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Everything's Changing - Life Update

2021-10-20 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 43:56 · watch on YouTube

Topic: YouTube, writing online and creators (also: Business and entrepreneurship, Relationships and personal life, Productivity and time, Goals, purpose and life design, Medicine and his doctor years) · mode: Reflection and life update · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, His medical past, Lesson from a book, Feel-Good Productivity thesis, He changed his mind

In a rambling life update Ali reports his move to London, a studio costing about £150,000 a year, a team of 18 or 19, the Deep Dive podcast and a fourth Part-Time YouTuber Academy cohort, then talks through his challenges: planning, organisational design, chasing views versus making videos he is proud of, niche and short-form platforms, leaning towards leaving medicine, and making time for himself.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — A rambling life update: what has happened, what is next, and about 15 challenges

00:00:48 — The move to London and the new studio, with its cost and the reasons for an office

  • ★★ Ali moved to London about two months ago after nine years in Cambridge, and will live there for the next year. — 00:00:48 · Cambridge, London
  • ★ In London Ali's social calendar is much fuller than in Cambridge and many of his friends are there, but everything is quite a lot more expensive. — 00:00:48 · London, Cambridge
  • ★★★ Ali's business has taken a big studio space in London on a one-year lease; when he was there alone after moving in about two weeks earlier, he felt strong buyer's remorse. — 00:01:17 · London
  • ★★ Ali's London studio costs his business about £11,000 a month plus 20% VAT, about £13,000 a month or about £150,000 a year, which he calls utterly absurd. — 00:01:41 · London
  • ★★ Ali hopes the London studio will be return-on-investment positive. (hedged) — 00:01:41 · London
  • ★★ In his last months in Cambridge Ali and his team member Angus worked from the local WeWork, and Ali found it super nice to have a place to commute to. — 00:02:05 · Angus, Cambridge
  • ★ Ali's fancy home desk setup ended up barely used, because he does everything on his laptop, phone or iPad. — 00:02:33
  • ★★ Having an office to commute to was so good that Ali thinks there may be something to the nine-to-five, rather than working from home and doing whatever he wants. (hedged) — 00:02:33
  • ★★ Ali has made himself a rule of no cameras and no filming at home, though he expects to break it at some point; the studio makes coming to work a lot more fun. — 00:02:33
  • ★★ On Mondays Ali's team gets together in the studio for a content brainstorm with the writers, the YouTube producer, Ali and Angus. — 00:03:19 · Angus

00:03:43 — The hiring spree: a team of 18 or 19 and the pressure of fixed costs

  • ★★★ After hiring for about eight positions, Ali's team has around 18 or 19 people besides him, about four of them part-time, and is still recruiting the final positions. — 00:03:43
  • ★★ As the business grew with its courses, especially the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, Ali found holes of expertise in his team and much of it overstretched, with Angus doing seven people's jobs and Jacob four. — 00:04:12 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy, Angus
  • ★★ Ali's team now has four or five people working full time on the Part-Time YouTuber Academy and four or five writers who help brainstorm content ideas and do research. — 00:04:56 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali's team is still hiring a videographer and will probably look for another editor fairly soon. (hedged) — 00:05:19
  • ★★★ Ali's business is spending about a million pounds a year on team salaries, a thought that keeps him up at night. — 00:05:19
  • ★★★ The more people Ali's business hires, the higher its fixed costs and the more it relies on the YouTube channel and the courses doing well, which ramps up the pressure. — 00:05:44
  • ★★ Whenever a video does badly, Ali worries that his business is on the road to decline and may have to let people go. — 00:06:14

00:06:56 — The Deep Dive podcast is launched

  • ★★★ Ali has launched the Deep Dive podcast, which he had wanted to do for a while; his team first dabbled with it a year earlier in the Deep Dive livestream interview series. — 00:06:56 · Deep Dive
  • ★★ The Deep Dive podcast seems to be going well, and people seem to like the interviews. — 00:07:21 · Deep Dive
  • ★★ Amber, a member of Ali's team, produces the Deep Dive podcast: she reaches out to guests and compiles research on them, and Ali reads each guest's book on Audible or Kindle before the interview. — 00:07:21 · Audible, Kindle, Deep Dive
  • ★★ Ali calls the Deep Dive podcast a long-term project he is excited about; it takes some pressure off him because his job is to ask questions, which he loves. — 00:07:51 · Deep Dive
  • ★★ Ali admires what Tim Ferriss, Lex Fridman and Lewis Howes's School of Greatness have done with the podcast format; Ferriss's content started off all about himself, with The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Chef and The 4-Hour Body. — 00:08:13 · Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek
  • ★★ Interviewing other people, as Tim Ferriss does on his podcast, adds value to the audience, Ali says, and his team hopes to do more of it. — 00:08:43 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★ Ali calls his office space "the studio" because it sounds cooler. — 00:08:43

00:08:56 — Plans to make the studio look good for filming and the podcast

  • ★★ Ali wants the London studio to look great for filming, with a sofa, a bookshelf, a lamp and loads of plants in a light, airy, pastel-coloured style. — 00:09:40 · London
  • ★★ For the podcast, the studio will get a table so that interviews can be filmed from three angles. — 00:10:05 · Deep Dive

00:10:41 — Part-Time YouTuber Academy cohort four, its $2 million year and the courses funding free content

  • ★★ Ali would like the studio fully set up with ceiling-mounted lights and microphones, like the studios of Peter McKinnon, MKBHD and Linus Tech Tips, to reduce the friction of filming. — 00:10:41 · Peter McKinnon, friction
  • ★★★ Ali's team has just launched the fourth cohort of the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, and he thinks about 300 places sold within the first day or two. (hedged) — 00:10:41 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ The fourth cohort of the Part-Time YouTuber Academy officially starts on 1 November 2021; Ali will be in Pakistan for about three weeks, so the team is working on a reliable internet setup. — 00:11:10 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy, Pakistan
  • ★★ Almost exactly a year earlier, on 19 October 2020 as Ali recalls, he and Angus sat down with sticky notes to plan a YouTube course, which became the Part-Time YouTuber Academy. — 00:11:36 · Angus, Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ The Part-Time YouTuber Academy has made over $2 million in revenue in the last 12 months, which let Ali's business afford the studio and a bigger team. — 00:11:36 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Ali finds it scary that his business relies so much on the Part-Time YouTuber Academy as a stream of income, and says it needs to diversify into other things, such as new courses. — 00:12:07 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Ali's model is to make both the free content and the paid courses really good, with the courses funding the free content; if money were no concern, he would not bother making courses. — 00:12:07

00:12:37 — Book writing under way while meetings and the podcast eat into writing time

  • ★★ Ali likes that his courses appeal to people who can afford them, with scholarships for those who cannot, and that they fund all the free content. — 00:12:37
  • ★★★ Writing Ali's book is now under way. — 00:12:37
  • ★★ Ali has told himself to wake at seven every day for three hours of morning writing; that morning he wrote for about half an hour before an eye appointment, as random things keep getting in the way. — 00:13:00
  • ★★ Since running the business has taken Ali's time from content, his team is moving Angus and others to handle the business side so he can focus on content and his book. — 00:13:28 · Angus

00:13:54 — Getting the house in order, and the hamster wheel of a growing business

  • ★★ Ali's book should come out in about two years if everything goes according to plan. (hedged) — 00:13:54
  • ★★ Ali recalls that one year, around when Amazon hit about $1 billion in revenue, Jeff Bezos told his team to spend the next 12 months getting their house in order. (hedged) — 00:13:54 · Amazon
  • ★★★ Having grown so fast to just under 20 people, Ali's business will spend the next few months getting its house in order. — 00:14:34
  • ★★★ Being a YouTuber feels like being a slave to the algorithm on a hamster wheel, Ali says: he fears that if he takes a break from posting, the algorithm will penalise him and people will stop watching. — 00:14:34 · YouTube

  • ★★★ With a team of 20 to sustain, Ali's business needs its YouTube channel to succeed: the more you grow, he says, the more you have to grow to keep up with the demands of growth. — 00:15:04

    “the more you grow, the more you have to grow to keep up with the demands of growth”

00:15:32 — Medium- to long-term planning, and what he actually wants from his life

  • ★★ Even though things change so much in his industry, Ali says his business needs a destination to point towards so that people know what they are doing. — 00:15:32
  • ★★★ Ali wants his content to explore what makes a fulfilled, happy and meaningful life and to share it with his audience as questions he is working through. — 00:16:58
  • ★★ Ali hopes the Deep Dive podcast will let his team interview experts on relationships, happiness, longevity, health and fitness. (hedged) — 00:17:23 · Deep Dive
  • ★★★ Since his break from medicine, Ali has found himself on a ladder like medicine's, aiming for more views, subscribers, revenue and courses, without stopping to think what he actually wants to do. — 00:17:53
  • ★★★ Ali finds the Odyssey plan helpful: picture your life five years on along your current path, along a completely different path, and if money, status and what others think were no object. — 00:18:47

00:19:24 — The infinite game and the ideal ordinary week

  • ★★★ Ali asks himself what infinite game he wants to play, an idea from the book Finite and Infinite Games: some games in life are finite and have an ending, others are infinite. — 00:19:24
  • ★★★ If he did not care about money, Ali would probably still make YouTube videos, because he cares about reading, writing, learning and teaching; teaching is one of his main passions in life. (hedged) — 00:20:10
  • ★★ Courses are teaching, but Ali does not like charging for them; if his business did not need sustaining, he would not charge people for education. — 00:20:41
  • ★★★ A friend introduced Ali to the ideal ordinary week exercise: what would an ordinary week, not a holiday, look like if you could design your life however you wanted? — 00:20:41
  • ★★ Ali's ideal ordinary week has sports and the gym twice a week each, a board-games night at his place, more racket sports, a monthly holiday with friends and lots of daily time for deep work. — 00:21:06 · deep work (concept)
  • ★★★ Ali finds it useful to ask what your ideal ordinary week looks like and why your current calendar does not reflect it. — 00:21:35

00:22:01 — Organisational design, management and the books that help

  • ★★ Ali is not a numbers guy and dislikes metrics and goals, but he has learned that in a business people like clarity about what their job is and what they are working towards. — 00:22:28
  • ★★ In one way of structuring Ali's business he is the visionary and Angus the integrator, with sales and marketing, operations and production beneath them. — 00:22:28 · Angus
  • ★★ People say one person can manage about six people at most, so Ali's team of 20 needs some middle management. — 00:24:03
  • ★★ People say managing someone takes about a quarter of a day a week per person, so managing four people takes a day a week. — 00:24:03
  • ★★ A really good manager, Ali says, holds weekly one-on-one meetings with every team member, holding them to account, supporting them and helping them grow. — 00:24:03
  • ★★★ Learning management as he goes, Ali has found several books really helpful: Traction, The Great CEO Within, The Making of a Manager, The One Minute Manager, How to Be a Great Boss and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. — 00:25:22
  • ★★★ Ali now thinks it is really important, once a business reaches a certain size, to have clear flows of accountability. — 00:25:51
  • ★★ Ali has handed Elizabeth, in effect the YouTuber Academy's chief strategy officer, the job of making sure its students have an amazing time. — 00:26:24 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali's team has hired a YouTube producer to keep track of the content schedules for the main channel, the second channel, a third channel it is going to launch and the podcast channels. — 00:26:24
  • ★★ Ali says he does not really know what he is doing in leadership and management, nor do most of his team, whose average age he puts at about 26 or 27, his own age. (hedged) — 00:26:54
  • ★★ When Ali reads a management book such as The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, he tells Angus on Slack, Angus reads it too, and they learn and grow together. — 00:27:23 · Angus, Slack

00:27:52 — What makes content good: clickbait, a deleted video and no rigid upload schedule

  • ★★ Defining good content by views, likes and comments has a danger, Ali says: you start chasing the metrics. — 00:27:52
  • ★★★ Ali admits that in the past few weeks his channel put out a few videos whose objective was to chase views rather than to be valuable and help people. — 00:27:52
  • ★★ Citing Veritasium's video on the unreasonable effectiveness of clickbait, Ali says a title should intrigue people enough to click and get value, but not so much that it borders on clickbait. — 00:28:34
  • ★★★ Under the pressure on his channel, Ali went too far into clickbait in a couple of recent videos, and his team deleted one because it was not good, authentic content he felt proud of. — 00:28:34
  • ★★★ Ali judges whether a video is good not only by its metrics but by whether he feels proud and happy with it, whether it feels authentic and would add value to at least one person. — 00:29:14
  • ★★ Ali says Becki and Chris, and Charlie Houpert of Charisma on Command, told him on a livestream the weekend before that they upload a video only if they are proud of it, give it a decent title and thumbnail, then stop thinking about it. — 00:29:39
  • ★★ In the past Ali held himself to two videos a week, one of them sponsored, so running out of ideas or a late video meant uploading something he was not proud of. — 00:29:39
  • ★★ Ali can simply tell a sponsor such as Brilliant that a video will be delayed, and they put creator mental health first; he need not put out a video just because it is sponsored. — 00:30:08 · Brilliant, Mental health
  • ★★ From now on, the bar for a video on Ali's main channel is whether it is a good video that adds value, with a fair title and thumbnail that try not to go into clickbait territory. — 00:30:33
  • ★★★ Ali's channel will no longer hold itself to a rigid publishing schedule: two videos a week would still be nice, but its focus is now on quality rather than quantity of uploads. — 00:30:59
  • ★★★ In the early days of a YouTube channel, focusing on quantity does help, Ali says, because the more videos you make, the better you get at making them. — 00:30:59

00:31:28 — TikTok, YouTube Shorts and other platforms

  • ★★ With TikTok said to be taking over, Ali's team asks whether it should be on TikTok and whether YouTube is dying, and has been trying to repurpose some of his content for YouTube Shorts, Instagram and TikTok. — 00:31:28 · Instagram
  • ★★ Ali's in-depth, long-form educational videos do not lend themselves to TikTok, YouTube Shorts or IGTV, which are not long-form platforms, so he questions whether to bother with them. — 00:32:09 · Instagram
  • ★ Ali's channel has become the thing that other people aspire to, as he once aspired to established YouTubers. — 00:32:09
  • ★★★ Content is not a zero-sum game, Ali says: someone who watches Matt D'Avella will also watch him, the rising tide lifts all boats, and he sees other YouTubers as collaborators and colleagues rather than competitors. — 00:32:58 · Matt D'Avella
  • ★★ A solo operator building a lifestyle business can do what he wants, Ali says, but building an actual business with a team changes that. — 00:32:58

00:34:06 — Niche versus no niche, and making content regardless of the numbers

  • ★★ Ali has wondered since starting his channel whether to have a niche; productivity is the obvious one, but he does not care that much about productivity. — 00:34:06
  • ★★ Ali sees four pillars of living your best life, health, wealth, love and happiness; he cares about all of them, but they are very broad. — 00:34:37
  • ★★★ Most YouTube growth coaches say you must niche down as much as possible to blow up, Ali says, but he finds it more fun to make a wide variety of content around what he cares about. — 00:35:04
  • ★★ On Ali's channel the productivity videos do better and the finance videos do way better than anything else, while videos on gratitude, happiness, meaning, effective altruism or charity do really badly. — 00:35:28

  • ★★★ Ali leans towards making the content he thinks useful and valuable and letting the numbers take care of themselves, citing Matt D'Avella's phrase "be so good that you can ignore the algorithm". — 00:36:03 · Matt D'Avella

    “be so good that you can ignore the algorithm”

  • ★★ Ali puts this behind-the-scenes ramble out on his main channel even though it might not do well, and wants to move more towards authentic, potentially valuable content without worrying so much about the numbers. — 00:36:32

  • ★★★ Ali is still not decided whether to pursue medicine in the long term; a few weeks earlier he had a great chat about it with Lewis Howes on Howes's podcast School of Greatness. — 00:36:32

00:36:58 — Whether to keep doing medicine, after Lewis Howes's challenge

  • ★★★ Ali's plan had always been to do medicine part-time for fun, maybe training in emergency medicine, with YouTube on the side; when Lewis Howes asked whether he really enjoyed it, he answered honestly not really, as teaching is his passion. — 00:37:13
  • ★★ Ali really enjoys medicine when he has medical students with him to teach on the job, but did not particularly enjoy it when it was just him dealing with patients. — 00:37:13
  • ★★★ Lewis Howes (quoted): Lewis Howes put it to Ali that if teaching is what he ultimately cares about, he should spend his one or two days a week on teaching rather than half-doing medicine. — 00:37:13
  • ★★ Ali had kept medicine as a backup in case his business came crashing down. — 00:37:52
  • ★★ Asked by Lewis Howes how much he would make as a doctor, Ali put it at 40K a year. — 00:37:52
  • ★★★ Ali had not appreciated the skills he gained from videos and business: even if he lost everything and the channel disappeared overnight, he would probably still find a way to support himself and his family. (hedged) — 00:37:52
  • ★★★ Asked whether medicine is meaningful or fulfilling enough to warrant doing, Ali's current feeling is probably not: he finds teaching fulfilling rather than practising medicine, unlike many of his colleagues. (hedged) — 00:38:34
  • ★★ Counting his foundation years, Ali has devoted eight years of his life to medicine; he regrets none of it and would do the same again. — 00:39:04 · Foundation Programme

  • ★★★ Someone once told Ali that lots of shoulds lead to a shitty life: if he thinks he should do medicine rather than wants to, that is probably not a great way of living. — 00:39:04

    “lots of shoulds lead to a shitty life”

  • ★★★ Ali is still thinking about medicine but leaning towards leaving it completely. (hedged) — 00:39:04

  • ★★ Ali says he built his brand on being a doctor from Cambridge who does productivity on the side, which made his YouTube channel interesting. — 00:39:32 · Cambridge
  • ★★ Ali fears that if he chooses not to be a doctor, he could hamper his business and his YouTube channel could die because people no longer care what he has to say. — 00:39:57
  • ★★ Lewis Howes (quoted): Lewis Howes told Ali that people follow him for advice on being more productive, a better student or living their best life, and that no one really cares whether he sees patients one day a week. — 00:40:20

00:40:58 — Making time for himself: a profitable business that helps people while having fun

  • ★★★ Chasing more subscribers, views and podcast downloads is fine, Ali says, but the destination is broadly meaningless unless we also enjoy the journey. — 00:40:58
  • ★★ The more hours Ali spends on the business, the more it grows, while an hour at the gym or with friends has no clear monetary return; he is trying to be more okay with that. — 00:41:22
  • ★★ In a recent session with a business coach, Ali's team was encouraged to put a number on its 10-year target. — 00:41:46
  • ★ Ali understands that School of Greatness's 10-year target is to reach 100 million people every month. (hedged) — 00:41:46

  • ★★★ All Ali really wants is a profitable business that helps people while having fun; he does not care about hitting revenue targets or growth metrics. — 00:42:15

    “profitable business that helps people while having fun”

  • ★★★ Since his goal is a profitable business that is fun and helps people, Ali thinks he should be okay making more time for himself, going on holiday without his laptop and not feeling he must turn out a video every week. — 00:42:15

00:43:00 — Asking for advice in the comments and the clover emoji

  • ★ Ali asks viewers who reach the end of his very long videos to leave a clover emoji, which he calls their little thing for such videos. — 00:43:26

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked by a viewer whether, loving teaching, Ali has thought of becoming a professor of medicine, the channel replies that it would be fun. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Angus · Deep Dive · infinite game · Lewis Howes · London · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Also: People: Amber · Becki · Charlie Houpert · Chris (youtuber, mentioned from 2021) · Elizabeth · Jeff Bezos · Lex Fridman · Marques Brownlee · Matt D'Avella · Peter McKinnon · Thomas Frank · Tim Ferriss

Works: Finite and Infinite Games · How to Be a Great Boss · School of Greatness · The 4-Hour Workweek · The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive · The Great CEO Within · The Making of a Manager · The One Minute Manager · Traction

Organizations: Amazon · Brilliant · Instagram · Linus Tech Tips · Pick Up Limes · TikTok · Veritasium · WeWork

Concepts: deep work (concept) · effective altruism · Emergency medicine · Foundation Programme · friction · ideal ordinary week · lifestyle business · Mental health · Odyssey plan

Places: Cambridge · Pakistan

Products: Audible · Kindle · Slack · YouTube Shorts

Also centred on infinite game: How I Gained 1 MILLION Subscribers

Also centred on Lewis Howes: Why I Left Medicine... Forever

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