How to Enjoy Doing Hard Things (ft. Ali Abdaal)

It’s easy to assume that the hustle culture or “the grind” is all about pain and suffering. But as you’ll learn today, this simply isn’t true. In today’s episode, I’m talking to Ali Abdaal, a former medical doctor turned YouTuber and author of the new book, Feel-Good Productivity. Ali has attracted millions of global followers to his ideas on productivity and working because he’s managed to do what others have not: actually make it fun. It turns out that finding ways to make your work fun doesn’t just make you hate your life less, it actually makes you more productive. CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 | Introduction 00:03:38 | Our biggest misconception about productivity 00:05:38 | Emotions and productivity 00:08:47 | Mark’s epiphany on book writing 00:10:12 | Compounding returns on productivity 00:12:09 | Should we have zero distractions? 00:14:38 | Skills behind Ali’s success as a doctor and YouTuber 00:18:12 | What happens when you stop having fun 00:19:15 | “It’s all creative work” 00:22:26 | Making fitness fun 00:27:07 | The two types of productivity advice 00:32:55 | Can work-life balance get you to success? 00:35:27 | How to “feel good” in productivity 00:39:21 | The problem with caring too much what others think 00:42:52 | Experimentation as Ali’s way of life ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://markmanson.net/breakthrough⁩⁠⁠⁠ ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://bit.ly/4w46FMH⁠⁠⁠ FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  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?

• 0:42Mark Manson?

  Today, I'm talking to Ali Abdaal, a former medical doctor turned YouTuber and author of the new book Feel Good Productivity. Ali graduated near the top of his class at Cambridge and went into practicing medicine full-time in his twenties, when he realized something both dumb and profound: that it wasn't very fun. So Ali 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 has more than 5 million subscribers and runs one of the largest educational channels in the entire world. Ali has achieved incredible success in two of life's most intensely demanding and challenging

• 1:23Mark Manson?

  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 Ali 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.

• 2:08Mark Manson?

  This episode is more Other 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.

• 2:50Mark Manson?

  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, A U D I T. 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.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Bro, do you even podcast like bro? This is the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson.

• 3:38Mark Manson?

  What do you think is the biggest thing most people misunderstand about productivity?

• 3:45Speaker 02

  I think one of the big misconceptions about productivity is that it's about hustle, it's about grind, it's about work, work, work. You know, people sometimes are 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, okay, I can see that. I think.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  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 enjoyable.

• 4:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  And so to me, like, for example, this evening, I have an evening of alone time where I'm gonna play Baldur's Gate 3 on my MacBook and I might even go and get, pick up a gaming laptop for myself because I've been salivating over the Razer Blade 16 inch and there's a store in LA that has it in stock. And so I like, 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 gonna 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. My 13 year old self would be having a field day if he knew that 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,

• 5:01Speaker 02

  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 anything in life. So I love optimizing my relationship and like using principles of productivity in 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-ins 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.

• 5:38Mark Manson?

  I feel like people, there's a tendency to fetishize suffering and sacrifice. You know, 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.

• 6:23Mark Manson?

  And this is something that I like, I would try to write this for years. 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 not a software issue. It's not like a lack of tools or it's not because 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 modifying the behaviors you need to modify. People don't like hearing that. They like hearing, they want the tool, they want the system. They want the morning routine.

• 7:07Mark Manson?

  Why do you think that is?

• 7:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the emotional piece is so like, I remember the first time I really came across that idea was reading Steven Pressfield's The War of Art. And he calls it the resistance with a capital R.

• 7:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  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 like this whole book, exactly what I feel when I procrastinate. It's this, 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 bullshit is this?

• 7:54Mark Manson?

  Get over it.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  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. It seems to go in waves in terms of what people think the magic bullet is. But fundamentally, it 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, the, part of my goal with the book was to try and figure out, okay, cool. We know that's a thing.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  So therefore, what are the tools that we can use to kind of treat emotions as something important? Treat, 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 narratives sometimes are.

• 8:50Mark Manson?

  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 nine hours yesterday, let's do 10 today. Let's finish two chapters this month. And I noticed that it, it started to backfire that 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.

• 9:31Mark Manson?

  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.

• 10:01Mark Manson?

  And when that unlocked for myself, I started wondering where else that applied in my life. Where else in my life do in my is that the production curve actually not only is there diminishing returns, but it's actually turning negative at a certain point?

• 10:14Speaker 02

  I totally vibe with this. I think 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.

• 10:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Like, for example, but things like starting a YouTube channel, the difference between making one video a week and making two videos a week is actually, it's a step change because if you're able to do two 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 30, 30 hours to get two videos. And actually, that extra 10 hours then unlocks an extra step change in output, which then improves your odds at succeeding on 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 we have the diminishing

• 11:12Speaker 02

  returns and others where we have the compounding. But I think there are far more where we have the diminishing than the compounding.

• 11:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  And like balance is good. It's like, all writers fundamentally like ultimately arrive at the four hour number as well.

• 11:24Mark Manson?

  Sure.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Like I've yet to meet a writer who writes any more than four hours.

• 11:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah, right.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Or has done it for a long time, who has landed on number more than four. It seems to be a thing.

• 11:31Mark Manson?

  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. When they do studies on how much people get done in like the corporate world, hours five through eight, it's not much.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  And then if even the first four hours are like filled with multitasking and distractions and like, oh, grabbing a coffee with someone here and there. And the whole day goes by. And you know, I have this these days where the whole day will go by and I'd be like, I've written maybe 300 words and I was aiming for a thousand today. But like, how did I write 300 words in eight hours? Like, what the hell? Like, how does this happen? How it turns out because, well, distractions and lack of focus and you know, all the things that everyone struggles with.

• 12:11Mark Manson?

  Do you think the optimal number of distractions is zero? 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.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  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. There was a study, I think it was, you know, they got people to solve a Sudoku and also to like in 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 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 talk to me, I don't really let it faze me. I think of these as welcome distractions in a way.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  But one thing I used to do at university is prop my door open at all times with a little shoe doorstopper thingy. And so if a friend would come by and 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, 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.

• 13:50Mark Manson?

  Interesting. Yeah, 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 riffraff 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,

• 14:13Mark Manson?

  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. Being hyper productive all the time. 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.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  What you said there really resonates with me because, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll change it if it's a problem.

• 14:36Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Like, I think that's like, just a pretty chill way to approach life. That's like, I'll change it if it's a problem.

• 14:41Mark Manson?

  So you've achieved two things that are very difficult to do. You've become a doctor and you've become a successful YouTuber. Those are also two completely different things. One is a very creative entrepreneurial pursuit. One is a very traditional bury your head in the books, memorize a million things. You know, what are the skills that cross over between those two things?

• 15:03Speaker 02

  Two things. Number one is an ability to stick with it for long enough. And number two is, I think, the ability to teach.

• 15:12Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Well, 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? And there's a phrase, a doctor 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, 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-y 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.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  I actually started making musical song covers. And I wanted to be the next Kurt Schneider and Boyce Avenue and these sort of YouTube cover artists that would, you know, sing covers of popular songs. So the first like five or six videos are still there and it's those sorts of videos. Like, no one cared. I have 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, that things started to take off. And so I think like fundamentally, like, I don't think I would have been successful as a Mr. Beast or as an Airac or as a Ryan Trahan or someone who's making more entertainment-y, inspiring-y 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 BMAP Medical School entrance exam. Boom. It was what I needed. So that I think was a big, a big part of overlap.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  But I think the other thing that both medical school and being a YouTuber teach you is the ability to just stick with it for long enough. Like, like medical school in the UK is six years, where for the first three years, at least 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 two years. And then at that point, you start benefiting from the compounding and then you become an overnight success and all that stuff.

• 17:11Mark Manson?

  Sure.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  And I think that is, you know, the, the skill of faith and patience.

• 17:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  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 gonna work.

• 17:33Mark Manson?

  It also helps solve that, that conundrum of how do you know when to stick with it? And how do you know when to quit and give up and stop chasing a pipe dream? And it's, if you love it, then who cares?

• 17:47Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah, it's fun. I'm doing it for intrinsic reasons rather than extrinsic.

• 17:50Mark Manson?

  Totally.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  A reason, you're, you're doing it for the sake of the thing itself, rather than the outcome that you're getting from the thing.

• 17:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  That's why I loved what you said to me over lunch the other day. Now that like, if it's not fun, I'm not gonna do it. And I was like, yes.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  That is a great place to be once you're already successful.

• 18:06Mark Manson?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  Until you're successful, it's, I think the reframing is, I need to find a way to make it fun, otherwise I'm not gonna do it.

• 18:14Mark Manson?

  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 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 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.

• 18:59Mark Manson?

  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.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:14Mark Manson?

  And you lose the momentum that that keeps you going through the hard times. I want to 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?

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 19:34Mark Manson?

  Learning.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  All of it is creative work.

• 19:37Mark Manson?

  All of it.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  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 Kreb cycle.

• 19:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  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, like world champion memory people who like memorize decks of cards and 18,000 digits of pi and all that shit.

• 20:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  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, oh, 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. So it's like, imagine like peripheral neuropathy is like isoniazid. Or like, I don't know, ethambutol 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,

• 20:56Speaker 02

  which is a highly creative task.

• 20:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  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 traveled 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 of hematology, you can basically categorize them into three things. Great. That simplifies it. Now, within those three things, you've got categories for like four 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 the shit

• 21:39Speaker 02

  and be like, okay, what's a sensible categorization of this? Oh, great. There's like anemia, there's malignant human, there's like a non malignant human. Great. So there's three categories, bang, 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, oh, we need to talk. Because if you're finding medical school a grind, where going into the hospital is optional, you are not going to find being a doctor fun, 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 less stressed, and also make you enjoy life more. Yeah, I'm just like massively.

• 22:22Mark Manson?

  It's remarkable that you still have the recall of all that stuff, you know, 10 years later.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  Visual, visual.

• 22:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah. The fun thing for me, 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.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  I'm struggling with this right now. Like, help me, help me figure this out.

• 22:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah. So it's, it's the thing that unlocked it. And I'm not a huge CrossFitter, but I visited a couple of 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 to best get new PRs and do all this stuff. And it was the first time, you know, my association.

• 23:12Mark Manson?

  With fitness and working out, it was always this drudgery. It was like, oh, well, yeah, I'm doing this today because I don't want to fucking die when I'm 60. You know, all the stuff that you read about, or I want to lose 10 pounds before summer. And 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 judgment 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 I'm like giggling with how much fun I had.

• 23:54Mark Manson?

  And 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 pounds of muscle in the next three months. I'm like, oh, man, I gotta do this. I gotta 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 and 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 and you're going

• 24:35Mark Manson?

  to do it together, or maybe like 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 was just kind of, again, I would download some list off the internet and just like follow it to a T, like a fucking robot. And when I got a tracking app and I started putting in all my lifts and all my weights 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, okay, last week, I did three sets of eight at this, at this weight. Today, I'm going to try to do three

• 25:18Mark Manson?

  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 incredibly profound. And again, it's one of those fucking obvious things. And I hate shit like this because it's when you have to take your own medicine. It's the advice that you've written about for years and you never applied in your own life. But it's been really transformative the past couple of years.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  That's so I've been struggling with motivation or consistency on the fitness front. Yeah. Literally years. And it was again, when I was reading the audiobook for this a few months ago, I was like,

• 26:02Speaker 02

  my God, like literally, I have not thought about applying this principle to fitness.

• 26:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  And just like find a way to make it feel good. And if you've tried all the things and it doesn't, then like change it up and try something else.

• 26:13Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  So I've been thinking in the back of my mind, I really want to try CrossFit because there's so many examples from CrossFit of like how they use all these strategies.

• 26:20Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  And I've yet to try CrossFit.

• 26:21Mark Manson?

  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. 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 it actually dampened my energy because I was overexerting. 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 is such a worthwhile experience just to go experience the community. The community is amazing. People are, they're so positive there. Like it's very, doesn't matter. Like there'll be a dude next to you who's lifting 400 pounds. 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.

• 27:04Mark Manson?

  There's like no judgment. Everybody's super positive. So.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 27:08Mark Manson?

  Thumbs up CrossFit.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would absolutely check it out.

• 27:10Mark Manson?

  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 analog in the productivity world as well. But like 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 two 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 okay, right? So it's like, if you're depressed, here are some things you can do to like help you not be so depressed. But then there's also advice that takes you from okay 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 special. Here are four things that you can try to like make your life way more effective.

• 27:53Mark Manson?

  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 okay advice and they mistake it from for okay to great advice. They'll be like, oh, well, that's obvious. Like, everybody knows that. 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 okay to great 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.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 28:26Mark Manson?

  I wonder if there's a an analog in the productivity space, because a lot of what what we're talking about is mitigation. It's almost like mitigating unproductivity rather than maximizing productivity.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:42Mark Manson?

  It's like making sure you're not falling below 80% rather than killing yourself trying to get to 99%.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Oh, I really like this. I've not thought of it in this way, but that I think there are there are definitely analogs. One thing that comes to mind is like bad to okay is often about the basic obvious things and often about the hardware, like sleep, exercise, nutrition.

• 29:07Mark Manson?

  Totally.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  If you're depressed, just like, you know, people have done the studies on this, sleeping eight hours a night, doing some exercise every single day, seeing having some social contact and like, about it. And like eating well, it's like.

• 29:18Mark Manson?

  That that solves like 80% of it.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  It solves 80% of it, the other 20% is like, it's like, whatever. So for someone who's depressed, worrying about, you know, maximizing their 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 okay to great, you still have to have the basics done because the basics will derail you immediately.

• 29:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Like, you can have the best productivity hacks in the world, but if you're sleeping three hours a night, obviously, it's not going to work.

• 29:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  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 point you made at the start, like the people with billion dollar businesses are not really working that much harder than the people with million dollar businesses, even though there's a huge difference between billion and a million. They're just doing different, playing different chess moves.

• 30:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  And so going from, I think going from okay to great is often about finding the right chess moves rather than really about working harder. Cause 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 100x 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 could 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.

• 30:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  And so those are now the stories that I, I look for and I enjoy. 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 where someone's 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.

• 30:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Love that shit. I'm like, great. That is the person we should aspire to be.

• 30:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  Rather than Muhammad Ali is like, you know, I suffered every day for 10 years and it was worth it to become a champion.

• 30:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Most of us, I don't think want to suffer for 10 years just to become a champion.

• 30:58Mark Manson?

  Have you read the new Elon Musk book?

• 30:59Speaker 02

  I have not. It's on my Audible at the moment.

• 31:02Mark Manson?

  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.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:30Mark Manson?

  Like involving himself in every little decision and it, you could see he's like not a happy person.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. He describes entrepreneurship as like chewing glass or something.

• 31:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  And I've, 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.

• 31:44Mark Manson?

  You're just making YouTube videos.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  YouTube videos, trying to build a lifestyle there, trying to make time to play video games, hang out, hang out with people in LA. And so, yeah, different strands of entrepreneurship. One, one 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.

• 32:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Elon Musk would not recommend his branch of entrepreneurship for almost anyone.

• 32:07Mark Manson?

  No, and he actively doesn't actually. Um, 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 2,000 people who are inspired by you and who want to learn from you. Like, what is 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.

• 32:49Mark Manson?

  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.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  I do wonder though, this, like, I, you know, when I, when I interview people on my pod, I will ask the question of, like, once, once someone is post-success, they're always preaching work-life balance.

• 33:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  But I wonder, 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 start preaching work-life balance?

• 33:22Mark Manson?

  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 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, there seems to be an escape velocity phenomenon.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:51Mark Manson?

  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.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. So my, my way of squaring this, 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, okay, 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, 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, some, I would, the stuff I 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

• 34:45Speaker 02

  in the evening was actually more enjoyable than watching Netflix for four 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.

• 34:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  And so I went, went back into WoW, got a gaming PC because I was like, okay, I can afford it now, but a gaming PC, played some WoW. And I'd find myself more drained at the end of a gaming session than I would at 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.

• 35:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 35:26Mark Manson?

  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. Yeah, I'm gonna get, I'm gonna get a ton done. Like what, where is that line between feeling good about the work you're doing and distraction or indulgence?

• 35:49Speaker 02

  I think if the thing is feeling good and moving you in the direction of the work you want to be doing, then 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.

• 36:03Mark Manson?

  There's like a sustainability aspect.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's absolutely. And so the final three chapters of the 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.

• 36:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 36:15Speaker 02

  You know, Tim Ferriss asked that question, what would this look like if it were easy? And I think that's a great question. I ask myself that a lot. I ask myself a slightly different question. What would this look like if it were fun?

• 36:25Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  Like, what does a more fun version of a podcast look like? What does a fun version of editing look like? What is 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. We just say something nice about this patient's cat because it's just kind of funny. And like, doctors, 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 finished this discharge summary, but just make the process more fun. So it's not a case of doing cocaine and writing edits. It's a case of like adding a few jokes about the fact that this patient, you know,

• 37:08Speaker 02

  has been very disappointed because Chelsea lost the game recently or whatever the thing might be.

• 37:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  It's just like lame dad jokes that make things more fun sometimes.

• 37:16Mark Manson?

  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 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?

• 37:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think people just overindex way too much on thinking, it's just too much seriousness. Way too much seriousness.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  There's, you know, that quote from Alan Watts, don't be serious, be sincere. And it's like, the way I think of it is, I imagine myself in that position. If I were a GP, you know, general practitioner, reading a discharge summary, and someone made a comment about the cat, I'd have a little chocolate. It would make my day because everything else I've read has just been boring as fuck.

• 38:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  I used to give this advice to students when studying for exams. If you're writing essays, You just want to imagine the poor examiner, they're having to like empathy for the examiner, they're having to read 500 of these shitty pieces of writing.

• 38:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  Give them something to chuckle about, they're going to give you the top grade immediately because you've just made their 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.

• 38:29Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  So I started incorporating jokes into my discharge letters. And the only comment I ever got was actually a written compliment from a GP who emailed the hospital staffing department being like, can I just say this is the best discharge summary I've ever seen? And that was a commendation on my CV.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  That was sick. But you know, there were times where I also, you know, I made a video and I was a bit too blasé 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, okay, 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 blasé about data security. I'm like, yes, that's a very good point. I should have been less blasé about it. So usually these things are not that like life or death.

• 39:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  Not that like important, but we, we treat them with such importance. I think also in giving presentations at work, people are boring as fuck when giving presentations at work, but the most effective presentations are the ones that start with a bit of a joke.

• 39:20Mark Manson?

  Of course.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  Take it a bit less seriously.

• 39:21Mark Manson?

  Of course.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  Lightens everything up, gets the energy and the mood going. Whereas when you see someone who's like so timid and so like, I have to be professional, just sucks the joy out of it.

• 39:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  And everyone wants, wants more energy in their life.

• 39:31Mark Manson?

  It's funny because the classic caring 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 first 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 first 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.

• 40:15Mark Manson?

  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 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 want to call it. It's such a cliche thing to say like, oh, stop worrying about what other people think.

• 40:54Mark Manson?

  It's as the years go on, I'm consistently surprised and impressed at how deeply this affects people and kind of fucks everything up for them.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  It's so true. Yeah, as you were saying that, I was kind of thinking like, that's definitely the experience that I've seen from other people. And I was wondering why I personally didn't have that so much.

• 41:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  And I think all of it can be basically traced down to Tim Ferriss. Basically. Ever since I discovered the freaking Four Hour Work Week and realized the life that's possible, the whole like New Rich 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 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, is just the idea of running experiments and testing hypotheses.

• 41:44Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  Like, I was just signing up to go to med school for six years and then training for 10 years for the sake of being a consultant when I was 40. And I hadn't really considered that path beyond like two days of work experience and the fact that everyone I knew was a doctor. And so, after reading Four 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, would you change anything? My favorite question, if you won the lottery, how would you spend your time?

• 42:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Would you still do medicine? And then half of the people would say they would leave immediately.

• 42:10Mark Manson?

  Wow.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  One guy even said he'd leave in the middle of the operation.

• 42:14Mark Manson?

  Good luck.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  He was like, yeah, my dream is to coach my son's like football team. Because he loved football, this is soccer.

• 42:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  I've met people who enjoy working 30 hours a week as a doctor, maybe even 40, but not 80. 80, like, doing anything for 80 hours a week is just not fun. And I would always ask those people, it's like, okay, well, what's stopping you from going part time? And it would always be money. Well, I've got a mortgage, I've got 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.

• 42:52Mark Manson?

  So I think that's such a really great takeaway. The find 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've never heard anybody talk about that before.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  I think that has, that attitude of experimentation has pervaded every aspect of my life. Like, 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. Once my YouTube channel started to make money, my hypothesis was always, hey, I'll be a part-time doctor and a part-time YouTuber. I named my course the Part-Time YouTuber Academy. It was all about, you know, I still really enjoy 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 an eight-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?

• 43:57Speaker 02

  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 YouTuber life. I've realized, fuck this. It's so much more fun being a full-time YouTuber. 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 Dr. Ali Abdaal and have the title of the book and all that shit. 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 YouTuber? That's really fun. Ran the experiment of what's it like to have a team of 20 people?

• 44:42Speaker 02

  Not fun. More fun having a team of 10. 10 is a good number, 10 to 12. That was really fun and 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 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?

• 45:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  Rather than on a schedule. Done it, let's see what happens, let's run it as an experiment. We'll see. Best case scenario, experiment works out and I realise 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 an experiment. Even a failure is useful data and then I can inform the way I live my life.

• 45:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  Experiments around like, huh, I wonder if it would be fun to, I don't know, try running every day.

• 45:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Try that for a couple of weeks, see what happens. 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 feel happy and fulfilled, as we grow older, people say, the things that brought you happiness and fulfillment when you were younger, don't necessarily do it again. And so all of life is basically this sort of running bunch of different experiments, having fun along the way and sort of meandering your way to some sort of, some sort of fulfillment or something like that.

• 45:52Mark Manson?

  Something, yeah.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:54Mark Manson?

  The framing of it, the framing of life as experimentation is, I think is 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, okay, we ran an experiment, you know, I tried working overtime for a month as an experiment to see and didn't go well. So that's information, that's, it removes the mindset that you have to succeed at everything you try or that everything has to go well all the time. It's the only, the only metric of success is simply feedback.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  There's a story that I talk about in the book. There's a YouTuber 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, like, for 50,000 of his audience and he split them up into two groups. And the idea was this challenge 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.

• 47:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  So we're just seeing like, how much would people try? And so 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 than 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.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  You still try half, less than half the number of times as someone who wasn't told that at all. And so his whole message, 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.

• 47:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Well, Ollie, the book is Feel Good Productivity. Go buy it everywhere.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  There's a quote from you on the front.

• 48:06Mark Manson?

  It's a

• 48:06Speaker 02

  Thank you, by the way, for offering that quote. And yeah, I'm actually reading the thing.

• 48:09Mark Manson?

  It's a great book, man. You know, you, you did a great job with it and it's, it's, I have 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, it never really quite landed or I never like wrote it in a way that I felt good about it. As soon as I started reading this, I got like two, three chapters in, I'm like, all right. Yeah, this is it. Like he, he's got it. Like this is, this is the productivity book that we've all needed, so.

• 48:40Speaker 02

  Lovely. Clip that, put it as a testimonial.

• 48:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 48:46Mark Manson?

  You can put a second line with my name on it on the book. So, Ollie, it's been a pleasure, man.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Thank you so much.

• 48:51Mark Manson?

  Thanks for coming on.