- Hey, friends. Welcome back to the channel. Happy New Year, all of that good stuff. If you're new here, my name is Ali. I'm a junior doctor working in Cambridge. And in this video, I wanna talk about 15 life lessons that I learned in 2019. All of these are things
that I've mentioned in some capacity or another
in my weekly email newsletter. So pretty much, anytime I come across any interesting life lessons
that I find useful, I share them in my email
newsletter every Sunday. So you can sign up with
the link down below. But yeah, here is a roundup of 15 of my favourite ones from 2019. Let's go. Firstly, I learned about the importance of setting a daily highlight. And I came across this in a book called Make Time by John Zeratsky and Jake Knapp. And they suggest that every day, the way to be productive is to
have a single daily highlight that you're gonna be
working on for that day. So that's either something that's gonna bring you the most joy,
something that's the most urgent, or something that will bring you the most kind of
satisfaction when you do it. And I've started actively tracking this in the app Notion for the last few months. And I find that on the days
where I remember to set myself a daily highlight, I inevitably
get more done that day. Just because I then have
this default activity that I know I'm gonna be doing. So that was a really important
lesson that I learnt. Secondly, we have a
quote from Kurt Vonnegut, who is a famous writer. And he says, "And I urge
you to please notice "when you are happy,
and exclaim or murmur, "or think at some point, "'If this isn't nice,
I don't know what is.'" And I first came across this
kinda towards the end of 2019. And kind of on reflection, I realized that I'm very quick at moving from one thing to another thing to another thing and I very rarely take the time to appreciate and kind
of like enjoy the moment. And since I came across this quote, I've really started to
actively do that more. Like let's say I'm driving in the car and I've got a latte in my hand and I'm listening to something
on Audible or whatever, then I just occasionally
have the thought that, if this isn't nice, I don't know what is. Or let's say, I'm on my
desk and making a video or filming something or
trying to learn something or running a supervision for my students, I just like to think, if this isn't nice, I don't know what is. And it's that subtle encouragement for me to be more grateful for
the things in my life. So yeah, thank you, Kurt
Vonnegut, for that quote. Thirdly, I came across this idea of window openers versus door knockers. It's not quite the terminology they used in an episode of the My
First Million podcast that I first heard this on, but I kinda synthesized
what they were talking about and turned it into window
openers and door knockers. And the idea is that, in life, there are two sorts of people. There are the window openers
and the door knockers. The window openers need
to look through a window and when they see their expected
outcome on the other side, then they open that window
and they walk through. Whereas the door knockers
are the sorts of people that will knock on lots of
doors and open those doors and see what's on the other side. So the key difference between those is, for the door knockers, you don't know what the outcome of your action is going to be. You have to knock on the door and see. Whereas for the window openers, you see the outcome on the other side and you just kind of work
through it to get it. And the point that they
were making in this podcast that really resonated with me was that, in most things in life these days, a lot of the success disproportionately comes from the door knocker attitude rather than the window opener attitude. There are still some traditional careers, like medicine and stuff, whereby you have your path
charted out in front of you and any action predictably
leads to a certain outcome. But in all of the rest of bits of life and a lot of business, a lot of creation, like starting a YouTube channel, you don't know what the
outcome is going to be. You just know on the door,
you apply consistency and hard work and dedication
and all that good stuff, and you then gain the
opportunity for serendipity that you never would
have known was possible. If you'd asked me two
and a half years ago, "What's the point of
starting a YouTube channel," I wouldn't have been able to articulate. I would've been like, oh, I don't know. I'm just gonna do it consistently and I hope someday it'll go well. And now it's completely changed my life and I wouldn't have been able to do that if I'd been a window opener,
if I'd just been thinking, oh, let me focus on my medical career because that's the thing that
I can see in front of me. Point number four is this
idea by Derek Sivers, which is that what is obvious to you might be amazing to others. Now, whenever we're in any sort of sharing of ideas kind of
field, content creation, this sort of stuff, making videos, writing blog posts, writing books, recording podcasts and
stuff, we have this thing. We all have this thing that, oh, I'm not gonna share this idea because it's just kind of obvious. Surely everyone would know about it. This first lesson that I shared about the daily highlight, at this point, because I've incorporated it into my life, it's pretty obvious to me that if you wanna be more productive, you should set yourself
a task to do each day. And if you don't, then what's the point? But that idea, when
someone comes across it who hasn't heard it before,
it's pretty revolutionary. It's like, oh my God, that's incredible. Equally, for some of
you watching this video, when I talked about, "If this isn't nice,
I don't know what is," you might have been thinking, oh, come on, mate, that's obvious. Everyone knows that. But when I first read it,
I was like, oh my God, this idea has actually
changed the game for me because it's now made me more happier. It's encouraged me to feel more gratitude. So the point that Derek Sivers
makes in his blog post-- Again, link in the video description. Is that, don't worry that
what's obvious to you is gonna be obvious to others
because it probably won't be. And so, as a lesson to all of us, we can and should share the
things that we've discovered, the things that we've learned, the 15 life lessons
that we learnt in 2019, because what's obvious to us
might not be obvious to others. It might even be amazing to others. Point number five: in 2019, I really began to appreciate the value
of lifelong learning. So I recently became a
physiology supervisor at Girton College, Cambridge University, where I teach 10 medical students every week about human physiology, and that's meant that I've actually had to learn all this stuff all over again and kind of explore it in more detail. That's actually been really fun. It's been one of the most
kind of joyful activities in my life, kind of sitting with the books and with the PDFs and papers and stuff and trying to figure out what the best way to teach this sort of topic is. And actually, the UK government, I found, commissioned this study,
which was an analysis of all of the benefits of
lifelong adult learning. So people who learn stuff
actively in their adult life, and there are all sorts of benefits. So they've said, "Adult
learning can indirectly "improve wellbeing and
lead to positive outcomes "in health and socially positive
attitudes and behaviors," amongst loads of other stuff. So, yeah, I really began to appreciate the benefit of lifelong learning. And one other way that I've been trying to do this lifelong learning thing is by doing online
courses on Brilliant.org. And Brilliant is an
amazing learning platform targeted at maths, science,
and computer science. And they've got online classes from all sorts of things
within those categories, like probability, number
theory, algorithms, data structures, AI, neural networks. All this sort of stuff. I've personally enjoyed taking their computer science courses. Now, I actually considered applying for computer science rather than medicine, but I sort of reasoned
at the time when I was 16 that it would kinda be cool to be a doctor who knows how to code rather
than to just be a coder. But that meant that all of the coding that I've done has been
sort of very hodgepodge and I've never quite taken
the time to understand the fundamentals of algorithms, the fundamentals of how
computer science work. And that's what I've
been doing on Brilliant, which has been really
helping on that front. They've also got this really cool new daily challenges feature on Brilliant, whereby every day there
is a new daily challenge, and that introduces some concepts to you. Whether it's maths, science,
or computer science. And then it gives you a problem in which you have to kind of take that
concept a little bit further and try and apply your new learning to it. And then they give you the
solution and kind of explain it. And it's, A, a really good way of generally exercising the mind. And I find that it's
also a good model for me to build my own teaching sessions around because the idea of
tutorials and supervisions at universities like Oxford and Cambridge is that you would give the student a small amount of information. You'd kind of give them
the basic building block, and then you would ask
them a question about it that kinda tests that a little bit more. And so it kinda takes
it a little bit further. And then you see how far they can go, and then add some more knowledge. And it becomes this iterative process whereby hopefully you
kind of learn together and build on someone's understanding, rather than by just kind of
regurgitating something at them, like I'm currently doing in this video. So that's one of the great things about the daily challenges feature on Brilliant. So, if any of this sounds up your street and you wanna join this
journey of lifelong learning to improve your physical, mental, social, and economic wellbeing, then please do sign up for
free at Brilliant.org/Ali. And the first 200 people to use that link will get 20% off an annual
premium subscription and it's totally worth the price. So thank you very much, Brilliant, for sponsoring this video. Right, so point number six
is this idea of a flywheel. Now, I first came across this
in a Jim Collins interview on the Tim Ferriss show, I think. In engineering terms, a
flywheel is like a device that stores mechanical rotational energy. But in terms of business
and creation and YouTube and entrepreneurship and all the stuff that I'm interested in
outside of medicine, the idea of a flywheel is that it's something that takes ages to get going. But when it gets going, then it kind of builds on itself and is unstoppable. And people often use the flywheel analogy to describe how Amazon works. So for example, they get really low prices and that leads to people wanting
to buy stuff from Amazon, which leads to sellers
wanting to go on Amazon, which means that Amazon then have this supply and demand thing, which means they can drive prices lower. Overall, this one thing leads
to another, leads to another, leads to another on this flywheel that takes a lot of effort to get going. Amazon's been going for years now. But then it becomes completely unstoppable because each thing kind
of builds on itself. And the way that I've
applied this flywheel concept to my life and I've
started thinking about it is in terms of things like YouTube and podcasts and making a blog. At the start, when you're
starting a YouTube channel, you get basically no
one viewing your videos and you might get one
extra subscriber a day and you feel super proud. "Oh my God, I've gone from 47 "to 48 subscribers in two
days, that's incredible." And no one's watching your videos. But the more you can kind of
produce hopefully valuable content consistently over
a long period of time, the more the flywheel gathers momentum. And the weird thing about YouTube and the cool thing about YouTube is that the algorithim is very flywheel-y in that the more videos
a YouTuber creates, the more opportunities
there are for other people to discover their content,
the more they're likely to subscribe, the more watch
time they're gonna get, the more the algorithm benefits you and starts recommending your
stuff in suggested videos. And it kind of drives this wheel that keeps on going and going and going. But the point is that it takes so much effort to get started initially. And anytime I'm sort of in that mode where I'm thinking, oh,
this is too much effort, I think, no, it's a flywheel. If I'm starting something
new, then I know it's gonna take that effort to get
started to begin with. Point number seven is I discovered this idea of mastering
boring fundamentals, and I got this from a blog post by a guy called James
Stuber, which was entitled Master Boring Fundamentals: Boring Is Fun. I just wanna read a few things from it. So firstly, he says, "For any endeavor, "there are a set of basic skills "needed to build a strong foundation." "These are the boring fundamentals." "Sleeping eight hours a night,
exercising consistently," "eating your vegetables,
meditating, reading books, "writing for yourself and for your peers." And then there are domain
specific fundamentals, like drilling guitar cords or calculus, if you're into maths. He says that, "Even when we
know they're good for us, "even when we know that
they'll advance our goals, "we avoid taking the steps needed." "We don't do the boring fundamentals "because, well, they're boring." "Repetitive actions done day after day "are not a recipe for excitement." "There's a disconnect between the future "positive result and the present slog." "Progress often plateaus "and only arrives in
unpredictable bursts." And this sorta goes back
to this idea of a flywheel in that we have to do
these boring fundamentals and he's kind of making a
broader point about life. You know, sleeping eight hours a day, exercising, eating your vegetables. I don't even do these boring fundamentals. I don't sleep eight hours a
day, even though I want to. I don't really eat vegetables because I'm just terrible at
cooking and my diet is awful. And I don't really exercise consistently because I always feel like there's something better I could be doing. And the reason for that
is because it's boring. It's a fundamental and the
rewards don't come immediately. Whereas if I think, ooh, I could go home and film a
video, that results in a video and that's like immediate gratification. Whereas if I think, ooh, do I wanna go to the gym for two hours or do I wanna actively go to the shops and cook some vegetables to
just improve my life in general? That's got less of an obvious benefit. And so, reading this
kind of stuff reminds me that I need to master
the boring fundamentals and this is something that I've tried to actively think about more. That's sort of encouraged me
to go to the gym a bit more and to eat a little bit more healthily and to really take care of my sleep. Point number eight is another idea that I found from James Stuber's blog and that's the idea of type
one versus type two fun. When we think of fun, we
often think that there's just the hedonism, the pure,
unadulterated joy type of fun. Oh, playing video games is
fun or playing sports is fun. But for something like running a marathon or climbing a mountain or
doing cross country skiing, we probably wouldn't consider that fun because it's not the same sort of fun. But in this blog post, he talks about this kind of long distance
skier called Tim Peck who defines a type two fun, which is where it's
suffering in the present, but then it's sort of fun in hindsight. And that's a different sort of fun. And that is sort of the sort of fun that I noticed that being a doctor, when it's really, really busy, is like. It feels very grueling when you're there. But then at the end of the day,
you look back and you think, oh, that was actually a really good day. It's definitely not pure hedonism when you're trying to
kind of treat someone and there's emergencies going on and you're struggling to
keep up with the workload, but it is definitely fun and
it's a type two kind of fun. And so just understanding,
recognizing this distinction between type one and type two fun has been really helpful for me because now I have the
vocabulary in my head to think about the sort of
fun that takes some suffering. I now appreciate why some
people say that running is fun because, previously, I used to think, how on Earth can running be fun? Because it's not as fun as playing squash. But actually, it's just a
different sort of fun, so yeah. Point number nine is something I came across on Tim Ferris show. He interviewed a guy called
Safi Bahcall, I think. I can't remember his credentials. I think he wrote a book. Ooh, maybe he wrote a book called Loon. Maybe that's it. I'll link it over there if
that's the case and down below. This guy, Safi, is a
writer and he talks about how there are a few
different modes of writing. And the first one is FBR, which
stands for fast, bad, wrong. And he says that when you're
doing your first draft, just think to yourself,
"This is going to be fast, "it's gonna be bad, and
it's gonna be wrong." And just having that mindset encourages us a lot more to actually just
put stuff down on paper. And so, for me, every time I'm writing my weekly email newsletter,
I initially have that kind of writer's
block where I'm like, oh, I don't know what to write 'cause I don't know if
this is gonna be good. But then for the last few months since I first came across this, I've been actively writing
down FBR on top of the page. Just to remind myself, okay,
this is just a first draft. It's gonna be fast, it's gonna
be bad, it's gonna be wrong. And that means that I
can just kind of write without worrying, without judging myself, without worrying about the quality. Inevitably, at the end of
it, I've written something and then I come back to editing it and I think, oh, actually,
this is kind of reasonable. Or if it's not, then I edit it. But it's a lot easier
to edit once you've got a fast, bad, wrong thing
than that thing that we as writers or as
creators always try and do, and try and get it right
on the first draft. So just appreciating this
and having this kind of vocabulary to define, fast, bad, wrong, has been really helpful for
me and my writing career. And again, plug to my
weekly email newsletter. You can sign up with the link down below. Point number 10 is something
that I came up with, just completely made up one day for my weekly email newsletter. But I've started to apply it a lot more, and that is the Reitoff
Principle for productivity. For me, I kinda struggle with... It's not a bad struggle to have. But I kinda struggle with switching off. Like when I get home from
work, let's say it's 9PM. I would think, oh, I've
got two hours before bed, I should probably film a video. Even if I'm really not feeling up to it, even if I'm feeling really tired and I know I'm not gonna do great work. I just think, you know
what, I should film a video. And that's fine. Consistency's important
and all that stuff. But there are a lot of
days whereby I kind of procrastinate from filming
the video at 9PM after work and I just kind of lay on my sofa, just scrolling through Instagram
and I don't do anything. Like I wouldn't get
out a book and read it. Or recently, I wouldn't stop
playing on my Nintendo Switch because I would be feeling guilty about not making the YouTube video
and not doing the work. And so, the idea behind
the Reitoff Principle is that sometimes it's okay to
just write the whole day off. And once you've written the whole day off, you've decided that, you know what, I'm gonna give myself a break today. Which means that, at least for me, I find this helpful because then I don't have to feel guilty
about not doing anything. There was a day a few weeks
ago where I was doing this. I was sort of sitting
on the sofa behind there and my housemate Molly
was sitting next to me. And I was just like, "Oh,
Molly, I need to film a video," "but I can't be assed." And she was like, "Ali,
haven't you written "something about the Reitoff Principle?" "Why don't you just make
it a write off day?" And I was like, "Oh my
God, Molly, you're right." "This can be write off day." And then it just brought
so much joy to my life that I didn't have to
film a video that evening that I just kind of dropped my phone, got out my Nintendo Switch and played The Witcher
3 for like two hours. But it was two glorious
hours and I wouldn't have had that joy had I not kind
of written the day off. So, yeah, the Reitoff Principle. If you wanna read more
about it, I'll put a link to my email newsletter where
I talked about it first. But yeah, that's point number 10. Point number 11. God, this video's getting really long. If you're still here, I
apologize for being so ramble-y. I'll try and speed up. Point number 11 is the
mundanity of excellence. And this comes from a paper that I read, which is from like the 1970s or 80s. You know, like old. Old school, like boomer level territory. Where the author talks about
what defines excellence and he studies the field of swimmers. So he looks at competitive
swimmers in the local, club, national, and Olympic levels and tries to figure out what's
the difference between them. And he realizes that the
difference between them, it's not a quantitative difference. It's not really that Michael
Phelps practices that much more than someone who's a club
or a county level player. It's that the people who
are at the really pro end of the excellence spectrum, they do things qualitatively differently. And the point he makes is that
it's all just very mundane. Like they actively put a bit of effort into figuring out their technique, they wake up on time every day and do it, they look after their diet. There's nothing really sexy about the way that these people get
really good at stuff. It's just that they just
do the mundane repeatedly and just kind of do it consistently. And kind of reading this,
it's a really long paper, but I read the whole thing
'cause it was a riveting read. It made me realize that we're always on the lookout for some kind of shortcut. I fall into this myself. I'm guilty of this,
spreading the good news about the latest productivity app. But really, the latest
productivity app probably isn't gonna make much
difference to your life. What will make a difference
to your life is just doing the boring fundamentals repeatedly, and the point that this
guy makes in his paper is that excellence is
ultimately a mundane phenomenon. There's nothing sexy or exciting about it. It's all just very mundane. It's all just doing the
right things consistently and trying to get a little
bit better each time. But I thought it was a
very interesting read and a good lesson that
I took away from it. Point number 12 is the Go First rule, and I first came across it-- I don't know where I came
across this, several years ago. But I've sort of
ingrained it into my life. But it really stood out to me when I was in Sudan this time last year. When you go to a new
place, you probably know, there's always that kind of little bit of meeting new people and
needing to break the ice. And what I read in this book, that I really can't
remember where it's from, is that everyone is friendly, but you have to be willing to go first. Because if you go first,
if you take the initiative to say hello and introduce yourself and strike up a conversation, you will find that people
are just generally nice and everyone's really friendly. And so in Sudan, for a few minutes, I was like, "Ehh, everyone's kinda shy." "Everyone's kinda quiet." "I don't really know what to do." But then I started actively going up to people and kinda saying hello and just kinda generally having a chat. This going first that I did
on my part, if I can say so, I suddenly appreciated
how friendly everyone was and people were so happy to talk to me and it was just really nice. A really, really good experience. And I think my experience
in Sudan would've been a lot less fun had I not gone first
with those sorts of things. And I think this just applies generally across the board as well. When I'm at work, I try and go first in introducing myself to new colleagues, and kind of initiating
banter a bit when I can, and inviting people to things. Just being able to take
that fear of embarrassment and internalize it within ourselves and just forget about it and just go first means that we see just
how amazing humanity is. This sounds really corny. How amazing humanity is,
how friendly people are, and how willing people are to connect as long as we go first. Point number 13: high
leverage housekeeping. This is an idea that my
brother came up with, which is that every Saturday,
what he does is that, instead of doing active work on his thing, he does what he calls high
leverage housekeeping. Which is that kind of
sorting out the email inbox, sorting out the to-do
list, cleaning the desk, sorting out the project
management software. I think he uses Notion to
manage and track his own startup and figuring out what needs to be done. Spending a few hours on a Saturday to just get your life in order. Sort of like what Amazon used to do in-- Apparently there was one year, just before they hit a billion in revenue, where the mantra for the
whole year was GOHIO. G-O-H-I-O: getting our house in order. And the point of the whole
year was to kind of focus on the systems and make
everything work really well, not try and create new things. And so what I try and do now
is that, every now and then, I try and do this weekly. But it ends up not being weekly. I think about having a whole day dedicated to high leverage housekeeping, where I can do things like
make decisions about what I wanna be doing for the
next weeks or the next month, or actively planning new video ideas. Whereas otherwise I'm just
in kind of technician mode. I'm just kind of doing the thing. I never really take the time to step back and figure out where I can apply leverage, where I can do some
housekeeping to make things scale better, grow better, be more fun. That sort of stuff. So, high leverage housekeeping. Again, link to all of these
in my email newsletter if you wanna have a read in more detail. Point number 14 is this idea of having an inbox for your brain. And this is from David Allen's
book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, which is just kind of like
the bible for productivity about how to get stuff done. But the main thing I take
away from this is that it's really important to
have an inbox for your brain. Basically, a place where you
can capture ideas and things as soon as they hit your
brain so that you can then offload them from your
brain and into this inbox. So these days, I use
the app Drafts for that. So any time I have an idea for a video or a quote or literally
anything I'm thinking of, either on my Apple Watch or
on my phone or on my Mac, I will open up the Drafts app and just write a quick note for that. And that means that when I'm doing my high leverage housekeeping and my weekly reviews or whatever, then I can convert the Drafts items either into Notion projects
or into to-do list items if they need to be done urgently, or I can just kinda file
them away in my archives. And it's nice having
this inbox for my brain because it means that my brain is then for having ideas, not for storing them. And that's the idea that David Allen talks about in his book
Getting Things Done. Again, link in the video description. And finally, point number 15
is the power of project lists. So again, I only really started doing this after reading Getting Things
Done for the third time. And the idea is that
you should have a list of all of the projects that
you're currently working on and that you want to be working on. So after reading this in the app Notion, I made like a project list of all the video ideas that I might have and all the videos that I
was currently working on. And just the fact that I had
all of that stuff written down meant that my brain was doing
this background processing of these various projects
as I was going about my day and just not even realizing it, or even maybe when I was asleep. So sometimes I genuinely
wake up in the morning and I'd be like, oh, that idea for a video that I had ages ago that I
wrote down on this project list, I've just thought about
something to make that happen. Or if I'm driving to work in the car and listening to an audio book
or listening to a podcast, occasionally I just have
an idea that references some of the projects
that I've got on my list and I didn't really have that before I started writing
this sort of stuff down. And so I'm a real big believer of having a list of projects that we're working on. And that's not even in the video front. It's just kind of in life in general. And the way that David Allen
defines that is that a project is anything that has more than
one step required to do it. So now I've got a whole list
of projects that I'm working and I find that that's really helpful. And that's been the final
lesson that I learnt in 2019. So, that was a roundup of all the things that I learnt in 2019. In fact, it wasn't all of them. It was like 15. Pretty much all of them I write in my weekly email newsletter. So for all 52 of them, check
out Email.AliaBdaal.com. Link in the video description. You can have a look in my
weekly email newsletter. You can subscribe if you like, but that is where I
share all of the things in real time as I discover them. But I thought I'd do this annual roundup, just 'cause a few weeks ago, I was making my annual
review video and I thought, oh, this is a list of 15 things, life lessons I've learnt this year. Why don't I just make it into a video? So that was kind of
where the idea came from. Yeah, thanks for watching. If you liked this video,
I'll put links to here of another playlist that has similar sort of life lessons,
life advice sort of stuff. If you liked this whole lifelong
learning thing like I do, then please do sign up
to Brilliant.org/Ali. That also really helps
support the channel. So if you like this video, consider signing up for
a free trial of that. Thanks for watching and I'll
see you in the next video. Bye, bye. (light music)
