Welcome to the Listening Time Podcast.
Hey everybody, this is Connor and you're listening to episode 166 of the Listening Time Podcast.
I hope you're all doing great.
And I hope that you're inspired to practice your English today.
And speaking of inspiration, the topic of today's episode is inspirational quotes.
So I'm sure that you see quotes like this if you're on social media or whatever.
You'll see people post these quotes to inspire or motivate people.
Quotes from famous people throughout history.
And so I thought it would be interesting for me to take some of these inspirational quotes and talk about them and give my thoughts and my experiences related to the topic of the quote, and I'll talk about whether or not I agree with the quote.
So I chose four quotes that I'll talk about in this episode And then I'm going to do a part two with four other quotes, but that will be in a bonus episode, this month's bonus episode.
So if you want part two, then you'll have to sign up for my membership and, by the way, I recommend that you sign up for the membership if you want me to help you understand native speakers when they speak fast.
You'll get my specialized training, my listening practice seminars and, if you become a Listening Time family member, you'll get my advanced podcast episodes in which I speak fast so you can practice with real English spoken at normal speed.
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And you have the link to the transcript for this episode down below as well.
All right, let's get started.
Are your ears ready?
You know what time it is.
It's listening time.
All right, let's talk about some inspirational quotes.
So some of these quotes might not be 100% accurate.
They might be misquotes, as we call them.
And maybe some of them might not even be actual things that the famous person said.
But for some reason, everyone thinks that that person said them.
So I can't say for sure that all of these quotes are definitely things that these famous people said.
But these are quotes that you see on the Internet and that people attribute to these different famous people.
So I'll do that as well.
By the way, when we say that you attribute something to someone else, this means that you're giving credit to someone else.
You're giving credit for something to a certain person.
So you're saying that this person said that quote, for example.
So the first inspirational quote that I want to talk about is one of the ones that I see the most, which is you miss 100 of the shots you don't take.
And this was said by Wayne Gretzky, who I believe is one of the greatest hockey players of all time.
So what is Wayne Gretzky saying when he says this?
Well, he's saying that if you don't actually attempt to shoot, in this case, in hockey, you shoot the puck into the net to score a goal.
I think it's called a goal.
Sorry, I don't watch hockey.
But he's saying that if you don't try this, then you won't score.
You have to try in order to score, and people are afraid of missing, but if they don't even attempt the shot, then they have a 0 chance of actually scoring.
So if there's a soccer player who is too afraid to actually try to score a goal and so he doesn't attempt to score, then he'll never score.
So the idea behind this quote is that if you're afraid of failing, then you should think about the fact that if you don't even try, then you are for sure going to fail, in the sense that you will have a 0 chance of succeeding because you're not even starting that thing.
I think you get the point right, so i like this quote.
This is a very famous quote.
I've heard this many times and i think that there's a lot of wisdom behind this quote.
I think that if we're always afraid to fail, then we won't try things and therefore we won't actually accomplish things, And I think of my own life and examples of this.
And one great example is when I started this podcast.
So before this podcast, I had created other content that didn't do very well.
And I spent a lot of time making content and I didn't have much success and other things actually failed.
And so I easily could have said well, I don't want to fail again and have a podcast that I start and then I stop because no one listens to it.
So I'm just not going to make the podcast.
I easily could have said that because I had other content that I made that didn't succeed.
So, of course, that thought was in my mind.
However, I still went for it.
By the way, when we say that you go for something, we're saying that you try, you attempt something.
OK, I went for it and I succeeded for the most part.
And I'm still making this podcast today.
It's still helping many people around the world with their English listening comprehension.
And that's because I actually took the shot, so to say.
I actually tried to score the goal.
And if I had been afraid of failing, then I never would have started this podcast.
So that's how I can apply this quote to my own podcast.
I think that that demonstrates this point well.
And throughout the rest of my life, I want to try not to be afraid of failing.
I know I will fail probably many times, because I want to take a lot of shots And miss some, of course, but I will make some.
I will succeed in some areas.
And so, if you look at some of the greatest athletes who have scored the most goals or the most baskets in basketball, A lot of times these are athletes that have actually missed more goals or more baskets than most other people.
I don't have the exact numbers, but I imagine that Kobe Bryant probably missed tons and tons of shots if you actually just look at the number of misses.
However, he made tons and tons of shots because he wasn't afraid of missing, and that's why he became one of the greatest players of all time, right?
So i think that's a good lesson for us.
Do not go where the path may lead.
Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
And this is by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
So I partially agree with this.
First of all, what is this quote saying?
It's saying don't just follow a path that is already there.
You should make your own path.
So in other words, don't just do what other people have done before you.
Find your own way and do things differently.
And I partially agree with this because sometimes being a trailblazer can be a great thing.
By the way, we can use the word trailblazer to talk about someone that is the first person to make this path, this trail.
They're the first ones to do it and then people follow you after you do it.
So that's a trailblazer.
Sometimes being a trailblazer can be great.
Sometimes people have great success because they think outside the box, as we say, and they do things differently and they find new ways, and they have great success because they did everything differently.
And that happens sometimes.
I also think that you don't need to do this.
You don't need to do things completely differently in order to have success in different areas of your life.
And, in fact, I think that this can sometimes be a bad thing.
When you decide that you want to do things completely differently from how everyone else did them before you, oftentimes this can lead you to fail.
So I think that this quote is sometimes true and sometimes not true.
I think that it's good, when possible, to follow other people's examples and have role models and say oh, I want to do things like him.
I want to be like her.
I want to try it the way he did it.
And maybe you just follow their path and do things like someone else who is successful, did them before you.
And that's great.
So, for example, I think of business and some people want to come up with a brand new business model, an idea that is unlike anything else that's on the market.
No one else has ever done it before.
And sometimes this leads to a great product and the person becomes a really, really successful entrepreneur.
But probably more often than not, that doesn't happen.
And they end up failing because if no one else has ever done it this way, that might be because that's not a good way to do it.
Right.
So some advice that I hear a lot when I listen to people that have succeeded in creating a successful business is is they say that you shouldn't try to reinvent the wheel.
That expression means that you don't want to create something brand new from scratch, when you can just do the thing that other people have had success with, and then you add your own style to it, your own twist, so to say.
And I think that's good advice.
However, yes, there are times when being a trailblazer can lead to great success.
So I guess, in summary, I understand this quote and I think that it's sometimes good advice, but I think that in a lot of other cases it's good to just use role models and examples of people that have succeeded before you and to try to kind of follow their path.
But, like I said, do it in your own style and and add things to that.
Okay, so this one i partially agree with.
All right.
The next inspirational quote that i want to talk about is this one many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up, and i believe that's from thomas edison.
So what is this quote saying?
It's saying that a lot of times, someone who failed is someone who was really close to succeeding, but they didn't know that.
They didn't know how close they were to success.
And then they gave up right before that.
And so they became a failure.
And I like this quote, and I think that it applies to many areas of life.
And the first thing that came to mind when I was thinking of different ways I could apply this quote is, in language learning and, specifically language, the concept of learning vocabulary, because many of you, if you've listened to me long enough, you might know my philosophy when it comes to learning vocabulary, and that is that we learn it through exposure and repetition, and And each new word takes a different amount of time to learn or, more specifically, a different number of individual repeated encounters with that word.
So, for example, maybe one word.
You have to hear it 55 times in order to finally know it and be able to use it naturally.
And then another word might take 155 times and you don't know where that threshold is.
You don't know that exact number that you'll have to reach in order to know the word.
And when it comes to language learning people who are at an intermediate level, because they are already at that level, they already know the basic words.
And those basic words are the words that show up again and again and again and again.
And you learn them a lot faster because of how many times you've seen them.
But once you're at an intermediate level, the words that you don't know don't show up very frequently, they're not used as much, so it takes a lot longer to actually learn new words at that level because you don't see them repeated as much as the basic words, and so because of that, many people at an intermediate level they feel like they're stuck and they're not learning enough new words in order to advance and they feel like they're not improving and a lot of times they just wanna give up or they get really desperate and they think they need to start all over again and learn from scratch.
And what they're not realizing is that maybe they've heard this particular word 150 times and they don't realize that this word requires them to hear it 151 times in order to finally get that word.
That's an improvement, because you just need one more repetition of that word and then suddenly you're going to know it.
But you won't know until you actually reach that threshold.
Does that make sense?
So that's what I thought of when I thought of this quote is people don't realize that that they're close to success, and so they get discouraged and sometimes they quit.
And in language learning this can definitely happen, especially at an intermediate level, when they feel like they aren't learning as many new words and it's a lot harder for them to improve.
They need to realize that if they're doing the practice, they are getting closer to success.
So hopefully that made sense.
I know that that idea is a little bit complex maybe in terms of vocabulary, but I hope I explained that well and why this quote made me think of that.
All right.
One other quote that I want to talk about is this one.
The purpose of life is to be happy.
So I think many people have said this quote.
I think.
In particular, I saw that even the Dalai Lama said this, and he had his own reasons for saying it.
It was obviously a little deeper than how it sounds.
But this is something that I disagree with.
Okay.
And I know people have different reasons for saying this.
And I know that many people's reasons for saying this are deeper and more complex than just what this quote sounds like.
I get that for sure.
However, even with those deeper reasons or whatever, I still disagree with this.
I don't think that the purpose of life is to be happy.
I think that we should all want to be happy and I think that's something that is good, right?
We want to be characterized as happy people, right?
That's something that is a good thing if you're happy.
However, if that is our focus, if that is our main goal in life, I believe that we end up living selfishly, because if something doesn't make us happy and our ultimate purpose in life is to be happy then that means that we will not do many things if they don't make us happy, and i think that that's a big mistake.
I don't think that we should only do things that we want to do, And I know that people who believe in this quote and believe that this is the ultimate goal, they'll have a different explanation of why they say this.
But if I just look at the quote itself right, the purpose of life is to be happy um, i have to just attack the, the overall meaning of that, right?
If i disagree, right.
So i get that you might think that and you might have good reasons for that, but i'm just uh, talking about this quote the way i see it.
So i don't think that our primary goal should be to be happy.
I think that I've known multiple people who have this goal and they try their best to live their life in a way that makes them happy before anything else.
I've seen this.
I've experienced this, where people who have this goal do things or don't do things because they have this goal.
And because of that, I suffered as a result.
And I don't think that's good.
I don't think that we should think of our lives as being just an opportunity to be happy, and that's our ultimate goal.
Like I said, I think it's good to be happy and we should try to be happy.
And, in my experience, I think that it's good to be able to sacrifice and be selfless and to deny ourselves certain pleasures, even though those pleasures make us happy.
And I think it's even necessary to suffer a little bit.
And some people don't like that.
They don't want to ever suffer because suffering is like the opposite of being happy, right?
And I'm not saying that life is all about these things sacrifice and denying yourself and suffering.
I think that these things are part of life, but it's not all this.
I think that we should accept these negatives and while we also aim for happiness.
And that means that our purpose shouldn't just be to try to be happy, because if that's the ultimate purpose, that means that we will reject these other things, because these other things don't make us happy.
We don't want to have to sacrifice and deny ourselves and suffer and things like that.
But sometimes those things actually produce a better result and help us and the people around us.
And so, I don't know.
I think that when I hear people talk about this, about that's their business only concern or that's their biggest concern is being happy, or even when parents say this, when parents say that their only wish is for their kids to be happy and i know parents like this who, as long as their kids are happy, they support and encourage them to even make bad decisions, and which are pretty obviously bad decisions but because the kid thinks that that decision will make them happy and the parent says well, as long as you're happy, then you should do it and honestly, i disagree with that and you might disagree with me, and that's perfectly okay.
I did a whole episode on disagreeing with people.
It's great that we have disagreements, but i'm just saying what i think.
I don't think that the ultimate goal should be to be happy and i'm not just gonna say well, as long as my kids are happy, then everything they do is fine and i'm not gonna discourage them from making certain decisions.
I'm definitely gonna discourage my kids from making certain decisions if i think that those decisions will be harmful for them.
Even if my kids say that wow, that decision makes me happy, I'm going to try to advise them and help steer them in the correct direction.
So that's it for this episode.
If you want the part two to this and to hear me talk about some other quotes, then make sure to join my membership so you can listen to that bonus episode in which I talk about that.
And remember that you can get my advanced episodes if you become a Listening Time family member.
And you can also sign up for my US Conversations podcast by going down and clicking on the link below.
And you'll be able to sign up to listen to my conversations that I have with other people around the country.
And it's great practice for your listening experience.
It'll help you reach the level at which you can understand more than one person speaking at normal speed.
All right, thank you so much for listening to this episode and I'll talk to you on the next episode of Listening Time.
