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The Book That MOST Changed My Life

2021-02-14 · Book summary (Book Club) · Ali · recording, 18:00 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Goals, purpose and life design (also: Productivity and time, Business and entrepreneurship, Work and career) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Lesson from a book, His own products discussed, His medical past, His own numbers, Sponsor segment present

Ali summarises The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, the book he says most changed his life: the deferrers against the new rich, the eight rules of the new rich and the DEAL method (define, eliminate, automate, liberate), with how fear-setting, the Pareto principle, virtual assistants and the muse idea led him to set up SixMed, make medicine optional and write his book.

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: the book that most changed his life, despite its scammy-seeming title

  • ★★★ Ali says The 4-Hour Workweek, the book that most changed his life, is really about how the life we want is closer than we think, and asks viewers not to be put off by its scammy-seeming title. — 00:00:00 · The 4-Hour Workweek

00:00:29 — Deferrers and the new rich; the eight rules of the new rich

  • ★★ Ali explains that in The 4-Hour Workweek Tim Ferriss calls the traditional path of working hard while young and enjoying life only after retiring the deferred life plan. — 00:00:29 · The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ Ali explains that the new rich of The 4-Hour Workweek alternate periods of work and fun and aim to free up their time and location, which makes their money worth 10 times more. — 00:00:58 · The 4-Hour Workweek
  • ★★ Ali says the new rich idea was radical when Tim Ferriss suggested it in 2006 and 2007 but is now much more mainstream, with digital nomads and the creator and passion economy. — 00:00:58 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ Ali says he lives this lifestyle to an extent: his work is not tied to a location, so outside lockdown he could travel and work from his laptop, earning more than in his day job as a doctor. — 00:01:27
  • ★ Ali says hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people now live a location-independent working life, with remote working accelerated by the pandemic. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ The first of Tim Ferriss's eight rules of the new rich, as Ali tells it: interest and energy are cyclical, so alternate work and rest and spread mini-retirements through life. — 00:01:27 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ Rule two of the new rich, less is not laziness, means leveraging your time for accelerated results; Ali says it is a principle behind his Part-Time YouTuber Academy: systems around content production that do more of the work. — 00:02:04 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Rule three of the new rich in The 4-Hour Workweek, as Ali tells it: the timing is never going to be right, so just do the thing and figure the rest out along the way. — 00:02:33 · Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek
  • ★★ Rule four of the new rich, seek forgiveness rather than permission, is one of the mantras Ali tries to live by. — 00:02:33
  • ★★ Rule five of the new rich, as Ali tells it: emphasise your strengths rather than fixing your weaknesses, focusing on what you are uniquely placed to leverage. — 00:03:06 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★★ Ali slightly disagrees with the rule to emphasise strengths: he was once really bad at public speaking and at talking to girls, and weaknesses we know about can be improved. — 00:03:06 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ Rule six of the new rich, which Ali likes: money alone is not the solution, though many think they cannot do something because they lack the money. — 00:03:06
  • ★★ Ali says a main point of The 4-Hour Workweek is that you can do the things you think you want to do a lot more cheaply than you think. — 00:03:55 · The 4-Hour Workweek
  • ★★ Rule seven of the new rich: relative income, which counts both money and time as resources, matters far more than absolute income. — 00:03:55
  • ★★ Ali treats time as the main resource and his mother money: she cannot fathom why he orders a takeaway every day to save time, and he cannot fathom her driving three hours to save 10% on halal meat. — 00:04:25 · Ali Abdaal's mother
  • ★★ Rule eight of the new rich: distress, harmful stress that weakens us over time, is bad, but eustress, the stretch zone just outside the comfort zone, is good and helps us grow. — 00:04:25

00:04:54 — D for define: fear-setting, the book deal and medicine; excitement over happiness and the 15 dreams exercise

  • ★★ The rest of The 4-Hour Workweek gives a four-part method for joining the new rich, following the acronym DEAL, in which D stands for define. — 00:04:54 · The 4-Hour Workweek
  • ★★ Ali agrees with Tim Ferriss that fear stops us trying new things and that most of us would rather be unhappy than uncertain. — 00:05:23 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ Ali does not follow Tim Ferriss's six fear questions step by step, but whenever he finds himself not doing something out of fear he runs through them mentally. — 00:05:52 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ Tim Ferriss's six fear-setting questions, as Ali lists them: what you are not doing out of fear, what you miss by not doing it, why not, the worst case, how you would fix it, and how you would go back. — 00:05:52 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★★ When a publisher approached Ali a few months earlier about writing a book, these fear-setting thoughts went through his mind and he was very scared. — 00:05:52
  • ★★ Ali's reasoning on the book offer: the worst case, a book people dislike with bad reviews, is not the end of the world, and he would probably regret not doing it, so he should write it. (hedged) — 00:06:42
  • ★★★ About six months after he stopped working full-time as a doctor, meaning to travel the world, Ali is going back into medicine part-time. — 00:07:11
  • ★★ Going back into medicine scared Ali, who feared he had forgotten it all or would be seen as a fraud, so he asked himself Tim Ferriss's worst-case fear-setting questions. — 00:07:11 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★★ For defining ambitious goals, Ali still uses a mental model from The 4-Hour Workweek, read about eight years ago: ask what would make you excited, not what would make you happy. — 00:07:40 · The 4-Hour Workweek
  • ★★ Ali is quite happy making videos at home but not particularly excited by it; going by excitement pushes him to take more risks that will probably lead to more interesting things. — 00:08:02
  • ★★ Tim Ferriss's dreams exercise, as Ali gives it: list five things to have, do and be, making 15 dreams; choose the top four, set three action items for each and do the first action right now. — 00:08:27 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ Ali adapted this dreams process for his 2021 goal setting, defining that he wanted to become good at concept art, with steps such as practising art every day and getting an art teacher. — 00:08:27
  • ★★ Ali has been doing art since January 2021, has definitely noticed an improvement and finds it really fun. — 00:08:57
  • ★★ Ali says forcing yourself to take the first action as soon as you set a goal really accelerates progress. — 00:09:22

  • ★★ Tim Ferriss (quoted): In The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss writes that for the most important things the timing always sucks: the stars never align and the traffic lights of life are never all green at the same time. — 00:09:22 · The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss

    “the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time”

  • ★★ E for eliminate in The 4-Hour Workweek means cutting the things that take up too much time and add little value; Ali says much of it is now standard in the productivity world. — 00:09:51 · The 4-Hour Workweek

  • ★★ Parkinson's law, that work expands to fill the time allocated to it, is one of Ali's favourite laws. — 00:09:51

00:09:58 — E for eliminate: Parkinson's law, the Pareto principle and batching

  • ★ Ali gave himself a whole day the week before to film this video and never got it done; given one hour today, it is getting done. — 00:10:20
  • ★★ Ali first heard of the Pareto principle, that 80% of results come from 20% of inputs, in The 4-Hour Workweek eight years ago; it is now pretty standard. — 00:10:20 · The 4-Hour Workweek
  • ★★ Ali used the Pareto principle for his medical school exams: minutiae give maybe an extra 10% of marks, the core 20% of content gives 80%, so focus on that. — 00:10:50
  • ★★ The third idea of the eliminate step is batching: doing similar tasks together. — 00:10:50
  • ★ Ali and his housemate batch their grocery shopping once a week via Click and Collect. — 00:11:19
  • ★★ Ali suggests batching email to the morning and evening: nothing really important is likely to slip through if you check twice a day, and it frees you to be more productive. — 00:11:19
  • ★★ A for automate in The 4-Hour Workweek is about building a system that automates the results you want. — 00:11:19 · The 4-Hour Workweek

00:11:53 — A for automate: virtual assistants, geoarbitrage and finding a muse; SixMed

  • ★★ Ali thinks Tim Ferriss was the first to make hiring a virtual assistant mainstream, the idea of having a virtual assistant. (hedged) — 00:12:09 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ Ali says paying a virtual assistant in a country such as the Philippines, Pakistan or Bangladesh five or six dollars an hour is absolutely huge there. — 00:12:09 · Pakistan
  • ★★ Ali explains geoarbitrage: a virtual assistant paid less than you earn frees your time to make more money or do more of what you love. — 00:12:38
  • ★★ While building SixMed, Ali's company used a lot of virtual assistants in the Philippines; he now has a non-virtual assistant based in the UK. — 00:12:38 · 6med
  • ★★★ If you are an entrepreneur and your time is worth a certain amount, Ali says you can and should pay someone who earns less to take tasks off your plate so you can focus on the most important things. — 00:13:14
  • ★★ Ali's time is worth a lot when filming a video and little when booking flights, ordering groceries or doing laundry, so he can easily outsource those to free time for high-leverage work. — 00:13:14
  • ★★ Ali does not enjoy the dishes or the laundry, so he has a dishwasher and has recently outsourced his laundry to an external provider. — 00:13:57
  • ★★ The second part of automating is finding a muse: Tim Ferriss's term for a lifestyle business that takes little of your own time to run but makes reasonable money. — 00:13:57 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★★ Ali says there is no such thing as truly passive income, which is why he always puts the phrase in air quotes. — 00:14:26 · passive income
  • ★★ The key to a muse, Ali says, is to find a niche market, offer it a service and build systems and people so that you do not spend your own time delivering it. — 00:14:26
  • ★★★ Reading The 4-Hour Workweek helped Ali set up his first company, SixMed, which helped people into medical school: a lifestyle business where he worked probably under four hours a week for a full-time living. (hedged) — 00:14:26 · 6med, The 4-Hour Workweek

00:14:55 — L for liberate: quitting medicine, financial independence as his north star; read the book

  • ★★ L for liberate: with the pieces in place you can free yourself from the shackles of a full-time job, or of working in your business rather than on it. — 00:14:55
  • ★★ On his break from medicine, Ali found it nice to have a business that could very comfortably support his lifestyle while not having to go to work every day. — 00:15:24
  • ★★★ Since reading The 4-Hour Workweek eight years ago, financial independence and passive income have been Ali's north star: through medical school his dream life was one where medicine is optional. — 00:15:24 · The 4-Hour Workweek, passive income
  • ★★ Ali credits what he learned in The 4-Hour Workweek for getting him to multiple streams of passive income, multiple muses or lifestyle businesses. — 00:15:53 · passive income, The 4-Hour Workweek
  • ★★★ Ali recommends reading The 4-Hour Workweek; it is a little out of date, with many sections recommending tools, but those are easy to skip and the advice is still really good. — 00:15:53 · The 4-Hour Workweek

00:16:27 — Shortform summaries and the affiliate link

  • ★★ Ali says readers should look past the book's somewhat arrogant tone, which Tim Ferriss has admitted on his podcast, which Ali listens to religiously, to find a treasure trove of gold. — 00:16:27 · The Tim Ferriss Show, Tim Ferriss
  • ★ Shortform is now Ali's favourite way of reading book summaries, a lot more detailed than Blinkist or others he has tried. — 00:16:27
  • ★★ Ali warns that reading a summary of a book is no substitute for reading the book itself. — 00:16:56

00:17:26 — Summary before the book; the other two books that changed his life; sign-off

  • ★★ Before reading a new book, Ali often reads its Shortform summary first, so that he starts with a big-picture idea of what the whole book is about. — 00:17:26
  • ★★ The 4-Hour Workweek is one of the three books that have most changed Ali's life; the other two are Austin Kleon's Show Your Work and Derek Sivers's Anything You Want. — 00:17:26 · The 4-Hour Workweek, Show Your Work!, Austin Kleon, Derek Sivers

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: muse · new rich · The 4-Hour Workweek · Tim Ferriss

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's mother · Austin Kleon · Derek Sivers

Projects: Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: Anything You Want · Show Your Work! · The Tim Ferriss Show

Organizations: 6med

Concepts: 80/20 rule · batching · eustress · fear-setting · geoarbitrage · lifestyle business · mini-retirement · Parkinson's law · passive income · virtual assistant

Places: Bangladesh · Pakistan · Philippines

Products: Blinkist · Shortform

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