Shadowing Practice: The Art of Systems | James Clear - Learn English Speaking with Video
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So if you're building a habit, there are roughly four different stages that every habit goes through.
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Cue, craving, response, and reward.
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So pretty much every habit follows that cycle.
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And you can see that, you know, this paperclip strategy does kind of play into this a little bit.
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I came across this guy named Trent Durstman.
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He had this job where he was a stockbroker in Abbotsford, Canada.
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And he had this one simple habit
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that he used to end up becoming the top performer in the firm
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and building the biggest book of business there over like the next couple of years.
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And it was this simple strategy of paperclips.
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So all he did is whenever I make a call,
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I'm going to make a sales call and then I'm going to take one paperclip and then move it over.
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And then I'm going to make another sales call.
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I'm going to take another paperclip and move it over.
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And he had a hundred paperclips in the jar.
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And his goal every day was to move a hundred from one jar to the next.
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And that was all he did.
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And with that one simple habit, he ended up building this huge book of business.
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Q, you have the paperclips on the desk, right?
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So like, not only do you want to make the sales calls for a business standpoint,
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but you also have these staring at you every morning when you come into your desk.
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And so it's a little bit of a visual reminder.
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Reminds you, prompts you, just think, okay, all right, I do want to make these calls and try to drive more business or,
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you know, build up the, make another successful sales call.
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That craving gets you to pick up the phone, which is the actual response.
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And then the reward is I get to move the paperclip over.
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And now I feel like, yeah, you get the little ting, jingle in your ear of the paperclip hitting.
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And, you know, it just adds to the reward effect.
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What I think is most interesting is how do we take this, how do we take these four steps that basically all behaviors go through
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and then translate it into something that we can use and apply in daily life and work.
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I learned when you said that ambitious people, they have lots of aspirations, lots of habits they want to start.
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I was thinking about myself and thinking, there's probably 30 habits that I would like to acquire.
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I'd want to be better at writing.
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I want to be a runner.
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I want to be better at speaking.
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I want to
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be a better friend and be more attentive with my friends and all of these new habits that I want to pursue.
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How does one know which one to aim for first?
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Is there a framework for knowing?
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I do think there's some level of strategy,
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which is a good place to start is by asking yourself which habits are upstream from other good things happening.
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So, for example, I know that if you were, maybe the question to start with is, when you live a good day,
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when you feel dialed in, when things are like rolling along well for you, what tends to be part of that day?
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Sleep.
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You know, okay, great.
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So that's, you know, I would say for me, sleep is definitely one.
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I would say getting my workout in and usually reading and writing are part of it,
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but I think I could just boil it down to reading.
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If I just read like 10 pages, that often sparks the writing.
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It's like reading is like the fuel for writing for me.
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So I could say, get a workout in and read for five minutes or 10 minutes.
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Those are the two things that are part of a good day.
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And what happens is they're upstream from a lot of other good things happening.
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For example, if I get the workout in, yeah, I feel good.
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I get the benefits of the workout, but I also have a post -workout high for like an hour or two.
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So my focus and concentration is better.
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I sleep better at night because I got the workout in.
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Now I'm tired.
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I tend to eat better when I work out.
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It's when I'm not working out that I eat terribly.
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I don't know.
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It's kind of like I don't want to waste it or something.
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So at no point was I trying to build better focus habits or sleep habits or nutrition habits.
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Those just came kind of as a natural consequence of getting the workout in.
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So what are those things that you do that are upstream from other good things happening?
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I think those are good like anchor habits to start and focus on.
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If I could add another one for myself, I would say it's a little bit of time.
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It's really just time to think, but it's time to reflect and review.
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There's this interesting thing that happens.
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If you have a really good work ethic, if you have a strong work ethic and working hard has gotten you far in life,
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it kind of becomes a crutch.
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For a long time, I was like, if I ever had a problem, I was like, well, I'll just work my way out of it.
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I'll just work harder on it until I figure it out.
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And that's great.
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That's really powerful for a lot of things.
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But at some point it breaks, you know, like you can maybe if you really try,
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maybe you can work 10 % harder or 20 % harder, but there's some limit.
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But if you work on the right thing, well, you could get 100x the result or 1000x the result.
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And so if you just keep your head down and work hard,
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it's very unlikely that you'll be spending your time in the highest and best way.
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and the only way to figure that out is to have time to reflect
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and review time to think you know
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so you need enough time to think to figure out what should I be focused on next
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and so I think
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that is almost all it's almost reflection review is almost like the meta habit
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that is above all others because if you give yourself time to reflect
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and review then you can troubleshoot your habits
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and figure out how to adjust them you start thinking even
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if you don't say this explicitly you think like what would peak performance look like you know
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if I could really get my habits dialed in.
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What could I do?
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And you start imagining five,
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six, seven things that you would do and what all of them would look like in their perfect form and so on.
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And I think instead of asking ourselves, what could I do on my best day?
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It's better to start by asking, what can I stick to even on the bad days?
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And that becomes your baseline.
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That becomes the first step.
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And now that you have this floor that is achievable, even when you're tired, even when you're exhausted, even when you don't have much time,
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now you can show up and feel like you're succeeding you know and then you can progress from there.
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One of the most motivating feelings to the human mind is feeling of progress.
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If you feel like you're making progress even
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if it's smaller than what you ultimately hope to do you have every reason to move forward
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but often we become like a victim of our expectations.
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We spend all this time optimizing the perfect plan
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and then expect things to go perfectly out of the gate
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and you had it so built up in your mind
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that once you don't hit that mark in the first or second or third day it falls apart.
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You know, really what we're talking about there is you just need to be okay with being inconvenienced
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or uncomfortable for like five to ten minutes.
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Getting dressed, getting through the rain, getting to your car, getting to the gym.
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The workout is the same that it's always been.
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It's the same, you're in the same gym that you are in the summer when the weather's beautiful or whatever.
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So it's really, can you handle that like five minutes of inconvenience?
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And so many things in life are like that.
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Can you master that little moment?
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And if you can, and you can still get started, that's when you gain an advantage which everybody works out on the good days.
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But on the days when you feel stressed and tired, on the days when the weather's bad and it's kind of inconvenient,
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on the days when you don't really feel like it, can you show up, even if it's in a small way?
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One of my little mantras that I try to keep in mind is reduce the scope, but stick to the schedule.
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So the normal scope might be, I write for 30 minutes.
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And then you look up at the clock and you're like, oh, I only have 15.
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And sometimes what happens in your head is you're like, oh, I don't have enough time to write today.
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Or you're like, oh, I was planning to work out for 60 minutes and you look up and you're like, time got away from me.
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I only have 20 minutes now.
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I don't have time to go to the gym.
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It's easy to talk yourself out of it, but reduce the scope, but stick to the schedule.
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It's like, well, I only got 20 minutes instead of 60.
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So I'll just get in there and do a couple sets of squats and that's it.
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And I've had so many workouts that have been like that, where you're like almost, you know, it's easy to be kind of disappointed.
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You weren't able to do the whole thing that you wanted to do, but you didn't throw up a zero.
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And if you don't throw up a zero, you maintain the habit.
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And if you maintain the habit, all you need is time.
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And so the bad days are more important than the good days in that sense.
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You need to figure out how do you show up even when it's not optimal.
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Is there anything that you've learned, any frameworks, any tactics for making sure you get past
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that first five minutes so you can get into the flow of the habit?
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Yeah, there's multiple things.
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So first thing is try to prime the environment to make the first action easy.
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Prime the environment to make the first action easy.
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So let's say writing, for example.
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I find that for myself, the biggest point of friction is choosing what to write about.
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Once I've actually finally settled, this is the thing I'm writing today, then I can get into it and I'm off and running.
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But I'll sit there for two hours just debating whether it's the right thing to be focused on writing or not.
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You know, should I work on this chapter?
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Should I work on something else or whatever?
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So what I've started to do is sometimes I will write the first sentence of what I'm going to write
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and just leave it on the Google Doc right there and then leave.
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And the next day when I come back, I'm already in, right?
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Like it's already the first sentence is already written.
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So now I'm just writing the next piece of what's coming rather than trying to choose what to write about.
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Another one that I've done sometimes is I will write sometimes I'll write the topic
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or I'll write the sentence on a post -it note and I'll put it on top of the keyboard.
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And so when I come into the office, it's right there in front.
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I can't, you know, I got to pick it off the keys to log on to the computer.
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And so it's like, remember, this is what you're writing about right now, you know, so it's just trying to make it easy to get in.
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I have a bunch of readers who do stuff like set their running out running clothes out the night before
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You know, so they're right next to the bed.
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You got your clothes new shoes there I one woman I just talked to her at an event
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She came up afterward and she said I actually sleep in my running clothes
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and I just get out and put her shoes on It goes right out the door,
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but you're trying to prime the environment to make the action easy
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Okay, so how can you set up the spaces that you're in?
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To prime those habits.
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I think one really interesting question to ask
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Walk into the rooms where you spend most of your time each day your office your living room,
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your bedroom, and then look around and ask yourself, what is this space designed to encourage?
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What behaviors are easy here?
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What behaviors are obvious here?
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And the good habits that you say you want to build, are those the path of least resistance?
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Is that the obvious thing in this environment?
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And if not, maybe you can make some adjustments to try to make the good habit easier
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and the distractions maybe a little bit harder.
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So that's first thing, prime the environment to make the action easy.
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Second thing is if there's like one principle that is probably the single most important for building habits, it's make it easy.
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Just scale it down and make it easy.
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I refer to it sometimes as the two minute rule.
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So take whatever habit you're trying to work on, you scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do.
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Read 30 books a year becomes read one page or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat.
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sometimes I will mention this to people and they resist a little bit, you know, they're like, okay,
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buddy, like, I know the real goal isn't just to take my yoga mat out, you know, no, I'm actually trying to do the workout.
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So this is some kind of mental trick.
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And I know it's a trick, then why would I fall for it basically?
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But there's this guy, I mentioned him in Atomic Habits, his name's Mitch.
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And he went to the gym.
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And for the first six weeks, he had this strange little rule for himself where he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes.
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So get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car, drive home.
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And you're like, this sounds silly, right?
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Clearly this is not going to get the guy the results that he wants.
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But what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up, right?
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He was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week, even if it was only for five minutes.
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And so I think this is kind of a deep truth about habits, which is a habit must be established before it can be improved.
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You know, it has to become the standard in your life before you optimize and scale it up into something more.
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There's that quote from Ed Lattimore where he says, the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door.
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There are a lot of things in life that are like that.
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And so by trying to make it easy to master, easy to get started, then you're in the game.
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Now you're in the arena.
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There's all kinds of things you can improve from there.
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A lot of the time when someone sits down and they want to build a new habit, they don't say this,
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but what they kind of assume is what it would mean to be successful with this habit is
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that I do it for the rest of my life.
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You know, and that if at some point I'm not doing it, then that must mean that I failed or I quit on it.
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But that's not how it is at all.
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Like things have a season, you know, and so habits have to change shape over time.
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Let's take my writing habit, for example.
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The habit that launched my career was I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday, and I did that for three years.
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So the first three years, 150 articles, you know, write twice a week.
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That was a great habit.
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There were like 2000 word pieces or so.
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But then I signed the book deal for Atomic Habits.
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I didn't have the capacity to do that and also write the book.
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So that had to change.
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I wrote the book for like three years
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and then the book came out and now I write a newsletter once a week and that's much shorter.
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But I kind of feel like my writing habit is maintained that whole time.
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It just changed shape, but that's fine.
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It just needed to shift based on the season.
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But I don't know people, they get so attached to one form of a habit sometimes that they don't realize that it's no longer serving them.
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And I think that's one of the trickier things to give up, is a habit that used to be good for you,
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that used to work well, but no longer serves you in your current season.
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I find that I'm kind of a slow learner with that.
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A fundamental part of life is trade -offs, and you cannot be good at everything at the same time.
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So this is true across projects.
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You choose to try to do seven things at once, spreading yourself thin in seven different ways is very hard to be excellent.
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For me, what I think about is life has a series of seasons and life has a series of sequences.
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So let's say it's not always exactly 10 years, but let's say the big movements in life are roughly 10 -year buckets.
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So for me, building my first business, that was kind of like a 10 -year thing.
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And eventually it led to the launch of Atomic Habits.
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You maybe get five or six of those in your adult life.
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Some of those things make sense to do in a different order than others like
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if you want to travel the world and see a bunch of places
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and party in Ibiza you're probably not going to do
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that in your 60s you know like I mean you can there's no nobody's saying you can't
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but it's some things are probably better sequenced in other
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you know in other spots obviously there's you know especially for women there's a certain limit on
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if you want to have a family what decades that happens in
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so yeah it's just uh it's just a matter of sequencing and prioritization
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if you look at the like tapestry of your life what do you want the big movements to be
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and where do those seasons need to slot in.
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Yeah, it's a, it's a, there is no right answer, but it's interesting that as soon as you realize it's a finite number,
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and as soon as you realize that trade -offs are always going to be a reality, you have to deal with that in some way.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “The Art of Systems”. This video has 240 sentences and 3260 words to shadow. The speech runs for 13:51. The speaker talks fast, about 235 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 87% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is easy to follow.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| habit noun | /ˈhæb.ɪt/ | An action performed on a regular basis. |
| workout noun | /ˈwɝk.aʊ̯t/ | An exercise session; a period of physical exercise. |
| reflect verb | /ɹɪˈflɛkt/ | To bend back (light, etc.) from a surface. |
| sequence noun | /ˈsiː.kwəns/ | A set of things next to each other in a set order; a series. |
| reward noun | /ɹɪˈwɔɹd/ | Something of value given in return for an act. |
| scope noun | /skəʊp/ | The breadth, depth or reach of a subject; the extent of applicability or relevance; a domain, purview or remit. |
| yoga noun | /ˈjoʊ.ɡə/ | Any of several Hindu or Buddhist disciplines aimed at training the consciousness for a state of perfect spiritual insight and tranquillity; especially a system… |
| cloth noun | /klɒθ/ | A fabric, usually made of woven, knitted, or felted fibres or filaments, such as used in dressing, decorating, cleaning or other practical use. Sometimes… |
| upstream adjective | /ʌpˈstɹiːm/ | In a direction against the flow of a current or stream of fluid (typically water); upriver. |
| trick noun | /ˈtɹɪk/ | Something designed to fool, dupe, outsmart, mislead or swindle. |
| desk noun | /dɛsk/ | A table, frame, or case, in past centuries usually with a sloping top but now usually with a flat top, for the use of writers and readers. It often has a… |
| roughly adverb | /ˈɹʌf.li/ | In a rough manner; without kindness, softness, or gentleness. |
| framework noun | /ˈfɹeɪm.wɜːk/ | A support structure comprising joined parts or conglomerated particles and intervening open spaces of similar or larger size. |
| shoe noun | /ˈʃu/ | A protective covering for the foot, with a bottom part composed of thick leather or plastic sole and often a thicker heel, and a softer upper part made of… |
| dial noun | /ˈdaɪ.əl/ | A graduated, circular scale over which a needle moves to show a measurement (such as speed). |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| show up verb | To appear, arrive, or attend, especially suddenly or erratically. | |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. | |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| get out verb | To leave or escape. | |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. | |
| throw up verb | To vomit. | |
| work out verb | /ˌwɝk ˈaʊt/ | To calculate. |
| build up verb | To erect; to construct. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- I'd want to be better at writing.
- What could I do?
- Can you master that little moment?
- You know, should I work on this chapter?
- Should I work on something else or whatever?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to end · used to be · used to work |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has gotten · it's always been · I've had |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | being inconvenienced · is already written · wasn't allowed |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | phone, which is · habits, which is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 70 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, I'm, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: cloth /klɒθ/, ethic /ˈɛθ.ɪk/, thin /ˈθɪn/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: shoe /ˈʃu/, concentration /ˌkɑn.sənˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/, reflection /ɹɪˈflɛkʃən/, nutrition /njuːˈtɹɪʃ.ən/, expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: inconvenience /ɪnkənˈvinjəns/, disappointed /ˌdɪsəˈpɔɪnɪd/, fundamental /ˌfʌn.dəˈmɛn.təl/, concentration /ˌkɑn.sənˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/, uncomfortable /ʌnˈkʌm.fɚ.tə.bl̩/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like habit, workout, reflect.
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.