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How to Make Your Job Optional

2026-08-04 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 26:54 · watch on YouTube

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

Ali argues that a job is not optional because of expenses and that the real problem is a job's freedom profile of fun, flexibility, fulfilment and finances; his income versus asset equation makes work optional over time, he urges everyone to try starting a business, and he defends paying for courses and coaching as education.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Intro: making a full-time job optional, and the three parts of the video

00:00:52 — Why your job isn't already optional: expenses, cutting them to zero, universal basic income

  • ★★ Ali says a job is not already optional mainly because we have expenses such as rent, food and bills. — 00:00:52 · work optional
  • ★ One way to make a job optional, Ali says, is to get your expenses down to zero, as a child whose parents cover them does. — 00:01:49
  • ★ Ali says a universal basic income, which he hopes governments will switch to once AI takes over, is not happening any time soon, so nobody can rely on it to cover their expenses. — 00:02:47

00:03:10 — The freedom profile: fun, flexibility, fulfilment and finances, with friends' jobs as examples

  • ★★★ Ali's hot take is that the problem is not having a job but the characteristics of the job, the freedom it gives. — 00:03:11 · freedom profile
  • ★★ Ali calls the job of one of his friends' fathers, a few days a month assessing hedge funds, with travel, fine dining and loads of money, a high-freedom job. — 00:03:45

  • ★★★ Ali's freedom profile rates work on four Fs: fun, flexibility, fulfilment and finances; work that gives you a good amount of all four has a high freedom profile. — 00:04:14 · freedom profile

    “So these are the four Fs. Fun, flexibility, fulfillment, and finances.”

  • ★★ Ali says a freedom profile is no value judgement, only whether a job's balance of the four Fs is good or bad for you personally. — 00:04:14 · freedom profile

  • ★★ Ali suggests rating your job out of 10 on each of fun, flexibility, fulfilment and finances. — 00:05:00 · freedom profile
  • ★★ A friend of Ali's, a remote software developer for a big US tech company who lives in Romania, has a high freedom profile: an insane amount of money, loads of flexibility and fun from writing code. — 00:05:00 · freedom profile
  • ★★ Another friend of Ali's, a corporate lawyer working about 16 hours a day, rates his finances 10 out of 10 but his fulfilment and flexibility one out of 10: a very low freedom profile. — 00:05:29 · freedom profile

00:06:17 — Jobs versus businesses: the factory and the freelance web designer

  • ★★ The key difference between a job and a business, Ali says, is that in a job someone else is the boss and in a business you are; otherwise the work is broadly similar. — 00:06:28
  • ★★★ Even if you start a business, Ali says, some businesses have a good freedom profile for you and others a bad one. — 00:06:28 · freedom profile
  • ★★ A friend of Ali's who runs a factory says it is not very fulfilling and the finances are tough, with razor-thin margins against competition from China, Vietnam, India and Bangladesh; Ali calls a factory a poor choice of business. — 00:07:06
  • ★★ A friend of Ali's, a freelance web designer, charges between $15,000 and $50,000 a website; he taught himself to code in about six months, became active on Twitter and found clients. — 00:07:06 · Twitter
  • ★★ Even the freelance web designer faces a trade-off, Ali says: education businesses and non-profits are more fulfilling but pay less, so starting a business is no magic bullet for all four Fs on day one. — 00:07:36 · freedom profile

00:08:27 — Passive income and assets

  • ★★ Ali names three ways to earn: a job, paid for your time and work; a business, paid more for the outcomes you deliver; and passive income from assets, things that put money in your pocket such as a rented house. — 00:08:27 · passive income
  • ★★ Since you have to earn an income through some kind of job or business, Ali says, pick one whose freedom profile you like. — 00:08:27 · freedom profile

00:09:15 — Sponsor read: Trading 212

  • ★★ Ali's book Feel-Good Productivity is in bookstores around the world, translated into about 35 languages, has sold a few hundred thousand copies and pays him royalty checks each quarter. — 00:10:14 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

00:10:23 — The book as an asset and the income versus asset equation

  • ★★ Although Feel-Good Productivity took three and a half years to write, Ali says, it is an asset that puts money in his pocket every quarter, passive because it is now decorrelated from his time. — 00:10:43 · Feel-Good Productivity (book), passive income
  • ★★ Ideally, Ali says, work gives you income that pays your expenses, and some of the profit is invested in assets, which over time give you more income. — 00:10:43 · work optional
  • ★★★ Ali's income versus asset equation: the more assets you own, the more of your income comes from them rather than from work, until the job eventually becomes optional. — 00:11:28 · work optional
  • ★★ Work being optional does not mean quitting, Ali says: humans need work to flourish, and when people retire their risk of heart attack and depression rises sharply as they lose a big sense of purpose. — 00:11:51 · work optional

00:12:19 — Work you'd do anyway: Brandon Sanderson, Ali's own work, and listing what you would keep

  • ★★ Ali's other definition of retirement: what you do for work is what you would choose to do anyway, even if you did not care about the money. — 00:12:19
  • ★★ Brandon Sanderson could retire if he wanted, Ali says, but he loves writing and does it "for the vibes": work is optional for him and he does it anyway. — 00:12:41 · Brandon Sanderson, work optional
  • ★★★ Ali sets two goals: earn so much from assets that work becomes fully optional, and move the line so that as much of your work as possible is work you would do even if you did not care about the money. — 00:13:23 · work optional
  • ★★ Even if he did not care about the money, Ali would still make YouTube videos, write books and give talks and workshops, because he enjoys them and they are fun. — 00:13:48 · YouTube
  • ★★ Sponsorships are something Ali does for the money; with a zillion dollars in the bank he would not need advertising on his videos, and beyond that very little of what he does is for the money rather than for the vibes. — 00:14:32
  • ★★★ Ali suggests listing what in your job or business you would do anyway, even if retired, and what you would drop if you could, such as meetings, performance reviews, a manager, direct reports or bureaucracy. — 00:14:32

00:15:14 — Why everyone should try starting a business

  • ★★ Working for himself, Ali can hire people for the work he does not want to do, so close to all his work is what he wants to do, which is also what makes the business the most money: a virtuous cycle. — 00:15:14

  • ★★★ Ali thinks everyone should at least try to start a business, even without wanting to be an entrepreneur: an entrepreneur differs from an employee only in having many clients instead of one. — 00:15:14

    “i think everyone should at least try and start a business even if you don't want to be an entrepreneur”

  • ★★ Being a business owner is far more stressful than being an employee, Ali says: if the business crumbles, his employees still get paid and he is the one who loses out. — 00:15:58

  • ★★ Just as very few people who go electric switch back to a petrol car, Ali says, very few people whose business succeeds go back to having a job. — 00:15:58
  • ★ If he stopped wanting to run his business, Ali could see himself working at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, YouTube or Apple, but not for a local accountant or a local hospital. (hypothetical) — 00:16:38 · Google, YouTube, Apple
  • ★★ Everyone should try entrepreneurship at some point, Ali says, because you take income generation into your own hands; it is more stressful, but you learn a lot more and have more control. — 00:17:04

00:17:34 — The truth about starting a business: a 9-5 for a 24-7, trade-offs, selling

  • ★★ Starting a business trades a nine-to-five for a 24/7, Ali says, as business owners often say, though they also say they would not have it any other way. — 00:17:41
  • ★★ What Ali misses most about working as a doctor is that he could genuinely switch off from work when he got home. — 00:17:41
  • ★★ The more money you earn in any field, job or business, the more it becomes a 24/7, Ali says, because you are always thinking about it. — 00:18:11
  • ★★ We all want what we don't have, Ali says, citing a YouTube Short by Alex Hormozi: entrepreneurs wish they could go back to a nine-to-five, employees want to be entrepreneurs, solopreneurs want a team and owners of big businesses long for a smaller one; there are no solutions, only trade-offs. — 00:18:59 · Alex Hormozi, YouTube
  • ★★★ If you have not yet started a business, Ali says you are probably the sort of person who should, if only so you don't die with regret. — 00:18:59
  • ★★ Starting your own business, or giving it a go, is a very worthwhile skill, Ali says: in the worst case it doesn't work out and you go back to a job with far more skills. — 00:19:27
  • ★★★ The hard part of building a business, Ali says, is not doing the work but selling it. — 00:19:49
  • ★★ A business owner spends about 70% of their life selling, Ali says, and the skills of selling are in many ways more valuable than the skill of doing the work. — 00:20:18

00:20:44 — How to start a business: do it yourself or get help through courses, coaching and community

  • ★★★ Ali sees two paths to starting a business: do it yourself, as he did for about the first ten years of his business journey, or get help. — 00:20:44
  • ★★ For the do-it-yourself path Ali points to free business advice on YouTube: videos on his own channel and on the channels of Alex Hormozi, Dan Martell and Cody Sanchez. — 00:20:44 · Alex Hormozi, YouTube
  • ★★ Information is not the problem in starting a business, Ali says: ask Claude or ChatGPT how to start one and it will give pretty reasonable advice. — 00:21:14 · Claude, ChatGPT
  • ★★ Ali learned the guitar by watching YouTube tutorials and then signing up to the JustinGuitar online course, around 2013. — 00:21:14 · YouTube
  • ★★ Ali's Part-Time YouTuber Academy costs about a thousand dollars, offers scholarships to people who can't afford it and gives a roadmap for starting a YouTube channel. — 00:21:43 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy, YouTube
  • ★★ Lifestyle Business Academy, the most recent offer of Ali's team, is an online business school with a course component that also pairs each member with a dedicated one-on-one coach. — 00:21:43 · Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★★ A course gives you the generic instructions and a coach helps personalise them to what you are doing, Ali says. — 00:22:12
  • ★★★ Ali currently spends about $250,000 a year on coaches and mentors who help him grow his business from five million to ten million a year in revenue. — 00:22:12
  • ★★ Ali pays $60,000 to be in Taki Moore's mastermind, a community of million-dollar-plus entrepreneurs that meets every four months, most recently in Australia and before that in California. — 00:22:12
  • ★★ Once you make millions from your business, Ali says, it makes a lot of sense to spend 50 to 100 thousand on mentorship, community and coaching. — 00:22:51
  • ★★ Whether to learn alone or pay depends on your time and money, Ali says: with money and little time he should hire a guitar teacher, while a student with no money and lots of time can figure it out alone. — 00:23:18
  • ★★ Loads of people build million-dollar businesses without paying for any resources, Ali says, but even more pay for mentorship and help along the way. — 00:23:18
  • ★★ Ali knows plenty of graduates of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Stanford and MIT with first-class degrees who struggle to get jobs; that does not make university a scam, he says, but you should go in with your eyes open. — 00:23:42 · University of Oxford, University of Cambridge

00:23:43 — Is paid education a scam? Books, university, master's degrees, MBAs and online courses

  • ★★★ People who call paid courses and coaching a scam are usually fine paying for books and university, Ali says, so the objection is not the cost: these are all forms of education. — 00:24:26
  • ★★ A member of Ali's Sparkle Studios team pays tens of thousands of dollars for a part-time master's with a weekly Zoom workshop, which Ali calls basically an online course sold by a university. — 00:24:26 · Zoom
  • ★★ To become an executive at IBM, Ali says, do an MBA; but friends of his who run startups worth hundreds of millions or billions actively blacklist applicants with an MBA, seeing it as a negative signal. — 00:25:36
  • ★★ Pretty much all of Ali's friends who run online courses do it well, he says, with good courses, liberal refund policies and no scammy marketing, so calling all online education a scam throws the baby out with the bathwater. — 00:26:00

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: freedom profile · work optional

Also: People: Alex Hormozi · Brandon Sanderson · Cody Sanchez · Dan Martell · Ed Sheeran · Phil Knight · Taki Moore

Projects: Lifestyle Business Academy · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: Feel-Good Productivity (book) · JustinGuitar

Organizations: Anthropic · Apple · Google · Harvard University · IBM · Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Nike · OpenAI · Sparkle Studios · Stanford University · Twitter · University of Cambridge · University of Oxford · Yale University · YouTube

Concepts: passive income

Places: Australia · Bangladesh · California · China · India · Romania · Vietnam

Products: ChatGPT · Claude · YouTube Shorts · Zoom

Only in the description or credits: Trading 212

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