How this doctor turned YouTuber and author learned to create on his own terms again

Ali Abdaal followed a senior doctor into the patient’s room to prep them for surgery. The senior doctor said hello and asked how the patient was doing. But the patient ignored the senior doctor as his eyes locked onto Ali.

“Hey!” he brightened, “I was just watching one of your YouTube videos!”

The senior doctor looked confused, and Ali bashful. 

They continued their rounds, and later, the senior doctor told the other doctors, “Hey, did you know junior doctor Ali is actually a famous YouTuber? One of our patients recognized him!” 

Word spread, and later, a few doctors asked Ali how much money he was making from YouTube. “About $4,000 a month,” Ali shared. The doctors were floored: “That’s how much a doctor we know makes in his private practice. And you’re making that by the age of 24?” 

Ali always planned to be a doctor, not a YouTuber, but their reaction made him wonder: Is there something more here? 

“I never thought I would be a productivity YouTuber.”

While being a doctor was always Ali’s primary goal, when he was 15, he dreamed of being a music YouTuber. He found a million reasons not to start, like not having the right equipment, but when he finally decided to try YouTube about seven years ago, he started with music videos he made with his friends. 

In one early video, he plays guitar while his friend Katherine sings. It’s charming, but he laughs when he tells me no one watched those videos. They get views now because people look through his backlog, but he says he learned quickly that he didn’t have what he calls a “natural advantage” when it came to music. 

He did, however, have a natural inclination for teaching. 

While studying to become a doctor, Ali started his own business teaching in-person seminars to help people get into medical school, and when sales started to slow, he decided to try YouTube to market those courses.

People watched the videos, and some joined his seminars, but in the comments, people really wanted to know how Ali was so productive. How, they wondered, did he have time to be in med school, run a business, read so many books (which he often referenced), and run a YouTube channel, all without seemingly being burnt out or miserable? 

They kept asking, and asking, and asking. 

I never thought I would be a productivity YouTuber. That was not the plan. But I was like, huh, I’ve never really thought about how I’m so productive.

People didn’t stop asking, and Ali didn’t want to leave them hanging. So he started making videos addressing their specific questions, like how to study, how he sets up his desk, or the three books that changed his life. 

“And basically,” he explains, “through answering questions, I ended up in this genre of productivity.”

Even though he says he accidentally stumbled into the YouTube productivity space, it was a space he was always fascinated with personally. 

But for him, productivity wasn’t based on how to get more done at work or always feeling like your time has to be in service of “producing” something. Instead, Ali defines productivity as “doing more of what matters to us in a way that’s intentional, effective, and sustainable.”

While Ali has very specific strategies that he shares in his channel and his book that have worked for him, he is always quick to point out that productivity is personal. 

Not everything works for everyone every time. It’s about experimentation and spending time in a way that matters most to you. 

Sometimes, people will say, “Oh, Ali Abdaal, all he cares about is productivity.” But time is all we have. We can always make more money. We can never make more time. So why wouldn’t you actively seek out ways to make you more effective with how you’re using your time?

That’s not to say that you need to be productive when it comes to spending time with your kids. But it is to say that, Hey, if you can productively do your work so you have an extra hour to spend with your kids every day, surely that is something worth doing. So I feel very strongly that productivity is something that everyone should be interested in because time is fundamentally all we have.

“I could no longer juggle the medicine and YouTube thing.”

But when Ali graduated from med school and started working as a doctor, everything he’d learned about productivity that had gotten him to this point—discipline, willpower, and enduring short-term suffering for a long-term goal—wasn’t working anymore.  

I quickly realized when I was working full-time that this is an unsustainable attitude; just working harder, being more disciplined, and applying more grit and willpower only gets you so far. 

I found myself super drained and very burned out. I was very de-energized when I would get home from work and I wouldn’t want to make my YouTube videos. I could no longer juggle the medicine and YouTube thing. 

He didn’t want to quit YouTube and he also didn’t want to quit being a doctor. He wanted to find a way to do both. But every time he tried one of his old productivity strategies, they failed. He was burnt out, and his to-do list was neverending. 

While looking for an alternative, he remembered experiments he’d learned about in a psychology course he took in medical school, like one that showed giving people candy before they solved a puzzle helped them perform better because they felt positive emotions before they started. 

Ali started reading positive psychology books, and started to connect the dots between fun and productivity; what’s fun isn’t inherently unproductive, it’s just that productivity strategies are less needed in those arenas because it’s easier to do what is fun. 

Ali wondered, what if  he could make the things that were hard feel more fun? What if he could unlock that natural motivation we feel towards the things we love and enjoy and direct it towards the things he was obligated to do? 

Things really shifted when he read this phrase by philosopher Alan Watts: “Don’t be serious. Be sincere.” 

Ali realized that his burnout often resulted because he was taking things too seriously. Being a doctor isn’t something to take lightly, but Ali noted that sincerity could replace seriousness in ways that were more beneficial, not less, to the people he was trying to serve. 

He notes how top surgeons often play upbeat music in the operating room because they know that taking something too seriously can result in a mistake. He later found studies that confirmed that Nobel prize-winning surgeons were often the ones who kept things light in the operating room. 

And while he knows it’s a fictitious example, Ali loves to quote the pre-op routine of Grey’s Anatomy neurosurgeon Derek Shepard, who would often say after putting music on in the operating room: “It’s a beautiful day to save lives. Let’s have some fun.”

If having fun and being sincere even in life-or-death situations was possible and helpful, Ali decided to apply this to all areas of his life where willpower was no longer working. 

When I found ways to make it fun, when I found ways to feel good within my work, that was when everything changed.

And he really means everything.

“Do I really want to live my life based on the fear of what other people will think?”

Shortly after, Ali’s YouTube channel, in its third year at that time, made $120,000. (He made no money in his first year and $20,000 in his second.) 

I almost couldn’t believe it.

I thought something must be wrong. I must be cheating somehow. There’s no way that these numbers are possible, given that I was doing 5 to 10 hours a week on my YouTube channel and 40 to 60 hours a week at work. But somehow, the YouTube channel was making way more money than work was.

Once he made three times what he made as a doctor, Ali wondered about going full-time on YouTube. Even many of his colleagues wondered the same thing. 

But he never planned on being a creator. He was a doctor. Plus, he thought his videos were all about how productive he was as a doctor who was also a YouTuber. If he wasn’t a doctor anymore, he feared, wouldn’t people also stop caring about his YouTube channel? 

The creator path was also still new and volatile. The medical path was stable and secure. “Am I really going to throw away the medicine thing I’ve trained eight years for to do this YouTube thing?” he wondered. 

He worked through his fears one by one, but the last one he faced was the idea of losing the social status of being a doctor. 

But then I realized, if the only thing that’s keeping me in medicine is purely social status, is that really how I want to live my life? Do I really want to live my life based on the fear of what other people will think and this attachment to the identity that I get prestige points for being a doctor? 

I realized no, I don’t want to live my life based on the opinions of other people or this weird attachment to an identity I signed up for when I was 16 years old.  

And when it came to security, something he did still value, he realized that going full-time on YouTube wasn’t an irreversible decision. 

If I wanted to, I could always go back to medicine.

There was something happening here, and he figured this was the time to explore what else it could be.

“As much fun as being a YouTuber is, it becomes a lot less fun when I have a sponsored deadline.”

What it became was a 5 million+ subscriber channel and a multi-million dollar business with a team of 13 people. 

Ali says he got there with a combination of using the productivity strategies he teaches, hiring a great team, and using Kit automations to sell his popular courses. 

What he really loves about this model is that it allows him to better align his content creation schedule with his own values, priorities, and interests, instead of the algorithm’s, something he struggled to do when his business first started to grow. 

I value being able to teach, learn, and share, but I also really value the ability to do it on my own terms. As much fun as being a YouTuber is, it becomes a lot less fun when I have a sponsored deadline to work towards or when I feel like I have to make a video rather than I get to make a video. 

Creating his own digital products, and using Kit automations and Recommendations, he says, was a game-changer in helping him rely less on the algorithm and brand deals and be able to create in a way that kept it fun.

Which for him, also comes from a deeper place of knowing what he really wants in life.

A few months ago I did a journaling prompt where you write your own obituary. It was  really eye opening and helped me realize that fundamentally what I wanted was to be a really good teacher and at the same time to be a family man and to always put my family first and to be in good health.

That kind of gave me a North star for my life. It helped me realize what I’m optimizing for. 

 And if I can do that while having fun along the way, I think that’s like the ultimate victory. 

Now, before he sets a goal, he asks himself if the process of reaching that goal and the end result of that goal will take him closer or farther from his north star. If the answer is farther–even if it means more money–he says no. 

When Penguin approached him to write a book about productivity, he also asked himself this question. And the answer was yes. 

“Write a book about that.”

Ali thought it sounded like fun. Plus, he says, “I did not realize how hard it was going to be. I type pretty fast,” he laughs, “so I thought, I can write 2,000 words a day, and a book is about 65,000 words, so that’s just 32 days of writing. Let’s go!”

The book ended up taking more than three years. 

And at times, the process was brutal. During one of his first editorial meetings, a New York editor said of Ali’s first book proposal: “This is terrible. No one’s gonna read this. Productivity is dead.”

But Ali is grateful for the feedback that the first book proposal was too scientific, and for what the editor said next: “You’ve got to boil it down to one thing. If you had to boil it down to one secret, what have you discovered that the rest of us don’t know?”

Ali responded, “Oh, that’s easy. I found a way to make it fun.”

“Oh, that’s a book,” the editor replied. Write a book about that.”

Ali did, and Feel-Good Productivity was published in December 2023. 

I’m not saying that everything has to be fun all the time because nothing is fun all the time. Even being a YouTuber, even being a writer, is not fun all the time.

But what I’m saying is that literally anything we’re doing, we can always find a way to make feel just a little bit better, a little more fun.  

It’s not about always being productive or always having fun or always putting so much pressure to always be pushing. In fact, the essential theory in Feel-Good Productivity is about reducing pressure and finding more lightness in the everyday so that you have more time to pursue the things you want people saying about you in your obituary. 

For Ali, that means he’s just started his own digital nomad trip around the world. All of his possessions are in a small backpack somewhere in the corner of the Airbnb in LA he’s currently staying in. 

When I think of what would my life be looking like right now if I didn’t start the business? If I didn’t start the YouTube channel, if I stopped putting myself out there, right now? I would be in a doctor’s office in the freezing cold in the middle of winter in like a random town in the UK. 

And I’d probably find a way to enjoy it because, you know, I’m a pretty chipper guy, but it’s just a radically different life to being here in LA, hanging out with friends, being able to work whenever I want. It’s just like a ridiculous amount of freedom and autonomy that’s unlocked by having your own business that’s actually making some money. That has been a huge change in my life.  

While a lot of top YouTubers have been quitting or stepping down or stepping back due to burnout lately, Ali says what’s helped him keep going is reducing reliance on brand deals by creating his own products and selling them via Kit, and pairing things down to optimize for doing the creative work he loves most–teaching about things he cares about.

 

He doesn’t ever want the business part of his creative business to stifle what made him want to do this in the first place. 

There are some games that are finite games where the objective is to win. And then there are some games that are infinite games where the objective is to keep playing the game. 

The point of hanging out with your friends is not so that you complete hanging out with your friends. It’s so that you are able to continue hanging out with your friends because it’s the thing that brings your life fulfillment and meaning and joy.

I’m so excited about building a business where I can just continue doing this thing that I love. Some people are like, well, if you’re not growing, you’re dying, but I don’t know, I disagree. I think if you can find a way to focus on the process and keep it fun, that to me is the thing that I’m most hopeful for.

If you found this story helpful, please support Ali by checking out his new book Feel-Good Productivity.

You can also connect with Ali on YouTube, subscribe to his email list, or learn more at aliabdaal.com.