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The psychology of making money

2026-03-19 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 21:39 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Money and investing (also: Business and entrepreneurship, Learning and studying) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: His own numbers, His own products discussed, His medical past, Sponsor segment present

Ali names four beliefs from school and society that hold back people who want to make money, and replaces each: money is value created times the share of it captured, not a job; sales is service; skills are self-taught; index funds and validated, service-first businesses are not very risky, and a job may be riskier.

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: four beliefs from school and society that hold back your earning

  • ★★ Ali says school and society teach four beliefs that hold back people who want to make more money and become financially free. — 00:00:00
  • ★ Ali says doing well at school, going to a fancy university and becoming a doctor taught him all the wrong things about how money is actually made. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ The first belief school and society instil, Ali says, is that having a job is the thing that makes you money. — 00:00:29

00:00:36 — Belief 1: a job is what makes money; the equation of value created times value captured

  • ★★★ Ali's equation of how money is made: money equals value created, in currency, multiplied by the percentage of that value captured; a job is one way to execute it, but not the only one. — 00:01:39

    “Money equals value created in something like dollars, so like the currency amount, multiplied by value captured as a percentage.”

  • ★★ Value, Ali says, is solving someone's problem, alleviating their pain or giving them what they want, and it counts as value because people are willing to pay for it. — 00:02:08

  • ★★ Ali says the UK's National Health Service puts a price on extending life: last time he checked, about £50,000, or about $65,000, per quality-adjusted life year (QALY). (hedged) — 00:02:38 · NHS
  • ★★ A doctor who saves a life creates a lot of value but captures only a small percentage of it, which Ali calls a very good thing: we probably don't want doctors to be like mercenaries. — 00:03:36
  • ★★★ In general, Ali says, with your own business you capture a higher percentage of the value you create than as an employee working for someone else. — 00:04:35
  • ★★ Ali finds getting customers and running a business quite fun skills to learn, generally more enjoyable than most jobs. — 00:05:04
  • ★★★ If you want to make money, Ali recommends to stop thinking of money as the result of a job and think of it as what happens when you create value. — 00:05:04
  • ★★ Other ways besides a job to create and capture value, Ali says: freelancing for several clients, your own business with a small team, a lifestyle business designed to facilitate your life, or software sold in your spare time. — 00:05:33 · lifestyle business, Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★★ Ali wishes schools did a better job of teaching that there are all sorts of ways to make money besides having a job. — 00:06:02

00:06:15 — Sponsor read for Trading 212

00:07:29 — Belief 2: sales are sleazy; sales equals service, and the book-plug test

  • ★★ The second belief school and society instil, Ali says, is that sales are sleazy: films such as The Wolf of Wall Street, with "sell me this pen", frame sales as a sleazy, adversarial thing. — 00:07:29
  • ★ Ali cites research by Dr Brad Klontz, published in the Journal of Financial Therapy, on the money scripts people are taught throughout childhood. — 00:08:07
  • ★★ Our beliefs about money, Ali says, are unconsciously shaped by what we heard as children, such as "all rich people are evil". — 00:08:37
  • ★★ Ali often sees students in his Lifestyle Business Academy, starting their first businesses, get very scared of selling because they have never tried to sell anything before. — 00:09:06 · Lifestyle Business Academy

  • ★★★ Ali's reframe for the fear of selling is that sales equals service: for the most part the economy functions because both parties win when a sale happens, so a sale is a win-win. — 00:09:35

    “this idea that sales equals service”

  • ★ Ali pays his accountants between $30,000 and $50,000 a year for his business accounting, which he calls a win-win transaction. — 00:10:24

  • ★★ When you sell something, Ali says, you are merely making an offer, not forcing anyone. — 00:10:53
  • ★ The paperback of Ali's book Feel-Good Productivity has just been released for about five to ten dollars, at Target, on Amazon and wherever books are sold. — 00:11:22 · Feel-Good Productivity (book), Amazon
  • ★★★ If you reacted negatively to Ali plugging his book, he says, you will probably struggle to make money, because you judge him for daring to make an offer. (hedged) — 00:12:04 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★ Ali says he still has some level of discomfort when it comes to sales. — 00:12:45
  • ★★ In Ali's experience the people who judge others for selling are mostly broke themselves; he has not met a single rich, successful person who judges someone for making an offer in a nice way. — 00:12:45

00:13:19 — Belief 3: skills need formal training; learning skills is self-learning

  • ★★ The third belief, Ali says, is the lesson of school and society that if you want skills you need some kind of formal training. — 00:13:45
  • ★★★ If you care about making money, Ali says, it is far more useful to embody the idea that you learn skills through self-learning: you teach yourself. — 00:14:14
  • ★★ Under Ali's video How to Get Rich on Easy Mode, which argued you get rich by learning a skill that helps another person make money, a comment called this unattainable for a regular person. — 00:14:14
  • ★★ Very few skills are gatekept by someone else, Ali says: becoming a neurosurgeon needs formal training, but that is a tiny percentage of all the skills available. — 00:15:18
  • ★★★ Ali says that for him at Cambridge and his friends at Oxford, Harvard and Yale, the biggest place they learned the skills of being a doctor was not university lectures or course material but YouTube. — 00:16:16 · University of Cambridge, YouTube, University of Oxford
  • ★★ Ali says the best medical physiology lectures in the world are not inside universities but on YouTube for free. — 00:16:16 · YouTube
  • ★★ Practical skills such as examining a shoulder or a knee, Ali says, medical students actually learn by watching YouTube videos that break them down, practising on friends and going back to the video. — 00:16:45 · YouTube
  • ★★★ High-income, high-value skills such as selling, copywriting, coding and AI automation need no MBA or university, Ali says: you can learn them yourself on weekends and evenings. — 00:17:41

00:18:07 — Belief 4: business and investing are very risky

  • ★★ The fourth belief school instils, Ali says, is that business and investing are very risky things. — 00:18:07
  • ★★★ Putting all your money into one stock a friend recommended is dumb, Ali says, but investing in an index fund spread across the top 500 US or top 5,000 world companies is not risky at all. — 00:19:06
  • ★ Ali gives 2008 as an example of the market going down by about 40% and then recovering after two years. — 00:19:06
  • ★★ Ali advises parking money in an index fund and just letting it be: over the past 100 years that has generally been a fairly safe way to grow wealth. — 00:19:35
  • ★★ Watching your portfolio and taking money out of an index fund whenever the market goes down, for fear of losing it all, is how you do lose money through investing, Ali says. — 00:19:35

  • ★★★ Building a business is not risky in itself, Ali says; building risky businesses is, such as betting 50 grand of savings on manufacturing 10,000 tote bags no one wants to buy. — 00:20:04

    “It's not that building a business is risky. It's that building risky businesses is risky.”

  • ★★★ To make starting a business not that risky, Ali advises validating the idea before putting any money into it, and perhaps starting with a service-based business that needs no investment. — 00:20:34

  • ★★★ Ali argues, tentatively, that having a job is riskier than starting your own business, because an employee is not fully in control of their own financial situation. (hedged) — 00:20:34
  • ★★ With your own business, Ali says, you generally have a lot more visibility and a lot more control over your financial situation. — 00:21:03

00:21:13 — Pointer to his investing video and sign-off

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: index fund · sales equals service · value created and value captured · YouTube

Also: People: Brad Klontz

Projects: Lifestyle Business Academy

Works: Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Journal of Financial Therapy · The Wolf of Wall Street

Organizations: Amazon · Harvard University · NHS · Target · University of Cambridge · University of Oxford · Yale University

Concepts: COVID-19 · high-income skills · lifestyle business · money scripts · Neurosurgery · Quality-adjusted life year

Places: Hong Kong

Products: Goodreads

Also centred on index fund: How to Invest for Beginners · 9 Passive Income Ideas - How I Make $27k per Week · Revealing ALL My Investments at 27 · How to Invest as a Teenager · How to Invest for Beginners (2026) · The Only Investing Video You’ll Ever Need (Start With $0)

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