The School of Greatness - Build Multiple Income Streams, Habits To Become A Millionaire, and How To Gamify Your Productivity w/Ali Abdaal EP 1158

Episode Date: September 3, 2021

My guest today is Ali Abdaal. Ali is a part-time doctor in the UK and a creator online with a YouTube channel of 2 million subscribers where he focuses on how we can lead happier, healthier and more productive lives with the aim of helping people do more of what matters to them. He’s the creator of Part Time Youtuber Academy where he shares his skills, knowledge and experience of becoming a YouTuber with others.In this episode we discuss how Ali has been able to build multiple income streams that bring in over a million each year, how to turn your work into passive income over time, the habits that have set him up for success to become a millionaire, how to turn productivity into a game and how to eliminate all distractions, and we also turned this conversation into a coaching session for the both of us throughout. I kindly challenged Ali to think about what he’s aiming for and I think if you’re on the fence about where your energy and time is spent in your life right now, you’re going to get A LOT from this conversation.For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1158Check out his website: www.aliabdaal.comCheck out his Youtube page: www.youtube.com/c/aliabdaalThe Wim Hof Experience: Mindset Training, Power Breathing, and Brotherhood: https://link.chtbl.com/910-podA Scientific Guide to Living Longer, Feeling Happier & Eating Healthier with Dr. Rhonda Patrick: https://link.chtbl.com/967-podThe Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson: https://link.chtbl.com/896-pod 

This is episode number 1158 with Ali Abdaal. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome, everyone. My guest today is Ali Abdaal. And Ali is a part-time doctor in the UK and a

creator online with a YouTube channel of over 2 million subscribers, where he focuses on how we can lead happier, healthier, and more productive lives with the aim of helping people do more of what matters to them. He's the creator of the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, where he shares his skills, knowledge, and expertise of becoming a YouTuber with others as well. And in this episode, we discuss how Ali has been able to build multiple income streams that bring in over a million dollars each year, how to turn your work into passive income over time, the habits that have him set up for success to become a millionaire, how to turn productivity into a game and how to eliminate all distractions. And

also, I turned this into a coaching session for the both of us throughout this episode. And it wasn't my intention, but I kindly challenged Ali to think about what he's aiming for. And I think if you're on the fence about where your energy and your time is spent in your life right now, then you're going to get a lot from this conversation. As I'm coaching and working with Ali, look at this as if I was coaching yourself as well in certain decisions in your life and see what comes up for you. I'd love for you to share with me your thoughts over on Instagram, or you can tag it in the comments below over on the YouTube channel as well on this video. And if you know someone that you think would be inspired by this, then please share this with a friend.

You can text a few people, post it on social media, put it in a group chat somewhere, and leave us a review. Post your review, click the subscribe button over on Apple Podcast, and stay up to date with the latest and greatest on the School of Greatness podcast. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Ali Abdaal. Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest. We've got Ali Abdaal in the house. My man, it's good to see you all the way from the UK. How are you doing? Hey, Lewis. I'm doing great. It's weird to be on this podcast because I've been listening

and watching to it for so long. I just admire everything you've built up over the last like however many years, seven years, I think. It's been about eight years now. Yeah, eight years now. Damn. It's just really cool. Yeah, I just think everything you do is just so high class and high quality. So it's a real honor to be on. I appreciate it, man.

And you've been exploding over the last few years as well. And it's been cool to watch your growth. You talk about productivity. You talk about passive income and many other things. But what I'm curious about is how you've kind of transitioned from a traditional career of being a doctor to really building multiple streams of passive income on the side, which I'm assuming has kind of surpassed your career income many times over now. I believe that everyone wants to have this passive income coming in in their life. They would like to have a few hundred dollars coming in or a few thousand dollars or even more every single week or month. You've done this

successfully. You've created multiple passive streams of income. I'm curious, what were the keys for you to switch your mindset from um just having one stream of income with your career to having passive multiple streams of income yeah so i think i can probably trace it back to when i was 17 years old and i first read the four-hour work week and came across the idea of passive income and immediately my mind was blown and i could you know it's that it's it's sort of like in in there's like like like japanese animes when like the good guy gets this like special power and suddenly they can see like all the chakras around them it was sort of that that kind of moment where i had just by default

been following the traditional path of just assuming that oh okay you know i'm going to be a doctor i'm going to make money and then i'm going to hopefully ascend the hierarchy and eventually make enough money to buy a bigger house and then retire and i just hadn't really considered any of those assumptions until i read four-hour work week and then from that point on it like you know it seemed to put a terminology on something that i'd sort of been feeling anyway that you know maybe just the the traditional career path of medicine maybe wasn't quite for me but it was reading that book um the parable of the mexican fisherman which he talks about as well that made me realize okay what i really want to do is i want to do medicine for fun and then i want

to make enough money to sustain myself through multiple streams of income and so from my first year of med school onwards when i was 18 i decided, I decided, okay, this is going to be, this is going to be the path. And, you know, that was then, that was then my hobby in the evenings when I wasn't writing an essay or studying for an exam or hanging out with friends, I'd be tinkering, tinkering away at websites and trying to slowly, slowly, slowly build these streams of passive income. Really? And can you explain for those who have not read the four-hour workweek yet, can you explain the parable of the Mexican fisherman?

Oh, certainly. The parable of the Mexican fisherman fisherman oh certainly uh the parable of the mexican fisherman is one of my one of my favorite stories essentially the story is that uh there's uh an american investment banker and he goes to this small coastal mexican fishing village and he sees this mexican guy on the boat and the guy's like fishing a few fish and he has some of the fish he's like oh this tastes amazing um And the guy's like, yeah, you know, it's enough to support my family's immediate needs. And the American asks, well, why don't you go and fish more? Like, why are you only fishing like five fish a day? And he says, well, you know, I'm quite happy. I'm making good money.

I get to spend time with my family. I get to have a nap in the afternoons. I get to go down to the pub in the evenings to play the guitar with my amigos and then the american investment banker like goes on some big rant about how he's a harvard mba and he can kind of transform this into a business empire and how he can then get the mexican to move to new york and then open up his own warehouse open up his own like empire and eventually make millions 30 years down the line um and then the kind of long story short the mexican kind of goes down this you know asks the american okay what next what next what next and the the the clincher at the end of the story is that well the american says well that's great

you know once you're 65 then you can retire and you'll have all that money and then you'll be able to live in a village you'd be able to like have a nap with your wife you'd be able to play the guitar with your friends in the evenings uh and that story really hit me hard because it really shows the importance of building a life day to day that we enjoy and get value out of rather than the deferred life plan of like working really hard um and grinding and hustling to get to the point where we have lots of money and then we're retired and then kind of going back to that life that we could have had much like when when we were younger so i'm probably butchering like butchering the story the actual

version is much more concise than that but that was a real powerful moment for me to realize that kind of day-to-day happiness is is what matters and i i sort of felt maybe i wouldn't necessarily get that within the traditional career of medicine right yeah. Yeah, it's a great story. It's a great kind of approach to life. It's like, okay, if you're going to work this hard to kind of relax when you're older, why not kind of incorporate some of that, integrate that philosophy in your life right now and set yourself up. And obviously, there's different seasons of life where we've got to be working hard and learning a new skill and developing and to build something in the first place is going to take time and energy to do that for a lot of people, but especially in our modern world, but there are things we can do to build up passive

streams of income to hopefully not have to overwork ourselves so we can have a happier, healthier, productive life. I'm curious, what were the keys for you building passive income in the beginning when you started it? And how many recurring streams of income do you have today oh okay so today there's probably around somewhere between eight and ten kind of big categories and within those eight to ten big categories there are sort of like dozens if not hundreds of smaller categories uh which we can which we can certainly go into i think the key like one of the keys at the beginning was actually learning to code is like yeah like anytime i get an instagram dm from someone being like hey how do i build passive income like i think even even today even in 2021 even with all

the no code tools and everything out there i still think learning to code is just a ridiculously valuable thing that anyone can do um anyone can learn. And it just immediately unlocks the ability to generate income from the internet, which you just don't really unlock when you don't know how to code. So kind of in two ways. Number one, I think when you learn how to code, then anytime you have an idea for something. So for example, when I was in med school, I had an idea that, hey, I want to help other people get into med school. And it kind of the non-coder way of approaching that is, okay, cool. Let me run a course. Let me create my materials and let me advertise it to my local neighborhood and see if one or two students will,

you know, bite and take my course. Because I knew how to code, because I knew how to make websites, because I'd been doing freelance web design for since the age of like 13, I knew that I could make a website for this and i knew something about marketing i knew something about ads i knew something about content marketing i knew something about seo those were all things that i learned through the learning to code web design trajectory which meant that when i had this idea for a business immediately it had a scale far greater than anyone else could have done who didn't know how to make websites and didn't know about this world world of the internet more than just like let me print some flyers and put them at the coffee shop and hope someone like pulls a number and calls me randomly and then i have one client and

then yes yeah absolutely so i think that's that's one aspect of it and then you know later on a few years down the line again in in medical school sort of on the side while i was preparing for my med school exams me and my brother we were you know, we both knew how to code. Neither of us did a degree in computer science or anything, but we kind of dabbled with it on the side. And so we created this software program, again, helping med students because that was the niche that I was in. It was like an online question bank

with subscription billing and an interactive kind of system with JavaScript and like React. And again, if we didn't know how to code, that wouldn't even have been a possibility, let alone something we could have created for ourselves or you would have thought like okay i need to make some money to go hire someone to code this and try to tell them exactly what i want and this long process of edits and clunkiness without the speed and the knowledge that you had of what you wanted to create in the moment yeah and i think i think

even if we even if even if you do hire someone, so since then, lots of people have reached out to me saying, Hey, I don't know how to code, but I have this idea. How much would it cost to hire a developer to build this thing? And that's always a hard question. It's like, well, it could be 10,000, could be 50, could be a hundred thousand. Usually that number scares people off. They're like, Whoa, I was hoping it would be like $200 for someone in the Philippines, you know, following the like 200 for some philippines you know following the tim ferris method and you know having having tried to outsource things in the past it's genuinely really hard to outsource something especially when you don't know about the thing that you're trying to outsource so you know i i know how to edit videos being a youtuber and therefore when

i outsource editing to an editor i know what i'm doing equally when you know a little bit at least the basics of how to code, that doesn't mean you necessarily have to code everything from scratch yourself, but it means that you're more able to outsource that because you now have an understanding of the landscape. Yes, yes. Okay, so you learned how to code and that was one way of really learning.

So when you can code, you can develop your idea and potentially make money from that idea. There are other things. Is there anything else from coding that's allowed you to understand the internet besides building software and sites or yeah i always can use that skill yeah i think the other thing about coding is that it so so the first one is that if you if you get an idea then then you can just build it over the weekend and ship it and it can do quite well i think the other the other thing of it is again like when when you

learn to code it unlocks an aspect of your brain and opens up your mind to ideas that you just wouldn't have had before really so explain so so for example let's say i were to generally when when people talk about um coming up with startup ideas they say that you shouldn't just try and sit down and think of a startup idea you want want to find a problem in the world, preferably a problem that you're having yourself, and then think about how you might solve that problem. So let's think a few years ago, let's say you were to think, you know what, it's a real pain in the bum trying to get a taxi, because, you know, the taxis are expensive, they don't take card, you know, it's an absolute nightmare. Now, if you're not a coder, you think, okay, this is a problem.

I wish someone solved it. But if you're a coder, you think, huh, this is a problem. Right. What would it take to solve this problem? Well, I guess all we really need is a middleman app that connects taxis with people who want taxis. And I suppose you could build that by essentially making a database by having one table of taxi drivers, having one table of passengers, figuring out some kind of integration with Google Maps api figuring out some kind of payment system maybe using stripe and all of a sudden you've built a very prototype version of uber or lyft in your head because you know how to code and if you don't know how to code you just wouldn't your mind wouldn't even go in that direction but if you do it does and that is where a lot of the most interesting and most profitable businesses over the last like two decades have come from people who know a little bit about how to code

being able to apply that knowledge to a problem they're having and then kind of you know the rest is history coding seems like it can be very daunting for people that have no understanding of it what would you be doing what other skill would you have taken on to generate passive income if you didn't learn coding? Oh, interesting. If I wasn't going down the coding route, I would learn how to edit videos. And that's because basically every single YouTuber above about 5,000 subscribers hates editing videos

and needs someone to edit their videos and there are so few youtubers who actually outsource their editing because to them it feels too hard it feels like oh i could never do this no one can match my style and i know i know hundreds of youtubers at this point who are making good money who would pay to outsource editing if someone made it easy for them and so if i were let's say i were 14 years old and i wanted to create a side hustle or let's say even i were like i don't know 26 or 35 or whatever and i wanted to create income on the internet i would learn how to edit videos i have a skillshare class on this that people can access for free

in two hours you learn how to edit videos from zero to youtuber level um using final cut so you just take a course or just follow free youtube tutorials because they're all for free anyway you learn how to edit videos within a few days and at this point you can then outsource you can then market your services as video editor to other youtubers this is not passive income but i think one of the things with passive income is that you have to start with active income initially and then you passivify it over time it's very very difficult to just go straight for the passive income right how would you pacify it over time it's very very difficult to just go straight for the passive income right how would you pacify it over time as a video editor or as a coder if you weren't doing

it yourself product to product yeah so i think as a coder this the the key would be building a product um so software as a service or some kind of app. Those are the sorts of things that you build at once and you can sell it multiple times. And then obviously, you know, the marketing angle comes in, the sales angle comes in, and you start to learn so much about these sorts of fields. And even if the thing doesn't fail, you know, I tried building apps and websites for seven years

before anything was successful. But all of the lessons I learned throughout that time, yeah. Yeah, because I started age 13 and i was doing freelance web design every year me and my friends would come up with an idea that oh we're gonna make money through this this is the next big thing next big thing 100 we tried like mlm multi-level multi-level marketing we tried like pyramid schemes we tried the whole which we we tried everything and it all failed but it was all such a good learning opportunity such that when i was 19 and i had the first idea that was actually successful i knew enough to be able to build it myself um so i think on the coding front you passive you

passivify it by creating a product a digital product i think on the video editing front there are two ways to passivify that way number one is to teach the thing so there are still loads of people out there who want to learn video editing and teaching something, turning into consulting, turning into a course and probably not an ebook for editing,

but that kind of stuff is passive income. The alternative way to do it would be to kind of build essentially a services agency. Like if you really understand the market of being a YouTuber, and this is probably the business I would be in if I lost everything else i would i would start editing videos for other youtubers

i'd initially offer my services for free for 30 days i'd make it super easy for them to say yes and then once i've got a few clients i would then hire my own team to edit the videos for them and i would just be the final kind of final cut like final level of the final level of quality control and build up that sort of agency system over time where I'd be able to say to any YouTuber, look, we can edit your videos. We're priced competitively. The quality is really good and we'll take care of it. And again, it wouldn't be passive as such in that I would have to do a lot of work to build up the business. It would be scalable. The skills I'd be learning along the way.

Yeah, it's extremely scalable at that point. Right. What is the top three revenue streams that you have on a monthly basis? skills i'd be learning along the way yeah it's extremely scalable at that point right what is the top three revenue streams that you have on a monthly basis you don't have to say the specific numbers unless you want to but what are the top three revenue streams so all three are you said you have nine right there's nine yeah roughly yeah nine roughly so i'd say the top one is a live online course that I teach called the Part-Time YouTuber Academy.

That's something that started about a year ago. In that time, we've taught over a thousand students. I think we've done about $2 million in revenue, of which about $1.5, $1.6 million is profit, which is pretty good. And it's been really fun. In one year. Yeah, that's great.

In one year. Yeah, so that's our sort of, I wouldn't really call that passive income. It's very active in that it's a six fun in one year yeah it's great in one year yeah so that's our our sort of that's i wouldn't really call that passive income it's very like active in that it's a six-week live course i'm on zoom calls all the time helping people out it's a very high touch uh very accountability and community focused so that's revenue stream number one revenue stream number two is actually skillshare uh this is completely passive and it is completely mind-blowing how much money you can make from skillshare so i started making skillshare courses in september 2019 so actually about two years ago now and the very first course i made was just a uh how to edit videos in final cut because i'd been

doing it for two years at that point i didn't really have any experience beyond that but i just filmed myself editing one of my own videos and talking through it. And that class, Skillshare class took me one day to film. And I hired a freelancer for two days to edit it for about $500. And that class has been making somewhere between 2000 and $5,000 a month, every single month since September 2019. For the last two years, without me doing anything marketing at all. I just have a link to it in my YouTube descriptions. people find it through youtube people find it through skillshare itself and it's just insane how much money just that one class makes what's the revenue split for skillshare the way it works is that you get paid um per minute of watch time and so interesting yeah

it's sort of like spotify streaming royalties and so i last time i checked the number was round about somewhere between three and five cents per minute of premium watch time so if someone has a skillshare account and they watch your thing for five minutes you'll make like 15 cents but if you have i don't know a few thousand a few tens of thousands few hundreds of thousands people are doing that that really adds up and so so they have to buy the course or is it a free course uh so it's sort of like netflix in that people have a subscription to skillshare and then they can watch anything on the platform for free after that yeah they don't have to buy the course

yeah gotcha and skillshare has a pretty good affiliate program as well where anyone in fact this is a good way of generating passive income for anyone anyone can become an affiliate for skillshare and if if someone just signs up for a free trial they pay somewhere between seven and ten dollars per sign up right and so each month we make about fifteen thousand dollars just off of skillshare free trial signups and another like fifty sixty thousand dollars per month off of people just watching the courses that we've made over the last two years so that one course brings in two to five thousand but fifty to sixty thousand a month on all the courses you have there yeah we've got about like eight somewhere between eight and ten courses on skillshare wow and every every quarter every every few months we just think you know what let's make another one and we've got an endless

list of like course ideas really yeah and the nice thing about doing a course is that like there's there's just an endless amount of stuff to teach and because for me teach teaching is the thing that i'm most passionate about and the thing that brings me like intrinsic joy far more so than saving lives as a doctor or even even the coding thing i i've always been super into teaching since like the age of 13 and so it's pretty easy for me to like learn something and then teach it to other people through camera and i enjoy doing it so it's that perfect match of a thing that pays well a thing that adds value to the world and i think that i personally enjoy doing as well that's pretty cool okay so you've got the skillshare and then what would be the third biggest revenue stream probably third biggest is

actually youtube adsense so i think these days we're making somewhere between 40 to 50 000 30 to 50 000 a month off of youtube ad sense um and it's actually most of that money comes from our older videos so videos that i made three years ago four years ago two years ago are generate are still generating money each month and that's why anytime i make a youtube video i sort of consider it um i sort of consider it as their own asset class. It's sort of like an investment, you know, real estate or crypto is an asset class. And you put money in and you expect that money to grow over time. It's sort of the same that if you make a YouTube video, you put the effort in once over a few hours to make the video.

And then once it's on the platform, and hopefully it's evergreen, people are just watching that as long as it's good. And then you just keep on making money and so we've got like i don't know 400 videos on the channel and each one brings in a few dollars a day uh but you know at scale that ends up being somewhere between 30 and 50k every month it's pretty fun to watch isn't it it's pretty fun to watch yeah it's it's not very fun in the early days when nothing's happening i mean but it's like any kind of compounding. I didn't make money for, I don't know, first five years. When I was on YouTube, I don't know, a long time ago, 2006 maybe, but just playing around. But it wasn't until five years, six years ago,

where I started being more consistent. But I didn't make any money, literally any money. One, because I didn't turn on YouTube ads. Because I was just kind of like, I just want to have free value out in the world. I just want to help people. You know, I don't want to have sleazy like car commercials before my videos or something or whatever. And so I made zero money. I was just investing a lot. But then when we turned it on about a year and a half ago, I was like, oh, this is a lot of fun. You can see the payoff

of years of work, of years of adding value, of years of showing up for people. And those are like assets. People continue to find them. They continue to watch them. So now I'm getting paid those returns, those dividends for the time that we put in years ago, which is nice to see. Because on other social media channels, you've got to work hard to try to get attention or get people to watch something in the first eight hours, and then it kind of goes away and you're not monetizing it. So that's why I like YouTube as a platform, because it's evergreen. You know, it doesn't have to be like this new timely trend thing that goes away in two days and no one sees on your stream. Yeah, I think that's one of the great things about YouTube. And we kind of we've

touched on again, like one of the secrets of passive income which is that it really is just about adding value consistently over a very very very long time and then you just kind of automatically make money you don't even have to think about it very hard if you're doing stuff like youtube um and i think one mistake i see a lot of people make is that they focus on the income side of it too early and they don't recognize that ultimately money is just an exchange of value and so if you can show up you know week after week like you've been doing for the last eight years then you of course you're going to make money like you would not make money the more value you add to the world the more the market rewards that um and the nice thing about the sort of stuff that you and i make generally

educational content stuff that inspires people to live better lives, you don't need to be sensational about it. You don't need to be too clickbaity. You just need to make stuff that's useful, that's helpful to some people, and it just adds up over time. That's it. What would you say are some of the habits that have helped you think this way and start earning more money?

Are there a few specific habits that you've learned or things you learned the hard way not to do that you've been consistent on now in kind of developing these revenue streams? Yeah, that's a good question. So I think one habit is that basically any time I find myself trading my time for money, I always think, okay, this is fine for the short term, but it's definitely not where I want to be in the long term. And so this is why I'm not really a fan of like you know medicine for example trading time for money consulting coaching trading time for money like however we spin it and i always think okay how can i take this value that i'm offering in exchange

for my time and turn it into some sort of product that can preferably live on the internet where you benefit from the scale of the internet the zero cost of distribution the zero cost of reproduction and so you know if initially people look you know in initially my med school admissions business started because people were coming to me and i was offering them tutoring on how to ace their med school interviews and then i thought you know what let's productize this into a course and then i would teach a course and now i can teach it to 30 people at a time. And it's still trading my time for money, but it's now at a greater scale. And then the next step is, okay, let's take my time out of it. Let's hire someone else to teach instead. Let's

build a team around it. And then let's turn it into an online course where now I've done the work once and I never have to do it ever again. And so i think that sort of way of thinking is one habit that's that's really helped over time um i think another one which is a bit like underrated in this is i always try my very best to enjoy the journey and i think like people often say like how do you how do you stick to doing youtube videos for so many years before it's before it's successful before it starts to make money and i generally think the only real way to do it is to find ways to enjoy the process and when you're not making money that's the key is how do you enjoy it when you're not making any money when you're working actually really hard more hours than you need to to create something or then maybe you want to but you're like you know what i'm enjoying this process even if i don't make money. And I think that's, not to interrupt you, but for a second, I started my podcast with

the intention of I want to create something that's fun for me that adds value to others. And I'm going to do it for a year. I'm going to do it every week for a year. And my intention is not to make money in the first year. Eventually, I would like to make money. But the first year for me was all about how do I learn this new skill that I've never done before, podcasting. I had no clue what I was doing. How do I have great conversations with people so I can learn something and improve my life? And then how can I share this in a way that other people get value from listening as well?

And I remember saying, I don't want to have any sponsors. I don't want to sell anything for the first year. I just want to become better. And then after year one, I'll reassess and see if I like it, if it's working, if it's not working. And then if I want to start making money, how to make money. And that approach really supported me. And I feel like because I was so clear in my intention and I came from that space, not how do I make as much money or this, but how do I add as much value? came from that space, not how do I make as much money or this, but how do I add as much value, sponsors started coming very quickly. And I was kind of like shying them away because I was like, well, let me just keep figuring this out and get better. And then it just started coming in lots of different ways. And I was thinking, okay, maybe there's just advertising. But then people said,

well, can you write a book about this? Can you do a course about this? Can you do a live event so we can all come together, this community? Can you do coaching? Can you do a mastermind? Like all these things came from just trying to be good at one thing. And it sounds like it's what's worked for you as well. Like you just did YouTube because you enjoyed creating YouTube videos. And then all these revenue streams started to come after you said, let me focus on adding value to people first. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I really like that line that you said, which is like, I think you said, how do I do something that's fun for me that adds value to others? And I think that's just the key. Like, if you can do something that's fun for you and adds value to others, then you're just bound to make money at some point over the long term with a long enough time horizon. you're just bound to make money at some point over the long term with a long enough time horizon um yeah i think i think for me like i didn't i didn't set out to make youtube videos kind of just for fun i always like in the back of my mind there was always the possibility that okay i want to i i could monetize this further down the line again like you i i thought if i can hit

i don't know 4 000 subscribers in in my first, then that would be the dream. And at 4,000 subscribers, I'd be making like $10 a month or something from YouTube. And so I just didn't really consider the monetization side of it very much, other than kind of content marketing for my existing business. But I think that's like, again, one of the main habits that helps with this stuff. Like, either you're lucky enough to stumble upon something that's just intrinsically fun by default um so actually like like for me making youtube videos was pretty fun in the early days in particular because you're creating something and you're getting instant feedback and you're seeing a sense of progress and these are all things that we know the research tells us and personal experience tells us these are all things

that make an experience more fun but then i think the trick was over time how like how do we keep it fun and find ways to make it more fun so like building progress and building a sense of accomplishment and doing it with friends i found that making up friends with other youtubers engaging more with the community really thinking about how i could help people all of these were very deliberate things i did to make sure it was fun over the long term because otherwise i would have just burned out from doing it right exactly and it's something i you know i've been doing this for eight and a half years now and i've done 1150 episodes and so you've got to you know i've had to learn i continue to keep it interesting and fun doing the same thing over and over because consistency is one of the keys

to long-term success is like you showing up consistently. Like you did 400 videos. That's consistency over time. And enjoying it is part of long-term success as well because if you're doing something you don't enjoy and it's a drag and it takes your energy,

it's going to be hard to keep doing it, keep showing up. So we're always kind of innovating and creating new formats and meeting new people. And I just have a fascination for learning, which is kind of, I guess, one of the skills that makes it work for me.

But it's always got to constantly innovate and improve and grow to make sure that you're staying excited as well when you do something for so long. Yeah, I'm curious in that front about you like like i'd love to be at the point eight years from now where i've done 1150 podcast episodes how how do you keep it fun like what are what are the what are the levers you pull to to make sure it's still fun for you uh well first off i'm fascinated by the topic of of that i'm interviewing

or the guests that i'm interviewing i'm always fascinated by the. So I don't choose people I'm not interested in. I'm like, I want to know more about this person. I want to know the way they think. I want to know the way they sleep at night. I want to know what they dream about. I want to know the challenges they overcame. I want to know what makes them tick. So I think just that obsession of curiosity about people

makes it interesting for me. We're constantly evolving the show structure, the format. We have a new set so it's like a different energy and different environment. The team continues to build and grow and they bring new ideas and they'll

offload some of the energy that might have took me for the first few years and now they're able to take on some of that. Hitting certain milestones and seeing things really take off and it's like, oh, this video went viral and this audio is really doing well and we're in the top charts and you know, all the opportunities that we can build and create and come from it. Also, probably the thing that keeps me most excited, if I'm really thinking about it, those are all good things, but the thing that keeps me most excited and passionate and driven is the impact we make. And every week we talk about,

on our team calls, we talk about the testimonials or the reviews or the life-changing messages that people write in, whether it be YouTube comments or on a podcast review or on an email or whatever it may be, how one moment or one thing they listen to or one thing they watch, they implemented, whether it be from me or one of the experts we've had on, they implemented that strategy and something transformed in their life. They got out of a toxic relationship. They finally got the divorce after 10 years of thinking about it. They had the courage to go ask the person out. They stopped smoking. They got healthy again. They started sleeping better. They went to therapy, whatever it is. And they say, thank you for this moment. It helped me improve the quality of my life. And that's what really drives me is like, okay, we're here to serve people. We're here to

add value to people. And I think, again, if you do something you enjoy that also adds value to someone or some ones then that is the golden ticket in my mind and if you can make money with it then now we're really talking how so i you know i'm just really curious about this how do you how do you combat that thing so when it comes when it comes to my youtube channel one one problem that i have is that i feel like i'm constantly chasing more like more subscribers more revenue more success i often think like what what's the what's the point uh but and you know a few years ago if someone had told me i'd be on two million subscribers i would have had a stroke because it's just completely completely outside of the world of possibility. But now it's like,

Oh, two millions. It's good. But like 3 million would be better. I know. But like this one, your friends have 10 million, you know,

it's like, exactly. How do you think about like the pursuit of more? Well, I think the universe is always expanding. I think we're designed to grow. I think we're, we're meant to evolve and develop and grow ourselves, whether

it be with wisdom or experience or, you know, our health. We're meant to grow, in my opinion. And if we're not growing, then we're slowly dying. And if a business is not growing, then it's eventually going to be out of business. If your health is not improving the quality of growth in a healthy way, then eventually your body will be out of business, out of commission. It'll get sick. It'll cause, you know, get disease or it'll die. And I think spiritually as well, if we're not spiritually evolving and growing and seeking more wisdom and seeking more spiritual growth, then our soul or, you know, our hearts will start to suffer and we'll start to lose sense of meaning and purpose,

and that will start to die. So for me, I think it's extremely healthy when you're running a business to track and measure things, to keep you excited about growth. But I tie it to, well, how can we continue to grow so we can serve more people? It's not about how can I get more subscribers to feel well, how can we continue to grow so we can serve more people? It's not about how can I get more subscribers to feel good, to look good because I'm comparing myself to other YouTubers.

But okay, we just got 70,000 new subscribers in this last 30-day window or I guess 28-day window on YouTube, it shows. So that's 70,000 new potential lives that we can impact. that's 70,000 new potential lives that we can impact. And what do they need right now? What's the message they need? What question do I need to ask to really serve at the highest level? And how do I ask questions that hit the most number of people that they might be asking? And how can we continue to show up in service to these 70,000 people? We tie it to a mission of ours, which is to serve 100 million people weekly.

And it's a big mission. And we're nowhere near that, right? We're nowhere near that mission yet. But because that's our mission, to serve 100 million lives weekly, to help them improve the quality of their life, to help them grow, to help them overcome challenges they face, fear, anxiety, worry, to help them feel more peace and love. Because that's our mission, we think about serving those individuals. And so it's exciting to attract a team on our team that's committed to the same mission.

That's not just thinking about growth to look good. And I'm not saying you're thinking about that or a comparison game or anything, but he's thinking about the 70,000 people this month that have subscribed, 10 million views on YouTube this month that have watched. Cool. Let's keep growing. We're not at our mission yet. Who do I get to become in order to reach more people and serve at a higher level? What skills do I need to develop? What limiting beliefs do I get to let go of so that I can reach more people so we can think in a different way?

So I can be the coder example like you. I have a coding skill in my mind that allows me to expand the ability to reach more people quickly or create the video that I know will hit or whatever it might be to attract. And so that's the way I think about it. You know, in some months it goes down.

And as you've seen, and like the revenue goes down and the subscribers are less. And you're like, ah, you know, it's never fun to see that happen. But as you know, as human beings, we can't breathe in 24-7. We've got to breathe out. You know, there's things that have to expand and contract and expand and contract and continue to evolve. You know, you know this more than anyone as a, you know, someone who's studied the human body. And so, like you said, going back to the journey, really enjoying the journey of all of it.

Okay, we had a great month. Let's celebrate. Okay, we were down a little bit this month. Let's celebrate. We still impacted millions of lives. Let's celebrate it. You know, why are we getting upset about like, ah, it didn't grow as much. You know, the goal is to keep growing every day.

But you learn in the down months as well. And it makes you not get too comfortable. It makes you evolve. It makes you think differently. It makes you, okay, what's the skill? Maybe we needed another person on our team to help us here. Maybe I need to evolve as a leader. And I think all those things play into it. Yeah's that's so great to hear you say that um i've been

kind of thinking thinking along along the same lines i think in in the early days of the channel my motivations for it were a lot more selfish like oh i want the views i want the subscribers i want the revenue and stuff and now we've gotten to a point where like i don't really need any more money to be happier and so that's not really the point and i know so something that you talk about in the book is vision setting and defining the the kind of vision for your life and i in in the past i would have been like oh that's all it's all spiritual bs like who cares and now i'm like oh my god like vision is so important like figuring out what i actually want to do what does my life look like three five ten years from now and it is often focused around that question of impact and for me it's like how can i like

the way that i i think about it in my head weirdly is i want to have the same impact on other people that tim ferris had on me through his stuff and so how do we do that well that involves reaching a lot of people which in which means we grow perfect cool and what was having a quite like a breadth of impact um initially he was quite focused on a few things but then through the podcast and kind of similar to your stuff yeah it's it's really expanded but also depth of impact and so kind of going deep on certain topics long-form interviews maybe even in-person meetups and teaching in real life and all of that stuff i think would just be really really cool um so yeah i try my best to think more impact rather than selfish it isn't interesting i

mean for me i have a very similar story about how i started where i was transitioning playing uh arena football here in the United States, got injured. I had a surgery in my wrist and I was living in a cast, a full arm cast for six months like this. They did a bone graft on the wrist, took a bone out of the hip, put it in the wrist. So I wasn't able to turn the wrist or bend the arm for six months. And I was kind of in this position, which was just not as an athlete who's like always using your body it was it was not fun and uh that that was an end of August and that so for the next six months I had that on and that Christmas my my family and I did uh I guess I don't know if you

guys do secret Santa in the UK but they did oh yeah Santa where it's like you just you get one gift and you get one gift. You know, it's kind of like what we did that year. And I remember I got one gift from, and my brother was like choosing me as his, you know, picked me out of the hat and he got me the gift. And he didn't even wrap the gift. He's like a very tough, like, here you go. I hope you enjoy it.

He just gave me a book in a bag that he got from Barnes & Noble, and he said, here you go. And it was the four-hour work week. And I remember, you know, he got a guy who's dyslexic who doesn't like to read a book for Christmas. And I was like, okay. But something about the title grabbed me. It was in the transition of my life. My dream was over. I thought I was going to be playing football for years.

I didn't even think about, you know, building a business or online marketing. None for years. I didn't even think about building a business or online marketing. None of that. I didn't even know about the internet, really. I was just kind of like, okay, my dream is over. What do I do with the rest of my life? And I read this book in three days. And I remember at the end, I was just like going down every rabbit hole from this book. Every page, I was like checking out online and trying these things.

And I became obsessed with learning about the internet, online marketing, building networks through social media, doing online events, creating products. I invented a product, like all these things. And his book was kind of the catalyst for me to then go explore and learn from other people and learn other strategies. then go explore and learn from other people and learn other strategies. And, you know, I feel like all roads lead back to Tim Ferriss' For Our Work Week for so many of us. That was an eye-opener for us. That was a catalyst. In my first book, I wrote a whole page or two in the end of my book, like, dedicating,

you know, acknowledging Tim for being a pioneer. And, you know, think about it. He wrote one book that impacted me, that impacted you, and thousands and millions of other people that have then built their own millions of person communities have created content or businesses that have served so many people around the world. And I think it's cool that you and I could do something similar. We can be a catalyst for someone to then transform or go create something that could hopefully impact hundreds or thousands or millions of lives in their in their experience as well and

i think that's that's cool that we both have a similar story there yeah yeah i think the thinking of impact in this way is is really interesting um one thing that I struggle with to this day is this decision to kind of go part-time as a doctor and not do it full-time. And I'd often get a lot of comments being like, oh my God, how can you like, you know, leave medicine in the middle of a pandemic, et cetera, et cetera. And it really got me thinking like about the question of impact, because, you know, if people have done like statistical analyses on this like you know the the impact of an individual doctor in a country like the uk uh which is a very developed country has a surplus of people wanting to get into med school the impact of an

individual doctor is maybe over the course of an entire career you'll save um about seven or eight lives which is pretty good um but it doesn't take into account the uh the counterfactual impact so if i wasn't a doctor the next person would have gotten into med school in my place and would have been a doctor in my place because there is a surplus it's not like i'm in uh i don't know sub-saharan african country where i'm the only doctor or something like that and so the actual impact of me being a doctor is so so so little and i think that's a very uncomfortable thing for a lot of people to get their heads around that impact can be had in a way like inspiring people to do something or teaching

other people or inspiring people to start start a business or create content which then ultimately serves others and i think there's often at least kind of from some of the some of the messages i get there's often an undercurrent that if you do something that makes money that is bad um but i think these people fail to realize that money is created as a result of providing value um and so i've you know i'm i'm trying to become more okay with uh this sort of impact the sort of impact that you and tim and people have rather than the direct impact of oh i've helped this person by putting a putting an iv into their arm and giving them a drug. That's something I struggle with to this day. I'm curious. There's doctors in the US who are bigger personalities that have TV shows that also

do surgeries like once or twice a week. They're still practicing and they're making a big impact with their TV show or their content. I know those doctors. But I'm curious, because this is the second time you've mentioned this. We talked about this before we started recording as well. What would it look like if in the next 30 days, just a hypothetical scenario, you completely stopped being of service in that way, hands-on, one-on-one as a doctor? How would it make you feel right after you made that decision i'm done practicing oh it would feel very scary and i think it would it would feel very scary mostly for selfish reasons in that i would worry that oh but like you know i built my brand off of being a

doctor and being a medical student and what you know if if i'm not a doctor then i'm just just a youtuber and that feels like less less legit for some reason how long have you been a practicing doctor uh so i graduated med school in 2018 and then i worked full-time for two years and then i've been kind of very part-time since then got it it's only been two years so two years you've been practicing uh two years practicing yeah then six years six years of med school before then um so it would it would feel scary in that sense it would feel scary in the sense of like i think even now i can still convince myself that this the youtube channel the business everything else i can still sort of convince myself that it's all it's all just a side hustle it's not my main gig you know you're making more doing this than you are as a doctor yeah but still it's still in my mind i think i'm very risk averse

uh i don't like to do the whole oh quit your job and figure it out thing i very much want a solid solid solid foundation before i mean it sounds like you've got a solid foundation of nine passive revenue streams and multiple six-figure sources of income every month yeah it doesn't it doesn't really make any logical sense but i think that those those would be the two main fears the the fear of um losing out over time the fear of not being seen as credible or legitimate enough by just being a youtuber the The fear of not having that old world prestige of medicine, which is not quite the new world prestige of being a YouTuber. But those are all selfish things. I wouldn't be concerned at all about not having an impact on people because I know that I'm not special as a doctor. Anyone in my position will do the same thing.

You're not the best doctor in the world. You're not the most specialized expert in what you do. No, absolutely. Not that you're not talented, but there's tons of people that can do what you do. Exactly, yeah. I'm a junior doctor. I'm two years fresh out of med school.

I follow guidelines. I follow the evidence. They could probably do it better than you because they obsess over it. Yeah, the people who obsess over it could probably do it better than me as well. They go all in on it. So in a sense, you're doing a disservice

by giving 10% of your time and energy to helping people in an area as opposed to the people that really want to do it full time. Yeah, that is an interesting way of looking at it. I hadn't quite thought of that. I mean, imagine me showing up at your office and saying, is this the thing you love doing the most? Are you the top person in this? Or you care about being the best and like researching, obsessing this and masterminding with all the other doctors to make sure that this is the right decision for me as your patient? well, I kind of just dabble in this like a little part-time and I just, you know, really I've got nine other revenue streams on the side that are my main thing and this is just something that I kind of hold on to because I want to feel good.

Yeah, I think I'd – that's a good point. The way I kind of see it is – I'm not trying to make you wrong here or make a decision here. I'm just trying to shed light on a possibility. Because as you continue to grow, if you've got 4 million YouTube subscribers, 5 million YouTube subscribers, 10 million, are you still going to be wanting to practice? Maybe. But as more and more of your time and energy goes towards impacting millions and millions as opposed to one-on-one every day i guess it all just depends what you want i know there's other doctors that

do youtube and are practicing full-time and they make it work um but is that your mission and that's why i always go back down to like mission and vision and maybe it is maybe it's like i want to be a doctor for the next 30 years and let that credibility lead with my decisions and so people see me in that way but you don't need that it sounds like to also make an impact and make an income and have fun yeah yeah that's a really good point um yeah i think if i if i think of my mission at all and all that stuff it always comes down to teaching it never comes down to practicing interesting yeah teaching you've got five to seven classes on skillshare you got you're teaching on youtube

all the time interesting so what would it look like if you had 10 million subscribers would you be like oh maybe i don't need to do this doctor thing if you had five million or would you want to keep holding on to giving 10 effort to helping people in one area of your life? I think it's sort of like that question of what does enough money look like? Because I think for me, holding on to medicine, I'm kind of doing it because of risk aversion. Really? Yeah, I'm doing it because of a sense of oh okay if the youtube thing doesn't work out okay i've got this as a fullback option that this is very irrational

i know it's so how many i mean please talk me out of this this is on the scale of okay of your nine revenue streams yep how far down does your income as a doctor fit how much you make as a doctor monthly on average if if i were working full-time about no part-time right now oh part-time right now your current like current money you're making right now as a doctor how much you bring in two two hundred dollars a month two hundred dollars a month is all you bring in correct and you're holding on to so let me ask you this if you had a two hundred dollar a month ebook that came in and it took you i don't know 40 hours a month to maintain it for 200 bucks okay so so the reason i'm holding on to it is it's not because of that income it's more like if i needed to go all in yeah if i need

to go all in in the future then i will i won't have forgotten everything i will still have kept my finger in it and then it becomes more of an option further down the line. How much could you make full-time if you were full-time right now as a doctor? At my level, probably 40,000 a year, 50,000 a year, something like that. 50,000 a year.

You make that in a month on Skillshare. Yep. So you're doing something full-time. You make 50,000 in a year. You'd make it in a month without doing anything that's a good point 50 000 max that's all you could make uh at my current so in the uk so 10 10 years from now i'd be making 120 of course 120 000 that's sort of the the upper limit of doctors in the uk. Okay, in 10 years. And you make that in one week with all your revenue streams.

Yeah, ish. Right. This is pretty, yeah, you're right. This is pretty irrational. Wait a minute. So you make 200 bucks a month right now. And you could make, if you went all in, if you obsessed, if you gave your life to this mission,

you can make 50 grand, maybe 55,000 in a year. If you went 60, 80 hours a week for the hopes in 10 years of making $120,000, maybe. And you would save seven people's lives. Yes. As opposed to changing millions of people's lives through your content, which is the thing you love to do, which is teach. And you're holding on to it for the potential that maybe all these revenue streams run dry and you won't be able to figure it out if one thing goes down. If you had all the energy and thought and skill that you've developed over your time, you wouldn't be able to figure out how to launch a new revenue stream. Damn, you're right. Yeah. That's so true i feel like this is turning into a therapy session which is great because i've genuinely

never really thought in this way before because in my mind it was just oh oh it's a good backup option but you just like really listing it out like that what would happen makes it seem completely absurd yeah what would happen if you what how many hours a week are you putting in as a doctor right now oh like four four hours okay so you're putting in 10 to 12 hours a month yep so 120 hours a year or something what if you completely eliminated that idea from your mind that you were letting go of that time 10 hours hours a month, 12 hours a month. You weren't going to be thinking about it. You weren't going to have to show up somewhere and practice it. You were just going to use that energy, that thought,

that emotional strength to develop the next program, to make your channel even bigger, to go all in on hiring more people, to do these things to help you expand, if you want to, and serve and teach more people on a broader scale, as opposed to, 10, 12 hours a month, I'm going to hold on to this thing. What type of impact do you think you'd be able to make?

And in the last couple of years, you said you had no clue you'd get to 2 million subscribers on YouTube. If you had that extra time and thought, how much bigger do you think you'd get it in the next two years? Yeah, I think it would, to it feels it feels less like a you know the the physical time the hour spent and more like the the mental weight of that because i do mental emotional weight right i do genuinely think about this like almost every day i think oh am i making the wrong decision by

by staying going all in on medicine it's wait a minute. You think about this every day. Maybe five minutes, maybe 20 minutes. You think about this. You ruminate on this. How many minutes is that adding up? And how much energy is that consuming that's holding you back, that's making you think? As opposed to all that energy focused on building and creating something that you truly, truly love and want to do. Good point. It's quite a lot of energy spent on holding on to this thing because it's thinking about it it's like you know it's like being in i i know this feeling because it's like being in a

relationship for for too long and every day you think should i be in this relationship or not is this the right person for me or not uh i really love this person i care about them and i don't want to hurt them. And could I find someone as good as them in the future? But they have this quality I really like and maybe they could be a good mother and maybe they could be this. But is it really fueling your heart and your soul? And I know people watching or listening have had that experience in a previous relationship or maybe they're in one right now where they're having this everyday conversation. Should I stay in this? should I not?

If you're constantly questioning this, it's almost like you either need to go all in and say, I'm making the decision to stay in this and I'm going to do this 12 hours a month thing to hold on for maybe 10 years, make $100,000 if I lose all my money. But it sounds like you've got the skills to be able to generate a revenue stream in a moment if you wanted to. If everything went away, could you make $100,000 in a year if you needed to with your skills? Yes. Yeah. Not being a doctor. Oh, yeah.

Absolutely. Okay. So if all your money went away, if all your business, if your YouTube shut down, if core Skillshare went out of business, there's all these things. Could you figure out how to make money on a platform to make a hundred grand in a year uh maybe not year one but definitely by year two yeah okay so by year two you could do this i think you could do it in three months personally yeah maybe by year two you'd still be making double what you'd be making as a doctor full-time by year two if you had nothing that's a good point yeah what's what's stopping me from letting go of that i think the big thing is the

prestige the credibility not just being a youtuber i'm hearing you say this over and over and i'm i'm not trying to convince you one way or another i'm just trying to shed light and reflect you And I'm not trying to convince you one way or another. I'm just trying to shed light and reflect to you what you're saying to me and what's possible for you. And I know as someone who's – if you're telling me I love to be a teacher, this is what I obsess over, this is what I really want to do, but you're doing something else where you're not doing it, then part of your heart is held back. The energy is held back from you going all in on that. And I just know when people go all in on the thing they love magical things start to happen maybe it doesn't happen right away but magical things start to happen not only impact wise but financially and i know that you'll

financially start to really expand and evolve and i think it's one of the things that for me you know i want to talk about mindset while we talk about this, the mindset of making more money. This is my belief. When you go all in on something and you truly believe in your heart that this is what you're meant to do and you let go of something that you you're like, ah, but I don't want to lose this because what if they're going to be a great partner in the future? What if they're going to be a great parent? Will they show these qualities that maybe they could work out for me? As opposed to, no, going all in on the thing that you know you're meant to do. And the signs continue to show you, oh, you're good at making passive income. You've got nine revenue streams.

You're good at YouTube. You just, what, grew a couple million in the last few years? Like it's grown extremely fast. You're good at this. It's almost like what if you obsessed a couple million in the last few years. It's grown extremely fast. You're good at this. It's almost like what if you obsessed and went all in on these things? What could you create? How much faster could you do these things? So for me, what is the mindset that you've developed in general to get to this place that's helped you make more money? And did you always feel like you could make money as a kid did you always feel like money came naturally to you or did you feel like money was bad and wrong and you

had to shift that at some point yeah i think as a kid the idea of making money it was it was more around like oh i could you could, you know, I can, I can upgrade my laptop if I have a bit more money and I can supplement the money that I make from my birthdays. And like, you know, that, that kind of thing by making money on the internet. Then over time, especially after I discovered the four-hour workweek, it was a case of, okay, you know, I think, I think, I think the way I think about it these days is that, and I'm, I'm kind of reflecting on this based on what you just said that the the way i think of money is that we we all need to tick the box of making enough money to survive through some something or another um

for most of us that's through our day job through our day job we make enough money to live off and then we do our the stuff we actually enjoy in the evenings and in the weekends and for me it was always a case of okay i never want to be in that position where i am shackled to a job that i might not necessarily enjoy uh just for the sake of that money which is what which which which was then the mindset that made me develop all these streams of income and at every junction thinking okay how do i how do i turn this into another income stream how do i how do i how do i i how do i do it that way um and the thing that actually sparked this so before i work because it was one of them but then since i i got into med school every every time i would meet another doctor i would ask the question

that hey if you were to win the lottery would you still do medicine that's a great question if you won a lottery would you do a lot uh would you do medicine still and so like in my in my polling casually polling every basically every doctor i know about half of them said no they would leave immediately and the other half said yes they would still do it because it's fun but they would do it part-time uh i.e not like 80 hours a week but instead maybe like 30 hours a week or 40 hours a week to be able to spend more time with their kids or be able to kind of do things they cared about and they made the point that you know working 80 hours a week is less good for the patients than a doctor working 40 hours a week or 30 hours a week with more time and more energy to give more clarity more thoughtfulness

more attention yeah yeah and in that time i don't think i've met yeah i've not met anyone who has said they would continue to work in medicine full-time if they didn't need the money and that really set off an alarm bell in my mind being like okay cool if 100 of doctors that i know would change what they're doing based on if they won the lottery i want to get to the like ideally the kind of life i want for myself is the kind where if i did suddenly win the lottery or suddenly got an extra 10 million in the bank it would not change anything about the way that i live that would be like a dream kind of goal of mine to live the sort of life where the answer to that question is i would not change anything at all would you keep practicing

medicine no i wouldn't if you had 10 million in the bank you'd stop if i had 10 million in the bank i would stop practicing medicine i would just do youtube videos that i cared about uh and i would teach things in real life so you don't love free seminars so you don't love it because i'd probably teach medical students i i do enjoy teaching you teach them i just don't want to be i just don't enjoy doing it yeah, I don't really want to be practicing. So that's why for me, when I launched my podcast, School of Greatness, I was like, I'm going to do something that I love and not make money. And I'm going to show up and do it out of the love of it and of the mission for it.

And eventually, I do want to make money, but it wasn't the main intention. And I think it sounds like if you had more money which you already have enough to to quit and be fine for a few years it sounds like you would quit you would stop and you would go all in on this yeah yeah i i think i think the the problem that i have is a very much an irrational internal thing is how the goalpost keeps on changing. And, you know, our business is going to do, I don't know, like 3 million revenue with like 80% profit margins this year. That is way beyond any reasonable person's point of I have enough money. And yet I still think, oh, but what if I get cancelled?

What if I say something on a podcast? I need 10 million now you know i was speaking to a um a startup founder in the u.s who has a company valued at a billion dollars and he was saying well he's got about 10 million in the bank but he thinks 25 million is is really where he's going to feel comfortable and i was just sort of laughing and then i realized hang on that's basically what i'm doing yeah exactly the same thing someone who's just getting started on youtube would be like i'd love to make three million dollars this year on youtube i would quit everything if i made a million dollars so so what's your number there these days how much do you need to bring how much do you need to bring in for you to say oh i'm going to actually go all in on this

i think it's less about a number and more about actually just being okay with it's like think thinking like these questions that you've asked me have really like thrown me forward because i've never genuinely considered that and i think i'm i'm past the number where yeah you know i think if i was being objective if i had like a million in the bank i would feel okay this will actually support me for 20 years i can live with a 40 40 000 salary yes 50 000 salary for 20 years i'm pretty sure i could find a way to make money in 20 years with a million in the bank and so yeah i'm way past that point already i think it's it's the fear it's the prestige it's the status anxiety it's the

that irrational stuff it's a time investment you've 80 years of your life investing in this skill and this you know yeah i think it's also i think it's also like an insecurity around do i have value outside of my if you're not a doctor my if i'm not a doctor exactly like do i have credibility can i really talk about productivity if i'm not saying hey when i was a was a doctor, I did X, Y, Z. How long can I really trade off of the fancy university I went to to talk about how to study for exams? I think that's the main concern. Who are the top YouTubers you really respect?

Peter McKinnon, Matt D'Avella, Thomas Frank. Tim Ferriss, well, I wouldn't really call him a youtuber yeah all of these guys are full-time youtubers right right yeah i mean they weren't on the side yeah they weren't well they also weren't like i mean matt he was he was like a struggling film film editor right that now talks about productivity and life hacking. He wasn't like some prestigious film school documentarian. I don't know. Who else did you mention? Peter was a photographer.

Peter McKinnon, photography. Yeah, I mean, but you respect him as a content creator and what he's built for his life through the content creation and his art and his expression. I don't know. I think about Mr. Beast or something. Maybe you respect him.

It's like he's just a kid who's brilliant and executes like a machine. He didn't have some college degree. I don't know. Maybe he did, but he didn't have something he was known for. It's like you become known for the thing that you're teaching as well and the people that you can help and the results they get. You become known for the thing that you're teaching as well and the people that you can help and the results they get. You become known for the results that other people get. I wasn't, you know, I was a former athlete.

Why should people be listening to me? You know, it's like I didn't have some fancy degree. It took me seven years to finish college. It's not like I'm this, you know, wise expert who like, you know, learned all these things. I learned through like the school of hard knocks of just like suffering and going through pain and being like i want the answers let me find the answers and then apply it and teach it and and share it so i think the fact that you went after something you built your career yeah i mean people are do you think people are really

respecting you as from your experience as a doctor? You don't teach that. No, they really don't. Yeah. There's nothing to do with anything that I teach. People value your advice, but they're not looking to you for the answers of like, teach me how to heal my whatever. Yeah. Broken arm. They're not coming to you for the thing that you're doing.

They're coming to you. They're not coming to you because you are a doctor. Oh, let me learn his productivity and passive income streams because he's a doctor. No, they're coming to you because you know how to do those things and you've applied them to become a doctor and everything else in your life. That's what they come for.

And that's how you're helping people. You're not teaching medical advice, are you? Yeah, no, absolutely not. And even if I lost it all, the business died, YouTube channel died, everything died overnight, lost all the investments, lost all the money in the bank. The sort of stuff I would teach would be entrepreneurship,

coding, videography, the creator stuff. I would not venture into teaching medicine unless I was kind of doing it for fun for like friends of mine, that kind of thing. Right, right. If you're like, oh, I have a cut here and you'd be like okay go do this and go get this yeah okay yeah i'm gonna let you ruminate on this for a little bit and think about it i'm gonna text you in like a week and see where you're at with this yeah message me yeah this is so interesting

i've genuinely never thought about it about it in this way before i think you just laying it out in in such clear language has made me realize how well i think a lot of people i think a lot of people this is i think i think i can relate to this and a lot of people watching listening can relate to this because we've all done this in some area of our life whether it was i'm in a career that i don't really enjoy or that i maybe i hate but i stay there because the benefits are because the credibility or the community i've built or whatever. But you know it's not what you want to do, but you stay. There's a relationship that I've stayed in that people can feel like, yes, I've stayed in this for six months too long, six years too long, 30 years too long when I knew it wasn't right. But, well, we had the kids and we had the family integration and we had the house together.

So it was a safety backup plan because it was too risky to go out there and have courage and go all in on something else or be alone for a period of time and try to create something new. So we feel safe with this. This is the same thing here. So I'm not telling you what to do. I'm just trying to reflect back to you and see what's possible from a place of vision, not from a place of fear or status anxiety and how much greater of an impact you could create by in a wise manner making a decision either way and giving your energy towards the thing that you think is going to help the most. So I'm going to connect you about this later. But I'm curious, a lot of your content revolves around being productive.

Since we've talked about that, you're an expert in this. This is what people come to you for. They don't come to you for medical advice. It revolves around being productive. What would you say are the best tools to increasing productivity for someone that says, you know, I'm already overworked. I'm already overwhelmed. I don't have the time to create a passive income stream, or just improve like the health of my life. What are some of those main tools that you use or you

teach to help increase productivity for people? Yes, I think the first step is to really get clear on what productivity means. And so I think a lot of people view productivity as just being efficiency. But to me, productivity is, efficiency is like part of it. But the other part of it is living intentionally. Am I going in a direction that I want to go? So for example, you know, it's not very productive to drive at 100 miles per hour if you're going in the wrong direction. So really figuring out that direction.

And also, to me, productivity is, am I doing, am I like, basically, am I having fun along the way? Because the more fun, certainly for me, I found the more fun I have, the more productive I naturally am as a result. And I think a lot of the advice around productivity basically talks about it basically centers on how can you do more things if it sucks it's like okay well you have a to-do list you have your this you have your weekly reviews but really i think again optimizing for what's fun optimizing for enjoyment and either picking something that's already fun or more likely finding ways to enjoy

the thing that you're already doing that is the thing that really moves the needle for productivity. And then everything else, you know, the to-do lists, whether you use Notion or Todoist or things or all these other apps, all these other hacks, these are just like very minor things

that very minor tweaks. But the thing that moves the needle, I found is make it really easy to start and make it really fun to do. So easy to start, meaning essentially essentially this is the the subject of the book that i'm writing and i i have to hand in the proposal today so i've just been having all this stuff percolating in my head um i call it the the the three horsemen

and the three horsemen that like kill us when it comes to productivity is number one procrastination number two distraction and number three burnout yes, procrastination is really a problem with getting started. There's that inertia, like to start anything, it's like it takes a bit of effort. And so the way we can defeat the horsemen of procrastination is just make it super easy, the easiest thing possible. People say you should set ambitious goals, et cetera, et cetera, make a change in the universe. That's all well and good. But if you're struggling with productivity and procrastination you don't want an ambitious goal you want a really really really easy goal you know i struggle with procrastination when i think i want to write a new york times bestseller i don't struggle with procrastination when i think instead you know what

i just want to write one paragraph that i'm happy with today that is how i make it so easy to get started yeah i think it's so true when you think think of the big daunting goal and you're like, okay, I got to get started on that. And I'm going to do that right now. It seems like, but it's so big. How do I do that right now? But if you're like, you know what? This is a vision of mine. I want to create this.

But what can I do where I just enjoy writing one page or enjoy writing an outline with a few bullet points? And that's what I'm going to do today. Not try to do the whole thing in a day or a weekend, but I going to do that one thing today i like that approach yeah and then progress made made one step at a time and so yeah that's sort of step number one you overcome procrastination by just making it really easy by reducing all the friction reducing all the i call it environmental friction and emotional friction environmental friction in that if i want to practice the guitar i have my guitar over there because it's in it's in sight and in reach it's not in my closet just sitting there and emotional friction is like you know the perfectionism the fear the self-doubt the guilt the i need to wait

until i have a perfect camera setup before i make a youtube video because otherwise because you know you know otherwise people are going to laugh at me or i need to wait until i'm in better shape before i go to the gym because i don't want people to judge me while I'm at the gym. It's the emotional friction that is often a bigger source of procrastination than almost anything else. And that's just, you know, as you know, it's a long term battle to overcome that side of ourselves that's afraid and self-doubting, which is all the things that I'm currently doing when I think about this decision to leave medicine, interestingly. currently doing when i think about this decision to leave medicine interestingly um so that's procrastination the second one is distraction and i think distraction only is only really a problem when we're not having fun like no one gets distracted from watching netflix no one gets

distracted from hanging out with their friends or playing board games that's like my source of fun but we get distracted from like i don't know working on a thing that's either hard or that we find boring um and you know there's all all sorts of techniques that we can use to get over that. One of the biggest ones is gamification. Actually find a way to turn it into a game, even if it's really dull, you know, like studying for med school exams. If you find a way to turn it into a game to incorporate a challenge and progress, like tracking your scores, color coding things,

I would color code my revision timetables like red, orange, green, and I'd see the change to green over time and that would feel good. So even if I was not enjoying the thing, I would enjoy the gamification of the thing. And there's tons of evidence about how that really works to make things more fun. Bringing other people on board is another big one.

You know, again, to use MedSchool as an example, studying with friends is always more fun than studying alone. Building this business, you know know working with a team is more fun than working solo anything we can do to incorporate more people into the thing that we're doing will automatically make it more fun and therefore as a side effect will make us more productive um and i think what i've certainly learned about productivity over over the last few years of researching extensively is that i think productivity is kind of like a trojan horse in that a lot people want and i certainly wanted productivity hacks and productivity tips and ways to be more efficient but the deeper you go into it the

more you realize that it's not actually about that it's actually more about you know the stuff that you talk about living a life that's aligned with your values living intentionally living living living your your vision and what you find meaningful and when you do that then you then the productivity takes care of itself like you probably don't need it's not about it's not about getting yeah it's not about getting more things done it's about doing things you enjoy in a fun way and and doing those things consistently and enjoying the process. And if you're feeling like overwhelmed or procrastinated, you probably need to realign like what are the things that are at least fun for me and how can I make them more fun?

How can I gamify it? How can I add other people that I enjoy doing this with? It's like how can I make chores like my favorite part of the day where it's like it's not the thing that's the chore that I'm dragging my feet on cleaning the dishes or taking out the trash it's like no i've actually trained myself to enjoy this process so much because we do it as a family because we turn on music and dance when we do it because that's when we we reward ourselves whatever it might be and i think that's when we you know we gotta we gotta train our brains differently around some of these things you know yeah absolutely so i think those those for me are like the things that actually move the needle for productivity like

make it easy and make it fun and then everything else is just kind of fun to note out about like oh which app do you use and you know what are the tricks and i've got i've got plenty of tricks but really the tricks are not the thing that actually makes any difference to anyone's productivity the tricks are in a way a distraction from what actually matters which is from productivity yeah you know yeah make it easy make it fun yes so make it easier make it fun um you said distraction you said procrastination what was the third one the third one was burnout um burnout yeah so this that's like a you know if if something is easy and something is fun then and and i think this is something that i'm still i'm still trying to figure out i'm doing a lot of research around around this topic where i will find myself working until like 11 p.m midnight just like doing business stuff or like reading a management book or working on a youtube video

because it's so fun that i'm just not taking care of myself and i think from basically all of the evidence like i haven't i don't think i've yet experienced this personally myself i probably have maybe i'm just bullshitting myself but you know that's just a pathway to burn out like there is too much you know there is such a thing as too much of a good thing too much fun too much productivity is bad even if you're enjoying yourself um and so that bit is just basically about taking breaks and you know one of the biggest tips that i found um i found really helpful for me is i don't know if you if you have that feeling where like, I often get it where I'd get to the end of a day. And I'd always, I have this sense of dissatisfaction that, oh, I could have done more, you know,

in between recording the podcast with Lewis and my friends coming over, I had a half an hour window. You know, I scrolled Twitter in that time. Instead, I could have made progress on my book. What's wrong with me? And, you know, it's just, I'm choosing to just flagellate myself for no reason because I'm really unsatisfied

with like what I've managed to do that day. And it's just completely stupid. If I find myself doing that, I think, no, what the hell are you doing? I've had a great day. Life is good. I'm having fun, enjoying the journey. Business is doing well.

We're profitable. We're helping people. That's enough. I don't need to try and eke out every moment of efficiency every moment in my day um why do why do we why do we as human why do we as humans tend to do that i feel like that's a common theme as human beings like oh i had this open window and i should have done i should have done this i should have done more of this i should created that. Why do we as humans tend to do that? Is that just kind of social pressure you think?

Is that the way our culture has been built on being the most efficient and productive people we can be? Is that because we're always obsessed with wanting to buy more things or make more money? Why do you think we're wired that way as humans in general? Not everyone, but it seems like a lot. Yeah, this is an area i'm doing a lot of a lot of reading around i think i think for me personally it's fear-based as we've kind of just talked about it's if i don't keep on running at 120 miles per hour someone will overtake me and then that would be bad because then i will suddenly lose all my

subscribers and all my revenue and all my income streams overnight and it goes into a completely irrational loop of i need to constantly be on my a game and constantly be moving because similar to the stuff that you know that i believe that if you're if you're not growing you're dying it's like oh okay but i could be growing faster and i could be i'm leaving money on the table and i could be building even more of a safety net because in case I lose the job, I'll have 30 years worth of savings rather than 20 years worth of savings. That's probably what it is for me. Yeah.

I haven't yet done enough reading to figure out, to try and understand what it's like for other people. Do you have that feeling at all? That strife or did you in the past? Yeah, I think I did in the past where I was broke on my sister's couch for about a year and a half trying to figure, you know. And I didn't have, I didn't think I had skills or tools to make money. And so I was like, okay, what am I going to do with my life? Luckily, my sister let me stay for a year and a half rent-free, and I kind of ate all her food for free, and I didn't, you know.

or let me stay for a year and a half rent-free, and I kind of ate all our food for free, and I didn't, you know. While I was learning these things, this is when I was like reading blogs, you know, reading for our work week and trying to implement these things, studying other thought leaders and the content they were creating.

This is when I was doing kind of like local networking events and started learning events. I was inventing a product, and I remember in 2008, I was using Alibaba.com. And I was like sent over this janky design to a few different people in China. And then I remember like all the money I had, I think it was like 160 bucks. It was like all the money I had.

I wired it to some bank in China. And I was like, hopefully they send me the prototype. And I think it was like four weeks later, I got like this box. And it's like the most incredible. I was like hopefully they send me the prototype and I think it was like four weeks later I got like this box and it's like the most incredible I was like I got it my idea is here it arrived and um you know it's definitely needed more work and prototypes and this and this and I continued down the path but it was like I didn't I didn't have any money and I remember every dollar mattered for that year and a half window. Like every dollar was going towards food or was going towards like something to help me improve.

And when I had that feeling, I can't speak for everyone else, but when I had that feeling and I started to make money, I did not want to go back to that place. I was saving everything. I was just like I was, if I had to travel, I was in the middle back seat of the cheapest airline with as many connections or I took a Greyhound bus places or I never paid for a hotel room. I remember it wasn't until like five, six years ago when I actually

paid for my own hotel room. I was like, who do I know? Whose couch can I stay on? Who's got an extra bed? I'll sleep on the floor to save this extra $150 for a hotel room. It didn't make sense for me to spend money on a – I was like, why spend money on a bed at a hotel when I can use that money for something else and just try to meet people and crash? I remember I was literally kicked out of a hostel that I was paying like, I don't know, $8 for a night in Philadelphia. that I was paying like, I don't know, $8 for a night in Philadelphia. It was like 20 bunk beds in one room,

and they somehow double booked my bunk bed or whatever. And they had to kick me out that night. And I remember walking the streets of Philadelphia with my suitcase. I was waiting to go back on the Greyhound bus to get back to Ohio later the next day. And I was like, I'm either going to sleep in the sidewalk on a bench in a city that I'm not familiar with, or I got to meet someone and go find a place to crash. I went into a bar. I kid you not. I went into a bar.

I don't drink alcohol, but I went into a bar and I started having conversation with this group of people, telling them what I'm up to, just like building a rapport. And within 30 minutes, they were like, oh, why don't you come crash on our futon, stay the night. I literally stayed in some stranger's futon, got up in the morning, left, went to the bus station, and then drove back. And it was just about how can I be as resourceful as possible because I was afraid to go back to a place of being broke.

And for years, I was afraid of that. Probably wasn't until about four years ago i was like okay i can i know i can make money again if i lose it all like it's gonna be okay so i understand your position but i also wasn't as far along as you are you know within the first few years of getting started uh you know of the youtube growth and everything else so you're much farther along financially than i was in those first couple years yeah lots to lots to ruminate about after after this call i appreciate you pushing me on this this is like really useful of course um what um so we got these three areas

of procrastination distraction distraction, and burnout. What do you think is the area that is the most difficult for people to overcome? I think it depends on what stage of the journey you're at. I think if I do a quick back of my head poll of every message I've ever had about this, procrastination is the biggest one. why do people procrastinate so much what is the main cause of procrastination ah yeah so um one one theory about this which which i agree with is okay so basically i think i think it's in two parts number one there's this uh in concept of in psychology called uh exponential discounting basically if i offered you a hundred dollars now or a hundred dollars in a year's time you would

you would definitely take the hundred dollars now um even if i offered you 110 in a year's time you would still prefer the hundred dollars right now because we prefer short-term gains over long-term gains but if i offered you like a million dollars in a year's time you'd be like all right i'm gonna delay my gratification right now and get the million dollars in a year's time and if you if you ask enough people this question you get this like exponential like curve over time where this is how much how much we care about our future selves compared to our current selves and so usually when we procrastinate it's because we have to do something right now which is somewhat unpleasant for the sake of a very long-term gain like i don't want to do my ab workout right now

there's 12 minutes of pain for the sake of oh you know better health 12 months from now a year from now 20 years from now it's it starts to it's like genuinely really really really hard to motivate ourselves to suffer in the short term for the sake of the long term uh i think that's one like completely rational reason why people procrastinate because you just can't be bothered to do the thing that's going to have long-term results but i think also procrastination often is like putting things off oh i could do this tomorrow uh and it's weird because like again there's a bunch of evidence in psychology about this how what we think of our future selves is like a very idealized version of our future self. Like right now, I'm thinking, you know what?

After this episode, I've got some friends coming along. I really want to get like a burger. I haven't had a burger in a while. But I'm thinking, you know, tomorrow I'm going to have a salad instead. Yeah, my future self tomorrow will want to have a salad. So our future self is like an idealized version. And so we think, oh, you know, I don't have the energy to do this right now,

but six weeks from now or tomorrow, my future self will. And this is why, you know, I find myself, you know, if- And then we always procrastinate because we never do it. Exactly, exactly. And like, if someone emails me asking me to give a talk at something that I don't really care about, but it's two months from now, I think, oh, oh look at my calendar it's so free two months from now i mean yeah of course of course

i say yes to that and then i always regret it when it comes to two months from now because i don't yeah we just don't realize that who we are right now is who we will who exactly who we'll be tomorrow with exactly the same energy levels and exactly the same mindset yes same mindset um i think those two things the exponential discounting over time and also the fact that we consider our future selves to be an idealistic version of ourselves that is just bad and leads to procrastination especially if we're procrastinating from something that's hard that's not clearly defined and that we think is going to be unpleasant and so we make it easier we make it more clearly defined and we make it

more fun and again all those things help with procrastination as well make it we make it easier we make it more clearly defined and we make it more fun and again all those things help with procrastination as well make it easier make it more clearly defined and make it fun if you do those three things it'll help you procrastinate less or hopefully help you eliminate procrastination okay i like that procrastination is probably the biggest problem i think distraction is the second biggest and to be honest burnout is only really a problem for the people who are so productive that they need to worry about burnouts um i think so that's i i get very few questions from people saying i'm so productive to the point that i just love working so much that i get burned out usually actually people get burned out if they're working on things they don't enjoy exactly yeah it's about

redirecting your energy towards things you're fun because if something's fun you never want to stop the game like you stop the game because you're like i don't know it's 3 a.m in the morning we find we gotta sleep at some point so let's go to bed and then you dream about playing again and you're like let's do it again tomorrow so if you can create your life around that is like this is a fun game and i enjoy this you're not gonna feel burnout that is like this is a fun game and I enjoy this, you're not going to feel burnout. You might need like a break every now and then. Like, okay, let me take a week off and like just go, I don't know,

on a lake or go on a vacation somewhere and just like water ski. I don't know, something where you can just clear your mind, but then you can get back to the game. And if you can design your life that way, that's a pretty cool experience. That's a pretty cool journey that you get to live. So burnout, it's just like you're working on things you don't enjoy. Because you've enjoyed it, you'd want to spend more time on it. You'd obsess about it. You'd be thinking about it all day, all night. You'd dream about it. So burnout's that. Gotcha. So distraction is something that's massive for so many people because obviously because of social media and because of just, you know, whatever games that people want to play that are more fun than the activity they want to do.

How do people eliminate distraction when it's just they're constantly on their phone? It's like you have to put your phone in a lock, a safe somewhere in order to do that or there are other ways you can do that or is it again making it smaller bite-sized items that you can tackle every day not trying to spend eight hours doing one thing but really saying okay for the next 50 minutes i'm going to do this and then i'm going to be okay with what i completed and allow yourself time to be distracted on twitter for 30 minutes like you said like how do we do this yeah i think it's really all of the above um there's there is one school of thought that says basically the solution to distraction is to throw away your phone. If you lock your phone away, turn off

Netflix, do not disturb, set some kind of app on your Mac that blocks all websites, then you will not get distracted. I mean, yeah, that works. I'm not a huge fan of that approach. I think the way I approach distraction, again, it just comes back down to make it fun. Like, how do I make this thing so fun to do that I would rather do the thing than watch Netflix? I would rather do the thing than check notifications. And I still do, you know, I still have my phone face down

and on do not disturb mode if I really want to get work done, because even if something is fun, there's still that notification that can pull us away from it and that can look sort of attention switch and then that's generally bad for us. But again, I think with distraction for me, the needle is moved by making it fun. And the way that I'm kind of describing this in the book

is a five-part framework that spells G-A-M-E-S, games. So it's like fun and games. Gamification, autonomy, mastery, environment, and social. uh gamification autonomy mastery environment and social gamification we've talked about turn it into a point system uh the two elements of gamification are challenge and progress so you know i used to be addicted to world of warcraft where you're just like grinding grinding grinding but it's challenging and i see the progress i see the xp bar filling up i see myself leveling up that's really addictive the more we can we can fake those things and hack those things into the stuff that we're doing, the more fun it's going to be, the less distracted we're going to be, crucially.

And, you know, people often talk about, or occasionally you'll hear parents complaining that, oh, their kids are super distractible, or this is, you know, my kid is so ADHD, like not in the clinical setting, but just generally that they're just so so distractible i can never get them to sit still and do stuff and then those same kids are waking up at three o'clock in the morning to log on to minecraft to like play with their friends like you know these kids are not suffering from distraction problems they're suffering from a problem with work that's really freaking boring to the point they're getting distracted from it um and so like learning from video game designers who i think are the world experts on human psychology uh what are the things that go into video games that make stuff more fun

and how like if we have to how can we put that more into into the stuff that we're doing um so that's the g a for autonomy like autonomy is one of the core drivers of human human motivation daniel pink writes about this in the book drive which is very good uh basically when we feel we have ownership of something when we feel we uh yeah we're in control that makes everything more fun and the the sort of the practical hack that i use for this uh i got from seth godin which is just a subtle mindset shift um and i remember there was a there was a moment when you know it was it was about this time last year actually uh i was i was working as a doctor there was a moment when, you know, it was, it was about, it was about this time last year, actually, I was, I was working as a doctor, it was full blown pandemic, all that, all that jazz, I'd got into the end of a 13 hour long shift. And the nurse said to me, Hey, Ali,

you know, this patient needs an IV, can you put a cannula so we can give them fluids overnight? And I was like, Oh, no, my heart sank. I was like, shit, I was just about to go home. And now this patient needs needs fluids. And if the nurse wasn't able to put the IV must be really hard. So it's going to take me half an hour to do it. And while I was kind of getting the supplies thinking, oh, you know, woe is me for having to do this. I heard someone in the next bay, one of the patients talking to one of their relatives about how how much of a privilege it was to be in the hospital and how much they loved the NHS, the National Health Service. And I, I realized at moment that i i wasn't being a good ambassador at least like internally

i think i would have i would have put on an act externally but internally i was feeling resentment and i remember the blog post that i came across from seth godin which is that if we're finding ourselves not enjoying stuff we just need to change our mindset from i have to to i get to and immediately i was like okay i get to put in this IV. I get to make a difference in this person's life. I get to have the privilege of, you know, helping them in their hour of need, giving them fluids overnight. So their baby's going to be fine.

They're going to be over fine. I was working on obstetrics at the time. And it just immediately made the thing more fun. And I think that spoke to this core driver of autonomy that when I felt it was the nurse telling me I had to do this and it's part of my job and I have to it's not fun but when it's like oh i get to do this i have gratitude it's immense privilege it just becomes more fun automatically um yeah a friend of mine a friend of mine i think that's a great example and something i learned about nine years ago eight years ago a friend and coach of mine chris, who's been on my show many times, he teaches the process from gaining perspective of when we say I have to do something, how does it make us feel?

We might feel resentment. We might be dragging our feet. We come from the language and mindset of I have to as opposed to when you said I get to. It's more of like I get to do this because people would love to have my job. I get to do this because it gives me – I get to, it's more of like I get to do this because people are – people would love to have my job. I get to do this because it gives me – I get to help someone else. I get to do this because it brings me a paycheck that provides for my lifestyle. I get to do this because it offers so much more. He takes it a third step farther.

He says where he has you go from I have to, I get to, and then I'm blessed to. I'm blessed to do this. I'm blessed to do this. I'm blessed to do this because. Because, you know, my life has meaning and purpose, and this is an important task right now that could save someone's life. I'm blessed to do this because I've been trained as a doctor for eight plus years, and people rely on me, and this is a beautiful gift that I get to give into the world. I'm blessed to do this because

I have security here and I can go home and feel good at night about my role, my task here in society. I'm blessed to, I'm blessed to, I'm blessed to. And when we come from I'm blessed to because and we find the meaning behind the because, then it shifts our mindset, it shifts our energy around our day-to-day tasks. Even if we're maybe like, do I want to be here? Yes, I'm blessed to be here because that perspective of gratitude that you said is huge. And there are so many people in the world that have everything that don't feel blessed to have it. And that negative mindset makes them feel resentful and angry when everyone else can be like, but you have so much. Why don mindset makes them feel resentful and angry when everyone else could

be like, but you have so much. Why don't you just shift your perspective and have gratitude for it? And then there are others who have very little, who have nothing, but they're blessed to have health. They're blessed to have peace. They're blessed to have their family and one meal a day. And they come from an attitude of gratitude, of blessed to, because they find the meaning behind it and they live a very rich life. And I think that's something we can all practice. And when we practice this, we have a much more peace in our hearts.

So I love that you shared that. And I think Seth was right about that as well. So was this A? Yeah, so gamification autonomy. M stands for mastery. Again, mastery is another one of the, so gamification autonomy. M stands for mastery. Again, mastery is another one of the core drivers of human motivation. When we do something that we feel we're good at

and when we feel we're getting better at the thing, whatever the thing is, it just makes it more fun, even if it's washing dishes. If you feel like you're the world expert on washing dishes and you understand more about it than anyone else, you understand how the, I don't know, the surfactant works or whatever. Or how to do it faster or whatever yeah yeah um it just makes it more fun uh and so again like just thinking about what are the ways in which again again it like a lot of it

just comes down to mindset um you know even if you're there is really good this really good story that i came across i think it was in some study about a uh truck driver who was doing like deliveries for fedex or something and the way he would approach it the way he would make it fun is that he just made it his mission that the boxes were going to fit like like a tetris grid like it was going to be so in line that it was just gonna he was he's gonna be the master line that it was just going to, he was, he was going to be the master at that. And they talked about how he found his job so much more fun than the other FedEx drivers, because you know, he's became,

he essentially talked himself into becoming a master of this one very niche specific craft, but that tapped into our human desire of the motivational drive for mastery. So that's a big one. And then E and S are environment and social so environment is basically how do we make our environment a bit nicer so that it's a bit more pleasant to do the thing uh like like you mentioned earlier washing the dishes with music in the background is more fun than washing the dishes in pure silence uh adding music there's some evidence that having

greenery on your desk improves creativity and focus, which is why I always have a fake Ikea pot at plant. Having a nice desk is just more fun working at a slightly nicer desk or at a coffee shop that we like the vibe of or at a library that we enjoy than it is not doing that. So those are just very, very simple tweaks we can make to our environment. And just recognizing that the environment we're in has such a big impact on how much we enjoy the job. And finally, there's S for social. So whatever we can do to incorporate people into the things that we're doing has such a big impact on how much we enjoy the job um and finally there's s for social so whatever we can do to incorporate people into the things that we're doing so true working with

friends co-working sessions even like zoom like these days i'm struggling with writing the book but i joined this writer's hour which is like 200 people on a zoom call just writing and just makes it more fun and again it just takes takes advantage of the fact that we have this desire for social connection and we can use that to make whatever we're doing more fun and all of this game stuff gam es gamification autonomy mastery environment and social if we can tick those boxes and if we can pull these levers we'll make something i'm not i'm not i'm not saying that everything can just be pure fun all the time i'm saying everything can be more fun than we're currently making it and these are the five kind of evidence-based ways of sprinkling a bit more joy into whatever we're

doing so that we're less likely to get distracted. And you can do that alongside turning off your phone and putting on airplane mode and all that fun stuff. Oh, yeah, smart. Yeah. I think you've simplified it for us, which is smart. And what are some time management skills that you wish you would have learned earlier or knew earlier in your life? All right. I think there are two that are game changing. Number one is the daily highlight. Basically every day, what is the one thing I actually want to get done today? In the morning doing this or is this the night before? So I do it in the morning. If I were really pro, I'd do it the night before, but I'm kind of lazy. So I just do it in the morning. I also only do it about 50% of the time, but every time I do it, I'm always glad I did it. And I am, I am striving just do it in the morning i also only do it about 50 of the time but every time i do it i'm always glad i did it and i i am i am striving to do it every day so what does that

look like what does that look like for you when you do it uh do i have i'm actually like about to release a line of merch like a productivity planner uh basically it's a to-do list that says my most important task the one thing i'd like to do today is in the morning uh and so for me depending if i'm trying out a new app i'll just have that i'll put a little star emoji by it if i'm using pen and paper i'll just write it at the top and circle it um the one thing so one thing you want to accomplish today and if you accomplish that one thing and that's all you do then it's a successful day exactly yeah what is the one thing where if this was the only thing i did today it would be a win and what's an

example of the last couple of things you wrote down? Is it like write one page in my book? Is it create a new YouTube video today? What are those things kind of typically? Yeah, so for me today, it's doing this podcast with you, this interview with you. If this was the only thing I got done today, it would be a successful day because I get to meet you and it's fun and all that jazz. Yesterday was completing the chapter outlines for my book proposal, which is due today,

which I didn't manage to do, but I made more progress on them than I would have done had I not had that as my daily highlight. So it's just things like that. It's really asking what is the single thing that will actually make a difference in my life today? And sometimes that can actually be, you know what? The thing I want to do today is call my grandma

or spend more time with a friend. I think I just asking that question because i i don't really i don't really like to-do lists uh i i think of my to-do list as a my to-do list instead i don't like feeling a slave to my to-do list yes so i just think i will be a slave to that one thing just that that one daily highlight um so that's technique number one and technique technique technique number two which is related i feel like before you get into that i feel like you could you could switch your language there as opposed to saying i'm going to be a slave to this one thing today yeah i'm going to be of service to this one thing and i think if you said i'm going to be of service to yeah whatever that

thing is there's a deeper meaning and a deeper vision behind that. And when you come from a service-based, it doesn't feel like I'm slaving to do this work and grudging along and I'm exhausting myself. It's I'm being of service for a greater mission in my life. I'm here to serve someone else. I'm here to serve myself in a greater way for a higher purpose, for a higher cause, a higher vision for my business, my family, my life, my health.

And I think when you change the language, again, from I have to, to I get to, to I'm blessed to, to this is the thing I'm going to be a slave of, even though you were kind of tugging cheek about it, obviously, but just the language we use really dictates the way we feel about things and how we communicate about things makes us reflect on how we feel so change it to this is the one thing i'm going to be of service to today and if i do that it was a great day something to consider oh i love that that's really really good yeah i i mean i i do use the phrase tongue-in-cheek but i think i even though it's tongue-in-cheek i still still you still say it i still i still say it like oh i'm a slave to my calendar oh i've got i've got all these zoom calls back to back.

Yeah. You know, there's a psychological – I mean, there's psychological things around – any word you say after I am. I am not enough. I am not good looking. I am not feeling good. I am sick. I am this.

Like the words you use after I am really start to resonate with your body and resonate with your body and resonate with your mind and so when you start to say I am whatever joyful I am passionate I'm excited about this I'm excited to learn something I'm I'm I'm of service to this thing it starts to shift attitude and energy for the rest of the day um something to think about I suppose that's why affirmations work I've never really tried them properly, but I've spoken to so many people who just love the daily affirmation thing.

Is that something that you do at all? I used to do that when I didn't feel good about myself. Now I feel good about myself pretty consistently. It's hard to kind of get me off track, I think because I've just been practicing so much for so long now.

Even when I'm not feeling good about myself, I know how to get back to like a baseline where I can manage things well enough and feel okay. Or I'm in the process of like, okay, if I'm not feeling good, how can I find who's the coach who can support me and navigate this process? How can I – what exercise or what type of journaling prompt do I need to do to self-reflect so I can learn from this and improve and move through it as opposed to stay stuck in this negative feeling? I still feel these challenges in my life. of coaching of community support of accountability of self-reflection of uh you know letting go of my ego of feeling like i have all the answers and having a beginner's mind around these things so

that's what's worked for me awesome yeah that makes a lot of sense so that was one thing i think i interrupted you on the second thing you were to say around time management skills oh yeah the second one like yeah so these are the only two productivity hacks i actually use the daily highlight and time blocking just once i decide what that thing is i stick it in my calendar and then generally when the time comes around i'm like oh i i'm just gonna i'm just gonna do it because it's in the calendar um and and and if i can if i can attach uh accountability to it like do it with a friend or do it on a zoom call with someone, or even if I really have to putting money on the line and telling my brother, look, if I don't do this thing that I'm really struggling with, you know, I'm going to pay you 50 pounds. At that point, if I really have to, I'll start using tricks like that.

But generally, if it's important to me, if it's on the calendar, it'll get done. This is the thing when, you know, I'm led my vision, and my actions are based on my calendar. If it's not in the calendar, it's always going to be pushed to the next day, the next week. If you're like, I know I need to do this thing, and I'm going to get around to it. You're not going to get around to it. Scheduling cleaning your place or organizing your closet, don't just say, I'm going to get around to it when I have free time. Schedule the free time you have now to make it something you want to do so it's complete.

And I think that has helped me by having a schedule. And obviously, some days maybe I don't do anything on this calendar because I'm like, whatever, I'm having an off day and that's fine too. But 80%, 90% of my calendar that's scheduled happens. And it's amazing what you can create in a month you know six months a year years by being led by a vision a purpose and then intentional actions in your calendar to support that vision yeah completely agree i feel like i am i'm currently not as vision and purpose led as i would like to be i'm sort of slowly dabbling with this stuff and realizing every time I do like a guided meditation about vision, like it's actually really helpful. Do you have any exercises or thing, prompts that you find helpful to think about vision and purpose and that kind of stuff?

Yeah, I have an exercise called the perfect day exercise. People, you know, they download it. It's free on my site, lewishouse.com. I'll send you it if you want it. But it's essentially kind of like a self-guided visualization process where on one piece of paper or multiple pages, you can just use one piece of paper. You sit, you can put some, you know, soft music on or you can just sit in silence and really eliminate distractions. And

you imagine and you visualize your perfect day, what that would look like. From specific details, from the moment you wake up, where are you? What does the sheets feel like? What does the pill feel like? Is there someone next to you? Who is that person? Are they smiling at you? Are they hugging you and kissing you? Are you full of emotion of gratitude because of this relationship you have? Are there children in your life? What is the imagery of the perfect ideal day look like? Knowing that every day is going to be different, but if you could have the perfect day, what would that generally look like?

What are you doing in the morning? What location in the world are you? What is your view like when you open up the windows and the curtains? What do you see? Where are you making a cup of coffee? Are you making tea? Are you having a conversation with someone? Are you spending alone time and working out or doing something you enjoy?

Are you writing? What does the rest of your afternoon look like? What does your evening look like? How do you fall asleep? And write it in detail. And then when you're done writing this imagery of what you would like to create, you create on the other side of the page

or whatever, another blank page, you write down the schedule and you write down your calendar. You say, okay, what time do I wake up then in this ideal perfect day? Do I wake up at 6 a.m., 8 a.m., 9 a.m.? When do I wake up? And then every 10 to 30 minutes, you're scheduling in your perfect day. Kind of like how would this look in the calendar? With the time that I have, how would this fit in? And now you have, okay, I've got a visioning process.

I've got an integration and practical process. Now, how do I go live this? And how do I try to relive this as often as possible? And obviously, it's going to evolve and change and grow and all these things over time. But coming from that place of like, what is the ideal day? What is the perfect day?

And try to live that. So that's the process that I have. Love it. That's really good. I'm going to try that. I will download it from your website. Yes. Yes. Yeah. It'll be good. I'm curious. I got a couple of final questions for you. How do you go about setting and achieving your own personal goals? If you've got an idea, how do you set it as a goal? own personal goals if you've got an idea how do you set it as a goal and then do you give yourself a timeline do you start creating time in your calendar and you're scheduling it for a certain timeline does it need to be done by a certain time what is the process for you for setting and achieving goals yeah i wish i wish i had a better a better system for this i think right now the only thing i focus on is okay i've

got this as a goal let me now forget about this as a goal and focus on how can i make it as easy easy to start and fun to do as possible um often for the goals that you know i've i i've got a i've got a general goal that i want to i want to be more fit want to be more healthy sort of maybe want to go for six-pack abs but that's a very much maybe because it's very like uh extrinsic etc etc um but i find a question i ask myself is um oh yeah so i have i have this template on my annual review thing when i actually set goals once a year i should do it more often which is like um what what is the thing I want to accomplish? And then, and by what date, crucially, and then how surprised would I be on a scale of zero to 10, if I didn't do the thing? And then I ask, what are the top three reasons why I might not do the thing?

And then I ask, what are three ways in which I can like mitigate those top three reasons? And then I say, who or what can help me? And usually when I ask myself that question, I realize, oh, I should get a coach for this thing. So ever since I got a personal trainer about, I don't know, eight months ago, I've never been in better shape. And it's still a work in progress. But I've been trying to hit the gym for about eight years before then and never made any

progress. But as soon as I decided, you know what, let me get someone, let's get a coach let's get some accountability that's been that's been really useful and so this year i i i had it as one of my goals to learn to become a concept artist so to be able to illustrate scenes from fantasy fiction books absolutely love brandon sanderson incredible author uh and so i got an art teacher i posted on instagram being like hey i want to anyone know this stuff uh and i had art lessons three times a week for a few months and then eventually like you know after i'd gotten to a certain standard at it i realized that actually right now it's no longer a priority and the goal changed and i didn't feel bad about it i was like cool let's cancel that goal um you know thanks to the art teacher and now he's actually part of my team

doing illustrations for some of our videos which is cool um another kind of sort of semi tongue-in-cheek joke that i have is a goal to get married uh at some point in the next few years and so i was really thinking like how do i how do i approach this a bit more systematically like what does what does that actually look like and i decided once the pandemic situation sorts itself out, you know, going on two dates a week would be like my goal. And then, you know, what are the reasons I might not do it? Oh, well, because I would feel like I'm too busy. How can I mitigate against the risk of that? Well, I can block time in my calendar,

which is only going to be for date night, maybe a Saturday morning and a Thursday evening. That's what I decided. I can like put money on the line with my brother and say, look, I have to go on these dates. I can like optimize my dating profile i can send it to female friends for confirmation like there's all these things that i could do um to work towards that goal and when i started thinking in those ways it genuinely helped helped me make progress on this stuff because i think especially with the whole like relationship stuff it's a bit it's a

bit like unfashionable to view relationships as being any kind of quantitative goal directed thing. But I thought, you know what, screw it. Let's apply the principles of goal setting and motivation and stuff to this thing. And you know,

I've, I've not been on two dates a week since then, but I've been more intentional about my dating life than I've ever been in the past purely because I set it as a goal and asked myself these questions. Yeah. That's how I approach it. It's very vague and ad hoc, but it sort of works. I think it's great strategies. Yeah. I think it as a goal and asked myself these questions. Yeah, that's how I approach it. It's very vague and ad hoc, but it sort of works. I think it's great strategies.

Yeah, I think it's beautiful. This has been a great conversation. I've got a couple of final questions for you, Ali. And I want people to, before I ask them, I want people to follow you and subscribe to you over on YouTube and Instagram. And you've got a book coming out later in the year, right? And where can we- Oh, two years from now now two years from now okay where can we 23 yeah where can we go what's the best website for you to to stay subscribed and to learn more about

all the things you're up to and and connect with you yeah thanks very much um yeah so my website aliabdallah.com there's a newsletter there i send out an email every sunday that just has a few thoughts and some links to interesting articles i've read um so that'll be where all of my all my stuff will get circulated but otherwise yeah just check out the youtube channel and youtube channel if they want to check out your courses they can go to skillshare and check those out and and all that good stuff i love it man um this is a question i ask everyone towards the end of the interview called the three truths and imagine it's a hypothetical scenario. It's your last day on this earth and you've accomplished every goal and dream

that you've ever wanted. But for whatever reason, you've got to take all of your content with you to the next place or it leaves this place. And so no one has access to any of your content, your videos, this interview, your books, your work, none of it. They don't have access to it anymore, but you get to write down on a piece of paper three things you know to be true or three lessons from your life that you'd want to leave behind what would you say would be those three truths for you oh that's good okay truth number one would be a journey before destination. Truth.

Number two would be when you're having fun, productivity takes care of itself. And truth. Number three would be something like always ask why and i yeah i hesitated on that one a bit like going back to this conversation about why am i doctor well like why why am i doctor yeah i i need to i need to get better at taking my own advice. I hear you, man. Yeah. Those are good. Those are good. I'm going to check in on you in a week and I'm going to check in on you in a month and see if you made a decision. Either way, I want you to make a decision. You know what? I'm going to be a doctor for the next year at least and I'm going to go all in at this 10 to 12 hour part-time thing a month making $200 for the next year and commit to it. And cool. Or okay, I'm going to commit to transitioning out.

And what does that look like? So I'm going to check in on you and make sure that you're holding yourself accountable as well to either going either yes to it or you're moving out of it. I want to acknowledge you for, Ali, for showing up the way you do. I think it takes a lot of courage to take on a career of eight years of being in the medical world and being a doctor while also building up side passions and side incomes and creating all these projects on the side to do things that you're also interested in. Not limiting yourself just to one thing of like, okay, I've got to be this medical doctor and this is the way, the process and the way, but let me explore this thing and let me help people this way and let me try this thing.

Let me try this thing. It sounds like you did many things for many years that didn't work out, but they gave you the skills, the strategies, the experience to make these things work out for you. So I want to acknowledge you for showing up for yourself, doing things that you've been inspired by, coming from a place of creativity, of thoughtfulness, of analysis, and then executing to help others. It's been inspiring to watch your journey

and I'm grateful to have you on this show and hopefully we can have you back on in the future sometime when you're in LA someday. When you're not in your full-time, part-time job and you can travel more. Amazing. Yeah, thank you so much for having me it was a pleasure and yeah thank you so much for the therapy slash coaching session that we had i think that's genuinely like you've thrown me for one and i'm gonna be thinking about that over the next

few days and yeah i will uh get get back to you with a decision one way or another yeah because you're right like being in limbo and not really deciding, I'm not really putting my heart into anything I'm doing because I'm in this limbo mode. Yeah, and I don't want you to think for five to 15 minutes every day, should I do this? Either commit to doing it for the way it is right now and then you can reassess it later in a year or something

or commit to not doing it in either way. But give yourself that freedom of thought and i think that will support you in either direction whatever you want to do uh my final question for you ali is what is your definition of greatness i think my definition of greatness is living a life where we're impacting people in our own way, working with others and enjoying the journey along the way. I think, yeah, if I can do that, I think that'll be pretty great.

My man, Ali, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me on. It's been a real pleasure. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed this, please share it. And also leave us a review of the part you enjoyed the most or the section of this interview that you got the most out of it

or that really inspired you to think differently. And what did you think about the coaching part? Did that support you? If so, let me know. You can tag me over on social media, at Lewis Howes everywhere. And also subscribe over on Apple Podcasts. Leave us a review there. And make sure to subscribe over on our YouTube channel as well

for long form video content there. And I want to leave you with a reminder today that if no one has told you lately, you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And I hope you remember this.

I hope you come back here every week. You're listening to the show and you're remembering this as you continue to learn, as you continue to develop and build yourself and build the wealth of information that we have here available on the School of Greatness. Because you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do

something great.