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Stress, Regrets and Inspirations - Q&A with Kharma Medic

2020-12-17 · Q&A video · Ali, Kharma Medic · recording, 20:36 · watch on YouTube

Topic: YouTube, writing online and creators (also: Productivity and time, Goals, purpose and life design, Learning and studying, Health, sleep and habits, Work and career, Medicine and his doctor years) · mode: Answering questions · tags: Aimed at students, Lesson from a book, His medical past

In the first half of a Q&A with the medical-student YouTuber Kharma Medic, Ali and Kharma answer viewers' questions on to-do lists, making time for YouTube, why they started their channels, regrets from medical school, note-taking, stress, writing emails that get answered and why they are interested in residency in the US.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Ali introduces Kharma Medic and the Q&A

  • ★ Kharma Medic, whose name is Nasser, is a fourth-year medical student at King's College London with a YouTube channel about his experience of medical school. — 00:00:00
  • ★ Kharma Medic's YouTube channel has just passed 500,000 subscribers. — 00:00:29

00:00:59 — How do you manage your to-do list?

  • ★★ Ali runs his to-do list in the app Things, which he calls fantastic: he lists every project he works on, and his team members' projects, to track who is working on what. — 00:00:59 · Things 3
  • ★ Ali also keeps areas in Things, such as a list of his friends' birthdays and his bucket list. — 00:01:27 · Things 3
  • ★★ Ali puts tasks into his Things inbox, processes the inbox at various points in the day, or at least once a day, into projects, and puts what he must do that day in his Today list. — 00:01:27 · Things 3
  • ★★ Kharma Medic keeps three to-do lists, for life, medical school and YouTube, and writes down anything he thinks of at once, or he will forget it; he checks them before sleeping to plan the next day. — 00:01:50
  • ★★ Kharma Medic finds splitting his tasks into three to-do lists much better than one long list of many intertwined things. — 00:01:56

00:02:26 — Time management between being a med student and a YouTuber

  • ★★ Kharma Medic treats his YouTube channel as a non-negotiable in his life: his weekly video goes live even if his sleep or social events have to give way. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ Kharma Medic encourages people to make whatever they really care about a non-negotiable, as he does with exercise: it can be fitted in by organising your time so that it is. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Ali says that if you make something a priority it will happen, because what we are doing at any moment is what we most want to be doing in that moment. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ For Ali, publishing a video is not an option to take up when he feels like it but a fixed slot, such as a video every Thursday at 8.30 a.m. — 00:03:25
  • ★★ Ali agrees with a line of Kharma Medic's that resonated with him: he does not decide what he feels like doing but what he needs to do right now, and does not think "I don't feel like doing something". — 00:03:25

00:04:17 — What inspired you to make YouTube videos?

  • ★★★ Kharma Medic got into medical school after an undergraduate degree in Toronto, having been rejected by four medical schools when he first applied in 2013. — 00:04:23
  • ★★ Kharma Medic: To share what he had learned about applying, Kharma Medic posted an Ask Me Anything on Reddit and then on The Student Room forum; nobody replied, so he put the content into a video. — 00:04:38
  • ★★ Kharma Medic's goal was to help 10 people get into medical school and then stop making YouTube videos, but he enjoyed it so much that he kept going. — 00:04:53
  • ★★ Ali cites a quote often attributed to J. P. Morgan and discussed in The Elephant in the Brain: a man always has two reasons for doing something, a good reason and the real reason. — 00:05:17

  • ★★★ Ali says the honest answer to why he started YouTube is that he saw a business opportunity: a way to promote the courses he was running and make money online; he knew YouTubers were making it big and loved the idea of being famous. — 00:05:17

    “the honest answer would have to be that I saw a business opportunity.”

  • ★★ Ali says the bigger your audience, the more it unlocks opportunities in your life. — 00:05:45

  • ★★ Ali's YouTube channel started as an entirely selfish venture motivated by money, which later turned into a feeling that it is quite nice to help people. — 00:05:45
  • ★★ Kharma Medic sees nothing wrong with starting a YouTube channel to make money or grow a business. — 00:05:45
  • ★★ Kharma Medic started his channel because he enjoyed making videos: he had long edited videos of his holidays and of playing basketball. — 00:06:14
  • ★★ Kharma Medic: If he won the lottery, Kharma Medic would probably still make videos, but less often. (hedged) — 00:06:14
  • ★★ Ali likes to ask people in ordinary jobs whether they would still do their job for fun if they won the lottery: most say definitely not, but YouTubers often say they probably would. — 00:06:14
  • ★ Kharma Medic notes that Ali makes two to three videos a week, while he can barely keep up with one. — 00:07:00

00:07:28 — What do you feel when you watch each other's videos?

  • ★★ Kharma Medic calls Ali the biggest creator in the medical-school productivity space when he started making videos, and one of the biggest now. — 00:07:28
  • ★★ Kharma Medic gets productivity and workflow tips from Ali: Ali introduced him to Notion, and seeing Ali do it made him watch everything, YouTube videos too, at 1.5 times speed. — 00:07:28 · Notion
  • ★★ Ali usually watches other people's YouTube videos for the meta around them rather than for the content. — 00:08:10
  • ★★ Ali felt one of Kharma Medic's vlogs was better than any vlog he had ever put together, and after watching it he thought he needed to up his game. — 00:08:39
  • ★★ Kharma Medic started YouTube a year after Ali and is growing faster than Ali did at that stage. — 00:08:39
  • ★★ Ali has an anxiety that a newcomer will come in and surpass him, a line of reasoning he says makes no sense at all. — 00:09:07
  • ★★ Watching smaller YouTubers inspires Ali to ask what he can learn from them to make his own videos better. — 00:09:07
  • ★ Ali loves Kharma Medic's USMLE videos, which help him as he prepares for the USMLE himself. — 00:09:07 · USMLE
  • ★★ Kharma Medic says you can learn a lot from other YouTubers' editing techniques, how they talk, what footage they include and the camera framing, and add it to your own videos. — 00:09:53

00:10:13 — Any regrets from medical school?

  • ★★★ Ali's only regrets from medical school are the times he was mean to someone, accidentally or on purpose; every single time he has regretted it. — 00:10:23
  • ★★ Ali's other big regret is that he did not take more notes when reading books when he was younger. — 00:10:52
  • ★★ Kharma Medic's biggest regret is his first year of medical school, when he was obsessed with writing notes on every aspect of every lecture and spent so much time in the library that he could have started his channel a year earlier. — 00:10:52

00:11:27 — Taking notes, Anki and spider diagrams

  • ★★★ Ali thinks taking notes is a total waste of time. — 00:11:27
  • ★★ Kharma Medic: Learning Python, Kharma Medic writes a few things down and takes screenshots but puts them under a question, an idea he took from Ali, so that he is forced to use active recall; he uses Notion toggles for this. — 00:11:27 · active recall, Notion
  • ★★ Kharma Medic knows that the First Aid book and Ali's evidence-based video call note-taking the worst way to learn, but he feels writing information down and reading it is the best way for him. — 00:11:56
  • ★★ Kharma Medic gets anxiety from Anki: its flashcards give him no context and feel very bitty, one fact at a time. — 00:11:56 · Anki
  • ★★★ Studying for the USMLE with Anki, Ali knows what a flashcard says when it is phrased that way but could not say in real life what microscopic polyangiitis is: he has no way of integrating its 18 flashcards into a coherent picture. — 00:12:25 · Anki, USMLE
  • ★★★ So Ali bought physical notebooks to draw spider diagrams and concept maps: if he can get, say, all of haematology onto one page, position and colour on the page help him see where each condition fits. — 00:12:25
  • ★★ Kharma Medic highly recommends fitting everything into one field of view: it helps connect the parts and remember them, and location and colour are underrated in note-taking. — 00:13:03

00:13:24 — Stress management tips

  • ★★ Kharma Medic: By far the biggest thing Kharma Medic does to relieve stress is exercise: it clears his head, gives him a mental reset and makes him feel better when he sits back down to study. — 00:13:42
  • ★ Ali asks what stress means: he finds it hard to appreciate stress. — 00:13:42
  • ★★ Kharma Medic does not generally feel stress in the general sense of the word, but sometimes so much is going on that he feels overwhelmed and needs a reset. — 00:13:42
  • ★★ Ali listens to lots of fiction audiobooks: commuting to work an hour each way, he had two hours of fantasy audiobooks in the car, so at home he needed no downtime or relaxation time. — 00:14:10
  • ★★ When they get stressed, Ali says, he and Kharma Medic write down what they need to do on a to-do list and then do it, and the stress is gone. — 00:14:49
  • ★ Ali wonders whether some people deal with stress in a more emotional than practical way. (hedged) — 00:14:49

00:15:15 — How to ask questions that get responses

  • ★★ Kharma Medic: Until he had about 200,000 subscribers Kharma Medic replied to every comment and email, until he realised he was answering the same questions again and again. — 00:15:29
  • ★★ Kharma Medic is likely to answer very specific questions, such as advice on someone's particular situation, and very unlikely to answer a question that a Google search could answer. — 00:15:58 · Google
  • ★★ Ali gets far too many emails asking things such as the grade requirements for medicine at Cambridge, which are on the website, though he has not been in that system for about 10 years. — 00:16:27 · University of Cambridge, Cambridge
  • ★★ Ali thinks people send such emails probably because of parasocial relationships: they feel they know him and that he would answer. (hedged) — 00:16:27
  • ★★★ To get a reply from someone who receives about 200 emails a day, Ali says, put yourself in their shoes and phrase the question to make a reply likelier: structure the email specifically and make it obvious what the question is. — 00:16:27
  • ★★ The emails Ali answers put the question at the top, such as "should I take biology or chemistry?", then the context, what the writer thinks they should do, what they think Ali would say, and ask for his view. — 00:17:27
  • ★★ Kharma Medic: When Kharma Medic emails a consultant at his hospital, he is succinct and strict about what he wants to say, with a clear one-line subject; such emails, he says, are likelier to get a response. — 00:17:27
  • ★★ Ali recommends a blog post, he thinks on Tim Ferriss's blog, called something like "How to email busy people", with a template and guidance that he says 98 per cent of the people who email him do not follow. (hedged) — 00:18:16 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★ Kharma Medic: When Kharma Medic was answering all his emails, it took about two hours a day. — 00:18:16
  • ★ Asked when he and Kharma Medic will collaborate with Anas Nuur Ali, Ali says Anas was supposed to come over that day but had to work instead. — 00:18:47

00:19:04 — Collab with Anas Nuur Ali

  • ★★★ Ali has made a half-hour video on why he is interested in residency in the US; in essence, he thinks it would be more of an adventure. — 00:19:12 · United States
  • ★★ Ali thinks that training in the UK would limit the new people he meets and the adventure he has, since he has been in the UK, in Cambridge, for the last eight years, and would not be much of a challenge. — 00:19:12 · United Kingdom, Cambridge

00:19:13 — Why are you interested in doing residency in the US?

  • ★★ Moving across the world to a country where he does not know many people would be an adventure for Ali, and probably not something he would regret. (hedged) — 00:19:34
  • ★★ Kharma Medic has grown up in several countries, and the idea of being trapped somewhere he does not want to be really scares him. — 00:19:34
  • ★★ Kharma Medic takes USMLE Step 1 to keep his options open: it puts him on the path to practising medicine in the US or Canada, while he still works towards staying in the UK. — 00:19:34 · USMLE, United States, United Kingdom

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Kharma Medic

Also: People: Anas Nuur Ali · J. P. Morgan · Tim Ferriss

Works: First Aid for the USMLE · The Elephant in the Brain · USMLE

Organizations: Google · King's College London · Reddit · The Student Room · University of Cambridge

Concepts: active recall · hidden motives · parasocial relationship · speed listening · spider diagram

Places: Cambridge · Canada · Toronto · United Kingdom · United States

Products: Anki · Notion · Python · Things 3

Also centred on Kharma Medic: What's on my iPhone - Favourite iPhone Apps ft. @KharmaMedic

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