Shadowing Practice: How to Teach Yourself Anything (The Self-Study Blueprint) - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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What if I told you that every single day somebody else is deciding what you think about, what you believe.
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They're choosing what you care about and ultimately they are choosing who you become.
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Do I have your attention?
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Because most people they think that they're making their own decisions
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but they're actually just being programmed by algorithms and by social media feeds
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and by news headlines and whatever content happens to show up on their phone that day.
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And the scary part about all of that is
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that your brain really doesn't care if that program is intentionally coming from you
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or if it's accidental from just stuff that you're consuming.
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It just wires itself around whatever you repeatedly expose it to, which means that if you don't learn how to consciously educate yourself,
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someone else is going to be doing it for you.
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And the quality of your life is determined by the quality of your mind.
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So learning how to direct your own education might be one of the most important skills that you actually ever develop.
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And so today I want to teach you how to educate yourself like someone who's really, really incredibly intelligent.
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And I'm going to show you exactly how most people mess this up
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and honestly how you might have been messing this up your entire life.
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And then I'm going to give you a five-step process to use immediately on your own mind.
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So the first thing we need to cover is this.
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Your brain never stops learning, ever.
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So it's learning when you're scrolling.
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It's learning when you're watching people yell at each other on reality TV.
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It's learning when you're watching strangers argue in the comments of someone's social media feed.
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It's constantly learning and taking in information, whatever it is that you're consuming.
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Your brain doesn't care about the intentionality of it, it just cares about what is coming in.
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Whether it's something that you're sitting down like a book, I'm going to read this thing, or you're just scrolling through a political post and seeing people yell at each other.
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Your brain just notices repetition and whatever you repeatedly expose yourself to is flagged as important in your brain,
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which is why you can see somebody who spends three hours every night watching people complain about politics
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and eventually like they become cynical and fearful and they choose a side and they start to hate the other side.
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Or you can see someone who constantly watches like luxury lifestyle content
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or they follow these people who have these big businesses
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or these 17 year olds who built a multi-billion dollar business
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and now have all these Lamborghinis within a year and they start to think to themselves, oh I never have enough.
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Or somebody can constantly consume relationship drama in reality TV and then accidentally start creating drama inside of their own relationships.
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Your brain is just downloading information.
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What is it downloading?
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Like if you imagine your brain like fresh concrete, right?
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Every experience, every conversation, every podcast, every book, every social media post,
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everything that you see and have come into your brain throughout the day, It kind of like leaves footprints, right?
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And eventually, if it's done long enough, over and over and over again, those footprints start to become roads.
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And those roads, done long enough, become highways.
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And you start being able to move down those highways
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much quicker than you were able to when they were just a road.
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You have to understand those highways become your default way of thinking.
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And we will be right back.
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Hey, real quick, let me interrupt you.
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I've got an honest question for you.
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Are you really, truly ready to change your life?
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Not just like think about it and watch the videos, but to actually do it.
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If the answer is yes, then you need to be at my live event later on this year.
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It's called Freedom Live.
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It's three days in person with me in Austin, Texas.
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Here's why you wanna be there.
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You already know what to do.
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You're just not doing it.
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So at Freedom Live, we're gonna find the fears
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and the limiting beliefs that are holding you back and tear them out at the root.
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And here's what you will leave with.
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A plan on how to actually change your life and be the person that changes your life, not motivation that just fades by Monday.
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You will leave a different person with the life that you actually want finally within reach.
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So go to Freedom Live 2026 right now, grab your seat before they sell out, and I'll see you live in Austin, Texas.
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And now back to the show.
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That's what neuroplasticity actually is.
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It's how your brain changes over time through repetition.
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And you have to understand information itself or the amount of information is not the problem.
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Like you don't want to just learn more information, like learn a bunch of random stuff.
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What you really truly need is clarity around what you need to learn.
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Like think about it.
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Your phone has access to more information than every library in history combined.
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So the problem isn't information, it's deciding which information deserves your focused attention.
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Because most people know like a little bit about everything, but very few actually master something.
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And the smartest people in the world
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figure out what they need to learn to get to the next level of their life.
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And then they focus all of their attention
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on downloading that information into their head so that they're so much further ahead than everybody else.
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And so what you really should ask yourself, instead of like asking yourself, what do I need to learn, which is important, before you figure out what you need to learn,
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what you need to actually ask yourself is who do I want to become?
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Because if I look at the life that I want in the future, the natural byproduct of who I am will be that life.
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And so really what I need to focus on is first, where do I want to be?
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and then who do I want to become?
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Because once we decide on who we need to be in order to create the life that we want, then we can create the curriculum to get there.
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So if you want to be a great father or a great parent, the way I'm looking at it is I'm going, okay, I'm going to study psychology.
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I'm going to study early childhood development.
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I'm going to study communication.
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I'm going to work on my own emotional regulation.
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Not just like I'm going to read a bunch of shit on parenting.
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No, I want to like actually get very granular on the things
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that I want to learn so that I can get better.
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I'm not just gonna scroll parenting information on Instagram, right?
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If I'm wanting to become a great entrepreneur, I wanna study leadership.
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I wanna study sales.
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I wanna study decision-making.
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I wanna study finance.
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I wanna study how to raise capital, right?
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If I'm trying to become mentally peaceful, I'm studying meditation.
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I'm studying stoicism.
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I'm studying spirituality.
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I'm going to work on learning, letting go.
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right?
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So first what we need to do is figure out who we need to be first.
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Then your identity tells your brain's filter what's important for you and what is not.
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Your reticular activating system, which is your brain's filter, starts filtering reality through that identity of who you're needing to be.
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It's like if you go buy a Tesla and then you start seeing Teslas everywhere, they were always there.
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Your brain simply started paying attention to them now that you own one.
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And so this exact same thing happens when you're learning.
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Once you decide like, okay, based off of the life that I want to create, this is who I am becoming.
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Then your brain starts to find the teachers for you everywhere.
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That could be a podcast.
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That could be a book.
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That could be a friend who's really good at this thing that you want to get better at.
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So first, what we need to do before we decide what it is
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that we need to learn is we need to decide who we need to be to create the life that we want.
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And then from there, we can start to build out the curriculum.
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That way we're not just like collecting a bunch of irrelevant information for us.
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I don't want to just learn more.
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I want to learn the right things.
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And this is where most people in I think self-development go wrong.
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Like people become collectors.
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They collect podcasts.
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They collect books.
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They collect courses and quotes and YouTube videos and all that stuff and that's fine and all, but they like wear it like a badge.
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Like some people will be like, I've read over 300 books.
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Cool.
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Have you changed your life yet?
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Because a lot of people will just read
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and act like they're changing their life versus actually putting the action in their life, right?
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Knowledge without action is really just entertainment.
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Like reading about confidence is not gonna give you confidence.
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Reading about discipline isn't discipline.
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reading about boundaries is not going to create those boundaries in your life.
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Like, don't get me wrong, books and podcasts and courses, all of those things, they're all great.
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They all help.
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But if you're just putting information into your brain and doing nothing with it, it's like mental masturbation is really what it is.
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Your brain only really truly changes through experience, through the application of your knowledge, not just the information.
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You have to understand there's knowledge and then there's skills, right?
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There's knowledge and there's skills.
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Knowledge is what lives in the brain after reading a book on business.
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Skills is what is created when you apply that knowledge to your business
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and learn from it and get better from it and develop a skill set from that.
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And so every time you perform an action, your neurons are firing together.
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And every time you repeat that action, those neurons are wiring together even stronger.
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And eventually the action becomes automatic.
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And now you've built a skillset, which is what really truly matters more than anything else.
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Your brain becomes more efficient at being whatever you repeatedly practice.
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And so here's the actual system that I personally use,
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like the five-step system that you can use in your own life okay the first thing is this consume intentionally
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not randomly ask yourself what skill would change my life the most over the next year
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and then become obsessed with that become obsessed with figuring out what
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that skill is maybe it's sales for instance you're a business
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owner sales is your weakness you need to learn sales okay
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then you're going to read some sales books you're going to
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get some sales courses you might get a sales coach
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and you become obsessed with learning about it
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and then getting on to sales calls and developing
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that skill set right
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so the question is what skill would change my life the
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most over the next year not what five skills what one skill will
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and then you ignore almost everything else and you focus on just
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that thing you focus on creating depth around that thing
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because most people they don't have really deep knowledge they just know a little bit about a a whole bunch of things.
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When you really deepen your knowledge and then you deepen your skill set around that, you can then master that thing.
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And you're developing skills that are extremely valuable in the marketplace.
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And that is how you become a high value earner.
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And you can charge much more for your services when you have higher value.
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So that's step number one.
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Step number two is to reflect.
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Every single time that you finish reading something or you listen to a podcast or you listen to a YouTube video, ask yourself one question.
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What can I apply right now?
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And then what you do is you journal through what you can apply right now.
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And from that, you make a plan.
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You put it on paper.
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And the reason why you do this is
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because reflection forces your brain to take all of the information that you just learned,
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organize that information instead of just simply storing it away.
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And then from there, now that we've got it, we can actually start to use this knowledge that we just learned, which goes to step number three, which is apply it immediately.
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This is the key step that most people skip.
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Most people wanna read a book and then they read a book and then they don't do shit with it, right?
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Never finish a podcast or a book without taking some sort of action
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from the knowledge that you just learned in that podcast or that book.
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Once again, the point is not to acquire knowledge.
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It is to use your knowledge in action to develop skills.
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I know a lot of really highly educated people that cannot get their shit together.
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They've got degrees falling off the walls, but their life is still not where they want it to be.
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And the reason why is because they learned a lot, which is fine, but they're not taking any action with that knowledge and that knowledge is not becoming a skillset.
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And once again, you want to do this immediately.
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Not Monday, not next week, today.
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The faster that you can apply what you just learned, the faster that you start creating new neural pathways, and that's real skills in your life versus just knowledge.
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That's step number three.
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Step number four is to repeat.
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One action changes almost nothing.
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Repetition changes everything.
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Actually develop your brain differently.
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Think about learning to drive, right?
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Do you remember your first time?
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I remember my first time driving and I was like actually on the road.
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Like my brain was overwhelmed.
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It's like the gas and there's the brakes and there's the steering wheel and there's other cars and there's turn signals.
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And I remember I was pulling up to a stoplight
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and I like slammed on the brakes because I didn't know how much pressure to use in my mom's Honda Accord.
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But then like months later, you know, you're like driving around having a conversation.
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You ever ask yourself why that is?
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It's because repetition of something builds automation.
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Like have you ever driven home from work and realized that you weren't even paying attention the entire time and you're like, oh shit, I just got home.
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You have to realize it's because your brain has turned what was once a foreign skill, like driving a car, into a habit where it now becomes autopilot.
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Everything that you've mastered happens the exact same way.
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And then step number five is to teach it.
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If you really want to own an idea, teach it to somebody.
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Teach it to your spouse, teach it to your child, teach it to your best friend.
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If you live alone and you have nobody to teach it to,
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you can journal through what you just learned and teach it out loud to yourself as if you are teaching somebody else.
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I've done that many times.
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When I was younger, way younger, and I lived by myself, and I was in my early 20s and I was just downloading all this information.
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I was like, I don't wanna just hold on to this information.
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I know that one of the best ways to learn is to teach.
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And so what I wanna do is start actually teaching this.
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And so the best way for you to learn something is to teach it.
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Teaching basically consolidates all the information and it forces your brain to organize it.
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And the other thing
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that teaching does is it exposes your gaps in your understanding where you're starting to teach something
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and then you realize like there's a gap in my understanding.
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You go, oh, hold on.
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I actually need to learn this thing better.
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And then teaching deepens your understanding around as well.
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And so if we were to take like the step-by-step process, you know, step number one, which is to consume intentionally, if we go back to my first example, which is like, I need to learn sales.
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Well, then I'm going to consume intentionally.
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Like when I was first learning sales, when I was 20 years old,
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back in 2006, my coach told me to buy a CD that was called The Psychology of Selling by Brian Tracy.
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And so I stopped listening to music and I listened to that thing on repeat anytime I got into the car, right?
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So consume intentionally.
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I would consume just anything that I would on sales.
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If you're trying to learn sales, you can read Influence by Robert Cialdini.
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Amazing book, right?
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So it's just the podcast on sales.
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It's just the books on sales.
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It's just the coaches on sales.
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The next thing that you want to do is reflect on it.
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And so after you learn, okay, how do I get better at this objection handling?
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the next question is how can I apply it right now well then you take
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that objection that you just learned and you get onto your next sales phone call
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and you use it which is step number three
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which is to apply it immediately and then step number four you do it over
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and over and over again and now objection handling
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which used to be really foreign to you
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and really uncomfortable to you has become much more comfortable
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because you're doing it over and over and over again
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and now what was really uncomfortable for you is now something
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that you're able to do pretty much on autopilot because you've done it over and over and over again.
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And the last step of step five is to teach it.
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Find a friend or find a coworker who is also trying to get better at sales and teach.
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Like if it's objection handling, teach objection handling to them.
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Hey, I just learned something.
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Let me try to teach it to you.
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Let's try to discuss it.
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Let's see if we can use it on our next call.
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And that's how you actually start to really take knowledge, not just download it into your brain, but take that knowledge and develop it into a skill set.
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Because I'm gonna leave you with this thought, right?
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Imagine somebody gave you a million dollars.
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You'd probably protect that million dollars, right?
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Like you wouldn't let strangers just take pieces of it every single day throughout the day.
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Your attention and what goes into your brain is infinitely more valuable than a million dollars.
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And your attention is being stolen all day long because your attention determines what your brain becomes.
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Your brain determines your habits.
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Your habits determine your identity.
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Your identity determines your life.
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So the question I want you to start asking yourself is this, what kind of brain do I want to build?
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And you get very clear on the brain that you want to build, the skills that you want to get into your life.
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And then every single day, educate yourself intentionally.
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Start doing it on purpose to start taking that information
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and turning it into a skillset and watch how your life changes over the next couple years.
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Hey, thanks so much for watching this video.
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Based off what you've been watching recently, YouTube thinks out of all of my videos
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and all the stuff you've been watching that this video is the one
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that you need the most right now based off of what you've been watching.
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So hit that one.
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And if you want to make sure to never miss another video, hit that subscribe button, join us, and I'll see you on the next video.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “How to Teach Yourself Anything”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: brain, learn, skill, knowledge, sales. This video has 274 sentences and 3376 words to shadow. The speech runs for 18:05. The speaker talks fast, about 187 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 89% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is easy to follow.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| consume verb | /kənˈsum/ | To use up. |
| podcast noun | /ˈpɑdˌkæst/ | A program, especially an audio program, produced on a regular basis, delivered over the Internet in a compressed digital format and designed for playback on… |
| intentionally adverb | /ɪnˈtɛn(t)ʃənəli/ | In an intentional manner; on purpose. |
| objection noun | /əbˈd͡ʒɛkʃən/ | The act of objecting. |
| repetition noun | /ˌɹɛp.əˈtɪʃ.ən/ | The act or an instance of repeating or being repeated. |
| educate verb | /ˈɛd͡ʒ.əˌkeɪt/ | To instruct or train. |
| deepen verb | /ˈdiːpən/ | To make deep or deeper |
| obsess verb | /əbˈsɛs/ | To be preoccupied with a single topic or emotion. |
| scroll noun | /skɹoʊl/ | A roll of paper or parchment; a writing formed into a roll. |
| expose verb | /ɪkˈspoʊz/ | To reveal; to uncover; to make visible; to bring to light. |
| autopilot noun | /ˈɔtoʊˌpaɪlət/ | A mechanical, electrical, or hydraulic system used to guide a vehicle without assistance from a human being. |
| neuron noun | /ˈn(j)ʊɹɑn/ | A cell of the nervous system, which conducts nerve impulses; consisting of an axon and several dendrites. Neurons are connected by synapses. |
| footprint noun | /ˈfʊtpɹɪnt/ | The impression of the foot in a soft substance such as sand or snow. |
| yell verb | /jɛl/ | To shout; holler; make a loud sound with the voice, especially to express intense emotions such as anger or excitement. |
| brake noun | /bɹeɪk/ | A device used to slow or stop the motion of a wheel, or of a vehicle, usually by friction (although other resistive forces, such as electromagnetic fields or… |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| build out verb | To develop or expand (a system, structure, project, etc.). |
| fall off verb | To become detached or to drop from. |
| get on to verb | To contact (someone) in order to raise or discuss a certain matter. |
| go back to verb | To stem from; to originate in. |
| move down verb | To demote |
| read over verb | To read (a document, book, etc.) through, though not necessarily thoroughly. |
| sell out verb | To sell all of a supply or stock of something. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Do I have your attention?
- Are you really, truly ready to change your life?
- Have you changed your life yet?
- What can I apply right now?
- Do you remember your first time?
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 | have been messing · you've been watching |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | somebody who spends · someone who constantly · people who have |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have come · I've read · you've built |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | being programmed · is determined · is flagged |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 90 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, I'm, wanna. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: pathway /ˈpæθˌweɪ/, algorithm /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: intentionally /ɪnˈtɛn(t)ʃənəli/, objection /əbˈd͡ʒɛkʃən/, repetition /ˌɹɛp.əˈtɪʃ.ən/, automation /ˌɔ.təˈmeɪ.ʃən/, meditation /mɛdɪˈteɪʃn̩/
- Long words — get the stress right: intentionally /ɪnˈtɛn(t)ʃənəli/, repetition /ˌɹɛp.əˈtɪʃ.ən/, autopilot /ˈɔtoʊˌpaɪlət/, curriculum /kəˈɹɪk.jə.ləm/, uncomfortable /ʌnˈkʌm.fɚ.tə.bl̩/
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 consume, podcast, intentionally.
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.