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Stop Waiting: Productivity Advice I Wish I Knew Sooner

2024-07-26 · Q&A video · Ali, Andy · recording, 26:37 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Mindset, motivation and happiness (also: YouTube, writing online and creators, Productivity and time) · mode: Answering questions · tags: Lesson from a book, Feel-Good Productivity thesis, His own products discussed, His own numbers

In an episode of Not Life Advice filmed on a morning walk in Boise, Idaho, Ali answers Andy's question on perfectionism and overthinking: recognise the voice of the saboteur, set the bar at helping at least one person, optimise for enjoyment, record without promising to publish, tell yourself "this one just needs to be reasonable", and focus on serving others instead of your ego.

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: over 800 videos and a book, both needing perfectionism overcome

  • ★★ Ali has made YouTube videos for seven years, over 800 of them, and says both that and writing his book Feel-Good Productivity required overcoming a lot of perfectionistic tendencies. — 00:00:00 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★ In an episode of Not Life Advice, Ali answers Andy, a viewer whose perfectionism holds back the growth of his YouTube channel. — 00:00:00

00:00:44 — Andy's question: overthinking and over-analysing his YouTube content

  • ★ Andy says he gets caught overthinking and over-analysing what he wants to post, asking whether it is good enough, so it takes him a long time to post anything. — 00:00:58

00:02:20 — Recognise the voice of the saboteur: the thoughts telling Ali to wait before filming in a park in Boise

  • ★★ Ali was in Boise, Idaho, to speak at the ConvertKit Craft and Commerce Conference; jet-lagged after flying in from London, he woke early and went for a walk. — 00:02:56 · London
  • ★ Before filming in the park, Ali thought he should be at his desk, where he could draw diagrams, so maybe it was not the right time to film the video. — 00:03:21
  • ★★★ Against perfectionism and overthinking, Ali has learned over time to recognise when the voice of the saboteur is holding him back. — 00:04:26
  • ★★★ Ali's CEO coach Eric Partaker, with whom he talks about it a lot, calls it the voice of the saboteur: a voice in everyone's mind bent on sabotaging any creative work; Steven Pressfield's The War of Art calls it the resistance. — 00:04:47
  • ★★ Perfectionism, imposter syndrome and overthinking generally get better with expertise, Ali says; he no longer feels much of them making videos on how to grow on YouTube. — 00:05:12 · imposter syndrome
  • ★★ With five and a half million subscribers and over 800 videos in seven years, Ali still feels the voice saying "this isn't good enough" for videos outside his wheelhouse, and often at his desk too. — 00:06:19
  • ★★ Ali's weekly email newsletter, formerly Sunday Snippets, has been rebranded as LifeNotes. — 00:06:19 · Sunday Snippets

00:06:36 — The newsletter's rebrand from Sunday Snippets to LifeNotes

00:07:02 — The saboteur says prepare more; write down what it says; change the context or format

  • ★★★ The voice of the saboteur never says "don't do the thing", Ali says: it says do it but work harder and prepare more, which is where overthinking comes from; a voice saying "you suck" would be easier to dismiss. — 00:07:02

    “The voice of the saboteur never says don't do the thing.”

  • ★★ A strategy that often helps, Ali says, is literally writing down what the saboteur is saying, such as "I must prepare this video for another 20 hours, otherwise it's not valuable enough". — 00:08:28

  • ★★ Ali had a lot of perfectionism about Feel-Good Productivity because a book is a serious thing; he has yet to see it in a bookstore himself, though friends have sent him photos of it in various shops. — 00:09:45 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ Ali's hack against perfectionism is to change the context: asked the same question by a friend over coffee you would speak from the heart without overthinking, so ask whether a different context or format changes how you feel. — 00:10:18
  • ★★★ Ali gets past perfectionism by setting his bar as whether a piece of work has the potential to help at least one person who watches, reads or listens to it; if it does he posts it, if not he does not. — 00:10:18

00:10:27 — Define your quality bar: the potential to help at least one person; Show Your Work

  • ★★ Ali took the bar of helping at least one person from Austin Kleon's book Show Your Work, which he read in 2016 and has reread several times, and recommends it. — 00:11:35 · Show Your Work!, Austin Kleon
  • ★★ Show Your Work helped Ali get over the fear of starting a personal website, which he had overthought. — 00:12:17 · Show Your Work!, aliabdaal.com
  • ★★ Show Your Work taught Ali that if your work has the potential to help at least one person along in their journey, there is almost a moral obligation to share it. — 00:12:17 · Show Your Work!
  • ★★ Ali advises defining your bar for quality: "this has to be really good" is a hard bar to meet, especially when you are new to something. — 00:12:39
  • ★★ Ali tries not to overthink production value, cinematic shots or a tight edit: in periods when he overthought his content, it was worse and he enjoyed it less. — 00:13:06
  • ★★ A major principle of Feel-Good Productivity, Ali says, is that enjoying your work makes you better at it, more creative, less stressed and more productive, with more energy for the rest of life. — 00:13:32 · Feel-Good Productivity (book), feel-good productivity (concept)
  • ★★★ Joe Hudson (quoted): Executive coach Joe Hudson's central idea is that enjoyment is efficiency: optimising for enjoyment of the process produces better work than optimising for better work. — 00:13:32 · feel-good productivity (concept)
  • ★★ Joe Hudson, an executive coach to some of Silicon Valley's biggest CEOs whom Ali met at a retreat in San Francisco a couple of weeks earlier, is featuring on Ali's podcast shortly. — 00:13:32

00:13:44 — Optimise for enjoyment: enjoyment is efficiency; what would it look like if it were fun

  • ★★★ To combat perfectionism, Ali asks what it would look like if you were not concerned about quality and only wanted to enjoy the process: "What would it look like if it were fun?" — 00:14:11 · feel-good productivity (concept)

00:15:07 — Start doing: just hit record, you can always scrap it; the messy process and the magic of the edit

  • ★★★ When the voice of the saboteur stops him from pressing record, Ali tells it he will just record and need not publish, since he can scrap it if it sucks; that often silences it. — 00:15:35
  • ★★ Many YouTubers feel a lot of resistance to pressing the record button, Ali finds, and he does too, even for proper videos at his desk. — 00:16:35
  • ★★★ After filming more than 50% of his videos Ali has felt they were terrible, but for about 98% of them, once edited and left unseen for a couple of weeks, he thinks they are actually not bad. — 00:17:23
  • ★★ Creating something is messy, Ali says, but he has done it enough to trust that a lot of magic happens in the edit between raw recording and finished product, which is often quite reasonable. — 00:18:15

00:19:15 — The next one will be good: Cal Newport's advice on writing books

  • ★★★ Cal Newport (quoted): When Ali was writing his book and asked about perfectionism, Cal Newport told him he gets it all the time and tells himself: "This one just needs to be reasonable. The next one is going to be good." — 00:19:42 · Cal Newport, Feel-Good Productivity (book)

    “This one just needs to be reasonable. The next one is going to be good.”

  • ★★ Cal Newport told Ali he repeated "this one just needs to be reasonable, the next one is going to be good" for every book he wrote, including Slow Productivity. — 00:19:42 · Cal Newport

  • ★★★ Ali suggests lowering the bar by telling yourself "this one just needs to be reasonable", reasonable meaning it has the potential to help at least one person. — 00:20:26

00:20:46 — Create to serve: perfectionism as a focus on the self, the soul and the numbers, questions from the audience

  • ★★★ Perfectionism usually stems from a focus on the self and the ego, Ali says: not care for the audience's time but fear of being thought of as bad for putting out something below an arbitrary standard. — 00:21:41
  • ★★★ Ali combats perfectionism by moving the focus from himself and putting it on someone else. — 00:22:08
  • ★★ In being a YouTuber, or in any creative act, Ali sees a balancing act between the soul and the numbers. — 00:23:27
  • ★★ Sensible steps to increase a video's reach, such as a reasonable title, thumbnail and hook, help more people, Ali says, and framing them that way makes him feel less icky about algorithm and retention hacks. — 00:24:54
  • ★★ Ali asks viewers to comment with something they are struggling with and would like his take on, or to submit a video question as Andy did; he wants to make more videos like this. — 00:25:27
  • ★★ Asking himself what his YouTube channel would look like if it were fun, Ali landed on answering questions from the audience, so that he feels there is genuinely someone on the other end. — 00:25:52

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Mentioned

Central: Andy · Not Life Advice · perfectionism · voice of the saboteur

Also: People: Austin Kleon · Cal Newport · Eric Partaker · Joe Hudson · Steven Pressfield

Projects: aliabdaal.com · Sunday Snippets

Works: Deep Work (book) · Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Show Your Work! · Slow Productivity · So Good They Can't Ignore You · The War of Art

Concepts: feel-good productivity (concept) · imposter syndrome · resistance

Places: Boise · London · San Francisco Bay Area

Events: Craft and Commerce

Products: ConvertKit

Also centred on Not Life Advice: I Helped My Subscribers Fix Their Productivity

Also centred on perfectionism: The Perfectionism Trap (And How to Escape It)

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