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People feel that the more energy you give, the more drained you become.
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But it s actually not true.
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Similarly with work, it s like the more effort and engagement you give to your work, that doesn t deplete your energy.
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That actually renews your energy.
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The most draining thing in the world is coasting, looking at your clock, being like, oh God, when is this going to end?
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No one is energized by that.
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That sucks the life out of you.
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Sucks the life out of you.
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But if you re fully engaged, if you re like giving it your all, if you re showing up sincerely rather than seriously, if you re doing all the things, treating it like play, lightness at knees, having fun along the way, trying to help people out, you get home from the end of the day of work feeling more energized than when you started, even though, counterintuitively, you ve been putting a lot of energy into it.
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Welcome to the School of Greatness.
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My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur.
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And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.
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Thanks for spending some time with me today.
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Now let the class begin.
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Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness.
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Very excited about our guest.
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We have the inspiring Ali Abdaal in the house.
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My man.
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Good to see you, brother.
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Great to see you.
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It s good to see you again.
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Very excited about this because two and a half years ago, we had a conversation on the internet.
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that changed the course of your life.
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Genuinely.
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That half an hour segment of me being interviewed on your podcast two and a half years ago has literally single-handedly changed my entire life.
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It s cool to see.
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It s cool that I get to be here in person with you now.
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You re here, man.
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It s just insane.
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So here we are.
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It s fun, you ve got a book out called Feel Good Productivity, how to do more of what matters to you.
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And this book is going to help a lot of people.
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And I want to dive into it around productivity, passive income, making money online, identity, and how we can also feel our emotions while also being a productive human being.
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And not just
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you know, push our emotions aside by being overproductive constantly.
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I want to talk about all these things.
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The first thing is going into your story about deciding to leave medicine because you started as a doctor and you were building YouTube content on the side, talking about how to be productive and how to optimize your day and your routine and things you were learning in medicine and all that stuff.
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But then you started making money online and realizing, oh, I m actually making really good money online, more money online than I am as a doctor full-time.
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And so you started pulling your time down as a doctor from my memory.
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And two and a half years ago when I had you on for the first time, you were still part-time as a doctor, but making a ton of money doing the online marketing, YouTube content, all that stuff.
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And so what made you decide and know that it was time to leave medicine, leave being a full-time doctor or even a part-time doctor to go all in on the side hustle, which was also making way more money than anything that became the full-time thing.
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How did you learn to shift your identity to say, okay, this path that I ve been on for eight years,
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I m going to let go of and go all in on this other thing that I ve been doing on the side.
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Yeah.
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Let s talk about that.
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Mate, that conversation with you changed my life.
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Before that conversation, I had been feeling a lot of money anxiety and security anxiety about
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about my business and about my YouTube channel.
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And even though it was making like a load of money at the time, I thought to myself, okay, it s making money right now, but it s sort of like, I don t know, being an actor or being an athlete or something, like you ve got maybe a year or two or three to really make money.
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And then at that point you become a has-been and no one cares about you anymore.
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And like, you re sort of washed up and irrelevant.
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And all of those fears were going on inside me.
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And so I had this real risk aversion, this real fear of like, what if I, you know, if I leave medicine and go all in on this YouTube stuff and it doesn t work out, what if I ll end up broke and homeless and alone and destitute?
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And I just had this narrative running in my mind that there s something about medicine that gives you security and I need a job for security.
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And I had never really questioned that until you were questioning me about it.
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And what you asked me, you were like, you know, we were actually just running the numbers.
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You were asking me, how much are you earning in medicine?
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I was like 40 grand a year.
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And you were asking, okay, and then when you fully qualify, how much will you be earning?
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And in the UK, it s very different to the US.
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In the UK, a consultant would earn 100 grand, 100,000 pounds, $120,000, something to that effect.
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That s like full-time.
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That s like full-time expert.
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Fully expert.
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And if in your 50s, you re doing private practice and you re really good, then maybe it goes up to 300, 400.
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Right.
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Whereas in the US, it s very different.
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It s a different sort of equation.
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And I was like, how much are you making a month right now on YouTube?
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And I think you were like over 50 grand a month.
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Yeah, it was something more than that.
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I was like, wait, so monthly you re making more than in a whole year.
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if you busted your butt as a doctor in medicine.
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And this is just a side thing.
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And you were like, yeah, I never thought about that.
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And one of the things I find so interesting, I ve listened to that conversation back again so many times, is that I think a lot of us have these stories about money and about security and the need for certainty.
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A lot of these stories that are actually completely disjointed from what the reality actually is.
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The reality was I was making more money in a month than I was in a whole year working as a doctor.
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But in terms of how I felt about money and felt about security and certainty, I didn t feel that confident about it.
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And what it took was an outside perspective, you know, someone with a lot of love and a lot of care to just sort of challenge me on that for me to realize, wait a minute, actually the story I ve told myself, which is that, oh, I have all this insecurity around money.
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It s actually a bit of a bullshit story.
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And it took you challenging me to say, look, let s say you lost everything.
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Let s say no one knew who you were, but you still had all the skills that you ve got.
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How long would it take you to make a hundred grand?
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And I think I said something like, oh, I can do it within two years.
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You were like, oh, you can do it in three or six months.
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And I was like, that s probably true.
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Because in the course of building a YouTube channel, it s not just about the fact that, I don t know, I ve got followers on the internet.
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Anytime anyone does anything entrepreneurial, you just build a ton of skills in that thing.
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And so even if it doesn t work out, worst case scenario, you just get another job.
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And now you have all these skills from entrepreneurship.
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If it doesn t work out best case scenario, you just start something else and you use the skills that you ve already developed through the process.
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And that was something that you kind of challenged me on.
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Like before that conversation, I was so fearful about the money thing, about losing it all, about what if all of this comes crumbling down.
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Since that conversation, I have, I still feel weird about money.
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I think it s not a, it s like a, I don t know, a long-term thing that s hard for one conversation to change.
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But speaking to so many people, there s so many people who I ve met in real life and who ve emailed me, having listened to that conversation that we had two and a half years ago, and something in that conversation resonates with them as well.
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Like, even though maybe they re not a YouTuber, and maybe they re not making 10 times as much as they are from their side hustle as they are from their day job, I think everyone can relate to this idea of feeling insecure about money.
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Like, I don t quite have enough, and I m, oh, I should stick at my job a bit longer, because what if I get that next raise?
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What if I get that next promotion?
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because then I ll feel safe.
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And I ve spoken to people who are deca-millionaires who also feel unsafe about money.
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So there s like some kind of emotion thing here that s disjointed from reality.
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Where do you think that came from, that fear of money for you originally?
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Yeah.
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Because you were also making it.
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You weren t afraid of making it, because you were making it on the side.
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You were making more in a month than you were in a year.
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But was it a fear of, I don t want to lose this?
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Was it something conditioned you early on that you saw that you were like, oh, this is a scary thing?
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I think it was a scarcity mindset growing up.
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I think because, you know, my mom is a single mom, raised me and my brother, and her mom, like, kind of single-handedly, we moved countries.
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As, you know, immigrant families always have a bit of a scarcity approach about money that, hey, you know, money is this thing we have to hold on to.
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It doesn t grow on trees.
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You ve got to work hard for it.
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You ve got to save and all this kind of stuff.
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And so that was an attitude that really served me because it gave me my entrepreneurial spirit of wanting to make the money.
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But once I got there, there was a lot of this fear of losing it, as you said, a lot of this scarcity that, yeah, money doesn t grow on trees.
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I got very lucky with this YouTube thing.
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What if it was just luck?
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What if, I don t know, a year from now, people stop following me anymore for whatever reason because I become irrelevant?
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Oh my goodness, what if?
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What if I no longer make all this money?
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And all of this stuff around that.
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At least I could be a doctor.
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At least that s a way that I can have value and make some money and support my family and things like that.
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So what was your identity like before YouTube?
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And then what was your identity like as you started making money on the side on YouTube while you were also full time as a doctor?
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Yeah.
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So I think before YouTube,
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I think when I was growing up, my identity was very tied to academic success, because I was really good in school and I got good grades.
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But I realized after a few years, after sort of my teenage years of doing that, that I kind of wanted my identity to be different.
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So even in my school years, I was trying to make money on the side, trying to build businesses, trying to make money on the internet, passive income, all that crap.
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Then when I got to university and medical school, suddenly, I no longer had the identity of being really good in school.
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Everyone around me was really good in school and I was bang average.
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I was like middle of the class.
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I was like, wow, okay.
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I no longer have that thing that s propping up my self-worth.
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The fact that I got really good grades.
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And so I think as we all do, I tried to find other ways of diversifying my identity.
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I started a business that I finally succeeded.
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And then I was like, oh, cool.
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I m the entrepreneurial guy.
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yeah you know all these other all these other students around me some of them are really good at sports obviously they re gonna be great at sports but i ve got a business i m making money this is good when i started the youtube channel i developed i got that identity of being a youtuber when i became a doctor i got that identity of being a doctor there s something weird about the doctor identity that i clung to for so long because i think
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If someone had asked me, what do I do?
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I wouldn t have said, I m an entrepreneur, I m a YouTuber.
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I would have said, I m a medical student, I m a doctor.
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That was the noun that I was using to describe myself.
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I ve spoken to people since when people ask, what do you do?
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Some people are like, oh, I enjoy saying that I m a lawyer because that gives me, you know, people respect that.
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Even the people who work for me now don t like saying they work for a YouTuber, because there s something low status about that.
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They prefer to say, oh, I work in marketing, or, oh, I work in customer success, or something like that.
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And it s taken a long time for the people in my team to be actually comfortable with, yeah, I work for a YouTuber.
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Because they realize it s actually more interesting.
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If you say you work in marketing, no one has any follow-up questions.
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If you say you work for a YouTuber,
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Huh, that s interesting.
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What type of content?
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It creates a more interesting conversation.
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But I find it so interesting how we re all, how a lot of us are so tied to the identity of the thing that we do for work.
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And I was so tied to that identity of being a doctor.
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Yeah.
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And you like had pride in it, it gave you self-worth.
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Yeah.
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What was it like when you were thinking about leaving being a doctor and just going all in and being a YouTuber?
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Were you scared about how you would perceive your self-worth or how others would perceive your self-worth?
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I was so scared about how others would perceive it.
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I was so scared that I would be just a YouTuber.
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And I had this phrase in my mind that just a YouTuber is a terrible thing.
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I don t want to be just a YouTuber.
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I want to be the guy who s like a doctor and a YouTuber on the side because that s what gives my content value.
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I had this real fear that, hey, if I m not a doctor anymore, I m just a dude making videos in his bedroom about productivity.
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Hang on, that feels a bit like not nice, or people won t like it, or people will hate me for leaving medicine, which is an altruistic profession for the sake of making money on the internet.
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I had all these fears around it.
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How did you overcome that fear?
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I sort of broke it down and I realized, you know, after our conversation that was a big catalyst, that was when I sort of, that was, I haven t practiced a day in medicine since that conversation.
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Wow.
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Really?
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Yeah, genuinely.
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That conversation changed everything.
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Do you regret leaving and not practicing anymore?
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Absolutely not.
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Best decision I ve ever made.
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Really?
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Because as you said, I think at the time you said that, hey, what if you could, what if you devoted all your headspace to your business or to your YouTube channel or to teaching, which is the thing you want to do.
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Whereas before, even though I was only working like a few hours a week,
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Half of my headspace was like, should I go back to medicine?
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Should I not?
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Like the uncertainty, something you talk about in greatness mindset is a meaningful mission.
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In the past, I didn t really have a meaningful mission.
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I was sort of torn in multiple directions.
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But now I have a meaningful mission.
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I feel like the thing that I m here to do is to learn cool stuff, synthesize it and share it with other people in whatever format.
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And that s just like so clear for me that that s what I want to do.
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And so when all my focus goes on that, that s what like the business completely skyrocketed.
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SPEAKER_00
Where was the business, you know, two and a half years ago?
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How much were you making a year, that year prior to then, you know, how much you make today in the business?
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Yeah, so in 2020, we, I think, did just over a million in revenue.
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Is that when we had this conversation?
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We had a conversation in 2021.
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So this was, I was still doing part-time medicine and we did about a million.
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So you were making a million dollars a year and you were afraid of leaving, you know, being a doctor for five hours a week.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, I made a million dollars that year, but the year before it was like a hundred grand.
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So that was, it was so fluctuating that I was like, well, you know, I m sure this was a fluke.
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Right.
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And it was a pandemic and it s like everyone.
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So there was all these other stories I was telling myself.
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Um, but then 2021, we did 4 million, 2022, 4.6.
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This year we ll do like 5.3, something like that, which is pretty cool.
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So it s like, where do you think it d be if you didn t decide to go all in?
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If you were like, I m still going to be a doctor part-time because I really want to hold on to that.
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I like the identity.
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I like the feeling it gives me.
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I like being able to help people in medicine a few hours a week.
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Where do you think your business would be?
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I think the business would be a lot less successful than it currently is.
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Because it s like the thing, everyone finds this eventually, that the more you split your focus, the less progress you make in each individual direction.
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I still probably would have had fun, but at least for me, once I tasted the freedom of entrepreneurship, when I was working my five hours a week as a doctor, every half an hour I was thinking, why am I doing this?
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Why am I doing this?
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Why am I here?
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Why am I here?
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I could be in a really nice WeWork right now with my team.
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free coffee on tap.
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You ve got to pay for coffee when you re a doctor.
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SPEAKER_01
You know, there s a table tennis table there.
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SPEAKER_01
I could be just, you know, playing ping pong in my breaks, but instead I m going to this sort of smelly doctor s office that smells of mold to have like really unhealthy food from the hospital canteen from Burger King.
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SPEAKER_01
every half an hour, I was like, why am I here?
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Why am I here?
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Why am I here?
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And the answer was, because, well, I have to stay being a doctor, because otherwise no one s going to follow my content.
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I have to have this identity.
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SPEAKER_01
Wow.
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SPEAKER_00
So that was a story you were telling yourself.
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SPEAKER_01
That was a story I was telling myself, that I had to do this, because otherwise I m worthless if I m not a doctor and a YouTuber at the same time.
1
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
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SPEAKER_01
I m worthless as a YouTuber, and I have self-worth as a doctor plus YouTuber.
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SPEAKER_00
Where was your self-worth at on a scale of one to 10 back then, when you were working part-time as a doctor and doing YouTube, versus where is your self-worth today?
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SPEAKER_00
So two and a half years ago, scale of one to 10, 10 being I have incredible self-worth, not ego self-worth, but I feel really confident about myself, I love and accept myself, I appreciate, versus a zero being I have zero self-worth.
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SPEAKER_00
So where were you then, the week before we had that conversation, to two and a half years later today?
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SPEAKER_01
I was probably a seven then and I m probably a nine now.
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Back then I did a lot of questioning around like, why am I doing this?
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SPEAKER_01
What s the path I should really be on?
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Even after that conversation, for the first few months of going full-time on YouTube, I had this thing of like, uh-oh, have I made the right decision?
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SPEAKER_01
Have I made the wrong decision?
1
SPEAKER_01
Now it s been two and a half years and I ve so settled into that and I ve realised
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SPEAKER_01
After, you know, a lot of the journaling prompts in your book and writing your own obituary I did a few months ago as I was reading it and just made me realize that no part of me wants to practice medicine.
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SPEAKER_01
And every part of me wants to be a really good teacher, to be learning, synthesizing and sharing cool stuff.
1
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
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SPEAKER_01
And to, you know, be a family guy on the side and to take care of my health.
1
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, there s other things as well.
1
SPEAKER_00
Sure, sure.
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SPEAKER_00
That s inspiring, man, because you invested, what, six to eight years of your life becoming a doctor, right?
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SPEAKER_00
So you put a lot of time.
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SPEAKER_00
A quarter of your life was invested in this identity.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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And even before then, even in school, it was like, I knew I was going to be a doctor.
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SPEAKER_01
Thinking about it, planning for it, working on it, doing the exams, all for the sake of getting into medical school.
1
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
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SPEAKER_00
So probably half of your life was involved in thinking about it, planning about it, working hard to get into medical school, being in medical school, training as a doctor, being a doctor, and telling people, I m a doctor.
1
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
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SPEAKER_00
Your parents being like, I have these proud parents and a son who s a doctor.
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SPEAKER_00
He s made it.
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We re safe.
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We have security.
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He s going to be safe for the rest of his life.
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SPEAKER_00
And then you say, well, I m going to go be a YouTuber.
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SPEAKER_00
So half of your life was committed to this thing that then you said, I m no longer to do.
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SPEAKER_00
So I can only imagine the amount of fear that comes with letting go of a half of your life s time and work around an identity.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s a big fear.
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SPEAKER_00
So I don t want to diminish the fear that comes with that and the questioning that might come with that.
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SPEAKER_00
And a lot of people probably wouldn t have the courage, especially because they wouldn t be making the money on the side that you were making.
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SPEAKER_00
It was hard for you even though you were making money.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I was literally making a million on the side and I was still worried.
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SPEAKER_01
which kind of says that it s not about the money.
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SPEAKER_01
It s about something deeper, some kind of emotion, some kind of fear around there.
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SPEAKER_01
Because even if I was making five million on the side, that wouldn t have changed the story I was telling myself.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, because I realized the story I was telling myself was, this is all going to go away.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I have no worth.
1
SPEAKER_01
I have no worth to the market.
1
SPEAKER_01
I have no worth to others unless I m also a doctor.
1
SPEAKER_01
Because that was such a narrative.
1
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
1
SPEAKER_01
And what it took was you to challenge me on that to help break.
1
SPEAKER_00
You were unwinding a lot of it.
1
SPEAKER_00
You weren t full time.
1
SPEAKER_00
You were already trying.
1
SPEAKER_00
You were thinking about it for a year or two.
1
SPEAKER_00
So I think I just was a mirror to what your higher self really wanted to do.
1
SPEAKER_00
And you just needed that extra push.
1
SPEAKER_00
Isn t it fascinating the stories we tell ourselves around identity and how we make decisions based on identity?
1
SPEAKER_00
I think Tony Robbins says that identity is one of like the key factors of success in life.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s like choosing what identity you wanted to have.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I was at one of his events the other day and one of the things that really stuck out was the strongest force in human personality is the need to stay consistent with your identity.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so if you have the identity of being a doctor, that is the strongest force in your life is causing you to stay consistent with that.
1
SPEAKER_01
If you have the identity of being an unfit person, then the strongest force and personality is keeping you
2
SPEAKER_01
in line with that.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you change your identity, as Jean-Claude talks about, to that of a healthy person, someone who s in shape, someone who takes care of themselves, now the decisions become easier because now you re working with the identity that you actually want rather than the identity that s kind of pulling you back.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so it s really important to decide what identity we want to live in.
2
SPEAKER_00
and daily doing this.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s this guy on TikTok and Instagram who just did 365 days in the ice tub, and he films it every day.
2
SPEAKER_00
So from day one, you could see the transformation.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s incredible.
2
SPEAKER_00
From day one, he s like,
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SPEAKER_00
I m not in a good place mentally, physically.
2
SPEAKER_00
You can see he s got 30 pounds overweight.
2
SPEAKER_00
He s let life slip by.
2
SPEAKER_00
He s married, he s got kids, he s got a job, but he doesn t have a positive identity.
2
SPEAKER_00
He s just kind of showing up.
2
SPEAKER_00
And he decided to do this challenge.
2
SPEAKER_00
Literally 365 days yesterday he completed it.
2
SPEAKER_00
And every single day he shot a video of him getting into like one degree Celsius ice tub.
2
SPEAKER_00
And he would say a message every day about what s coming up for him.
2
SPEAKER_00
And he got better over time.
2
SPEAKER_00
You could see the first few months he struggled.
2
SPEAKER_00
Then he became a pro and you started to see his body transform.
2
SPEAKER_00
He started to take notice in his health, his mindset, his decisions every day.
2
SPEAKER_00
And he said, I m the guy who s got to do this every single day for 365 days.
2
SPEAKER_00
His entire life changed because of that commitment, that identity.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so we ve got to be thinking about our identity around all things, relationships, health, money, career, all that stuff.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s cool.
2
SPEAKER_00
What else did you learn that opened up from you from the event with Tony recently that stood out to you based on the reflection of the last couple of years?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, just one point before, on the iSpot thing.
2
SPEAKER_01
I really like that idea, this idea that in order to change our identity,
2
SPEAKER_01
Often all we need to do is commit to doing one small thing.
2
SPEAKER_01
For this guy, it was the ice tub.
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SPEAKER_01
It s not small.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s kind of painful.
2
SPEAKER_01
The first time I went on was over here.
2
SPEAKER_01
Painful as hell.
2
SPEAKER_01
The fingers feel like they re going to freeze off.
2
SPEAKER_01
And similarly, one of my friends and team members, Tintin, started doing cold showers recently.
2
SPEAKER_01
And he s into this sort of stuff.
2
SPEAKER_01
So he was like,
2
SPEAKER_01
Weirdly, when I start my day with a cold shower, it helps embody the identity that I am the sort of person who does hard things.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that bleeds into other areas of your life.
2
SPEAKER_01
And some people, you know, make that point of like, oh, if you want to get in shape, it s not about exercise, it s about the diet.
2
SPEAKER_01
But, you know, as Peter Attia would say, actually the exercise is the keystone habit that like all of everything else flows from that.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because if you are the sort of person that exercises every day, you are also the sort of person that starts doing these other healthy habits just to stay consistent with that identity.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so this is partly why, you know, when it comes to YouTube, I personally believe that like,
2
SPEAKER_01
posting something every week or with a blog or a newsletter, posting it every week.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s something about that where just the act of doing it every week helps you stay consistent with the identity that you want.
2
SPEAKER_01
Another big thing I learned from the Tony Robbins event was this, I think,
2
SPEAKER_01
One of the exercises, essentially this event was just a lot of journaling prompts.
2
SPEAKER_01
This is what I realized.
2
SPEAKER_01
On a meta level, all these Tony Robbins events are, or any of these personal development seminars, because I ve seen a few videos of them, I ve attended a few, it s not someone telling you how to live your life.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s someone encouraging you to do the journaling and reflection to think about how you want to live your life.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so one of the prompts, they do the thing, lights down, eyes closed, inspiring background music, and he s doing his little guided meditation.
2
SPEAKER_01
One of the most powerful ones for me was imagining, what s been the story of your life so far?
2
SPEAKER_01
And the story of my life so far is a story about dot, dot, dot.
2
SPEAKER_01
What s the story?
2
SPEAKER_01
And then from now, the story of my life will be a story about dot, dot, dot.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I realized after doing this that the story of my life so far has been a story about serving the self.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s been a story of, to use David Brooks  metaphor, climbing the first mountain.
2
SPEAKER_01
The first mountain is the mountain of achievement, of success, of freedom, of optionality, of autonomy, of pride, of fame.
2
SPEAKER_01
I want all of these things, all of these options.
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SPEAKER_01
I want all this freedom.
2
SPEAKER_01
I want to be able to quit my job.
2
SPEAKER_01
I want to have all this money so that I can, I don t know, whatever.
2
SPEAKER_01
Travel the world.
2
SPEAKER_00
Travel the world.
2
SPEAKER_00
Be flexible.
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SPEAKER_01
All that kind of stuff.
2
SPEAKER_01
The flexibility aspect of it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And David Brooks  book, The Second Mountain, is really good because what it talks about is that as you re climbing this first mountain, usually, you know, in your 20s or whatever, sometimes 30s, sometimes 40s, sometimes teens, it depends on, different people are at different stages of the process.
2
SPEAKER_01
As you re climbing the mountain, one of three things will happen.
2
SPEAKER_01
Either you ll get to the top and realize, huh,
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
2
SPEAKER_01
Or you ll get knocked off the mountain by either you having some sort of crisis or someone close to you having some sort of health crisis or like trauma or anything like that.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then you get into the valley.
2
SPEAKER_01
And in the valley, it was when you re like feeling a bit like meaningless, purposeless, aimless, and all this kind of stuff.
2
SPEAKER_01
But in the valley is when you realize that there is a second mountain.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that s not the mountain of the self, that s the mountain of service.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s the mountain of commitment, of committing yourself to a spouse, or a family, or a community, or a faith, or a philosophy.
2
SPEAKER_01
Cause.
2
SPEAKER_01
Or a cause, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
Or all of the above.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that s where you realize that actually freedom buys happiness, sure, in the short term, but it doesn t buy joy.
2
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
2
SPEAKER_01
Freedom actually kind of sucks because if you re just free, then you re like, well, I can do whatever.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then you feel that meaninglessness of like, well, so what should I do?
2
SPEAKER_01
I don t really know.
2
SPEAKER_01
But actually aligning with something you really care about, committing yourself to a spouse or family, all this, all this kind of stuff.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s the Mount, that s the second mountain.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it s a harder mountain to climb.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it s not filled with so much dopamine and so much excitement, but it s filled with like lasting joy.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I read that book this year, and this Tony Robbins event really put that metaphor for me, because I realized that my story so far was about climbing the first mountain.
2
SPEAKER_01
And what I want my story to be moving forward is to work on the second.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s beautiful, man.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think I saw some clip of Dan Bilzerian, I think, online.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I m going to paraphrase it, where he was like,
2
SPEAKER_00
It seemed fun and exciting for a while to be able to sleep with every woman in the world that you wanted to and have all this money and just gamble all the time and shoot guns and do all these cool, exciting things, but then it becomes very empty.
2
SPEAKER_00
It becomes very lonely, kind of meaningless after you do all those things.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it sounds a lot like this second mountain.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like, okay, climb the first mountain, you do these things.
2
SPEAKER_00
Sure, you can have a fun life, but is it fulfilling?
2
SPEAKER_00
And fun does not always mean meaningful.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like you said, it s like, yeah, you have freedom and I m traveling the world and doing these things.
2
SPEAKER_00
Then you ask, what is the purpose of my life?
2
SPEAKER_00
Why am I here?
2
SPEAKER_00
And what do I want to be known for or remembered for?
2
SPEAKER_00
Or who really cares about me?
2
SPEAKER_00
Who s in my corner?
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think it s kind of learning that balance of how do I enjoy and have fun in my life, but also have meaning at the same time.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it sounds more like the second mountain theory and going after that.
2
SPEAKER_00
We re both kind of in that same stage, I think.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you ve gotten engaged recently.
2
SPEAKER_01
That removes optionality from your life.
2
SPEAKER_00
It does.
2
SPEAKER_00
It removes freedom.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it s thinking of like, OK, what s our vision for the family we re creating?
2
SPEAKER_00
OK, we want to have kids one day.
2
SPEAKER_00
We want to get married, all these different things.
2
SPEAKER_00
And what will life look like for the next 10, 20 years?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of visioning in the future that far.
2
SPEAKER_00
If you re going to choose to.
2
SPEAKER_00
get married with the intention of having kids, you ve got to plan 20 years in the future, in a sense.
2
SPEAKER_00
And you have to realize, how can I continue to live a life that I want, knowing that I m going to need to be, if I want to be a great human being, or a great man, or a great person, I also want to show up fully and presently for my partner, my kids, and the responsibilities that I have from there.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it s almost shedding an old identity.
2
SPEAKER_00
and stepping into a new identity.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s similar to you.
2
SPEAKER_00
You had to shed an old identity of I m this doctor and this is what I m known for to becoming a new identity.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s interesting perspective.
2
SPEAKER_00
Are there more than two mountains in this book?
2
SPEAKER_01
No, I think there are just two.
2
SPEAKER_00
The first mountain is like chasing success and fame and accomplishment and freedom and flexibility.
2
SPEAKER_00
The second one is
2
SPEAKER_00
really going after meaning, it sounds like.
2
SPEAKER_00
Service.
2
SPEAKER_00
Meaning and service.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s my whole book about the Greatest Mindset, which is really about stepping into service.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s one of the things I like.
2
SPEAKER_01
When I read that, I sort of slowly worked my way through it over the last four months or so, to kind of doing it.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s quite a heavy book.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s like so many exercises.
2
SPEAKER_01
And initially I was like, oh, it s just a personal thought.
2
SPEAKER_01
I read it for a living.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m going to blitz through it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then I was like, oh, hang on.
2
SPEAKER_01
I need to do my GPA.
2
SPEAKER_01
OK, crap.
2
SPEAKER_01
I should take better care of my health.
2
SPEAKER_01
OK, cool.
2
SPEAKER_01
Next one, it s like, write your obituary.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s heavy.
2
SPEAKER_01
Figure out your three Ps.
2
SPEAKER_00
Have you ever done the obituary?
2
SPEAKER_00
Have you ever done that exercise?
2
SPEAKER_01
I thought about it from the context of what do I want written on my gravestone, which was I was born as a good father, good husband, a good teacher.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I had a sense.
2
SPEAKER_01
But when I wrote it out as a three-paragraph thing, there was something about writing it out in obituary style that made it land.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think also when you do the exercise matters, because if I d done the exercise when I was in my early 20s, I d have been, again, optimizing for freedom.
2
SPEAKER_01
One of the other things that Tony talks about is, and this was just a throwaway,
3
SPEAKER_01
thing that he said, he wasn t even part of the event officially, it was around like core values and he said that when he was young freedom was his core value and he realized that actually the more you focus on trying to acquire freedom the less free you are.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I was like, Oh, that s interesting.
3
SPEAKER_01
Cause that vibes exactly with my experience.
3
SPEAKER_01
I ve been chasing freedom for my entire twenties.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like the whole reason of starting this business, building the YouTube channel, all this stuff was financial freedom, time, freedom, location, freedom, all that kind of stuff.
3
SPEAKER_01
But you know, I would have like one thing on my calendar, like.
3
SPEAKER_01
few months ago I d have one thing on my calendar I d be thinking oh I m not truly free because I ve got one thing on my calendar I d be having like um you know a meeting with my team and I d be like you know I love hanging out with my team it s great vibes but I d be thinking oh the fact the fact it s on the calendar means I m not truly free really so by obsessing about freedom I actually became a lot less free
3
SPEAKER_01
Whereas what Tony Robbins was saying was like, when you spend, when you, when you, instead of, instead of focusing on the self, you focus on service and you re like, how can I serve in the best way possible?
3
SPEAKER_01
You become free as a result of taking the focus away from the self and putting it onto others.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was like, that s good.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it is.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now, for people watching or listening, thinking, this all sounds great, but how do I make money?
3
SPEAKER_00
And how do I stay productive without obsessing over hustle culture and burning myself out?
3
SPEAKER_00
How do I make money, create passive income, without burnout and feeling like I m exhausting myself?
3
SPEAKER_00
What is your thoughts on that?
3
SPEAKER_00
My thoughts on that are... Listen, before you get into that, how did you start making money, I guess, passively?
3
SPEAKER_00
Do you remember like the first hundred dollars you made?
3
SPEAKER_00
When that was?
3
SPEAKER_00
What that was?
3
SPEAKER_00
And then how has your passive income journey evolved?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so over the last 15 years of my life, I have tried so many attempts to make money on the internet.
3
SPEAKER_01
When I was 13, I was a freelance web designer trying to do web development on the side.
3
SPEAKER_01
I started my own web design studio.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was a kid in his bedroom, but I called it studio because I thought it would be more legit.
3
SPEAKER_01
I tried making video games.
3
SPEAKER_01
I learned how to program.
3
SPEAKER_01
I emailed Nintendo and Blizzard Entertainment and authors that I liked being like, hey, can I turn your content into a video game?
3
SPEAKER_01
They all said no, or they just ignored me.
3
SPEAKER_01
I built an affiliate marketing site where I was doing, there was a game StarCraft 2 that had just come out, some guy was selling a guide, there was a 50% affiliate deal on that guide, and I was like if I build a WordPress site then people, I ll SEO rank for Protoss build orders and then I ll be able to sell that affiliate site.
3
SPEAKER_01
I tried building a multi-level marketing pyramid scheme-y type
3
SPEAKER_01
website that would get people to sign up for free trials of stuff then cancel them so that they could get credit towards a games console.
3
SPEAKER_01
I tried building a forum that was helping kids learn martial arts and lockpicking so they could become spies because that was really cool when I was a teenager.
3
SPEAKER_01
I tried those six or seven business ideas when I was in school.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the one that finally succeeded was when I was 18.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was in my first year of med school.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I d lost a bunch of money because some dude scammed me out of a MacBook Air.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I lost my life savings of $1,000.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I decided I need to build a business to recoup these losses.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I still have the Evernote file from 2012 where I was like, what am I good at?
3
SPEAKER_01
I m good at teaching.
3
SPEAKER_01
I did well in the med school exams.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I know how to make websites.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was like, how do I combine these three things to make a business?
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I made a business teaching people courses on how to get into med school and made a nice website to go with it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then that business did 10K in year one, 100K in year two, 150K in year three.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that was when I, you know, initially I was doing all the work.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then I realized that the way to get passive income once I read The 4-Hour Workweek is to find a way to get other people to do that work.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think a lot of people try to go for passive income immediately.
3
SPEAKER_01
it s really hard to go for passive income immediately.
3
SPEAKER_01
Usually you have to go for very active income, and then over time you passivify it a little bit.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right.
3
SPEAKER_00
You still have to show up and do some work though.
3
SPEAKER_01
You have to do a lot of work to get the thing going.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then once it s going, it s like, okay, cool.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now you build systems and processes, operations, delegation, outsourcing, all of that fun stuff to make it a little bit more fun.
3
SPEAKER_00
Fun stuff for you, but not for everyone.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s not for everyone, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
You love that stuff.
3
SPEAKER_01
I love that stuff, but I also think part of the philosophy of field of productivity is that
3
SPEAKER_01
Whatever you re doing, find a way to make it fun.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because the things that you find fun are the things you will do for a long time.
3
SPEAKER_01
You just have to do this for a very long time.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think most people quit way too early.
3
SPEAKER_01
Most people either don t get started because they re afraid, or they get started and they quit too early.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was looking at some stats, like over 50% of podcasts don t make it past episode three.
3
SPEAKER_01
80% of podcasts don t make it past episode 20.
3
SPEAKER_01
You ve hit like your 1,000th episode or something?
3
SPEAKER_01
Over 1,500.
3
SPEAKER_01
1,500 now, bloody hell.
3
SPEAKER_01
10 years, 1,500 episodes.
3
SPEAKER_00
every single week for 10 years.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
And you just don t quit.
3
SPEAKER_00
Just consistently.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I m not the smartest and I m not the most talented and I m not the, you know, most innovative, but it s like when you try to get a little bit better every single week and do your best to get a little bit better and you do it consistently, either it s going to work or maybe after a few years you re in the wrong position.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s the wrong profession.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like learning, okay, maybe this isn t working and I haven t figured it out yet after a few years.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, cool.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but I think actually on that note, what I would say is either it works or you realize it s not working and you change your plan.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s like the thing you talk about in Meaningful Mission.
3
SPEAKER_01
When you know where you want to go, then that s like the most important thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like, where do I actually want to go?
3
SPEAKER_01
Let s say, I don t know, my goal is to make 10k a month in passive income.
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay, cool.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s a destination.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, what are the three to five chess moves that right now I think will get me there?
3
SPEAKER_01
This is something Hormozy talked about in a recent video or a recent keynote or something, and I really like this approach.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like you ve got a destination in mind and you know where you are now.
3
SPEAKER_01
That creates potential energy, because now there s where you are and where you want to be.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like going on a voyage or whatever.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, either you know how you re going to get there, or you don t know how you re going to get there.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you don t know how you re going to get there, you have an information problem.
3
SPEAKER_01
You need more information.
3
SPEAKER_01
If I was like, oh damn, jeez, I really don t know how to build more muscle, I have an information problem.
3
SPEAKER_01
I should watch a couple of videos and I ll realize very quickly, progressive overload, weightlifting three times a week.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s about it.
3
SPEAKER_00
Eating more calories and protein.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, all of that stuff It s like there are three to five things that if you don t do will probably get you to that destination If you so if you don t know the path to get to where you want to go You just ask people you read about it and you figure it out.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s the internet.
3
SPEAKER_01
Anyone can figure it out Information should not be the problem
3
SPEAKER_01
But if you know what the path is, now you can figure out, okay, what s the most effective path to get there?
3
SPEAKER_00
And so- And what s holding me back?
3
SPEAKER_00
What s like the fear, the insecurity holding me back?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly.
3
SPEAKER_00
What s the story that I m telling myself?
3
SPEAKER_01
What are the obstacles that are getting in the way of that?
3
SPEAKER_01
What are the monsters that Leviathans need to slay along the way to my journey?
3
SPEAKER_01
So if someone was like listening to this and they re like, okay, I know I want to be a podcaster like Lewis.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I know 10 years from now, I want to say I ve had 1500 episodes.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like, okay, cool.
3
SPEAKER_01
How much money do you want to make?
3
SPEAKER_01
Like, let s like really define the destination and figure out where we want to go.
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And then maybe they start off doing solo episodes just talking to their phone in vertical.
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And they do that for like a couple of months.
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And there s easier attraction.
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They re like, hmm, my plan, which was do solo episodes every single day and hope that that gets me to a School of Greatness podcast, that plan s not working.
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Let s change the plan.
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Let s try something else.
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And then they ll try something and let s try something else.
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Let s try something else.
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Let s try something else.
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And eventually, you know, this is something I think that Jeff Bezos wrote about this in one of his shareholder letters to Amazon.
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It was like, it was using the analogy of baseball.
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I don t do baseball because I m from the UK, but I understand the principles, which is that in baseball,
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You either strike out, or you hit a single, or two, or three, or four.
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The most you can get is a home run, where it s like four points.
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But in the world of entrepreneurship, sure, you might strike out a few times.
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But actually, if you hit a home run, that home run can get you a million points.
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There is no cap to how many points you can get from the home run.
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And so, if you know where you want to go, and you just keep on trying until you start making progress in that direction,
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There s like no world in which you re not going to be successful at the thing.
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It s like, you know, yeah, fine, if you re like four foot eight and you re trying to go to the NBA, then okay, fine.
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Maybe, you know, some people will tell you that, bro, your strategy is just very unlikely to get you there.
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Maybe you need to coach.
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You can still be in the arena that you re wanting to get to.
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You know, if you can t be a player, maybe you can be a coach or an owner or a manager.
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You can still play in the game.
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You just got to shift the role you re playing.
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Exactly.
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Yeah, there s a whole strategy I ve got around this, which is not in the book, but I ve sort of developed this over the last few months.
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And I was like, damn, I should have put it in the book.
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And it s GPS.
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Goal, plan, system.
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What s a goal?
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What s a plan to get there?
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And what s the system to make sure you execute on the plan?
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And I think when it comes to building a business, making passive income, starting a podcast, getting married, all of this stuff, fundamentally, you have a goal, you have a plan, i.e.
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the moves you think will get you there, and you have a system to make sure you follow it.
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And if you re struggling with any of these, it s either a problem with a goal, you don t know what you want, or it s wildly unrealistic and never gonna happen, or it s a problem with a plan, i.e.
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the strategy you re employing is actually not effective, or it s a problem with a system.
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You know where you wanna go and what you need to do, you re just not doing it.
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So let s figure out a way to help you do it.
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I was having a conversation actually right before you came here with Alexandra on my team about the idea of being an entrepreneur, passive income, hustle culture, all these different things.
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And I was telling her sometimes when people want to launch a side hustle or a side project or thinking about becoming an entrepreneur, they re really good at one skill, but the challenge is
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Being an entrepreneur, you have to learn lots of skills.
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And that s usually what holds people back.
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Okay, I really like doing graphic design.
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But now I m launching a business and I have to learn sales, customer support, refunding people.
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I need to learn how to build a website and checkout card and accounting and taxes and all these other things.
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Manage employees.
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It s like you have to learn a plethora of skills around being an entrepreneur.
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And I think sometimes it s what holds people back.
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from being consistent.
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They go in because they have one skill that they re really good at, but you have to learn so many other things that you don t enjoy.
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So how do we learn to make productivity fun and enjoyable when 90% of the time you re doing things that aren t your number one skill set, the thing you re really good at as an entrepreneur?
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Yeah.
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Oh, great question.
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Okay.
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Because you were talking about this before, but how do we really make all the unenjoyable things enjoyable in order to keep going?
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Okay, this is like the ultimate secret.
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Like the secret to all productivity is to find a way to make the process feel enjoyable.
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If you can just do that, you know, you enjoy doing podcast episodes.
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This is why you ve been able to continue doing it for literally 10 plus years and 1500 episodes.
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I enjoy making videos, making YouTube videos.
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Not every aspect of that is enjoyable.
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And certainly there are days where I don t enjoy it.
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You clearly enjoy working out more than I do, which is why you re in better shape than I am.
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You know, there s something about the process that you found a way to make fun.
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And so my whole journey of productivity has been to try and figure out what are the ways that we can make that we have to do a little bit more fun.
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And I ve pretty much boiled it down to three things.
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Play, power, and people.
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The three P s, I call them the three energizers.
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Play, power, and people.
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And if you can incorporate some or some of these into whatever you re doing, I guarantee it will be way more enjoyable.
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And you ll have more fun along the way.
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It ll be more sustainable.
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It ll be more energizing.
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You ll be more productive.
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You ll be more creative.
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You ll be less stressed.
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All of the good things will happen.
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Can you give an example of each one, what that looks like for something that you don t enjoy doing and how you incorporate these three energizers?
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Sure.
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So let s use a business example, because I know a lot of your audience wants to do business.
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When I started my first business, well, my first successful business, it was actually my eighth business, this was sort of selling real-life seminars to help people get into med school.
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We would use Eventbrite for the ticketing, and then I would have to figure out how to get that into a Google Sheet.
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And there was a lot of admin involved in Google Sheet formulas, and making sure the emails are being sent on time, and making sure that the logistics of
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ordering course booklets have been sent to the hotel in time for the event and that DHL doesn t f**k up the delivery like they often do, whatever the thing might be, a lot of boring admin work that required just sending a lot of emails and being on the phone with hotels.
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This is not my skill set.
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I do not enjoy admin.
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I don t think, I think very few people, actually there are some people I know who just love organizing things and love admin.
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I absolutely hated that stuff.
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So I was like, how do I find a way to make this a little bit more fun?
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So play, power, and people.
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Play is when we find a way to approach our work in the spirit of play.
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Unfortunately, these are only strategies that I discovered later.
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I wish I d discovered them when I was in that first business as well, because that was a bit of a grind.
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But if I were to have that situation now, how might I approach that in the spirit of play?
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Sometimes even just asking that question is enough.
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But generally, play is where one of the things that stops play from happening is when the stakes feel too high.
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So like Roger Federer is not feeling playful when he s playing Wimbledon finals, especially when he s defending his title.
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That s a high stakes situation.
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They ve done some really cool studies in rats where they, you know, rats like often play with each other and they ll measure how many times they re playing, but like, you know, biting the nape of the neck and like roaming around and doing all that cool stuff.
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And then they will inject the rats with adrenaline or cortisol, like stress hormones.
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Or they ll like stress the rat out a little bit by putting them in a cage for a bit and then taking the cage off.
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And they ll see what happens to play behavior.
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And unsurprisingly, when a rat is stressed, the play behavior gets reduced.
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People don t play when they re stressed.
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It s like when you re stressed, you re like survival mode, like what?
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Yeah, you very much narrow your range of options.
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You get laser focused and you start taking things very seriously.
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And it tends to drain your energy and it s not fun.
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So one of the big things is like, how do we make this thing feel less stressful?
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How do we lower the stakes?
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And one of my favorite phrases or mindset shifts is from the philosopher Alan Watts.
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And something that he says is, be sincere, not serious.
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And I think a lot of us, when I was doing my admin for this Google Sheets and all this, I was taking it very seriously.
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I m like, oh my God, if this email doesn t get sent out, then all these people are going to be unhappy.
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It s like,
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What s going to happen is going to happen either way.
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I can choose to approach it very seriously or I can approach it sincerely.
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Sincerely is where I recognize that this is an important thing, but I also recognize it s not the end of the world.
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I can just choose to approach it with a bit more lightness and ease.
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Because the thing is, what I ve realised about productivity is that, and life, is that a lot of our experience is about the story we tell ourselves and the thing that we focus on.
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If I m telling myself the story that this thing I have to do is enormously important, oh my god, I m on this podcast, such high stakes, there s such a big audience, oh my god, I haven t said the right thing, oh yeah.
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I go into myself, it s less fun, it s less fun for everyone.
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You re not going to be in flow.
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I m not going to be in flow.
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But generally, anyone watching this or listening to this, if you think of the times where you ve performed the best, it s probably been when you ve been in flow, when you ve been feeling good, when you ve been feeling energized.
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I mean, what about when the stakes are high, though?
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Like, when there is life or death, when you are a doctor and you ve got to deliver a baby, or something happens where you re like, I can t just be goofing around and playing the whole time.
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I ve got to actually take my time seriously and show credibility.
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Even then.
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I ve been in operating theatres quite a lot, in life and death, open heart surgery, brain surgery, obstetrics, baby mum, mum bleeding out, all that I was doing in medical school, I was doing as a doctor.
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even when life and death is in the balance, one thing that s interesting is in operating rooms, there s often upbeat background music playing.
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Because surgeons realize, and the staff working in theater realize, that actually, having background music and having that sense of lightness and ease when it comes to, even when life and death is hanging in the balance, actually helps you perform better.
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It s like surgeons are cracking jokes when they re in the middle of life-saving operations.
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They re sort of being friendly and smart, like the good surgeons.
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They have to be.
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If you re tense and rigid, you re probably more prone to make a mistake.
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I ve worked with so many surgeons who are like that, and there s a... Screaming at you, give me this and give me this, and you re like, ah, you re... It s terrible.
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And then I think this was in the checklist manifesto by Atul Gawande, talking about human factors, errors in hospitals, where the surgeon s operating on the wrong leg, but no one wants to say anything because the environment is a stress... Everyone s thinking, I m pretty sure you were meant to amputate the right leg, not the left leg.
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Oh my gosh.
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Oh, no, I can t say anything because it s the big boss.
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So it s when you have this atmosphere of like high stakes and pressure It s mental.
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This is why now there s checklists and operations where it s like Mark the leg with a sharpie.
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Are you operating on the right limb?
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Make sure the patient knows you re operating on that limb because they ll tell you if you re not
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A lot of it, there are so many instances where when we feel pressured and stressed, we actually don t perform very well and we don t raise concerns when concerns need to be raised.
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So having a light-hearted atmosphere, you know, some surgeons and scrub nurses will wear like a rainbow-colored scrub cap because it just makes- To lighten it up, yeah.
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Lighten it up.
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So even when life and death is in the balance, lightening it up is actually the way to perform better.
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Interesting.
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Okay, be sincere but not serious.
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Exactly.
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Okay.
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The other thing on play, you know, one thing I really loved, very practical thing, back when, you know, I, at the moment, I m like digital nomading around the world.
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And so I don t have a desk, but when I used to have a desk with a computer monitor on it, I had a post-it note on the bottom of my monitor.
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And on that post-it note was written, what would this look like if it were fun?
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What would this look like if it were fun?
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Anyone can do this.
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If you are ever doing anything at all, and you find yourself feeling stressed, or feeling anxious, or feeling like, the stakes are too high, or like, I want to be more productive at this thing, but it s really hard, or procrastinating, you take a step back.
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You take a breath and you ask yourself, what would this look like if it were fun?
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And usually you can come up with some pretty good answers.
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Maybe I d have some background music.
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Maybe I d lighten up a bit.
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Maybe I d, I don t know, bring some of my friends along for the ride.
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Maybe I ll just choose to take it a little bit less seriously.
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There s so much value in lowering the stakes.
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The other thing, again, on the play front, like a really cool,
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That was a really cool thing.
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There s a YouTuber called Mark Rober.
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He used to work for NASA, then he used to work at Apple, and now he does science educational videos.
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He s amazing.
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He did a really fun experiment where he was trying to teach people how to code.
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And so he got 50,000 people in his audience, different ages, different walks of life, to do this online experiment learning how to code.
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And they got this robot maze that they had to program to program a robot to go through the maze.
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And the trick was, this was an impossible task.
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There was no way to actually do this.
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But he split the groups up into two halves.
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Half the group, every time they failed, they got an error message saying, you failed.
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Please try again.
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The other half got an error message saying, you have failed.
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You have lost five points.
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You now have 195 points.
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Please try again.
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Everything else was the same.
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The puzzle was impossible.
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The only difference was that group two lost five points.
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The points are arbitrary.
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Completely made up.
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No one cares what the points are.
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They have no idea.
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But actually, if you looked at the number of attempts they made to solve the puzzle... Actually, I don t think it was an impossible puzzle.
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I think it was able to be solved.
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But if you look at the number of attempts they made, how many shots on goal they had,
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The group that lost the five points had less than half as many attempts as the group that didn t lose any points at all.
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Because they were afraid to lose more.
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They were afraid to lose points.
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And so Mark Rober gave a really good TED talk about this, where he explained this experiment.
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And he says, what if we reframed our...
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What if we reframed how we think about failure?
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What if we thought of it as a scientist does, as, oh, it s just an experiment.
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It didn t work this time, maybe it ll work next time.
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Even if it didn t work, I ll get data.
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What if we just stopped worrying so much about the concept of failure, and what if we started to treat it more like an experiment?
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That s another thing that helps you play if you are so worried about failure.
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Yes, in some context, life and death.
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Okay, fine.
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But most people listening to this are not dealing with life and death every single day.
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They re probably not realistically.
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In most contexts where it s not life and death, a fear of failure, it really holds you back from feeling good about the thing.
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Hard to deal with, easier said than done, but if we can, I really like this idea of reframing it as an experiment, as a learning opportunity.
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People know this stuff, but I think reminders often really help.
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It s such a good reminder, man.
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What about power?
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How do we use power in this situation of something you don t enjoy doing?
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Yeah.
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Okay, so we talked about how, you know, with an entrepreneurship, you might be really good at design, but you might suck at sales and marketing and copywriting and accounting and legal and HR and all of that crap that you have to deal with as an entrepreneur.
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The concept of power is that when we feel powerful in doing anything, it makes it feel good, it makes it more intrinsically motivating when we do it for the sake of doing the thing, it makes it more rewarding, makes it more energizing.
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And you notice this in video games.
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In video games, there s this sense of like an experience bar, and the more monsters you kill, the more XP you gain, and then you level up, and you get more power, you get more powerful, and then you do more things.
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You get more confident and all these different things.
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All of the different stuff.
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And so video game designers know that a video game is kind of boring.
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People just sit there and just twiddle some things around and kill fake monsters on screen.
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But one of the ways they make it fun is by helping you feel powerful.
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This is partly why all of the good stories, like Star Wars, Anakin Skywalker starts off as a kid racing drones in Tatooine.
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And then over time, you see his power gain.
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You see his journey of becoming a legend and then turning to the dark side and stuff.
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In the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson, incredible series of books, you get these characters, they start off young, they start off inexperienced, they learn, they grow, like we love following stories where someone is becoming more powerful over time.
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If they re powerful to begin with, we need some kind of challenge.
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Most stories don t start with the main character being a legend already.
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They re a bit of a dweeb, but over time, Mr. Miyagi comes along and teaches them the thing, and they learn, and Rocky doing all his training.
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We love that.
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Similarly, it works for ourselves.
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When we can experience a sense of power with what we re doing, a sense that I m getting better at the thing.
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Maybe it s like, I don t enjoy marketing right now because I suck at it.
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Let me try and read Dotcom Secrets by Russell Brunson.
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Let me try and read $100 million offers by Alex Formosi.
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Let me just try and apply some of these methods.
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Oh, hang on.
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That thing actually worked.
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I now get how to build a funnel.
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Oh, that s fun.
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That s cool.
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Like that sense of accomplishment and achievement is one of the things that makes us feel powerful, which drives us to feel intrinsically motivated to do stuff.
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And so you could, again, it s the same thing.
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You could choose to approach creating a landing page with, oh, it s not my skill set.
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Oh, God, I have to write this landing page.
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Or you could approach writing a landing page with, wow, it s not my skill set.
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I get to learn this new thing.
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Let me figure out how I can do this.
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Let me get better at the thing.
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Man, it s so good you re saying this, because for 20 years, I ve been trying to learn Spanish, on and off.
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Not like every day obsessed with it, but I m like,
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okay, I m going to pick up a Spanish learning book or try an app or get a tutor or whatever it is off and on for like 20 years since high school, right?
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Just like, and I always felt like it was hard.
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And it wasn t until about six months ago where it started to shift where Martha, my fiance was like,
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you got to look at it as an experiment more and play with it.
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Like really play the game of being fascinated by why it is that way.
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As opposed to saying, okay, in English, we have a structure of sentences and it s almost complete opposite sometimes in Spanish.
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And I m always like, why do they do that?
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Why don t they just make it the same way in English?
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So I can speak it in, I guess, in the same order, as opposed to have to flip-flop everything.
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And she goes, you got to start looking at it like a game and just saying, wow, isn t that fascinating that they do this?
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It s so interesting and so fascinating and keep it more lighthearted.
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So, she d been helping me play more and we re doing games now and we re doing flashcards and making like games with points and it s like interesting as opposed to – and I think I m learning faster now because I m not saying why is it this way?
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I m saying how – that s so fascinating that it is this way.
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Let me learn more about that.
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Let me learn why in an interesting way as opposed to a frustrating way.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s exactly the same scenario, but just changing the way that you approach it changes everything.
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Yeah.
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That s cool.
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The other cool thing about power, but part of power as well, is the idea of we feel powerful when we have control over stuff.
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This is why we enjoy decorating our bedrooms when we re kids, decorating our houses.
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We don t like our autonomy being taken away.
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We like feeling empowered in that sense.
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And so a lot of people will say, well, I don t have control over what my boss is asking me to do.
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SPEAKER_00
Okay, you might not have control over what you re having to do, but you usually have control over how you re going to do it.
5
SPEAKER_00
You know, when I was working as a doctor, I used to have to write a lot of these discharge letters.
5
SPEAKER_00
These are kind of boring, boring, boring.
5
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
5
SPEAKER_00
You have to troll something, handwritten notes, old school hospitals, no electronic record system, trolling through handwritten notes to be like, okay, well, I m trying to decipher the handwriting.
5
SPEAKER_00
You re in a doctor s office.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s tiny.
5
SPEAKER_00
The computers, there s no air conditioning because the NHS doesn t have any money.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
All of this kind of, God, okay, I m going to write this discharge letter again and again and again.
5
SPEAKER_01
You re like, I didn t become a doctor to do this.
5
SPEAKER_00
Exactly, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s not my skill set.
5
SPEAKER_00
This is what burns a lot of people out.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s like the fact that you have to do this.
5
SPEAKER_00
Obviously, someone s got to write the discharge letter.
5
SPEAKER_00
As the junior doctor, you re going to be the one doing it, obviously.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so in just taking that scenario, I realized something really cool about writing discharge letters, which is that I could just change the way I did it.
5
SPEAKER_00
I had no control over what I had to do.
5
SPEAKER_00
Someone s got to write the discharge letter.
5
SPEAKER_00
But I had control over how I did it.
5
SPEAKER_00
So what I started to do is I brought a little Bluetooth speaker into the office, taped it to the ceiling with like a little string type thing.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I would just play the Pirates of the Caribbean or Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter movie soundtracks in the background while doing it.
5
SPEAKER_00
And initially I was like, oh, isn t this unprofessional?
5
SPEAKER_00
And then I realized, who cares?
5
SPEAKER_00
Forgiveness rather than permission.
5
SPEAKER_00
The seniors would come in and then they d be like, oh, that s a cool idea.
5
SPEAKER_00
And they d walk out again.
5
SPEAKER_00
No one cared.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s like, it s fine.
5
SPEAKER_00
But just having concerning hobbits from the Lord of the Rings playing in the background while I m writing a discharge letter makes it feel like I m a hobbit on an adventure in the shire.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that was cool.
5
SPEAKER_00
The other thing with discharge letters is I found a way to inject a little bit of humor into them.
5
SPEAKER_00
So these are technically legal documents that could be called on in court by a coroner or anything like that.
5
SPEAKER_00
But there s no law saying that you have to be like boring with it.
5
SPEAKER_00
So occasionally I d say things like, you know, I knew that the patient supported Manchester United, the football team.
5
SPEAKER_00
So I d say, you know, at the end of the note, because these are discharge letters that you write to the doctor, their general practitioner on the other end.
5
SPEAKER_00
Say, P.S., while we re delighted that Mr. Jones made a speedy recovery, we wish him commiserations for Chelsea s recent performance in the exam.
5
SPEAKER_00
Something basic like that.
5
SPEAKER_01
But you know that at some moment, someone might read that, and they might get a giggle.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, exactly.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you re like, OK, how can I make someone else s day when they read this?
5
SPEAKER_00
That s the one.
5
SPEAKER_00
And actually, that point of how do I make someone s day.
5
SPEAKER_00
So there s kind of two things here.
5
SPEAKER_00
One is it makes it fun for me, because I ve created this challenge for myself.
5
SPEAKER_00
Challenge is another one of those things that makes stuff a bit more fun.
5
SPEAKER_00
Even if the thing is boring, if you can create some sort of arbitrary challenge, like, let me do this faster.
5
SPEAKER_00
Let me do this slower.
5
SPEAKER_00
Let me find a shortcut.
5
SPEAKER_00
Let me challenge myself to dot, dot, dot.
5
SPEAKER_00
That makes it way more fun.
5
SPEAKER_00
But also, if you can find a way to connect it to someone else, this is the third P, people.
5
SPEAKER_00
If you can find a way to help someone through the thing, even if it s in a really tiny way, whether it s making them laugh or whether it s in the middle of seeing a bunch of patients, you re spending 30 seconds just asking the nurses, can I make you a cup of tea?
5
SPEAKER_00
That makes their day.
5
SPEAKER_00
You feel the help is high because you feel good.
5
SPEAKER_00
Both parties feel energized.
5
SPEAKER_00
Life is good.
5
SPEAKER_00
You can always take 30 seconds to make someone a cup of tea.
5
SPEAKER_00
One of my favorite stories from when I was doing interviews for the book, there s a guy called Matthew Dix, who s now an author and he s written some amazing books.
5
SPEAKER_00
But back in the day, in his 20s, he used to work at McDonald s.
5
SPEAKER_00
And he hated working at McDonald s.
5
SPEAKER_00
It was grim.
5
SPEAKER_00
He was working in Burger Flipper initially, and then he graduated to the drive-thru.
5
SPEAKER_00
And one thing he said, he was like, yeah, working at McDonald s was really boring, but I found a way to challenge myself to make it fun.
5
SPEAKER_00
So what he would do is he would try and upsell a different sauce every day of the week.
5
SPEAKER_00
So Monday was barbecue sauce day.
5
SPEAKER_00
And every time someone would come through the drive-thru, would you like fries with that?
5
SPEAKER_00
I m like, yeah, no.
5
SPEAKER_00
How about some barbecue sauce?
5
SPEAKER_00
And they d be like, huh.
5
SPEAKER_00
No, I m good, thanks.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then he d be like, you know, it s a really good barbecue sauce.
5
SPEAKER_00
You know, the last customer I had really loved the barbecue sauce.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then they sort of crack up.
5
SPEAKER_00
They were like, OK, fine.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, give me the barbecue.
5
SPEAKER_00
Why not?
5
SPEAKER_00
Break the pattern.
5
SPEAKER_00
People are not used to being asked, being upsold on a barbecue sauce when they re in a dull drive-thru.
5
SPEAKER_00
It made it fun for the customer.
5
SPEAKER_00
It made it fun for him.
5
SPEAKER_00
And he said that it just transformed the energy that he got from his days, purely because he now gave himself a little bit of a challenge to make something that was boring become more fun.
5
SPEAKER_01
And yeah, whether you call it a challenge or some type of game.
5
SPEAKER_01
Every day, how can you make what you re doing a game?
5
SPEAKER_01
I remember, man, I ve had some boring, I guess, jobs before I got into this.
5
SPEAKER_01
I was a truck driver for six hours a day.
5
SPEAKER_00
Oh, no way.
5
SPEAKER_00
I didn t know that.
5
SPEAKER_01
Driving from Columbus, Ohio to Cincinnati and back every day, driving car parts in the back of a truck every day, unloading it, putting in new car parts from Cincinnati, driving it back in rush hour.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I remember this was a time when there was no Bluetooth.
5
SPEAKER_01
Bluetooth was still like,
6
SPEAKER_00
I didn t have a Bluetooth capability.
6
SPEAKER_00
It was like a CD player or something was in there.
6
SPEAKER_00
And it was like 2007 maybe, 2006, 2007.
6
SPEAKER_00
And this truck was like a massive U-Haul.
6
SPEAKER_00
So it was like the biggest U-Haul truck you could get before needing a truck license, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
So it wasn t a semi, but it was a big truck.
6
SPEAKER_00
You have to climb up multiple feet to get up in there.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s like a bucket seat.
6
SPEAKER_00
It just kind of bounces.
6
SPEAKER_00
And it only went 55 miles an hour, the truck.
6
SPEAKER_00
The pedal, when you put it all the way to the end, that s as fast as it would go.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I was in the right lane the entire time.
6
SPEAKER_00
I guess that d be the left lane in the UK.
6
SPEAKER_00
But I was in the slow lane the entire time for six hours a day.
6
SPEAKER_00
watching people go by me.
6
SPEAKER_00
And in Ohio at this location, it s like cornfields.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s all flat cornfields.
6
SPEAKER_00
So you re not looking at anything really like mountains and big cities.
6
SPEAKER_00
You re just driving through corn.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I remember after a week of this, I go, I m going to drive myself crazy if I don t find a way to have like some type of game or challenge from this.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I asked a friend, and at the time I was really trying to learn salsa dancing.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I asked a friend to burn me a CD of the greatest hits of like the best salsa songs.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I started listening to the CD on repeat and imagining myself as I was learning salsa dancing, I would imagine myself dancing to the songs in my mind while I was driving.
6
SPEAKER_00
And that got me through these like long days.
6
SPEAKER_00
And it made it more interesting and fun to the point where I started to get excited about going to work because I was like, okay, even though I m going to drive six hours a day,
6
SPEAKER_00
I m going to listen to this music.
6
SPEAKER_00
I m going to practice salsa dancing in my mind.
6
SPEAKER_00
And it was just a game.
6
SPEAKER_00
It was a game.
6
SPEAKER_00
I also did it for three months.
6
SPEAKER_00
I was also, my aunt was a, what s it called when you work, when you re like a pharmacist, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
She was like a pharmacist specialist.
6
SPEAKER_00
And she had me essentially like filling, what is this?
6
SPEAKER_00
Filling medicine and filling like, you know, pills, I guess, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
For different things.
6
SPEAKER_00
But it was more like generic stuff.
6
SPEAKER_00
So it was like, okay, I need you to put like 20 in these, like a hundred bottles of whatever, you know, maybe it was Tylenol or something.
6
SPEAKER_00
Filling it.
6
SPEAKER_00
And this was like very boring.
6
SPEAKER_00
It was like you re sitting in a small room, probably like a doctor s office, small room, bad lighting, and I was just like, okay.
6
SPEAKER_00
But I remember thinking like, I m gonna create a game, I m gonna see how fast I can do this, and all these different things, and celebrate after I do 20 bottles.
6
SPEAKER_00
So it was like creating some type of game and scenario around that, and that made it more enjoyable.
6
SPEAKER_00
Interesting, I love this.
6
SPEAKER_00
Play, power, and people.
6
SPEAKER_00
I really like this concept of how can I make someone else s day with this activity that I m doing.
6
SPEAKER_00
So that s a really cool one right there.
6
SPEAKER_01
How can I find a way to help someone else doing this thing?
6
SPEAKER_01
We ve all had that feeling of, you know, there are some people that you hang out with who, you know, you leave feeling really energized.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think you re one of those people.
6
SPEAKER_01
I always leave our conversations feeling energized.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m like, yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
But we also probably know people that you leave conversations with them feeling a bit drained.
6
SPEAKER_01
And there s this concept that psychologists call relational energy, which is exactly this, the sort of energy you get from relationships.
6
SPEAKER_01
And they ve done studies in organizations where they ll do a relational energy map where they ll ask everyone, who are the people that energize you and who are the people that drain you?
6
SPEAKER_01
And they ll do this for the whole organization.
6
SPEAKER_01
And they will find that there are usually a handful of people that are super energizers, that everyone loves them, people meet with them, and they get energized as a result.
6
SPEAKER_01
And they also find that these people have higher ratings, they perform better, they re more productive, they re more creative, they re less stressed, they re happier, they re getting more promotions, getting more money.
6
SPEAKER_01
All of the good things happen to the people who are energizers.
6
SPEAKER_01
Whereas the people who are drainers in an organization, no one really wants to talk to them.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s like, no one really wants to promote them.
6
SPEAKER_01
They re a bit of a drain on energy.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so what we can take away from this is, A, we should strive to become energizers ourself.
6
SPEAKER_01
If someone is sharing good news with us, we respond in an active and a constructive way, like, oh my goodness, that s so good, tell me more about that.
6
SPEAKER_01
rather than, oh, cool.
6
SPEAKER_01
You know, there s stuff that we can do to make ourselves a little bit more energizing for others.
6
SPEAKER_01
But the other thing that it does is that it tells us that, you know,
6
SPEAKER_01
the profound power of being able to try and find people who energize us, who lift up our energy.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, surrounding yourself with those individuals.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
And then some people are like, oh, but like every single person in my team is a total, is totally miserable.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s like, okay, find a way to get outside of that group.
6
SPEAKER_01
Find a way to bring the energy yourself.
6
SPEAKER_01
Generally, if you re the one bringing energy and helping other people, they will respond in kind.
6
SPEAKER_01
Most people have good intentions most of the time.
6
SPEAKER_01
And often what it takes is one person to be the person to be like,
6
SPEAKER_01
Hey guys, instead of going to the local cafeteria for lunch, should we just go to this other coffee shop and we can have a bit more of a lively conversation?
6
SPEAKER_01
Or should we go for a walk in the park?
6
SPEAKER_01
And there are things that you can do to add more energy to your interactions.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it s kind of weird.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s like, one of the nice things about energy, and I think this is a misconception people have, people feel that the more energy you give, the more drained you become.
6
SPEAKER_01
but it s actually not true.
6
SPEAKER_01
Similarly with work, it s like the more effort and engagement you give to your work, that doesn t deplete your energy.
6
SPEAKER_01
That actually renews your energy.
6
SPEAKER_01
The most draining thing in the world is coasting, looking at your clock, being like, oh God, when is this gonna end?
6
SPEAKER_01
No one is energized by that.
6
SPEAKER_00
No one- Sucks the life out of you.
6
SPEAKER_01
Sucks the life out of you.
6
SPEAKER_01
But if you re fully engaged, if you re like giving it your all, if you re showing up sincerely rather than seriously, if you re doing all the things, treating it like play, lightness at knees, having fun along the way, trying to help people out, you get home from the end of the day of work feeling more energized than when you started.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
6
SPEAKER_01
Even though, counterintuitively, you ve been putting a lot of energy into it.
6
SPEAKER_00
That was a challenge for me in school growing up.
6
SPEAKER_00
Every day I was looking at the clock being like six hours until the end of the day like just struggling.
6
SPEAKER_00
It was hard for me to find, you know, play in just reading a book that I struggle to reading a book or memorizing or things like that.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so I procrastinate a lot.
6
SPEAKER_00
I procrastinate to the very last minute to get something done.
6
SPEAKER_00
I bet you were the person that just got everything done early.
6
SPEAKER_01
Oh no, I wish.
6
SPEAKER_01
I would also leave everything to the last minute.
6
SPEAKER_01
I didn t know these strategies back in the day.
6
SPEAKER_01
Right, right.
6
SPEAKER_00
But procrastination is a massive struggle for so many people.
6
SPEAKER_00
Why do you think people procrastinate so much?
6
SPEAKER_00
And what are three key things people can do to overcome procrastination?
6
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so procrastination, if we really boil it down, is usually a problem with getting started.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think people think of procrastination as like, I m leaving things to the last minute or like whatever.
6
SPEAKER_01
But usually people find that once you get started with something, generally you can keep it going.
6
SPEAKER_01
This is the law of inertia.
6
SPEAKER_01
It takes a bit of a push to get started once you re there.
6
SPEAKER_01
You know, for me, once I m at the gym and I ve lifted the first weight, it s like I ll complete most of the workout.
6
SPEAKER_01
I might skip the final set just because I m a bit soft.
6
SPEAKER_01
But it s getting to the gym that s the hardest part.
6
SPEAKER_01
So if we recognize that procrastination is a problem with getting started, then all we need to do is optimize for how do I start, not how do I finish.
6
SPEAKER_01
Because the finish will take care of itself, as it were.
6
SPEAKER_01
So how do we optimize for getting started?
6
SPEAKER_01
There are basically three things.
6
SPEAKER_01
See our top three so usually the first blocker that causes us to procrastinate is Uncertainty if you don t know what you actually need to do
6
SPEAKER_01
So in students, for example, I ll hear people be like, oh, today I m going to study chemistry.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s like, okay, but what does that mean?
6
SPEAKER_01
What does study chemistry mean?
6
SPEAKER_01
And they don t know.
6
SPEAKER_01
They re like, oh, I m just going to study chemistry.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s never going to happen.
6
SPEAKER_01
If your plan is to study chemistry, it s never going to happen because you don t know what it actually means.
6
SPEAKER_01
Does it mean I m going to read the textbook?
6
SPEAKER_01
Does it mean I m going to do a practice test?
6
SPEAKER_01
Does it mean I m going to do questions eight to 15 of the work that the teacher gave me?
6
SPEAKER_01
Does it mean I m working on this assignment or that or reading about this?
6
SPEAKER_01
unless you know specifically what you re going to do, it s very hard to actually do the thing.
6
SPEAKER_01
There s like, when I try and go to the gym without a plan, now I have to spend half my brain power figuring out what am I going to do?
6
SPEAKER_01
And then I m like, oh, this is just too much friction.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m just not going to bother.
6
SPEAKER_01
Like there is always an activation energy to doing anything and having clarity on what the thing is actually is.
6
SPEAKER_01
And crucially, when you re actually going to do it makes an enormous difference.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
6
SPEAKER_00
So getting clarity first.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
Clarity is like one of the big, um,
6
SPEAKER_01
one of the big solutions to procrastination.
6
SPEAKER_01
What are you doing and when are you going to do it?
6
SPEAKER_01
I have a little journaling reminder every morning.
6
SPEAKER_01
I fill out this thing.
6
SPEAKER_01
I call it the AM5 because it s sort of like 5 a.m.
6
SPEAKER_01
But like AM5 means the first five minutes of the morning when I sit down to work, it asks me three questions.
6
SPEAKER_01
It asks me, what is the diet plan for today?
6
SPEAKER_01
This is the only thing I ve started doing because I realized it s super helpful.
6
SPEAKER_01
What s the diet plan for today?
6
SPEAKER_01
Because I realized if I think about it in the morning for 30 seconds, I ll get my protein and I ll get the calories and I ll eat healthily.
6
SPEAKER_01
But if I don t think about it,
6
SPEAKER_01
Now the first meal I have is lunch and now I have to decide I want to decide in the morning protein shake for lunch mid-morning snack protein shake again and then Chicken breast and veg for dinner or whatever thing just spending 20 seconds making a plan The next question is what s the exercise plan for today where I m like, oh, that s a good question.
6
SPEAKER_01
Um, okay, cool So I think yeah, so today s workout day.
6
SPEAKER_01
So i m going to do a workout.
6
SPEAKER_01
Um straight after my next zoom call And the final question is is it in the calendar?
6
SPEAKER_01
and then i m like Good point Let me just put it in the calendar
6
SPEAKER_01
Because often all it takes is for us to know what we re doing and when we re doing it for us to just not procrastinate.
6
SPEAKER_01
A lot of people are like, oh, I don t have time to go to the gym.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s like, it s not in the calendar.
6
SPEAKER_00
You didn t schedule it.
6
SPEAKER_01
If it s not scheduled, it s not going to happen.
6
SPEAKER_01
Schedule the bloody thing.
6
SPEAKER_01
Treat it like you were at a work appointment.
6
SPEAKER_01
And automatically, you solve about 50% of people s procrastination problems by just putting it in the calendar.
6
SPEAKER_01
So that s clarity.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s where you get clarity.
6
SPEAKER_00
There you go.
6
SPEAKER_00
OK, cool.
6
SPEAKER_00
So once you get clarity and you answer those three questions, is there anything else that holds us back from procrastinating?
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the other big thing is fear.
6
SPEAKER_01
Fear is a massive one.
6
SPEAKER_01
The fear of starting, the fear of continuing.
7
SPEAKER_01
the fear of failure, the fear of rejection.
7
SPEAKER_00
This is what I hear from a lot of people.
7
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot of smart people in my community.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I used to do a lot of webinars and coaching and do Q&A sessions, and I would hear this all the time.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, these are individuals that are extremely intelligent, super smart, got, you know, master s degrees, PhDs, whatever it might be.
7
SPEAKER_00
They ve been working 10, 15, 20 years, and they ve got a lot of skills, a lot of talent.
7
SPEAKER_00
And they re like, oh, I ve got these three or four different big ideas, these dreams I ve had that I really want to get started on, or I really want to launch this book.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I ll say, how long have you been thinking about this?
7
SPEAKER_00
And they ll say, like, seven years.
7
SPEAKER_00
Like, I ve just been thinking about this book for seven years.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I m like, seven years?
7
SPEAKER_00
I m like, how much time and energy is that taking you from actually just getting started on it, or creating a game plan, finding out when you re going to do it, how you re going to do it, and when you want to complete it by?
7
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t have to be perfect.
7
SPEAKER_00
But one of the biggest things that people have is this fear, like you talked about.
7
SPEAKER_00
Why is fear such a huge procrastination thing that holds people back?
7
SPEAKER_01
Oh, man.
7
SPEAKER_01
Like, fear is everything.
7
SPEAKER_01
I spent seven years thinking about starting a YouTube channel before I started a YouTube channel.
7
SPEAKER_01
2010 to 2017.
7
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
7
SPEAKER_01
Our brain is a survival machine.
7
SPEAKER_01
We re so attuned to see any kind of threat as being like a terrible thing that could impact our survival.
7
SPEAKER_01
You know, this is part of the brain called the amygdala, which is sort of the fear center of the brain.
7
SPEAKER_01
And a lot of the time, you know, back in the day, we were afraid of the lion.
7
SPEAKER_01
Obviously the lion s going to kill us.
7
SPEAKER_01
But back in the day, we were also afraid of social disapproval, because if you lose the respect of the alpha male in the tribe, you re going to get kicked out of the tribe.
7
SPEAKER_01
And then that s going to be terrible for your survival because the lion s going to kill you.
7
SPEAKER_01
So you have to kind of go around with these tribes and stuff.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so the brain, the mind became very attuned to viewing any decrease in our social status as being a profound threat to our survival.
7
SPEAKER_01
And usually when people are scared of doing something, it s not because the thing is going to kill them.
7
SPEAKER_01
People are usually not, oh man, I ve been thinking of skydiving for seven years and I ve not done it because I m scared of dying.
7
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It s usually not that.
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It s usually, man, I ve been thinking of writing a book for seven years, but I ve been a bit afraid to start because
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What will people think of me?
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What if I fail?
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What if it doesn t work?
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What if I never get a deal?
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What if I don t manage to do it?
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What if I judge myself?
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There s a lot of this, this sort of stuff.
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It s usually not survival.
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It s usually...
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Threats to our social status or our standing with people with other people and stuff And so because the brain is designed to do this is designed to protect us from these threats That s why it s so easy to let fear get in the way of us living our best life You know, I wanted to start a blog for like six years 2010 to 2016.
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I was like, you know what?
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I want to start a personal blog.
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I was reading people s personal blogs This was in the era of blogging for mark manson stuff in 2010 back in the day Before he went back when it was post masculine.net.
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It was about how to how to be a man and how to get girls and stuff
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I was like, damn, personal blogs are really, I want to start a personal blog.
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And I was like, no, I can t, I can t do that.
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Who am I to start a personal blog?
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Who am I to have my domain aliamdhal.com?
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I bought the domain.
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I just kept it inactive for six years because I was afraid.
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I was afraid.
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Will people think less of me if I have the arrogance to think that me, a 15 year old kid has the right to start a personal blog.
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And then I read Austin Cleon s amazing book, Show Your Work.
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That book, that one book, 20 minutes long, it s so easy to read, helped me realize, I don t need to be so scared of this.
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I m not showing myself, I m just showing my work.
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What I m learning in the process.
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Yeah, that s cool.
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I m not the expert, I m learning how to become better.
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Yeah, exactly.
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I m the guide, not the guru.
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I m like, hey, I ve just tried this thing out, and here s what I learned along the way.
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So my first blog post was how I overcame the fear of starting a blog, where I talked about exactly this in 2016.
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Wow, really?
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And it took me six years to overcome that fear.
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And it was just the right book at the right time that helped me realize no one gives a ****.
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I was like, oh my God, all my friends and family are going to think, none of my friends and family even know that I have a personal blog.
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Why would they know?
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Why would they care?
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The only people that see it are now people who know my stuff.
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Because I got over that fear of starting a website and a personal blog in 2016 That s what allowed me to start a YouTube channel in 2017 because I was like man I ve been didn t start that blog.
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Yeah, where would you be today if I didn t start that blog?
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I would never have started the YouTube channel I would have had a failing business trying to still still running and at the age of like nearly 30 helping people get into med school I d have been like trying to grind to get more leads for that because it s becoming more competitive I d be working as a doctor right now
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Freezing my bum off in like a random doctor s office in the middle of nowhere in England because I would have been shipped off to some random location to do my specialty training What it took was getting over the fear while starting that blog which led to the YouTube channel which led to all of the good things in my life What was the secret of you overcoming that fear of getting started?
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Oh great question
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It was two things.
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It was firstly realising that no one actually cares.
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Realising that, I think at the time, I hadn t heard of this, the thing of the spotlight effect.
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We all walk around thinking that we have this spotlight trained on us.
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And that anything that we do, people are scrutinising and judging and shit.
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No one s thinking about you.
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No one s thinking about me.
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You know, people are busy with their own lives.
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So recognizing that was a big step.
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And the other thing was getting out of myself and recognizing that the point of my blog is to help someone else.
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When we move from the self to service, you know, a lot of... I speak to so many people.
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The average age of people in my YouTuber course is 36.
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We have a lot of people who are parents.
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They would they struggle so much to start to make their first youtube video.
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They re making it about them.
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They re making about them.
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But if you ask them Would you do anything for your kids?
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You also of course they do anything like We re so much more likely to do things for other people than we are for ourselves And so finding a way to shift the reason you re doing something.
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It s not about me.
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It s about helping someone else so the thing I would tell myself and what austin cleon says in the in his book show your work is
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Does this thing that you re thinking of sharing have the potential to help at least one person in any small way?
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If it s a photo of your coffee, probably not.
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Therefore, don t post it.
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But if it s a little, small little write-up of like, hey, I read Lewis Hauser s book, The Greatness of Mindset, here are three things I ve learned from it.
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That has the potential to help someone.
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Great.
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Make it about them.
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Don t make it about you.
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And so every blog post that I wrote, I was like, it s not about me.
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I m writing for someone else.
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And I m just trying to help them with something that I ve learned recently.
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No ego involved, purely in the spirit of service.
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And that attitude of service served me so much in the last 10 years of YouTube as well.
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I think that s one of the reasons why I ve been able to make it sustainable for me with the School of Greatness is because when I started it, I remember a lot of people telling me, oh, you should make, because I kind of had like a little, you know, personal brand and like online marketing and LinkedIn and webinars.
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And I was like an online marketing guy or whatever.
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One in a sea of many people, but I had my lane.
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And when I was thinking about doing the podcast and I was calling a few different friends, they re like, why don t you just make it like your name, you know?
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And I go, I could, but I don t want to make it about me, I want to make it about others.
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And so that s what I made, it was like the School of Greatness with Lewis Howes.
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Because I want to be on the journey of learning from other smart people, like yourself, and like learning these lessons.
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And that has allowed me to take a lot of pressure off me.
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I don t have to be as serious of like, everything needs to be perfect.
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Although I want things to be perfect and great, it s allowed me to kind of let go of that pressure.
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And it s made me to think about like,
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if I can help one person from this conversation, then it s worth it.
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And I think about those things.
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It s not about me, it s about serving, learning from others, and serving others who are listening.
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And that has allowed me to be consistent, I think, one of the things that has allowed me.
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But I think going from self to services is a key message a lot of people need to step into because fear holds so many people back on taking action.
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Mark Manson actually created a video recently called The Spotlight Effect.
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It s of him walking in a chicken suit.
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Like he has a full chicken suit on and he s walking down in Santa Monica, where you re staying, and he s walking down the boardwalk where everyone s kind of going by on bikes and rollerblades or whatever, walking around, and he s walking by them, shooting the video, saying there s this concept called The Spotlight Effect.
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And he s put himself in this chicken suit, he s wearing a chicken hat, he s got a whole chicken thing on and he s talking about it and he goes, to be honest, most people don t care.
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Like I m walking down the street right now in a chicken suit and most people aren t watching me.
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And they had another camera showing the reactions of people walking by or riding by.
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And maybe he d get like a glance of someone and be like, huh, what is this guy doing with a camera and a chicken suit?
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And then he would make a point of like, okay, even if they are looking for a second, they re turning around and they re going towards their destination.
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And they re probably not going to remember this.
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they re not going to sit there and point a finger and laugh at you all day and all year long.
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Even if it s for a moment of humiliation, they re on thinking about their own lives.
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So let it go.
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Keep focusing on your own thing was kind of the premise of it, which I thought was interesting.
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OK, so you re talking about getting clarity would be the first one.
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Learning to overcome fear.
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Would there be one other way to overcome procrastination in your mind?
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One other way is just getting over that hurdle of inertia.
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And my favorite thing for this is the five-minute rule.
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Just convince yourself you re only going to do the thing for five minutes.
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So back when I had an actual desk, I would have a five-minute hourglass on my desk at all times.
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And when I found myself procrastinating from something, I d think, you know what?
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I ll just turn the hourglass over and just do it for five minutes.
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And usually, I forgot that I even had an
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I had an hourglass, because the time would just go and I d be doing the thing.
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Sometimes I d be like, OK, I m really not feeling it.
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And then I would give myself permission to just not do it.
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Yeah, I don t want to do it.
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Yeah, I did five minutes.
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I m done.
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Yeah, five minutes is a win.
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That s good.
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It s like finding the win in as easy a way as possible.
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But like 85% of the time, probably, I would just continue doing the thing.
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And I found the five minute rule to be really good in beating procrastination.
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This is also why I, this is kind of random, but I like finding songs that are exactly five minutes.
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Bohemian Rhapsody is a song that is basically exactly five minutes.
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So you can even put on Bohemian Rhapsody and you can be like, for the duration of this song, I m going to do this thing.
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I often think in terms of like song length, like, um, I, you know, most songs like three, three minutes, three and a half minutes.
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Sometimes I ll tell themselves, I ll tell myself, you know what?
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My room s a bit of a mess right now.
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My desk is a bit right now.
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I m just going to give myself a song.
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And in that song, I m going to clean up as much as I can.
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And I would put on like my favorite, like rule the world by take that or like the greatest day or like something by One Republic.
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It s like upbeat and uplifting.
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As soon as the song s over, I m done.
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But you can make so much progress with tidying your desk in three minutes.
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So much.
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And it becomes a game.
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It becomes fun.
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It becomes less of a chore.
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And you might also feel like, okay, I m halfway done, let me finish this.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Yeah, sometimes I d be like, I would go on to the next song, Spotify autoplay it, like it knows the vibe that you re going for with one song, so we go to the next one.
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Yeah.
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One of the things I really respect about you is that you ve read a ton of books in the last 15, 20 years.
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And I think you have a photographic memory.
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You ve memorized almost all the key insights from every book you ve ever read, I think is what I... Is that something like that?
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I wish I had a photographic memory.
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But you have a great memory.
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And you remember a lot of things.
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You can recall three things from probably most books you ve read.
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Yeah, it s also because I make videos about them.
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I think that s the thing.
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In 2016, when I started my blog, I was like, huh, I read a lot of these books, and I remember all from what I ve read.
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So why don t I just make these little articles where I write some lessons that I ve learned from the things?
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That helps you remember them.
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Helps me remember, yeah.
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I m thinking, greatness mindset.
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What was the lesson?
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It s GPA, meaningful mission, the three Ps.
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That was the thing that you said.
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What was it?
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It was, there was a really good Seth Godin quote.
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I m like, oh, I need to go back and find the Seth Godin quote.
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I think it was about the process and doing things 7,500 times or something like that.
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That was some good.
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And then there were the five Ps, priority, but I can t remember the five.
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Okay, I need to go back and look at that.
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It s like, as I m reminding myself of these things, because I m making a video about the book or writing a newsletter about the book or whatever, like sharing something makes you way more likely to learn it yourself.
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And so even if it s just sharing it on Facebook or sharing it on Instagram, like one of the things I m very bullish on is just people sharing the things they ve learned.
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purely selfishly, because it helps you remember it yourself.
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Yeah, of course.
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That s cool.
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So sharing these things.
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You have a video that a lot of people loved, which is about what really makes people successful.
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I m curious, from all the studies, all the research, the interviews you ve done, the videos you ve made, the books you ve read, your own personal experience, what do you think really makes people successful?
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My answer to this has actually changed over time.
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My answer to this now, like,
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When I started this process of doing these videos and stuff, I wouldn t have had a good answer for this.
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I would have said, oh, success is all very personal.
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And who knows?
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Who s to say that money success is actual success and things like that?
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And I don t know.
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Someone just doing what they want maybe is what makes them successful.
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And my answer is still that, but it s a bit more refined.
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The thing that makes people successful is knowing what they want and actually just working towards it.
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Knowing what they want and working towards it and adjusting course along the way.
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And it s just that thing of GPS, a goal plan system.
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If you have a goal, you have a plan, you have a system to follow the plan, and you just change the plan if it s not working, you re going to be successful.
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This is not successful in terms of like, you have to make all this money or you have to whatever, get a six pack abs.
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It s success in terms of whatever you want it to be.
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That s why the subtitle of the book is how to do more of what matters to you.
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To me, success is knowing what matters to you and then just doing the thing.
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Doing more of it.
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Doing more of it, or like working towards it.
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And there s a thing, I think Hubert has been talking about this recently.
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It s not the pursuit of happiness.
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It s the happiness of pursuit.
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When you re pursuing something that you actually enjoy and that s meaningful to you,
8
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That is, that s literally the pinnacle of life.
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I know people, I m sure you know people who ve sold companies for hundreds of millions of dollars.
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They re miserable once they sell the company.
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They were happier working towards the goal.
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And they all start new companies, because they re like, either they start companies or they start podcasts.
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That s their thing, or they write self-help books.
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Because it s like- They need some new pursuit.
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They need some new pursuit.
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The pursuit is what creates happiness.
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The pursuit is what creates that feeling of success.
8
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Yeah, it s interesting because, you know,
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Before I used to be a type of guy that always wanted to achieve my goals and I achieved a lot of them You know from sports to business to whatever it might be different milestones that I had for my teens and 20s and 30s And I would accomplish a lot of them and I realized that wasn t the thing that made me feel peaceful and fulfilled Accomplishing it was fun.
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It was cool, but it wasn t like now I feel better about myself.
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I
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it increased some confidence, but it also made me realize, oh, I still have sadness and pain and suffering inside.
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So this isn t the answer to being peaceful and joyful and fulfilled and happy.
8
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And I started to go on my healing journey and really kind of like dissecting the past and creating different stories about my past and finding meaning from the past and having harmony around it.
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I started to set different goals and actually realize it doesn t matter if I accomplish this goal.
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What matters is what I do every day on the pursuit and the path.
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Did I show up doing what I said I was gonna do for myself and for others?
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Was I consistent in my ways of being?
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Did I respond well?
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My majority of the times, I m not a perfect human being, but did I respond well in situations that were frustrating or triggering?
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Did I care about other people?
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Did I want other people to succeed and did I do my best to empower them and give them tools and trainings to succeed?
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Did I show up with good attitude and good energy the majority of the time?
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Did I make it about others and not about me?
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All these different things.
8
SPEAKER_00
And if I accomplish the goal, cool.
8
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But if I don t accomplish the goal, can I still be proud of who I was and how I showed up every single day?
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And that makes me feel good.
8
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Now, part of my ego wants to say, ah, but if you don t accomplish the goal, you re a loser, right?
8
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Part of me wants to think that.
8
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And that s part of the reason why I ve created such big goals because I m like, it might take me 10 years.
8
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I don t know.
8
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But what I can create in the path
8
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And who I become in that path is going to be so much greater than the actual accomplishment.
8
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And I think if we start thinking that way about who we re becoming and how we re showing up and how we re being on a day-to-day basis, we ll be a lot happier with who we are.
8
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So that s what I think about.
8
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Like, I want to accomplish all my goals.
8
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I want to hit my financial numbers.
8
SPEAKER_00
I want our team to grow.
8
SPEAKER_00
I want, you know, all these things.
8
SPEAKER_00
I want to be healthy, but it s also like, if it doesn t happen, you know, what can I control and how can I just be consistent with that every day?
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think people think that success makes you feel good, but it s actually that feeling good makes you successful.
8
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Absolutely.
8
SPEAKER_01
And you can feel good every day of the thing.
8
SPEAKER_00
And like, crucially, like, I think this is... Because there s no point in being super successful, rich and famous if you don t feel good.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, what s the point?
8
SPEAKER_00
What is the point of working that hard to get those things if you still don t feel good about you?
8
SPEAKER_00
But feeling good will just make you successful in terms of it doesn t matter if you have those things or not because you feel good about you.
8
SPEAKER_00
And people, you usually will attract good people around you.
8
SPEAKER_01
And you re also more likely to then be productive and creative and less stressed.
8
SPEAKER_00
And more financially successful or whatever it is.
8
SPEAKER_01
Like all the good things happen when you can just focus on the process and focus on enjoying it.
8
SPEAKER_01
And you know, it s useful to have an idea of what you want.
8
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Like, you know, as you said, you have these goals, but the way I think of goals is it s not about the goal.
8
SPEAKER_01
The point of the goal is to set your direction.
8
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It s like, I m not fixated on the destination, but at least I know what direction I m heading in.
8
SPEAKER_01
Because otherwise, you know, we all have so many options.
8
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Anyone listening to this has a ton of options in their life, even if you feel like you don t have any options right now.
8
SPEAKER_01
Compared to someone who s not able to listen to this podcast, you have a ton of options, objectively.
8
SPEAKER_01
But a lot of uncertainty and anxiety comes from this thing of like, I could go in this direction or that direction or this direction or that direction.
8
SPEAKER_01
But one of the best pieces of advice I got in medical school was from one of the senior colleagues who I really looked up to.
8
SPEAKER_01
And he said, this was around the time, I think it was four years in out of the six-year course.
8
SPEAKER_01
And around that time, people start asking you, what do you want to specialize in?
8
SPEAKER_01
What specialty do you want to go for?
8
SPEAKER_01
And you don t need to decide until like six years later.
8
SPEAKER_01
People kept asking.
8
SPEAKER_01
And this guy asked me, Dr. Adcock, Chris.
8
SPEAKER_01
So Chris asked me, what specialty do you want to go into?
8
SPEAKER_01
And I was like, oh, I m not sure.
8
SPEAKER_01
I ve got some time to decide.
8
SPEAKER_01
And he was like, OK, but one piece of advice is that it s much easier to steer a moving ship than a stationary ship.
8
SPEAKER_01
So what he said was, I d recommend you just pick a specialty and start working towards it, and you can always change your mind.
8
SPEAKER_00
If you don t like it, then you can steer it in a different direction.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I was like, huh.
8
SPEAKER_01
OK, Chris, sure, I ll do that.
8
SPEAKER_01
So I picked plastic surgery and I just started working towards it.
8
SPEAKER_01
And tons of good stuff started happening in my life when I started working towards that.
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Now I got connected with these cool plastic
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I became the web designer for this really cool charity that does reconstructive surgery in developing countries.
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I joined these hackathons where my skills with computer programming combined with this plastic surgery stuff.
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I made friends along the way and ultimately realized, actually, now I ve met a lot of plastic surgeons.
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Don t think it s a life for me, but what I really like is I love the emergency side of things.
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Maybe I want to go into anesthesiology, anesthetics as we call it.
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And it s like moving in that direction allowed me to steer the ship.
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And I think that s the point of goals.
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The point of goals is that it just gives you a direction to head in and it gives you a path.
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And you can ask yourself.
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Is this the right path?
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Am I on the path towards the goal?
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And do I want to be on the path towards the goal?
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And either which way, it s okay.
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If you re not on the path to the goal and you want to be, it s like, cool, you changed something.
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If you are on the path and you realize the goal is not what you want, you change the goal.
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Either way, you re making progress, you re moving.
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And it s kind of weird.
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It s like, I have all the freedom in the world now.
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I can literally do whatever I want.
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I could not work a day in my life if I didn t want to and just live on a beach in Bali.
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But when I ve taken an extended break from not making YouTube videos, there s part of me that feels unfulfilled.
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Why?
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Because right now my meaningful mission is to be able to learn, synthesize, share, and teach.
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I love that.
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And to me, right now, that s in the format of YouTube videos, in the format of the book, in the format of the podcast.
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But the main thing is YouTube videos.
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That s the practice.
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That s the thing that I show up and I do every week, where if I read something, I ll figure out a way to share it.
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If I ve learned something, I ll figure out a way to share it.
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If someone s asked a question, I m like, hmm, I actually have a take on goal setting.
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I d find a way to share it in video.
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And I don t have to make a video every week.
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But there s something like when I m doing, it s like working out.
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When you re showing up to the gym regularly, you just feel better about yourself.
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There s something about it of like, you re acting in a way that s consistent with your meaningful mission, with your identity, with who you want to be.
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You know, freedom ain t all that it s cracked up to be.
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The point of freedom is to be able to do things that matter to you.
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And so you realize, I should just do the things that matter to me.
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And I just feel way better about myself.
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I suppose it s just having endless options.
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Yeah.
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Options are not that fun.
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Yeah, they re fun for a bit.
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Yeah.
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Not meaningful after a while.
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Yeah.
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Feel good productivity, how to do more of what matters to you.
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Make sure you guys get a copy of this book.
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When you dropped the video of announcing it, I pre-ordered it right away.
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And there s so much wisdom in here, so much great information that people can use on how to be more productive, feel more productive, and have more fun doing it.
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And that s really the key.
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I don t think it s about like,
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grinding and working so hard and hustling to where you feel exhausted, drained, and burnt out.
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That s not what people want.
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They want to feel productive.
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They want to feel like they re maximizing time and that they re enjoying their time while doing it.
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So that s what Feel Good Productivity teaches you and shows you how to do by Ali Abdaal, the world s most followed productivity expert.
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So make sure you guys check out a copy of this book.
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I would say get a couple copies for your friends, family members, people that maybe feel stressed out and overwhelmed right now.
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Give them this so they have some tools and frameworks on how to apply their time differently to their life and their work and feel good about it.
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What else do we need to know about burnout, productivity, hustle culture, making money online?
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What else is on your heart and mind right now that you feel like if people knew this one thing,
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If they truly knew this one thing, their life would be better, more meaningful, and they would feel abundant versus overwhelmed and stressed.
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I would say, when it comes to making money,
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If you can get to a point, and this is accessible to literally anyone, if you can get to a point where the money you re making on the side covers your expenses, that unlocks a ridiculous amount of freedom for you.
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It gives you the freedom to quit your job if you want.
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It gives you the freedom to cut down your hours on your job if you want.
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A lot of people enjoy their jobs, but maybe you don t enjoy it for 60 hours a week.
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Maybe you d enjoy it for 20 hours a week.
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Gives you the option to go part-time, gives you the option to go freelance, gives you many, many, many options.
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Getting to the point where the money you make on the side covers your expenses, I think that should be a goal for everyone in life because it just changes your life.
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It gives you so much freedom.
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It means you re more anti-fragile.
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It means that if a pandemic strikes and people are losing their jobs, you re not that concerned because you re making the money on the side.
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It teaches you so many skills because to become the sort of person who makes
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2 or 3k on the side requires you to have so many to develop so many skills that are going to change your life and they re going to make you more valuable to employers in the future if that s what you care about they ll give you more self-esteem because now you ve learned all these new skills and literally anyone can do it with the power of the internet and the power is reading a couple of books that is incredible beyond that point
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beyond the point where you re making enough money to buy your freedom, I would say don t fixate so much on the money.
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You know, you and I are rich, objectively.
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We also know people who are way richer than us.
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It doesn t really buy more happiness beyond the freedom that it buys initially.
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Maybe you get a slightly nicer house and a slightly nicer area of LA for an extra five million or whatever the thing might be.
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But I think beyond the point,
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If I had my time again, I d be doing whatever I could to get to, Noah Kagan calls it the freedom number.
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Oh, you re about to interview him.
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He calls it the freedom number.
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Get to the point where you re making enough money to feel free.
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At that point, stop worrying so much about the money and focus on doing a process consistently that provides value to others that you enjoy, and you can find a way to enjoy, because then the money will take care of itself.
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that first hurdle, that freedom number that Noah talks about, that s so important.
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It will change your life to have enough money coming in on the side to pay your expenses.
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And it seems out of touch with some people.
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People can be like, oh, you don t know my circumstances.
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Okay, fine, I don t know your circumstances.
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I know plenty of people who have been from terrible circumstances who have managed to find that and finally make it happen.
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There s no shortage of stories on the internet and podcasts and books of people who ve done it.
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If someone else can do it, you can as well.
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There s always a way if you decide it s a priority for you.
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If you don t, that s okay.
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But personally, you and I can attest to it.
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It s so nice having enough money to not worry about paying bills.
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It s really nice.
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It s so nice to be able to do what you love rather than
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drive trucks for six hours, or for six years, or be a doctor in a way that s not... Sure, sure.
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Yeah, not that being a doctor, if that s meaningful for you, then that s a great life.
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Exactly.
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Driving a truck is meaningful to you, that s a great life.
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It wasn t the path that I felt called to do at that time.
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Same with you.
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It was originally, but then the path shifted.
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Yeah, and that s okay.
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And that s okay too.
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And also, again, we both know a lot of people who have way more money than us, who are way more stressed out, overwhelmed, exhausted, unhealthy, have horrible relationships.
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It is nice to have more money than I did before.
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It s nice to have money where I can pay for my own things as opposed to my sister, sleeping on my sister s couch for a year and a half for free, living at my brother s place for $250 a month for six months, and feeling like I couldn t take care of myself.
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So it is nice to be able to provide for yourself and others in different ways.
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But it doesn t mean there aren t other challenges and complications that you have to learn how to overcome with money.
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So we ve both seen that as well.
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This is powerful, man.
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I want people to get the book.
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Feel good productivity.
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Make sure you guys get a couple copies.
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I asked you this question before, two and a half years ago, but I m going to ask you again.
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Your three truths.
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So hypothetical question.
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Imagine you get to live as long as you want to live, but it s your last day.
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You ve extended your life as long as you could go physically, but you ve got to turn the lights off.
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And you re out of this physical world.
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And you get to create everything you want for your life.
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All your dreams come true.
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You feel good every day.
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You do meaningful work.
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You have a beautiful life, relationships.
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Everything you want happens.
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But for whatever reason, you have to take all of your work with you.
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All your content, book, video, everything you make from here on out has to go with you to another place.
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No one has access to it anymore.
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But you get to leave behind three lessons.
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Everything you ve learned from your existence, what I call three truths.
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What would be those three truths that you would want people to have access to?
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OK, the first one would be,
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Success comes to those who figure out where they want to go and keep moving in that direction Number two would be On the route to success Remember to take care of your health and relationships because they matter far more than your work and number three would be And whatever you do remember to enjoy the journey along the way
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I love those.
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I feel like there s been a big shift in you over the last few years.
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I think a lot of people might look at you and see this analytical, really intelligent, productive master.
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But I ve noticed, getting to know you, you tap into emotions and feelings and reflecting on these things.
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And I think it s really beautiful to see that transition of kind of blending both like the analytical mind and like the genius in you that s like creative and productive and launching and building with someone who s also reflecting and taking time to
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Go to a retreat or journal, or therapy, or coaching, or whatever it might be, and start reflecting inward as well, as opposed to just thinking of like, how can I be as hyper-productive as possible?
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So I want to acknowledge you, Ali, for the journey you ve been on since I ve gotten to know you in the last couple of years, for tapping into your heart, your emotions, not letting them consume or control you, but allowing you to feel
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and experience the beauty and the wonder and the awe of life as well, as well as being productive and creative and building what you re building.
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So I really acknowledge you for the journey, man.
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It s fun to watch you evolve.
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And I acknowledge you for everything that s happening in your life.
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and all the beautiful things behind the scenes that I ll keep private between us that I know are happening as well, man.
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So I want to acknowledge you for that.
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And again, I want people to get the book, feel good productivity.
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Final question for you, Ali, is what is your definition of greatness?
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I think for me, the definition of greatness is working towards what truly matters to you and having fun along the way.
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I hope today s episode inspired you on your journey towards greatness.
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Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a rundown of today s show with all the important links.
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And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me as well as ad free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel on apple podcast.
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If you enjoyed this, please share it with a friend over on social media or text a friend, leave us a review over on Apple podcast, and let me know what you learned over on our social media channels at Lewis Howes.
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I really love hearing the feedback from you and it helps us continue to make the show better.
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And if you want more inspiration from our world-class guests and content to learn how to improve the quality of your life, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness Newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.
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And if no one has told you today, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.
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And now it s time to go out there and do something great.