If you're like me, you've probably had periods in your
life where you romanticized working brutally long hours
while surviving the intense suffering that comes with it.
For me, it was starting my first business.
I distinctly remember falling asleep with my laptop on my
stomach, only to wake up six hours later and immediately get
back to work. Where I.
Left off in a world that glorifies hustle culture and
emphasizes the grind, it's easy to make the assumption that hard
work must fundamentally suck. It's not supposed to be fun,
we're told. After all, if it was easy, then
everybody would fucking do it. But what if it didn't have to
suck? What if it wasn't painful?
What if it was actually kind of fun?
Today I'm talking to Ali Abdahl, a former medical doctor turned
YouTube and author of the new book Feel Good Productivity.
Ollie graduated near the top of his class at Cambridge and went
into practicing medicine full time in his 20s when he realized
something both dumb and profound, that it wasn't very
fun. So Ollie decided to make it fun.
And as a part of making it fun, he created a YouTube channel to
share some of his ideas around making it fun.
Today, he is has more than 5 million subscribers and runs one
of the largest educational channels in the entire world.
Ollie has achieved incredible success in two of life's most
intensely demanding and challenging domains.
Yet he claims that his success stems less from his hard work
and willingness to suffer and more from his creativity and
ability to make even the most intense drudgery fun.
In this episode we're going to talk about how productivity got
its bad reputation, how most of the so-called productivity
advice actually makes it worse. We'll discuss why working more
hours isn't always more productive, and how sometimes
the most useful thing you can do is not work at all.
We'll hear Ollie explain why the optimal number of distractions
is actually not zero, and how he chooses goals in his life to
make failure impossible. We'll also learn how the biggest
thing holding most people back is that they actually take their
work too seriously. This episode is more than just a
conversation, It's a journey into rethinking how we view
work, time, and our lives. It's about breaking down the
barriers of conventional productivity myths and
discovering a path that leads to genuine happiness and balance.
But before we dive into the conversation, I have a small
request. If you're tuning in today,
please take a moment to leave a rating or a review for the
podcast. Your support helps us grow and
bring more content like this, along with more incredible
guests like Ollie Plus. As a token of appreciation, if
you send me a screenshot of your review of this podcast, you'll
receive my exclusive 2024 Life Audit for free, just in time for
the new year. The Life Audit takes you step by
step through a process that I've personally used for over 10
years now to zero in on the most important values in my life so I
know exactly what I want to give a fuck about in the new year and
what I don't. You can learn more by going to
markmanson.net/audit AUDIT. You just submit the screenshot
of the review and we will automatically verify and send
the PDF to you. Now.
The audit will show you what goals are worth pursuing and
this episode will help you make that pursuit more enjoyable,
thus increasing your chances of success.
So without further ado, let's fucking get into it.
Brawl. Do you even podcast like Brawl?
This is the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your
host Mark Manson. What do you think is the biggest
thing most people misunderstand about productivity?
I think one of the big misconceptions about
productivity is that it's about a hustle.
It's about grind. It's about work, work, work.
You know people sometimes they're like, oh, but like don't
you want to be unproductive some of the time And then things like
that. And I guess it's somewhat
semantic because if people are defining productivity as
efficiency of getting work done, then OK, I I I can see that.
I think I choose to define productivity in a much more
holistic sense. To me, productivity is using
your time in a way that's intentional and effective and
and enjoyable ideally. And so to me, like, like for
example, this evening I have an evening of alone time where I'm
going to play Ballader's Gate 3 on my MacBook and I might even
go and get pick pick up a gaming laptop for myself because I've
been salivating over the razor blade 16 inch and there's a
store in LA that has it in stock.
And so I like to that. That to me is productivity.
It's using my time intentionally and effectively because I'm
playing on hard difficulty and enjoyably because it's going to
be fun. And having that one evening a
week where I play video games to me is like that's a dream.
That's what I've been trying to optimize for my whole life.
And my, my 13 year old self would be, you know, having a
field day if you knew that this is, this is where I've ended up,
where I can play video games. That to me is also productivity.
And I think if we expand out the definition then we can, we can
start applying the principles of productivity.
Like, you know, the stuff that you and I talk about, the stuff
that Tim Ferriss talks about, you can start applying the
principles of productivity to to anything in life.
So I love optimizing my relationship and like using
principles of productivity and my relationship.
It's like how do we do this in a way that's more intentional and
effective and enjoyable and reading books about what makes
relationships work and regular rituals and check insurance and
routines. And we have a notion page for
like our relationship reviews and have done for the last two
and a bit years that is applying productivity to real life rather
than just to work. And so I think people almost
focus down too much on just the work thing or the how do I get
better grades and not enough on hang on, I'm learning a set of
skills here. Let me just make my life better.
I I feel like people there's a tendency to fetishize suffering
and sacrifice. You know, we we tend to love
hearing other people's stories of all the shit you went
through, how much you struggled, all the setbacks you overcame.
Like that's very entertaining when it happens to other people.
And we really admire that. And so I think we kind of
romanticize that in ourselves and we think to do something
great you have to struggle and suffer immensely and be
miserable and force yourself through all sorts of awful shit.
So what I love about this is it's the first productivity book
I've come across that treats emotions as one of the
fundamental systems within an overall productivity framework.
And this is something that I like.
I would try to write this for years.
I I would try to explain to people that any sort of
productivity problem is fundamentally an emotional
problem. Like the reason if you're not
doing something, it's because you don't feel like doing it.
It's not there's no it's it's not a software issue.
It's not like a a lack of tools or it it's not 'cause you didn't
get up early enough. It's because there's some sort
of emotional resistance or anxiety that's preventing you
from taking the right actions or or modifying the behaviors you
need to modify. People don't like hearing that.
They like hearing. They want the tool.
They want the the system, they want the morning routine.
Why do you think that is? Yeah.
I think the the the, the emotional piece is is so like, I
I remember the first time I really came across the idea was
reading Steven Pressfield's The War of Art and he calls it the
Resistance or the Capital R And like when I read that book, it
just sort of hit me like a ton of bricks.
I was like, Oh my fucking God. Like this is, this is the thing
like, he's just describing in in like this whole book exactly
what I feel when I procrastinate.
It's it's this resistance. And what it took for me to kind
of get over that was a recognition that the resistance
is an internal emotional thing and almost treating myself like
a system. Whereas I think when it comes to
kind of like even even hearing you say that right now, talking
about emotions, like the part of me that was reading Lifehacker
back in the day is thinking, oh, come on, emotions.
Like, what bullshit is this? Get over it.
Get over right. Back.
Come on. And so many people I speak to,
you know, there's that thing of if I could just find the right
tool, if I could just find the right technique, then I wouldn't
procrastinate so much. Or if I could just find the
right meds for my ADHD or whatever The thing is like.
It seems to go in waves in terms of what people think the magic
bullet is, but fundamentally just comes down to this thing of
you're unproductive because you don't feel like doing the thing.
No one, no one ever struggles with procrastination, watching
Netflix or hanging out with friends.
That's that's not a thing. We struggle with procrastination
when it comes to writing that blog post or like studying for
that exam, or like doing that slightly boring, annoying
PowerPoint at work that we don't really want to or like asking
our manager for a raise. The stuff that feels we feel
that resistance. And so part of the part of my
goal with the book was to try and figure out, OK, cool, we
know that's a thing. So therefore, what are the tools
that we can use to kind of treat emotions as something important?
Treat them sincerely rather than thinking of it as like, oh, I'm
just a pussy because I'm not like, grinding like David
Goggins does or whatever the narrative sometimes are.
I think it also kind of taps into.
So I think the big epiphany for me that I had I think I had it
writing my second book. So my attitude in my first my
first book was very much bro, you gotta fucking grind.
You gotta suffer. You know you did 9 hours
yesterday, let's do 10 today, let's finish two chapters this
month. And I noticed that it it started
to backfire that, But essentially I would get four
really, really good, high quality hours out of myself, and
then every hour past that would be low quality or it would be a
very mediocre output. And then I realized that when
you're writing a book, mediocre output is actually worse than no
output, because you have to go back and either heavily edit and
revise it, which is just adding work for yourself, or you have
to make a bunch of very difficult decisions of whether
to cut it, delete it, and so on. So I had this weird realization,
probably way too late, that at least in the context of book
writing, four really effective hours was actually more
productive than 10 moderately effective hours.
Yeah, and when that unlocked for myself, I started wondering
where else that applied in my life.
Where else in my life do am I? Is that the production curve?
Actually, not only is there diminishing returns, but it's
actually turning negative at a certain point.
I I I totally vibe with this. I think I I am always on the
lookout for areas of my life that have that diminishing
return sort of kind of where the curve goes down down afterwards.
I'm also always on the lookout for areas where there's kind of
compounding returns, like for example, but things like
starting a YouTube channel, the difference between making one
video a week and making two videos a week, it actually it's
a it's a step change because you get if you if you're able to do
2 videos a week, you have twice as many chances for one of them
to pick up. And generally putting twice as
much effort into a single video does not.
Depending on the channel doesn't yield as much value as putting
that effort into two different videos.
And so there comes a point where maybe it takes you 20 hours a
week to do to do one video. But like you could do 3030 hours
to get 2 videos. And actually that extra 10 hours
then unlocks an extra step change in output, which then
improves your odds at succeeding in the thing rather than
diminishes your odds at succeeding on the thing.
And so I think there are, there are some areas of life where
where we have the diminishing returns and others where we have
the compounding. But I think they're far more
where we have the diminishing than the compound.
Yeah. And like balance is good.
It's like all all writers fundamentally like ultimately
arrive at the four hour number as well.
Sure. Like I've yet to meet a writer
who's who writes any more than four hours or has done it for a
long time who has landed on number more than four.
It seems to be a thing. Yeah.
Well, I think there have been a lot of studies too on just your
average worker laborer. It's the vast majority of their
productivity comes in the first four or five hours.
Like when they do studies on how much people get done in like the
corporate world, hours 5 through 8, it's not much.
And then if even the 1st 4 hours are like filled with
multitasking and distractions and like oh, grabbing a coffee
with someone here and there and the whole day goes goes by and
you know, I I have this these days where the whole day will go
by and be like I've written maybe 300 words and I was aiming
for 1000 today. But like how did I write 300
words in eight hours? Like what the hell?
Like how did this happen? And it turns out because, well,
distractions and lack of focus. And you know, all the things
that everyone struggles with. Do you think the optimal number
of distractions is 0? Do you think this this concept
that we're talking about of how like having that day to just
play video games and like let your brain wander, does that
also apply on a micro basis with say checking your phone?
Yeah, we we found a really cool study about this that's in the
book and weirdly there's a graph and it's sort of like an N
shaped graph. You know, there was a study, I
think it was, you know, they got people to solve a Sudoku and
also to like on a different tab do some other puzzle and also in
a different tab do some other puzzle.
And they looked at like, you know, they were allowed to
switch between the puzzles. And they found that there was
actually a sweet spot that like some amount of switching between
tasks is actually good for you rather than the traditional
narrative, which is that you must focus on one thing at a
time and exclusively that one thing at a time.
And so there is there, there does seem to be some kind of
some kind of optimal number. So, so you know, This is why
like if I'm if I'm working on something and someone will come
along and and talk to me, I don't really let it phase me.
I I think of these as welcome distractions in a way.
If I get a notification of like some news site that I wasn't
really I didn't really care about and that derails me, that
to me is an unwelcome distraction.
But one thing I used to do at university is prop my door open
at all times with a little shoe and door stop, I think.
And so if a friend would come by and then disturb me and distract
me for a few minutes, that to me is a great thing.
Like the point of university is to hang out with friends, not
really to study, and maybe I was marginally less efficient and
less productive. But like those, those, like
hallway conversations sometimes led to Hangouts, led to plans,
led to interesting things. Like, that's kind of the point
of life. So I'm all about trying to find
find ways to leave the door open or like work in a communal area
or something that allows surface area for serendipity when it
comes to interactions with people.
Interesting. Yeah, I I used to be one of
those people who was a little bit religious.
I went through a Phase, I should say of maybe three years that I
was very religious about those blocker apps that like block out
social media and news sites and you know, all the riff raff that
you try to avoid on a day-to-day basis.
And I guess I don't know, a year or two ago I just kind of came
to a conclusion that it was well to the core premise of your
book. It was I was feeling bad.
You know, I was I was almost like over invested in in being
hyper productive all the time. And and so at some point I just
turned them all off and I'm like, well, I'll turn them on if
it's ever a problem. And 90% of the time it's not
really a problem. Well, you said that really
resonates with me because, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll change it
if it's a problem. Yeah, I think that's like just a
pretty chill way to approach life.
That's like I'll change it for this if it's a problem.
So you've achieved two things that are very difficult to do.
You've become a doctor and you've become a successful
YouTube. Those are also two completely
different things. One is a very creative
entrepreneurial pursuit. One is a very traditional
barrier head in the books. Memorize a million things.
You know, what are the skills that crossover between those two
things? Two things. #1 is an ability to
stick with it for long enough, and #2 is, I think, the ability
to teach. OK.
One of the things that, you know, medical applicants often
say in their interviews is that you know when they ask why do
you want to be a doctor? You know there's a phrase a
doctor is a is a teacher. Like, you're trying to break
things down. You're trying to understand
things. You're trying to explain them to
patients, but you're also trying to explain them to your
colleagues. You're trying to to, you know,
running them by a senior. You're trying to break some
things down in an explainable way.
You're also kind of teaching the people the juniors below you.
It's a very teaching me type thing.
And so I think that's a skill set that I've had for most of my
life. I would always be the guy
helping kids out with their with their homework and I did private
tutoring when I was younger as a way of making money off the
Internet. Being a medical student, being a
doctor, I would always try my best to teach the people who are
younger than me. And when my YouTube channel
started, it wasn't an educational channel.
I actually started making musical song covers and I wanted
to be the next Kurt Schneider and Boyce Ave. and these sort of
YouTube cover artists that would, you know, sing covers of
popular songs. So the first like 5 or 6 videos
are still there. And it's those sorts of videos.
I'm like, no one cared. I'm no musical talent.
Some of my friends were good at singing.
I was like, yeah, I'm going to learn to play the guitar.
I'm going to be a big YouTuber. But it was only when I started
actually using the fact that I was pretty good at teaching and
making educational videos and things started to take off.
And so I think like fundamental, like I don't think I would have
been successful as a Mr. Beast or as an Eric or as a Ryan
Trahan or someone who's making more entertainment tea,
inspiring E type content. But I managed to do well by
being like, right, guys, Today we're going to talk about five
ways to do well in your B map medical school entrance exam,
boom. It was what I need.
So that I think was a big, a big part of overlap.
But I think the other thing that both medical school and being a
YouTube teach you is the ability to just stick with it for long
enough. Like like medical school in the
UK six years where for the first three years, at least in in
Cambridge, you don't see any patients.
So you have no, like real world contact with real people.
You're just in the books learning the science, memorizing
tedious pathways and stuff. And again, finding a way to make
it fun was the real hack for me even when I was in medical
school. Similarly, YouTube, most
channels don't succeed unless you consistently make videos
every week for like 2 years and then at that point you start
benefiting from the compounding and then you become an overnight
success and all that stuff. And I think that is, you know,
the the skill of faith and patience.
Faith that something good will happen and patience to stick at
it long enough to make it happen.
And honestly, I think it all comes back down to feel good
productivity. If you find a way to make your
work feel good, you're more likely to be patient with it for
two years. If it doesn't feel good, you're
like, fuck, why is my view, you know why is why isn't my YouTube
channel blowing up after a month?
And obviously that's not going to work.
It also helps solve that that conundrum of how do you know
when to stick with it, and how do you know when the to quit can
give up and stop chasing a pipe dream.
And it's if you love it, then who cares?
Right, exactly. Yeah.
It's fun. You're doing it for intrinsic
reasons rather than extrinsic. Totally a reason.
You're doing it for the sake of the thing itself, rather than
the outcome that you're getting from the thing.
Yeah, That's why I love what you said to me over lunch the other
day. That like, if it's not fun, I'm
not going to do it. And I was like, yes, that is a
great place to be once you're already successful.
Oh. Absolutely.
Until you're successful. It's like the the I think the
the reframing is I need to find a a way to make it fun otherwise
I'm not going to do it. Yeah, well, you know, you know
what's funny about me is I think I had that early in my career,
and I think it's a big reason of why I became successful, because
I I was always just very I was very similar to you.
I was very uncompromising about what I would write, the way I
would write it, the the tip, the particular tone or style, the
subjects I would address. And I think I part of what kind
of fucked me up after subtle art became so popular was just very
big impressive corporations name brands celebrities you know all
these people started interacting with me and wanting to do
projects with me and I didn't feel that liberty to.
I was like oh man, I'm I'm doing a feature film with Universal
Pictures like I can't fuck this up.
You know like I can't say these things And and I I think I lost
touch with that for a number of years and as your book correctly
points out I got burnt out because that's what happens when
you stop having fun with something.
If you're not completely aligned with why you're doing something
you lose the joy and you lose the momentum that that keeps you
going through the hard times. I wanna ask you really quick,
while we're talking about medicine versus YouTube, how is
the production function different between creative work
and say kind of rote memorization?
Studying science, oh, learning. All of it is creative work.
All of this. This is another thing that
students always get wrong. Like this.
Like, this is my biggest piece of advice for a lot of students.
Like, sometimes you do have to rote, memorize.
Like the Krebs cycle. Yeah, And one way to do that is
to just continue to drill it again and again.
The other way of doing it is to create a mnemonic or something
fun or like a cool way of thinking about it.
And I so actually, before starting medical school, I read
loads of books about memory and like the like world champion
memory, people who like memorize decks of cards and 18,000 digits
of π and all that shit. And basically all of them were
like, yeah, you just need to create a really strong
association. Like a strong visual association
in your in your in your mind. And the more absurd that
association is, the more likely you are to learn the thing.
And so even now, like when me and my medic friends get
together, we'll like joke about the ways that we used to
memorize things like isoniazid gives you peripheral neuropathy
because isoniazid, the drug sounds kind of like ISIS, and
ISIS famously chop your hands off if you do bad things.
It's like imagine like peripheral neuropathy is like
isoniazid or like I don't know, ethanbutol is sort of makes your
wee orange because etham has the word ham in it.
And if you think ham is sort of like pink and pink is sort of
like orange. So it's like you get like
orange, orange, wee. And that was how me and my most
of my friends got through the rote memorization of medical
school which is a highly creative task.
Or like making cool mnemonics to like memorize all 12 cranial
nerves. Like you know, there's various
rude versions of them. It's like on on, on.
They travelled and found various something and Horcruxes, it's
like gives you all the nerves of the face and stuff.
It's like shit like that that makes it fun.
It's a creative act finding a way to another kind of tip if
any students listening to this to categorize things.
You know, hematology is like, you know, the study of the blood
is like a huge field, but like if you look at all 100
conditions in hematology, you can basically categorize them
into three things and great, that simplifies it.
Now within those three things you've got categories for like 4
things. And like, the textbooks won't
tell you this because they're sorted in fucking alphabetical
order for no reason. So you just have to like, look
at this shit and be like, OK, what's a sensible categorization
of this? Oh great, there's like, anemia.
There's malignant heme and there's like a non, a non
malignant heme. Great, Let's have three
categories, bang, bang, tree structures.
And it's also creative and also fun.
And you know now when I speak to medical students, the ones who
are like, oh man, medical school's such a grind.
But once I be a doctor, it's going to be fun.
I'm always like we, we, we need to talk.
Because if you're finding medical school of grind where
going into the hospital is optional, you are not going to
find being a doctor. Find where suddenly going into
the going into work is no longer optional.
And I will always try and encourage students, find a way
to make whatever you're studying feel good, find a way to make it
fun, because that is an attitude that will help you learn the
thing better and also make me and you're less stressed and
also make you enjoy life more. I'm just like, massively.
It's remarkable that you still have the recall, all that stuff,
you know, 10 years. Later visual, visual metaphors,
imagery. The fun thing for me?
I've I've, I find it in my own life particularly useful around
fitness and health because like most people I think I found
fitness to be just a fucking bummer.
I'm. Struggling with this right now,
like help me help me figure. This out?
Yeah. So it's it's the thing that
unlocked it. And I'm not a huge Crossfitter,
but I I visited a couple CrossFit classes and it
completely. I mean, it's like the first
section of your book could basically just be kind of a
guide to, like, why CrossFit works.
Because they gamify everything. They put you in teams and they
track scores and help you, you know, try the best, get new PRS
and and do all this stuff. And it was the first time, you
know, my associations with fitness and working out.
It was always this this drudgery.
It was like, huh, Well, yeah, I'm doing this today because I
don't want to fucking die when I'm 60, you know, all all the
stuff that you read about or I want to lose 10 lbs before
summer. And it it never felt good.
It was never fun. It felt like an obligation.
It felt like a chore. It felt like a lot of it was
shame driven or judgement driven.
And then I went to some of those CrossFit classes and I had the
hardest workouts of my life. Like I was literally laying on
the floor you know like world swirling above me barely
remaining conscious and and I'm like giggling with how much fun
I had And it it was such an epiphany to me of just like turn
it into a game turn it into a little competition with
yourself. Invite friends over.
Like I used to be so rigid and structured about like a workout
program, right. Like I'd go I'd go online and
find like this oh this is the workout program that's going to
help you build 10 lbs of muscle in the next three months.
I'm like oh man, I got to do this.
I got to like show up every day. And again, back to that point
of, you know, I used to think you had to hit every workout
exactly the way it's listed at exactly the day that you're
supposed to do it. And I realized, like, if you
miss a day or if you have to push it back a day, or maybe a
friend is coming into town and he's got a workout program,
you're gonna do it together. Or maybe, like, he won't.
He likes to run. So maybe I go running with him
instead of my workout that day. It keeps it fun and interesting
and novel and that keeps the motivation going.
It keeps the excitement going. Tracking was another huge unlock
for me. I never tracked my workouts in
the past. I I was just kinda again.
I would download some list off the Internet and just like
follow it to AT like a fucking robot.
And when I I got a tracking app and I started putting in all my
lifts and all my weights and and how many reps I did of
everything. And every single week when I
open up that app, when I start my workout, I'm like, OK, last
week I did three sets of eight at this, at this weight.
Today I'm gonna try to do three sets of nine and see if I can do
it. And that just that little bit of
competition with myself gets me through that set, gets me
excited about it. When I hit it, it feels good.
Yeah, it's been, it's been incredibly profound.
And it's again, it's one of those fucking obvious things
like, and I I hate shit like this because it's it's when you
have to take your own medicine, like it's like the it's the
advice that you've written about for years and you never applied
in your own life. But it's it's been really
transformative the past couple of years.
For sure, that's so I've I've been struggling with motivation
to or consistency on the fitness front for literally years.
And it was again, when I was reading the audiobook for this a
few months ago, I was like, my God, like literally, I have not
thought about applying this principle to fitness.
Yeah. And just find a way to make it
feel good. And if you've tried all the
things and it doesn't, then change it up and try something
else. Yes.
So I've been thinking in the back of my mind, I really wanna
try CrossFit because there's so many examples from CrossFit of
how they use all these strategies and stuff and I've
yet to try CrossFit. I didn't stick with CrossFit.
I actually found CrossFit too intense, which a lot of people
run into that issue and a lot of people get injured and things
like that. Like what I noticed when I was
doing CrossFit is I would go so hard that I would feel exhausted
for the next 48 hours and and it actually dampened my energy
because I was over exerting. So in many ways it's almost like
the problem with CrossFit is it's too effective.
It like gets you going too hard. It it is such a worthwhile
experience just to go experience the community.
The community's amazing people are they're so positive there.
Like it's very doesn't matter. Like they'll be a dude next to
you who's lifting 400 lbs and you're like struggling to get
the bar off the ground and people are cheering for you just
as hard as they're cheering for that guy.
There's like no judgement. Everybody's super positive.
So nice. Thumbs up, CrossFit.
Yeah, I will absolutely check it out.
So this is something that comes up a lot with my readers and
fans, and I'm curious, It just occurred to me that there might
be an analogue in your in the productivity world as well.
But like I I've actually, I've over the years, I've come to the
conclusion that in kind of the self help personal development
space, there's actually secretly 2 separate categories that are
going on. And I think a lot of people get
them mixed up, which is the first one is advice that takes
you from bad to OK, right. So it's like if you're
depressed, here's some things you can do to like help you not
be so depressed. But then there's also advice
that takes you from OK to great. You know, if you're just kind of
a normal person going about their life, but you want to do
something really amazing. And especially here are four
things that you can try to like, make your life way more
effective. And and I find there's so much
confusion in my world and readers and people who follow
other people in this in this space, they see the bad to OK
advice and they mistake it from for OK to great advice.
They'll be like, oh, well, that's obvious.
Like, everybody knows that. And I'm like, well, yeah, it's
not meant for you. It's meant for the guy who can't
get off the couch or it's OK to grade advice, but it's
misconstrued by by people being like, you know, well, that's not
going to help me, you know, get over my crippling anxiety.
Like I can't even do this or that.
I wonder if there's a an analogue in the productivity
space. Because a lot of what what we're
talking about is mitigation. It's it's almost like mitigating
unproductivity rather than maximizing productivity.
Yeah, it's like making sure you're not falling below 80%
rather than killing yourself trying to get to 99%.
Oh. I really like this.
I've I've not thought of it in this way, but that I think there
are. There are definitely analogues.
One thing that comes to mind is like bad to OK is often about
the basic obvious things and often about the hardware like
sleep, exercise, nutrition, totally.
If you're depressed, just like, you know, people have done the
studies on this Sleeping 8 hours a night, doing some exercise
every single day things, having some social contact and like
about it and and like eating, well, it's like that.
That solves, 80% of it solves. 80% of it?
Yeah. 20%. It's like, it's like, whatever.
So if there's someone who's depressed, worrying about, you
know, maximizing the typing speed or keyboard shortcuts or
batching and all that shit that we have to talk about, like it's
kind of meaningless. But to go from OK to great, you
still have to have the basics done because the basics will
derail you immediately. Yeah, like, you can have the
best productivity hacks in the world, but if you're sleeping 3
hours a night, obviously it's not gonna work.
And so you have to do the basics well, the basic fundamentals,
the boring fundamentals, and then you can start adding stuff
on top of that. But recognizing that like, I
think like that that that that point you made made at the start
like like the people with billion dollar businesses are
not really working that much harder than the people with
$1,000,000 businesses. Even though there's a huge
difference between a billion and a million.
They're just doing different, playing different chess moves.
And so going from I think going from OK to great is often about
finding the right chess moves rather than really about working
harder. Because if you have the basic
fundamentals and you're operating at 80% and you find an
area of the market where your business will just 100 X by
default by virtue of being in that market.
Like trying to sell to people with money rather than trying to
sell to broke students. You can do the same amount of
work and still play video games and still have a great life but
also make tons and tons of money.
Yeah. And so those are now the stories
that I, I look for and I I enjoy.
I I, I don't really vibe with stories of like, Oh my God, I
struggled so much and I suffered so much.
I love the stories. When someone like, you know
what? I was working on this for a few
years. It was really fun.
I had a really balanced life. Spent time with my friends and
family, played some video games and also the thing was
successful. Yeah, love that shit.
I'm like great. That is the person we should
aspire to be rather than Muhammad Ali who's like, you
know, I suffered every day for 10 years and it was worth it to
become a champion. Yeah, most of us, I don't think,
want to suffer for 10 years just to become a champion.
Have you read the new Elon Musk book?
I've not. It's not my audible at the
moment. It is a wild ride.
It is an absolute wild ride. It is.
He is everything you expect times 10.
But it's funny because he is totally that person.
I was actually surprised how few takeaways there are from the
book, because I don't think what he does is reproducible at all.
Or if you tried to reproduce it, you would make yourself so
miserable that I'm not sure you would even want to do that.
Like, he is that guy who is 18 hours a day on the factory floor
screaming at people. Like involving himself in every
little decision. And you could see he's like, not
a happy person. Yeah, he.
Describes entrepreneurship as like chewing glass or something.
Yeah, And I've never felt like entrepreneurship is chewing
glass. But obviously I'm not trying to
get people on Mars. I'm just.
Trying to build a You're just making YouTube videos.
Trying to build the lifestyle. There's trying to make time.
To play video games, hang out, hang out with people in LA and
so yeah, different strands of entrepreneurship. 11 gets you to
Mars. The other one gets you a couple
of YouTube videos. But one leads to what I would
describe. You know, I'd I'd recommend
entrepreneurship for a lot of people.
Elon Musk would not recommend his bunch of entrepreneurship
for almost anyone. No, and he actively doesn't
actually there. There's a great moment in the
book where, I don't know, he goes through like some crazy
drama at SpaceX, loses his mind, and then immediately has to get
on a plane and fly to Asia for like some big conference.
And he gets there and it's a room full of founders and
business owners who are there to hear him, hear him speak.
And the first question is, this is a room full of 2000 people
who are inspired by you and who want to learn from you.
Like, what is the the best piece of advice that you can give us
to be as effective as you are? And he just looks at him and
says, don't. It's like you don't want to go
through what I go through. And by that point in the book,
you've read enough of the book that you're like, yeah, don't,
don't, don't do it. I do wonder though this, like I,
you know, when I when I interview people in my pod, I
always ask the question of like, once once someone is post
success, they're always preaching work life balance.
Yeah, but I wonder, I I always wonder, like, could they have
achieved that level of success while also having work life
balance? Or is it a phase that everyone
has to go through, where there is always a phase of grindiness
or whatever, and then on the other end you stop preaching
work. Life balance?
I don't think so. Rich people, they go through 10
years of grind, failure, suffering, struggle, come out
the other end, balance their lives, become very healthy and
happy and then turn around and tell everybody else that they
should be balanced, healthy and happy.
And it it depends what you're trying to do, right?
Like I think if you are in a more conventional career path, I
think there's a lot to be said maybe about work life balance.
If you are doing something entrepreneurial, there seems to
be an escape velocity phenomenon, yeah, where you need
an immense amount of force and pressure to get off the ground
and to get into orbit. And then once you're in orbit
you can kind of ease off a little bit.
I don't know if you can escape that though.
Yeah. So my way of squaring this
conundrum was to, and I I think I recognize this fairly on,
fairly early on, which is why the book is called Feel Good
Productivity is to be to be like, OK, I need to do lots of
work to make my business successful and be financially
free. Great.
Let me find a way to make that work feel really good.
And you know, I'd get home from work when I was working in my in
my day job and I would look forward to editing a video.
And on days where I didn't look forward to editing a video, I
would find a way to make editing the videos and I would the stuff
to talk about in the book, like play power people find a way to
do it in a slightly different way, find a way to level up the
transition or the animation. So random shit like that.
I found as a way to make almost convince myself that editing a
video for four hours in the evening was actually more
enjoyable than watching Netflix at 4 hours in the evening.
And I would have friends being like look, Ali, you know, you're
working working too hard and shit.
And so I, you know, I used to be addicted to World of Warcraft
back in the day. And so I went, went back into
Wow got a gaming PC because I was like, OK, I can afford it
now. But again gaming PC played some
Wow. And I'd find myself more drained
at the end of a gaming session than I would by the end of an
editing session because I found a way to make the process so
enjoyable. And from all the recent, you
know, interviewing a bunch of people and reading, reading a
lot in in preparation for for writing the book, a lot of
successful people seem to land at the thing of like the way to
do something consistently is to find a way to make it feel good.
And if the thing gives you energy, then you kind of want to
do it. You don't just want to scroll
TikTok, which is not a thing that really energizes anyone.
Yeah, so let's let's talk specifically about what
constitutes feeling good, because my fucked up head, as
soon as I see feel good productivity, I'm like, oh,
cocaine. Of course I'm going to get a I'm
going to get a ton done. Like what?
Where is that line between feeling good about the work
you're doing and distraction or indulgence?
I think if The thing is feeling good and moving you in the
direction of the work you want to be doing, great.
If The thing is feeling good and moving you away from the work
you want to be doing, then that's not so good.
Or feeling good, but moving you away from it in terms of like
the rest of your life. There's like a sustainability.
Yeah, there's absolutely. And so the final three chapters
of book are all about sustainability broadly.
Anything that feels good that moves you towards your goal is a
good thing. I am a big believer of small
little tweaks like, you know, Tim Ferriss has that asked that
question. What would this look like if it
were easy? And I think that's a great
question. I I ask myself that a lot.
I ask myself a slightly different question.
What would this look like if it were fun?
Like, what does a more fun version of a podcast look like?
What does a fun version of editing look like?
What does a fun version of writing discharge summaries look
like when you're, you know, you know, a junior doctor?
And asking myself that question is like, what does it look like?
If it were fun? While I'm writing my discharge
letter, let me add a few jokes here and there.
It's going to be a real life human reading this letter on the
other end, but just say something nice about this
patient's cat because it's just kind of funny.
And like doctor, don't do that because it's too straight, laced
and too boring. It's like let's sort of make the
writing a little bit nicer. Let me use my creativity a bit
when writing this patient's like discharge summary.
Little tweaks like that move me in the direction that I want to
go. I finish this this discharge
summary, but just make the process more fun.
So it's not a case of doing cocaine and writing yet.
It's a case of like adding a few jokes about the fact that this
patient, you know has been very disappointed because Chelsea
lost the game recently or whatever the the thing might be.
Yeah, it's just like lame, lame dad jokes that make things more
fun sometimes. I feel like a lot of people find
that difficult, perhaps because they worry about doing something
differently. They worry what other people are
going to think if I comment on somebody's cat on on the
discharge form. What if they don't like that?
What if they complain to my supervisor?
What if the other doctors look at me weird?
How does that factor into this? Yeah, I think people just over
index way too much on thinking just too much seriousness.
Way too much seriousness. Like you.
There's, you know, that quote from Alan Watts.
Don't be serious, be sincere. And it's like I the the way I
think of it is I imagine myself in that position.
If I were AGP, you know, General practitioner reading a discharge
summary and someone made a comment about the cat, I'd have
a little little chocolate. It would make my day because
everything else I've read has just been boring as fuck.
I used to give this advice to students when they're studying
for exams. If you're writing essays, I just
want to imagine the the poor examiner.
They're having to like empathy for the examiner.
They're having to read 500 of these shitty pieces of writing.
Give them something to chuckle about.
They're going to give you the top grade immediately because
you've just made the life a little bit better.
You know, you have nice handwriting.
Maybe you use a little pink highlighter or something just to
make it a little a little bit more pleasant.
I think people over index on this way too much.
I'm also a strong believer in seeking forgiveness rather than
permission. So I started incorporating jokes
into my discharge letters and the only comment I ever got was
actually a written compliment from AGP who emailed the
hospital staffing department being like, can I just say this
is the best discharge somewhere I've ever seen?
And that was a commendation on my CV that was sick.
But you know, there were times where I also, you know, I made a
video and I was a bit too blase about data security in the way
that I spoke about patient data and stuff.
And so someone complained to the hospital and I was like, ah, OK,
let's not do that again. So most things are not, it's not
like they're going to fire me immediately.
They're going to be like, hey man, you know, be a bit less
blase about data security. And I'm like, yes, that's a very
good point. I should have been less blase
about it. So usually these things are not
that like life or death, not that like important, but we we
treat them with such importance. And then also when giving
presentations at work, people are boring as far when giving
presentations at work. But the most effective
presentations are the ones that start with a bit of a joke, take
it a bit less seriously, lightens everything up, gets the
energy in the mood going. Whereas when you see someone
who's like, so timid and so like, I have to be professional,
It just sucks the joy out of it. Yeah, and everyone wants wants
more energy in their life. It's funny because the classic
carrying too much what other people think.
I think not only does it kill fun, it attacks that that issue
that we started off with, which is knowing what to optimize for
in the 1st place. I I personally interact with a
lot of readers and and listeners that they feel very lost in
life. Like they don't know what they
should be pursuing in the 1st place.
And when you really drill down deep, it's because they've spent
their entire life trying to please the people around them.
You know, it's like mom and dad wanted me to be a lawyer, so I
went to law school and then I got a job at this firm and they
wanted me to take on these sorts of cases.
So I took on these sorts of cases and then I needed to move
into a bigger apartment. So I had to work on this team.
But I don't like the people on the team.
And next thing you know, they have an entire life that has
been structured around other people's wants and desires.
And not only are they not addressing their own wants and
desires so. They're out of touch with what
they should be optimizing for. They've never actually taken
that time to experiment and discover who that who themselves
are. So they don't even know what
they like. Like they know they don't like
being a lawyer, but they don't know what they would like
otherwise. And so again, it's this really
deep intersection between emotions and productivity
optimization, achieving goals, you know, whatever you wanna
call it. It's such a cliche thing to say,
like, oh, stop worrying about what other people think it.
It's as the years go on, I'm I'm consistently surprised and
impressed at how deeply this effects people and kind of fucks
everything up for them. It's so true, yeah.
As you as you were saying that, I was kind of thinking like
that. That's definitely the experience
that I've I've seen from other people and I was wondering why I
personally didn't have that so much.
And I think all of it can be basically traced down to Tim
Ferriss. Basically ever since I
discovered that making 4 hour workweek and realised the life
that's possible, the whole like new age thing, the whole like,
wait a minute, think about what you actually want from your life
Rather than following the script and assuming when you retire at
65 with osteoarthritis in both of your knees, you'll suddenly
be happy to sipping cocktails in a beach in Thailand.
One of the core insights from it, which is not like a
highlight, it's not one of the top level highlights that people
normally say. It's just the idea of running
experiments and testing hypothesis.
Like I was just signing up to go to Med school for six years and
then training for 10 years to for the sake of being a
consultant when I when I was 40. And I hadn't really considered
that path beyond like 2 days of work experience and the fact
that everyone I knew was a doctor.
And so after reading 4 hour work week, I started asking people
who were 10 years ahead of me in their careers, are you happy?
What are you up to? Like what do you change
anything? My favorite question, if you won
the lottery, what? What?
How would you spend your time? Yeah.
Would you still do medicine? And then half of the people
would say they would leave immediately?
Wow. One guy even said he'd leave in
the middle of the operation. Good luck.
He was like, yeah, my dream is to coach my son's like football
team because he loved football. This is soccer.
And the other half of the people said they would continue
medicine but they'd go part time.
I've never met anyone who enjoys working 80 hours a week as a
doctor. It's just not fun.
I've met people who enjoy working 30 hours a week as a
doctor, maybe even 40, but not 8080.
Like doing anything for 80 hours a week is not fun.
And I would always ask those people, it's like, OK, well
what's stopping you from going part time?
And it was always be money. Well, I've got a mortgage with
kids like bills and all that shit.
And so the four hour work week gave me that language, gave me
that, like, mindset shift to be like, oh fuck, if money is the
problem and the people 10 years ahead of me in their career are
not having fun, I need a way to make money.
And so I think that's such a really great take away.
The fine people 10 years ahead of you on your current path and
ask them how they feel, what their current problems are, what
their regrets are or what anything that would change.
Like it's one of those things that is once you hear it said is
so obvious. But I I've never heard anybody
talk about that. Before I I think that has that
attitude of experimentation has pervaded every aspect of my
life. Like all, we've got 54
actionable tips in this book. All of them are framed as
experiments because it's like the idea is try this experiment,
see if it works. And once my YouTube channel has
started to make money, my hypothesis was always, hey, I'll
be a part time doctor and a part time YouTube and named my course
the part Time YouTube Academy. It was all about, you know, I
still really enjoyed medicine. It's still really fun.
I want to be a part time doctor. And I kind of realized, wait a
minute before I sign up to A8 year residency program and try
and go part time. Let me just experiment with a
few extra shifts to see what it's like being a part time
doctor. And for about two weeks I did
extra shifts in the emergency department.
This was when I wasn't working. So I would do like two days a
week or something. And every 10 minutes I was
thinking, why am I here? What am I doing right now?
The dingy emergency department. There's no natural light.
I could be in a really nice we work right now with my team
making YouTube videos. That's so much more fun.
Why am I here? And after two weeks of this, I
realized, hang on, I've just tried out this experiment, this
part time doctor, part time YouTube life.
I've realized, fuck this, it's so much more fun being a full
time YouTube. Oh my goodness.
Wow that. That two week experiment has now
changed the course of my life. Because now I'm not worrying
about applying to the US for a residency program and spending
three years preparing for the exams and stuff.
But if I hadn't run the experiment I would have thought,
well of course theoretically being a part time doctor is fun
because these doctors I've spoken to say it's reasonable
and it's you know it's good to call myself doctor Ali Abdahl
and type of the book and all that shit.
But I ran the experiment and I was like Nope, not for me ran
the other experiment of what's it like being a full time
YouTube that's really fun. Ran the experiment of what's it
like to have a team of 20 people.
Not fun, more fun. Having a team of 10/10 is a good
a good #10 to 12 that was really fun and it continues to be
really fun and even now it's like everything in life I almost
treat like an experiment. I said to my team this morning
we we had like an all hands team meeting.
The experiment we're trying for the next three months is what
does it look like if I only make a video when I feel like it
rather than on a schedule? Don't know.
Let's see what happens. Let's run it as an experiment.
We'll see. Best case scenario, experiment
works out and I realize I've got more joy in my life.
Worst case scenario, experiment doesn't work out.
I get more data. It's not really a failure.
It's just an experimental it's it's an experiment.
Even if failure is useful data. And then I can inform the way I
live my life. Yeah, experiments around like,
huh. I wonder if it would be fun to.
I don't know, try running every day.
Yeah, buy that for a couple of weeks, see what happens.
I just, I'm just all about experimenting with life and over
time landing on a nice place. But even then, like the place we
land where we're feel happy and fulfilled as we grow older.
People say this, the things that brought you happiness and
fulfilment when you were younger don't necessarily do it again.
And so all of life is basically this sort of running bunch of
different, different experiments, having fun along
the way and sort of meandering your way to some sort of.
Just sort of performance or something like that.
Something. Yeah, yeah.
The framing of it, of it, the framing of life as
experimentation is I I think it's incredibly powerful as well
because it removes the stigma of failure.
There's no such thing as failure.
There's only information, right? It's like, OK, we ran an
experiment, you know, I tried working overtime for a month as
an experiment to see and it didn't go well.
So that's information. That's it's it removes the the
mindset that you have to succeed at everything you try or that
everything has to go well all the time.
It's it's the only the only metric of success is simply
feedback, yeah. Yeah, there's a story that I
talk about in the book. There's a a YouTube called Mark
Rober, who used to work at NASA, then worked at Apple, and now
he's like a science educator on YouTube.
And he ran a really fun experiment.
He created like a coding challenge for his life, for
50,000 of his, of his audience. And he split them up into two
groups. And the idea was this challenge
would, would, would help you learn how to code.
And it was some sort of like robot maze.
And you had to sort of program the robot to like go around the
maze or something on this online interface.
And the ingenious thing for this was that this was not a solvable
problem. Like, you couldn't actually
solve it. Yeah.
So we were just seeing like, how much would people try?
And so he split. He split the 50,000 people into
two into two groups. For half of them, you know if
they they hit execute on the code and it didn't work, it said
you have failed, please try again.
But for the other half of the people, it said you have failed.
You've lost five points. You now have 195 points.
Please try again. These points were totally
meaningless, completely arbitrary.
But one group started with 200 fake points, and the other group
got told nothing. And the group who got told they
lost five points tried less than half as many attempts at solving
this coding puzzle. And the group that didn't say
anything didn't say anything at all.
And this whole experiment was a ruse.
It wasn't intended to teach people how to code.
It was intended to see how do people feel about failure.
And when you're told you've lost five points, even though it's
totally meaningless and it does not mean anything, and it's not
money, it's completely irrelevant, you still try half,
less than half the number of times as someone who wasn't told
that at all. So this whole message he, he has
a Ted talk about, this is all about how do we reframe failure.
And I think the way we reframe failure as you said is
experimentation. Where even failure is, is data
gathering. Yeah, Well, Ollie, the book is
Feel good Productivity. Go buy it everywhere there's.
A quote from you on the front. It's thank you by the way it.
Has my name on the front. And yeah, and actually reading
the. Front dude.
It's a great book man. You know you you did a great job
with it and it's it's I've been very passionate about this idea
of an emotional emotions as part of the overall productivity
system. It's something that I've tried
to write about at times. Productivity is not really my
wheelhouse. So it's like I I, it never
really quite landed or I I never like, wrote it in a way that I
felt good about it. As soon as I started reading
this, I got like 2-3 chapters in.
I'm like, all right, yeah, this is it.
Like he's, he's got it like this is this is the productivity book
that we've all needed. So.
Lovely clip that. Put it as a testimonial.
Yeah, there you. Go.
You can pay. That on it.
You, you. You can put a second line with
my name on it on the book. So, Ollie, it's been a pleasure,
man. Thank you.
Thanks for coming on.