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Shadowing Derek Sivers

Keep Your Goals to Yourself — Under four minutes, spoken straight to the audience with lots of short questions — quick, but easy to follow. Original video on YouTube: Derek Sivers — Keep Your Goals to Yourself.

Derek Sivers — Keep Your Goals to YourselfStart from the beginning
  • Level: B1–B2
  • Accent: American
  • Length: 4 min · 37 lines to practise
  • Speed: about 185 words a minute (faster than most talks)
  • Words: about 520; the talk asks 7 questions
  • Timing: Sada measures how far behind the speaker you are on every line

What to focus on in this talk

Quick, but built from short questions: “Doesn’t it feel good to say it out loud?” is a great line for rising intonation at the end of a question. “You’ve got to feel this to learn it” shows “got to” said fast, close to “gotta”.

What this talk trains

Derek Sivers speaks for about 4 minutes: roughly 520 words in 37 caption lines. Overall it is faster than 57 of the other 66 talks on Sada. Its sentences average 14.8 words, longer than the middle of the library (14.3), and 11.8% of its words fall outside the 3,000 most common English words (library middle: 12.9%). It asks 7 questions, so there is plenty of question intonation to copy. Phrases that fast speech often shortens come up again and again: “going to” (2 times).

Lines from across the talk, and what each one trains

Three lines from across 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. 1:14 The mind is kind of tricked into feeling that it's already done.

    “kind of”: fast speech often shortens it to “kinda”. Listen for whether the speaker does here. Linking: say “mind is”, “kind of”, “tricked into” without a break between the words.

  2. 2:09 Now, those who kept their mouths shut worked the entire 45 minutes on average,

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

  3. 2:57 So audience, next time you're tempted to tell someone your goal, what will you say?

    A question: listen to where the voice rises or falls at the end, and copy it. Several commas: say it in short chunks first, then as one line.

Words that keep coming up

Words outside the 3,000 most common English words that Derek Sivers 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.

How the talk opens: press any line to practise it

  1. 0:16 Everyone, please think of your biggest personal goal.
  2. 0:20 For real -- you can take a second. You've got to feel this to learn it.
  3. 0:23 Take a few seconds and think of your personal biggest goal, okay?
  4. 0:27 Imagine deciding right now that you're going to do it.
  5. 0:30 Imagine telling someone that you meet today what you're going to do.
  6. 0:33 Imagine their congratulations, and their high image of you.

How to practise this talk

  1. Start with the opening lines above.
  2. Then take the chosen lines above one at a time: a shortened phrase, linked words, a line said in chunks, a question.
  3. On each line, press Record and say it after Derek Sivers (Repeat) or along with them (Shadow), then open Compare and go again until every word is green.
  4. At one minute a day you finish the whole talk in about 4 days, and Sada shows your first try against your latest.

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