Shadowing Practice: Do you really want this? - Learn English Speaking with Video
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You're using the excuse of passion to disguise your inability to tolerate hardness.
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One of the early lessons that I wish someone had told me, and I want to transfer it to you now, is that when you start, you will be cringey as fuck.
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You will be awkward, you will be weird, people will look at you, the people you're friends with, people you're dating, hopefully not for long,
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will make you feel like you're being not cool.
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And the reality is they're right.
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Because when you start, you will suck and you will have no reputation, you will have no track record.
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And is that a reason to not do it?
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If you're a loser, yes.
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Because it means that you care more about their disappointment in you than your own disappointment in you.
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Why don't you do your passion?
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Because if you did your passion, you wouldn't work another day in your life.
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And it's just a very simplistic and inaccurate view of the world.
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There's only one way that you will truly be able to only do your passion.
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It means that you would only do this very narrow thing, right?
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For me at the time was training more advanced athletes who liked powerlifting
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and had the same work capacity and schedule as me, who were willing to pay me tons of money to do it, right?
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In order to get those people, you have to do a lot of stuff that is not
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that to get them the vast majority of your time will not be anything that you're passionate about.
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And if that's the case, even when you're pursuing your passion, and I'm saying this as someone who's gone full cycle with this, I now have a gym that has no memberships and it is not for profit.
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And I'm saying this, that it is okay to make money doing one thing and be passionate about another.
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You don't even know how much you can work.
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Like you think you know how much you can work until you like really, really work.
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but what's interesting is that like
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if you work a hundred times harder you can sometimes get like a million times the payout
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and so like the the top end of work still has disproportionate payoffs
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and so i don't even i don't even like there are diminishing returns
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but there's a point where you actually get like outsized returns for the effort
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because like if you think about it from like a olympic racing perspective like
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if i work you know 10 times more than everybody else does
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but i get gold and the next guy gets silver the difference between gold and silver and running is everything
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even though it's the tenth of a second.
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And so from an absolute perspective, there's diminishing returns.
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But from a relative perspective, I think you have exponential returns from being the best.
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The difference between number one and number two can be Uber and Lyft.
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The difference is 10x.
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I looked at the first presentation I ever gave, and it's embarrassing.
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I mean, it's truly embarrassing.
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I think it has 19 slides with four bullets on each slide.
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I remember thinking, man, I spend a lot of time on this.
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And a lot of time to me back then was like, I spend a day on it.
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The reason I'm making this is that most of the shit sucks, even if it starts as something you love.
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The passion is a very bad judgment filter.
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Everything within a business, especially if you're the owner,
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will suck because business is a funneling mechanism of the hardest and worst problems related to the thing that you supposedly love.
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Elon Musk talks about this where he says, there are problems that are too hard for anyone else to solve
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or problems that are too painful that no one else either can't solve or they don't want to solve it.
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I feel like it's easier to get that emotion that you like feeling from ambition, from watching other people, rather than having to do it yourself.
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You continuously are consuming someone else rather than yourself doing something.
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You can almost just get away with that quick fake dopamine hit that you get.
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And I feel like people lie to themselves that doing nothing
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is better than doing something bad or doing nothing is better than failing
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because failing is terrifying and then in doing the nothing they watch other people do it
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so they can at least kind of like keep alive to themselves.
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Your proficiencies will take you much further than your passions.
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Imagine this and I used to think about this a lot.
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Imagine farmers thousands of years ago right?
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They probably weren't passionate about rice or corn or soybeans,
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but they felt a duty and a pride in providing.
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And I think that we need to bring that back.
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The idea that a man can do his duty and feel good for a job well done,
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knowing that you did an honest day's work and that you left everything that you had in the field.
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You have nothing left in the tank.
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Chris Rock has a great saying.
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He says, follow your dreams if they're hiring.
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And so you have to embrace how much it will suck and put yourself in no fail situations.
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A big part of why I even think I was able to stick with the gym business after realizing
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that I no longer spent almost any of my time doing the thing I was passionate about
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was because I couldn't get out of the lease.
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And all my net worth was in there.
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And so there was nothing else I could do.
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And so I had to make it work.
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And I think that a little moniker that I have is just count in hundreds.
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It's like, how many hundreds of hours did you spend on something?
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Because when you start counting in hundreds, the depth of understanding of something goes to such a large degree.
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And it's like if I were to tell someone to edit a video, like a short clip, and I said, hey, edit this clip in 30 minutes and give it back to me.
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And they give it back to me.
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I'm like, okay, I'm not going to edit it yet.
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If I give you another 30 minutes, could you make it better?
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And they're usually like, I can make it better another 30.
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So I give it back to him.
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Like, give it back to me another 30.
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He gives back to me another 30.
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And I say, okay, if I give you two more hours, do you think you'd make it better?
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There's a point to this.
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Yep.
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He's like, yeah, I think I'd make it better.
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Comes back to me.
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I say, okay, what if I gave you two weeks?
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And so a huge amount of success really comes down to just executing day in and day out
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and solving problems intelligently and making decisions that are harder short-term
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and easier long-term and sitting in the discomfort of unsolved problems that aren't the biggest problems of the day.
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That is how you grow a business.
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And so your passion likely won't get you very far.
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It's not true.
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Pursue your passion is only true in the vague and never in the specific.
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When you actually play it out, when you stop just believing the bullshit saying and just think, what does this really mean?
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It doesn't pencil and I only say this as somebody who fucking went all the way with it.
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The amount of time, sure work does expand to the amount of time that you allow it,
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but I deem work done when there's nothing else that I can do to make it better.
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That there's nothing else that I know of that I can make this better.
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I've been thinking a lot lately about how we live in an age of distraction
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and how people genuinely spend more time Looking at a screen than thinking about their own reality.
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They always make excuses like I don't have time I'll start
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next week Sometimes you don't even have the ability to make excuses
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because you're too consumed in distraction to even know what you're
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not Doing with your life odds are you're probably no different
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You've probably known exactly what you need to do for years
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and odds are things probably aren't going to change unless you
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can actually fix the root cause The dream is really easy to love when it hasn't cost you anything yet.
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And before you've taken action, it hasn't cost you anything.
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I don't even think it's necessary that people are lazy.
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I just think they're addicted to the idea of potential.
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Because it's super easy to sit there and say, I have the potential to do it, but I just haven't done it yet.
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Versus, no, I tried and I failed because I'm not good enough to do that.
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That's a fucking gut punch right there.
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And so you have this idea, I'm going to pursue what I'm passionate about.
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I'm going to paint paintings all day.
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But even then, quickly, you're going to be outpaced by the amount of paintings
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that you probably produce and so i said there's only one way
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that you can truly do the passion is
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that you do not scale you choose to paint your painting
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you choose to make your wallets you choose to do your level of consulting
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or whatever it is and you only do the amount
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that you feel like doing and you only do it
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when you feel like doing it and you're so good at doing
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that that people come and spend more and more money with you
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and you just increase your prices that is the only way
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that i can conceive someone would actually purely do only what they're passionate about and still be able to make a living.
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I can't take anything else out and I can't add anything to it
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and I can't make anything clear
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and I've written this whole thing in a third grade reading level
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and I've added a hundred and six hand-drawn images into this.
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There's nothing else I can do and if it does not succeed, that's fine.
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Yeah.
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But it will not be for lack of effort.
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And that makes sense.
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It's just difficult because you will be in the minority.
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And most of your life, most of our lives as humans, we are taught to do what the pack does.
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The whole class gets in line, you get in line, right?
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If the whole class gets up to leave the class, you leave class.
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The whole class goes to lunch, you go to lunch, you go to recess, right?
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You do everything together.
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Being the outman now is not fun.
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It's outgroup.
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It literally was a survival mechanism.
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But you have to go against that very hardwiring to become the man
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or woman that I think you ultimately want to be.
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Or at least for me.
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That's what I had to do.
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You just started.
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Of course you're not good.
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How do you think anyone gets good?
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You suck for a long time.
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And you get a little bit better.
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Until you suck so little that you're actually good.
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And that sucking period, slow down, takes a long time.
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It takes a long time to get through that.
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And that is frustration tolerance.
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How many times can you do the same thing without reward, without reinforcement, and keep going?
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That is the hard part because it's very difficult to observe that.
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If I believe I'm capable of that, well, then in my fucking position right now, looking back at the last five years of my life, we're like, what the fuck was I doing?
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I just wasted all that fucking time doing nothing.
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But unless you can look at that reality and use guilt as feedback to push yourself forward rather than the
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Shame as identity as you can't do it You're gonna be stuck.
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So you got to realize you're capable of way much than you fucking know You're just afraid to admit it.
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That's gonna suck.
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It's gonna hurt It's gonna be embarrassing to look back at your life
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But you need to be able to sit in that embarrassment
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and look at yourself I am embarrassed of who I used to be that's why I'm not gonna be
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that person anymore It's time for me to fucking change my life and actually take action.
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Until someone physically restrains you from working, you can keep going.
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The vast majority of people stop because of perceived failure in their mind.
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And I love this quote by Jocko Willick.
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He said, all failure besides death is psychological.
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It's literally made up stakes with made up goal lines that we decide that we fell short of.
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But we were the ones who decided where to draw the line.
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And so to the same degree to
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that young man who quit sales early in the career because he wanted to find something he's passionate about.
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The reality is that it doesn't matter what path he chooses to take.
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All of them will include tons of stuff that he will hate doing
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and that he will have to keep doing for extended periods of time.
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And that in the pain of having to do these repeated things that you are not enjoying, what do you think you do?
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You try and figure out better ways to do them so that you hate them less.
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And what do you think that is?
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It's called getting better.
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Has so much pain between where you are and where you want to go that you trying to say, I only want to do the thing I'm passionate about is a weak excuse.
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It will not get you through it because that is where people fall off is where it gets boring.
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Not even hard.
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It's where you do the same thing over and over and over again.
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And you want to go nuts because you're like, I can't read the script again.
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I can't make yet another ad.
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And you have to learn to suffer for something that you deem worth suffering for.
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And I don't know of anything more valuable to suffer for than the person that you ultimately want to become,
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the man that you want to become, the woman that you want to become.
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And when I think about that man, I think about how much suffering would that man have to go through to become the person that I envision.
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If you could do one thing, literally tonight, sit down and define your future self, or if you can't think of yourself like that,
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define like your ideal man of the person who could achieve the goals that you want to do.
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What is he working towards and how does he act?
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What are his values, his belief systems?
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define what this man is and then define what he's capable of.
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And if you go through all that stuff and you read it, you might be getting jacked up creating this character in your
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mind you're like he could accomplish even more than I could have thought
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that I wanted to accomplish if he did these things
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well they start doing those things in your day it could
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be the smallest things like I said earlier as he's skipping
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the gym sleeping in late eating shitty food all these things probably not
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so define what this person's values are and then take action on it
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if you take one thing I would say at least to do that process, experiment, whatever you would want to call it.
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Take action first or believe you can first
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because it's hard to take action when you don't believe you can but you don't believe you can until you take action.
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So it's like a chicken or the egg scenario.
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The reality is that you have to want to be bad.
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You have to switch your mindset of like oh this is
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embarrassing to no I actually want to be bad at this because being bad at some things means I'm taking action.
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You can't be bad at something you're not doing.
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Sitting on the couch doesn't mean you're bad at, Doesn't show you that you're bad at tennis.
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You have to get on the court and try
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and play tennis to be bad at tennis But from that point of action, you're at least at a starting point
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which allows for progress We will do the things that we are reinforced for doing now many people
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Conflate that idea with we will do the things that we were awarded for No, we will do the things that we were reinforced for doing.
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Let me explain if I said I have to Shock you you probably say this is a punishing event.
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Okay, what if I then said your family, your wife, kids, are on the other side of the wall.
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Every shock that you take, they don't have to take.
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Are you going to take another shock?
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Yes.
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Why?
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Because it's a reinforcing event.
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So that's how something negative can still be something positive.
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Let's flip it differently.
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If I said for every one of these shocks, you get a million dollars.
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You'd probably be pretty down to take some shocks, right?
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Interestingly though, your willingness to take shocks over time would go down because the reinforcing event would need more variety.
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Most people do not have a stable sense of self-worth so they attach it to things around themselves,
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myself included, done this my whole life working on it still.
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But when you attach your self-worth to something you are working on then that failure feels like your self-worth is diminished.
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So when people don't have that stable sense of self-worth they're much more afraid to actually go out and take action.
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The skill deficiency that you might have and
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that this young man might have that many people have is something called frustration tolerance.
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It's the number of times that you can be rejected and try again.
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And here's the best part.
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It's learnable, which means it's a skill.
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But what I do know is that every single one of those paths you can be successful on.
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I also know that every single one of those paths will suck and will take longer than you expect they will.
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And I also know that every single winner that I have ever spoken to, I can see in them that they have one thing, which is that they will just keep fucking going.
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They will not know what's going to happen next, and they will keep going.
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They will fail, and they will try again.
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And there's something incredibly dangerous about being the type of man that no matter what happens,
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your competitors know that you will not stop because there's literally nothing they can do unless you get killed.
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Besides that, they know that you're going to get up and try again.
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And when you try that many times for the rest of your life on one thing, you tend to get pretty fucking good at it.
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Is this person's opinion of how I live my life
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going to be the most important thing that I spend the next 80 years listening to?
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If the answer is yes, then I mean, more power to you.
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But I don't know about you, I wouldn't want the one voice
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that I'm listening to for the rest of my life be some random dude
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that I worked with Or my uncle that said something
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or my dad or my mom or your sister Whatever
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because the only real voice that you actually have to listen to that's not made up is yours
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You need frustration tolerance
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Sitting in the unknown with the confidence that you will continue to try because it is solvable
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even though you don't know how to solve it yet.
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It just comes down to that.
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Key Speaking Skills to Build from This Video
This clip helps you practice two critical skills: expressing complex ideas with clarity and using conversational emphasis. The speaker balances blunt honesty with detailed examples, teaching you how to structure arguments (e.g., contrasting "passion" with hard work) while keeping your tone natural. Additionally, you’ll learn to stress key terms ("cringey," "disproportionate payoffs") to highlight important points—essential for engaging listeners.
Listen For These Connected Sounds
Pay attention to linking and reductions that make the speech flow. For example, "you're using" becomes "you're usin'" (reducing "using" to "usin'"), and "inability to tolerate" links smoothly as "inability t'tolerate" (eliding the "o" in "to"). Phrases like "a lot of stuff" often sound like "a lotta stuff" in fast speech. These patterns are common in casual English, so noticing them will help you understand native speakers better.
Say It Like a Native: Rhythm and Stress
To mirror the speaker’s style, focus on rhythm and stress placement. The speaker uses short, punchy sentences ("And the reality is they're right.") followed by longer explanations, creating a dynamic flow. Stress words that carry meaning: in "the difference between gold and silver is everything," stress "difference," "gold," "silver," and "everything." Practice shadow speech by repeating the dialogue aloud immediately after the speaker—this trains your mouth to mimic natural pacing. Tools like a shadowing app can help you track your progress, but even repeating lines from the video will improve your English pronunciation. Remember, native speakers don’t stress every word; they emphasize the ones that matter, so focus on that to sound more natural. Shadow speak exercises like this build muscle memory, making it easier to replicate the speaker’s confident, conversational tone.
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 did your passion, you wouldn't work · if you take one thing I would say |
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to think · used to be |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | You've probably known · hasn't cost · you've taken |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | be outpaced · are taught · be stuck |
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.