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I spent $50,000 on a business coach so you don’t have to

2023-06-28 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 21:53 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Goals, purpose and life design (also: Productivity and time) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Lesson from a book, Sponsor segment present, He changed his mind, Family

Ali shares three lessons from his CEO coach Eric Partaker: set one to three quarterly goals in health, work and relationships to "take off the blindfold" and see the target; keep an ideal week calendar that makes time for those goals, with a parking lot for the rest; and use identities, values and daily quests from Partaker's book 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 — Why a business coach; who Eric Partaker is and how Ali became his client

  • ★★★ Ali says having a business coach for the last several years has been the most ROI-positive thing he has ever done in his business or his life. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali's coach Eric Partaker was on Skype's early team before its billion-dollar sale to eBay, then ran a UK restaurant chain that grew over about 12 years; now retired in Portugal, he coaches CEOs on the side. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Eric Partaker was a former student of Ali's Part-Time YouTuber Academy and interviewed Ali about content creation on his podcast, where Ali saw how much he knows about business. — 00:00:29 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Since about October 2022 Ali has had weekly one-hour coaching sessions with Eric Partaker, dozens of hours over about seven or eight months. — 00:00:58

00:01:27 — Eric's onboarding questionnaire and Ali's lack of direction

  • ★ At the start of the coaching Ali answered Eric Partaker's questionnaire of about 27 questions on a scale of one to five. (hedged) — 00:01:27
  • ★★ On the questionnaire Ali disagreed that he is consistently productive and focused on what matters most, and strongly disagreed that he schedules time for continuous learning in his calendar. — 00:01:56
  • ★★★ Ali realised he has never been clear about where he is headed in business and life; no one can predict the future, but having no direction still feels quite stressful. — 00:02:26
  • ★★★ The answer to having no direction, Ali and Eric Partaker concluded, backed by psychology research, is goal setting: setting a few goals and building systems to hit them. — 00:02:55

00:03:08 — Sponsor read

00:04:22 — Remove the blindfold: quarterly goals in health, work and relationships, habits and tasks

  • ★★★ Ali used to focus his goals on inputs within his control, such as making two videos a week rather than hitting a subscriber count; Eric Partaker explained goals to him in a way that has replaced this, as a "firmware update" in his brain. — 00:04:22

  • ★★★ Eric Partaker's point, which Ali adopts: setting goals takes off the blindfold so you can see the target, and even the worst darts player who sees it will move in its rough direction. — 00:04:52

    “setting goals is just about taking off the blindfold so you can see where the target is”

  • ★★★ Ali and Eric Partaker set goals in a Google Doc: life is split into health, wealth or work, and relationships, with one to three goals in each for the quarter. — 00:05:28

  • ★★ Ali's 2023 health goals were cooking adventurer, acro yoga and an athletic muscular body; the cooking goal is to cook healthy, tasty meals for himself and friends, like levelling up a World of Warcraft trade skill. — 00:05:28 · World of Warcraft
  • ★★ Ali's cooking goal is neither a SMART goal nor particularly challenging: he only roughly sketches what he would like to do for his health. — 00:06:15
  • ★★ The action from Ali's athletic-body goal was to get a health coach: Dan Go now programs his workouts, with calls every couple of weeks. — 00:06:44
  • ★★ Ali advises setting some goals at any time of the year; he likes limiting them to three and splitting them into health, work and relationships. — 00:07:13
  • ★★ Ali's work goals were to finish his book, film some YouTube videos and launch the final cohort of the Part-Time YouTuber Academy. — 00:07:13 · Feel-Good Productivity (book), Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★ Ali's annual relationship goals were to be a great boyfriend, a group adventure leader who organises adventures for friends, and a dinner-party chef. — 00:07:13
  • ★★★ Seeing his goals has meant Ali has done more towards them than ever before; earlier he made New Year's resolutions and kept a Notion goals page but never looked at it and had no accountability system. — 00:07:48 · Notion
  • ★★ Just looking at his goals Google Doc at least once a month keeps Ali taking steps towards his goals. — 00:08:12
  • ★★ Ali scrapped the idea of hiring a ghostwriter because he enjoys writing himself, and finds enormous relief in being able to say a goal is no longer a priority. — 00:08:12
  • ★★★ Ali breaks goals into habits, which recur, and tasks, which happen once: for his athletic-body goal, gym blocks three times a week and 10,000 steps a day are habits, and buying a walking-desk treadmill is a task. — 00:08:41
  • ★★ To finish his book by the end of May 2023, Ali set a habit of writing four hours a day; he often missed it, but having it in the calendar moved him much closer. — 00:09:14 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

00:09:43 — The ideal week calendar and the parking lot for goals

  • ★ Ali scored one out of five on having protected weekly time to think about strategy and industry trends and to review company and team performance. — 00:09:43
  • ★★★ Ali calls the ideal week, which he has applied for nine months, one of the most game-changing time-management techniques: block out your ideal week so the habits your goals require have time in the calendar. — 00:10:12
  • ★★ A week has 168 hours; sleeping eight hours a day leaves 112 hours to decide what to do with. (hedged) — 00:10:12
  • ★★ Ali's ideal week calendar in Google Calendar: wake at seven, morning routine 7 to 8, breakfast, journaling and a walk 8 to 9 every day, weekday lunch 1 to 2 except the Wednesday team lunch, and a night routine 10 to 11 p.m. — 00:10:43
  • ★★ Ali's ideal week puts the gym on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and Saturday mornings, team meetings and one-on-ones with Angus, Wednesday team hangouts and levelling-up time for learning, and deep-work writing blocks on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. — 00:11:12 · Angus, deep work (concept)
  • ★★ Ali's ideal week also covers relationships: date nights on Mondays and Thursdays, social dinners on Tuesday evenings for his cooking-adventurer goal, and Sunday brunch with his brother. — 00:11:41 · Taimur Abdaal
  • ★★ The ideal week calendar shows Ali where he can make progress on his goals; before, he set goals without making time for them and forgot them after a week or two. — 00:12:10
  • ★★★ When planning his actual week, Ali looks at his ideal week calendar and asks how his actual time differs from how he would ideally spend it, and why. — 00:12:39
  • ★★ When Eric Partaker said Ali needed calendar time for continuous learning, they found none in his ideal week and rearranged it to make some. — 00:13:09
  • ★★★ Ali limits goals to a small manageable number, three at most in most categories (work may need more), and puts other potential goals in a parking lot or bucket list so they are not forgotten. — 00:13:09
  • ★★ Ali's team works in six-week cycles: ideas outside each member's three goals go into a bucket list, which the team reviews every six weeks to choose its next small projects. — 00:13:46
  • ★★ Ali keeps a personal bucket list in the to-do app Things, including songwriting, a YouTube channel on learning music production and busking on the London Underground. — 00:13:46 · Things 3
  • ★★ Eric Partaker's simpler suggestion, which Ali passes on: create a parking lot section under your goal-setting document, where ideas wait until you are ready to make them active goals. — 00:14:15
  • ★★ Ali keeps his energy investment portfolio of habits, projects and tasks as minimal as possible, because with too many goals he would have no time to do any of them. — 00:14:44 · energy investment portfolio
  • ★★ Ali has introduced many people to the ideal week, and basically all his team now uses it, after initial pushback that a scheduled life leaves no spontaneity. — 00:15:14
  • ★★★ Ali thinks an ideal week calendar, showing how he would love to spend his time, creates more freedom and spontaneity in his life rather than limiting it. — 00:15:43

00:16:29 — The identity alarms: identities, values and daily quests

  • ★★ A few months earlier Eric Partaker, who lives in Lisbon, came in person to Ali and his whole team in Portugal and taught them the identity-based goal-setting method of his book The 3 Alarms. — 00:16:29
  • ★★★ The 3 Alarms method splits life into health, work and relationships and defines for each an identity, values and daily quests; Ali says tapping into an identity makes a habit far easier. — 00:16:58
  • ★★ Making YouTube videos and writing are a fundamental part of Ali's identity: he still needs motivation, discipline and willpower some of the time, but the identity carries him most of the time. — 00:17:21
  • ★★ Eric Partaker's own identities are the world fitness champion at 6.30 a.m., the world's best coach at 9 a.m. and the world's best husband and father at 6.30 p.m. — 00:17:21
  • ★★★ Ali prefers a fun version: pick a superhero or other fictional or real character who has the identity you want in each area; his are Hawkeye for health, young Charles Xavier for work and Chuck (as heard) for relationships. — 00:17:21
  • ★★ At the hard part of a workout, Ali asks himself what Hawkeye would do, and most of the time he goes the extra mile and finishes the set. — 00:19:02
  • ★ Ali admires young Charles Xavier for sharing without fear, being a teacher at heart and being motivational and inspiring, the identity he wants for filming and work with his team. — 00:19:02
  • ★★ In the identity session one of Ali's team members chose Jesus as their relationships identity and another a playful David Goggins for health. — 00:20:05
  • ★★★ Every morning, Ali defines one daily quest in each of health, work and relationships, a practice from Eric Partaker's identity session that he and his team have kept up. — 00:20:28
  • ★★★ Sharing their daily quests with each other on a Slack channel keeps Ali's team connected and gives them accountability and community around the practice. — 00:20:58 · Slack
  • ★ One week Gareth's daily quests were a run, a newsletter competitive analysis and a present for a friend; Ali's were the gym, diagrams for his book and calling his grandma. — 00:20:58 · Ali Abdaal's grandmother

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Ali has become a big believer in getting coaches to help you improve in different areas of your life. — video description
  • ★★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked how Ali reconciles goal-setting with his earlier systems-over-goals advice, the channel answers: set a goal, then build a system to get there. — creator comment
  • ★★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked how to know when to spend on a coach like Eric Partaker for a business, the channel answers: when the return on investment becomes clear. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: daily quests · Eric Partaker · identity-based habits · The 3 Alarms · Trident calendar system

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's grandmother · Angus · Becky · Dan Go · David Goggins · Gareth · Jesus · Taimur Abdaal

Projects: Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: Feel-Good Productivity (book)

Concepts: acro yoga · CASTLE method · deep work (concept) · energy investment portfolio · parking lot · process goals · SMART goals

Places: Lisbon · London Underground

Characters: Charles Xavier · Hawkeye

Products: Google Calendar · Google Docs · Notion · Skype · Slack · Things 3 · World of Warcraft

Also centred on daily quests: How I Manage My Time - The Trident Calendar System

Also centred on Eric Partaker: How I Manage My Time - The Trident Calendar System

Also centred on identity-based habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results - Atomic Habits by James Clear

Also centred on The 3 Alarms: 15 Incredible Books to Read in 2026

Also centred on Trident calendar system: How I Manage My Time - The Trident Calendar System · 8 Simple Habits That Save Me 20+ Hours a Week · How to Make Next Year The Best Year of Your Life

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