Shadowing Practice: 5 Things To Do Instead Of Wasting Your Evenings - Learn English Speaking with Video
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- If you live to be 80, you'll have about 22 ,000 evenings as an adult.
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That is your entire allotment.
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The question is what do you do with them?
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Your evenings decide what kind of life you wake up to.
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But most ambitious people are wasting time.
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For those of you who are new here, I have been a CEO, investor, board member in tech companies that generated billions in value.
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I want to show you a system that helps you stop wasting your evenings and weekends and make time for everything.
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By the end, you'll know how to achieve more out of one well -run week than most people get out of a year.
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The most important number in your bank account is not on your bank statement.
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It's the number 1437.
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That's the number of free or leisure hours a full -time worker in America gets every year.
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That's according to BLS.
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You get about 3 .18 hours per weekday and 5 .8 hours per weekend or holiday.
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And this is what's surprising.
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The average worker puts in about 45 work weeks a year.
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And if you add up all your free time, it's almost 36 work weeks every year.
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So your after work hours are not some tiny leftover.
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They're almost another career hiding inside your ear.
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But those hidden hours do not automatically become a better life, right?
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They arrive with hope and they often end with a quiet shame of knowing that you had time, but you did not really have control over it.
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That is why attention matters.
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You own your time only when you own your attention.
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During the day, your role gives you guardrails.
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From nine to five, You have a calendar, you have a team, you have a job, you have a role.
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And all of that constantly tell you how to manage your attention.
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and your time.
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Then comes the evening and those guardrails disappear.
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Now you're free. But...
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Is your attention actually free?
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The phrase "free time" makes us think these hours cost nothing.
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But every hour, has an opportunity cost.
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So the best way to think about your evening is like a bank account.
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Some hours are deposits and some hours are withdrawals.
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Sleep, creative work, time spent with your loved ones, all a great deposit.
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What if you have doom scrolling, social media, withdrawal?
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But what if you have had a rough day and you need to unwind?
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If all you want to do is binge watch Grey's Anatomy or Bridgerton, are you withdrawing from your bank account?
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And sure, Sometimes you have to unwind and be a total zombie.
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But here's the trap.
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There is a research from the Journal of Applied Psychology paper called, "Did you have a nice evening?" They found that relaxing and recovery are not the same.
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If you had a stressful day, It's better to choose a form of recovery that changes your state cook something or practice music,
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read 10 pages of a book, go for a walk.
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That is a deposit.
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And the debt in the bank account is a little more subtle.
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When I work late at night, I feel like I have to squeeze everything I can out of the last few hours of the day.
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The house is quiet, nobody is interrupting me, I have focus, I have momentum, I stay up late, really late.
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And the next morning, I pay for it.
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That is my ambition turning into a debt.
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The first action item is pretty straightforward.
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Audit your evening bank account.
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Make a list of your deposits, your withdrawals, your debts.
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Because just like a bank account, if your deposits exceed your withdrawals over time, you keep growing and compounding.
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The real question is, if your evening is a hidden bank account, what is the best way to invest in it?
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How do you decide whether tonight should be about work, about family, about learning, or just about shutting down.
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You need a decisioning framework.
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I call it the 3C framework.
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Clock compass and climate.
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Clock is about what kind of work fits your biology.
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Compass, which accounts need funding?
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Your physical body or your emotional bonds? or your big career bets, and the climate, what zone you're in.
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All of those things will change the way you think about your evening.
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Let's start with the first C: Clock.
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Are you a morning person or a night owl?
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Waking up at 5 a .m alone does not make you a great leader.
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Tim Cook used to wake up at 4 a .m every morning,
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and Barack Obama and Winston Churchill were famously night owls who stayed up use,
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it depends on what your chronotype is.
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A chronotype is basically your biological rhythm.
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Some people naturally come alive early in the morning.
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Some people, like me, come alive later.
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Some people are somewhere in the middle.
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The point is to know when your brain actually works best.
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If your best hour is 1 a .m., use it.
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But only if your life lets you protect the sleep on the other side. to steal from tomorrow.
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is a permission to stop following someone else's clock.
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I know of plenty of night owls who work late and sleep late.
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That's why advice like just go to bed early or wake up early is useless to many of us.
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The lesson is Stop borrowing from someone else's biology.
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MASH the work to your clock.
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Ask yourself, what are the hours when you're the sharpest?
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Use that for precision work.
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What are the hours when your brain is more uninhibited and open to associative thinking?
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Use those hours for imagination.
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What are the hours where you were completely tired and depleted?
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Use them for closure and recovery.
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In terms of action items, you don't have to do much except reflect.
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You probably already know more than you think.
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You know what your chronotype is.
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When do you usually make clear decisions, clean decisions.
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and when do you get your best ideas.
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And when do you start making dumb mistakes?
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That's your clock.
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And as long as you're not asking your tired brain to do your sharpest thinking, you'll be fine.
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And remember, At night, When you get that second win, Don't mistake treating it like a second day.
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And now get to the second C in the framework: your compass.
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When I was young, my first job was in Boston.
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And it was in a very small, dark, dingy little room full of cables and servers and hardware
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and computer parts and three other guys who were as unhappy as they were stuck.
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I was working as a help desk person.
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But for me, That room was such a gift because I didn't come from tech.
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So on evenings and weekends, I studied everything I could about technology.
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The operating systems, networking protocols, programming languages, anything and I read everything about communications and collaborations and soft skills and hard skills.
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I would reach out to senior leaders of the company and say, "Hey, do you have any extra projects that I can take?" and I would do it after hours.
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One of those leaders was the EVP of Advanced Technologies.
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His name was Dr. Paul Abramson, and he had two PhDs from MIT for some reason.
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He took a liking to me and he became one of my earliest mentors in corporate America.
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When I applied to MIT, he wrote a wonderful recommendation letter for me and he even guided me through the application process.
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Now looking back, I can see it now that my future was built very quietly, one evening and one weekend at a time.
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But let me be honest about this too that It worked because at that point of my life I was single,
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I had very few obligations outside of work.
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Two of my best friends were buried in medical school and neuroscience.
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My evenings and my weekends were usually open.
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So I just doubled down on investing in skills and a better future for myself, building networks.
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Now that is what I mean by compass.
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"Your evening compass has to have a clear direction." Typically, there are three directions that I think of.
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Physical direction is anything that gives you better health, energy capacity.
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Emotional directions are actions that bring you closer to people who mattered to you.
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and vocational direction, where you make future -facing investments, skills, projects, relationships.
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Now, they may not pay off tomorrow morning, but can change the direction of your future life tremendously.
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But here's a trap that most ambitious people miss.
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I did.
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I was living in a suburb north of Boston, and the winters were super harsh and the loneliness was harsher.
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It would get dark at 4 p .m in the afternoon.
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Now, fortunately, I had trained to be a monk.
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I had good enough tolerance for solitude, but I should have invested more in my emotional relationships and in exercise.
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If your body has been ignored, your success will become too heavy a burden for you to carry.
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If your relationships are ignored, your success will get very lonely.
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Early in your career, many mornings will start in the same dark rooms like mine did.
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But what changes your life is what you do in the evenings.
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And now the final C, the climate.
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Sometimes your normal evening routine will not survive contact with reality.
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peacetime evenings and wartime evenings are not the same thing.
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So your evenings should change when your climate changes.
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When Google's Gemini started gaining momentum, the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, reportedly declared a code red inside the company.
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Till then, OpenAI had built a massive lead in terms of 800 million users worldwide.
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They had become a verb that replaced AI.
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Just like people used to say, "Google it." people started saying, "Oh, I'll just chat GPT it." But when the sleeping giant awoke,
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Google delivered Gemini 3 .0.
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That was miles ahead of anything else at that point.
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And it was wartime.
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OpenAI had to refocus all of their energy on their core engine.
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They delayed or canceled a lot of their initiatives like ads,
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agents, Pauls, Sora, so that all the energy could be redirected to the single battlefront.
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ChatGPT.
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That's what wartime looks like.
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And I can't imagine that Sam Altman had time to play piano.
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during his wartime evenings.
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When the climate changes, the old routine becomes the wrong routine.
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You choose what matters most and everything else can wait.
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A founder raising money for his startup, for example, does not have the same evening as someone in a stable career.
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A mother with a newborn does not have the same evening as a mother with a 12 year old.
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A hedge fund analyst during the peak earning season is not
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gonna have the same night as he did in a quiet month.
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In peacetime, your evenings can compound.
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In wartime, your evenings have only one job.
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Survival.
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Before you plan your evening, Name your climate.
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Ask, am I in peacetime right now or in wartime climate?
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If it is a peacetime, Invest away.
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If it's a war time, narrow the night.
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narrow the fight.
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But what if your evening is totally crazy? and you have no time to do anything.
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There is a version of yourself who finishes work on time, eats a clean dinner, trains for 45 minutes, reads 20 pages of a wonderful book,
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journals, meditates, calls a friend, and sleeps by 10 o 'clock.
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But that version does not exist.
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Real evenings have late calls and delayed trains and sick kids and client fires and mad bosses, dishes and laundry.
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If your evening only works when life is perfect, you don't have a system.
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you have a fiction.
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But in those wartime zones, when everything is going against you, it's better to stop chasing the perfect evening.
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Aim for what I call the "enough" evening.
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Three things for the evening that has already gone out of hand.
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First, remove.
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Barack Obama wore mostly gray or blue suits as president.
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Steve Jobs had that famous black turtleneck.
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Anna Wintour has kept the same bob and the same sunglasses for 30 years.
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Different worlds.
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Same move.
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They have too many real decisions to make, so they remove the small ones.
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Apply that to your evening.
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Ask yourself, What small decisions or distractions can you remove?
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Second, Reflect.
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Pick three questions and ask them every night before bed.
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It'll take you two minutes.
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Nowadays, my three favorite questions are super simple.
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What did I learn today?
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What did I improve today in my life or someone else's life?
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And what did I smile about today?
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Because the most grounded people I know Share one habit.
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Morning for meditation, evening for reflection.
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And third, rest.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson has this great line that if aliens came to our planet and watched us humans lie down,
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semi -comatose, for one -third of Earth's rotation, they would wonder what the heck is wrong with these people.
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And he's right.
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Sleep looks totally absurd.
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For a third of the day, you lose consciousness, become so vulnerable, and produce absolutely nothing.
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And yet, evolution chose sleep that should humble every productivity addict on earth.
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So protect your sleep.
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First, have a 15 minute landing strip.
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That's your ritual before you go to sleep.
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Read a book, shower, change clothes, journal, whatever comes to mind.
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And second, protect your sleep from your devices.
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Harvard Medical School study found that using our devices before bed delays your body clock.
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It suppresses melatonin, cuts REM sleep, and leaves you less alert the next morning even if you had a eight hours of sleep.
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A part of my Enough Evening ritual is to write a
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short note to the community of folks who think about these kind of things.
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That newsletter, by the way, goes out every week.
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Link is in the description if you feel like it.
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60 years of adult life, roughly 22 ,000 evenings total.
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That's what you and I have.
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The question is, Will they be enough?
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You know, we're called human beings.
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we're terrible at just being.
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The best evenings do not just end the day.
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They are enough.
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to return you to yourself.
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Thank you.
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And I love you.
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Context & Background
In the video "5 Things To Do Instead Of Wasting Your Evenings," the speaker, an experienced CEO and investor, emphasizes the importance of making the most out of your evening hours. With the average adult having around 22,000 evenings throughout their life, he prompts viewers to evaluate how they spend this time. He highlights that many ambitious individuals waste these precious hours, which could potentially lead to a more fulfilling life if managed properly. The speaker instructs viewers to consider their time budget as a bank account, weighing the "deposits" of quality activities against the "withdrawals" of time wasted on less productive tasks. This approach not only helps prioritize important activities but also encourages reflection on personal time management.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication
- “You own your time only when you own your attention.” - This phrase serves to remind learners that focused attention is crucial for effective time management.
- “Every hour has an opportunity cost.” - Highlighting that all time spent is a choice, reinforcing the need to make conscious decisions.
- “The best way to think about your evening is like a bank account.” - A relatable metaphor to help reflect on how time is spent.
- “Relaxing and recovery are not the same.” - Useful for discussing the difference between downtime and actively recuperating.
- “Audit your evening bank account.” - An actionable suggestion that encourages self-assessment of how time is utilized.
Step-by-step Shadowing Guide
To effectively engage with the material presented in this video and improve your English speaking practice, follow this shadowing technique:
- Choose Your Segment: Start by selecting a short, manageable segment of the video. Focus on just a few sentences that resonate with you.
- Listen Actively: Play the chosen segment and listen carefully to the pronunciation, intonation, and rhythm of the speaker’s voice.
- Repeat & Imitate: Pause the video after each sentence and attempt to shadow the speaker. Mimicking their speech will help improve your accent and fluency.
- Record Yourself: Use your device to record how you sound while shadowing. Listening to your recordings can highlight areas for improvement.
- Practice Regularly: Incorporate shadow speaking into your daily routine. Consistency is key to mastering the nuances of English conversation.
By employing this shadow speak method, you can enhance your language skills and turn what might be wasted time into valuable learning experiences. For the best results, consider using a shadowing site or resources that cater specifically to English learners.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | If you live to be 80, you'll have |
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to wake · used to say |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have been · have had · has been ignored |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was built · were buried · has been ignored |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.