Shadowing Practice: stop watching life from the sidelines - Learn English Speaking with Video

People used to grow up early.

Most people in the 50s, 60s, and 70s were married with kids by the time they were 25, and men were going off to war at the age

that I was still playing 10 hours of Minecraft daily in my bedroom.

My great grandpa literally worked in a Nebraska oil field

when he was a teenager

and was spontaneously moving across the country to pursue a new career path in construction when he was 20.

When I was younger, I would look at people in their late 20s

and think that they were all so impressive with a concrete plan

and a level of discipline responsibility that could only be found in a true, real adult.

But now that I'm 25, I don't feel like that person I always looked up to as a kid.

I feel like I'm still the kid who doesn't know what he's doing, and honestly, I don't know if that's ever going to change.

If you've personally ever felt this way, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

You have the job and the responsibilities, but underneath all of it, you still feel like a kid in costume, hoping that nobody notices.

I kept thinking there'd be a moment where I finally felt like a man instead of a boy playing dress-up.

I waited for it at 18, when the government decided I was officially an adult, and absolutely nothing inside of me changed,

except now I can choose which old man declares war on countries across the world.

Yay.

When I turned 21, and was able to drink legally in the US, I didn't feel any different.

When I got my first full-time job, it felt like a weird hobby that gave me money.

I'm now 25 years old

and the feeling I was waiting for still hasn't fully arrived A survey of 2,000 adults found

that 59% of them still don't always feel like a grown-up

and most said it didn't truly sink in until they were almost 30.

So if you're in your 20s or even well into your 30s

and you still feel like a kid hiding inside an adult's schedule You are not the only one

and you are not broken But I hate to break it to you

because that feeling you're waiting for the one where you wake up and feel like an adult isn't coming on its own.

You have to create it for yourself, and today, we're going to talk about what causes it and how to fix it.

And it has nothing to do with waiting for the right moment.

I genuinely told myself that once I hit 25, it would all click.

The fog would lift, I would suddenly understand what I was doing, and I would finally feel like the man I was supposed to be.

Then, 25 actually showed up, I blew out the candles, and I felt exactly the same as I had at 24, except now I get hangovers way easier,

and one milligram of caffeine affects my sleep for a week.

Nothing changed because, well, nothing changed.

A birthday doesn't really mean anything, and adding a new number to the end of your age is only a symbolic change.

I was still the same person, and I was missing something.

I was missing the rite of passage that transitioned me to adulthood.

For nearly all of human history, there was a moment, a clear, undeniable line you crossed where the people around you stopped treating you like a boy and started treating you like a man.

Every culture did it a little differently, but the shape was always the same.

You went off and did something difficult, often something that scared you and was a little dangerous, and you came back changed, and everyone who knew you recognized that you were not the same person who left.

Every culture did it a little differently, and you don't have to go back very far to find it.

For a lot of men last century, the thing that turned them from a boy into a man was getting drafted and shipped off to war, leaving as somebody's kid and coming home as the veteran

that the whole town treated like a man for the rest of his life.

For others, it was quieter, like the day they left school at 15 and went down to the factory or out to the farm to start earning, because the moment you brought home a paycheck,

your family started looking at you differently.

Now trust me, I don't think these things are good, and I'd personally rather not be shipped off to war, but they are undeniable parts of the human experience that has existed for for pretty much all of history.

These events, as traumatic and undesirable as they were, created a real before and after.

You knew you'd become a man because your entire community told you

so out loud on a specific day and then they treated you accordingly for the rest of your life.

After the Industrial Revolution, this dynamic shifted more and more towards your value as a member of the workforce, and by the time of our parents' generation, being an adult meant owning a home,

starting a family, and working full-time in a new city.

These things used to happen around your 18th birthday, so we formed a cultural association with turning 18 and starting your adult life.

But this only worked because those things were doable at age 18.

Now, the world is a different place.

People are lucky to get a job by the time they're my age, living with your parents for longer has become the norm, the housing market is a disaster, and work doesn't require you to make any real life changes

because you can do it from a laptop in your living room.

The cost of a normal life has climbed a whole lot faster than the average paycheck, so the markers that used to tell a young man that you made it across to adulthood,

the house, the job in a new city, or some other cultural moment, keeps getting pushed back by years, and now people are 30 and still feeling like children.

So yeah, that's why you still feel like a kid, but that's only half of what's going on here, and it doesn't really change anything.

Because even with no ceremony and no clear finish line, people still used to grow up out of pure necessity.

Life forced it on you whether you felt ready or not.

And that's the piece that we've quietly lost.

Consumer culture has gotten so good and so frictionless that you never actually have to carve out your own world anymore.

The world shows up pre-built and pre-packaged on your doorstep, and all that's left for you to do is consume it.

Yeah, the fact that the clear transition into adulthood is gone does make it harder, but we've also handed off every single skill that used to come bundled with that transition.

Think about what genuinely used to happen when a young man moved out of his parents' house for the first time.

Nobody was there to feed him, so he had to learn how to cook something that wasn't bowl of cereal.

His laundry became his own problem, so he figured out how a washing machine worked before he ran out of clean clothes.

He had to walk into a grocery store and work out how to keep himself alive on a budget.

If he wanted any new friends in his new city, he had to get uncomfortable and actually talk to strangers because nobody was going to deliver them to his inbox.

And if he didn't want to spend every single Friday night alone, he had to work up the nerve to ask a girl on a date, face to face knowing

that she might turn him down on the spot every one of those things was a small

and slightly scary act of stepping out into the world

and every one of them quietly built this person into a capable adult whether he ever noticed it happening

or not now we've outsourced the entire list you don't learn to cook

because an app will have an underpaid stranger drop off a

hot meal at your door in 20 minutes you don't work out how to feed yourself for a week

because groceries arrive in a box with a recipe card and everything pre-measured for you.

You barely need to know where anything is

because a voice on your phone narrates every turn and you never build a real map of your city in your head.

And you don't have to risk talking to anyone new in person

because there's an app for friends

and an app for dating where you swipe through actual human beings like a vending machine

and let the algorithm decide who you even get to see.

The discomfort that used to grow you up has been carefully engineered out of your life, one convenient little service at a time.

While the convenience of all of these things feels nice, we need to be honest with ourselves about what it's doing

because every task you hand off is a small piece of your own competence

and independence that you now never get the chance to build.

There's a deeper layer to this as well though, and it goes past simple life skills.

We've basically stopped creating anything at all.

Almost everything we do now is just pure consumption.

You watch what other people made and you scroll through feeds that other people fill, playing inside games and worlds that other people built for you.

And when your whole life is consumption like that, you end up living inside a world that was completely pre-carved by somebody else.

You become a passive observer, wandering around in a reality that other people designed for their own reasons, usually to keep you watching and spending for as long as humanly possible.

You don't own any of it.

You're just a guest in someone else's house, and a guest has to ask for permission to do anything the same way a kid does.

This, I think, is what actually drives that exact feeling that we've been talking about this whole time.

To feel like you're in control of your own life, you have to be a participant instead of a spectator.

Now, I want to be honest with you here because I'm not going to sell you some fantasy.

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You're never fully in control of your life.

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None of us are.

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The economy, your genetics, the place you happen to be born, the random chaos of simply being alive, almost all of it is out of your hands and it always will be.

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But the feeling of control comes from participating, from making things happen rather than waiting around for them to happen to you, even when you have no idea how any of it is going to turn out.

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There's a balance that you need to find between going with the flow

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and having some sort of a plan to keep you moving, and that balance, while very hard to obtain, is the art of life.

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As Alan Watts says, you need rigidity and you need wiggles.

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And I know that probably makes no sense, but if you read Alan Watts, which I think you should, you can understand what I mean by that.

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The rigidity and the wiggles balance each other out.

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The wiggles is going with the flow, and the rigidity is the bones that hold the wiggles together.

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Again, I'll dive into that in another video because it's a whole complicated conversation, but I think you get the gist.

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The wiggles are great, but the rigidity, that sense of authorship over your own life, is part of what makes a person feel like an adult.

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Think about the people that you know who genuinely seem like grown-ups, The ones with that quality that you can't quite put a name to.

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They make their own decisions and then they live with whatever comes of them.

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They have some real sense of where they're trying to go.

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They deal with their own problems instead of passing them up the chain to someone older and wiser.

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And the life they are living actually feels like theirs, like something they chose and built rather than something that got assigned to them by society.

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Every one of those qualities traces back to the same root, which is that they're actively authoring their own lives instead of passively receiving one from other people.

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Again, I've talked a lot about going with the flow on this channel, and I'm not trying to contradict myself by saying that you have to have everything planned, because that's not my point here,

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and that's not what this channel is about.

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The key is to build that life for yourself while still going with the flow.

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Adulthood is the act of creating the life that you actually want to live, or at the very least, making a genuine attempt of it,

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instead of quietly accepting the default life that your parents and your circumstances handed you.

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It's the difference between living inside a world that was built for you and slowly building one that's your own.

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Your own worldviews, your own opinions, your own skills, your own hobbies, and your own passions.

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Think of it like a Minecraft world.

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If you play in a world that someone else built, it just feels sterile and boring and you don't want to mess any of the builds up, so you walk around in it and then you lose interest.

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But if you build a world yourself from scratch, a forever world, then it feels like your own

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and you can see how your thoughts and ideas and creativity has progressed over time.

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Anyways, with rites of passage and the hard transition into adulthood through buying a house or moving out gone, you're going to have to take the first step into adulthood on your own.

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You have to reach out and take it for yourself, which brings me to a part of this video where I'm probably going to upset a few people.

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Being an adult means making your own decisions and then truly owning them and taking responsibility for the consequences of them.

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I'm not gonna lie, this is maybe my single biggest pet peeve in all of life.

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These days, people expect to have no consequences for their actions, and then they complain about how things are going when they're the ones who made the decision that put them there.

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My uncle got a DUI for drinking and driving, and then complained about it for the rest of his life.

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He said how it ruined everything for him, but he was the one who decided to pick up the alcohol and drive.

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This form of thinking drives me insane.

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Our culture has somehow turned complaining into an entire personality.

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The economy is rigged, the housing market is hopeless, the planet's cooking, the generation before us took everything and left us holding the bill, so why should any of us even bother trying?

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And trust me, I understand the appeal of that mindset because it lets you off the hook completely.

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If the whole game is rigged, then losing was never your fault, and you never have to risk anything by actually trying.

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But here's the uncomfortable truth, and I went pretty deep on this in my last video, which I'll link down in the description, so I won't run through the whole thing again here.

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The game has always been rigged.

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The past was never the stable and certain and fair little world that we love to imagine it was.

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People have always been born into chaos, and that chaos has never once stopped human beings from going out and building something anyways.

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Isaac Newton did some of his most important work on gravity and mathematics while he was holed up at home, hiding from a plague that was killing people by the thousands.

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Shakespeare wrote some of his greatest plays in the years when the theaters were forced shut because of disease.

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A massive amount of the technology sitting in your pocket right

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now traces directly back to two world wars dreamed up by people who had every reason to believe

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that the world was ending around them.

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None of those people were living through calm and uncertain times.

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They created regardless because creating is the only real alternative to lying down and giving up.

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So you have to try.

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You have to try to make something, to carve out some kind of path for yourself and build a life with your own two hands,

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even on the days when it all feels pointless and you're convinced that none of it is ever going to work.

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And as I've said in other videos, this isn't about building a business or making money, it's about building you as a person.

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The trying is not a guarantee of anything and I won't pretend that it is, is, but the trying is the entire difference between a person who feels like an adult

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and a person who feels like a kid sitting around waiting for the world to sort itself out on his behalf.

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In practice, this just means that you have to stop being a passive consumer and start being an active participant, both in your own life and in the world around you.

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Leaving the house on nights when every part of you wants to stay in and watch something instead, and forcing yourself to talk to the strangers that you would normally walk past without looking twice.

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It's taking the risk that has a real chance of embarrassing you, whether that's asking someone out, starting a creative project that you keep putting off, posting the thing that you're scared to post,

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or showing up somewhere brand new where you don't know a single soul.

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The discomfort is simply the toll that you pay to feel alive and in charge of your own life again.

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And that, more than anything else, is the entire reason that this channel exists in the first place.

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My whole mission here is to get people in motion, building the kind of friendships that actually mean something,

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and slowly taking their lives back from the handful of tech companies that watch and quietly steer almost everything we do.

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I want to be clear that I'm not doing any of this for the money because, well, I really don't make that much money from this.

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I make these videos because I genuinely care about this stuff

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and because I wish someone would've been making videos like this one back when I was a little younger, stuck in my room, feeling hopeless, and waiting for my real life to somehow start on its own.

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If you want to support that mission and pick up a few bonus perks while you're at it, you can become a member over at solitspeaks.com for $5 a month.

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Members get things like healthy recipes, book summaries, exclusive content, and the random useful bits of information

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that I come across that I think can genuinely help people on this journey.

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It's what keeps this whole thing running without any sponsors, and I'm grateful for every single person who chooses to do it.

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I also have a Minecraft server exclusively for members of this community, where you can play your favorite game in a curated group of people who all think like you do.

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It's genuinely an inspirational community and you have to be in our discord to play on the server, so check it out in the description if you want to learn more.

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The server is supported solely by members on SolvusSpeaks.com, so we're building a whole ecosystem here and I'd love for you to be a part of it.

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So what is one thing that you've been outsourcing or quietly avoiding that you could start doing for yourself this week?

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Let me know down in the comments

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because your answer might be the exact push

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that someone else needs to finally get out of their room and back into their own life.

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it for our conversation today and we will talk again soon.

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 Practice: stop watching life from the sidelines - Learn English Speaking with Video

Context & Background

Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication

Step-by-step Shadowing Guide

What is the Shadowing Technique?