Shadowing Practice: If You’re Creative But Lazy, Please Watch This - Learn English Speaking with Video

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My advice to young filmmakers is to make a movie every week in super 8 or high def, write every night, and every weekend shoot for two days, then go out and make another picture the next weekend,

and just keep doing it.

When I was getting into photography way before I ever started with filmmaking, I used to spend hours and hours on the internet trying to find the perfect hack that would make success easier.

I'd read the same blog posts over and over and watch every YouTube video I could find, but I never seemed to get anywhere.

And after more than a year of that, and without really anything to show for it, I started to feel pretty terrible about myself and started to wonder

if maybe I just wasn't cut out for a creative career.

But eventually I realized

that all of this was just a way of avoiding doing the one thing that could actually get me what I wanted.

Just do it, okay?

Because you can think of 95 ,000 reasons why not to start a movie.

Don't try to be crazy.

So this video is all about how I broke out of

that rut and the strategies you can use to stop being lazy and make progress on your creative goals.

And if you're creative but feel like you're not doing enough, I made this video for you.

So a lot of what feels like creative laziness really boils down to overthinking.

For me, that meant researching ideas for photo stories obsessively, like checking the location of the sun at different times of the day

and reading a ton of news articles and consuming every top five tips video I could find.

Eventually, I'd thought about it so much

that it kind of started to feel like I'd actually gone out and shot the thing, but the truth was that I hadn't taken a single photo.

Actually, for my first ever project, which was about the last remaining shantytown in Seoul, South Korea, I pretty much didn't do anything, like ever.

I think I physically went there one time for like two hours, and I was so nervous to photograph the strangers

that I spent most of my time trying to shoot from the hip while lurking behind a telephone pole.

And whenever I looked at the eight photos I came back with

and compared them to the photographers I admired most in the world, I just feel terrible about myself.

Deep down, I knew the real problem was that I was thinking too much and doing too little.

I tricked myself into thinking that researching was the same thing as doing, and I let myself off the hook for not shooting by blaming my brutal work schedule.

And it was an awful schedule, I'm not gonna lie.

I worked 5 a .m to 1 p .m., and then again from 6 p .m to 10 p .m., so it's not like I was just swimming in free time. That sucks.

So whenever I spent the entirety of my five -hour break just doom scrolling, or like the whole weekend on YouTube instead of taking photos, it seemed like I had a valid reason to let myself

off the hook your job sucks you deserve to chill it's

not your fault it's the school blah blah blah month after month would go by

and i hadn't done anything but read more

and think more about gear i could buy and

that inner voice always found a way to justify it

and i don't want to diminish how hard some people's schedules are especially

if there's kids involved but i was definitely lying to myself

and that wouldn't have been such a big deal if it didn't make me feel so bad all the time

like i really loved the idea of becoming a photojournalist

and i felt like i'd be good at it

if only i could get some traction

but at the same time i wasn't doing anything about it

and the more time i wasted the more i felt like

a lazy failure any of this sounding familiar the only thing

that would have actually helped me improve as a photographer was to go out

and take photos

but i did literally everything i could to avoid it i

even made a whole website for myself complete with like a photographer's bio section

and all that stuff and this is back in the day before squarespace or whatever made this easy.

And even though I had almost no work to show on it, I just kept looking for ways to improve my SEO through keywords or whatever.

Come on, man, really?

Basically anything to avoid just doing the things that would actually make a difference.

Eventually, I was so desperate, I sunk all my life savings into a workshop with a photographer I really liked, and that changed everything.

Not because he snapped his fingers and suddenly I got good, because I still sucked for a long time after that.

No, the reason it was so helpful is because he forced me to confront the thing that scared me most, going out in the world to do the work.

On the first day of the workshop I was all set to sit down

and have these deep talks about the industry and which editors I should reach out to first, which we did for a little bit, but pretty soon he realized what the issue was.

So he told me to go get my camera and then we jumped in a rickshaw, this was in Bangladesh, and we went into the old city and just started shooting.

At first I didn't know what to do so I just kind of followed him around, but eventually I felt a bit silly and started taking pictures too, even though it was awkward.

We only stayed out for a few hours that day, but it changed everything.

I think today I shot way too many pictures.

I shot like 700 pictures or some ridiculous number.

I wasn't learning about documentary photography or making plans for the big project I do one day.

I was actually out in the world and taking action.

When the workshop ended 10 days later, I stayed behind in Dhaka and kept doing the same thing, but by myself.

It wasn't comfortable or fun really, but I was doing the thing.

And after a few weeks of that, i felt like a totally different person i pulled out of grad school

and spent the next eight months traveling around asia alone building a portfolio i shot six

or sometimes seven days a week even if it was only for an hour

or two but i made sure i was prioritizing action over everything else not posting about it

or reading about it but actually doing it and what do you know

i got better it took time

but within about two years i published a photo on the front page of the new york times

and was getting hired enough to support myself full time

and it was all downstream of action maybe right now you're thinking well that's all well

and good but i'm not in a position to take an expensive workshop

and that's fair

but it's also just another way of avoiding action since then

things have gone pretty well for me i had a nice little photo journalism career

and then i transitioned into documentary film production where i still

work the cinematographer now much later i started up this youtube channel

which has also grown a lot more than i ever expected

but the one thing that all these successes have in common is

that i did them i wasn't naturally gifted at any of

these things i mean just watch the first few videos on this channel

and you'll see

that pretty clearly what's going on youtube today we're going to talk about everyone's favorite depressing topic failure

and my first short films were so bad i've since scrubbed them from the internet

but i got better and better until i didn't suck anymore

and all of that was downstream of the same process i started one day

and then i kept going that's it and that's exactly what

so many unsatisfied creatives are not doing

and this is coming from someone who used to make every

excuse in the world to avoid taking action trust me there is no other way

and once you start you'll feel so much better the first uh mechanical

casualty of a river's tale i dropped my camera in the river while trying to climb into a fishing All right, so you get the point.

Action is good.

Fine.

Great.

That's easy to say.

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But why is it so hard and how can we stack the deck in our favor?

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Luckily, there are a bunch of small changes you can make to your habits

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and mindset that will make doing things a lot less scary.

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It took me years to figure out what worked for me, but the longer I do this stuff, the more I realize that it's actually a lot easier than you might think.

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That's a really good starting point because one of the things

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that lazy creatives do is make things harder than they need to be.

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This isn't about laying out your gym clothes at night or anything like that, but when I talk to early career filmmakers during consultation calls,

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one of the first things I run into again and again is that they're thinking too big.

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And really quickly before I dive into what I mean here, I want to take a second to shout out the sponsor of today's video, Audio.

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If you're someone who's taken that first step and actually gone out and shot something, you've also probably experienced that feeling of absolute dread and despair

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that comes from staring at a blank timeline and not knowing where to begin.

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And one thing that's always worked for me is to start with the music.

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First, I'll go through my interview track and find the spine of the story, and then I'll switch over to audio

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and go filter through the catalog until I find something that fits the tone I'm going for.

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Once I hear the character's voice paired with the music, more often than not, I'll start to get a feel for the piece and the editing will flow so much more smoothly.

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Audio makes this super easy in a bunch of ways.

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Firstly, you won't get sued for using music or have your film pulled for copyright infringement, which is obviously a massive plus.

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But more than that, audio has this tool called Hans AI

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that just lets you type in a description for the kind of music you need, and then it'll filter through like thousands and thousands of tracks to give you the best options.

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It makes it fast and easy so you get back to editing, i .e taking action, as soon as possible, and it's just one of the things that make audio such a great deal.

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But the best deal is the price, because if you use the link below and enter the code LUKE70 at checkout, they'll knock 70 % off the price, which brings it down to just $59 for a ProPlan membership.

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So if you're caught in an unproductive rut

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and spending like $200 on a music service doesn't sound like a good idea right now, audio is a fantastic option.

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It's where I get almost all my music for this channel and my personal projects, and you won't find a better deal out there.

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Okay, back to the video.

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So when I talk about thinking too big, what I really mean is that when you're starting out, there's usually a huge disconnect between people's taste and their abilities.

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Or to put it another way, you've got really high creative standards, but you haven't put in enough reps to be able to match that taste with your own work.

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That's why when you're in a bit of a funk and you can't seem to get started, you have to start small so you don't get paralyzed by the scope of what you're trying to do.

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Like if you know you have to get out and start shooting, but then you plan some sort of epic about, I don't know, a refugee crossing Africa towards Europe that will take a year to film,

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or maybe you want to make the definitive doc about the war in Ukraine because you really like 20 days in Mariupol, you're setting yourself up for failure.

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I did the same thing.

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It's totally natural because

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when I started I was really into the work of the war photographer James Noctway

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and so I tried to figure out how I could do the same sorts of assignments he was doing

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which was of course impossible because he had like 30 years more experience than me

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and that led to this thought spiral of thinking that

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if I couldn't go to a distant war zone then what was the point of actually doing anything.

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Now there's nothing wrong with having good taste

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and the further you go in your career the more important your taste becomes but

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when you're struggling to get initial momentum this is absolutely the

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wrong approach either you won't be able to afford these big projects

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or they'll be so logistically hard to work on regularly

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because they're happening far away and that means you'll just end up doing nothing

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and then probably feeling bad about it instead focus on small

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wins make something about someone in your city maybe even in your family something that's actually doable

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and that you can finish quickly even

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if this isn't the award -winning masterpiece you hope to make one day these small wins compound

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and build momentum and most importantly small wins build a habit of action

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which is what matters most it's not going to be the greatest thing in the world

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when you start and that's fine it's not supposed to be i mean

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if you were able to make an incredible film on your

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first attempt it would be kind of annoying for all the

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people who've spent decades mastering their craft the point is to start with doing something

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and then move on to make something that's a little bit better

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and then a little bit better and then you just keep doing that if you've ever heard of the book Atomic Habits, there's this great case study in there that I love.

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Basically, a teacher took two groups of pottery students

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and told one group to spend the whole semester making one single pot

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and to try and make it as good as they possibly could.

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The other group was told to make like, I don't know, 50 or 100 pots, which meant they had to work really fast and constantly move on to the next thing.

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You might expect, like I did, that the group who focused on one pot came out with a better product, but actually the group who made tons of pots were way

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better in the end they tried they failed they moved on

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and they improved each iteration until they ended up getting pretty

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good i'm sure you can see the creative parallels in whatever you're doing

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but dreaming of making your magnum opus

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when you're stuck in a lazy rut just isn't gonna work for most people think small get better

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and build the muscle memory of doing instead of planning set ridiculous deadlines shoot a film in like a month

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or even a day and you'll be

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so much better off in the long run and

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when it comes to building creative habits the most common thing stopping people from developing them is the illusion

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that they just don't have enough time

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and i get it people are busy you've got kids

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or a full -time job

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so how are you supposed to find an uninterrupted eight -hour block where you can sit down to edit

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or write or whatever so you just keep waiting and hoping

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that that day might come like maybe next weekend it's all going to work out

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but we all know that time is probably never coming

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so you go back to planning and researching but another month

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or year passes and you still haven't started it's easy to get frustrated in this situation

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but the reality of creative productivity is that you don't really need all

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that much time to achieve something

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because the truth is you don't need a full day of magic free time to make good stuff

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and unless you have superhuman levels of concentration you probably can't work for eight hours straight anyways.

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I mean I know I can't.

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Maybe you can't but I can't.

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I've kept this YouTube channel going with a weekly upload schedule

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plus writing a bi -weekly newsletter plus I wrote a 500

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page book manuscript all by going to a coffee shop for an hour every day.

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Just that one hour every morning was more than enough to keep this channel going and

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if i really needed to get stuff done i might do

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a second hour in the afternoon i can't really concentrate for much longer than

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that anyways but since i do it every single day it adds up to something real

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and even at the super elite levels people probably aren't working

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as much as you think they are stephen king says in his book on writing

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that he only writes for four hours a day

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and then he spends the rest of his time reading

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and running errands and he's written like 65 books most of which are massively long.

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So please don't tell yourself the lie that you can't get going or make progress because there isn't enough time.

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Almost everyone can find half an hour somewhere in their day.

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Like if we're being honest most people are spending way more time than

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that on Instagram or Netflix every day and that time is more than enough to make real gains.

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It's definitely easier not to do that

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but is it really worth the pain of feeling like you're not going after your dreams?

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Sure at some point you might need to do more than 30 minutes

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but the point is when you're caught in this cycle of inaction, your top priority has to be to break it and just get started.

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And once you're up and running, it just gets easier and easier to keep going.

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Momentum creates momentum, so don't make the mistake of thinking that it's either all or nothing.

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Something is always better than nothing.

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I could keep going on this stuff all day, but I think you get the point.

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Feeling like you're not living up to your creative potential sucks.

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Believe me, I know.

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But just know that this laziness isn't something that defines you.

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You're just stuck.

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And just Just like if you get your car stuck, flooring it out of the gate isn't going to work most of the time.

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You have to build up momentum by rocking back and forth, and when you get enough of it, you'll pop right out.

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Not sure if that was the best analogy, but you get me.

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You did good, kid.

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Think small and start with tiny, consistent wins until taking action is habitual, and before long you'll look back at that lazy person you used to be like it's a distant memory.

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See ya.

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142 sentences

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This video has 217 sentences and 3279 words to shadow. The speech runs for 14:15. The speaker talks fast, about 230 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 85% 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
audio adjective	/ˈɔ.di.oʊ/	Focused on audible sound, as opposed to sight.
suck verb	/sʌk/	To use the mouth and lips to pull in (a liquid, especially milk from the breast).
lazy adjective	/ˈleɪ̯zi(ː)/	Unwilling to do work or make an effort; disinclined to exertion.
momentum noun	/ˌmə(ʊ)ˈmɛntəm/	Of a body in motion: the tendency of a body to maintain its inertial motion; the product of its mass and velocity, or the vector sum of the products of its…
photographer noun	/fəˈtɑ.ɡɹə.fɚ/	One who takes photographs, typically as an occupation.
habit noun	/ˈhæb.ɪt/	An action performed on a regular basis.
workshop noun	/ˈwɝk.ʃɑp/	A room, especially one which is not particularly large, used for manufacturing or other light industrial work.
edit verb	/ˈɛdɪt/	To change a text, or a document.
ridiculous adjective	/ɹɪˈdɪk.jə.ləs/	Deserving of ridicule; foolish, absurd.
photography noun	/fəˈtɑ.ɡɹə.fi/	The art and technology of producing images on photosensitive surfaces, and its digital counterpart.
pot noun	/pɑt/	A flat-bottomed vessel (usually metal) used for cooking food, possibly excluding saucepans (see usage notes).
hook noun	/hʊk/	A rod bent into a curved shape, typically with one end free and the other end secured to a rope or other attachment.
documentary noun	/ˌdɒk.jʊˈmɛn.tɹi/	A film, TV program, publication etc. which presents a social, political, scientific or historical subject in a factual or informative manner.
filter noun	/ˈfɪltɚ/	A device which separates a suspended, dissolved, or particulate matter from a fluid, solution, or other substance; any device that separates one substance from…
distant adjective	/ˈdɪstənt/	Far off (physically, logically or mentally).

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
go out verb	To leave, especially a building.
end up verb	To bring to a conclusion.
figure out verb	To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
add up to verb	To have a particular effect in combination.
build up verb	To erect; to construct.
come out with verb	To say (something) unexpectedly.
deal out verb	not to deal cards to someone who is leaving a game.
get back to verb	Return to (an activity)

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 93 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, can't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “sh” and “zh” sounds: workshop /ˈwɝk.ʃɑp/, transition /tɹænˈzɪʃ.ən/, concentration /ˌkɑn.sənˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/, shout /ʃaʊt/, consultation /ˌkɑnsəlˈteɪʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: momentum /ˌmə(ʊ)ˈmɛntəm/, photographer /fəˈtɑ.ɡɹə.fɚ/, ridiculous /ɹɪˈdɪk.jə.ləs/, photography /fəˈtɑ.ɡɹə.fi/, documentary /ˌdɒk.jʊˈmɛn.tɹi/

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 audio, suck, lazy.

Grammar in this video

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

Structure	In the video
“Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true	used to spend · used to make · used to be
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	have gone · has also grown · you've also probably experienced
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	project, which was · someone who used · infringement, which is
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	wasn't cut · was told

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

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

Shadowing Practice: If You’re Creative But Lazy, Please Watch This - Learn English Speaking with Video

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