Ads promoting quick results with minimal effort—losing weight, becoming an engineer, overnight success, or learning a language—far overshadow legitimate ads. It seems most people naturally gravitate toward shortcuts.

Towards the end of last year, I was baffled by the number of ads claiming you’ll sound like a native speaker within two months of learning a language. The pervasiveness of it all screamed that these ads must actually work.

So I experimented with a video on Instagram to personally test if those catchy, cringy ads promising big results for no effort actually worked. It turns out, there’s a reason they exist.

I created a simple video starting with “The secret of language learning…” After posting it, I waited for the algorithm to pick it up—and boom, the numbers started climbing. It quickly became my second most-watched video.

Though, after watching it, viewers probably felt somewhat disappointed when I explained there’s no real secret—just persistence.