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How To Build A Life You Love

2022-11-04 · Livestream or live hangout · Ali · recording, 24:02 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Goals, purpose and life design · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: His own products discussed, His medical past, Lesson from a book, Sponsor segment present

In a recorded livestream Ali gives a three-step design-thinking method for building a life you love (identify with the fast-forward test and the Odyssey Plan, experiment with the smallest step, iterate), tells how the Odyssey Plan in 2019 turned him from anaesthetics to YouTube, and adds three tips: a team of builders, identity alarms and daily proofs from Eric Partaker's The 3 Alarms.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — How to build a life you love: a design-thinking approach in three steps

00:00:27 — Step one, identify: health, work and relationships, and one step in each

  • ★★ Step one of building a life you love, Ali says, is to rate from zero to ten how far you are living a life you love and work out what the problem is. — 00:00:27
  • ★★ For simplicity Ali splits life into three areas: health, work and relationships. — 00:01:52
  • ★★ In each of the three areas of life, Ali suggests asking what one step you can take to get closer to where you want to be. — 00:02:14
  • ★★ Ali's health goal is to become a Gymshark athlete with a body like Sam Kolder's. — 00:02:44 · Gymshark
  • ★★ For work, Ali looks at his calendar and asks how many of the things he does energise him and how many drain him. — 00:03:12 · energisers and drainers

00:03:27 — The fast-forward test

  • ★★★ Ali's fast-forward test: for each thing in a standard day, ask whether you would press a button to skip to its end and just get the result. — 00:03:40
  • ★★ Working as a doctor, Ali would have pressed the fast-forward button almost every workday, but not when teaching medical students, which he enjoyed and found energising. — 00:04:09

  • ★★ Ali defines a life he loves as one where he would not fast-forward many things, because he wants to experience what he is doing. — 00:04:36

    “my definition of a life that i love is one where i wouldn't fast forward very many things”

  • ★★ The mistake Ali sees is treating building a life you love as a one-and-done thing, when it is a very long process. — 00:05:23

00:05:49 — The Odyssey Plan and how it changed his path in 2019

  • ★★★ Ali recommends the Odyssey Plan, an exercise from Stanford's Designing Your Life: ask three questions, starting with what your current life looks like five years from now. — 00:05:50
  • ★★ The Odyssey Plan's other two paths are a completely different life five years from now, and a different path where money, other people's expectations and society's obligations do not matter, as if you won the lottery. — 00:06:26
  • ★★ The point of the Odyssey Plan is not to commit to any of its paths but to systematically answer what building a life you love means to you. — 00:06:56
  • ★★★ In 2019, working full-time as a doctor, Ali planned to train in anaesthetics, become a physiology supervisor in Cambridge and a fellow of Emmanuel College, his old college. — 00:06:56 · Emmanuel College, Cambridge
  • ★★★ Writing out his anaesthetics plan five years ahead, Ali found it neither exciting nor energising; he re-evaluated his life and chose YouTube, teaching and writing a book instead. — 00:07:31
  • ★★ Ali thinks doing the Odyssey Plan every few years, or even every year if your life is changing quickly, is helpful. — 00:08:02
  • ★★★ You can analysis-paralyse yourself as much as you like, Ali says, but until you try things out you will never know what a life you love means. — 00:08:02
  • ★★ Recognising at medical school that being a full-time doctor was not a life he would love, Ali tried a med-tech app, many societies and a business; the business and med-tech were fun, and the teaching was really fun. — 00:08:36
  • ★★ After steps down the teaching path and the entrepreneurship path, Ali landed on his YouTube channel and saw something there. — 00:08:57
  • ★★ Ali can now comfortably rate himself ten out of ten on living a life he loves, while still trying to improve over time. — 00:08:57

00:09:48 — Step two, experiment: starting the channel and the smallest step

  • ★★★ Step two of building a life you love is to experiment; Ali loves the word because it takes the pressure off. — 00:09:48 · experimental mindset
  • ★★ Ali started his YouTube channel as an experiment: a video filmed on his bed saying he was going to start a vlog, edited in Premiere after a few tutorials. — 00:10:17
  • ★★ Ali's first YouTube videos were BMAT tutorials, because he had a business helping people get into medical school. — 00:10:17 · BMAT
  • ★★ When viewers asked, Ali made vlogs of life as a medical student and then videos on how to study; at every step he had no plan and took small steps. — 00:10:44
  • ★★ For Ali the YouTube experiment went well: it was fun and energising. — 00:11:12
  • ★★ The big mistake Ali sees is people with an idea, such as starting a podcast or a YouTube channel, who take no action and let the fear of getting started stop them experimenting. — 00:12:04
  • ★★★ To experiment with an idea, Ali asks what is the smallest step he can take. — 00:12:04
  • ★★ To Part-Time YouTuber Academy students worried about switching their channel's niche, for example to finance, Ali says to take the smallest step, such as a community post asking viewers what they think. — 00:12:34 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

00:13:04 — Step three, iterate, and taking action

  • ★★★ Step three is to iterate: see how doing the thing felt and improve on it, so that identifying, experimenting and iterating become a constant feedback loop. — 00:13:04
  • ★★ Ali did not enjoy his personal trainer's sessions, with too many high reps and too much volume, so he downloaded Jeff Nippard's minimalist workout routine guide and found another trainer to work in the five-to-eight rep range. — 00:13:54
  • ★★ Doing the exercises, not reading about them, is what gets you in shape, Ali says; nerds especially overanalyse things and take no action. — 00:15:04
  • ★ The Part-Time YouTuber Academy is a five-week live course with 60 hours of content. — 00:15:04 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Ali tells Part-Time YouTuber Academy students not to watch all the content first: start the channel now with a crappy phone video, then watch the live sessions and do the weekly homework. — 00:15:34 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Analysing is fine as long as you are taking action, Ali says, but not when you are not. — 00:15:34

00:15:55 — Nebula and CuriosityStream sponsor read

00:17:42 — Tips: the team of builders, the three alarms and daily proofs

  • ★★★ Ali's first tip for building a life you love is a team of builders: people around you also trying to build a life they love, supporting each other. — 00:17:49
  • ★★ In the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, Ali says, those who stick to YouTube consistently tend to form accountability groups: two or three people on a weekly Zoom call holding each other accountable. — 00:18:13 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ On Ali's team, Tintin, Alice, Angus and Bav (as heard) have an accountability group that meets every Monday at 5 p.m. — 00:18:13 · Angus
  • ★ A team of builders can be just one or two friends; Ali thinks three is an ideal size for a WhatsApp group. — 00:19:08
  • ★★★ Behind the three alarms method of his coach Eric Partaker, author of The 3 Alarms, is the idea that action follows identity: thinking of himself as a healthy person makes Ali go to the gym more often. — 00:19:30
  • ★★ Ali has three daily alarms on his phone naming the identities he wants: "humble and inspiring teacher", "Gymshark athlete" and "relationship sustainer". — 00:20:18 · Gymshark
  • ★★ Ali has had his three identity alarms for several weeks and has genuinely found them helpful. — 00:21:05
  • ★★★ The three alarms method is free, Ali says: decide the identity you want to embody in work, health and relationships and set a phone alarm with it that encourages you to act. — 00:21:33
  • ★★ Ali's final tip, daily proofs: plan at the start of each day one small action in each of your three areas of life, to prove to yourself that you are building a life you love. — 00:21:57
  • ★ For relationships that day, Ali still has to call his grandmother, who is in Pakistan, and has a dinner with guy friends he has not seen in a while. — 00:22:23 · Ali Abdaal's grandmother, Pakistan

00:23:35 — Sign-off

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: experimental mindset · fast-forward test · Odyssey plan · team of builders

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's grandmother · Angus · Eric Partaker · Jeff Nippard · Sam Kolder

Projects: Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: BMAT · The 3 Alarms

Organizations: Emmanuel College · Gymshark · Stanford University

Concepts: accountability buddy · analysis paralysis · energisers and drainers · identity-based habits

Places: Cambridge · Pakistan

Products: Adobe Premiere Pro · iPhone

Also centred on Odyssey plan: I'm Moving to America 🇺🇸 - Life Update · 20 Lessons that Improved My Life · How To Figure Out What You Want To Do With Your Life · How to Make Productivity Healthier

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