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21 Life Lessons I've Learned

2022-01-04 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali, Arun Maini · recording, 27:36 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Mindset, motivation and happiness (also: Money and investing, Productivity and time, Goals, purpose and life design, Relationships and personal life, Business and entrepreneurship, Work and career, Health, sleep and habits, Books and reading, Learning and studying, YouTube, writing online and creators) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Lesson from a book, His own numbers, His medical past, His own products discussed, Sponsor segment present

Ali gives 21 lessons he takes out of 2021: from Die With Zero, The Minimalist Entrepreneur, Happy Sexy Millionaire (the quitting framework, 112 chips of time), The Gap and the Gain, the 37% rule, Keep Going and The Courage to Be Disliked, and from his own year: asking what he wants, delegating, accepting career risk, embracing the suck, being himself when dating, keeping a Kindle at hand, learning Mandarin by audiobook and questioning his assumptions.

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: 21 life lessons learned in 2021

  • ★★ Bill Perkins (quoted): In Die With Zero, Bill Perkins argues that if you die with anything more than $0 in the bank, you have done something wrong. — 00:00:00

00:00:10 — Die With Zero: get better at spending money on experiences

  • ★★★ Seeing himself in the accumulation part of his life, Ali takes from Die With Zero that what matters are experiences and relationships with loved ones, and that he should be more okay spending money on them. — 00:00:50

00:01:26 — Stay scrappy, from The Minimalist Entrepreneur

  • ★★ As his team has grown, Ali feels the quality bar for his videos and courses is higher than it used to be, which pulls him into perfectionism and trying to make things perfect before launch. — 00:01:49
  • ★★ Sahil Lavingia (quoted): In The Minimalist Entrepreneur, Sahil Lavingia says you create something good by launching it and iterating over time, not by retreating to your cave to make a perfect masterpiece. — 00:02:18
  • ★★ Ali applies The Minimalist Entrepreneur's advice to stay scrappy to writing his book: it helps with first drafts, since in perfectionism mode it is hard to get anything written down. — 00:02:18
  • ★★ Steven Bartlett (quoted): In Happy Sexy Millionaire, Steven Bartlett says quitting is for winners, not losers, and knowing when to quit is a very useful life skill; his quitting framework asks whether the thing is hard or sucks, and whether the reward is worth the effort. — 00:02:47
  • ★ Ali recommends Steven Bartlett's Happy Sexy Millionaire, which he listened to as an audiobook. — 00:02:47

00:02:50 — Steven Bartlett's quitting framework and the USMLE

  • ★★ Ali had decided to take the USMLE and practise as a doctor in America, but found it hard and that it sucked, with payoffs not worth it to him; he read the quitting framework only afterwards. — 00:03:45 · USMLE, United States
  • ★★ Ali calls Steven Bartlett's quitting framework a good distillation of how he has always decided whether to continue or quit things, and now uses it as a clear framework for quitting decisions. — 00:03:45

00:04:04 — The gap and the gain

  • ★★★ From The Gap and the Gain by Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy, Ali advises measuring the gain, how far you have come, rather than the gap between where you are and your ideal; comparing himself with his ideal demotivates him. — 00:04:15 · choose to be satisfied

00:04:51 — The 37% rule for explore versus exploit

  • ★★ Ali presents the 37% rule from How to Not Die Alone as a way to solve the explore-versus-exploit problem: dating more people shows you what you want, but at some point you have to commit to one person. — 00:05:13
  • ★★ Under the 37% rule, Ali says, explore for the first 37% of instances, in dating up to about age 26, treating it casually; after that, commit to the next person you vibe with rather than think someone better is around the corner. — 00:05:42
  • ★★ Ali finds the 37% rule helpful beyond dating, for questions such as how to niche his YouTube channel, what the business should do and what he wants to do with his life. — 00:06:12

00:06:31 — Forget the noun, do the verb

  • ★★ Austin Kleon (quoted): In Keep Going, Austin Kleon's chapter "forget the noun, do the verb" says it does not matter what you are, only what you do. — 00:06:41 · Austin Kleon
  • ★★ After releasing his video on leaving medicine for good, Ali had an identity crisis over what to call himself if not a doctor, and reread Keep Going. — 00:06:41
  • ★★ Ali says we should think of our identity by what we do rather than through labels such as doctor or YouTuber, because we are made up of multitudes. — 00:07:10

00:07:39 — Ask what you actually want from life

  • ★★★ Ali finds it really helpful to ask himself fairly regularly what he actually wants from life, a question he did not stop to ask for 26 years. — 00:07:39
  • ★★ A few weeks earlier, feeling he was on too many Zoom calls and life was too busy, Ali asked himself what he wanted, found the reason and changed it, and is much happier. — 00:08:05
  • ★★ Whenever he feels out of alignment, Ali asks what he wants, what is happening, what the difference is and whether he can fix it; in most cases he finds he can. — 00:08:48
  • ★★ Ali's team running his business and YouTube channel is now 17 or 18 people. — 00:08:48
  • ★★★ Ali says delegation is really hard but game-changing: after shouldering most of the work himself in the channel's first years, not having to do everything himself feels like a blessing. — 00:08:48

00:09:00 — Delegation is hard but changes the game

  • ★★ Ali says anyone making money knows their hourly rate and can delegate tasks that cost less than it, to a team, friends, interns or cleaners; delegating laundry and getting a cleaner added enormously to his quality of life. — 00:09:46 · money buys back time

00:10:05 — Everyone has some level of career risk

  • ★★ Ali's mentor Charles told him that everyone has some level of career risk, even in a normal job, since jobs for life hardly exist any more, except perhaps in medicine. — 00:10:15
  • ★★★ Ali says to embrace career risk: the risks of running your own business are in some ways better than those of a doctor or employee and different in others, and seeing risk as normal means less worry. — 00:11:07

00:11:36 — Time as 112 chips a week

  • ★★ Steven Bartlett (quoted): In Happy Sexy Millionaire, Steven Bartlett counts 112 waking hours a week and treats them like 112 casino chips that must each be played on something and cannot be saved. — 00:12:06
  • ★★ Thinking of each week as 112 chips to play makes time concrete for Ali and helps him be more intentional about how he spends his hours. — 00:12:29
  • ★★★ Ali's lesson from writing his book is to embrace the suck: whenever he struggles with procrastination, the answer is to lower the bar, since perfectionism is what makes him procrastinate. — 00:13:12

00:13:13 — Embrace the suck: lower the bar

  • ★★ When Ali writes in his to-do list that he just needs 500 crappy words for the crappy first draft of chapter two of his book, the word "crappy" twice shows him the stakes are low. — 00:13:41

  • ★★ Students of his Part-Time YouTuber Academy get paralysed by perfectionism, Ali says; the more we accept our work will be bad at first, the more likely we are to do it and get better: get going and then get good. — 00:14:14 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

    “get going and then get good”

  • ★ If you are worried about your belly expanding, Ali says, stop ordering takeaway every day. (playful) — 00:14:44

  • ★★★ Ali now frames what he wants from life as the infinite games he wants to play, things done for their own sake, rather than finite games done for an outcome, such as doing YouTube for two years to make money. — 00:14:44 · identified motivation

00:14:49 — Stop ordering takeaway every day

00:14:53 — Infinite games over finite games

  • ★★ The infinite games Ali wants to play forever are reading, writing and teaching, hanging out with his friends and playing board games once a week. — 00:15:13

00:15:59 — Separation of tasks

  • ★★ As Ali summarises it, The Courage to Be Disliked holds that all problems in life are interpersonal problems caused by failing to separate tasks: your own thoughts and actions are your task, and what others think of you is theirs. — 00:16:10
  • ★★★ When someone's treatment annoys or stresses him, Ali reminds himself of the separation of tasks: his task is good intentions, his own thoughts and acting well, and how others perceive it is their problem, so external events affect him less. — 00:16:37 · stoicism
  • ★★ Ali used to hold that you should not be yourself when dating but choose the person you want to be, since your default self is an accident of birth, genetics and circumstance. — 00:17:07

00:17:20 — Be yourself when dating

  • ★★★ From his dating experiences in 2021, Ali finds that the more he leans into being himself, the happier he is on dates and with the person, whether or not they end up together. — 00:18:05
  • ★★ Ali holds that he can be himself while still trying to improve himself, and is okay with the tension between the two. — 00:18:46

00:19:15 — Always have a Kindle with you

  • ★★ Ali lost his Kindle when moving house a few months earlier and went about two weeks without one; his sleep quality suffered, because he reads his Kindle in bed until he falls asleep. — 00:19:24 · Kindle
  • ★★★ Ali says always have a Kindle with you: he now has two, one in his bag and one on his bedside table, so wherever he is he can fall asleep better at night. — 00:19:24 · Kindle

00:19:58 — Learning languages through audiobooks

  • ★★ In 2014, before going to Japan for a medical research project, Ali listened to a Japanese audio course for 20 minutes each night before bed for about two months and got to a reasonable standard fairly passively. — 00:20:01 · Japan
  • ★★ Ali recently decided to learn Mandarin and listens to an audiobook course for it, for about an hour on long drives. — 00:20:01
  • ★★★ Ali finds learning a language through audiobook courses, with exercises and native speakers to copy, fun and almost passive, because he can do it while driving or at the gym. — 00:20:56

00:21:15 — What Mrwhosetheboss taught him about scripting

  • ★★ Arun Maini says scripting is most of what he does: a 22-minute Google Pixel versus iPhone 13 Pro camera comparison took probably three and a half days of 14-hour days of scripting. (hedged) — 00:21:30
  • ★★ Ali recalls Penn and Teller's saying that magic is often putting more time into something than any reasonable person would, and sees the same in Arun Maini's videos. — 00:21:56
  • ★ Arun Maini's channel Mrwhosetheboss is on nearly 10 million subscribers. — 00:21:56
  • ★★★ Having thought three hours of scripting a video was a lot, Ali sees from Arun Maini's 40 to 100 hours per video how much more he could do to make his videos better. — 00:22:25

00:22:52 — Loving himself for who he is rather than what he does

  • ★★★ Ali says he loves his friends for who they are but did not apply that to himself; his old housemate Sheen spent months helping him see that he may be worthy of love and friendship just by existing. (hedged) — 00:23:22 · Sheen
  • ★★ When he catches himself beating himself up for not living up to a standard, Ali reminds himself he is worthy of love, attention and respect for who he is rather than for what he does. — 00:23:50

00:24:20 — Questioning assumptions

  • ★★★ Whenever he feels out of alignment or stressed, Ali asks what assumptions lie behind the feeling and whether they are even true; often they are not, just an old story he kept telling himself. — 00:24:43
  • ★★ Unhappy with his channel's content a few months earlier, Ali found that his assumptions, such as having to put out two videos a week, were flawed and had gone unquestioned for four and a half years. — 00:24:43
  • ★★ Ali long assumed people would stop following his channel if he were no longer a doctor, until thinking about leaving medicine made him question it; friends told him his content is not medical any more. — 00:25:12

00:25:55 — Bonus lesson on lifelong learning as a sponsor read, and sign-off

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali's go-to board games are Articulate and Avalon. — creator comment
  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): For further books on relationships after How to Not Die Alone, the channel recommends Attached and Models. — creator comment
  • ★ To a parent who tries to show her child love for no reason, Ali recommends the book Unconditional Parenting. — creator comment
  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Ali's medical project in Japan was an IFMSA placement at Nihon University Medical School, the channel says. — creator comment · Japan
  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked how to find what to do in life, the channel says to try lots of things. — creator comment
  • ★ Asked whether his routine gets boring, Ali says he does not really have a routine. — creator comment

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Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: 37 percent rule · embrace the suck · Kindle · separation of tasks

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's grandmother · Arun Maini · Austin Kleon · Ben Hardy · Bill Perkins · Dan Sullivan · Sahil Lavingia · Sheen · Steven Bartlett · Zac Efron

Projects: Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: Die With Zero · Happy Sexy Millionaire · How to Not Die Alone · Keep Going · The Courage to Be Disliked · The Gap and the Gain · The Minimalist Entrepreneur · USMLE

Organizations: Netflix

Concepts: 112 chips · forget the noun, do the verb · identified motivation · infinite game · quitting framework · stoicism

Places: Japan · Pakistan

Products: Apple Notes · Gumroad · World of Warcraft

Only in the description or credits: Articulate · Attached · Avalon · Models · Nihon University · Unconditional Parenting

Also centred on embrace the suck: How to overcome the fear of getting started.

Also centred on separation of tasks: This Book Made Me a Happier Person

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