Shadowing Practice: How to Master Yourself | Robert Greene - Learn English Speaking with Video

Knowledge and skills are like gold, a currency you will transform into something more valuable than you can imagine.

It's similar to one of your tweets, which is, eventually the time

that was not spent on learning skills will catch up to you and the fall will be painful.

Well, you know, life can be kind of difficult, right?

You don't really know sometimes where you're headed.

Nobody kind of gives you any kind of guidance in this world, right?

And they don't tell you when you graduate college, go ahead, go Robert, you go study this.

This is what your brain is suited for, etc., etc. You have to find your own path.

And so for me personally, I spent years in the wilderness.

So I'm going to give this a personal spin because I think that helps a little bit.

Because I can answer it inside my own body here.

So, I know I want to be a writer, but I can't figure out what the hell I'm going to write.

So, I leave college and I try journalism because I have to make a living, I have to support myself.

And I don't really like it.

It doesn't suit me.

He writes an article and then a week later it's forgotten, nobody reads about it.

And as somebody who studied ancient Greek and Latin in college, I think in terms of thousands of years and not in three days or a week, you know.

I want something that I write to be read in 3020 for, you know.

Sorry.

So, it wasn't a good fit.

So I quit.

I wander around Europe trying to write a novel with my backpack.

I live in London.

I live in Paris.

I lived in Ireland.

I lived in Greece.

You name it.

I taught English in Spain.

Trying to write a novel.

I had no discipline, I couldn't do it, it didn't work, and I started to get depressed.

I had spent 18 years or so acquiring high levels of skill in writing, okay?

I learned in journalism how to write under a deadline, under pressure, how to make it dramatic, how to make the opening sentence exciting enough to make you read off further.

trying to write novels taught me about creating stories which is a huge part of my writing

working in Hollywood I learned how to research which is a huge element

and then the theatrical element making things dramatic also story okay all of

that time slowly by slowly brick by brick I had developed real level skill

so when it came time to write the 48 laws of power I could do it.

I had learned all this discipline.

I had learned how to write under a deadline.

I learned how to make things entertaining.

The whole bag.

Okay, and so the world opened up for me.

Prior to that time, I was miserable.

Really was.

I mean, I had good moments too.

You're young.

You're always happy when you're young.

But a lot of times I was miserable.

I didn't know why, but I was acquiring skills not even aware of it.

And so the reason I write that is when you develop that skill, when you're serious about it,

because I was very serious about writing, you change your brain.

You rewire your brain.

It's like, and this is a remarkable power of the human brain that people don't realize.

Something I'm also writing in my new book.

This one writer, his name is Schwartz I believe, he's a UCLA neuroscientist.

He wanted to help people who had OCD, right?

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

And usually it's drugs and it's talking therapy.

He wanted to find out something more effective.

And he found that through certain strategies that he developed, that they could use in their life,

that they would get over their disorder.

And the point isn't what the strategies were, the point was he did brain scans.

And through the strategies that he gave them to do, which I can't remember right now, the brain scans show that they changed the brain.

And his His point was, through thinking, through developing skills, you literally change matter, you change your brain.

So something non-material like thoughts can literally change material things like the wiring of your brain.

You learn skills, you're changing your brain, you're changing the matter of your brain.

Things are connecting that weren't connected before.

And slowly, if you do it if you're serious enough, a point will be reached like it was reached in my life where either you will start a business

or someone will ask you to do something like write a book

or make a film and the world will open up for you

and you'll be able to do it because you have that, you've laid the ground, you've laid the soil, everything is there, it's rich and now something great, amazing will sprout up out of it.

When you have no talents, you have no skill, life is a series of endless confusion.

hit this road you go here then something else you go

here then you go here you you end up in a circle

and you don't know where the file you are

when you've got skills zoom you know where to go it's not something zoom it's more like

but your head yeah it's not yeah I don't know for a big film

but so yeah so that's that's my answer to your question

if you believe as if you were confident as if you are powerful,

it will tend to be read that way, right?

And so, like, he had the analogy, if you smile, even though you don't feel like smiling,

you'll end up kind of maybe feeling kind of happy.

So the physical action will create the psychological action, was his belief, because he was very much a believer in the body, I think starting from the body.

So if you believe physically and bodily embodied that you were great that you deserve this will kind of

Become part of your psychology that will radiate outward but for those

that don't they just don't have that belief Can you lie to yourself?

Can you tell yourself?

I am strong and I am powerful.

Well everybody has some good qualities Right everybody.

I think almost everybody has something

that they can can go back to in the past and go I I was actually very good at that.

That was actually a good moment.

I actually was, you know, scored in that particular moment.

And you can think about that.

I mean, actors do that all the time in movies.

When they want to express an emotion, they go back into their past.

Like, they have to express sadness.

They go back and they think about their father or mother who died, and they call that emotion up.

You can call that emotion up of when you did something actually really great.

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You might have only been in high school when you were on the sports team and you threw the touchdown or something.

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Okay, think about that and it'll come back to you.

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Everybody has something that they can be confident about, I hope.

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If there was one law that the powerless amongst us, who feel powerless or lost in the current world,

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one law or one fact of human nature,

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that people who are feeling lost and purposeless and adrift right now should be thinking the most about, which one springs to mind?

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Well, there's no one-shot answer to this kind of thing,

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but one law that I would highlight is interaction with boldness.

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And what I mean by that is, if you're feeling timid, if you're feeling that you're not confident in something,

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you will start a project and it will fail because you feel that way.

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Because you don't enter into it with the right energy.

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So if you feel, if you take something and you do something boldly, Everybody loves the bold, everybody admires it.

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Even if it's stupid, even if it fails, it will gain you that kind of attention.

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And so, let's say you're thinking about starting a business.

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Well, just go ahead and do it and be bold about it

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and start it and be as dramatic as you can

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and be as confident as you can and it creates a self-fulfilling dynamic.

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People admire it.

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They don't admire the timid and the insecure

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and the guy who spends two years talking about that podcast he's going to start, they admired that bloke who just decided, all right, I'm going to start it.

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I don't care.

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If nobody likes it, fine.

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You know?

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I remember this guy who interviewed me once.

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He had a magazine called Bad Ideas.

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And it was a really successful magazine in, like, the early 2000s.

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And I said, where did you get that idea?

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And he said, my mother told me that to start that magazine was a really bad idea.

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Right?

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So I thought I'd put the title there.

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you know, and that would be the title of it.

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And I just went ahead and started it.

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And it was very successful because it was a great, like, marketing gimmick.

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And it also worked, and it was actually full of bad ideas of the book, but in a very interesting way.

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So being bold, being different.

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Everybody nowadays, I'm getting on my goddamn soapbox again, and I apologize to everyone about this, but everyone is so similar.

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Everybody is so afraid.

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Everyone's trying to be like everybody else.

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You go out there and you start something that's different, that's you, that's unique, that's loud, that proclaims I'm a different voice on it, you're gonna get attention.

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So I want more bold people in this world.

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We've got too much fear, you know?

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That's, I'm not maybe a big admirer of, in some ways, of Elon Musk, but dammit, he's always bold and it always works for him.

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He doesn't start just a minimal business about maybe sending rockets

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out there that's the thing that's going to take you to Mars.

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He's bold, and people love it.

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One of the groups, I suppose, I think, that's looking for a lot of advice at the moment is young men feeling a little lost,

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like their place in the world is, you know, just uncertain.

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They don't really know or have the direction.

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What advice would you have for young men that are feeling a little lost in the modern world?

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Well, you have to be comfortable with who you are and with your masculinity.

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So the word masculine has now got like this negative connotation around it, which is terrible because you're a young man.

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It's not every young man.

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Some men don't feel this way.

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But a lot of young men, I remember myself, you've got this testosterone that's roaring through you.

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You're competitive, you're ambitious, you have goals, you have this energy, you want to assert yourself.

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But it's bad, it's bad, it's bad.

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You're not supposed to be like that, you know?

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And so, and the culture isn't about, there's no virtue in masculinity.

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Okay, there is such a thing as toxic masculinity, most definitely.

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But there are virtues in being masculine and have to be redefined.

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And we have to have icons and role models for that.

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And so when I was growing up, oh god, I sound like, I hated that when people said that when I was a kid, so I know you're going to hate me,

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but I'll say that anyway.

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I can't help it because it's true.

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When I was growing up, you know, I watched like a lot of westerns.

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You know, it was the silent hero kind of thing, the Gary Cooper thing.

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But my idea of masculinity growing up was a man who was in control of himself,

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who wasn't mean, wasn't pushing people around, who was decent, who treated women well.

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So, treating women well is a masculine virtue, is a good thing.

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It comes from a position of strength.

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You're not insecure about your masculinity.

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You don't have to prove that you're a man by demeaning women, by pushing them around, by calling them whores and bitches, etc. You have to take the Andrew Tate path in life.

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You can respect women, and respecting them is a sign of your strength, a sign of being secure in your masculinity.

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You don't need to put other people down to make yourself feel better.

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So we have to redefine these qualities.

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But there are no icons like out there.

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You either have the Andrew Tates out of there, or you have these wimpy men who are just so afraid of being masculine.

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Your aggression, your assertiveness, your testosterone, it's a good thing.

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It's how things get done.

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It's what energizes you, what puts you in the world, in the world, it makes you ambitious, it makes you assert yourself and motivate yourself.

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It has to be channeled, it has to be disciplined, but you have to see,

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you know, we were talking about our people pleasing things and how you reframe it.

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You have to see who you are and see the virtue and see the power in that.

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And it's a cultural problem because men Men are very confused.

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I didn't have that confusion when I was growing up.

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So now it's very difficult because you're being told that all these things that you feel naturally are negative.

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They're only negative if you can't control them.

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So self-control is a very masculine quality.

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You're able to control yourself.

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You're able to control your passions.

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You're able to not talk too much if you don't need to talk too much.

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I'm not saying that women don't have, that the opposite is wrong.

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These are things that men naturally have because of their biology.

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And I'm sorry I do believe in these things.

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But they're good.

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They're just how you use them that can be bad.

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And so I just wish there were more positive role models out there.

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I know I could be a real bastard.

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I could be a real asshole.

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I'm very competitive.

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When I play games, I like to win.

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And I can be a little bit mean about it.

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Okay, I mean, I'm a pleaser, but I like winning.

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I channeled it, all of my aggression, all of that testosterone.

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I'm not saying I have more than anyone, I just have normal amounts.

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I poured it into my books.

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I poured that edge, that aggression, that like, damn you, I don't really like you, I don't like the world into the 48 laws of power.

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here's how these manipulatives, these are how people manipulate, these are how people can be bad and cruel.

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And damn it, I'm going to get all my aggression by exposing it and showing it and being as real and direct.

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I channel it into something as opposed to hurting other people kind of thing.

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So finding ways to channel your aggressive tendencies is a positive way of being a man.

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You have to find whatever that is.

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Sports is a great example, but there are other things as well.

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It feels a lot like alchemy in a way. Or actually it's even...

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It's...

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Alchemy is taking something which is bad or useless and turning it into something which is valuable.

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This is taking something which is uncertain.

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It could go either way.

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You know, this desire for mastery, for conquer, for achievement. And...

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.

Shadowing Practice: How to Master Yourself | Robert Greene - Learn English Speaking with Video

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What is the Shadowing Technique?