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If I Wanted to Be a Millionaire Before 30, I'd Do This

2023-08-11 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 21:41 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship (also: Money and investing) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: His own numbers, Lesson from a book, Feel-Good Productivity thesis, Sponsor segment present, His own products discussed

Ali, who made his first million at 26, gives five lessons for becoming a millionaire young: set a clear goal of financial freedom, start your own business (service, product or content), have a bias to action, make time every week to learn, and do not give up but make the work feel good.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Introduction: five lessons he would give his younger self

  • ★★★ Ali made his first million at 26 and says that following the advice in this video would probably have got him there a lot sooner. — 00:00:00

00:00:11 — Lesson one: have a clear goal for financial freedom, and adjust your content diet

  • ★★ Growing up, everyone Ali knew was a doctor, his parents included, and the people he knew with a lot of money had got there as doctors who bought houses in London in the 1980s. — 00:00:11 · London
  • ★★★ At 17 Ali read Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek, which changed his life: it taught him financial success could come young, joining the "new rich" who value time freedom and independence over money. — 00:00:29 · The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss
  • ★★★ Ali's first lesson is to have a clear goal of financial freedom; you need no number, and he has never had a magic number for financial independence. — 00:01:27 · work optional
  • ★★ Ali says that without a goal of becoming financially free while young it probably will not happen: everyone he knows who reached financial freedom did it very intentionally. — 00:01:57 · work optional
  • ★★ Having financial freedom as a goal, Ali says, makes the brain recognise patterns and look out for opportunities; after reading The 4-Hour Workweek he started to see them everywhere. — 00:02:26 · The 4-Hour Workweek
  • ★★ Through medical school Ali kept the goal of financial freedom in mind, building assets and businesses that make money while he sleeps so he would do medicine for fun rather than for money. — 00:02:26 · passive income
  • ★★ Apart from his brother, Ali was the only one in his friendship group into making money online; his friends wanted to become doctors, lawyers, management consultants or investment bankers. — 00:02:55 · Taimur Abdaal
  • ★★★ Ali says you need not have people around you on the path to financial freedom: the books, podcasts and YouTube videos you consume can mirror the effect of being the average of the five people you spend most time with. — 00:03:24
  • ★★ At the gym or on a run Ali listens to podcasts about how people make money: the Indie Hackers podcast, My First Million, Pat Flynn's Smart Passive Income and Amy Porterfield's Online Marketing Made Easy. — 00:03:53

00:04:10 — Plug for his book Feel-Good Productivity

00:04:42 — Lesson two: to become a millionaire in your 20s, start your own business; service, product and content businesses

  • ★★ Ali says a job makes you component labour, a cog in a machine, and the education system, built off the back of the Industrial Revolution, trains people to be such cogs. — 00:04:52
  • ★★★ Ali's second lesson: to become a millionaire in your 20s you need your own business, since the owner of the machine gets rich; very few jobs, such as Goldman Sachs or US neurosurgery, do it, and probably in your 30s. — 00:05:33

  • ★★ Ali simplifies a business down to something that solves a problem in exchange for money. — 00:06:02

    “A business just solves a problem in exchange for money.”

  • ★★ Ali names three types of business: a service business that does a thing for money (an accountant, a mechanic, a plumber), a product business that makes a thing and sells it to many people (a bakery), and a content business. — 00:06:02

  • ★★ Ali calls a content business, making content online and monetising through advertising, a modern third category; some argue it is only a marketing channel for others' products, but he thinks content is becoming its own thing. — 00:07:01

00:07:30 — Sponsor read for Trading 212

  • ★★ Ali generally does not recommend investing in individual stocks: he, like most people, recommends a broad stock market index fund such as a Vanguard fund or the S&P 500, playing with individual stocks with about 10% of his portfolio. — 00:08:28 · S&P 500

00:09:45 — Lesson three: have a strong bias to action; from web design and tutoring to a medical school admissions course and YouTube

  • ★★★ On how to start a business, Ali says just give it a go and start with a service business, by far the easiest way to start making money. — 00:09:56
  • ★★ At 13 Ali started his first service business as a freelance web designer, soon calling himself a web design agency, marketing it on getacoder.com and charging $5 or $10 here and there. — 00:09:56
  • ★★ From 14 to 19 Ali did private tutoring for £4 an hour, rising to £4.50, £5 and £6, then £15 an hour for GCSEs and A-levels, more money than he had ever seen; a month could bring £360. — 00:10:25

  • ★★★ Ali's third lesson is to have a strong bias to action: you learn to build a business by trying to build one, not through an MBA, books or videos; action is the foundation and learning the supplement. — 00:10:54

    “action is the foundation and learning is the supplementation”

  • ★★★ At 19 Ali moved to a product business, a course to help people get into medical school; he taught it at first, then hired contractors to teach while he owned the business. — 00:11:23 · 6med

  • ★★ Ali's medical school course business made £10,000 in its first year, about £80,000 in the second and about £150,000 in the third, then hovered at £150,000 a year with margins of about 30%; he took home £40,000 to £50,000 a year in medical school. — 00:11:23 · 6med
  • ★★★ At 23, in 2017, Ali started his YouTube channel as a marketing asset for his medical school admissions courses, then found making videos far more fun, rewarding and lucrative than that business. — 00:11:53
  • ★★★ Ali calls his biggest mistake having too much bias to action and too little time learning: he tried to invent the playbook from scratch, knowing nothing about sales, marketing, operations, finance or delegation. — 00:12:22

00:12:32 — Lesson four: make time every week to learn; books, coaches and masterminds

  • ★★ When SixMed stalled at £150,000 a year, Ali did not realise that getting more customers and charging them more is sales and marketing, which books already teach and which would have levelled up the business. — 00:12:51 · 6med
  • ★★ About two years into his business, at around £100,000 revenue, Ali was overwhelmed doing all the admin, operations, bookkeeping, accounting and tax returns himself, not knowing that businesses grow by hiring and delegation. — 00:13:43
  • ★★ Ali says Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited describes everything he struggled with in his first business; had he known it existed, he would have seen that he could hire people. — 00:14:13 · The E-Myth
  • ★★★ Ali's fourth lesson: make time every single week to learn, through books, audiobooks, podcasts, courses and in-depth YouTube videos, and think about hiring a coach or getting a mentor. — 00:15:01
  • ★★★ Ali calls hiring a coach the single biggest return-on-investment expense of his life; as you improve faster at tennis with a coach, he wishes he had thought to hire a business coach at 19. — 00:15:01
  • ★★ At Ali's stage the learning that levels up a business is no longer in books, audiobooks and podcasts but in hiring coaches and going to events and masterminds with other business owners. — 00:15:58
  • ★★ Some people Ali knows pay $50,000 a year to join a quarterly Zoom call with other business owners and say it has returned 10 times or more, unlocking $500,000. — 00:16:30 · Zoom
  • ★★★ Ali tried to make his first dollar online at 13 and it took him 13 years, to 26, to make his first million: about $0 from 13 to 19, about 10K a year at 19 to 20, about 100K a year from 21 to 25, then a million a year from 26. — 00:16:30

00:17:06 — Lesson five: do not give up, and make the journey feel good; sign-off

  • ★★★ Ali's fifth lesson is not to give up: many people starting a business or a YouTube channel stop because they do not see results immediately, but you have to play the long-term game. — 00:17:20

  • ★★★ Ali says side hustles are much harder with a day job than as a student whose time was worth nothing: nothing stifles innovation more than a paycheck that comes in once a month. — 00:17:49

    “there is nothing that stifles innovation more than a paycheck that comes in once a month”

  • ★★ Gary Vaynerchuk (quoted): Gary Vaynerchuk calls for impatience with actions but supreme patience with results. — 00:19:01 · Gary Vaynerchuk

  • ★★ At 13 Ali could not wait to get home from school to check his getacoder.com profile; for his first $5 gig he opened a PayPal account, lying about his age since the minimum was 18. — 00:19:01
  • ★★★ To keep going over the long term Ali says to make it feel good: building businesses has been fun and energising for him, more enjoyable than scrolling social media or watching Netflix. — 00:19:31 · feel-good productivity (concept)
  • ★★ If your work genuinely feels like play and you keep learning along the way, Ali finds it hard to imagine not reaching financial success at some point. — 00:20:35
  • ★★ Ali calls himself a multimillionaire who can do whatever he wants and could quit his job, which he would not have known was remotely possible when he started 13 to 16 years ago. — 00:21:04

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: 6med · bias to action · The 4-Hour Workweek · work optional

Also: People: Amy Porterfield · Gary Vaynerchuk · Michael Gerber · Pat Flynn · Taimur Abdaal · Tim Ferriss

Works: Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Indie Hackers podcast · My First Million · Online Marketing Made Easy · Smart Passive Income · The E-Myth

Organizations: getacoder.com · PayPal · Vanguard

Concepts: feel-good productivity (concept) · index fund · new rich · passive income · time freedom

Places: London

Products: S&P 500 · YouTube AdSense · Zoom

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