Shadowing Practice: Every stage of self improvement explained - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Here is every stage of self-improvement explained.
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The first stage is the Doomer era.
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At this stage, you basically haven't started self-improvement.
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You do virtually nothing healthy.
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Your life revolves around short-term pleasure-seeking.
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And maybe that wouldn't be so bad if you were enjoying yourself.
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But for most people living the drifter lifestyle, they don't like themselves.
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They don't want to be stuck in that situation.
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They're just sedating themselves with pleasure.
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hoping that one day they will have a different brain,
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hoping that one day they will feel differently.
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They'll kind of have an aha moment that will propel them out of that degeneracy.
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But the problem is when you do degenerate things,
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your subconscious tells you that you are a degenerate.
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And when you believe that you're a degenerate,
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your confidence in yourself and your ability to work yourself out of it decreases.
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It's a total catch-22, entirely fueled by a feeling of self-loathing.
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Stage two is the eff it stage.
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This is where the sedation starts to wear off,
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and there's a little bit of a clearance in the fog.
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Stage two is basically the point where people say, yeah, I've had enough.
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Life at the bottom sucks a little bit too much.
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Eff it.
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I'm just going to start changing things in my immediate vicinity.
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So they do all the dishes.
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They put on their running shoes and go for a run.
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They escape their house.
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They're not thinking.
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They flipped a switch in their brain and they say,
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I don't really care if I have a plan or not.
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I'm tired of thinking that I need one.
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I'm tired of my excuses.
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I'm tired of the life that I've been living.
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And out of pure frustration,
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they start to make some progress.
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They start to do things that are good for them and stop doing things that are bad for them.
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In fact, they're so strict with it purely because they're disgusted by anything that's bad for them.
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This stage usually lasts like a day.
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Then you go to sleep,
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you wake up in the morning,
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and you're triggered by all of the things that you didn't change.
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You slip back into old habits.
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This is what happens to people in stage two almost all the time.
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They just go back to stage one.
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But stage two can, and often does, lead to stage three.
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And stage three is the yo-yo era.
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The yo-yo era happens when you had a little bit of foresight back in stage two.
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You had a glimpse of a vision,
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a glimpse of a goal that you wanted to aspire to,
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in your 24 hours of productivity,
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you actually took steps to remove environmental triggers,
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which kind of set the stage for a new era.
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You start chaining days together where you're doing what's good for you and you notice that it actually starts to feel good.
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You prefer the feeling of being who you are
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when you're living a healthier lifestyle and you start to quite like that experience, right?
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You're starting to go to the gym every day and you're saying,
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damn, I'm getting swole.
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I have more energy.
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My skin looks healthier.
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I'm drinking water instead of pop.
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I'm not playing my Xbox at all.
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And you're just hoping that this streak lasts as long as it needs to,
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to kind of turn into the rest of your life.
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But the pressure you put on yourself is astronomical.
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You can't afford a bad day.
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You can't afford the sweet smell of a Triple O's burger because you're afraid you might like it.
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So you're extremely strict with yourself.
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The pressure is super high to chain days together.
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And when you eventually do slip,
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it's like the house of cards comes crumbling down.
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And when you come crashing down, you crash hard.
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You binge.
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You totally relapse into degeneracy again.
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Your monkey brain goes, well,
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we were starved of this before.
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We might as well just ravenously consume this flesh.
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And then your logical brain goes, yeah, fair enough.
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Like, we'll let you kind of do this.
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You'll, you know, have it out,
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get it out of your system.
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And eventually the feeling of binging feels so terrible
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and it makes you feel worse about yourself and you feel so disgusted that you decide,
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that's it, I'm going on another streak.
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And sometimes that streak is even longer than last time.
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Maybe it's even stricter than last time,
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but then you come crashing down again and it's frustrating to you because you can never seem to have steady liftoff.
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In the yo-yo era, you believe that the streak is everything.
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You believe that the amount of days that you pack on top of each other is everything.
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In other words, you figure that by doing everything right,
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by sprinting as fast as possible towards the life that you want to live, you'll stop tripping.
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The fourth stage of self-improvement is the optimization era.
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The optimization era is where you start to become a little introspective.
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You start to get frustrated that you're yo-yoing in life so much,
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and clearly white-knuckle tactics aren't doing it for you.
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This is where people start to go inwards.
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They start doing inner work.
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Maybe they go to therapy.
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Maybe they start watching David Goggins videos, watching podcasts.
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Maybe they're watching this video right now.
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They're trying to educate themselves on their inner systems,
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their motivation cycles to try to figure out how the heck do I stop yo-yoing between degeneracy and self-improvement?
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How do I just enter into my new life where I don't have to worry about the frustration
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and the effort and the teeth pulling it takes to be a good person.
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And by educating yourself, things start to be a little bit easier.
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Maybe you're learning things like, oh, positive affirmations.
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Maybe you're learning that, oh,
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if I identify as a healthy person,
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I will be a healthy person.
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Maybe you watched Andrew Huberman and you eat fish oils now.
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And this helps you move through life in a more lubricated way.
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You started chipping away at your drop shipping empire.
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I don't want to on these things.
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Like I do so many of these things.
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I eat fish oils.
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Now that my herniated disc is on the up and up,
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I'm going to the gym every day.
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I listen to the occasional podcast.
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I really enjoy my supplement stack,
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but doing all these things won't make you enjoy doing these things.
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Eating a fish oil is not going to motivate you to lead a healthy life
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and not be a degenerate all the time.
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It's not like the fish oils are an amoeba in your brain that tells you things,
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a benevolent amoeba, but they do help.
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So if you're taking all of these supplements
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and listening to all this advice and learning
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and trying to optimize your way into a new life where you have a new identity and you like yourself more,
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it often works eventually, but it's not the most efficient path to get there.
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My dog is snoring way too much.
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Stop that.
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Are you kidding?
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It looks like a Bene Gesserit from Dune.
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Before we get into the next tip,
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I just want to give a big thank you to HiggsField AI for sponsoring this video.
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If you make any kind of video or photo content,
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HiggsField AI is definitely worth knowing about.
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Basically, it's an AI video platform that gives you access to all the leading generation models in one place,
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like Kling 3.0, VO 3.1,
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Nano Banana 2, and more.
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You pick the model, you pick the style, and you generate.
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No bouncing between five different apps,
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trying to figure out which chats you were talking in.
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It's streamlined and it's organized.
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So I actually used Higgs Field for two shots in this video.
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Earlier on, it was during the daydream sequence where I'm imagining myself in these different wild locations.
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So for situations like this and whatever situation you want to use generative AI for,
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Higgs Field AI is by far the easiest and most streamlined way to do just that.
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The standout tool for me is Cinema Studio 2.5.
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It's a full filmmaking pipeline inside the browser.
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You start with a text prompt to generate your base image,
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set up to three consistent characters,
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pick a genre, action, horror,
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comedy, whatever, and it influences the pacing and camera behavior automatically.
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You get multi-shot sequences up to six shots with start and end frame control,
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built-in color grading, and 3D scene access where you can move through the environment spatially.
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It's a free AI video generator to start with,
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and it's one of the cheapest AI platforms out there for what you get.
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Go ahead and give it a try yourself using the link in the description.
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It's a ton of fun.
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And thanks again to Higgs Field AI for sponsoring this video.
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Stage five, the influencer era.
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Now, this is an optional side quest that I see a lot of people go on.
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And what happens is people,
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since they've been consistent and it seems like their degenerate life is in the rearview mirror,
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they start to really attach their identity to their victories.
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But it's something that they express outwardly.
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They want people to know that they've made it.
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Maybe they're 35 pounds down and have made an Instagram slash fitness account documenting their journeys
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and they sell a course now
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and they want to help people do what they did and make a little bit of money in the process.
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A lot of these instincts come from a very good place.
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I think it's It's very healthy to bring people along to your journey,
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to show them what you did and how they can do the exact same thing.
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But the drive to do this wasn't purely out of benevolence.
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It was also out of existential security.
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They hoped that by outwardly expressing to the world that they are a successful person,
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they might also convince themselves in the process.
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They're still trying to achieve this existence where pain doesn't happen anymore.
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There's no such thing as toil.
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I don't know where this idea necessarily comes from,
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but it's a fairly modern idea.
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It's definitely not stoicism.
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It's not Christianity.
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It's almost like a pseudo-epicureanism.
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But people seem to think that they can get to a place where they no longer have to experience their own shadow,
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where they don't have bad days,
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where they don't have weeks or months where they feel like s*.
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They want to be seen as somebody who has their s* together through and through,
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100% of the time, and they are superior.
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But the fundamental problem with this is that it's utterly exhausting.
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It's not real.
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It's not a accurate reflection of who you are and what you're for.
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Instagram culture sells you on this idea that this type of person exists because you visit their Instagram profile,
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which is a carefully curated highlight reel of absolutely crushing it,
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just a superior lifestyle in every single way compared to yours.
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And you're trying desperately to get there.
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So you make an Instagram account trying to prove that you're there,
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even just a little bit.
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Then you're dependent on other people telling you that you're worth something in order to feel like you are.
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You're definitely not that degenerate that you were.
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You're not the person who likes the taste of french fries.
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You're beyond that.
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That's pathetic.
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And you feel offended and you get threatened when people don't really care or they show indifference or they don't like you.
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It's a desperate, frivolous existence,
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which often leads people to stage six, the recalibration.
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If you're lucky, you get to the recalibration era,
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and often it feels like a failure.
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So the recalibration stage is where you get so exhausted and burnt out by trying to maintain appearances,
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maintain this outward expression of perfection,
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that you kind of just find yourself cheating a bit.
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You kind of just start doing what you want, right?
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If you want to eat a burger,
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you go buy a burger and you eat it.
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If you want to play some video games with your brothers,
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you do it because you find it fun.
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And then you also go to the gym because you've learned to like that as well.
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For the very first time,
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you are doing both unhealthy and healthy things, but it feels different.
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You're noticing that when you do an unhealthy thing that's not particularly good for you,
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you didn't want to do it too much because you're like,
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eh, no, it actually doesn't really feel that good.
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And you find yourself doing healthy things because you want to do that.
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It's because you've learned on your journey to step six that this thing feels good and it feels good to feel good.
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And you're not doing it because you feel like you have to,
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because you have to prove to yourself that you're not a degenerate anymore.
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You've learned through your self-improvement journey that,
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oh, it feels good to feel good.
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And if you do too much of a bad thing,
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it doesn't feel so good.
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This is the stage where everything starts to make sense.
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It's a stage where very few people actually get to.
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Sometimes they do get to it and it comes later in life,
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in their 50s, in their 60s,
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where they're like, I just kind of,
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I do what I want to do.
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I don't really care what other people think.
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I don't care about external markers of success.
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I do what I want because I think it's fun and I want to lead this kind of life.
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I'm being who I want to be,
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which flows naturally into the final stage,
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which is the real stage.
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The real stage is where your ego starts to melt away.
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You start opening up to the people around you.
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You start having a lightness to your actions and your thoughts.
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You're not as afraid of what people might think about what you say.
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You just say what you mean and you mean what you say.
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You don't really care about how you're coming across.
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There's less calculation.
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You've stopped running and sprinting away from your flaws.
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And you're not embracing your flaws either.
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You're just aware of them and you're working with what you got.
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This is the stage where you realize that we're all just a bit degenerate.
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So the best you can do is generate a positive vision as to where you want to go
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and what you want to do and who you want to be and realize that that's what you want.
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You're aware you're never going to hit that perfection and there's no pressure to.
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You just know there's a direction and every step in that direction feels good.
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It generates its own motivation, right?
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Does that make sense?
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Like I always bring it back to the gym, right?
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Because it's always the easiest example.
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It's a powerful motivator to hate how you look in the mirror.
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This is often the very fuel you need to get started,
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to just run in the opposite direction.
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But that's not the energy that gets most people to stay in the gym for the rest of their life.
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The energy is simply, I like how I feel when I go to the gym.
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There's no grand mystery.
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There's no hatred.
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There's no self-loathing.
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You're just simply doing what you want.
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And I feel like that's what it comes down to on how to stop doing things that are bad for you.
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You know, how to lead a healthier life is all of your failures,
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all of your yo-yoing is data, right?
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And if you start treating it more like data, maybe you'll learn something.
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You don't have to hate yourself or you don't have to do anything, right?
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You have free will.
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You can do whatever you want.
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But if you want to change,
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there's probably an internal reason why you want to change.
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Probably because it doesn't really feel good to do bad things.
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And I feel like a lot of our parents had this mindset.
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Like when you were a kid,
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you couldn't believe why your dad didn't want a fourth Oreo or a fifth Oreo.
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You're like, it's an Oreo.
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Like what's wrong with you?
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And he'll just say, no, I'm okay.
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That's my dad anyways.
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And as a kid, I'd be like, it's an Oreo.
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But if you're properly matured and you're an adult,
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you start realizing that, oh,
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when I eat 13 Oreos,
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I don't feel so good.
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I prefer how I feel when I don't do that.
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Because you realize whatever pain is there in that decision goes away pretty much immediately.
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And then you're just vibing at a higher frequency where you like being who you are more.
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A lot of people freak out when they really don't need to.
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They can just be sitting there,
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chilling, having a great day,
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and then they get an urge to do something that they view as degenerate.
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And they immediately freak out.
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They say, oh, see, I knew it.
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I knew you were still a degenerate.
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But it's like, just calm down.
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Calm down.
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You don't need to form any kind of crazy conspiracy on yourself.
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Just take a deep breath and just say, I've been expecting this.
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This is the energy of the realist,
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the final stage of self-improvement.
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You saw it coming.
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You know you're not perfect.
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You know you have degenerative tendencies,
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but it's just data coming in.
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You don't have to freak out has nothing to do with your identity.
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It's not proof that you haven't become a perfect person yet because you know that's just not going to happen.
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But if you wish to improve upon the past,
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you can view it as data
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and just evaluate how you felt the last time you did that and dive into it calmly.
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And then you can confidently,
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after consideration, do the option that you want to do.
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If you enjoyed watching this video,
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I would really appreciate it if you hit the like button,
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because when you hit the like button,
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the algorithm blesses me, and it shoves my bald head into other people's homepages,
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helping them out and also helping me out,
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so it's just a win-win for everybody involved.
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If you're lurking here, consider subscribing.
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As usual, thank you so much for watching,
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and we'll catch you in the next video.
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Why practice speaking with this video?
This video explains every stage of self-improvement, providing rich context for learners to practice their speaking skills. Engaging with the content allows you to grasp how to express complex thoughts and emotions clearly. By using this transcript as a guide, you can enhance your speaking abilities while also developing your vocabulary around personal growth and motivation. This context is particularly valuable for those looking to share their own experiences or aspirations, turning your learning into a practical conversation. Utilizing a shadowing app with this video will help you mimic the speaker's intonation and pace, leading to improved English pronunciation and greater fluency.
Grammar & Expressions in Context
- "I don't really care if I have a plan or not." – This structure showcases the use of the first person and highlights a common attitude shift during self-improvement. It’s a great phrase to practice, as it conveys determination and a break from indecision.
- "I'm tired of thinking that I need one." – Here, the speaker uses a gerund to express fatigue with overthinking. This can help learners understand how to articulate feelings regarding their own procrastination or indecision effectively.
- "They just go back to stage one." – This expression provides insight into the cyclical nature of human behavior, emphasizing the unpredictability of change. Practicing this sentence will improve your ability to discuss challenges in personal development.
Common Pronunciation Traps
While listening and speaking along with the video, pay particular attention to some tricky words and phrases that may challenge your pronunciation:
- "degenerate" – The pronunciation can be tricky due to its syllabic structure. Practice breaking it down into syllables: de-gen-er-ate.
- "eff it" – This informal phrase may require attention to intonation and rhythm, as it reflects frustration and a conversational tone.
- "Doomer era" – The combination of sounds in this phrase can be difficult; focus on articulating each part clearly to convey the intended meaning effectively.
Incorporating these phrases into your shadowing practice will not only enhance vocabulary but also build confidence in your speaking ability. Shadow speaks and practice will lead to noticeable improvements in your English pronunciation, allowing you to communicate your ideas with clarity and effectiveness.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | I've been living · I've been expecting |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | haven't started · I've had · they've been |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | be stuck · were starved · be seen |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | somebody who has · person who likes |
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.