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5 High Income Skills for Students to Learn in 2026

2024-06-21 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 30:17 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship (also: Work and career) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Aimed at students, His own numbers, His own products discussed, His medical past, AI, Family, Sponsor segment present

Ali explains that everyone has a "personal stock price" raised by high-income skills, advises selling skills to businesses rather than consumers, and names five high-income skills for students — software consulting, writing, design, website building and coding — with real examples and figures from his team and friends.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Ali's background, from medical student to entrepreneur

  • ★★ Over the 12 years since he first became a student, Ali says, he has learned many high-income skills that helped him make millions of dollars on the internet. — 00:00:00

00:01:02 — The philosophy of making money: personal stock price, low-income and high-income skills

  • ★★★ In today's capitalist world, Ali says, everyone has a personal stock price above their head, their worth to the market; he calls it a bad system but says it is the world we live in. — 00:01:24

    “everyone has above their head a personal stock price”

  • ★★ As a medical student, Ali says, his personal stock price was close to zero: he earned £4.50 an hour working at the local library. — 00:01:49

  • ★★ Doctors in the UK earn £14.50 an hour when they start out, Ali says, and so do residents in the US. — 00:02:16 · United States
  • ★★★ Everyone is already an entrepreneur, Ali says: as a medical student and a full-time doctor he was running his own business, hired out to one employer, the NHS. — 00:03:12 · NHS
  • ★★★ Your personal stock price correlates with your skills, Ali says: the more money-making skills you have, the higher it goes. — 00:04:48
  • ★★ Ali divides skills into low-income skills, which do not raise your worth to the marketplace, and high-income skills, which do. — 00:05:15
  • ★★ A neurosurgeon, after 15 years of training, has a high-income skill, Ali says: maybe 300K a year in the UK with private practice and maybe 100K without, and over a million dollars a year in the US. (hedged) — 00:05:40 · United States
  • ★★ Coding an app and copywriting, such as writing Apple's iPad homepage, are very high-income skills, Ali says, while writing an academic essay is a low-income skill. — 00:06:13 · Apple, iPad
  • ★★ Most university degrees and school systems do not teach high-income skills, Ali says; many of them do not sound sexy and you often have to learn them on your own. — 00:06:58

00:07:10 — Sponsor read for a web hosting company

00:08:50 — Who buys a skill decides its value; sell to businesses, not consumers

  • ★★ The value of a skill depends on who buys it, Ali says: guitar playing becomes a high-income skill when a record company gives you a record deal for it. — 00:09:16
  • ★★ Ali focuses on high-income skills that raise your worth to the marketplace without your being the best in the world, very lucky or very well connected. — 00:09:46
  • ★★★ Ali advises generally not trying to sell to consumers but to businesses, for example by copywriting their social media and sales pages. — 00:10:24
  • ★★ All five high-income skills in the video are sold to businesses, Ali says, because businesses have lots of money to spend and value money very differently from consumers. — 00:11:03

00:12:08 — High-income skill one: software consulting for businesses, with Melina's Notion consulting

  • ★★★ Ali's first high-income skill is software consulting: get good at software businesses use, such as Notion, and train businesses in how to use it. — 00:12:53 · Notion
  • ★★ Businesses hire many consultants to teach them basic things they could learn from the internet, Ali says, because business owners don't have time. — 00:12:53
  • ★★ It is no longer worth Ali's time to teach himself a skill: he would pay $500 an hour for someone to teach it to him, because his time is worth more than $500 an hour. — 00:12:53
  • ★★ At university, Melina, now on Ali's team, worked as a Notion consultant for businesses in South America, charging $300 for a 90-minute Zoom session, $1,000 for four, or $800 with 20% off. — 00:14:06 · Notion, Zoom
  • ★★ Melina's consulting proposal showed business team spaces in its Notion sidebar (engineering, design, product, marketing, operations, HR, legal), which Ali says made it really appealing to businesses. — 00:14:57 · Notion
  • ★ Melina learned Notion by watching a few YouTube videos and building her own Notion workspace, not by taking classes. — 00:15:29 · Notion
  • ★★ Software Ali's business uses includes ConvertKit, HubSpot, Help Scout, QuickBooks, Kajabi to host some of its courses, Webflow and sometimes Framer; it has dabbled with Asana. — 00:15:51
  • ★★ A student who teaches themselves software businesses use, even the CRM HubSpot that students have no reason to learn, can become a consultant for it to local or online businesses, Ali says. — 00:16:20
  • ★★ Consulting for businesses teaches you the language of business, how to speak to entrepreneurs and in terms of return on investment, Ali says; university and even an MBA do not teach this, you only learn it by doing it. — 00:17:17

00:17:40 — Newsletter plug

00:18:04 — High-income skill two: writing, copywriting and ghostwriting

  • ★★★ Ali's second high-income skill is writing: copywriting, writing done to persuade, such as a brand's sales emails or Black Friday campaign, and ghostwriting. — 00:18:04

    “Copywriting is writing that's done with the intent to persuade.”

  • ★★ Each sale of the Part-Time YouTuber Academy earns Ali's business $997; its sales page converts at about 0.5%, one sale per 200 visitors. (hedged) — 00:19:01 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy, landing page

  • ★★★ The Part-Time YouTuber Academy makes just over a million dollars a year at a 0.5% conversion rate, Ali says. (hedged) — 00:19:44 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Raising the course's conversion rate from 0.5% to 2% would make it a $4 million a year business instead of $1 million, and the difference, Ali says, is copywriting. — 00:20:10 · landing page, Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Copywriting is not that hard to learn, Ali says: his favourite book on it is Jim Edwards's Copywriting Secrets, and Cardinal Mason's YouTube channel, a little guru-y, is genuinely very good. — 00:20:10
  • ★★ Ali's business now has a good copywriter, who he says could add $3 million directly to its bottom line. — 00:20:57
  • ★ Ali would gladly pay a copywriter who guaranteed to lift his sales page from 0.5% to 2% a tenth of the gain, $300,000 of an extra $3 million. (hypothetical) — 00:21:20
  • ★★ To learn ghostwriting, Ali points to his friends Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole, whose online course and YouTube channel teach how to make loads of money from it. — 00:21:20
  • ★★★ Ali's third high-income skill is design, as a web designer or a general graphic designer selling to businesses. — 00:21:52

00:22:02 — High-income skill three: design, and Ali's own freelance design for med tech companies

  • ★★ Entrepreneurs Ali knows commonly lament how hard it is to find good designers. — 00:22:22
  • ★★ Causal, the startup run by Ali's brother, was looking to pay a product designer $400,000 a year when it hired one. (hedged) — 00:22:49 · Taimur Abdaal
  • ★★ Small businesses probably cannot afford a full-time designer and contract work out to freelance designers, Ali says, which even a student can be. (hedged) — 00:23:24
  • ★★★ Design was Ali's highest-income skill at medical school: he worked as a freelance designer for medical tech companies, having taught himself app design from YouTube videos. — 00:23:24
  • ★★ At medical school Ali was paid £100 an hour for freelance app and web design for med tech companies. — 00:23:53
  • ★★ Ali targeted med tech companies because as a medical student he understood medicine, so they would rather hire him than a random designer, which made the gigs fairly easy to get. — 00:23:53
  • ★★ Ali found his med tech design work by reaching out to people in his network and doctors at his hospital who were working on med tech products. — 00:24:23
  • ★★ To learn design, Ali recommends the YouTube channel of Abi Connick, a full-time graphic and brand designer who did not go to university and taught herself. — 00:24:23
  • ★★ With a reasonable aesthetic sense, learning Figma, Canva and Photoshop gives very high-income skills, Ali says, provided you sell them to the right business. — 00:24:52

00:25:06 — High-income skill four: website building, with Henry's Webflow work

  • ★★★ Ali's fourth high-income skill is website building: every business needs a website, and someone who can both design and develop websites is a bit of a unicorn. — 00:25:21
  • ★★ When Ali first dabbled with web design, around 2008 and 2009, it was a fairly low-income skill for him: he says he was dumb to advertise himself on freelance websites, where people wanted work for $5 or $10, so that is what he charged. — 00:25:21
  • ★★ Ali's friend Henry taught himself web design in about six months a couple of years ago and went all in as a Webflow designer and developer. — 00:25:21
  • ★★ Webflow has loads of tutorials, Ali says, and Framer is another good tool: a very good Framer designer can probably make loads of money. (hedged) — 00:26:06
  • ★★ Henry charges businesses thousands to tens of thousands of dollars for websites; he designed feelgoodproductivity.com, the site for Ali's book, for which Ali thinks they paid $15,000. (hedged) — 00:26:06 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Henry also designed some of the sales pages for Productivity Lab, for which Ali thinks they paid him $10,000. (hedged) — 00:26:35
  • ★★ Ali's business does multiple seven figures a year in revenue and profit, so to him $10,000 or $15,000 for a website is nothing. — 00:26:35
  • ★★ Businesses pay like this only if you target the right ones, Ali says: a local coffee shop making no money is a different equation. — 00:26:35

00:27:24 — High-income skill five: coding, Sahil's Firecut and Indie Hackers

  • ★★★ Ali's fifth high-income skill is coding, which he calls surprisingly accessible: free YouTube tutorials teach the basics, and AI tools such as GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT are phenomenally game-changing help. — 00:27:41
  • ★★ US-based tech companies pay coders starting salaries of about $400,000, Ali says. — 00:27:41 · United States
  • ★★ Everyone Ali knows who taught themselves coding and got a job in the field earns at least six figures a year, basically straight out of university. — 00:28:08
  • ★★ Coding need not be sold to other businesses, Ali says: you can use it to create your own products. — 00:28:08
  • ★★ Ali's friend Sahil taught himself to code and built Firecut, an AI tool for video editors, which Ali partnered on and drove traffic to; about nine months after quitting his job, Sahil was earning $35,000 a month from it. — 00:28:08
  • ★★ It is hard to overstate how amazing coding is, Ali says: if you can code, you can see how to build almost any business idea involving a computer, a phone or the internet, and even a 13-year-old in Pakistan could build an app and, with leads and traffic, make thousands or more a month. — 00:28:49 · Pakistan
  • ★★ Ali recommends Indie Hackers, whose interviews with people who coded things from their bedrooms and made huge sums he finds super inspiring; he read every blog post on it. — 00:29:34

In the description and comments

  • ★★★ Ali names five high-income skills for students to learn: software consulting, writing, design, website building and coding. — video description

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: copywriting · Henry · high-income skills · Melina · Notion · Part-Time YouTuber Academy · personal stock price · Sahil

Also: People: Abi Connick · Cardinal Mason · Dickie Bush · Jim Edwards · Nicolas Cole · Taimur Abdaal

Projects: Productivity Lab

Works: Copywriting Secrets · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

Organizations: Apple · Asana · Causal · Indie Hackers · Kajabi · NHS · Sony

Concepts: ghostwriting · landing page · Neurosurgery

Places: Pakistan · South America · United States

Products: Adobe Photoshop · Canva · ChatGPT · ConvertKit · Figma · Firecut · Framer · GitHub Copilot · Help Scout · HubSpot · iPad · QuickBooks · Squarespace · Webflow · Zoom

Also centred on high-income skills: If I Wanted to Make $10,000 as a Student, I'd Do This

Also centred on personal stock price: What I Learned on My Personal Finance Journey 💰

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