Shadowing Practice: If you’re ambitious but inconsistent, please watch this - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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The most damaging words in the English language are I am.
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Because whatever comes after I am is what your psyche will expect you to become.
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All right, so this video is about why you know what to do, but you are still not doing it.
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And because this is a problem that we all struggle with, I was very keen to have a conversation with best -selling author Nir Eyal.
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We all basically know what to do.
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The problem is that we don't follow through because there's an element missing.
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Now Nir has previously written the wonderful book called Indistractable, which I personally found super helpful in overcoming my own tendencies to procrastinate.
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It's not good enough just to know what to do and why you want to do it.
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You also need to...
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But then a few months ago, I read his latest book, Beyond Belief, and I really enjoyed it.
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What about imposter syndrome?
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A lot of people feel like they have imposter syndrome.
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It has this word syndrome, which makes it sound like it's a real thing.
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Totally limiting belief.
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And so I invited him to come over to Hong Kong where he and I could have a conversation in person, basically exploring the research he's been doing for the last, like, five plus years of working on the book to try and answer this question.
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Why do we know what to do, but then just not do it?
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despite knowing what to do and why we want to do it
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so many times in life we don't actually carry it out
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right how many times do we do we have all the
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information we need we know exactly the framework we know exactly
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all the steps we want the benefits of carrying out those steps
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but we don't do it why
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so the book is about how do we use our beliefs
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which are upstream of our behavior to change what we are able to see what we feel
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and ultimately what we do now you
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and i have both done this a lot of times in
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our life we start something with the best intention in the world
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and then we just stop doing the thing we might think it's a lack of discipline
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or we're just lazy or we're just unmotivated but what near argues is
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that there's something deeper underlying this and
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that is our belief i spent the past 30 years uh being a professional dieter
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and my diet went kind of this yo -yo roller coaster for for literally 30 years of my life
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and uh what i found was that every diet worked until it didn't
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and when it stopped working it was always because i stopped believing in it.
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So at first I tried going low fat.
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And then after that, I became a vegetarian.
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Then after that, it was keto.
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And then after that, it was intermittent fasting.
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And I, they all worked for a while, but then some bit of doubt would enter my mind.
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Somebody would say, oh, keto is bad for your kidneys and vegetarians don't get enough nutrients and whatever it was.
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And as soon as my faith in that, in that diet faltered, then I fell off the wagon and I would stop and I'd say, ah, diets don't work.
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Well, it wasn't that diets don't work.
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It was that when I stopped believing in that plan and that course of action, my behavior changed.
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I would succumb to what's called the what the hell effect that, hey, you know, diets don't work anyway.
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So give me that that piece of pizza and I'll chase it with some French fries.
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And so what was missing was that conviction.
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And ultimately what I learned was that to lose weight,
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to seek financial freedom, to have a better relationship with the people you love in your life, to accomplish any long -term goal,
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what's really required is not the one true method.
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That's what I kept searching for.
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Give me the next book, the next guru, the next method that's going to be the one and ultimate way to do it.
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When really, I think that the key is that we pretty much already know what to do.
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It's how do we stick with it over time?
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That the number one trait that will define whether you will meet your goals, it's not how intelligent you are.
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It's not even what resources you have or what skills you've acquired, the number one determinant of whether you will reach your goal is whether or not you quit.
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It's pretty basic, right?
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So if quitting is the number one determinant of whether you will fail, how do you persist?
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Okay.
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At this point I was like, okay, fair enough.
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Like I agree that quitting guarantees you're going to fail at doing the thing, but surely some problems are actually tactical or strategic in nature rather than just about quitting.
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And this is what he had to say.
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You know, I've met a lot of very successful people.
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I interviewed billionaires.
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I interviewed people who were broke.
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And it turns out that people who are successful at whatever venture they choose to accomplish, successful people are losers.
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Successful people lose more often.
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They have more failures on their rap sheet than people who aren't successful.
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Successful people try and try and try.
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They figure out a way.
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Whereas unsuccessful people, they try something once and they give up.
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I mean, you know this with your creator program, right?
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What's the defining than the rest of us.
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I met a lot of very successful people.
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They're modestly smart.
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They're not necessarily the most smart people I know in the world.
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It's that they're the most tenacious, the most persistent.
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But there's never been a formula, I think, for understanding how do I stay persistent?
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And it turns out that if you persist, you will overcome these challenges.
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You'll find a way.
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If there is a way, you'll find one.
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It's not that persistence guarantees success.
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It's that quitting guarantees failure.
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So if you can do everything you can to inoculate yourself from quitting too soon, not that there isn't a time to quit.
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There's definitely a time to quit.
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And we can talk about one of the criterias for that.
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But what we find in the research is that too many of us quit far too soon.
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That is good for us.
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Okay.
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But just don't quit, bro, uh, is to me not a particularly satisfying answer because
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that sounds like telling a depressed person to just cheer up
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or telling someone who's struggling to build a habit to just do it.
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So I think the real question is what does it actually
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take? for one person to persist with doing the thing
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but then for a different person with the same kind of
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general circumstances to not persist to decide the thing is pointless
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and to quit doing the thing
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and this is where we get to the motivation triangle okay
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so the motivation triangle is a new explanation of how motivation works
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that i think most people including myself i used to think that motivation was about the reward, right?
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The incentive, the benefit, that if you want this thing, you know, you want more money, you want better health and longevity, you want to find a mate, whatever it is that you want,
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that motivates you to do certain behaviors.
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So it's a straight line between knowing what to do and just doing it for the benefit.
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But that's obviously not true because if it was that easy, we would all have six pack abs and be multimillionaires because we all basically know what to do, right?
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I don't think that's the problem anymore.
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We all have bookshelves full of advice.
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We can watch YouTube videos that tell us what to do.
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We can ask ChatGPT or Google the answer to our questions when we don't know what to do.
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We all know what to do.
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The information's out there.
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We're drowning in information.
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The problem is that we don't follow through because there's an element missing, that it's not good enough just to know what to do and why you want to do it.
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You also need the belief.
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So the benefit is why you're doing the thing.
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The behavior is what you're doing.
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But if you don't have the belief holding this triangle together, you won't sustain your motivation.
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So, for example, if I'm working for a boss who I don't believe has my long -term interests at heart, right?
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So if I don't believe I'm going to get the benefit of
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that promotion or that raise because I don't think my boss has my best interests at heart, well, then I'm not going to work very hard.
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Eventually, I'm going to quit.
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And on the other side, if I don't believe in my own ability to do a behavior, I also won't persist, right?
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If I don't believe in the kind of person who exercises regularly
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or who can start a business or who can start a YouTube channel, if I don't believe I can sustain that behavior, I'm also going to quit over the long term.
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So even if I know what to do, the behavior, even if I know why I want to do it, I have to have that belief that holds it all together.
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Now, this is the core model of this entire episode.
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The benefit is why you want the thing.
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The behavior is what you do to achieve the thing.
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But if the underlying belief collapses, then so does the entire motivation triangle.
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Now, speaking of stuff that we know we should do, but probably don't do.
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So I have a massive long list of slack messages
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and emails that I should probably get around to replying to at some point.
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Now this would be probably multiple hours of typing
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but I can save a lot of
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that time by using the people who are very kindly sponsoring this video and that is Whisperflow.
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Whisperflow is an incredible voice to text tool that I've been using literally non -stop for the last several months.
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It has saved me dozens of hours of time.
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I use it on my computer, I use it on my phone and you can use it literally within any app.
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And so even though I type quite fast, I speak a lot faster than I type.
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And so it's just a way more efficient at getting text out onto a computer.
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So for example, this is something I could write to Owen, one of my team members.
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Hey Owen, I've got three quick things before Thursday.
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Firstly, can you send Angus the updated numbers from last quarter?
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Secondly, we need to move the onboarding call to Wednesday.
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Oh no, wait, Thursday afternoon.
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And then thirdly, can you find somewhere for the team lunch next week?
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Ideally near West Kowloon, so it's easy for everyone to get to.
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Boom.
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So that took about 20 seconds.
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And what it does is that it's already formatted it as a numbered list.
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It took into account the fact that I made a mistake of Wednesday, um, no, Thursday.
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All of my ums and ahs are gone.
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The punctuation is reasonable.
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And if you're thinking
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that wait why do I need a separate tool for this like surely my phone
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or computer already has Siri built in as dictation I mean I would say
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when was the last time you tried to actually use your phone's built -in dictation
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and like was it any good actually let's try this right
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now uh hey Angus uh can we do the team lunch on Thursday uh no wait Friday
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and um can we do it somewhere near West Kowloon this time as you can see here
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that it just doesn't understand what I'm trying to say it's
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kept in the mistake it doesn't know what Kowloon is
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because I mean it's a weird kind of word
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and the nice thing about Whisperflow is that it's just sorted all of
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that stuff out without me having to think about it.
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Whisperflow is free to use, but if you use the link down below, you get a one month trial completely free of Whisperflow Pro, which is what I personally signed up for and paid for.
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So thank you so much Whisperflow for sponsoring this video and let's get back to it.
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But okay, we're talking about belief and at this point things can start to sound a little bit mystical, a little bit woo, a little bit like manifestation -y.
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And so what's actually going on here?
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Like how does the underlying belief actually change our behavior?
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We see this a lot when someone is told in school that you're bad at math, right?
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That you've flunked out on an exam, So you're bad at math and people start internalizing that, you know, they have one bad experience and they think I'm not a math person.
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Well, what happens the next time they have that challenge?
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Well, you know, I'm not a math person.
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So am I going to really study as hard as a person who thinks I'm great at math?
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No, I'm going to give up early.
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I'm not going to try very hard.
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And then actually that belief becomes the reality.
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This is actually so fascinatingly demonstrated.
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You know, how much time do we spend on longevity and health?
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We talk about eating right and exercise and don't smoke, don't drink, all these things.
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Do you know that we have found
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that beliefs will affect your longevity more than stopping smoking or eating right or even exercise?
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That in a study at Yale, they found that having positive views of aging increased lifespan by seven and a half years.
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That's shocking.
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Seven and a half years, that is more than the effect size.
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Thank you of exercise, diet, or stopping smoking.
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Now, that doesn't mean that having positive use of aging magically changes your mitochondria because of the vibrations of the, you have nothing to do with that at all, right?
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It has nothing to do with that.
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It's that your beliefs become your biology via behavior.
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So if you have the kind of person who says to themselves that I'm having a senior moment, or I'm getting too old for this,
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what type of behavior will they do in their day -to
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-day of life versus someone who has a positive view of aging, what does that sound like?
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Something like growth is possible at any age.
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If you believe growth is possible at any age versus I'm having a senior moment, I'm too old for this, how does your behavior change?
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Your beliefs become your biology because you behave differently.
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You're more likely to take care of your body, to exercise, to not smoke, to do these behaviors that will increase your lifespan much more than just telling people don't do this,
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don't do that if you change your beliefs you're much more likely to do those behaviors
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and stuff because again these beliefs are upstream of the behavior
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so i think we should you know we should constantly be
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preaching to not reinforce these limiting beliefs right why do we tell ourselves i'm having a senior moment
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or i'm too old for this like why do we tell ourselves
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because which is true
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which is true i'm too old for this i'm having a senior moment versus growth is possible at any age
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they're both true right they're both potentially true
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but the person who defaults to this belief The negative belief versus the positive belief is going to behave differently.
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There's another amazing study where they took a group of men
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and they told them that they were enrolling in a steroid study.
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There was a new steroid pill that they would be a part of.
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And these were guys who exercised regularly in the gym.
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And that group of people who were told they were in this steroid study, they were actually given a placebo pill.
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So no steroid but they were told this is a steroid.
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Now, those men who were told
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that they were taking a steroid gained more muscle mass and became stronger than the guys who didn't get the placebo steroid,
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even though both of them were taking nothing, right?
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Both groups had, it was a completely inert substance.
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Why did the group get stronger when they were taking a placebo steroid?
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Well, because when they went to the gym, they pushed out another rep.
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They worked a little bit harder.
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And so that's not a trick.
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That's not magic.
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It shows you how our beliefs become our biology via behavior I really like this.
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I found myself taking notes on it
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while we were doing the podcast Your beliefs become your biology
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via your behavior Now there is a really cool scientific study
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that backs this up from the 1950s Let's just say it would not pass through an ethics board of approval
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if someone were to try to do it today But because it's from the 1950s, we can talk about it And
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so i'm going to give you a trigger warning here If you do not like animal cruelty, then please feel free to skip this next section One of my favorite studies
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that demonstrates this is a study that was done in the 1950s by a biologist by the name of Kurt Richter.
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And Richter had this very simple experiment.
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What he wanted to do was determine how long rats could swim in water.
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This was in the 1950s.
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He did kind of an ethically dubious study, but here's what he did.
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He took some rats, and he put them in a cylinder of water.
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And he stood there with his stopwatch, and he measured how long they could swim.
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It turns out a wild rat can swim for about 15 minutes before it gives up and dies.
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It's interesting.
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It didn't exhaust itself.
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It just kind of gave up.
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So what Richter observed was if the baseline was 15 minutes, he was looking for how he could make that rat persist for longer.
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How could he change how long the rat could swim for?
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So he had a second experiment.
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The second experiment, he took a new group of rats.
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He put them in the same exact cylinders of water.
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He waited till they swam for 15 minutes.
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And at the 15 -minute mark, he reached in, pulled out the wild rat, dried it off, let it catch its breath, and then plunked back in the water it went.
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And this time, he wanted to see would there be any difference in how long the rat swam for.
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And when he did this intervention a few times, when the rat saw that if it persisted, that it might be saved, that salvation might be possible, the rat didn't swim for 15 minutes anymore.
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Do you want to take a guess how much longer it swam for?
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Do you know already?
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One hour?
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Two hours?
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That's what most people say.
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They say maybe it swam for twice as long, for 30 minutes, for maybe an hour, which would be crazy.
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Think about that, right?
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If I could make you four times more persistent, imagine if everybody who takes one of your courses, if you could make them four times more persistent, if you could run a marathon for four times longer,
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that'd be crazy, right?
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That'd be an unbelievable intervention.
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But the rats didn't swim for 60 minutes or two hours, 120 minutes.
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They swam, Ali, for 60 hours.
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60. 60.
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60 hours.
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Not 60 minutes.
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It's 60 hours of nonstop swimming.
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So what can we learn from this?
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Nothing changed in the rat's body.
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Same exact rat body.
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They didn't suddenly become super rats.
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Nothing changed in the environment.
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As much as we talk about, well, you know, the environment shapes behavior, nothing changed in the experiment.
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Same cylinders, same rats.
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What changed was, we can't ask the rats, obviously, but we think the only variable left was that something changed in their minds.
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That some switch was flipped all of a sudden in this experiment when the rats saw, hey, if I persist, then I might survive.
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They swam way longer, 240 times longer.
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So the lesson here for us is where are we quitting
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at the 15 -minute mark where we believe we're done versus
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when we are actually at our limit and that we quit way, way, way too soon that is good for us
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so that's really what this research reveals is that our beliefs
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that shaping how we see a challenge will dramatically affect how long we will persist
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and persistence dramatically shapes whether we will succeed the useful question
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here is not could i work 240 times harder the question is where am i stopping
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because i believe
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that i've hit my limits whereas my actual limits might be
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way further ahead than what i think i can achieve and
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so as near was telling me about this stuff i was
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like objection your honor what about burnout are you just saying
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that you should just keep going like surely burnout is a thing right we know
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that there is a formula for burnout this is what most people don't understand they think
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that burnout is having to do too much
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and that's not necessarily the case that there's something more to it
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or you know
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when i thought about burnout you think oh it's about doing
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a difficult job that's why people burn out it's not necessarily the case did you know
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that there's actually a formula for burnout it's a two -part equation for burnout this is the work of stansfield
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and candy they did this at oxford university a few years ago
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and they determined that the formula for burnout is a confluence of two things.
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It's not whether you're working a sad job.
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Like when I first saw this research and I guessed, hey, why would a job cause burnout?
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Why does it lead to more anxiety and depression disorders?
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Turns out it's not what you do.
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It's the environment you do it in.
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That the recipe for burnout is a confluence of two factors.
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High expectations coupled with low control.
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That is the recipe for burnout.
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High expectations and low control.
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Interestingly, if you have high expectations and high control, no problem.
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We rise to the occasion.
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It's when we have low control, despite having high expectations, that's when we get into trouble.
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So what does that mean?
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It doesn't mean we lower expectations.
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No, that doesn't solve the problem.
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It means we raise control.
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We raise our sense of agency.
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Well, it turns out that our beliefs shape what we believe we can do, where we have control.
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There's a concept in psychology called locus of control.
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Locus of control says that people have two types of views of the world.
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There are people who have what's called an external locus of control.
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An external locus of control means things happen to me.
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It's the economy.
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It's AI is taking over the jobs.
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It's this war going on thousands of miles away from me that has nothing to do with me.
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That's what's controlling my life.
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Then on the other end, there are people who have what's called an internal locus of control.
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An internal locus of control is someone who says, no, I control my circumstances.
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I control what happens to me.
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Now, no big surprise here, but the people who have an internal locus of control seem to have everything good happen to them.
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Turns out the people who have an internal locus of control, they make more money, they have more friends, they contribute more to their community, they live longer, fewer instances of mental health.
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All this good stuff happens to people who have an internal locus of control.
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That's interesting, not that surprising.
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What is surprising is that even when you have every reason to factually say I'm downtrodden,
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I'm discriminated against, I'm at the bottom of the socioeconomic totem pole, even when factually you have every reason to say, hey, external circumstances do control what's happening to me,
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especially in those situations, people who believe they have an internal locus of control, even when factually they're fighting against circumstances they can't control, they still do better.
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So even if that is factually correct, you would do better in life to believe you have an internal locus of control.
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This is the important point here.
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If we wanna avoid burnout while we are persisting with all these things, often by just increasing our agency or even our perceived agency, we are likely to reduce the risks of burnout.
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But even with all this internal locus of control stuff, it is just a fact, right?
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That like there are circumstances in life that are just plain outside of your control.
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So I posed the question to Nir and this is where we come to the facts versus faith spectrum.
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And so this is the big aha that I think most people don't understand, that beliefs serve you even if they're not true, that beliefs are not the same thing as facts.
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I think this is, for me, was a major breakthrough, that facts, the definition of a fact is an objective truth.
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It is something that is true whether or not you believe it.
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The world is more like a sphere than it is flat.
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Sorry, flat earthers, it's a fact, doesn't care what you believe.
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On the other end of the spectrum is faith.
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Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence.
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God rewards the righteous.
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There's no amount of evidence that would change someone to then say that that's not true, right?
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Because it's a matter of faith and they shouldn't change that conviction.
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But beliefs are something different.
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Beliefs are not facts.
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They're not faith.
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A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence.
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So it's not pie in the sky.
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It's not pulled out of thin air it's a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence, which means that beliefs are tools, not truths.
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That's a big unlock.
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That when you understand that beliefs have this very
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almost magical power it's not magic it's science there's no woo -woo here at all
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but beliefs can literally change what you're able to see what you're able to feel
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and ultimately what you're able to do that sense of agency
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and so when you adopt the right beliefs you can literally see things differently feel things differently
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and ultimately do things differently because of that underlying conviction
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because of those beliefs so you don't necessarily have to ground those beliefs
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and hold them to the burden of proof of fact you can use them as tools
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that serve you rather than hurt you.
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So, so far we've learned that beliefs are convictions that are open to revision and that beliefs are tools.
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And often you don't even need new facts to adopt a belief.
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You can simply choose to adopt that belief.
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Now, later on in the episode, we're going to talk about the idea of, isn't this just you gaslighting yourself, which Nir has a very good response to.
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But before we go there, so far we've talked a lot about how you should just not quit the thing, right?
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But obviously quitting is the strategically useful decision some of the time.
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So let me give you a very simple, but very practical framework on when do you quit?
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Because I'm not anti quitting.
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Sometimes Lord knows I've quit all kinds of things in life.
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I've quit book projects.
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I've quit relationships.
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I've quit businesses.
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I've done a lot of quitting.
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And it's not that I'm anti quitting.
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I'm anti quitting too soon.
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Why?
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Because that's what leads to regret in life.
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When you say, Oh, if I had just persisted a little longer, look, that person did what I wanted to do.
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You know how many businesses I've quit where, and then I see someone else succeed at it's maddening that's the worst right you only want to make sure
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that you quit under three criteria
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the first is that you quit
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when you've met your mile marker this is super important not
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when you've reached the goal per se that's that's too long what you want to do is to persist
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when you've met that mile marker mile marker is
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when you say in advance i'm going to try this new behavior this new belief for x number of days
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and i'm not going to quit until i hit that days why is that so important.
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Because the reason we don't persist, the reason we quit is because nine times out of 10, it doesn't feel good anymore.
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It's hard, right?
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It's difficult.
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I don't want to do that.
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I don't feel like going to the gym today.
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I don't really want to post that YouTube video.
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I don't really want to work on that project right now.
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It's hard.
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But if you have that mile marker that you say, I will keep doing this for X number of days, no matter what, you've protected yourself from quitting too soon.
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Because you've said in advance, this is how many days I'm going to try this this belief
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or this behavior that's number one the second criteria is are you still learning
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so failure doesn't necessarily mean you should quit that if you're failing
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but you're learning that's a good thing right so
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if i were to tell you hey i know uh
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that in the future you're gonna have five more failures before
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the sixth success you make five more sales calls the sixth
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one is gonna you're gonna close the deal you're gonna post five more videos
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and the sixth one's gonna to be a banger and go viral.
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You're going to go on five more dates
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and then you're going to find the love of your life on that sixth date.
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How much more excited would you be to get through failure?
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Let's get through those failures quickly so I can get to that sixth success.
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So if you're still learning about why you're failing, don't quit.
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The third criteria is does persistence matter?
413
In many ventures in life, persistence doesn't matter.
414
So for example, if you're working at a company that has toxic culture.
415
Okay.
416
People aren't happy to be there.
417
They're bringing you down.
418
It's, it's, it's a place that on Sunday nights, you've got the, the, the, you're dreading going to work on Monday morning.
419
Well, that company culture is not something you're going to change readily.
420
It's going to, that company culture is going to outlive you.
421
So that might be a condition where persistence doesn't matter, but in other areas of your life exercise, right?
422
When I was losing weight, I used to be chronically obese, and many times there were months, even years, where I would plateau, where I wasn't losing weight, where nothing was happening.
423
But it turns out in physical fitness that persistence pays off, that if you just continue, you're going to break out of that plateau.
424
I mean, you know this when you're creating content.
425
It doesn't work, it doesn't work, it doesn't work, oh my God.
426
And then suddenly you've got something that goes viral or reaches a ton of people.
427
Persistence pays in some areas, but in other areas it doesn't pay.
428
So, for example, trying to change a toxic work environment that you might be working in, a workplace that people are down and has a work environment that doesn't suit you,
429
that's not an environment where persistence might pay.
430
So if you meet that three criteria of I met my mile marker, I'm not learning anymore, and persistence doesn't pay, now you can quit.
431
But short of those three criteria, don't quit too soon.
432
And are we saying all three need to be true or just one of them needs to be true?
433
I think all three need to be true hmm
434
so that's a very reasonable framework for deciding when to quit
435
and if i'm honest with myself and maybe
436
if you're honest with yourself we often quit things even
437
when all three of these things are not true
438
but let's go back to the belief thing now right
439
so we talked about how beliefs are tools
440
and we've talked about how your beliefs end up shaping your behavior
441
which changes your biology and it seems like nearest point here is
442
that you can simply choose to change the beliefs
443
that you hold about the world or about yourself
444
which then begs the question of how the hell do you actually do this?
445
You can take out those beliefs that don't serve you and choose
446
better beliefs that are also just as true
447
so you can't make up facts
448
but you can make up beliefs based on whether they serve you
449
or not especially in the domain of relationships that's where i
450
think in my life what's most changed is is how i
451
view interactions with other people i'll give you i'll demonstrate here
452
so um a few years ago my mom had her 74th birthday
453
and i wanted to do something nice for her
454
so i wanted to buy her some flowers the problem was that i was in singapore and she was in central Florida.
455
And I had to stay up late at night to call
456
the florists on the other side of the planet to make sure that the flowers would get there on time, that they'd be the right arrangement and all that.
457
And, uh, I, I, I did that and I went to bed
458
that night and I patted myself on the back and said, you're a good son.
459
You know, mom's going to tell you tomorrow what a good boy you are.
460
And, uh, that didn't happen.
461
Here's what did happen.
462
I called her up the next morning.
463
I said, Hey mom, happy birthday.
464
How were the flowers I sent?
465
And she says, um, thank thank you for the flowers.
466
But just so you know, the flowers that you sent, not so nice.
467
They were kind of half dead.
468
So don't order from that florist again.
469
To which I said, in response, well, that's the last time I buy you flowers.
470
And that went over about as well as you'd expect.
471
Not so good.
472
And my wife, Julie, was sitting next to me during this conversation.
473
And afterwards, she turns to me and she says, Nir, would you like to do a turnaround on this?
474
To which I said, no, I don't want to do your hocus pocus, touchy feely, mumbo jumbo.
475
I need to vent, right?
476
Because that's what we're taught to do that when someone hurts you, you're supposed to tell them how you feel.
477
You're not supposed to keep your feelings inside.
478
You're supposed to let it out, right?
479
Well, it turns out the research shows that that's exactly the opposite.
480
That what most people don't realize is that when we vent about others, you are reinforcing your existing beliefs about them.
481
You're building this effigy of them because we don't see people as they are.
482
We see people as we believe them to be first thing i did was write down
483
that belief the belief
484
that was causing me suffering this is something anybody can do
485
whatever is causing you suffering in your life whether it's
486
that relationship uh with a co -worker or colleague or your boss
487
or your mom it doesn't matter or maybe it's a a reason
488
that you're not doing something
489
that you know you're capable of doing uh starting a youtube channel starting
490
that business finishing that book you've been meaning to write
491
or why aren't you exercising whatever it is that you know you can do but for some reason you're not doing.
492
So you write down the belief that's keeping you from being happy, the belief that's causing you suffering.
493
The belief that was causing me suffering was that my mother was being too judgmental and hard to please.
494
And so now inquiry -based stress reduction gives us four questions to answer.
495
The first question is, is it true?
496
Okay, second question, is it absolutely true?
497
Sounds like the first question, right?
498
A little bit different.
499
Not just is it true.
500
Is it absolutely true.
501
That means it has to be a hundred percent.
502
There's no other possible reason why things happen as they were other than the reason I believe to be a fact.
503
I had to admit that actually, you know, maybe there might be another reason.
504
I can't be a hundred percent certain.
505
It can't be absolutely true.
506
Now, the third question, who am I or how do I feel when I hold on to that belief?
507
When I believe that my mother is too judgmental and hard to please, I'm kind of impatient.
508
I'm a little bit of a jerk.
509
I'm kind of my 13 year old version of myself.
510
I'm not actually who I am proud of.
511
And now the fourth question, who would I be without that belief?
512
So how would I feel if I had a magic wand and poof, that belief disappeared from my mind?
513
And when, even when I just asked myself that, what would reality feel like if I didn't hold onto that belief?
514
Now, the tricky part is that your brain hates this because your brain hates changing its mind.
515
Your brain hates changing its mind.
516
So when people hear about these four questions, they say, well, okay, that might work for you, but it's not going to work for me because you don't understand my mom.
517
You don't understand what I'm dealing with.
518
You don't understand my circumstances.
519
Here's what, here's what I've got in my life.
520
And that's why what I think is a fact is a fact.
521
And this is what's so dangerous about these limiting beliefs is that you can't see your own limiting beliefs.
522
It's like your face, right?
523
We all have a face.
524
And if I said, Ali, look at your face.
525
You can't look at your face.
526
You can look at your hands.
527
You can look at your feet.
528
You can't look at your own face.
529
And yet we all have one.
530
The only way you can look at your face is to reflect.
531
You need a tool to look at your own face.
532
And the same goes with our limiting beliefs.
533
That we all have these limiting beliefs.
534
It doesn't matter how successful you are.
535
I've talked to billionaires.
536
I've talked to people who are broke.
537
We all have limiting beliefs.
538
We just can't see them in ourselves.
539
So with these four questions, what I determined in about 30 seconds is that what I thought was a fact wasn't a fact, right?
540
It's not one of Newton's laws that my mother is too judgmental and hard to please.
541
It's just a belief.
542
It's just here.
543
And so now you do what's called a turnaround.
544
Here's what a turnaround looks like.
545
You're gonna ask yourself, could the exact opposite also be true?
546
Just for exercise, right?
547
You're not changing your mind.
548
You're not convincing yourself of something that's not true.
549
You're just asking yourself to collect what I call a portfolio of perspectives.
550
What's the opposite of my mom?
551
is too judgmental and hard to please.
552
My mother is not too judgmental and hard to please.
553
How could that be true?
554
Well, she did thank me for the flowers
555
and she was just saying a statement of fact that the flowers weren't so nice.
556
So maybe she was trying to help me, not hurt me.
557
Maybe she was just trying to make sure I didn't get scammed from this florist.
558
A third belief might be the opposite of my mother is too judgmental and hard to please.
559
I am too judgmental and hard to please.
560
How could that be true?
561
Well, I had rehearsed in my brain that if I was going to do something nice for somebody, I deserved effusive praise.
562
And when that didn't come from my mom, I lost it, right?
563
And so who was being judgmental there?
564
I was.
565
Now, there's a fourth potential belief.
566
I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself.
567
How could that be true?
568
This one actually turned out to be the most true.
569
that when I'd done something nice and spent a lot of time
570
and effort and money on doing something nice and it didn't work out the way I'd planned, I thought that meant that I was inferior, that I did something wrong.
571
So now I have four potential beliefs.
572
Okay.
573
Back to your question of, well, are we just picking things out of, out of thin air, right?
574
Like, are we just making stuff up?
575
Well, now I've got four beliefs.
576
Which one of those is true? Which one is false?
577
They're not facts, they're beliefs.
578
And so one of those beliefs, that first one only allowed me one way out to feel happy,
579
to stop suffering, that she had to change so I could stop suffering.
580
Now, I know you haven't met my mom.
581
That's not going to happen.
582
Right.
583
And that doesn't happen in general with people that sitting here and expecting them to change so I can finally be happy.
584
That's not the way it works.
585
Okay.
586
If you hold your breath, you're going to suffocate.
587
So now I had different options.
588
I didn't have to wait for her to change.
589
I had three other beliefs that had the signature of liberating beliefs.
590
What's a liberating belief as opposed to a limiting belief?
591
A liberating belief is a belief that increases your motivation and decreases your suffering.
592
Unlike a limiting belief, a limiting belief decreases your motivation and increases your suffering.
593
You still feel the signal.
594
You still feel the pain, but you can separate the pain from the suffering.
595
And that's a huge concept in psychology that I think most people don't realize
596
that pain and suffering are not the same thing.
597
So by picking those beliefs that serve you rather than hurt you, it unlocks everything.
598
It unlocks your relationships.
599
It unlocks your potential.
600
It unlocks how you view the world, not because outside circumstances have to change, but because you've changed.
601
I really like this turnaround method.
602
I came across this when I read Byron Katie's The Work a few years ago
603
and have experimented with it on and off throughout my own life.
604
And I do find it genuinely very helpful.
605
But the whole idea here is
606
that you're not trying to force out one correct interpretation i
607
think this is just one of those rules laws of life
608
that different people seem to realize at different ages which is
609
that there is no ground truth there are no like true
610
facts especially as it relates to the behavior of other people and a lot of the
611
interpretations and judgments and stories that we tell in particular about the behavior of ourselves
612
and about other people they're not actually facts like it's not a binary zero
613
or one type situation it's that there's a bunch of different perspectives
614
that you could choose to take and you simply happen to be choosing a particular perspective, often subconsciously, right?
615
Because, you know, the perspectives we have are basically a sum of the environment and the society we were brought up in.
616
And you see this if you kind of visit other countries, like, for example, in the West, it's a very sort of individualistic type culture.
617
And so the idea of the agency of an individual
618
and you doing what you feel is best internally is like the ultimate hallowed truth kind of thing.
619
But if you look at more Eastern, more collectivist type cultures, it's actually not about individual liberty at all.
620
It's actually more about what is good for the collective interest.
621
And so depending on what society you've grown up in, the same kind of behavior can have drastically different interpretations.
622
And if you're someone who's like experienced both types of cultures, you know firsthand like the clash that can happen,
623
the clash of values that can happen when both parties feel very righteous about a particular belief, a particular interpretation, thinking that that is the truth,
624
when really it's just an interpretation based on the society that they were brought up in.
625
So anyway, the whole idea here is
626
that we are collecting a portfolio of evidence that supports beliefs
627
that we can choose that increase our agency and decrease our suffering
628
but then what about situations where the deck is truly stacked
629
against you surely there is a limit to how much of
630
a belief you can choose to have let's say there are like structural issues
631
that are should i say sort of preventing or maybe not preventing
632
but just like drastically reducing the odds of me being able
633
to do something for example right now i am 31 years old
634
and uh it would be very unlikely for me to be able to win an Olympic gold medal in swimming.
635
Absolutely.
636
And remember, a belief is not making up facts.
637
Facts you cannot make up.
638
Facts are facts.
639
A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence.
640
So you are considering evidence in a belief.
641
It's not that it's cut from whole cloth.
642
It is based on evidence, and you're revising those beliefs.
643
But the determining factor, what's so important about this, is that for the most part, we don't base it on reality.
644
We base it on our perception of reality, that even the things that we could accomplish, we give up way too soon based on these limiting beliefs,
645
based on that little whisper in our head of, I can't do this, I'm not ready, there's no time, I'm not good enough.
646
The real problem is not that we have goals that are too big for us.
647
The real problem is that we are capable of so much more than we can ever imagine, right?
648
Those rats who kept quitting at 15 minutes and died because actually, you know, the reason we do this, is because your brain is actually trying to protect you.
649
It's a protective mechanism.
650
We have evolved to stay way far away from our actual limits.
651
The brain is trying so hard to protect us from actual exhaustion, from actually meeting our limits that it's called the central governor.
652
It tries to keep us so far away from actual exhaustion so that we won't experience it.
653
And why does the brain do this?
654
Why do we even have limiting beliefs?
655
Because your brain is not interested in you being happy or flourishing or meeting your full potential.
656
Your brain doesn't care about any of that stuff.
657
Evolution has created a brain that is there to keep you alive and procreating.
658
That's what evolution wants.
659
That's got nothing to do with you being happy and flourishing and meeting your full potential.
660
So yeah, our beliefs do need to be grounded in some kind of evidence, but most of us don't fail.
661
Most of us don't quit because our dreams are too big.
662
For most of us, our dreams are probably fairly achievable and yet we still quit before we achieve them, even though they actually would be achievable.
663
And what Nir is gonna talk about here is the idea
664
that we quit when we start to interpret signals of pain as being suffering.
665
And so then our brain protects us by causing us to quit.
666
Why do we quit?
667
Why do you say, I don't have time to work on the second book
668
or I don't have time to go to the gym.
669
I don't have time to start a family.
670
I don't have time to start a business.
671
I can't do these things.
672
The reason we give up is because it hurts.
673
At the end of the day, pain is the reason that we quit.
674
It's too hard.
675
I don't like it.
676
It feels bad.
677
Pain is there.
678
The suffering is there to tell you, hey, you're approaching your limit.
679
Back off.
680
This, you know, you could get into danger here.
681
Again, the brain is not interested in you flourishing and being happy.
682
The brain is trying to protect you.
683
So pain is not suffering.
684
Even if things are happening, right?
685
Even if pain is that signal that's coming into our brains all the time, even if that pain is there, we don't have to suffer from it.
686
I find that this is very true with students within our Lifestyle Business Academy, which is the online business school that we've been running for the last six months, and this was also true back when we were doing live cohorts of my YouTuber Academy a few years ago,
687
that there would be a profound difference between the students in our academies that would actually make it, like actually grow YouTube channels or actually make tens of thousands of dollars and build their own businesses,
688
versus the ones who had exactly the same set of skills and experiences and backgrounds and stuff, but they just wouldn't do the thing.
689
And one of the key differences is that the students
690
that succeed are more able and willing to tolerate discomfort
691
and then other students feel the pain and treat
692
that as a sign that they should quit
693
because the brain interprets pain as a signal that oh my god our survival is being threatened.
694
Our brain evolved over like hundreds of millions of years to protect us
695
and to optimize for survival at all costs
696
and the brain doesn't really care about helping us thrive
697
and probably for the goals
698
that you're working on they're more like thriving goals rather than surviving goals
699
and so especially in that context it's very easy for us to misinterpret a signal of discomfort
700
or pain as a reason why we should quit
701
the number one hack to succeeding in business is not what
702
you think most people think it's just about the right market
703
or the right technology or the right tools or the right program
704
that you have to take before you start the most important
705
life hack to being successful in any venture not just in business is to see the suffering differently and
706
if you can learn to savor the suffering to enjoy the
707
process to learn how to prepare for the pain in a way
708
that you believe that what's happening is not happening to you it's happening for you
709
that the sales calls are hard to make great you're learning how to be a great salesperson
710
that pitching to investors is uncomfortable amazing you're learning how to present properly
711
that the the managing the team is difficult incredible that means
712
that you're becoming a better manager so
713
if you can see those experiences differently you'll be less likely to quit you'll be more likely to persevere
714
and more likely to succeed people who succeed over the long
715
term remember how we talked about how they fail more
716
but they don't suffer more that's the trick that
717
if you can do these things and it's fun the same thing
718
that somebody else says is miserable
719
so i used to believe this is hard this sucks i
720
need a break instead i believe i have this mantra
721
that i repeat all the time i take a deep breath
722
and i repeat to myself this is what it feels like to get better.
723
This is what it feels like to get better.
724
Another mantra I like to repeat to myself a lot is things don't get easier, you get stronger.
725
There will always be the chaos and we should relish that chaos.
726
We can see it differently because it serves us to think of it differently.
727
When we relish it, when we say, hey.
728
it's never going to get easier.
729
I'm just going to get stronger.
730
It motivates us and it decreases our suffering.
731
Now, all of these like positive affirmations and mantras and stuff can sound a lot like manifesting.
732
And so I asked Nir about the difference between what he's talking about and this whole manifestation, positive thinking.
733
As long as you visualize strongly enough, then you're guaranteed to get the outcome.
734
But that's all you can control.
735
By the way, this is why manifesting doesn't work.
736
Manifesting, positive thinking, magical thinking.
737
This is what I'm actually fighting against in this book.
738
And so I really want to not be in that category because why is manifesting and positive thinking, you know, it's actively harmful.
739
The reason it's actively harmful and studies have shown this, this isn't just me saying this, you're actually less likely to meet your goals when you visualize the outcomes.
740
And that's what manifesting and positive thinking is all about.
741
It's all about, you know, to get those goals, vibrate harder, be more positive.
742
You're not being positive enough.
743
And it backfires because it's totally outcome -focused.
744
The unlock is that the right way to visualize is not about the outcome.
745
This is a great example of how the self -help industry has taken something that's true and made it false.
746
So for example, athletes do in fact visualize, but what are athletes visualizing?
747
They're not visualizing the gold medal.
748
They're not visualizing the trophy.
749
They're visualizing what they will do physically as well as mentally
750
when they have some kind of barrier in their way that's
751
what we do it's called mental contrasting you're contrasting what you want the outcome with what you will do
752
that with what's in your way that's the right way to do it
753
because now you're increasing your agency
754
and control over not the outcome how you will feel about the barrier
755
so the trick here the unlock is to prepare yourself psychologically for what will happen
756
when i know i need to do that thing
757
and i don't feel like it and i start going down this shame spiral
758
and anxiety loop about what if it doesn't work
759
and people don't like it do i even like this topic what's gonna happen
760
so the useful visualization is not like visualizing yourself winning the thing it's short you visualize yourself winning the thing
761
and then you imagine all of the obstacles
762
that are going to get in your way
763
and you visualize yourself overcoming those obstacles now at this point
764
near offered to do like a live uh sort of turnaround type thing on me to explore a limiting belief
765
that i have and see
766
if we could turn it into something more empowering i'm going to warn you
767
that like this is a very champagne first world problem uh
768
that i'm going to talk about like it's probably not relevant to a lot of people
769
but we'll keep it in any way because why not
770
i've been in the muck for the last several years uh when it comes to making youtube videos uh
771
which is that when it comes
772
when it comes to a filming day before i'm hitting record
773
that i feel a lot of like muck around like hitting record
774
and making a video but are we all hearing this
775
that like Ali Abdaal that has a gigantic YouTube audience also feels the same exact limiting beliefs that we all feel, right?
776
I mean, that should be, I think, very comforting to everybody out there that even someone as successful as you also has these limiting beliefs,
777
also has the same script.
778
I love how you've just confirmed so much of what we've been talking about.
779
You confirmed the reasons for quitting, that it was just a mile marker, right?
780
That you were learning, that it was an area
781
that where persistence did pay off and that you used to have a situation where you had high expectations,
782
perhaps for yourself of, I'm just going to do this video for every week for a few years.
783
And you had high control because that was the only thing you cared about was to just do the thing.
784
Yes.
785
So all the things that you talked about that were causing this, this muck, this uncomfortable sensation, it's because you still have these high expectations, but now you feel like you have low control
786
that we this is a perfect example of how we keep holding up to these old beliefs
787
that actually demotivate us right when i believed
788
that my mother was too judgmental
789
and hard to please i became less likely to have a
790
good relationship with her i wanted nothing to do with her
791
because she's too judgmental and hard to please it's a fact
792
and by you thinking to yourself i have to create videos because i'm on a schedule
793
that served you in the past but actually has decreased your motivation today to keep making videos.
794
So which one is true?
795
Which one is false?
796
Beliefs are tools, not truths.
797
So it's just like a carpenter doesn't say, hey, you know, one time I built a house and I used a hammer.
798
And so I'm only going to use hammers from now on.
799
No screwdrivers, no saws, only hammers.
800
That's stupid, right?
801
We've got tools.
802
We can take a belief that served us in the past and say, you know what?
803
Thank you very much.
804
Great tool, no longer useful.
805
That doesn't motivate me more.
806
It creates more suffering.
807
And I can pick up a different tool at a different stage of life and say, whoa, that belief is way better.
808
The problem is if we don't stop to think about it
809
and write it down and do this little exercise where we say, Hey, you know, if I look through the world through these different lenses, am I better off?
810
No, we just keep doing and doing and doing without taking a step back and saying, I fundamentally need to shift a belief here.
811
You know, we're so, we're so obsessed with the behavior part right the strategy the tactics
812
but all that stuff is downstream from the belief
813
so hopefully you took something away from that maybe even
814
if the specific situation doesn't apply to you maybe there's something
815
that you can take away and apply to your own life
816
and actually if you found
817
that interesting i'd love to hear a comment about what you personally took away from
818
that example i think the general principle here is
819
that our beliefs are often there because they served us at one point
820
or another right like we're not freaking idiots we're not dumbasses we're not just holding on to beliefs
821
that have never ever served us
822
that are just sabotaging us throughout our whole life it's often
823
that when we hold a belief it's because that belief served us
824
when we were in a different season of life
825
if for example you grew up in a household where expressing
826
anger to your parents was not allowed for whatever reason then you know you adopt the belief
827
that anger is bad anger makes me a bad person and
828
that belief is very useful when you're a kid but then
829
that belief when you become an adult and enter relationships
830
and you start carrying all this like resentment that's unexpressed
831
and all this sort of stuff you know it's it starts to sabotage you're, it starts to sabotage you from getting the things that you actually want, which is, you know, joyful,
832
peaceful, fulfilling life where you're not like repressing your emotions.
833
A belief that can be useful in one season of life can be completely useless and actively harmful in another.
834
Now, at this point, we want to talk about the beliefs that are hardest to notice.
835
The beliefs that are hardest to notice are the ones that become labels.
836
I think we are going down a very dangerous path where we don't realize how our labels can become our limits.
837
And that doesn't mean that diagnoses aren't helpful.
838
They certainly are.
839
But I think we're looking at our diagnoses completely wrong, especially when it comes to ADHD and depression, anxiety, insomnia.
840
Many of these conditions are highly susceptible to placebo effects and nocebo effects.
841
In fact, for me, you know, I have ADHD.
842
I've been diagnosed with ADHD.
843
And in my experience, it was very helpful at first because we have what we call the Rumpelstiltskin effect.
844
When we have a label for something
845
when we can name something that's troubling us it's very empowering it's it's uh it feels great you know
846
when i got my adhd diagnosis it explained so much it felt really good
847
the problem was that very soon after i got my diagnosis it became a distraction in itself
848
that every time i went off track every time i got distracted i would say to myself there's my adhd again?
849
And am I always going to have this?
850
Because this is a chronic condition and I'm never going to get better at this.
851
And what if I don't meet my deadline?
852
And you see, why do I have to struggle this?
853
Nobody else has.
854
And I went down this rumination loop, which led to me thinking about my diagnosis as opposed to the thing I was trying to work on.
855
Because these type of diagnoses, they can be helpful, but the diagnosis is the map.
856
The diagnosis says, hey, here's where you are and here's where you want to go.
857
And so here's a map to get to that place.
858
Now, the problem was that I thought I was the map.
859
I became the identity.
860
It became who I am.
861
And that is very dangerous.
862
This is called identity foreclosure.
863
When we believe we are a certain type of person, I'm not a morning person.
864
I can't remember.
865
I have a bad memory.
866
I'm having a senior moment.
867
I'm a Sagittarius.
868
My condition becomes who I am.
869
It becomes my identity.
870
Well, then we lock out any other possible perspective.
871
Remember, beliefs are tools, not truths.
872
So the most damaging words in the English language are I am.
873
Because whatever comes after I am is what your psyche will expect you to become.
874
So be very, very careful with those labels.
875
Because those labels, if you're not careful can become your limits
876
so instead now my liberating belief is i'm learning a new
877
skill i used to tell myself chronic condition chronic condition chronic
878
condition wasn't helpful all right i was i became the map
879
that is who i am i i am this chronic condition
880
not helpful i'm learning a new skill right i learned time
881
boxing i wrote indistractable for me i needed to become indistractable myself
882
and it turns out it was learnable you know
883
when i couldn't overcome it when I believed I couldn't overcome it
884
when I went to well but my prefrontal cortex isn't as developed
885
and I you know and then I started spiraling into this anxiety loop
886
which made me more distracted
887
and I would give up too soon now I had a
888
reason to give up too soon right as opposed to this
889
is a skill what about imposter syndrome a lot of people feel
890
that they have imposter syndrome what's up with
891
that totally limiting belief it's not in the DSM it's not a psychological diagnosis it has this word syndrome
892
which makes it sound like it's a real thing
893
it's totally a limiting belief and in fact it's a limiting belief because
894
if you think about it it meets the definition definitely increases
895
our suffering oh what was me i just have imposter syndrome the same thing as perfectionism completely a limiting belief
896
that i i don't think serves people i think imposter syndrome
897
is a classic example of how your label becomes your limit
898
because you don't even try because you say well that's just what i got so i i don't for me, I don't think it's useful.
899
So all throughout this video, we've been talking about the idea that beliefs are very powerful.
900
Like we talked about the motivation triangle.
901
We talked about how benefit is why you're doing the thing.
902
The behavior is what you're actually doing.
903
And then the belief underlying it, where if you've got a strong belief, it can cause you to persist.
904
And that persistence and just not quitting means that you're more likely to compound towards success.
905
Whereas if your belief is that this is not going to work
906
or that you suck or that this sucks or that this thing's going to suck forever or whatever the thing might be, then that belief will cause the motivation and discipline to crumble.
907
And then you're going to quit way too soon.
908
And so Nir's argument in his book is that yes, beliefs are powerful and beliefs are tools.
909
And crucially, we have the power to change and actively mold our own beliefs.
910
And so the final objection I wanted to throw at Nir is that isn't all of this stuff just like self gaslighting?
911
Are you not simply gaslighting yourself by saying that like what you believe isn't actually true?
912
And so when I posed this objection to him, this is what Nir had to say.
913
I think what we don't realize is that we're already gaslighting ourselves.
914
We're already lying to ourselves.
915
We just choose those beliefs that served us in the past, but may not serve us in the future.
916
You see, our limiting beliefs, they come from somewhere.
917
They come from what's called our priors, your prior upbringing, your prior experiences.
918
Whatever has happened to you in the past will color how you see the future.
919
So we're already gaslighting ourselves.
920
When we tell ourselves that we can't do this, that we have imposter syndrome, that we're perfectionists, that we're not ready, that we're not good enough,
921
that this is too hard, those aren't facts.
922
Those are facts.
923
Those are beliefs.
924
And so we're gaslighting ourselves because we are have chosen these limiting beliefs that decrease our motivation and increase our suffering
925
at our own expense.
926
We are trapped in these cages of our own device.
927
So I really like this vibe.
928
It's like you're already gaslighting yourself, whether you know it or not, you're already choosing to believe things that are actually actively sabotaging you in your life.
929
So if we're going to gaslight ourselves, we might as well gaslight ourselves into believing things that are helpful rather than into believing things that are harmful.
930
And so all of this brings us back to the original question, why is it that we know what we need to do, but we just don't do the thing?
931
What is it that causes some people to know what to do
932
and do the thing and continue doing the thing and causes the rest of us to know what to do, start doing the thing, and then quit doing the thing?
933
That's what it really comes down to, is that the people who don't suffer from hard things are the ones who persist, and the people who persist are the ones who are more likely to meet their goals.
934
So this has affected me not even just in goal setting and productivity, but just day -to -day life like i was doing this
935
webinar the other day with people who uh who bought the book
936
and we had this this this q a session
937
and somebody asked this question like mir you seem way happier is
938
that true i thought i was like you know what i am not
939
because i'm like more joyful that's that's not my goal i just suffer
940
so much less right it becomes this isn't happening to me
941
it's happening for me is it true i don't know is it a fact probably not
942
but I choose that belief because it empowers me.
943
It reduces my suffering, increases my motivation.
944
The most important things to remember is that beliefs are tools, not truths, and you are capable of far more than you believe.
945
So then the final question I would leave you with is this, where in your life are you actually quitting at the 15 minute mark?
946
Where in your life is an area where if you just persisted, you would actually end up with way better outcomes than if you allowed yourself to quit because you have convinced yourself,
947
you've gaslit yourself into thinking that you don't actually have what it takes
948
but then having said all that beliefs are very helpful
949
but they're not a magic bullet
950
and often one thing that's really helpful to add to an empowering belief is an empowering system
951
that can help you achieve your desired result
952
or success without having to put in so much hard work
953
and so much effort and so we're going to be talking about
954
that in this video right over here
955
which is about the five systems you can install in your life from literally today
956
that drastically increase your chances of success so thank you very much for watching
957
and I will see you in the next video.
958
Bye -bye.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 957 sentences and 11651 words to shadow. The speech runs for 53:57. The speaker talks fast, about 216 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 84% 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
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| belief noun | /bɪˈliːf/ | Mental acceptance of a claim as true. |
| motivation noun | /ˈmoʊ.tə.veɪ.ʃən/ | Willingness of action especially in behavior. |
| persist verb | /pɚˈsɪst/ | To go on stubbornly or resolutely. |
| persistence noun | /pəˈsɪst(ə)ns/ | The property of being persistent. |
| helpful adjective | /ˈhɛlp.fl̩/ | Furnishing help; giving aid; useful. |
| differently adverb | /ˈdɪf.ə.ɹənt.li/ | In a different way. |
| syndrome noun | /ˈsɪndɹoʊm/ | A recognizable pattern of signs, symptoms and/or behaviours, especially of a disease or medical or psychological condition. |
| rat noun | /ɹæt/ | Any of the numerous members of several rodent families that usually have short limbs, a pointy snout, a long, hairless tail, and a body length greater than… |
| swim verb | /swɪm/ | To move through the water, without touching the bottom; to propel oneself in water by natural means. |
| outcome noun | /ˈaʊtkʌm/ | That which is produced or occurs as a result of an event or process. |
| versus | /ˈvɝsəs/ | Against; in opposition to. |
| conviction noun | /kənˈvɪkʃən/ | A firmly held belief. |
| expectation noun | /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/ | The act or state of expecting or looking forward to an event as about to happen. |
| label noun | /ˈleɪ.bəl/ | A small ticket or sign giving information about something to which it is attached or intended to be attached. |
| diagnosis noun | /daɪəɡˈnəʊsɪs/ | The process of, or an instance of, identification of the nature and cause of a medical condition or illness. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| give up verb | To surrender (someone or something); to inform on (someone). | |
| turn out verb | To end up; to result. | |
| make up verb | /ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/ | To constitute, to compose. |
| follow through verb | To execute or complete a commitment. | |
| get through verb | /ɡɛt ˈθɹu/ | To overcome; to endure. |
| go down verb | To descend; to move from a higher place to a lower one. | |
| pay off verb | To bribe, especially to deter oversight. | |
| write down verb | To produce or set (something) down in writing; to record something. |
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 you persist, you will overcome · If there is a way, you'll find · if it was that easy, we would all |
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | I've been using · you've been meaning · we've been running |
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to think · used to be · used to believe |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | you've acquired · I've met · has saved |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 363 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, you're, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: sixth /sɪksθ/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, thin /ˈθɪn/, athlete /ˈæθ.liːt/, threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: motivation /ˈmoʊ.tə.veɪ.ʃən/, conviction /kənˈvɪkʃən/, expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/, interpretation /ɪnˌtɜːpɹəˈteɪʃən/, revision /ɹəˈvɪʒ.ən/
- Long words — get the stress right: motivation /ˈmoʊ.tə.veɪ.ʃən/, differently /ˈdɪf.ə.ɹənt.li/, expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/
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 belief, motivation, persist.
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.