- Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. If you're new here, my name is Ali, I'm a junior doctor working in Cambridge. And in this video, I
wanna share three books that have really changed my
life over the last few years and I'll be sharing some of the
lessons that I got from each of these along with some quotes. Before we get started, I just
wanna say a big thank you to Blinkist, for sponsoring this video. They're a fantastic app,
that lets you read summaries of popular nonfiction books
so you can learn the lessons from them and at the end of
the video I'll talk about the value that I derived
from Blinkist and how it fits into my life as a doctor slash YouTuber. But yeah, let's just
get started by talking about book number one. This is THE 4-HOUR WORK WEEK
by Tim Ferriss, subtitle; Escape the 9-5, live anywhere
and join the new rich. Essentially, this book is the
author talking about his story but also giving some
tips about how you can, if you want to, you can quit your job and set up businesses with automated streams of
income, and essentially creating a system whereby your businesses
are generating you money, without you having to
physically do work for that, and then you're able to travel
the world and live this sort of lifestyle that everyone
thinks is just the exclusive domain of rich people. Like for example, when I was growing up, I just had in my head this
vague notion that one day, it would be cool to be rich. And if I were to really examine
that, I would have thought, oh well, I guess 'cause if you're rich, then you can like, travel and
stuff and then you don't have to work and stuff. And the idea that he talks
about here is that, actually a lot of this whole life
of a rich person i.e., you know, just the idea
of being able to travel, live on a beach in Thailand,
all this sort of stuff is available surprisingly cheaply. Like for just a few
thousand dollars per month, you can live like a really
really really rich person in places like Thailand and like Argentina and other cool places like that. Rather than you know, do this whole thing that
we all get trained to do, i.e., work really hard,
go to a good university, get a fantastic job, work
super super super hard and then make loads of money
so that when you retire, then you can be happy. Rather than doing that, instead
it's more about you know, why are we, why are we working
to retire when we're in our 60s and we've got
osteoarthritis in both our knees? Instead, why don't we take
those 20 years of retirement, and spread them out throughout our life. So, he he suggests that
we all try this thing of mini retirements, where
each year you take a few months off, and you go travelling
while running your business remotely from your laptop or whatever, which sounds all scammy and stuff. But if you have even a passing
interest in entrepreneurship, or setting up your own business
or if the idea of being able to travel the world, while
your businesses generate money while you sleep, if that
seems even remotely intriguing to you, then you should
definitely read this book, to be honest you've
probably read it already. But, the impact it's really had
on me, is that this has been the book that has pretty
much single-handedly allowed me to set up my business. So I set up a company while
I was in medical school six years ago, 2013, six years ago now. And we've run courses for
medical school applicants, then made like an online question bank, and some online courses
and all this stuff. And that company's been doing really well, it's done six figures in revenue, pretty much every year since it started, with five figure corporation tax bills, thank you Her Majesty's
Revenue and Customs. And I was able to run
that company alongside, studying medicine at
Cambridge and doing reasonably well in my exams, because of the stuff that
I learned in these books. All the productivity tips and tricks, things like outsourcing to remote workers, that was a big reason as to
why some of our question banks are really successful, a
big reason as to why my own mental health wasn't completely
destroyed by you know, the challenge of running
a company alongside being a medical student. So this was all the stuff
that I learned from this book. I'll stop waffling all about
it, but yeah, any interest at all in entrepreneurship or
anything like that definitely give this a read and
check out his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show,
is absolutely wonderful. So yeah, let's move on to book number two. Alright, this is a tiny book called, SHOW YOUR WORK, by Austin
Kleon and this has been another book that has been really
pivotal to my life. It's really small it, took
me about half an hour to read it on Kindle. And actually I only I only
bought these physical copies so that I could show
them off in this video, but yeah, I'm gonna have this
around the house now I'm gonna be revisiting the lessons
in it whenever I pick it up. Anyway, this has been a really
pivotal book in my life, because, for a long time
like ever since I started medical school and started
running this company, 6med, I'd been sort of toying
with the idea of setting up a personal blog and kind
of writing about some of the lessons that I gained
and you know book reviews and things like that and
I'd never been able to get over the fear of personal,
like self promotion. That you know, it's people
are gonna judge me people are gonna think I'm an arrogant
narcissistic twat for having the audacity to have a blog
you know, with my domain like aliabdaal.com I mean
who's got their own name as a domain name unless
you're like super rich and super famous blah blah blah. I used to have all these negative
thoughts about this whole stuff and then in January
2016 I read SHOW YOUR WORK, by Austin Kleon and
that completely changed the game for me. It made me realise that actually, even if you're not an expert in anything, just the fact that you have
done anything at all means, that you can then write
about that experience and there will be people
somewhere in the world who'll find that helpful. So for example, setting up
a company in med school, like you know, it's it's
not a very common thing and it's a sort of thing a lot
of people would be interested in, therefore if I just write about it, and I can share the
lessons that I've learnt and just kind of help people. And that's the main idea,
that this book says is that, by sharing your work, with
the world you are working towards helping people, and that is gonna be an inherent good. So after reading this,
I started my own blog, I started writing a few
posts that year and I think if it hadn't been for this book,
I wouldn't have even set up this YouTube channel
because, starting that blog was the small step, that made
me comfortable with the idea of putting myself out there. And you know, I've had so
many messages from people asking advice for starting
a YouTube channel, and oh how do you get over the fear? And there really isn't a
way to get over the fear, but I think you know, taking
small steps reading this book, lets you see that actually
there isn't really much to be afraid of, and sharing yourself
and your work with the world is only really gonna a
good thing if the message that you're sharing is positive. So yeah, I've now had in
the realm of like over over 2000 messages and comments from
people all around the world who've been inspired or have
been you know have learned something from the content
that I've put out from the work that I've shared, I've shown
and I think if it weren't for this book that I
read three years ago none of this would have happened. So, thank you Austin Kleon
for encouraging me to become more okay with the idea of
putting myself out there. If this is something that you
ever you ever thought about, if you have something to
say, if you think you might have something to say, if
you like the idea of maybe writing stuff and sharing
it with the world, even if you don't if you're
any kind of if you'd make any kind of content at all, if you're if you're an
artist if you're a painter, if you're a writer,
any anything like that, you're really really benefit
from reading this book, because it's it takes
like half an hour to read, there's no time at all. You can buy on Amazon, I'll
stick a link in the description below, and you'll love it,
it will change your life like it did mine, I hope. And last but obviously not
least, is ANYTHING YOU WANT. This again really tiny
book by Derek Sivers, that takes like half an
hour to read as well, 40 lessons for a new kind of entrepreneur. And yeah, it's got the word
entrepreneur in the title, but even if you're not an entrepreneur, I think you can still
gain a lot from this book. Pretty much anyone everyone
everyone should read this book, because it's a lot of lessons for life, not just for entrepreneurship. Anyway, this had an enormous
impact on me as well, and I can honestly say that
this really changed my life. Derek Sivers is a guy, he set
up a company called CD Baby many years ago, grew it to
like an 80-man operation, with millions and millions in
revenue, then sold it for like $20 million and you know,
gave that money to like this Charitable Trusts for musical
education stuff like that. Anyway, in this book, he
talks about his story of how he got started with the company, but also, a very counterintuitive
approach to business and also to life i.e., not
chasing growth all the time, and actually just trying to
make something that you enjoy running and you enjoy the
process of, that you're having fun and that you're helping people. Now that's such a novel
thing in the world you know, where every startup is just aiming to get that billion-dollar valuation
aiming for growth at all costs but this was like a very
nice very nice thing and for me this is a book that
I'll always hold really dear, because when I was in my fourth
year, approaching the end of my fourth year of medical
school, I'd been running my company, 6med, for
that for like three years at that point. And we'd been growing in
terms of revenue every year, in terms of student numbers,
it was taking up more and more of my time. But then around 2016, our
growth started to stagnate and even dip a little. I'd never really experienced
anything like that before, where you know, you've
grown something and it keeps on growing and then suddenly
it stops and then you're like, oh wow, it's on the decline. And this made me really really sad during the summer holidays of my
fourth year and I can remember kind of lying in bed
awake thinking you know, whatever you know what have I done? Where I've gone wrong? Have I screwed up my life by
throwing away this fantastic opportunity I had? And then I came across this book. There's one quote in particular
that I wanna share from here and it's on in this chapter, yeah okay. So in this chapter he's
talking about how sometimes MBA types you know, people with MBAs Masters in Business
Administration would ask me, What's your growth rate? What's your retained earnings
rate as a percentage of gross? What are your projections
for your company? And he's talking about his
own company, I'd just say, "I have no idea. "I don't even know what
some of that means. "I started this as a hobby
to help my friends, and "that's the only reason it exists. "There's money in the
bank and I'm doing fine, so no worries." And then he goes on to
say, and this is probably my favourite quote of all time and a quote that I return to many
times a month whenever I'm feeling down or whenever
I am feeling like explain in a minute here's here's the quote. "Never forget why you're
really doing what you're doing. "Are you helping people? "Are they happy? "Are you happy? "Are you profitable? Isn't that enough?" And this is just like, if there
are if there are three lines like you know, any time I read this, it just makes me feel infinitely better, because like doing stuff like running a business, where you're
aiming for growth in revenues and profits and stuff and
also now this thing of having a YouTube channel having this
like social media following, having an email list, and
everything that I'm now doing in my life with the
exception of my you know, full-time job of being a doctor. All these other things, are all
geared towards making stuff, and then trying to grow the
brand or the your subscriber count or the revenue or whatever. And that can be quite I
don't wanna say stressful, I don't like the word
stressful, it can be quite a it's it's it's something that
that often plays on my mind, and I know from speaking to
other people doing this sort of stuff that it plays
in their minds as well, and the idea being that
whenever you're relaxing or spending time with
friends or family and stuff, you're sort of in the back
of your mind you're thinking, you know, I could be
making a video right now, and if I you know, if I don't
show now that that video this week, then you know the
algorithms is not gonna rank my channel highly enough or
you know, I could be writing a blog post for 6med about how
to get to into medical school right now and then that'll rank
us highly for search engine optimization then more
people are gonna find out, of course and then we'll get more revenue, and you just kind of go down
this spiral where anytime you're not working you feel
super super super guilty for it and you can't really enjoy
life because you have this amazing thing that
you've somehow you know, by the Grace of God you've
got this YouTube channel or this company and you know
you have to keep putting work into them to make them grow
but you also wanna live a life on the side. And just this this quote it's
just it's just amazing like, "Never forget why you're
really doing what you're doing. "Are you helping people? "Are they happy? " Are you happy? "Are you profitable? Isn't that enough?" So, whenever I find myself
thinking, oh you know, I should make another
video so I can something about ad revenues or oh,
my ad revenues have dropped this month 'cause I haven't
made an iPad video in a while, or any anything like that. I just, you know, open
this book on my Kindle, find my highlighted
quote and just read that, because it just makes me
appreciate that you know, the revenue isn't important you know, I'm enjoying what I'm
doing which is fantastic. I've got this amazing
thing going on the side and in addition to my full-time job which I also quite enjoy. It's making a reasonable amount
it's making an incredible amount of money actually, and
it's not an amount of money, that I'd ever dreamed I could
have been make especially at this age. And therefore, you know,
it's it's helping people, I get messages from people who are happy because I've inspired them
or you know, help them learn something or helped them out
with their exams or getting into med school. And I'm happy doing it, I
think people are happy watching these videos, I hope people
have been watching these videos. And that's that's enough,
that's all we really need. And a lot of burnout
within entrepreneurship, within YouTubers, within
bloggers, within any anything like this comes from people
working too hard to grow the numbers, to grow the
audience, to grow everything, and I think if anyone is
stuck in that position or even if you're not, this is
just like a really good book for general life advice. Yeah, anything you want, Derek Sivers, one of my favourite books
had a big impact on my life, because it's helped me, become
more happy and at peace, with this whole kind of running an online entrepreneurship empire, I
think empire is a strong word, I don't mean empire, just like you know, being an online, online
person who tries to make money online and stuff, just really
really really good book. Okay, this whole video has
been a lot more waffling than I intended but I
hope you guys enjoyed it, if you did, can you let
me know in the comments or if you didn't, again I'd
love to hear some constructive advice as to what you
would do differently. If you know, I do wanna do
more book reviews and stuff and I've read a lot of
books over the years, thanks to having a Kindle
and thanks to Blinkist which I'll talk more about in a second. I've read so many books over
the years and I do wanna talk more about books on this
channel and yeah so any kind of feedback about the about
the format would be great. And before we finish I just
wanna tell you about Blinkist, which is a fantastic app. And what they do is that they
take all the important lessons from thousands of non-fiction
books and they summarise them into these like 15-minute
summaries that you can either read or listen to. So, the way I use Blinkist,
is that if I ever come across a recommendation for a nonfiction book, I search through Blinkist
and see if I can find it, and I add it to my library
this is a quick scroll through, some of the books that I've read on Blinkist, oh 4-HOUR WORKWEEK. And essentially they've
summarised the salient points of the book in this series
of like, I don't know, 15, 13 blinks that you can read through, in about 15 minutes. If you're like me and you find
yourself strapped for time and you have all these book
recommendations being thrown at you and you just don't
really know where to begin, this is a great place to start,
where you can read a summary of the book, get the
most important essence, and if that's all you need,
then that's fine you can just take that away or if
you wanna find out more, then you can actually buy the
book and read it properly. So yeah, 4-HOUR WORKWEEK, 4-HOUR BODY, Seth Godin's marketing books, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, that was one that I read on
Blinkist, it's a massive book. I've never read it in real
life, but because I've read it on Blinkist, I feel like
I've got the main lessons from it so I haven't needed
to read it in real life which has saved me about
100 hours of my life. But yeah, Blinkist is pretty
great and if you wanna try it, then there's a link in
the video description, it's gonna appear over here
and the first 100 people to use that link, will get
unlimited access to Blinkist. The premium subscription
where you've got access to all of their library of thousands
of books completely free, for one week and you can
decide if you like it, then if you do like it, if
you use my code, my link, then you'll get 25% off a
paid subscription as well. I'd recommend it, I think
there are a lot of lessons, that you can gain from
these non-fiction books. I think the fact that they're
all summarised in Blinkist, means that it's very easy to access them, and you know, it does cost a bit of money for an annual subscription. But if you're anything
like me then you know, ideas from a single book can
completely change your life. So you know, why not why
why why not go for it? But yeah, thank you Blinkist
for sponsoring this video. I think you guys are
great, and I'll continue to use Blinkist, whenever I
get a recommendation to decide if I then want to read the book. So yeah, that brings us
to the end of this video. Thank you so much for watching. This has been the first
time I've tried doing like a book thing on the channel, but as I said let me know
if you have any comments, I'd love to hear from you. Thanks watching, if you liked the video, please give it a thumbs up,
if you haven't subscribed to the channel, then
please consider doing so. Have a lovely day, and I'll see you in
the next video goodbye. (gentle music)
