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I Got Married and Moved to Hong Kong! (Life Update)

2024-11-15 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 43:13 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Relationships and personal life (also: Business and entrepreneurship, Goals, purpose and life design, Mindset, motivation and happiness, Productivity and time) · mode: Reflection and life update · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, Lesson from a book, Feel-Good Productivity thesis, Family, He changed his mind

In his annual life update Ali says he married Izzy in August 2024 and moved with her to Hong Kong for at least a year, and that his business is scrapping its separate brands to sell everything under his own channel and website, after seeing that "shoulds" and borrowed desires to scale and sell drained him.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — An annual-ish life update in three parts: life, business, reflections

00:00:23 — Marrying Izzy, keeping the relationship private, and the second mountain of commitment

  • ★★★ Ali has married Izzy, a YouTuber he met as a fellow medical student at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who was also a student of his Part-Time YouTuber Academy. — 00:00:23 · Emmanuel College, Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Ali and Izzy got married in August 2024. — 00:00:55
  • ★★★ After the wedding Ali and Izzy moved to Hong Kong, where he will be for at least the next year, maybe longer if they like it. — 00:00:55
  • ★★ Ali and Izzy were together for about three years before marrying and deliberately kept the relationship private. — 00:00:55
  • ★★ Ali is unsure how much to share online once his life involves another person, such as a wife or, later, children. (unsure) — 00:01:57
  • ★★ Ali and Izzy do not want their relationship to become content: when a relationship becomes someone's content and livelihood, he sees a risk of pressure and scrutiny. — 00:01:57
  • ★★ David Brooks (quoted): In The Second Mountain, David Brooks argues that after the first mountain of success comes a taller second mountain of commitment to a relationship, community, cause or faith, the mountain of true and lasting joy. — 00:03:37
  • ★★★ Ali says, as his married mentors tell him, that in the next chapter of life true joy comes from committing to someone and to a place: building roots rather than having wings. — 00:04:46
  • ★★ Tim Ferriss (quoted): The 4-Hour Workweek ends with a chapter on filling the void: once you can do whatever you want, you need to find something to do, a purpose. — 00:04:46 · The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ Ali tried being a digital nomad about a year ago and found travel fun in small doses; he enjoys life at home. — 00:04:46
  • ★★ A couple of months into his marriage, Ali says he is very much enjoying married life. — 00:06:35
  • ★ Ali is reading books about marriage and says he will make videos on some of them at some point. — 00:06:35
  • ★★ Ali asks married viewers to comment with marital advice: what they wish they had known a few months into their marriage. — 00:06:35

00:07:10 — Why they moved to Hong Kong, and the joy of routine and stability

  • ★★ The main reason Ali and Izzy left London is that Izzy does not like the London weather. — 00:07:10 · London
  • ★★ Ali and Izzy explored Miami, Los Angeles, Austin and San Francisco, but found the US broadly similar to the UK. — 00:07:38 · United States
  • ★★ After looking at taxes, residency options, weather and people they knew, Ali and Izzy shortlisted three Asian cities: Hong Kong, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. — 00:08:10
  • ★★ Ali says Hong Kong has great weather and a lot of greenery, with about 80% of it national parks. — 00:09:20
  • ★★ Hong Kong is very well connected internationally, Ali says: the airport is easy to reach and flies direct almost everywhere, which matters to him because he travels for work, friends and family. — 00:09:20
  • ★★★ After trying Hong Kong for a few weeks, Ali and Izzy committed to living there for at least a year and rented a place for at least a year. — 00:09:49
  • ★★ In Hong Kong Ali is trying to find a local squash, badminton and tennis club to join and build a life there. — 00:10:17
  • ★★ Ali asks people in Hong Kong who would like to be friends to email him or reach out, especially with tips for playing squash, badminton and tennis without paying extortionate club fees. — 00:10:17
  • ★★★ The main change of settling in Hong Kong is routine and stability, which Ali loves: boring stability is fun in a way the constant novelty of the globetrotting entrepreneur lifestyle was not. — 00:10:46
  • ★★ Ali's brother Taimur has had a baby; they recorded an episode of their podcast Not Overthinking on what being a new dad is like. — 00:12:12 · Taimur Abdaal, Not Overthinking
  • ★★ Ali's business model: his team makes free content, some of the audience become paying customers, and that funds the free content, an infinite game. — 00:12:12

00:12:38 — The business model, the lottery question, VoicePal, and jobs kept only for the money

  • ★★ If he had all the money in the world, Ali would probably not sell paid courses and would put what he makes online for free. (hedged) — 00:12:52
  • ★★ VoicePal, the app Ali's team built recently, has about 2,500 paying users. — 00:13:17
  • ★★ Ali now plans videos and course modules by walking with AirPods in and talking into VoicePal, which transcribes his thoughts and asks follow-up questions. — 00:13:17 · AirPods
  • ★★★ For the last few years Ali's answer to the lottery question has stayed the same: if he won the lottery, there is not a lot he would change about what he does. — 00:14:21
  • ★★★ Ali recommends the lottery lens for goal setting and business growth: ask what major changes you would make with all the time and money in the world, then whether you really need that to make them. — 00:14:45
  • ★★★ Ali thinks many corporate professionals stuck in a well-paid job they dislike probably do not need it to put bread on the table and could take a lower-paid, more fulfilling one. (hedged) — 00:15:34

00:16:13 — Spin-off brands, the shoulds of scale and sale, and dropping them

  • ★★★ In recent months Ali's team tried to spin off the Part-Time YouTuber Academy and Productivity Lab into their own businesses, with an online business school planned as another, which overcomplicated everything with three or four brands. — 00:16:13 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali says the business got overcomplicated because of two shoulds in his mind: build it to be scalable and build it to be sellable. — 00:16:52
  • ★★★ A big lesson Ali has learned in business: take the thing that is working and keep doing it until it stops working, which for him means doubling down on his personal brand. — 00:18:29
  • ★★ Ali went on a seven-day intensive retreat in California hosted by Joe Hudson and his wife Tara, who run The Art of Accomplishment. — 00:18:52
  • ★★★ Ali's takeaway from the Art of Accomplishment retreat: shoulds are not a good way to live, because behind every should there is some kind of shame and some kind of whip. — 00:18:52
  • ★★ Ali makes his yearly life update video, though it gets few views, because he wants to; because it is a want rather than a should, it happens. — 00:19:58
  • ★★★ Shoulds add a lot of negative energy, Ali says, and make him rely on discipline rather than enjoyment to do things. — 00:20:24
  • ★★ The philosophy of Ali's book Feel-Good Productivity: if you find ways to enjoy what you do and do things you enjoy, productivity takes care of itself. — 00:20:24 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ Ali has decided to stop trying to build his business to sell, to scale or to reduce its key man risk: if he stops making YouTube videos one day the business will crumble, and that is okay. — 00:21:07
  • ★★ Ali no longer worries about his team's livelihood if the business ends: everyone can find another job, helped by having worked for him. — 00:21:07

00:21:46 — His yearly pattern of adopting others' desires: mimetic desire, thick and thin desires

  • ★★★ Ali keeps flipping: he lands on choosing to do whatever he wants, then people, books and advice draw him into making more money, scaling and selling, and the energy drains until he returns. — 00:22:10
  • ★★ Ali is sure that within a few months he will again speak to someone very confident, probably an American man making far more money than him, and be drawn to that person's ambitions for his business. — 00:23:15 · United States
  • ★ Ali read Luke Burgis's Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire a while ago, and says his channel will make a video about it at some point. — 00:24:04
  • ★★ René Girard (quoted): René Girard's mimetic theory, as Wanting explains it: we often do not know what to want, so we adopt the desires of people around us, especially those we look up to. — 00:24:04
  • ★★★ A mistake Ali has made repeatedly over the years is to change his business on the strength of a temporary want borrowed from someone he looks up to. — 00:24:33
  • ★★ Luke Burgis (quoted): Luke Burgis distinguishes thick from thin desires in Wanting: a thick desire is something you have always wanted. — 00:24:33
  • ★★ Ali's thick desires are to teach, which he has wanted and done since the age of 13, and to build and design things. — 00:24:33
  • ★★ Ali has never really wanted to sell a company for 50 million. — 00:24:33
  • ★★ When he comes back to who he is, Ali is content making a couple of million in profit a year and does not need more. — 00:26:03
  • ★ Ali and Izzy rent in Hong Kong because houses there are too expensive for them to buy. — 00:26:03

00:27:40 — Simplifying back to one brand and one website; deciding by what feels energetically right

  • ★★★ Ali's business is scrapping the idea of multiple brands and going back to his YouTube channel and aliabdaal.com, which is getting a redesign and will sell all the products. — 00:27:40 · aliabdaal.com
  • ★★★ Ali has realised that how something feels is really important; in his twenties, his grind and hustle era, he treated feelings as irrelevant. — 00:28:08
  • ★★ Over the years, especially in a relationship, Ali has learned to notice the feelings in his body and know when something feels right and when it does not. — 00:29:11
  • ★★ Ali's mentor Olly Richards asked him how he feels energetically about the directions his business could go; Ali felt weird about multiple brands and good about simplifying. — 00:31:12
  • ★★★ A big part of Ali's decision-making is now what feels energetically right. — 00:32:06
  • ★★ Simplifying means one online courses platform with one checkout for all of Ali's products, instead of three checkout providers and Stripe accounts going to three bank accounts. — 00:32:37

00:33:35 — More versus enough: the profit plateau and a dynamic equilibrium

  • ★★★ Ali asks what the point is of building a business that is a prison for yourself, once you have quit the day job and make money. — 00:33:35
  • ★★ Ali says an online business can probably make a million in profit comfortably, but two is uncomfortable and three hard; around 3.5 million, info-product businesses probably need paid ads. (hedged) — 00:34:55
  • ★★ To grow beyond that plateau, Ali says, a business needs big launches whose results are unpredictable, which leads to stressful constant selling to the audience. — 00:35:16
  • ★ Ali calls Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks a very good book. — 00:35:40
  • ★★ Ali reminds himself of what a friend once told him: growth does not have to be measured by the top line and the bottom line. — 00:36:09
  • ★★★ Ali feels he is always balancing in a dynamic equilibrium between two poles, "I want more" and "I have enough", with no easy answer. — 00:36:44
  • ★★ Ali's friend Daniel Priestley is sometimes in the "more" camp, wanting to build another business, and sometimes in the "enough" camp, wanting to sell assets to focus on his core business. — 00:37:08

00:37:59 — Work versus chill: burnout, stagnation and his own tendency towards more

  • ★★ Seeing more versus enough as a dynamic equilibrium, Ali would correct course slightly when he senses himself going too far towards more, rather than upend the whole business. — 00:37:59
  • ★★ Ali thinks debates such as hustle versus chill and toxic productivity are all about the balance between how much you want to work and how much you want to chill, which changes with the seasons of life. — 00:37:59
  • ★★ Ali advises checking whether a big goal, such as 10 million and an exit, which takes very hard work, is really the goal that resonates with you internally. — 00:39:11
  • ★★★ Ali's hot take: too much work leads to burnout, and too much chill leads to stagnation and depression. (hedged) — 00:40:00
  • ★★ While researching his book, Ali read that burnout tends to be experienced differently by men and women; in men it tends to show as a feeling that the work is purposeless. — 00:40:00 · burnout, Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ For Ali the sign of burnout is work starting to feel pointless; that "what's the point" feeling probably means he is too far on the work side and should do less and simplify. (hedged) — 00:40:58 · burnout
  • ★★ Knowing himself, Ali's inertia is towards more and towards work, so his usual correction is to simplify and go for less. — 00:41:27

00:42:25 — Relearning the same lessons; last year's life update

  • ★★ Ali says that much of what he learns each year is relearning the same lessons and reminding himself of what he already knows, because there is a difference between knowing something and applying it until it is internalised. — 00:42:51

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Hong Kong · Izzy Sealey

Also: People: Daniel Priestley · David Brooks · Joe Hudson · Luke Burgis · Oliver Burkeman · Olly Richards · René Girard · Taimur Abdaal · Tim Ferriss

Projects: aliabdaal.com · Not Overthinking · Part-Time YouTuber Academy · Productivity Lab

Works: Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Four Thousand Weeks · The 4-Hour Workweek · The Second Mountain · Wanting

Organizations: Emmanuel College · Stripe · The Art of Accomplishment

Concepts: burnout · digital nomad · infinite game · info product · key man risk · mimetic desire · personal brand · thick and thin desires

Places: Austin · California · Kuala Lumpur · London · Los Angeles · Malaysia · Miami · San Francisco Bay Area · Singapore · United States

Products: AirPods · VoicePal

Also centred on Hong Kong: How I Built A YouTube Studio in a Tiny Room

Also centred on Izzy Sealey: How to Grow a YouTube Channel From Nothing in 2026

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