What I Actually Do When I’m Not Making YouTube Videos
AAli Abdaal
Small Business/StartupsAdvertising/MarketingManagementTelecommuting
Transcript
00:00:00Hey friends, welcome back to the vlog.
00:00:06The day starts at 8am when I wake up, negotiate myself out of bed, have a shower, do my skincare
00:00:11and play with the baby girl for a bit. I wave goodbye to the other baby girl and I head over
00:00:19to the office to start the work day. Fridays are unusual in that I start work at 9am, usually I
00:00:28start at 10am, but on Fridays from 9am to 10am I do a live session called the Friday Fireside
00:00:33for students of our Lifestyle Business Academy, which is our online business school. I run
00:00:37a Monday masterclass every Monday, and then twice on a Friday I do the more casual Q&As
00:00:40where I help our students wherever I can with their businesses. Cool, great stuff gang, have
00:00:45a lovely rest of the day, good luck with the businesses and life, and I will see you all
00:00:49next week. Bye!
00:00:50We've just done the Friday Fireside, that was quite nice, there were only like four people
00:00:53on the call, and so it felt like I could really dive in in detail. So these are our very casual
00:00:59like Q&A calls that we run, and they can just ask me anything, and we just have a chit-chat
00:01:03about their business, giving feedback on their content, or on their sales pages, or on their
00:01:06proposals, or on their offers. And in this group we had Sherylaine, who's already made $100,000
00:01:09in the last few months. We've had Carlos, who's just joined us, and so he's trying to figure out
00:01:13his niche. And so yeah, it's good vibes. We then have a little bit of chit-chat with the team
00:01:17about this vlog format, and we take a look at some of the old vlogs I used to do many, many years ago
00:01:21while I was in med school. I mean, I used to save lives in different countries, and now
00:01:25I make YouTube videos. I really enjoyed doing that stuff back in the day, and so I'm experimenting
00:01:29with potentially trying to recreate that sort of format. We'll see how it goes. Sick, man!
00:01:33What have I? Six minute long vlog, edited by me, filmed by me, and so this was how I stayed
00:01:40consistent with content while I had a real life as a student and a doctor. As the day progresses,
00:01:45I sort of am constructing the vlog in my head with the footage that I've got, thinking like,
00:01:50okay, where do I think a little montage would be good? Where is a voiceover sensible? And then I'll
00:01:56like write out the voiceover. I want to experiment with this format for the business stuff, because
00:02:03it's basically like the study with me thing. Instead of studying, I'm like, I don't know,
00:02:06trying to build a landing page or like freaking, I don't know, whatever, trying to figure out ads
00:02:10for Super Focus or whatever. If we can nail this as a format, this is a massive unlock, because it means
00:02:16that for example, a Wednesday can be dedicated to filming, where we're like talking to the camera
00:02:20and shit. But then on a Friday, I can actually just be doing stuff, and we can just film me doing
00:02:24stuff, and I can explain how I'm doing the stuff, and then I'll be fucking sick, because then I can
00:02:29actually do the stuff, rather than just being a professional content creator. So that is the dream.
00:02:34After the vlog discussion, one of our new team members, Anne, shows me some of the process mapping
00:02:38stuff that she's been working on to try and improve the operations of our Lifestyle Business Academy.
00:02:42One thing we've been, me and Anne has been talking about for a while is we need like, we always need
00:02:45like a student roadmap. Yeah. Like a nice, cute looking Figma page that we can be like, this is the
00:02:50roadmap, and this is where you are, and this is what the next step is. Yeah. That'll be sick.
00:02:53So I think, yes. Yes. Yeah. Student facing like roadmap, doc. Yeah. Which then maps to
00:02:59student experience, which maps to coach thingy, and everyone is like singing from the same
00:03:03machine, even though the students never see the coach and the system one. We know that it maps to the
00:03:07roadmap. Yes. And so if we change the roadmap, everything else has to change.
00:03:10And anyone across the entire business is able to look at like, what am I doing today? And what box
00:03:16am I touching? How am I helping? And how does that then fit into the bigger picture? Yes.
00:03:20Nice. And if, if I go to go spend the next half an hour or like half a day doing X and it doesn't
00:03:26touch any of those boxes. Yeah. Is that a valuable exercise? Even if it seems fun or seems important,
00:03:32and that's going to help, help prioritization. Nice. At this point, it's around 11 AM and it's
00:03:37time to crank on some work. It's time to get started with life notes. Life notes is the email
00:03:43newsletter that I've been sending since like April, 2018. So how many years is that? Eight years,
00:03:47almost every week for the last eight years sending an email. And there is a technique that I came across
00:03:51from a writing coach, which is called the splurge. This is how the splurge works. You basically set
00:03:56a timer for 10 minutes. Conveniently, I only have 12 minutes until my next meeting, pretty much with
00:04:01eyes closed and not being allowed to press the backspace or the, or the delete button. You just like
00:04:06word vomit anything that comes to mind. So this is the sort of thing that it might look like. Okay.
00:04:14The idea is that you do this for like a whole 10 minutes with your eyes closed. You see how
00:04:18janky this is, but this is a good way of like silencing the inner critic and finding out where
00:04:26you want to go and what you want to say about a particular thing. So by literally writing out,
00:04:30ah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I've actually landed on what I now think is a good
00:04:33topic, which I'm now going to continue to splurge about. That will be like the first draft of the
00:04:37newsletter. And then if I want to, I can just chuck it into Claude and be like, Hey, can you just
00:04:41clean it up to make sure there's no typos and shit? Or I could just like manually hand
00:04:44craft it if I really felt like it, but we'll see how it goes after continuing on with this
00:04:48splurge. Oh shit. I'm going to have my call with Nathan. Whoopsie.
00:04:59Alrighty. So just got off a call with Nathan, who's one of our coaches. Nathan is in Australia.
00:05:05And so it's a good time zone for Hong Kong because it's a few hours ahead. So it's very
00:05:08easy to get on a call with Nathan. Nathan is actually our outreach specialist in the Lifestyle
00:05:11Business Academy because he ran his own like marketing agency for like 12 years.
00:05:1412 years before joining us. And he basically got all of his clients through outreach, like
00:05:19a combination of warm outreach and cold outreach and sending DMS and doing cold emails and stuff
00:05:23like that, which is really cool. He's never made content as far as I know. He doesn't have
00:05:28much of a personal brand. So he didn't get clients through like being famous on the internet.
00:05:32And he also didn't get clients through running ads. He literally just got them through like
00:05:35messaging and emailing people being like, Hey, do you want to work with me? Obviously doing
00:05:39it slightly more sophisticated than that. And so what we do is that this was initially started
00:05:44out as a sort of coach training conversation where Nathan, you know, I have these two, three
00:05:50times a week with all of our coaches where a couple of coaches get on a call with me and
00:05:55kind of like we model it after like a medical ward round where the coach goes through and
00:06:00we discuss any patients or any students that they are struggling with. So in this context,
00:06:03Nathan was struggling with one of his students. Let's call the student, John. John is having
00:06:07existential angst about his niche and his business model. So he's like, what do I want to go with
00:06:12this particular business model in this particular niche, but that one doesn't really feel aligned
00:06:15or do I want to do this thing, but I know that's going to make less money. And so when people have
00:06:19that kind of like, Oh, I'm pulled in these different directions, it's a real struggle for them.
00:06:24And so we identified that as being the problem. We also then go through the Dr. CPR method,
00:06:28DR CPR, which stands for DMS replies, calls, proposals, and revenue, which is sort of like the,
00:06:33uh, I think of them as the five vital signs of a business in the early stages, uh, that can help
00:06:37the coach and the student and me diagnose again, medical analogy, diagnose exactly where the problem
00:06:42is so that we can then prescribe a solution or suggest an experiment for that specific problem.
00:06:46So we did that with one of Nathan's students. And then we happened to have half an hour left where
00:06:49I was like, you know what, let's actually just cause I'm working on the DMS module of the new curriculum.
00:06:54Let me get Nathan's thoughts on this cause Nathan is a pro at DMS. And actually that was a very
00:06:58generative conversation that resulted in quite a lot of, um, new stuff that I realized we can
00:07:02incorporate into the curriculum, which is absolutely sick. So I love it when a Zoom call turns into
00:07:07curriculum content, which turns into just making a better experience for our students.
00:07:10All right. If you're enjoying the video so far, I would love to tell you about WeWork who are very
00:07:14kindly sponsoring this video. So if you run a small business like I do, you will know how much of a
00:07:18nightmare office space is. A commercial lease is usually at least two years. It's super expensive.
00:07:22You've got to sort out the fit out and you end up having to do things like unblocking the toilets
00:07:25and dealing with plumbing and all that kind of stuff yourself. Total nightmare, which is why me and my team
00:07:29have been paying customers of WeWork since like 2020. Back then it was just me and our general manager
00:07:33Angus working out of the WeWork in Cambridge. We'd go there every day. It was super nice interior
00:07:37design. There'd be whiteboards everywhere. And a lot of what the business does now got sketched out
00:07:40in those conference rooms in the WeWork. These days, the team is a lot bigger and mostly remote.
00:07:44And so we've got people working from all around the world and we don't have a physical office
00:07:47anywhere except here in Hong Kong. So instead, everyone on the team has a WeWork all access membership.
00:07:52So wherever someone happens to be, they can walk into the local WeWork and get a proper day of work done.
00:07:56And then whenever I'm back in London or a few of the team end up in the same city, we can just book a
00:08:00desk or a meeting room and actually work together in real life, which is awesome. The great thing
00:08:03about WeWork is that it's also super flexible. The contract goes month to month and you can add
00:08:07or drop membership super easily as the team changes. So especially for our remote team these days,
00:08:10WeWork basically takes care of all of the office side of things, which means our team and me can get
00:08:14to focus on actually running the business rather than trying to be a part-time office manager. And
00:08:18wherever you are in the world, you know exactly what you're getting. So if your business is at the point
00:08:21where you're ready to think about something like this, head over to we.co/aliabdal and book a tour
00:08:26at a WeWork near you. And if you use the codes on screen, you can get 10% off the monthly membership
00:08:30or 25% off the pay-as-you-go on-demand desks and meeting rooms. Links and codes are in the video
00:08:34description as well. So big thank you WeWork for sponsoring this video and let's get back to it.
00:08:38At this point, it's 12:25 PM. I've got 15 minutes until lunch with the team.
00:08:42And so I'm going to use that time to try and incorporate Nathan's insights into the DM's curriculum
00:08:47material and also to polish off this week's issue of life notes.
00:08:52Alrighty. So that is this issue of life notes that has been written. I'm actually very proud of it.
00:08:56Just actually it's weird because it's having, having very few minutes to actually write it,
00:09:00I think made it way better than sometimes I agonize over it for like two or three hours and stuff.
00:09:05And yeah, not a single ounce of AI was used in the writing of life notes.
00:09:09Previously, I used to use our app VoicePal and used to walk around and sort of like dictate
00:09:12what I would, what I wanted to write about. Then I would chuck it into Claude and then go back
00:09:15and forth with the AI for absolutely ages to like figure out. And then once I discovered this like
00:09:19splurge method, um, it just, I, I just sort of realized that I prefer the craft of writing with
00:09:26my fingertips on a keyboard. So I'll still use like AI dictation and stuff for things that are not like
00:09:30creative output, but for things that involve like creative output that sort of, I actually do prefer
00:09:35sort of raw dog writing it myself rather than, um, trying to get an AI to find my voice and you know,
00:09:41all of that, all that crap. Now me and Sean are, uh, so the team has gone for lunch. Uh,
00:09:47they are going to a local Thai place and they're going to order for us. And then we are going to
00:09:50join them. Uh, once we go to the DJI store, cause we want to buy some new tech. What are we buying?
00:09:55Yeah. New microphones. Cause we want to be able to capture more stuff like in a more sort of candid
00:09:59fashion, uh, rather than it just being the sort of official desk setup. So yeah, time for a little trip
00:10:05to the DJI store and then team lunch, multi-colour magnetic front cover.
00:10:21All righty. So we are back after lunch. We have done a nice haul of equipment from the DJI store,
00:10:28which we are now putting on charge for a four-way microphone setup with a single transmitter, which
00:10:32means we can do four-way podcasts. We can do four-way like round tables. We can capture conversations
00:10:36that are happening over lunch. So that's really cool. And so now I have a call with Angus. It's
00:10:40currently 20 past two. Uh, I've got a call with Angus at three. And so the rest of the afternoon,
00:10:44I'm going to be focusing on super focused marketing. So super focus is our app.
00:10:48And the way I think of it is like magnetic marketing and effortless sales. We want marketing that is
00:10:52magnetic, i.e. it effortlessly attracts our ideal customers and also repels people that we don't want.
00:10:58And we want effortless sales, sales that feel effortless. I don't like it when it feels like
00:11:02we're trying to sell something and it feels hard. I want it to feel effortless because selling is a
00:11:06service and sales is merely about educating the person about your product. And if it's right for
00:11:11them, then they'll just naturally buy. Right. Um, and if it's not, then this is no hard feelings.
00:11:15And so I'm trying to sort of figure out like, okay, how do we present, how do we position and present
00:11:20super focus so that we attract the right people to become founding members? Uh, because we have only
00:11:25another couple of weeks while we're still doing the founding member program for super focus,
00:11:28which is basically you get massive discount, uh, which will be grandfathered in forever for as
00:11:33long as you're a subscriber, you get like a money back guarantee and you get to join our little
00:11:36community where you give us feedback about the product. Oh, by the way, if you happen to be
00:11:39watching this before Saturday, the 26th of September, 2026, I'm hosting my quarterly workshop,
00:11:44the autumn reset. It's completely free. I host it with thousands of attendees from all around the
00:11:48world. And the whole idea in this totally free live workshop is that you and I work together to
00:11:52essentially reflect on how 2026 has gone so far. And then we set goals for the final 90 days of
00:11:572026 so that we can finish the year strong. I've been running these every three months for the last
00:12:01few years. It's around two hours together on a zoom call. People get tons and tons of value from it.
00:12:04And so there'll be a link to register completely for free down in the description, if you're interested.
00:12:15At three o'clock, I have a 45 minute one on one zoom meeting with Angus, our general manager,
00:12:20where we discuss various issues and opportunities in the business. Alrighty. So I was meant to be doing
00:12:26some super focused stuff, but I ended up spending half an hour just yapping with Ann because she had
00:12:29to leave. And so we were just sketching out a bunch of the operations and processes for the Lifestyle
00:12:33Business Academy in terms of like what, like what the student journey looks like and what the coaches
00:12:38are up to and basically trying to figure out where are the holes in the system? Because what we're really
00:12:42trying to do is there's like basically a zillion different things we could do to improve the
00:12:46experience of students and coaches in the Lifestyle Business Academy. But the discipline is in
00:12:50figuring out what are the high priority, high impact ones and doing those first, which requires us to
00:12:54really understand the map of all of this stuff so far. One of the things with Lifestyle Business Academy
00:12:59is I had an idea going in of what the student experience would look like. And then students
00:13:03started going through it. And then almost from day one, we started to get data about where people are
00:13:09struggling. Basically, the struggles with building a business were a lot more numerous than I thought
00:13:13they would be, because in particular, various like mindset and emotional and like mental hurdles were
00:13:19coming up for students. So even though I thought it was pretty clear, like what they should do, and they
00:13:23sort of knew what they should do, they were not doing the thing. And so all of those like things are now
00:13:28bubbling to the surface and have been over the last few months where we're like, all right, there's all sorts of
00:13:33things we could do to solve this, to solve these problems. Let's figure out what the problems actually
00:13:37are. And then let's put systems in place to actually solve them. And so there was a lot of like drawing
00:13:41boxes on a page and like process mapping and stuff. So it is now 4:47 PM. I have my next Friday fireside
00:13:48with the LBA students. So that is the next order of business. We then have our second Friday fireside
00:13:53for the day, this time where I'm speaking to our European and Australian students primarily. And then the
00:13:57day ends with a casual chit chat amongst the team in the office. Yeah, I feel like I've been sort of
00:14:01carrying the weight of some kind of business since the age of 18 for the last like 14 years. Because
00:14:07even with the first business, the first successful business, the courses business, SixMed, there was
00:14:11always stuff that was going wrong with it. Like books weren't delivered on time or like a student was
00:14:15unhappy or like a student was really happy and I had to get a testimonial or just the website was broken.
00:14:20And then there was a period of time once I sold that business and when the YouTube channel was still a
00:14:24side hustle where it didn't feel heavy, I don't think. It felt like I was playing with house money. Just
00:14:30like, oh, this is the, you know, we're in the bonus round. I've already got my day job. I have no intention
00:14:33of quitting my day job. So this YouTube thing is just like a cool, cool, cool thing on the site. But then
00:14:37it got so big and I enjoyed it so much that I decided to quit the day job and made it my main thing.
00:14:41But then it added a level of heaviness to it. That's like, it's my main thing now. And so this business
00:14:45is like what I do for work and like the work domain. And ultimately every decision makes its way back to me.
00:14:52And having a team is amazing because it takes, it definitely takes a lot of that load off.
00:14:55And without the team and without Angus, like being the general manager, it would be a lot worse than
00:14:58it currently is. But it's sort of like the whole thing is sort of reliant on me to continue to
00:15:03do the content, sort out the curriculum with LBA and all this sort of stuff.
00:15:08And we don't yet have senior leadership team that can truly take ownership of their particular
00:15:14department yet because we've historically only really hired people who are like young and inexperienced.
00:15:20And so in that context, because I can't hand over the ownership to a senior leader in that
00:15:25department, it's just sort of me and Angus who are like shouldering the load of the entire business.
00:15:29At least that's what it feels like. But I hear from more experienced entrepreneurs that once you
00:15:32get that load, those like senior hires who can truly own something, then it's like that load
00:15:38feels like it's being taken off your shoulders and it's being sort of shared around a bit more.
00:15:41But at the same time, it feels weird to be talking about this, right? Because it's sort of like,
00:15:44I don't want it to look as if, and also I don't want it to feel internally as if I'm complaining
00:15:48about this at all, because this is the life I've chosen for myself and it's absolutely sick. And it's
00:15:51like way better than the life I would have had working as a doctor. And so it's sort of like,
00:15:55choose your heart. It's like, if you want to be a business owner, then you're signing up to
00:15:58feeling the weight of the business on your shoulders. If you have co-founders, then it feels like more
00:16:02like the load is shared. I had a friend who had four co-founders for his business. He was like,
00:16:05four was probably a bit much, but like, it felt like the load was shared. Whereas when you're
00:16:09a solo founder or even a duo, then yeah. One of the challenges is constant context switching,
00:16:16where it's like, we've got this LBA workshop in the morning. And then immediately it's like
00:16:21doing operations with Anne. And then there's, we're talking about something about the YouTube channel.
00:16:24And then we're like, all right, we need to work on the curriculum stuff. Oh, and then there's
00:16:26meeting with Nathan, which turns into a curriculum chat. And then it's like, okay, lunch with the team.
00:16:30We need to sort out our audio process while we're doing lunch. We're trying to figure out like the
00:16:34content for the vlog for the day. It's like, in the back of my mind, I need to focus on super focus.
00:16:37And then I start working on super focus. And then I've got this meeting with Angus. In some ways,
00:16:41I like the variety of it, but in other ways, I'm like, ah, there's a lot going on. And also it's like
00:16:47all in one day. And so I almost prefer when the calendar is completely empty and I can just like
00:16:51dig into just like one thing. And so this is sort of where I've, I'm, I'm always trying to sort of get
00:16:56to that Nirvana where I can actually just single task on something for four hours rather than being
00:17:01constantly derailed by other things. So that's been a bit of a struggle with today. I find it useful to
00:17:06set the rules for myself. Like the rule is I'm not allowed to work after 7pm. And it's not my
00:17:10definition of work. It's like someone else's definition of work. Like what looks like, if it
00:17:13looks like work to someone else, I'm not allowed to do it after 7pm. And I find that to be a very
00:17:16useful thing. It was like, okay, well, it's all like going home at the end of the day in medicine where
00:17:20you're like, yeah, that's patient's bleeding, but I can't do anything about it. It's not quite as detached as that,
00:17:24because you really can't do anything about it when you're not there. And I could always just like
00:17:27open up code code or do something. And sometimes I do, I do those things, especially when inspiration
00:17:31strikes. I think for the most part, the balance feels good. For the most part, I feel happy, fulfilled,
00:17:36joyful in the business. And at the same time, it also feels like heavy, um, to an extent. But at the
00:17:44same time, it also doesn't because we've got, we've got, we've got a great team and it does feel
00:17:47light a lot of the time. And if it was heavier, I wouldn't be like, oh my God, I can't, I can't
00:17:51spend a lot of lunch with the team because it's like, well, that's fine as well. And so I definitely
00:17:56have it a lot better than most business owners because of the team structure around, around it.
00:18:00And because the products are so high margin and because we've got the audience. So we have a lot
00:18:02of unfair advantages in our favor. Um, who knows how long that will continue to last, but fingers crossed.
Community Posts
No posts yet. Be the first to write about this video!
Write about this video