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Reflecting On My Fears - Day in the Life

2021-12-03 · Vlog or day in the life · Ali, Cliff Weitzman · recording, 19:15 · watch on YouTube

Topic: YouTube, writing online and creators (also: Productivity and time, Mindset, motivation and happiness, Relationships and personal life) · mode: Reflection and life update · tags: Lesson from a book

In a Saturday vlog Ali reflects in Apple Notes on what he wants from his channel, business and life, runs Tim Ferriss's fear-setting exercise on no longer caring about the numbers, and decides to drop the fixed upload schedule and publish only when a video is ready, before a gym visit to Cliff Weitzman of Speechify.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Saturday morning: instant coffee, journaling in Day One, a Tim Ferriss post on the way to the studio, tea in the communal area

  • ★ On a Saturday Ali wakes at 8 a.m., makes his morning instant coffee and starts a writing session by journaling in Day One, his usual app. — 00:00:00 · Day One
  • ★★ In the car Ali reads Tim Ferriss's blog post on saying no to cool things and why he quit angel investing; Ali has been dabbling in angel investing and must decide whether to make it serious or drop it. — 00:00:29 · Tim Ferriss

00:01:41 — Tim Ferriss on saying no to cool things; hell yeah or no

  • ★★ Drawing on Tim Ferriss's posts, Ali says that after some professional success you move from seeking opportunities to batting away inbound ones, and saying yes to too many kind-of-cool things fills your calendar with other people's agendas. — 00:02:11 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★★ Ali says he has said yes to way too many cool things; had he applied Derek Sivers's "hell yeah or no" filter, he would have said no to most of what is now in his calendar. (hedged) — 00:02:41 · hell yeah or no, Derek Sivers

00:04:05 — What he wants from the channel, the business and life: guide not guru, four pillars, the dream world

  • ★★ Ali writes his reflections in Apple Notes, which he calls his second brain of choice. — 00:04:05 · second brain

  • ★★★ Ali says the aim of his business is to help people live their best life through inspiring educational content, with the vibe of a guide, not a guru. — 00:04:34

    “we have the vibe of being a guide, not a guru”

  • ★★ Ali says a happy, fulfilled life broadly rests on four pillars, health, wealth, love and happiness, which he is keen to explore in his content. — 00:04:55

  • ★★ Ali wants to live by "journey before destination": life is less about hitting some arbitrary goal than enjoying the journey, because the journey is all we have. — 00:05:22 · journey before destination
  • ★★ Ali wonders whether, if winning the lottery would significantly change the work he does, that means he is doing the wrong thing. (hedged) — 00:06:03
  • ★★ If he did not have to worry about money, Ali would still make content but would not care about the numbers or about making paid courses: his paid courses exist only to fund the business that makes his free content. — 00:06:03
  • ★★ Ali wants to learn cool things, read about interesting topics and document his findings, and to write books and make videos and podcasts that help people live their best life. — 00:06:03
  • ★★ In Ali's dream world he would not care about numbers: he would upload videos he thinks authentic and useful to at least one person, forget their views, likes and comments, and not be confined to topics chosen for the numbers. — 00:07:13
  • ★★★ In Ali's dream world his business would not rely on the YouTube channel hitting numbers and would be a lifestyle business, not trying to be huge, just sufficiently profitable while having fun and helping people. — 00:07:13
  • ★★★ From now on Ali wants new hires and the people he works with to be in person, because he gets a lot of energy from in-person interaction and loses a lot on Zoom; he does not mean to fire his current remote staff. — 00:07:42 · Zoom
  • ★★ Ali wants his team to enjoy their work and feel they make a difference while seeing it as just a job: the business should not take over anyone's life so that they are not living their own best life. — 00:07:42
  • ★★ Ali thinks it is worth sometimes thinking about what your life would look like if you could design it however you wanted. — 00:07:42
  • ★★ When Ali imagines his ideal life it is rarely absurd things such as a yacht in Monaco, but mostly a calendar within his control and no meetings he does not find useful. — 00:08:21
  • ★★ Ali says chasing the YouTube hamster wheel, trying to appease the algorithm and grow the numbers, makes it very easy to go down the clickbait route. — 00:08:21
  • ★★ Ali is trying to get better at making videos that feel authentic and interesting to him and would help at least one person, rather than worrying about the numbers. — 00:09:09

00:09:37 — What if he stopped caring about the numbers: Tim Ferriss's fear-setting

  • ★★★ Ali says caring about the numbers is what adds stress and anxiety to his life. — 00:09:59
  • ★★ Asking himself what would happen if he genuinely stopped caring about the numbers, Ali turns to Tim Ferriss's fear-setting exercise, which he had never really done seriously. — 00:09:59 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ Rereading Tim Ferriss's fear-setting post, Ali almost tears up at its message that putting your current path on indefinite pause is not giving up, and puts the emotion down to the numbers. — 00:10:50 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ Ali says caring about numbers is now so intrinsic to his psyche that, while it is easy to talk a good game about not caring, actually living that philosophy is different. — 00:11:17
  • ★★ Applying Tim Ferriss's fear-setting to not caring about the numbers, Ali asks what the worst case would be, how to mitigate it and whether it is even all that bad. — 00:11:57 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ Ali cites a quote he attributes to Mark Twain, that of the many problems he had known very few actually happened, and another: we suffer more in imagination than in reality. (hedged) — 00:12:19

00:13:06 — Fear-setting results: no upload schedule, excellence defined internally; afternoon work

  • ★★★ Doing the fear-setting exercise, Ali finds the worst cases pretty unlikely: even if the business died it would not be the end of the world, as he could get a real job and his team could easily find other jobs. — 00:13:06
  • ★★★ Ali decides his channel will no longer be beholden to an upload schedule: a video goes out when it is ready and good, not when a sponsor asks for it. — 00:13:39
  • ★★ Ali decides personal videos such as this vlog will go on his main channel first, and move to his second channel if they really hurt the stats. — 00:13:39
  • ★★ Ali decides that from now on his team defines excellence internally rather than by views or stats. — 00:14:09
  • ★★ Ali traces putting out content he is not fully proud of to his two-videos-a-week schedule, chosen fairly arbitrarily about a year earlier; he sees no need for it and would rather make fewer videos he is proud of. — 00:14:38
  • ★★★ Ali says a fixed schedule and consistency make sense in the early days of a YouTube channel while learning to make videos, but once you know how, even a one-video-a-week schedule is bad, since some weeks no video is quite ready. — 00:14:38
  • ★★ Ali sees vlogs and community content as very different from his educational videos: an educational video has to be really good before he publishes it, while a vlog he just makes anyway. — 00:15:58
  • ★★ Ali plans to ask his agency Standard to pare down his sponsored-video schedule. — 00:15:58
  • ★★ From 3 p.m. Ali works on a video about the book How to Not Die Alone, which he read a few months earlier. — 00:15:58

00:16:40 — Gym at Cliff Weitzman's Speechify house, the Prince of Egypt musical, an evening with friends

  • ★★ Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify, says he and Ali became "pandemic friends" after meeting during one of Ali's Deep Dives. — 00:16:40 · Deep Dive
  • ★★ Cliff Weitzman says the Speechify team moves location every three to six months and has grown from 18 people at the start of the year to 76, with engineers in 15 countries. — 00:17:09
  • ★ Ali calls Speechify, Cliff Weitzman's company, a pretty cool product. — 00:17:53

00:18:52 — Friends singing from Hamilton

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked whether Apple Notes is now Ali's second brain of choice, the channel says a video about it is coming out at some point. — creator comment · second brain
  • ★★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Told that in-person-only work is not very accessible and shrinks the pool of talented people, the channel replies that this is always the drawback. — creator comment
  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): The channel names the backpack Ali carries in the vlog as the Peak Design Everyday Backpack. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: fear-setting · guide, not guru · Tim Ferriss

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's mother · Cliff Weitzman · David Goggins · Derek Sivers · Mark Twain · Ramit Sethi

Projects: Deep Dive

Works: How to Not Die Alone

Organizations: Standard

Concepts: angel investment · hell yeah or no · journey before destination · lifestyle business · second brain

Places: London · Monaco

Products: Apple Notes · Day One · Huel · Speechify · Zoom

Only in the description or credits: Peak Design Everyday Backpack

Also centred on guide, not guru: How To Beat Imposter Syndrome · The Key to Success on YouTube

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