Multilingualism is the most underpaid skill on the job market 

I grew up monolingual, only with Russian.

When I was 14, I started learning English

When I was 20, I seriously started learning German

But it all really started falling together when I moved to Berlin when I was 20 y.o.. By the time I was 25,I was speaking English and German, on a very decent level. 

I’ve learned Portuguese (European, living in Lisbon), after that Spanish (living in Andalucia) and some years French and Polish (I could still activate them if ever needed). 

Some days, I’ll have meetings in English, German and Russian, and go outside and have dinner in my broken Spanish. That’s the cognitive load very little amount of people can relate to. 

But right now, I understand that the more languages I speak, the worse I speak them all. Yupp, Bye-Lingual. 

Heartbroken, I have decided to focus on English. Expand vocab, learn idioms, work on clarity. And emotional intelligence. And the biz. 

Because ultimately, the amount of languages you speak will not make you more successful. But it will add a lot more complexity to an already high cognitive load. And I personally need optimization of my resources right now. So I stick with English (first), German (because Berlin is home) and Russian (because that’s the language I speak with my mom and my bestie). 

The most successful people are English speakers. They might speak two languages in their everyday life, that’s so much easier than four. 

So yes, the go-to language is English. Ideally, you speak it as your first language. Even better, if you went to the right school. Perfect if you are white. And damn it, I gotta say it, if on top of all that, you are a cis male – congrats, you cracked the code.