SOLVED with Mark Manson - How to Enjoy Doing Hard Things (ft. Ali Abdaal)

Episode Date: December 27, 2023

It’s easy to assume that the hustle culture or “the grind” is all about pain and suffering. But as you’ll learn today, this simply isn’t true. In today’s episode, I’m talking to Ali Abdaal, a former medical doctor turned YouTuber and author of the new book, Feel-Good Productivity. Ali has attracted millions of global followers to his ideas on productivity and working because he’s managed to do what others have not: actually make it fun. It turns out that finding ways to make your work fun doesn’t just make you hate your life less, it actually makes you more productive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction.

So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose.com. That is purpose. If you're like me, you've probably had periods in your life where you romanticized working brutally long hours while surviving the intense suffering that comes with it. For me, it was starting my first business. I distinctly remember falling asleep with my laptop on my stomach, only to wake up six hours later and immediately get back to work where I left off. In a world that glorifies hustle culture and emphasizes the grind, it's easy to make the assumption that hard work must fundamentally suck. It's not supposed to be fun, we're told.

After all, if it was easy, then everybody would fucking do it. But what if it didn't have to suck? What if it wasn't painful? What if it was actually kind of fun? Today, I'm talking to Ali Abdal, a former medical doctor turned YouTuber and author of the new book, Feel Good Productivity. Ollie graduated near the top of his class at Cambridge

and went into practicing medicine full-time in his 20s, when he realized something both dumb and profound, that it wasn't very fun. So Ollie decided to make it fun. And as a part of making it fun, he created a YouTube channel to share some of his ideas around making it fun. Today, he is more than 5 million subscribers and runs one of the largest educational channels in the entire world.

Ali has achieved incredible success in two of life's most intensely demanding and challenging domains. Yet, he claims that his success stems less from his hard work and willingness to suffer and more from his creativity and ability to make even the most intense drudgery fun. In this episode, we're going to talk about how productivity got its bad reputation, how most of the so-called productivity device actually makes it worse. We'll discuss why working more hours isn't always more productive and how sometimes the most useful thing you can do is not work at all. We'll hear Ali explain why the optimal number of distractions is actually not zero

and how he chooses goals in his life to make failure impossible. We'll also learn how the biggest thing holding most people back is that they actually take their work too seriously. This episode is more than just a conversation. It's a journey into rethinking how we view work, time, and our lives. It's about breaking down the barriers of conventional productivity myths and discovering a path that leads to genuine happiness and balance. But before we dive into the conversation, I have a small request.

If you're tuning in today, please take a moment to leave a rating or a review for the podcast. Your support helps us grow and bring more content like this, along with more incredible guests like Ollie. Plus, as a token of appreciation, if you send me a screenshot of your review of this podcast, you'll receive my exclusive 24 Life Audit for free, just in time for the new year. The Life Audit takes you step by step

through a process that I've personally used for over 10 years now to zero in on the most important values in my life, so I know exactly what I want to give a fuck about in the new year and what I don't. You can learn more by going to markmanson.net slash audit, A-U-D-I-T. You just submit the screenshot of the review, and we will automatically verify and send the PDF to you.

Now, the audit will show you what goals are worth pursuing, and this episode will help you make that pursuit more enjoyable, thus increasing your chances of success. So, without further ado, let's fucking get into it. Bro. Do you even podcast? Like bro. This is the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast, with your host, Mark Manson. What do you think is the biggest thing most people misunderstand about productivity?

I think one of the big misconceptions about productivity is that it's about a hustle, it's about grind, it's about work, work, work. You know, people sometimes are like, oh, but like, don't you want to be unproductive some of the time and things like that's like. And I guess it's somewhat semantic because if people are defining productivity as efficiency of getting work done, then, okay, I can see that. I think I choose to define productivity in a much more holistic sense. To me, productivity is using your time in a way that's intentional and effective and enjoyable. And so to me, like for example, this evening, I have an evening of alone time where I'm going to play Bellardesgate 3 on my MacBook. And I might even go and pick up a gaming laptop for myself because I've been salivating over the razor blade 16 inch.

And there's a store in LA that has it in stock. And so that to me is productivity. It's using my time intentionally and effectively, because I'm playing on hard difficulty and enjoyably because it's going to be fun. And having that one evening a week where I play video games to me is like, that's a dream. That's what I've been trying to optimize for my whole life. My 13-year-old self would be having a field day if you knew that this is where I've ended up where I can play video games.

That to me is also productivity. And I think if we expand out the definition, then we can start applying the principles of productivity, like, you know, the stuff that you and I talk about, stuff that Tim Ferriss talks about. You can start applying the principles of productivity to anything in life. So I love optimizing my relationship and like using principles of productivity and my relationship. It's like how do we do this in a way that's more intentional and effective and enjoyable? And reading books about what makes relationships work and regular rituals and check-ins and routines. And we have a notion page for like our relationship reviews and have done

for the last two and a bit years. That is applying productivity to real life rather than just to work. And so I think people almost focus down too much on just the work thing or the how do I get better grades and not enough on hang on I'm learning a set of skills here. Let me just make my life better. I feel like people there's a tendency to fetishize suffering and sacrifice. You know, we tend to love hearing other people's stories of all the shit you went through, how much you struggled, all the setbacks you overcame. Like that's very entertaining when it happens to other people. And we really admire that. And so I think we kind of romanticize that. in ourselves. And we think to do something great, you have to struggle and suffer immensely and be miserable and force yourself through all sorts of awful shit. So what I love about this is

it's the first productivity book I've come across that treats emotions as one of the fundamental systems within an overall productivity framework. And this is something that I would try to write this for years. I would try to explain. to people that any sort of productivity problem is fundamentally an emotional problem. Like the reason, if you're not doing something, it's because you don't feel like doing it. It's not, there's no, it's not a software issue. It's not like a lack of tools or it's not because you

didn't get up early enough. It's because there's some sort of emotional resistance or anxiety that's preventing you from taking the right actions or modifying the behaviors you need to modify. People don't like hearing that. They like hearing, they want the tool, they want the system, they want the morning routine. Why do you think that is? Yeah, I think the emotional piece is so, like, I remember the first time I really came across the idea was reading Stephen Pressfield's The War of Art. And he calls it the resistance or the capital R.

And like when I read that book, it just sort of hit me like a ton of breaks. I was like, oh, my fucking God, like this is the thing. Like he's just describing in like this whole book exactly what I feel when I procrastinate. It's this resistance. And what it took for me to kind of get over that was a recognition that the resistance is an internal emotional thing and almost treating myself like a system. Whereas I think when it comes to kind of like even even hearing you say that right now talking about emotions like the part of me that was reading Life Hacker back in the day is thinking, oh come on. Emotions like what bullshit is this? Get over it.

Get over it. Yeah, right, man, come on. And so many people I speak to, you know, there's that thing of if I could just find the right tool, if I could just find the right technique, then I wouldn't procrastinate so much. Or if I could just find the right meds for my ADHD or whatever the thing is. It seems to go in waves in terms of what people think the magic bullet is. But fundamentally it just comes out to this thing of you're unproductive because you don't feel like doing the thing. No one ever struggles with procrastination watching Netflix or hanging out with friends. That's not a thing. We struggle with procrastination when it comes to

writing that blog post or like studying for that exam or, like, studying for that exam or like doing that slightly boring, annoying PowerPoint at work that we don't really want to or like asking our manager for arrays, the stuff that feels, we feel that resistance. Yeah. And so part of the, part of my goal with the book was to try and figure out, okay, cool, we know that's a thing. So therefore, what are the tools that we can use to kind of treat emotions as something important, treat them sincerely rather than thinking of it as like, oh, I'm just a pussy

because I'm not like grinding like David Goggins does or whatever the narratives sometimes are. I think it also kind of taps into, so I think the big epiphany for me is. that I had, and I think I had it writing my second book. So my attitude in my first book was very much, bro, you got to fucking grind, you got to suffer, you know, you did nine hours yesterday, let's do 10 today, let's finish two chapters this month. And I noticed that it started to backfire that essentially I would get four really, really good high quality hours out of myself. And then every hour past that would be low quality, or it would be a very mediocre output. And then I realized that when you're writing a book, mediocre output is actually worse than no

output because you have to go back and either heavily edit and revise it, which is just adding work for yourself, or you have to make a bunch of very difficult decisions of whether to cut it, delete it, and so on. So I had this weird realization probably way too late that, at least in the context of book writing for really effective hours was actually more productive than 10 moderately effective hours. Yeah. And when that unlocked for myself, I started wondering where else that applied in my life? Where else in my life do, am I, is that the production curve actually, not only is there a diminishing returns, but it's actually turning negative at a certain point. I totally vibe with this. I think I am always on the lookout for areas of my life that have that

diminishing return sort of kind of where the curve goes down, down afterwards. I'm also always on the lookout for areas where there's kind of compounding returns. Yeah. Like, for example, but things like starting a YouTube channel, the difference between making one video a week and making two videos a week, it's actually, it's a step change because if you're able to do two videos a week, you have twice as many chances for one of them to pick up. And generally putting twice as much effort into a single video does not, again, depending on the channel, doesn't yield as much value as putting,

that effort into two different videos. And so there comes a point where maybe it takes you 20 hours a week to do one video, but like you could do 30 hours to get two videos. And actually that extra 10 hours then unlocks an extra step change in output, which then improves your odds at succeeding in the thing rather than diminishes your odds at succeeding on the thing. And so I think there are some areas of life where we have the diminishing returns and others where we have the compounding.

But I think there are far more where we have the diminishing than the compounding. Yeah. And like balance is good. It's like all writers fundamentally arrive at the four hour number as well. Sure. Like I've yet to meet a writer who writes any more than four hours. Yeah, right. Or has done it for a long time who has landed on number more than four.

It seems to be a thing. Yeah. Well, I think there have been a lot of studies too on just your average worker, laborer. It's the vast majority of their productivity comes in the first four or five hours. When they do studies on how much people get done in like the corporate world, hours five through eight, It's not much. And then if even the first four hours are like filled with multitasking and distractions and like, oh, grabbing a coffee with someone here and there and the whole day goes by and, you know,

I have this these days where the whole day will go by and I'd be like, I've written maybe 300 words and I was aiming for a thousand today. Like, how did I write 300 words and eight hours? Like, what the hell? Like, how did this happen? And it turns out because, well, distractions and lack of focus and, you know, all the things that everyone struggles with. Want to go electric without sacrificing fun? That's the Volkswagen ID4.

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and let your brain wander, does that also apply on a micro basis with, say, checking your phone? Yeah, we found a really cool study about this that's in the book. And weirdly there's a graph, and it's sort of like an N-shaped graph. There was a study.

I think it was, you know, they got people to solve a Sudoku and also to like in a different tab do some other puzzle and also in a different tab do some other puzzle. And they looked at, like, you know, they were allowed to switch between the puzzles. And they found that there was actually a sweet spot that like some amount of switching between

tasks is actually good for you rather than the traditional narrative, which is that you must focus on one thing at a time and exclusively that one thing at a time. And so there is, there does seem to be some kind of, some kind of optimal number. So, so, you know, this is why, like, if I'm, if I'm working on something and someone will come along and talk to me, I don't really let it phase me. I think of these as welcome distractions in a way. If I get a notification of like some news site that I wasn't really, I didn't really care about and that derails me. That to me is an unwelcome distraction. Yeah. But one thing I used to do at

university is prop my door open at all times with a little shoe door stopper thing. And so if a friend would come by and disturb me and distract me for a few minutes, that to me is a great thing. Like the point of university is to hang out with friends, not really to study. And maybe I was marginally less efficient or less productive. Yeah. But like those, those like hallway conversations sometimes let to hangouts, let to plans, let to interesting things. Like, that's kind of the point of life. Yeah. So I'm all about trying to find ways to leave the door open. or like work in a communal area or something that allows surface area for serendipity when it comes to interactions with people.

Interesting. Yeah, I used to be one of those people who was a little bit religious. I went through a phase, I should say, of maybe three years, that I was very religious about those blocker apps that like block out social media and news sites and, you know, all the riffraff that you try to avoid on a day-to-day basis. And I guess, I don't know, a year or two ago, I just kind of came to a conclusion that it was, to the core premise of your book, it was, I was feeling bad.

You know, I was almost like over-invested in being hyper-productive all the time. And so at some point I just turned them all off. And I'm like, well, I'll turn them on if it's ever a problem. And 90% of the time, it's not really a problem. What you said that really resonates with me because, you know, I'll change it if it's a problem.

Yeah. Like, I think that's like just a pretty chill way to approach life. That's like, I'll change it if it's a problem. So you've achieved two things that are very difficult to do. You've become a doctor and you've become a successful YouTuber. Those are also two completely different things. One is a very creative entrepreneurial pursuit.

One is a very traditional bury your head in the books, memorize a million things. You know, what are the skills that cross over between those two things? Two things. Number one is an ability to stick with it for long enough. And number two is, I think, the ability to teach. Okay. Well, one of the things that, you know, medical applicants often say in their interviews is that, you know, when they ask, why do you want to be a doctor? You know, there's a phrase, a doctor is a teacher.

Like, you're trying to break things down. You're trying to understand things. You're trying to explain them to patients. But you're also trying to explain them to your colleagues. You're trying to, you know, running them by a senior. You're trying to break things down in an explainable way. You're also kind of teaching the people, the juniors below you. It's a very teachingy type thing.

And so I think that's a skill set that I've had. for most of my life, I would always be the guy helping kids out with their homework. And I did private tutoring when I was younger as a way of making money off the internet. Being a medical student, being a doctor, I would always try my best to teach the people who are younger than me. And when my YouTube channel started, it wasn't an educational channel. I actually started making musical song covers. And I wanted to be the next Kurt Schneider and Boyce Avenue and these sort of YouTube cover artists that would, you know, sing covers of popular songs. So the first, like, five or six videos are still there.

And it's those sorts of videos. I'm like no one cared. I have no musical talent. Some of my friends were good at singing. I was like, yeah, I'm going to learn to play the guitar. I'm going to be a big YouTuber. But it was only when I started actually using the fact that I was pretty good at teaching and making educational videos,

that things started to take off. And so I think, like, fundamentally, like, I don't think I would have been successful as a Mr. Beast or as an ARAC or as a Ryan Trajan or someone who's making more entertainment-y, inspiringy type content. But I managed to do well by being like, right, guys, today we're going to talk about five ways to do well in your BMAP medical school entrance exam.

Boom. It was what I need. So that I think was a big. a big part of overlap. But I think the other thing that both medical school and being a YouTuber teach you is the ability to just stick with it for long enough. Like medical school in the UK's six years, where for the first three years, at least in Cambridge, you don't see any patients.

So you have no like real world contact with real people. You're just in the books, learning the science, memorizing tedious pathways and stuff. And again, finding a way to make it fun was the real hack for me even when I was in medical school. Similarly, YouTube, most channels don't succeed unless you consistently make videos every week for like two years. and then at that point you start benefiting from the compounding and then you become an overnight success and all that stuff.

And I think that is the skill of faith and patience. Faith that something good will happen and patience to stick at it long enough to make it happen. And honestly, I think it all comes back down to feel good productivity. If you find a way to make your work feel good, you're more likely to be patient with it for two years. If it doesn't feel good, you're like, fuck, why isn't my YouTube, you know, why isn't my YouTube channel blowing up after a month?

And obviously, that's not going to work. It also helps solve that conundrum of how do you know, when to stick with it and how do you know when to quit and give up and stop chasing a pipe dream and it's if you love it then who cares right exactly yeah it's fun you're doing it for intrinsic reasons rather than extrinsic totally a reason you're you're doing it for the sake of the thing itself rather than the outcome that you're getting from the thing yeah that's why i loved what you said to me over lunch the other day now that like if it's not fun i'm not going to do it i was like yes that is a great place to be once you're already successful

Oh, absolutely. Until you're successful, I think the reframing is, I need to find a way to make it fun, otherwise I'm not going to do it. Yeah. Well, you know what's funny about me is I think I had that early in my career, and I think it's a big reason of why I became successful, because I was always just very, I was very similar to you.

I was very uncompromising about what I would write, the way I would write it, the particular tone or style, the subjects I would address. And I think part of what kind of, fucked me up after subtle art became so popular was just very big, impressive corporations, name brands, celebrities. You know, all these people started interacting with me and wanting to do projects with me. And I didn't feel that liberty to, I was like, oh, man, I'm doing a feature film with universal pictures. Like, I can't fuck this up, you know? Like, I can't say these things. And I think I

lost touch with that for a number of years. And as your book correctly points out, I can't got burnt out because that's what happens when you stop having fun with something if you're not completely aligned with why you're doing something you lose the joy and you lose the momentum that keeps you going through the hard times i want to ask you really quick while we're talking about medicine versus youtube how is the production function different between creative work and say kind of wrote memorization studying science oh learning all of it is creative well All of it. This is another thing that students always get wrong.

Like this is my biggest piece of advice for a lot of students. Like sometimes you do have to wrote memorize like the Krebs cycle. Yeah. And one way to do that is to just continue to drill it again and again. The other way of doing it is to create a mnemonic or something fun or like a cool way of thinking about it. And I, so actually, before starting medical school, I read loads of books about memory and like, like, world champion memory people who like, Memorized decks of cards and 18,000 digits of pie and all that shit. Yeah.

And basically all of them were like, yeah, you just need to create a really strong association. Like a strong visual association in your mind. And the more absurd of that association is, the more likely you are to learn the thing. And so even now, like, when me and my medic friends get together, we'll, like, joke about the ways that we used to memorize things. Like, oh, isinized gives you peripheral neuropathy because isinized, the drug sounds kind of like ISIS. And ISIS famously chop your hands off if you do bad things. It's like, imagine, like, peripheral.

neuropathy is like isinized or like I don't know ephembutol is sort of makes your wee orange because etham has the word ham in it and if you think ham it's sort of like pink and pink is sort of like orange orange so it's like you get like orange orange we and that was how me and by most of my friends got through the rope memorization of medical school which is our highly creative task yeah or like making cool nymonics to like memorize all 12 cranial nerves like you know there's various rude versions of them as like on on on they traveled and found various something and hawkruxes. It's like gives you all the nerves of the face and stuff.

It's like shit like that that makes it fun. It's a creative act. Finding a way to another kind of tip, if any, students are listening to this to categorize things. You know, haematology is like, you know, the study of the blood. It's like a huge field.

But like if you look at all 100 conditions in hematology, you can basically categorize them into three things. Great. That simplifies it. Now within those three things, you've got categories of like four things. And like the textbooks won't tell you this because they're sorted in fucking,

alphabetical order for no reason. So you just have to look at the shit and be like, okay, what's a sensible categorization of this? Oh, great. There's like anemia, there's malignant heem and there's like a non-malignant heem. Great. Three categories, bang, bang, tree structures. And it's also creative and also fun.

And now when I speak to medical students, the ones who are like, oh man, medical school is such a grind, but once I'll be a doctor, it's going to be fun. I'm always like, oh, we need to talk. Because if you're finding medical school a grind, where going into the hospital is optional. You are not going to find being a doctorate fond where suddenly going into work is no longer optional.

And I will always try and encourage students find a way to make whatever you're studying feel good, find a way to make it fun because that is an attitude that will help you learn the thing better and also make me and you're less stressed and also make you enjoy life more. I'm just like massively. It's remarkable that you still have the recall

all that stuff, you know, 10 years later. It's the visual visual. Yeah. The fun thing for me, I find it in my own life particularly useful around fitness and health. Because like most people, I think I found fitness to be just a fucking bummer. I'm struggling with this right now.

Help me. Help me figure this out. Yeah. So it's the thing that unlocked it, and I'm not a huge crossfitter, but I visited a couple crossfit classes. And it completely, I mean, it's like the first section of your book could basically just be kind of a guide to like why crossfit works. Because they gamify everything.

They put you in teams and they track scores and help you, you know, try to best get new PRs and do all this stuff. And it was the first time, you know, my associations with fitness and working out, it was always this drudgery. It was like, oh, well, yeah, I'm doing this today because I don't want to fucking die when I'm 60. You know, all the stuff that you read about

or I want to lose 10 pounds before summer. And it never felt good. It was never fun. It felt like an obligation. It felt like a chore. It felt like a lot of it was shame driven or judgment driven. And then I went to some of those CrossFit classes, and I had the hardest workouts of my life. Like I was literally laying on the floor, you know, like world swirling above me, barely remaining conscious.

And I'm like giggling with how much fun I had. And it was such an epiphany to me of just like turn it into a game, turn it into a little competition with yourself, invite friends over. like I used to be so rigid and structured about like a workout program, right? Like I'd go online and find like this, oh, this is the workout program that's going to help you build 10 pounds of muscle in the next three months. And I'm like, oh, man, I got to do this. I got to like show up every day. And again, back to that point of, you know, I used to think you had to hit every workout exactly the way it's listed at exactly the day that you're supposed to do it. And I realized like if you miss a day or if you have to push it back a day or maybe a friend.

is coming in the town and he's got a workout program. You're going to do it together or maybe like he likes to run. So maybe I go running with him instead of my workout that day. It keeps it fun and interesting and novel. And that keeps the motivation going. It keeps the excitement going. Tracking was another huge unlock for me. I never tracked my workouts in the past. I was just kind of, again, I would download some list off the internet and just like follow it to a T like a fucking robot. And And when I got a tracking app and I started putting in all my lifts and all my weights and how many reps I did of everything. And every single week, when I open up that app, when I start my workout, I'm like, okay,

last week I did three sets of eight at this weight. Today I'm going to try to do three sets of nine and see if I can do it. And that, just that little bit of competition with myself gets me through that set, gets me excited about it. When I hit it, it feels good. yeah it's been it's been incredibly profound and it's again it's one of those fucking obvious things like and I I hate shit like this because it's it's when you have to take your own medicine like it's like it's the advice that you've written about for

years or you never applied in your own life but it's um it's been really transformative the past couple years. Mm-hmm that's so I've I've been struggling with motivation to or consistency on the fitness front yeah literally years and it was again when I was reading the audiobook for this a few months ago. I was like, my God, like, literally, I have not thought about applying this principle to fitness. Yeah. And just like find a way to make it feel good. And if it, if you've tried all the things and it doesn't, then like change it up and try something else. Yes. So I've been thinking in the back of my mind, I really want to try CrossFit because there's so many examples from CrossFit of like how they use all these strategies and stuff.

Yes. And I've yet to try CrossFit. I didn't stick with CrossFit. I actually found CrossFit too intense. Yeah. Which a lot of people run into that issue and a lot of people get injured and Things like, like, like, what I noticed when I was doing CrossFit is I would go so hard that I would feel exhausted for the next 48 hours. And it actually dampened my energy because I was over-exerting. So in many ways, it's almost like the problem with CrossFit is it's too effective. It, like, gets you going too hard. It is such a worthwhile experience just to go experience the community. The community is amazing.

People are, they're so positive there. Like, it's very, doesn't matter. Like, there'll be a dude next to you who's lifting 400 people. pounds and you're like struggling to get the bar off the ground and people are cheering for you just as hard as they're cheering for that guy there's like no judgment everybody's super positive so nice thumbs up crossfit yeah how well love to you check it out so this is something that comes up a lot with my readers and fans and I'm curious it just occurred to me that there might be an analog in your in the productivity world as well but like I've actually I've over the years I've come to the conclusion that

in kind of the self-help personal development space there's actually secretly two separate categories that are going on, and I think a lot of people get them mixed up, which is the first one is advice that takes you from bad to okay, right? So it's like, if you're depressed, here are some things you can do to, like, help you not be so depressed. But then there's also advice that takes you from okay to great. You know, if you're just kind of a normal person going about their life, but you want to do something really amazing. And especially, here are four things that you can try to, like, make your life way more effective. And I find there's so much confusion in my world, and readers and people who follow other people in this space,

they see the bad to okay advice and they mistake it for okay to great advice. They'll be like, oh, well, that's obvious. Like everybody knows that. I'm like, well, yeah, it's not meant for you. It's meant for the guy who can't get off the couch. Or it's okay to great advice, but it's misconstrued by people being like, you know, well, that's not going to help me, you know, get over my crippling anxiety. Like, I can't even do this or that.

I wonder if there's an analog in the productivity space because a lot of what we're talking about is mitigation. It's almost like mitigating unproductivity rather than maximizing productivity. It's like making sure you're not falling below 80% rather than killing yourself trying to get to 99%. Oh, I really like this. I've not thought of it in this way,

but I think there are definitely analogs. One thing that comes to mind is like bad to okay, um, is often about the basic obvious things and often about the hardware, like sleep, exercise, nutrition.

Totally. If you're depressed, just like, you know, people have done the studies on this, sleeping eight hours a night, doing some exercise every single day, seeing,

having some social contact and like, about it. And like eating well. It's like, that solves like 80% of it. Yeah. It's like, whatever.

So for someone who's depressed, worrying about, you know, maximizing the typing speed or keyboard shortcuts or bashing and all that shit that we'd have to talk about. Like, it's kind of meaningless. But to go from okay to great, you still have to have the basics done because the basics will derail you immediately. Yeah. Like you can have the best productivity hacks in the world, but if you're sleeping three hours a night, obviously it's not going to work. Yeah. And so you have to do the basics well, the basic fundamentals, the boring fundamentals.

And then you can start adding stuff on top of that. But recognizing that, like, I think, like that point you made at the start, like, the people with billion dollar businesses are not really working that much harder than the people with million dollar businesses, even though there's a huge difference between billion and a million. They're just doing different, playing different chess moves. Yeah. And so going from, I think going from OK to great is often about finding the right chess moves rather than really about working harder.

Because if you have the basic fundamentals and you're operating at 80%, and you find an area of the market where your business will just 100x by default by virtue of being in that market, like trying to sell to people with money rather than trying to sell to broke students, you could do the same amount of work and still play video games and still have a great life but also make tons and tons of money. Yeah.

And so those are now the stories that I look for and I enjoy. I don't really vibe with stories of like, oh my God, I struggled so much and I suffered so much. I love the stories where someone's like, you know what? I was working on this for a few years.

It was really fun. I had a really balanced life. Spent time with my friends, family played some video games and also the thing was successful. I love that shit. I'm like, great. That is the person we should aspire to be

rather than Muhammad Ali who's like, you know, I suffered every day. for 10 years and it was worth it to become a champion. Most of us, I don't think want to suffer for 10 years just to become a champion. Have you read the new Elon Musk book? I've not. It's on my audible at the moment.

It is a wild ride. It is an absolute wild ride. It is, he is everything you expect times 10. But it's funny because he is totally that person. I was actually surprised how few takeaways there are from the book because I don't think what he does is reproducible at all. Or if you tried to reproduce it, you would make yourself so miserable that I, I'm not sure you would even want to do that.

Like, he is that guy who is 18 hours a day on the factory floor screaming at people. Yeah. Like involving himself in every little decision. And you could see he's like not a happy person. Yeah, he describes entrepreneurship as like chewing glass or something. Yeah. And I've never felt like entrepreneurship is chewing glass. But obviously, I'm not trying to get people in Mars.

I'm just trying to build a, you're just making YouTube videos. I'm just making bloody YouTube videos, trying to build a lifestyle and try to make time to play video games, hang out, hang out with people in L.A. And so, yeah, different strands of entrepreneurship. One gets you to Mars, the other one gets you a couple of YouTube videos. But one leads to what I would describe. You know, I'd recommend entrepreneurship for a lot of people. Elon Musk would not recommend his branch of entrepreneurship for almost anyone. No, and he actively doesn't, actually.

There's a great moment in the book where, I don't know, he goes through like some crazy drama at SpaceX, loses his mind, and then immediately has to get on a plane and fly to Asia for like some big conference. And he gets there and it's a room full of founders and business owners who are there to hear him speak. And the first question is, this is a room full of 2,000 people who are inspired by you and who want to learn from you. Like, what is the best piece of advice that you can give us to be as effective as you are? And he just looks at him and says, don't. It's like you don't want to go through what I go through. And by that point in the book, you've read enough of the book that you're like, yeah,

don't don't do it I do wonder when I interview people in my pod I always ask the question of like once someone is post success they're always preaching work life balance but I wonder I always wonder could they have achieved that level of success

while also having work life balance or is it a phase that everyone has to go through where there is always a phase of grindiness or whatever and then on the other end you start preaching work life balance I don't think so. Rich people, they go through 10 years of grind, failure, suffering, struggle, come out the other end, balance their lives, become very healthy and happy, and then turn around and tell everybody else that they should be balanced healthy and happy. And it depends what you're trying to do, right? Like, I think if you are in a more conventional career path, I think there's a lot to be said maybe about work life balance. If you are doing something entrepreneurial, there seems to be an escape velocity phenomenon. where you need an immense amount of force and pressure to get off the ground and to get into orbit. And then once you're in orbit, you can kind of ease off a little bit. I don't know if you can escape that, though.

Yeah. So my way of squaring this, this conundrum was to, and I recognize this fairly early on, which is why the book is called Feel Good Productivity, is to be like, okay, I need to do lots of work to make my business successful and be financially free. Great. Let me find a way to make that work feel really good. And, you know, I'd get home from work when I was working. in my day job and I would look forward to editing a video. And on days where I didn't look forward

to editing a video, I would find a way to make editing the video, the stuff I talked about in the book like play power people, find a way to do it in a slightly different way, find a way to level up the transition or the animation. So random shit like that, I found as a way to make, almost convince myself that editing a video for four hours in the evening was actually more enjoyable than watching Netflix at four hours in the evening. And I would have friends being like, look, Ali, you know, you're working, working too hard and shit. And so I, you know, I used to be addicted to World of Warcraft back in the day. Yeah.

And so I went back into Wow, got a gaming PC because I was like, okay, I can afford it now, but a gaming PC played some wow. And I'd find myself more drained at the end of a gaming session than I would it by the end of an editing session. Because I found a way to make the process so enjoyable. And from all the recent, you know, interviewing a bunch of people and reading, a lot in preparation for writing the book, a lot of successful people seem to land at the thing of, like the way to do something consistently is to find a way to make it feel good. And if the thing gives you energy, then you kind of want to do it.

You don't just want to scroll TikTok, which is not a thing that really energizes anyone. Yeah. So let's talk specifically about what constitutes feeling good because my fucked up head, as soon as I see feel good productivity, I'm like, oh, cocaine, of course. Yeah, I'm going to get a ton done. Like, where is that line between feeling good about the work you're doing? and distraction or indulgence. I think if the thing is feeling good

and moving you in the direction of the work you want to be doing, great. If the thing is feeling good and moving you away from the work you want to be doing, then that's not so good. Or feeling good,

but moving you away from it in terms of like the rest of your life. There's like a sustainability. Yeah, there's absolutely. And so the final three chapters of the book are all about sustainability. Broadly, anything that feels good

that moves you towards your goal is a good thing. I am a big believer of small little tweaks. Like, you know, Tim Ferriss has that. ask that question, what would this look like if it were easy? And I think that's a great question. I ask myself that a lot.

I ask myself a slightly different question. What would this look like if it were fun? Like, what does a more fun version of a podcast look like? What does a fun version of editing look like? What does a fun version of writing discharge summaries look like when you're a junior doctor? And asking myself that question is like, what does it look like if it were fun? While I'm writing my discharge letter, let me add a few jokes here and there. It's going to be a real life human reading this letter on the other end.

We just say something nice about this patient's cat because it's just kind of funny. And like, doctors, don't do that because it's too straight, laced and too boring. It's like, let's just make the writing a little bit nicer. Let me use my creativity a bit when writing this patient's like discharge summary. Little tweaks like that move me in the direction that I want to go. I finish this discharge summary, but just make the process more fun. So it's not a case of doing cocaine and writing it. It's a case of like adding a few jokes about the fact that this patient, you know, has been very disappointed because Chelsea lost the game recently or whatever the thing might be. Yeah. It's just like lame, lame dad jokes that make things

more fun sometimes. I feel like a lot of people find that difficult perhaps because they worry about doing something differently. They worry what other people are going to think. If I comment on somebody's cat on the discharge form, what if they don't like that? What if they complain to my supervisor? What if the other doctors look at me weird? How does that factor into this? Yeah, I think people just overindex way too much on thinking just too much seriousness. Way too much serious. Way too much There's, you know, that quote from Alan Wads, don't be serious, be sincere. And it's like, the way I think of it is,

I imagine myself in that position. If I were a GP, you know, general practitioner reading a discharge summary and someone made a comment about the cat, I'd have a little chocolate and would make my day because everything else I've read has just been boring as fuck. Yeah. I used to give this advice to students when you're studying for exams.

If you're writing essays, you just want to imagine the poor examiner. They're having to, like, empathy for the examiner. They're having to read 500 of these shitty pieces of writing. Yeah. give him something to chuckle about. They're going to give you the top grade immediately because you've just made their life a little bit better.

You know, you have nice handwriting. Maybe you use a little pink highlighter or something just to make it a little bit more pleasant. I think people over-index on this way too much. I'm also a strong believer in seeking forgiveness rather than permission. So I started incorporating jokes into my discharge letters. And the only comment I ever got

was actually a written compliment from a GP who emailed the hospital staffing department being like, can I just say this is the best discharge summary I've ever seen? And that was a commendation on my CV. that will sit. But, you know, there were times where I also, you know, I made a video and I was a bit too blasé about data security in the way that I spoke about patient data and stuff.

So someone complained to the hospital and I was like, ah, okay, let's not do that again. So most things are not, it's not like you're going to fire me immediately. They're going to be like, hey man, you know, be a bit less blasé about data security. I'm like, yes, that's a very good point. I should have been less blazay about it. So usually these things are not that like life or death, not that like important. But we treat them with such importance. I think also when giving presentations at work.

People are boring as fuck when giving presentations at work. But the most effective presentations are the ones that start with a bit of a joke. Of course. Take it a bit less seriously. Of course. Lightens everything up, gets the energy and the mood going. Whereas when you see someone who's like so timid and so like, I have to be professional, just sucks the joy out of it.

Yeah. And everyone wants more energy in their life. It's funny because the classic caring too much what other people think. I think not only does it kill fun, it attacks that issue that we started off with, which is knowing. what to optimize for in the first place. I personally interact with a lot of readers and listeners that they feel very lost in life. They don't know what they should be pursuing in the first place.

And when you really drill down deep, it's because they've spent their entire life trying to please the people around them. It's like, mom and dad wanted me to be a lawyer. So I went to law school. And then I got a job at this firm. And they wanted me to take on these sorts of cases. So I took on these sorts of cases. And then I needed to move into a bigger apartment. So I had to work on this team, but I don't like the people on the team. And next thing you know, they have an entire life that has been structured around other people's wants and desires. And not only are they not addressing their own wants and desires, so they're out of touch with what they should be optimizing for. They've never actually taken that time to experiment and discover who themselves are. So they

don't even know what they like. Like they know they don't like being a lawyer, but they don't know what they would like otherwise. And so again, it's this really deep intersection between emotions and productivity, optimization, achieving goals, you know, whatever you want to call it. It's such a cliche thing to say like, oh, stop worrying about what other people think. It's as the years go on,

I'm consistently surprised and impressed at how deeply this affects people and kind of fucks everything up for them. It's so true. Yeah, as you were saying that, I was kind of thinking, like, that's definitely the experience that I've seen from other people. And I was wondering why I personally didn't have that so much. Yeah. And I think all of it can be basically traced down to Tim Ferriss.

Basically. Ever since I discovered the, freaking four-hour work week and realized the life that's possible, the whole like New Ridge thing, the whole like, wait a minute, think about what you actually want from your life, rather than following the script and assuming when you retire at 65 with osteoarthritis in both of your knees, you'll suddenly be happy sipping cocktails in a beach in Thailand. one of the core insights from it, which is not like a highlight. It's not one of the top level highlights that people normally say. It's just the idea of running experiments and testing hypotheses. Like I was just signing up to go to med school for six years and then training for 10 years for the sake of being a consultant when I was 40.

And I hadn't really considered that path beyond like two days of work experience and the fact that everyone I knew was a doctor. And so after reading a four hour work week, I started asking people who were 10 years ahead of me in their careers, are you happy? What are you up to? Like, what do you change anything? My favorite question,

if you won the lottery, how would you spend your time? Would you still do medicine? And that half of the people would say they would leave immediately. Wow. One guy even said he'd leave in the middle of the operation. Oh, my God. Good luck. He was like, yeah, my dream is to coach my son's like football team

because he loved football. This is soccer. And the other half of the people said they would continue medicine, but they'd go part-time. I've never met anyone who enjoys working 80 hours a week as a doctor. It's just not fun. Yeah. I've met people who enjoy working 30 hours a week as a doctor,

maybe even 40, not 80, 80, like doing anything of 80. 80 hours week, it's not fun. And I would always ask those people, it's like, okay, well, what's stopping you from going part time? And it was always be money. Well, I've got a mortgage, with kids, like bills and all that shit. And so the four hour work week gave me that language, gave me that like mindset shift to be like, oh, fuck, if money is the problem and the people 10 years ahead of me in their career are not having fun, I need a way to make money. So I think that's such a really great takeaway. The find people 10 years ahead of you on your current path and ask them

how they feel what their current problems are, what their regrets are, or what anything that would change. It's one of those things that is, once you hear it said, is so obvious, but I've never heard anybody talk about that before. I think that has,

that attitude of experimentation has pervaded every aspect of my life. Like, we've got 54 actionable tips in this book. All of them are framed as experiments because it's like the idea is try this experiment and see if it works. Once my YouTube channel has started to make money, my hypothesis was always,

hey, I'll be a part-time doctor and a part-time YouTuber. I'd named my course the part-time YouTuber Academy. I was all about, you know, I still really enjoy medicine. It's still really fun. I want to be a part-time doctor. And I kind of realized, wait a minute, before I sign up to an eight-year residency program and try and go part-time, let me just experiment with a few extra shifts to see what it's like

being a part-time doctor. And for about two weeks, I did extra shifts in the emergency department. This was when I wasn't working, so I would do like two days a week or something. And every 10 minutes, I was thinking, why am I here? What am I doing right now? The dingy emergency department, there's no natural light. I could be in a really nice we work right now with my team making YouTube videos

that's so much more fun. Why am I here? And after two weeks of this, I realized, hang on, I've just tried out this experiment, this part-time doctor, part-time YouTuber life. I've realized, fuck this.

It's so much more fun being a full-time YouTuber. Oh my goodness, wow, that two-week experiment has now changed the course of my life because now I'm not worrying about applying to the US for a residency program

and spending three years preparing for the exams and stuff. But if I hadn't run the experiment, I would have thought, well, of course, theoretically being a part-time doctor's fun because these doctors as I spoke to say it's reasonable.

And it's good to call myself Dr. Ali Abdel and the title of the book and all that shit. I ran around the experiment. And I was like, nope, not for me. Rounded the other experiment of what's it like being a full-time YouTuber. That's really fun. Ryan the experiment of what's it like

to have a team of 20 people, not fun. More fun having a team of 10. 10 is a good number, 10 to 12. That was really fun. And it continues to be really fun. And even now, it's like everything in life I almost treat like an experiment. I said to my team this morning,

we had like an all-hands team meeting. The experiment we're trying for the next three months is what does it look like if I own, only make a video when I feel like it rather than on a schedule. Don't know. Let's see what happens. Let's run it as an experiment. We'll see.

Best case in a scenario. Experiment works out and I realize I've got more joy in my life. Worst case scenario, experiment doesn't work out. I get more data. It's not really a failure. It's just an experimental. It's an experiment. Even a failure is useful data.

And then I can inform the way I live my life. Yeah. Experiments around like, huh, I wonder if it would be fun to, I don't know, try running every day. Yeah. By that for a couple weeks. See what happens. I'm just all about experimenting with life and overtime, landing on a nice place.

But even then, like the place we land where we feel happy and fulfilled, as we grow older, people say, the things that brought you happiness and fulfillment when you were younger don't necessarily do it again. And so all of life is basically this sort of running a bunch of different experiments, having fun along the way and sort of meandering your way to some sort of, some sort of fulfillment or something. Something, yeah.

The framing of it, the framing of life experimentation is I think is incredibly powerful as well because it removes the stigma of failure. There's no such thing as failure. There's only information, right? It's like, okay, we ran an experiment. You know, I tried working overtime for a month as an experiment to see and didn't go well. So that's information. It's it removes the mindset that you have to succeed at everything you try or that everything has to go well all the time. It's the only metric of success is simply feedback. Yeah. There's a story that I talk about in the book.

There's a YouTuber called Mark Rober, who used to work at NASA, then worked at Apple, and now he's a science educator on YouTube. And he ran a really fun experiment. He created like a coding challenge for 50,000 of his audience, and he split them up into two groups. And the idea was this challenge would help you learn how to code. And it was some sort of like robot maze,

and you had to sort of program the robot to, like, go around the maze or something on this online interface. And the ingenious thing for this was that this was not a solvable problem. You couldn't actually solve it. So he was just seeing like, how much would people try? And so he split the 50,000 people into two groups. For half of them, you know, if they hit execute on the code and it didn't work, it said, you have failed, please try again. But for the other half of the people, it said, you have failed, you've lost five points.

You now have 195 points. Please try again. These points were totally meaningless, completely arbitrary. But one group started with 200 fake points and the other group got told nothing. and the group who got told they lost five points tried less than half as many attempts at solving this coding puzzle and the group that didn't say anything

at all. And this whole experiment was a ruse. It wasn't intended to teach people how to code. It was intended to see how do people feel about failure. And when you're told you've lost five points, even though it's totally meaningless and it does not mean anything and it's not money and it's completely irrelevant,

you still try less than half the number of times as someone who wasn't told that at all. And so his whole message, he has a TED talk about this. is all about how do we reframe failure. And I think the way we reframe failure, as you said, is experimentation where even failure is data gathering. Yeah. Well, Ollie, the book is Feel Good Productivity.

Go buy it everywhere. There's a quote from you on the front. It's a guy by the way for offering that quote. And actually reading the thing. Dude, it's a great book, man. You did a great job with it. And I've been very passionate about this idea of an emotional, emotions as part of the overall productivity system.

It's something that I've tried to write about at times. productivity is not really my wheelhouse so it's like I never really quite landed or I never like wrote it in a way that I felt good about it. As soon as I started reading this I got like two, three chapters in I'm like all right, yeah, this is it. Nice. He's got it.

Like this is the productivity book that we've all needed. Lovely. Clip that, put it as a testimonial. Yeah, there you go. You can put a second line with my name on it on the book. So Ollie, it's been a pleasure, man. Thanks for coming on.