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How to Live more Intentionally

2021-07-07 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali, Ali Abdaal (channel) · recording, 9:59 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Mindset, motivation and happiness · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Lesson from a book, His own products discussed, His own numbers, Sponsor segment present

Ali uses the four Stoic virtues as a framework for living more intentionally: wisdom (money and success as preferred indifferents), temperance (long-term over short-term pleasure, and learning to take breaks), courage (leaning into fear, including difficult conversations with his team of ten) and justice (being useful to others, as when he cancelled the Inner Circle membership and refunded about $100,000).

What is said

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

00:00:00 — What it means to live intentionally: a framework of the four Stoic virtues

  • ★★★ Working out what he wants to do with his life, Ali has found a framework from Stoic philosophy helpful for living intentionally: a good life means finding the right balance of the four Stoic virtues. — 00:00:00 · stoicism
  • ★★ Ali explains the first Stoic virtue, wisdom, as recognising the difference between what is good, what is bad and what is indifferent. — 00:00:29 · stoicism

00:00:33 — Wisdom: good, bad and preferred indifferents

  • ★★★ Following Derren Brown's Happy, Ali says money, success, possessions, YouTube subscribers and whether someone likes you back are what the Stoics called preferred indifferents: nice to have, but fundamentally indifferent. — 00:00:58 · Derren Brown
  • ★★ Ali admits he still wants more money, more subscribers and a reply from a girl, but whenever he fixates on such things he reminds himself, in Derren Brown's voice, that each is a preferred indifferent. — 00:01:47 · Derren Brown
  • ★★ Ali thinks many people bring stress into their lives by chasing money, success and possessions in the belief that they are good. — 00:01:47
  • ★★ Ali explains the second Stoic virtue, temperance, as moderation, self-restraint, self-discipline and self-control: balancing short-term pleasures with what is good for us in the long term. — 00:02:17 · stoicism

00:02:21 — Temperance: long-term joy over short-term pleasure, and taking a break

  • ★★ Ali has trained himself to get more joy from long-term benefits: four hours of World of Warcraft or Netflix feel good at the time but unsatisfying afterwards, while three hours learning a guitar song feel better. — 00:02:46 · World of Warcraft, Netflix
  • ★★ Before a weekend trip to the Lake District with friends that evening, Ali is already planning to wake hours before everyone to write or work on the business; his mind is always racing to be productive. — 00:03:24
  • ★★ Ali says he needs to get better at recognising when to step back and take a break, which he counts as part of the Stoic virtue of temperance. — 00:03:50 · stoicism
  • ★★ Ali explains the third Stoic virtue, courage, which Derren Brown, Ryan Holiday and William Irvine write about: for the Stoics, courage is feeling fear, desire and anxiety and acting in the right way anyway. — 00:03:50 · stoicism, Derren Brown, Ryan Holiday

00:03:56 — Courage: leaning into fear, the Part-Time YouTuber Academy launch and difficult conversations with his team

  • ★★★ Thinking of Stoicism, Ali reminds himself that feeling fear is usually the sign that he should lean into doing the thing he is scared of. — 00:04:19 · stoicism
  • ★★ Before launching the Part-Time YouTuber Academy to the public a few months earlier, Ali feared nobody would sign up or that he was out of his depth; with his Stoic reading, the fear told him he had to do it. — 00:04:19 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy, stoicism
  • ★★★ With a team of 10 people in his business, Ali often shies away out of fear from difficult conversations about salaries, expectations, targets and whether people perform to the standard wanted. — 00:04:56
  • ★★★ Every good leader or mentor Ali has spoken to told him to feel the fear of difficult conversations with the team, lean into them and have them anyway, after a lot of preparation; he is struggling but trying. — 00:05:32
  • ★★ Ali explains the fourth Stoic virtue, justice, as our duty to society and to our fellow man; for him, living intentionally means acting in ways that are useful to other people. — 00:06:01 · stoicism

00:06:04 — Justice: being useful to others, cancelling the paid membership, and three books on Stoicism

  • ★★★ Ali distinguishes happiness, short-term enjoyment of life, from meaning, which can be simplified to being useful to other people: our lives feel more meaningful and fulfilling when we are useful to others. — 00:06:30
  • ★★ For the last few months Ali's team had run a paid monthly membership community in the Part-Time YouTuber Academy's alumni programme, with weekly events at about $50 to $100 a month, but attendance was dwindling. — 00:07:05 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Choosing the community over himself, Ali cancelled the paid alumni membership and refunded all fees ever paid, about $100,000, so members had six months free; the business lost about $120,000 of top-line revenue. — 00:07:31 · stoicism
  • ★★ Ali has not figured out how to live intentionally, but books on Stoicism have helped; he recommends William Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life, Derren Brown's Happy and Ryan Holiday's The Obstacle Is the Way, which he calls probably the most accessible. — 00:07:31 · stoicism, Derren Brown, Ryan Holiday
  • ★★ Ali finds Derren Brown's Happy a little verbose, in a very British academic style, but it is his favourite of the three books on Stoicism. — 00:08:20 · Derren Brown
  • ★ Shortform, which has summaries of some of these books, is Ali's favourite way to read book summaries, which he does daily. — 00:08:20

00:08:36 — Skillshare sponsor read, his Stoicism class with Sam, and sign-off

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): To a viewer who says the video was made 10 minutes long to carry ads, the channel replies that the length for ads is now 8 minutes. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: Inner Circle · preferred indifferents · stoicism

Also: People: Derren Brown · Matthew Le Mottee · Ryan Holiday · Sam · William Irvine

Projects: Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: A Guide to the Good Life · Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine · The Obstacle Is the Way

Organizations: Netflix

Places: Lake District

Products: Shortform · World of Warcraft

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