Skip to content

Monthly Favourites #10 - Ali Abdaal

2019-07-02 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 11:47 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Health, sleep and habits (also: Tools, apps and tech, Business and entrepreneurship, Goals, purpose and life design) · mode: Review and recommendation · tags: Lesson from a book, His own numbers, His medical past

In Monthly Favourites for June 2019, Ali recommends a Leuchtturm1917 notebook for free writing, Phil Knight's memoir Shoe Dog, Rolf Potts's podcast Deviate, and Ramit Sethi's Get Rich Slowly post The Psychology of Passive Barriers, which he ties to friction: cutting small barriers makes good habits and filming easier.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Monthly Favourites for June 2019: a physical product, a book, a podcast and a blog post

00:00:21 — Physical product: the Leuchtturm 1917 notebook for free writing

  • ★★★ Ali recommends the Leuchtturm1917 A5 dotted notebook: he never thought he would be a fan of physical notebooks, but he has really enjoyed writing in it. — 00:00:21 · Leuchtturm1917 notebook
  • ★★ Ali started his Leuchtturm1917 notebook on 24 May 2019 and filled 80 pages of it in a little over four weeks. — 00:00:21 · Leuchtturm1917 notebook
  • ★★★ Free writing in a paper notebook, a few pages of whatever comes with arrows and diagrams, sometimes over a latte in a coffee shop, has given Ali lots of insights and ideas for his website and YouTube channel. — 00:00:51 · Leuchtturm1917 notebook, aliabdaal.com, YouTube
  • ★★ Ali says part of the appeal is feeling a bit of a badass: when everyone uses tech, there is something romantic about writing in a physical notebook in a coffee shop, sipping a latte "like a pretentious twat". — 00:00:51 · Leuchtturm1917 notebook
  • ★★ After two years of writing with the Apple Pencil on his iPad Pro, which is now his default, Ali finds pen on paper a different experience; the novelty has not worn off in five weeks, and the delight of it makes him write more. — 00:01:35 · Leuchtturm1917 notebook, iPad Pro, Apple Pencil
  • ★ Ali thinks he paid about 15 pounds for the Leuchtturm1917 notebook, a bit expensive for a notebook. (hedged) — 00:01:35 · Leuchtturm1917 notebook

00:02:04 — Winner of last month's Bad Blood giveaway

  • ★ Leuchtturm1917 notebooks are apparently the ones Neil Gaiman uses. (hedged) — 00:02:04 · Leuchtturm1917 notebook
  • ★★ Ali names the viewer TheRealJasonKO, an aspiring physician from Canada, as the winner of the copy of Bad Blood from last month's (June 2019) video, and asks them to email him their address. — 00:02:04

00:02:33 — Book: Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

  • ★★ Surprised last month (June 2019) that Bad Blood was a good nonfiction book, Ali decided to give other nonfiction a try, an autobiography, and around then someone recommended Phil Knight's Shoe Dog. — 00:02:33
  • ★★★ Ali calls Shoe Dog, the memoir of Nike founder Phil Knight, really good: not a standard business book full of advice but the story of how the Nike brand started. — 00:03:14
  • ★★ Ali agrees with Warren Buffett's blurb on Shoe Dog that Phil Knight is a gifted storyteller. — 00:03:14
  • ★★ Shoe Dog tells how Phil Knight's love of running, and a coach who cared about running shoes, led him to go to Japan to have a type of shoe made, and how the company he started eventually led to Nike. — 00:03:14 · Japan
  • ★★ Ali finds Shoe Dog well written and gripping, never braggy: an inspiring memoir of how much hard work and grind goes into building something like Nike. — 00:03:44
  • ★★ Ali never thought he would cry at the end of a nonfiction book, but the ending of Shoe Dog had him properly in tears. — 00:04:05
  • ★★ Ali finds the epilogue of Shoe Dog particularly powerful: since we all want to be rich to some extent, hearing one of the world's richest men say what being rich is actually like is very interesting. — 00:04:05
  • ★ Shoe Dog also covers the Nike sweatshop scandal, which Ali thinks spread through the company about ten years ago. (hedged) — 00:04:31
  • ★★ Ali fully agrees with Bill Gates's blurb that Shoe Dog is an amazing tale; he loves the book so much that he has bought it for a friend and started gifting it to people. — 00:04:31

00:05:05 — Podcast: Deviate by Rolf Potts, and plans for long-term world travel

  • ★★★ Ali recommends Deviate, the podcast of the author Rolf Potts, which he recently discovered and really enjoyed. — 00:05:05
  • ★★ In 2002 Rolf Potts wrote Vagabonding, a guide to long-term world travel showing that the dream of travelling the world is not as ridiculous, expensive or difficult as people assume. — 00:05:18
  • ★★★ Ali read Vagabonding years ago at university, when long-term travel was not on the cards; now, in about a year, he will be free of full-time employment and likes the idea of a long trip around the world alongside some medical work in different countries. — 00:05:18
  • ★★ In Deviate Rolf Potts holds long-form interviews; Ali most enjoys those with travellers, such as a man who travels the world with only his passport and wallet and no bag, a woman who travels with one backpack, and travel journalists, writers and photographers. — 00:06:01
  • ★★ Deviate gave Ali the travel bug: since he started listening he has been making concrete plans for a hopefully semi-long-term trip around the world, which now seems a lot less daunting. (hedged) — 00:06:30
  • ★★ Ali highly recommends Deviate to anyone into travel; it also goes off topic and is always interesting, because its guests have done cool things with their lives. — 00:06:30
  • ★★★ Ali calls Get Rich Slowly, despite "a bit of a crap name", one of his favourite personal finance blogs, with a ton of good advice on building wealth, saving and low-cost, low-effort investing. — 00:07:03

00:07:05 — Blog post: The Psychology of Passive Barriers on Get Rich Slowly, and friction

  • ★★ Ali says Ramit Sethi's book I Will Teach You To Be Rich has a terrible, clickbaity title but is a really good book, like Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek. — 00:07:41 · The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ The Psychology of Passive Barriers is a guest post on Get Rich Slowly from around 2009 by Ramit Sethi. — 00:08:10
  • ★★ Ali calls the idea of passive barriers friction, and says it is not an original idea: lots of people have come up with it. — 00:08:10 · friction
  • ★★★ Ramit Sethi (quoted): In The Psychology of Passive Barriers, Ramit Sethi argues that what stops us from reaching goals or building good habits is often not anything big but passive barriers, and that in personal finance the answer is to reduce them. — 00:08:36 · friction
  • ★★ Ramit Sethi (quoted): The post tells of a man who never cashed a cheque for about $3,000 because he had no envelope; months later the company that sent it went bankrupt and he lost the money. — 00:08:36 · friction
  • ★★★ When Ali started making YouTube videos, setting up his microphone, light, camera and screen took so long that it was a big passive barrier to filming; streamlining it to reduce the friction made sitting down to film a lot easier and more pleasant. — 00:09:05 · friction, YouTube
  • ★★ James Clear (quoted): In Atomic Habits James Clear says that to build good habits you should make them obvious: to floss, keep the floss on the bathroom counter rather than in the cabinet. — 00:09:34 · Atomic Habits, James Clear
  • ★★ To play PlayStation less, Ali says, put the PlayStation away in its cupboard, so getting it out again means overcoming friction. — 00:10:04 · friction
  • ★★ Ali says The Psychology of Passive Barriers explains friction in much better detail than he does and was probably the blog post that resonated with him most in June 2019. (hedged) — 00:10:04

00:10:33 — Shoe Dog giveaway and sign-off

  • ★★ Ali gives away his copy of Shoe Dog: viewers comment with an emoji at the start and their Instagram username, and he will message one winner on Instagram and send the book with a little message from him in the front. — 00:10:55 · Instagram
  • ★★ YouTube retention graphs show that only about 10 to 15 percent of viewers watch Ali's videos to the end. — 00:10:55 · YouTube

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Deviate · friction · Leuchtturm1917 notebook · Shoe Dog · The Psychology of Passive Barriers

Also: People: Bill Gates · James Clear · Neil Gaiman · Phil Knight · Ramit Sethi · Rolf Potts · Tim Ferriss · Warren Buffett

Projects: aliabdaal.com

Works: Atomic Habits · Bad Blood · Get Rich Slowly · I Will Teach You To Be Rich · The 4-Hour Workweek · Vagabonding

Organizations: Instagram · Nike · YouTube

Places: Japan

Products: Apple Pencil · iPad Pro

Replied to by

← Previous: How I Make My YouTube Videos · Next → AWAY Weekender Bag Review