Shadowing Practice: View - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
C1
I want to show you how I became number one in different fields,
403 sentences
If sentences are too short or too long, click Edit to adjust them.
1
I want to show you how I became number one in different fields,
2
industries, and even broke a world record
3
and how you can apply the same process to winning or getting whatever it is that you want.
4
My name is Al Shamozzi.
5
I'm a portfolio of companies at acquisition.com that generates $250 million per year in aggregate revenue.
6
I did a book launch that did $106 million in a weekend
7
and broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest selling nonfiction book of all time.
8
And so there's my kind of proof behind that.
9
So in this video, I'm going to explain a core shift in my understanding of getting what I wanted
10
and specifically in business.
11
So this will be a belief breaker for you guys.
12
So I talk to business owners for a living every single day,
13
like literally every week, and I have for a decade plus.
14
And one of the things that drives me absolutely nuts is the idea of industry standards.
15
So you've probably heard this,
16
people are like, oh, this is industry standard, that's industry standard.
17
And I'll tell you a real conversation that might shift this for you.
18
So there was a company that I recently met with,
19
that was about a $500 million company.
20
So half a billion dollar company, right?
21
And they were efficient, but it was an old school model.
22
So I met with the chiefs of that business,
23
and I met with the leaders, right?
24
And the entrepreneur who runs the business wanted me to look
25
at certain components of how they do things in terms of acquisition and things like that.
26
And when I walked them through their acquisition process,
27
I was like, hey, these are some things that need to change.
28
And there was a lady who was there who was in charge,
29
or probably maybe half of it.
30
And at least, you know,
31
it fell under her purview.
32
And as I would, you know,
33
point out things that were bad or like needed improvement,
34
she kept repeating the same thing,
35
which is like, well, you know, we're industry standard.
36
and I was, and she'd be like,
37
we're meeting industry standards and she would get really kind of flustered and she kind of,
38
I would say maybe to a degree got offended because I was saying,
39
well, you know, this sucks and this sucks and these numbers aren't good.
40
And they kept repeating, we're meeting industry standards.
41
And so I paused and I was like,
42
do you wake up in the morning and just say,
43
I want to be an average company, right?
44
We are average.
45
Half the people are better than us and half are worse.
46
We are average.
47
Who gives a shit, right?
48
I don't know about you,
49
but like I didn't get in the game,
50
whatever game you're playing to be average.
51
Like the average business is average.
52
The average American is overweight.
53
They're in debt.
54
They're divorced.
55
They're depressed.
56
And so the average business makes almost no money.
57
Why would I use industry standards,
58
industry averages, anything like that at all?
59
And I say this because I have people who will push back on some of the things
60
that I talk about with regards to margin,
61
when I things I talk about in terms of timeline,
62
when I talk in terms of pricing, right?
63
And they'll say something like,
64
well, you know, in HVAC, it's different.
65
Or, you know, in SEO,
66
it's a little bit different.
67
Or, you know, we've got XYZ issue in trucking, and it's different.
68
It's logistics, it's different.
69
No, it's not.
70
You get what you tolerate.
71
You get what you accept and deem good enough.
72
You are the standard setter.
73
It is the highest and most important job in the company,
74
and it is why some companies prevail and some companies fail.
75
It's the reason that Jobs was so important for Apple,
76
Elon was so important for Tesla and XAI and all the other things that he does.
77
And at a certain point,
78
you cannot actually do anything in the company except for hold the fucking line.
79
And the person who should run every department or every division should be the person with the highest standards, right?
80
And this applies to everything, right?
81
Sales rates, closing percentages, profit margins,
82
cashflow, the people you date,
83
the body fat percentage you hold,
84
how fast you expect something to get done, literally everything.
85
Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10 stage roadmap from zero to 100 million plus
86
that less than 1% of companies finish.
87
I've now done multiple times.
88
And so I can say with a lot of confidence
89
that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through.
90
And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business,
91
what the constraint feels like,
92
like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it,
93
and then what steps we actually took to graduate.
94
And we've done this across software,
95
physical products, service businesses, brick and mortar,
96
all of this, and it works.
97
And it's my gift to you.
98
It's absolutely free.
99
And so the link's in the description,
100
but you just go acquisition.com forward slash roadmap,
101
just enter your info, and it'll spit it right back to you all free.
102
So let me tell you a story about a billionaire mentor of mine.
103
Again, I had a conversation many years ago,
104
and he said this thing to me that I'll I'll never forget.
105
He said, profit is unnatural.
106
And I was like, what does he really mean by that?
107
He said, it's common and normal for people when money is in a bank account to spend it.
108
And that's why most people don't have money.
109
He said, so if you have a company and it makes money and it actually starts to succeed,
110
that success has this constant pressure of normalcy that fights against it.
111
And so there has to be someone who holds the line and is like,
112
no, we will not spend more,
113
but we will keep making more.
114
We will get more customers and we will not hire more people.
115
We will find a way to service these customers better than we did our last customers without adding headcount.
116
And we're going to do it even better, even faster with less.
117
And so let me tell you another example of something that just happened in one of our portfolio companies.
118
So they needed to add 15 sales reps to hit their Q1 goals, right?
119
And so the leader was saying how his plan was to hire five reps a month, right?
120
Every single month.
121
And doing it this way,
122
he said, would stretch the team,
123
but it would still kind of like ensure quality,
124
make sure the culture wasn't too stressed, et cetera.
125
And honestly, it was a fair plan, right?
126
But for this business, the extra sales guys were going to add about 4 million in profit that quarter.
127
That's how much extra he was going to add just that quarter.
128
So I pushed back and I said,
129
why can't we do it in a month?
130
I need a lot of different reasons of,
131
and he kept hitting, you know,
132
like it'll be cultural issue.
133
I think we'll stretch the team.
134
We might lose other sales in other places.
135
And I kept pushing and pushing,
136
but he had some reasons to come back.
137
And thankfully he's a stud.
138
And then after the meeting,
139
he messaged me back and said,
140
two of our guys have bandwidth who are more senior.
141
They can assist the new manager and onboard three to five guys each.
142
If we do that, we can actually do it in a month.
143
And boom, $4 million more potential next year in Q1 because of one thing, a higher standard.
144
Just saying like, why does it need to take that long?
145
Why can't we?
146
Like, if we were doing a billion in sales in this business,
147
we probably wouldn't say we need to hire five guys a month.
148
No way.
149
Right.
150
We'd be like, we need to start with 50 and maybe add 50 every other week.
151
Right.
152
The, the, it's just this minimum standard of,
153
of something that you decide is enough or acceptable.
154
And the crazy part about it is like,
155
we're the ones who decide this.
156
And then we're upset that we don't get,
157
or that we're upset that we got the fruit of our very low standards.
158
And so the way that you can kind of know kind of what your standards are,
159
the, what the standard for somebody else on your team is,
160
is how many attack vectors you use to approach or solve a problem, right?
161
So it's not about doing the same thing a hundred times.
162
That's not smart, right?
163
It's about trying to accomplish the same goal with a hundred different iterations and angles until one finally gets through,
164
till you pass the goalie,
165
till you chop down the tree, right?
166
It's like, well, I'm hitting it this way and I'm getting rock.
167
It's like, okay, well then let's try from another angle.
168
Let's try underneath.
169
Let's see if we can poison the tree,
170
like whatever we need to do.
171
Can we reach out to our network and give $100,000 bounty for another SDR?
172
Is there a company with a large SDR team that doesn't make as much as us we can buy?
173
Can we hire five recruiters to speed up the process?
174
Can we fly all of the SDRs in person to get them trained up faster
175
so we don't lose cultural issues and we can get them on ramp in three days rather than in 30 days, right?
176
Can the top two, most experienced guys who have some blank space,
177
have them sub in?
178
Bingo, right?
179
All of these have costs,
180
obviously, but of the costs, they're still worth it.
181
So you're not getting what you want because you're not attacking the problems you have enough times in enough ways.
182
So you're trying one or two things and then saying like,
183
I tried that and it didn't work.
184
I tried Facebook ads.
185
You know, I tried making content.
186
I tried hiring a salesman and it didn't work.
187
It's like, no, it's not that it didn't work.
188
It's that you weren't skilled enough to make it work.
189
Very big difference.
190
And so you're gonna tell me that no one on earth has ever had the same problem that you have right now?
191
And of those many people on earth who've had it,
192
no one solved it.
193
You have somehow come across the Gordian knot of problems.
194
No one has hired more than five SDRs in this period of time for a company of this size.
195
Of course they have.
196
And that's why those people won.
197
And they didn't just accept that it wasn't possible within this timeline.
198
And so the rules that I would encourage you to live by is that unless the laws of physics prevent it,
199
consider it mental handicaps that your competition gets to live by and measure themselves by.
200
Not a suggestion, a recommendation,
201
and certainly not a fucking law, right?
202
Industry standards are a handicap that you let your competitors use and think they're doing well.
203
That is the gift that we get as soon as you get out of this belief.
204
Because if you want to be average, use industry averages.
205
And most industry average businesses suck, right?
206
Why would we look at them to judge ourselves by like,
207
oh, this guy's completely broke and distracted,
208
has no idea what he's doing.
209
I should look at what his numbers are and say,
210
oh, we're about the same.
211
Is that an accomplishment?
212
Should we be looking forward to something like that happen?
213
Like if you wanna be the best,
214
use physics and math and then work backwards.
215
And so I think something that'd be really good to finish on is this great piece by Jeff Bezos.
216
I want to read it to you because I think it just really drives this point home.
217
Differentiation is survival and the universe wants you to be typical.
218
This is my last annual shareholder letter as CEO of Amazon.
219
And I have one last thing of utmost importance I feel compelled to teach.
220
I hope all Amazonians take it to heart.
221
So here's a passage from Richard Dawkins' extraordinary book, The Blind Watchmaker.
222
It's about the basic fact of biology.
223
Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at.
224
left to itself, and that is what it is when it dies,
225
the body tends to revert to the state of equilibrium within its environment.
226
If you measure some quantity,
227
such as temperature, the acidity,
228
the water content, or the electrical potential in a living body,
229
you'll typically find that it's markedly different from the corresponding measure in the surroundings.
230
Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than the surroundings.
231
And in cold climates, they have to work hard to maintain that differential.
232
When we die, the work stops.
233
the temperature differential starts to dissipate,
234
and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings.
235
Not all animals work so hard to avoid coming into equilibrium with their surrounding temperature,
236
but all animals do some comparable work.
237
For instance, in a dry country,
238
animals and plants work to maintain the fluid content of their cells,
239
work against a natural tendency for water to flow from them into the dry outside world.
240
If they fail, they die.
241
More generally, if living things didn't work actively to prevent it,
242
they would eventually merge into their surroundings and cease to exist as autonomous beings.
243
This is what happens when they die.
244
While the passage is not intended as a metaphor,
245
it's nevertheless a fantastic one and very relevant to Amazon.
246
I would argue it's relevant to all companies and all institutions and to each of our individual lives too.
247
In what ways does the world pull at you in an attempt to make you normal?
248
How much work does it take to maintain your distinctiveness,
249
to keep alive the thing or things that make you special.
250
I know a happily married couple who have a running joke in their relationship.
251
Not infrequently, the husband looks at his wife with faux distress and says to her,
252
can't you just be normal?
253
They both smile and laugh.
254
And of course, the deep truth is that her distinctiveness is something that he loves about her.
255
But at the same time,
256
it's also true that things would be often easier,
257
take less energy if they were a little more normal, right?
258
This phenomenon happens at scale at all levels.
259
Democracies are not normal.
260
Tyranny is this historical norm.
261
If we stopped doing all the continuous work that is needed to maintain our distinctiveness in that regard,
262
we would quickly come into equilibrium with tyranny.
263
We all know that distinctiveness, originality, is valuable.
264
We're all taught to be yourself.
265
What I'm really asking you to do is to embrace
266
and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness.
267
The world wants you to be typical.
268
In a thousand ways, it pulls at you.
269
Don't let it happen.
270
You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it's worth it.
271
The fairytale version of be yourself is that all your pain stops as soon as you allow distinctiveness to shine.
272
That version is misleading.
273
Being yourself is worth it,
274
but don't expect to be easy or free.
275
You'll have to put energy into it continuously.
276
The world will always try to make Amazon more typical,
277
to bring us into equilibrium with our environment.
278
It will take continuous effort,
279
but we can and we must be better than that.
280
You have to hold the fucking line.
281
Like, this is the last letter that Jeff Bezos wrote.
282
And can you think about,
283
like, all the things that he wanted to say?
284
The thing that he chose to leave on was the line,
285
was this is the standard.
286
This is what makes us different.
287
And of course it's going to take work.
288
Of course it's going to take more ways to solve the problem.
289
It might cost millions more in order to do the better solution than the easy solution.
290
But, like, if I could just transfer this one thing,
291
like, you can tell how good someone will be as an entrepreneur by the standards they keep for themselves.
292
They continue to push back and say like,
293
why can't it be faster?
294
Why can't it be easier?
295
And there's famous stories of Steve Jobs putting the phone book on the desk and saying it has to fit in there.
296
And people have been saying,
297
it's never been done before.
298
And you've got Elon Musk going on the manufacturing line saying,
299
this could have two bolts.
300
And they're like, there's no way no one's done it before.
301
And he's like, break it down to physics.
302
Why can't we do this?
303
And so when someone pushes back on you and says,
304
we can't hire that fast.
305
It's like, why?
306
What physical law is preventing us from hiring that fast?
307
If another company who's 20 times their size can hire 100 people a day,
308
why is it taking us a year to do it, right?
309
What choice are we choosing or what cost are we not choosing to bear
310
that we could bear to make the investment to pull a future forward?
311
And I think it's like that push,
312
that relentless energy, the drive to choose to be different, right?
313
To choose to hold a value,
314
the perfect value that you have as the ideal,
315
and then to strive continuously and though imperfectly to try and live that out.
316
And I think of that as like the reason you win or you don't win.
317
And again, I'm not talking table stakes.
318
If you want to be average,
319
then just look at industry averages, right?
320
Look at industry norms, industry standards.
321
But most businesses, if you looked at the average business in the US, they break even.
322
The median business almost makes no money, right?
323
And so it's like, why would we measure ourselves by that?
324
We have to, by very definition,
325
reject the vast majority of what other people do in order to achieve what other people can't.
326
And I think that that is like,
327
I would encourage you to be less reasonable.
328
And I would say that it has been a skill that has served me well.
329
I mean, you can imagine having,
330
saying, hey, we, I want to break the world record
331
that every other person who has had a book has had massive media empires.
332
They've had big deals.
333
They had national media behind them for presidents and monarchs who released books.
334
And I'm saying, I'm just some guy in America saying like,
335
let's see if we can do more than all of them.
336
And we did, we fucking did, right?
337
We outsold Prince Harry, Obama combined within 24 hours.
338
And to be fair, please don't kill me for,
339
you know, having some point of disrespect for whatever secret nations exist, right?
340
But I'm only saying this to make the point,
341
which is like, when I set that goal originally,
342
can you imagine the amount of people who are like,
343
I don't know if that's realistic, man.
344
Like, hey, that's a really big number.
345
Like, I've really thought, I mean,
346
like, but what if it doesn't happen?
347
I had someone ask me that.
348
They said, well, what if we don't hit the goal?
349
And I said, we dare greatly, motherfucker.
350
That's the point.
351
Like, so what if we don't hit the goal?
352
It doesn't mean we don't,
353
we give ourselves an excuse to not try,
354
but like try in earnest,
355
not say like, oh, we're going to do this and we hope this happens.
356
It's like, no, we want to have five different versions of this thing going wrong and it's still hitting the goal.
357
And so I say this because like the goals that I have
358
and probably the goals that you have never apologize for them.
359
They're, they're, it's normal for them to be unreasonable,
360
but you don't need to be reasonable.
361
The world wants you to be reasonable.
362
It's like you need to be unreasonable.
363
You need to stick your feet in the mud.
364
And there's a certain amount of stubbornness that's required.
365
And I think part of the reason that Peter Thiel
366
and some of these great investors talk about phenomenal entrepreneurs is that they have – sometimes they don't have super high agreeableness.
367
It's that they don't need consensus.
368
They don't need everyone else to like them because they believe what they believe, right?
369
And the thing is that in order to have an outsized return at anything,
370
you have to bet against conventional wisdom, right?
371
And conventional wisdom can be right.
372
And so that means that fundamentally either you're an idiot or you're right and you're early and that's where you get rewarded.
373
And so you have to think,
374
like, at least the process I come down to is always like,
375
what physical law of reality prevents us from selling this many books?
376
And that's why it came down to like,
377
all right, we'll have multiple generators.
378
Like, if we don't have power, we can't sell books.
379
We have to make sure that we have backups for internet.
380
If we don't have internet, we can't sell books.
381
Okay.
382
Do we have enough books to sell?
383
We got to print them.
384
Okay, great.
385
We have to have logistics that we have hundreds and hundreds of people ready to actually ship those books out.
386
Okay.
387
If we have each of these things,
388
then all that it really takes is enough people to see it and an offer enough that is compelling,
389
that makes sense for a big enough audience to say yes.
390
That's it.
391
And so you have these problems in your business.
392
You're not cash flowing enough.
393
You're not hiring fast enough.
394
You're not, your price isn't what you want it to be.
395
If you believe and you can reason it to say like,
396
what prevents us from doing this?
397
I think that that's where you can get these special outsized returns.
398
I think that's where you can have the unreasonable accomplishments,
399
but it comes first from having unreasonable conviction that you will hold the line,
400
that this will be the standard that you have.
401
And the fact that no one else has ever done it before means absolutely nothing to you
402
because there's no reason that they couldn't have done it.
403
And good on you for ignoring the fact of their mediocrity.
Download App
AI scoring for every sentence you speak
TRENDING
Popular
About This Lesson
In this lesson, you will practice enhancing your English speaking skills through listening and shadowing techniques. By analyzing the transcript of a compelling YouTube video where the speaker, Al Shamozzi, discusses breaking industry standards and achieving significant business success, you will learn how to express opinions confidently and engage in discussions about standards and expectations in various scenarios. This exercise will help you not only improve your English pronunciation but also develop your ability to articulate your thoughts clearly and assertively.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Industry standard - A benchmark of quality or performance that is generally accepted in a particular industry.
- Efficient - Achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.
- Belief breaker - An idea or concept that challenges commonly held beliefs.
- Acquisition process - The steps involved in acquiring a business or its assets.
- Average company - A business that performs at the midpoint relative to its industry peers.
- Flustered - Agitated or confused, particularly due to unexpected challenges.
- Perspective - A particular attitude or way of regarding something; a point of view.
Practice Tips
To effectively learn English with YouTube and make the most of this video, consider the following practice tips:
- Shadow the Speaker: Use a shadowing app to repeat Al Shamozzi’s phrases immediately after he says them. Aim for clarity and fidelity to his speech. This will help improve your English pronunciation and rhythm.
- Focus on Tone and Emotion: Pay attention to the tone and emotion in the speaker's voice. Notice how he emphasizes certain words, especially when discussing ideas that challenge the norm, such as "average" and "industry standards."
- Pause and Reflect: After each key idea, pause the video and reflect on how you would respond. Take this time to practice forming your own opinions about industry standards versus personal standards.
- Repeat for Mastery: Replay sections where you find difficulty. Repetition will help solidify not only the vocabulary but also the correct articulation and intonation you aim to achieve.
- Engage with a Partner: If possible, practice shadowing with a partner. This can encourage you to speak more confidently and provide constructive feedback on each other’s pronunciation.
By incorporating these tips into your practice routine, you can effectively utilize “shadowspeak” techniques to enhance your speaking abilities and gain confidence in conversing in English.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
☕ Buy us a coffee
ShadowingEnglish remains 100% free thanks to your support. Server and AI costs are high — your coffee keeps us going! 🙏