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7 Obsessive Habits That Turned Me Into a Multi-Millionaire

2026-04-30 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 17:43 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Productivity and time (also: Business and entrepreneurship, Relationships and personal life, Work and career, Health, sleep and habits, Money and investing, Goals, purpose and life design) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: His medical past, Family, Sponsor segment present

Ali lists seven habits that made him rich in his 20s (no downtime, constant business consumption, always thinking about work, shirking other responsibilities, sacrificing health, being okay with wasting money, judging everything by his hourly rate), each with its cost, and says such habits suit a season of building, not a whole life.

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: seven habits that made him money in his 20s, all unhealthy in some way

  • ★ Ali has carried his laptop and camera bag everywhere for years; when they started dating, his wife called it his safety blanket. — 00:00:29 · Izzy Sealey

00:00:41 — Habit 1: the zero downtime habit, and his weekend rule

  • ★★ Ali's first habit, zero downtime: building his business in his 20s, he allowed himself no downtime and, in any spare moment when others would scroll Instagram or TikTok, got out his laptop to work. — 00:00:58 · Instagram, TikTok
  • ★★ Ali's friend Matthew Dicks, a writer and teacher, says that whatever you are trying to do you probably lack much free time for it, especially with a day job beside a side hustle. — 00:01:27
  • ★★★ Using the small moments of the day for your business, instead of scrolling or just enjoying a coffee, makes a real difference to how much progress you make and adds up, Ali says. — 00:01:56
  • ★★★ The cost of the zero downtime habit, Ali says, is losing presence and the chance to rest; for him and many entrepreneur friends the muscle gets so trained that switching off becomes genuinely difficult. — 00:01:56
  • ★★★ Ali's weekend rule, after he got round a plain no-work rule by calling work fun: he may do nothing on the weekend that would look like work to an impartial, reasonable, objective observer, which he finds very helpful. — 00:02:33

00:03:14 — Habit 2: constant consumption of business content

  • ★★ Ali's second habit, constant consumption: for years, whenever he could not work, he consumed business podcasts, audiobooks, YouTube videos at double speed and Kindle books, with AirPods in even while commuting or on the toilet. — 00:03:32 · Kindle, AirPods
  • ★★★ For a beginner in business, Ali says, constantly consuming advice from people who have been on the journey levels you up a lot: it drastically raised his knowledge of business, though not his skills, which require practice. — 00:03:32
  • ★★ Constantly listening through AirPods at 3x speed is not a present or mindful way to live, Ali says, and makes it easy to miss nuance and not reflect or engage deeply with what you hear. — 00:04:15 · AirPods
  • ★★★ Ali is now realising that more information does not result in more progress: for years in his 20s he thought what stopped his business growing was that he did not know enough. — 00:04:38

00:05:08 — Sponsor read: Skillshare

  • ★★★ Spending an hour thinking about the bottleneck stopping his business from growing tenfold would probably have had more impact than an hour of audiobook, Ali says. (hedged) — 00:05:08
  • ★★ Ali has recently got into drawing, wanting more things in his life that are less productive: he took a How to Draw class on Skillshare and doodles and sketches in the evenings to switch off from screens. — 00:05:42 · Skillshare

00:06:26 — Habit 3: constantly thinking about your work

  • ★★ Ali's third habit, constantly thinking about work, turned unhealthy with friends and family: often physically there but not present, he thought about work or worked on his laptop at the kitchen table instead of hanging out with his mum and grandma. — 00:06:40 · Ali Abdaal's mother, Ali Abdaal's grandmother
  • ★★★ Constantly thinking about your business often produces interesting ideas, Ali says: most people have business breakthroughs in the shower or driving to work rather than at their desk. — 00:07:10
  • ★★★ Constantly thinking about work costs your relationships; entrepreneur friends with older kids advised Ali that having a child is a good reason to learn to be present, so he tries to be truly present with his daughter. — 00:07:10
  • ★★ Ali's fourth habit, shirking other responsibilities: he started his first successful business in medical school and says he half-arsed medical school for six years because his mind was on the business. — 00:07:52

00:08:01 — Habit 4: shirking your other responsibilities

  • ★★ As a doctor, while colleagues used discretionary time for research, audits and conference presentations, Ali did the bare minimum to tick the boxes and spent the rest on his business. — 00:08:37
  • ★★★ Outlier success in any field, from entrepreneurship to sports, acting or music, shows a pattern, Ali says: it is really hard to do something at a really high standard while focusing on more than that one thing. — 00:08:37
  • ★★★ Building a business on the side of university or a career, unless you are particularly superhuman, your main thing will probably suffer, Ali says; whether to make that trade is up to you. (hedged) — 00:09:06
  • ★★ Ali is glad he made the trade of a side business over a full medical career, granting survivorship bias: had the business failed or had he wanted to return to medicine, he would be behind. — 00:09:06
  • ★★ Ali's fifth habit, the health sacrifice: deciding grocery shopping and healthy cooking took too much time, he put those hours into the business and lived off takeaways for most of his twenties. — 00:09:44

00:09:45 — Habit 5: the health sacrifice

  • ★★ Now in his 30s, Ali has a personal trainer and sees a physio to undo damage to his posture from years at a computer; he says his cardiovascular health is worse than it would have been without fatty food in his 20s. — 00:10:13
  • ★★★ Ali does not think you have to sacrifice your health to build a business: there are now many super healthy takeaway options. — 00:10:13
  • ★★ With his time again, Ali would still order takeaways but would optimise them for health instead of living off kebab rolls. — 00:10:42
  • ★★ Ali's sixth habit, being okay with wasting money: rather than spend ages researching a tech, work or studio purchase, he ordered anything below a certain price without thinking about it. — 00:10:42

00:10:53 — Habit 6: being okay with wasting money

  • ★★ Ali guesses that about 80 percent of the things he bought untested went unused; he gave them to Oxfam through a donations box, to a friend, or binned them. (hedged) — 00:11:11
  • ★★★ Being okay with wasting money makes you ruthless with your time, Ali says, but it creates waste, is probably bad for the environment and is probably not good for the soul. (hedged) — 00:11:11
  • ★★ Ali and his wife still clash about waste: she is very anti-waste, and he is still struggling to unlearn buying things wastefully. — 00:12:01 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★★ Ali's seventh habit draws on entrepreneurship advice to work out your effective or aspirational hourly rate: at $100 an hour, half an hour spent returning a $25 item costs $50 to get back $25. — 00:12:01 · money buys back time

00:12:30 — Habit 7: is this worth my time, the hourly rate

  • ★★ In his early twenties Ali worked out his effective hourly rate from his business income and a much higher aspirational rate, which gave him license to skip many things and to waste money. — 00:12:49 · money buys back time
  • ★★ Reasoning from his hourly rate, Ali hired a cleaner fairly early in his professional career. — 00:13:19 · money buys back time
  • ★★★ The cost of judging by your hourly rate, Ali says, is that you start to see everything in life through it; he tried not to apply it to friendships or relationships, but says it has to be actively fought. — 00:13:19 · money buys back time

00:14:20 — Reflection: habits for a season, and dialling up health and relationships in his 30s

  • ★★★ The seven habits let Ali build a business in medical school and grow his YouTube channel while working full time as a doctor, and made him financially free; he does not regret them. — 00:14:20 · work optional

  • ★★★ Ali has realised that habits like these are useful for a season but not for a whole life, and that the habits that help you get rich seem to conflict with those that lead to a happy, fulfilled, peaceful life. — 00:14:20

    “useful for a season, but they're not very useful when you apply them to your whole life”

  • ★★★ Never doing anything beneath your hourly rate is useful while building a business, Ali says, but running a household with a spouse and child by "is this really worth my time?" takes a relationship where you do not want it to go. — 00:14:58 · money buys back time

  • ★★★ Almost all the entrepreneurs in their 50s or 60s Ali speaks to say it is okay, even good, to take a break on weekends, since it helps creative ideas and rest. — 00:14:58
  • ★★ Ali feels his muscle of being productive and grinding on the business has been overtrained, and learning to switch it off is not as straightforward as he thought. — 00:15:27
  • ★★★ The more time, energy and focus you spend on getting rich, the more likely it is to happen, Ali says; but they are finite, so the more you spend on getting rich, the less goes to everything else. — 00:15:56
  • ★★★ We are not optimising for dollars in the bank but for peace, happiness, fulfilment and joy, Ali says; money leads to financial freedom, which can lead to time and creative freedom. — 00:16:41 · work optional, time freedom
  • ★★★ Ali calls his 20s strategically imbalanced towards making money over health and relationships; in his 30s he wants to dial down the focus on money while maintaining it, and dial up health, relationships, family and peace. — 00:17:09
  • ★★ The key takeaway of Ali's video on his 168 hours spreadsheet, about how to make time for everything, is that you cannot make time for everything. — 00:17:09

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: money buys back time · productive downtime

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's daughter · Ali Abdaal's grandmother · Ali Abdaal's mother · Izzy Sealey · Matthew Dicks

Works: Harry Potter (book series)

Organizations: Instagram · Oxfam · TikTok

Concepts: strategic imbalance · time freedom · work optional

Products: AirPods · Kindle

Also centred on productive downtime: How I Created a $3 Million Business Part Time

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