Shadowing Practice: Be Better than AI: 8 Highest Value Skills to Learn Now - Learn English Speaking with Video
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A skill that you spent years mastering, one that used to be your competitive edge, might be completely outsourceable for a few pennies today.
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AI can now write code, design graphics, analyse data, the very skills that we were once told would future -proof our careers.
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Being irreplaceable means not only leveraging how to use AI well, but developing all those critical human skills that you just can't outsource.
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If you're new here, I'm Izzy, a mum, tech co -founder and Cambridge trained doctor,
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and on this channel we explore the strategies and mindsets to help you create your dream life.
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Today I'm sharing a pyramid framework of the eight highest value human personal skills to help you become irreplaceable
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and actually skill number eight is probably the most important of all.
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I've also created a completely free guide with exercises and journal prompts to help you along the way.
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I'll pop the link in the description below.
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By the end of this video I hope that you'll know exactly
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which skills to focus on and feel confident about your place in an AI driven future.
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Without further ado let's dive in.
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I spend a lot of my time thinking about hiring
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and also what are actually key high value skills that I want our team to learn.
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And as a business owner, I'm so interested in where AI is going to go
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because that's going to fundamentally change the way that all of these businesses actually work.
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And so these eight high value skills are drawn from both my own personal experience
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and also reading what experts have been writing and saying about AI
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and how that's going to change the way that we work and live.
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Workplace surveys looking at how long a technical skill
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that you learn is relevant to your work found
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that a few decades ago a skill that you learned would usually last approximately 15 years.
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The technical term is the half -life where it would take
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about 15 years for half of your technical skills to become outdated.
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So for example here
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if I draw out this half -life of skill relevance with the top of the graph meaning
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that 100 % of the skills that you have learned are relevant
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and useful in your job and zero meaning none of them.
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A few decades ago the skill relevance decay curve looked a little bit like this,
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where you would start at 100 % and then it would very slowly kind of decay with this exponential decay curve, kind of like this.
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And about half of the skills would decay at the about 15 year mark over here.
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Now, however, because things are changing so quickly, that same curve looks a bit more like this.
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And as you can see, the exponential decay here is much steeper.
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This means
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that there used to be a point in time where you
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could almost stay with the same set of technical skills throughout most of your career, and by the time that you retired,
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a lot of them would still be relevant.
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But today, this just really isn't the case.
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This means that about half of what you're learning right now might already be outdated in two years time, unless you keep learning.
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And so this first foundational skill is adaptability and the ability to learn anything and become anything.
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And so in a world that is changing more rapidly than ever, adaptability becomes one of the highest value skills.
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At Cambridge University, during my medical degree, I actually spent one year studying biological anthropology.
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And one of the key books that I read during this time was On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, written in 1859.
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And in this book, he proposed that it is not the strongest of species that survives, nor is it the most intelligent.
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It is the one most adaptable to change.
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Adaptability isn't just about picking up new skills and being able to learn.
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It's also about being willing to let go of who you were in order to become who you need to be, who you're becoming.
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This identity flexibility actually sits upstream of a lot of skill development.
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Another quote that I love from Alvin Toffler, who was an American writer and futurist,
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the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
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And so this is your invitation to get really comfortable with actually just putting yourself out there, learning new skills, unlearning old identities,
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and continually evolving and changing and adapting as the times change as well.
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The next high value skill is communication.
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Humans are fundamentally social creatures and communication will always be at the core of who we are and how we socialize.
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Being able to communicate with skill, clarity, and compassion is an incredibly high value skill that is only going to get more essential.
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There are two books and frameworks that I'd love to share
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that have completely leveled up the way that I communicate and changed my relationships.
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Before diving into those specifically, it's actually really helpful to understand and soft skills versus hard skills,
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because skills can be broadly divided into these two camps.
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Hard skills tend to be highly technical, job specific and teachable, such as learning how to code or like studying at medical school, learning law.
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These are the types of skills that you often learn in school or in training.
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And in some cases you get a shiny qualification or a certificate to show for it.
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Soft skills on the other hand are behavioral attributes, values or traits that you learn through personal experience and reflection.
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And so you won't necessarily be able to quantify or measure them, but they are essential for working well in a team and with other people.
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Key examples here would be communication, teamwork, adaptability, which we already mentioned in point one.
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And in this age of AI, increasingly soft skills are becoming the things that make a team stand out.
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One study actually found that 58 % of managers felt
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that their company's success would be held back by poor soft skills instead of hard skills,
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especially in fast growing industries and startups that need to scale quickly.
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And 59 % of managers found it more challenging to find good candidates with good soft skills compared to hard skills,
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which basically means that soft skills are really very much in demand
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and they're actually going to be even more important in the age of AI.
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Google did a landmark internal study called Project Aristotle.
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After studying 180 of their teams, Google discovered that the best performing teams weren't just the ones that had the highest IQ or the most talented.
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They were actually the ones where the team members felt safe enough to share ideas, their thoughts, and mistakes without fearing embarrassment or humiliation.
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They actually realized that the psychological safety net facilitated by great communication
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and connection resulted in more productive discussions and more innovative solutions, and overall better performance.
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And so these soft skills made the difference between the good teams and the excellent teams.
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The first communication book that changed the game for me is Radical Candor by Kim Scott.
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She worked at big tech companies
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and drew a lot of learnings from her own experiences as a manager
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and also what she learned from some of these high -powered executives that she was working with.
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And she created this 4x4 grid with the axes of challenge directly,
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where you're directly sharing honestly what you think and not being afraid to challenge somebody else's thoughts or opinions with your own.
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And the other axis being care personally, where you really see the other person
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that you're talking to as a real human being with an incredibly complex world that you don't truly fully understand,
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but you really care about them deeply on a personal level.
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And she realized that basically every interaction could be categorized into one of these four quadrants.
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What this really unlocked for me was actually being able to see that being truly honest with somebody and candid,
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while also maintaining this personal care and deep warmth and love for the person,
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actually is a kinder way to communicate than trying to hide my negative feedback.
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I used to view sharing my honest,
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candid thoughts as maybe hurtful or inconvenient or unpleasant for other people to deal with if it conflicted with their worldview.
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However, what reading this book made me realize is that, for example, let's say you're working with somebody on a project
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and you think that their work could be improved in a certain way.
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It's easy to think, oh, well, I don't wanna say that to them because they might feel offended by it.
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And so then I'm just gonna not challenge them directly
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because then maybe that will protect their feelings and either that's because I want them to feel good,
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and that's ruinous empathy, or it's because I want them to like me because I don't really care about them personally,
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but I want them to like me and manipulate them essentially into liking me, and that's manipulative insincerity.
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And only by actually challenging them directly and being honest with how you're feeling do they have the opportunity to improve.
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Because otherwise you're essentially denying them that opportunity before you've even presented it.
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You've assumed, oh, they can't handle that, so I'm not going to give them the opportunity to potentially do the best work of their life.
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And equally, if you challenge directly without caring personally, then that can come off as just obnoxiously aggressive.
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And so it's this beautiful meeting place of communication where you feel like actually being truly honest with someone
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and being willing to challenge them directly, giving them that opportunity to really understand what's going on.
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Alongside Radical Candor, there's another book with a communication framework that I genuinely think everyone should know about.
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It's completely changed the way that I communicate, mostly with my husband, but also other family,
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friends, team members, colleagues, etc. It's called Nonviolent Communication and it was written by a psychologist called Marshall Rosenberg,
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who originally actually created it while mediating racial integration conflicts in the American South in the 60s.
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So this was genuinely forged in high -stakes situations, but the framework actually works for so many different applications.
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The core idea is beautifully simple.
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Rosenberg basically believed that underneath almost every conflict is actually a miscommunication about needs.
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We all have the same basic human needs to be respected, to feel safe, to belong,
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to have autonomy, but most of us have actually never really been taught how to express them directly
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because this level of directness makes us vulnerable.
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So instead of saying I really need to feel valued in this team, we say you don't appreciate anything I do.
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And with this violent version of communication,
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the other person is now feeling defensive and now we're in a conflict about something that was never the real issue.
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So the NVC framework gives you four steps.
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The first is to observe what happened without judgment.
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For example, instead of saying, you always interrupt me, try saying, I noticed you interrupted me three times during our conversation just now.
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Step two is to name the feeling, name the emotion that came up for you, such as, when you interrupted me, I felt frustrated.
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The third step is to identify the unmet need underneath that.
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I felt frustrated because I have a wish to feel heard.
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I have a need to feel heard.
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I sometimes personally like to phrase this as wish instead of need.
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In his original framework he uses the word need but I'm like you know what I don't need it, I actually just wish for it.
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I have a wish to feel heard and respected.
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And the fourth step is to make a clear and actionable request.
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So this is very clearly not a demand
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and the difference between a request and a demand is that a request has no punishment or consequence.
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A demand would be something like would you be willing to let me finish my thought before responding otherwise otherwise
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I'm going to punish you in.. xyz kind of way.
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A request is, would you be willing to let me finish my thoughts before responding?
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The next skill is emotional fluidity and self -awareness.
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The value of knowledge alone is going steeply downhill with AI, as so much knowledge is instantly accessible.
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But emotional fluidity and self -awareness are two of the most important emotional skills that you actually can't delegate.
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This has to come from you.
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You have to cultivate your own mind, your own self -awareness, and your own wisdom internally.
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One thing that you might have noticed, and I've certainly noticed this myself, is that AI often struggles to make good quality decisions.
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And I think a key part of this is that decision -making is fundamentally emotion -driven.
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Antonio Damasio was a neuroscientist who did a lot of research
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on patients who had damage to the emotional centers of their brains.
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He did one particular case study on a patient that he calls Elliot.
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Elliot was always a really smart guy, sociable, well -liked.
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However, he developed a brain tumor and he needed surgery to remove it.
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After surgery, Elliot's IQ stayed in the genius range.
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His memory, logic, language was all perfect and all intact.
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And so you'd probably think, oh great, this surgery went well.
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But actually, Elliot had completely changed and was unrecognizable.
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Even though his IQ was intact,
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he would spend literally hours trying to decide whether to schedule his next doctor's appointment on a Tuesday or a Thursday.
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Or for example, when he wanted to decide to go to a restaurant for lunch, He would drive to restaurant after restaurant,
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going in, comparing the menus and the seating arrangements, but still being completely unable to just pick one and actually eat.
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Damasio realised that underpinning all of this was that Elliot had lost the ability to feel his emotions.
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And without those emotions, he couldn't make decisions.
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Even the most trivial choices, such as what colour pen to use or where to eat at lunch, became impossible.
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And so Damasio's conclusion was
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that pure logic without emotion doesn't actually lead to better decisions it actually just leads to no real decision at all.
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And one thing I noticed is that this honestly sounds a little bit like some of the conversations I've had with AI.
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Chatting to ChatGPT about, let's say, designing and running a hiring process, it could brilliantly come up with dozens
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and dozens of options of questions I could ask
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or like orders of hiring process and what kinds of trials and interviews and all that kind of thing.
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But then when I asked it to have an opinion and choose which option it would recommend, it chose one.
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But as soon as I pushed back on it even a little, It immediately completely changed its opinion and chose a different option.
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And then I pushed it a little bit again.
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And then it kept changing its mind over and over again.
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Because fundamentally, it didn't really have a clear opinion or decision around this.
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And so learning to be really aware of your own emotions
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and your internal state is this source of embodied human wisdom that is so personal to you.
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Literally millions of years of evolution and this chain of ancestors has gone before us into honing our internal system.
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And I've always found that making decisions that are aligned on three levels, which is head, heart, and gut,
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are always the most powerful and feel the best.
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And so whenever I'm making a big decision, such as hiring, or where to move, or something about our baby,
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I always try to align on my decision with head, heart, and gut.
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And fundamentally, AI can never make decisions like this for you.
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All it can provide is some kind of scaffolding of logic and options for you, and maybe act as a bit of a sounding board therapist
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but fundamentally you have to learn to hear your own intuition and your emotions and trust yourself.
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And fundamentally this is something that AI can never replace, which is the ability to lead your own very human life.
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The next two skills are actually literacy and the first one is AI literacy.
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Most people are under utilizing their longest lever, which is actually AI.
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And people who use this lever the best unlock so much more of their potential.
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The goal here is where AI becomes an extension of you like a team member
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or like an extra limb and it adds so much leverage.
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There are two key things I'd like to say here.
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Firstly is
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that actually spending about an hour a day leveling up on
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your AI usage is one of the highest leverage uses of your time that you could possibly ever do.
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And the second thing is that a really clear place to start is with prompt engineering.
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Obviously there's all this extra stuff with agentic AI
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and building out AI agents which is an even longer lever
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but the first step on that is learning how to engineer really good prompts
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that get the kind of output that you want.
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One thing that you can easily do to figure out
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if AI can help you at any point to leverage your time is doing a simple time tracking
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and then actually pasting this into either ChatGPT or Gemini
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or Claude and asking it to analyze where you're spending your time
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and brainstorm in what ways AI could actually help you to accelerate
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or skip out or automate some of what you're working on.
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Some examples for me are meal planning.
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I found that AI is so helpful with this where I put in the macros
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that we want and the kind of balance of whole unprocessed foods
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that we want and AI comes up with a great meal plan off the back of this.
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Another AI tool I use regularly is called VoicePal
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which is actually part of our portfolio of software apps
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and it essentially lets you chat to the app
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and then AI will clean up the transcription
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and then help you to flesh out your ideas more by asking you follow -up questions.
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I could honestly go on and on about this.
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But the key takeaway is to spend time investing in your AI ability.
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The next form of literacy is a business literacy.
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So much of the world is built by and run on businesses.
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And a business fundamentally is a form of value creation and exchange.
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So even just knowing the fundamentals of business gives you
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so much more of a deep understanding of how things around you are working.
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At the most fundamental level, a business creates value and people exchange money for that value.
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And often the value that businesses create is in the form of solving problems for people.
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The higher value a problem is to somebody who has the money to pay for that problem to be solved,
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the more valuable a business generally is.
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And the more people it can solve that problem for, so the more scalable it is.
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So let's say instead of just being able to help one person, being able to help 1000 people, usually the more value that business is creating,
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and therefore the more money they get in exchange for that.
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Let's take the example of Amazon.
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Amazon have created a marketplace where people can buy things that are useful to them.
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Sellers can list their items on there or there's things sold from Amazon directly and then consumers, people like you and me,
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can go on the website and think oh I need that.
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Let's say this journal.
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I want to buy a new journal.
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I have a problem where I want to be able to write things down
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and keep them in a nice place with nice paper
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and it feels good to use and
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so a journal is a great solution for that and
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so I'm willing to pay money in in exchange for a nice journal that I can use.
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And most jobs in the world are actually created by businesses.
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So once you understand how businesses actually work, how value is created, exchanged and captured, you start seeing all of these opportunities everywhere.
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The restaurant that has a 30 minute wait becomes a problem worth solving.
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The friend feeling lost at the gym
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and not knowing what to do about their workout routine becomes a potential audience or someone that can be helped with value.
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Business literacy isn't about getting an MBA, it's about actually developing a problem solvers lens on the world.
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This allows you to either build your own business
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or understand the one that you work in and the ones that you interact with to be able to excel.
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One question I love to ask is what will be true in 10 years time?
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And I think what will still be true is that humans will still crave human connection.
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For example, social media has supposedly made us more connected,
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but actually we feel more isolated than ever and are actually craving human connection more than ever.
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Another thing to mention is that if you ever wanted to start up your own business someday,
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we're actually launching a mentorship program called the Lifestyle Business Academy.
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It's still in the early stages.
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The goal is essentially to help you to go from zero to 100k plus on your own lifestyle business.
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And where the focus isn't just making more money, but actually creating a lifestyle and business ecosystem, which helps you to create your dream life.
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If you're interested in hearing more or joining the waitlist, I'll leave a link down below in the description.
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The next high value skill is the courage to be seen.
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The bar for entry to create content is getting lower and lower.
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And AI slop is really sloshing into the algorithms these days.
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And maybe you can relate to this where whenever I go onto one of these social media platforms, and I start scrolling through the feeds,
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there is a moment where I think, is this AI?
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And then when I see a face that I don't recognize pop up, there's immediately some level of skepticism.
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On the flip side, if I see a creator who I know, like and trust already, I immediately feel more comfortable actually believing what they're saying.
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And so in a world where anyone can vibe code an app or have expert knowledge at the touch of a button,
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one of the most powerful moats in business and life is trust.
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And a personal brand is an incredible way of doing this and building this founder -led content,
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essentially content that's created by the CEO of a company, actually gets 46 % more engagement than typical corporate material.
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And this is because people like engaging with real people and they want to buy from real people.
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Another incredible example of this is the Hormozis.
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So Alex and Leila Hormozis are co -founders and managing partners of acquisition .com,
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which is essentially the portfolio of companies where they invest in companies and help them to succeed.
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Over four years or so, their portfolio has grown to over 250 million in annual revenue.
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Traditionally, private equity firms who go and invest in companies or buy companies are usually like hunters.
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Essentially, they pay high costs to find good deals
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and find good companies and convince people that they are the right investor
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or they are the right person to buy that company.
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But for the Hormozis, by producing vast quantities of founder -led content with really high quality value first stuff,
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the Hormozis have actually turned themselves into a magnet where the deals come to find them.
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This creates a few clear unfair advantages.
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Firstly, content is acting as a 24 -7 lead machine for them.
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Secondly, the content is building significant trust and influence with the people that they want to speak to, aka founders.
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Founders who are watching their content are learning about how the Hormozis think about culture
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and metrics and how they are building their businesses,
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which then means that those founders are much more likely to want to work with the Hormozies down the line.
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And so they've built out this incredible trust engine in the form of their personal brands.
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I believe so strongly in building a personal brand and having a personal website to show for it.
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But so many people just don't take that leap
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because they think maybe you need to hire a developer for a website
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or learn to code or spend hundreds of dollars setting everything up or getting a designer.
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But what this results in is continually delaying these ideas from actually being executed on.
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And so instead of saying, one day I'm gonna build a website,
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make today day one of actually building your personal brand and that's where Hostinger comes in, who are sponsoring today's video.
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It's an all -in -one website builder
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that lets you create a site in genuinely minutes
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and it's one of the most affordable ways to just get your presence online.
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You simply describe your brand or your project and it generates a full website for you in literally seconds.
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The point isn't to have a perfect site on the first try
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but a foundation to build off of and then you can go ahead and customize everything from fonts,
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colors, images, add different features with drag and drop, literally no coding needed.
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As a creator entrepreneur, what caught my eye was that Hostinger literally provides everything that you need in one place.
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You get various tools, a website builder, logo maker, SEO assistant, so you're not piecing together multiple subscriptions.
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You can even start selling products in your own online store with no transaction fees on their business plan.
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If you happen to be watching before the end of March 2026, with their new year sale running right now,
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where if you sign up for a longer period, such as their 48 -month plan,
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then you can lock in their lowest prices for their business plan at $2 .99 a month.
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I've popped the link in my description down below, hostlinger .com forward slash Dr. Izzy,
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and you can use my code Dr. Izzy for an extra 10 % off.
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Now let's get back into the video.
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Your personal brand isn't about being perfect or universally liked.
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It's actually about being trustable, authentic, and real.
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And so here are some steps that you can put into practice right now.
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Pick a platform with an algorithm and start creating content for it.
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Learn how to create great content and show up really as you and delivering value, but as your authentic self.
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Over time, this will hopefully gain traction with some people who actually vibe with you
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and then start building your owned audience in the form of your email list.
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The seventh high value skill is storytelling.
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Whether this is for business, content marketing or connection,
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our love of stories is one of the key things that gave humans a survival edge hundreds of thousands of years ago.
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Anthropologists believe that storytelling actually gave homo sapiens,
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which is our species, a critical survival advantage over other hominids because it allowed us to coordinate across large groups.
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In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari writes that this ability to create and share fictional stories such as myths or religions,
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nations, currencies, is what enabled humans to cooperate in these large numbers, something that literally no other species can do on the same scale.
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And there is genuinely a formula to storytelling.
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Several years ago, I read the book Storyworthy by Matthew Dix, and he talks about his homework for life,
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where every single day he writes down a single line story about his day.
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And I found that whenever I do this, and I actually exercise this storytelling muscle every single day, my life feels so much more alive.
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I have a page in my bullet journal where I literally just have a one line for every single day's story,
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like what's the highlight of the day.
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And reading back through this helps me to weave together a feeling of romanticizing my life.
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Princeton Research in 2017 had participants watch a dramatic part of an episode of Sherlock
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while they were in an fMRI scanner scanning their brain.
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They then asked one of the participants to tell back the story of the episode while also being scanned again,
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and they made a voice recording of their storytelling.
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And finally they got new participants who hadn't seen the episode
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at all to listen to the voice recording of the storytelling
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and they also had their brains scanned while they listened to the story
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and were mentally constructing the show from what they heard.
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And so on the face of it watching a video clip, recalling it later and telling a story,
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and then actually imagining it from someone else's description are three very different cognitive processes.
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But actually the team found that the brain patterns were remarkably similar.
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There were shared patterns of brain activation regardless regardless of whether the participant was watching, remembering or imagining the scene.
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And this is the power of storytelling.
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Being able to craft a compelling story is a fundamentally human thing
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and a way to really connect and resonate with other people and actually sync up the patterns of brain activity.
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Another incredible power of storytelling is its counter positioning to AI, where AI often deals in objective averages, essentially predicting the most likely next word,
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whereas storytelling actually deals in subjective truth and includes things like your unique, quirky, and sometimes irrational perspective or experiences.
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And so in a world of averages, actually these unique, quirky human stories are what still feel crunchy and can cut through the white noise.
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And now onto the eighth and most important skill of all, which is self -love.
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And this is the one high -value skill that I haven't seen anyone list anywhere else.
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But this really cuts to the core of why we should
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even be investing in all these high value skills in the first place.
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Most people would say that skills are useful
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because they can get you opportunities or money or status or achievement or create an impact on the world etc.
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But then if you go one level above that, why care about those things?
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Usually when we dig deeper there's actually a fundamental wish to feel happy and fulfilled.
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And so all of the above are often proxies for this sense of joy and fulfillment.
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Things that we predict will help us to get to or create that feeling.
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But what if there was a direct path that you could start walking on today?
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And that path is self -love and compassion.
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This might sound kind of woo -woo, but there's actually evidence behind this, so bear with me.
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Kristin Neff at the University of Texas, who is a specialist researcher on the topic of self -compassion,
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found that her research shows that self -compassionate people have less performance anxiety, more self -confidence, less fear of failure,
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they're more willing to take risks, have a growth mindset.
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And the reason that I put this at the top of the framework is that if you have this one skill,
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this is something that AI can never do for you ever, ever.
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But actually developing this sense of compassion for yourself
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and others is the prerequisite to living a life that you love and that you feel fulfilled in.
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So now that we've gone through all the eight high value skills that are irreplaceable in the age of AI,
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I'd like to invite you to choose at least one of them to work on this week.
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It's all good and well watching these kinds of videos and getting inspiration, but the key thing is actually making this happen in your own life.
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You can even use the completely free guide that I've made to get you started.
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If you liked this video, I think you'll enjoy this one over here where I share eight simple shifts
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that will help you to step into being the CEO of your own life.
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Feel free to hit subscribe for more self -development videos every single week.
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And as always, thank you so much for watching.
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Take care of yourselves and remember that the journey is the destination.
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I'll see you in the next video.
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Bye.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Be Better than AI: 8 Highest Value Skills to Learn Now”. This video has 374 sentences and 5479 words to shadow. The speech runs for 26:38. The speaker talks fast, about 206 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 84% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| skill noun | /skɪl/ | A capacity to do something well; a technique, an ability, usually acquired or learned, as opposed to abilities that are regarded as innate. |
| fundamentally adverb | In a fundamental or basic sense; reaching the very core of the matter. | |
| storytelling noun | The act and skills of presenting stories and tales. | |
| essentially adverb | /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/ | In essence: by nature. |
| founder noun | /ˈfaʊ̯n.dəː/ | One who founds or establishes (a company, project, organisation, state, etc.). |
| emotion noun | /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/ | A person's internal state of being and involuntary physiological response to an object or a situation, based on or tied to physical state and sensory data. |
| framework noun | /ˈfɹeɪm.wɜːk/ | A support structure comprising joined parts or conglomerated particles and intervening open spaces of similar or larger size. |
| hire verb | /ˈhaɪɹ/ | To obtain the services of in return for fixed payment. |
| literacy noun | /ˈlɪtəɹəsi/ | The ability to read and write. |
| decay noun | /diˈkeɪ/ | Rot; any processes or result of organic matter being gradually decomposed, especially by microbial action. |
| invest verb | /ɪnˈvɛst/ | To spend money, time, or energy on something, especially for some benefit or purpose; used with in. |
| communicate verb | /kəˈmjuːnɪkeɪt/ | To impart or transmit (information or knowledge) to someone; to make known, to tell. |
| genuinely adverb | /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/ | In a genuine manner; truthfully, truly. |
| compassion noun | /kəmˈpæʃ.ən/ | Deep awareness of the suffering of others that people have to the point of them being motivated to relieve such states. |
| awareness noun | /əˈwɛɹ.nəs/ | The state or level of consciousness where sense data can be confirmed by an observer. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| build out verb | To develop or expand (a system, structure, project, etc.). |
| come up with verb | To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it. |
| clean up verb | To make an area or a thing clean; to pick up a mess; to tidy. |
| come off verb | To become detached. |
| cut through verb | To take a shortcut through. |
| draw out verb | To make (something) last for more time than is necessary; to prolong; to extend. |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| follow up verb | To take further actions remaining after an event; to continue, revisit, or persist; especially, to maintain communication or verify. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- I'll pop the link in the description below.
- Without further ado let's dive in.
- I'm going to punish you in..
- I'll see you in the next video.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to be · used to view |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've also created · have learned · you've even presented |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | are drawn · be outdated · would be held |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | those who cannot · levels, which is · replace, which is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 72 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, I'm, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: underneath /ˌʌndɚˈniθ/, authentic /ɔˈθɛn.tɪk/, seventh /ˈsɛvənθ/, eighth /eɪtθ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, emotion /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/, compassion /kəmˈpæʃ.ən/, extension /ɪkˈstɛnʃən/, capture /ˈkæp.(t)ʃɚ/
- Long words — get the stress right: essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, literacy /ˈlɪtəɹəsi/, communicate /kəˈmjuːnɪkeɪt/, genuinely /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/, portfolio /pɔːtˈfəʊ.liˌəʊ/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like skill, fundamentally, storytelling.
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.