What I Actually Do When I’m Not Making YouTube Videos — Transcript

Hey friends, welcome back to the vlog. [music] The day starts at 8:00 a.m. when I wake up, negotiate myself out of bed, have a shower, do my skincare, and play with the baby girl for a bit. [bell] I wave goodbye to the other baby girl, and I head over to the office to start the workday. Fridays are unusual in that I start work at 9:00 a.m. Usually I start at 10:00, but on Fridays from 9 to 10:00 a.m. I do a live session called the Friday fireside for students of our lifestyle business academy which is our online business school. I run a Monday master class every Monday and then twice on a Friday I do the more casual Q&As's where I help our students wherever I can with their businesses. Cool. Great stuff gang. Have a lovely rest of day. Good luck with the businesses and life and I will see you all next week. Bye. We've just done the Friday fireside. That was quite nice. There were only like four four people on the call and so it felt like uh I could really dive in in detail. So these are our very casual like Q&A calls that we run and they can

just ask me anything and we just have a chitchat about their business, give them feedback on their content or on their sales pages or on their proposals or on their offers. And in this group we had Cherylyn who's already made $100,000 in the last few months. We've had Carlos who's just joined us and so he's trying to figure out his niche. And so yeah, it's good vibes. We then have a little bit of chitchat with the team about this vlog format and we take a look at some of the old vlogs I used to do many many years ago while I was in med school. >> Me I used to save lives in different countries and now I make YouTube videos. >> I really enjoyed doing that stuff back in the day and so I'm experimenting with potentially trying to recreate that sort of format. We'll see how it goes.

>> Sick man. >> What five? [laughter] >> 6 minute long vlog edited by me, filmed by me. Uh and so this was how I stayed consistent with content while I had a real life as a student and a doctor. As the day progresses, I sort of am constructing the vlog in my head with the footage that I've got, thinking like, okay, where do I think a little montage would be good? [music] Where is a voice over sensible? And then I'll like write out the voice over. I want to experiment with this format for the business stuff because it's basically like study with me thing except instead of studying, I'm like I don't know trying to build a landing page or like freaking I don't know whatever trying to figure out ads for super focus or whatever. If we can nail this as a format, this is a massive unlock because it means that for example, a Wednesday can be dedicated to filming where we're like talking to the camera and [ __ ] but then on a Friday, I can actually just be doing stuff and we can just film me doing stuff and I can explain how I'm doing the stuff and then that'll be [ __ ] sick because then I can actually do the stuff rather than just being a professional content creator. So, that

is the dream. After the vlog discussion, one of our new team members, Anne, shows me some of the process mapping stuff that she's been working on to try and improve the operations of our lifestyle business academy. >> One thing we've been me and have been talking about for a while is we need like we almost need like a student road map, >> like a nice cute looking Figma page that we can be like this is the road map and this is where you are and this is what the next step is. >> Yeah, >> that would be sick. >> So I think [music] Yes. Yes. >> Yeah. Student facing like road map doc. >> Yeah. which then maps to student experience which maps to coach thingy and everyone is like singing from the same him sheet even though the students never see the coach in the system one >> we know that it maps to the road map.

>> Yes. >> And so if we change the road map everything else has to change >> and anyone across the entire business is able to look at right what am I doing today and what box am I touching how am I helping and how does that then fit into the bigger picture. >> Yes. And if if I'm going to go spend the next half an hour or like half a day doing X and it doesn't touch any of those boxes, >> is that a valuable exercise? [clears throat] >> Even if it seems fun or seems important, it seems and that's going to help help prioritization. >> Nice. >> At this point, it's around 11:00 a.m. and it's time to crank on some work. It >> is time to get started with >> LifeNotes. Lifeotes is the email newsletter that I've been sending since like April 2018. So, how many years is that? Eight years. Almost every week for the last eight [music] years sending an email. And there is a tech technique that I came across um from a writing coach which is [music] called the splurge. This is how the splurge works.

You basically set a timer for 10 minutes conveniently. I only have 12 minutes until my next meeting. Pretty much with eyes closed and not being allowed to press the backspace or the or the delete button. You just like word vomit anything that comes to mind. So this is the sort of thing that it might look like. Okay. The idea is that you do this for like a whole 10 minutes with your eyes closed. You see how janky this is? But this is a good way of like silencing the inner critic [music] and finding out where you want to go and what you want to say about a particular thing. So by literally writing out h no I've actually landed on what I now think is a good topic which I'm now going to continue to splurge about. that will be like the first draft of the newsletter and then if I want to I can just chuck it into Claude and be like, "Hey, can you just clean clean it up to [music] make it sure there's no typos and shit?" Or I could just like manually handcraft it if I really felt like it, but we'll see how it goes after continuing on with this splurge.

Oh [ __ ] time to call the Nathan. Whoopsie. >> All righty. So, just got off a call with Nathan who's one of our coaches. Nathan is in Australia and so it's a good time zone for Hong Kong because he's a few hours ahead. So it's very easy to get on a call with Nathan. Uh Nathan is actually our outreach specialist in the Lifestyle Business Academy because he ran his own like marketing agency for like 12 years before joining us. [music] And he basically got all of his clients through uh outreach like a combination of warm outreach and cold outreach and sending DMs and doing cold emails and stuff like that which is really cool. Uh he's never made content as far as I know. uh he doesn't have much of a personal brand. So he didn't get clients through like being famous on the internet and he also didn't get clients through running ads. He literally just got them through like messaging and emailing people being like, "Hey, do you want [laughter] to work with me?" Uh obviously doing it as slightly more sophisticated than that. And so, um, what we do is that this was initially started out as a, [music] um, sort of coach training conversation where Nathan, uh, you know, I have these [music] two, three times a week with all of our coaches where, um, a couple of

coaches get on a call with me and kind of like we model it after like a medical ward round where the coach goes through and we discuss any patients or any students that they are struggling with. So, in this context, Nathan was struggling with one of his students. Let's call the student John. Uh John is having existential angst about his niche and his business model. So he's like ah what do I want to go with this particular business model and this particular niche but that one doesn't really feel aligned or do I want to do this thing but I know that's going to make less money. And so when people have that kind of like oh I'm pulled in these different directions [music] it's a real struggle for them and so we identified that as being the problem. We also then go through the DRC CPR method, DRCPR, which stands for DMs, replies, calls, proposals, and revenue, which is sort of like the I think of them as the five vital signs of a business in the early stages. Uh that can help the coach and the student and me diagnose again medical analogy, diagnose exactly where the problem is so that we can then prescribe a solution or suggest an experiment for that specific problem.

So, we did that with with one of Nathan's students. Then we happen to have half an hour left where I was like, you know what, let's actually just because I'm working on the DMs module of the new curriculum. Let me get Nathan's thoughts on this because Nathan is a pro at DMs. And actually, that was a very generative conversation that [music] resulted in quite a lot of um new stuff that I realized we can incorporate into the curriculum, which is absolutely [music] sick. So, I love it when a Zoom call turns into curriculum content, which turns into just making a better experience for our students. All right, if you're enjoying the video so far, I would love to tell you about Weiwork, who are very kindly sponsoring this video. So, if you run a small business like I do, you will know how much of a nightmare office space is. A commercial lease is usually at least two years.

It's super expensive. You've got to sort out the fit out, and you end up having to do things like unblocking the toilets and dealing with plumbing and all that kind of stuff yourself. Total nightmare. Which is why me and my team have been paying customers of Weiwork since like 2020. Back then, it was just me and our general manager, Angus, working out of the Weiwork in Cambridge. We'd go there every day. It was super nice interior design. There'd be whiteboards everywhere. And a lot of what the business does now got sketched out in those conference rooms in the Weiwork. These days, the team is a lot bigger and mostly remote. And so we've got people working from all around the world and we don't have a physical office anywhere except here in Hong Kong. So instead, everyone on the team has a Wei work all access membership. So wherever someone happens to be, they can walk into the local Weiwork and get a proper day of work done. And then whenever I'm back in London or a few of the team end up in the same city, we can just book a desk or a meeting room and actually work together in real life, which is awesome.

The great thing about Weiwork is that it's also super flexible. The contract goes monthto monthth and you can add or drop membership super easily as the team changes. So, especially for our remote team these days, Weiwork basically takes care of all of the office side of things, which means our team and me can get to focus on actually running the business rather than trying to be a part-time office manager. And wherever you are in the world, you know exactly what you're getting. So, if your business is at the point where you're ready to think about something like this, head over to wei.co/aliabdal and book a tour at a Weiwork near you. And if you use the codes on screen, you can get 10% off the monthly membership or 25% off the pay as you go on demand desks and meeting rooms. Links and codes are in the video description as well.

So, big thank you Weiwork for sponsoring this video. And let's get back to it. At this point, it's 12:25 p.m. I've got 15 minutes until lunch with the team. And so, I'm going to use that time to try and incorporate Nathan's insights into the DM's curriculum material and also to polish off this week's issue of lifeotes. All righty. So, that is this issue of lifeotes that has been written. I'm actually very proud of it. Just actually it's it's weird cuz just having having very few minutes to actually write it, I think made it way better than sometimes I agonize over it for like 2 or 3 hours and stuff. And yeah, not a single ounce of AI was used in the writing of life.

Previously, I used to use our app voice pal and used to walk around and sort of like dictate what I would uh what I wanted to write about. Then I would chuck it into Claude and then go back and forth with the AI for absolutely ages to like figure out. And then once I discovered this like splurge method, um it just I I just sort of realized that I prefer the craft of writing with my fingertips on a keyboard. So, I'll still use like AI dictation and stuff for things that are not like creative output. But for things that involve like creative output that sort of I actually do prefer sort of raw dog writing it myself rather than um trying to get an AI to find my voice and blah blah you know all of that all that crap. Now me and Sean are uh so the team has gone for lunch. Uh they are going to a local Thai place. They're going to order for us and then we are going to join them uh once we go to the DJI store cuz we want to buy some new tech. What are we buying?

Yeah, new microphones cuz we want to be able to capture more stuff like in a more sort of candid fashion uh rather than it just being the sort of official desk setup. So yeah, time for a little trip to the DJI store and then team lunch. Multicolor magnetic front cover. [music] >> All righty. So we are back after lunch. We have done a nice haul of equipment from the DJI store which we are now putting on charge for a four-way microphone setup with a single transmitter which means we can do four-way podcasts. We can do four-way like roundts. We can capture conversations that are happening [music] over lunch. So that's really cool. And so now I have a call with Angus. It's currently 20 2. Uh I've got a call with Angus at 3. And so the rest of the afternoon I'm going to be focusing on superfocused marketing. So super focus is our app. And the way I think of it is like magnetic marketing and effortless sales. We want marketing that is magnetic i.e. It effortlessly attracts our ideal customers and also repels

people that we don't want and we want effortless sales. Sales that feel effortless. I don't like it when it feels like we're trying to sell something and it feels hard. I want it [music] to feel effortless because selling is a service and sales is merely about educating the person about your product and if it's right for them then they'll just naturally buy, right? Um and if not then there is no hard feelings. And so I'm trying to sort of figure out like, okay, how do we present, how do we position and present Superf Focus so that we attract the right people to become founding members. Uh cuz we have only another couple of weeks while we're still doing the founding member program for Superf Focus, which is basically you get massive discount uh which will be grandfathered in forever for as long as you're a subscriber. You get like a money back guarantee and you get to join our little community where you give us feedback about the product.

[music] At 3:00, I have a 45minute one-on-one Zoom meeting with Angus, our general manager, where we discuss various issues and opportunities in the business. All righty. So, um, I was meant to be doing some super focused stuff, but I ended up spending half an hour just yapping with Anne cuz she had to leave. And so we were just sketching out a bunch of the operations and processes for the lifestyle business academy in terms of like what like what the student journey looks like and what the coaches are up to and basically trying to figure out where are the holes in the system because what we're really trying to do is there's like basically a zillion different things we could do to improve the experience of students and coaches in the lifestyle business academy. But the discipline is in figuring out what are the high priority high impact ones and doing those first which requires us to really understand the map of all of this stuff so far. One of the things with lifestyle business academy is I had an idea going in of what the student experience would look like and then students started going through it and then almost from day one we started to get data about where people are struggling. Basically the struggles with building a business um were a lot more numerous than I thought they would be

because in particular various like mindset and emotional and like mental hurdles were coming up for students. So even though I thought it was pretty clear like what they should do and they sort of knew what they should do they were not doing the thing. And so all of those like things are now bubbling to the surface and have been over the last few months where we're like, "All right, there's all sorts of things we could do to solve this uh to solve these problems. Let's figure out what the problem problems actually are and then let's put systems in place to actually solve them." And so there was a lot of like drawing boxes on a page and like process mapping and stuff. So it is now 4:47 p.m. I have my next uh Friday fireside with the LBA students. So that is the next order of business. We then have our second Friday fireside for the day. this time where I'm speaking to our European and Australian students primarily and then the day ends with a casual chitchat amongst the team in the office. Yeah, I feel like I've been sort of carrying the weight of some kind of business since the age of 18 for the last [music] like 14 years. Cuz even with the first business, the first successful business, the courses business, six, there was always stuff that was going wrong with it like books weren't delivered on time or like a

student was unhappy or like a student was really happy and I had to get testimonial or just the the like website was broken. And then there was a period of time once I sold that business and when the YouTube channel was still a side hustle where it [music] didn't feel heavy. I don't think it felt like I was playing with house money just like oh this is the you know we're in the bonus round. I've already got my day job. I have no intention of quitting my day job. So this YouTube thing was just like a cool [music] cool thing on the side. But then it got so big and I enjoyed it so much that I decided to quit the day job and made it my main thing. But then it added a level of heaviness to it that's like it's my main thing now. And so this business is like what I do for work in like the work domain and ultimately every decision makes its way back to [music] me. And having a team is amazing because it takes it definitely takes a lot of that load off and without the team and without Angus like being the general manager it would be a lot worse than it currently is. But it's sort of like whole thing is sort of reliant on me to continue to do the content sort out the curriculum with LVA and all all this sort of stuff and we don't yet have senior leadership team that can truly take ownership of their particular department yet [music]

because we've historically only really hired people who are like young and inexperienced. And so in that context, because I can't hand over the ownership to a senior leader in that department, it's just sort of me and Angus who are like shouldering the load of the entire business. At least that's what it feels like. Um, but I hear from more experienced entrepreneurs that once you get that load, those like senior hires who can truly own something, then it it's like that load feels like it's being taken off your shoulders and it's being sort of shared shared around a bit more. But at the same time, it feels weird to be talking about this, right? because it's it's it's sort of like I don't want it to look as if and also I don't want it to feel internally as if I'm complaining about this at all because this is the life I've chosen for myself and it's absolutely sick and it's like way better than the life I would have had working as a doctor. [music] And so it's sort of like choose your hard. It's like if you want to be a business owner then you're signing up to feeling the weight of the business on your shoulders. If you have co-founders then it feels like more like the the load is shared. I had a friend who had four co-founders face business. He was like four was probably a bit much but like it felt like the load was shared.

Whereas when you're a solo founder or even a duo then yeah one of the challenges is [music] constant context switching where it's like we've got this LBA workshop in the morning and then immediately it's like doing operations with an and then there's we're talking about something about the YouTube channel and then we're like all right we need to work on the curriculum stuff oh and then there's meeting with Nathan which turns into a curriculum chat and then it's like okay lunch with the team we need to sort out our audio process while we're doing lunch we're trying to figure out like the [music] content for the vlog for the day it's like in the back of my mind I need to focus on super focus and then I start working on super focus And then I've got this meeting with Angus. In some ways I like the variety of it, but in other ways I'm like, ah, there's a lot going on. And also it's like all in one day. And so I I almost prefer when the calendar's completely empty and I can just like dig into just like one thing. And so this is sort of where I I'm I'm always trying to sort of get to that nirvana where I can actually just single task on something for 4 hours rather than being constantly derailed [music] by other things. So that's been a bit of a struggle with today. I find it useful to set the rules for myself. Like the rule is I'm not allowed to work after 7:00 p.m. And it's

not my definition of work, it's like someone else's definition of work. Like what looks like if it looks like work to someone else, I'm not allowed to do it after 7. Yeah. And I find that to be a very useful thing. Okay. Well, it's all like going home at the end of the day in medicine where you're like, yeah, this patient's bleeding, but I can't do anything about it. It's it's not quite as detached as that because you really can't do anything about it when you're not there. And I could always just like open up C code or do something. [music] And sometimes I do I do those things especially when inspiration strikes. I think for the most part, the balance feels good. for the most part I feel happy, fulfilled, joyful in the business and at the same time it also feels like heavy um to an extent, but at the same time it also doesn't because we've got we've got we've got a great team and it does feel light a lot of the time and if it was heavier I wouldn't be like oh my god I can't come to lunch with the team because it's like but like that's fine as well and so I definitely have it a lot better than most business owners because of the team structure around around it and because the product is so high margin and because we've got the audience so we have a lot of unfair advantages in our Um, who knows how long that will continue to last, but fingers crossed.