Shadowing Adam Grant

Summary

Adam Grant describes languishing as a state of emptiness and stalled motivation that can exist without depression or burnout. During the pandemic, he found himself staying up late and searching for small distractions despite understanding motivation professionally. Family games of Mario Kart unexpectedly helped him feel engaged again. He uses that experience to explain flow through three conditions: mastery, mindfulness and mattering.

Key points, in order

1. Naming languishing can make a hard-to-describe experience easier to recognize and discuss. Grant challenges the pressure to seem constantly upbeat and describes research in which demanding more positive examples did not necessarily make people happier.
2. Mastery means noticing progress, including small wins rather than only major achievements. Mindfulness means giving one activity full attention; constant checking and task switching fragment the time needed for absorption.
3. Mattering adds a sense that your actions benefit someone. Grant describes a fundraising experiment where callers met a scholarship recipient and subsequently engaged more strongly with the purpose of their work.
4. The family game combined challenge, concentration and connection across distance. His conclusion is that a response to languishing can be joyful shared activity, and need not always be another productive accomplishment.

Five useful phrases to practise

Choose a caption line to open Repeat mode. Listen, then say it after the speaker.

1. 1:10 I just felt a little bit aimless and a little bit joyless.
2. 6:50 It's that state of total absorption in an activity.
3. 10:13 But mastery does not have to be a big accomplishment, it can be small wins.
4. 11:46 If we want to find flow, we need better boundaries.
5. 12:43 Mattering. Knowing that you make a difference to other people.

Based on the video’s captions. Original video: Adam Grant: How to stop languishing and start finding flow | TED · TED.

Everyday phrases from this video

• take a look
• can I get
• make a difference
• make sense
• at the same time

• Level: B2–C1
• Accent: American
• Length: 16 min · 204 lines to practise
• Speed: about 149 words a minute (an average pace)
• Words: about 2,340; the talk asks 10 questions

What to focus on in this talk

Learn the central terms first, then practise the examples that explain them.

What this talk trains

Adam Grant speaks for about 16 minutes: roughly 2,340 words in 204 caption lines. The pace stays fairly even, about 147 words a minute in the first quarter and 158 in the last. Overall it is faster than 22 of the other 66 talks on Sada. Its sentences average 12.3 words, no longer than the middle of the library (14.3), and 18.8% of its words fall outside the 3,000 most common English words (library middle: 12.9%). It asks 10 questions, so there is plenty of question intonation to copy. Phrases that fast speech often shortens come up again and again: “going to” (3 times) and “want to” (3 times).

Lines from across the talk, and what each one trains

One line from each quarter of the talk. Press a line to open it in Sada, ready to record. “Linking” marks words that run together: a word ending in a consonant sound joins the vowel that starts the next one.

1. 2:39 I was seeing it all over the media, being discussed by celebrities, by royalty.

   Linking: say “seeing it”, “it all”, “all over” without a break between the words. Several commas: say it in short chunks first, then as one line.

2. 5:52 AG: You want to name all the poets you’ve ever heard of?

   “want to”: fast speech often shortens it to “wanna” when a verb follows. Listen for whether the speaker does here. A question: listen to where the voice rises or falls at the end, and copy it.

3. 9:35 Mastery is something a lot of us have been having a hard time finding lately.

   “a lot of”: fast speech often shortens it to “a lotta”. Listen for whether the speaker does here. Linking: say “something a”, “lot of”, “having a” without a break between the words.

4. 12:02 She went to a Fortune 500 company and she tested a quiet time policy.

   A number (500): practise saying it at the speaker’s speed. One of the quicker lines: about 192 words a minute by the caption timing, against 149 for the whole talk.

Words that keep coming up

Words outside the 3,000 most common English words that Adam Grant uses more than once. The number is how often each is said. Look up any you don’t know, then press it to practise the line where it first comes up.

• languishing ×16
• mastery ×8
• pandemic ×5
• mindfulness ×5
• explain ×4
• peak ×4
• bingeing ×3
• psychologist ×3

How the pace changes through the talk

The fastest minute starts at 8:12 (about 189 words a minute): practise that minute once the rest feels easy. The slowest starts at 10:40 (about 95): a good minute to warm up with.

Measured from the caption timing, so the numbers are close, not exact.

How the talk opens: press any line to practise it

1. 0:12 I know you all have long to-do lists, but I hate wasting time so much that I have a to-don't list.
2. 0:19 Don't scroll on social media,
3. 0:21 don't check my phone in bed and don't turn on the TV unless I already know what I want to watch.
4. 0:27 But last year I found myself breaking all of those rules.
5. 0:31 I was staying up way past midnight, doomscrolling,
6. 0:34 playing endless games of online Scrabble and bingeing entire seasons of TV shows that weren't even good.

How to practise this talk

1. Warm up on the slowest minute (from 10:40) or on the opening lines above.
2. Then take the chosen lines above one at a time: linked words, a line said in chunks, a shortened phrase, a question, a number, a quick line.
3. On each line, press Record and say it after Adam Grant (Repeat) or along with them (Shadow), then open Compare and go again until every word is green.
4. Save the fastest minute (from 8:12, about 189 words a minute) for last.
5. At one minute a day you finish the whole talk in about 16 days, and Sada shows your first try against your latest.

More talks to practise

• Adam Grant — The Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers (B1–B2 · 165 words a minute · same speaker)
• Adam Grant — What Frogs in Hot Water Can Teach Us About Thinking Again (B2–C1 · 173 words a minute · same speaker)
• Robert Waldinger — What Actually Makes a Good Life, According to 85 Years of Data (B2–C1 · 141 words a minute · same level)
• Malcolm Gladwell — The Unheard Story of David and Goliath (B2–C1 · 165 words a minute · same level)

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