Shadowing Practice: Imagine Life If You Didn’t Overthink Everything - Naval Ravikant - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
C1
You mentioned anxiety before.
267 sentences
If sentences are too short or too long, click Edit to adjust them.
1
You mentioned anxiety before.
2
Imagine how effective you'd be if you weren't anxious all the time is one of yours.
3
Anxiety is the emotion du jour of the 21st century.
4
And lots of driven people, very anxious, very paranoid.
5
That's what's caused them to be effective.
6
It pays so much attention,
7
detail-oriented, not letting things go,
8
staying up at night thinking about it.
9
That's the paranoia coming in.
10
What have you come to learn about anxiety and dealing with it?
11
So anxiety and stress are interesting.
12
They're very related.
13
Stress is when, like if you look at an iron beam,
14
when an iron beam is under stress,
15
it's because it's being bent in two different directions at the same time.
16
So when your mind is under stress,
17
it's because it has two conflicting desires at once.
18
So for example, you know,
19
you want to be liked,
20
but you want to do something selfish,
21
and you can't reconcile the two.
22
And so you're under stress.
23
You want to do something for somebody else.
24
You want to do something for yourself, right?
25
These are examples.
26
You don't want to go to work,
27
but you want to make money.
28
So you're under stress, right?
29
So you have two conflicting desires.
30
And I think one of the ways to get through stress is to acknowledge that,
31
oh, I actually have two conflicting desires.
32
And either I need to resolve it.
33
I need to pick one and then be okay losing the other.
34
Or I will decide later.
35
But at least just being aware of why your stress can help alleviate a lot of stress.
36
and then anxiety i think is sort of this pervasive unidentifiable
37
stress where you're just kind of stressed out all the time
38
and you're not even sure why and you can't even identify the underlying problem
39
and the reason for that is because you you have
40
so many uh unresolved problems unresolved stress points
41
that are piled up in your life
42
that you can no longer identify what the problems are there's this mountain of garbage in your mind
43
and it's a little bit of it poking out the top like an iceberg and that's anxiety.
44
But underneath there's a lot of unresolved things.
45
And so you just need to kind of go through very carefully every time you're anxious.
46
Like, okay, why am I anxious this time?
47
I don't know why.
48
Oh, well, let me sit here and just think about it.
49
Let me write down what the possible causes could be.
50
Let me meditate on it.
51
Let me journal.
52
Let me talk to a therapist.
53
Let me talk to my friends.
54
Let me just kind of see like,
55
when does that stress go away?
56
If you can kind of identify and unravel and resolve these issues,
57
then I think that helps get rid of anxiety.
58
A lot of the anxiety is piled up because we move through life too quickly,
59
not observing our own reactions to things.
60
We don't resolve them.
61
So this goes counter to what I was saying earlier about not reflecting too much on things.
62
But you reflect on the problems to observe them and solve them.
63
You don't reflect on them to feel better about yourself.
64
Well, if you're doing it to just feel better about yourself,
65
that could be strengthening your personality and your ego and could be creating a more fragile personality.
66
You know, one big anxiety resolve for me is just ruminating on death.
67
I think that's a good one.
68
You're gonna die.
69
It's all going to zero.
70
You cannot take anything with you.
71
And I know this is trite.
72
And I know that we don't spend enough time thinking about the big questions.
73
We kind of give up on them when we're very, very young.
74
You know, a little child might ask the big questions like,
75
why are we here?
76
What's the meaning of life?
77
What is this all about?
78
You know, is there Santa Claus?
79
Is there God?
80
but then as adults we're taught not to think about these things we've given up on them
81
but i think the big questions are the big questions for good reasons
82
and uh if you can keep the idea in front of you at all times
83
that you're going to die and that everything goes literally to zero
84
what's there to stress about yeah for better or worse life is very short how should people deal with its briefness?
85
Enjoy it.
86
Make the best of it.
87
It's even briefer than that.
88
Each moment just disappears.
89
It's gone.
90
There's only a present moment and it's gone instantly.
91
So if you're not there for it,
92
if you're stressed out or you're anxious or you're thinking about something else, you missed it.
93
So any moment when you're not in that moment,
94
you are dead to that moment.
95
You might as well be dead because your mind is off doing something else
96
or living in some imagined reality
97
that is just a very poor substitute for the actual reality
98
so one of my recent realizations was what is wasted time what is what is a waste of time
99
so i don't like to waste time but what is wasted time
100
and everything is wasted time in a sense
101
because nothing matters in the ultimate
102
but in each moment the thing matters in each moment it's the only thing that matters actually.
103
What's happening in front of you is literally has all the meaning in the world.
104
And so what matters is just being present for the thing.
105
So if you're doing something that you want to do and you're fully there for it,
106
then it's not wasted time.
107
If you don't want to do it
108
and your mind is running away from it and you're reacting against it
109
and you're wishing you were somewhere else and you're thinking about some other thing
110
or you're anticipating some future thing or regretting some past thing or being fearful of something,
111
then that's wasted time.
112
That's time that's being wasted when you're not actually present for the reality in front of you.
113
So my definition of wasted time,
114
yes, I do want some material things in life.
115
And, you know, there are things that have more value than others within this life.
116
But this life is very short and bounded.
117
So the true wasted time is a time that you are not present for when you are not there for it,
118
when you are not doing the thing you want to do to the best of a capability such
119
that you're immersed in it.
120
If you're not immersed in this moment,
121
then you're wasting your time.
122
People get worried about dying and no longer being here,
123
but they don't realize that so much of their life is spent not being here in any case.
124
That's right.
125
And I think people crave being here for it.
126
And when you're here for it,
127
you're actually not thinking about yourself.
128
You're more immersed in the thing,
129
the moment, the task at hand.
130
We don't want peace of mind.
131
We want peace for our mind.
132
That's right.
133
Yeah, you don't, peace, the mind is what will eat you alive if you let it.
134
And there's more to you than the mind.
135
How so?
136
Well, I mean, it's very...
137
I don't want to disassemble the body, so to speak, right?
138
Because...
139
Please, go on.
140
Yeah, at the end of the day,
141
everything arises within your consciousness, right?
142
You've got nowhere else to experience it.
143
Sorry?
144
You've got nowhere else to experience it.
145
You've got nowhere else to experience it.
146
And that consciousness is relatively static in the sense
147
that it's been exactly the same from the moment you were born to the moment you die.
148
And everything that you experienced from your body,
149
from your mind to the world,
150
to everything is within that consciousness.
151
And that thing, that base layer of being,
152
and this is what the Buddhists will tell you, is the real thing.
153
Everything that comes and goes in the middle,
154
including your mind, including your body is unreal.
155
And trying to find stability in those transient things is your castle that you're building on sand that's going to crumble.
156
Life is going to play out the way it's going to play out.
157
There will be some good and some bad.
158
Most of it is actually just up to your interpretation.
159
You're born, you have a set of sensory experiences, and then you die.
160
How you choose to interpret those experiences is up to you,
161
and different people interpret them in different ways.
162
Yeah, it's the old line about two people walking down the street.
163
They're having the exact same experience one is happy one is
164
sad right it's a narrative in their heads it's how they choose to interpret um
165
so i think when i said
166
that it was a long time ago i was talking more about having positive interpretations
167
and negative interpretations but these days i think it's better just not to have any interpretations
168
and to just allow things to be you're still going to have interpretations you can't stop it
169
and nor should you try but even that having an interpretation is just a thing you can leave alone.
170
Yeah, I really want to try
171
and just dig in a little more to the best way to remind people that they should value their time.
172
Just how brief it is that the time that you spend ruminating,
173
being distracted, fears of the past, regrets.
174
Well, I don't want to tell anybody how to live their life.
175
I would just say that to the extent that you want to improve your quality of life,
176
the easiest and best way to do that is to observe your own mind and your own thoughts and be a little,
177
not necessarily critical, but be observant of yourself more objectively.
178
And then you'll kind of realize your own loops and patterns.
179
It takes time.
180
It's not overnight.
181
It's not instantaneous.
182
So you mean letting go is not a one-time event?
183
Yeah, and letting go is not necessarily even the right answer.
184
Like, yes, if you're trying to be an enlightened being and,
185
you know, you want to live like a god and everything's going to be perfect and be a Buddha,
186
sure, you can let go.
187
But I think in practice it's actually quite hard to do.
188
I think I would say
189
that you're going to find a lot of fulfillment out of life by just doing what you want to do
190
and genuinely exploring what it is
191
that you want rather than doing what other people expect you to do
192
or society expects you to do or what you might just think should be done by default.
193
um you know i think most older successful people will tell you
194
that their life was best
195
when they lived it unapologetically on their own terms be selfish holistic selfishness there you go exactly we can clip
196
that little i'm telling you about being selfish yeah yeah yeah
197
that's it just keep running about bad guy uh great i i had this insight
198
or a question i guess how much do you think
199
that we should trust the voice in our heads because half of wisdom suggests to rely on your sort of bottom-up intuition,
200
and then half of it has to be sort of top-down rational as possible.
201
How do you navigate the tension between head and gut in this way?
202
I think the gut is what decides.
203
The head is kind of what rationalizes it afterwards.
204
The gut is the ultimate decision maker.
205
And what is a gut?
206
The gut is refined judgment,
207
it's taste aggregates aggregated and it could be aggregated through evolution uh
208
and it's in your genes in your dna
209
or it could be aggregated through your experiences
210
and what you've thought through the mind is good at solving new problems
211
and uh new problems in the external world
212
that have different defined edges you know beginnings and ends and
213
and objectives what the mind is actually really bad at is making hard decisions
214
so when you have a hard decision to make i find it's better to,
215
yes, you ruminate on it,
216
you think through all the pros and cons,
217
but then you sleep on it.
218
You wait a couple of days.
219
You wait until the gut answer appears with conviction and it feels right.
220
And when you're younger, it takes longer because you just don't have as much experience.
221
And when you're older, it can happen much faster,
222
which is why, you know.
223
And you have less time to Yeah.
224
And old people are more set in their way as a consequence, right?
225
They know what they want.
226
They know what they don't want.
227
So it takes time to develop your gut instinct and judgment.
228
But once you've developed them,
229
don't trust anything else because you can't go against your gut.
230
It'll bite you in the end.
231
Usually in relationships that failed,
232
you can look back and say,
233
oh, actually I knew it was going to fail because of this reason,
234
but I kind of went ahead anyway,
235
because I wanted it to be this way, right?
236
I wanted this person to be a different way than they are.
237
I wanted to get a different thing out of it than I thought I was going to,
238
than I knew I was going to get,
239
but I just wanted it.
240
So sometimes desire will override your judgment and then trap you.
241
Yeah, wishful thinking.
242
It traps you into a pathway that just chews up time.
243
As you get older, one thing that becomes harder to ignore is your testosterone levels.
244
They impact everything from your energy to your mood and how well you recover.
245
However, there are science-backed supplements like Tonkat that support testosterone, strength and recovery.
246
And that is why I'm such a huge fan of Moentis' product
247
because they make the only NSF-certified Tonkat LE on the planet.
248
That means it's so rigorously tested that even Olympic athletes can use it
249
and why I partnered with them because they make the most carefully tested,
250
highest quality supplements on earth.
251
This is a huge part of my brain,
252
body and sleep stack, which makes a big impact on my cognition,
253
my strength and my recovery.
254
And if you're still unsure,
255
Momentus offers a 30 day money back guarantee.
256
So you can buy it and try it for 29 days.
257
If you don't love it,
258
they'll give you your money back.
259
Plus they ship internationally.
260
Right now you can get 35% off your subscription and
261
that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below
262
or heading to livemomentous.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout.
263
That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout.
264
Thank you very much for tuning in.
265
If you enjoyed that clip with Naval,
266
just a mere taster, the full-length episode is available right here.
267
Go on, watch it.
Download App
AI scoring for every sentence you speak
TRENDING
Popular
About This Lesson
In this lesson, you will practice English through the lens of anxiety and stress management as discussed by Naval Ravikant. By engaging with the content, you'll learn to articulate thoughts about common emotional challenges while improving your listening and speaking abilities. The emphasis on the shadowing technique will help enhance your pronunciation, rhythm, and intonation in English communication. Through this engaging exercise, you'll also expand your vocabulary related to mental health and emotional awareness, making you more equipped to discuss these topics in English.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Anxiety: A feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease.
- Stress: A state of mental or emotional strain resulting from challenging situations.
- Conflicting desires: Competing wants or needs that cause inner turmoil.
- Underlying problem: The root cause of a situation or emotion that isn't immediately obvious.
- Unresolved stress points: Sources of tension or anxiety that have not been dealt with.
- Meditate: To engage in a mental exercise to focus or relax.
- Pervasive: Spreading widely throughout an area or a group of people.
- Detail-oriented: Paying close attention to specifics and minor details.
Practice Tips
When using this video to practice speaking, consider employing the shadowing technique. First, listen to a small segment and then repeat it immediately, mimicking the speaker’s tone and pace. The video features a thoughtful and reflective speaking style that is ideal for this practice. Focus particularly on the nuances of Ravikant’s delivery, which conveys both conviction and calmness. Start by shadowing at a slower speed to catch every inflection and emotion, then gradually increase your pace to match his. This will enhance your fluency and help you become comfortable discussing complex subjects like anxiety and stress in English.
As you shadow, pay attention to how emotions affect communication. This will not only improve your speaking skills but also arm you with the vocabulary you need when navigating discussions about mental well-being. By practicing with “learn English with YouTube” content featuring natural conversation, you’ll refine your listening comprehension and develop your ability to express thoughts clearly during interpersonal exchanges.
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.
☕ Buy us a coffee
ShadowingEnglish remains 100% free thanks to your support. Server and AI costs are high — your coffee keeps us going! 🙏