Shadowing Practice: How to Create Change | Simon Sinek - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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People with new ideas, whether they have neurodiversity or not, are threatening to the status quo.
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And there's nothing wrong with the status quo per se.
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The reason the status quo exists is because things are kind of working.
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And the people who are the most defensive of the status quo are people who benefit from the status quo.
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So if you come in and say, I'm going to try something new with no guarantee of success, away, if we fail you're all going to lose your jobs.
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Not a lot of takers, which is why most people don't start businesses.
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Most people aren't entrepreneurs and nor should they be because the chances of failure are overwhelming.
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And even if you have the desire and you've got a family and kids, like it's just not worth the risk
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because the chances are in the high 90th percentiles that you're going to fail in the first three years.
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And so you You have to remember that.
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And so my rule has never been to try and convince people who don't want to be convinced.
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Because all you're going to do is fight.
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I'm right, you're wrong.
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And they're going to say, no, I'm right, you're wrong.
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And you're both right.
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Contextual.
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For me, my religion for new ideas has been something called the law of diffusion of innovations, bell curve.
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In every population, you're going to have a standard deviation.
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You're going to have high performers, you're going to have low performers, you're going to have an average.
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Always, right?
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What Emmett Rogers wrote about in the 1950s
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when he wrote about the low of diffusion is that the first 2.5% of any population, this one included, are going to be your big idea people, your innovators, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, right?
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The next 12.5% of your population are your early adopters.
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These are the people who are very comfortable spending time, money, or energy to be a part of something that reflects their own beliefs.
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They have a pretty good risk tolerance.
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They stand in line for 48 hours to see a new
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Star Wars movie where you could just go two weeks later and buy a ticket and go in.
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For them, that's worth it, right?
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Then you have your majority, the 68%.
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More cynical, more practical.
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What's in it for me?
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Will I get my money back?
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Am I going to get in trouble if everything goes wrong, right?
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Then you have your laggards, the last 16%.
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The only reason they make any change is because you have no choice anymore.
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The law of diffusion says that if it's market success or mass market acceptance for any idea or product, you have to achieve between 15% and 18% market penetration.
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And there's a social phenomenon that happens called a tipping point.
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It just goes.
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And the reason is very simple.
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It's because the early majority will not try something until someone else has tried it first.
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The problem is, is that if you ignore this, you'll always get about 10% of people who believe what you believe, who see what you see.
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Right?
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Always.
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Oh, love her, she gets it.
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Oh my god, he's an idiot, he doesn't get it.
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Get what?
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But that's how we describe it.
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Right?
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And that 10% is not enough to make the system tip, and that's where you get frustration.
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And so what Jeffrey Moore wrote about called Crossing the Chasm is how do you get from 10% to 15 to 18%?
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And what I learned is that the way you talk to early adopters is by starting with why.
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Talk about what you believe, not what you do.
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Talk about why you're doing it, not what the plan is.
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Talk about the dream.
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And what I learned was the more I did that, the more I found the early adopters, and they were willing to take risks, and they were willing to experiment.
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I built my entire brand with zero marketing budget and no public relations.
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And at the time, no social media.
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It's because I made a decision that I was going to focus only on early adopters.
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And I was going to start with why.
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I got really good at learning how to talk to people at an emotional level, not a product or fact level.
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Eventually the facts and product had to bear out.
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But that's not where I started.
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Start with why. and the system tipped.
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And I've done it in companies.
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I've done it in companies.
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And so if you wanna affect change in your company, stop trying to convince people.
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So I'll give you a real real-life example.
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In the early days of me spreading this message of Start With Why, I was doing consulting because I still hadn't figured out how I wanted to spread it.
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And I needed every dollar I could get.
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I was living hand to fist.
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I mean, I had no money in the bank account, literally like pennies.
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And I remember a guy called me, and he'd heard about me.
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He said, you know, I got your number from whomever.
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I've heard you do great work.
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He literally said this to me, convince me why I should hire you.
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Now, as much as I needed his business, I got very good at hearing who's an early adopter and who's not.
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Convince me why I should hire you, not an early adopter.
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So literally I said to him, don't.
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Don't.
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He goes, what?
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I'm like, I am the wrong guy for you.
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Right?
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But the people who called me and said, you're on to something.
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It's not perfect, but you're on to something.
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I said yes to them.
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Every time.
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Even if they paid me zero.
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because what ended up happening is they let me experiment on their businesses.
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I would literally say, can I try something new on your company?
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They went, yeah, try it.
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Go ahead.
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That's an early adopter mentality.
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Going back to you, find the early adopters, the ones who want to try it, volunteer.
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I'll tell you a real-life example of how it worked inside a company.
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You'll like this too.
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A big company, they've got 100,000 employees.
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They wanted me to build a millennial training program for them, right?
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Because of the millennial leadership issues.
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So I said, okay, but we're going to do it my way.
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Because this is how big companies do things.
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They spend lots of money to hire all the best people to make the training program, and then they launch it.
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And they have PowerPoints galore saying, this is why you need to take part in this program.
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And people go, no. And they go, no, it's really good.
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And then it fails.
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Good stuff, just no adoption.
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And a lot of resistance.
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I know this because you can't take new things and give them to the majority.
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Duh.
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So I said, we're going to do it my way.
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And here's what we're going to do.
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Because early adopters, you want small barriers.
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You don't want to make everything too easy.
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You want small barriers, right?
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So I said, here's what we're going to do.
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I'm going to teach the first class.
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And I don't know what the program is going to look like.
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We have no program.
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We're going to teach one class.
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And I'm going to teach it.
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And they have to apply.
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We only have 100 spaces.
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And they have to apply to be a part of it.
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And I made them write essays. from across the company.
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We made the announcement it's going to happen.
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We did an application process.
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It wasn't easy.
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We read the actual essays and chose 100 people.
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We told them that you're going to have to come to New York for the training, wherever you are, across the country.
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You're going to get no extra money for it.
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We said that nobody born before the year 1984 was eligible to come into the room, which means all the senior leaders couldn't come spy on me.
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I was the only person born before 1984 who was in the room.
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And it was fantastic and we had tons of fun.
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And at the end I said, look, this program isn't built.
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I need volunteers to help build it.
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And here's the conditions.
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I'm going to, we can't, we don't have any more money to give you.
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You still have to do your regular job.
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It's not, it probably won't help you get promoted.
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It's just that you think this is important work.
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I had 50 volunteers from the room who wanted to help build the program.
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Great.
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I let them all go back to their job.
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They all fly home.
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About two weeks later, the sponsor, my sponsor at the company calls me up, furious at me.
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You screwed me.
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I'm like, what happened?
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He goes, I'm getting calls from across the country from all of these managers screaming and yelling at me, demanding, why aren't my people invited into this thing?
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And I leaned in and I said, that's called demand.
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We created demand because all the early adopters went back and said, this is amazing, we need it.
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No marketing, no PR, no PowerPoints.
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And best of all, they were going to build it for us.
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So that's how you leverage the law of diffusion
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when you have new ideas in a system that's largely resistant to new ideas.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This C1 speaking lesson is built on the video “How to Create Change”. This video has 153 sentences and 1573 words to shadow. The speech runs for 7:56. The speaker talks fast, about 198 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 88% 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
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| adopter noun | /əˈdɑp.tɚ/ | one who adopts |
| diffusion noun | /dɪˈfju.ʒən/ | The act of diffusing or dispersing something, or the property of being diffused or dispersed; dispersion. |
| millennial adjective | /mɪˈlɛn.ɪ.əl/ | Thousand-year-old; also (by extension, loosely) thousands of years old. |
| performer noun | /pɚˈfɔɹmɚ/ | One who performs for, or entertains, an audience. |
| sponsor noun | /ˈspɒn.səː/ | A person or organization with some sort of responsibility for another person or organization, especially where the responsibility has a religious, legal, or… |
| contextual adjective | Of, pertaining to, or depending on the context of information; relating to the situation or location in which the information was found. | |
| deviation noun | /ˌdiː.viˈeɪʃən/ | The act of deviating; wandering off the correct or true path or road. |
| galore adjective | /ɡəˈloɹ/ | In abundance. |
| innovator noun | /ˈɪnəˌveɪtəɹ/ | Someone who innovates; a creator of new ideas. |
| neurodiversity noun | /ˌn(j)ʊɹoʊˌdaɪˈvɝsəti/ | The variety of configurations of the brain, especially with regard to autism. |
| overwhelm verb | /ˌoʊ.vɚˈwɛlm/ | To engulf, surge over and submerge. |
| percentile noun | /pɚˈsɛn.taɪl/ | Any of the ninety-nine points that divide an ordered distribution into one hundred parts, each containing one per cent of the population. |
| whomever | /humˈɛvɚ/ | Whatever person or persons (as object of verb or preposition). |
| cynical adjective | /ˈsɪnɪkəl/ | Of or relating to the belief that human actions are motivated only or primarily by base desires or selfishness. |
| penetration noun | /pɛ.nəˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/ | The act of penetrating something. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| go back to verb | To stem from; to originate in. | |
| bear out verb | /bɛəɹ ˈaʊt/ | To corroborate, prove, or confirm; to demonstrate; to provide evidence for. |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. | |
| go ahead verb | /ˌɡoʊ əˈhɛd/ | To proceed with; to begin. |
| go back verb | To return to a place or state after having been there at a previous time. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Because all you're going to do is fight.
- What's in it for me?
- Will I get my money back?
- I've done it in companies.
- I'm like, what happened?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who are · takers, which is · people who don |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has never been · has tried · I've done |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | be convinced · isn't built |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 58 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, I'm, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: diffusion /dɪˈfju.ʒən/, deviation /ˌdiː.viˈeɪʃən/, penetration /pɛ.nəˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/, frustration /fɹʌsˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: millennial /mɪˈlɛn.ɪ.əl/, deviation /ˌdiː.viˈeɪʃən/, innovator /ˈɪnəˌveɪtəɹ/, neurodiversity /ˌn(j)ʊɹoʊˌdaɪˈvɝsəti/, penetration /pɛ.nəˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/
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 adopter, diffusion, millennial.
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.