Pratique du Shadowing: Watch this if you feel like you’re behind in life - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec YouTube

Increasingly, a lot of us seem to have this feeling that we are falling behind in life.

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Increasingly, a lot of us seem to have this feeling that we are falling behind in life.

There is this feeling that other people are already ahead of us,

like they figured out what to do with their lives,

they've got the perfect career,

they've started their business, they've got married,

started a family, and I am still not hitting those little milestones that I'd set for myself.

Now this feeling of feeling behind is often the result of something called mimetic desire,

which is what Luke Burgess talks about in this book,

wanting the power of mimetic desire in everyday life.

So we're going to be breaking down some of the insights from this book in this episode of Book Club,

the ongoing series where for the last five years I have been distilling

and discussing highlights and summaries from some of my favourite books.

Part 1.

Why we feel behind in life.

Alright, so broadly this feeling of feeling behind comes from,

let's say you are here at point A and you want to be at point B.

And point A could be anything.

This could be like, you're on a five-figure salary and you want to be on a six-figure salary,

or you're working a day job that you hate and you want to have your own business,

or you're not yet married with kids and you want to be married with kids,

or like whatever the thing is.

You are at point A and you want to be at point B.

Now that in itself does not result in the feeling of being behind.

That actually could just form the basis for setting a goal.

But specifically the feeling of feeling behind comes from the feeling of like,

I'm at point A, I wanna be at point B,

but actually I should already be at point B and I am not already at point B.

Therefore I feel behind, I feel bad, I feel uncomfortable.

I feel like I'm a loser.

I feel like I'm a failure because I am not already where I would like to be.

Now, a lot of the videos in this YouTube channel are about like,

okay, how do you get yourself from A to B?

How do you set a goal?

How do you break it down?

How do you be productive?

How do you be efficient?

But this video is going to be a little bit different

because the point of this book is not about how do we get more efficiently from A to B.

It's really about asking why do we want B in the first place?

And the whole shtick in this book,

the thing that Luke Burgess is arguing,

is that you want that thing that you want quite possibly because of mimetic desire.

And so in this video,

we're going to be breaking down exactly what mimetic desire is and where it comes from.

And then we're going to go over a bunch of actionable strategies from the book

that I found really helpful

that hopefully you will find helpful as well in terms of how to mitigate the effect

that mimetic desires have on our life and as a result hopefully start feeling a little bit less behind.

Part 2.

What is mimetic desire and where does it come from?

And here is a lovely story from the book that illustrates this.

My friend tells me about a promotion he's about to get.

He'll receive a $20,000 boost in salary and have a new title,

Managing Director of Something or Other That Sounds Important.

It comes with more vacation time too.

As I smile and tell him how exciting that is,

I feel some anxiety.

Shouldn't I be making an extra $20,000 too?

Will my friend and I still be able to plan vacations together

if he gets twice as much paid time off as I do?

And also, what the hell?

We graduated from the same university,

and I worked twice as hard as he did in school and after.

Am I falling behind?

Did I choose the right path in life?

Even though I used to say I could never be in his line of work,

now I'm second guessing myself.

My friend has become a model of desire to me.

We will never speak of it,

but an inner force has been activated in me that if left unchecked will cause conflict.

I'll start to make decisions based on what he wants.

If he moves to a certain neighborhood,

I'll start evaluating where I live accordingly.

If he reaches Delta SkyMiles Platinum status,

I won't be satisfied with gold." This is the theory of mimetic desire

that was first talked about by French philosopher René Girard.

And the whole book basically is like an exploration of Girard's theories on mimetic desire.

So where does this mimetic desire come from?

And in the book, Luke talks about it being from two distinct worlds,

and he labels these two worlds Celebristan and Freshmanistan.

Oh by the way

if you didn't know stan as the suffix in a lot of different countries like Pakistan

and Kazakhstan and Afghanistan it means place of or home of or land of.

So Celebristan is the land of the celebrities and Freshmanistan is the land of the people who are more like us.

And the idea here is that we model the desires of these two different groups of people.

We model the desires of celebrities and influencers and like movie stars and stuff.

We've never actually met these people but we still look up to them for inspiration.

Inspiration on what to do,

but also inspiration on what to want.

And so that's the stuff that a lot of us would be already familiar with.

But then you've got Freshmanistan,

which is the people who are like you,

the people that you went to school with,

your neighbours, your parents, your family members, your cousins.

We form models of mimetic desire based on what these people around us want.

And generally it's this category that causes us to feel behind.

Like you probably don't feel that behind because you're not as rich as Kim Kardashian.

I suspect Kim Kardashian's not someone that you're looking to as a model of like,

oh, I should be here.

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But you might be feeling behind in life because your neighbor

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or your friend or your cousin or that person you went to university with is making more money than you are,

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or has a fancier business,

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or seems to be more fulfilled,

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or seems to have a more fulfilling marriage or whatever based on their social media feeds or whatever the thing might be.

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And in a way, we are directly competing against the second group of people.

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When they are doing things and we feel like,

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oh, I should be there already and I'm not,

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like everyone around me seemingly is getting that promotion at work.

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That is a profound model for mimetic desire and and contributes to us feeling bad that we are behind.

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Now I'm gonna put a few questions on screen

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that I would love for you if you would like to pause the video and consider your answers to these questions.

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Firstly, who are the people in your fresh manistan who influence what you want?

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Secondly, what goals or possessions have you started wanting because someone else close to you wanted that thing?

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And thirdly, what achievements or milestones contribute to you feeling behind if someone else gets there first?

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Feel free to pause the video now and have a little think about this.

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And by the way, these are just some of the various journaling prompts that I like collecting for myself over time.

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I've put them all into a journaling hub,

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which is a completely free list of all of my favorite journaling prompts.

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That'll be linked down below if you wanna check it out.

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And these questions aren't easy to answer,

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but they can reveal where our desires come from.

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And I've seen this so much in my own life as well.

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Back when I was in school,

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the mimetic desire was around sort of the people around me,

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like my friends, all wanting to get into the same universities,

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like the fancy universities, to study fancy subjects like medicine.

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Then when I actually got into med school,

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it became about the prizes and the accolades and the publications and the points on the CV.

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And I'd never before wanted these things,

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but I was now in an environment where other people seemed to want those things.

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And so I, without thinking about it, modeled their desires.

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Like, oh, that person's going after those publications.

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I should probably be going after those publications as well.

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Even now, many years after I've left medicine,

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I can still fall into that feeling of feeling behind.

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Because now my team and I are building software,

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and so we're like comparing our software growth rates for VoicePal,

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our productivity writing app, against other AI apps in the industry and being like,

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oh, wait a minute, but that app is growing faster,

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and that app's gotten funded by that fancy investor,

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and ours hasn't done that yet,

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leading to that feeling of feeling behind.

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And I never thought I would care about things like software growth rates,

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but I've now started to find myself caring about it,

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because I'm now in a group where other people around me care about the thing,

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and therefore subconsciously, I have modeled their desires.

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I've started to want or desire things that are maybe not my own intrinsic interests.

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And so what René Girard talked about is

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that we have this natural instinct to model the desires of the people around us.

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And this isn't necessarily always a negative thing.

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Our mimetic desires can be positive if,

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for example, you are inspired by the goals of someone else,

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or if those desires help you form social connections or get healthier or whatever,

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which is generally good for your life.

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And it does save some amount of mental energy

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when you can just sort of model someone else's goal because you don't then have to figure it out entirely for yourself.

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But it can become very problematic when we start chasing things that aren't actually meaningful to us,

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and especially when we are chasing things that make us feel inadequate

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or that we're constantly behind because we're not yet at

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that level that we thought we should be based on what the people around us are getting at.

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Now as Luke writes in the book,

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the obsession we have with goal setting is misguided, even counterproductive.

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Setting goals isn't bad, but

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when the focus is on how to set goals rather than how to choose them in the first place,

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goals can easily turn into instruments of self-flagellation.

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And the important thing to recognize here is that the things that we want shape the goals that we aspire to,

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which completely changes our actions and our feelings.

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If, for example, I grew up in Palo Alto and I found myself chasing the desire to build a billion dollar company,

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that desire to build a billion dollar company is going to shape the goals that I set for myself.

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And the goals that I set for myself are going to shape literally my day-to-day actions and also my feelings.

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Because if I'm 30 and haven't got a billion dollar company yet,

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I will feel bad.

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I will feel behind in that context.

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The goals that we choose to set,

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which form from the desires that we have are so incredibly important.

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And so this idea that that goal selection is in many ways more important than goal achievement.

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This is partly why I spend so much time journaling and really trying to get a sense of like,

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what do I actually want?

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And to what extent is what I want modeled with my own authentic desires versus just what other people around me want.

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This is a big part of the vision component of LifeOS,

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which is my productivity course,

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more details down below if you wanna check it out.

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But it's really the sense that if you change the destination that you're aiming towards,

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it drastically changes the journey that you're on.

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And our choice of goals is ultimately dictated by our desires.

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And so that brings us onto part three,

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how do we actually chase meaningful desires?

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Now, strategy number one that I took away from the book is to identify thick versus thin desires.

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So in the book, Luke talks about thick desires as being kind of like layers of rock.

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So these are solid and they are enduring and they are deeply embedded in who you are.

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These are the sorts of desires that you've probably had for a long time,

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maybe even since childhood.

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These desires don't change easily.

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You've had them for a long time and they probably give you a sense of deep fulfillment when you're pursuing them.

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And we can contrast that with thin desires.

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These are more like the surface layer desires that we find ourselves wanting,

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primarily because someone else around us that we respect or who's like our neighbor in some capacity,

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because that person wants that thing.

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So we find ourselves wanting that thing as well.

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The easy example I see for this in my own life is

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that I've always had a thick desire to be interested in teaching.

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I always liked teaching when I was,

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even when I was like seven years old,

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I'd be helping kids who were like six with their homework and kids in my class and all that stuff.

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Then when I was 13,

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I started teaching at this like maths and English study center,

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and that was really fun.

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And then when I was 16,

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I started doing private tutoring.

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And then when I was in med school,

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I was helping our younger medical students and I started a business all about teaching.

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And ultimately, when I created this YouTube channel,

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like the thing that brings me fulfillment from it is the fact

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that I can read a book and share my insights from it and just,

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you know, share it with people.

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And that's kind of teaching and that's kind of fun.

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And so for me, the desire to teach in

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that sense is probably a thick desire

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because it's been with me for a very long time and it hasn't changed very much.

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But then there are all these other thin desires that get painted over the top.

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For example, I often go to the US to take part in these like entrepreneurship conferences

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and to give talks and to go to these masterminds.

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And when I go to these events,

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I often feel like the brokest person there

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because there's all these people around me who have way bigger businesses and I'm making way more money.

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And then I find myself having this desire to be like,

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oh, you know, I want to get our business to $10 million in revenue.

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And I want to do this.

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And I want to do that.

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And my team knows that whenever I come back from the US

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and like start making plans for the business to basically ignore everything I say for a full 72 hours,

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because generally within about three days,

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that desire to have a bigger business and like make more money and have a bigger team,

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all of that kind of stuff,

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those desires generally fade because they are thin desires

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that were modeled off of these other people I was hanging out with rather than a thick intrinsic desire.

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And so if you're finding yourself feeling behind because you're chasing some kind of desire,

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it might be worth asking yourself a few little journaling prompts around,

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has this desire been with me for a long time?

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Does pursuing this desire energize me,

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or does it actually drain me?

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And here's one of my favorite ones,

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would I still want this thing,

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even if no one could ever know that I had achieved that thing?

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And if you want to do these exercises by speaking them rather than writing them,

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then with VoicePal, the app that my team and I are building,

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we've just released a new frameworks feature.

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And so we've got a few guided frameworks for helping you figure out thick versus thin desires.

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And so the app is going to be linked down below.

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You can try it out for free on iOS and Android.

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And within the free trial,

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you can try out these journaling frameworks and you can see

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if it helps you get any more clarity on what your own desires are.

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The other fun way to identify thick desires is based on what Luke calls stories of fulfillment.

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And so a story of fulfillment has three things.

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Firstly, you took some kind of action.

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Secondly, you believe you did that thing kind of well.

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And thirdly, that thing gave you a lasting sense of accomplishment.

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And so the question you can ask yourself is what is a time in my life

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when I took action and it made me feel genuinely fulfilled?

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For me, the example that often comes to mind is that in my fifth year,

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I was one of the directors of the medical school pantomime.

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And this was like a huge amount of investment in terms of like our spend

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and like hours commuting to and from like hospital placements to do rehearsals and things like that and organizing stuff.

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No one got paid for it.

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It was fully a charity thing,

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but we brought like a hundred plus medical students together who were all insanely talented.

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And we created this production that was way bigger than ourselves.

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And I remember that that as being like one of the most fulfilling things I've ever done.

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And so it's like, huh,

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you know, I was contributing towards this thing,

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working with a group of really talented people.

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We were creating something bigger than us.

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That's interesting.

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It's interesting that I found that very fulfilling.

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What can I learn from that about what my own thick desires are

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and how can I incorporate that more into what I'm doing with my work, for example?

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And then we come to tip number two,

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which is to identify your Michelin stars.

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Now there is a powerful story in the book that Luke talks about.

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And it's kind of a contrast between these two Michelin starred chefs.

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So in 2003, there was a chef called Bernard Loisseur who was one of France's most celebrated chefs.

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And one of his restaurants had three Michelin stars,

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which is very prestigious in the world of food.

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But then this chef heard from the Michelin inspectors

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that he might be losing one of his Michelin stars

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because the inspectors didn't like the lack of inventiveness or the artistic direction of his restaurant.

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At the same time,

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this chef got downgraded from 19 out of 20 points to

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17 out of 20 points in some other restaurant rating system in France.

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And he ended up taking his own life shortly thereafter.

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And it's interesting to contrast this with another chef that he talks about in the book,

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Marco Pierre White.

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At age 32, Marco was the youngest chef to ever get three Michelin stars.

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But then in 1999, at the height of his success,

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he decided to opt out of the Michelin star game and he decided to retire.

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And what he said was,

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I gave Michelin inspectors too much respect and I belittled myself.

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I had three options.

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I could be a prisoner of my world and continue to work six days a week.

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I could live a lie and charge high prices and not be behind the stove.

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Or I could give my stars back,

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spend time with my children and reinvent myself.

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And he was the first three-star chef in history to shut down and walk away.

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And what Luke writes in the book is that each of us has our own version of a Michelin star system.

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We can easily find ourselves like a French chef wanting stars,

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marks of status and prestige, badges of honor.

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Naming the mimetic forces at work in the systems in

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which we operate is an important first step towards making more intentional choices.

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Like for me, my own Michelin stars have evolved a lot through my life.

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In school, it was like exam scores and like the year group rankings

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and like university admissions and all that kind of crap.

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In medical school, it was academic achievements and like first class degrees and like publications.

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Then it became like YouTube followers and views and like ad revenue

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and like New York Times bestseller list status and you know,

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all that kind of stuff.

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And so once we've identified what are our own personal Michelin stars

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that we are chasing after and feeling behind that we're not,

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that we haven't acquired yet,

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we can ask ourselves a few questions.

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Are these measures actually aligned with my thick desires?

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Which ones am I pursuing because others value them, not because I do?

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And which ones would I happily give up if they conflicted with what truly matters to me?

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Now, this exercise isn't about rejecting all external measures

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because some of them might align perfectly with whatever your own authentic goals are,

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but it's really about having more of an awareness of the hidden scorecards

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that we often use to measure our life and to make ourselves feel like we are behind.

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All right, now, once we've identified by these thick and thin desires and our own Michelin stars,

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we come to tip number three,

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which is to set boundaries with unhealthy mimetic models.

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Now there are various ways of doing this boundary setting thing.

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You could set digital boundaries.

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So you could unfollow or mute people on social media who trigger these unhealthy feelings of inadequacy or unhealthy comparison.

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There are various people, for example,

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who I used to follow in the world of entrepreneurs who show off flashy cars and flashy watches.

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But after reading this book,

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I decided to unfollow a bunch of them because I know it is not good for my soul

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and for my life for me to start wanting fancier cars or fancier watches.

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I'm perfectly content with my Apple watch and my Wook band.

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And I really do not need to even see any content about the world of like 10,000, $100,000 watches.

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I have friends, for example,

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who follow this content around cars and watches.

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And because they follow the content,

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they're interested in the thing,

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they desire, I don't know,

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the latest Porsche, whatever the thing is,

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or the latest Lamborghini, whatever the thing is,

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or the latest Patek, whatever the thing is.

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And they have more of a sense of feeling behind because they have not yet acquired these symbols.

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And so in many ways,

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you can curate your own social media feeds.

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If we take it as given that the people we follow on social media are gonna be models of desire,

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whether we like it or not,

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we can just choose to unfollow the people that are prompting us to have unhealthy or unwholesome desires.

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You could create a mental boundary.

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So for example, when you find yourself feeling behind,

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you can ask yourself, you know,

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take a little bit of a pause to ask yourself,

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maybe journal on this, why am I feeling behind right now?

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Is it because I'm chasing a desire that is authentically mine?

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Or is it because I'm chasing a desire that belongs to someone else?

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You can even set physical boundaries.

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Like you can actually get physical distance from hanging out with the sorts of people

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that inspire this sort of envy or jealousy or like desires that you don't wanna have.

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The other thing he talks about is

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that we often think a lot about experts and we kind of trust the opinion of experts,

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but there's a fun little quote for your consideration.

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Experts play an increasingly prominent role in our society,

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but what makes an expert?

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A degree, a podcast?

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Increasingly, experts are crowned mimetically like fashion.

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Find sources that have stood the test of time.

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Be wary of self-proclaimed and crowd-proclaimed experts.

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And here we go, here's a real kicker.

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It's less likely that experts will be mimetically chosen in the hard sciences,

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physics, maths, chemistry, because people have to show their work.

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But it's easy for someone to become an overnight expert on productivity merely because they got published in the right place.

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Oh, Luke, love it.

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Love that.

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And then finally, after that bombshell,

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we come to tip number four,

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which is to create positive flywheels of desire.

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And this is one of my favorite ideas in the book,

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the idea that we can intentionally create momentum around whatever our own authentic desires are.

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And what he says in the book is that the choices we make today affect the things we'll want tomorrow.

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So the example in the book is that you could say,

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for example, I want to start working out because my friend started a new program and looks great.

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That makes me want to eat better so I don't negate my hard work in the gym.

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That makes me want to turn down social invites involving late nights and alcohol and unhealthy food.

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Therefore, I want to go to the gym in the morning instead of feeling hungover.

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And that means I want to spend more time doing productive work, for example.

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In this sense, you're taking a mimetic desire,

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like I want to look good like my mate does,

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but because the flywheel that you can create around it is positive,

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it will improve your life rather than worsen your life.

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Now, understanding mimetic desire doesn't mean that you will never again feel like you're falling behind,

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but it does hopefully give us the awareness to pause and ask ourselves,

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am I really running my own race or am I just feeling behind in someone else's race?

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And the main thing I've really taken away from the book is that when we focus on our thick desires,

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like the ones that have been with us for years and the ones that energize rather than drain us,

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then that feeling of falling behind starts to go away

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because we're no longer measuring our life against external models and external other people's definition of success,

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but we are measuring it against the things that truly matter to us.

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And then hopefully we can use those desires as a way of setting positive goals

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and patting ourselves on the back for how far we've come rather than choosing to feel bad

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because like we're not quite there yet.

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If you liked this video,

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you will definitely enjoy reading the book.

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I'll put a link to it down below.

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And related to the feeling of feeling behind is the feeling of feeling lost,

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which it seems like a big chunk of people who watch this channel sometimes feel.

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And so if you're interested,

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I have another book club episode where we break down the feeling of why you might feel lost in life

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and what to do about that,

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which is somewhat related to the idea of feeling behind,

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but a little bit different.

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So check that video out over there if you are interested.

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Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you hopefully in the next one.

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Bye-bye.

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Qu'est-ce que la technique du Shadowing ?

Le Shadowing est une technique d'apprentissage des langues fondée sur la science, développée à l'origine pour la formation des interprètes professionnels. Le principe est simple mais puissant : vous écoutez de l'anglais natif et le répétez immédiatement à voix haute — comme une ombre suivant le locuteur avec un décalage de 1 à 2 secondes. Les recherches montrent une amélioration significative de la précision de la prononciation, de l'intonation, du rythme, des liaisons, de la compréhension orale et de la fluidité.

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ShadowingEnglish.com – Pratique du Shadowing en Anglais

Parlez anglais couramment grâce au Shadowing. Écoutez des vidéos YouTube de locuteurs natifs, répétez phrase par phrase et développez une vraie prononciation et fluidité — utilisé par les candidats IELTS du monde entier.

Pratique du Shadowing: Watch this if you feel like you’re behind in life - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec YouTube

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Pratique du Shadowing: Watch this if you feel like you’re behind in life - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec YouTube

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About This Lesson

Key Vocabulary & Phrases

Practice Tips

Qu'est-ce que la technique du Shadowing ?