- Wanna live a happy, fulfilling life?
Give up these three things.
(ambient electronic music)
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,
I'm Julian Northbrook from DoingEnglish.com
here today with another two-minute English learning tip
to help you transform your English speaking in record time.
Not exactly about your English speaking per se,
but certainly an important aspect
of being non-native speaker of English.
If you are not happy with the life you are living,
there are three key changes
that I believe you need to make.
First of all, stop trying to please everyone.
It's impossible to make everybody else happy
because no matter what you do,
somebody is always gonna criticise that.
Somebody is always gonna complain about that.
Anything that you can do
is gonna annoy somebody.
If you try to please this person,
you're gonna piss this person over here off.
If you then try to rectify the problem
and please this person,
well, you're just gonna piss this person off.
And all that's gonna happen
is you are just gonna become
this vague, meaningless blob of nothing in the middle,
no real opinions of your own, no real personality,
just this keen-to-please people pleaser
who really doesn't end up pleasing anyone,
least of all themselves.
Second, stop trying to be popular,
and really, this is a continuation of the previous point.
But if you're trying to please everyone,
you're gonna end up pleasing no one, including yourself.
Much better is to just do what you want to do.
Live life on your own terms,
do the things that you want to do,
and put, rather selfishly, yourself first.
And forget about how many friends you have,
how many people love you,
and how popular you are.
Look, when you be yourself,
you attract the right kind of people to you,
and the people who aren't really
the right kind of people to be in your life,
well, they are just gonna disappear
because they're not gonna want to be around you,
and that's fine
because you don't need to please everyone
and you don't need to be friends with everyone.
Popularity is overrated.
I often hear from people in the comments
of videos just like this one, for example,
oh, if you did your videos like this,
you'd get more subscribers, more lights, more fans,
and what I always say to those people is,
I don't care.
This is not a popularity game.
I'm not here to make friends.
I don't care how many subscribers I get.
I frankly don't give a shit
how many people like this video
because those things to me are meaningless.
What matters to me is getting my message out there
to the right people,
and if that's only a tiny, tiny percentage
of the number of people who watch this video,
and then say, I don't like what this guy has to say,
that's fine, 'cause I'm not interested
in pleasing everyone.
I'm just interested in pleasing, reaching,
and working with the right kind of people
for me, and for me to them.
Number three, closely related to this,
stop worrying about offending people.
Look, your very existence offends someone.
And as a non-native speaker of English,
you have to traverse a minefield of potential pitfalls.
You're gonna mistake your English at some point.
You're gonna use the wrong word.
You're gonna say a wrong word
with a nuance or a connotation
that you didn't realise that it had,
and someone's gonna get upset,
someone's gonna get offended.
We live in an world where everybody's begging
to get offended about something
and shout their mouth off.
Don't worry about those people, forget about it.
You are likely from a different culture
to the people you use English with.
But at some point, you're gonna trip over their culture,
and again, say something which might upset them.
Should we purposely go out and try to offend people?
Of course not, but don't let fear of offending people
stand in your way of being the person
who you want to be, living on your own terms,
expressing your own thoughts and ways of being,
and really, just getting on with the life
that you want to live.
Ultimately, again, you can't be somebody to everybody.
You can't please all people.
You can't be popular with everyone.
And there are always people who are just
ready and waiting to be offended.
Not at least because there are people
who simply just hate people
who are not natives of their own country.
You go to the UK,
and there are plenty of nationalist twats
who are just ready, waiting
to say something hateful against you
simply because you weren't born in that country,
which is ridiculous,
but there are people like that in the world.
Screw them, sod them, who cares.
Just make those three changes to your life,
and I can guarantee you will be much happier,
day to day, in whatever it is that you're doing.
This is Julian Northbrook signing out
from another video.
Before I do, though,
head over to DoingEnglish.com/FreeTraining
to check out my free training,
where I will teach you the five key changes
that you need to make to your English-learning routine
to see rapid progress.
This is me, again, Julian Northbrook,
signing out from another video.
If you find it useful,
give it a nice big ol' thumbs up.
If you hate it, give it a thumbs up anyway,
and have a good day, bye bye.
(upbeat techno music)