How to be Happy, Healthy & Wealthy - Ali Abdaal

The main thing that I care about is being a teacher. Like, I love the idea of teaching. I've always loved the idea of teaching. Don't really care about the numbers. I'm not overly concerned about getting to 10 million or 20 million. I just want this to be a lifestyle business that lets me live the life of my dreams while hopefully impacting people at scale.

Today on the show. Super happy to have Ali Abdaal. Ali, welcome to the show.

Hey, thank you so much for having me. Looking, looking forward to diving in.

And Ali, so quick backstory here. Ali actually helped me out quite a bit with YouTube. So helping me understand, you know, how what, what, what goes into, you know, making a great video, what goes into crafting and communicating, you know, a really great message, A message that resonates with people in a way to grow your, your whole audience. And on that note, Ollie is a prolific YouTuber. You have like what, over 3 million subscribers now, right?

That's the one. Like 3.3, 3.2, something like that. I try not to look at the numbers because they make me feel a little bit like concerned sometimes.

Yeah, I mean, and the growth is prolific because if you look at that, if you divide that by the number of videos that you produce and you compare that to other similar YouTubers who have so many subscribers, you have like a way higher subscriber per produced video count than most people, don't you?

I guess if you look at the averages, yeah, but we have, I mean, having said that, I've still made around 480 videos over the last five years. So there's still quite a lot of videos.

Yeah, definitely, definitely a journey of love. And. But you didn't start in this, right? So you started off as a medical student, you were a doctor for a while. You're now an ex doctor and a full on YouTuber. Can you, can you tell us a little bit though about the early days, your story, you know, how did you get, for example, why medicine and what was the pivot point that.

Turned you from what is a rather, you know, traditional career? Like all the parents always want their kids to, you know, become a lawyer, become a doctor, that sort of thing. And then you became a YouTuber. So. Yeah, tell us a bit about the, the origin of all this.

Yeah, so, I mean, from when I was pretty young, kind of age 11, 12, I was always interested in computers. I started dabbling in web design, learned how to code and I loved the idea of making money on the Internet. So I started doing like freelance web design, web development. When I was like 12, 13 years old. And every year I'd make my own, one of my own little project to try and make money, and they would all fail. But then when I was 18 and I got into medical school, that was my project for that year, was a business that helped other people get into med school. So I used to teach courses for medical school admissions exams. And because I had this sort of six years of experience as a web designer, I combined those two interests in teaching and web design to build a business that basically ran courses and marketed it nationally. And that business ended up doing really well. And every year, you know, year one made around 10 grand, year two around 40, and year three around 50. And I was making the salary of a doctor while I was in my second year of med school through teaching these courses.

That's amazing. Incredible.

And I like when I was, when I was around 18, that was when I read the Four Hour Work Week. And so I thought that, oh my God, like multiple streams of passive income, this is exactly what I want to do. And around that time, I started really speaking to doctors who were in the middle of their careers and asking them the question that, hey, do you really enjoy this? Like, if you won the lottery, would you really continue doing medicine for fun? And like, half of them said would say they would leave immediately. One guy even said he'd leave in the middle of the operation, but the other half would say that they would go part time. And I'd be like, all right, cool. You know, being a part time doctor sounds pretty fun. Maybe two or three days a week. And I'd ask, hey, why don't you go part time? And they'd say, oh, it's because of money. I can't afford it. I have a mortgage, I have a family, I have blah, blah, blah. And so I realized that, hang on, if these doctors that I'm aiming to be are not happy in their lives and they would love to go part time, but the only reason they can't is because they're not making enough money. Great. That gives me a clear path. I need to make money on the side. Therefore, I can do medicine for fun rather than because it's my job. And that following that trajectory led me to growing this business that I had. And then like five years later, as you know, the business was sort of plateauing. And I thought, you know what, what's the next stage of growth? And content marketing was my answer. And I realized no one's making videos on YouTube teaching this stuff. And so top of funnel I was somewhat familiar with marketing funnels. Why don't I teach video? Why don't I make videos teaching people how to do well in medical school admissions exams and give share my advice for free. And some percentage of them hopefully will convert to a sale for my course. And so that's how I started the YouTube channel in 2017, which is now five years ago. And that evolved slowly to be like, hang on, this YouTube thing is now way bigger than this business was. I'm kind of bored of the business. Why don't I just focus all in on the YouTube thing? So that was five years ago. And here we are five years later, quit the job, got a team of 13 people in an office and considering a move to Portugal, thanks to the conversation we've just had.

Yeah, yeah. By the way, if you're watching this and if you don't know, check out Portugal. It's basically tax free for the first 10 years. Okay, so can you give us a idea of the size of the business right now? So 13 people, but like, you know, sales, like, you know, how big is this business and where do you want it to go?

Yeah, so 13 people I think will probably do conservatively, I think about 3.5 million pounds. So $4 million in top line revenue this year. Margins are around 60%. So I think 2 million, ish, 2 and a bit million kind of operating profit. Obviously we're in the UK, so then that gets depleted by 20% thanks to corporation tax and then dividend tax and all that kind of stuff. So that's like the top level stats. I guess for me, the main thing that I care about is being a teacher. Like, I love the idea of teaching. I've always loved the idea of teaching. And if I imagine what I want my own career to look like, I want it to be some combination of Tim Ferriss, Derek Sivers, Ryan Holiday, Cal Newport, these sort of people who are doing the thought leader, public intellectual thing at scale, writing books, doing podcasts, writing blog posts, making videos. I kind of want to do that for like personal development and just anything I'm interested in. And so really what I see, that I see the function of the business is allowing me to live the lifestyle where I can spend my time reading, writing and teaching, which is the thing that I personally love doing.

Awesome. And you've already surpassed a pretty big milestone from a business point of view. I mean, one of the things that the primary thing that I focus on is helping founders CEOs scale their businesses. And some of the stats that relate to that. So, yeah, 100 businesses that start, only about 4% of them will ever get to the 1 million mark in sales. And then of those four out of the hundred businesses, it's only 0.4% that ever get to the 10 million mark. So now the journey that you're on right now is, you know, it's like getting ever, ever higher in the Premier League, if you will, right of business. But it's, but it's interesting though, because I think a lot of people, when they think about business success, they put the bar so incredibly high. You know, they think like, business success is, oh, you have to make the next Google or the next Facebook or the next, you know, but the threshold is actually much, much, you know, lower than that. Just again, only four out of 100 businesses, you know, make a million or more, you know, in a, in a year. So that's.

This is something I wanted to ask you, like, so do you work with entrepreneurs at the 10 million mark or do you go from 1 to 10? Because I'm actually looking for a business coach to help us scale and be more efficient and stuff. Would I be work with or.

Yeah, 80% of the clients I work with are between 1 and 10. So they're trying to cross, basically that. Because that's often a valley of death. But not like, I don't mean that companies die. I mean that the intent, the original intent of the founder kind of dies. Right. So the founder wanted it to be more than, say, 10 million, but they end up in this, like a land of the living dead, whereby, you know, there's three, four, maybe five, but they're just not scaling appropriately. And it's like basic things that hold them back. So the company isn't set up in the right way from a strategy execution or a people point of view.

Or the person at the helm doesn't actually cross the chasm from founder to CEO. Right. Because you'll know from when you were starting when you're a founder, and I remember this too, building the restaurant chain and other businesses. When you're a founder, you can get away with, like, just about anything. A lot of, like, subpar, you know, performance, because you're just being the generalist. But like a true CEO, when you cross that founder to CEO chasm, that's when you have to be, you know, a coach of specialists, where the people are actually, like, you know, better than you in the roles. And so there's all those different, you know, points that people, people can falter on. But yeah, that's My passion, My passion is helping people scale by, but not just the company, their leadership, and also themselves. So.

Now the. It sounds very rosy. Everything that you just described, right? It's like, wow, you know, Ali was going to be a doctor. He what, he became a doctor, you know, pretty smart guy. Everything's going for, you know, going well for him. Then he starts this YouTube channel and now, you know, he's making millions. And it just sounds like such a beautiful, rosy picture. So let's switch gears a little bit here. Can you talk about the cost of chasing success and be honest? Because that's where we can help people the most.

Yeah. All right, let's begin.

So.

Essentially with my, with my first business, I think that was my first experience with like the lows of running a business where for the first three years it was growing, it was like 10k, then like 100k in revenue, then 150k. And then in year four it dropped to about 140, 130. And that was a real moment of like crisis for me because I was like, hey, this is still a lot of money. But at the same time it feels really awful. Like, how did I squander this lead that we had? We were growing so much. Have I dropped the ball? What am I doing? Like, what's going on? I went in this whole like cycle of trying to figure out like, why do, why does, why do I now feel not like why, why, why am I not enjoying running this business? And I guess over time I sort of realized that growth hides a lot of problems. And when you're growing, it's very easy to be like, everything's all rosy and stuff. Then you stop growing, you're like, oh shit. And now all of the problems are coming to the forefront and I had this whole thing of like soul searching thing of figuring out do I really care about this business? Like, is this really what I do over the world, what I want to do over the long term? And at the time I kind of decided, ah, whatever, I'll keep it ticking along, I don't really care about it too much. And that was sort of when I started shifting the focus towards, towards doing other things then. So that was like a big, a big thing. Then I guess with the, with the YouTube channel again, like when I was doing it as a part time thing. So for three years, final year of med school and then two years of working as a doctor, I was doing the YouTube channel on the site. And when something is a side hustle, it has like, there's no stakes, anything goes. Making money hand over fist, it's like, feels like free money. It's making it rain, it's all that jazz. But then in 2020, I took a break from medicine to go full time on the YouTube thing. In reality, I intended to travel the world. But then pandemic happened and I ended up being a full time youtuber and now all of a sudden this thing that I now I once did for fun had become my job. And it's like every day I'm like, oh, I need to film this video today. But oh, I can't be bothered to film the video. Like I'm just at home, like what's the point? And I'd be procrastinating like all day and filming the video at like 10pm and I'm like, why? I literally had all day just to film one, one, one video. And that was a reminder of this idea that when something becomes your job, when you attach a lot of extrinsic meaning to the thing, like this is the thing that makes money in a way, it's easy to lose the joy in it and to for it to have the fun sucked out of it. And then, you know, when the business started hiring people, so now our fixed costs are going up and now the business is sort of reliant on making some consistent amount of money but nothing on YouTube is particularly consistent. So it's like, hey, shit. Like it's fairly fluctuant depending on brand deals and depending on whether a video goes viral. So now we're like trying to chase numbers and trying to chase numbers.

Yeah, and on that note, just real quick, so based on what you just said there, would you consider what you're doing more passive or active income?

I think we have lots of passive income, but it's all reliant on being continually continuing to be active on YouTube. So it's not really passive. Like if I stopped uploading it would just, it would, it would all die. Like there's no such thing as passive income.

Yeah, exactly. Right. So because it's quite interesting because people start a dream with a certain notion, you know, in their head about what that dream is, whether it's becoming a doctor or starting a YouTube channel and then, you know, reality steps in. But two.

I think it's also about, you know, we have to recognize that look, nothing's, you know, rosy like everything that, you know, that a value comes with some kind of hardship with it as well. It's not like I just, you know, full out do not believe you know, and that there's people out there who love doing every single aspect of their day. You know, I think about my day, for example, and there's. There's tons of crap that I have to do in the course of the day where I'm like, oh, I really rather not, you know, be doing this. But I think it's about the balance. Right. And it sounds like when you were in medicine, the balance was not in favor of staying in. Right?

Yeah. There's a great mental model for this I came across recently. I was reading a book. I was reading a book called what We Owe the Future, which is all about, like, long termism and philosophy and stuff. At the end of it, they talk about the idea of how do you decide if someone's life is worth living? This is a bit of a tangent, but it's getting to the point. So one way of deciding if someone's life is worth living is you ask them, hey, is your life worth living? Most people would say, yeah, my life's worth living. But another way of doing it, which is a clever thing that sociologists do, is that they give someone a pager or like an app or something, and like 20 times a day, at random times, they'll page them and they'll ring them and say, hey, what are you doing right now? I'm making a cup of tea. I'm at work, I'm doing a podcast, I'm doing a video, whatever the thing might be. And they'll ask them the question of if you could wave a magic wand and skip this experience and just fast forward to the end, would you do it? And you find that about 85% of people, or whatever the stat is, would skip most of their workday. And a lot of people would skip a lot of other parts of their day doing things they don't really want to do. And the theory is that if you, if, if you would choose to skip enough of your life, then non, like, not experience the thing is better than experience the thing. Experiencing the thing. And then maybe like someone who would skip 80% of their day, their life is, quote, less worth living compared to someone who'd only skip 5% of their day. And I.

Don'T have the challenge of yeah, yeah. And I guess it would feel, Wouldn't it just feel too easy, too, like everything just feel like you don't have to really give much effort and it gets a little bit boring then in.

That sense, yeah, I guess, like the way I interpreted this was like, you know, applying this skip test to My own life. Like, if I think of my calendar in my day to day life, how much of what I'm doing would I choose to fast forward now? Back when I was a doctor, almost every day I would choose to fast forward to the end of it because clearly, even though I enjoyed medicine, I was still looking forward to the end of the day where I could go home right now as a YouTuber doing this podcast, like, I'm enjoying myself right now. I would not choose to fast forward this experience. I was filming a video.

It'd be really funny.

I wouldn't admit it even if that was the case.

But for most of what I do right now, I would shoot. I wouldn't shoot. Like, I don't look forward to getting to the end of my workday. And that's really nice. There's still stuff I have to do that I don't like doing. There's still like, dealing with like, finances and taxes and shit. But beyond that, I would actually, I want to experience most of my work day. And I feel like that's really nice. It shows me that, hey, for me, being a YouTuber is way more fun than being a doctor because I would choose to not skip most of my day.

Yeah, I totally with you. I mean, I actually, you know, I, I love, I love, I love working. I love working hard, you know, I love working. Like, my standard week is like 50. I. I can't remember a week where I've worked like less than 50 hours. It's like, that's just my standard week. But, but, but I love it, you know, I enjoy it. And if you go back to. I just want to go back to the medical school and doctor thread just for a moment. So.

You talked about friends who were not wanting to do it because they felt like they had to. So if you could reach a point where you no longer had to worry about money, would you go back to medicine then, just for the fun of it?

Oh, for me, absolutely not.

No. Why not?

Why not? It's just not that fun. There are parts of it that are fun. I really enjoy teaching medical students. For me, teaching medical students was always way more fun than actually practicing medicine. And so if someone offered me a voluntary volunteer position to teach physiology at a university, I would strongly consider I'd be like, yeah, actually, I would do that for free. But if someone said, do you want to work in the emergency room? I'd be like, no, not really. Do you want to work on the wards? Not really. Do you want to be a gp? Not really. So that, that thought process helped me realize that fundamentally for me personally, the thing I really enjoy is teaching. I have a few friends, not many, but a few who are in medicine who would do it for free, but even then they would say like 10% of it is really enjoyable. Talking to families, doing the operation. The other 90% of it, paperwork and admin and all the other BS associated with working in a bureaucracy like the NHS is not fun at all. So it's a, it's a tricky one.

It's score, score low on the fun meter. Now the. So with the current business, you're at so 3 million, you said 3.2 or whatever it was. I bet a lot of people listening had no idea that you could build a multi million dollar business. You know, being a YouTuber where you're essentially going out and helping people, you know, with different, different pieces of content, teaching, educating, all that.

And we could talk about like how to make great YouTube videos and all that stuff, but you got like tons of stuff on that, so. So let's instead can we talk about how you've scaled the company? So how did you. What, what were some of the, the key things that worked well to get from, you know, just below a million to that 3 million. What were some of the key levers that you pulled to, to, to, you know, to, to make that initial leap?

Yeah, that's a good question. So I think really the revenue started to skyrocket when we dove into online courses. So initially the channel was just making money through AdSense, not very much. Then it started making some amount of money through brand deals like sponsorships, making like 5k, 6k, 7k every time we did a sponsored video. That's nice. That got us to like 30k a month in revenue. So what if it's like quarter million a year? Something like that. But then I started making online courses on a website called skillshare that viewers might be familiar with because they sponsor everyone. And when I made my first online class, that was September of 2019, so three years ago, that instantly started making 5K a month, like completely passively, like I was literally doing nothing to promote this, but I just put it on Skillshare.

Which class was this?

This wasn't a class on how to edit videos in Final Cut.

Really?

Yeah.

You started making 5k a month after that?

Yeah. That class still makes somewhere between 3 and 5k a month every single month for the last 3 years. And I don't promote, I've never mentioned it in a video. Oh, it's free. So Skillshare is like Netflix. So people sign up to a subscription and then you get paid watch time royalties depending on how off how much of the class people watch.

That is ridiculous. That's crazy.

So that was the first class and then I thought, this Skillshare thing is interesting. What if I made another one? And then I made a second class on how to study for exams.

That class makes somewhere between 10 and 15k a month on top of the final cut class. And then I thought, hang on, this is pretty good. Why don't I make another one and another one and another one. And now we've got like 12 classes on Skillshare and we're making, I think this month we'll make 90k just from Skillshare. And it's just completely absurd and so also mad, like just off of Skillshare, we've got a million dollar business and it's just a completely blew my mind. And so that's what prompted me to first hire an editor, thinking, hey, if I can just edit an extra course every six months, it pays for the editor. And then I hired a writer to be like, hey, if I can get a writer and I can just tell them, hey, I want these 20 lessons in the course, can you go and write them out? It's like, okay, cool, that's probably ROI positive. And online courses have just been just utterly ridiculous for us getting the business.

And so you get. Okay, so you're talking about scale there from a revenue and a growth perspective. You've also scaled in terms of people. So you said earlier you have 13 people right in the company now. So what do they all do?

We actually had 18 up until about two months ago.

So this was one of those non rosy things. So what do they all do? We have, we have me, we have a general manager, this is Angus, who initially started off as a part time writer and then over time has become somewhat accidentally promoted to become the general manager of the business. We have an editor, we have a podcast producer, we have three people full time on our YouTuber academy. We have two people on courses, we have a marketing guy, we have an assistant. I think that makes up about 13 up until a couple of months ago. We also had a full time videographer, two extra writers, a full time YouTube producer and another full time editor. And one of the mistakes I think like when, when the pandemic was happening and cohort based courses were all the rage and suddenly everyone started seeing growth. That was when I read the business books, I was like, okay, when you have Excess cash. Like, don't let it just sit there doing nothing. Like use it to hire people. I was like, great, let's hire people. In theory, if we hired four writers to work on my YouTube channel, that's four times as many videos, right? Turns out, no, when you hire four times as many people to work on a thing like the output was like less than half of what it was when it was just me.

Wow. Because of all the extra management that you had.

All the extra management and the communication and the bottlenecks and the passing things back and forth. Yeah. And this is a thing that I just had not appreciated. I thought, of course, in theory it makes sense. We're making, I don't know, 30k a month of YouTube just on AdSense. So hiring a writer for 30k a year, I mean, of course it's ROI positive. But I didn't imagine the unforeseen circumstances, unforeseen foreseen complications of communication and management and stuff. So we parted ways with five people a couple of months ago. We've since rehired most of them as like one day a week freelancers because actually turned out we just needed them on a freelance basis and they're really good. We just didn't need them as full time employees or we then had to manage them and all of that treacle associated with working with lots of people. So it's it, it now feels a lot more lean and really we've, we've sort of got three business units within the business. I'm not sure if I'm using the word business unit a unit appropriately, but essentially there's three parts to the business. There's me, the Ali Abdul personal brand. There's our part time YouTuber Academy, which you were a student of, which has three 43 people full time on it. And then there's this new brand that we're trying to develop, the CreatorPreneur, which is a sort of, we're trying to build like a publication, a brand, an audience off this idea of combining creator and entrepreneur and mashing them up into creatorpreneur role. And so that's got a team of two people on it full time.

Awesome. And where's. Where, where do you see your role in the business as the company continues to grow? Like what do you want to be doing more of, doing less of?

Yeah. So in my dream world, I would spend all of my time reading and writing and talking to people on podcasts and making videos and none of my time managing people. That's actually pretty close to the world I'm living in now because Angus, our general manager, does all of the worries about running the business where I just focus on the creative stuff. So we. We had a session with one of our other coaches who was also a pty student, incidentally. She came over in person and she does, like, coaching sessions with us once a month. Yeah. And she asked, like, where. Where do you want your role to be in the business? And I was like, honestly, I just want to sit in my ivory tower and just read books and make videos about them, and I want to let the rest of the team take care of making sure the business is profitable.

Amazing. And so how close are you to that?

Pretty close. Like, I. I get. I. I don't get involved with very much unless I see a problem with, like, quality of output. Like, hey, our podcast trailers could be a little bit better. Why don't we figure that out? Or, hey, we probably need another editor. What do you reckon? But I'm trying now to kind of step back from meddling and micro. Be, like, looking over someone's shoulder and being like, huh, why are you doing it that way rather than that way? It's like, no, I need to step back and recognize, hey, it's fine. It's all good. I need to somehow get over that fear of letting go.

What's that in terms of building this business? What's the biggest mistake? And then what was the lesson learned that you've made along the way?

I want to say the biggest mistake was not hiring fast enough, but. And then the biggest mistake was hiring too fast. Yeah, not hiring fast enough in the early days when I could have outsourced my editing a long time ago, but it took me two years to outsource it because I kept on thinking, oh, no one can do this as well as I can. And it just always felt like I might as well just do it myself. I wish I'd outsourced it a year, 18 months prior to that, because then I would have freed up more of my time. But then when the business started to go well.

And we were like, oh, there's all these things we could do. Let's do them, and sort of just piled on all the different projects, and we're like, okay, we need people for all these projects. We can afford it, like, to hire higher, higher, higher, higher. And ended up not taking probation periods very seriously, not taking the interview process very seriously, just thinking, oh, it's fine. Like, someone in a seat is better than an empty seat. Right? And it's true. And it was nice and the vibe was really fun and the people are great, but we just didn't, hadn't figured out a way of actually working with them in a way to optimize output and so hence why we switched a bunch of them to freelancers.

Nice, nice. And then.

Let'S fast forward three years. So where would you like the business to be in 3 years time?

Good question. Um, I don't really know. I think I'd like it to be where for me personally, I have published my first book, I'm writing the second. I'm known as a thought leader, public intellectual in the space of personal development. I get invited to give talks at conferences and things and I'm continuing making YouTube videos and doing my podcast.

And yeah, the business has maybe sort of somewhere between 12 and 15 people in it who are plugging away pretty.

Much same size as now, I think.

Pretty much same size. I don't really have ambitions, ambitions for a much bigger business. But what the team is doing is leveraging up my output. So let's say I make a video, we have a team who writes it up as a Twitter thread or chops it up into TikToks, chops it up into LinkedIn, whatever, all of, all of that stuff so I can focus on the thing that I want to do, which is learn cool stuff and make a video about it. And then everyone else in the team worries about leveraging the output to distribute it across all the platforms and then figuring out the getting people into our sales funnel for one of our courses and as long as the business is sufficiently profitable. So for me, I've arbitrarily defined that as 60% margins, then I don't really care about the numbers. I'm not overly concerned about getting to 10 million or 20 million. I just want this to be a lifestyle business that lets me live the life of my dreams while hopefully impacting people at scale.

Awesome. Okay, so let's now imagine that everything that you just said you want to achieve in three years time, you fail at that.

Yeah.

So a bit of a pre mortem. Right. So what would be, what's the first thing that comes to mind that you think would drive a failure?

Slowly declining view counts on YouTube slowly declining relevance for the audience. It's. I can't imagine there's something that would just. I mean, unless I get canceled overnight for saying something non woke in a podcast or something like that. Beyond that, yeah. I think the most likely negative outcome is slowly over time the YouTube channel becomes less and less relevant we don't manage to evolve with the times. We don't manage to get on short form content. We don't manage to grow an audience across multiple platforms. Therefore sales decline across all of our courses. Therefore we're having to let go of team members because we can't afford it anymore.

So how do you mitigate that then?

I think the way we mitigate that is by continuing to recognize that we need to innovate at the top of the funnel. We always need to be ahead of like kind of on our toes when it comes to the YouTube channel. And I think in the past I have been. Okay, so actually, actually there's two things. I think in the past I've been a bit like, oh, I can just turn on the camera and make a video. It's all good. And sort of not really respecting the YouTube channel and thinking, you know what, let me focus on the other areas of the business. But actually everything in the business does better when I just focus on the YouTube channel and everyone else does everything else. Because that's I think my core thing.

But I think the other way of mitigating against it is by being less reliant on the YouTube channel. And that's kind of where we're trying to get to with this creatorpreneur brand which we're trying to grow as being separate from me somewhat.

But also what I'm personally trying to do is get to a point where like the thing with a YouTube channel is that it feels almost like being an athlete, just less cool in that you only really have a few years in the limelight and there are very few YouTubers that are big today who were big 10 years ago. There's like a few of them, but it's like it's not a normal thing. And so how can I continue given that the thing I care about is read, write, learn, teach. How can I basically funnel the cash flow we're making right now into assets like property and stocks such that I become, you know, default alive financially independent and I can just make 100k a year without even having a YouTube channel. That's where I'd personally like to get to because I think that will make my own ability to do content more anti. Fragile.

Yeah, yeah, that's the thing I focus on as well. It's just asset, you know, asset cash allocation and then, you know, asset accumulation. Right. Okay, so the business. So last question for you. So.

A 10 is obviously perfect. So 1 to 10 rating. So the business as it exists today, a 10 is. It's perfect. No room for improvement. Just, you know, passage of time and things keep ticking over. One is it cannot obviously only go up. Where would you rate the business today?

Oh, good question.

I'd say probably a six.

And what's the first thing that comes to mind, which, if done, I don't know, better more often, perhaps more consistently within the business, would take the six to a solid seven.

Finding a way to systemize creativity on the YouTube channel. And this is something that we've been trying for the last year and haven't. Haven't cracked. Initially, we thought, let's hire writers to ghost write in my voice. Turned out, that's actually really hard to do because it's really hard to write a script. Impossible. Then we're like, all right, cool. Let's hire a producer who can worry about idea generation, titles, thumbnails. That's worked to an extent, but actually, a lot of the ideas that come from me because if. When I feel energized to do a video, it tends to do better, and I tend to feel better about it. So we're slowly figuring out a system of, like, what are. If we break down all of the components of what makes a YouTube video and repeat that. What are the bits where I need to be involved, I. E. Writing and filming, and what are the bits where we can incorporate other people who are maybe better than me at doing the thing. Better than. Better than me at Photoshop to make thumbnails, for example, or better than me at editing or better than me at chopping up and repurposing. And how do we make a system that we can add people to, to increase the A, make more content and B, B, make better content. And I think that's a struggle right now. And if. If we can crack that, I think it will go up to a solid 8 out of 10.

But there's gotta be at least 5 people in the world who are world class at what you just described that you could, like, interview. Right. And I would think there must be. You wouldn't be the first person in the world to create such a system, would you?

No. I mean, people like Mr. Beast definitely have that sort of system. There's a bunch of other sort of huge YouTubers. Linus Tech Tips has a team of, like, 40 people cranking out 17 videos a week.

Well, you just got to take one of those freelancers that you're only using for a day a week now and have the other four days a week spent with Mr. Beast.

Yeah, something like that. That would be good. Yeah. I actually do know quite a few people who work for Mr. Beast and I have, like, I'm only one degree separated from him. So at some point it would be worth. That sounds like people.

Very worth. That sounds like five very worthwhile interviews. It's like, who's the top five that you would assume have that now and then? I'm sure the insights would emerge from these discussions.

Yeah, almost any, I think.

Okay, just to wrap up then, Ali, what's the. If you could give our listeners just one piece of advice. If they have a dream, you know, to build a business, whatever that business may be, it doesn't have to be a YouTube business, doesn't have to be a creative business. What's your kind of sterling piece of advice when it comes to business building?

Okay, I can't. I, I can't. I guess I can only speak for what's worked for me. My thing has always been that finding a way to make the process feel energizing. Because most of us trying to build businesses, we're doing it alongside a day job. You, you want to, you know, we get home from the day job, you're feeling drained, you're feeling like, oh, okay, I don't want to. I can't be bothered to make my YouTube video or to do my business or whatever. But if the process of making the video or the business is more enjoyable and energizing than watching Netflix, now, you're really winning because your default action is, I want to work on my business, I want to work on my channel, I want to work on my website. And so I think it's a. About finding the appropriate thing that you by default already find energizing, because each of us has different interests. But also, once you decide what that is, there's always bits of it that you're not going to enjoy doing that are going to feel draining. But there's things that you can do to make them more energizing, whether it's doing it with friends, whether it's doing it with music, whether it's like, I don't know, doing it in a slightly more interesting way, just changing your mindset about it. For me, finding a way to make the process energizing has always meant that I do the thing. Whereas if the process feels draining and it feels like a drag, like going to the gym feels like a drag, I just don't do it. So that's, that's how I do things.

Yeah, that's excellent piece of advice. Focus on the process rather than just the product. Product is a nice, nice carrot. But if you're not going to like the journey, then you'll never get to it. Right, Ali, thank you so much for today. Really appreciated the chance to understand a bit more on the, about the inside of the business and, you know, some of the things that you've struggled with and found challenging. And, yeah, thank you very much. And those watching and listening, Ali's got a book. It's still, I think it's still over a year away. Right, Join us. Join his email list and you'll get first dibs on when the book is out. So thanks a lot, Ali.

Thank you very much.