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Ready Player One + 'My First Million' - Monthly Favourites #12

2019-09-24 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 13:59 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Money and investing (also: Books and reading, Business and entrepreneurship) · mode: Review and recommendation · tags: Lesson from a book, His medical past

In Monthly Favourites for September 2019, Ali recommends Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, the My First Million podcast, Nat Eliason's blog and the board game One Night Ultimate Werewolf; Nat's posts on the emptiness of passive-income freedom make him rethink why he builds passive income, which he still thinks worth it so that he is never a doctor only for the pay.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Intro and his new Skillshare class on how he edits videos

  • ★★ In the twelfth Monthly Favourites video Ali talks about a book, a podcast, a blog and a board game he enjoyed this month (September 2019). — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali has just made a Skillshare online class on his own process for editing videos in Final Cut Pro, and this video is used as an example in it. — 00:00:00 · Skillshare classes, Final Cut Pro

00:00:58 — Book: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

  • ★★★ Ali recommends Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One: he first watched the film and absolutely loved it, then read the book, which he also absolutely loved. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Ali took about two nights to finish Ready Player One, staying up until about 4 a.m. both nights. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Ali's rating for books runs from good up to "really, really, really good", the grade for a book that keeps him up until four in the morning; Ready Player One earned it. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Ready Player One is set in a future of pollution and city slums, where almost everyone spends their life in a realistic virtual-reality game invented by James Halliday, because it is far better than real life. — 00:01:31
  • ★★ The premise of Ready Player One: when James Halliday dies, he announces that he has hidden an Easter egg in his virtual world, the OASIS, and that the first to find it will inherit his fortune and his company. — 00:02:00
  • ★ Ready Player One follows Wade on his quest for Halliday's Easter egg, meeting other hunters along the way, against an evil corporation that wants the egg first. — 00:02:30
  • ★★ Ali calls Ready Player One a really nice coming-of-age story with a little romance, adventure, action, mystery and suspense, and says it is just absolutely sick. — 00:02:59
  • ★★ The book and the film of Ready Player One are surprisingly different, Ali says; he would read the book first and watch the film afterwards. — 00:02:59

00:03:28 — Winner of The Third Door giveaway and a new giveaway of Ready Player One

  • ★★ Ali picks Broken Chalk (as heard), on Instagram Sophia Broken Chalk, as the winner of last month's (August 2019) giveaway of The Third Door, and will message her on Instagram to send her the copy. — 00:03:28 · Instagram
  • ★★ Ali gives away a physical copy of Ready Player One that he bought just to give away: viewers who want it comment with anything plus their Instagram username, and next month (October 2019) he will pick one and post the book. — 00:03:57 · Instagram
  • ★★ Ali read Ready Player One on his Kindle, because he reads everything on Kindle. — 00:03:57 · Kindle

00:04:22 — Podcast: My First Million

  • ★★★ Ali recommends My First Million, a podcast by the people behind The Hustle that gets the gritty details of how Silicon Valley's most prolific founders made their first million, to anyone interested in entrepreneurship. — 00:04:22
  • ★★ Ali calls The Hustle a really good daily tech-news email newsletter, which he has been subscribed to for the last few months. — 00:04:22
  • ★★ My First Million asks founders how they got started and how they would make their first million if they started today without their connections, network or money. — 00:04:51
  • ★ One My First Million episode tells how the makers of the website Hot or Not, when web hosting was very expensive, sneaked into their university and piggybacked off its computer system to host the site. — 00:04:51
  • ★★ Ali calls Shaan Puri, the host of My First Million, a really good interviewer who explores the stories behind people making their first million. — 00:04:51
  • ★★★ Ali likes that My First Million does not shy away from real numbers: the host asks a founder whose company is worth 750 million what he earned in his first year and how long his first million took. — 00:05:32
  • ★★ Interviews such as The Tim Ferriss Show often leave out the numbers behind their guests' success, Ali says, which is another reason he likes the Indie Hackers podcast: it breaks down revenue figures. — 00:06:02 · The Tim Ferriss Show, Tim Ferriss

00:06:25 — Blog: Nat Eliason, and why build passive income at all

  • ★★★ Ali recommends the blog of Nat Eliason, founder of Growth Machine, co-host of the Made You Think podcast and co-founder of Cup and Leaf Tea, who writes on psychology, self-education, entrepreneurship, marketing, philosophy, health and finance. — 00:06:25
  • ★★ Nat Eliason has published for free his personal notes on a huge list of books, podcasts and videos; Ali found it inspiring and wants to do the same on his website. — 00:06:54 · aliabdaal.com
  • ★★ Nat Eliason has several businesses bringing in passive income, and he too started out by reading Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek. — 00:06:54 · The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss, passive income
  • ★★★ Reading The 4-Hour Workweek about six or seven years ago gave Ali the bug of making money while you sleep; since then he has been building sources of passive income so that he need not rely on his full-time job as a doctor to make money. — 00:07:24 · The 4-Hour Workweek, passive income
  • ★★ With his passive income Ali could quit medicine if he wanted to, though he won't, and that gives him more freedom to travel the world and do things. — 00:07:24 · passive income
  • ★★★ Nat Eliason (quoted): Nat Eliason writes about the existential dread of having passive income and no need to work, which Tim Ferriss also alludes to in The 4-Hour Workweek: after travelling a lot, including a few months in Argentina, Nat realised that fetishising travel was not the route to happiness. — 00:07:53 · passive income, Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek
  • ★★★ Nat Eliason (quoted): Nat Eliason says that much of the happiness in your life comes from your relationship, close friends and family, mostly in the city where you live, rather than from travelling the world and living on a beach. — 00:09:02 · passive income
  • ★★ Ali is still trying to build sources of passive income to break free from his job, though he does not want to leave it, and Nat Eliason's posts made him question what the point is. — 00:09:02 · passive income
  • ★★ Ali thinks his life would be a lot better with the freedom to do whatever he wanted, and with that freedom he could choose to remain a doctor. — 00:09:33
  • ★★ Asked by Ali whether they would still do medicine if they won the lottery, a senior doctor said there was no way: they would open their own pet sanctuary. — 00:09:33

  • ★★★ Ali never wants to be a doctor only because it pays the bills, so he still thinks it very valuable to build sources of passive income and an entrepreneurial lifestyle. — 00:10:03 · passive income

    “I never want to be in the position where I am being a doctor because I have to”

  • ★★ Ali loves Nat Eliason's blog because it made him think again about why he is doing all this and work out his priorities. — 00:10:03

  • ★★ Ali has started making notes and says that at some point he will publish them all on his website, as Nat Eliason and Derek Sivers, whom he calls his mate, do; he is working on it. — 00:10:32 · Derek Sivers, aliabdaal.com

00:10:50 — Board game: One Night Ultimate Werewolf

  • ★★ Ali discovered the board game One Night Ultimate Werewolf this month (September 2019) after hearing it praised on the board games subreddit, and played it for the first time with friends. — 00:10:50
  • ★★ In One Night Ultimate Werewolf a phone app in the middle of the table does the narration, waking roles such as the werewolves, the seer and the robber in turn during the night. — 00:11:41
  • ★★ In One Night Ultimate Werewolf, once night is over, the players try to work out who the werewolves are, and at the end of the round the village as a whole decides to kill one person. — 00:12:12
  • ★ One Night Ultimate Werewolf is for three to ten players. (hedged) — 00:12:12
  • ★★ A round of One Night Ultimate Werewolf takes only about 10 to 15 minutes; Ali's group played five or six rounds and had the hang of it by the third or fourth. — 00:12:41

00:13:10 — Sign-off, the Skillshare class and the Monthly Favourites playlist

  • ★★★ Ali really recommends One Night Ultimate Werewolf as a very nice party game for people willing to engage with it, unlike Through the Ages, which takes eight hours a game. — 00:13:10

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: My First Million · Nat Eliason · One Night Ultimate Werewolf · passive income · Ready Player One

Also: People: Derek Sivers · Ernest Cline · Shaan Puri · Tim Ferriss

Projects: aliabdaal.com · Skillshare classes

Works: Indie Hackers podcast · Made You Think · The 4-Hour Workweek · The Third Door (book) · The Tim Ferriss Show

Organizations: Cup and Leaf · Growth Machine · Instagram · Reddit · The Hustle

Places: Argentina · Silicon Valley

Characters: James Halliday · OASIS · Wade

Products: Avalon · Final Cut Pro · Hot or Not · Kindle · Through the Ages

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