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Ask Doctor Ali - 100k subscribers Q&A

2018-12-08 · Q&A video · Ali · recording, 37:45 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Mindset, motivation and happiness (also: Learning and studying, Productivity and time, Books and reading, Relationships and personal life, Medicine and his doctor years, YouTube, writing online and creators, Health, sleep and habits) · mode: Answering questions · tags: Aimed at students, His medical past, Lesson from a book, His own numbers, His own products discussed

For his 100,000-subscriber Q&A, junior doctor Ali answers 24 questions from newsletter readers: systems that make tasks not optional beat procrastination, discipline and fun beat motivation, new skills come from quantity, his motto is "how hard can it be?", everyone is winging it, and efficient study leaves plenty of time.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Thanks for 100,000 subscribers; questions sent in by newsletter readers

  • ★★ Ali's YouTube channel has reached 100,000 subscribers, and this video is his 100,000-subscriber Q&A. — 00:00:00 · YouTube
  • ★★ Every Sunday, usually in the morning, Ali sends a short weekly email newsletter with a few paragraphs of thoughts for the week and a link or two he discovered that week. — 00:00:29 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★ A few weeks before the video Ali asked for questions in a postscript to his newsletter, and 50 people replied. — 00:00:29 · Sunday Snippets

00:01:21 — How he learned to code and what he would use now

  • ★★ Ali taught himself to code from year eight, at about 13, mostly by doing, with a project every year in which he tried to build an online business to make money. — 00:01:27
  • ★ When Ali learned to code he used W3Schools, Macromedia Dreamweaver books and small DK Multimedia books about Flash and HTML. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Learning to code from scratch today, Ali would just sign up for a course on Codecademy, Code School, Udemy or anything else: there are so many resources now. — 00:01:57

00:02:14 — Fighting procrastination with systems that are not a matter of debate

  • ★ On the evening of this video Ali procrastinated for three hours before filming: lying on the couch, reading on his Kindle, listening to country music on the Amazon Echo and chatting with his housemate Molly. — 00:02:26 · Kindle, Molly Hunt
  • ★★ Ali's system is to make one or two videos every week, an easy target: in a week when he has not yet made them, making a video is his task for the evening. — 00:02:56
  • ★★ From around April 2018 Ali decided to write his weekly email newsletter every Sunday and has not missed one since, because once he set that system it stopped being optional. — 00:02:56 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★★★ Ali's main way to fight procrastination is having systems set up front: with many options after work he procrastinates, but knowing what the day calls for (a video if none is made yet this week (week of 3 December 2018), Sunday for the newsletter, the gym every Monday morning) settles it. — 00:03:40

00:04:12 — Balancing revision of old material with learning new content

  • ★★★ To balance old and new material, Ali says, take a few minutes to test yourself on previous topics: with spaced repetition, 5 to 20 minutes of self-testing is worth about three hours of just reading a book. — 00:04:41 · spaced repetition, active recall
  • ★★ Ali advises making review of old material a priority and part of your routine, for example revising your active recall questions on the previous topic before learning the new one. — 00:05:17 · active recall

00:05:33 — Motivating yourself to do things outside medicine: the three-year-old self and making things fun

  • ★★ Ali says doing so much outside medicine is not a matter of motivation: the article "Screw motivation, what you need is discipline", which changed the game for him a few years ago, calls motivation a temporary feeling and discipline a permanent decision to do something whatever you feel. — 00:05:46
  • ★★ Ali found the gym hard until he set up a system that made it enjoyable: a workout decided in advance so he does no thinking, and an audiobook, these days Brandon Sanderson's Oathbringer. — 00:08:03 · Brandon Sanderson

  • ★★★ Ali sees two conflicting sides of himself, a higher self with his long-term interests at heart and a "three-year-old self" who wants to scroll Instagram; recognising the conflict lets you override the three-year-old. — 00:08:31

    “You are like competing with this three-year-old self of yours to decide what to do.”

  • ★★★ Ali's second point on motivation: do things you enjoy, and find a way to make the rest fun; he needs motivation only for things that are inherently unpleasant. — 00:08:31

  • ★ Ali has been struggling to go to the gym recently because of a shoulder injury from falling off his skateboard a few days before. — 00:08:31

00:08:50 — Learning new skills such as video editing

  • ★★ Learning a new skill such as video editing is about quantity rather than quality at the start, Ali says: just churn out videos. — 00:09:00
  • ★★ When Ali decided in July 2017 to vlog his medical elective he had to churn out content, about 12 videos there, then BMAT and interview videos; one or two videos a week makes 50 to 100 a year. — 00:09:24 · BMAT
  • ★★ Ali also improved his editing actively by watching YouTubers he admires, such as Peter McKinnon and Casey Neistat, analysing their editing style, and by watching editing tutorials on YouTube. — 00:09:51 · Peter McKinnon
  • ★★★ Ali's formula for learning any new skill: there is no substitute for just doing it, and you can find material on the internet that helps you do it better. — 00:09:51

00:10:20 — His life motto: how hard can it be?

  • ★★★ Ali's life motto is "how hard can it be?": other people have done it, so it is doable, and the internet lets you learn almost anything. — 00:10:20

    “one life motto that I like to follow is the phrase, how hard can it be?”

  • ★★ Ali finds liberating a saying he credits to Steve Jobs or someone: everything in the world around you was made by people no smarter than you. (hedged) — 00:10:20

  • ★★ Ali says the motto "how hard can it be?" has helped him so much that he cannot remember his last moment of self-doubt, since self-doubt comes from thinking you can't do something. — 00:11:15
  • ★★ Ali says humour, social skills and charisma are learnable from the internet, books and practice; he asks funny colleagues how they make jokes and has read books on being funnier. — 00:12:08
  • ★★ Ali highly recommends The Magic of Thinking Big, which tech entrepreneurs including Tim Ferriss say changed their lives; he found it in the last two years and wishes he had read it at secondary school. — 00:12:34 · Tim Ferriss

00:12:59 — The best books he read this year

  • ★★ Ali's top three reads of 2018, enjoyed equally: Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series, Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicles and Sanderson's Stormlight Archive. — 00:13:03 · Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson

00:13:24 — Staying motivated to study at medical school

  • ★★ To keep studying fun at medical school, Ali studied with friends and with epic instrumental music in the background; his Spotify Study With Me playlist has the tunes. — 00:13:32 · Spotify
  • ★★ Asked about his private life, Ali says he is currently single. — 00:14:02
  • ★★ At medical school Ali did not enjoy some boring lectures: he fell asleep in them and did not attend many in his first and second years. — 00:14:02

00:14:11 — Is he dating anyone?

00:14:30 — The parts of medical school he did not enjoy

  • ★★ Ali half wishes he had attended more lectures, but thinks he would have taken nothing in after rowing or staying up with friends until 5 a.m., experiences he would not give up. — 00:14:48
  • ★★ Overall Ali calls medical school an incredible experience and says he absolutely loved his medical school years. — 00:14:48

00:15:17 — Advice on starting a YouTube channel and editing videos

  • ★★★ Ali's advice for starting a YouTube channel: just do it, upload video after video, and accept that your first hundred videos will be absolutely terrible. — 00:15:17 · YouTube
  • ★★ To new YouTubers afraid of putting their face online, Ali says no one is going to laugh at them: with a handful of subscribers, no one really cares. — 00:15:17
  • ★★ Ali says a growth mindset is the way forward for a new channel: accept that the first videos will be bad, learn, and churn out content. — 00:15:52

00:16:10 — How his content will change as he gets older

  • ★★ Ali thinks his study-with-me videos probably have a sell-by date: when he is 35, people will probably not care about watching him time-lapse his studying. (hedged) — 00:16:28
  • ★★ As he gets older Ali wants to make much more medical education for medical students and junior doctors, teaching medicine in a fun and engaging way, and fewer videos for medicine applicants. — 00:16:49
  • ★★ Ali says he will keep writing his weekly email newsletter forever: if Seth Godin can publish a blog post every day, one piece a week cannot be that hard. — 00:17:18 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★★ Ali wants to continue making content on self-improvement, life advice, motivation and productivity. — 00:17:18
  • ★★ Ali wants to bring his music hobby much more into his videos and to keep making tech videos as a semi-tech YouTuber. — 00:17:18

00:18:10 — Friendships and relationships at medical school

  • ★★★ Ali says the idea that medical school leaves no time for friends, sleep or sport is sold to applicants and not true: medical school is fairly chill, especially at Cambridge with very few contact hours. — 00:18:40 · University of Cambridge
  • ★★ Ali calls poring over textbooks, highlighting and summarising terribly bad study techniques, and points to the book Make It Stick on the efficient ones. — 00:18:40 · Make It Stick
  • ★★★ With spaced repetition and active recall your study becomes so efficient that you have plenty of spare time, Ali says, so forming meaningful relationships at medical school is easy. — 00:19:13 · spaced repetition, active recall

  • ★★ Ali's second tip for friendships at medical school is to work together with friends: working together brings people together. — 00:19:13

    “Friends that work together stay together in my book.”

  • ★ Asked for scientific ways to beat procrastination, Ali says he knows of none and has not really checked. (unsure) — 00:19:13

00:19:44 — Scientific ways to beat procrastination

  • ★★ Ali, who says he still procrastinates a lot yet churns out content, says you need not eliminate procrastination completely; to reduce it, make the work fun and easy. — 00:20:00
  • ★★ Ali recommends James Clear's Atomic Habits for its four-part framework for building good habits, much of which he thinks applies to fighting procrastination. — 00:20:00 · Atomic Habits, James Clear

00:20:29 — The most useless activity with a hidden value

  • ★★ Ali sees no ostensibly useless activities with hidden value: everyone now knows meditation is a good thing, though few people do it. — 00:20:52
  • ★★ Ali cites a line he attributes to Shay Carl on Tim Ferriss's podcast: the secrets of life are hidden behind the word cliché. (hedged) — 00:21:24 · The Tim Ferriss Show, Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ Ali says that before dismissing anything as too clichéd you should stop and think, because things are clichés for a reason and much of the best advice is clichéd. — 00:21:24

00:22:06 — Keeping up with the content of medical school

  • ★★ To keep up at medical school Ali advises reading Make It Stick and his videos on study techniques: the content is not conceptually difficult, only a matter of efficiently remembering and understanding it. — 00:22:16 · Make It Stick
  • ★★ If you do not understand something at medical school, Ali advises speaking to the lecturer afterwards, asking a question in the lecture or asking students in the years above to explain it. — 00:22:16

00:23:00 — Perfectionism and the fear of being thought foolish

  • ★★★ On the fear of being thought foolish, which Ali sees as a matter of ego, his advice is first to recognise it as a fear and then to be okay with it, because people thinking you foolish will not harm you. — 00:23:48
  • ★★ Citing Tim Urban's Wait But Why article on taming the mammoth, Ali explains the fear: in a caveman group the weird one would not mate and pass on genes, a worry no longer useful today. — 00:24:16
  • ★★ Ali also recommends Ryan Holiday's Ego Is the Enemy, on how we are too attached to our own egos. — 00:24:38

00:25:03 — Harming a patient through inexperience and how to deal with it

  • ★★★ Ali says he has probably caused harm to patients: trying many times to insert a cannula, and in more serious situations where his inexperience might even have contributed to significant harm or a patient's death. (hedged) — 00:25:55
  • ★★ After such cases Ali mulled them over for about three weeks, and made peace by recognising that the harm was not intentional and that he did the best he could under the circumstances. — 00:26:24
  • ★★★ Even in life-or-death situations Ali advises keeping a growth mindset: a medical student or F1 cannot be expected to work at a consultant's level, so learn from the mistake and improve. — 00:26:58
  • ★★ Ali suggests a utilitarian view of pain caused while learning: short-term pain for one patient means long-term gain for the others you will treat as a better doctor. (hedged) — 00:27:44

00:28:14 — Imposter syndrome: everyone is winging it

  • ★★★ Against imposter syndrome and feeling inadequate, Ali says first recognise that everyone is just winging it: no one really knows what they are doing, so making it up as you go along is fine. — 00:28:38
  • ★★ Ali says he personally does not really get feelings of imposter syndrome, because of his motto "how hard can it be?". — 00:28:38
  • ★★ Ali says that with over 100,000 subscribers he too is just winging it, as is every YouTuber who seems successful. — 00:29:29
  • ★ Ali recalls a commencement speech whose speaker he cannot remember: asked who had felt in the last week that they were just making it up, every faculty member raised a hand. — 00:30:03

00:30:18 — Finding time to write and keeping a blog consistent

  • ★★ Ali keeps his writing consistent through the Sunday email: if it gets to midnight on Sunday he stays up until one or two in the morning to send it, because it is not optional. — 00:30:32 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★★★ To write more, Ali advises making it not optional with a system, such as 200 words a day, 500 words a week, a weekly blog post or an email every few days. — 00:30:56
  • ★★ Among his favourite YouTube channels Ali names Peter McKinnon, whose photography and videography tutorials he calls incredible, and Casey Neistat, whom he watches in phases. — 00:31:23 · Peter McKinnon

00:31:27 — His favourite YouTube channels and blogs

  • ★★ Ali has recently come to really like Matt D'Avella, who he says has exploded in popularity. — 00:31:53 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ Ali's favourite blogs: Tim Urban's Wait But Why, Eric Barker's Barking Up the Wrong Tree, Mark Manson's blog (behind his book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck) and Mr. Money Mustache on personal finance and frugal living. — 00:31:53

00:32:33 — Growing every day through good habits

  • ★★★ Ali says you grow every day by having good habits and setting up good systems that make you improve incrementally every day. — 00:32:34
  • ★★ James Clear (quoted): James Clear's Atomic Habits says that habits are the compound interest of life. — 00:32:34 · Atomic Habits, James Clear
  • ★★ Ali says improving by 1% every day leaves you exponentially better by the end of the year; good habits compound well over time and bad habits compound badly. — 00:33:12

00:33:50 — Doing side projects at medical school

  • ★★ Ali thinks half an hour of work a day is a reasonable amount at medical school and two hours on the excessive side, leaving hours each evening for friends and side projects. — 00:34:01 · University of Cambridge
  • ★★ At medical school work was Ali's lowest priority unless a deadline was due: friends, sport, societies and events all came first, and he would do it the same way again. — 00:35:00

00:35:13 — Having time for yourself in A-levels: pay yourself first

  • ★★ Ali says school gives you more spare time than you will ever have again: an A-level student with no time for themselves is studying inefficiently, carrying binders, highlighting and making notes despite having revision guides. — 00:35:24
  • ★★ Ali says keeping on top of schoolwork does not matter, nor pre-reading for every class: all that really matters is acing the exam at the end. — 00:35:49

  • ★★★ Ali applies "pay yourself first" from personal finance to time: set aside two hours every day for your own project first, and fit schoolwork around it. — 00:36:18

    “i think it's kind of the same with time you pay yourself first”

00:36:57 — Wrap-up and the offer of a part two

  • ★ Ali ends the video to sleep by half past ten, because from the next day he is restarting his habit of going to the gym before work. — 00:36:57
  • ★★ Ali says he will make a part two answering the remaining 15 or so questions if viewers ask for it in the comments. — 00:36:57

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: how hard can it be?

Also: People: Brandon Sanderson · Casey Neistat · Eric Barker · James Clear · Mark Manson · Matt D'Avella · Molly Hunt · Patrick Rothfuss · Peter McKinnon · Ryan Holiday · Seth Godin · Shay Carl · Steve Jobs · Tim Ferriss · Tim Urban

Projects: Sunday Snippets

Works: Atomic Habits · Barking Up the Wrong Tree · BMAT · Ego Is the Enemy · Make It Stick · Mistborn · Mr. Money Mustache · Oathbringer · Screw motivation, what you need is discipline · Taming the Mammoth · The Kingkiller Chronicles · The Magic of Thinking Big · The Stormlight Archive · The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck · The Tim Ferriss Show · Wait But Why

Organizations: Code School · Codecademy · Instagram · University of Cambridge · W3Schools · YouTube

Concepts: active recall · discipline · growth mindset · meditation · pay yourself first · spaced repetition · Utilitarianism

Products: Amazon Echo · Kindle · Macromedia Dreamweaver · Spotify

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