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What I Actually Do When I’m Not Making YouTube Videos

2026-09-21 · Vlog or day in the life · Ali, Anne · recording, 17:41 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship (also: YouTube, writing online and creators) · mode: Reflection and life update · tags: His own products discussed, AI, His medical past, Sponsor segment present

In a day-in-the-life vlog from his team's Hong Kong office, Ali runs Friday Firesides for Lifestyle Business Academy students, coaches with Nathan using the DR CPR method, writes his LifeNotes newsletter with the splurge and no AI, works on marketing Superfocus, and reflects on carrying the weight of a business for 14 years.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Morning before work

00:00:25 — Friday Fireside with Lifestyle Business Academy students

  • ★★ Ali runs a Monday masterclass every Monday for students of the Lifestyle Business Academy, his online business school, and on Fridays two casual Q&A sessions, the Friday Fireside, helping them with their businesses. — 00:00:25 · Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★★ In Ali's Friday Fireside group, Lifestyle Business Academy student Sherilyn has already made $100,000 in the last few months, while Carlos, who has just joined, is working out his niche. — 00:01:01 · Lifestyle Business Academy

00:01:12 — Bringing back the old vlog format

  • ★★ After looking at his old medical-school vlogs with his team, Ali is experimenting with bringing back that format: six-minute vlogs he filmed and edited himself, which kept him consistent with content as a student and doctor. (hedged) — 00:01:23
  • ★★ Ali wants vlogs of his business work, like study-with-me videos of building a landing page or Superfocus ads; if the format works, Wednesdays could be for filming to camera and Fridays for filmed work, so he does the work rather than only making content. (hedged) — 00:01:46 · Superfocus

00:02:29 — Mapping the student roadmap with Anne

  • ★★ Anne, a new member of Ali's team, maps processes to improve the Lifestyle Business Academy's operations; she and Ali want a student roadmap, a Figma page showing students where they are and their next step. — 00:02:29 · Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★★ Ali has sent his email newsletter LifeNotes almost every week since about April 2018, for eight years. — 00:03:35 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★★★ The splurge, a writing technique Ali got from a writing coach: set a 10-minute timer and, eyes closed and without the backspace key, word-vomit whatever comes to mind; he says it silences the inner critic and shows what you want to say. — 00:03:35

00:03:37 — LifeNotes and the splurge method

00:04:52 — Coaching call with Nathan and the DR CPR method

  • ★★ Nathan, a Lifestyle Business Academy coach in Australia, is its outreach specialist: he ran his own marketing agency for about 12 years and got clients through warm and cold outreach, DMs and cold emails; as far as Ali knows he has never made content, and he has little personal brand. (hedged) — 00:04:52 · Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★★ Two or three times a week Ali holds calls with Lifestyle Business Academy coaches modelled on a medical ward round, where each coach goes through the students they are struggling with. — 00:05:33 · Lifestyle Business Academy

  • ★★★ The DR CPR method (DMs, replies, calls, proposals, revenue) gives what Ali calls the five vital signs of an early-stage business, to diagnose where a student's problem lies and then prescribe a solution or an experiment. — 00:06:19

    “i think of them as the five vital signs of a business in the early stages”

  • ★★ Working on the DMs module of the Lifestyle Business Academy's new curriculum, Ali asked coach Nathan for his thoughts; the call produced a lot of new material for the curriculum. — 00:06:49 · Lifestyle Business Academy

00:07:05 — Sponsor read

00:08:35 — Why Ali stopped using AI to write; trip to the DJI store

  • ★★ Ali is very proud of a LifeNotes issue written in a few minutes before lunch; he thinks the time limit made it far better than issues he agonises over for two or three hours. — 00:08:48 · Sunday Snippets

  • ★★★ Ali now writes LifeNotes with no AI: he used to dictate it into VoicePal on walks and work it over with Claude, but since finding the splurge he prefers writing creative work himself, keeping AI dictation for non-creative work. — 00:08:48 · VoicePal, Claude, Sunday Snippets

    “I prefer the craft of writing with my fingertips on a keyboard”

  • ★ Ali's team bought a four-way DJI microphone setup with a single transmitter, for four-way podcasts and roundtables and for recording conversations over lunch. — 00:10:22

  • ★★ For marketing Superfocus, his team's app, Ali wants magnetic marketing, which effortlessly attracts ideal customers and repels people they don't want, together with sales that feel effortless. — 00:10:22 · Superfocus

00:10:24 — Marketing Superfocus

  • ★★★ Ali wants selling to feel effortless because selling is a service: sales is only educating people about your product, so if it is right for them they buy, and if not there are no hard feelings. — 00:10:51
  • ★★ Superfocus's founding member programme runs for only another couple of weeks: members get a big discount kept for as long as they subscribe, a money-back guarantee and a community that gives feedback on the app. — 00:11:17 · Superfocus

00:11:36 — Autumn Reset workshop plug

00:12:15 — One-on-one with Angus and operations mapping with Anne

  • ★★ There are countless ways to improve the Lifestyle Business Academy for students and coaches, Ali says; the discipline is finding the high-priority, high-impact ones and doing them first, which needs a map of everything. — 00:12:15 · Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★★★ Almost from the first day of the Lifestyle Business Academy, students struggled far more than Ali expected, above all with mindset, emotional and mental hurdles: they knew what to do but did not do it. — 00:12:54 · Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★★★ Ali feels he has carried the weight of a business since he was 18, for about 14 years: even his first successful business, the courses business, always had something going wrong, from late books to unhappy students or a broken website. — 00:13:34 · 6med

00:13:42 — The weight of running a business

  • ★★★ After selling his courses business, while YouTube was a side hustle beside his day job, Ali felt he was playing with house money; once he quit the day job to make the channel his main thing, it grew heavy, as every decision comes back to him. — 00:14:13
  • ★★★ Ali's team and his general manager Angus take much of the load, but the business still relies on Ali for content and the academy's curriculum; having hired mostly young, inexperienced people, it has no senior leaders to own departments, so he and Angus shoulder it. — 00:14:54 · Angus (general manager)
  • ★★ Ali hears from more experienced entrepreneurs that once a business has senior hires who can truly own something, the owner's load is taken off his shoulders and shared around. — 00:15:16
  • ★★ Ali does not mean to complain about the weight of his business: it is the life he chose, and far better than the life he would have had as a doctor. — 00:15:37
  • ★★ Wanting to be a business owner means signing up to feel the weight of the business on your shoulders, Ali says; with co-founders the load feels shared. — 00:15:37
  • ★★ A challenge of Ali's day is constant context switching between academy sessions, operations, YouTube, curriculum, Superfocus and meetings; he likes the variety but almost prefers an empty calendar to single-task on one thing for four hours. — 00:16:03 · deep work (concept), Superfocus
  • ★★ Ali finds rules for himself useful: he is not allowed to do anything after 7 p.m. that would look like work to someone else. — 00:16:43
  • ★★ For the most part Ali feels happy, fulfilled and joyful in his business, though it also feels heavy to an extent. — 00:17:30
  • ★★ Ali says he has it much better than most business owners thanks to his team, his high-margin products and his audience, which he calls unfair advantages. — 00:17:30 · unfair advantage

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: DR CPR · Lifestyle Business Academy · Nathan · Sunday Snippets · Superfocus · The Splurge

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's daughter · Angus (general manager) · Anne

Organizations: 6med · DJI

Concepts: deep work (concept) · magnetic marketing · unfair advantage

Places: Australia

Products: Claude · Figma · VoicePal

Only in the description or credits: Hong Kong

Also centred on The Splurge: My favourite writing technique #ad

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