Shadowing Practice: You Just Don't Want It Enough. - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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In a world that's changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.
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It's really good to be idealistic, but be prepared to be misunderstood.
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Anyone working on a big vision is going to get called crazy, even if you end up right.
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Anyone taking on a complex problem is going to get blamed for not fully understanding it, even though it's impossible to know everything up front.
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Anyone taking initiative will always get criticized for moving too fast because there's always someone who wants to slow you down.
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In our society, we often don't take on big things
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because we're so afraid of making mistakes that we ignore all the things wrong today if we do nothing.
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The reality is, anything we do today is going to have some issues in the future.
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But that can't stop us from getting started.
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So what are we waiting for?
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I just think part of learning is failing.
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So many things go wrong when you're starting a company, and often I think people ask, you know, what mistakes should you avoid making?
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And, you know, my answer to that question is, don't even bother trying to avoid mistakes, because you're going to make tons of mistakes, right?
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And the important thing is actually learning quickly from whatever mistakes you make and not giving up, right?
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And I mean there are things every single year of Facebook's existence
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that could have killed us or made it so
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that It just seemed like moving forward
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and making a lot of progress just seemed intractable
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But you just kind of bounce back and you learn
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and nothing is impossible You just have to kind of keep running through the walls.
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Let's do big things not just to create progress But to create purpose
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You know whenever it comes to Whenever you get yourself into
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a position where you have to make some some big shift in direction or do something you know, there are always people are going to point to the downside risks of that decision.
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And locally, they're maybe right, right?
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I mean, for any given decision that you're going to make, there's upside and downside.
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But in aggregate, if you are stagnant and you don't make those changes, then I think you're guaranteed to fail, right?
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And not catch up.
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So to some degree, I think it's really right that over time, the biggest risk that you can take is to not take any risks.
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Facebook wasn't the first thing I built.
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I also built chat systems and games, study tools and music players, and I'm not alone.
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J.K.
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Rowling got rejected 12 times before she finally wrote and published Harry Potter.
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Even Beyonce had to make hundreds of songs to get Halo!
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The greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail.
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Well, let me tell you a secret.
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No one does when they begin.
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Ideas don't come out fully formed.
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They only become clear as you work on them.
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You just have to get started.
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So I'm always very focused on people, and...
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I think the most important decision you're probably going to make if you're in college is who you surround yourself with, because you become like the people you surround yourself with.
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And, well I think you learn what matters to you
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and what's important and kind of your place in the world through repeatedly hitting your head against different challenges.
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And I mean I think that that is sort of, that's the journey, right?
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I mean that's the entrepreneurial journey.
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It's also, I think, part of the beauty of building things.
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And, um, but, you know, this is something that Jensen talks a lot about too.
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It's like, I feel like, you know, when you go to start a company,
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you know, everyone kind of writes down what they would like their values to be, but values are not what you write down on the wall.
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It's like your lived behaviors.
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And you only really learn what you care about when you have to make hard trade-offs and face challenges.
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So, yeah, you learn the most important things through facing challenges.
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You know, I actually, I spent a bunch of time analyzing
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and reflecting on why it was that we were even able to do it, because all, like all reasons suggest that we shouldn't have been able to do it, right?
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Because all these other companies had way more engineering power and servers and time and money and all this stuff.
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And I actually think that this is a pretty instructive thing for anything that you want to go do, because this is, the same property is going to be true for anything that you guys start,
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is that someone else is going to have more resources and be able to do it.
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The reason why I think we actually ended up being the ones doing it
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is because we just cared way more about it than everyone else.
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Right, so there were always projects at some of these other companies that were these hobbies,
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but we always thought that it was this really important thing and really just like felt in our gut, in our heart that we wanted to do it.
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And, you know, early on there were always these skeptics saying that, oh, this can't be a business.
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We didn't actually care that much about it being a business early on.
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But a lot of the reason why bigger companies didn't invest in it was
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because it wasn't clear that there was a model that would work for it.
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It seemed like a bad idea.
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Yeah, and I actually think that that's true for a lot of the best ideas.
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Where it is that it's not that someone else can't do it, they actually can.
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And the odds are stacked against you, but I think often that belief in the fact
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that you just care so much about what you're doing is the only thing that kind of drives you to do it.
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And to be honest, that kind of drives me to this day.
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One of the big emphasis points for the company right now is internet.org.
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For a while we had this rallying cry of can we connect a billion people
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and when we started talking about that we thought that was crazy.
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It was way bigger than any service in the world that had been built and it was ten digits long.
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It felt crazy, we'd never get to that.
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But then the thing is, as we started to actually get closer to that, we took a step back and we're like, all right, well, our mission isn't actually to get one in seven people in the world to be connected, it's we want to connect everyone.
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So it's a big issue that only around a third of the people in the world have access to the Internet, and that's something that we think that we can do something about.
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And similar to early Facebook, there's no business model around this.
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I mean, all the people who have all the money in the world, I mean, it's not necessarily a fair thing, are already the people who are on Facebook, right?
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It's in the first, you know, seventh of the world.
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But we just believe really strongly.
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It's like, this is what we are here to do.
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This is what our company cares about.
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I care about it.
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The team cares about it.
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Our culture cares about it.
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So we're just going to keep pushing on it.
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And I actually think a lot of the reason why great stuff gets built is
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because it's kind of irrational at the time.
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But so it kind of selects for the people who care the most about it doing it.
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First of all, focus on it.
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I mean, I think, like, you basically get what you spend your time doing.
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I want the company to build three products this year, and we're gonna work on a few others because people are interested in them, but those are the three things that I'm spending my product time on, right?
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You get what you put into it.
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If you spend a third of your time trying to make the people around you better through getting better people, mentoring, getting them to be better,
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getting the best people in your organization and you're known to more impactful roles, then I think over time that just accrues and you get a better organization.
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I don't hire people who I wouldn't work for myself.
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I think that's a really good heuristic because everyone knows this, there's this saying like A players hire A players and B players hire C players, which is like good people hire good people.
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And I don't think that that's that informative.
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Right, it's not that useful.
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What are you going to say to someone in your organization?
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Hire better people.
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You're a B player, you don't get to hire people.
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I mean, no. I mean, I think a lot of the time the problem is you don't actually know.
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Sometimes you're trying to figure out how good someone is.
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If you didn't think they were good, you wouldn't have hired them.
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But the heuristic of only hiring people who you would work for tends to be pretty good, I think.
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Because then it's like, then that you know.
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It's like, I would not work for this person, then okay, I'm not going to stretch just because I need to fill a role today.
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When you're starting something, it's just kind of hard.
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You need to be pretty headstrong about it.
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There are going to be all these challenges that come up.
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And I think the main thing that you need to do is just not give up.
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And kind of know what you want to do.
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The best entrepreneurs who I've met don't really start companies because their goal is to build a company.
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They do it because they want to make a change in the world and help people.
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And I think if you kind of stay true to that
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and if you just focus on kind of powering through no matter what the challenges are
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that will inevitably come up in your path, then you'll find that there are lots of tools that are available
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and a lot of people who will help you build what you're building.
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One definition that I have for a good team is a group of people
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that makes better decisions as a whole than would individually make as a sum of the parts.
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And when you're...
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I think most smart people like learning, right?
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And I mean that's like one of the thrills of starting a company, right?
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The learning curve can be so steep.
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And if you can set up a team dynamic where you're constantly learning from the people around you, then I mean what's better?
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These are the people I wake up every morning and I want to go learn from and work from.
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Is that one of your heuristics for hiring people too?
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To like hire people that you learn from?
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Yeah, and when building a team you want to think about the dynamics
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so that way you can maintain this property that the team makes better decisions as a group than any individual would.
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The more that we work on this, it actually seems like all the things that we think are going to happen, happen sooner.
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And being even more ambitious has been more predictive over the
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last few years about where things are likely going to be in the industry.
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So I mean, we keep on building, setting goals for our teams.
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Meta AI is like right about a billion people monthly active using it across our apps.
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We keep on setting these goals for what do we think is going to be the most used AI, what do we need to do?
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And we keep on passing them.
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And then others in the industry keep on passing their goals too.
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And then we're like, ah, we should have had even higher goals.
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Rule number two is always keep learning.
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I think that there are some things that you need to be able to do yourself.
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I think that's a lot of the basic fear that people have around this.
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I agree with that.
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Is that while we're building these amazing tools,
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we get away from this self-confidence and ability of being able to do this basic stuff yourself.
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So it's like, all right, you have a calculator, but it's still good to be able to do basic math in your head
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because there are a lot of things that come up throughout the day
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that you just want to have a general numeracy around right
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that often they're not expressed in numerical terms
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but just in terms of understanding trends or understanding arguments
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that people are making you kind of need to understand the shape of how numbers come together and
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so i think one of the big debates is like should
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we still teach our kids to program computers even though you're
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going to We're going to have these tools in the future
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that are just so much more powerful than anything that we have now to produce incredibly complicated pieces of software,
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I think the answer to that is probably yes, because I think teaching someone how to code is teaching them a way to think rigorously.
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And that even if they're not doing most of the code production, I think it's important that you kind of have the ability to think in that way.
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And I think it's going to just make you generally a better thinker and better person.
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So yeah, maybe that's like this generation's version of calculators.
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It's like, so you'll want to use the calculator, but you'll also want to be able to generally do without it.
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Other ones like language.
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I don't know.
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I mean, different people can come out.
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I mean, I think this is one of the interesting questions about parenting these days is like,
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is just kind of like what's important to teach your kids in an era where
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so much is going to change over the time that they're even in school.
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Language, I think you can make similar arguments.
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I know there's a lot of, it's probably going to be less functionally relevant in the future to learn multiple languages, but it sort of helps you think in different ways.
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I've found from the languages that I've studied that a lot of it, yeah, you learn about the structure of your own language you can, you know, you also learn about the culture, right?
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Because so much of how things are expressed in different places is tied to the nuance
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and the history of kind of what, so I think that's all valuable and interesting stuff to get into.
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But then, I don't know, at the same time, we only have so many hours in the day, so people need to prioritize what they're going to learn, and it may be that, okay, in a world with perfect translation,
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which, by the way, we basically just announced on the Ray-Ban Metas
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that now you're going to be able to just go to different countries We're starting out with just a few languages, but we'll roll it out to more.
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You could be traveling anywhere, and you have your glasses, and they just translate in real time in your ear. So it's wild.
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Yeah, so I think people are going to need to choose what they want to focus on going forward.
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I just think part of learning is failing.
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But obviously, when you're getting started with something, you're not going to be an expert at it immediately.
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So you just need to be willing to go with that.
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But I think this is like, I don't know.
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I mean, maybe I've just been embarrassed enough times in my life.
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Yeah.
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I do think there's a thing where like, as people grow up, maybe they don't want to be embarrassed or anything.
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They've built their adult identity and they kind of have a sense of who they are and what they want to project.
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And I don't know, I think maybe to some degree,
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you know, your ability to keep doing interesting things is your willingness to be embarrassed again
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and go back to step one and start as a beginner and get your ass kicked and look stupid doing things, but running the company.
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It's like we just take on new adventures, and all the big things that we're doing, I think of as 10-plus-year missions that we're on,
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where often early on, people doubt that we're going to be able to do it, and the initial work seemed kind of silly, and our whole ethos is we don't want to wait until something is perfect to put it out there.
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We want to get it out quickly and get feedback on it.
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So I don't know.
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I mean, there's probably just something about how I approach things in there, But I just kind of think that the moment that you decide
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that you're gonna be too embarrassed to try something new Then you're not gonna learn anything anymore.
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We have a lot of competitors
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In pretty much everything we do from social media to devices to advertising to like all the different areas, but I Don't know.
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I guess one philosophy that I've always had is I actually think your biggest
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The thing that determines your destiny is not a competitor.
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It's how you execute
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And I think most companies probably focus too much on competitors and maybe even focus too much on ideas.
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And I think at the end of the day, a lot of what makes great companies great is the ability to just relentlessly execute
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and efficiently execute and do that rigorously and just get better and better at it all the time.
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And that's one of the things that we've really focused on.
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So, I don't know, maybe it's like, it's sort of like a very, I don't know, like martial arts view of the world or something,
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that you, it's like when you go into a competition, it's not, you're not fighting another person, you're fighting yourself, right?
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And you're just trying to be a better version of yourself
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and make the company better and able to better execute every day.
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There's this culture in Silicon Valley that kind of makes startups seem glamorous.
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And I never really believed that, right?
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I never had a goal of starting a startup, and my goal when I realized
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that I had a company was to get it to be a good company as quickly as possible, where I didn't kind of get out of what you'd call the risky startup phase,
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where you are just constantly about to die, and where you could get to a point where you can actually do some interesting things
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and make a lot more interesting bets.
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And so I don't know, I never read a lot of the literature on this, and I mean, maybe if I had, then I wouldn't have made so many mistakes.
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because I don't know if learning for me is the right way to go on this, but it did, I think.
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Your model must have come from somewhere though, even if it was unintentional, right?
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Like, were you influenced by Peter Thiel or Sean?
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Well, yes, I was influenced by all these people once I met them.
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I hadn't really heard of Peter Thiel before Sean introduced me.
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Yeah, right.
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Yeah, but he was massively influential on my thinking.
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I mean, thinking.
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A lot of the early lessons that I took on how to think about strategy came from Peter and Sean.
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I did pay a lot of attention when I was growing up to Microsoft.
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I grew up using Windows 3.1 and then Windows 95, and I just thought that those were the most unbelievable things.
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In a sense, they are.
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Yeah, they really were awesome.
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Well, I don't know if you meant that positively, but I did.
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And I thought building this ecosystem was really neat, and that kind of inspired me.
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In the way that they built a platform, I kind of thought, okay, well, maybe one day the tools that I'm building can be part of a broader ecosystem as well.
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Phase one is build a thing that kind of sparks some joy and that people appreciate it.
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Then from there, you want to get to something that is retentive.
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So that way people who have a good experience with a thing come back and want to keep using it.
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And those two things are not, they're not always the same.
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There are a lot of things that people think are awesome, but may not always come back to.
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I mean, I think some of what people are seeing now around like chat GPT is part of that.
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It's like, I mean, this is like, like this level of AI is, it's like a miracle, right?
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It's awesome.
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But I mean, that doesn't mean that everyone is going to have a use case every week, So I think that there's first is like create the spark.
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Second is create the retention.
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Then once you have retention, then you can start encouraging more people to join.
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But if people aren't going to be retained by it, why would you ask people to go sign up for something? So step one, spark.
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Step two, retention.
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Step three, growth and scaling the community.
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And then only at that point is step four, which is monetization.
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And we take a while to go through all those.
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I mean, we're really, in some sense, only getting started on the monetization of the messaging experiences like WhatsApp now with stuff like business messaging.
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Took a while.
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Two billion people use the product every day, right?
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So, I mean, we scaled it pretty far.
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But I think with our model, that sort of works.
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It wasn't so long ago that I was a student
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and sitting in a seat in an auditorium like you guys are here today,
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listening to, I remember very specifically this time when Bill Gates came to talk at Harvard, and I was just like,
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wow, how do you do that?
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And, but, you know the trick is,
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is that the media likes to sensationalize this as
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if you have some eureka moment
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or you are some singular person who can't build something on your own and that's just not how the world works.
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You know, when I was in school I built a lot of stuff that I just liked building.
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There was not a single moment when I had some revelation that Facebook was going to be awesome.
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That's not maybe how the media or movies or whatever would like to portray things.
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It's much less exciting.
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But the reality is I think most services in the world that reach the scale that Facebook has
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You start off building something that you care about and you don't necessarily think it's going to be that big.
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I didn't.
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I built Facebook, the first version of Facebook, for my college community because I wanted to be able to connect with the people at my school.
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And I remember very clearly talking to my friends at the time and saying, how cool is it
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that we have built this community for our school? you know one day it's gonna be awesome
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when somebody else builds this for the world
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because something like this needs to exist for the world
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but it didn't even occur to me that you know my friends
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and I might be able to play a role in doing that right
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because we were college students right I mean we didn't have any you know engineers to work with
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or servers or resources or anything like that
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and you know there are these huge companies
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that deliver products for hundreds of millions of people right there's I always assumed
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that it was gonna be like Microsoft or Google
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or someone would build this for the world And what basically just happened is, at each step along the way,
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we just kind of kept doing the next thing and growing from there.
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And there were teams inside these other companies that thought social media was important and were working on it,
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but there were all these different memes and narratives in the world.
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You know, people would say, oh, well, this is just a fad.
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People are going to use it, but then they're going to stop.
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So, you know, so a lot of the teams who were working on it didn't take it that seriously, or the higher ups in those companies didn't care, so they didn't get resources,
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and we just kept going and going.
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And then people would say, all right, well, all right, fine.
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So maybe people are using it, but it's never gonna make any money, right?
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Social media doesn't make any money.
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And we just kind of kept going and going, and then pretty soon we had a service that was bigger than any of these other ones,
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and that kind of is how we are here where we are.
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There's no magic.
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A lot of times I think people just get afraid Because often your dream, it seems like it's so far off.
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But if you just kind of focus on building stuff
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that you think is good and you keep on going at each step along the way
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and don't let people deter you from that
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and you just really care about what you're doing and kind of don't give up at each step along the way, then I think that's how you build something good.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 299 sentences and 4356 words to shadow. The speech runs for 22:20. The speaker talks fast, about 195 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 89% 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 |
|---|---|---|
| hire verb | /ˈhaɪɹ/ | To obtain the services of in return for fixed payment. |
| connect verb | /kəˈnɛkt/ | To join (to another object): to attach, or to be intended to attach or capable of attaching, to another object. |
| embarrassed adjective | /ɪmˈbæɹ.əst/ | Having a feeling of shameful discomfort. |
| execute verb | /ˈɛksɪˌkjuːt/ | To kill, especially as punishment for a capital crime. |
| spark noun | /ˈspɑɹk/ | A small particle of glowing matter, either molten or on fire, resulting from an electrical surge or excessive heat created by friction. |
| startup noun | /ˈstɑɹtˌʌp/ | The act or process of starting a process or machine. |
| competitor noun | /kəmˈpɛt.ɪ.tɚ/ | A person or organization against whom one is competing. |
| retention noun | /ɹɪˈtɛnʃən/ | The act of retaining or something retained. |
| calculator noun | /kæl.kjə.leɪ.tɚ/ | A mechanical or electronic device that performs mathematical calculations; (now usually) an electronic one specifically. |
| necessarily adverb | /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/ | Inevitably; of necessity. |
| server noun | /ˈsɝvɚ/ | A program that provides services to other programs or devices, either in the same computer or over a computer network. |
| surround verb | /səˈɹaʊnd/ | To encircle something or simultaneously extend in all directions. |
| ecosystem noun | /ˈikoʊˌsɪstəm/ | A system formed by an ecological community and its environment that functions as a unit. |
| downside noun | /ˈdaʊnˌsaɪd/ | A disadvantageous aspect of something that is normally advantageous. |
| ignore verb | /ɪɡˈnɔː/ | To deliberately not listen or pay attention to. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| come out verb | /ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/ | To be discovered; to be revealed. |
| come up verb | To emerge or become known, especially unexpectedly. | |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| give up verb | To surrender (someone or something); to inform on (someone). | |
| grow up verb | To mature and become an adult. | |
| catch up verb | To pick up suddenly. | |
| come back verb | To return to a place. | |
| come together verb | /ˈkʌm tʊˈɡɛðɚ/ | To assemble; to congregate; to combine. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if I had, then I wouldn't have |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | someone who wants · people who have · people who care |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've met · has been · I've found |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | be misunderstood · are stacked · had been built |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 118 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, you're, we're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: bother /ˈbɑðɚ/, seventh /ˈsɛvənθ/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, thrill /θɹɪl/, ethos /ˈiθɑs/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: retention /ɹɪˈtɛnʃən/, translation /tɹænzˈleɪʃən/, initiative /ɪˈnɪʃ.ə.tɪv/, influential /ɪnflʊˈɛnʃəl/, martial /ˈmɑɹʃəl/
- Long words — get the stress right: competitor /kəmˈpɛt.ɪ.tɚ/, calculator /kæl.kjə.leɪ.tɚ/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, ecosystem /ˈikoʊˌsɪstəm/, complicated /ˈkɑm.plɪˌkeɪ.tɪd/
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 hire, connect, embarrassed.
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.