Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. (Phil. 2:3, 4, ESV)
Yesterday a friend of mine asked me to transcribe his handwritten copy of a graduation speech for a phlebotomy certificate at a nearby community college. We both agreed to have him deliver the message orally (as opposed to copying the speech from a print form). As a primarily visual learner, this took me out of my comfort zone, yet the work was fantastic.
As he recited the words, I copied them down in Microsoft Word, and being a native English speaker (as opposed to him), I was persistent, and observed grammatical rules that would be best understood by one (in this case, me) whose top language is English. His thick West African (Ghana) accent was another obstacle, but I still tenaciously continued to “break the barrier.”
To polish it off, I double-spaced and printed it. He did the proofreading, which (slightly embarrassingly) led to awareness some of my own grammatical errors. But they were minor, and I corrected them, printed the typed speech, and presto! It was complete.
As they say, no man is an island. This was one exercise of me going out of my comfort zone. Whether we like it or not, this can be necessary. And auditory input, I assume, might have been sharpened. But I would check with a psychiatrist or psychologist on that.
The Adventures of a Christian Bookworm 