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How to Change Your Life

2025-09-12 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 28:56 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Goals, purpose and life design (also: Mindset, motivation and happiness) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Lesson from a book, His own products discussed, His medical past, Family, Sponsor segment present

Ali walks through his think day in Hong Kong: about four hours somewhere new with a wheel of life, the prompt "What would I do if I knew I couldn't fail?" with Tim Ferriss's fear-setting, journaling prompts and documented decisions, since the quality of our decisions dictates the quality of our lives.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Bill Gates's think week, the think day, and why the quality of decisions dictates the quality of life

  • ★★ Ali says Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder, spent a think week once or twice a year in a cabin in the woods with a private chef, reading and thinking, and credits many of Microsoft's best innovations to it. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali came across the think day in his friend Sahil Bloom's book The 5 Types of Wealth. — 00:00:45
  • ★★ Ali says decisions he made earlier in life let him start his business, become rich and financially free and quit his job, and led him to meet the woman who became his wife; they now have a child. — 00:01:13 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Ali swears by the right journaling or reflection prompts, ideally used outside your normal context, to decide what you want to do. — 00:01:38

  • ★★★ Ali says the quality of our decisions dictates the quality of our lives: changing your life comes down to a decision that leads to actions that change its trajectory. — 00:03:03

    “the quality of our decisions dictates the quality of our lives”

  • ★★★ Ali's think day: take about four hours out of your routine, go somewhere you have not been before, and use the time to journal, read and think until you make a decision or two that changes your life's trajectory. — 00:03:32

  • ★★ Ali holds his think day away from home or work because the brain, a prediction machine saving energy, defaults to past thinking patterns there, while a new place gives a bird's-eye view of your life. — 00:04:01

00:04:57 — Sponsor read

00:06:28 — Part one: the Wheel of Life and Ali's own scores

  • ★★★ Ali's Wheel of Life: split a circle into health (physical, mental, spiritual), work (mission, money, growth) and relationships (family, friends, romantic), add joy as a tenth category, and rate your satisfaction with each out of 10. — 00:06:28
  • ★★ Ali's Wheel of Life scores: physical health 6, mental 9, spiritual 7; mission 9, money 9.5, growth 8; romantic relationship with his wife 9, family 8, friends 6; joy about 6. — 00:07:43 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Ali's friendships need work: since having a baby he and his wife have been antisocial, and back in Hong Kong after a month in London they have not organised things with friends. — 00:08:50 · London, Hong Kong, Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ During a think day Ali keeps a rolling tally of action points on a separate piece of paper, then decides at the end which ones to take forward. — 00:09:46

00:10:11 — The free online workshop on 20 September 2025

  • ★★ Ali hosts a free two-hour online workshop of reflective journaling prompts on Saturday 20 September 2025, the last of 2025; he has hosted one every three months for about two years, attended by tens of thousands. — 00:10:11

00:10:48 — Part two: what would I do if I knew I couldn't fail, Tim Ferriss's fear-setting, and the Lifestyle Business Academy

  • ★★★ Ali calls "What would I do if I knew I couldn't fail?" the most powerful journaling prompt he knows: answer it sincerely and intuitively, because fear of failure is possibly the biggest thing holding us back. — 00:10:48
  • ★★ Ali says hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, when failure meant death, trained us to avoid failure, so we are very fearful of making changes to our lives. — 00:11:41
  • ★★ When Ali was still a doctor and people asked why he did not quit medicine for the business he seemed to enjoy more, fear of failure was what stopped him. — 00:12:17
  • ★★ For fear-setting, Ali opens Tim Ferriss's blog post from May 2017, "The most valuable exercise I do every month", and recommends reading it. — 00:13:00 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ Tim Ferriss (quoted): Tim Ferriss's fear-setting: define your nightmare, the worst that could happen if you did what you are considering; rate its permanent impact from 1 to 10 and its likelihood; then list steps to repair the damage. — 00:13:00 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ In Ali's use of fear-setting, "What would I do if I knew I couldn't fail?" is followed by "Why am I not doing it?", and the answer is always fear. — 00:13:27
  • ★★★ Ali says writing a fear down shows that in your head it is a dark monster, but on paper it becomes a problem to solve. — 00:15:05
  • ★★ Just as nobody designs a complex bridge in their head, Ali says, trying to solve a complex life issue that fear holds you back from in your head is a recipe for staying stuck: write it down. — 00:15:29
  • ★★ Ali says that on paper the worst case is usually not as bad, as permanent or as hopeless as the brain claims: the road to ruin is not binary. — 00:15:54
  • ★★ Rather than putting all your life savings into a first business, Ali suggests investing $100, then $300, then $500, gathering data, iterating and treating it as experiments. — 00:16:22
  • ★★★ For a couple of months Ali has toyed with building the Lifestyle Business Academy, an online school for entrepreneurs with some in-person elements, with the tagline "the world's best school for lifestyle entrepreneurs". — 00:18:02
  • ★★ Ali says an MBA teaches you to run someone else's corporation and an accelerator a venture-funded startup, but he knows no good online school for lifestyle businesses of six to low seven figures giving fun, fulfilment and freedom. — 00:18:31 · lifestyle business
  • ★★ If he knew he couldn't fail, Ali would go all in on the Lifestyle Business Academy; he is held back by worries that it will not work, that people will call him a get-rich-quick scammer, or that it will be unprofitable. — 00:19:34
  • ★★ Ali wants an in-person office for workshops for entrepreneurs and for his team to work in person, but fears offices are expensive, especially in Hong Kong. — 00:19:34 · Hong Kong
  • ★★ Thinking it through, Ali sees the worst case for the Lifestyle Business Academy is shutting it down, and success depends on three variables, enough students, paying enough, getting results, each with fixes such as raising prices. — 00:20:29
  • ★★ The exercise shows Ali that he had let a general fear that the Lifestyle Business Academy might not work hold him back from something he really wants to do. — 00:21:27

00:21:54 — Part three: journaling prompts

  • ★★★ Ali keeps collections of journaling prompts on his phone, picks the ones that call out to him, thinks hard about each and writes his answers in a notebook or dictates them into VoicePal. — 00:21:54 · VoicePal
  • ★★ Ali's think-day prompts include what you would do if money were no object, what you want said at your funeral, where ten years of this week's (week of 8 September 2025) actions lead, and what energised or drained you. — 00:22:32
  • ★ Asked what he would do with two years to live, Ali almost always answers that he would play more video games, plays for a week, then falls out of the habit. — 00:23:02
  • ★ From his friend Dickie Bush, Ali takes the prompt "What's the biggest bottleneck to achieving my next goal, and why aren't I working on it?" — 00:23:02
  • ★★ Ali recommends Keith Cunningham's question from The Road Less Stupid, "What backpack am I carrying that no longer serves me?", an identity, fear or grudge that once served you; it always gives him insights. — 00:23:48

00:25:29 — Part four: documenting decisions and action points, and Ali's own decisions

  • ★★★ Ali documents each decision as "Before today, I was…", "As of today, I have decided that…", "Therefore my action items are…", and a review, usually a calendar event a week later. — 00:25:29
  • ★★ Ali says a calendar meeting with yourself a week after a think day lets decisions percolate and gets action points started, since it is easy to write them down and never act. — 00:26:44
  • ★★★ Ali's business decisions from his think day include getting an office and building the Lifestyle Business Academy. — 00:27:19
  • ★★ After his think day Ali decides to make one or two hires for his team that he had been unsure about. — 00:27:19
  • ★★ To improve his physical health, Ali decides to experiment with going to the gym first thing in the morning before starting work. — 00:27:19
  • ★★★ Ali's general hack: make anything you want to do the first thing of the day; a side hustle is easier to work on before work than after, when energy is low and other things and social plans come up. — 00:27:48
  • ★★ Having not seen friends in a while, Ali plans to talk with his wife that night about putting a standing weekly social event, such as a brunch or dinner, in the calendar. — 00:28:18 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Ali says that for him and his wife, action points actually happen once they are turned into calendar events. — 00:28:18 · Izzy Sealey

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): To a viewer who has no contact with their family, the channel replies that you can change the categories of your wheel of life. — creator comment

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Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: fear-setting · Lifestyle Business Academy · think day · wheel of life

Also: People: Bill Gates · Dickie Bush · Izzy Sealey · Keith Cunningham · Sahil Bloom · Tim Ferriss

Works: The 5 Types of Wealth · The most valuable exercise I do every month · The Road Less Stupid

Organizations: Microsoft

Concepts: funeral technique · lifestyle business · standing order social event · think week · triage system

Places: Hong Kong · London

Products: VoicePal

Also centred on fear-setting: Reflecting On My Fears - Day in the Life

Also centred on Lifestyle Business Academy: How I use AI as an Entrepreneur (My complete workflow)

Also centred on think day: This Book Changed How I Think about Time

Also centred on wheel of life: How to Make Next Year The Best Year of Your Life · What does your wheel of life look like? · How to Figure Out What You Really Want in Life · Change Your Life by Journalling - 10 Powerful Questions · You're Not Behind: How to Change Your Life in 90 Days

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