Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 284: Feel-Good Productivity (w/ Ali Abdaal)

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

Call talks with Ali Abdaal about his journey from doctor to YouTube sensation, and then dives deep into Ali’s new book, “Feel-Good Productivity,” and the possibilities of making accomplishment something enjoyable. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaINTERVIEW: YouTube Star Ali Abdaal [3:41]Cal Reacts: Dissecting Ali’s YouTube career path [1:32:27]Links:FREE download for “Slow Productivity”: calnewport.com/slowThanks to our Sponsors: expressvpn.com/deeprhone.com/cal shopify.com/deepnotion.com/calThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in a distracted world. So if you're new to our show, I'm a computer science professor at Georgetown University and a digital theorist who writes about the way technology impacts how we live, how we work, and how we relate to each other. On this podcast, we discuss concrete strategies for putting these ideas into action. I'm here on my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer Jesse. But Jesse, I'm excited about today's episode because we're doing something we haven't really done a lot of but are starting to do more recently, which is have a guest. Yeah, it's exciting stuff. My theory on guest is it's not a default for me. If someone comes along who I think is fascinating and really well known and an opportunity to talk to them comes around and they're really deeply connected.

what we talked about on this show, that I'm all for it. But otherwise, I'm not seeking out guests. So we happen to have another really cool guest who was around and available and was happy to snag him. That's my friend Ali Abdal. He is probably the most well-known productivity figure online, especially in the world of YouTube, where he has a huge following for his videos. A really interesting guy because he was a doctor, a practicing medical doctor in the UK. He left that job to do his YouTube channel and productivity full time. So he have a double point of intersection with the interest of the show here. First of all, just someone who thinks a lot about what productivity means and how to pursue it, also somewhat agnostic to the content of what he does,

who made an interesting shift in his life. So in pursuit of something deeper, made somewhat of a radical change. Now, the reason why we had him on the show is he has a new book out. It came out in December. It's called Feel Good Productivity, How to Do More of What Matters to You. It gives a really interesting counterintuitive take on productivity that is philosophically aligned with my upcoming book's slow productivity. Not surprisingly, I blurbed this book and he blurbed my book because we're sort of preaching from the same hymnal here. I feel good productivity is really interesting book that basically says starting from a place where you feel good about your life and your job is actually the way to be more productive. This runs counter to the American hustle culture

prescription of by being more productive and getting after it, you will eventually feel good because you will earn all these rewards and accolades. So he sort of flips that and does so in a really interesting way. So I was happy to have him on. We talked some about the book at the end, but honestly, what I really wanted to find out is his story. So we get deep into his deep life story. How does one go from being a doctor to a productivity YouTuber? How does a YouTuber make a living? what is that world like? What was it like to be there forming something like this? And then we get deep into his thoughts on productivity,

including me interrogating him about the online culture surrounding productivity, which I don't know as well as other people because I'm not as online. So I think it's just a all-and-all fascinating discussion that I think everyone is going to enjoy. All right, so Jesse, why don't we jump over now to my conversation with Ali Abdal? All right, so, Ollie, thank you for coming on the Deep Questions Podcasts. I've been on your show before, so I'm excited to return the favor and try to pick up. It's going to be so fun. Yeah, pick up where we left off.

I mean, the main purpose of our conversation, of course, is going to be talking about your new book, which I'm holding up for those who are watching instead of just listening, Feel Good Productivity, which came out in December. But before we get into the specific prescriptions from this book, I thought my audience would, benefit from getting a little bit of your history because I think it's relevant, right? So, I mean, tell me if I, if I, this 100 foot view is correct or not, but essentially for those who are not familiar with you, who is a small group of people, you are right now, one of the best known people talking about productivity, especially on YouTube. Not that long ago, a handful of years ago, you're practicing doctor British National Health Service. So there's an interesting transition that happens in there. So let's go back. You identify early in your book that your

interest and productivity as a topic of studying picked up when you were a medical student. So do I have that right? Where did you first begin this second part of your life? Yeah. So in my first year of med school, in high school I co-sted because I was naturally smart and I could just get good grades by default. And then I got to med school and then it was like I was hitting the face with a baseball bat. because now all of a sudden, everyone around me was really smart, and I was totally mediocre. And I was like, oh, my goodness, this is a new experience. And my first year of Met School was, like, pretty overwhelming and pretty, like, draining. And I was doing a lot of the hard work in inverted commas, the grind, all that stuff.

And then randomly in my second year, we had a lecture in experimental psychology around effective study techniques or effective memory and learning techniques. and that was where I first heard the phrase active recall and spaced repetition and stuff. And my mind was freaking blown. I was like, how the hell have I never in my life come across this stuff before? Like what? And then I was like, I need to research more about this stuff.

And then I came across your blog. And I came across your books. And I came across LifeHacker and a bunch, I started doing a bunch of digging into the studies around active recall and stuff. And then I started applying those to my life as a student. And then in my second year, I did super well. I got a first class in my exams. I felt like euphoric. Then in my third year, that was when I was studying psychology as like an extra degree type thing. I was thinking,

hmm, you know what? Now that I know all these effective study techniques and I know how to be productive as it comes to being a student, let me try and go for rank one. Because I was like, this is the best time. Like, I'm going to try and go for top of the year. And what is rank? What is rank one? Yeah. For the American listeners, that's how elite in the class ranking is rank one. Oh, that's like the top. Is it number one? Is that the same as being like number one? Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. So you're going for number one in your class. Yeah, rank one number one. Yeah, number one in the class. I was like, you know, it was, it was a year where I was like, you know, I'm studying psychology. This is a super interesting subject. I know all these techniques. Let's just go for it. Let's try and play this game. And so I applied all the productivity techniques and the stuff from your blog and the stuff from all of these things, started giving talks about them and ended up winning joint first prize for, you know, top of the top of the class. that year. I was like, it worked. So that's kind of what started this interest in productivity,

like literally having a before and after of I didn't know any of this stuff, and then I applied it, and then I did really well and had a way better time. It's funny how the parallels here. I mean, I mean, you know this. We've talked about this, but this was exactly my introduction too. College for me, not med school, first year went okay, got serious about techniques, begin crushing it. I didn't get smarter over the summer between those two years. So there's this urgency of, I got to tell other people. people about this. This was crazy. I didn't get number one in my class at my college, but I was top 30 out of a thousand. That first year held, held me back. But it sounds like you had a similar

urgency of why don't more people know about this. This made a big difference, just being intentional and careful and evidence-based about how you approach work, at least in the academic setting, it was like a low-hanging fruit. And of course, that blogging world you talked about, what a wonderful time. But it was the air of that blog. You couldn't really monetize those blogs. It wasn't like it is today where you could gain real notoriety. People just were interested in things and wanted to help each other.

So you're, okay, so now you're coming out of your studies with this same sort of insight I had as well, that at least in the world of studies and studying technique matters. And it could matter a huge amount. So you have that bug. How does that bug then grow as you, I assume after this, you're going into the early stages of training. In the U.S., this would be like the internship year followed by residency. It's probably different terminology in the UK. But as you enter in the maelstrom of formal medical training, clinical training,

what happens to this bug, this interest? Yeah. So this interest in study techniques then morphs into an interest in time management and productivity generally. Because around when I started my second year of med school, I also started a business on the side that was helping other people get into med school in the UK. So I was running courses and stuff on the weekends, going up to random conference rooms and running seminars

in the olden days, printing out these little booklets and things. And so I was starting a business from scratch. And that obviously takes time and energy. And so I was spending a lot of time like reading your blog, reading your stuff, reading like LifeHacker, following everything Tim Ferriss has ever written.

Anyone who's a video, vaguely in the world of productivity, I was reading and trying to apply things like 80, 20 and batching and all this stuff that, you know, your listeners will be aware of, but to me at the time was like, oh my goodness, you're saying if I batch my emails all in one hour, I can reply to all these customer service things. That's cool. Why didn't no one tell me this before? And so as I'm discovering all these productivity techniques, I'm applying them to my life while I'm building the business on the side while being in med school. And that, you know, continues for a while. I give a few talks about like how to study for exams because I'm like,

more people need to hear about this stuff. And then in like 2017, this was in my penultimate year of med school. I decided, you know what? You know, I'd been running the business for a few years at that point, and we were sort of plateauing. So I thought, I think I should start a YouTube channel. And I think I should make videos that teach people how to get into med school because then maybe if they think I'm legit,

they'll sign up to my paid courses or something. And I now know that this is called organic content marketing, but I didn't have that terminology back in the day. And I started making those videos. people started liking them and very quickly students started asking me how do you study for your exams you're a cambridge medical student and i was like oh funny you should ask i've been doing this shit for four years now and i've been giving talks about it so let's just make some videos about it and my first video that went viral was a video called how to study for exams where i talked about active recall i talked about some of the studies some of the kind of literature reviews and systematic reviews that have been done that show that active recall and space repetition and stuff is the way to go and that video went viral and that was like the you know that was the start of my youtube channel really really taking off. And so where were you on the medical side of things, 2017-ish, where are you in your training at this point? Yeah, so at this point, the way it works in the UK is you have three years of pre-clinical, like medical school, kind of like pre-med, like lots of basic physiology, anatomy,

biochemistry, blah, blah, blah. And then you have another three years of clinical school, which is where you're still technically a student, but you're not going into the hospital and like seeing patients and stuff. So I was in my second of the three clinical years. So I had one more year of clinical school left when I started the YouTube channel. I see. So in the American system, you actually go to university for being a doctor. So like those first three years would be like being a premed major at an American university. And then the clinical years are like the U.S. equivalent of being what we would call medical school. Is that? Yeah, exactly. So it's a bit more compressed in the UK. Like it's six years for the whole thing. Whereas in the U.S., it's four years and then four years and

then residency. So it sounds like in that period leading up to this, you were running the business on the side, that was actually one of your focuses in terms of applying productivity advice in your own life, which makes sense given the tenor of the sort of Tim Ferriss age of productivity was very sort of side hustle focused and how do you take a business and push into a smaller portion of your life. And so was any of the energy and ideas that were coming out of this productivity literature that you're applying to your business, were you also applying this still to what was going on academically, or did this feel different?

Was there a break between the active recall, how do we study well stuff, and the Tim Ferriss, Lifehacker, like how do you run a business stuff? Or did you see this all is sort of packaged? Yes. So one thing that you have wrote about in the blog, I don't know when I discovered this,

but you have a blog post that's something to the effect of when trying to figure out what to do with your career, don't start with a degree and then figure out therefore what job do I want to go into? You say something like figure out what life you want and then reverse engineer what job you want based on that. And so I don't know when I read this, but I was like, this is useful advice.

And I realized the life I wanted, I was a life where I worked part-time as a doctor. Because I'd spoken to so many doctors, they all hated their lives, except the ones who work part-time. The ones who work two or three days a week, having a great time. They love it.

I was like, okay, how do I reverse engineer part-time medicine from this? So beginning with the end in mind, recognizing part-time medicine, I was like, okay, cool, I now need to devote time and energy to building sources of passive income so that I can afford to work part-time. And secondly, I kind of realized that playing the academic game, you know, I got the number one position in my third year. I was like, do I want to keep working for that number one position? Like, is it worth it? Is it worth it, given that I'm not trying to be a fancy professor or anything?

I'm literally trying to work part-time so I can, like, have a chill life? Probably not worth it. So what's the minimum amount of studying I need to do to comfortably pass the exams without, like, going to go? going overboard because unless you, for example, get a distinction, which is how it works in the UK, which, you know, I knew it would have taken a lot of work and not actually translate to the lifestyle that I wanted. So thank you for that advice. But what that meant was I was like going, kind of doing the bare minimum of like, how do I kind of only study for like half an hour a day so that I can edit videos for the other seven hours of the day? So I'd be going into hospital

with my laptop. I'd be seeing, I'd be very targeted and like, I think like a lot of medical students have a scatter-gun approach to clinical stuff. You go in and you shadow the doctors and you get an exposure and like get a feel of what's going on in the hospitals. I was like, no, screw that. That's so inefficient. What a poor use of time. Let me identify exactly what my learning outcome is. Find the specific patient that I want to talk to based on talking to doctors, be like, I need a patient who has this kind of murmur. Go and talk to them, do the thing. I'm done in 20 minutes. Now I can sit in the common room and edit my video for the next six hours. I was doing that kind of hustle while I was in my final year of med school.

So you were Tim Ferrissine medical school. Like figured out, oh, hey, what actually matters here? Let me get rid of the wasted effort. Let me deal. Let me eliminate and automate. It's fascinating. So in the years before that, you were going all out. But that kind of makes sense, right?

Because that helps you get placed into the better clinical training, I'm assuming. I mean, I know, for example, you were doing some peer review publication during your extra psych year. Like, you were doing the things that you do to stand out. But I guess like in the U.S., once you got into a good medical school, if your plan was like you were talking about maybe to be like an emergency department doctor that does swing shifts three days a week, it doesn't really matter that you're the number one student in your med school. Once you're there, let's start Tim Ferrissing this. That is fascinating. Absolutely. Yeah.

And did you – And it all came from that blog post of yours that said figure out what life you want in reverse engineering. I was like, mind blown. I remember exactly when I wrote that. Yeah, the piece of career advice no one gives you, I think it was titled, something like that. I was at a graduation. I remember that post well. It was because I was getting towards the end of grad school and starting to think about,

why didn't I actually work backwards? Also, Tim was a big influence. So we're all just stealing from. Exactly. We're stealing from Tim. Okay. So now a lot of what's going to happen now makes sense because you have now adopted this mindset of lifestyle engineering.

You see the impact of systems matter, technique matters. there's a lot of time to be saved by how you approach things. You want to definitely have the end in mind and figuring out what you do today. So now you're in this sort of clinical phase of medical school. You have this growing YouTube business on the side. You have your eyes towards sort of an engineered lifestyle. All this, by the way, is now making me much less surprised that you end up, you're ending up where you are today because you are already holding your medical training as just a piece towards the bigger goal of constructing,

constructing lifestyle. What was YouTube like? 2017, you start doing these videos. This is early YouTube. This is, when I'm thinking of learning videos in 2017, how to study, I'm thinking maybe like Thomas Frank, like, I don't know who's around at this point, but what is YouTube in 2017? What's the landscape you were surveying as you began to grow that part of your life? Yeah. So YouTube 2017 was, yeah, Thomas Frank was the only real, voice in productivity. And there were a couple of medical people doing content about like what medical school is like, but a lot of them were in the US.

And there wasn't anyone doing it very well in the UK. And so I thought, hmm, this is interesting. This was what Casey Nystart was doing his daily, daily vlogs-ish. Peter McKinnon had just started making YouTube videos about photography and videography. And Peter McKinnon was a big inspiration because he was teaching photo and video, but in a engaging and dynamic way. There was a guy called Simon Clark who had a 100,000 subscribers.

He was like the first vlogger in the UK in the student scene, and he was an Oxford PhD physics student. And that kind of helped me realize, wait a minute, you don't need to be a gregarious personality. Simon Clark is a freaking nerd. He's talking about his degree and his weather calculations

and the fact that he goes to choir on the weekends. I was like, great, he's got 100,000 subscribers. Wow, there is room on YouTube for a sort of normal person without a very outgoing personality to talk about the subject that they're passionate about, which for me was like helping people get into med school. And so I thought, you know what, let's just start making videos. And I had a bit of a, I think I went into YouTube with five years of experience of running my

courses business and another 10 years of trying to make money on the internet with websites and affiliate marketing and stuff. So I approached YouTube from a business perspective rather than as a, I want to be a creator. The word creator wasn't really a thing in 2017. And so I thought, even if my videos only get like a couple of hundred views, those are a couple hundred views from students who are trying to get into Cambridge Medical School. That is a valuable audience because I can help them out because I know my stuff.

And some of them bought my course. And so I had a bit of a monetization engine built in even though I had like no subscribers and no views. And slowly over time, it took me 52 videos in six months to get my first thousand subscribers. Then another six months to get monetized. and like my 91st video or whatever it was was that video about how to study for exams where I just repurposed a talk that I gave

added loads of studies and stuff to it and then that went super viral and suddenly people around the university were like oh my god like I watched your half an hour video about how to study for exams and that's changed my life and I'm like nice this is working interesting interesting so it's your 91st or 90 second video that you really started talking

not just medical school yeah do you think that took off in part because you are more practiced or in part because of the wider niche that you are now addressing. The medical school was very specific. Getting to the medicals in the UK, or is it some combination of the two?

You knew what you were doing, and then you hit a niche that had a big enough audience to support real virality, those two came together. Man, I haven't thought of this in a while. So this is like a good line of, because it's all like connecting

now that I connected those looking backwards. So when I started my YouTube channel, again, I applied the Tim various Cal Newport approach to productivity to the YouTube channel as well. Because I was like, I know that this has potential. And so I therefore absorbed a lot of YouTube advice on how to grow on YouTube. And a piece of advice I came across was you actually don't want your first video to go viral. You want your 100th video to go viral because if that's the video that goes viral,

now there's this whole back catalogue of content that people can binge. Whereas if your first video goes viral, who cares? You're just getting views for no reason. And at the time, I knew nothing about making videos, nothing about editing. and another principle from the productivity world is just do a thing 100 times and you'll get good at doing the thing. So I was like, all right, let's apply these together.

Let me make 100 videos and not think too hard about it. Let's lower the bar. Let's not be perfectionistic about it. Let's try and get a little bit better each time. I've watched tutorials on the side to see how I can level up my editing and make sure I improve the way I talk on camera and all that stuff.

And I knew in the back of my mind when I started YouTube, at some point I want to make this video about how to study for exams because I think that video could be a banger. but I knew I did not want it to be my first video. I was actually aiming for that to be like my 100th video. Because I thought, you know what, in 100 videos, I will learn enough about how to make videos

in order to do justice to that one. And so in a way, like, I did have a sense of market demand here because in like 2015 randomly, this was a year into my discovering study techniques and your blog and everything, I randomly decided to do a talk for the local Islamic society at my university on how to study for exams. And so we booked it

We booked like the local prayer room Which holds like 20 people Yeah And we booked it and made a Facebook event On Ali Abdullah teaches you how to study for exams Like with science-backed techniques And that Facebook event page went viral Around the university

And like 20,000 people saw this Facebook event page Which was meant to be for like A handful of people in the Islamic Society prayer room For God's sake And like thousands of people clicked attending on this event And I was like whoa And then the Islamic Society events guy Was like bloody hell

We need to book a lecture theater and everything And we ended up me giving a talk in a lecture theatre with like a couple of hundred other students like hanging on to my every word because they were like, oh my God, no one teaches us how to study for exams. So I had a sense of like, at some point I want to make this YouTube video,

but it has to be video 100 and not video number one. So I was sort of like trying to get better at the craft. And it just sort of worked like around that time when I made that video. I also did a collab with a bigger YouTuber that put attention on my channel and the video itself was very good. I spent ages working on it

and I had so much research behind it. Like I think the perfect storm of variables hit at the right time for that video to go viral. Oh, interesting. And what makes a video like this good? So is it, it's the content, it's the editing. It's the, for an informative video, do I have this right? You also want, it's, the ideas make sense.

They're backed and you're just this, this, this, this. You just have it. You have the goods, basically. Like this technique, here's the study, here's what's happening. I mean, these are the different elements that came together. So then it just flows when you see it. It's convincing. It's useful.

It's interesting. You had all those things. together. Absolutely. I think nowadays it would be hard to make that same video because six years ago there was a lot less of this sort of content on YouTube. So there was also a sense of like no one has heard this stuff before. But now there's loads of student YouTube channels. And so talking about active recall or space reputation or Anki or whatever is no longer as novel as it felt at the time. So there was also that sense of like this is this is new. Like no one's talking about this stuff. Right. It's like when I published how to become a straight-a student,

people weren't writing books, believe it or not, on just straight up study techniques. So I was like, I will do that. The book has sold hundreds of thousands of copies because no one was doing that. Now it's not so rare. Yeah, let's talk about how to actually study. But back then, there's something about being new. All right, so that if we jump ahead, how far did you get? Where were you in your medical career when that key decision came, which we've talked about in depth on your show, that key, scary decision of I am leaving medicine to do.

YouTube full-time or my business is full-time. How far along were you when that happened? So it did kind of happen a little accidentally. Sorry, there's a crying child in the background right now. I don't know if you can hear that. That's life. That's life right there. That's life. Yeah. It's not my child. It's a friend's child, for the record. It happened kind of accidentally. So in the UK, the way it works is you do two years of working. I guess those are sort of the equivalent of your intern years. We call them the foundation years. So you work clinically for two years once you're fully qualified. And then at that point, you decide what residency program do I want to apply to, whether it's medicine or surgery or neurosurgery or emergency

medicine or anesthetics or whatever. And so there's a natural career break after those two years. And what a lot of people will do is take a gap here to, for example, go to Australia to do emergency medicine. So that was my plan. My plan was in 2020, once I've done my two years, once I've done my time, I'm going to go to Australia for a year to do emergency medicine as a way of boosting my CV so that when I apply to emergency medicine residency, I'll have more points and plus Australia's cool, plus why not? But August 2020 was, you know, Australia closed their borders, pandemic takes over the world.

And so I accidentally ended up becoming a full-time YouTuber where I'm like, you know, one day I'm at work assisting with C-sections because I was in Obzangini, wearing the whole like hazmat suit because it was COVID times. And the next day I'm like, right, I'm stuck at home with nothing to do other than to make YouTube videos. But in August 2020 was the idea, Oh, my trip to Australia got canceled. Now I have this year off. I'll YouTube, but after this year, I'm going to still go into the residency match. And, you know, was that the idea? Okay. So you had this sort of... That was the idea. So I was planning to apply for a residency thing in November because it's like the applications happened a year earlier. And I was like gearing up towards it. I also had some friends who were who moved from the UK to the US. And so I was dabbling with like, do I want to move to the US for residency? Do I want to take the US MLE and do all that crap? So I got the resources. I signed up to Pathoma. I started.

started doing some practice questions, realizing, oh my God, this is so hard. And thankfully, the YouTube channel took off that year. And was there, was there an extra incentive or pressure that when the Australia plan fell through, you were thinking, okay, I actually need to pick up some more revenue from my YouTube channel, because this is a source of revenue that's not coming. So was there a, I'm going to take this thing a little bit more seriously for pragmatic reasons? Was there an extra bolt of energy? Or was it already doing well at that point? Yeah. I think the YouTube channel was maybe making about 20k a month at that point. And my salary as a doctor was making 3K a month. So already I was like blew past my doctor's salary. But randomly at the end of 2020,

I decided, you know what, let me make a course teaching people how to do YouTube. Because people have been asking for it. And then that completely took off and ended up taking over my life for the next like two years. And then that was the first year that the business did a million pounds in revenue. I was like, bloody hell. I've never seen a million quid before in my life. This is insane. And so the walk people through. That changed things. Like a little bit how YouTube revenue works. So like when you're coming into fall of 2020, you're talking about 20K, I guess, pounds per month. At this point, this is YouTube would be mainly sponsorships. So this is just a mix of automatically inserted ads from YouTube plus perhaps like sponsorships you sold yourself and you say to camera. So mainly some combination of that was going on. Yeah, ish. So three big sources of revenue at the time. The first one was ads. AdSense, which is the five second ads that appear before YouTube videos, that was maybe making like 2K a month.

Then there were sponsorships where weirdly companies will pay like five grand or three grand or two grand for like, this video is brought to you by Skillshare or like Blinkist or short form or whatever the thing might be in your case. And so the AdSense and sponsorships are about 5K a month. Yeah. But weirdly, I started making classes on Skillshare in 2019 because I spoke to Thomas Frank and he had a class on Skillshare and he was making several. several grand a month. And I was like, wait a minute, you can make online courses on this platform called Skillshare, which is basically free for people to access because you can just sign up to a trial and then cancel. And I know how to make courses. Huh, let me just make a course about video editing. Let me make a course in studying for exams. Let me make a course in productivity.

Let me make a course on how to type faster. Let me make a course on anything I know anything about. And, you know, the first course I made on Skillshare was about how to edit videos. It took me one day to film and it took a freelancer two days to edit because I was just like doing over-the-shoulder walkthrough of how I edit videos. And that course has been making five grand a month on Skillshare since September of 2019 to this day. It still makes several thousand a month. And it's because...

And my doctor's salary was several thousand a month. And you would mention it, I mean, because you had a big enough audience. Now, not a big enough audience, you could just add sense yourself to like a really healthy revenue, but a big enough audience that if you mentioned semi-regularly, hey, I have a course on this, you had a funnel there that just like maybe the average Skillshare instructor wouldn't have. Yeah, absolutely. And Skillshare, we're also sponsoring our videos as well.

So I was like, I was doing an ad read for my own course, which was then even getting more people. And so there was this kind of like, again, thank you to Thomas Frank for turning me on to this like method of making money from Skillshare. So like by the fall of 2020, like 15 grand a month was coming in from Skillshare, which was just insane. Interesting. So you're making all this money. You have this break from your medical training trajectory. And you were being confronted with the complexity and difficulty of the next phase of your medical training. You're looking at these applications.

You're thinking about what it would take to do a U.S. residency and the complexity of the applications. And let's layer on, everyone in the fall of 2020, I was writing about this a lot for the New Yorker at the time, was going through this shift of what really matters to me, what do I want my life really to be like. It was the beginning of this sort of mass reconsideration of the meaning of one's professional life. All of these things hit together. Now, I guess it's not at all surprising that at some point, I guess it sounds like you're, you're saying by the new year, you said, no, I'm not going to submit. I'm not submitting my residency application. Let's just keep going with this. I want to take a quick break from my conversation with Ali to talk about one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. That is our friends

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because it was like, I'm making all this money on YouTube, but like medicine has been my identity this whole time. And I had a theory. My theory was, you know what, let me run a lifestyle experiment. My hypothesis is that working two days a week as a doctor is fun and I can do three days a week as a YouTuber. That's pretty cool. Why not? And so I ran the experiment. Again, thank you Tim Ferriss for encouraging me to run experiments on my life. And I tried it out. I tried working part time because I picked up a few shifts in the emergency department because they knew me and I was like, hey, can I just come in and do some extra shifts? They were like, sure. And every 10 minutes while I was there, I was thinking, what am I doing here?

I could be in like the local we work right now, which is like super nice and there's actually free coffee there. And I can hang out with my team. And it was a workplace that was open during COVID. Why am I in this emergency department that has no natural light where it's just kind of grim? And I'm on the phone trying to convince radiology to do a scan that they don't want to do. So I ran the experiment for a couple of weeks. I was like, wait a minute. This whole theory that I've got that working part-time as a doctor is fun and part-time YouTuber is fun.

This actually does not hold true. so what would it look like if I actually gave that up? And it was when I did a podcast interview with Lewis Howes, who runs the School of Greatness podcast, where he was initially interviewing me about passive income ideas and stuff. And at some point I said to him that, yeah, you know, I'm still thinking of staying in medicine. And he ended up like challenging me on that.

He was like, wait, why do you want to stay in medicine? Yeah. And I was like, oh, but like, what if my YouTube business crumbles and stuff? Like, I need the money, right? And he was like, bro, the skills you've gotten over the last 10 years of entrepreneurship, how long would it take you to make 100K? I was like, I don't know, a few months. He was like, yeah.

How long would it take you to make 100K as a doctor? In the UK, it's like 10 years of training, and then you make 100K as a doctor a year. And so it took Lewis to sort of just push me on this for me to realize that I was holding on to this identity of being a doctor because of the status and the prestige and all sorts of fear and financial insecurity around, oh, what if I run out of money?

All of that stuff helped me break through this barrier that I had in my mind of I have to be a doctor forever. Yeah. And I decided to take the plunge and just go full-time on the entrepreneurship, writer, YouTubery thing. And did that close the door? I mean, is it different leaving in the UK pre-residency? Is that closed a door into way that if you had said, no, no, I'm going to persist for another four years.

I'm going to get an ED residency. I'm going to, you know, if you had gone through all of that, would you then be in a situation? We're like, okay, now I could walk away and come back. I'm a fully credential doctor. I mean, was there a sense? Or did not really matter. I mean, whenever you left, it could be an issue. I mean, was that, I guess I'm trying to understand, was there pressure to like, why don't you just finish your training?

Yeah, and then you can always make a decision later. Exactly. So that was my mom's whole narrative around this because she's a doctor as well. The issue is that most residency programs in the UK are at least six years long. So it was like six to eight years. And all of a sudden, that's not a case of like, oh, just finish your residency. It's the case of like bloody hell, another six to eight years of this. And I also, again, one thing that I think you're, encourage and Tim Ferriss also does as well is speak to the people who are in the position that you think you want to be in. So I was speaking to a bunch of consultants who, you know, the fully qualified doctors and the our equivalent of attendings and saying, you know, what advice do you have? Like, do you wish you'd gotten there earlier? Do you wish you'd take on your time? And 100% of them said,

don't rush to get here. This is, it's not all that is cracked up to be. It's more fun being a resident where actually you can do stuff, but you have no responsibility. It's, it's lonely at the top man. You know, don't rush for it. And so I was like, all right, cool. I don't, I don't need worry so much about this. Because if, you know, to this day, if I wanted to, I could still go back to medicine. It would be a bit embarrassing with all the big game I've been speaking on the internet about like making millions and stuff. But I could go back if I really wanted to.

Yeah, you could always just change your name a little bit. Yeah, that wasn't me. That was someone else. Take glasses off. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Just change your haircut. Blonde hair, I think will do it.

So here's my psycho. I'm going to psychoanalyze you. And you can tell me if I'm right around. Here's my thing. I'm going to say that the pivotal moment in your. path was actually much earlier where you decided, because according to your book, when you were still in that first phase of your training, you were gunning for surgery, right? So you're like, okay, if I'm going to do this, I want a gun for the most competitive, sort of high prestige medical

job. My contention is when you made that decision to switch to emergency medicine was actually what was said in place all of the motion that was going to lead to where you are today, because That's where you decided, wait a second, I want to construct my lifestyle and work backwards to see how my professional career. That was to shift from prestige, maximizing happiness to working backwards. And once you're in that mindset of I want to work backwards from what I want my life to be like, now you're setting yourself up for you to actually change and learn what that target is as you get more information. It seems to open up that shift. That's my psychoanalysis.

Okay, so how close am I there? Pretty close, actually, yeah. The story in the book is a bit truncated for space, obviously. I would say that was definitely one start of it. The other start of it was a bit before that, reading the four-hour work week and when I was like 18 years old, just going into med school and just coming across initially toying with this idea

of lifestyle design being a thing. But, yeah, no, absolutely. It was when I switched my focus from going for plastic surgery, which is like really competitive and really intense, the hottest one. I was in my fourth year of med school and I decided plastic surgery. Then I started gunning for all the publications and the whole shabang and all brown-nosing my way to try and connect with all the people. To realizing, actually, is this the lifestyle I want?

Probably not. Working part-time as an emergency physician sounds more fun. That was a big shift in like, hang on, rethinking what does it mean, like prestige and status and happiness and fulfillment? And to what extent does happiness and fulfillment? come from having a fancy job title or a competitive, you know, residency program under my belt. Well, yeah. I mean, that goes back to my contention, and I wrote a piece about this as well, that

people underestimate the cultural impact of Tim Ferriss. That, like, planting that seed in so many people's mind over that period between, like, 2007 and 2015 is, like, has actually had a huge impact. It's like that article I wrote during the pandemic is, why are people not talking about Tim Ferriss, he got all the stuff people are talking about now. He got that all right 10 years ago. Like, why aren't people talking about?

I think people were very quick in the more elite chattering classes to like hone in on like the specific advice. And be like, well, this is kind of anachronistic and out of date. And, you know, it's, hey, he's putting too much work on virtual assistant. Like looking for flaws, but missing the forest for the trees.

Like this notion of designing your life, working backwards, you know, it changed everybody. It changed the way that so many people thought about it. Okay, so then let's jump forward. What did you learn? Now we're in product, you're full time doing this.

The topic has shifted. Your YouTube channel has shifted much more towards productivity, even outside of academia and classes. It gets more general, which makes sense as you're older now, and that's a broader audience. What did you see building up to getting to your book? How did you see productivity YouTube?

What did you encounter there? How did that change over the years? was your experience being one of the leaders of that particular media sector? There was definitely a sense of a few years ago. A lot of it was about the apps and the tools. And, you know, 2020, 2021, Tiago Forte's building a second brain was really taking off. And this whole idea of personal knowledge management, like, if you just have the right note-taking app, the right-node-taking system, suddenly creativity will become effortless and stuff.

And I was like sold on that. Yeah. Not to interrupt you, but did you also get yelled at a lot by Zettelcast and people for not taking them seriously enough? I would not yell that so much as like Zettlcast and people in my life are like, you just aren't getting it. If you have, don't you realize you have to get this? Can I just come show this to you? I'm assuming you probably got similar pushback from them. Like if you would just read how to take smart notes, you would understand.

Like this is it. This is the key. Yeah. Yeah. And I read how to take smart notes like multiple times. And each time I was like, oh, the thing that's missing in my life is a Zettelcast and system. So I tried Rome and I tried obsidian and I tried all the things and then Notion became a thing and stuff and I was a mentor for building a second brain and Tiago's become a good friend now. And there was like that whole genre of like if you just had the perfect system, your life

would be sorted. I think you said this in one of your recent episodes the other day. I think I was listening to this last week and someone asked a question about building a second brain and you said something that very much vived with my experience, which is, you know, I hope Tiago doesn't listen to this. But I have never once had an actual. insight from my second brain. A lot of it has come from like, I need to make a video or I need to write this chapter. So let me Google the appropriate things. And so it's not quite been, at least for me, maybe I haven't been using it right. The holy grail that I thought it would be. But the productivity ecosystem around then on YouTube was very much focused on the tools. And there was always

part of me that was like, that was not keen on this. Because actually around that time, late 2020, I got the offer from Penguin to publish the book about productivity. And so I was trying to figure out like I didn't want it to be a I did I didn't want it to be criticized in the way that the four hour work week was for being too specific about the tools yeah I was like okay I need a philosophy here philosophy that is completely decorrelated from the tools and I had a few ideas that was sort of forming over the years around productivity and stuff and what it took was uh sort of a conversation with a guy called david who was actually james claire's book proposal guy an editor in New York.

So I showed David like the first draft of the proposal. And he was like, this stinks. Like it's not going to sell. And I was like, damn, shit, I spent a year working on this. What do you mean it's not going to sell? And he was like, it's too complicated. At the time, it was like productivity is an equation. And part of that equation is to like figure out what's meaningful to you.

And then like how to optimize it and stuff. And he was like, like, man, you just got to simplify it. You're pretty successful. You've done the med school thing. You've done the doctor thing. You've done the business thing. You're making millions. Blah, blah.

if you had to boil it down to one word or one phrase, what would it be? Like, what's the secret to your productivity? And I was like, oh, easy. I just made everything fun. And he was like, that's the book, write that fucking book. Like, don't write the book about the equation. No one gives a shit about the equation. Like, write the book about making it fun.

And that, so after you're tinkering away on this productivity equation, I decided to change course because I realized, oh, hang on. There's this whole thing of like, if you focus on enjoying the journey, productivity just takes care of itself. and the reason I was able to crank out the YouTube videos and get through med school while having a pretty good time and being a doctor while having a pretty good time is because I always found a way to make it fun.

And that was very distinct to what my colleagues were doing where they would complain about how awful the job was. Even though I left medicine in the end, I had a great time. It was super fun. But it's because there were things that I was applying to make it fun. And so that's what ended up becoming the book. Do you think YouTube, this is like a medium-is-the-mess-type analysis, Do you think YouTube biases content towards apps, systems, technical details because of something about what plays well in the format?

Or do you think that format just happen to attract people? Like you and I are nerds. Like we, I love that. I'm like, yeah, I want the algebra of productivity book. I want like, you have a whole system of like when we have like an exponent on time management divided by, you know, time blocking equals. The whole thing, yeah. Yeah, so is it the medium of YouTube biases towards this sort of technical list approach? Or is it just that's who was attracted to YouTube?

So what do you think? What's direction? What's the arrow of influence there if you had to think about it? Yeah, that's a good point. I think it's people love actionability. Yeah. And if, you know, like Tim Ferriss's podcast intro is like actionable advice from the world, you know, Tribe of Mentors to Tools of Titans, actionable advice.

there's something about something feeling actionable. Even now when I listen to your podcast, it's the candy, the actionable stuff that makes me think, oh, let me take that away. Even though, and the philosophy, and through reading slow productivity, as well, the philosophy is sort of comes in under the radar.

But the actionable insights are the ones where if someone were to ask me, what have you done from Cal Newport? I'm like, oh, that actionable thing about adventure studying or whatever it was called. Even though the philosophy is a bit more like, underneath that. And what we find for YouTube videos and I guess just like books and podcasts as well is people love the actionable stuff.

But that encourages you to go down into the route of I need to keep on finding new actionable things to talk about, a new system, a new framework, a new tool. But actually the thing that, you know, it's like trying to try to build muscle, go to the gym, progressive overload, eat enough protein. You can't make a career out of creating content around that. So you have to come up with like, do it. put your wrist this way versus that way, or like do incline versus decline bench, because like, but really the basics are fairly simple.

It's just, it doesn't make for sexy content. And I found myself going into that rabbit hole of like trying to come up with new productivity systems every day. And it was a bit exhausting after a while. But I'm ashamed to say that I indulged in that for at least a few months. So was it, was it a relief then to be working on,

you know, on the YouTube video you might be very technical because that's what the medium demanded. And, you know, here's my new mechanical keyboard keycaps. But you're writing a philosophical book at the same time. Did you find that to be a nice contrast or relief? It was quite nice, yeah. I was trying to keep the book also actionable,

but the nice thing about a book is you have a lot more space to expose about the theory. Yeah. And whereas in a YouTube video, you know, at the time everyone was trying to optimize for retention and like looking at analytics and seeing as soon as I mention anything even vaguely philosophical or conceptual, I see a measurable drop-off in engagement or retention. And that translates to literally 10.000.

if not hundreds of thousands of views that are disappearing at the point where I stop being actionable. And so now I don't care about that anymore. I'm like, optimizing for retention is not actually the goal. But at the time I was thinking, oh my goodness, I'm a full-time YouTuber now. I need to optimize for retention and all this stuff. Definitely the incentives of the platform go towards like how do you dopamine hit people as much as possible and as frequently as possible in the shortest amount of time, which doesn't actually lead to useful content necessarily.

Yeah, I mean, if you push it to its extreme, I guess you end up with Mr. Beast a bit, which is just sort of nothing wrong about it, but it's just purifying the retention graph. It's like taking the retention graph on YouTube and just like purifying that. Like only things that keep retention. It's like its own, it's the 21st century version of jazz, like a uniquely kind of American invention. And I like, by the way, the way you do it in the book is great, which I think it's you lead with philosophy science. And then you, but you've carefully structured. Okay, here's experiments.

Here's advice. So it's like really clear. Like, great, here's the actionable stuff, but it has a clear container around it. So it's like I'm learning, story science philosophy, now I'm put into action. That doesn't work on YouTube, but it works great in books. I thought it worked well in yours. So let's dive into feel good productivity in some more detail. So you talk about, you have this underlying idea.

It's, you know, feeling good about what you're doing is going to lead you to be more productive, right? which is kind of a reverse. There's a sort of grinded out American way of thinking of just you'll be happy when you get the plastic surgery attending position. You be productive so that you can later be happy. So early in the book you talk about essentially redesigning or rethinking about your work from a perspective of is this going to be fun or playful or energetic. So for example, when you were building out the YouTube digital business part of your life, and especially as you said, started taking that on full time. How were you thinking about how do I keep this fun? Because it's easy to make that into a grind. So what did you do to make sure that what you were building

was going to be something that you were going to continue to feel good about doing? Yeah, that's a great question. I tried so many, so many different strategies. I think society lulls us into believing the myth that, you know, this arrival fallacy, this idea that when we get to a particular destination, then we will be happy. And actually it was, for many years, I thought that your destination was where I wanted to be. And we talked about this a year and a half ago when you were on my show where I was like, oh man, Cal Newport, tenured professor, what a living the dream, freaking writing books, the books are amazing, and now he's doing the content.

Oh, I want to be that tenured professor and do the stuff. and speaking to you, you were like, you know, it's good, yeah, but also there's a lot of admin and a lot of stuff and like, enjoy the journey, man. And I was like, damn, that's very reassuring to hear. And it was the same pattern. When I would speak to Plastic Surgeons, they were like, bro, enjoy the journey. Don't worry about it. Don't rush to get to where I am. Yeah, it's nice.

But like, enjoy the journey. I wish I'd enjoy the journey. So speaking to all these people and listening to all the podcast, every single successful person lands on that idea, on that idea. The journey is the destination. and optimized for enjoying the journey, don't worry so much about getting to the end goal. And so, like, again, easier said than done. And it was so easy to sort of, you know,

there have been times in my YouTube journey where I felt like, oh, you know, once I get that next hire, then I'll be more chill. Or six weeks from now, when the calendar clears up, then my life will be a bit more chill. And through running a bunch of experiments on myself, I realized that really what I need to do is try and make the way.

work itself enjoyable. Yep. How do I, I had a post-a note on my desk that I used to have back when I wasn't nomading around the world, which is, what would this look like if it were fun? It's like the Tim Ferriss question, what would this look like if it were easy? But my version was, what would this look like if it were fun? You had this. What would editing a video look like?

And you had this written down and on your desk? It was a post-it note that I literally had underneath my monitor, because there's space under the monitor with the bezzles to put the post-it note. What would this look like if it were fun? We also turned this into like a wallpaper for my phone. me see if I can just give rid of my notifications and stuff. What would this look like if it were fun?

Oh yeah, there it is. Reverest, but yeah. And just that question, every single day I was asking myself that question, whenever I would feel drained about, by the work,

whenever I was like too caught up in the numbers or the stats or like the retention or any of that kind of stuff, I would try and remind myself, you know what? When I'm on my deathbed, I would give anything to be where I am right now. Like, let's enjoy the journey.

Interesting. So like, what was the, what were some of the answers to that question? question. Like, what were some of the things that you were doing that you stopped doing? Like, you mentioned the numbers. Oh, yeah. Like, were you two, were you, were you, uh, were you numbers captured for a while? And, and how does one get free from that if you're on YouTube? Yeah. So at the start of my YouTube journey, I was very, I was very anti-numbers. Uh, because, sorry about that. Right. No, good. Yep. Because, uh, you know, at the time I was reading a bunch of stoicism stuff, like, focus on what you can control and, you know, the numbers were outside of my control. So I reasoned, you know, I'm just going to focus and make on one video a week. And that worked really nicely. That's how I stayed consistent with YouTube when I was in Met School and when I was working.

But then when I became a full-time YouTuber and I suddenly started reading all these business books, all of them talk about like actually setting goals and like caring about the numbers and stuff. I was like, okay, cool, I guess I should set goals and I guess I should care about the numbers. And all of a sudden, I think when something is your side hustle and you're doing it for fun and you're making pocket money, who cares about the numbers? It's like it's free money. You're playing with house money. Who cares?

But when it became my full-time job, I was like, oh, crap. Like, now my job is to make these videos. And therefore, I guess I should care about the numbers. And I guess there's no point making a video if it's not going to get at least 100,000 views. And like, oh, my goodness, that video tanked. And therefore, and what I realized I was doing after a while was I was just taking it way too seriously. It's like, I'm a freaking YouTuber, man. I'm making videos on my bedroom in the middle of a pandemic.

All my friends are on the front lines, like working their arses off to safe people's lives have got COVID, putting themselves at risk. And I'm just making YouTube videos. What the hell do I have to complain about? Why am I taking it so seriously? And I took reading some Alan Watts, reading some Bertrand Russell's essay in praise of vitalness, and a lot of the stuff that was coming around, I think you were talking about around the time, around the pandemic around like actually taking a step back and not being so hustly when it came to productivity. All of that helped. And even to this day, it's still a bit of a struggle. like, you know, the book has come out and as of yesterday we hit the New York Times list.

Hey, congratulations. Not a surprise. But I've been... Thank you. But I've been like not reading the reviews and trying to dissociate myself from the numbers. Because I think when that focus on the numbers just takes all the fun out of everything. Yeah. And it probably didn't make a huge difference, I would guess, too.

I mean, some videos get more views than others, but you probably found when you stop caring about the numbers, you have your your core audience and it's probably growing at a certain rate and there's people doing your courses and it probably didn't make it probably didn't make that much of a difference you know whether or not yeah so that's interesting and then what about so for example I always guess that when you added deep dive so your your show deep dive your podcast video podcast deep dive that always seemed like something for you is that am I reading that right you're thinking like I want to spend because if you're a YouTuber you're trying to just build the biggest possible subscriber base or whatever. It's like, that's not the way

you do it, I guess. You would focus on more videos and make the, you know, bigger retention in the first 30 seconds. So is that an example, adding that to your portfolio, an example of you're like, this would be fun. I could have longer, I could talk to people who are interesting. Yeah, that's how it started off. I was like, we're never going to grow a big podcast, but that's fine. This is a cool thing. It's a great way to make friends and speak to people who I would otherwise be less like to be able to speak to. Over time, deep dive also became a job because we were, there's, there is a, I think,

I've realized over time there is a sweet spot when it comes to productivity and optimization. So we optimized the hell out of deep dive to grow deep dive. And I started batch filming podcast episodes. We started scheduling things way ahead of time. We started doing a bunch of research into titles and thumbnails and topics that, you know,

people, the guests hadn't talked about before. And it made the podcast grow, but it took a lot of the joy away from it. To the point that I've actually decided I'm going to take a bit of a pause from deep dive and figure out like, do I really want to continue doing the podcast in this format? Because for example, what I love to do is being like, hey, Cal, let's send you an email. Let's hop in a Zoom call and just shoot the shit about like our experiences with traditional career ladder versus, I don't know, other, like the creator life. But actually that episode that you and I did, I had the comment. that I wanted to have, and the first half of it was completely unrelatable for most people. Because we weren't talking about productivity. We were talking about what it's like being a tenured

professor and how you deal with the challenges of like also having like books and creative stuff you're doing and why are you still doing that? And it was so interesting for me. Yeah. But it was not useful for a lot of the audience. Some of the audience loved it. Oh my God, like you never hear these conversations. And we optimized deep dive to the point that it became less fun. Yep. And so after doing some soul searching a couple months ago, actually, I was thinking, do I really want to continue doing deep dive. And I want to continue doing the interviews. Like if you're hanging out in London, let's get together, look at a podcast studio and just chat and record it. That would be fun. But scheduling you and 20 other people in a given week that I have to then be somewhere for batch filming, it's like all of the, the optimization sucks the joy out of it. I've been trying to find this sweet spot between like optimizing for fun and optimizing for growth

with everything in the business. So do you think about your business from the standpoint now? more of like revenue floors than revenue optimization. Okay, as long as we're like here, it's all gravy. And so like beyond that, let's have fun. I don't want to fall below that, but like, hey, we could, we have a lot of flexibility now. You set a floor at a reasonable place and you have a lot of flexibility in, you know, and how you run things. Is that a reasonable way? Yeah, that's literally exactly how I think about it.

I think of it as a profit floor rather than a revenue floor. Yeah. I'm like, you know, if we do two million profit this year, great. Anything above that is, you know, feels like a book. bonus. Yeah. They're still naturally the sense of like, oh, we did 2.8 million last year. So like, let's do 2.9, 3 million this year.

And then I read books like 10x is easier than 2x where I'm like, fuck, okay, what about 20 million? And then I speak to entrepreneurs doing like 50 million a year in revenue. I'm like, whoa, that would be fun. But one thing the team always says to me is that any time I come back from the US, they have to ignore whatever I say for three days. Oh, yeah. Because usually when I'm in the US, I'm surrounded by people way richer than I am.

And I start getting this bug of like, oh, man, I'd be so much happier. if we had 100 million revenue. Yeah, where's my beach? And then I realize after a few days. Yeah. And also, I'm sure you get, when you're in the U.S., how many times have you had someone come up to you now and say, like, Ali, we need a Netflix show. This is like another very U.S. thing is like this would really do it. Like if you need a TV show, which is like a talk about like a terrible time suck doing TV.

You know who? It's interesting. I don't know if you had this impact, but it impacted me. And the person in the world of podcasting who, has had a big effect sort of accidentally on the way I think about your approach, which I completely agree with you. I mean, start with making, think about how do I keep this interesting and fun? Nothing else is going to be sustainable if you don't do that.

I think Joe Rogan has had a big impact on that. And the two things being him building cool places to do his work. And I know it's very insider baseball to most people, but the podcasters, this was very influential is he, you know, he rinsed out these warehouses and he puts like a gym in it and has like a pool table in it. And he makes it a place where, you know, you can hang out and his friends come there. And even like, especially early in the pandemic, like when he had his friends there hanging out, that was very influential. And then the other thing that was very influential is he, I heard him say once, they said, why don't you have an assistant? Everyone in Hollywood has a

personal assistant. And he said, oh, my theory is, when you get to the point, point where you need a personal assistant. So someone to go do your shopping for you and all this, that's just the signal you're doing too much. So you should use that as a signal not to hire a personal assistant, but to take things off your plate. I don't know who, I don't know if you had that same influence, but who do you look to? When you think about podcasting, YouTube, this sort of content creation, who are the role models you have in mind in terms of people doing this right? Hmm. Very question. For me on on YouTube, the inspiration has always been Peter McKinnon.

And the way he's been doing it for like seven years now, photo video tutorials. But he also seems to just talk about whatever he wants. He'll do a video about what's in his wallet. He'll do a video about, I don't know, some film thing that he's thinking about or reacting to something. And I don't know how true this is, but it seems like he doesn't care about the algorithm. And I love that idea. I also think to my. myself often, what is the YouTube channel that I would want Tim Ferriss to have? Yeah. And it's not one where he's like super hyper optimized. It's one where honestly, Tim, mate, I like your stuff. Just hit record and just tell me about something you're interested in. Yeah. That would be kind of cool.

And I almost prefer his solo episodes of the podcast compared to the interviews because it's like, I can't want to hear from him. It's kind of cool. I think, you know, what's the sort of vlog I would love for Cal Newport or James Clear to have? It's like, you guys live kind of interesting lives. It's like, I'd love to get. look into that.

Like, what would I want a Cal Newport vlog to look like? And so based on, like, the people who I aspire to be like in various ways, I sort of think what would they do when it comes to this particular thing, i.e. the way they do content or the way they do, whatever. Actually, I had a really, really good conversation with Mark Manson a few a year ago, actually. And he's been super helpful with helping out with the book as of you, so thank you for that. But what Mark said, because I was like, you know, man, you're living the dream, right? you've got the books,

the New York Times best sellers, 20 million copies, Hollywood film. Why are you doing YouTube videos? Because he was taking YouTube seriously. And he was like, look, man, I've had all the traditional media success. And I realized at the end of it,

making YouTube videos is more fun and reaches more people and makes more money. I was like, oh, okay. That's interesting. Which, again, was to that point around, like, the grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence. But actually,

everyone's life works for them and you just got to enjoy the journey and I sound like a spiritual woo-woo doctor but yeah enjoying the journey is the one. So what should you keep in mind if you're a listener to this interview and say, okay, you know, I'm not a writer, I'm not a content creator. But I like this feel-good productivity idea. I want to, you know, take the grass I'm in right now to use your metaphor instead of looking across the fence and make this just like a cooler, more interesting, more enjoyable place to live. What type of things are relevant when you're thinking about doing that for I have a

job at an office or I'm a professor or something that's not the fully autonomous sort of media age type position. Yeah. So the first three chapters of the book, I'm going to distill this into three P's, play, power and people. Play power and people are the three energizers that like you can apply to literally anything. Whatever grass you happen to be on, however much autonomy you have over that grass, you can apply it, play power and people to just make it greener and just make it more fun. We talked a little bit about play. Play, I think, is one of the most underrated productivity. tactics out there where when we can approach our job or our work or whatever we're doing with a sense of lightness and ease and a sense of like not taking it so seriously being

engaged but not taking it so seriously you know sincere rather than serious as Alan Watts would say that having having that spirit of play when it comes to our work can be super super super powerful you know a bunch of Nobel prize winners and stuff talk about how like really they were just playing with like graphene or Richard Feynman or whatever talk about the idea of play yeah with the plate. Yeah, planes and spinning plates. Yeah,

it was a great antidote. Yeah, thank you. So I think play is a big one. Power is another one. Power is like a sort of combination of having autonomy, but also feeling a sense of progress,

feeling like you're leveling up. Yep. So when it comes to autonomy, obviously entrepreneurs and media people have autonomy over a lot of what they do. But even if you don't have autonomy over what you do, you almost certainly have autonomy

over how you do it. Or at the very least, the mindset with which you are it. So, for example, when I was a doctor, this was something that actually didn't make it into the book. This got cut in the first draft. But I had a whole thing about how I realized that working on weekends was way more fun and way more energizing than working on weekdays. It's kind of random. Like, on weekends, there's less people around. There's more work to do. There's more emergencies coming in and there's fewer, and there's less support. And on weekdays, everyone's around.

It's like, you know, you've got the whole team. But what I realized is that on weekdays, I was the most junior person on the team and I was just like other people will take care of the responsibility. When the consultant would ask, what are Joe Smith's blood results? It would be my senior who would respond because he would or she or she would have it in their mind. It's like, oh, you know, the potassium was 4.8 or whatever the thing might be. But on weekends, there was no, that middle layer was gone. And so I was the one who had to think, shit, what was Mrs. Smith's potassium? It's 4.8. And I found that even though the work, there was more work, the sense of responsibility that I was taking. The fact that I was showing initiative and actually taking responsibility over the patients,

rather than just leaving it to the seniors, that made a huge difference to the enjoyment that I had when I was working. And I think there's something interesting here. I haven't quite figured out the perfect way to phrase it, but I think there's something counterintuitive in that we think of our energy as being like a battery almost. And the more, and the harder you work, the more that battery gets drained and then you get to the end of the day and you've been working really hard and now the battery's drained. But that's not actually how energy works. Like if you try and do the bare minimum, if you try and coast, if you try and just watch the clock and just do the minimum to get through your day job, that's really soul-sucking and really draining. No one enjoys that.

But if you're engaged and if you're finding a way to like, you know, going a bit of above and beyond and doing some wider reading and finding some side quests to do and like, you know, taking responsibility, you get to the end of the day of the work, often with more energy than you did when you got started. And that's really cool. Because like energy is like this renewable resource that the more you give to your work, the three. P's or whatever, the more energy you'll get out of it. And that means you'll have way more energy in the evening to side hustle if that's what you want to do or to be more present for your friends and family if that's what you want to do. So I think power is a big one. So that becomes like a good indicator. Is my energy low or high? At the end of the day, okay, if it's low, there's fixes to be done. Like it's a nice sort of green light, red light. And some of that might just have more

playful approach. But also like you said, you mentioned in there doing extra reading. I think this is a really core concept, exposing yourself the information related to what you do, not because you were asked to do that, but to try to even just signal to your own brain, I'm interested in this stuff. You know, like, this is a cool field. I used to give this advice to the university students. Go to talks and read books about your major because this is going to signal to your own mind. I find this stuff interesting, which means when it comes time to write a hard paper,

your brain says like, I know I were doing this. This is like something I'm into, you know? And so that's like an, it's an energy change. And you feel more energy towards your work as opposed to like, oh, my God. Everything is a chore. Everything is a conflict relationship. Everything is zero sum. Someone trying to take my time away to make me do their things.

I mean, talk about energy draining. So what you're talking about part one of your book is basically the opposite of that mindset. Yeah. And so on that point about the university students, the advice I used to give to people was, again, I was sort of Tim Ferrissing my way to figure out, like, how do you game the academic thing? And one of the criteria for a first-class degree when it came to writing essays was going beyond the lecture material and coming up with interesting insights. I was like, huh, why do I need to turn up to the lectures in the first place?

I know what the essay questions are going to be. So why don't I just not even look at what the lecturer is saying? because that just gets me maximum to a two-one-two, you know, whatever. Why don't I just read outside of it? And I found in that year where I came top of the class, all of my studying for my exams was actually not based on the lecture material, which by default meant that I was in the category of first-class degrees for all of my essays. And it also made it way more fun because now it's like, okay, I've got a question around, like, I don't know,

are differences in in IQ designed or discovered or something like that? I'm like, huh, what an interesting question. Let me go to the library. Let me find some books. Let me watch some videos. And assembling it myself, rather than thinking, let me go to the lecture notes that's where the work has already been done and just summarize it. And summarize it, yeah.

I also like the power aspect of the three peas. Something in there, which I think people miss often. Is that importance you just talked about? of looking for ways to level up. So you're looking for ways of, okay, what's important and what I do? Let me choose something that's important and let me work on doing that thing better and how motivating that is. I just did a segment recently on my podcast where we were reacting to a popular video going

around YouTube right now. Someone's like, I'm 33 years old and lost and my advice for young people or whatever. And one of the things we pointed out from this video was that the person in this video when she was talking about her career trajectory, there was a lot of just the way the world works is you get chosen for a job and then if it's the right job, you like it. And hopefully you get a stay. And then, you know, and then maybe they'll like fire you and you won't keep the job anymore. But there's no discussion like, well, what do you do once you get the job? And this mindset of like, yeah, let's let's find the levels that we're trying to, trying to move up is not just

makes it more enjoyable, but it's also probably like the base strategy for keeping jobs and opening up opportunities and gaining autonomy, not just, hey, you chose me for this job. Now it's just mine unless like you decide to fire me. It's more like you you let me into this arena. I'm going to start playing, you know, pretty aggressively. I want to get some points on the board. It seems like an obvious mindset, but I think a lot of people don't don't have that instilled. Yeah. Yeah, I've been coming across this sort of stuff a lot as well. There was a phrase I heard which was something like, you know, how can they expect me to put effort into my job given how little they're paying me.

It's like, it's such a disempowering way to live. And, you know, with, I think one of the, one of the ways in which the pendulum has swung, initially the whole hustle culture and all that crap, and then the pendulum has swung almost too far in the other direction,

where there's this sort of sense of entitlement around like, I am owed a high paying, fulfilling, meaningful job. And it's my managers and my, their boss's job. to give me career progression and make sure that I am thriving in mind. Just like, no, you've got to, no one has time for that shit. It's like, you've got to take it into your own hands. And I really now empathize with that now that I have my own team.

And I'm seeing like, oh, okay, like, this is how I think about people and the ones who go above and beyond. And the ones who, like, are taking more interest in the job actually have more fun. And they get more energy out of it. And they may end up making more money because they're just doing more interesting things. I think there's a lot of this sort of disempowering language that we like to, that some people use when it comes to their jobs. Well, I wanted to ask you about hustle culture, actually, because it's a confusion I have to

think you can clarify. So often critics of people like you or I who talk about things like productivity and crafting your life, they usually set up this dichotomy of, you know, most people are out there telling you to just grind it out. Most people are just telling you, like, just work harder. How do you get more work squeezed into your day? and this is always sort of set up as the ground state that they're sort of pushing back against, whereas I feel like most people I know in this space like you or other writers, they're all pushing back against that.

And in the book world, I can't find books. I did a piece on this once. I mentioned this. I've looked at the last 20 years of books on productivity. There's like two that specifically talk about, like, hey, how do we get more done? But is this hustle culture, does this exist online? Is that where this is coming from YouTube, Instagram? I'm not as familiar with that world.

But is there a place right now where people really are pushing, do more, fit more in, grind, grind, grind, or has that been largely just a construction because we needed something to push back against? How do you understand the reality and location of hustle culture? Oh, man, I love that we're talking about this, because this has been puzzling me for some time as well. Because, you know, sometimes I'll speak to people who are not. in the online or writing world. And they'll say, oh, productivity, isn't that all like hustle culture? I'm like, what do you mean by hustle culture? And they'll say this, oh, you know, the world is telling us that we've just got to grind it out.

Who is telling you that you just need to grind it? And they can never point to a specific source. They're not like David Allen from getting things done is telling me to grind it out. It's like, oh, he's not. He's saying, look, if you're overwhelmed, put it on a fucking to-do list and, you know. Yeah, chill out. He's like, chill out. He's like, chill out.

He's like, chill out. And certainly isn't the one is telling me to grind out. grind it out. It's like, um, but I think online, there is a bit of a grinded out thing. And that is,

it's, it's, it's mostly aimed at young men. So it's like the Andrew Tates of the world and the David Goggins's of the world. And that thing around like, I think there's, there's like, I was,

I was, I don't Mark Manson about this when I was on his podcast. I, he came up with this. It was a super, super interesting way to look at it, which is there is one set of advice that gets you from degenerate to baseline.

And, then there is a whole other method that gets you from baseline to success. Oh, interesting. And a lot of the advice that's aimed at sort of young teenage boys, they're addicted to porn, they're playing video games for 18 hours a day, they're flunking out of school, they're disengaged from society, they don't know how to talk to girls. But those guys, telling them, get the fuck up, go to the gym every single day,

wake up at 5 a.m., do it if you don't feel like it. Grind it out, man. You've got to find a way to make 10K a month so that, you know, you're not tied to a job. It's actually good advice for those kids. Interesting. And telling them, guys, you've got to be my kids. balanced in your life. It's like they're already way out of balance with self-care and playing video games and addicted to porn. So that advice is helpful for them. But if someone who's already

at baseline who's like maybe overwhelmed in their job and is like, you know, struggling to make time to be present with their family, if they get that advice of, hey, you know, the solutions to just wake up a few hours earlier and grind it out at the gym and go for a run at four in the morning even when you don't feel like it, the same advice then starts to feel like, what the, what is this hustle culture of BS? And so I think, I think maybe that's one way to, yeah. That makes sense. Right.

So you need for the young people or people whose life is way out of whack, they basically just need like the Goggins, like get after it, you know? Because they're changing, yeah, they're changing their mindset. But there's not a lot of books aimed at business executives, you know, that it's just, hey,

walk five times more. I mean, just a couple, but, but that's more rare. What about, okay, here's my other YouTube question. What about these videos? What should I know about these videos of people, studying for like seven or eight hours real time. And they like goes on YouTube. My younger listeners keep talking to me about this as being the big thing. Do you know anything about these? This sort of like endurance studying trend online. Yeah, this was the thing. We like we we we like to keep an

eye on what sort of videos are doing the rounds and like what's going viral and like 14 hour study with me how I'm able to study for 14 hours without breaks that people love that stuff. And it's kind of weird because obviously you and I know that that's not. effective at all. And having made some of these videos, I know that it's like, you know, I can tell that this video was actually filmed in three different sittings. It's like, this guy is like, hmm, interesting. But I think, again, there is something that students, this is something I always try and sort of rail back against when I hear students say this, which is there's almost a narrative that students have that studying for long hours is what you need to do and what you should be

doing to be successful. And there's almost a romanticization of, hey, you know, it's so aesthetic. I was like on my desk with my textbooks highlighting and rereading and making my pretty notes and I was doing that for 16 hours, aren't I a good student? And then the Instagramification of people's study notes and stuff now gives you clout points for having the prettiest looking notes

that you've made by just copying them out of a textbook even though we know that's completely ineffective. And so those people love the idea of like, oh, I can study for 14 hours a day. Whereas what you and I talk about is rough, deep work, small amounts of time, do the thing, focus on the thing, active recall. It's not that hard.

But it's not as sexy or Instagramable to say, hey, I did my flashcards for 25 minutes and then I took a break. Okay, that's interesting. So our summary here is it depends on the medium. So when it comes to productivity and getting things done, some of these online medium really are creating some notion. It's like a hustle culture, but for various reasons. And a lot of it is probably more about retention and views than it is like, I think more intellectual critics like to say, which is that we've internalized narratives of late stage capitalism and we're, you know, trying to brainwash effective producers. I think it's probably like those study videos is much more about someone else did this and got 700,000 views.

I'm going to draft off of that. It's more trend following. But in the medium of books, for example, you don't see this. So in a medium that's more set towards philosophy and thinking things through and being a little – it's not about clicks, but about like long-term changing of ideas. because if we see books as like a reflection of the more serious thinking on these topics, hustle culture is not something that's even really in the atmosphere. It's just this moment right now, especially the post-pandemic moment, but I would say I've argued that this is basically since the post-9-11, post-financial crisis moment,

has been a Tim Ferrissocation of work. It's a lot of people thinking more about what am I trying to do, where do I 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 my job be everything so I can't enjoy the other parts of my lives. And like figuring out that path, I would say for most people I know over the age of 30 is like the whole game.

You know, I don't know anyone that age that's like, how do I do 10 times more? And also I don't know a lot of people that age that just need to be told to like get up at five and they're just like not doing anything. It's that complex. That's the story of this moment.

It's the story you talk about in your book. It's like 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 broader part of my life and how do I make all these things, how do I intertwine all these things together and, you know, like feel good productivity

is part of the answer to that. Well, let's change the relationship you have towards your work. Let's make doing well in your work something that is sustainable, not something that you sacrifice to gain something later. But that to me is the big discussion happening in the world of work, not how to, whatever,

grind out more hours by using amphetamines or whatever it is. Yeah, whatever it is. Yeah, I think it's also like as I've gotten older in the productivity space or just as I've gone older in general, I find myself gravitating a lot more towards that stuff. But when I was when I was a kid, if David Goggins had been around, I'd have been like, yeah, of course, as a 15 year old,

I need to be grinding it out because like I want to whatever. And I think in a way, a lot of hustle culture, like at least the stuff that I've seen aimed at young men, it's not about like, hey man, you should. get up early and grind harder so you can make more money for your employer. It's like you should wake up early and grind it out so that you can get to the gym, you can take care of your health, and you can build your business on the side so that you don't have to be attached to the man or whatever. It's like this is not some like capitalist thing that's like the factory overlords are trying

to get us to produce more widgets for them. It's more like individuals realizing actually I don't want to be tied so hard to the kind of the infrastructure of paid employment. And I actually want to have the freedom to do my own thing while also being jacked or whatever. And so for those people, I think that's the audience that the hustle culture advice is broadly aimed up. Yeah. And for men, for example, the being jacked, which is often derided by commentators, it's like a foundation of discipline that kind of changes mindset so that they can also, if you follow any of these podcasts that are more aimed right at men, it's a foundation discipline from which they can also stop drinking so much, from which they can be like more present.

for their family. They can make more money. They can be more in their kids' lives. And it turns out, I think women have their equivalent who is going to completely stereotype content. But there's like equivalent versions to getting jacked for women that it's not about exercising with heavy weights, but something else. But I'm sure there's the equivalent that plays that role of this is a symbol of, I have some control and discipline over my life, from which I can then do all these other things that are that are really important to me.

And I don't know, maybe for students, it's like the grades. But I'm a believer in this notion. I've also softened to this. I've been trying to understand, especially sort of this like the non-political manosphere. You kind of have to pull, especially in American context, you have to pull the politics get weird. But the non-political manosphere, I'm more and more so like, I see what they're doing.

It's like helping guys who don't have to act together get their act together. And, yeah, again, it seems weird from the outside. He's like, why is everyone bow hunting? and doing jihitsu. That seems really specific, but it's not really about we need everyone to bow hunt and do jihitsu. It's just those are things that require discipline. And then once someone's discipline doing that,

then maybe also they'll start drinking, maybe also they'll be a better father, maybe also they'll get their accounting business much more stable so that their kids can go to college. It's interesting. The psychology of productivity in the modern world is much more, I mean, it's much more about this sometimes than just the tactics

that people associate with it. I'm taking your way off base here, basically. No, this is good stuff. This is something I really want to research more about, but this idea around, I'm always intrigued by this. I think the pendulum is swinging a lot more towards like traditional gender roles slash masculine feminine energy, however you want to call it, to the point that like, I think in the last sort of 10, 15 years, we've been told men and women are basically the same and like this sort of dampening down of like natural or unnatural differences between men and women. And now we're seeing the swing in the opposite direction where there is now

extra clout to be had as a man for being jacked and for bow hunting and for doing jihitsu and for like showing the footage of you in your cold plunge doing the hard thing. Whereas for women, I think, what it seems like is my fiancee is super into this sort of content. It's very much, we sort of jokingly refer to it as king content and queen content. King content is you're a king,

you're a warrior, you're a powerful man, you got this. Queen content is you deserve to take a break. You've got it so hard. Self care, you know, take a bath, rose petals, like you've got this girl.

Your man should be buying you roses every week. And the comments on these videos are just like insane and they get stupid amounts of views for no production value and no real content value but just this motivational thing of you're a queen. Similarly, you're a king.

You know, get after it. I'm so intrigued by how the space is evolving over time because what's also happening then is that the incentives are there for more people to create that sort of content. And so we're going to end up with an extreme version of king content and an extreme version of queen content where it seems like, you know, people's vision boards are like, oh, you know, make sure you get that Cartier-love bracelet, which is 18 grand or something. And that seems to be a thing for women, whereas for men, it's like, make sure you get your marathon time for under two and a half hours. I'm so intrigued by how this is an end of all. Well, if we believe

in your pendulum theory, then that means if you're just starting off right now, like with the YouTube channel, predict the pendulum coming back, right? Would that be the smart thing to do right now is start establishing a channel that's when the pendulum swings back and it's, and aspirational contents much more gender agnostic? Maybe that's where we're going to be in four years. So we have to middle way again. So I know we're over time, I know we're over time here, but I always love talking to you because, I mean, obviously we sort of think the same way about so many things. Thanks, man. Likewise. Yeah. Of course, ending up in gender roles is exactly where people expected us in our productivity conversation. So I really do recommend feel good productivity. I mean, it's a serious work of philosophy on productivity. And I think it articulates a lot of things I probably informally talk about on this show. So I know my audience, my audience is going to dig this for sure. The book is doing great. And I'm not surprised. I think it's going to continue to crush it. So, Ollie, thank you for coming on the show. long time in coming.

My listeners have been asking for it. A treat for me. And good luck and continued success. I'm wishing you continued success on your book. Thank you so much. And I kind of say, just thank you for all your graciousness and advice and everything over the years. I remember when I first sent you an email being like, hey, Cal, Alex, you want to come to the pod or whenever it was. I felt so scared.

I was like, oh, my God, this is Cal Newport. He's such a big deal. And it's like, you know, he's so busy. But you just replied instantly and you were so gracious about it and, like, so willing to share about the writing process and the writing process and the marketing and the publicity and what life and academia is like. So yeah, just thank you for all the good energy that you've been putting out there for years and for all the advice that you've given me as well. I really appreciate it. Of course. Hey, there's no narrower niche than people that produce professional content on productivity. So we got to stick together, man. Exactly. There's only

somebody of us. All right. Thank you. All right. So that was my conversation with Ali Abdal, talking about his book, which I'll hold up here for us to see. Feel good. Product. Now, I have a couple debriefing notes I want to touch on about this conversation, a couple things that caught my attention. Before we get there, let me just briefly mention another one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. That's our friends at Shopify. So whether you're selling a little or a lot, Shopify helps you do your thing. However, you ch-ching. You know Shopify, even if you don't think you do, because they are everywhere.

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36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. They even have a feature called Shopify Magic that uses AI. to help you with your sales efforts. If you are going to sell something, the internet is involved. Shopify is who you should be using. They have this figured out. The people I know who do e-commerce,

Shopify has been their savior. It gives them these professional-looking online stores with these really effective checkout systems where it's really, really easy for the consumer to quickly have their information looked up or entered and do the sale really quick and very professionally. It's really the way to go. You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period right now at Shopify.com slash deep, but you need to type that all lowercase, Shopify.com slash deep. Go to Shopify.com slash deep now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com

slash deep. I also want to talk about our friends at Notion. Now, I've talked about Notion before. The service that allows you to combine your notes, docs, and projects into one beautiful custom design space. Notion, for example, is what Jesse and I use to interact with our ad agency. They built out a beautiful Notion workspace that tracks all of the information about our ad reads and the episodes and the downloads on those episodes. and the scripts for the ad reads, and we have these great views where we can just immediately see, okay, show me the ad reads for this calendar day. Now show me all of the ad reads we've done

for this particular customer. It makes it easy for us to enter data, easy for them to peruse the data. Great example of notion at its best. Well, they have a new feature now to make the notion experience even better. And that is their AI-powered, as we could call it, assistant called Q and A. It can answer questions about the data that you've already entered into Notion without you having to have built a custom report or interface for getting that information. This could be, for example, questions about next quarter's roadmap or finding that marketing campaign proposal you're looking for, or digging up a long-lost link, all in seconds.

So where do you find that one piece of urgent information? Or more importantly, how do you find it quickly with your Sandy intact? in Notion, you just load up the Q&A interface, ask the question. It does the work for you. It can search through thousands of documents and seconds. It'll answer your question in clear language, no matter how large or complex your workspace is. You can ask these questions from anywhere in Notion. It'll find exactly what you need without you having to leave the current document review

where you already have to be. You can also trust your data is secure because Notion AI is designed to protect your information. No AI models will be trained with your information. Your data remains encrypted. The answer is given to you will never use information from pages that you don't have access to. So when you use Notion AI, it's even easier to do your most meaningful work. So try Notion AI for free when you go to Notion.com slash Cal. That's all lowercase letters, notion.com slash cow to try the powerful, easy to use notion AI today.

and when you use our link, you'll be supporting our show. So go to notion.com slash cal, all lowercase. Don't forget that slash cal. All right. So, Jesse, I enjoyed that conversation with Ollie. Yeah. A couple things I noticed to come back to things we've talked about before. I was really interested because to me,

this is what I hadn't heard as much about, his transition from being a doctor to a YouTuber. Mm-hmm. I think this gets to a lot of people's daydreams. I don't know if you know people have this conversation, but it's like, you know, can I just drop what I'm doing and be like on YouTube and have these videos about whatever weightlifting

and just like, that'd be so great and everyone would know who I am. It's like a common daydream. So we got to see with Ali how he actually did it. Two things I noticed. One, it was already really successful before he made the jump. So we had this very successful YouTube channel when the pressure came from to make a jump.

Because if you remember from the interview, what happened here is he had finished his first phase of doctor training. It had its own terminology he used for the UK. If you know the U.S. system, it's like after your internship year. You did medical school. You did your internship year. You're serving – you can service patients. I can't remember the word. Residency.

Yeah. And then you go to residence. Okay. So he was taking, but they don't call it residency. So it's also, it was pretty complicated. So he was seeing patients and was going to take a gap year before starting his residency in which he was just going to do like ER work, make some money. And then as he talked about that got canceled because of COVID.

And that's when he looked up and said, oh, my God, I'm making like a lot more money off of YouTube than not only what I make in my off year, but like a lot more than I'm going to make as a doctor. because doctors don't get paid as much in the UK. So it wasn't like it was a super courageous decision financially. He was already making way more money from his YouTube channel than he ever would as a doctor. So in my book, So Good They Can Ignore You, I have a phrase for this. I call this the use of money as a neutral indicator of value. How do you know how successful or how valuable you would be as a YouTuber?

See how much money you can get people to give you. he was making enough money to live off of, in fact, live better than being a doctor, is a really good objective indication that you're good at this and you can make a go at this. As opposed to just saying I trust myself and have courage, I think this will work out. People don't like hearing this strategy when it comes to these daydream style jumps, like becoming a full-time YouTuber because what it means is you have to get objective feedback and you don't get to do the fun thing to quitting your job until you're making a lot of money, and they don't really trust it they'll ever get there.

And they sort of know, like, I probably won't make the money. And I kind of want to just do the change. I want to make the change because that seems really exciting. And the idea of like, well, why don't I actually just try to make a lot of money doing this before I quit my job? That's not nearly a sexy or romantic. And so people don't like it as much. But it's really a good way to do this, especially when you're transforming a side hustle to a primary hustle. Get people to give you money.

They don't do that if they don't want to. They'll give you good opinions whenever you want. You can say, hey, I want to become a YouTuber, and people will say, yeah, you do you, and the internet's blowing up, and I found this video about how to make my YouTube channel big, and I'm sure it'll work for you. That's easy. I'll give you that positive feedback all day long. Money?

I got to see something valuable. So he waited until he was doing really well with YouTube before he even considered doing that full time. The second thing I noticed is part of his, part of his success was he was there early. So we talked about this. He was early to YouTube. He was doing things early on about studying and study habits on YouTube that at the time was still scarce and it helped him build this big audience. And he said very clearly in this interview, I wrote this down as he said it, if he was to do those same videos today or if someone else was to come along and do those same videos today, they wouldn't get as much play because there's a thousand people doing them.

So there's a first mover advantage that happened there as well. He stumbled into YouTube, found a seam that was very successful, gave it really careful, diligent attention. Eventually that became demonstrably and unambiguously successful because he was actually making money from it, more money than his other job. and then he made the jump. So, I mean, neither of those things are what the aspiring YouTuber wants to hear, that if you're not sort of first into a category of a technology, it can be a lot harder.

And then even if you are, you need the wait to see that you're making enough money, which took a lot of trial and error in years of work for Ali to get there. None of that's what people want to hear. What they want to hear is like, yeah, if you just have some courage, six months from now, you're going to be Mr. Beast. Like, that's what people want to hear. That's not the way it works out. In fact, Mr. Beast himself was also very early to what he was doing.

There are people that replicate that formula. It's hard to be as successful. That's often the case, I think, when it comes to these seemingly low barrier to entry dream jobs. Hey, anyone can do this and it has the capability of generating a lot of income. Those are rarely the target you want to look at because it usually requires some sort of combination of being early to it and working at it for a long time and finding the right angle. and there's limited slots for who's going to survive at it. Ali has the slot for really sort of smart, well-researched productivity expert on YouTube. I don't know how any more slots there are.

So if you're looking to do something similarly radical, you probably need to find what the new next thing is where you're going to make your move as opposed to trying to replicate what's being done. A lot of other interesting stuff in the interview, of course, but I like that tidbit because we see these people that have these huge, impressive seven-figure a year businesses online. And it really is interesting to say, how did they get there? What mattered and what lessons can we pull out of it? So, you know, good for him. Yeah. I would say first of all. Yeah. I love his stuff. His channel's

great. Mm-hmm. The videos are really high quality. They're really high quality. Yeah. I mean, you know, but as he said, he's been doing this forever. Yeah. So you get, you get better and better. He's got good cameras, though, too. Yeah. Also, he has like the perfect voice for YouTube. Like he talks quickly. That's not a YouTube adapted put on. It's not, okay, I'm going to do this sort of artificial way of talking to do well for YouTube. If you just talk to him casually, he has a pretty fast talking pace, which just happens to be perfect for YouTube. Because this type of content, people are like, I want to get to it.

Like, don't waste my time. But he has complicated content. So by talking faster, he can overcome people's tendency to click away before they get the really interesting content. So it's almost like being born unusually tall and then leveraging that to become a basketball player. He has like the perfect cadence to be a YouTuber. We were listening to someone recently, me and my kids.

There's a, what's a fake YouTube voice? Mark Roberer. You know Mark Rover? No. He's a cool guy. He's got a cool channel and he, it's like he builds things. Oh, okay. Yeah.

I mean, he did like the porch pirate. You know, he would build the things to packages, the package thieves would steal. and then they would have elaborate bombs and glitter bombs and stuff that would go off. He's a former engineer that's really cool builds. But he just talks at a yell, which is like this high energy always smiling, oh, Mark Rober, today we're going to do that. No normal person talks that way, right?

It would be like the Will Ferrell character from early 2000s, SNL, who cannot control the volume or modulation of my voice. Like he's just constantly just yelling, like, ah, no, but it's really good for YouTube. Like it works really well on YouTube. Like, I don't know about this, but we're going to see what happens. Like,

no one, it's great for YouTube. But if he talked that way in real life, his wife would probably divorce him. Like, this is crazy. You're just yelling. I mean,

my five-year-old talks that way. It's his way of dealing with being the youngest of three is like, I'm just going to yell. It's like, I don't care if anyone else is talking. So that's like an artificial voice. Ollie's just talking to way he normally talks. It just happens to be like really well suited for this content.

So a lot of things came together. to make him really good at what he did. Not easy to replicate kids, though. So you should admire what he's doing, but maybe not plan to follow his path in the next six months. All right, so I think it's all the time we have for today's episode. Thank you, everyone who listened or was. If you listened, then you want to see what we just talked about.

This is episode 284. Find it at the deeplife.com slash listen. The videos will be at the bottom. We'll be back next week with another old-fashioned episode of the show. So until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter,

which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, and over 70, thousand subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you got to sign out for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.