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The 4 Hobbies that Improved my Life

2021-04-22 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 20:26 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying (also: Mindset, motivation and happiness) · mode: Personal story · tags: Sponsor segment present, His own numbers, His medical past

Ali tells how four hobbies changed his life and what each taught him: coding and web design let him see and build business ideas and gives him job security; music showed him anything can be learned online and that talent is a black box to crack open; close-up magic trained him to embrace discomfort; teaching showed him you need not be an expert to help others.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Four hobbies that genuinely changed his life

00:00:34 — Hobby number one: coding and web design, how it started and what it unlocked

  • ★★ At 11, in his school's basement computer room, Ali saw an older boy view the source of the Google homepage and decided he wanted to be a hacker. — 00:00:37
  • ★★ Wanting to make a text-based online game like Kings of Chaos, which he and his school friends were addicted to, set Ali off learning to code, make websites and do web design. — 00:01:12
  • ★★ As a teenager, web development was the main source of excitement in Ali's life, and he started bidding for freelance web design projects to make money on the internet. — 00:01:41
  • ★ Ali still dabbles in design and code and has recently redesigned his personal website, aliabdaal.com. — 00:02:10 · aliabdaal.com
  • ★★★ Ali says learning to code unlocks your brain to see business ideas everywhere, because you know what is possible with apps, websites and even physical products. — 00:02:35
  • ★★ Ali credits learning to code with basically all the business ideas he has had since, more than 20 of them. — 00:03:11
  • ★★ Once you code to a reasonably proficient standard, Ali says, you can put any idea you come up with into practice in a weekend, a week or a school holiday. — 00:03:11
  • ★★ Knowing how to code, Ali could build a question bank for medical school applicants from scratch himself, and knew he could whip up a website for his company SixMed in about a week. — 00:03:34 · 6med
  • ★★★ Even if he lost everything, his YouTube channel or his medical registration, Ali is confident he knows enough coding to get a job as a software engineer, a job security tied to neither YouTube nor medicine. — 00:04:03

00:04:30 — Brilliant sponsor read: learning Python online

00:05:44 — Hobby number two: music, guitar and piano from the internet, and cracking open the black box

  • ★★ Ali says he had an inferiority complex, and still does to an extent; at school his only identity was being a nerd with good grades, so he looked for other ways to diversify his identity, such as music. — 00:05:44
  • ★★ In his second year of medical school Ali saw a fellow medical student play guitar and sing Eric Clapton's Tears in Heaven on stage, and decided the next day to become that guy. — 00:06:06
  • ★★ Ali bought a guitar for £30 ($40) at a local second-hand shop and followed the free tutorials on justinguitar.com for about 10 minutes a day for a month or two, which made him reasonably good. — 00:06:36
  • ★★ One of Ali's dreams is to busk on the London Underground, maybe to raise money for charity; because that needs an audition, he is taking singing and piano lessons and arranging guitar lessons. — 00:07:05
  • ★★ In his third year of medical school, with a piano in his room, Ali taught himself the piano from YouTube tutorials. — 00:07:05
  • ★★★ Learning piano and guitar almost entirely from online tutorials gave Ali the confidence that he can learn anything he needs in the future on the internet. — 00:07:34
  • ★★ Ali says many, generally older, people still think you need formal training or lessons to get good at something, but for most things you can make a pretty good start on the internet. — 00:08:22
  • ★★ Ali says that at Cambridge University basically everyone he knew taught themselves most of the syllabus from the internet, using Wikipedia and YouTube, and very few used textbooks. (overstated) — 00:08:46 · University of Cambridge, Wikipedia
  • ★★ Playing a song by ear once looked to Ali like mysterious innate talent, but cracking open that black box he found that such players follow a series of almost mathematical formulae he could learn. — 00:09:14 · cracking open the black box
  • ★★ Ali can now hear a song, or one he knows well, and basically play it on the piano, playing along when a friend sings or to a film track. — 00:09:40
  • ★★ From a biography of Elon Musk, Ali tells how Musk, starting SpaceX, was told a rocket costs $12 million, priced its components in a spreadsheet and found one could be built for about $2 million. — 00:10:10 · cracking open the black box

  • ★★★ Ali's lesson from music is to crack open the black box: when someone seems so talented at something, there is talent to a degree, but mostly a method you can figure out. — 00:10:56 · cracking open the black box

    “the lessons I've learned from music are about cracking open the black box”

  • ★★ At about 17 Ali saw Michael Vincent do a card trick on the TV show Penn & Teller: Fool Us and decided to learn sleight of hand with cards to impress people at school. (hedged) — 00:11:22

00:11:30 — Hobby number three: close-up magic, a journey of embracing discomfort

  • ★★ Ali performed magic at the local hospice and at a restaurant, and at university was paid to do magic at events and parties. — 00:11:51
  • ★★★ Ali is auditioning for The Magic Circle, preparing a 12-minute act of tricks, stories and narrative, with his friend Matthew Le Mottee as his magic coach. — 00:11:51
  • ★★★ Performing magic for real people, with shaking hands at first, made Ali's whole magic journey one of embracing discomfort, or seeking discomfort, as the folks at Yes Theory would say. — 00:12:23
  • ★★★ Having missed the deadline for the hospice's long volunteer application, Ali offered to do magic for free; after his Christmas-party show it asked him to perform every two weeks, a post that helped his medical school application, getting in through "the third door", as Alex Banayan calls it. — 00:13:46
  • ★★ Hired by a family friend to do magic at a corporate event in his restaurant, Ali saw his very first trick fail; he clammed up, did no more tricks that night and ran away. — 00:14:15
  • ★★ Ali says the failed restaurant magic gig was probably the most embarrassed he has ever been, but he realised afterwards that it actually wasn't so bad. — 00:15:13
  • ★★ For about three years of university ball and party seasons Ali approached groups as the magician, a test of approach anxiety, and was eventually paid about $200 an hour. — 00:15:46
  • ★★★ Magic gave Ali a taste of overcoming the discomfort of approaching groups, which he thinks was a big part of what made him comfortable putting himself out there on YouTube and his website. — 00:16:16
  • ★★★ To people too scared to start a YouTube channel, Ali says the fear of rejection and of looking a fool shrinks with baby steps, as you realise the fear is mostly in your head, though getting comfortable takes practice. — 00:16:45

00:17:07 — Hobby number four: teaching, and why you don't need to be an expert

  • ★★ At about 14 Ali got a job at Kumon, a local maths and English study centre, helping children with maths for about £4.50 (about $6) an hour. — 00:17:13
  • ★★ Ali, who through school and university prepared sessions to teach the year below what he had just learned, sees his YouTube channel as the same teaching hobby at a bigger scale. — 00:17:45
  • ★★ SixMed, Ali's first business at university, was entirely based on teaching and changed his life. — 00:18:09 · 6med
  • ★★★ Ali's main insight from teaching: you don't need to be an expert to help someone, and no one cares about qualifications as long as you provide value to them. — 00:18:09
  • ★★ Ali credits C. S. Lewis with the curse of knowledge: beginners are often best taught by people just one step ahead, who were doing it last year (2020). (hedged) — 00:18:09
  • ★★ Ali has never seen a medical student leave a good teaching session wondering whether the teacher had a medical education qualification: people only care about the value you give them. — 00:19:08
  • ★★★ Ali says the worry of not being qualified enough holds many people back in life, and teaching showed him that this worry is kind of a myth. — 00:19:44
  • ★ Ali names writing on the internet as a fifth hobby that changed his life, the subject of his video How Writing Online Made Me a Millionaire. — 00:19:44

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: cracking open the black box

Also: People: Alex Banayan · C. S. Lewis · Elon Musk · Eric Clapton · Matthew Le Mottee · Michael Vincent

Projects: aliabdaal.com

Works: JustinGuitar · Kings of Chaos · Penn & Teller: Fool Us · Tears in Heaven

Organizations: 6med · Kumon · SpaceX · The Magic Circle · University of Cambridge · Wikipedia · Yes Theory

Concepts: diversifying your identity · the third door (concept)

Places: London Underground

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