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Reading Mean Online Comments About Me

2024-09-10 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 24:14 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Mindset, motivation and happiness (also: YouTube, writing online and creators, Medicine and his doctor years, Productivity and time, Money and investing, Business and entrepreneurship) · mode: Reflection and life update · tags: His medical past, His own numbers, His own products discussed, Feel-Good Productivity thesis

Ali reads the meanest comments his team found about him online and answers them: no qualification is needed to teach or share online, leaving medicine for another career is fine, he is money-orientated, and asking what must be true for a comment to be correct takes the sting out; such comments mostly hold back would-be creators.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Opening comments and why he reacts to negative comments

  • ★★ Ali generally makes it a policy not to look at negativity, but reacts to negative comments about himself because creators and would-be entrepreneurs tell him they fear what others will think and fear getting negative comments. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ After seven years on the internet and his fair share of negative comments, Ali realised quickly that the best policy is simply not to look at them. — 00:00:48

00:01:20 — Hustle culture, anime at four times speed and the obsession with money

  • ★★ Ali says commenters who call him hustle culture clearly have not read Feel-Good Productivity, which he thinks is an antidote to hustle culture. — 00:01:50 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Catching up on anime his brother recommended, Ali found he could watch at two, three or four times speed and still read the subtitles, switching back to normal speed for the epic parts. — 00:01:50 · Taimur Abdaal
  • ★★ Ali makes no secret that he is an entrepreneur: part of building a business is making money, which you do by adding value to people, and a lot of money if you add value to a lot of people. — 00:02:24

00:02:48 — Not a qualified teacher: his guitar teacher and sharing educational things online

  • ★★★ Against the comment that he is not a qualified teacher, Ali points to his guitar teacher, who has no teaching qualification but is a guitar teacher because he is a few steps further ahead on the journey. — 00:03:11
  • ★★★ Ali says you need no special qualification to share useful things online: a viewer could summarise books on YouTube, share lessons from their job on Twitter or LinkedIn, or post their old student notes on Instagram. — 00:03:11 · Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram
  • ★ Ali once toyed with doing a postgraduate certificate in medical education, in a way a teaching qualification. — 00:03:47
  • ★ Citing the dictionary definition of teaching, to impart knowledge or instruct someone how to do something, Ali calls the qualified-teacher criticism stupid. — 00:04:16

00:04:39 — LifeNotes newsletter plug

00:04:57 — Wasted a spot in medicine, and changing your mind about a career

  • ★★ Ali agrees to an extent that he wasted a place in medicine: after six years of medical school and two and a bit years as a doctor he went full time on YouTube, and had he known he would not practise, he would not have applied. — 00:05:07
  • ★★★ To students unsure whether they want to be doctors who ask whether to do medicine anyway, Ali usually says no: only do medicine if you think at that point that you want to be a doctor. — 00:05:43
  • ★★ Ali decided aged 14 or 15 that he wanted to be a doctor, the age at which UK pupils choose their GCSEs, then their A-levels and work experience, to have a chance of getting into medical school. — 00:05:43
  • ★★ By the age of 26 Ali had realised that he preferred being an online entrepreneur to being a doctor. — 00:06:11
  • ★★★ Ali tells anyone who picked a career years ago that if building a life they love means changing career, it is totally okay, even if that career is medicine. — 00:06:40

00:07:06 — Not productive: the gym, why he wrote Feel-Good Productivity and asking readers what to put in it

  • ★★ To the comment that he is not productive at all, Ali concedes he is not productive at motivating himself to go to the gym, which is why he finds strategies to use. — 00:07:37
  • ★★★ Ali wrote Feel-Good Productivity because he had found strategies that really helped him while working full time and juggling a growing YouTube channel and a business. — 00:07:37 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Ali cites Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions: feeling good about your work increases productivity, reduces stress, makes you more creative and gives you energy for other areas of life. — 00:08:06 · feel-good productivity (concept)
  • ★★ For Feel-Good Productivity Ali researched intrinsic, extrinsic, identified and introjected motivation and procrastination, interviewed professors who study procrastination and tried the ideas himself. — 00:08:06 · Feel-Good Productivity (book), identified motivation
  • ★★ Ali asked readers what to put in Feel-Good Productivity to learn what they struggle with, so the book could address it rather than be purely his own experience. — 00:08:35 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ When writing a book, Ali says you have to work out who your target audience is and what problems they have, so the book is not just an autobiographical account. — 00:09:11 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ For Feel-Good Productivity Ali also asked on Twitter and LinkedIn for stories, studies and company examples, and people suggested stories such as LeBron James's, Adele's alter ego and Slack's pivot. (hedged) — 00:09:11 · Feel-Good Productivity (book), Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack

00:10:12 — Beige human being; no one needs to give you permission

  • ★ Called a beige human being, Ali says he has been called a lot worse and will take it. (playful) — 00:10:12
  • ★★★ Ali says no one needs to give you permission or a qualification: anyone can make videos or write online without having achieved something first, and let the market decide whether it is good. — 00:11:08

00:11:50 — Productivity videos done by a team; graduating from the course

  • ★★ Ali agrees that his early productivity videos were based on advice he was learning at the time; after seven years of videos and some 15 years of reading about productivity, his videos now draw on advice he has internalised. — 00:12:08
  • ★★ Ali now makes productivity videos mainly because his audience asks and struggles with focus, distraction and procrastination, which he himself does not particularly struggle with most of the time. — 00:12:34
  • ★★ Ali's podcast Deep Dive is conversations he wants to have, and his vlogs document what is happening in his journey right now. — 00:12:34 · Deep Dive
  • ★★ Ali likes his friend Ankur Warikoo's view that someone who finds the content repetitive has graduated from the course, as he would find a repeat of his first year of medical school repetitive. — 00:13:13

00:13:42 — Arrogant and money-orientated

  • ★★ Fans who meet Ali often say he is the same person in real life as on YouTube, which he takes as a compliment because he is not trying to be anything other than what he is. — 00:14:09
  • ★★★ Ali says he is pretty money-orientated: making money is an important life skill, and money buys you the freedom and flexibility to do what you want. — 00:14:09
  • ★★ Since having money, Ali says his life is better than before because he is now in control of his time. — 00:14:50
  • ★★ Ali has given 10% of everything he earns to charity since 2019, so the more money he makes, the more he can give away. — 00:14:50

00:15:00 — Day-in-the-life vlogs and troll comments on Instagram

  • ★★ Ali's day-in-the-life vlogs followed his life at each stage: studying for exams as a student, working as a doctor, building a business during the pandemic and moving to London with a team in an office. — 00:15:21 · London

00:16:17 — Grifter, refunds, the sponsorship price and selling out

  • ★★ Ali sometimes posts troll comments on his Instagram story, mostly for entertainment because they are kind of funny; he did not realise it comes across as being hurt. — 00:16:17 · Instagram
  • ★★ Ali thinks people call anyone who sells an online course a grifter. — 00:16:17
  • ★★ Ali's company has about five people in customer support who still help people who bought a course five years ago, and refunds anyone who asks, for pretty much any reason. — 00:16:40
  • ★★ Ali confirms his team charges 20K for a sponsored YouTube video and believes the price has since gone up. — 00:17:37
  • ★★ Ali disagrees that having a medical degree means you should be a doctor: many people with medical degrees work in careers outside medicine. — 00:17:37
  • ★★ At one point Ali thought of moving to the US to practise medicine there, and many people called him a sellout then too. — 00:18:06 · United States

00:18:33 — How he deals with criticism now, and why such comments hold people back

  • ★★ Some four years earlier Ali reacted to mean comments with his brother in a video on his podcast channel and was visibly upset, the first time he had really confronted negative comments. (hedged) — 00:18:33 · Taimur Abdaal
  • ★★ Ali thinks he has become better at dissociating from the ego, perhaps helped by reading spiritual books, an ayahuasca retreat about a year earlier and a friend who is a coach, therapist and spiritual guide. (hedged) — 00:18:59
  • ★★ Ali says he has asked himself every criticism in the comments at one point or another, from regurgitating book summaries to being a sellout or grifter selling bad courses, and has always found answers. — 00:18:59
  • ★★★ With criticism, Ali finds it helpful to ask what must be true for the comment to be correct; if he does not agree with that underlying principle, he no longer believes the criticism. — 00:19:48
  • ★★ Ali used to worry that he was a bad person for quitting medicine to do YouTube, but after thinking it through a lot he concluded that he is not. — 00:19:48
  • ★★ Ali likes seeing negative comments when he feels something about one, because the feeling reveals an area of ego defence that he then explores with curiosity. — 00:20:59
  • ★★ Ali's main response to these comments was exasperation, partly because he thinks they reveal what genuinely holds people back from becoming creators. — 00:21:27
  • ★★★ Everyone Ali knows who started a YouTube channel or business and succeeded has not regretted it, survivorship bias aside, and even those who quit after two years learned a lot about themselves. — 00:22:46
  • ★★★ Ali likens mean comments on gossip forums and subreddits to crabs in a bucket dragging others down: they do not affect him, but they tell thousands of readers that they cannot try their own thing. — 00:23:19

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: crabs in a bucket · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

Also: People: Adele · Ankur Warikoo · Barbara Fredrickson · Cal Newport · LeBron James · Taimur Abdaal

Projects: Deep Dive

Organizations: Instagram · LinkedIn · Reddit · Twitter

Concepts: broaden and build theory · extrinsic motivation · hustle culture · identified motivation · introjected motivation · money-back guarantee · speed listening

Places: India · London · United States

Products: Slack

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