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Productivity, Books and Careers Advice - Ali Abdaal x Noah Kagan // Deep Dive

2020-04-29 · Podcast or interview · Ali, Noah Kagan, Ali Abdaal (channel) · recording, 1 h 58 min · watch on YouTube

Topic: Work and career (also: Business and entrepreneurship, Mindset, motivation and happiness, Medicine and his doctor years, Money and investing, YouTube, writing online and creators, Productivity and time, Goals, purpose and life design) · mode: Conversation and interview · tags: His medical past, Aimed at students, Lesson from a book, Family, He changed his mind

In a two-hour live Deep Dive, Ali and AppSumo founder Noah Kagan trade career, productivity and life advice: Ali explains why he will be unemployed from August 2020 and would rather travel than apply for residency, and how he starts things by just shipping, buys for the time he wants to spend and adds friction to his phone. Noah gives his 10-year rule, the coffee challenge, three kinds of goals and his typing, trackpad and bedroom tips.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Going live and welcoming Noah Kagan to Deep Dive

00:00:58 — Career walkthroughs: Noah's businesses and the 10-year rule; Ali's coding, school businesses and SixMed

  • ★★ Noah Kagan was employee number 30 at Facebook and number 4 at Mint, then founded AppSumo, which he calls an eight-figure company and the number one site for software deals. — 00:00:58 · Facebook
  • ★★ Ali read Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years two days before the stream, and it made him cry many times. — 00:02:28
  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah says college is the best time to start a business, with time and little downside: take as many risks as you can early, because people get safe and scared of losing as they age. — 00:03:35
  • ★★ Ali started his entrepreneurial journey at about 12, teaching himself to code from W3Schools tutorials and freelancing on rentacoder.com, undercutting the market at $5 a project. — 00:04:05
  • ★★ Every year at secondary school Ali and his friends came up with a new business idea; every one failed, but they learned a lot from each. — 00:04:34
  • ★★ SixMed, Ali's company running courses for UK medical school applicants, began to do well in his first year of medical school; the lessons from the poor websites he had made over the previous five or six years went into its 2012-2013 website. — 00:05:00 · 6med
  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah listed every business he has started, more than 20, and says that after 20 years of trying he is now worth over a million dollars. — 00:05:24
  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah's 10-year rule: work on something for 10 years and you will become a millionaire if that is your goal, or reach whatever success you want as a musician, artist or writer. — 00:05:53
  • ★★ Ali's classic advice: it is easy to spend a lot of time thinking and reading, but getting started is the first step. — 00:06:20

00:06:45 — Noah at Facebook; what would you do with a million dollars; Ali's lottery question to doctors

  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah encourages people to find the work they would do with a million dollars in the bank and do it now, because doing it is how they will earn the million. — 00:08:48
  • ★★★ For eight years Ali has asked doctors and medical students whether they would still be doctors if they won the lottery: about half would leave medicine, half would go part-time, and none go part-time now because of bills and mortgages. — 00:09:16
  • ★★★ Wanting to avoid that future set Ali on the path of businesses, passive income and financial independence: medicine is fun, but he doesn't think anything is fun full-time. — 00:09:52 · passive income, work optional
  • ★★ Forced to choose, Ali would do YouTube full-time for the freedom, but ideally he wants both part-time: full-time YouTube would lose its charm as a job. (hedged) — 00:10:18

00:10:20 — Medicine or YouTube full time; keeping hobbies

  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah advises finding work you enjoy that makes money while keeping hobbies, as an ice-cream maker who had not eaten ice cream in two years showed him that doing what you love full-time can spoil it. — 00:11:02

00:12:20 — Noah's firing from Facebook, getting out of a low point, the coffee challenge, building an audience; garden rather than hunt

  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah was fired from Facebook; he thinks they were right to fire him, and it gave him a chip on his shoulder that drove him to do other things. — 00:13:00 · Facebook
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: If you work for someone, Noah says, ask whether you are invaluable: how far the company would be set back if it replaced you today. — 00:13:30
  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: To climb out of a low point such as being fired, Noah says first rebuild confidence and self-worth with things you can control, such as making your bed or doing a push-up, then help one person. — 00:15:59
  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah's coffee challenge: wherever you buy something, usually a cafe, ask for 10% off, to practise asking, which he calls one of the most powerful muscles anyone can develop. — 00:17:27
  • ★ When Ali first heard Noah describe the coffee challenge on a podcast, he broke into a sweat just thinking about it. — 00:17:27
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah advises building your brand and audience early, with a blog or a newsletter, because no one can take that away from you. — 00:18:46
  • ★★★ Asked what he would tell himself at 15, Ali says: start a personal blog and write, at the very least reviews of the books you read, to build the habit of writing. — 00:19:45
  • ★★ A blog more than ten years old is a superpower, Ali says: with an existing audience everything is much easier than starting from scratch. — 00:20:32

00:21:33 — Feeling behind in life; what makes a day fulfilling; Ali's list of things he enjoys

  • ★★ Noah Kagan: To find his calling, Noah tells a viewer to look back at what he enjoyed as a child and at what he does in his spare time for free. — 00:22:46
  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah treats jealousy as a compass to what you want or don't want: rather than worrying about being behind peers, decide where you want to be, starting with the end of the month. — 00:24:28
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah wrote a Fantasy 2020, a fiction story of where he would be at the end of 2020 if the year were unreal: Oktoberfest, the Joe Rogan show, hanging out with Ali. — 00:25:19
  • ★★ A great day for Ali is coming home from work having accomplished something and with good banter with nurses and doctors; days alone doing paperwork, or scrolling Instagram, feel wasted. — 00:26:19 · Instagram
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah starts every morning with his GEBY routine, tracked in the Strides app: gratitude, exercise, breakfast and something for yourself. — 00:27:04
  • ★★★ Writing a list of the things he enjoys, Ali found that being a doctor was not on it: making videos, good audiobooks, board games with friends and learning music theory on piano and guitar fulfil him more than his job. — 00:29:35
  • ★★ Having gone through so much of medicine, Ali tells himself that a break from it would throw away all that effort or step into the void. — 00:30:03
  • ★★ Ali found listing what fulfils him a helpful exercise: those things would fill his ideal day, so he asks how to work towards a future where that is possible. — 00:30:03
  • ★★ Ali went into medicine because he did not know what else to do: for someone of his ethnicity with decent grades, medicine is the default path. — 00:30:27

00:30:30 — Why Ali chose medicine, his August 2020 plans and A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

  • ★★ Torn at 17 between medicine and computer science, Ali chose medicine thinking a doctor who can code is cooler than a coder, and six years at university better than three. — 00:30:56
  • ★★★ Ali is glad he did the medical degree and finds the job quite fun, but doesn't want to be a doctor for the rest of his life, at least not full-time, hence YouTube and his businesses. — 00:31:24
  • ★★★ From August 2020 Ali will be essentially unemployed: after two years as a UK doctor one applies for a residency programme in a specialty, and he was not sure which specialty he wants. — 00:31:24
  • ★★ Most senior doctors Ali asked told him there is no rush through the training pathway: in medicine you can take a break and come back without losing anything. — 00:31:58
  • ★★★ Before the coronavirus hit, Ali planned to spend a year travelling the world solo, inspired by Rolf Potts's podcast Deviate and its one-backpack travellers. — 00:31:58
  • ★ Ali's mother is a doctor but never pushed him into medicine; she thought he would more likely do maths. — 00:34:48
  • ★★ Ali's mother, a traditionalist, tells him he can travel the world but should finish his training first. — 00:35:16
  • ★★★ Single and without kids, Ali reckons a year travelling at 25 or 26 is unlikely to be a regret; on his deathbed he won't wish he had been a fully qualified doctor a year longer. — 00:35:38
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah's guiding phrase is "no apologies": he asks what you would do if you never had to apologise, and says it has made him more outspoken in his content. — 00:35:38

00:36:25 — No apologies, Yes Theory, what they are most proud of and when they grew most; starting a newsletter

  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah says you need things to look forward to, and if you have none this week (week of 27 April 2020), make something; he also keeps fantasy lists of adventures, such as living in a van. — 00:37:25
  • ★★ Ali recommends Yes Theory, a channel he calls life-changing: three guys travel the world under the mantra "seek discomfort", stepping out of their comfort zone. — 00:38:21
  • ★★★ Ali is most proud of his YouTube channel, the most difficult thing he has done: a long grind that starts with shouting into the void before the flywheel gains momentum. (hedged) — 00:39:35
  • ★★★ Ali rarely uses the word proud, because it implies taking credit, whereas his success is mostly luck, privilege and circumstances; he has just tried not to squander a good hand. — 00:40:25
  • ★★★ Ali grew most when, after singing in the Cambridge medical school pantomime in his fourth year, he was asked in his fifth to co-direct it, with no acting or theatre experience. — 00:40:25 · Addenbrooke's Hospital Pantomime, University of Cambridge, Cambridge

  • ★★★ With imposter syndrome beside the experienced Will, Ali realised that everyone was worried about their own lines and nobody cared about his inexperience, which was liberating. — 00:41:49

    “actually no one cares and that was very liberating”

  • ★★ Co-directing the pantomime pushed Ali to branch out his channel from medical school content into the other things he enjoys. — 00:41:49

  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah says we are proud of things we actually had to work for, not of money that simply came to us, such as the payout when Teachable sold. — 00:42:32
  • ★★★ Ali's standard advice for starting anything is to start an email newsletter: it is easy, at first only you, a friend and your mum read it, and having it makes you write much more. — 00:43:44
  • ★ Ali started a personal blog in 2016 meaning to post weekly, but wrote about three posts that year. — 00:43:44
  • ★★★ Ali has sent his weekly Sunday email newsletter for 108 weeks without fail, probably the best habit he has started: writing brings ideas, publishing brings feedback and an audience, and it connected him with Noah. (hedged) — 00:44:28 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah says he believes in fulfilment and control rather than happiness: happiness can be easy and fleeting, fulfilment is challenging. — 00:45:44

00:46:20 — Wanting things versus being satisfied; optimise the 80%; buying for the time you want to spend

  • ★★ Donald Miller (quoted): In A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller writes that you can tell a lot about people from what they want: wanting nothing is a boring life, wanting a Roomba a stupid one. — 00:46:36
  • ★★ Ali cannot reconcile Donald Miller's call to go after what you want with the idea of being satisfied with what you have and having no desires. (unsure) — 00:46:36
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: If you are unsure whether a purchase would make a difference, Noah says, try it out without committing, as he did by renting a nice house before buying one. — 00:48:46
  • ★ At 11 Ali would have bought every game in the shop if he were rich; now he can buy any game and buys none. — 00:49:15
  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah's "optimise the 80%": invest in what you spend your time on, such as your bed and computer, and not in things that matter less to you, such as clothes. — 00:50:05
  • ★★★ For a purchase Ali asks where he spends his time and also where he wants to spend it: he talked himself out of a Tesla because it would only make him spend more time driving. — 00:50:28
  • ★★ A nicer couch would make Ali sit more, so he buys things that make him create, such as a camera, a drone, a better laptop, a piano, a guitar and, two days earlier, a ukulele. — 00:50:55
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah offers to ship a copy of A Million Miles in a Thousand Years anywhere in the world to five commenters who say what action they will take from the conversation, picked by Ali's team about seven days after the video. — 00:51:48

00:52:20 — Finding your talents; advice to high school students; deciding your own metric of success

  • ★★ Ali's advantages: computer work never feels like work to him, and being a doctor from Cambridge University gives him kudos among students worldwide. — 00:52:39 · University of Cambridge, Cambridge
  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: To find your talents, Noah says look at what you gravitate to in free time, ask a friend you respect what your unique talent is, and try many things to learn what you don't like. — 00:53:07
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah's advice to high school students: treat life as a buffet and try many dishes, from Boy Scouts to online businesses and reading clubs. — 00:54:51
  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah tells high school students to think about who they surround themselves with: he spent more time with friends who went on to tech and less with those who were only cool in school. — 00:55:20
  • ★★★ Ali tells students to make use of their huge free time at school and university, because a working job leaves far less: even after two hours of homework from 5 p.m. the evening is free. — 00:56:49
  • ★★ In high school Ali learned to code, taught himself design and took up hobbies that seemed of little use then; those skills have compounded over time. — 00:57:18
  • ★ Ali also spent about four hours a day for three years playing World of Warcraft, which he jokingly calls the happiest time of his life. (playful) — 00:57:18 · World of Warcraft
  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah calls success a horrible word and says decide your own metric: when he chased money he was less fulfilled and earned less, and when he did what he loved he earned most. — 00:58:47
  • ★★★ Ali's first question about anything is whether it is fun: he does what is fun and skips what only makes money; early on he took on unfun work for money, but now doing what fills him with joy makes more sense. — 00:59:13

00:59:40 — Starting a blog or channel, momentum, working for free, monetising passions, using summers for skills

  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah's premise for a beginner's blog or website: don't spend money until you start making money; YouTube is free. — 00:59:40
  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Starting today, Noah would use YouTube, Instagram and a SendFox newsletter, and post at least weekly for a year before even thinking of stopping. — 01:00:02 · Instagram
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah advises finding the medium that suits your style, whether audio, writing or photos, and committing to it weekly for a year. — 01:00:44

  • ★★★ When people ask Ali to critique their channel or blog after three videos, he tells them to ask again after 50: at first you learn far more from churning out videos than from targeted feedback. — 01:01:37

    “Ask me again in a year's time once you've made 50 videos”

  • ★★★ In his first video Ali said he would just try it: his first 100 videos would be terrible, so he would make 100 and then get good, and at worst his grandma would enjoy them. — 01:02:29 · Ali Abdaal's grandmother

  • ★★ Ignoring worries about gear, Ali recorded his first vlog on his iPhone lying on his bed, edited it in Premiere and uploaded it the same evening. — 01:02:29 · iPhone
  • ★★★ Had Ali worried about making his first video good, he would never have made it; putting something out builds momentum and the flywheel. — 01:03:11
  • ★★ At the start Ali focused on view counts, refreshing YouTube Studio or the YouTube app about 18 times a day. — 01:03:11
  • ★★★ After a few months, at one or two thousand subscribers, Ali decided metrics made no sense and to focus on the process of two videos a week without worrying about views. — 01:03:59
  • ★★ Ali still struggles with views: he wants to make videos about fiction books, but every one so far has tanked compared with productivity videos. — 01:03:59
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah's "sex cash theory": like an actor who follows a blockbuster with an indie film, a creator makes videos that bring in the audience and also experimental, more creative ones. — 01:04:28
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Being an influencer is as much work as any job, Noah says, so work out what you would work on for free and keep enjoying whatever it pays. — 01:05:35

  • ★★★ Ali is big on monetising your passions: not every passion must be monetised, but getting paid for what you already do makes life more interesting. — 01:05:35

    “the phrase of trying to monetize your passions”

  • ★★ Towards the end of high school Ali learned close-up magic; he performed weekly as a volunteer at the local hospice, and a paid restaurant gig was very scary and a complete failure. — 01:06:14

  • ★★★ Taking a skill public makes it more fun and shows you what you are weakest at and must improve, unlike practising moves in front of a webcam that no one cares about. — 01:06:43
  • ★★ Baking muffins is fine, Ali says, but baking them and trying to sell them adds another dimension of fun. — 01:07:09
  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah tells people without the job they want to work for free for someone living the life they admire: email them offering value, such as three things they could do, for free. — 01:07:38
  • ★★★ To students asking how to prepare for college or medical school over the summer, Ali says not to do schoolwork such as anatomy but to learn a new hobby or skill or level up existing ones. — 01:09:54
  • ★★★ More doors in medicine have opened for Ali because he can make a good-looking website than because he scored 1% higher than someone in an anatomy exam. — 01:09:54
  • ★★ Ali was invited onto the committee of a large plastic surgery charity after offering to make its website look good for free. — 01:10:23
  • ★★ Through the plastic surgery charity Ali met consultant plastic surgeons, which led him to help develop an augmented-reality app for remote surgical assistance in low-resource areas. — 01:10:23
  • ★★★ Ali's productivity rests on optimising every interaction with a computer: a fast typing speed, keyboard shortcuts and tools like Alfred. — 01:11:40 · Alfred, keyboard navigation

01:11:46 — Productivity: computer interactions, effectiveness, colour-coded calendars and how to set goals

  • ★★ Ali wants to minimise the time between thinking of something and it happening on the computer; watching people click around pains him. — 01:12:10
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Citing a man paddling his canoe fast up the wrong stream, an image he believes comes from Gary Halbert, Noah says efficiency differs from effectiveness: work on the right things. — 01:12:52
  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah colour-codes his Google Calendar by goal, purple for content creation and yellow for learning, to see at a glance how much of his week serves each goal. — 01:14:01
  • ★★★ Ali resonates with Jason Fried and DHH's Basecamp view that goals are arbitrary; a business mentor urges numerical YouTube goals on him, but he wonders what the point is. — 01:15:07
  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah has seen three systems of goals that each work: objective goals such as a revenue target, progress goals that only ask whether something grows, and system goals such as the gym three times a week. — 01:16:14
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: A subscriber target for his YouTube channel would kill Noah's motivation: he just enjoys putting out videos. — 01:17:25
  • ★★★ Ali runs his channel on a systems goal: one, two or three videos a week, getting a bit better over time with numbers trending the right way. — 01:17:54
  • ★★ Ali has no subscriber goal because it would take the fun out of the channel: chasing views would rule out videos on fiction books. — 01:17:54
  • ★★ For a new business venture Ali sets a bar of at least $500 a month and does what it takes to reach it; beyond that he does not care. — 01:18:35
  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah says it is really hard to know what you want but easy to get it once you know, so spend more time working out what you really want. — 01:19:01
  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah set his podcast a goal of 100,000 downloads an episode, quit when he reached 30,000, and restarted months later with the goal of one episode he loves a week; it now gets 10,000. — 01:20:08
  • ★★★ Ali calls Marques Brownlee's answer on the Y Combinator podcast such good advice: pick something, anything, and work on it for 10 years. — 01:22:04

01:22:45 — Trackpad, typing and shortcuts; optimising the bedroom; reducing Instagram

  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah's first productivity tip: set your trackpad or mouse to full tracking speed, or you are doing half work. — 01:23:17
  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah says type at least 80 words a minute: practise 20 minutes a day on keybr.com, ratatype.com and 10fastfingers until you get there. — 01:24:09
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah recommends learning the Gmail keyboard shortcuts, listed by pressing shift and question mark, to save hours of your life. — 01:24:31
  • ★★ Ali recently started using Things 3 for his to-dos; whenever he is tempted to use the mouse he looks up the keyboard shortcut and commits it to memory. — 01:25:00 · Things 3
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Once you are 30, Noah says, you don't change your productivity system: find the one that works and don't get sidetracked by which to-do app to use. — 01:25:00
  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah calls optimising your bedroom the number one thing to do, because the whole day depends on how you get up. — 01:25:53
  • ★★ Ali has started on sleep: blackout curtains, an Oura Ring to track deep and REM sleep, and blue-light-blocking glasses on the way. — 01:26:21
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah calls a mattress topper, at $50 at most, the most affordable way to upgrade your sleep. — 01:27:54
  • ★★ After reading Why We Sleep, Ali, with no air conditioning, runs a fan with the window open to cool his bedroom to about 19 degrees overnight. (hedged) — 01:27:54
  • ★★ After reading Why We Sleep, Ali stopped taking his phone to bed and keeps it across the room on the dresser. — 01:27:54
  • ★★ With only his Kindle on the bedside table, Ali can only read in bed, and in the morning he must get up to fetch his phone; that friction keeps him from lying in bed on it. — 01:28:37 · Kindle, friction
  • ★ Ali puts a bottle of water on his bedside table each night to drink on waking, after reading that it is good for you. — 01:28:37
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah unfollowed everyone on Instagram, so there is nothing to see, and has no email on his phone. — 01:30:01 · Instagram
  • ★★★ A couple of weeks earlier, spending too much time on Instagram, Ali unfollowed the models he followed; his feed is now desk setups, landscape photography and workout accounts that push him to do pull-ups. — 01:30:26 · Instagram

01:31:15 — Adding or subtracting; environment design; bucket lists

  • ★★★ Noah Kagan: Noah asks of every activity whether it adds or subtracts: people give their time away accidentally, and Instagram and YouTube are optimised to waste it. — 01:31:27 · Instagram
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah recommends the News Feed Eradicator Chrome extension for Facebook. — 01:32:15 · Facebook
  • ★★ Ali keeps his guitar next to the couch, so on a break the easiest thing is to practise scales instead of scrolling Instagram, which serves his goal of busking. — 01:32:45 · Instagram
  • ★★★ Ali's environment design: remove friction from what you want to do and add it to what you don't, such as uninstalling Instagram or burying it in a folder; his is on the third page. — 01:32:45 · friction, Instagram
  • ★★ In Cambridge, where busking needs no licence, Ali and friends busked two or three times in medical school with a guitar and amp, raising money for the local homeless shelter; he has not since starting work. — 01:33:22 · Cambridge
  • ★★ Busking on the London Underground, which needs an audition and a licence, is on Ali's bucket list: he wants to get good at guitar and singing, perform there and maybe film it. — 01:33:50
  • ★★ Ali's bucket list includes making a magic show and performing it at the Edinburgh Fringe. — 01:34:38
  • ★ Ali also wants to learn archery and become a Gymshark athlete. — 01:35:00 · Gymshark
  • ★★ Ali likes the idea of asking on Instagram for someone anywhere in the world to host him for a week, then visiting them and making a video. — 01:35:00 · Instagram
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah sets goals in one-year segments and makes each year's goals a bucket list, in five categories: work, workout, living, personal and travel. — 01:35:41
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah reads his goals every day and says to keep them in view in as many places as possible, such as on the mirror. — 01:37:26

01:37:55 — Word of the year; treating personal life like a business; what viewers learned from Ali

  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah's word of the year is congruency: he wants how he behaves in relationships, at work and towards himself to be aligned. — 01:38:02
  • ★★★ Ali and his brother Taimur note on their podcast that most gains in their personal lives came from treating them like a business, and in their businesses from treating them personally. — 01:38:59 · Taimur Abdaal, Not Overthinking
  • ★★ Ali asked friends for their birthdays and put them in Things as recurring reminders five days ahead, so he can buy presents and organise group gifts. — 01:39:29 · Things 3
  • ★★ Ali says that from August he will post on Instagram and YouTube so that someone can host him for a week. — 01:40:33 · Instagram
  • ★ Ali found the Mac emoji shortcut Control-Command-Space while using Notion: it lets him type the name of the emoji he wants. — 01:42:15 · Notion

01:43:20 — Vulnerability, putting yourself out there and The Art of Happiness

  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah used to hedge his advice; after therapy he stopped apologising and began putting out what he believes. — 01:43:58
  • ★★ After three years of advice online, Ali still frames it as things that worked for him that might work for others. — 01:45:07
  • ★★ Ali still hesitates to say things unapologetically and cloaks them in throat-clearing such as "don't hate me for saying this"; he is trying to get better. — 01:45:54
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: From the Dalai Lama's The Art of Happiness Noah takes being intentional with your words; he has dropped "I think" and "try" to speak definitively. — 01:46:16

01:47:25 — Freedom, control and not needing permission

  • ★★★ In traditional fields it feels as if you need permission; Ali's biggest lesson is that you don't: if you want to do the thing, do it. — 01:47:53

    “we don't need permission like you know if you want to do the thing then just do the thing”

  • ★★★ Ali knows the right answer between travelling the world and applying for a residency programme is to travel; talking to people he looks up to is a way of asking permission he doesn't need. — 01:47:53

  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah says an entrepreneur cannot be satisfied: someone satisfied has no problems they want to solve. — 01:48:32
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: Noah recommends Teaching as a Subversive Activity, on how schools would be if they were not run like factories. — 01:49:06

01:50:10 — Resources, the Unfair Advantage edit, building a community; sign-off

  • ★★ Angus edited Ali's Unfair Advantage video, his first YouTube edit, after working through Ali's 35-video Skillshare class on Final Cut a month earlier; it got about 150,000 views in two days. — 01:53:24 · Angus, Skillshare classes, Final Cut Pro
  • ★★ Noah Kagan: After Keith Ferrazzi's Never Eat Alone, Noah advises becoming a hub that connects people: life is richer, people see you as an expert, and it builds a community. — 01:54:27
  • ★★★ Ali started a Discord a few months earlier where a few thousand people swapped homework tips, but it became unmanageable from the sheer number, so he is looking for another way. — 01:54:27
  • ★ Unfollowing the Facebook news feed and joining groups of smart people, such as Tiago Forte's, might be a way to get more value out of Facebook. (hedged) — 01:55:12 · Facebook, Tiago Forte
  • ★★ Seeing viewers keen on the Discord, Ali says he might reinstate it once there is a way to manage some 10,000 people. (hedged) — 01:56:08

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): The channel says this livestream with two speakers and a screen share was filmed with Ecamm. — creator comment
  • ★★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked for the best way to learn guitar, the channel recommends JustinGuitar. — creator comment

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Central: 10-year rule · A Million Miles in a Thousand Years · friction · Noah Kagan

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's grandmother · Andrew Warner · Angus · Dalai Lama · David Heinemeier Hansson · Donald Miller · Gary Halbert · Gary Vaynerchuk · Jason Fried · Keith Ferrazzi · Liz · Mark Zuckerberg · Marques Brownlee · Ramit Sethi · Rolf Potts · Taimur Abdaal · Tiago Forte · Tim Ferriss · Will (student, mentioned from 2019)

Projects: Addenbrooke's Hospital Pantomime · Not Overthinking · Skillshare classes · Sunday Snippets

Works: Deviate · Never Eat Alone · Teaching as a Subversive Activity · The Art of Happiness · The Courage to Be Disliked · The Unfair Advantage · Why We Sleep

Organizations: 6med · AppSumo · Basecamp · Facebook · Gymshark · Instagram · Mint · Tesla · University of Cambridge · W3Schools · Y Combinator · Yes Theory

Concepts: coffee challenge · flywheel · keyboard navigation · passive income · Plastic surgery · work optional

Places: Cambridge · London Underground

Events: Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Products: 10FastFingers · Adobe Premiere Pro · Alfred · Discord · Final Cut Pro · Gmail · iPhone · Kindle · News Feed Eradicator · Notion · Oura Ring · SendFox · Things 3 · World of Warcraft · YouTube Studio

Only in the description or credits: Deep Dive · Ecamm · JustinGuitar

Also centred on A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: 15 Books To Read This Year

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