Make 2024 Your Best Year: Ditch The Hustle Culture & Achieve Your Dreams

00:00:00.000 | You are right now one of the best known people talking about productivity, especially on YouTube.

00:00:07.680 | Not that long ago, a handful of years ago, you were practicing doctor, British National Health

00:00:14.080 | Service. So there's an interesting transition that happens in there. So let's go back.

00:00:18.400 | You identify early in your book that your interest in productivity as a topic of studying

00:00:23.600 | picked up when you were a medical student. So do I have that right? Where did you first

00:00:28.960 | begin this second part of your life? Yeah. So in my first year of med school,

00:00:35.600 | in high school I coasted because I was naturally smart and I could just get good grades by default.

00:00:41.360 | And then I got to med school and then it was like I was hit in the face with a baseball bat

00:00:44.880 | because now all of a sudden everyone around me was really smart and I was totally mediocre.

00:00:50.480 | And I was like, "Oh my goodness, this is a new experience." And my first year of med school was

00:00:55.200 | like pretty overwhelming and pretty like draining. And I was doing a lot of the hard work in inverted

00:01:01.120 | commas, the grind, all that stuff. And then randomly in my second year, we had a lecture

00:01:07.040 | in experimental psychology around effective study techniques or effective memory and learning

00:01:12.000 | techniques. And that was where I first heard the phrase active recall and spaced repetition and

00:01:17.120 | stuff. And my mind was fricking blown. I was like, "How the hell have I never in my life come across

00:01:23.280 | this stuff before? Like what?" And then I was like, "I need to research more about this stuff."

00:01:28.000 | And then I came across your blog and I came across your books and I came across Lifehacker and I

00:01:33.360 | started doing a bunch of digging into the studies around active recall and stuff. And then I started

00:01:39.280 | applying those to my life as a student. And then in my second year I did super well. I got a first

00:01:42.720 | class in my exams. It felt like euphoric. Then in my third year, that was when I was studying

00:01:47.360 | psychology as like an extra degree type thing. I was thinking, "Hmm, you know what? Now that I know

00:01:52.000 | all these effective study techniques and I know how to be productive as it comes to being a student,

00:01:55.600 | let me try and go for rank one." Because I was like, "This is the best time. I'm going to try

00:02:00.400 | and go for top of the year." And I applied all the techniques.

00:02:04.320 | What is rank one? For the American listeners, that's how elite in the class ranking is rank one.

00:02:09.200 | Oh, that's like the top.

00:02:11.280 | Is it number one? Is that the same as being like number one?

00:02:13.840 | Number one, yeah.

00:02:14.240 | Oh, wow. Okay. So you're going for number one in your class?

00:02:16.160 | Yeah, rank one, number one. Yeah, number one in the class. It was a year where I was like,

00:02:21.360 | "I'm studying psychology. This is a super interesting subject. I know all these study

00:02:24.480 | techniques. Let's just go for it. Let's try and play this game." And so I applied all the

00:02:28.240 | productivity techniques and the stuff from your blog and the stuff from all of these things,

00:02:32.400 | started giving talks about them, and ended up winning joint first prize for top of the class

00:02:38.400 | that year. I was like, "It worked." So that's kind of what started this interest in productivity,

00:02:41.680 | like literally having a before and after of I didn't know any of this stuff, and then I applied

00:02:46.000 | it. And then I did really well and had a way better time.

00:02:48.720 | It's funny how the parallels here. I mean, you know this, we've talked about this,

00:02:52.240 | but this was exactly my introduction to college for me, not med school. First year went okay,

00:02:57.680 | got serious about techniques, began crushing it. I didn't get smarter over the summer between those

00:03:04.560 | two years. So there was this urgency of I got to tell other people about this. This was crazy.

00:03:10.560 | I didn't get number one in my class at my college, but I was top 30 out of a thousand.

00:03:15.680 | That first year held me back. But it sounds like you had a similar urgency of why don't more people

00:03:24.800 | know about this? This made a big difference, just being intentional and careful and evidence-based

00:03:30.080 | about how you approach work, at least in the academic setting. It was like a low-hanging

00:03:35.920 | fruit. And of course, that blogging world you talked about, what a wonderful time.

00:03:39.440 | But it was the air of that blog. You couldn't really monetize those blogs. It wasn't like it

00:03:43.840 | is today where you could gain real notoriety. People just were interested in things and wanted

00:03:50.960 | to help each other. So you're okay. So now you're coming out of your studies with this same sort of

00:03:55.760 | insight I had as well, that at least in the world of studies and studying, technique matters, and

00:04:01.680 | it could matter a huge amount. So you have that bug. How does that bug then grow? I assume after

00:04:08.720 | this, you're going into the early stages of training. In the US, this would be like the

00:04:12.560 | internship year followed by residency. It's probably different terminology in the UK.

00:04:16.480 | But as you enter in the maelstrom of formal medical training, clinical training,

00:04:22.160 | what happens to this bug, this interest? Yeah. So this interest in study techniques

00:04:27.120 | then morphs into an interest in time management and productivity generally. Because around when

00:04:35.040 | I started my second year of med school, I also started a business on the side that was helping

00:04:39.280 | other people get into med school in the UK. So I was running courses and stuff on the weekends,

00:04:42.400 | going up to random conference rooms and running seminars in the olden days, printing out these

00:04:48.320 | little booklets and things. And so I was starting a business from scratch. And that obviously takes

00:04:54.160 | time and energy. And so I was spending a lot of time reading your blog, reading your stuff,

00:05:01.760 | reading Lifehacker, following everything Tim Ferriss has ever written. Anyone who's vaguely

00:05:06.560 | in the world of productivity, I was reading and trying to apply things like 80/20 and batching,

00:05:12.160 | and all this stuff that your listeners will be aware of. But to me at the time was like,

00:05:15.840 | oh my goodness, you're saying if I batch my emails all in one hour, I can reply to all these customer

00:05:20.240 | service things? That's cool. Why did no one tell me this before? And so as I'm discovering all these

00:05:24.480 | productivity techniques, I'm applying them to my life while I'm building the business on the side

00:05:28.800 | while being in med school. And that continues for a while. I give a few talks about how to study for

00:05:34.960 | exams because I'm like, more people need to hear about this stuff. And then in 2017, this was in my

00:05:39.680 | penultimate year of med school, I decided, you know what, you know, I'd been running the business

00:05:44.080 | for a few years at that point. And we were sort of plateauing. So I thought, I think I should start a

00:05:48.880 | YouTube channel. And I think I should make videos that teach people how to get into med school,

00:05:53.120 | because then maybe if they think I'm legit, they'll sign up to my paid courses or something.

00:05:56.960 | And I now know that this is called organic content marketing, but I didn't have that terminology back

00:06:01.600 | in the day. And I started making those videos, people started liking them. And very quickly,

00:06:06.640 | students started asking me, how do you study for your exams? You're a Cambridge medical student.

00:06:10.800 | And I was like, Oh, funny, you should ask. I've been doing this shit for four years now. And I've

00:06:14.480 | been giving talks about it. So let's just make some videos about it. And my first video that went

00:06:18.080 | viral was a video called how to study for exams, where I talked about active recall, I talked about

00:06:22.240 | some of the studies, some of the kind of literature reviews and systematic reviews that have been done

00:06:26.880 | that show that active recall and spaced repetition and stuff is the way to go. And that video went

00:06:31.040 | viral. And that was like the, you know, that was the start of my YouTube channel really taking off.

00:06:35.760 | And so where were you on the medical side of things? 2017 ish? Where are you in your training

00:06:40.560 | at this point? Yeah, so at this point, the way it works in the UK is you have three years of

00:06:44.560 | pre clinical, like medical school, kind of like pre med, like lots of basic physiology,

00:06:49.680 | anatomy, biochemistry, blah, blah, blah. And then you have another three years of clinical school,

00:06:54.000 | which is where you're still technically a student, but you're not going into the hospital and like

00:06:57.440 | seeing patients and stuff. So I was in my second of the three clinical years. So I had one more

00:07:03.520 | year of clinical school left when I started the YouTube channel. I see. So in the American system,

00:07:08.480 | you actually go to university for met for being a doctor. So like those first three years would

00:07:14.320 | be like being a pre med major at an American university. And then the clinical years are like

00:07:19.840 | the US equivalent of being at what we would call medical school. Is that? Yeah, exactly. So it's a

00:07:24.480 | bit more compressed in the UK, like it's six years for the whole thing, whereas in the UK in the US,

00:07:28.560 | it's four years and then four years and then residency. So it sounds like in that period

00:07:33.040 | leading up to this, you were running the business on the side that was actually one of your focuses

00:07:37.840 | in terms of applying productivity advice in your own life, which makes sense, given the tenor of

00:07:42.480 | the sort of Tim Ferriss age of productivity was very sort of side hustle focused. And how do you

00:07:48.640 | take a business and push into a smaller portion of your of your life? And so was any of the energy

00:07:55.680 | and ideas that were coming out of this productivity literature that you're applying to your business,

00:07:59.360 | were you also applying this still to what was going on academically? Or did this feel

00:08:06.080 | different? Like, was there a break between the active recall? How do we study? Well, stuff. And

00:08:13.680 | the Tim Ferriss life hacker, like, how do you run a business stuff? Or did you see this all as sort

00:08:17.520 | of package? Yes. So one thing that you have wrote about in the blog, I don't I don't know when I

00:08:23.040 | discovered this, but you have a blog post that's something to the effect of when for trying to

00:08:27.840 | figure out what to do with your career, don't start with a degree and then figure out therefore,

00:08:31.760 | what job do I want to go into? You say something like figure out what life you want, and then

00:08:35.360 | reverse engineer what job you want based on that. And so I don't know when I read this, but I was

00:08:39.760 | like, this is this is useful advice. And I realized the life I wanted, I was a life where I worked

00:08:45.440 | part time as a doctor, because I had spoken to so many doctors, they all hated their lives,

00:08:49.680 | except the ones who work part time, the ones who work two or three days a week having a great time,

00:08:53.280 | they love it. I was like, Okay, how do I reverse engineer part time medicine from this?

00:08:57.200 | So beginning with the end in mind, recognizing part time medicine, I was like, okay, cool,

00:09:01.680 | I now need to devote time and energy to building sources of passive income so that I can afford to

00:09:05.360 | work part time. Yep. And secondly, I kind of realized that playing the academic game, you know,

00:09:11.680 | I got I got the number one position in my third year, I was like, do I want to keep working for

00:09:15.840 | that number one position? Like, is it worth it? Yeah, is it worth it? Given that I'm not trying

00:09:20.160 | to be a fancy professor or anything, I'm literally trying to work part time so I can like have a chill

00:09:24.000 | life, probably not worth it. So what's the minimum amount of studying I need to do to comfortably

00:09:29.120 | pass the exams without like going overboard? Because unless you, for example, get a distinction,

00:09:34.400 | which is how it works in the UK, which, you know, I knew, I knew it would have taken a lot of work

00:09:39.040 | and not actually translate to the lifestyle that I wanted. So thank you for that advice. But what

00:09:42.720 | that meant was a quick interruption. If you want my free guide with my seven best ideas on how to

00:09:50.240 | cultivate the deep life, go to Cal Newport dot com slash ideas, or click the link right below

00:09:57.680 | in the description. This is a great way to take action on the type of things we talk about here

00:10:03.440 | on the show. All right, let's get back to it. I was like going kind of doing the bare minimum of

00:10:08.320 | like, how do I kind of only study for like half an hour a day so that I can edit videos for the

00:10:12.480 | other seven hours of the day. So I'd be going into hospital with my laptop, I'd be seeing I'd be very

00:10:17.040 | targeted. And like, I think like a lot of medical students have a scattergun approach to clinical

00:10:22.080 | stuff. You like go in and you shadow the doctors and you get an exposure and like, get a feel of

00:10:27.280 | what's going on in the hospitals. I was like, No, screw that. That's so inefficient. What a

00:10:31.040 | poor use of time. Yeah, let me identify exactly what my learning outcome is. Find the specific

00:10:36.320 | patient that I want to talk to based on talking to doctors be like, I need a patient who has this

00:10:39.760 | kind of murmur, go and talk to them do the thing. I'm done in 20 minutes. Now I can sit in the

00:10:43.680 | common room and edit my video for the next six hours. I was doing that kind of hustle while I

00:10:47.600 | was in my final year of med school. So you were Tim Ferrissine, medical school, like figured out,

00:10:52.560 | oh, hey, what actually matters here? Let me get rid of the wasted effort. Let me do let me deal,

00:10:57.040 | let me eliminate and, and automate. It's fascinating. So in the years before that,

00:11:02.160 | you're going all out. But that kind of makes sense, right? Because that helps you get placed

00:11:08.480 | into the better clinical training, I'm assuming. I mean, I know, for example, you probably were

00:11:12.960 | doing some peer review publication during your extra psych year, like you were doing the things

00:11:16.480 | that you do to stand out. But I guess this like in the US, once you got into a good medical school,

00:11:21.280 | if your plan was like you're talking about maybe to be like an emergency department doctor that

00:11:26.400 | does swing shifts three days a week, it doesn't really matter that you're the number one student

00:11:29.760 | in your med school. Once you're there. Let's start Tim Ferrissine. This has fascinating. Yeah.

00:11:36.320 | And did you, and from that blog post of yours that said, figure out what life you want in

00:11:39.440 | reverse engineering. I was like, mind blown. So I think I remember exactly when I wrote that. Yeah.

00:11:43.920 | The piece of career advice no one gives you, I think it was titled something like that. I was at

00:11:47.360 | a graduation. I remember that. I remember that post well, as because I was getting towards the end of

00:11:52.800 | grad school and starting to think about why didn't I actually work backwards. Also, Tim was a big

00:11:58.080 | influence. So we're all just, we're all just stealing from, we're stealing from Tim. Okay.

00:12:02.160 | So, so now a lot of what's going to happen now makes sense because you, you, you have now adopted

00:12:06.880 | this mindset of lifestyle engineering. You see the impact of systems matter, technique matters.

00:12:14.960 | There's a lot of time to be saved by how you approach things. You want to definitely have

00:12:20.720 | the end in mind and figuring out what you do today. So now you're in this sort of clinical

00:12:24.880 | phase of medical school. You have this growing YouTube business on the side. You have your eyes

00:12:30.160 | towards sort of an engineered lifestyle. All of this, by the way, is now making me much less

00:12:33.760 | surprised that you end up, you're ending up where you are today because you are already

00:12:39.440 | holding your medical training as just a piece towards the bigger goal of constructing a

00:12:44.560 | constructing lifestyle. What was YouTube like? 2017, you start doing these videos. This is early

00:12:51.600 | YouTube. This is what I'm thinking of learning videos in 2017, how to study. I'm thinking maybe

00:12:57.920 | like Thomas Frank, like, I don't know who's around at this point, but what is YouTube in 2017? What's

00:13:03.120 | the landscape you were surveying as you, as you began to grow that part of your life?

00:13:08.320 | Yeah. So YouTube 2017 was, yeah, Thomas Frank was the only real voice in productivity.

00:13:14.640 | And there were a couple of medical people doing content about like what medical school is like,

00:13:23.520 | but a lot of them were in the US and there wasn't anyone doing it very well in the UK.

00:13:28.000 | And so I thought, hmm, this is interesting. Yeah. This was what Casey Neistat was doing his daily,

00:13:33.040 | daily vlogs-ish. Peter McKinnon had just started making YouTube videos about photography and

00:13:37.040 | videography. And Peter McKinnon was a big inspiration because he was teaching photo and

00:13:41.680 | video, but in a engaging and dynamic way. There was a guy called Simon Clark who had a hundred

00:13:46.960 | thousand subscribers. He was like the first vlogger in the UK in the student scene. And he was an

00:13:51.200 | Oxford PhD physics student. And that kind of helped me realize, wait a minute, you don't need

00:13:55.680 | to be a gregarious personality. Simon Clark is a fricking nerd. He's talking about his degree and

00:14:00.160 | his weather calculations and the fact that he goes to choir on the weekends. I was like, great. He's

00:14:05.200 | got a hundred thousand subscribers. Wow. There is room on YouTube for a sort of normal person

00:14:11.120 | without a very outgoing personality to talk about the subject that they're passionate about, which

00:14:15.120 | for me was like helping people get into med school. And so I thought, you know what, let's just start

00:14:19.200 | making videos. And I had a bit of a, I think I went into YouTube with five years of experience of

00:14:25.920 | running my courses business and another 10 years of trying to make money on the internet with

00:14:29.920 | websites and affiliate marketing and stuff. So I approached YouTube from a business perspective

00:14:35.600 | rather than as a, I want to be a creator. The word creator wasn't really a thing in 2017.

00:14:39.760 | Yeah. And so I thought, you know, even if my videos only get like a couple of hundred views,

00:14:44.400 | those are a couple of hundred views from students who are trying to get into Cambridge Medical

00:14:48.400 | School. That is a valuable audience because I can help them out because I know my stuff.

00:14:52.240 | And some of them bought my course. And so I had a bit of a monetization engine built in,

00:14:56.560 | even though I had like no subscribers and no views. And slowly over time, it took me 52 videos

00:15:01.840 | and six months to get my first thousand subscribers, then another six months to get monetized.

00:15:07.200 | And like my 91st video or whatever it was, was that video about how to study for exams,

00:15:11.280 | where I just repurposed a talk that I gave, added loads of like studies and stuff to it. And then

00:15:16.720 | that went super viral. And suddenly people around the university were like, "Oh my God,

00:15:19.920 | like I watched your half an hour video about how to study for exams and that's changed my life."

00:15:23.760 | And I'm like, "Nice, this is working." Interesting. Interesting. So it was your

00:15:27.600 | 91st or 92nd video that you really started talking, not just medical school. Now,

00:15:35.120 | do you think that took off in part because you were more practiced or in part because

00:15:39.920 | of the wider niche that you're now addressing? The medical school was very specific. Getting

00:15:46.000 | to the medical school in the UK. Or is it some combination of the two? You knew what you were

00:15:50.400 | doing and then you hit a niche that had a big enough audience to support real virality and

00:15:54.400 | those two came together. I haven't thought of this in a while. So this is like a good line of...

00:15:59.920 | Because it's all like connecting now that I connected those looking backwards. So when I

00:16:04.160 | started my YouTube channel, again, I applied the Tim Ferriss, Cal Newport approach to productivity to

00:16:08.480 | the YouTube channel as well. Because I was like, I know that this has potential. And so I therefore

00:16:14.320 | absorbed a lot of YouTube advice on how to grow on YouTube. And a piece of advice I came across was,

00:16:18.240 | you actually don't want your first video to go viral. You want your 100th video to go viral,

00:16:23.520 | because if that's the video that goes viral, now there's this whole back catalog of content that

00:16:26.720 | people can binge. Whereas if your first video goes viral, who cares? You're just getting views

00:16:30.080 | for no reason. And at the time, I knew nothing about making videos, nothing about editing.

00:16:34.320 | And another principle from the productivity world is just do a thing 100 times and you'll get good

00:16:40.000 | at doing the thing. So I was like, "All right, let's apply these together. Let me make 100

00:16:43.760 | videos and not think too hard about it. Let's lower the bar. Let's not be perfectionistic about

00:16:47.600 | it. Let's try and get a little bit better each time. Let's watch tutorials on the side to see

00:16:51.280 | how I can level up my editing and make sure I improve the way I talk on camera and all that

00:16:55.680 | stuff." And I knew in the back of my mind, when I started YouTube, at some point, I want to make

00:17:00.080 | this video about how to study for exams, because I think that video could be a banger. But I knew

00:17:04.000 | I did not want it to be my first video. I was actually aiming for that to be like my 100th

00:17:07.440 | video. Because I thought, "You know what? In 100 videos, I will learn enough about how to make

00:17:11.280 | videos in order to do justice to that one." And so in a way, I did have a sense of market demand

00:17:18.480 | here. Because in 2015, randomly, this was a year into my discovering study techniques and your blog

00:17:25.360 | and everything, I randomly decided to do a talk for the local Islamic society at my university

00:17:30.960 | on how to study for exams. And so we booked the local prayer room, which holds like 20 people.

00:17:36.720 | And we booked it and made a Facebook event on "Ali Abdaal Teaches You How to Study for Exams"

00:17:40.960 | with science-backed techniques. And that Facebook event page went viral around the university.

00:17:46.640 | And like 20,000 people saw this Facebook event page, which was meant to be for like a handful

00:17:51.280 | of people in the Islamic society prayer room, for God's sake. And like 1000s of people clicked

00:17:55.360 | attending on this event. I was like, "Whoa." And then the Islamic society events guy was like,

00:17:59.520 | "Bloody hell, we need to book a lecture theater and everything." And we ended up me giving a talk

00:18:03.840 | in a lecture theater with like a couple 100 other students like hanging on to my every word,

00:18:07.520 | because they were like, "Oh my God, no one teaches us how to study for exams."

00:18:10.880 | So I had a sense of like, at some point I want to make this YouTube video,

00:18:13.520 | but it has to be video 100 and not video number one. So I was sort of like trying to get better

00:18:17.280 | at the craft. And it just sort of worked like around that time when I made that video. I also

00:18:22.480 | did a collab with a bigger YouTuber that put attention on my channel. And the video itself

00:18:26.880 | was very good. I spent ages working on it and had so much research behind it. I think the perfect

00:18:31.360 | storm of variables hit at the right time for that video to go viral. - Oh, interesting. And what

00:18:36.640 | makes a video like this good? So is it, it's the content, it's the editing, it's the, for an

00:18:42.160 | informative video, do I have this right? You also want, the ideas make sense, they're backed and

00:18:46.320 | you're just this, this, this, this. You just have it. You have the goods basically. Like this

00:18:50.800 | technique, here's the study, here's what's happening. I mean, these are the different

00:18:53.920 | elements that came together. So then it just flows when you see it. It's convincing, it's useful,

00:18:58.720 | it's interesting. You had all those things coming together. - Absolutely. I think nowadays it would

00:19:04.400 | be hard to make that same video because six years ago there was a lot less of this sort of content

00:19:08.640 | on YouTube. So there was also a sense of like, no one has heard this stuff before. But now there's

00:19:13.840 | loads of student YouTube channels. And so talking about active recall or spaced repetition or Anki

00:19:18.000 | or whatever is no longer as novel as it felt at the time. So there was also that sense of like,

00:19:22.560 | this is new. Like no one's talking about this stuff. - Right. It's like when I published How

00:19:26.640 | to Become a Straight A Student, people weren't writing books, believe it or not, on just straight

00:19:30.800 | up study techniques. So I was like, I will do that. And the book has sold hundreds of thousands

00:19:35.360 | of copies because no one was doing that. Now it's not so rare. Like, yeah, let's talk about like how

00:19:40.080 | to actually study. But back then, there's something about being new. All right, so then if we jump

00:19:44.160 | ahead, how far did you get? Where were you in your medical career when that key decision came?

00:19:49.680 | Which we've talked about in depth on your show. That key scary decision of I am leaving medicine

00:19:57.360 | to do YouTube full time or my business is full time. How far along were you when that happened?

00:20:02.240 | - So it did kind of happen a little accidentally. Sorry, there's a crying child in the background

00:20:07.200 | right now. I don't know if you can hear that. - Yeah, that's life. That's life right there.

00:20:10.240 | - That's life, yeah. It's not my child, it's a friend's child for the record.

00:20:13.600 | It happened kind of accidentally. So in the UK, the way it works is you do two years of working.

00:20:19.600 | I guess those are sort of the equivalent of your intern years that we call them the foundation

00:20:24.160 | years. So you work clinically for two years once you're fully qualified. And then at that point,

00:20:28.320 | you decide what residency program do I want to apply to? Whether it's medicine or surgery,

00:20:32.800 | neurosurgery or emergency medicine or anesthetics or whatever. And so there's a natural career break

00:20:37.680 | after those two years. And what a lot of people will do is take a gap year to, for example,

00:20:42.080 | go to Australia to do emergency medicine. So that was my plan. My plan was in 2020,

00:20:46.880 | once I've done my two years, once I've done my time, I'm going to go to Australia for a year

00:20:50.160 | to do emergency medicine as a way of boosting my CV so that when I apply to emergency medicine

00:20:55.040 | residency, I'll have more points and plus Australia's cool, plus why not? But August 2020

00:21:00.880 | was, you know, Australia closed their borders, pandemic takes over the world. And so I accidentally

00:21:05.280 | ended up becoming a full-time YouTuber where I'm like, you know, one day I'm at work assisting

00:21:10.800 | with C-sections because I was an obs and gyne, wearing the whole like hazmat suit because it

00:21:15.440 | was COVID times. And the next day I'm like, right, I'm stuck at home with nothing to do

00:21:18.880 | other than to make YouTube videos. - But in August 2020 was the idea,

00:21:22.800 | ah, my trip to Australia got canceled. Now I have this year off, I'll YouTube,

00:21:28.000 | but after this year, I'm going to still go into the residency match. And, you know,

00:21:31.840 | was that the idea? Okay. So you had this- - That was the idea. So I was planning to apply

00:21:36.000 | for a residency thing in November because it was like the applications happened a year earlier,

00:21:39.040 | and I was like gearing up towards it. I also had some friends who moved from the UK to the US.

00:21:43.840 | And so I was dabbling with like, do I want to move to the US for residency? Do I want to take

00:21:47.760 | the US MLE and do all that crap? So I got the resources. I signed up to Pathoma. I started

00:21:52.960 | doing some practice questions, realizing, oh my God, this is so hard. And thankfully the YouTube

00:21:57.760 | channel took off that year. - And was this also, was there an extra

00:22:01.920 | incentive or pressure that when the Australia plan fell through, you were thinking, okay,

00:22:06.000 | I actually need to pick up some more revenue from my YouTube channel because this is a source of

00:22:10.800 | revenue that's not coming. So was there a, I'm going to take this thing a little bit more seriously

00:22:14.480 | for pragmatic reasons. Was there an extra bolt of energy or was it already doing well at that point?

00:22:20.080 | - Yeah, I think the YouTube channel was maybe making about 20K a month at that point. And my

00:22:26.640 | salary as a doctor was making 3K a month. So already I was like blew past my doctor's salary.

00:22:31.440 | But randomly at the end of 2020, I decided, you know what, let me make a course teaching people

00:22:36.640 | how to do YouTube because people have been asking for it. And then that completely took off and

00:22:41.920 | ended up taking over my life for the next like two years. And then that was the first year that

00:22:45.440 | the business did a million pounds in revenue. I was like, bloody hell, I've never seen a million

00:22:48.480 | quid before in my life. This is insane. - So walk people through like a little bit

00:22:53.120 | how YouTube revenue works. So like when you're coming into fall of 2020, you're talking about

00:22:56.960 | 20K, I guess, pounds per month. At this point, YouTube would be mainly sponsorships. So this is

00:23:05.280 | just a mix of automatically inserted ads from YouTube plus perhaps like sponsorships you sold

00:23:13.120 | yourself and you say to camera. So mainly some combination of that was going on.

00:23:17.680 | - Yeah, ish. So three big sources of revenue at the time. The first one was AdSense, which is the

00:23:22.960 | five second ads that appear before YouTube videos. That was maybe making like 2K a month. Then there

00:23:27.920 | were sponsorships where weirdly companies will pay like five grand or three grand or two grand for

00:23:32.880 | like this video is brought to you by Skillshare or like Blinkist or Shortform or whatever the thing

00:23:37.520 | might be in your case. And so the AdSense and sponsorships were about 5K a month. But weirdly,

00:23:46.160 | I started making classes on Skillshare in 2019 because I spoke to Thomas Frank and he had a

00:23:50.880 | class on Skillshare and he was making several grand a month. And I was like, wait a minute,

00:23:54.320 | you can make online courses on this platform called Skillshare, which is basically free for

00:23:58.960 | people to access because you can just sign up to a trial and then cancel. And I know how to make

00:24:03.120 | courses, huh? Let me just make a course about video editing. Let me make a course in studying

00:24:07.040 | for exams. Let me make a course in productivity. Let me make a course on how to type faster. Let

00:24:10.640 | me make a course on anything I know anything about. And the first course I made on Skillshare

00:24:15.840 | was about how to edit videos. It took me one day to film and it took a freelancer two days to edit

00:24:21.280 | because I was just like doing over the shoulder walkthrough of how I edit videos. And that course

00:24:24.960 | has been making five grand a month on Skillshare since September of 2019. To this day, it still

00:24:29.840 | makes several thousand a month. And my doctor's salary was several thousand a month. It's insane.

00:24:33.920 | And you had mentioned it, I mean, because you had a big enough audience. Now, not a big enough

00:24:37.440 | audience that you could just AdSense yourself to like a really healthy revenue, but a big enough

00:24:40.960 | audience that if you mentioned semi-regularly, hey, I have a course on this. You had a funnel

00:24:45.920 | there that just like maybe the average Skillshare instructor wouldn't have.

00:24:49.040 | Yeah, absolutely. And Skillshare were also sponsoring our videos as well. So I was like,

00:24:52.480 | I was doing an ad read for my own course, which was then even getting more people. And so there

00:24:56.560 | was this kind of like, again, thank you. Thank you to Thomas Frank for turning me onto this method of

00:25:00.800 | making money from Skillshare. So like by the fall of 2020, like 15 grand a month was coming in from

00:25:06.240 | Skillshare, which was just insane. Interesting. So you're making all this money. You have this

00:25:12.080 | break from your medical training trajectory, and you were being confronted with the complexity and

00:25:18.080 | difficulty of the next phase of your medical training. You're looking at these applications,

00:25:22.480 | you're thinking about what it would take to do a U.S. residency and the complexity of the

00:25:26.640 | applications. And let's layer on everyone in the fall of 2020. I was writing about this a lot for

00:25:32.240 | the New Yorker at the time was going through this shift of what really matters to me. What do I want

00:25:38.160 | my life really to be like? It was the beginning of this sort of mass reconsideration of the meaning

00:25:44.320 | of one's professional life. All of these things hit together. Now, I guess it's not at all

00:25:49.120 | surprising that at some point, I guess it sounds like you're saying by the new year, you said,

00:25:53.360 | "No, I'm not going to submit. I'm not submitting my residency application. Let's just keep going

00:25:58.480 | with this." Absolutely. Yeah. I enjoyed your articles at the time in the New Yorker. I was

00:26:04.640 | reading all these pieces around trying to figure out what to do with your life. So it was like,

00:26:08.000 | I'm making all this money on YouTube, but like medicine has been my identity this whole time.

00:26:12.160 | And I had a theory. My theory was, you know what? Let me run a lifestyle experiment. My hypothesis

00:26:18.000 | is that working two days a week as a doctor is fun and I can do three days a week as a YouTuber.

00:26:22.400 | That's pretty cool. Why not? And so I ran the experiment. Again, thank you, Tim Ferriss, for

00:26:26.800 | encouraging me to run experiments on my life. And I tried it out. I tried working part-time

00:26:30.320 | because I picked up a few shifts in the emergency department because they knew me and I was like,

00:26:33.200 | "Hey, can I just come in and do some extra shifts?" They were like, "Sure." And every 10 minutes while

00:26:37.920 | I was there, I was thinking, "What am I doing here?" I could be in the local WeWork right now,

00:26:43.280 | which is super nice. And there's actually free coffee there and I can hang out with my team.

00:26:47.040 | And it was a workplace that was open during COVID. Why am I in this emergency department that has no

00:26:51.520 | natural light where it's just grim and I'm on the phone trying to convince radiology to do a scan

00:26:55.360 | that they don't want to do? So I ran the experiment for a couple of weeks. I was like, "Wait a minute.

00:26:59.760 | This whole theory that I've got that working part-time as a doctor is fun and part-time

00:27:02.960 | YouTuber is fun. This actually does not hold true. So what would it look like if I actually

00:27:07.840 | gave that up?" And it was when I did a podcast interview with Lewis Howes, who runs the School

00:27:13.440 | of Greatness podcast, where he was initially interviewing me about passive income ideas and

00:27:17.360 | stuff. And at some point I said to him that, "Yeah, I'm still thinking of staying in medicine." And

00:27:21.440 | he ended up challenging me on that. He was like, "Wait, why do you want to stay in medicine?"

00:27:25.840 | And I was like, "Oh, but what if my YouTube business crumbles and stuff? I need the money,

00:27:29.920 | right?" And he was like, "Bro, the skills you've gotten over the last 10 years of entrepreneurship,

00:27:33.840 | how long would it take you to make 100k?" I was like, "I don't know, a few months?" He was like,

00:27:36.800 | "Yeah. How long would it take you to make 100k as a doctor? In the UK, it's like 10 years of

00:27:40.560 | training and then you make 100k as a doctor a year." And so it took Lewis to sort of just push

00:27:45.840 | me on this for me to realize that I was holding onto this identity of being a doctor because of

00:27:50.080 | the status and the prestige and all sorts of fear and financial insecurity around, "Oh, what if I

00:27:54.880 | run out of money?" All of that stuff helped me break through this barrier that I had in my mind

00:28:00.880 | of, "I have to be a doctor forever." And I decided to take the plunge and just go full-time on the

00:28:05.680 | entrepreneurship, writer, YouTuber-y thing. - And did that close the door? I mean, is it

00:28:10.960 | different leaving in the UK pre-residency? Is that closed the door in the way that if you had said,

00:28:18.560 | "No, no, I'm going to persist for another four years. I'm going to get an ED residency. I'm

00:28:22.000 | going to..." If you had gone through all of that, would you then be in a situation where like, "Okay,

00:28:26.640 | now I could walk away and come back. I'm a fully credentialed doctor." I mean, was there a sense

00:28:30.400 | or did not really matter? I mean, whenever you left, it could be an issue. I mean, was that,

00:28:33.840 | I guess I'm trying to understand, was there a pressure to like, "Well, why don't you just

00:28:37.200 | finish your training? Then you can always make a decision later." - Exactly. So that was my mom's

00:28:43.280 | whole narrative around this because she's a doctor as well. The issue is that most residency programs

00:28:48.560 | in the UK are at least six years long. So it was like six to eight years. And all of a sudden,

00:28:53.200 | that's not a case of like, "Oh, just finish your residency." It's a case of like, "Bloody hell,

00:28:57.200 | another six to eight years of this." And I also, again, one thing that I think you encourage and

00:29:03.280 | Tim Ferriss also does as well is speak to the people who are in the position that you think

00:29:06.320 | you want to be in. So I was speaking to a bunch of consultants who, you know, the fully qualified

00:29:09.600 | doctors are equivalent of attendings and saying, "You know, what advice do you have? Like, do you

00:29:15.520 | wish you'd gotten there earlier? Or do you wish you'd taken your time?" And 100% of them said,

00:29:19.440 | "Don't rush to get here. It's not all that it's cracked up to be. It's more fun being a resident

00:29:23.440 | where actually you can do stuff, but you have no responsibility. It's lonely at the top, man.

00:29:27.840 | You know, don't rush for it." And so I was like, "All right, cool. I don't need to worry so much

00:29:32.240 | about this." Because if, you know, to this day, if I wanted to, I could still go back to medicine.

00:29:36.640 | It would be a bit embarrassing with all the big game I've been speaking on the internet about like

00:29:40.720 | making millions and stuff. But I could go back if I really wanted to. - Yeah, you can always just

00:29:44.160 | change your name a little bit. - Yeah. - Like, "Oh, that wasn't me. That was someone else."

00:29:48.560 | - Take glasses off, yeah. - Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Just

00:29:51.040 | change your haircut. Blonde hair, I think, will do it. So here's my psycho. I'm going to psychoanalyze

00:29:55.920 | you. And you can tell me if I'm right or wrong. Here's my thing. I'm going to say that the pivotal

00:30:01.360 | moment in your path was actually much earlier where you decided, because according to your book,

00:30:08.240 | when you were still in that first phase of your training, you were gunning for surgery, right? So

00:30:13.040 | you're like, "Okay, if I'm going to do this, I want a gun for the most competitive sort of high

00:30:18.000 | prestige medical job." My contention is when you made that decision to switch to emergency medicine.

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00:34:32.480 | to learn more was actually what was said in place all of the motion that was going to lead to where

00:34:39.680 | you are today because that's where you decided Wait a second, I want to construct my lifestyle

00:34:45.840 | and like work backwards to see how my professional career that was to shift from

00:34:49.200 | prestige, maximize prestige, maximizing happiness to working backwards.

00:34:55.600 | And once you're in that mindset of I want to work backwards from what I want my life to be like,

00:35:00.560 | now you're setting yourself up for you to actually change and learn what that target is. As you get

00:35:04.560 | more information, it seems to open up that shift. That's my psycho psycho analysis. Okay, so how

00:35:10.000 | close am I there? Pretty close, actually. Yeah. The story in the book is a bit truncated for

00:35:17.760 | space, obviously. I would say there were sort of, that was definitely one start of it. But the other

00:35:24.800 | start of it was a bit before that, like, just reading the four hour workweek. And when I was

00:35:29.680 | like 18 years old, just going into med school, and just coming across initially toying with

00:35:33.920 | this idea of like lifestyle design being a thing. But yeah, no, absolutely. It was when I switched

00:35:39.760 | my focus from going for plastic surgery, which is like really competitive and really intense,

00:35:43.840 | the hardest one, where I was in my fourth year of med school, and I decided plastic surgery,

00:35:48.240 | then I started gunning for all the publications and the whole shebang and brown nosing my way

00:35:52.080 | to try and connect with all the people to realizing actually, is this the lifestyle I want?

00:35:57.680 | Probably not. You know, working part time as an emergency physician sounds more fun. That was a

00:36:02.880 | big shift in like, hang on, rethinking, what does it mean like prestige and status and happiness and

00:36:09.280 | fulfillment? And to what extent does happiness and fulfillment come from having a fancy job title or

00:36:13.280 | a competitive, you know, residency program under my belt? Yeah.

00:36:17.200 | Well, that goes back to my contention. And I wrote a piece about this as well, that people

00:36:21.840 | underestimate the cultural impact of Tim Ferriss. That like planting that seed in so many people's

00:36:27.920 | mind over that period between like 2007 and 2015 is like, has actually had a huge impact. It's

00:36:34.800 | like that article I wrote during the pandemic is why are people not talking about Tim Ferriss?

00:36:39.200 | He got all the stuff people are talking about now. He got that all right 10 years ago. Like,

00:36:44.560 | why aren't people talking about it? I think people were very quick in the more like elite

00:36:49.120 | chattering classes to like hone in on like the specific advice and be like, well, this is kind of

00:36:53.680 | anachronistic and out of date. And, you know, it's putting too much work on virtual assistant,

00:36:58.880 | like looking for flaws, but missing the forest for the trees that like this notion of designing

00:37:04.240 | your life, working backwards, you know, it changed everybody, changed the way that so many people,

00:37:09.760 | people thought about it. Okay, so then let's jump forward. What did you learn? Now we're in product,

00:37:14.960 | you're full time doing this, the topic has shifted, your YouTube channel has shifted

00:37:18.480 | much more towards productivity, even outside of academia and classes, it gets more general,

00:37:24.000 | which makes sense as you're older now, and that's a broader audience. What did you see

00:37:29.520 | building up to get into your book? How did you see productivity YouTube? What did you encounter

00:37:36.640 | there? How did that change over the years? What was your experience being one of the leaders

00:37:41.360 | of that particular media sector? There was definitely a sense of

00:37:47.120 | a few years ago, it was a lot of it was about the apps and the tools. And, you know, 2020, 2021,

00:37:55.200 | Tiago Forte's building a second brain was really taking off and this whole idea of personal

00:37:59.040 | knowledge management, like if you just have the right note taking out the right note taking system,

00:38:02.880 | suddenly creativity will become effortless and stuff.

00:38:05.840 | - Not to interrupt you, but did you also get yelled at a lot by Zettelkasten people for

00:38:11.360 | not taking them seriously enough? I would not yell that so much as like Zettelkasten people,

00:38:15.440 | Zettelkasten people in my life are like, you just aren't getting it. If you have,

00:38:20.320 | don't you realize you have to get this? Can I just come show this to you? I'm assuming you

00:38:24.320 | probably got similar pushback from them. Like if you would just read how to take smart notes,

00:38:28.480 | you would understand like, this is it. This is the key.

00:38:30.640 | - Yeah. And I read how to take smart notes like multiple times. And I was each time I was like,

00:38:35.040 | oh, the thing that's missing in my life is a Zettelkasten system. So I tried Roam and I

00:38:39.120 | tried Obsidian and I tried all the things and then Notion became a thing and stuff.

00:38:43.120 | And I was a mentor for building a second brain and Tiago's become a good friend now.

00:38:46.480 | And it was like that whole genre of like, if you just had the perfect system,

00:38:51.680 | your life would be sorted. I think you said this in one of your recent episodes

00:38:56.720 | the other day. I was listening to this last week and someone asked a question about building a

00:39:00.880 | second brain. And you said something that very much vibed with my experience, which is,

00:39:04.240 | I hope Tiago doesn't listen to this, but I have never once had an actual insight from my second

00:39:08.400 | brain. A lot of it has come from like, I need to make a video or I need to write this chapter. So

00:39:12.080 | let me Google the appropriate things. And so it's not quite been, at least for me, maybe I haven't

00:39:17.360 | been using it right. The holy grail that I thought it would be. But the productivity ecosystem around

00:39:23.440 | then on YouTube was very much focused on the tools. And there was always part of me that was

00:39:27.840 | like, that was not keen on this. Because actually, around that time, late 2020, I got the offer from

00:39:34.320 | Penguin to publish the book about productivity. And so I was trying to figure out like,

00:39:37.600 | I didn't want it to be a, I didn't want it to be criticized in the way that the four hour work

00:39:43.360 | week was for being too specific about the tools. I was like, okay, I need a philosophy here.

00:39:47.600 | Philosophy that is completely de-correlated from the tools. And I had a few ideas that

00:39:52.880 | I was sort of forming over the years around productivity and stuff. And what it took was

00:39:56.560 | sort of a conversation with a guy called David, who was actually James Clear's book proposal guy,

00:40:02.640 | who was an editor in New York. So I showed David like the first draft of the proposal. And he was

00:40:07.760 | like, this stinks, like it's not going to sell. I was like, damn, shit, I spent a year working on

00:40:12.560 | this. What do you mean it's not going to sell? And he was like, it's too complicated. At the time,

00:40:15.920 | it was like productivity is an equation. And part of that equation is to like figure out what's

00:40:19.760 | meaningful to you and then like how to optimize it and stuff. And he was like, look, man, you just

00:40:25.120 | got to simplify it. You're pretty successful. You've done the med school thing. You've done

00:40:28.160 | the doctor thing. You've done the business thing. You're making millions, blah, blah, blah.

00:40:30.800 | If you had to boil it down to one word or one phrase, what would it be? Like, what's the secret

00:40:34.800 | to your productivity? And I was like, oh, easy. I just made everything fun. And he was like,

00:40:40.640 | that's the book, right? That fucking book. Like don't write the book about the equation. No one

00:40:44.080 | gives a shit about the equation. Like write the book about making it fun. And that, so after your

00:40:49.360 | tinkering away on this productivity equation, I decided to change course because I realized,

00:40:53.840 | oh, hang on. There's this whole thing of like, if you focus on enjoying the journey,

00:40:57.360 | productivity just takes care of itself. And the reason I was able to crank out the YouTube videos

00:41:01.760 | and like get through med school while having a pretty good time and get being a doctor while

00:41:04.800 | having a pretty good time is because I always found a way to make it fun. And that was very

00:41:08.640 | distinct to what my colleagues were doing, where they would complain about how awful the job was.

00:41:12.640 | Even though I left medicine in the end, I had a great time. It was super fun. But it's because

00:41:17.120 | there were things that I was applying to make it fun. And so that's what ended up becoming the book.

00:41:20.800 | - Do you think YouTube, this is like a medium is the message type analysis. Do you think YouTube

00:41:27.280 | biases content towards apps, systems, technical details, because of something about what plays

00:41:36.000 | well in the format? Or do you think that format just happened to attract people? Like you and

00:41:41.120 | I are nerds. Like we, I love that. I'm like, yeah, I want the Algebra of Productivity book.

00:41:45.280 | I want like, you have a whole system of like, when we have like an exponent on time management

00:41:51.520 | divided by, you know, time blocking equals. - The whole thing.

00:41:54.720 | - Yeah. So is it the medium of YouTube biases towards this sort of technical list approach,

00:42:01.200 | or is it just, that's who was attracted to YouTube? So what do you think, what direction,

00:42:06.880 | what's the arrow of influence there if you had to think about it?

00:42:09.280 | - Yeah, that's a good point. I think it's, people love actionability. And if, you know,

00:42:17.360 | like Tim Ferriss' podcast intro is like actionable advice from the world, you know,

00:42:21.760 | tribe of mentors, tools of action, actionable advice. There's something about something

00:42:25.520 | feeling actionable. Like even now, when I listen to your podcast, like it's the candy,

00:42:30.160 | the actionable stuff that makes me think, ooh, let me take that away. Even though, and the

00:42:36.240 | philosophy and, you know, through reading Slow Productivity as well, the philosophy is sort of

00:42:41.520 | comes in under the radar, but the actionable insights are the ones where if someone were

00:42:45.280 | to ask me, what have you learned from Cal Newport? I'm like, oh, that actionable thing

00:42:48.000 | about adventure studying, or whatever it's called. Even though the philosophy is a bit more like,

00:42:51.920 | underneath that. And what we found for YouTube videos, and I guess just like books and podcasts

00:42:57.360 | as well, is people love the actionable stuff. But that encourages you to go down into the

00:43:01.280 | route of I need to keep on finding new actionable things to talk about a new system, a new framework,

00:43:06.480 | a new tool. But actually, the thing that, you know, it's like, trying to build muscle,

00:43:13.600 | go to the gym, progressive overload, enough protein. You can't make a career out of creating

00:43:19.440 | content around that. So you have to come up with like, do it, put your wrist this way versus that

00:43:24.400 | way, or like do incline versus decline bench, because like, but really, the basics are fairly

00:43:30.000 | simple. It's just, it doesn't make for sexy content. And I found myself going into that

00:43:33.520 | rabbit hole of like, trying to come up with new productivity systems every day. And it was a bit

00:43:37.760 | exhausting after a while. But I'm ashamed to say that I indulged in that for at least a few months.

00:43:42.000 | So was it a relief then to be working on, you know, on the YouTube video, you might be very

00:43:47.360 | technical, because that's what the medium demanded. And you know, here's my new mechanical keyboard

00:43:51.360 | keycaps. But you're writing a philosophical book at the same time. Did you find that to be a nice

00:43:56.800 | contrast or relief?

00:43:59.040 | It was quite nice. Yeah, I was, I was trying to keep the book also actionable. But the nice thing

00:44:03.280 | about a book is you have a lot more space to expose about the theory. Yeah. And whereas in

00:44:08.240 | a YouTube video, you know, at the time, everyone was trying to optimize for retention and like,

00:44:11.760 | looking at analytics and seeing as soon as I mentioned anything, even vaguely philosophical

00:44:16.400 | or conceptual, I see a measurable drop off in engagement, or retention. And that translates

00:44:21.440 | to literally 10s, if not hundreds of 1000s of views that are disappearing at the point where

00:44:25.200 | I stop being actionable. Right. And so now I don't care about that anymore. I'm like retention,

00:44:29.600 | optimizing for retention is not actually the goal. But at the time, I was thinking,

00:44:32.720 | oh, my goodness, like, I'm a full time YouTuber. Now I need to optimize for retention and all this

00:44:36.080 | stuff. Yeah, definitely the incentives of the platform go towards like, how do you dopamine

00:44:40.560 | hit people as much as possible and as frequently as possible in the shortest amount of time,

00:44:45.680 | which doesn't actually lead to useful content necessarily.

00:44:48.640 | Yeah, I mean, if you push it to its extreme, I guess you end up with Mr. Beast of it, which is

00:44:52.480 | which is just sort of nothing wrong about it, but it's just purifying the retention graph. It's like

00:44:58.960 | taking the retention graph on YouTube and just like purifying that like only things that keep

00:45:04.320 | retention. It's like its own it's it's a the 21st century version of jazz, like a uniquely kind of

00:45:09.360 | American invention. And I like by the way, so the way you do it in the book is great,

00:45:14.320 | which which I think it's you lead with philosophy, science, and then you, but you've carefully

00:45:19.600 | structured, OK, here's experiments, here's advice. So it's like really clear, like, great,

00:45:23.760 | here's the actionable stuff, but it has a clear container around it. So it's like I'm learning

00:45:28.800 | story, science, philosophy. Now we put into action that doesn't work on YouTube, but it works great

00:45:35.520 | in books. I thought I thought it worked well in yours. So let's let's dive into feel good

00:45:39.520 | productivity in some more detail. So you talk about this underlying idea. It's feeling good

00:45:46.560 | about what you're doing is going to lead you to be more productive. Right. Which is kind of a

00:45:51.520 | reverse is there's a sort of grinded out American way of thinking of just you'll be happy when you

00:45:57.600 | get the plastic surgery attending position like you product you be productive so that you can later

00:46:03.200 | later be happy. So so early in the book, you talk about essentially redesigning or rethinking about

00:46:08.480 | your work from a perspective of is this going to be fun or playful or energetic? So, for example,

00:46:15.440 | when you were building out the the YouTube digital business part of your life, and especially as you

00:46:20.640 | started taking that on full time, were how were you thinking about how do I keep this fun? Because

00:46:27.760 | it's easy to make that into a grind. So so what what did you do to make sure that what you were

00:46:32.960 | building was going to be something that you were going to continue to feel good about doing?

00:46:39.600 | Yeah, that's a great question. I tried so many so many different strategies like my

00:46:44.400 | I think society lulls us into believing the myth that you know, this arrival fallacy,

00:46:51.680 | this idea that when we get to a particular destination, then we will be happy. Yeah. And

00:46:56.720 | actually, it was for many years, I thought that your destination was where I wanted to be. And

00:47:02.800 | we talked about this a year and a half ago, when you were on my show, where I was like, Oh, man,

00:47:05.920 | Cal Newport, 10 year professor, what a living the dream. Frickin writing books, the books are amazing.

00:47:10.800 | And now he's doing the content. Oh, I want to be that 10 year professor and do the stuff.

00:47:15.200 | And speaking to you, you were like, you know, this, it's good. Yeah. But also, there's a lot

00:47:21.040 | of admin and a lot of stuff and like, enjoy the journey, man. And I was like, that's very reassuring

00:47:26.640 | to hear. And it was the same pattern. When I would speak to plastic surgeons, they were like, bro,

00:47:30.000 | enjoy the journey. Don't worry about it. Don't rush to get to where I am. Yeah, it's nice. But like,

00:47:34.400 | enjoy the journey, I wish I'd enjoy the journey. So speaking to all these people and listening to

00:47:38.080 | all the podcasts, every single successful person lands on that, on that idea that the journey is

00:47:43.120 | the destination and optimized for enjoying the journey. Don't worry so much about getting about

00:47:48.320 | getting to the end goal. And so like, again, easier said than done. And it was it was it's

00:47:54.640 | so easy to sort of, you know, there have been times in my YouTube journey where I felt like,

00:47:58.000 | oh, you know, once I get that next hire, then I'll be more chill or as you know, six weeks from now,

00:48:03.920 | when the calendar clears up, then my life will be a bit more chill. And through running a bunch

00:48:08.720 | of experiments on myself, I realized that really, what I need to do is try and make the work itself

00:48:14.720 | enjoyable. Yep. How do I, I had a post-it note on my desk that I used to have back when I wasn't

00:48:20.480 | nomading around the world, which is what would this look like if it were fun? It's like the

00:48:24.160 | Tim Ferriss question, well, what would this look like if it were easy? But my version was, what

00:48:27.280 | would this look like if it were fun? You had this editing a video look like yeah, you had this

00:48:30.800 | written down and on your desk. It was a post-it note that I literally had underneath my monitor,

00:48:34.560 | because there's space under the monitor with a bell, the bezels to put the post-it note.

00:48:37.680 | What would this look like if it were fun? I, we also turned this into like a wallpaper for my

00:48:42.800 | phone. Let me see if I can just get rid of my notifications and stuff. What would this look

00:48:46.560 | like if it were fun? Oh, yeah, there it is. But yeah. And just that question, every single day,

00:48:52.960 | I was asking myself that question, whenever I would feel drained about by the work whenever I was like,

00:48:58.080 | too caught up in the numbers, or the stats or like the retention or any of that kind of stuff,

00:49:02.720 | I would try and remind myself, you know what, when I'm on my deathbed, I would give anything

00:49:08.080 | to be where I am right now. Like, let's enjoy the journey. Interesting. So like, what are,

00:49:12.080 | what was the, what were some of the answers to that question? Like, what were some of the things

00:49:16.320 | that you were doing that you stopped doing? Like you mentioned the numbers, like were you, were you,

00:49:22.000 | were you, were you numbers captured for a while? And how does one get free from that if you're on

00:49:26.480 | YouTube? Yeah. So at the start of my YouTube journey, I was very, I was very anti numbers.

00:49:32.240 | Because, you know, at the time, I was reading a bunch of stoicism stuff, like focus on what you

00:49:36.160 | can control. And, you know, the numbers were outside of my control. So I reasoned, you know,

00:49:39.600 | I'm just gonna focus on making one video a week. And that worked really nicely. That's how I stayed

00:49:43.200 | consistent with YouTube when I was in med school and when I was working. But then when I became a

00:49:46.960 | full time YouTuber, and I suddenly started reading all these business books, all of them talk about

00:49:51.600 | like, actually setting goals and like caring about the numbers and stuff. Okay, cool, I guess I should

00:49:56.560 | set goals. And I guess I should care about the numbers. And all of a sudden, it's I think,

00:50:00.320 | when something is yours, when something is your side hustle, and you're doing it for fun, and

00:50:04.640 | you're making pocket money, who cares about the numbers? It's like, it's free money, you're playing

00:50:08.160 | with house money, who cares? Yep. But when it became my full time job, I was like, Oh, crap,

00:50:12.400 | like, now, my job is to make these videos. And therefore, I guess I should care about the numbers.

00:50:18.560 | And I guess there's no point making a video if it's not going to get at least 100,000 views. And

00:50:22.080 | like, Oh, my goodness, that video tanked. And therefore, and what I realized I was doing after a

00:50:28.080 | while was I was just taking it way too seriously. It's like, I'm a freaking YouTuber, man. I'm

00:50:32.720 | making videos in my bedroom in the middle of a pandemic. All my friends are on the front lines,

00:50:36.000 | like working their asses off to save people's lives have got COVID putting themselves at risk.

00:50:40.080 | And I'm just making YouTube videos. What the hell do I have to complain about? Why am I taking it

00:50:43.520 | so seriously? And I took reading some Alan Watts reading some Bertrand Russell's essay in praise of

00:50:48.560 | idleness. And a lot of the stuff that was coming out, I think you were talking about around the

00:50:53.040 | time around the, you know, the pandemic around like, actually taking a step back and not being

00:50:57.360 | so hustly when it came to productivity. Yeah, all of that helped. And even to this day, it's still

00:51:03.040 | a bit of a struggle. Like, you know, the book has come out. And as of yesterday, we hit the New York

00:51:07.840 | Times list, which was super cool. Congratulations. Not surprised, but congratulations.

00:51:11.680 | Thank you. But I've been like not reading the reviews and trying to dissociate myself from the

00:51:17.680 | numbers. Because I think when that focus on the numbers just takes all the fun out of everything.

00:51:23.520 | Yeah. And it probably didn't make a huge difference, I would guess too. I mean,

00:51:27.600 | some videos get more views than others, but you probably found when you stop caring about the

00:51:31.920 | numbers, you have your core audience and it's probably growing at a certain rate. And there's

00:51:37.280 | people doing your courses and it probably didn't make, it probably didn't make that much of a

00:51:41.120 | difference, you know, whether or not. Yeah. So that's interesting. And then what about, so for

00:51:46.960 | example, I always guess that when you added Deep Dive, so your show Deep Dive, your podcast,

00:51:54.320 | video podcast Deep Dive, that always seemed like something for you. Is that, am I reading that

00:51:58.480 | right? You're thinking like, I want to spend, because if you're a YouTuber, you're trying to

00:52:02.240 | just build the biggest possible subscriber base or whatever. It's like, that's not the way you do

00:52:07.120 | it. I guess you would focus on more videos and make a, you know, bigger retention in the first

00:52:11.920 | 30 seconds. So is that an example, adding that to your portfolio, an example of you're like,

00:52:15.760 | this would be fun. I could have long, I could talk to people who are interesting.

00:52:18.720 | Yeah. That's how it started off. I was like, we're never going to grow a big podcast,

00:52:24.640 | but that's fine. This is a cool thing. It's a great way to make friends and speak to people

00:52:28.000 | who I would otherwise be less likely to be able to speak to. Over time, Deep Dive also became a job

00:52:34.640 | because we, there's, there is a, I think I've read it over time. There is a sweet spot when it comes

00:52:41.760 | to productivity and optimization. So we optimized the hell out of Deep Dive to grow Deep Dive. And

00:52:47.760 | I started batch filming podcast episodes. We started schedule things, scheduling things way

00:52:53.040 | ahead of time. We started doing a bunch of research into titles and thumbnails and topics that,

00:52:57.520 | you know, people, the guests hadn't talked about before. And it made the podcast grow,

00:53:02.960 | but it took a lot of the joy away from it. To the point that I've actually decided I'm going to take

00:53:06.960 | a bit of a pause from Deep Dive and figure out like, do I really want to continue doing the

00:53:10.240 | podcast in this format? Yeah. Because for example, what I love to do is being like, hey, Cal, let's

00:53:15.200 | send you an email. Let's hop in a Zoom call and just shoot the shit about like our experiences

00:53:18.720 | with the traditional career ladder versus, I don't know, other, like the creator life.

00:53:25.120 | But actually that episode that you and I did, I had the conversation that I wanted to have,

00:53:29.120 | and the first half of it was completely unrelatable for most people. We weren't talking

00:53:32.720 | about productivity. We were talking about what it's like being a tenured professor and how you

00:53:36.160 | deal with like the challenges of like also having like books and creative stuff you're doing. And

00:53:40.560 | why are you still doing that? And it was so interesting for me, but it was not useful for

00:53:45.040 | a lot of the, a lot of the audience. Some of the audience loved it. Oh my God, like you never hear

00:53:48.320 | these conversations. And we optimized Deep Dive to the point that it became less fun. And so after

00:53:53.840 | doing some soul searching a couple of months ago, actually, I was thinking, do I really want to

00:53:57.760 | continue doing Deep Dive? And I want to continue doing the interviews. Like if you're hanging out

00:54:02.960 | in London, let's get together, book a podcast studio and just chat and record it. That would

00:54:07.200 | be fun. But scheduling you and 20 other people in a given week that I have to then be somewhere for

00:54:13.360 | batch filming, it's like all of the optimization sucks the joy out of it. And I've been trying to

00:54:19.360 | find this sweet spot between like optimizing for fun and optimizing for growth with everything in

00:54:24.080 | the business. So do you think about your business from the standpoint now more of like revenue

00:54:30.080 | floors than revenue optimization? Like, Hey, as long as we're like here, it's all gravy.

00:54:35.920 | And so like beyond that, let's have fun. I don't want to fall below that, but like, Hey, we could,

00:54:41.040 | we have a lot of flexibility. Now you set a floor at a reasonable place and you have a lot of

00:54:44.640 | flexibility in how you run things. Is that a reasonable way? That's literally exactly how I

00:54:50.080 | think about it. I think of it as a profit floor rather than a revenue floor. I'm like, if we did

00:54:54.000 | 2 million profit this year, great. Anything above that feels like a bonus. There's still naturally

00:54:59.920 | the sense of like, Oh, we did 2.8 million last year. So like, let's do 2.9, 3 million this year.

00:55:04.720 | And then I read books like 10X is easier than 2X where I'm like, fuck, okay. What about 20 million?

00:55:09.840 | And then I speak to entrepreneurs doing like 50 million a year in revenue. I'm like,

00:55:12.960 | Whoa, that would be fun. But one thing the team always says to me is that anytime I come back from

00:55:18.880 | the US, they have to ignore whatever I say for three days. Because usually when I'm in the US,

00:55:23.440 | I'm surrounded by people way richer than I am. And I start getting this bug of like, Oh man,

00:55:26.960 | I'd be so much happier if we had a hundred million revenue. And then I realized after a few days.

00:55:30.960 | Yeah. And also I'm sure you get, when you're in the US, how many times have you had someone

00:55:34.960 | come up to you now and say like, Ollie, we need a, we need a Netflix show. This is like another

00:55:40.240 | very US thing is like, this would really do it. Like if you need a TV show, which is like a talk

00:55:45.680 | about like a terrible time suck doing TV, uh, you know, you know who it's interesting. I don't know

00:55:51.440 | if you had this, this impact, but impacted me and the person in the world of podcasting who, uh,

00:55:59.200 | has had a big effect sort of accidentally on the way I think about your approach, which I completely

00:56:04.480 | agree with you. I mean, start with making, think about how do I keep this interesting and fun?

00:56:08.960 | Nothing else is going to be sustainable if you don't do that. I think Joe Rogan has had a big

00:56:14.720 | impact on that. And the, the, the two things being, um, him building cool places to do his work.

00:56:23.520 | And I know it's very insider baseball, the most people, but the podcasters,

00:56:27.120 | this was very influential as he, he, you know, he rents out these warehouses and he puts like a gym

00:56:31.920 | in it and has like a pool table in it. And he makes it a place where, uh, you know, you can

00:56:37.840 | hang out and his friends come there. And even like, especially early in the pandemic, like when

00:56:43.120 | he had his friends there hanging out, that was very influential. And then the other thing that

00:56:47.440 | was very influential is he, I heard him say once, uh, they said, why don't you have an assistant?

00:56:52.960 | Everyone at Hollywood has a personal assistant. And he said, oh, my theory is when you get to the

00:56:57.760 | point where you need a personal assistant, so someone to go do your shopping for you and all

00:57:01.280 | this, that's just a signal you're doing too much. So you should use that as a signal, not to hire a

00:57:05.760 | personal assistant, but to take things, take things off your, take things off of your plate.

00:57:10.640 | I don't know who, I don't know if you had that same influence, but, but who do you look to when

00:57:16.000 | you, when you think about podcasting, YouTubing, this sort of content creation, who are the,

00:57:21.520 | the role models you have in mind in terms of people doing this, right?

00:57:24.720 | Fair question. For me on, on YouTube, the inspiration has always been Peter McKinnon

00:57:31.760 | and the way he's been doing it for like seven years now, photo video tutorials.

00:57:35.280 | But he also seems to just talk about whatever he wants. He'll do a video about what's in his wallet.

00:57:40.160 | He'll do a video about, I don't know, some film thing that he's thinking about or reacting to

00:57:44.320 | something. And I don't know how true this is, but it, it seems like he doesn't care about the

00:57:49.680 | algorithm. And I love that idea. I also think to myself often, what is the YouTube channel that I

00:57:57.440 | would want Tim Ferriss to have? And it's, it's not one where he's like super hyper-optimized. It's one

00:58:02.400 | where honestly, Tim, mate, I just, I like your stuff. Just hit record and just tell me about

00:58:06.480 | something you're interested in. That would be cool. And I almost prefer his solo episodes of

00:58:10.640 | the podcast compared to the interviews. Cause it's like, I can't really hear from him. It's

00:58:14.400 | kind of cool. I think, you know, what's the sort of vlog I would, I would, I would love for Cal

00:58:19.840 | Newport or James Clear to have. It's like, you guys live kind of interesting lives. It's like,

00:58:23.760 | I'd love to get a look into that. Like, what would I want a Cal Newport vlog to look like?

00:58:28.000 | And so based on like the people who I, I aspire to be like in various ways, I sort of think what

00:58:33.280 | would they do when it comes to this particular thing, i.e. the way they do content or the way

00:58:37.520 | they do whatever. Actually, it was, I had a really, really good conversation with Mark Manson

00:58:42.560 | a few, a year ago, actually. And he's been super helpful with helping out with the book as of you.

00:58:48.320 | So thank you for that. But what Mark said, because I was like, you know, man, you're living the dream,

00:58:53.200 | right? You've got the books, the New York Times bestsellers, 20 million copies, a Hollywood film.

00:58:57.200 | Why are you doing YouTube videos? Because he was taking YouTube seriously. And he was like, look,

00:59:02.160 | man, I've had all the traditional media success. And I realized at the end of it, making YouTube

00:59:07.520 | videos is more fun and reaches more people and makes more money. I was like, oh, okay.

00:59:11.920 | That's interesting. Which again, was that, was, was to that point around like,

00:59:16.800 | the grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence. But actually, everyone's

00:59:23.200 | life works for them. And you just got to enjoy the journey. And I sound like a spiritual wooboo

00:59:27.760 | doctor. But yeah, enjoying the journey is the one. So what should you keep in mind if you're a

00:59:32.480 | listener to this interview? You say, okay, you know, I'm not a writer, not a content creator.

00:59:36.880 | But I like this feel good productivity idea. I want to, you know, take the grass I'm in right

00:59:41.200 | now to use your metaphor instead of looking across the fence and make this just like a cooler,

00:59:44.880 | more interesting, more enjoyable place to live. What type of things are relevant when you're

00:59:49.280 | thinking about doing that for I have a job at an office or I'm a professor or something that's not

00:59:53.920 | the fully autonomous sort of media age type position? Yeah. So the, the first three chapters

00:59:59.200 | of the book kind of distilled this into the three P's, play, power, and people. Play, power, and

01:00:04.400 | people are the three energizers that like, you can apply to literally anything, whatever grass you

01:00:08.800 | happen to be on, however much autonomy you have over that grass, you can apply it, play, power,

01:00:12.800 | and people to just make it greener and just make it more fun. We talked a little bit about play.

01:00:18.720 | Play, I think, is one of the most underrated productivity tactics out there where when we

01:00:23.040 | can approach our job or our work or whatever we're doing with a sense of lightness and ease

01:00:28.400 | and a sense of like not taking it so seriously, being engaged, but not taking it so seriously,

01:00:34.000 | you know, sincere rather than serious, as Alan Watts would say that having, having that spirit

01:00:38.800 | of play when it comes to our work can be super, super helpful. You know, a bunch of Nobel prize

01:00:42.960 | winners and stuff talk about how like, really, they were just playing with like graphene or

01:00:47.040 | Richard Feynman or whatever. Your Richard Feynman story was great. Yeah, with the plate,

01:00:51.440 | seeing the spinning plate. Yeah, it was a great anecdote. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

01:00:54.800 | So, I think play is a big one. Power is another one. Power is like a sort of combination of

01:01:01.280 | having autonomy, but also feeling a sense of progress, feeling like you're leveling up.

01:01:05.360 | So, when it comes to autonomy, obviously, entrepreneurs and media people have autonomy

01:01:11.200 | over a lot of what they do, but even if you don't have autonomy over what you do,

01:01:14.960 | you almost certainly have autonomy over how you do it. Or at the very least, the mindset with which

01:01:20.080 | you approach it. So, for example, when I was a doctor, I, you know, this was something that

01:01:24.160 | actually didn't make it into the book. This got cut in the first draft. But I had a whole thing

01:01:28.480 | about how I realized that working on weekends was way more fun and way more energizing than working

01:01:35.760 | on weekdays. It's kind of random, like, why is that? On weekends, there's less people around,

01:01:40.400 | there's more work to do, there's more emergencies coming in and there's fewer and there's less

01:01:43.520 | support. And on weekdays, everyone's around. It's like, you know, you've got the whole team.

01:01:47.040 | But what I realized is that on weekdays, I was the most junior person on the team,

01:01:50.400 | and I was just like, other people will take care of the responsibility. When the consultant would

01:01:55.840 | ask, what are Joe Smith's blood results? It would be my senior who would respond because he would,

01:02:01.200 | or he or she would have it in their mind. It's like, oh, you know, the potassium was 4.8 or

01:02:04.720 | whatever the thing might be. But on weekends, there was no, that middle layer was gone. And

01:02:09.040 | so I was the one who had to think, shit, what was Mrs. Smith's potassium? It's 4.8. And I found that

01:02:14.800 | even though there was more work, the sense of responsibility that I was taking, the fact that

01:02:19.600 | I was showing initiative and actually taking responsibility over the patients, rather than

01:02:23.520 | just leaving it to the seniors, that made a huge difference to the enjoyment that I had when I was

01:02:28.640 | working. And I think there's something interesting here. I haven't quite figured out like the perfect

01:02:33.840 | way to phrase it. But I think there's something counterintuitive in that we think of our energy

01:02:39.200 | as being like a battery almost. And the more and the harder you work, the more that battery gets

01:02:43.600 | drained. And then you get to the end of the day, you've been working really hard, and now the

01:02:46.160 | battery's drained. But that's not actually how energy works. Like if you try and do the bare

01:02:50.640 | minimum, if you try and coast, if you try and just watch the clock and just do the minimum to get

01:02:54.320 | through your day job, that's really soul sucking and really draining. No one enjoys that. But if

01:02:59.040 | you're engaged, and if you're finding a way to like, you know, going a bit of above and beyond

01:03:02.640 | and doing some wider reading and finding some side quests to do and like, you know, taking

01:03:06.080 | responsibility, you get to the end of the day of the work, often with more energy than you than you

01:03:10.560 | did when you got started. And that's really cool. Because like energy is like this renewable

01:03:15.120 | resource that the more you give to your work, the three P's or whatever, the more energy you'll get

01:03:20.640 | out of it. And that means you'll have way more energy in the evening to side hustle if that's

01:03:23.600 | what you want to do, or to be more present for your friends and family if that's what you want

01:03:26.160 | to do. Right. So I think power is a big one. So that becomes like a good indicator. Is my

01:03:31.440 | energy low or high? At the end of the day, okay, if it's low, there's fixes to be done. Like it's

01:03:36.560 | a nice sort of green light, red light. And some of that might just a more playful approach. But

01:03:42.400 | also, like you said, you mentioned in there doing extra reading, I think this is a really core

01:03:47.280 | concept, exposing yourself to information related to what you do, not because you were asked to do

01:03:53.760 | that, but to try to even just signal to your own brain, I'm interested in this stuff. You know,

01:03:58.880 | like this is a cool field. I used to give this advice to the university students, go to talks

01:04:04.400 | and read books about your major because this is going to signal to your own mind. I find this

01:04:10.560 | stuff interesting, which means when it comes time to write a hard paper, your brain says like, I

01:04:15.200 | know why we're doing this. This is like something I'm into, you know? And so that's like, it's an

01:04:20.000 | energy change and you feel more energy towards your work as opposed to like, oh my God, everything

01:04:24.640 | is a chore. Everything is a conflict relationship. Everything is zero sum. Someone trying to take my

01:04:31.040 | time away to make me do their things. I mean, talk about energy draining. So what you're talking about

01:04:35.520 | in part one of your book is basically the opposite of that mindset. - Yeah. I just thought on that

01:04:39.680 | point about the university students, the advice I used to give to people was, again, I was sort

01:04:45.440 | of Tim Ferrissing my way to figure out like, how do you game the academic thing? And one of the

01:04:51.040 | criteria for a first class degree when it came to writing essays was going beyond the lecture

01:04:56.480 | material and coming up with interesting insights. I was like, huh, why do I need to turn up to the

01:05:01.840 | lectures in the first place? I know what the essay questions are going to be. So why don't I just not

01:05:06.880 | even look at what the lecturer is saying? Because that just gets me maximum to a two, one, two,

01:05:11.760 | whatever. Why don't I just read outside of it? And I found in that year where I came top of the class,

01:05:20.320 | all of my studying for my exams was actually not based on the lecture material, which by default

01:05:24.720 | meant that I was in the category of first class degrees for all of my essays. And it also made

01:05:29.760 | it way more fun because now it's like, okay, I've got a question around like, I don't know,

01:05:33.440 | are differences in IQ designed or discovered or something like that? I'm like, huh,

01:05:41.680 | what an interesting question. Let me go to the library, let me find some books,

01:05:44.640 | let me watch some videos. And assembling it myself rather than thinking, let me go to the

01:05:49.120 | lecture notes where the work has already been done and just take it and summarize it.

01:05:52.960 | - I also like the power aspect of the three Ps. Something in there, which I think

01:05:58.560 | people miss often is that importance you just talked about of looking for ways to level up.

01:06:05.600 | So you're looking for ways of, okay, what's important and what I do. Let me choose something

01:06:09.040 | that's important and let me work on doing that thing better and how motivating that is.

01:06:12.560 | I just did a segment recently on my podcast where we were reacting to a popular video going around

01:06:18.720 | YouTube right now. It was someone who's like, I'm 33 years old and lost and my advice for young

01:06:23.920 | people or whatever. And one of the things we pointed out from this video was that the person

01:06:28.000 | in this video, when she was talking about her career trajectory, there was a lot of just the

01:06:32.880 | way the world works is you get chosen for a job and then if it's the right job, you like it and

01:06:38.160 | hopefully you get to stay. And then maybe they'll fire you and you won't keep the job anymore.

01:06:43.120 | But there's no discussion like, well, what do you do once you get the job? And this mindset of like,

01:06:47.360 | yeah, let's find the levels that we're trying to move up is not just makes it more enjoyable,

01:06:52.320 | but it's also probably like the base strategy for keeping jobs and opening up opportunities

01:06:56.960 | and gaining autonomy. Not just, hey, you chose me for this job. Now it's just mine. Unless you

01:07:02.080 | decide to fire me. It's more like you let me into this arena. I'm going to start playing

01:07:07.440 | pretty aggressively. I want to get some points on the board. It seems like an obvious mindset,

01:07:12.640 | but I think a lot of people don't have that instilled. Yeah. Yeah. I've been coming across

01:07:18.480 | this sort of stuff a lot as well. There was a phrase I heard, which was something like,

01:07:23.680 | how can they expect me to put effort into my job, given how little they're paying me? It's like,

01:07:32.400 | it's such a disempowering way to live. And I think one of the ways in which the pendulum has swung,

01:07:43.120 | initially, the whole hustle culture and all that crap. And then the pendulum has swung almost too

01:07:48.480 | far in the other direction, where there's this sort of sense of entitlement around like,

01:07:52.240 | I am owed a high paying, fulfilling, meaningful job. And it's my manager's and their boss's

01:08:00.080 | job to give me career progression and make sure that I am thriving in my design. No,

01:08:03.760 | no one has time for that shit. It's like, you've got to take it into your own hands.

01:08:08.160 | And I really now empathize with that now that I have my own team, and I'm seeing like, oh, okay,

01:08:12.320 | this is how I think about people and the ones who go above and beyond. And the ones who are

01:08:18.240 | taking more interest in the job actually have more fun, and they get more energy out of it,

01:08:21.840 | and they may end up making more money because they're just doing more interesting things.

01:08:26.160 | I think there's a lot of this sort of disempowering language that some people

01:08:30.400 | use when it comes to their jobs. - Well, I wanted to ask you about hustle

01:08:33.440 | culture, actually, because it's a confusion I have that I think you can clarify. So often,

01:08:39.040 | critics of people like you or I who talk about things like productivity and crafting your life,

01:08:45.360 | they usually set up this dichotomy of most people are out there telling you to just grind it out.

01:08:54.000 | Most people are just telling you, like, just work harder. How do you get more work squeezed

01:08:58.240 | into your day? And this is always sort of set up as the ground state that they're sort of pushing

01:09:03.360 | back against. Whereas I feel like most people I know in this space, like you or other writers,

01:09:08.480 | they're all pushing back against that. And in the book world, I can't find books. I did a piece on

01:09:15.520 | this once. I mentioned this. I was like, I've looked at the last 20 years of books on productivity.

01:09:20.320 | There's like two that specifically talk about like, hey, how do we get more done? But is this

01:09:25.040 | hustle culture, does this exist online? Is that where this coming from? YouTube, Instagram? I'm

01:09:30.080 | not as familiar with that world. But is there a place right now where people really are pushing,

01:09:36.320 | do more, fit more in, grind, grind, grind? Or has that been largely just a construction because we

01:09:41.520 | needed something to push back against? And how do you understand the reality and location of hustle

01:09:47.280 | culture? Oh, man, I love that we're talking about this because this has been puzzling me for some

01:09:51.280 | time as well. Because, you know, sometimes I'll speak to people who are not in the online or

01:09:58.320 | writing world. And they'll say, oh, productivity, isn't that all like hustle culture? I'm like,

01:10:03.280 | what do you mean by hustle culture? And they'll say this, oh, you know, the world is telling us

01:10:07.920 | that we've just got to grind it out. Who is telling you that you just need to grind? Like,

01:10:11.920 | and they can never point to a specific source. They're not like David Allen from Getting Things

01:10:15.840 | Done is telling me to grind it. I was like, no, he's not. He's saying, look, if you're overwhelmed,

01:10:19.120 | put it on a fucking to do list. And, you know, chill out. He's like, chill out on it. Yeah.

01:10:23.760 | It certainly isn't the ones telling me to grind it out. It's like, yeah. But I think online,

01:10:31.840 | there is a bit of a grinded out thing. And that is, it's mostly aimed at young men. So it's like

01:10:37.200 | the Andrew Tate's of the world and the David Goggins of the world. And that thing around like,

01:10:43.120 | I think there's like, I was talking to Mark Manson about this when I was on his podcast.

01:10:48.720 | He came up with this. It was super, super interesting way to look at it, which is,

01:10:51.760 | there is one set of advice that gets you from degenerate to baseline. And then there is a whole

01:10:58.240 | other method that gets you from baseline to success. And a lot of the advice that's aimed

01:11:03.680 | at sort of young teenage boys, they're addicted to porn. They're playing video games for 18 hours a

01:11:08.240 | day. They're flunking out of school. They're disengaged from society. They don't know how

01:11:11.920 | to talk to girls. For those guys, telling them, get the fuck up, go to the gym every single day,

01:11:17.440 | wake up at 5am, do it if you don't feel like it. Grind it out, man. You've got to find a way to

01:11:21.360 | make 10k a month so that you're not tied to a job. It's actually good advice for those kids.

01:11:26.160 | And telling them, guys, you've got to be more balanced in your life. It's like they're already

01:11:29.120 | way out of balance with self-care and playing video games and addicted to porn. So that advice

01:11:33.440 | is helpful for them. But if someone who's already at baseline, who's maybe overwhelmed in their job

01:11:37.600 | and is struggling to make time to be present with their family, if they get that advice of,

01:11:43.680 | "Hey, the solution is to just wake up a few hours earlier and grind it out at the gym and go for a

01:11:47.600 | run at four in the morning even when you don't feel like it," the same advice then starts to feel

01:11:52.320 | like, "What is this hustle culture BS?" And so I think maybe that's one way to spread that.

01:12:00.800 | That makes sense. Right. So you need for the young people or people whose life is way out of whack,

01:12:05.280 | they basically just need the Goggins, get after it because they're changing their mindset. But

01:12:11.120 | there's not a lot of books aimed at business executives that it's just, "Hey, walk five times

01:12:18.880 | more." I mean, just a couple, but that's more rare. Okay, here's my other YouTube question.

01:12:23.600 | What about these videos? What should I know about these videos of people studying for seven or eight

01:12:29.520 | hours real time? And it goes on YouTube. My younger listeners keep talking to me about this

01:12:36.240 | as being the big thing. Do you know anything about these, this endurance studying trend online?

01:12:41.760 | Yeah, this was the thing. We like to keep an eye on what sort of videos are doing the rounds and

01:12:46.640 | what's going viral and 14-hour study with me, how I'm able to study for 14 hours without breaks.

01:12:52.400 | People love that stuff. And it's weird because obviously you and I know that that's not effective

01:12:57.920 | at all. And having made some of these videos, I know that it's like, I can tell that these,

01:13:02.800 | that video was actually filmed in three different sittings. It's like, this guy is like, interesting.

01:13:07.360 | But I think, again, there is something that students, this is something I always try and

01:13:13.360 | sort of rail back against when I hear students say this, which is there's almost a narrative

01:13:17.600 | that students have that studying for long hours is what you need to do and what you

01:13:22.000 | should be doing to be successful. And there's almost a romanticization of, "Hey, you know,

01:13:26.960 | it's so aesthetic. I was like on my desk with my textbooks, highlighting and rereading and

01:13:32.160 | making my pretty notes. And I was doing that for 16 hours. Aren't I a good student?" And then the

01:13:36.080 | Instagrammification of people's study notes and stuff now gives you clout points for having the

01:13:40.720 | prettiest looking notes that you've made by just copying them out of a textbook, even though we

01:13:43.920 | know that's completely ineffective. That's nothing. Yep. And so those people love the idea of like,

01:13:48.320 | "Oh, I can study for 14 hours a day." Whereas what you and I talk about is, bruv, deep work,

01:13:52.800 | small amounts of time, do the thing, focus on the thing, active recall. It's not that hard.

01:13:57.200 | But it's not as sexy or Instagrammable to say, "Hey, I did my flashcards for 25 minutes and then

01:14:03.040 | I took a break." Okay, that's interesting. So our summary here is, it depends on the medium.

01:14:07.360 | So when it comes to productivity and getting things done, some of these online medium really

01:14:11.760 | are creating some notion. It's like a hustle culture, but for various reasons. And a lot of

01:14:17.120 | it is probably more about retention and views than it is like, I think, more intellectual critics like

01:14:24.720 | to say, which is that we've internalized narratives of late stage capitalism and we're trying to

01:14:30.880 | brainwash effective producers. I think it's probably like those study videos is much more

01:14:34.720 | about someone else did this and got 700,000 views and I'm going to draft off of that. It's more

01:14:39.760 | trend following. But in the medium of books, for example, you don't see this. So in a medium that's

01:14:47.120 | more set towards philosophy and thinking things through and being a little... It's not about

01:14:52.560 | clicks, but about long-term changing of ideas. If we see books as a reflection of the more serious

01:14:58.160 | thinking on these topics, hustle culture is not something that's even really in the atmosphere.

01:15:03.360 | It's just this moment right now, especially the post-pandemic moment. But I would say I've argued

01:15:08.320 | that this is basically since the post 9/11, post financial crisis moment has been a Tim Ferriss

01:15:15.520 | occasion of work. It's a lot of people thinking more about, "What am I trying to do? Where do I

01:15:20.320 | want to live? What do I want my job to be? How do I do well so that I can keep my job, but not make

01:15:25.280 | my job be everything so I can't enjoy the other parts of my lives?" And by figuring out that path,

01:15:30.240 | I would say for most people I know over the age of 30 is like the whole game. I don't know anyone

01:15:36.560 | that age that's like, "How do I do 10 times more?" And also I don't know a lot of people that age

01:15:40.560 | that just need to be told to get up at five and they're just not doing anything. It's that

01:15:45.360 | complex. That's the story of this moment. It's the story you talk about in your book. It's like,

01:15:49.040 | "I want to do well in my work. I need work, but I want to enjoy it too. And I want to be part of a

01:15:55.520 | broader part of my life. And how do I make all these things? How do I intertwine all these things

01:15:59.360 | together?" And feel-good productivity is part of the answer to that. Well, let's change the

01:16:04.160 | relationship you have towards your work. Let's make doing well in your work something that is

01:16:08.960 | sustainable, not something that you sacrifice to gain something later. But that to me is the big

01:16:15.440 | discussion happening in the world of work, not how to, whatever, grind out more hours by using

01:16:23.520 | amphetamines or whatever it is. Yeah, whatever it is. Yeah. I think it's also as I've gotten older

01:16:30.400 | in the productivity space or just as I've gotten older in general, I find myself gravitating a lot

01:16:35.200 | more towards that stuff. But when I was a kid, if David Goggins had been around, I'd have been like,

01:16:40.960 | "Yeah, of course, as a 15-year-old, I need to be grinding it out because I want to whatever."

01:16:45.520 | And I think in a way, a lot of hustle culture, at least the stuff that I've seen aimed at young men,

01:16:50.880 | it's not about like, "Hey man, you should get up early and grind harder so you can make more money

01:16:56.400 | for your employer." It's like, "You should wake up early and grind it out so that you can get to the

01:17:00.000 | gym, you can take care of your health, and you can build your business on the side so that you don't

01:17:04.400 | have to be attached to the man or whatever." It's like, this is not some like capitalist thing that

01:17:11.280 | it's like the factory overlords are trying to get us to produce more widgets for them.

01:17:14.320 | It's more like individuals realizing, "Actually, I don't want to be tied so hard to the infrastructure

01:17:20.960 | of paid employment. And I actually want to have the freedom to do my own thing while also being

01:17:25.760 | jacked or whatever." And so for those people, I think that's the audience that the hustle culture

01:17:30.640 | advice is broadly aimed at. - Yeah. And for men, for example, being jacked,

01:17:36.160 | which is often derided by commentators, it's like a foundation of discipline that kind of

01:17:42.080 | changes mindset so that they can also, if you follow any of these podcasts that are more aimed

01:17:46.480 | right at men, it's a foundation to split from which they can also stop drinking so much,

01:17:50.720 | from which they can be more present for their family. They can make more money. They can be

01:17:56.240 | more in their kids' lives. And it turns out, I think women have their equivalent. We're just

01:18:01.600 | going to completely stereotype content, but it's like equivalent versions to getting jacked for

01:18:07.520 | women that it's not about exercising with heavy weights, but something else. But I'm sure there's

01:18:11.600 | the equivalent that plays that role of this is a symbol of I have some control and discipline

01:18:17.280 | over my life from which I can then do all these other things that are really important to me.

01:18:22.160 | And I don't know, maybe for students, it's like the grades, but I'm a believer in this notion.

01:18:27.040 | I've also softened to this. I've been trying to understand, especially sort of this, like

01:18:31.200 | the non-political manosphere. You kind of have to pull, especially in American context,

01:18:35.840 | you have to pull, the politics get weird, but the non-political manosphere, I more and more feel like

01:18:41.200 | I see what they're doing. It's like helping guys who don't have to act together, get their act

01:18:46.880 | together. And again, it seems weird from the outside. It's like, why is everyone bow hunting

01:18:50.960 | and doing jiu-jitsu? That seems really specific, but it's not really about we need everyone to bow

01:18:55.920 | hunt and do jiu-jitsu. It's just, those are things that require discipline. And then once someone's

01:19:00.720 | disciplined doing that, then maybe also they'll start drinking. Maybe also they'll be a better

01:19:04.480 | father. Maybe also they'll get their accounting business much more stable so that their kids can

01:19:09.840 | go to college. It's interesting. The psychology of productivity in the modern world is much more,

01:19:15.680 | I mean, it's much more about this sometimes than just the tactics that people associate with it.

01:19:21.120 | I'm taking you way off base here, basically. No, this is good stuff. This is something I

01:19:26.160 | really want to research more about, but this idea around, I'm always intrigued by this.

01:19:32.080 | I think the pendulum is swinging a lot more towards traditional gender roles/masculine/feminine

01:19:40.080 | energy, however you want to call it, to the point that I think in the last 10, 15 years,

01:19:46.560 | we've been told men and women are basically the same and this dampening down of natural or

01:19:53.120 | unnatural differences between men and women. And now we're seeing the swing in the opposite

01:19:56.720 | direction where there is now extra clout to be had as a man for being jacked and for bow hunting and

01:20:02.640 | for doing jiu-jitsu and for showing footage of you in your cold plunge doing the hard thing.

01:20:07.840 | Whereas for women, I think what it seems like, my fiancé is super into this sort of content,

01:20:13.280 | it's very much, we sort of jokingly refer to it as king content and queen content. King content

01:20:19.120 | is you're a king, you're a warrior, you're a powerful man, you got this. Queen content is

01:20:22.800 | you deserve to take a break, you've got it so hard. Self-care, you know, take a bath, rose petals,

01:20:28.000 | like you got this girl, your man should be buying you roses every week. And the comments on these

01:20:32.720 | videos are just like insane and they get stupid amounts of views for no production value and no

01:20:38.480 | real content value but just this motivational thing of you're a queen. Similarly, you're a king,

01:20:43.440 | you know, get after it. I'm so intrigued by how the space is evolving over time because what's

01:20:49.520 | also happening then is that the incentives are there for more people to create that sort of

01:20:53.040 | content. And so we're going to end up with an extreme version of king content and an extreme

01:20:58.320 | version of queen content where it seems like, you know, people's vision boards are like, oh,

01:21:01.760 | you know, make sure you get that Cartier love bracelet, which is 18 grand or something. And

01:21:06.240 | that seems to be a thing for women, whereas for men, it's like, make sure you get your marathon

01:21:10.480 | time for under two and a half hours. I'm so intrigued by how this is going to evolve.

01:21:15.200 | Interesting. Well, if we believe in your pendulum theory, then that means if you're just starting

01:21:19.040 | off right now, like with the YouTube channel, predict the pendulum coming back, right? Would

01:21:23.920 | that be the smart thing to do right now is start establishing a channel that's when the pendulum

01:21:27.920 | swings back and aspirational content is much more gender agnostic. Maybe that's where we're going to

01:21:33.040 | be in four years. So we have to. So I know we're over time. I know we're over time here, but I

01:21:39.920 | always love talking to you because, I mean, obviously we sort of think the same way about so

01:21:44.160 | many things. Yeah, of course, we ended up in gender roles is exactly where people expected us in our

01:21:49.520 | productivity conversation. So I really do recommend feel good productivity. I mean, it's a serious

01:21:55.920 | work of philosophy on productivity, and I think it articulates a lot of things I probably informally

01:22:00.960 | talk about on this show. So I know my audience, my audience is going to dig this for sure. The

01:22:06.880 | book is doing great and I'm not surprised. I think it's going to continue, continue to crush it. So

01:22:12.320 | Ali, thank you for coming on the show. Long time, long time and coming. My, my listeners have been

01:22:17.840 | asking for it, a treat for me and good luck and continued success. I'm wishing you continued

01:22:23.360 | success on your book. Thank you so much. And can I say just thank you for all your like graciousness

01:22:27.680 | and advice and everything over the years. I remember when I first sent you an email being

01:22:31.520 | like, Hey, Alex, you want to come to the pod or whatever it was. I was, I felt so scared. I was

01:22:35.120 | like, Oh my God, this is Cal Newport. He's such a big deal. And it's like, you know, he's so busy,

01:22:38.480 | but you just replied instantly. And you were so gracious about it and like so willing to share

01:22:42.480 | about the writing process and the marketing and the publicity and what life in academia is like.

01:22:47.200 | So yeah, just thank you for all the, all the good energy that you've been putting out there for

01:22:52.400 | years. And for all the advice that you've given me as well, really appreciate it.

01:22:54.800 | Oh, of course. Of course. Hey, there's no narrower niche than people that produce

01:22:58.400 | professional content on productivity. So we got to stick together, man.

01:23:01.120 | There's only so many of us. All right. Thank you. All right. So that was my conversation

01:23:06.480 | with Ali Abdaal talking about his book, which I'll hold up here for us to see feel good

01:23:12.400 | productivity. Now I have a couple of debriefing notes. I want to touch on about this conversation,

01:23:18.640 | a couple of things that caught my attention before we get there. Let me just briefly mention

01:23:22.800 | another one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. That's our friends at Shopify.

01:23:26.560 | So whether you're selling a little or a lot, Shopify helps you do your thing. However,

01:23:33.920 | you chaching, you know, Shopify, even if you don't think you do, because they are everywhere,

01:23:42.400 | they power 10% of all e-commerce in the US. They're also the global force behind all birds,

01:23:48.400 | Rothy's, Brooklyn, and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across 175

01:23:53.040 | countries. What are they? It's a global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of

01:23:57.600 | your business from the launch, your first online shop stage to the first real life store stage,

01:24:03.440 | all the way to the, did we just hit a million order stage? Shopify is there to help you grow,

01:24:09.600 | whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits. Shopify helps you sell everywhere

01:24:16.400 | from their all-in-one e-commerce platform to their in-person point of sale system, wherever you,

01:24:20.560 | or whatever you're selling. Shopify has got you covered. They've got it down to a science

01:24:26.480 | to turn your browsers into buyers. They have the internet's best conversing checkout,

01:24:30.240 | 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. They even have a feature

01:24:36.400 | called Shopify magic that uses AI to help you with your sales efforts. If you are going to

01:24:45.520 | sell something, the internet is involved. Shopify is who you should be using. They have this figured

01:24:53.200 | out. The people I know who do e-commerce, Shopify has been their savior. It gives them

01:24:58.480 | these professional looking online stores with these really effective point of checkout systems,

01:25:05.280 | where it's really, really easy for the consumer to quickly have their information looked up or

01:25:10.000 | entered and do the sale really quick and very professionally. It's really the way to go.

01:25:13.120 | You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period right now at shopify.com/deep,

01:25:21.600 | but you need to type that all lowercase, shopify.com/deep. Go to shopify.com/deep now to

01:25:29.840 | grow your business no matter what stage you're in, shopify.com/deep. I also want to talk about

01:25:37.440 | our friends at Notion. Now I've talked about Notion before, the service that allows you to

01:25:44.320 | combine your notes, docs and projects into one beautiful custom design space. Notion, for example,

01:25:50.880 | is what Jesse and I use to interact with our ad agency. They built out a beautiful

01:25:56.400 | Notion workspace that tracks all of the information about our ad reads and the episodes and the

01:26:02.400 | downloads on those episodes and the scripts for the ad reads. And we have these great views where

01:26:06.880 | we can just immediately see, okay, show me the ad reads for this calendar day. Now show me all of

01:26:12.480 | the ad reads we've done for this particular customer. It makes it easy for us to enter data,

01:26:17.440 | easy for them to peruse the data. Great example of Notion at its best. Well, they have a new feature

01:26:22.320 | now to make the Notion experience even better. And that is their AI powered, because we could

01:26:31.840 | call it assistant called Q&A. It can answer questions about the data that you've already

01:26:39.600 | entered into Notion without you having to have built a custom report or interface for getting

01:26:44.080 | that information. This could be, for example, questions about next quarter's roadmap or

01:26:48.880 | finding that marketing campaign proposal you're looking for, or digging up a long lost link,

01:26:53.840 | all in seconds. So where do you find that one piece of urgent information? Or more importantly,

01:26:59.760 | how do you find it quickly with your Sandy and tack and Notion, you just load up the Q&A interface,

01:27:04.640 | ask the question, it does the work for you. It can search through 1000s of documents in seconds,

01:27:11.440 | it'll answer your question in clear language. No matter how large or complex your workspace is.

01:27:17.040 | You can ask these questions from anywhere in Notion, it'll find exactly what you need without

01:27:20.640 | you having to leave the current document or view where you already have to be. You can also trust

01:27:25.680 | your data is secure because Notion AI is designed to protect your information. No AI models will be

01:27:31.280 | trained with your information, your data remains encrypted. The answers given to you will never use

01:27:37.120 | information from pages that you don't have access to. So when you use Notion AI, it's even easier

01:27:42.720 | to do your most meaningful work. So try Notion AI for free when you go to Notion.com/Cal. That's

01:27:50.560 | all lowercase letters, Notion.com/Cal to try the powerful, easy to use Notion AI today. And when

01:27:58.960 | you use our link, you'll be supporting our show. So go to Notion.com/Cal, all lowercase, don't

01:28:05.280 | forget that slash Cal. All right. So Jesse, I enjoyed that conversation with Ollie. A couple

01:28:13.440 | things I noticed that come back to things we've talked about before. I was really interested

01:28:19.760 | because to me, this is what I hadn't heard as much about, his transition from being a doctor

01:28:25.760 | to a YouTuber. I think this gets to a lot of people's daydreams. I don't know if you know

01:28:31.840 | people have this conversation, but it's like, can I just drop what I'm doing and be like on YouTube

01:28:39.040 | and have these videos about whatever weightlifting and just like, mate, that'd be so great. And

01:28:43.520 | everyone would know who I am. It's like a common daydream. So we got to see with Ollie how he

01:28:46.960 | actually did it. Two things I noticed, one, it was already really successful before he made the jump.

01:28:57.440 | So he had this very successful YouTube channel when the pressure came from to make a jump,

01:29:06.560 | because if you remember from the interview, what happened here is he had finished his first phase

01:29:10.800 | of doctor training. It had its own terminology he used for the UK. If you know the US system,

01:29:15.920 | it's like after your internship year, you did medical school, you did your internship year,

01:29:20.080 | you're serving, you can service patients. I can't remember the word.

01:29:25.280 | >> Residency.

01:29:26.560 | >> Yeah. And then you go to residency. So he was taking, but they don't call it residency. So it's

01:29:32.560 | also, it was pretty complicated. So he was seeing patients and was going to take a gap year before

01:29:39.360 | starting his residency in which he was just going to do like ER work, make some money. And then as

01:29:44.560 | he talked about that got canceled because of COVID. And that's when he looked up and said,

01:29:48.560 | "Oh my God, I'm making like a lot more money off of YouTube than not only what I make in my off

01:29:54.960 | year, but like a lot more than I'm going to make as a doctor because doctors don't get paid as much

01:29:58.480 | in the UK." So it wasn't like it was a super courageous decision financially. He was already

01:30:05.600 | making way more money from his YouTube channel than he ever would as a doctor. So in my book,

01:30:10.480 | So Good They Can't Ignore You, I have a phrase for this. I call this the use of money as a

01:30:17.440 | neutral indicator of value. How do you know how successful or how valuable you would be as a

01:30:22.800 | YouTuber? See how much money you can get people to give you. He was making enough money to live

01:30:28.160 | off of. In fact, live better than being a doctor is a really good objective indication that you're

01:30:34.880 | good at this and you can make a go at this. As opposed to just saying, "I trust myself and have

01:30:39.760 | courage. I think this will work out." People don't like hearing this strategy when it comes to these

01:30:46.720 | daydream style jumps like becoming a full-time YouTuber, because what it means is you have to

01:30:51.680 | get objective feedback and you don't get to do the fun thing to quitting your job until you're

01:30:55.840 | making a lot of money, and they don't really trust that they'll ever get there. They know, "I

01:31:01.840 | probably won't make the money. I want to just do the change. I want to make the change because that

01:31:07.120 | seems really exciting." The idea of, "Well, why don't I actually just try to make a lot of money

01:31:11.600 | doing this before I quit my job?" That's not nearly as sexy or romantic, and so people don't like it

01:31:16.800 | as much. But it's really a good way to do this, especially when you're transforming a side hustle

01:31:20.880 | to a primary hustle. Get people to give you money. They don't do that if they don't want to.

01:31:26.720 | They'll give you good opinions whenever you want. You can say, "Hey, I want to become a YouTuber,"

01:31:30.080 | and people will say, "Yeah, you do you, and the internet's blowing up, and I found this video

01:31:33.920 | about how to make my YouTube channel big, and I'm sure it'll work for you." That's easy. I'll give

01:31:37.440 | you that positive feedback all day long. Money? I got to see something valuable. So he waited until

01:31:44.320 | he was doing really well with YouTube before he even considered doing that full-time.

01:31:48.720 | The second thing I noticed is part of his success was he was there early.

01:31:57.520 | So we talked about this. He was early to YouTube. He was doing things early on about studying

01:32:05.200 | and study habits on YouTube that at the time was still scarce, and it helped him build this big

01:32:11.280 | audience. He said very clearly in this interview, I wrote this down as he said it,

01:32:14.720 | "If he was to do those same videos today, or if someone else was to come along and do those same

01:32:19.360 | videos today, they wouldn't get as much play because there's a thousand people doing them."

01:32:22.640 | There's a first mover advantage that happened there as well. He stumbled into YouTube,

01:32:29.920 | found a seam that was very successful, gave it really careful, diligent attention.

01:32:35.600 | Eventually, that became demonstrably and unambiguously successful because he was

01:32:41.200 | actually making money from it, more money than his other job, and then he made the jump.

01:32:46.320 | So I mean, neither of those things are what the aspiring YouTuber wants to hear,

01:32:51.040 | that if you're not sort of first into a category of a technology, it can be a lot harder,

01:32:56.160 | and then even if you are, you need to wait to see that you're making enough money,

01:32:58.960 | which took a lot of trial and error and years of work for Ali to get there.

01:33:02.080 | None of that's what people want to hear. What they want to hear is like, "Yeah,

01:33:04.640 | if you just have some courage, six months from now, you're going to be Mr. Beast."

01:33:09.040 | That's what people want to hear, but that's not the way it works out. In fact, Mr. Beast himself

01:33:13.520 | was also very early to what he was doing. There are people that replicate that formula. It's

01:33:17.760 | hard to be as successful. That's often the case, I think, when it comes to these seemingly low

01:33:23.680 | barrier to entry dream jobs. Hey, anyone can do this, and it has the capability of generating a

01:33:29.200 | lot of income. Those are rarely the target you want to look at because it usually requires some

01:33:34.160 | sort of combination of being early to it and working at it for a long time and finding the

01:33:40.080 | right angle, and there's limited slots for who's going to survive at it. Ali has the slot

01:33:46.000 | for really sort of smart, well-researched productivity expert on YouTube. I don't have

01:33:53.040 | any more slots there are. If you're looking to do something similarly radical, you probably need to

01:33:58.400 | find what the new next thing is where you're going to make your move as opposed to trying

01:34:02.560 | to replicate what's being done. A lot of other interesting stuff in the interview, of course,

01:34:05.680 | but I like that tidbit because we see these people that have these huge, impressive,

01:34:10.560 | seven-figure-a-year businesses online, and it really is interesting to say,

01:34:13.920 | "How did they get there? What mattered, and what lessons can we pull out of it?"

01:34:21.200 | Good for him. I would say, first of all, I love his stuff. His channel is great.

01:34:25.600 | The videos are really high-quality.

01:34:28.400 | They're really high-quality, yeah, but as he said, he's been doing this forever,

01:34:31.520 | so you get better and better and better. He's got good cameras, though, too.

01:34:35.760 | Also, he has the perfect voice for YouTube. He talks quickly. That's not a YouTube-adapted

01:34:44.960 | put-on. It's not, "Okay, I'm going to do this sort of artificial way of talking

01:34:49.120 | to do well for YouTube." If you just talk to him casually, he has a pretty fast talking pace,

01:34:54.720 | which just happens to be perfect for YouTube because this type of content, people are like,

01:34:59.040 | "I want to get to it. Don't waste my time," but he has complicated content, so by talking faster,

01:35:03.520 | he can overcome people's tendency to click away before they get the really interesting content,

01:35:08.400 | so it's almost like being born unusually tall and then leveraging that to become a

01:35:12.880 | basketball player. He has the perfect cadence to be a YouTuber. We were listening to someone

01:35:18.720 | recently, me and my kids, who has a fake YouTube voice, Mark Rober. Do you know Mark Rober?

01:35:25.200 | >> No.

01:35:25.680 | >> He's a cool guy. He's got a cool channel, and he builds things.

01:35:31.680 | >> Oh, okay, yeah.

01:35:32.400 | >> Yeah, I mean, he did the porch pirate. He would build the things, the packages that package

01:35:37.360 | thieves would steal, and then they would have elaborate bombs and glitter bombs and stuff

01:35:42.160 | that would go off. He's a former engineer that does really cool builds, but he just talks at a

01:35:46.240 | yell, which is like this high energy, always smiling, "I'm Mark Rober, and today we're going

01:35:52.000 | to..." No normal person talks that way. It would be like the Will Ferrell character from early

01:35:58.240 | 2000s SNL who, "Cannot control the volume or modulation of my voice." He's just constantly

01:36:03.920 | just yelling, like, "I don't know," but it's really good for YouTube. It works really well

01:36:08.640 | on YouTube. Like, "I don't know about this, but we're going to see what happens." It's great for

01:36:14.240 | YouTube, but if he talked that way in real life, his wife would probably divorce him. Like, "This

01:36:18.320 | is crazy. You're just yelling." I mean, my five-year-old talks that way. It's his way of

01:36:23.200 | dealing with being the youngest of three is like, "I'm just going to yell. I don't care if anyone

01:36:27.440 | else is talking." So that's like an artificial voice. Ollie's just talking the way he normally

01:36:32.400 | talks. It just happens to be really well-suited for this content. So a lot of things came together

01:36:37.520 | to make him really good at what he did. Not easy to replicate kids, though, so you should admire

01:36:42.240 | what he's doing, but maybe not plan to follow his path in the next six months. All right, so I think

01:36:48.080 | that's all the time we have for today's episode. Thank you, everyone who listened or watched. If

01:36:54.080 | you listened and you want to see what we just talked about, this is episode 284. Find it at

01:36:58.240 | thedeeplife.com/listen. The videos will be at the bottom. We'll be back next week with another

01:37:03.440 | old-fashioned episode of the show. So until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, so if you enjoyed my

01:37:10.080 | conversation with Ollie Abdaal, you might also like my recent interview with the author Arthur

01:37:16.720 | Brooks. That was in episode 280. We had a great conversation about his book, Build the Life You

01:37:22.480 | Want, as well as his own path towards building a really interesting career. So I think you're

01:37:28.960 | going to like that one. Check it out. I mean, human behavior is the most interesting thing ever

01:37:32.720 | because you can use mathematical and statistical tools, complicated tools, to at least apprehend

01:37:38.160 | in some of these complex problems of human behavior.

Make 2024 Your Best Year: Ditch The Hustle Culture & Achieve Your Dreams | Ali Abdaal & Cal Newport

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