Thomas Frank is this huge YouTuber, two and a half million subscribers, the way he motivated himself to publish videos in the early days of his channel, when no one was watching was an app called a beeminder, which is an automatic thing where it would it like connects to your YouTube RSS feed.

And if you don't publish a video every week, it will take $30 out of your debit card or out of your bank account just completely automatically. And that was how he made himself accountable. He's like, Well, I've got to publish a video every week. Otherwise, I'm losing $30. Now, depending on who you are $30 might not seem like enough money, but it needs to be enough money to sting.

So one thing that I've actually tried in the past is giving my housemate 1000 pounds and saying, if I don't do this thing, you get to keep the 1000 pounds. And that just worked magically for me to do absolutely anything. I don't like using it all the time. I'd much rather use all these other nicer methods.

But that is a failsafe. If I'm ever really struggling to do a thing that I know I have to do, like write 1000 pounds transfer the money and they can always give it back to me once once I've done the thing. Hello, and welcome to another episode of all the hacks show about upgrading your life, money and travel.

I'm Chris Hutchins. I'm excited you're here today. So imagine this, you're a smart kid, your family prioritizes education, you study hard and you decide you want to become a doctor. You ace your exams, you're admitted to one of the top medical schools in the world, you complete the program and you start work.

And then a few years later, you decide to leave it all behind to focus on something else. At first glance, many of you might think that's crazy. But it's exactly what my guest today, Ali Abdaal did. He left the practice of medicine a few years ago to focus on his exploding and growing YouTube channel and the businesses surround it, which now has more than 3 million subscribers.

On it. He talks about everything from productivity to study skills to making an impact and so much more. If that's not enough, he has two podcasts has two courses, a blog and a newsletter. I've consumed so much of Ali's content that I'm a such a huge fan of his work.

So I'm really excited to talk about everything from how he got the courage to quit a successful career to double down on his passion and build a business around it. A lesson I might need in the near future. I also want to spend a good part of the conversation digging into the strategies, the tools, the hacks he uses to live a happier, healthier and more productive life.

He's a true expert here. He's dialed in when it comes to productivity, reading efficiently, the tech and the tools he uses and a lot more. This is going to be a really great conversation. I also want to get his take on a few things I'm thinking about doing with all the hacks.

And because I know he believes in having a lasting impact in the world. I want to hear how he thinks we can all work towards doing that right. Welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having me. That's an incredible intro. You've really done your homework.

And I'm just like, wow, that sounds really cool when you put it that way. Yeah, I mean, I'm excited. So I want to start off and just talk about your passion for teaching. You said that being able to teach more through your YouTube channel, your podcast, your courses, and have an impact that way is a big reason you step back for medicine.

But it must have been a tough decision. So what can you share about that process that might help anyone, myself included, figure out what it takes to step away and take a big bet on yourself? Yeah, okay. So a few things come to mind in no particular order. Basically, I was always trying to figure out what the hell do I actually want to do with my life.

And after, after a couple years in medicine, after kind of going through med school, I always kind of knew I wanted to have some level of, you know, streams of passive income, financial independence, discovered the fire movement through Tim Ferriss's interview with Mr. Money Mustache and got straight into that.

I remember I was on my general practice placement when I discovered it. And I was just like, I need to get through my patients as soon as possible. So I can just read more articles on Mr. Money Mustache. But ever since I discovered the four hour work week at the age of 17, just before going into med school, I knew that like medicine is cool, but it's not the it's not the only thing I want to be doing with my life seems a bit, you know, not very anti fragile to just be reliant on a single source of income.

So throughout my whole time in med school, I always kind of knew that I wanted to dabble with like, maybe making a startup, maybe being interested in tech, because I was I knew how to code and stuff, and started a couple of businesses along the way. But really, like, as the YouTube channel started to become successful, and I really started to think, Okay, what do I actually want to do with my life, there were a couple of exercises that I discovered on the internet and various blogs that I found useful.

The first one was, it didn't have a name, but like, I'm calling it the gravestone technique, which is figuring out like, when you die, what do you want to be written on your gravestone? And me, I thought about it, and I realized some combination of good father, good husband, and inspirational teacher.

And I was like, Oh, interesting. I guess that is probably Yeah, you know, if I, if I died, and like people thought of me as an inspirational teacher, alongside being a good father, a good husband, you're my family, that would be a life well lived. And I was like, Okay, cool.

And then there's this other exercise I tried that a friend of mine who's like this business coach ran past me when I was like, Hey, man, Simon, like, what to do with my life? He was like, try this exercise. And it's called the ideal ordinary week, where you fast forward your Google Calendar five years, you hope that you don't have any recurring events that are still there.

And you basically block out what does your ideal ordinary week look like? And so it's like, where are your time for deep work? Where's lunch? Where's hanging out with friends? Where's playing squash? Where's video games? Where's reading? I went through that, through that, and I looked at it, I was like, Oh, damn, like, there's not even a single half day here, where in my ideal ordinary week, I am in a hospital treating patients.

And so those two, those two data points together, and it made me think, Hmm, do I read like, if I could design a life, however I wanted, in theory, would I choose to spend time in a hospital, treating patients and saving lives? The answer was like, I think it's great for a lot of people, but it really wasn't for me.

And I then looked back through my time in med school and being a doctor, and I realized that I much and much preferred teaching medical students than actually doing medicine. And on days where I would have medical students with me, those would be the great days, because I'd be like, Yeah, we can learn stuff.

Let's do shit together. And days where I didn't, I'd be like, Oh, yes, I've got to deal with patients myself. Sounds really bad to say, but that gave me a big signal that maybe the thing, maybe my quote calling, maybe the thing that I'm supposed to be doing is something to do with teaching rather than something to do with medicine.

And so that was the I guess the, the philosophy behind what like led to me ultimately stepping back from the profession. Yeah. So maybe one thing that an exercise that I just came up with thinking about your process is to look back at what you're doing and your job and what are the parts of it where you really get fulfilled.

So for you, it was teaching within that role to younger students, like maybe there's something there. I interviewed Cal Newport last month, and he talked about, you know, trying to figure out the life you want, and then work backwards towards make it plan, make it happen. You know, he calls it lifestyle centric career planning.

So is that something that you think, you know, kind of came naturally? Or is that another version of this five year calendar? Yeah, I think it is. I was recently on a binge rereading of Cal's blog posts from like 2008 to 2012. I came across this kind of lifestyle centric career planning.

And I was like, damn, this is basically what I did. I just didn't realize that Cal Newport had already said it about 10 years ago. And I should have just read his blog post because it would have saved me a lot of time. But I've I've now seen that play out in a lot of decisions I'm making with this business as well.

It's like instead of thinking, I've got this thing, what do I do with it? It's more like, okay, what is the actual lifestyle that I want? And how do I then reverse engineer the stuff that I'm doing today to optimize for that particular lifestyle? And when it came to, you know, paying the bills, right?

I a lot of times I see people encourage others, maybe not themselves to say, Oh, take a bet on yourself now take a bet on yourself now. And people often might be default more towards waiting till their side business is so big that it's like an obvious decision. Is there a point where you think people should actually maybe wait a little longer or, you know, take the leap a little earlier?

Or what? What have you kind of reflecting what you did? Think now? Yeah, so for me, I waited on the till the side business was like ridiculously huge before making the leap. But I was also in a career where like, after two years of working as a doctor, there's a very natural career break where a lot of people take time out.

And then it makes a lot of sense to take time out at that point. Whereas I've got a bunch of friends who are in careers where it never makes sense to take time out, because you're always going to be worried about the gap in the resume and stuff. And especially my friends in management consulting, it's always like, Oh, the next, the next promotion, the next round of bonuses is when I will do the thing.

And they never end up doing the thing because it's not like a hard stop of like, two years later, you're out of a job. And now you have to reapply for the next round of residency specialty training or whatever. So I kind of think I had it easy in that the decision was made for me in that a the business became ridiculously successful.

And B, I already had this career gap that I was going to take. I think if I had my time again, or if I were advising someone, and they were young, and actually I very much vibe with the Gary V approach of like, when you're young and unencumbered, that's when taking risks, you know, the whole asymmetrical upside thing, that if you start a business, and it pays off, you are then sorted for life.

Whereas, you know, you lose out on an extra few 10s of 1000s of dollars worth of earnings. And unless you really, really, really need that money for you and your family to survive. I think kind of being young and unencumbered is a great time to take risks. You knew you wanted to teach, right?

You talked about how you got fulfillment from that. It's not clear to me that if you were thinking, what am I going to take a bet on? What is it going to be that you knew what it would become ultimately? Is there are there things you learned along the way that helped you kind of figure out how to take, okay, I love teaching, and turn that into, I want a YouTube channel I want I here's what I actually want to teach about, you know, here the different mediums, whether it's a newsletter, a blog, like, how do you how do you go down that path?

I think for some people, for me, it was, there's this thing I was passionate about, I would say most of my friends almost all knew that one day I would be talking about, you know, optimization of life and travel and money and all this stuff. Everyone else knew that but for me, I was like, maybe I should start a podcast.

And at first, the podcast was actually going to be about parenting because I was about to have my first child and I was like, trying to dial in everything. And then slowly, I was like, well, maybe I don't love the parenting thing as much as the broader topic. But it was not natural, right?

Like 10 years ago, people probably could have better predicted I would be doing this than I could have done it myself. Yeah, I think it's kind of similar for me, it sort of felt like just one step in front of another. So when I was 18 years old, and in the summer, in the summer holidays, just before going to med school, I had saved up about 1000 pounds, so like $1200 through private tutoring here and there for three years and years to get a MacBook, I was like, I'm gonna get a MacBook for the first time in my life, I'm going to join the Apple ecosystem, Apple products are super expensive, but now I can finally afford it.

And instead of buying the base model MacBook Air from the Apple Store, in 2012, I decided I was going to go on Craigslist and find one that was more specked out. I found some guy we met up at the station, he handed me this laptop, I forked over 1000 pounds in cash.

And turned out he'd actually sold me like a four year old defunct model of a MacBook Air. And because I was an idiot, I kind of took his word for it. And I didn't I was I just sort of didn't I kind of ignored all the red flags that were that were there.

And I was like, Oh my god, I've lost all this money. It's like I spent a month trying to get it back and trying to try and geolocate his tweets to see where is he? Where can I serve him papers to take him to small claims court and like, sue him and stuff.

And eventually my mom was like, you know what, screw this guy, you're about to start university. And she just bought me a new MacBook. And she was like, you know, just forget about this guy, which was very nice of her. But at that point, I opened up an Evernote document, and I still got it from like, August of 2012, where I said, Okay, I need to make money.

What are the things I'm good at? And what are the things I enjoy doing? And on the on the list of things I was good at, I put teaching, I put web design, and I put, I did well in med school admissions exams. And I was like, sick, how do I make a business that involves teaching web design and med school entrance exams?

Huh? Why don't I make a business that teaches courses, or med school entrance exams? And why don't I make a website that like markets this nationally, and undercut all the other competitors and make a website that just looks more pro than anyone else's on the market, because, you know, I could do that.

And that was how my first kind of successful business started when I was at university. And then really, five years later, I'd sort of gotten a bit bored of that business. But I was reading a lot about SEO and content marketing. And I was like, content marketing is a thing.

No one is really making high quality YouTube videos, teaching medical school admissions. So if I make videos on YouTube, teaching med school admissions and teaching people how to get a med school in the UK, maybe some of them will convert and buy my course or sign up to my email list.

And it was like, you know, this sort of content marketing funnel thing that I had a very unsophisticated knowledge of at the time. And that was how the YouTube channel got started. So connecting the dots looking back, it feels like Yes, of course, I was going to do something in teaching because I've been teaching from like the age of seven, my job when I was 13, was involved, involved private tutoring, I was always teaching medical students.

And people were always asking me to explain stuff, whether it was medical stuff, or like website stuff, or like productivity stuff. But it was really just sort of putting one step in front of another and putting things together that ultimately led me to this point where, I guess, I guess we're here chatting.

But I mean, it wasn't an overnight success, right? You mentioned when you left your medical career, career, the channel had grown big enough that it was, you know, an easier decision. But you know, there are people who have successful followings, they start a YouTube channel, they start a podcast and overnight success.

If I recall, you started with like zero followers, zero views, zero anything, and had to build it up. How did you stay motivated? I know that's a grueling process. So yeah, I started with zero followers. I mean, I think I had about 37 subscribers on YouTube, just because I had a YouTube account from like 2008.

So it's like 37 subscribers. Yes. The way I stayed motivated was, I think, in general, I only set goals that are within my control. And so the goal that I set for my YouTube channel was like, I think this, I think this has potential, I think maybe this could go somewhere.

But the only thing I'm going to think about is I just need to make one or two videos every week. And I'm not going to care about the numbers. And maybe a year from now, if I can hit, I don't know, a few 1000 subscribers, that would be that would be incredible.

I looked, did a bit of market research, I was like, Oh, there's that person over there who's making medical content. And I think I can make better videos than she can. And she's on 4000 subscribers. So maybe if things go really well, I can get 4000 subscribers. But really, the goal was just one foot in front of the other, how do I just make sure I bang out a video or two every week.

And by just staying true to that particular thing, and not being overly wedded to outcomes that are outside of my control, like how many views are getting or how many subscribers or revenue. That's how I stayed motivated to do it. And along the way, just found ways to make it interesting for myself, I get to learn editing, I get to try this new transition and get to try this new thing.

And let me try and explain this in a little bit of a different way. The goals that are within my control exclusively and finding a way to keep the process fun for myself. Did you ever find that a video maybe did well on a topic, but maybe you weren't that excited about that topic and have to balance like what's personally exciting to you, to what's working and growing for your business or your brand and, you know, have to pick?

Yeah, so in the early days, that was not really a consideration because like, I didn't have any videos that did well. I was just like, cool, let's just keep going. These videos, I mean, the videos are doing okay, like people are viewing them, people are commenting, this is kind of nice, even got recognized in the street one time.

And I was like, Oh my god, I've made it. That was when I had like 2000 subscribers. But it's, it's been really more of a thing that I've had to figure out now. Because now we're at a point where, you know, the channels been is five years old. I kind of know that if I do a video about personal finance, about like passive income about how I make however many million a year, it's going to get loads of views.

And I know I enjoy talking about those topics. But I know that, you know, I often think to myself, like, okay, if we took money out of the equation, and if we took status out of the equation, and if we took the sort of the need to accumulate more and more out of the equation completely, what would I be doing with my time?

What is the YouTube channel that I would want? And I always think Yeah, I still I still make YouTube videos, because I like teaching and YouTube videos of teaching at scale. And I get to learn cool shit and teach it to people, which is nice. But do I really want a channel where all the only videos I make are about finance or crypto because that's currently doing well?

No, I want a channel where I can hit record and talk about anything, whether it's, oh my god, guys, check out Chris's podcast, it's sick, or like, I just read this book, it's incredible. And here's a summary, or here is why I use this pen pocket knife to unbox my parcels, like, I want to have, in my mind, I'm thinking, I want to have the YouTube channel that I wish Tim Ferriss would have, where I would just lap up anything that he posts on YouTube and just be like, Tim, man, I just want you to make two videos a week where you talk about whatever's on your mind, and I would just watch it.

And I'm like, Okay, let me have that kind of channel that I know I'd want to watch. Yeah. And is that the future of where the channel is going? I think so. I think my dream is where the channel is, I can make videos about whatever I want. And the team that I've built around me takes care of everything else, like the money side of the equation, the figuring out the funnels, figuring out the products, and figuring out a way to make this whole thing sustainable for the long term.

So I don't know if this is going to be a topic that, you know, fits in line with that future channel or not. But a lot of the top content you've made is about productivity, getting more done optimizing your time. It's something I'm really passionate about, you know, you have this great ultimate guide to productivity, I'll link it to the show notes, we don't need to cover everything.

But I would love to run through some of the core components you think are important to someone just starting to say, Okay, how do I really dial in my productivity? And we might go a little deeper on a few things along the way. Yeah. So like, where do you where do you start with someone saying, Okay, is there an inventory someone should take?

Like, what's the first step? Because some people might already be at the 201 level, the 101 level? How do you get get people in the door thinking about productivity? Yeah, so I've got a bunch of different like, on like disorganized thoughts about this. But actually, I did a podcast interview with my productivity coach or performance coach.

His name is Chris box earlier today. And he has a quiz on his website. It's completely free. It's called the performance assessment. It's on like forcing function.com forward slash assessment. And that's a quiz that I took two years ago. And it basically asks you questions like, do you have a vision for your life?

And do you have goals? And do you look at those goals? And do you do weekly reviews? And in the morning? And do you check your email first thing? Or do you have like a hard stop? Do you have a bedtime routine? Do you have a morning routine? And based on the answers to those questions, it basically says, Okay, here are all of the things you could be doing to increase your productivity, but start with this one.

And it basically orders all of the evidence based productivity tips in order of how needle moving they actually are. And I think that quiz would be a I've been recommending it today to everyone on my team being like, guys, take this quiz, because it's actually really good. Always, like whenever I take it, it always helps me realize, oh, you know, I'm not doing weekly reviews, I should probably do a weekly review, because it's a thing that is really, really helpful.

That would be where I would start. And I kind of wish I make made something like that. But in the meantime, I think that's the best resource that I can point people to, you know, obviously, I haven't taken this quiz, I probably will do it as soon as we wrap up, I'll put the link to the show notes.

Let's run through a few aspects of productivity that I think I'll focus on ones that I'm more most interested in, which is just not wasting time, procrastinating, pushing things off, getting distracted. What are your suggestions there? I know, this was an interview, I was really excited to prepare for yet somehow, even though there was a hard start, you know, last night, I found myself going down a rabbit hole of something that was less time sensitive, but definitely interesting.

Help me out. Yeah, the whole thing about procrastination. I'm in the process of writing three book chapters on this for my book. So I've had the whole procrastination thing in my mind and in my headspace for the last few weeks. Essentially, I think the first step is to appreciate the difference between procrastination and prioritization.

Because I'm a big believer of the, you know, a lot of people will say that they don't have time to do something. I know that you want like that, because you're, you're in this optimization space. But when people say, Oh, I don't have time to do x, you know, I want to learn Japanese, but I don't have time.

I always think, you know, if, if I'm in the mode of giving unsolicited advice, or if they're asking me for advice, I'd be like, okay, do you do not have time, like genuinely? Or is it just not a priority? And you have people like, No, I don't, I don't, I don't feel like I have the time.

I work full time. I've got kids, I've got to put them to bed. I'm like, Okay, fair enough. I'm gonna time that. Basically, what that means is it's not a priority. When I say something like, okay, if I if I gave you a million dollars, every time you did 20 minutes of Japanese practice, would you do the 20 minutes of Japanese practice?

Oh, hell, yeah. Okay, cool. So you've you're consciously deep prioritizing Japanese, because there are other more important things in your life. And that's totally fine. That doesn't mean you're procrastinating from this thing. So there's no need to beat yourself up about it just means it's not a priority in your life.

And then people are okay, cool, that's fine. But But I have this thing that is a priority in my life. And then that takes us down an interesting conversation of like, how do we actually prioritize things that we say are a priority? I feel like I wonder if you're like this as well.

I feel like it's easy to give advice. And then we just don't take our own advice. So when it comes to book writing, for example, literally last week, my editor and I had a call. And I was like, Yeah, she was like, how's progress on the book this week?

And I was like, Oh, you know, stuff came up. Oh, you know, this happened, and that happened. And this happened. And she was like, Okay, you know, it's, she was super nice about it. But she was like, you know, it sounds like this book is supposed to be a priority in your life.

Is it actually? I was like, yeah, it is. It definitely is. It's my number one priority. And she was like, Okay, so then why aren't you prioritizing it? And I was like, Damn, you're right, Rachel. And then we figured out strategies to help me prioritize that and actually make time for it.

And happy to go over the strategies. But those have really helped. And in the last week, I've been able to make so much more progress than I did in the last month. Yeah, let's get into it. I know. The number one thing that is like my biggest satisfaction when I get an email from a listener is like, I took all these notes of tactics listening to this episode.

So let's get into all of them. Basically, three part way to approach this equation. Essentially, let's start with the problem. I think my gambit here, my opening gambit is going to be that procrastination is not a problem with doing the work. procrastination is a problem with starting the work.

Because usually once you've gotten started with something, it's generally easy enough to keep on going. You know, Newton's first law, the law of inertia, it takes energy to get the flywheel going. But once it's going, it's like, oh, you know, you're, you're into the swing of things, you're enjoying the thing that you're doing, you're getting energy from it.

And it's, it's usually not so bad. Does that broadly vibe with your experience of kind of procrastinating as well? Yeah, I think it's probably two part, it's hard to get started. And then it's hard to avoid the shiny objects that pop in front of you like an email or a news, some alert or something.

So I think it's those those two are big for me. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So the way I think of them is I separate out procrastination, which is the getting started problem from distraction, which is the how do I focus once I've already gotten started. The distraction stuff is all fairly, fairly simple is like turn off notifications.

Great hack I discovered the other day, option and clicking on a Mac on your time in the corner, automatically puts your Mac into do not disturb mode, which automatically silences all notifications except the ones that you let through from a loved one or something like that. So I've been using that a lot this last week.

And now I just don't see my notifications until I go to the toilet to take a break. I'm like, Oh, hello. I'm so glad I missed all the notifications, because they would have just completely taken me out of flow and gotten me very distracted. But just for the procrastination stuff, and we can talk about distraction in in a sec.

If we if we accept that procrastination is ultimately a problem with getting started. And that's the thing that we're trying to optimize for is like, okay, what are the barriers that stop us from getting started with something? I think broadly, there's three things there. And I call them I like to give things names in my mind, the fog of obscurity, the bridge of anxiety, and the hump of inertia.

Probably to come up with better names, I sort of have a bit of a diagram in my head. The fog of obscurity is where you know, you want to do a thing. But you don't, you actually don't know specifically what you need to do, or when you're going to do it, or where you're going to do it, or how you're going to do it.

And then you're just like, Oh, you know, there's this thing, it's like, I need to I need to start start that podcast. But like, if you don't know what that first step is, or what the next step is, it's just so hard to even even think about getting started, because now there's this enormous, like mental barrier, that's stopping us from like, actually moving forward in this thing.

And so the solution to that one is basically just make a very, very concrete plan. And what I like to do is separate like the planning of a thing from the doing of a thing, because very easy to make a plan, right? If, if, for example, I need to work out, it's very easy for me to procrastinate when I don't have a plan.

I don't know, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know why I'm working out. But if I was talking to someone right now, and they were to be like, Alright, what's your plan for the workout? I'd be like, I can make a plan. It's not that hard making a plan.

You know what, I'll do it tonight. 7pm. Yeah, I'll go to the gym that's in my building. And I'll do you know, let me bring up Reddit fitness and find a workout plan. And it has taken me two minutes to make a plan. But now, I'm far more likely to actually go and do the thing I either work out, because I've got a slot in my calendar for it.

And I know what I'm doing. I think it's really just about those two things finding a slot in the calendar, and then actually knowing what to do. And that is broadly how you tackle tackle the fog of obscurity. You with me so far? Any thoughts? Yeah, yeah. No, no, I'm here.

Yes. Nice. And then, you know, there are there are other things we can do with this. If I'm coaching someone or this, you know, this is the method that whenever I, you know, this chap Chris, this productivity coach that I had, it was always like, Okay, so for me, at the time, I wanted to take I wanted to get good at art.

I was thinking, You know what, I want to take so take some art lessons, because why not? It was like, Okay, what's the next step? Okay, I guess, find an art teacher. It was like, Okay, how are you going to do that? I was like, Okay, um, post on Instagram and be like, Hey, anyone want to teach me art and also like, just do a Google search for art teachers in Cambridge.

It was like, cool. When are you going to do that? I was like, shit. Okay. I guess I've got a 15 minutes like my calendar two hours from now. It was like, cool. Put it in the calendar. And I was like, cool. And it was like, Okay, nice. Now you've now you've got a slot in your calendar.

Fast forward. This time next week, you and I are chatting, and you have not found an art teacher. What are the top three reasons why you've not found an art teacher? And I was like, Okay, okay, fine. I guess, maybe something came up. And I was super busy. Maybe I looked on Google, and I couldn't find anyone in the first two results.

And so I gave up. Maybe no one replied to my Instagram thing. And it was like, Okay, cool. That's fine. How might you mitigate against each of those risks? I was like, Okay, maybe I mean, I can just like look at 10 Google results rather than five, I can maybe post on Twitter as well.

Now Instagram, it's like you're coming up with strategies ahead of time, knowing that I am a dumbass, and my brain is going to encourage me to procrastinate from this thing. But if I try and nudge myself in the direction of kind of doing the thing that I know I want to do, I get art lessons, I'm far more likely to actually do the thing.

And so just working through this loop a single time. The final question there is like, what is the action you can take right now that will almost guarantee that you'll actually do this thing when it comes when it comes to the thing? When it comes when it comes to the time?

I was like, Okay, you know what, while I'm here, I'll just type out the message I'm going to post on my Instagram story. So I literally opened up all notes, I typed out, hey, guys looking for an art teacher. Anyone want to teach me art over zoom. And then when it came to two hours later, I just copied and pasted that onto Instagram.

And now I found an art teacher. And just through that one action, I've been procrastinating from taking art lessons for three years at that point. And all it took was a conversation with a guy who had paid a lot of money to ask me a basic question of what are you doing?

When are you doing it? And just give him just like giving me this framework to think about decision making here. And I took art lessons for about six months. And it was super fun. Okay, so that's that's getting past the first start. I can't remember. So it was fog of obscurity, something and then a hump.

Yeah, exactly. Okay, cool. So fog of obscurity is the first one. You know, you've gotten over the fog of obscurity when you have a when the thing that you're trying to do, you've got it in the calendar, and you know what you're doing. So that's all you need. At that point, you have enough clarity on the task to be able to make progress on it.

But if you don't have those two crucial points, and everything else is kind of goes out the window, basically getting clarity on what you're doing, and when you're doing it is like just the magical solution to that. And you don't need to pay a performance coach large amounts of money to encourage you to basically do that.

The next one is what I like to call the bridge of anxiety. And this is where we appreciate that a lot of procrastination doesn't come from not having the time to do something. It comes from actually like our emotions that get in our way. And there's a researcher called Tim Pitchell, who has a great book, I think it's called the procrastination puzzle, which is basically all about the emotional side of procrastination.

And he researches this and talks about all the all the different emotional barriers that get in our way. And so for example, if you know, the example I use a lot is people who procrastinate from starting a YouTube channel, for example, and it's like, yeah, I know that I've got my time slot.

And I know, I just need to film this video, because I've taken Ali Abdaal's course on YouTube, whatever, I know, I just need to film the video. But you're in the time slot, and there's something that's stopping you something that's holding you back from doing this thing, which you claim to want, actually, it's like, what's going on there.

And there's this thing in the world of meditational mindfulness called the RAIN method. Have you come across this? No. So the RAIN method, Tara Brock talks about this quite a lot, I think is invented like 20 years ago by some other meditation practitioner. Basically, the idea is that anytime an emotion is getting in our way, we want to follow the RAIN method.

So R A I N. So R is recognize. So recognize that what what the feeling is, it's getting in the way in the case of, I'm struggling to start my YouTube channel, I'm struggling to post that video, it's probably some kind of fear, or rather some kind of anxiety, because I'm going to cite Brene Brown's Atlas of the heart, which defines fear as like, when you're when when there is a threat to your survival right now, and anxiety as there is a potential threat to your survival at some point in the future, maybe.

And so no one ever procrastinates from running away from a lion. But we procrastinate from public speaking, we procrastinate from starting the podcast from writing a blog from putting ourselves out there in some way, because we perceive there is a potential threat to our survival, i.e. our social status within our group, at some point, maybe in the future.

And just recognizing that as a thing that like, yeah, I don't want this video to go out because I'm afraid of what people will think of me. Okay, cool. We've recognized the emotion that's getting in our way. And we have a for allow, which is basically that, that's totally fine.

I don't need to moralize. I don't need to beat myself up for having this emotion. But yeah, you know, I have, I have a fear that people are gonna look down on me if I started a TikTok page. Because I feel that people are going to judge me and I feel that that's going to be really bad for my social standing in my group.

And that's, that's totally okay. I'm human. Then we have I, which is investigate, which is like getting curious. Oh, I wonder where this feeling is coming from? Why do I feel like if I started a YouTube channel, or if I started a podcast, or if I started talking about airline point hacking on my on a podcast, that suddenly it would be a big, it would be a bad thing.

I wonder what's going on there. And that's where you just sort of take a few minutes to explore your feelings around that around that thing. And then n stands for either nurture or non identification depending on who you ask. And basically what that means is just this appreciation in the world of meditation and mindfulness that we are not our feelings, just because I have the feeling of fear does not mean I am that that thing and does not mean necessarily that I need to let that hold me back.

And this idea that like, the way you feel about something actually doesn't really have any bearing on whether you do the thing or not. I might not feel like going to work in the morning, but I'm going to go to work anyway, I might not feel like brushing my teeth, because I can't be bothered, but I'm going to brush my teeth anyway.

Similarly, just because I feel the fear of starting my podcast and talking about airline point hacking, that doesn't necessarily mean like I have to identify with that I can choose to act in spite of that fear. And so that's where we kind of go a little bit like emotional and a little bit like trying to figure out and I've got a bunch of sort of more specific things, but I think that's the general kind of RAIN method for dealing with any kind of emotion that gets in our way.

Okay. I'm practically thinking about a few ways that I would have used this. I feel like the one place where I get stuck is like, Oh, I'm trying to get a specific person to come on the show. And what's the email say? When do I send it? And then I end up just sending the thing that I drafted like two weeks ago.

And now I'm just like, I just waited two weeks to do the thing I was already going to do. And so I'm trying to struggle with because it's not writing it. I've even written the email. It's like trying to figure out is there a more optimal way to do something?

Maybe I can find a friend who knows the person and that would be better. So I should hold off and but I don't think even doing it precludes you from from finding another path if it doesn't work. So I think I just need to like, zone in on why I'm not doing it.

No, exactly. Yeah, I think that's interesting. I think that there's another point here. Again, it's fresh in my mind, because me and Chris were talking about this. So Chris, this productivity coach who I interviewed is a professional poker player. And I was kind of asking, we were talking about kind of lessons he's learned from the world of poker that apply to life.

There's a concept that apparently people who play poker use, which is the idea of expected value, which you and some listeners might be familiar with, basically, you know, the magnitude of the outcome you want, like how good is this thing? Will this thing make me $100? Cool. And then multiplied by the probability of the thing happening.

So if I've got a 50% chance of making $100, the expected value of every time I flip the coin is $50, for example, and expected value poker players shortened to Evie, because people like these sorts of acronyms. And whenever poker players are making decisions, they're like, oh, it's either a plus Evie or a minus Evie decision, that is the expected value positive?

Or is it is it negative? And what they what they mean there is that if this if I did this decision every time, would it would I expect to come out on top? Or would I expect to not come out on top? Now, in the case of you're sending an email, that sounds like a pretty plus Evie decision.

Because like, if you were to send 100 emails, maybe a handful of people reply to you, but it's not like there's any real downside. And so thinking and thinking of decisions in terms of rather than being wedded to the specific outcome of this decision that I really want this person, how do I reach out to them?

I remember the email you sent me, you're like, Yeah, I was kind of procrastinating a bit. I was kind of I just, I just owned the email. I was like, that's kind of funny. Because, because I have that same feeling. I'm always like, Oh, maybe I couldn't possibly just cold email someone I I've got to, I've got to find some kind of way of like, damning them on Twitter in some way and getting just so much work is still like, it's plus Evie.

Like, sending a cold email is always a plus Evie decision, because there's literally no downside to it. And chances are, if someone didn't respond to the email, they either didn't want to talk to you or didn't see it. So if you reach out to them through some other channel, if they didn't see it, maybe it'll work.

If they didn't want to talk to they probably won't respond there either. So like, I don't know, I'm, I'm coaching myself through this conversation. Okay, let's, let's hit the last one. The last one is the hump of inertia. And that is this recognition that like, for whatever we're struggling with, whatever we're struggling to get started with, there's always a little bit of a push of energy that we need to get started with the thing.

Now, the question is, like, how do we how do we get there? Like, once we've got the clarity on the thing, once we've tried to figure out what our emotions are getting in the way, at some point, some some stuff is just kind of boring, and you just kind of have to do it.

So like, how do you not yourself to just get started? At this point, you know, some people would say that motivation is a thing. And so like, you got to motivate yourself to do it, you got to like really want it, you got to want it so much that you can't breathe, or whatever these motivational videos say.

And that's fine. But like, there's a great book by Jeff Hayden called the motivation myth, which basically argues that like motivation is a bit of a myth. Like, we don't summon up the motivation magically to do a thing, we do the thing. And by seeing a small success, that then helps us summon the motivation to continue to do the thing.

And so really, motivation doesn't lead to action, action leads to motivation. And so understanding that, I think was a big, big unlock for me that like, really, just because I don't feel like doing something doesn't actually stop me from doing a thing. And therefore, I can just do it.

And sometimes that works, where I just tell myself that, like, I could just get out of bed right now, even though I don't feel like it. That's like the motivation approach. And you've got like the discipline approach, the willpower approach, the David Goggins approach of like, well, if you're not doing it, at that point, you're just soft, you just got to, you know, use the willpower, you got to use grit, determination, discipline to kind of push through and do the thing.

That's fine as well, that works. The thing that I personally like to do is I like to tell myself, I'm just going to do the thing for two minutes, and then I'm going to stop doing the thing. So I've got a couple of songs on my Spotify playlist, which are like two minutes long, like instrumental songs.

I just like I, if I, yeah, I'll just like put on one of the songs, I'll be like, I'm just gonna do this thing until the end of the song. And usually the song, the song ends, the next one plays on shuffle. And I don't even realize that I've just continued doing the thing.

Occasionally, I just do it for two minutes, and then I stop. And I think, cool, that's fine. It's not my day. But I say 90% of the time, as long as I can just talk myself into doing it for two minutes, then I'm, I'm unlikely to stop doing it.

Because once I've got into the swing of things, it's a lot easier to get started. And I guess my kind of final kind of point on this is, if all else fails, something that will never fail is genuinely actually putting money on the line. So I know, you know, my friend Thomas Frank is this huge YouTuber, two and a half million subscribers, the way he motivated himself to publish videos in the early days of his channel, when no one was watching was an app called Beeminder, which is an automatic thing where it like connects to your YouTube RSS feed.

And if you don't publish a video every week, it will take $30 out of your debit card or out of your bank account just completely automatically. And that was how he made himself accountable. He's like, well, I've got to publish a video every week. Otherwise, I'm losing $30. Now, depending on who you are $30 might not seem like enough money, but it needs to be enough money to sting.

So one thing that I've actually tried in the past is giving my housemate 1000 pounds and saying, if I don't do this thing, you get to keep the 1000 pounds. And that has just worked magically for me to do absolutely anything. I don't like using it all the time, I'd much rather use all these other nicer methods.

But that is a failsafe. If I'm ever really struggling to do a thing that I know I have to do, like write 1000 pounds transfer the money and they can always give it back to me once once I've done the thing. It probably depends on the circumstance. I was, I was running today with our daughter in a stroller, which, by the way, for anyone who doesn't have kids, once you start running with a child, you're like, I'm now a horrible runner.

Like I've taken like 10 steps back, because, you know, I'm now pushing this this stroller and you just can't run as fast. I use the Goggins approach, which is like, am I really going to tell myself that I can't just make it to the you know, the end of this neighborhood, like if I really, I really can't do that, like, that works really well.

But I don't think that works as well when you're like sitting down at your desk to complete a task. So having all the tools is probably pretty helpful. But you mentioned a few apps in the conversation, you mentioned you put notes in Apple Notes, you mentioned the this beeminder, I'm curious, right before we started, I was just, you know, doing some quick last minute research went to Twitter, you posted this 24 apps that you use, I don't need to go through all 24.

But I'm curious how you process information and where you put it. So let's just like not go down. What do you use for reading audiobooks? Oh, yeah, all those things. But like, what what is the the main stack for processing email or a new newsletter or something you find that you want to read later?

Because I find that a lot of the distraction that comes is like, oh, there's a thing I want to read it. Oh, this thing popped up. How do I stay on top of it all? The app that I used to use until about three months ago was Instapaper. Unsurprisingly, it's great.

Anytime I'd see a link, I'd either share it to Instapaper or right click save to Instapaper or open the article in Chrome and just save to Instapaper and just forget about it. So that's been that installing that app was just frickin game changing because I was also getting always so distracted down these rabbit holes of these interesting articles.

But then I saved them to Instapaper. And I just go through them when I was like on a train or on a bus or on the toilet or something like that. And the nice thing is, as I was, as I would follow links, you can click on a link.

And you can just save that link to Instapaper as well. So as I'd go through binge reading someone's blog, I'd be saving all these articles, and then I've got this whole list of articles, and it gets rid of the ads, and it formats it really nicely. Recently, I've started using an app called reader by the guys who make readwise.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with that. So readwise is sick readwise.io readwise.io/ali for extended trial and affiliate link. Readwise is basically an app that connects to your Kindle account, and imports everything you've ever highlighted. And every day it sends you an email with five of your highlights. And that's kind of cool.

It means you can revisit stuff that you've highlighted in books on Kindle. But they've also now got this feature where they import all of your highlights from Instapaper and from pocket and from these other read it later type apps. So every morning, if you want, you can subscribe to the email where you get a digest of five random things you've highlighted at some point in a previous life.

And often I'll see things that are highlighted five years ago when I read this book, and surprisingly, this highlight came to me at a reasonable time. And that helps me keep ideas that I've highlighted in the past, fresh on top of mind. But the guys who make readwise I'm kind of mates with them, we kind of became internet friends, and I had one of them on the podcast, we became internet friends through me just loving the app.

And there they've built this new app called reader, which is in beta, and it's coming out like either August, August or September. And it's basically like superhuman, but for articles and books and PDFs. And well, it's not books, articles and PDFs and things that you want to read. And it's amazing.

So that this reader app in beta, I've got the test flight version on iOS is currently how I consume everything. I just save everything to it. It's great. It's got like a Chrome highlighter, it means that any anytime I'm reading anything, whether it's a PDF or a blog post or an article or a tweet thread, just go straight into reader.

And it means I can deal with it at a later date rather than it distracting me from whatever I'm doing in the moment. Yeah, this superhuman for is like a sucker hook for me, right? I for anyone not listening, I think I've talked about superhuman in the past. I never thought I looked at my email, and I had all these invitations.

So superhuman is this new replacement email interface there for Gmail. And I'm like, gosh, I had a schedule a call schedule a call like for every they make you schedule a call to get to know the product before you sign up, because it costs I think about $20 a month, all the hacks.com slash superhuman affiliate link on my side for a free trial.

But I never did it because I never wanted to take the plunge because I was like, really, I'm gonna pay for email like this is crazy. And then finally, I was like, okay, I'm just gonna try it because I do a lot of email. And there was one feature I needed.

And Gmail didn't have it. And the feature, which is probably not important to that many people is I was wanted to look at emails I'd gotten from listeners and people and see all the other emails they've sent. And Gmail has this feature, but it doesn't work if you have aliases.

So for my Gmail, I send from my personal email, my work email, all this stuff. Gmail only works if that email came to or from the core Gmail account. And superhuman did the other thing. And so what I wanted to be able to do is know if we've talked about something in the past and all that.

So I was like, I'm gonna try it out. And now it's like, magical, right, like setting up different snippets to auto send things to it's just like changed everything. So when you say this is like superhuman for this, I'm like, where's the link, I want to install it, I'm going to pay for it.

It's great. Yeah, I can hook you up with beta access. If you'd like, I can do an email intro to the guys. I think you'd really like it. Yeah, that'd be great. What are there other apps like that that have kind of changed your change your productivity stack make you operate more efficiently that, you know, are not the obvious?

Yeah, I mean, I've tried dozens, if not hundreds over the years. Part of being a I guess productivity YouTuber is that there's an incentive for me to try out every app on the market and maybe decide if I want if I want to use it. We use notion for organizing basically everything in our business, all of our content production for YouTube videos, and for podcasts and for Twitter threads and for everything.

I've recently started using mirror mi ro, which is this interactive whiteboarding software just gives you a blank canvas where you can put post notes. And that's really useful for like brainstorming and whiteboarding ideas for my book or for courses that we're working on. Honestly, like having tried like dozens of these apps, I just tend to default to Apple Notes, if I want to write something down, it goes into Apple Notes.

And I don't think too hard about it. So having tried Do you use anything for task management? Yeah, so I, I use to do list, but it's kind of annoying, kind of annoying. And so we're moving to notion because I delegate a lot of things to my assistant times two.

So to do it is kind of annoying for that. So we're actually switching to notion for task management. But for someone who doesn't have an assistant, do you think so I use notion for a lot, right? We have one notion, that's everything related to all the hacks. I have another notion, that's everything for our family, like all the red, we're planning a trip, where do we put the notes for it?

Where do I log the flights? What are we looking at? You know, for our daughter, what is the baby registry? What do we need to go by? What is the schedule of doctor's appointments, all this stuff. So I'm a huge fan, but I find that getting information in and out of it is more like a project than like a quick, oh, I got to do this thing.

Throwing it into notion isn't the easiest. So how do you make that easy? Or is it just, you know, it's not easy, but it makes your life better. So you do it. Yeah. So I think my favorite task manager for iOS is things three, just so nice. The only problem is that it just it just doesn't work if you if you delegate things or if you have a team.

So but if I was purely solo things three all the way, Todoist is a good cross platform alternative. It's free. It's on iOS, it's on Android, it's on Windows, etc. But also, I think anyone listening to this, like, if you have a job, you could probably like, honestly, I think everyone should have a part time personal assistant.

And that's an absolutely life changing productivity hack. So I do not have one. And I've struggled in the past. And like, five years ago, we I tried. What kinds of things do you have this person do? And do you ever get too caught up in, I want to make sure that they're doing them the exact way I would do them.

And then it ends up taking more time, basically, everything that I don't want to do myself. So a lot of emails like the, so my assistant, Dan is remote, but he's based in the UK. So we've met in real life, which I think I think is like, really useful.

A lot of people try and hire a VA in the Philippines for $5 an hour, and then they're surprised when it doesn't work. But like, if you have the ability to hire someone that you can potentially work with in real life, some of the time, or at least meet in person, it's like, just really nice.

But anyway, Dan basically goes through all my emails, he deals with all my scheduling, things like scheduling this podcast, for example, I have basically outsourced the management of my calendar to Dan. So he deals with it. And it means that as emails come in and stuff, I I'm actually not the first person to see an email, I'll see the superhuman notification on my phone.

And if it's something like really interesting, or really urgent, then I'll reply to it there. And then, yes, scheduling and emails is a bit is a big one. But just like beyond that, there's a lot of random admin tasks in life. Like, for example, I knew I wanted to get a cleaner for the house, kind of a bit of a first world problem.

But like, I don't want to be the one calling up random cleaning agencies in London and trying to find a cleaner who can like be there at the same time that I want and like, do some of the ironing and like change the sheets and like, so I just said, Hey, Dan, can you find me a cleaner for the house?

I'm basically if they can come in on a weekday morning and like do all the things including ironing, that's what I want. It was like, cool, I'll call around, I'll ring a few agencies, and he found someone and now we've got a cleaner. Things like, I remember when I first got an assistant, I was just sort of like, hang around to be like, huh, what are all the things I could delegate?

I was like, you know, I wanted to learn how to play the ukulele. I was I said, I said her name was Elizabeth at the time. I said, Hey, Elizabeth, can you find me a ukulele for under like 200 pounds, and just find some reviews and just order it.

And she was like, cool. The next day, you clearly arrived at my house. And it's like, I, I'd been procrastinating from again, playing the ukulele for like two years, because all it would have taken was me for me to sit down and spend five minutes searching on the internet for what's the best ukulele for a certain budget.

But it's in a way so much easier to be able to say that to an assistant or to a voice note that you can then send to an assistant. Right now, Dan is hunting for a new property that we're moving into. We're trying to move studio spaces, ringing up estate agents and dealing with like booking viewings and arranging viewings.

Dan is doing all of that. And he's just getting them to send us WhatsApp videos, so that I can spend my time doing things that I actually want to be doing, like talking to you on this podcast, or like making videos or like writing or things other than dealing with the hours and hours of admin it takes to book viewings for a property in a market where properties are moving fast.

So almost anything, within reason can be outsourced to an assistant. Have you ever have you done a blog post or a video on how to use an assistant and all the tasks you could use for them? No, we're working on it. I have this course idea in my mind that we've sort of fleshed out, it's going to be called something like the life changing magic of a personal assistant.

And I want to make videos and blog posts and tweets and all of this stuff about it at some point soon. And for someone who hasn't gone down the path of how how much this could cost, like, you know, you mentioned, you could go to the Philippines, it's super cheap, like where you don't need someone full time, right?

This is something you can kind of start at a pretty low cost and add a lot of scale. Yeah, I've been telling all my friends four hours a week will completely change your life. And if you can find someone for like, you know, someone local here in the UK, 15 pounds an hour, so that's like $20 an hour, or four hours, that's like $80 a week.

And people are always like, Oh, that's, that's like $320 a month. That's so expensive. I ask, okay, like, this is not for students who are broke. It's for people who have real jobs. It's like a, what's your actual hourly rate? Like you're doing the whole Naval thing of like, what is what is what is your actual hourly rate?

Should you really be the one to do this thing that you don't want to do? But also, the other way of thinking of it is like, if you could free up four hours of your time to, for example, spend with your family, how much would that be worth to you over the long term?

It's like, okay, it probably probably worth more than $20. Right? So now that that gives you an idea of how much it would potentially be worth hiring an assistant for. I'm so bullish on the part time personal assistant thing. I think I think it's great. I got this email from someone this morning.

I'm going to butcher the name, but Lee Aaron, and they were like, Hey, can you do an episode on family life? And they've talked about it a little but like, I have no time. Like, how do I maximize my time? So this is a great example to the Aaron who wrote in something to consider to buy back some time.

And I'm a big fan of buying time, like to the extent that you can find a person to do a thing that you don't want to do, or not that you don't want to do. I used to love cooking. And before kids cooking was like in lieu of sitting on the couch doing nothing.

And that trade off was good. Now cooking might be in lieu of spending time with your kids or working or doing these other things because you just have less time. And so, you know, it's not that I don't like it, it's that I now have different priorities, because there are more things on my plate.

And so whatever's at the bottom of that list, I find that we often are doing those things, even though we might not actually prioritize them because they have to happen. But to the extent you can hire someone to cook or to clean or to do whatever task it is on your list, it sounds like I need to test out one of these VA services or find someone.

I keep procrastinating, I keep procrastinating, I got to make it I got to, I got to get get something very clear of what I'm going to do next and get it in motion. I mean, so Chris, the the next question I would ask you is, okay, when are you gonna find a VA?

I'm gonna if I'm being honest, right, I'm gonna right now I have like a couple tables. So this is a great segue. But before I want to hit one thing, and then I want to jump to what I think will be a great way to answer this. But you mentioned, you know, you read a lot, you save notes from Kindle, you find them all over the place.

I've seen that you write a bunch about reading effectively and efficiently. And so I want to wrap up the the productivity thing with what you're doing there. Because I have a lot of books, I enjoy reading them, but I don't think I'm doing it right. And I know that sounds so ridiculous.

Like I know how to read the words on the page. But I feel like if you've written posts, and made videos about reading effectively and efficiently, I'm confident that there's a way I can do it better. So do you read on physical book or Kindle? Or what's your? To be honest, I, I, a lot of times get the ebook.

And then I but I sometimes really prefer the physical book, but I could do both. I'm not like wedded to one or the other. But I am not good at audiobooks, despite being great at podcasts. I don't know, I feel like whenever I'm listening to an audiobook, sometimes I get distracted.

And then I realized, Oh, I missed the last five minutes. And if I try to not be distracted, and I just like lie in bed to listen, then I find that, you know, I might fall asleep or something. Yeah, sure. No, I know. I know what you mean. I guess, another question I would ask, and maybe you can answer like what your listeners would be thinking about this is like, why do you want to read more effectively?

Like, what's, what's the point? retention, you know, I, like, I read a lot of things. And I learned these fascinating things, especially when I'm reading books that people I'm interviewing have written, I want to remember those things, not just for five minutes, you know, not just for the day, I want to process them.

And then, you know, to the extent they're a way to read, I don't know, faster or more efficiently, like that there's kind of like efficiently, maybe effectively, it's like effectively, I retain the information efficiently, it just happens faster. Yeah, sure. Have you come across building a second brain? So I'm going back and forth with Tiago, who will come on the show a little later this year.

Amazing. Yeah. That's the I mean, I took his course in like 2019 2020, something like that. And that introduced me to a lot of ideas around kind of retention of stuff and taking information and doing useful things with it. It's a fairly expensive course, but the book covers all of the things and the book is like, you know, the price of a book, it's recently come out.

But broadly, I think the easy hack, we're all about hacks here for remembering stuff is to basically use readwise, I have yet to find an app that is better than readwise at this, which if you're highlighting things on Kindle, it automatically files them. It also has like an app where you can literally scan the text of a book as you're reading it, if you want a thing, and it will OCR recognize the characters, and we'll recognize what book it's from.

And we'll just categorize it automatically. And then just the by virtue of reading that email every day of like five highlights five things that have resonated enough with you for you to want to highlight that I found that to be genuinely the single biggest thing that has changed the game in terms of my retention of ideas.

And people was like, Oh, you know, when you're on podcasts, how are you able to cite all these sources and these books and quotes and stuff? I don't think I look at the readwise email. Once in a while, I just kind of resurfaces the quotes. That's like, I think the basic level that does most of the good stuff to make sure I got that if you scan the page of a physical book, like I mean, Apple now has this live text, right?

You could just copy and paste the text, but this actually knows what book it is. And we'll actually store that information also. I think so. I think there may be an intermediate step where like it connects to your Amazon account, and it therefore knows what book you own. And sometimes you have to like type in the name of the title or something.

But like, yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty magical when it works. There is an intermediate step when that particular thing doesn't work. Okay. So that would be how I do the whole retention thing broadly. I mean, the actual way of retaining anything is to find a way to use that information in your day to day life, maybe to create a piece of content or something or other based around that.

So if a book really, really resonates with me, I've got loads of highlights for it, I will try and write a book summary or write like a tweet thread summary of a book or make a video about the book or interview the author of the book and talk to them about the book, just some kind of output that creates this tangible thing, which is a reason to actually bother retaining the stuff.

Because it's all well and good saying that, like, oh, like, I have this all the time, like, oh, I really want to, like, remember what's in this book. But if I'm not creating anything from it, it's, it's going to be hard beyond looking at my readwise email every day.

So for me, it's easy, because I do videos about books. And that helps me helps me remember a lot of the things. Readwise also synchronizes to notion. And so I've got a notion page that has literally everything I've ever highlighted in my life on Kindle or Instapaper or reader or pocket or any other app I've used to read books or read articles.

And so if I ever need ideas for videos, I'll just look through my highlights and be like, cool, that's a cool idea. That's from that book. All right, cool. Let's piece things together and turn it into a video. Yeah, Nick Gray was on the show a couple weeks ago, and talked about friends newsletters.

So I'd say if you need a way to take the interesting content you're consuming, I can promise you that it's most people at least I do from your newsletter find interesting. Oh, here's this app I checked out. Here's this book I read, here's this thing I found. And so he proposed that everyone start a friends newsletter, that's just you know, send your emails, friends an email, whether it's weekly, monthly, quarterly.

And I feel like that would be a great place to put this stuff and reinforce it, which will help you remember it. So nice. There's there's one tip from that episode. I always try to wrap these conversations up with asking people love to travel and listen to the show.

And they always say, you know, I started doing this thing where I ask everyone I interview, to pick a city they know, well, I'm, you know, maybe London for you, and give people a suggestion of where to go, where would you recommend someone who hasn't been to London, or if there's another city, you know, better, go for a meal, have a drink and something unusual to do that.

That isn't the obvious. Nice. So I would actually go for Cambridge. So I spent nine years in Cambridge, which is just an hour north of London. That's where I went to university where I worked as a doctor and where I spent a year of pandemic kind of grew my YouTube channel.

The nice thing to do in Cambridge is go punting, you get these little boats, you sort of get this rod and you sort of pull yourself along the river with a rod. And it's super nice when the weather is good. And then there's this restaurant, this cafe called Fitz Billy's, which does a really good afternoon tea.

You can have tea with scones and jam and clotted cream. And it's very nice British type thing. And you like punt along the river. And then you have your tea and scones and Fitz Billy's. And it's a great vibe. Fantastic day out with the family. That's exactly what I'm looking for.

Okay, last thing, where where should people find everything you're working on online? Yeah, so probably my website, Ali Abdaal.com or my YouTube channel. If you just search Ali Abdaal or Ali or something on YouTube. It'll it'll come up. Awesome. I'll link to all that. And we got a lot of links from this episode in the show notes.

Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. Transcribed by https://otter.ai Transcribed by https://otter.ai (upbeat music) (upbeat music)