every word. It’s possibly a more physical than mental activity. Gallwey’s methods, which are based on observing experts and yourself is similar to the comprehensible input method of language acquisition (which is how we all learned our native language, so we know it works).

This book reminded me of Thinking, Fast and Slow [ad] by Daniel Kahneman, which also separates the self into System 1 and System 2 thinking, but with the line drawn in a slightly different place. To start with, he reverses the numbers, making System 1 the automatic system and System 2 the more conscious, logical, methodical system. Even so, they are not exactly the same, but close enough.

Gallwey’s book is about the things that the automatic system does well (sports) because it’s fast. Kahneman’s book is more about suppressing the automatic, heuristic-using System 1 when you should be doing the work to understand and analyze using System 2. His worry is that the fast system will give you a plausible (but incorrect) answer, and then you won’t do the work to find the right one. Gallwey thinks your judging self will slow down the automatic response you need at the speed of sports. Or, in my case, language acquisition.

I am sure that this book is the most important one I read this year (maybe in multiple years). I suspect that it will have the same kind of lasting impact on my thoughts and behavior as 4DX [ad] and Thinking in Systems [ad] have.