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Monthly Favourites #2 - Ali Abdaal

2018-03-07 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 17:44 · watch on YouTube

Topic: YouTube, writing online and creators (also: Books and reading, Tools, apps and tech, Mindset, motivation and happiness) · mode: Reflection and life update · tags: Lesson from a book

In his second Monthly Favourites video, Ali, a final-year Cambridge medical student, recommends four discoveries of February 2018: The Greatest Showman soundtrack, Patrick Rothfuss's The Kingkiller Chronicles, keyboard navigation with Alfred, and Gary Vaynerchuk's Crushing It, with its lessons on not fearing mistakes and "document, don't create".

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — The second monthly favourites, and the four picks for February 2018

  • ★★ Ali posts the second instalment of his monthly favourites series, in which he shares the books, articles, podcasts and other things he discovered that month. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ After the good response to the first monthly favourites video, Ali is glad that people watch even when he talks about things unrelated to medicine, so he can branch out into his other interests. — 00:00:29

00:01:41 — Favourite soundtrack: The Greatest Showman, and whether to post song covers on the channel

  • ★★★ Ali's favourite new music is the soundtrack of The Greatest Showman; his favourite songs are This Is Me, Rewrite The Stars, From Now On and A Million Dreams. — 00:01:41
  • ★ The Greatest Showman stars Hugh Jackman and Zac Efron and is about P. T. Barnum, who Ali thinks created the original circuses. (hedged) — 00:01:41
  • ★★ Ali has been learning to play The Greatest Showman songs on piano and guitar and might post a cover video of them. (hedged) — 00:02:11
  • ★★★ Ali started his YouTube channel to post covers of popular songs; it then turned into helping people get into medicine. — 00:02:40
  • ★★ Ali is unsure whether to share his singing on the channel; a second channel would probably be too much, since one is hard enough to maintain, especially once he starts work as a doctor. (unsure) — 00:02:40
  • ★★ Ali asks viewers whether they would still watch videos of him and his medic friends singing covers, worried that subscribers who came for medicine would leave. — 00:03:09
  • ★★ Ali says The Greatest Showman was not highly rated, at around six on IMDb by his recollection, which he finds fair: it is predictable and its plot is weak. (hedged) — 00:03:09
  • ★★ Ali finished The Name of the Wind, the first Kingkiller Chronicles book, on his GP placement and is listening to the second book only as an audiobook. — 00:03:38

00:03:44 — Favourite book series: The Kingkiller Chronicles, and an audiobook kept for the gym

  • ★★★ Ali lets himself listen to the Kingkiller Chronicles audiobook only at the gym, which makes him look forward to going and so go more often. — 00:04:44
  • ★★★ Ali recommends The Kingkiller Chronicles to fantasy fans, though as a famous series they have probably read it already. — 00:04:44
  • ★★ Ali suggests that people new to fantasy or who do not normally read start with the Mistborn series rather than The Kingkiller Chronicles, as it is more readable and faster paced. — 00:04:44

00:05:08 — Productivity trick: keyboard navigation with Alfred instead of the mouse

  • ★★ A recent update of Google Drive for Mac lets you share files in Google Drive by right-clicking them in Finder. — 00:05:08
  • ★★★ Ali's productivity hack on the computer is to minimise the time between thinking he wants to do something and it being done. — 00:05:38
  • ★★★ Ali uses the Mac launcher Alfred, or Spotlight, with equivalents on Windows, and has written about it on his blog aliabdaal.com. — 00:05:38 · aliabdaal.com
  • ★★ Ali's rule is to use the mouse or trackpad as little and the keyboard as much as possible: Command-Space and a typed name open an app, a search or a file. — 00:06:07 · Microsoft Word
  • ★★ Opening a poster file deep in his Google Drive by clicking took Ali 10 to 15 seconds; with Alfred it takes about two, and he says such savings add up. — 00:06:36 · Microsoft PowerPoint
  • ★ Ali marvels at how slowly friends less into computers work by clicking through menus, and says keyboard navigation would save them a lot of time. — 00:07:05
  • ★★ Ali picked up keyboard navigation from a programmer he follows and took a few months to switch; it really increased his productivity on the computer. — 00:07:05
  • ★★★ Ali argues that since most university work, schoolwork and other work is done on a computer, working faster there raises overall efficiency and frees time for more interesting things. — 00:07:34

00:08:04 — Favourite non-fiction book: Crushing It by Gary Vaynerchuk and the personal brand

  • ★★ Ali is trying to build a personal brand with his YouTube channel: becoming known as an expert in your field by giving people useful content over time. — 00:08:04
  • ★★ Gary Vaynerchuk is CEO of the social media company VaynerMedia and wrote a book in 2009 on the importance of a personal brand. — 00:08:04 · Gary Vaynerchuk
  • ★★★ Ali highly recommends Gary Vaynerchuk's Crushing It to anyone into entrepreneurship: it tells stories of people who turned side projects into businesses through a personal brand. — 00:08:35 · Gary Vaynerchuk

00:09:04 — Quote and thoughts on not being afraid to make mistakes, the growth mindset and starting YouTube

  • ★★ Gary Vaynerchuk (quoted): In Crushing It, Gary Vaynerchuk quotes a person from the book saying that being unafraid of mistakes makes everything easy: not worrying what people think frees you to act, and acting lets you win or learn. — 00:09:04 · Gary Vaynerchuk
  • ★★ Gary Vaynerchuk (quoted): Gary Vaynerchuk says in Crushing It that you are better off being wrong ten times and right three times than trying only three times and always being right. — 00:09:34 · Gary Vaynerchuk
  • ★★ Ali says self-help books rarely give groundbreaking advice, but it is useful to see truths we already know and stories of people applying them, as Crushing It does. — 00:09:34
  • ★★★ Ali thinks that the more people internalise that mistakes are good because they learn from them, the more success they can have in life. — 00:10:03
  • ★★ In medical lectures and classes few students put up their hands to answer; friends told Ali they feared getting it wrong and looking an idiot. — 00:10:03
  • ★★★ Ali says a growth mindset, which treats getting things wrong as part of improving, is probably better than a fixed mindset: more open to learning and less hurt by failures. (hedged) — 00:11:01
  • ★★ Ali says that on YouTube you have to not care what people think, since you talk to a camera or walk around in public with a camera and a big microphone. — 00:11:44
  • ★★★ When starting his YouTube channel, Ali struggled with what his friends and year group would think of him, but now he is really glad he did it. — 00:11:44
  • ★★ Ali has had at least 50 messages from students thanking him for his videos, which they say helped them with their interviews. — 00:12:13

00:12:37 — Quote and thoughts on "document, don't create", sharing your work and Show Your Work

  • ★★★ Gary Vaynerchuk (quoted): Gary Vaynerchuk's "document, don't create": instead of creating content, think of it as documenting your life, what you know or your process of learning. — 00:13:16 · show your work, Gary Vaynerchuk

    “document, don't create”

  • ★★ Ali says his day-in-the-life vlog on his GP placement is coming up soon. — 00:13:16

  • ★★★ Ali says thinking of a video as documenting rather than creating takes the pressure off and makes content much easier to make. — 00:13:16 · show your work
  • ★ Ali says YouTubers always worry whether a video is too boring, and he does every time. — 00:13:45
  • ★★ Gary Vaynerchuk (quoted): Gary Vaynerchuk says adding boring content to YouTube is fine: if you find you have no audience or the market is not there, at least you have tried. — 00:13:45 · Gary Vaynerchuk
  • ★★★ Ali thinks anyone who does creative work should share it with the world, though many of his artist friends do not post because they feel not good enough. — 00:14:14
  • ★★ Ali's friend Marcus puts his artwork on a site that sells it as merchandise and gives all the money from sales to charity, though he thinks his work is not very good. — 00:14:43
  • ★★ Ali recommends Austin Kleon's book Show Your Work to anyone interested in sharing their work. — 00:15:12 · show your work
  • ★★ Austin Kleon (quoted): In Show Your Work, Austin Kleon says to document your process of learning and put your work online, whether you are learning art, programming or writing. — 00:15:12 · show your work
  • ★★ Gary Vaynerchuk (quoted): Gary Vaynerchuk says in Crushing It that a backlog of content matters less now than five or ten years later, if you make it big and people see your long record on a topic. — 00:15:42 · Gary Vaynerchuk
  • ★★★ Ali says it is fine if no one watches his videos now: making them is fun and long-term, and he wants to document his journey as a medical student and junior doctor. — 00:15:42
  • ★★ Gary Vaynerchuk (quoted): Gary Vaynerchuk says he does not care whether people buy his book or find it in a library or pirate it: he cares about sharing the content, playing a long game of building a personal brand. — 00:16:11 · Gary Vaynerchuk
  • ★★★ Ali names Gary Vaynerchuk as one of his inspirations for sharing useful content with the world. — 00:16:11 · Gary Vaynerchuk

00:16:51 — Recap and sign-off

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Gary Vaynerchuk · show your work

Also: aliabdaal.com · Austin Kleon · Kindle · Microsoft PowerPoint · Microsoft Word · Show Your Work!

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