Hello. I'm Dr. Julian Northbrook from doingenglish.com. No question today. Instead,
I'm going to read out an extract from a book. This is an awesome line from Richard
K. Morgan's excellent Broken Angels. It's not about English or language learning per se,
but pay close attention to it, and you'll see why I am reading this and making a video about this.
"Face the facts then act on them. It's the only mantra I know. The only doctrine I have to offer
you, and it's harder than you'd think because I swear human seem hardwired to do anything but face
the facts. Don't pray. Don't wish. Don't buy into centuries old dogma and dead rhetoric. Don't give
in to your conditioning or your visions or your fucked up sense of whatever. Face facts then act."
Now, Richard K. Morgan is the guy behind the excellent Altered Carbon series of books which
got turned into a Netflix series a couple of years ago, but there's real wisdom in this extract.
The average person from the way I see it spends an enormous amount of time and energy refusing
to face facts, but very little time and energy in actually facing them and acting accordingly. Now,
honestly, I've been as guilty of this as anybody else. And this is a very
honest and very candid example, but it's a good one, and a very illustrative one, I think.
But back in 2016, about the time or just after the UK voted for Brexit, I mean, my business was
booming. But I was earning all of my money in British pounds and converting that
into Japanese yen for complicated reasons that I won't bore you with.
And then, Brexit was announced and the British pan crashed. And with it,
my income was effectively halved because of the extreme change in exchange rate. My expenditure,
however, which was all in Japanese yen remained exactly the same. So what did I do? Absolutely
nothing. Instead, we carried on spending as we always had. Business cost didn't change,
neither did our cost of living. We had two kids in a very expensive private school, and we carried on
like this for about six months, while I diligently ignored the facts. Ignored my balance sheets,
which I was paying somebody else to do, because I couldn't be bothered to do them myself, which
was pretty stupid on reflection. And long story short, I ended up in a pretty shit situation.
A good friend of mine who's an accountant stopped me and went through my books. My accounts with me,
with a fine-tooth comb, really looked at everything.
Made me fire the person was doing our books and had me start doing it myself,
because it turned out that I was right on the razor's edge of bankruptcy. It had gotten that
bad. Another month, perhaps two, and that would have been it. Now, luckily, we caught the problem
in time and I made some pretty extreme changes in cuts. I took my company's financial health into my
own hands, and studied my ass off reading every business finance book I could get my hands on.
And now five years later, businesses is once again booming and I am very financially healthy again.
But the point is, what facts are you refusing to acknowledge? Now for many, it's the simple
fact that their English is simply too shit to do the job that they've been hired to do.
And that's why they waste huge amounts of time, energy and opportunities, which translates into
huge amounts of lost money in terms of promotions never gotten and pay rises never considered.
For others, it's the fact that they're doggedly persisting learning methods that just don't work,
or conversation lessons that feel good,
but that have long ceased to do anything useful for actually improving in English conversation.
Or it might be taking the lazy approach and telling yourself that just watching TV every
now and then in English or living in an English speaking country will be enough, and it won't.
Well, you can ignore these facts, all you like and keep doing the things that you're doing
and you will keep getting the results that you are getting. Or you can take a long, hard, look at the
facts, then act upon them. Now, a good starting point for you if you are new to me and my world
will be to head over to masterenglishfast.com, and grab yourself a copy of my best selling and core
book, Master English FAST. It's going to take you step by step, by the hand, through all the things
that you need to know about improving in English as a second language as a higher level learner.
Now, of course it doesn't contain all of the customization and the depth that you'd expect
from me from my coaching program. But of course
you can get it done. You can go through that book for a fraction of the investment. For less than
the cost of a lunch, in fact. And it now comes... We have a complete audio version of the book via
the Doing English app. There's instructions in the back of the book for registering for that. Right.
That's it for me, Dr. Julia Northbrook. For another video, see you soon guys. Bye-bye.