Skip to content

My BIGGEST Rejections in Life

2020-10-04 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 22:19 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Mindset, motivation and happiness (also: Business and entrepreneurship, Relationships and personal life, Productivity and time, Money and investing) · mode: Personal story · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, Family, Lesson from a book

Ali tells the failures and rejections of his childhood and teens (a classmate he never told he liked, refused game-permission emails, a web design studio and a pyramid scheme that failed, a headmaster calling him robotic, losing his £900 life savings to a laptop scam) and draws seven lessons, from shooting your shot to using unfair advantages and turning failures into positives.

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: a video about his failures and seven lessons

  • ★★ Ali came to the UK aged eight in 2003, in year four, and fell for a girl in his class named Lily. — 00:00:00

00:00:20 — Lily, the girl in year four, and lesson one: shoot your shot

  • ★★ To get close to Lily, Ali read the books she was reading, among them Philip Pullman's Northern Lights, and finished it well before she did. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Ali still regrets never telling Lily how he felt; had he done so, he says, he might have had his first kiss at nine rather than at 19. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ Ali's first lesson: if you like someone, tell them and shoot your shot, because being rejected there and then is better than living in regret, as he has for 17 years. — 00:01:27 · rejection over regret
  • ★★ From about the age of 12 Ali had three strands of business ideas that all failed; the first was an online game, for which he learned to make websites and server-side coding in PHP. — 00:01:27

00:01:50 — The online game saga: emails to Robert Muchamore, Blizzard and Nintendo; lesson two

  • ★★ On 19 February 2007, aged 12, Ali emailed Robert Muchamore, author of the Cherub books, asking permission to make an online version of Cherub. — 00:01:57
  • ★★ Robert Muchamore replied the same day that he liked the idea of an online Cherub game but did not own the game rights; Ali was happy simply to get a reply. — 00:02:44
  • ★★ In August 2007 Ali emailed Blizzard Entertainment for permission to use its content in a non-commercial browser game he wanted to look like World of Warcraft. — 00:02:44 · World of Warcraft
  • ★★ Blizzard Entertainment did not even reply to the email Ali sent on 27 August 2007, aged 13. — 00:03:13
  • ★★ In November 2007, aged 13, Ali asked Nintendo for permission to make an online Pokemon MMORPG; Nintendo replied that it allows no one to use its intellectual property. — 00:03:42
  • ★★★ Ali's second lesson, from the companies that turned him down at 12 and 13: you have to try things and shoot your shot, but be okay with getting rejected. — 00:03:42 · rejection over regret
  • ★★ Ali advises accepting when a business idea, like his Pokemon game, is going to fail completely, then abandoning ship and moving on: knowing when to quit, a lesson he has kept all his life. — 00:04:27
  • ★★ Ali's second failed business was his own web design studio, which he ran from about the age of 12 to about 17. — 00:04:27

00:04:50 — The web design studio, Getacoder bids and the Console Gateway and iZool pyramid scheme

  • ★ The studio began in 2006 as UIA Web Solutions, named after the United Intelligence Agency, a kids' intelligence agency website Ali and school friends planned for teaching martial arts, lock picking and hacking. — 00:04:56
  • ★★ Getting no business, Ali decided the name UIA Web Solutions was not cool enough and renamed the studio Cybercraft in 2007; two more renames in 2008 did not bring business either. — 00:05:29
  • ★★ On freelance websites such as Getacoder, Ali applied to at least 100, maybe 200 projects, was rejected from about 95% and did only five or ten projects in five years. (hedged) — 00:06:57
  • ★★ Ali's third failed business, from 14 to 16, was a pyramid scheme based on affiliate marketing, which started as Console Gateway, a website promising free games consoles. — 00:07:26
  • ★★ The scheme, rebranded iZool, made Ali £50: his friend Godwin signed four family members' credit cards up to LoveFilm free trials at £12.50 each; Ali calls it his first and last scammy affiliate income. — 00:08:58 · Netflix

00:09:27 — Lesson three: do the stuff you enjoy

  • ★★★ Ali's third lesson: do the stuff you enjoy; forcing yourself to learn something is an uphill battle, while monetising what you would do anyway for fun makes things more interesting and easier. — 00:09:56
  • ★★ Ali says he is productive because most of his productive work is inherently enjoyable, though he procrastinated all day before filming this video. — 00:09:56

00:10:30 — The headmaster's feedback, asking questions at talks, and lesson four: choose yourself

  • ★★★ On his GCSE results day at 16, Ali's headmaster told him he came across as far too robotic, unsmiling and unenthusiastic, and must change his manner to get into medical school, though his grades were fine. — 00:10:54
  • ★★ Taking the headmaster's feedback to heart, Ali worked on his charisma and social skills: it was partly why he took up close-up magic, and he began reading books on social skills. — 00:11:24
  • ★★★ At 16 Ali set himself the challenge of asking a question at every talk or lecture; it was very scary at first but natural after a few months, and by university he had no qualms. — 00:11:53
  • ★★ In 2019 at the Power of Video conference in Belfast, Ali kept asking questions after talks by YouTubers such as Peter McKinnon, Chris Hau, Cody Wanner and Elle Mills, until people knew him as the questions guy. — 00:12:22 · Peter McKinnon
  • ★★ When Ali asked Peter McKinnon how he works with his editor, a professional videographer in his forties beside him said he had wanted to ask but was too scared to put his hand up. — 00:12:51 · Peter McKinnon
  • ★★ Ali thinks it is still very common, even among adults, to fear putting yourself out there, such as by asking a question at a conference. — 00:12:51

  • ★★★ Ali's fourth lesson: "be yourself" is nonsense, since who we are is an accident of genetics and upbringing; don't just be yourself, choose yourself, because you can change your personality. — 00:13:20

    “don't just be yourself, choose yourself.”

00:13:50 — The £900 MacBook Air scam and lesson five: too good to be true

  • ★★★ At 18, in what he calls the biggest failure of his life, Ali handed £900 in cash, his entire life savings, to a stranger at Paddington Station in London. — 00:13:50 · London
  • ★★ The seller, Matthew White, offered a specced-up MacBook Air normally costing £1,800 for £900; Ali, about to start medicine at Cambridge, wanted it as his first Apple product. — 00:14:19 · MacBook, Apple
  • ★★ On the train home Ali saw "copyright 2008" on the laptop: in 2012 he had been sold an obsolete four-year-old MacBook Air by a man who said he worked at Twitter. — 00:14:48 · MacBook, Twitter
  • ★★ For about a month Matthew White strung Ali along by email, claiming he was on his way to Western Union to refund the £900. — 00:15:30
  • ★★ Ali traced Matthew White's address from geotagged tweets and planned a small claims case, until his mother told him to forget it and bought him a new MacBook from the Apple Store. — 00:15:59 · Ali Abdaal's mother, MacBook, Apple
  • ★★★ Ali's fifth lesson: if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is; nobody sells at a loss and everyone looks out for their own gain, so don't trust people blindly. — 00:16:36
  • ★★ Ali thinks it is generally fine to trust people by default, but since the scam he is more careful to pick up red flags in people he deals with. — 00:17:05

00:17:20 — From an Evernote brainstorm to SixMed and lesson six: unfair advantages

  • ★★★ To win back the £900, in September 2012 Ali brainstormed money-making schemes in Evernote from what he was good at, including websites on getting into medicine, BMAT preparation and interview preparation. — 00:17:34 · Evernote, BMAT
  • ★★★ Ali's 2012 Evernote brainstorm morphed into SixMed, the company he founded a year later, in 2013. — 00:18:01 · 6med, Evernote
  • ★★★ Since 2013 SixMed has made roughly six figures in revenue every year, helped thousands of students into medical school and given bursaries to hundreds who could not otherwise afford its courses. — 00:18:01 · 6med
  • ★★ Ali's unfair advantages for SixMed were the Cambridge medical school brand and six years of web design, graphic design and coding, when rivals in 2012 and 2013 had poor-looking websites. — 00:18:30 · 6med, University of Cambridge
  • ★★★ Ali's sixth lesson, his advice to people asking whether a business idea will succeed: use your unfair advantages, what would be very difficult or impossible for others to replicate. — 00:19:08
  • ★★ A medical student who can code gains no unfair advantage by building a website builder, Ali says, but does by building something in the medical field. — 00:19:29
  • ★★★ To do content marketing for SixMed, Ali created his YouTube channel in 2017, first making videos on the BMAT and interview preparation, topics from his 2012 brainstorm. — 00:19:58 · YouTube, 6med, BMAT
  • ★★ Living a privileged and sheltered life, Ali says, losing his life savings was genuinely the worst thing that had ever happened to him, and he resolved to turn it into a positive. — 00:19:58

00:20:00 — From SixMed to YouTube and lesson seven: turn failures into positives

  • ★★★ Ali has taken a break from full-time medicine because his YouTube channel makes so much money that he can afford to travel the world and do what he wants. — 00:20:27 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Ali's seventh lesson: we will all have failures from time to time, and should do our best to find ways of turning them into a positive. — 00:20:57
  • ★★ Ali actively set out to turn losing his savings into an opportunity, the idea Ryan Holiday writes about in The Obstacle Is the Way. — 00:20:57

00:21:26 — Book Club pointer, offer of a second part, sign-off

  • ★★ If viewers want, Ali says, he will make another part about his relationship, business and academic failures at university, when he found he was no longer top of the school. — 00:21:55

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked for the best textbooks for students heading into or already at medical school, the channel replies with a link to Ali's video of study tips for first-year medical students. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: 6med · MacBook · Matthew White · rejection over regret · unfair advantage

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's mother · Chris Hau · Cody Wanner · Elle Mills · Peter McKinnon · Philip Pullman · Robert Muchamore · Ryan Holiday

Works: BMAT · Cherub · Northern Lights · Pokemon · The Obstacle Is the Way

Organizations: Apple · Blizzard Entertainment · getacoder.com · LoveFilm · Netflix · Nintendo · Twitter · University of Cambridge · YouTube

Concepts: affiliate marketing

Places: Belfast · London

Events: Power of Video

Products: Evernote · World of Warcraft

Also centred on unfair advantage: What Makes People Successful? · How Much Money I Earn as a Doctor + YouTuber

Replies to

← Previous: What's on my iPhone - Favourite iPhone Apps ft. @KharmaMedic · Next → How I Remember Everything I Read