Shadowing Practice: If I Was a Student Again, I'd Do This - Learn English Speaking with Video

When I was a first year medical student, I was an absolute mess.

The workload was way more than I'd ever thought possible.

I kept on falling behind my lectures, and I was getting terrible grades in all my assignments.

I'd be hanging out with friends until 4 in the morning, get basically zero sleep, stumble into lectures, fall asleep in the lecture hall, and generally things were not going well.

But then I decided that I was actually going to start doing this university thing properly, because they say that university is supposed to be the best time of your life.

And so I started applying a handful of strategies that completely transformed my student experience.

And because of these strategies, I managed to get through all six years of medical school while getting pretty good grades, while building a business on the side, and starting this YouTube channel, and making friends for life.

And so, in this video, we're going to go over those eight strategies, eight things that I really wish I'd been doing from day one, that if I were a student again, I would do to completely transform my student experience.

Alright, so let's start with strategy number one.

When I was in my first year, I realised that managing my time was a thing that I wasn't very good at.

And I knew that there was just such a huge amount of stuff that I wanted to do, in terms of studies, and extracurriculars, and joining clubs and societies, and hanging out with friends,

and actually finding the time and making the space in my life to juggle all those things just wasn't happening.

And there was one simple change that I made to my life

that I've done ever since then for the last like 10 years, which has been completely transformational, and that was essentially running my life entirely through my calendar.

So before I started doing this, this is what my calendar looked like.

It was basically blank, except I would have my like two lectures a day scheduled in, and the rest would be white space.

And I just sort of assumed that this is how you're supposed to use a calendar.

You schedule the things that are scheduled and then you do what you want with the rest of the time.

But then after reading a bunch of blogs and books about productivity and lifehacker.com and these other things, I realized that the most productive people in the world, almost all of them live their life based on their calendar.

And so then I started doing that.

I started scheduling what time I intended to wake up, what time I intended to do my homework assignments or my essays, what time I was going to go to these lectures, what clubs I was going to, which evenings I'd be hanging out with friends on.

And my calendar turned from a blank slate into like a rainbow looking calendar.

And that was completely game changing.

It's up to us how we want to want to allocate those 24 hours.

Let's say you're sleeping for eight hours a day.

You've got 16 hours.

Let's say you're studying or working or whatever for eight hours a day.

And then you have another eight hours that you need to figure out what to do with.

Now, if you're not intentional about how you're using that time, you're going to end up defaulting to the random shit that we default to when we're students, i.e. totally wasting time.

But at least if you're intentional about it, you can nudge yourself towards acting in a way that you actually want to act.

And then of course, I'm not saying that it has to be productive all the time, but at least try and be more intentional with your time.

And ever since I started doing that, people have started asking me questions how you so good at managing your time.

It's literally because I just 100% run my life based on my calendar.

All right, strategy number two was a thing that I discovered in my second year of medical school.

And again, I wish I'd discovered this way sooner, even when I was in high school.

And unsurprisingly, it's about learning how to study efficiently.

This is something that no one teaches us.

You don't get taught in school or at university how to learn.

It's just something you're meant to pick up

and you watch other people do it and you start highlighting

and taking notes and like watching videos or doing whatever the hell you think

because you think that like this is how you learn.

No one taught me how to learn.

But what I discovered in my second year of medical school is

that there is a vast swath of research out there where

people have literally done studies showing what are the absolute bang for your buck methods for effective study.

Like imagine you had two students and both of them have that same two hour block to study in, except one student has actually taken some time to learn how to learn and knows what the effective studying techniques are.

And the other student is just making it up as they go along.

Obviously the first student is gonna be way more efficient.

They're gonna get way more stuff into stuff into their brain.

They're going to have a better time.

It's going to be more fun because they're making more progress.

They're going to do way better in their exams.

And so I've actually been making videos on this stuff on YouTube for the last like five years now.

And so I'll put a little playlist up there and down below.

If you've not yet come across the strategies around efficient studying, then you should definitely check them out.

And I guarantee they will completely transform your life.

Continuing on the main theme of studying, strategy number three is to study with friends.

And this is another one of those things that makes those blocks of time in which you're studying way more efficient, way more effective, and way more enjoyable as well,

which is what makes it sustainable and fun and creates all the memories and all that fun stuff.

In my first year, I realized

that I was spending all my time on my own in my room or in the library and trying to study myself, and it was just kind of draining.

It wasn't that fun.

The subjects weren't that interesting.

I was like, I'm studying to be a doctor, not studying to learn some random biochemistry pathways that are going to be completely meaningless.

But then in my second year, I decided, you know what?

I want to try and get a really high mark in my exams.

I want to do this properly, but I also want the journey to be enjoyable.

And I realized I could just study with my friends.

And so during exam term, we got a group of friends together.

We're still friends to this day, and we'd all go to different libraries, and we'd all study.

We were all doing different subjects, but we would all do the Pomodoro technique together, 25 minutes of work, five minutes of rest.

But the fact

that there were eight of us around a single table in

a library made the entire process of studying way more effective because it was fundamentally more enjoyable.

And like with anything you do, doing it with friends just makes it more fun.

Now, if you're interested in learning how to study more effectively, then I've literally got a four-hour-long masterclass on this that will teach you everything you need to know, what all of the evidence says around how to study effectively,

and it's available completely for free on Skillshare, who are very kindly sponsoring this video.

You've probably heard of Skillshare by now.

They're a fantastic platform.

I've been a teacher on Skillshare since 2019, and it's a great platform for online courses and almost anything imaginable, from productivity and studying to cooking and video editing, graphic design, interior design.

They've got classes on everything.

But did you know that Skillshare also has classes on all sorts of career-related topics, like how to break into different creative industries and how to be a freelancer, and how to launch merchandise on platforms like Etsy and Shopify, things like that.

And actually very excitingly, I also have a productivity learning path that is on Skillshare.

So you can literally check out the page and check out my four classes on productivity in a sensible order.

And that's like a really cool way to experience my productivity classes if you're interested in becoming more productive with your time.

And so if you're a student and you want to study more effectively for your exams, absolutely check out my classes on there about studying or about productivity.

Or if you want to explore different possibilities in your career, you can check out the other classes on the platform.

And the best bit is you can access all of these classes completely for free during the one month free trial.

So if you're one of the first 1,000 people to hit the link in the video description.

That will let you sign up for a completely free one-month trial of Skillshare.

And during that time, you can watch my four-hour-long studying masterclass, which is all the evidence-based tips on how to study.

And you can check out the other classes on the platform.

And if you like it, then you can continue with the premium subscription of Skillshare.

I've been a paying member of Skillshare since like 2018.

Would fully recommend it.

So whether you're interested in time management or studying or productivity or marketing or sales, then Skillshare is a great place to check out if you want to learn those skills while you're at university.

So check out the link down in the video description.

And thank you so much, Skillshare, for sponsoring this video.

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All right, so zooming out and thinking about the calendar, let's say that one of the points of university is to get good grades slash to learn stuff.

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And let's say, for the sake of argument, you're doing that for around eight hours a day.

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That gives you another eight hours every day

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and 32 hours on the weekend to be able to do other more interesting things than studying.

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And so these next five strategies that I would do

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if I were a student again are around what I would do with the rest of that time, the time I wasn't spent directly trying to study for exams.

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And the first one is that I would join way more clubs and societies.

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I would think of them as sampling different types of experiences.

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Now there's a bunch of evidence

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that a chap called David Epstein cites where he kind of looks at what makes the most successful athletes.

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Are they the people that took one skill and just focused on that one skill, like Tiger Woods, who was playing golf from the age of three,

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or are they people that sampled loads of different sports and then kind of decided what they went for?

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Apparently Roger Federer was like this.

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He tried loads and loads of sports and and then around like age 16, decided to double down on tennis, which is very different to the kind of Tiger Woods model.

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And then when Epstein parsed all the data on this, apparently it turns out that like way more successful athletes are the ones

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that sampled loads of different sports rather than just like laser focusing on one specific thing.

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And so if you're spending all your time at university just laser focusing on this one subject that you care about, you're missing out on a lot of other potential life experiences

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and also career experiences that could potentially get you ahead in life.

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That's what you care about but that could also add colour

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and vibes and like a magic sparkle of enjoyment to your life as well.

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La, la, la, la, la, la, la.

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I really wish that back when I was in Cambridge, I tried more dancing or kickboxing or rowing or windsurfing or abseiling or climbing.

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There were so many clubs and societies that I wanted to join.

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But in the given moment, I would think, I'm just gonna do the easy thing.

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Instead of trying to go to this club and trying to meet new people and trying to try new experience, I'm just gonna hang out with my friends that I already know.

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There's a balance, you know, it's obviously fun hanging out with friends but like it's one of those things that I really wish I'd done more of.

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And so if I had my time again, I'd be sampling more of those experiences.

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All right.

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So the next strategy is something that I advise all students to do when they're at university, and that is learn skills in the universal toolbox.

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So the universal toolbox is a toolbox of skills and techniques that if you learn how to do them, even to a basic level,

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they will help you out in life in ways that you can't even imagine.

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So something like that would be public speaking.

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Whatever career you happen to be in, being confident at public speaking is just ridiculously helpful for doing better in your career, but also for having a more interesting life.

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Being good at negotiation is another one of those things.

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And kind of hard to learn at university because they probably don't have a negotiation club, but like everything in life is a negotiation.

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If you're better at negotiating, you're better at negotiating raises.

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Yes, of course, but you're also better at selling things, whatever you're doing in your career.

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You're better at putting yourself forward for new things.

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You're even better at negotiating with your friends, family, friends, relationships, all of this kind of stuff.

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Another thing I would add to the universal toolbox is something like video editing.

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It sounds weird, but like increasingly the world is moving multimedia.

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YouTube is a thing.

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Social media is a thing.

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If you know the basics of how to edit videos, then even if you're a, for example, physics professor later in life, the fact that you know how videos work means

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that you'll be able to communicate information way more effectively than someone who does not know how to basically make a video.

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Something like coding or design or how to write a good presentation.

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And so I'd be spending some of my non-studying time working on these different skills, which are basically guaranteed to synergize with whatever career I do in the future.

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By the way, if you're enjoying this video so far, I'd love it if you could hit the thumbs up button and it really helps support the channel.

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All right, strategy number six is that I would try and experiment more with side hustles when I am a student.

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Again, the reason for this is because when you're a student, you have loads of time on your hands.

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It might seem, oh, like, oh my God, my life is so busy, I'm so stressed, but wait until you get a real job.

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And, you know, I've heard, wait until you get kids.

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Then you'll be like, oh shit, I had so much time when I was a student.

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Then when you're a student is the perfect time to experiment with different side hustles where the stakes are pretty low.

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And I put a lot of my kind of, I guess, financial success later in life to the fact that I experimented with side hustles when I was a student.

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Initially when I was in high school, I was doing private tutoring, I was helping people with maths and English and science, and that was a thing that was making me a few pounds every hour.

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Then when I got to university, I started running courses, helping kids get into medical school.

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And then later on, I started doing user interface design and web design for medical technology companies.

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And all of those things fundamentally led to this YouTube channel starting, which has completely, completely transformed my life.

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Now at this point, some people are like very anti-anti-side hustle.

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Be like, oh, university is meant to be for enjoying yourself, not for trying to make money in the capitalist machine ecosystem kind of thing.

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To which I'd say, yes, fine.

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But also, like, would you say no to having an extra few hundred dollars a month

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or a few thousand dollars a month when you're working a job?

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Most people end up in jobs that they don't actually enjoy, that don't provide meaning and fulfillment.

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If you have the skills of making money on the side, then you're not tethered necessarily or shackled to a job that you might not enjoy.

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Which to me was always something I really wanted to avoid.

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I never wanted to be in a situation where I'm doing a job, because I have to pay the bills, and I'm not looking forward to work on a Monday, and I'm hating my life.

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And I think like experimenting with side hustles

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and learning how to build a business

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and learning the skills involved in making money means that at least in that part of your life, you have more autonomy, you have more control, you have more choice.

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All right, the final two strategies relate to relationships because yes, part of university is about studying, and part of university is about learning skills, but a big part of university is about making friends and having fun and making memories.

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And so strategy number seven that I would definitely do if I was a student again is to take way more photos.

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Now, it's been about five years since I've graduated university, I started university in 2012 and graduated in 2018.

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And so it's actually been 10 years since my first year of uni.

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But every year I took lots and lots of photos.

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I had a little camera, I would take it around with me.

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I would take photos on my phone.

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And now all of those photos are in my Apple Photos.

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And it means that now 10 years on, I see those like on this day, like on this day six years ago, on this day seven years ago.

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And it's so nice to look back at those memories of seeing me and my friends hanging out or studying, whatever that might be.

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And these days, for example, I haven't seen my friend Paul in many months because he lives in Singapore now.

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But the other day I saw a photo of Paul

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and me on my little Apple Photos widget from like six years ago.

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And I just sent him that on WhatsApp.

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They're like, oh, this was cute.

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This was 2017.

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And there's something so nice about being able to relive those memories of student life by virtue of having taken photos.

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And then the final strategy that I would do if I was doing university again, if I was a student again, is to really try and surround myself with energizers.

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So you know that feeling where some of the friends you hang out with, they really lift up your energy levels, but you might have some friends in your life, some people in your life, where you hang out with them and it dampens your energy levels.

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I would say that try your best to nudge the amount of time you spend more towards the energizers.

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It's less about time management and more about like energy management, like when it comes to productivity and efficiency and all this enjoyment, all this kind of stuff.

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If the people that you're surrounding yourself with are the people that are raising your energy level, it just makes your whole life more enjoyable, but it also gives you more energy to be able to apply to your studies,

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but also to apply to the important things outside of your studies.

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Whereas if the people you're spending your time with are draining your energy, then you have less energy to give to your studies, and now you have to work harder and it feels less fun,

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and now you have less spare time to do all the other eight things that we've talked about in this video.

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So I don't mean this in the sense of like, you know, cut out all the friends that are draining your energy, but at least nudge the time that you're spending more towards people

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that are lifting you up rather than the people that are bringing you down.

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Now, if you enjoyed this video and you'd like to learn more about how to manage your time as a student, then check out this video over here, which is an in-depth guide of the things

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that I would do specifically to manage my time and be more productive and be more efficient.

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So check that out.

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Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video.

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Bye-bye.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “If I Was a Student Again, I'd Do This”. This video has 202 sentences and 3569 words to shadow. The speech runs for 12:48. 86% 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
productivity noun	/ˌpɹɒdʌkˈtɪvəti/	The state of being productive, fertile, or efficient.
hustle verb	/ˈhʌsəl/	To push someone roughly; to crowd; to jostle.
lecture noun	/ˈlɛk.t͡ʃə/	A spoken lesson or exposition, usually delivered to a group.
toolbox noun	/ˈtuːlˌbɑks/	A storage case for tools.
enjoyable adjective	/ɛnˈd͡ʒɔɪ.ə.bl̩/	Pleasant, capable of giving pleasure.
transform verb	/tɹænsˈfɔɹm/	To change greatly the appearance or form of.
nudge verb	/nʌd͡ʒ/	To push against gently, especially in order to gain attention or give a signal.
intentional adjective	/ɪnˈtɛnʃənəl/	Intended or planned; done deliberately or voluntarily.
negotiation noun	/nɪˌɡəʊ.ʃiˈeɪ.ʃən/	The process of achieving agreement through discussion.
negotiate verb	/nəˈɡəʊ.ʃi.eɪt/	To confer with others in order to come to terms or reach an agreement.
drain noun	/dɹiːn/	A conduit allowing liquid to flow out of an otherwise contained volume; a plughole (UK)
energizer noun		A person who, or a thing which, energizes.
fundamentally adverb		In a fundamental or basic sense; reaching the very core of the matter.
surround verb	/səˈɹaʊnd/	To encircle something or simultaneously extend in all directions.
enjoyment noun	/ɪnˈd͡ʒɔɪ.mənt/	The condition of enjoying anything.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
check out verb		To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.).
come across verb		To change sides; to cross over to work for the opposition.
cut out verb		To refrain from (doing something, using something etc.), to stop or cease (doing something).
end up verb		To bring to a conclusion.
fall behind verb		To be late (for a regular event)
figure out verb		To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
get through verb	/ɡɛt ˈθɹu/	To overcome; to endure.
go along verb		To participate, cooperate, or conform.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

Alright, so let's start with strategy number one.
Let's say you're sleeping for eight hours a day.
You're better at putting yourself forward for new things.
To which I'd say, yes, fine.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	if I had my time again, I'd be · if you enjoyed this video and you'd like
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	I've done · have started · has actually taken
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	years, which has · masterclass, which is · tennis, which is
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	are scheduled · wasn't spent · is meant

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 96 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, I'd, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: athlete /ˈæθ.liːt/, tether /ˈtɛðəɹ/, pathway /ˈpæθˌweɪ/, thumb /ˈθʌm/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: intentional /ɪnˈtɛnʃənəl/, negotiation /nɪˌɡəʊ.ʃiˈeɪ.ʃən/, negotiate /nəˈɡəʊ.ʃi.eɪt/, shackle /ˈʃæk(ə)l/, subscription /səbˈskɹɪpʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: productivity /ˌpɹɒdʌkˈtɪvəti/, intentional /ɪnˈtɛnʃənəl/, negotiation /nɪˌɡəʊ.ʃiˈeɪ.ʃən/, negotiate /nəˈɡəʊ.ʃi.eɪt/, biochemistry /ˌbaɪəʊˈkɛmɪstɹi/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like productivity, hustle, lecture.

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 technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Sentences worth repeating

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?

9 Study Techniques that got me through Cambridge Medical School science-backed