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I Helped My Subscribers Fix Their Productivity

2024-04-19 · Q&A video · Ali · recording, 34:20 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Work and career (also: Productivity and time, Mindset, motivation and happiness) · mode: Answering questions · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, Lesson from a book, Feel-Good Productivity thesis, Sponsor segment present

In the first episode of Not Life Advice, Ali answers three subscribers' video questions: how to start and keep focus on a long PhD (lower the friction and the bar, focus hours, visible progress), how to find a passion and earn from it (get good first, run small career experiments), and how to get a job after many rejections (the third door and the sniper approach).

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Introducing Not Life Advice, a series answering subscribers' video questions

  • ★★ Ali starts Not Life Advice, a new series in which he answers questions from subscribers. — 00:00:00

00:00:50 — Morgan's question: getting started and staying focused on a PhD dissertation

00:02:28 — Getting started: the boulder and the hump, environmental and emotional friction, lowering the bar

  • ★★ Starting a task always takes the most energy, Ali says, like pushing a boulder up a hill: you have to get over the hump of procrastination to start at all. — 00:03:25
  • ★★★ To make a hard task easier to start, Ali advises reducing two kinds of friction, environmental and emotional; for environmental friction, set up the desk and open the right document the night before. — 00:04:18 · friction
  • ★★ To cut emotional friction, Ali breaks a huge task like a PhD into a specific first step, such as writing the first 100 words of one chapter, instead of just planning to work on it. — 00:05:17 · friction
  • ★★ Overachievers, Ali among them, tend to set very high standards for themselves, which adds emotional friction and makes it hard to get started. — 00:05:43 · friction
  • ★★★ Ali lowers the bar to get started: he tells himself he will do the task for just five minutes or just write 100 words. — 00:06:13
  • ★★ Enjoying the process is what makes the hill go down, Ali says; getting the boulder over the hump in the first place is the cold-start problem. — 00:06:13 · feel-good productivity (concept)
  • ★ Ali is hosting a free online alignment workshop of about two hours before 20 April 2024, nearly four months into the year, to reflect on 2024 goals and plan ahead. — 00:06:45 · first in: 2024-04-12, 5 Easy Ways to Become More Self-Disciplined

00:07:00 — Free online alignment workshop before 20 April 2024

00:07:27 — The hard thing in the morning, the consistency and intensity approaches, Maya Angelou, the four-hour limit and the focus hour

  • ★★ Ali says it is a lot easier to do the hard task first thing in the morning. — 00:07:27
  • ★★★ Finishing the edits of Feel-Good Productivity, Ali set himself a rule to do nothing but work on the book from 9 to 12 every morning, even if he only sat there; on days he kept it he made loads of progress. — 00:07:27 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ Ali's consistency approach to a hard project: block the same hours every day in the weekly calendar, such as 9 to 12 each morning, purely for that work. — 00:08:07
  • ★★ Ali's other way to get hard work done is the intensity approach, such as whole days or a week away devoted to it, which suits work with a very specific outcome, not things done over a very long time. — 00:08:32
  • ★ Ali believes the writer Maya Angelou would take herself to a boring hotel room and write on a legal pad sitting on the bed, away from distractions. (hedged) — 00:09:34
  • ★★★ Ali cannot focus for four hours, and says very few people can; he thinks four hours is the absolute upper limit of focus on a single task. — 00:10:04
  • ★★★ Ali thinks in single focus hours: the first five minutes to prepare and plan, 45 minutes to focus on the task, and the last ten minutes to recharge and reflect. — 00:10:29
  • ★★ Ali calls Opal, an app that blocks YouTube, very good: if you catch yourself watching YouTube during a focus hour, he suggests downloading it. — 00:11:29
  • ★★ Ali runs his focus hours as mini experiments, thinking like a productivity scientist, a big part of his book Feel-Good Productivity. — 00:11:29 · experimental mindset, Feel-Good Productivity (book)

00:12:30 — Making progress visible: the experience bar and word counts

  • ★★ Three focus hours from 9 to 12 every morning will get a PhD thesis done quickly, Ali says; it is roughly how he made progress on his book. — 00:12:30 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ Ali advises making progress visible: the feeling of progress, like a video game's experience bar, is profoundly addictive and a key driver of intrinsic motivation, which is why he writes in Ulysses and watches his word count. — 00:13:07 · play, power, people, identified motivation

00:13:58 — Skillshare sponsor read

00:15:19 — Patrick's question: how to find a true passion and earn money with it

00:16:04 — So Good They Can't Ignore You, monetising a passion, ideate-experiment-iterate, the micro and the macro, Ali's own path

  • ★★★ Asked how to find a true passion and earn money with it, Ali says it is probably the wrong question and recommends Cal Newport's book So Good They Can't Ignore You. — 00:16:07 · Cal Newport
  • ★★★ Agreeing with Cal Newport, Ali says to pick something and get really good at it, since that is what makes you passionate about it; the career capital you build can be cashed in for autonomy and flexibility. — 00:16:37 · Cal Newport
  • ★★★ The fastest way to kill a passion for photography, Ali says, is to try to make a living from it: professional photographers spend most of their time on admin and finding clients, not taking nice photos. — 00:17:00
  • ★★ People generally enjoy doing the work rather than winning it, Ali says, but monetising a passion means spending 90% of the time winning the work and 10% doing it. — 00:17:44
  • ★★★ Ali's life-design framework for a career is ideate, experiment, iterate: for example, rate your job satisfaction at three out of ten and generate ten ideas that could raise it to five. — 00:18:12 · experimental mindset
  • ★★★ Ali advises testing a career idea with the smallest experiment: rather than quitting your job to become a professional photographer, reach out to professional photographers in your area. — 00:19:06 · experimental mindset
  • ★★★ Job satisfaction comes from the micro, the tasks you do day to day, rather than the macro of a job that sounds appealing, Ali says; working in a product team can look good in the macro and be very unappealing in the micro. — 00:20:56
  • ★★ Over time, Ali says, put more energy into the career experiments that work, strategically narrowing your options down to what you are really passionate about. — 00:21:19 · experimental mindset
  • ★★★ Ali says that for the last 17 or so years he has tinkered with making money online: websites and private tutoring from 13 to 18, a company helping people get into medical school from 18 to 23, and his YouTube channel at 24. — 00:21:48 · 6med
  • ★★ Ali found that making YouTube videos worked and developed a passion for it along the way. — 00:22:23
  • ★★ Repeating the cycle of ideas, experiments and improvements enough times, Ali says, you spiral into a job, a life and a career you really love. — 00:22:23 · experimental mindset
  • ★★ Most people who earn money are not passionate about the way they earn it, Ali says. — 00:22:23
  • ★★★ Ali says he does not need the money any more and is rich enough: he does YouTube for the passion and the purpose. — 00:23:00
  • ★★ Ali recommends Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You and Professor Grace Lordan's Think Big, Take Small Steps; he has interviewed Lordan on his podcast. — 00:23:24 · Cal Newport

00:23:53 — Alex's question: finding a full-time job after rejection after rejection

00:25:21 — The Third Door, the scattergun and sniper approaches, working for free, how people join Ali's team

  • ★ Ali has made about 800 videos on his channel. — 00:25:48
  • ★★★ The traditional ways of getting a job are absolutely terrible, Ali says, and he recommends Alex Banayan's book The Third Door. — 00:25:48
  • ★★ The idea of The Third Door, as Ali tells it: life and work are like a nightclub with three entrances, the queue, the door for billionaires and celebrities, and a third door that is always there. — 00:26:29
  • ★ Ali says Steven Spielberg got his first Hollywood film through a third door, sneaking onto a set at Universal Studios or somewhere like it. (hedged) — 00:27:14
  • ★★ Applying through the first door, against hundreds of other applicants, you are very unlikely to get through unless you are on paper the absolute best candidate, Ali says. — 00:27:43
  • ★★ Ali calls the scattergun approach to job hunting, applying to lots of jobs hoping one says yes, a recipe for rejection. — 00:28:09
  • ★★ Ali's team is about 23 people. — 00:28:09
  • ★★★ Ali advises the sniper approach to job hunting: since the best jobs are never advertised, pick five or so companies you would love to work for, whether or not they have openings. — 00:28:35
  • ★★ Hundreds of people apply for each of Ali's job postings; his team rejects 90% of them in the first round, judging only what it can see on paper. — 00:29:05
  • ★★ To get a job on Ali's team, he suggests finding the names of his team members and talking to them. — 00:29:05
  • ★★★ Ali's example of a third door into his team: get to know his YouTube producer Tintin, add lots of value for free, then offer to work for free for a month as a trial. — 00:30:29
  • ★★ A growing company always has more jobs that need doing than people to do them, Ali says, but most companies find traditional hiring such a nightmare that they just do not do it. — 00:30:55
  • ★★ Ali recommends his Deep Dive podcast interview with Nicolas Cole on the power of doing free work for someone to land a job. — 00:30:55 · Deep Dive
  • ★★ Most people on Ali's team got there through a third door rather than the traditional job application route. — 00:31:24

00:32:20 — Rejection is not a rejection of you; sign-off

  • ★★★ Being rejected for jobs is not because you are a bad person, Ali says, but because your application and method are bad: losing at chess means a bad strategy, so focus on the strategy rather than your self-esteem. — 00:33:09

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: experimental mindset · friction · Not Life Advice · So Good They Can't Ignore You · The Third Door (book) · the third door (concept)

Also: People: Alex Banayan · Bill Gates · Cal Newport · Grace Lordan · Maya Angelou · Nicolas Cole · Steven Spielberg · Thomas Frank · Tintin

Projects: Deep Dive

Works: Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Think Big

Organizations: 6med · Skillshare

Concepts: career capital · feel-good productivity (concept) · identified motivation · perfectionism · play, power, people · pushing the boulder up the hill

Places: Switzerland

Products: Opal · Ulysses

Also centred on Not Life Advice: Stop Waiting: Productivity Advice I Wish I Knew Sooner

Also centred on So Good They Can't Ignore You: Follow Your Passion is Terrible Advice. Here’s Why.

Also centred on The Third Door (book): Smart Passive Income + The Third Door - Monthly Favourites #11 · My Top 5 Books On Entrepreneurship 📚 #shorts

Also centred on the third door (concept): Smart Passive Income + The Third Door - Monthly Favourites #11 · I Read 2,216 Resumes. Here’s How You Stand Out 🚀 · I Asked 5 Millionaires for Their Best Financial Advice

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