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Answering personal questions - 50k subs Q&A

2018-08-24 · Q&A video · Ali · recording, 13:55 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Medicine and his doctor years (also: Relationships and personal life, Goals, purpose and life design, Work and career, Mindset, motivation and happiness, Books and reading) · mode: Answering questions · tags: His own numbers, Family

In the personal part of his 50,000-subscriber Q&A, two weeks into work as a junior doctor, Ali answers questions on his goals, his past and his tastes, then on junior-doctor life: breaks, an F1 salary of about 30,000 to 34,000 a year, his first day, and the one thing that would make him quit, which is not enjoying the work for months.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Part of the 50,000-subscriber Q&A: personal questions and life as a junior doctor

  • ★★ Ali answers personal questions and questions on life as a junior doctor in one of the videos of his 50,000-subscriber Q&A series, built from about 120 viewers' questions. — 00:00:00

00:00:53 — Leaving formal education for work

  • ★★ Ali says moving from medical school to working in a hospital feels like a natural progression after three years of semi-working in hospitals at clinical school, and he is staying in Cambridge, living with one of his best friends. — 00:01:23 · Cambridge

00:01:47 — Next goals in life and where he sees himself in five years

  • ★★★ Ali's goals after university are to be a good doctor, to become financially independent by living off passive income, to take a few years out of medicine at some point and to keep growing his YouTube channel; he has no single overarching mission yet. — 00:01:47 · passive income, work optional
  • ★★ Ali finds the five-year question hard because life changes so much: his YouTube channel, started a year ago, and the business he started in his second year at university each came to feature in all his plans. — 00:02:16
  • ★★★ Ali hopes to do F1 and F2, his first two years as a junior doctor, and then maybe take a little time out to explore, perhaps doing some tech or more video work. (hedged) — 00:02:16 · Foundation Programme

00:03:01 — Places to visit, travel, and his girlfriend

  • ★ Ali says he is not really a massive fan of travelling: it is fun with a group of friends, but he thinks unstructured time together in Cambridge, such as a walk to the local park, would have been equally fun. — 00:03:15 · Cambridge
  • ★★ Ali would like to spend a while in Southeast Asia or South America, working on his online businesses while taking tango lessons or getting massages; he has never been to South America. — 00:03:15
  • ★★ Ali says he and his girlfriend got together about six months ago, which he places in the middle of medical school. — 00:04:01
  • ★ Ali would probably change nothing in his past because of the butterfly effect: changing something in the past changes everything in the future. (hedged) — 00:04:01
  • ★★★ Had he not studied medicine, Ali would have done computer science; he almost applied for it, but decided he would enjoy computers and coding more as a hobby than as a job. — 00:04:01

00:04:13 — What he would change, and what he would have studied if not medicine

  • ★★★ When choosing what to apply for about seven years earlier, Ali reasoned that a doctor who is also a real programmer is more marketable and interesting than just one of the two, so he applied for medicine to combine the fields, which he says has worked out nicely so far. — 00:04:43
  • ★★ Had he not gone to Cambridge, Ali might have gone to Imperial, which had given him an offer. (hedged) — 00:05:12 · Imperial College London, University of Cambridge, Cambridge
  • ★★ Ali absolutely loves being in Cambridge and calls it the best, though he probably would not live there forever. — 00:05:12 · Cambridge
  • ★★★ Ali was born in Pakistan in 1994, lived there about two years, then about five years in Lesotho in southern Africa, then another year in Pakistan while his mother took the PLAB, the exam international doctors take to work in UK medicine. — 00:05:12 · Pakistan, Ali Abdaal's mother, United Kingdom

00:05:28 — Born in Pakistan, Lesotho, and the move to the UK in 2003

00:06:03 — Personal development over six years: putting himself out there and confidence

  • ★★ Having been quite low-energy at school, Ali set out at university to put himself out there and make friends, has kept doing so every year since, and is really glad he did. — 00:06:19
  • ★★★ Ali says confidence is the main way he has developed over his six years at university: he now feels almost no anxiety about public speaking or asking and answering questions in class, which he once had an issue with. — 00:06:46
  • ★★ Ali has been rejected from a few things, including a year at Harvard and the Academic Foundation Programme, but he would not call these setbacks. — 00:06:46 · Academic Foundation Programme

00:07:03 — Setbacks and rejections

  • ★★ Ali sees rejections as part of taking lots of shots: some land and some do not, and either way you are still playing the game. — 00:07:33
  • ★★ Ali's favourite film is still probably The Dark Knight and his second favourite probably Tangled; Enchanted has dropped a bit but is still quite high. (hedged) — 00:07:33
  • ★ Harry Potter is still at the top of Ali's list of favourite books. — 00:07:33 · Harry Potter (book series)

00:07:44 — Favourite film and favourite book

  • ★★ Ali has recently fallen in love with Patrick Rothfuss's The Kingkiller Chronicles, The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear, which he has been listening to on Audible. — 00:08:02 · Audible
  • ★★ Ali subscribes to Audible every month for about seven pounds and calls listening to audiobooks an amazing way to pass the time. — 00:08:02 · Audible

00:08:23 — Why he does not talk about religion

  • ★★ Ali does not want to talk about religion: with a platform his words can influence people, he has not looked into it enough to feel qualified, and because it is tied up with family a comment could cause more consequences than it is worth. — 00:08:31
  • ★ Ali says he may talk about religion at some point, once he has read and researched more. (hedged) — 00:08:31

00:09:09 — Which specialty he wants

  • ★★★ Ali wants to specialise in obstetrics and gynaecology, his favourite placement at medical school, but is more than open to changing his mind. — 00:09:09 · Obstetrics and gynaecology
  • ★★★ Ali thinks the word "stressful" is overused: whether something is stressful depends more on how you deal with and cope with stress than on what the thing is objectively like; medical school was not particularly stressful for him. — 00:09:09

00:09:40 — Is life as a doctor stressful

  • ★★ Ali would not say doctors have an easy life after university; whether they call it stressful varies with what each doctor is like as a person. — 00:09:58
  • ★★ Junior doctors are supposed to get half an hour's break for every four hours worked, so a standard eight-hour shift has about an hour's break. — 00:09:58 · Foundation Programme

00:10:13 — Breaks, downtime and an F1 salary

  • ★ On a 12-hour shift a junior doctor is supposed to get an hour's lunch break and another half-hour break. — 00:10:27
  • ★★ Some days there is work all the time, but Ali says a lot of the time junior doctors have a little downtime and banter with colleagues in the doctors' office. — 00:10:27
  • ★★★ Ali calls an F1 doctor's salary pretty decent: he and most of his friends earn about 30,000 to 34,000 a year before tax. — 00:10:27 · Foundation Programme
  • ★★ Ali says an F1 salary is not as much as you would make working in the City, but that is not really what doctors signed up for. — 00:10:56

00:11:01 — His first day as a junior doctor and the challenges of the job

  • ★★★ Ali's first day as a junior doctor was busy but fun: he probably made quite a lot of mistakes, which he treats as a learning experience, and his colleagues were nice and supportive. — 00:11:25
  • ★★ Ali lists the challenges of being a doctor (a busy workload, issues with colleagues, being nice to patients who are not nice to you) and says they are trained for at medical school or learned by getting them wrong once, so he does not overly worry about them. — 00:11:25

00:12:07 — What would make him quit being a doctor

  • ★★ No job is enjoyable all the time, Ali says: he has run his own business for five years and dislikes many parts of it, such as the admin, even though running a business is seen as the holy grail. — 00:12:10
  • ★★★ Ali would consider quitting medicine only if, for months, he was really not enjoying the job and nothing he could change, in the job or in himself, would make him enjoy it more. — 00:12:39
  • ★★ Ali says he is fortunate, unlike many people, to have options other than medicine: his YouTube channel, his business, and tech, design and coding on the side. — 00:13:03

00:13:26 — Sign-off

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: The Kingkiller Chronicles

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's mother · Patrick Rothfuss

Works: Enchanted · Harry Potter (book series) · PLAB · Tangled · The Dark Knight · The Name of the Wind · The Wise Man's Fear

Organizations: Harvard University · Imperial College London · NHS · University of Cambridge

Concepts: Academic Foundation Programme · Foundation Programme · Obstetrics and gynaecology · passive income

Places: Cambridge · Lesotho · Pakistan · South America · Southeast Asia · United Kingdom

Products: Audible

Also centred on The Kingkiller Chronicles: Monthly Favourites #2 - Ali Abdaal · My Favourite Fantasy Books

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