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Everything's Changing - 2026 Life Update

2026-10-30 · Vlog or day in the life · Ali · recording, 37:28 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Relationships and personal life (also: Business and entrepreneurship, Health, sleep and habits, Goals, purpose and life design) · mode: Reflection and life update · tags: Family, His own products discussed, His own numbers, His medical past

In his 2026 life update Ali describes fatherhood of a 16-month-old with a full-time nanny in Hong Kong, a new boys group and a morning exercise rule, then his business: the Lifestyle Business Academy as his bid for the world's best online business school, three software apps, senior hires and a new office on a three-year lease.

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 to the 2026 life update

  • ★★ Being a dad is much more interesting than a year ago, Ali says: his daughter is now walking and toddling all over the place. — 00:00:00

00:00:15 — Fatherhood: a toddler, the nanny, the month in London, how much time to spend with a child

  • ★★ Ali says he is starting to feel much more of the joy that parents describe in having babies. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Childcare in Hong Kong is very cheap, Ali says. — 00:01:26 · Hong Kong
  • ★★★ Ali calls the childcare situation absolutely life-changing: he and Izzy have a full-time, 24/7 nanny, so they can go out on date nights once a week without much worry. — 00:01:26 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Ali and Izzy spent about a month in London over the summer without hiring any professional household or baby care. — 00:01:26 · London, Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ In London the baby, Izzy and Ali all fell ill and fires broke out in the business, and they realised how hard it is to look after a baby and work at the same time. — 00:02:05 · Izzy Sealey, London
  • ★★ Looking after a baby would not be that hard if it were all Ali did; what is hard is doing anything else too, such as work, cleaning or laundry, when the only time for it is while the baby sleeps. — 00:02:37
  • ★★ All of Ali's many parent friends in Hong Kong have nannies and childcare support, and they say a holiday without the nanny does not feel like a holiday. — 00:03:06 · Hong Kong
  • ★★★ Ali calls choosing to build a business whose income pays for 24/7 professional childcare the primary change in his life. — 00:03:06
  • ★★ After two years in Hong Kong and a month back in London, Ali and Izzy decided Hong Kong is great and have just signed another two-year lease on their flat. — 00:03:35 · Hong Kong, London, Izzy Sealey
  • ★★★ Ali's team has just signed a three-year lease on a brand-new office in Hong Kong and is in the middle of fitting it out. — 00:03:35 · Hong Kong
  • ★★ Ali and Izzy wake at seven; seven to eight is an exercise block, then the sauna; from 8:30 to 9:30 Ali has coffee with his daughter and walks her to the office, where the nanny picks her up for playgroup. — 00:04:13 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Ali now asks every parent he meets how they think about how much time to spend with a child. — 00:05:09
  • ★★★ Thanks to the way his business is set up, Ali says he does not have to work: he could be a stay-at-home dad and live off investment earnings. — 00:05:09
  • ★★ Ali does not want to spend 12 hours a day with his 16-month-old: one or two hours a day is fun, but more starts to feel not very fun. — 00:05:36
  • ★★ The general advice Ali has had from older parents: do not worry too much about how much time to spend with your child; asking the question means you will adjust over time, and as children grow you want more time with them. — 00:05:36
  • ★★ On the morning of filming his daughter cried "daddy, daddy" for the first time when Ali left her with the nanny, which made him feel guilty. — 00:06:16

  • ★★★ Honest with himself, Ali says he does not work to support the family but because work is really fun. — 00:06:43

    “I'm not doing it to support the family. I'm doing it because work is really fun.”

  • ★★★ Ali does not know what a good amount of time to spend with a baby is: whether to maximise fully present quality time, or also value quantity time, since bonding and attachment form just through being around each other. (unsure) — 00:07:12

  • ★★ Ali's Liminal pen began a few years ago when James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, gave him a pen at a writers' retreat; it was the best pen Ali had used, except that it was black. — 00:07:37 · James Clear, Atomic Habits

00:07:55 — The Liminal pen designed with Baron Fig and its origin in James Clear's pen

  • ★★ Ali asked Joey, founder and chief designer of Baron Fig, for a white version of the pen Baron Fig made with James Clear; together they designed a white, six-sided aluminium pen. — 00:08:27 · James Clear
  • ★★ The Liminal pen is engraved with the words diverge, converge and emerge, which Ali calls the general process of creativity: diverge into many ideas, then converge on a handful to explore. — 00:08:27
  • ★ On date nights Ali and Izzy often just look at photos of their baby and talk about her. — 00:08:56 · Izzy Sealey

00:09:10 — Date nights, schools and open days, more kids

  • ★★★ Ali recommends having kids, especially if you can get childcare. — 00:09:23
  • ★★ Impressed by the children he met at school open days, Ali now sees the value of school, especially Montessori, Waldorf and other alternative methods; before, he was very pro homeschooling. — 00:10:26
  • ★★ Ali would like another child sooner rather than later and wants to aim for five kids; he says his wife is the limiting factor. — 00:10:49 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Two years into Hong Kong and staying at least another three because of the office lease, Ali can see it as a long-term home: great weather, a lot to do, awesome vibes. — 00:11:17 · Hong Kong

00:11:20 — Two years in Hong Kong

  • ★★ Ali has recently set up a boys group in Hong Kong: a WhatsApp group of 12 entrepreneurs and business owners he has got to know there, who play pickleball every week and then go out for dinner. — 00:11:59 · Hong Kong, WhatsApp

00:12:01 — Friends: the boys group, couple friends, making the effort

  • ★★ Ali and Izzy are far more social than a year ago, when they had no friends in their new home: both have made a concerted effort to prioritise friends over work. — 00:12:22 · Izzy Sealey

00:13:02 — Health: a personal trainer and a non-negotiable morning exercise block

  • ★★ A couple of days before the video, Ali decided his morning exercise block would be non-negotiable. — 00:13:11
  • ★★ Travelling with a 16-month-old is a faff even with the nanny, Ali says: leaving their routine and setup often does not seem worth it, so they travel mostly for work. — 00:13:37

00:13:42 — Travel: mostly for work, and the 24-hour spas of mainland China

  • ★★ Ali calls mainland China's 24-hour spas the coolest thing about it: a 24-hour pass costs about 30 US dollars and covers hot tubs, cold plunges, saunas and a fruit and drinks buffet; a private room for the night is about 50 dollars. (hedged) — 00:14:07
  • ★ So far Ali has gone to mainland China only for the 24-hour spas, and he wants to make it a monthly trip. — 00:15:19
  • ★ Once his daughter is older, Ali would like to travel more in Southeast Asia: Japan, where they have friends, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. — 00:15:19

00:15:54 — Why he started a boys group: male loneliness and being the organising force

  • ★★ A tweet Ali read argued that a married man's male friendships fall by the wayside unless he steps up as the organising force, because other men want to hang out but no one can be bothered to organise. — 00:16:25 · Twitter
  • ★★ Ali had an AI agent research ideas for male bonding and make a plan; it landed on pickleball, an accessible sport you need not be good at to have a good time. — 00:16:52
  • ★★★ Ali is glad he got over his fear of admin to be the organising force: otherwise the boys group would not have happened, and it has added a lot of value to his life. — 00:17:21
  • ★★ If anything took Ali back to the UK it would be family and friends: his brother and his wife Lucy live there and now have two kids. — 00:17:21 · Taimur Abdaal, United Kingdom

00:17:28 — Family and friends in the UK

  • ★★ Ali has been surprised how often Hong Kong becomes a stopover for people flying elsewhere, so he has seen his entrepreneur friends remarkably often. — 00:17:58 · Hong Kong
  • ★★ Life is pretty good, Ali says: work is flexible and they have enough money to do what they want, so it is like playing on easy mode. — 00:18:27
  • ★★ Ali, 32, says that by 37 it would be nice to have a few more kids and a bigger place; they have just downsized to a three-bedroom flat in Hong Kong. — 00:18:27 · Hong Kong

00:18:31 — Five-year plan: more kids, a bigger place, better shape

  • ★★ A penthouse in Repulse Bay, Hong Kong, costs about 50,000 US dollars a month in rent, Ali says; he cannot afford that now but calls it a nice target to shoot for. — 00:19:05 · Hong Kong
  • ★★ Ali calls his life pretty pedestrian, with every day similar, but says he loves it. — 00:19:33

00:20:05 — The Academy: a crisis of purpose, the 1K Challenge and the business school

  • ★★ Ali felt stagnant at work in the first half of 2025: the only real product his business had to sell was the YouTuber Academy, which he had run since 2020. — 00:20:20 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ People want to start a YouTube channel to make money, but Ali does not think it is the best way of making money; he stopped caring about giving beginners advice about YouTube. — 00:20:20
  • ★★ For a big chunk of 2025 Ali was in a crisis of purpose at work, going through the motions because he was making money and videos had to come out. — 00:20:20
  • ★★★ Ali's mentor Olly Richards helped him work out what he actually wanted to do; Ali said he wanted to build his own business school, and Olly asked why he did not just do that. — 00:20:20 · Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★★★ Ali held back from building a business school for fear of being seen as a make-money-online scammer; he realised this was a major limiting belief he could let go of, though it took a while. — 00:20:59
  • ★★ The 1K Challenge in summer 2025, his team's first paid product teaching people to make money, went remarkably well: about 1,300 signed up, almost everyone made a first dollar, and a few made their first $1,000 online. — 00:21:23
  • ★★ Running the 1K Challenge's live sessions was so much fun that Ali went on for hours beyond the time. — 00:21:53
  • ★★★ Ali's vision for the Lifestyle Business Academy is the world's best online business school, better than a Harvard, Oxford or Cambridge MBA; since deciding on it a year ago he has woken up excited to work every morning. — 00:21:53 · Lifestyle Business Academy, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge
  • ★★★ Several hundred students have been through the Lifestyle Business Academy, some starting businesses and quitting their jobs; about 15 team members work only on it, including seven coaches and three admissions advisors. (hedged) — 00:22:37 · Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★★ Ali does live sessions with Academy students about three times a week; the team held an in-person event in London and has one coming in Austin; the Academy is now the main thing the business does. — 00:23:07 · London
  • ★★★ Ali's business has three arms: content, the academy and software. — 00:23:07

00:23:27 — The business: content, the academy and software

  • ★★ For content, Ali's team is about to hire a writer to focus on LinkedIn, Twitter and emails. — 00:23:32 · LinkedIn, Twitter
  • ★★★ Ali sees content as teaching at scale, as if he had tenure at a university and each week taught one or two lectures on helping you build a life you love: one on personal development, one on building a business. — 00:23:32
  • ★★ VoicePal, his team's small app, is doing really well; Ali calls it a ghostwriter in your pocket. — 00:24:16 · VoicePal
  • ★★ Ali has transcribed over 500,000 words on VoicePal, saving about seven days compared with typing. (hedged) — 00:24:37 · VoicePal
  • ★★ CreatorGrid is meant to help creators learn, grow and monetise; right now it is really an agentic brand-deal marketplace connecting creators and brands. — 00:24:37
  • ★★★ Superfocus, the all-in-one productivity app Ali is most excited about, now has about a thousand founding members; every day real people use it and give feedback. — 00:25:00 · Superfocus
  • ★★ In Ali's business the content is like teaching people to fish, and the software is giving them a fishing rod. — 00:25:00
  • ★★ About six months ago Ali was embarrassed by Superfocus because it was not very good; now he is genuinely proud of it. — 00:25:22 · Superfocus
  • ★★ Ali spends about three days a week on the Lifestyle Business Academy, one on Superfocus and one on content. — 00:25:22 · Superfocus, Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★★★ The academy is his business's fairly high-margin cash-flow engine, Ali says, and the software is the play for monthly recurring revenue and possibly enterprise value. — 00:25:50 · Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★★★ Ali does not want to sell the software but builds it as if to sell, since building a company to sell is a disciplined way to build any business: watch your margins, document everything, keep everything working. — 00:26:22
  • ★★★ About a year ago, as Ali started the online business school, one of his mentors asked him to rate how he felt about his work from 0 to 10, and he said six. — 00:26:22

00:26:36 — The new office: from co-working space to a three-year lease

  • ★★★ Ali told the mentor that a really nice, vibey office with filming studios for him and Izzy and the team there every day would make his work a 10 out of 10. — 00:26:50 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ With filming studios at home, the team took a small office in a co-working space on a flexible month-to-month lease for about a year; as the Lifestyle Business Academy exploded and the team grew, it became far too small. — 00:27:16 · Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★★★ That led Ali's team to commit to Hong Kong and seek an office to film and work from, where students can come and hang out and the team can host events and record podcasts. — 00:27:16 · Hong Kong
  • ★★ The team's current office, where Izzy, Ali, Owen, Nicole, Anne and others sit, is so small that they collide with each other and barely have space to walk. — 00:28:05 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ The new office is still a construction site: the walls are being built, where on the last visit nothing had been built. — 00:28:40
  • ★★ The new office will have a main area, studios for Izzy and Ali, a meeting room, a balcony and a pantry. — 00:29:45 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Once the office is ready, Ali's team will make lots of content showing the entire renovation process from start to finish. — 00:29:45
  • ★★★ Ali's business began in 2012 with classroom courses helping kids get into medical school, first in his family's living room for two and then four people, then a room at the local mosque with seven students. — 00:30:14 · 6med

00:30:36 — How it started: medical school courses in 2012, the YouTube channel, the offices

  • ★★ The medical school courses grew into classrooms of 30 and lecture theatres of 150 students, mostly in the UK but also in Singapore and the Netherlands. — 00:30:57 · 6med, United Kingdom
  • ★★★ Ali started his YouTube channel in 2017 because of that business, at first with videos on getting into medical school, as organic content marketing for it. — 00:30:57 · 6med
  • ★★★ In 2019, with his channel taking off and his interest in medical admissions gone, Ali sold SixMed to a man who became a friend and mentor; since then the business has basically been the YouTube channel. — 00:30:57 · 6med
  • ★★ Ali first filmed in his bedroom, then in the living room of the flat he shared with his friend Molly and later with his friend Sheen. — 00:31:38 · Molly Hunt
  • ★★ In 2021 Ali moved to London, where his business got its first office, in a co-working space, which he calls a great era. — 00:31:38 · London
  • ★★ The next office was a residential flat Ali shared with his brother and his brother's wife, with the team coming in every day; in Hong Kong they first worked from home. — 00:32:03 · Taimur Abdaal, Izzy Sealey, Hong Kong
  • ★★★ Ali's business has never before signed a three-year lease; it is paying around 200,000 US dollars for the office renovation, a big commitment that now feels right. (hedged) — 00:32:03
  • ★★ Ali's team now has about 25 people, about 10 of them in person. — 00:32:03
  • ★★★ As a business expands its overheads inevitably expand, Ali says, and so does the pressure on the business to keep functioning. — 00:32:52
  • ★★★ In the past, overheads at Ali's business grew while the business could not grow, and it had to say goodbye to team members and cut costs a lot. — 00:32:52

00:32:56 — What's next: overheads, senior hires, roles in the business

  • ★★ Ali says this time is different ("famous last words"): the business has two products he is very excited about, the Lifestyle Business Academy and Superfocus. — 00:33:21 · Lifestyle Business Academy, Superfocus
  • ★★★ Izzy is now in the business, roughly as CEO, general manager Angus is roughly COO, and Ali is the vibes guy, providing the vibes, filming and content, his zone of genius. — 00:33:21 · Izzy Sealey, Angus (general manager)
  • ★★★ Ali's business used to hire young, vibey people in their 20s to figure things out together; professionalising, it now wants department leaders who have done the job before and bring outside expertise. — 00:33:59
  • ★★ The new senior leaders have been insanely helpful and have taken a lot of pressure off Ali, Angus and Izzy. — 00:34:49 · Angus (general manager), Izzy Sealey
  • ★★★ With overheads and the team growing, Ali feels confident his business will make it work, and says the next life update in six to 12 months will show. — 00:34:49

00:35:12 — Thanks to viewers, jobs page and sign-off

  • ★★ Revenue from his free videos, emails, sponsors and courses now sustains a team of about 25 and an office in Hong Kong; Ali has a global audience of millions, and tens of thousands of students have taken his courses. — 00:35:14 · Hong Kong
  • ★★ It all started in 2012, when Ali needed money and asked what he was good at and whether he could make money teaching medical applicants to pass the BMAT. — 00:35:50 · BMAT
  • ★★ Ali hopes his team can move into the new office in a few weeks. (hedged) — 00:36:43

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Ali Abdaal's daughter · Hong Kong · Lifestyle Business Academy

Also: People: Angus (general manager) · Anne · Izzy Sealey · James Clear · Joey · Lucia (family, mentioned from 2022) · Molly Hunt · Nicole · Olly Richards · Owen · Sheen · Taimur Abdaal

Projects: 1K Challenge · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: Atomic Habits · BMAT

Organizations: 6med · Baron Fig · Harvard Business School · LinkedIn · Twitter · University of Cambridge · University of Oxford

Concepts: content marketing · Diverge, Converge, Emerge · going through the motions · Limiting belief · loneliness · vision board · zone of genius

Places: Austin · Australia · Bali · China · Dubai · Guangzhou · Indonesia · Japan · Karachi · London · Malaysia · Netherlands · Repulse Bay · Shenzhen · Singapore · Southeast Asia · Sydney · Thailand · United Kingdom

Products: CreatorGrid · Liminal pen · Superfocus · VoicePal · WhatsApp

Also centred on Ali Abdaal's daughter: We Had a Baby! Life Update + Reflections · 3 Surprising Things I Learned As a New Dad · 3 Surprising Things I Learned As a New Dad

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