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How to Get Ahead of 99% of People (Discipline Isn't Enough)

2025-05-09 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali, Joe Hudson · recording, 1 h 10 min · watch on YouTube

Topic: Mindset, motivation and happiness (also: Productivity and time) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Lesson from a book, Feel-Good Productivity thesis, He changed his mind, Family, Sponsor segment present

Drawing on his conversations with executive coach Joe Hudson, Ali gives five habits that he says take people past discipline into the top 0.1%: an iterative mindset of pace over perfection, embracing negative emotions, enjoyment as a compass, eliminating shoulds, and escaping time poverty.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Discipline gets you to the top 10–20%; Joe Hudson and the five habits of the top 0.1%

  • ★★★ Ali says being more disciplined, working harder and getting more done gets you into the top 10–20% of most fields, but for the top 1% or 0.1% the rules completely change. — 00:00:00

    “if you really want to get into the top 1% or even the top 0.1%, then the rules completely change.”

  • ★★ Ali calls Joe Hudson the secret coach whom the biggest Silicon Valley companies, including Apple, Google and OpenAI, pay huge sums to coach their CEOs and executive teams. — 00:00:00 · Apple, Google

  • ★★★ Ali discovered executive coach Joe Hudson's work about a year earlier, binged everything Joe has put online, and then attended his invite-only in-person intensive retreat. — 00:00:29

00:01:27 — Habit 1: the iterative mindset, pace over perfection, and the fear of public mistakes

  • ★★★ Joe Hudson says every successful CEO he knows cares more about the pace of the company than about getting anything perfect: they have a very iterative mindset. — 00:01:56
  • ★★★ Ali says you can just do things: instead of waiting until you are 80 to 100% prepared, start taking action with about 20% preparation and improve from the data you get. — 00:02:37
  • ★★ Joe Hudson describes the iterative mindset as prioritising pace over perfection, Ali says: pace matters more because you learn quicker and, moving, you can steer your ship more accurately. — 00:03:06
  • ★★ Ali really likes the book Ready, Fire, Aim, whose title he calls the iterative-mindset habit in action. — 00:03:30 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Joe Hudson says people stay stuck in research mode rather than taking action because they do not want to make mistakes publicly, though no CEO has avoided public mistakes. — 00:03:59
  • ★★ Ali used to struggle with the fear of making mistakes publicly and had to get over it eight years earlier when he started his YouTube channel. — 00:04:29
  • ★★ A quote Ali attributes to Epictetus helped him start: if you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid. (hedged) — 00:04:29
  • ★★ To deal with the fear of being judged, Ali advises reminding yourself that no one thinks about you as much as you worry they do. — 00:05:19

00:05:35 — Habit 2: changing your relationship with the feeling that failure triggers

  • ★★★ According to Joe Hudson, Ali says, the most successful people do not avoid failure but fundamentally change their relationship with the internal experience that failure triggers. — 00:05:48
  • ★★ Joe Hudson says we care about mistakes not because we made them but because of how they make us feel. — 00:06:46
  • ★★ Ali says what we fear is not judgement, criticism or failure itself but the feeling, the internal emotion, that failure might bring up. — 00:06:46

00:06:59 — Spotter Studio sponsors the video

  • ★★ Joe Hudson says the habenula, a switchboard of the brain, tells you after a failure not to fail again, as a tiger that lost a fight for dominance should not fight again. — 00:08:43

00:08:52 — The habenula, falling in love with the emotional state, curiosity about emotions, Joe's origin story

  • ★★ Ali explains the habenula as a tiny region deep in the brain that acts as an anti-reward or disappointment centre, active when an expected reward does not arrive. — 00:09:17
  • ★★ After a negative experience the habenula dampens dopamine, Ali says, which biologically reduces our drive to repeat the action that led to it. — 00:09:47
  • ★★ In the modern world, where reaching the top 1% or 0.1% requires taking risks of failure, Ali calls this failure-avoiding brain mechanism very unhelpful. — 00:10:16
  • ★★★ Joe Hudson: A tool Joe Hudson uses with people: visualise your success over and over and feel everything in it, then visualise your failure and feel all of that; then the action becomes clear. — 00:10:45
  • ★★ When Ali first heard Joe Hudson's teachings about 18 months earlier, the twenty-something tech bro in him thought the talk of emotions was total nonsense. — 00:11:12
  • ★★ Ali says Joe Hudson works one-on-one with Sam Altman, coaches the OpenAI team, and the founder of Twitter said Joe changed his life. — 00:11:41 · Twitter
  • ★★★ After taking a couple of Joe Hudson's online courses and his in-person retreat, Ali says the work on emotions transformed his life, his productivity and his relationship with his wife. — 00:12:15 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★★ Ali urges people like his former self to take emotions seriously: they are the heart of all decisions about work, business, life and relationships. — 00:12:15
  • ★★★ Joe Hudson says what is hard to love about an emotion is the resistance to it, not the emotion itself, so first work on the resistance; sadness you let yourself feel does not feel bad. — 00:13:05
  • ★★ Joe Hudson says every emotional state carries a signal: anger probably means there is a boundary, anxiety some way you are not caring for yourself. (hedged) — 00:14:06
  • ★★ Joe Hudson: When an emotion comes, Joe Hudson advises not running to your phone but stopping to get really curious about exactly how it feels in your body: where it is, how dense, where its centre is. — 00:15:04
  • ★★ Though he thinks of himself as logical, Ali says the most difficult problems and decisions cannot really be analysed while there is an underlying emotion that is not acknowledged or felt. — 00:15:26
  • ★★★ Ali has come to see an emotion as a series of internal bodily sensations, usually with a mental story, that arises and passes away. — 00:16:14
  • ★★ Joe Hudson: In his early thirties Joe Hudson was kicked out of the house for something that was not his fault. — 00:16:14
  • ★★ Joe Hudson: Each time he drove by the house Joe Hudson felt as if kicked in the stomach; curious, he drove past it on purpose to feel that thing. — 00:16:42
  • ★★ Joe Hudson found that an emotional experience changes when you really love it, but not when you love it in order to get rid of it. — 00:17:10
  • ★★★ Joe Hudson realised all his bad habits were resistance to an emotional experience, an avoidance of feeling something, and his bad decisions came from trying not to feel a certain way. — 00:17:38
  • ★★ Joe Hudson cites Descartes' Error, by a neuroscientist, on how our decisions are made in the emotional centre of the body. — 00:18:01
  • ★★ Acceptance and commitment therapy, Ali says, holds that suppressing or fighting difficult feelings paradoxically makes them stronger and consumes huge mental energy. — 00:18:30

00:19:39 — Decisions are emotional: fear of going broke, fear-setting with feeling, death meditation, staying in wonder

  • ★★★ Joe Hudson: Asked about real consequences such as colleagues laughing at your LinkedIn posts, Joe Hudson says it is really hard to find any decision in your life that is not made emotionally. — 00:20:21 · LinkedIn
  • ★★ Joe Hudson says we use logic to work out how a choice will make us feel. — 00:20:49
  • ★★★ Behind Ali's seemingly logical decisions about his business, work, channel and next book, he says, lies a fear of going broke, running out of money and ending up homeless. — 00:21:42
  • ★★ Ali has met people with net worths 10, 100 or 1,000 times his own, and many of them also fear running out of money and ending up homeless. — 00:21:42
  • ★★ Imagining himself homeless but at peace, Ali concludes that what he fears is not running out of money but the feeling of running out of money. — 00:22:11
  • ★★ Joe Hudson says CEOs usually do not buy in at first, but once a good CEO sees that letting a feeling move through brings clarity, they are in, since it is another avenue to clarity. — 00:23:52
  • ★★ Ali thinks his life would have been more peaceful, he would probably have been more productive and made more money, had he embraced his emotions and the fears behind his decisions earlier. (hedged) — 00:24:32
  • ★★ Ali's default way of making a decision is to journal a lot and write out the logical thought process, and he then stays stuck on the same decision for three to six months. — 00:25:01
  • ★★★ Joe Hudson says that if you are indecisive and doing SWOT analyses without an answer, you are avoiding one or more emotions; go into them and there is nothing left to avoid. His Great Decisions course explores these emotions. — 00:25:01
  • ★★ Joe Hudson says the samurai, the Stoics and The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying explored the fear of death by visualising the whole experience of death, through full decomposition. — 00:25:47 · stoicism
  • ★★ Joe Hudson says that if you are having a hard time making a decision, you are guaranteed to be in fear. — 00:26:16
  • ★★★ For decisions Ali uses Tim Ferriss's fear-setting exercise, and adds an addendum: really visualise and feel the feelings of the worst case rather than just typing it into a Notion doc. — 00:27:08 · Tim Ferriss, Notion
  • ★★ Joe Hudson says fear makes us think in binary terms, buying the car or not, so we miss options such as a lower model or a different colour. — 00:27:36
  • ★★★ Joe Hudson: Fear also creates a false end, Joe Hudson says, so do not only visualise the worst case: keep visualising what happens afterwards, as The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying imagines through death. — 00:27:58
  • ★★ Joe Hudson says all humans, CEOs included, have such fears; those who compartmentalise them are far more likely to be discontent in their success. — 00:29:03
  • ★★ Joe Hudson says business, in failure or success, teaches you more about yourself than almost anything except perhaps marriage and raising children. — 00:29:29

  • ★★ Joe Hudson defines wonder as curiosity without looking for an answer, the way you look at a sunset or a child at an anthill. — 00:30:15

    “So the way I define wonder is curiosity without looking for an answer.”

  • ★★ Joe Hudson: Instead of telling yourself to stop procrastinating, Joe Hudson advises wondering what makes you procrastinate, what would make the work fun, and what emotion you avoid by procrastinating. — 00:30:58

00:31:27 — Habit 3: the enjoyment compass, Hudson's first law that enjoyment equals efficiency

  • ★★ Using a car analogy, Ali says Joe Hudson's insight is that top performers seek efficiency rather than speed: using less energy lets them sustain progress longer and more consistently. — 00:31:28

  • ★★ Ali calls it Hudson's first law: enjoyment equals efficiency. — 00:32:07 · feel-good productivity (concept)

    “Hudson's first law comes in, which is that enjoyment equals efficiency.”

  • ★★★ Joe Hudson says enjoyment, not how quickly you did it, is a great measure of efficiency: if you enjoy the process you do more of it, more easily, and end with energy for the next one. — 00:32:58 · feel-good productivity (concept)

  • ★★ Joe Hudson suggests an experiment: do an hour of email one day just for the dopamine hit of getting it done, the next day asking how to enjoy it, then compare which session was more productive. — 00:32:58
  • ★★ Enjoyment as efficiency is the whole thesis of Ali's book Feel-Good Productivity, which he says has been translated into 35 languages. — 00:34:09 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Ali says the idea is scientifically well validated, citing Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory. — 00:34:09
  • ★★ Ali found Joe Hudson's work only after writing Feel-Good Productivity and took it as strong validation of the book, since Joe teaches the same concepts to billionaire CEOs. — 00:34:39 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ When Ali mentioned feel-good productivity on Chris Williamson's podcast, commenters called it nonsense: tell a taxi driver or a dishwasher to just enjoy themselves. — 00:35:26 · feel-good productivity (concept), Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ Joe Hudson says people are confused about enjoyment because they think it comes from what you do, not how you do it. — 00:35:55
  • ★★ Joe Hudson: If Thich Nhat Hanh can teach someone to enjoy washing the dishes, which Joe Hudson hated until he learned to enjoy it, you can learn to enjoy driving a taxi, Joe says. — 00:35:55
  • ★★ Joe Hudson read Thich Nhat Hanh on the warm, soapy pleasure of washing dishes, dismissed it, and set out to prove him wrong. — 00:36:22
  • ★★ Joe Hudson advises sitting down with something you say you dislike and really asking how to enjoy it: if you can enjoy it 5% more, you can probably enjoy it 10% more. — 00:37:12
  • ★★ Joe Hudson: Having committed to do only what he would enjoy for a week, Joe Hudson sat in front of a smelly trash can until he found a way to enjoy taking it out, by getting fully present in his body. — 00:38:00
  • ★★ Ali keeps the question "what would this look like if it were fun?" as his phone wallpaper, to ask of whatever he is doing. — 00:38:49
  • ★★★ Joe Hudson says the places where you are not enjoying yourself are exactly the places where you can improve efficiency. — 00:38:49
  • ★★ Joe Hudson: In one of the Alphabet companies Joe Hudson works with, every person must rate their enjoyment of each meeting from zero to five stars and say what would improve it. — 00:39:29
  • ★★★ Joe Hudson: To find what is wrong in a company, Joe Hudson advises looking at what people do not enjoy and focusing there; a sales team not enjoying itself probably will not make its quarter. — 00:39:29
  • ★★ Joe Hudson: For solo work sessions that are not five stars, Joe Hudson advises always looking for one small experiment for next time, such as a break every 15 minutes with jumping jacks, working with a friend or in a café. — 00:40:47
  • ★★ Joe Hudson: To the worry that enjoyable work would be unprofessional, Joe Hudson says not being professional is worth exploring, since most innovation comes from not doing it the way others did. — 00:41:32
  • ★★★ Joe Hudson calls it a great time-management skill to look at your whole to-do list and ask which two or three things would make all of it easier or irrelevant. — 00:42:23

00:43:02 — Habit 4: eliminate the shoulds; duty, obligation, guilt about not working, the need behind the want

  • ★★★ Joe Hudson says that if you force anything, yourself included, counterforce happens: forcing yourself creates natural resistance, which is friction and inefficiency. — 00:43:19
  • ★★ Joe Hudson calls forcing yourself dirty fuel with a cost; recognising that lets you ask what you want to do and how, which is far more efficient. — 00:44:17
  • ★★ Ali's metaphor for his LifeOS students: your actions are the rowing of a boat and your enjoyment of the work is its sail; without enjoyment you row against the wind. — 00:45:00
  • ★★ Joe Hudson: Most CEOs, especially venture capitalists, Joe Hudson knows are not highly disciplined people: they are aligned, invigorated and love what they do, and they delegate what they dislike. — 00:45:45
  • ★★★ For something you have to do but do not want to, Ali first asks whether it actually needs doing and what would happen if he just did not do it; often someone else just wants it done. — 00:46:13
  • ★★★ If it must be done, Ali recognises he does not have to do anything but chooses to, to avoid the consequences: he does not have to pay his taxes but chooses to rather than go to jail. — 00:46:51
  • ★★ Having chosen to do a task such as filing his taxes, Ali asks what he can do to make the process 10% more enjoyable. — 00:47:21

  • ★★★ Joe Hudson calls "should" a motivation killer more than anything else. — 00:47:50

    “Should is a motivation killer more than anything else.”

  • ★★ Joe Hudson suggests an experiment: say aloud "you should brush your teeth" for about a minute and feel how your body feels, then say "I really want to brush my teeth". — 00:47:50

  • ★★ Joe Hudson says a should sucks all your energy out of you and a want gives it to you; shoulding yourself is like a boss constantly over your shoulder. — 00:48:23
  • ★★ Joe Hudson: Asked whether without shoulds he would just watch Netflix and play PlayStation all day, Joe Hudson says you would lie on the couch because you are burnt out from beating yourself up for a decade, and you would eventually get up. — 00:49:07
  • ★★ Joe Hudson cites studies of unschooling: burnt-out children allowed to stay away from school until they are ready usually do nothing for about six months, then learn quicker than anybody else. — 00:49:07
  • ★★ In the early days of Ali's YouTube channel there was no should; it crept in a few years later and took away some of his enjoyment of making videos. — 00:50:44
  • ★★ Ali told a team member they really should be posting on LinkedIn; the strategy they brought back did not excite him, which he puts down to the idea starting from a should rather than a want. — 00:51:20 · LinkedIn
  • ★★ Joe Hudson: Instead of "I should post on LinkedIn", Joe Hudson suggests asking what would make you love posting on LinkedIn. — 00:51:20 · LinkedIn
  • ★★★ Joe Hudson says that beneath every should there is an impulse: under "I should work out" lies an impulse to be healthy, and the question is how you want to act on it. — 00:52:39
  • ★★ Joe Hudson: To act on the impulse to be healthy, Joe Hudson suggests listing 50 things that would keep you healthy, doing each for three days and keeping the ones you enjoy most. — 00:52:39
  • ★★★ Ali's fourth habit is to eliminate the shoulds, which he calls easy to say and very difficult to master. — 00:53:16
  • ★★ Ali links shoulds to reactance in psychology: our tendency to resist being controlled, which also makes us rebel against the inner voice telling us we should do something. — 00:53:16
  • ★★ Self-determination theory stresses our need for autonomy, Ali says: telling yourself you should do something undermines it and kills your motivation, even motivation that was intrinsic. — 00:54:05
  • ★★★ Joe Hudson: Asked about duty, Joe Hudson says to break down what you are actually obligated to: going to your mother's for Christmas, or having a great relationship with her, which is usually closer to what you want. — 00:55:51
  • ★★ Joe Hudson says acting from obligation means abandoning some part of yourself and not addressing the real problem. — 00:56:42
  • ★★ At the retreat Ali challenged Joe Hudson on shoulds, asking whether he felt no duty to feed his kids; Joe said he does not feed them out of obligation but because he loves them. — 00:56:42
  • ★★ Joe Hudson (quoted): Joe Hudson told Ali that duty and love are very different things and cannot coexist. — 00:57:08
  • ★★ Ali has not yet worked out duty for himself, but with friends, family, his wife and his future kids he would like to want to do things rather than feel obligated. — 00:57:37 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Joe Hudson used to do most things out of guilt or obligation, with no joy or love; when he stopped, he became a much better, more open-hearted person. — 00:57:37

  • ★★★ Joe Hudson calls obligation a trick we play on ourselves to block pleasure: in essence, pleasure anxiety. — 00:58:51

    “obligation in its essence is just pleasure anxiety”

  • ★★ Ali and his wife Izzy always feel they should be working, even at the weekend. — 00:58:51 · Izzy Sealey

  • ★★ Joe Hudson says guilt about not being productive is usually learned from parents, caregivers or teachers who were happy with us when we were productive; often an overly critical parent's voice becomes our own. — 00:58:51
  • ★★ Joe Hudson: When one of Joe Hudson's staff felt they had six things they had to do, they dropped the obligation and did them in the most enjoyable way; what she expected to take three days took three hours. — 01:00:39
  • ★★ Joe Hudson sees CEOs turn work into obligation all the time; asking which way would feel great usually makes a better phone than asking how we have to make it. — 01:01:29
  • ★★ Though he wrote a book about it, Ali keeps relearning that when he optimises for enjoyment as the compass, his work often turns out better and higher quality than when he tries to make it good. — 01:01:29
  • ★★★ Joe Hudson: For someone who wants financial freedom but resists the grind, Joe Hudson suggests asking the need behind each want: financial independence, to feel safe, to not be anxious, to have a joyful life. — 01:02:21 · work optional
  • ★★ Joe Hudson: Thinking grinding is the only way is a state of knowing, Joe Hudson says: many people reached financial freedom doing what they wanted, as he and Ali did. — 01:03:11 · work optional
  • ★ Joe Hudson tells Ali he was supposed to be a doctor, wanted to be a YouTuber, and is more successful than he could have been as a doctor. — 01:03:11
  • ★★ Ali says most of us live in time poverty, always rushed and reacting to urgent demands, while according to Joe Hudson the top 0.1% make time their ally. — 01:03:39

01:03:52 — Habit 5: escape time poverty and make time work for you

  • ★★★ Joe Hudson says entrepreneurs who succeed over the long run no longer work for time; time works for them, as they plant seeds today that bloom next month (June 2025) or next year (2026). — 01:04:17
  • ★ Joe Hudson cites a famous head of Sony in the 1990s who cared not about this year's (2025) quarter but about how the company would do five years on. — 01:04:51
  • ★★ Joe Hudson says ticking off to-dos is a dopamine hit we are wired for, but getting things done is not the same as being productive: ask what one thing gets ten things done. — 01:05:41
  • ★★★ Joe Hudson recommends investing in yourself: learning to speak better, be in touch with your emotions or communicate better pays off for the rest of your career. — 01:06:08
  • ★★ Joe Hudson: When Joe Hudson builds a new product he treats it as marketing at the same time, because he is interacting with his customers. — 01:06:08
  • ★★ Ali's fifth habit is to escape time poverty, so that your energy goes into things that compound, for far higher impact with much less frantic effort. — 01:06:37
  • ★★ Joe Hudson says you miss a lot when you rush: at one company he had five meetings in a day and none of them finished its conversation. — 01:07:07
  • ★★ Joe Hudson likes the phrase "slow is steady, steady is fast", which he thinks comes from the Marines. (hedged) — 01:07:07
  • ★★ Joe Hudson cites research that people working quickly while sleep-deprived are far less productive than they think, and than people who are not rushed or sleep-deprived. — 01:07:36
  • ★★ Ali really likes Naval Ravikant's line that the goal should be to play long-term games with long-term people. — 01:07:36 · Naval Ravikant

01:07:58 — Ali's takeaways: the Art of Accomplishment podcast, the VIEW framework, feeling the emotion behind a decision

  • ★★★ The best way to get started with Joe Hudson's teachings, Ali says, is his podcast The Art of Accomplishment. — 01:07:58
  • ★★★ Since applying Joe Hudson's VIEW framework for navigating conversations to his marriage, Ali says, his relationship has improved drastically, with far fewer arguments. — 01:07:58 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★★ Ali applies to his work the idea that struggling with a decision means there is an emotion he is not feeling, which he approaches with curiosity and wonder. — 01:08:28
  • ★★★ Ali finds that feeling the emotion behind a hard decision gives him more clarity than his default tendency to journal and logic his way to it, typing things out and talking to ChatGPT. — 01:09:05 · ChatGPT

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: feel-good productivity (concept) · iterative mindset · Joe Hudson · staying in wonder · time poverty

Also: People: Barbara Fredrickson · Chris Williamson · Epictetus · Izzy Sealey · Naval Ravikant · Sam Altman · Thich Nhat Hanh · Tim Ferriss

Projects: Life Operating System

Works: Descartes' Error · Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Modern Wisdom · Ready, Fire, Aim · The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Organizations: Apple · Google · LinkedIn · OpenAI · Sony · The Art of Accomplishment · Twitter

Concepts: acceptance and commitment therapy · analysis paralysis · autonomy · broaden and build theory · dopamine · fear-setting · habenula · need behind the want · reactance · self-determination theory · stoicism · unschooling · VIEW framework · work optional

Places: Silicon Valley

Products: ChatGPT · Notion · PlayStation 5 · Spotter Studio

Only in the description or credits: Antonio Damasio · Michael Masterson

Also centred on Joe Hudson: How to Find Your Life’s Purpose

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