Shadowing Practice: Success Is Hard Until You Build Systems Like This - Learn English Speaking with Video
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This video is all about how you can achieve more success in your personal or professional life by building systems.
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So we're gonna talk about the philosophy of this, why systems are important, and what the difference is between people who have systems and people who don't.
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And in the second part of the video, I'm gonna go through five systems that I think you should totally incorporate into your life if you haven't already,
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because they will drastically, drastically increase your chances of achieving whatever your own personal definition of success actually is.
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And if you're new here, hello, my name is Ali.
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I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and author of the New York Times bestseller, Feel Good Productivity.
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And this channel is all about the books and ideas and strategies and tools that can help us achieve financial freedom, live life on our own terms, and ultimately build a life that we love.
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So if that sounds good, you might like to hit the subscribe button, but now let's dive into the video.
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All right, so let's start out with a definition.
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So we are all trying to work towards this thing that we called success, but what the hell does success actually mean?
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There are lots of different definitions.
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People have their own like ways of defining this, but in my opinion, you would generally consider yourself successful
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if you've achieved or if you're actively working towards goals that you intrinsically care about.
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I would say your life is kind of successful if you're working towards those goals in a balanced way.
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So for example, I wouldn't call it massive success if you're single-mindedly focused on just this one thing, but then you've wrecked your health and your relationships and your life along the way.
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I wouldn't personally think of that as being success.
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And finally, success is where you are actually enjoying the journey along the way, because ultimately you could have success.
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You could have the nicest house.
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You could have the fanciest job.
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You could have the biggest business.
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But if you haven't enjoyed the journey of getting there, it will very much feel hollow because you'll get to
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that destination and you'll realize that that is not where happiness and salvation is actually to be found.
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Now, in order to achieve our goals, we basically need to take a series of actions.
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If we take the right sorts of actions and do them for long enough and consistently enough, we are more likely to get to our goals.
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In order to have a generally balanced life, we kind of need a somewhat reasonable diversity of goals
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and a therefore diversity of actions across the different domains of our life.
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For example, our professional and personal life, our work, our health, our relationships, our hobbies.
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And in order to have enjoyment along the way, to be honest, a lot of it comes from our approach to things.
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Like if you approach stuff in a sort of playful way, if you approach things in a sincere rather than serious way, if you have an attitude and a mindset of non-attachment,
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like you're working towards your goals and you're doing stuff to get there, but you're not overly attached to any particular outcome.
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And of course, if you can drive intrinsic motivation for the goals that you're achieving, so rather than being motivated by external factors like, I don't know, fame and money and what your society thinks you should do or whatever,
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you're actually motivated by intrinsic things, like you actually want to do the thing those are generally the factors that lead to enjoyment.
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And I would like to offer for your consideration in this video that if you build systems into your life, you are actually far more likely to achieve your goals.
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You're more likely to do the actions that are required to achieve your goals.
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You're more likely to have a balanced approach to the goals and the actions that you achieve and take.
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And you're also more likely to have enjoyment along the journey, all by building the right sorts of system into your life.
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So now let's try and define what actually is a system.
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And you can define a system as a network of interconnected things that lead to a particular result.
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And those things could be, for example, actions, or they could be processes, which are really just like sets of actions, or they could be checklists, which are again, really just sets of actions.
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So what you basically have is that a system is a step-by-step set of actions that leads to a particular result.
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And again, the whole point of this video is
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that I would like to argue that
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if you can take the approach of building more systems into your life
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and basically systemizing your approach to your personal and professional life, in my opinion, you are far more likely to achieve success, whatever that definition of success is for you.
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Now, I want to give you a couple of examples here.
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So imagine the world of aviation, right?
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Like pilots piloting aeroplanes.
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That is an enormously high stakes situation.
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And the entire world of aviation is built around systems.
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Systems are the most important thing.
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There is a system to build the appropriate aeroplane.
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This is why basically all aeroplanes kind of look the same, because people have figured out a system for making airplanes fly.
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And so if you deviate too much from the system, you end up not building an airplane that flies.
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Let's take another high stakes thing like medicine.
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I used to be a doctor in case you didn't know.
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And medicine is all about following a system.
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Yes, there is some level of like individual stuff that the doctors do, for example, like, you know, talking to the patient and make them feel nice.
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But when you go and see a doctor and you talk to them about your problems, the doctor is actually following a system.
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One of the most popular systems is the Calgary Cambridge method of patient interviewing, which is like a a whole system for what sort of
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questions as a doctor you need to ask the patient in order to make sure
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that you've got on all the symptoms and all the signs and all that kind of stuff.
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When the doctor examines you and listens to your heart and like examines your abdomen and all of that kind of stuff, again they are following a system.
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They are not just making shit up as they go along.
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If they have lots and lots of experience, then yes, then you know the systemization of the thing for doctors starts to become second nature, they start to pattern recognize,
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and so they're following a system even though they often don't realize they're following a system
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because the system has been so big drilled into them that they can now kind of go a little bit off script.
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But even then, even if you're like a surgeon with 50 years of experience and you're like the world's best person, you still literally have to fill out a checklist before every single operation
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and at the end of every single operation to make sure
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that you've checked the boxes for the important stuff that the system needs to make sure the patient has a good result.
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Now in our professional lives, in these sort of work environments, like in medicine or in aviation or in like Formula One, the idea of building systems into it is like fairly standard.
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Like with your job, you probably have systems that you have to follow.
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Systems for HR, systems for marketing, sales, operations, finance, the whole shebang.
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Businesses are built on the idea of systems.
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And I would like to offer for your consideration
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that we can totally build those sorts of systems into our personal lives as well for pretty much any goal
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that we want to work towards.
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And there is a really nice visual
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that I got from my friend Jeff Su that sort of describes the value of a system.
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So if you imagine this kind of graph, we've got effort over here.
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And so this is sort of what the line might look like
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if you're trying to do stuff without a system to it.
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Whereas this is what the line looks like.
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If you're trying to do something that does have a system attached to it, it will take a little bit more effort in the initial stages to build the system.
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But then very quickly, the fact that you are now using a system, i.e. there is a systemized set of actions or processes or steps that you're going to follow,
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it takes actually quite a lot of work and quite a lot of effort out of the process of doing the thing.
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Big thank you to Training212 for sponsoring this video.
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So now let's get back to it.
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I'll give you a personal example.
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I was doing weight training when I started out for about five years and I was not following the system.
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I was going to the gym a couple of times a week
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when I had the time and I was kind of doing whatever I felt like.
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I was going with the flow.
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And sure, this was kind of fun.
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I'd go to the gym with my friends and stuff, but I made almost no progress in my physique
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or in my health levels or in any of those things because I wasn't following a system.
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Recently, I started following a system.
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I got a personal trainer and he programs my workouts
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and I see him three times a week at the same time slot.
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We follow a similar kind of workout plan with progressive overload.
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There's a system behind the thing.
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And for the first time in my life, I'm finally seeing progress when I'm actually at the gym because I'm following a system.
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I'm not just screwing around and making stuff up as I go along and hoping for the best.
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I'm following a prescribed system that people have already figured out to get to a desired result, which is to try and attempt to get a little bit more jacked and to reduce my visceral fat levels.
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Let's take another example.
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Let's say you are starting a business and you're doing sales calls for the first time.
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Like you're getting on the phone or a Zoom call with your prospects and trying to sell them your product.
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Not having a system would be hopping on the call, making it up as you go along, just sort of vibing and going with the flow.
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Having a system means that you would have some kind of sales script that you would follow.
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You're probably saying a similar thing each time in the opening and in the closing.
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You have a list of objections that they might say, like, you know, the price is too expensive, or I don't have the time, or let me think about it.
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And you have defined responses that you've figured out because you've built a system around it.
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You have a system for following up with them.
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Now in that world, the business
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that follows a system for their sales process is gonna make way more money compared to the new business
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that has no system around this because they're just sort of making stuff up as they go along.
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And this is the core idea behind why systems are way more likely to lead you to success.
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Because success, if you define it as achieving your goals with balance and enjoyment along the way, is really just about executing on a set of actions.
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Now if you are making up those actions every time, depending on how you feel, you're a lot less likely to get to any particular goal compared to
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if you have a system or a set of processes that you're following every time.
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Now, after all of that opining, I would like to share with you the five systems that I think if you were to incorporate into your life, would drastically increase your chances of success.
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The first system that I think is incredibly helpful is some kind of goal setting system.
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When it comes to achieving success, having goals is really important because then at least you know what you're aiming for.
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You don't have to be wedded to the goals.
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You don't have to be attached to them.
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You don't have to be upset if you don't manage to achieve a goal in the time frame that you wanted.
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But it's so useful to actually have a goal to shoot for in the first place.
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Now, the way most people do this is sort of like, before they have a system, it's sort of like, you know, the new year comes around, and they'll sort of vaguely set some New Year's resolutions
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that I want to stop procrastinating or I want to go to the gym more often.
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And they just, they won't have a systematic approach to goal setting.
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And so what happens is that they start something, and they sort of meander a little bit, and then they quit, or they start something else, and they kind of go all over the place, and then they quit, or they set a goal for something else,
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and then they've taken one step and then they quit.
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And it's all this sort of like general kind of mess
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when you approach a goal setting as something that you do ad hoc whenever you have the time, and you just sort of try and figure it out as you go along.
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Whereas after you have a system for goal setting, and there are lots of them out there, I don't really care which one you use, but like you can just Google it or ask ChadGPT or Claude to give you a system for goal setting.
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I've got my own, it's called the GPS system.
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There'll be some videos over there somewhere on the channel.
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But after you have a system for goal setting, you have a systematic process that you can follow every three months or every year or however frequently you wanna do it. And
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so for example, my process starts with like vision where there's like a life
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compass section where you figure out like what you actually want your life to look like very long term
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and what are your core values and that kind of stuff.
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Then we turn it into a three year sketch
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where you can use like a vision board or something to figure out where do you wanna be three years from now.
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And then we make quarterly quests, which are like 90 day goals.
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Again, all of this stuff will be linked down below because we've got videos on the channel about all this stuff.
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So I'm not gonna expand on it in too much detail.
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And then after we figured out our quarterly quests, we have a weekly process of prioritization and reflection that I call the balanced week blueprint.
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And you might think that this stuff is a little bit much, but it doesn't take that long to do.
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It takes maybe a couple of hours to do a life
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compass exercise to really figure out what direction you wanna go with your life.
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It takes maybe half an hour to do a vision board, three year sketch.
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This is quite a fun thing to do as well.
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It takes maybe half an hour every quarter to define quarterly quests.
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And what you're doing with this systematic approach to goal setting is
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that you're really trying to decide what are the small number of goals I actually want to work towards.
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And most of us go through life without really stopping back to zoom out a little bit
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and just actually think about this.
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It's so easy to get fixated on the day to day.
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We're too busy at work and then we get home and then there's the kids and the stuff and whatever, and there's not enough time and not enough energy.
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And yet, if we just take a few hours once in a
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while to zoom out and follow a systematic process for goal setting, we are far more likely to end up working towards goals that are intrinsically motivated,
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goals that we actually want to work towards rather than casually working towards goals
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that are just a subconscious result of what society has told us, or what our parents had told us, or what, I don't know, that a previous version of ourself decided to do.
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The second major system I would really recommend installing into your life is some kind of time management system.
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And again, I've made videos about this in the channel.
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They'll be linked down below if you wanna check them out.
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But when it comes to achieving any goal at all, achieving every goal, as we talked about, is a series of actions.
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And in order to do those actions, we have to do some work.
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And there are generally three inputs into work, And that is time, energy, and focus, assuming you are the one doing the work.
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If you have a team and you have other team members doing the work, then you have the other metric of money because you're hiring the team and getting them to do the work and stuff.
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But for the most part, time, energy, and focus are the three fundamental resources that individuals invest in doing work, taking actions to achieve goals,
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which ultimately, fingers crossed, leads us to success, whatever that definition of success is for us.
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And on a very basic level, the most important one of these is time.
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Time is the primary thing because we only have 168 hours every week to do stuff.
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168 hours.
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Most of us spend like 56 of those sleeping
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and maybe another 12 of them eating and going to the toilet and stuff.
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So what that basically leaves is 100 hours.
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Nice round number.
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If you have a job and you have to, I don't know, spend 60 hours, you just, you know, you've literally just got 40 hours left every single week to do all of the things
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that you want to do.
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If you imagine that like most people have a screen time of like six hours a day, all of those 40 hours suddenly disappear.
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And so you realize very quickly, and maybe if you're the sort of person who watches this channel and if you're at this point in the video, that like there's actually not that many hours in every week to do all of the things that you want to do,
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which means that if we want to be able to do the work that helps us take the actions, that helps us get to our goal, that helps us eventually get to success.
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We wanna be good at managing our time.
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And ideally, instead of having to, again, make this up as we go along, ideally we have a system
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that makes it a lot easier for us to manage our time
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so that we can make time for the important stuff and to get rid of the stuff that is less important.
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But there are three key factors that I think everyone should have.
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Number one, a good time management system involves time blocking, which is basically where you stick blocks in your calendar for the stuff that is important to you.
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For example, I have a weekly date night with my wife.
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That is time blocked.
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I go to the gym three times a week.
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That is time blocked.
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I have two filming days a week where I work on YouTube videos.
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Those are time blocked in the calendar.
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The more you can intentionally decide how you want to be using your time ahead of time, rather than having to make a decision in the moment
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and then sort of being at the mercy of your mood or your energy levels, the easier it is to reliably do the actions consistently that are going to get you to your goals.
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That's not to say that you should have no room for spontaneity.
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You can totally have free time in the calendar as well, where you can just do whatever you want.
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But in general, the people
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that are most likely to achieve goals are the ones who actually make the time to achieve those goals, perhaps unsurprisingly.
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Factor number two that every good time management system should have is a method for prioritization.
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Now you probably have more things you would like to do compared to the time that you actually have to do them, because you're probably an ambitious person and you have lots of goals and you want to live a healthy balanced life.
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But as you've probably realized, it's actually impossible to do all the things.
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And so we need to prioritize what are the few that are the most important. And thirdly, ideally every good time management system should have some kind of
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component of reflection where you look at how you've been spending your time, you reflect on it, and then you use that reflection process to adjust your time blocking and prioritization system.
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For me, I try my best to do a weekly review or reflection.
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And this is just a series of questions that I ask myself, it takes about 20 minutes.
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And it's a good way of making sure
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that I'm continually realigning to the goals that I want to achieve and making changes to my schedule if like life happens.
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System number three that I think would benefit most people in their is some kind of health optimization or health operating system.
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I call mine HealthOS because it's just kind of cute.
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And what this is, is a system that you can follow on autopilot that gets you to your health goals.
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So this involves things like sleep and diet and exercise.
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Now before you have some kind of system around your health, you sleep roughly whenever you feel tired
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and you wake up whenever you wanna wake up
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or with your alarm if you have some kind of work to go to.
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Your diet is like, you're sort of making it up as you go along.
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Your exercise, you're sort of doing random stuff whenever you can find the time to do the thing.
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And this is why most people are on average not particularly healthy.
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But if you're building a system into your life where you're following a set of processes around your sleep, your diet, your exercise, then you're much more likely to be in a better place.
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So what might be the system for optimizing your sleep?
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Again, we have done videos about it.
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I'll link them down below, but you know, getting eight hours a night is generally very helpful.
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Having the room set to 19 degrees Celsius is generally very helpful.
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That tends to be the temperature for most people that optimizes sleep.
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Defining like when you want bedtime to be like, hey, I'm gonna sleep 10 p.m to 6 a.m or whatever, generally helpful the more you can stick to a consistent bed and wake time,
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the more your circadian rhythms actually line up.
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And so the less likely you are to be tired or groggy or have low energy throughout the day.
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Of course, there is the classic tip to view morning sunlight as per Andrew Huberman, which is again helpful for entraining our circadian rhythm.
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You've got things like no phone in the bedroom, getting rid of your phone so that you're not like browsing TikTok or Reddit at like two in the morning, which is another thing that would destroy your sleep.
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I personally like having a Kindle on my bedside table because then if I'm struggling to go to sleep, I can just read like a spirituality book or something on Kindle and that gets me to sleep pretty quickly.
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If you want, you can use some kind of sleep tracker.
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I wear a whoop.
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I've got like, I've been using this for the last like 380 days or something.
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I've got a 380 day streak on it.
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And so this gives me a sleep score.
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And so generally with any kind of system, having some sort of metric
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that you can look at to see how effective is your system performing
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and then being able to sort of adjust your system based on the metric is generally quite helpful.
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It's not absolutely essential, but for most things, having some way to measure the number actually does genuinely help.
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And all of these is just a series of steps.
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And sure, most people don't do all of these things absolutely all the time.
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But having a system, which is sort of a set of defaults
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that you're going to follow most of the time is going to be way more likely for you to have healthy sleep.
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And obviously we know that sleep is one of those things that like contributes to every other area of our life.
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When it comes to diet, if for every single meal, you know, three meals a day for like seven days a week, if every single time you had to figure out what you want to do in terms of what you're eating
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or what you're cooking or what you're buying from the grocery store, A, you end up wasting a ton of time in like mental decision fatigue
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and ordering random takeaways and going to random restaurants
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and then your calories and macros and all that kind of stuff are off and then you end up being pretty unhealthy.
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And so what busy people and especially people with kids tend to find is that actually systemizing the household diet is really, really, really helpful.
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Like knowing that Tuesdays are like Chinese takeout Tuesdays, knowing that Thursday is a movie night with the kids and therefore we're going to order pizza, knowing that like we're going to meal prep on the Sunday
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and then batch prepare the breakfast for the whole week
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and batch prepare the lunches for the whole week
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so the kids can take them to school or whatever the situation might be.
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Almost everyone who you consider to be successful probably has some kind of system for their diet and their nutrition.
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It doesn't have to be fancy.
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It doesn't have to be private chef levels, but just having a method that you are following, which means you don't have to think about what the hell
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I'm gonna eat for these 21 meals every single week will save you a huge amount of time
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and also make you way healthier.
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And then of course, having some kind of system that you're following for your exercise.
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What I do personally is weight training three times per week.
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I try to do 40 minutes of zone two cardio through like casual running about three times a week.
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I aim to do yoga about one or two times a week for general flexibility and mobility.
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And of course, I aim to get 10,000 steps per day
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because there's a good amount of evidence that like the more steps you take, the healthier you're going to be.
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And so I have a walking treadmill for my desk some of the time as well.
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And again, this is a system.
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The gym sessions are in the calendar.
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The runs should be more systemized for me because they're currently not.
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I kind of make time for running when I have the time, which is why I'm a lot less consistent with this than I am with the gym where it's actually in the calendar.
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And so if you have some kind of system that you're following, some set of default actions that you're taking every week, your health is far more likely to be good compared to someone who does not have that kind of system.
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And it's like that phrase goes, the healthy man has 99 wishes, the unhealthy man has only one.
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If you are sick or unhealthy, then that is a massive drain on practically every other area of your life as well.
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And so you might as well follow some kind of system.
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Again, if you're not sure, just ask ChatGPT, watch some YouTube tutorials for like, and it doesn't have to be fancy, but it does take a lot of the guesswork
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and a lot of the mental decision fatigue out of the process of keeping on top of your health.
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System number four
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that I think everyone would benefit from is some kind of system to keep on top of the relationships
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that matter to you the most.
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Now, this is where it can sometimes sound weird being like, why would you build a system for relationships?
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Relationships shouldn't be systemized.
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That's just not true.
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Like if you ask any like marriage counselor or marriage therapist or read any book about what makes a successful marriage, actually what a lot of it comes down to is systems,
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making sure you have a weekly date night and
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that it's in the calendar and that both parties know that it happens every Sunday evening, for example.
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That is an example of a system.
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Doing something like regular relationship reviews, maybe once a month where you and the spouse or you
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and your partner sit down and actually reflect on the state of your relationship.
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And if there's any like minor grievances that you haven't had a chance to bring up and you talk about those things.
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Again, sounds weird, but it's incredibly helpful.
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Me and my wife were seeing a relationship therapist before we got married, just because I got some advice from a friend saying that like relationship therapists are amazing.
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And he recommended we do relationship reviews.
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We read a couple of books about how to have a successful marriage that also were bullish on relationship reviews.
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This is a way of systemizing your relationships so
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that you do the sensible things without having to think too hard about them.
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As you become super busy at work, it's generally very helpful to block out holidays in advance.
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So a lot of the most successful entrepreneurs I know really, really take their personal life and their relationships very seriously.
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And so at the start of the year, before they do any of their business planning, they will block out in the calendar, okay, this is holiday with the spouse, this is holiday with the kids, this is, we're gonna take all of August off for a sabbatical.
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Because if you don't block all of that stuff out in advance, then the work and life commitments will just sort of fill the gaps.
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And so you've got to be intentional about blocking this stuff out in advance.
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This is building a system around your relationships.
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The most social people I know are not just randomly going to social events, especially once they become adults and start having kids and start becoming busy.
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They start doing standing order social events.
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One of my friends, Nat, who's very intentional about relationships, he was like living in Austin for a few years.
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And so he and his wife set up a weekly meetup at the local lake.
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Anyone was invited, so they just invited all their friends.
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They're like, hey, we're going to be at this lake 8am every Saturday morning, and then we're going to go for breakfast afterwards.
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If you can make it, come join us.
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And they did this every single week for four years.
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And this was an amazing way for them to maintain relationships and friendships with people that they already knew.
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And also it was a fantastic way to get to know new people because new people would be like, oh, I mean, my friend Johnny's in town.
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Let's bring him along to this standing order social event, this 8am every Saturday lake meetup.
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So there's things like that that you can do
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that systemize the stuff that you want to do in your social life as well.
327
This is the value of like a monthly book club
328
or a weekly lads video game night or monthly movie night with your friends
329
and Especially when people get busy like if you're watching this
330
and you're young
331
and you're like holy shit I can't believe like why do
332
you have to stick a calendar event for hanging out with your friends?
333
If you're watching this and you're above the age of 25 You know
334
that you're busy your friends are busy Especially if you're watching this
335
and you have kids
336
or your friends have kids man It's such a total frickin nightmare trying to schedule people
337
and get them together Which is why having a system around it can really really help
338
and I don't know if it's a thing in the rest of the world But in the UK, there's like a real tradition of like sending physical Christmas cards to the people
339
that you know And so we really suck at this
340
But like I've got some friends who are really good at sending an annual Christmas card
341
And it's amazing how such a small thing can actually sustain a friendship for decades and decades
342
because you know You've got this annual touchpoint where you just
343
send a nice handwritten Christmas card Maybe there's a photo of
344
the family Maybe there's a bit of an update about what you're up to
345
and there is a system around this the people
346
that remember birthdays They probably don't have the birthday in your head They probably have it in their calendar
347
and the people I know who are the most thoughtful about birthdays not only have your birthday in the calendar,
348
but they'll have a recurring event every year in their to-do list that like two weeks before the birthday reminds them that, hey, are these birthdays coming up on whatever?
349
And so they'll start thinking about the gift or the card and stuff like two weeks in advance.
350
All of these are different examples of systemizing your relationships so that it takes the guesswork out of it, it takes the mental decision fatigue out of it, and ultimately it nudges you towards doing the actions
351
that you know are gonna make it more likely that you achieve your goal.
352
In this case, it's to maintain a good relationship with your spouse and kids and friends and family and stuff.
353
The final system I want to talk about in this video, and we could talk about this for absolutely ever because I love this stuff.
354
This would be some kind of system around what do you do by default when your paycheck comes in, assuming you have a job or assuming you have a business.
355
And in general, most personal finance advisors and gurus
356
and stuff who like think about this stuff a lot and advise people about it, talk about building a system to put your finances on autopilot as much as possible.
357
So the people that end up not saving or investing any money are the ones who get the paycheck.
358
and then they do whatever they want with it.
359
And then they're like, oh hey, yeah, at some point if there's any leftover, then I'll invest it or then I'll save it.
360
That often never works because there is often very little leftover.
361
Let's say this is your monthly paycheck.
362
As soon as the paycheck comes in, automatically some percentage of it is set aside for savings and it goes into a savings account, for example.
363
Automatically some percentage of it is set aside for investments
364
and it automatically goes into the investment account via Robinhood
365
or the Roth IRA or whatever the system is depending on your country.
366
Some percentage of it is automatically set aside for tax, if you are in a country or in a situation where you have to pay your own taxes.
367
Some is automatically set aside for bills.
368
And then you know that you can kind of do whatever you want with the rest, because at least the basics that are going to keep you out of prison
369
and that are going to grow your financial nest egg have been taken care of.
370
This is an example of a personal finance system.
371
It is a series of actions or steps
372
that you do every time you get your paycheck that reduces the need for guesswork.
373
And if you can automate as much of this as possible, it means that you don't even have to make the decision every single time, because it automatically goes into the savings account, and the investment account, and the bills account,
374
and the tax account, and then you know what's left over.
375
Whereas if this is not automated, then every single month, you have to actively make the decisions.
376
And the problem with actively making decisions is that we generally make decisions emotionally rather than logically.
377
Even though we like to think of ourselves as logical creatures, actually, like 99% of our decisions are made purely based on emotion.
378
And because our emotions are fluctuant, if we're feeling great and the paycheck hits, then fantastic.
379
We might be living in line with our future self and putting stuff into savings and investments.
380
But if we're not feeling great and the paycheck comes in, we might be doing a lot less sensible things when it comes to our money.
381
And so what a system does is that it removes the need for you to make that decision every single time.
382
You make the decision ahead of time.
383
You set it and forget it.
384
And that tends to be how the people that succeed at saving
385
and investing through the mechanism of something like a regular paycheck, they tend to have some kind of system around it.
386
Now, hopefully this video has convinced you
387
that it's very helpful to have systems around your personal and professional life to help you achieve your goals.
388
And if you're interested in learning more about the specific system that I've developed around goal setting, then there'll be a video right over here, which is about the GPS method.
389
Now GPS stands for goal, plan and system.
390
So it's another video that's about systems, but it will go into much more detail about specifically how to set goals, how to create plans and then how to build systems to make sure you actually stick to the plan.
391
So that'll be right over there.
392
And thank you so much for watching.
393
And I will see you over there.
394
Bye-bye.
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About This Lesson
You're practicing English with "Success Is Hard Until You Build Systems Like This" using the Shadowing technique — a method originally developed for professional interpreter training.
Focus on sounding like the speaker — not just repeating words. With 15–30 minutes of daily practice, you'll build real-world speaking confidence.
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.