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8 Surprising Habits That Made Me A Millionaire

2021-06-13 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 11:15 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship (also: Money and investing, Productivity and time, Mindset, motivation and happiness, Work and career, Books and reading) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: His own numbers, His own products discussed, Lesson from a book, His medical past

Ali goes through eight habits he credits for becoming a millionaire: earning through multiple streams of income rather than a day job, strategic laziness, an entrepreneurial eye for problems, the growth mindset that everything is figureoutable, asking "who not how", making friends on Twitter, reading a lot, and acquiring financial literacy.

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: luck and privilege matter, eight habits for financial freedom

  • ★★ Ali says a lot goes into financial success, such as luck, privilege and unfair advantages. — 00:00:00 · unfair advantage
  • ★★★ Ali's first habit, a mindset shift: most people do not become millionaires through their day job; to build wealth quickly you need multiple streams of income, and streams that do not rely on trading your time for money. — 00:00:00 · work optional

00:00:16 — Habit 1: multiple streams of income instead of the day job

  • ★★ Ali first came across the idea of multiple streams of income in Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek; looking at the world this way since about the age of 17 let him see many opportunities he might otherwise have missed. — 00:00:29 · The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss

00:00:56 — Habit 2: strategic laziness in time, medical school and business

  • ★★★ Ali's second habit, strategic laziness, rests on recognising the value of your time: time is our most valuable non-renewable resource, and we can always make more money but never more time. — 00:00:58 · also in: How to Build Your Ultimate Productivity System
  • ★★★ Ali loves productivity because it saves him time: if an app, automation or macro makes a repeated task more efficient, he invests the time to set it up, knowing it will save time later. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Ali's other use of strategic laziness is to ask what the point of a task is: through school, university and his businesses he keeps in mind the outcome he wants. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ In his first year of medical school Ali thought he had to learn all of medicine to be a better doctor, then realised that is not what the exam is about, nor what makes a good doctor. — 00:01:56
  • ★★★ From his second year of medical school onwards Ali asked how to be strategically lazy, making sure what he did was the most efficient way to his goals of being a good doctor and doing well in exams. — 00:01:56
  • ★★★ First-time founders, Ali included, spend hundreds of hours on a website, business card and logo; being strategically lazy means seeing that the end goal is to get customers and sell them something, which these do not help. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ Ali says starting businesses is the easiest and quickest way to get wealthy in this day and age, and it will not be through your job. — 00:02:55
  • ★★★ Ali's third habit, the entrepreneurial diagnostic mindset: a good business idea identifies a problem people have, finds a way to solve it and ideally one people will pay for, so in daily life notice whenever something really sucks. — 00:02:55

00:02:59 — Habit 3: the entrepreneurial diagnostic mindset

  • ★★ Ali's examples: annoyance at phoning a restaurant to order a takeaway might give the idea for DoorDash, Deliveroo or Just Eat; annoyance at phoning for a taxi and waiting on hold, for Uber or Lyft. — 00:03:24
  • ★★ Many people email Ali that they want to make money but have no good business idea; he says that is because they are not looking at the world through the lens of what problems they could create solutions for. — 00:03:53

00:04:18 — Habit 4: the growth mindset, everything is figureoutable

  • ★★★ Ali's fourth habit, the growth mindset, which he thinks of as "everything is figureoutable": instead of "I don't know how to do it, therefore I can't", think "I don't know how, but I've got the internet and can figure it out". — 00:04:22 · growth mindset, cracking open the black box
  • ★★ When stopped by not knowing how to do something, Ali's habit is to make Googling it and figuring it out the default, since you can teach yourself any skill from the internet. — 00:04:52 · cracking open the black box

00:05:10 — Habit 5: ask the right people, Who Not How and the Part-Time YouTuber Academy

  • ★★★ Ali's fifth habit: you accelerate learning or doing anything by asking the right people, the approach of Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan's Who Not How: with a problem, ask who can help rather than how to solve it yourself. — 00:05:21
  • ★★ Young people starting in business who know few people have to do things themselves, Ali says, learning editing, websites or code free online; with some success or contacts in business, adopt the "who not how" habit and use your network. — 00:05:21
  • ★★ Starting the Part-Time YouTuber Academy while reading Who Not How, Ali reached out to friends he had made on Twitter to ask how they had done the same, instead of figuring it out alone; this massively accelerated the academy's learning curve. — 00:05:50 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy, Twitter
  • ★★ A few months earlier Ali started the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, a live online course he has now taught for two live cohorts. — 00:05:50 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ The Part-Time YouTuber Academy's first launch made about $300,000 and its second about $500,000, with very good reviews; Ali credits getting the right people involved rather than his team doing everything themselves. — 00:06:19 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

00:06:43 — Habit 6: make friends in real life and on Twitter

  • ★★★ Ali's sixth habit is to make friends in real life and on the internet, and the single best way he finds is Twitter: unlike visual Instagram, it is based on sharing good ideas, so connecting with people who share them leads to internet friendships. — 00:06:49 · Twitter, Instagram
  • ★★ Over the last year Ali has met up with many people he first met on Twitter, and has friends around the world he has never met in person but talks with on Twitter. — 00:07:18 · Twitter
  • ★★ Ali and Thomas Frank became friends on Twitter, and Frank introduced him to Standard, the YouTuber agency Ali is now part of, which changed the game for his business. — 00:07:18 · Thomas Frank, Twitter · first in: 2020-09-01, Gymshark, Inspirations & Pet Peeves - ONE MILLION Subscribers Q&A
  • ★★ Ali became Twitter friends with Tiago Forte and David Perell, who run their own online courses, after taking their courses; he messaged them for help with the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, which helped grow the business into a $2 million business. — 00:07:47 · Tiago Forte, Part-Time YouTuber Academy, Twitter
  • ★★ Making friends does not lead to a set result, Ali says: it is a general habit of befriending people who share your ideas and being nice and helpful, knowing it will eventually lead to interesting things. — 00:08:15

00:08:22 — Habit 7: read a lot, and his book in progress

  • ★★★ Ali's seventh habit is reading a lot: successful people almost always say they read a lot, so telling yourself you have no time to read is screwing yourself, since basically every millionaire has spent a lot of time reading books. — 00:08:41
  • ★★ Books boil five, 10 or 20 years of someone's experience into a few hours of reading, Ali says: Tim Ferriss did the entrepreneur thing for about 10 years before writing The 4-Hour Workweek. — 00:08:41 · Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek
  • ★★ Ali recommends reading lots of books on entrepreneurship, business, finance or anything you are interested in: they give huge value for little cost, and PDFs can be found free online if you are averse to paying. — 00:09:10
  • ★★ Ali is writing a book, which he expects to come out in about two years. (hedged) — 00:09:10
  • ★★★ Ali's eighth habit is acquiring financial literacy, which no one teaches in school, university or college, so you have to learn it yourself. — 00:09:43
  • ★★ Ali recently read Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money and calls it really good: 20 bite-sized lessons about money. — 00:09:43
  • ★ Ali says he is going to make a video about Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money. — 00:09:43
  • ★★ Ali advises taking your financial life into your own hands: he knows many people who leave it to the government to sort out, or to their hospital employer to work out their taxes. — 00:09:43

00:09:46 — Habit 8: acquire financial literacy, and sign-off

  • ★★★ Money is one of the biggest sources of stress for people without much of it, Ali says, so without financial literacy (the basics of saving, investing, the stock market and taxes) you are screwing yourself if you want to become a millionaire. — 00:10:22 · work optional
  • ★★★ To gain financial literacy Ali recommends reading a book like Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money, or his ultimate guide to investing in stocks and shares, a half-hour crash course on what you need to know about investing. — 00:10:49

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: growth mindset · strategic laziness · The Psychology of Money · Twitter · Who Not How · work optional

Also: People: Ben Hardy · Dan Sullivan · David Perell · Morgan Housel · Thomas Frank · Tiago Forte · Tim Ferriss

Projects: Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: The 4-Hour Workweek

Organizations: Deliveroo · DoorDash · Instagram · Just Eat · Lyft · Standard · Uber

Concepts: cracking open the black box · unfair advantage

Also centred on strategic laziness: Productivity for Lazy People - The RAD System

Also centred on The Psychology of Money: 15 Books To Read This Year · The Book That Changed My Financial Life 🤑 · 6 Money Tips in Under 60 Seconds 💰 · The 4 Best Books About Money - Part 1 📚

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