Skip to content

A Week in My Life · Vlog

2024-05-14 · Vlog or day in the life · Ali, a guest · recording, 15:51 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship (also: Relationships and personal life, Work and career, Productivity and time) · mode: Demonstration and walkthrough · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, Lesson from a book

On a quarterly team retreat in Antalya, Ali sets his company's 2024 theme "go slow to go fast", rules that nothing will be ghostwritten in his voice, gives first-business advice (validate the idea, define co-founder roles) and introduces quarterly quests for his team.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Arrival at the team villa in Antalya after Eid

  • ★★ Ali and his team are at a villa in Antalya, Turkey, for a quarterly team retreat; Eid was the day before, and after spending it with his family he took an evening flight and arrived that night. — 00:00:00

00:00:49 — Team presentations: building to scale, the five key objectives, go slow to go fast

  • ★★★ Ali tells his team the business is now trying to build to scale, so that it delivers results for students and customers without relying on him churning out videos or being involved at every step. — 00:00:49
  • ★ At the retreat Ali's team realigns on vision, mission and values and redoes the year's goals, now that it is clearer what they are going after. — 00:01:19
  • ★★ Ali lists his company's five key objectives for the year: Productivity Lab, onlyblah.com (as heard), email, the YouTuber Academy and systems. — 00:01:44 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Ali says the cavalier attitude he has had so far only goes so far: to reach the next level his business must go slow to go fast, planning for three, five and ten years to become a calm business that helps people build lives they love. — 00:01:44

00:02:44 — No ghostwriting in his voice; a session on Productivity Lab

  • ★★★ Ali says scaling his business gives the option of hiring a ghostwriter for Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram; he has dabbled with it over the years, but for now it feels too inauthentic. — 00:02:44
  • ★★ Ali writes his weekly newsletter Sunday Snippets himself, and many of his own Instagram captions. — 00:02:44 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★★★ A conclusion of the retreat meeting: nothing will be ghostwritten in Ali's voice; anything under his name will be written by him, and emails written by the team will come from "Team Ali Abdaal". — 00:03:11
  • ★★★ Ali says Productivity Lab is a new product his company is launching around next week (week of 20 May 2024), and the retreat held a session on it. — 00:03:11

00:03:41 — Run, team messages and dinner

00:05:16 — Sauna and cold pool: advice for starting a first business with a co-founder

  • ★★★ Ali's first step for anyone starting a first business: before anything else, validate the idea by checking that at least one person is willing to pay money for that specific idea. — 00:05:48
  • ★★★ Ali's second step, especially when starting a business with a co-founder, is to nail down the specific roles and responsibilities of each co-founder. — 00:06:19
  • ★★★ Ali says he and James, his co-founder at SixMed, his first successful business, were both visionaries and never settled who would do what, so Ali ended up doing everything and James small amounts. — 00:06:19 · 6med
  • ★★ Ali says co-founders who have not clarified roles end up with one resenting the other for doing more work, so ideally a co-founder has a complementary skill set. — 00:06:19
  • ★★ Ali says starting a business with a co-founder is much more fun than doing it alone. — 00:07:12
  • ★★ Ali recommends the book Slicing the Pie on splitting equity between founders: a 50-50 split from the start is a bad idea, and there should be a vesting schedule. — 00:07:12
  • ★★ Ali says that as he progresses in entrepreneurship, more and more of what he talks and thinks about is entrepreneurship, because he lives it every day. — 00:07:56

00:08:24 — Team members on working for a YouTuber and finding the job you want

  • ★★ a guest: A member of Ali's team says working for him is their favourite job ever and that they want it to be the last job they ever have. — 00:08:24
  • ★★ a guest: A team member puts Ali's company at about 14 or 15 people. — 00:08:24
  • ★★ a guest: A team member finds it most satisfying that the team puts thought into making genuinely helpful videos and sees comments saying a video helped. — 00:08:54
  • ★★★ a guest: A team member's lesson from working for Ali: you can create the job you want by outreach to the people you want to work for, instead of choosing from the pool of available jobs. — 00:09:53
  • ★★ a guest: The team member's first lever for finding a job: a long time horizon, since giving yourself a month limits you to the best jobs available that month. — 00:09:53
  • ★★ a guest: The team member's second lever: list the creators, businesses or people you would like to be mentored by, in an energising environment, and proactively reach out to work with them. — 00:10:19
  • ★★ a guest: The team member advises not to settle for a job: it is easy to get comfortable and think that is just what work looks like, but there are many different types of jobs. — 00:10:19
  • ★★ Ali's team spends an hour on quest planning, starting with the commercial side, as it gears up to launch Productivity Lab, the company's big project for the year. — 00:10:48
  • ★★★ In Ali's quest system each team member works each quarter on one quest, the one thing that will most move the needle for their area or the business's goals, broken down into projects and tasks. — 00:10:48

00:10:55 — Quest planning: quarterly quests, definition of done, one project at a time

  • ★★ Ali defines a finished quarterly quest by facts, feelings and functionality, the definition of done from Dan Martell's book Buy Back Your Time. — 00:11:38
  • ★★ Ali wants each team member to do the projects of a quest one at a time, in sequence, rather than having eight running at once. — 00:12:07

  • ★★★ Quarterly quests replace the five-to-six-week sprints Ali's business used before, which changed too often; to unlock the next level of growth it must take its time, as the year's theme is go slow to go fast. — 00:12:07

    “the whole theme for this year is go slow to go fast”

00:12:50 — Evening out, day-three adventure and a look back to 2017

  • ★★ Ali reflects that making YouTube videos in his bedroom in 2017 led to a team of 14 full-time employees, with whom he now visits incredible places as part of quarterly planning, as a business expense. — 00:14:50
  • ★ Ali tells anyone thinking of starting a business that this is genuinely the life. (overstated) — 00:15:12

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali says he has been posting his recent vlogs on his second channel and is trying one on the main channel as an experiment. — video description

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

6med · Angus · Part-Time YouTuber Academy · Sunday Snippets

← Previous: How To Boost Productivity Without Apps · Next → Struggling with Work-Life Balance? Watch This! 👀