How To Think Like A Life Coach - Hasan Kubba
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Hey friends, welcome back to Deep Dive. What you're about to hear is a conversation between me and my business coach, Hassan Kouba, who is in fact also the author of this book, The Unfair Advantage, which won the Business Book Awards, Business Book of the Year in 2021. We talk a little bit about the book, about the

concepts of this unfair advantages framework. And then we spend most of the conversation talking about the idea of having a business slash life coach and why it's a good thing for most people. And then the episode kind of turns into a mini coaching session where Hasan coaches me on issues that I'm facing in my life. And we try and figure out a way of

how you as the watcher or the listener can apply these coaching frameworks to your own life without needing to hire someone like a life or business coach. In the episode, we also talk about the idea of limiting beliefs. We talk a little bit about productivity and procrastination. We talk about confidence and we talk about how to find your unfair advantages. So sit back, relax, and I hope you enjoy the conversation. It feels weird to do this interview because we know each other quite well. And so I feel like, once I was gonna leave the room...

I feel like this will just be more of a conversation and I can ask you about the things that I'm curious about. Nice. So let's start with, we're working on a collaborative type video together about like you being my coach for some number of months. Yeah. And the stuff that I've learned from that. Yeah. And you've put some bullet points together, but like it was so long ago that we started working together like a year ago, almost to this date. And I really can't remember what were the main like epiphanies. Yeah. I'm very curious. Like you...

having having gone through the footage and like done run run the sessions a what was it like coaching me and what were like the epiphanies that i had and i'm asking because then people listening to this might have similar epiphanies in their life sure yeah no it was really interesting the going through all of that and looking at it and unfortunately we weren't recording the earlier sessions but i took really extensive notes so i was looking through the notes and stuff um

What was interesting is how much you figured out just in that first session. So the first session, I still remember you were in a cafe, just a random coffee shop. And we had just come out of a lockdown or something for the autumn 2020. And...

In that session, we did some exercises. So you talk about the Odyssey plan a lot and we did something very similar in that session. And we also spoke about, I just was asking you, what do you want to achieve? And you were like, ah, you know, I don't like goals. And you have the same squirming thing about goals now, but you have evolved a lot in terms of like how you view goals and how you see it as having a direction, having a destination matters. You know, it's all about the journey, but the destination still matters. So one of the things that you said, which was very interesting, was I want to have my

more, over 50% of the revenue, and this was kind of a very business goal, over 50% of the revenue coming from a platform that I control. So not from Skillshare and YouTube. And, and basically, I was like, Oh, cool. Have you thought about this already? Like, no, I literally just thought of that now.

And within about three months since the launch of PTYA or something thereabouts, you'd achieved it basically, which is so cool. And also the limiting beliefs that you had was very interesting. Oh, what limiting beliefs do I have? Oh, about like...

I can't charge a lot of money for my course. It feels weird. It feels like selling snake oil. And actually, I gave you, I brought you snake oil today because you thought that was really funny. I saw it in Dubai. Yeah. And I brought you some. George, can you chuck us the bottle of snake oil that we can show people?

This is snake oil. Thank you for buying me some snake oil from Dubai. Yeah, you're welcome, man. So I hope it cures everything for you. It's going to cure everything. I think I'm going to leave it in its packaging. Yeah. And then like maybe try and NFT-ify it or something like that. That's a great idea. Selling snake oil. I don't mean to have it displayed alongside your book, which I'm sure is not at all related to the idea of snake oil. Yeah.

Exactly. So you were really worried about selling snake oil. And I think a lot of people, to be honest, I would be very suspicious of anybody who didn't have that fear at all. Basically, if you're selling, especially when it comes to like information online. And usually what happens is when we develop some kind of

expertise, especially when it comes to business. Like you can be like three years into a business and you have made massive progress. But this was my experience and the experience of a lot of entrepreneurs I know is you take it for granted because you're just looking at people ahead of you and you're just looking at what you're going to do next and you still haven't. And always the goal line is always moving. And even if you haven't explicitly set goals, you're always kind of like thinking about the next thing you want to hit, the next milestone. Yeah. It's like you're measuring the gap rather than the gain. The gap rather than the gain. Yeah. And even if,

I mean, the gap is when you have a set goal. But even if you haven't got a set goal, I guess you just look for the next round number. No, exactly. Like, I remember when I was first setting up the YouTuber Academy and I was chatting to our mutual friends, Tiago and David, who run courses as well. And I was saying, like, why would anyone want to hear from me about how to grow on YouTube? I've only got 1.2 million subscribers. And they were just, like, laughing. They were like, bro, that's actually a large number. And I was like, but, like, you know, MrBeast has, like, 50 million subscribers. They were like, yeah, but, like, you know...

Like you can teach people the process that you used to get to 1 million subscribers and people would find that very useful Even if there are other people out there there are further ahead in the journey than you yeah, and I actually see this a lot I see this a lot amongst doctors so now that I'm doing this YouTube thing I've spoken to a bunch of medics who want to create educational content related to medicine one of my one of my friends is a cardiothoracic kind of surgeon in training and

And he wants to make content helping other wannabe cardiothoracic surgeons kind of about their exams and all that kind of stuff.

But his concern is, well, I'm not the ultimate, ultimate big dog person. And I have to wait until I fully qualify to be a consultant as a consultant. And then I can teach stuff. But then at that point, it's going to be, oh, well, I'm just a new consultant. I have to have to wait until I have, I'm the chairman of the board of cardiothoracic surgeons. And then I'm allowed to make stuff. And it just keeps on going, pushing further and further and further forward because we all have this like imposter syndrome of like, I am not yet qualified to do this thing. And then at some point in the future, I will become qualified to do this thing. But then the goalposts keep shifting.

And actually when you have just overcome, it's that whole thing of like being a guru versus being a guide. And actually being a guru is not always the best. It might be better in terms of marketing. You get people's attention more because if you're the best, if Usain Bolt wants to teach you how to run, that's interesting. He gets people's attention. We do a masterclass. But then it might come so naturally to him that he's going to not relate to a complete beginner who just doesn't, he's just like, ugh. So I think the people who are hard gainers are the best teachers.

And I think that is actually, so our coaching then evolved into book coaching. So we started off, we did like six months of kind of business general kind of coaching, but then it became like book coaching specifically. And one of the challenges that you had is like, okay, so where, because you've had, obviously everybody has struggles, but there are some things that came much more easily to you in terms of like productivity or in terms of procrastination or whatever it is. So it's like,

First of all, you need to highlight where you had trouble. And secondly, go think and basically think, remember what it felt like to be going through that trouble. So remember what it felt like to start YouTube. Remember what it felt like to start a business. And those are the things that are

like really difficult to do. And it's so easy to forget what a beginner feels, the fear, the lack of context. So it's that curse of knowledge where once you know something, you think it's so obvious that I've got nothing to teach. It's just so obvious, isn't it?

So whereas we all have our own perspective, or we worry that we're not original, we worry we don't have enough content. And reality is, I think part of that comes from just understanding how much value you can add. So once you put into a position where you're actually helping or mentoring, mentoring is actually very helpful, coaching, mentoring, because then you go, oh, okay, I can actually add loads of value. And actually, if you learn coaching frameworks, you can even add value without having the domain expertise in the thing itself. So you coach a bunch of people, like what is a coaching framework? How does that work?

- Coaching. So coaching is really interesting 'cause I've had a whole journey of like coming to terms with like believing that coaching is valuable because one way that a consultant explained coaching to me earlier on in my journey,

when I was like a year or two into business, I hired this consultant and she was like to me, okay, so a consultant, do you know the difference between a consultant and a coach? And I was like, no. Like, what's the difference? She said, a consultant gives you answers and a coach gives you more questions. I was like, oh, okay. Coaching sounds really stupid then. Like, how annoying is that? You ask a question. Why would you pay someone so much money just to ask you questions? Yeah. What's more annoying than asking a question and getting one in return? It's like,

Can you just tell me what is going on? So I always thought, no, you know what? Coach is an unregulated term. Every Tom, Dick and Harry on LinkedIn is like a life coach or whatever, something coach. And you just think, well, these 20-year-old life coaches, what the hell do they know? And you just think it's like crap. So I always stayed away from it.

But what made the shift for me is starting to understand. And we were actually mentoring early stage startup founders. And we were just kind of, we didn't know any coaching or mentoring frameworks. We just did what comes naturally. You just give people the answer. You tell people what to do. You give them advice. You tell them, okay, this is what I did in your situation.

And then I started to learn more about coaching and the value of asking questions and getting the coachee to figure out the answer, to really think about it. It's almost like showing you're working in maths when you did maths at school. It's like giving a student the answer straight away isn't going to help them. So the coaching is really valuable to do that. So I think the two main benefits of coaching is...

number one is clarity because getting asked those questions back about what you're trying to achieve what you're trying to avoid why and then just keep do we keep being asked why it's very valuable and by the way if you guys see some of the episodes of ali with tamer and not overthinking you'll see coaching in action because ali you've been doing that quite a bit and it's been fun to see um so a coaching framework to answer so clarity is number one number two is

or accountability. So clarity and accountability are the two main benefits of coaching. A coaching framework is simply taking somebody through the idea of like, okay, what are you looking to do? What are you looking to achieve? What do you want? Right. Asking why. What are you looking to avoid? Asking why. And then, okay, based on that, what do you think is your next action? What's the highest leverage thing you could do? Okay. So what are you trying to achieve?

- Why? What are you trying to avoid? Why? Okay, now that you've got this data, what's the next action that you want to take? - And this is a very simple framework. I call it AAA, achieve, avoid, act.

What do you want to achieve with it? A, A, A approach. So how would you apply this to me? Let's say we want to sort of switch this into where we're in coaching mode now. How would that conversation start? So I'll just be like, okay, at least first I'll just get some context and build. Imagine if we didn't know each other, I'll build some rapport. How are you doing? And just see what comes up. And that's kind of just getting a pulse of the situation right now. That's just context. And then from there you get into like, okay, so what are you looking to achieve right now?

And I like to leave it quite broad. - Okay. - I like to leave it quite broad. And then sometimes they go in what area and it's just interesting to see what comes up, right? So what are you looking to achieve right now? - What am I looking to achieve right now? We are gonna take a little quick break from the podcast to introduce the sponsor of this podcast, which is CuriosityStream. If you haven't heard by now, CuriosityStreams is the world's leading documentary streaming subscription platform founded by John Hendricks, who's the founder of the Discovery Channel

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and that is only available on Nebula. You won't find it anywhere else. So if you enjoy the sorts of conversations we have on Deep Dive, you might like to see, you know, a whole year before we started this podcast properly, once the pandemic stopped, what sort of conversations I was having with people on Zoom. I've also got a series of videos on Nebula called Workflow, which is where I deep dive into some of my favorite productivity tools. And on Nebula, you also get early ad-free access to my videos and videos from a bunch of other creators that you might be familiar with, like Thomas Frank and Tom Scott and Legal Eagle and Lindsay Ellis. And the really cool thing is that because CuriosityStream loves supporting independent creators,

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So head over to curiositystream.com/deepdive to get the bundle deal. So thank you CuriosityStream for sponsoring this episode. Okay, so in my head, I'm just gonna show you my working. In my head, part of me is like, I'm looking to achieve a clearer calendar. I'm looking to achieve time that I can focus on the book. I'm looking to achieve figuring out what I actually wanna say in the book. I'm looking to achieve figuring out like what I need to do to hand off like the running of the business responsibilities to Angus who is now running the business side of things so I can focus on the content.

I'm thinking of I need to achieve some sort of process with working with our writers, a videographer, and YouTube producer to create content that feels authentic to me that will also potentially be valuable to others in a way that still keeps me showing up in the content and not just like offloading all of it to kind of writers because I think it's important for me to be involved in it. And I'm thinking that how can I, I want to do all these things and also have time to sleep eight hours a night and have a bit of a social life and play like squash once a week and go to the gym twice a week.

That's sort of what I've got in my head. Nice. That's like things I'm trying to achieve. And because I know you already and we've done coaching before, I know that actually, if you notice, that all triangulates upon this

sort of process oriented goal well number one one outcome goal is the book and that always comes up when I've asked you what's the biggest thing for you right now you've got the book and understandably your book is a big project and you want to make it good and it takes a lot of cognitive kind of labor to really get into it but secondly if you notice that you're kind of trying to clear out your calendar to work on the book to have creative space to have that time and you're

part of that is lifestyle design as well. And then you've got some things in there about like keep the business running, keep that going smoothly, and how do you have the right amount of input

Into your videos and not completely abdicate. How do you delegate and not abdicate? Yeah, basically So yeah, so this is and then what we can go into is why and why you're getting into that and then we can go into it Okay, what you're looking to avoid and sometimes that comes up already and sometimes people when you ask them what you're looking to avoid they start talking about what they want to achieve again and It's very interesting. And what I love about this process is because I come from a background of marketing and

So my first business was a marketing agency. And actually, these are the kinds of things that you need to figure out for your customer avatar. You need to figure out what are they looking to achieve? What are they looking to avoid? And what's coming up for them? And you have to enter the conversation that's going on in their minds. And really, if you boil that down to what it actually is, it's how do you motivate people? So marketing is motivation and coaching is

in a way it's just motivation it's how do you most it's clarity and then motivation and so you're looking to get the whole so my coach did it recently so i've been dogfooding essentially they say that in startup world of like eating having your own product which is i've become this recent convert to coaching like it's been a year now and and i've got an executive coach i've got a health coach i've got like a coach to help me get organized with notion so my health coach recently um

reasserted we're kind of getting close to the 17 week program so it was the end now and i've already lost like five kilos i'm i'm like you're asking me what did i have for breakfast nothing because i'm just like like i'm doing the whole thing of getting back into shape getting back into my ideal weight etc so one of the things that he's did to me what he's because i actually had a bit of a cheat weekend

And one of the things he said to me on Monday, and it didn't have too bad of a knock-on effect because I didn't go too hard on it. And I was quite happy because I'm quite metabolically flexible. I could do that and then still get back on track and have steady energy and be a fat burner. So one thing that he asked me is,

So why is it that you want to... He went back to what you're trying to achieve. And I go, okay, well, I'd like to fit into my large clothes again instead of XL. That felt terrible to not know what to wear and to feel confident in front of the camera or to feel confident on stage, et cetera. And he's like, what would it feel like if you don't get there? What would it feel like if you do? And actually, I found those really difficult questions. I felt very like...

Okay, I have to like touch in with my emotions of how that's gonna feel. Okay, but it really helped like he forced me to do it Okay, how would that feel if you if you had to wear XXL clothing clothing? It just I just feel like such a failure because I've been talking about it for so long So one of the things about funny enough about health and fitness and stuff particularly nutrition I was into this ten years ago and everyone used to be like the Hassan diet before like the whole like primal paleo keto that that world

I was like very early into that world. I was telling everybody that butter is actually quite healthy before anybody really believed it until like now people started to agree with that. I used to drink bulletproof coffee before that was like trendy. So everybody's so if anybody hasn't seen me for a very long time, they're like, Oh my God, what happened to you? Because I was really slim. Yeah. And so, so that I think is the identity thing. And then this is because of a lot of introspection. I'm into self development. But I think the identity thing of like a

Come on, Hasan. You used to be the one who used to give people advice and inspire people to get into shape. And now you're like gained weight, you're overweight, you've locked down as an excuse, you've moved house, renovations, all this kind of stuff.

So it feels really. So you tied your identity to the idea of being someone who is slim, who gives people advice on how to be healthy. I mean, not, not kind of not on purpose. Okay. I mean, Oh, right. Yeah. I didn't do that on purpose, but like, as in part of that is like, and also, um, if you're out there giving advice, like on state, even if it's nothing to do with it, one thing that I've learned just as a coach in general, um, is you want to be like a, you're without meaning to be. And I think you've experienced this yourself is you're a role model without trying to be a role model. Yeah.

And it's like, as much as you don't want it, you have people are going to look up to you and they're going to look at other parts of your life, even though you're not saying, oh, I've got these other parts of my life or, you know, optimized and I'm doing so well in them. Maybe there are areas of your life where you need work on, but they'll still look at them. So if you're teaching people about, I don't know, being productive, but you're, um, you're really like overweight. People will be like, huh? He doesn't have his shit together in that other aspect.

And I think nowadays it's becoming more and more like you have to be more well-rounded. You don't get really fat CEOs as much anymore, like people who are really unhealthy or overweight. People really think of that holistic kind of being in shape. So these are all the things that drove me. And so being reminded of that really motivated me to be like, okay, this is why I need to stick with it. And I didn't feel like I needed it at that point, but it was very powerful. Okay, so in that context, if I can summarize, and please feel free to correct me if there's not what's going on. It sounds like...

You you feel like you're getting fat you have your identity tied to accidentally tied to someone who is slim and someone who's got their life together someone is healthy being fast in your view worldview is not that and Therefore you are targeting that being fat thing is it not more like it's not healthier to target the root cause whereby your own self-love is not actually related to your weight ultimately is the thing you want to cultivate being a healthy weight or is the thing you want to cultivate being happy with yourself in which case you could either change the

change your weight or you could change the expectation you have on your weight if that makes sense of course yeah and that is something that I really think about it's the value system it's like underneath all of that it's like why am I doing it am I just doing it because society tells me I need to be a certain weight that would be a very unhealthy

or potentially extremely unhealthy way of looking at it. And definitely I wouldn't do it for that reason alone. A big piece of this, which I haven't spoken about, which I've spoken to my health coach about a lot is productivity, is energy levels. And I know that I've noticed it. Like you're much more lethargic when you gain weight, just overall. Like your body just isn't as energized, isn't just as energetic. So that's a big piece of it. - Why do you value productivity?

So again, I've done a lot of work on this and I think it goes down and I've just come back from Dubai. I've just come back from a trip. First trip abroad in over two years because of COVID and the book launch and all of that before that. And really...

I was like thinking, okay, what am I doing this for now? I'm comfortable. I'm fine. Like now, what am I doing this for? And I think this goes back to like, as, and then you get into the cheesy stuff, but really it goes back to like, I feel like I've found my unfair advantage. It's taking me till almost age 30 when I figured out communication

and writing and creating content is actually something I'm really good at, even though I don't have that much practice in. So clearly there's some kind of underlying talent there. And I go into that in the book of like, I believe in talent. And this is a big shift from when I was younger and imbibing so much self-development and motivational videos and stuff, which used to say, it's not about talent. It's just about working hard. You just got to work really hard. Talent doesn't exist.

I think, no, it does. And you have to find yours and it might take time and you have to experiment and it might not be so obvious straight away, et cetera. That's part of self-awareness, which is a huge part of coaching is self-awareness is developing that. So I feel like I've got this gift and I want to share it. It goes down to that.

So once you have all your basic needs met, your Maslow's hierarchy of needs are all there, then you're like, okay, self-actualization. And that's why I want to be more productive because it makes me happier. And as lame as this sounds, and this sounds very toxic, but I'm really not. Actually, if you look at me, I'm very, in my life, I have a very clear delineation between work time and chill out time. And I actually usually don't work at all after 6 p.m., like at all.

So I'm actually, I've approached business from the beginning to try to be that way. And the first two years setting up the business was quite hard, was doing long hours, deadlines, make clients happy, et cetera. But I've always had this mindset of being able to cut off and I'm actually quite good at that. But, but,

my moods are dictated by how productive I've been that day oh interesting yeah they really are like if I've been having a bad day it's usually because I haven't done the work that I wish I would have done like I haven't actually said but it makes me happy as well and I don't think it's purely just me thinking oh I just need to be productive like writing or creating actually makes me happy and I've only recently started speaking of identity I've only recently started thinking of myself as a creative person I never thought of myself as that and I don't know if you had a similar thing because I think I kind of identified a bit with the

word nerd when I was younger and I was good at science and maths and I never thought of myself as a creative. Is that something that you've had a shift in as well or is that kind of always been there for you? Yeah, I mean, I still don't think of myself as a creative. I think I'm really bad at coming up with ideas. But you're a creator. I'm a creator, yeah, because I create things. But I'm not creative in that sense.

Think creative the adjective is like feels feels to me like something that I'm not I think I'm pretty productive But I wouldn't say I'm particularly creative. I mean what's what's helped me go over that? Yeah, you're describing is the whole Picasso thing of like good artists copy great artists steal and learning that actually design arts all of that is all from influences and nothing comes from scratch and

And yeah, like for example, Ash, my co-author, he's super creative. Like he can brainstorm anything and he could just come up with new things. I'm not to that level, but I'm really good at synthesis and I think you're really good at synthesis. We have a lot of that in common actually, in terms of like getting different ideas that we imbibe and then putting it together into our own model. I think you're very good and that is a creative thing. I mean, people like us, we love teaching, right? We love giving advice and we have to just stop ourselves from constantly telling other people, this is what you should try, this is what you should do.

because a lot of the time when we're doing that we haven't done enough listening to understand what we do is we assume they're like us we assume their goals are like us we assume we understood their goals we assume and so we're giving an answer but reality is we haven't done enough listening and enough work beforehand to even give an answer and actually a good consultant would spend so much time trying to figure out what's the goal what they why and all that stuff anyway let alone when you're coaching so it's uh

It's just one of those instincts to constantly, and that's one thing I teach my students. So one of the things that I did is I launched, so coaching went into group coaching, went into like an online course, right? I've run called Transformational Creator. And one of the things that I've told the students on there is,

how to coach because as a way to figure out if there is really a market for what you're trying to do in this case they're creators and they're trying to create like uh become build their personal brands become experts in the field become thought leaders etc but it's like teaching them how when they talk to people not to just constantly give them advice and be doing most of the talking but instead to ask open-ended questions and let them talk and so seek first to understand before being before seeking to be understood and that classic line so yeah

So you're teaching creators how to become coaches essentially? Essentially, yeah. Not necessarily for the end goal of being a coach, although many of them want to be coaches, but really the idea is how do you monetize a small audience? And you monetize a small audience not by building into a huge audience and then selling a $10 product to each person or a $5 product, whatever, t-shirts and stuff, but

But instead, if you have a tiny audience, you should sell a higher priced product, a more premium product. And a very valuable premium product that genuinely adds a lot of value is coaching. And learning to coach and learning to become a coach. Not only do you get to know your audience better, get to know your niche better, and niching down is so important, but you get to come up with new ideas. What are they thinking about? What video titles to create? What headlines to create? What emails, newsletters?

subject lines to write down because you understand how to enter the conversation going on in their heads. So there's a way to be a good listener to your audience, to qualitatively take them through a process. And one of the things I've been telling you for your book as well is take somebody through that process as you're developing it, like a small cohort of people and see how they get on, where do they get stuck? And then that's what we did for our book, kind of informally through mentoring, etc.,

And then you can kind of, and giving public speaking as well is a big piece of that. See what questions you get asked. So basically you're honing and iterating your content to then make it into a better product. And that was the idea. One thing I want to talk to you about, so you've done a fair bit of backpacking, traveling-y type stuff around like Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, that kind of thing.

And offline, we were talking about how over time you develop the ability to just go up and talk to people and get involved and like talk to strangers. How did you go about developing that kind of confidence? Yeah. Because if I imagine kind of like going to a random country and then going up to strangers and like striking up a conversation, even the thought of that just fills me with dread. And same with me. So I grew up very shy. And I remember even when I was in university, there would be these kind of careers events

And everyone would be kind of standing around with drinks and kind of networking. And I was extremely uncomfortable in those environments of like, do you just join a circle of people who are talking already? How do you join that conversation? And that's something that I really started to read up about. I started to read up about social dynamics. Started to read up about attraction and dating and how... I still remember I saw an advert when I was 15.

I was in like E-bombs world, which was this, I don't know if you remember that website, but it was this online gaming website. And it was like how to attract the girlfriend of your dreams or something. And I was like 15, super religious Muslim boy, not even having any intention of getting a girlfriend, but I was just so curious. And I started reading and reading and reading about it. And yeah.

I've learned so much. So it's like, it's quite interesting when nerds kind of put their mindset on the things that aren't necessarily nerdy, like social dynamics. It's really fascinating stuff. And I think it's really helped me in business. So essentially, I really had to push myself outside of my comfort zone and that. I really had to just like, you get approach anxiety and you're scared to go and talk to somebody to go and strike up a conversation. You know, funnily enough, like an interesting story just out of the blue that just came to my mind. I saw somebody, this is around,

I don't know, 2016-ish, I saw somebody on the tube

on the London Underground. And it was this guy and he was wearing this hoodie and it said Facebook on the shoulder. And this is before Facebook had a terrible reputation. I never really was a huge fan necessarily, but I was kind of on Facebook at that time. So it's not like nowadays the climate is now. Oh, that's interesting, Facebook. This guy, maybe he's a Facebook, that's so lame. Is he a Facebook fan? Like he's such a fan. And I thought, oh, maybe he works for them. So I go on the same carriage and I struck up a conversation with this guy.

He turned out to be like the global head of marketing, the global head of growth of Facebook. It was like a really high up executive at Facebook. And he was super friendly. And then he invited me down to the Facebook offices and I got shown around. And he told me the story of how he used to... He was one of the founders of...

uh what was it called a fire something to do with rss so it was one of the uh feedburner i think it was called he was one of the founders of feedburn or one of the early members and then it was bought by google and he worked for google for a number of years and then he went to facebook and this guy's like now amazon and stuff and it was just like what a cool

networking things happen just from talking to a stranger. Like the serendipity that can happen from that. Another story based on like me getting over my fear of doing stuff like this is I got into university by doing this. I got into the university I wanted. I was going down this path of medicine and all this stuff at Queen Mary. I dropped out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I decided after a lot of soul searching and drama, I talk about that in the book as well, but I decided to do economics and I wanted to learn about the developing world. I wanted to help. I'm

born in Iraq, kind of came to the UK when I was three years old. I was like, okay, maybe I can help rebuild Iraq after the war and stuff. So I thought, let me do this course at SOAS University, which has got an emphasis on developing economies. That'll be interesting. I'll learn about China, the Middle East, Africa, et cetera. But I actually was six months behind the UCAS deadline, which was like January 4th. This was in June. And I was, also I didn't have the grades because I didn't do the right subjects. So I didn't,

So by any stretch of the imagination, I shouldn't have been able to get in. But what I did is I looked up the undergraduate admissions tutor, Googled him,

those days, Google, like people didn't have their pictures online as often, but luckily he did. It was like this low res image of his face. It was just a headshot. And he was this professor and he was also the undergraduate admissions tutor. I went to his page and he said, student office hours. And this goes back to the whole thing of like bending rules as well. I've always been a bit, I've never really liked rules. Maybe that's why I wanted to start my own business. Didn't like authority.

So it was like, okay, I can't get into this course because I don't have the grades and I'm six months late. Okay, I shouldn't even bother. But okay, let me look this guy up and let me go and see if I can convince him. I could just go talk to him. So I turned up at like two, just like five minutes to two on like a Tuesday, which was during his office hours. I walked down, I got into the university somehow. I think they didn't have barriers at that time to get in. I went up to his, I walked down the corridor and I saw him walking towards me.

I was like, oh, professor, can I, do you have a moment? He's like, yeah, sure. Thinking I'm a student coming for his student office hours. I sat down with him and I was like, okay, so here's why I want to study economics. So here's why I want to do this. And by the end of my little

spiel my little pitch where i had on the train over i was writing bullet points and stuff in my notebook and he was like okay tell the admissions office that i'm going to accept your application and then i even wrote my personal statement just for so us i didn't even hedge my bets i literally just said this is what i want i sent it out and he accepted me and i go in so this has really changed like pushing past shyness and that

fear of starting a conversation, fear of initiating has helped me in so many ways. I've built up a lot of rapport skills, which has been interesting, which has helped me in business in so many ways. It's helped me with like dating and stuff like that, like just to be comfortable to talk and first dates and stuff. So it's really changed my life, like learning about social dynamics, learning about status, learning about like

body language and stuff like that. And then actually learning is more of a mindset thing than it is about how you sit and how you talk and how you project your voice, et cetera. It's a whole journey. So if you were to guide someone along that path, like what are the key milestones, key resources, key sort of things that helped you get from point A to point B?

It's, there are some brutal truths that you have to accept when it comes to learning about attraction and some of them feel a bit like, oh, life shouldn't be this way. People should judge people, you know, on the contents of their character rather than how they look and how they come across and how, I don't know, how they behave and what. So it's a whole rabbit hole to go down, but it's really understanding, particularly for men to understand how, well, actually it's not because it's just about

Okay, and we go back to this is I just realized it's not because when we talk about business it also applies It's understanding that human beings are hierarchical creatures And that's a hard pill to swallow because we want to feel like we're an egalitarian thing and everybody's equal and we try our best to make it that way but then there is always something happening there's a there's the conscious communication which they say is only about what they say in your linguistic programming is only about seven percent of the actual communication is the words and

the content when most of it is your voice tone, your body language, your timing, your pauses, your whatever.

So starting to understand communication, so I've been fascinated by this persuasion communication. It goes back to marketing, it goes back to coaching. It's just understanding how human beings work. So I did psychology at A level. And one thing that I didn't like about it is it was about like mental illness for the most part. It was about like, if somebody is below baseline, how do you deal with that? How do you treat them? But what I was much more interested in is what they call positive psychology is like, what is it for the average person?

And so I studied that and I learned all about like communication I learned about. So yeah, just research status, understand that it's not. So the first level of learning is like, I need to be more alpha and that's this really silly and stupid and overly simplistic way of thinking about it. 'Cause that's not how it works. That is a way oversimplification of it. It's actually much more subtle and it's actually, you kind of go full circle oftentimes. You think that you have to like,

do this and you know that stereotype of like somebody trying to be more confident than they really are. But once you start to understand it's more about self esteem and it's about deeper transformation, that is actually what changes things. Another person is Mark Manson as well that used to talk about this stuff a lot, which I actually haven't learned about his content, but I learned about it a little bit from you and I think he's really on the right track. I like his stuff anyway. So that might be a good place to start.

Yeah, I've kind of, it was a long time ago. It was before I got into business. I was like, I was obsessed with this. I was like, why do I care so much about popularity? Why do I care so much about like how I come across? Why do I feel so inadequate or insecure? You know, that was a lot of my younger kind of teenage years. I had a lot of that issue. So I want to change gears a bit and talk about the book. I've already done a video talking about the book. So I kind of want to talk to you more about the meta game of the book. Yeah.

How do you deal with negative reviews? It's funny. This goes back to that whole kind of maybe some people are wired, not literally necessarily genetically, although that plays a role, but maybe because of an inclination. You're always interested in it and you always learn about it. So one thing that I've always been interested in is...

like celebrities and how they talk about how they deal with fame and how they come across in interviews and stuff. So like one person speaking of like social dynamics was interesting when he was younger and he still is very interesting, Russell Brand. So I'll like, I'll be like, okay, I'll look on YouTube and I'll just see every interview of Russell Brand and I'll just learn that. And I'll kind of, I have this immersion approach to life of like immerse yourself in something to learn about it. And I really think that's a good way to learn things and model others and immerse yourself in something.

So one thing that I learned is from celebrities talking about haters, and obviously for them it's much more extreme. They'll have a lot of people that really love them and a lot of people really hate them. So I think I've imbibed that so much that I was okay with it. I was okay with negative comments. One thing that was quite challenging is when the book came out,

The day it was launched. So this was this whole thing. This is our first book. It's going to be published, all this. The day it was launched, literally, like, I think it was like, I can't remember now, it was dozens. It was like close to 100 reviews and ratings came out for the book on the day it launched, which was like already weird because like how could people have already read it? And they were weird. Like, for example, some of the reviews would be like positive, but then it'll be like two stars. And then some of them were just random. Some of them were four stars. Some of them were one star. And we're like,

That was weird. Yeah, there's some bot something's happening There's some bots happening or something going on because they can't have already read the whole book. It's only just released today It's not like we're that famous to have this huge marketing push that people are ready to buy it and stuff. So That was difficult and then but at the same time it was just like oh these must be bots something weird is happening here So we got in touch with our publishers and went oh by the way, there's a duplicate There's also a duplicate book issue where it was like there was two listings of the book and one of them had all these negative reviews were like

there's these weird bad reviews of the book but they must be bots because people can't have read it already and also there are two listings can you please merge them together but or sort out the listings but don't bring the bad reviews into it because they're not good anyway i don't want to start off with bad reviews for the book

And so what did they do? They merged the page and the reviews came along with it. The bad reviews came along with it. So it was like, okay, all right. Well, anyway, so we just have to get on with this. So I don't know. It's almost like I just wasn't that affected by it. I just told myself that this wasn't it. And it's not going to be right for most people.

Now, the book overall has done really well. Now, we've just hit 1,000 reviews on Goodreads, and the average rating is 4.1 something. So it's done really well. So I get the occasional bad review. Okay, that wasn't for them. I always knew it wouldn't be for everybody. So I'd already come to terms with that, that you can't be something for everyone. And that also applies to dating. That also applies to talking to people. You just won't get along with some people.

And if you have too far of an internal locus of control, you blame yourself for it. Yeah, I think this is my problem. Yeah, like you think it's all about you. It's not all about you. It's so self-centered and so narcissistic to think it's all about how we approached it. They might be having a bad day. They might just have a personality clash. They might have just, I don't know, whatever. Somebody might have passed away recently in their lives. Who knows? I don't know.

So, yeah, it was, it's part of that is to think people have their own shit. I'm not going to, I can't appeal to everybody. And to understand niching down, to understand that actually being polarizing can be a good thing anyway. Yeah. And to understand that if you're, if you want to please everybody, then you're going to be so bland and blah, no one's going to be into what you're doing. Yeah. Yeah.

Yes, so as you know, I'm a fan of systematically breaking things down. So it sounds like kind of your strategy, as it were, for dealing with the negative reviews. Number one, understand that you want for everyone and that's okay. Understand that it's really not about you a lot of the time. Maybe it's just, it wasn't right for them.

Two, you said that you had this bot issue which you can just sort of write off. What were some of the other things that you kind of imbibed from the Russell Brand ecosystem around dealing with haters around celebrity stuff? I think I learned early on from learning about social dynamics and confidence and stuff is that you have to define your own set of terms for what success and how to be happy with yourself.

and not to look to others. So one of the big insights is actually one of the leadership principles, one of the leadership properties is actually to try to gain firsthand knowledge rather than like figure out things for yourself

As opposed to just listen to what everybody else tells you. Now that can be taken too far. When people are just like, I need to do my own research for everything. Obviously that's silly. But this idea of kind of rejecting social conditioning wholesale and just to accept everything as people say it. And I think that is part of getting your validation externally rather than internally. And if you can...

start to build your internal validation and start to be pleased with yourself according to your own criteria, okay, I'm gonna be happy with, and I've kind of consciously set my criteria to be productivity based. And as I said, I'm honestly really not that productive of a guy. And I really relate, I've told you this before, I really relate to the whole Tim Ferriss thing where he's like, people really wanna, journalists always wanna follow me around for the day.

And I always say no, because it's so boring. I'll just be me pottering around in my underwear, wasting time and just taking too long in the bathroom and things like that. That's my life. So I think that's that creative thing of like, we're not very systematic. And one of my coaches has been telling me like, this is how you're creating. You're doing these other things that in the meantime, and the way I am, I'm constantly creating.

and I'm the 2x learner as well. I'm constantly like learning and taking in content and information. That's just how I do things and that's how it works. So for me,

That's how I set my own validation for myself and therefore I know, okay, I think I'm proud of what I've done. So I was really proud of what I did for the book and I was happy with it. Now, obviously I'm going to, I can't take away the external validation seeking thing completely. It's going to be there. Thankfully the book has done well. So I'm even got awards for it, which we were not even expecting. It blew our minds. So

it just shows that the process worked the process of like iterating and starting and we followed that whole you know the whole tech startup software thing of like doing an mvp and and testing how and iterating and improving it and i think that's why it worked okay that seems like a very sensible way to approach approach stuff

because it's like i think i think for me over the last few years i've gotten somewhat immune to negative comments on youtube but i just know that you know if and when this book ever comes out two years from now that if there are negative reviews then that's going to hit me on a level that is different to a youtube video yeah to be honest i expected more hate i expected more and therefore what little we got was like oh not too bad

We expected there to be more, it's like I over prepared and maybe that was a good thing. So because I expected people to be like, what do you mean unfair? What you're talking about is about hard work. What do you mean it's not a meritocracy? Of course it's a meritocracy. I expected much more pushback. So I had all these like, one of the things that you try and do is you kind of try and poke holes in your own arguments. So I think I did that a lot. And I addressed a lot of objections in the book. Like every time I said unfair advantages, we don't mean an unethical or illegal advantage.

You know, I didn't need to keep saying that. I probably overdid that. But like that, I kept wanting to like emphasize, I'm not trying to say like cheat the system or, you know, be corrupt or something. I'm talking about just like basic unfair. People knew that's what we meant. And I kind of, so I think what helped is over, like to expect, to expect to get a lot of pushback and then not to get that, to be pleasantly surprised. What's it like writing a book with a co-author? Yeah, you have to really understand what each of you brings to the table.

So I think Ash was the ideas man and he was an amazing sounding board and he came up with the whole thing. The unfair advantages came about from Ash.

The Miles framework came about from Ash. I developed it further. I poked holes in it. I put it together into a whole system. I think I'm good at that conceptual thinking. So I'm like, I put it into a whole system and into the whole, okay, what if people say this? Okay, how does mindset? People will say mindset is my biggest unfair advantage. What would you say to that? What do you say to people who say working hard

is my advantage. Is that an unfair advantage? Where do you draw the line between an unfair advantage and an earned advantage? You spoke about it as fair play in your video, which some people think is in the book. Some people like when they interview me, they'll be like, oh, so where do you think fair play? I was like, yeah, you've watched Ali's video, which is a great video about it. And essentially it's doing all that thinking. So you have to know what each of you brings to the table. And one of the things, again, I go back to Steven Pressfield. He was talking about how, I think it was,

In nobody wants to read your shit Which is one of my favorite books about like how to create compelling content and storytelling and stuff Which I've recommended to you a lot is he talks about how he was working with a writing partner to write scripts for Hollywood and this writing partner just Wouldn't really turn up at the time They said they would and he'd be fed up waiting for him and he and then he realized that this this guy isn't a writer writer this guy's a writer editor and

And he's the writer, writer. And that was, he had to do the writing. And this guy would come and edit and give his thoughts and give his feedback on it. And I think

That was essentially the relationship with me and Ash. It was like I did the actual writing for the most part. There are bits here and there that are written by him, but essentially it wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for him. He brought his name to it. He brought his ideas to it. He brought his whole, it gave it a lot of clout and status. We had the Just Eat IPO, 1.5 billion pounds, $2.4 billion. So you have to think about what each of you brings to the table. And

he's given me so much confidence and pushed me so much to go and do public speaking to go and mentor people and that was something that i hadn't done so there has been this is how we've split up ourselves um i'm a big believer in business partners and co-authors and working with people as opposed to doing everything yourself and that's a big theme in the book too um so i'm i was working on a draft of chapter one this morning which is all about like why you shouldn't really set hard goals and you should actually focus on setting easy goals

And that's sort of the somewhat counter-narrative argument I'm trying to make, that screw smart goals, focus on goals that are within your control. And once you've got a goal, then think of it purely as a destination and then just completely forget about it because at that point, fixating on it or even thinking about it at all is, at least for me, not a very helpful thing. And it should be.

Like, you know, imagine the treasure at the end of the rainbow and then that will motivate you to do the thing. But at least for me, I find that imagining the treasure at the end of the rainbow does not at all motivate me to do the thing. And instead focusing on the bits that I can control, focusing on the journey, focusing on, okay, my only task right now is to just...

write one really shitty first draft of this next of this chapter. I'm on 2,700 words. Cool. Let's just keep on going. And then anytime I think, Oh, but like this sounds bad or, Oh, but I should probably edit it over here. Oh, but like, I think, Nope, stay on task. Enjoy the journey. I've got my music in the background. I've got my coffee. I've got my oat milk, whatever. And I'm just like banging stuff out speed, speed running, writing the first chapter. Oh, cool. Um, and that seems to be working, but I often find myself like,

I think one of the issues with these sorts of nonfiction books is that really, it's not really about what's true. It is about what's useful. I think in a self-help book like this, like, you know, James Clear, you know, Atomic Habits, the four things that make a habit stick. It may not matter that this mental model is 100% true. Yeah. But if it's a useful way of modeling the information and it's true enough that people can use it and apply it to their lives, you know, similar to left brain, right brain analogy, like

that's not actually how the brain works. Like, oh, right brain is creative and left brain is not. But like just having that model is still somewhat useful where you think, you know, if someone said it describes themselves as a more like right brain kind of person, or if someone says, oh, I'm really high on trait extroversion, like, you know, the ocean personality traits, it's not actually how the brain works. It's just a model that we've taken to put on top of it to kind of simplify things

And as long as it's useful, it's all good. But at the same time, I keep on like poking holes in my own argument where I'm like, yeah, but you know, my point is that for me, setting more achievable and easier goals is better than setting harder goals. But also if you look at the evidence, actually, there's a bunch of evidence that setting challenging goals is better than setting easy goals. I'm like, what the hell? How do you? And I keep on kind of second guessing and guessing myself. How do you deal with that? Right. Yeah, this is important. And I think what you're doing is you're thinking on paper. It's like what I said about coaching. Like I said that,

One of the biggest takeaways is you don't know what you think until you hear yourself say it. And similarly with writing, that's why writing is so valuable. That's why journaling is sort of a good analog to coaching, specifically if you follow a good structure. You're figuring out what you think by writing it down. That's what's happening there. And I'm impressed that you're disciplined enough to not edit as you write because I still ended up doing that quite a bit. But the more I stayed away from it, the better it was.

- Yes, so going back to the whole idea of mental models, I think this is huge. And I talk about that in the book. I was like, so why did as I went meta and said, okay, look, there's two,

two models, extreme models. One is success is all luck and the other success is all hard work and merited and earned and success, if it's all fate and luck and unearned, that's the other one. The truth is in the middle. And then I talked about this kind of tension between the two. So that's one approach is you could describe it as a tension and you could talk about how, yes, you could do hard goals, but you can also do easy goals and here's how to think about it.

But yeah, the whole thing about mental models is fascinating. That's one thing that I got out of economics is in economics, it's too complicated. Just like the human body. It's way too complicated. Any guru out there telling you, well, this is to burn fat and this one's to turn your body alkaline or some shit like that. It's

all oversimplified for the most part nonsense for the most part even when they sound like they're using scientific language and they're saying insulin this and ghrelin and leptin and all this stuff it's like okay yeah but it's actually super super super complicated and this is an oversimplification but you know what the patients whose doctors tell them well you know the saturated fat that you're eating is just furring up and clogging your arteries that's not actually how it works but if it's a simple model for them to use and if saturated fats were actually bad which is

is very it's a whole other kettle of fish but the point is that you want to help people to change their behavior and transform so this goes back to the online course i'm doing so you could be a youtuber and you can be an educational youtuber obviously you could do comedy you could do whatever you can do drama the point is to be an educational youtuber is a whole category and you could then teach physics and maths but then there's another sub-segment of educational which

I said transformational creator. So you're helping people to transform and that's what you're doing with your book. You're helping people transform. What is that? That's mindset and behavior change. Ultimately it's behavior change really because that will also change the mindset and the identity and all of that stuff. So for behavior change, how do you motivate people to change their behavior? You oversimplify,

That's one thing. And then you make it power. Exactly. You empower and oversimplify to give them clarity to be like, okay, simple. I just need to do this. Yeah. Now that's an overly simplistic self-help book, which does that. It's kind of too can be too far. So you might want to make it deeper and talk about how the people go back and forth. But here's what's worked for me. And here's what I want to do. So the phrase I always like to go back to is the map is not the terrain or the map is not the territory.

So whatever you're mapping is not going to be the actual thing, otherwise it's a useless map. Imagine you had a one-to-one map that had every single detail. That's not a useful map. So what you're trying to do is you're mapping reality and you're saying, "Okay, here's one way, here's our approach." It sets easy goals, as you call it. And basically, are you saying process-oriented goals in that sense? Yeah, more or less. So what you have to do is set your own glossary and start to define your own terms.

And then within your own universe and what makes sense to others. Because one of the things is initially when we're using the word productivity and you say, well, productivity isn't just about output over time. And you had a great podcast episode with Unjaded Jade and you were discussing that. And well, I mean, you have to realize that you're taking liberties with the word productivity to include productivity.

Like intentionality and meaning and like enjoyment and joy and all that jazz, which wouldn't traditionally be in a technical dictionary definition of productivity. And therefore you can say, let's redefine productivity to mean this. Yeah. And then I can do what I want because now I've laid out my... You've redefined it. Got it. So when I'm thinking like screw hard goals, set easy goals, then that's like the clickbaity title of which kind of be like, oh, that's interesting. Or like smart goals are dumb. Here's how you set goals instead.

But and then they're like, okay, I thought that encourages me to read on and then it's like okay, I

there's some nuance here like there's a spectrum as with everything as with everything blah blah blah here's how i like to think of it yeah here are some people who find this this approach useful i personally find this approach useful and i think the balance between them is like 10 of my goals i'm happy for them to be outcome based but 90 i want to be process based and for me i personally find that that's the best sort of whatever i had this exact same thing writing the book i'll be writing a chapter and i keep going back and forth my arguments

Well, nevertheless, but although, and it's just constantly hedging and it's like, okay, but you need to figure out what you're trying to say here. But you have to, I feel like you have to go through that thrashing as part of the process. You're now in that thrashing mode where you're like, back and forth, back and forth. Yeah, I find that as I'm writing, my thoughts are solidifying and I sometimes find myself just like, oh, that's actually a really good point I just made. Like, where did that come from? And then I think, oh, and so now I'm,

It's like one issue I'm having right now is that for a lot of the chapters, I don't feel like I have enough content. And so I'm tempted to, you know, I was figuring out my calendar link, figuring out, okay, who can I contact to help me in these domains? I now have sufficient clout that if I were to email like a university researcher who's done publications about goal setting and be like, hey, I'm writing a book published by whatever I would love to interview, they'd probably say yes. But then I was thinking, okay,

Maybe that's actually, even that is just procrastination. And my first step is to just get stuff down on paper so I know I can just like expunge my own brain of everything that I think I want to say. And then when it comes to the editing stage, we can look at where the argument's going. I can sort of team up with my editor times twos to figure out, okay, what are we trying to say here? Where do we need extra evidence? Where do we need an expert opinion? And now let's reach out to professor whoever from Stanford who researches goal setting. It's not an academic paper, exactly. It's not, you're not doing,

Doing research and running studies and then you know publishing your findings That's not what writing a book is writing a book is actually just about helping people to level up in their lives It's a self-development book anyway. Yeah. Yeah, I think like maybe people listening to this will find that like a tough pill to swallow I wonder because I feel like

I feel like there can sometimes be an attitude that self-help books are a bit of a scam. And I guess what we're saying is, yes, they are a bit of a scam because they're not 100% true. But it also depends on what's the objective. It is a bit of a scam to say, well, the only thing you need to do to lose weight is eat fewer calories than you consume.

It's more complicated than that but really if that's the thing that gets you to lose weight like the the objective is to lose weight the objective is not to have a perfectly academically rigorous work of art. Exactly or like the insulin hypothesis of like it's all about insulin it's all about carbs the reason you're not losing weight is because you keep eating carbs and if your insulin is elevated then your blood sugar can't be your sorry the glucose can't be released or the fat the fat is trapped

in their fat cells and it's like that model really helps a lot of people to lose a lot of weight but it's not strictly true it's actually much more complicated it's kind of true there is there is some of that but there's also the calories thing and actually you can eat you know a low fat diet and lose weight and that can totally work even though it's harder it's just hard in my experience and in most people's experience it's much harder to stick to a low fat diet than it is just but then also fat has got vitamins and

The point is everything. Now, if you go to economics, there are people out there say economics is a complete scam. They couldn't even predict the 2008 crash. What's wrong? What's the point of all this? It's all just mental masturbation. That's all it is. It's just constant. And actually, if you think about social studies or social sciences, I mean,

Oh, it's all a scam. It's all a complete scam. You can't, it's not a hard science. It's a soft science. It's all complete nonsense. It's all just twiddling. And I mean, there's some truth to some of that. I think there is, well, there's also a lot of value in it too. So you really have to understand the nuance of everything. And that can be said, not just about self-development books. That's actually, in fact, that's actually more practical than a lot of the things I just mentioned. Yeah. Which you can think of more as scams. At the end of the day,

when you go into really theoretical physics models, I think you have the same issues. I'm not sure, but I think so. So yeah, whatever. Even maths at that advanced level becomes extremely theoretical. You start working with imaginary numbers and stuff. But yeah, it's a case of like understanding what it's for. Understanding that you're just, it's really, it's like you're on, a book is sort of an immersive experience where it's like,

it's almost like a good way to hone it down is into a TED talk. Like one way to think about what you're trying to say is what would you say in a 20 minute TED talk?

I'd actually encourage you to do that. I did that for our book. It really helped. It really helped to distill, okay, what is it in a nutshell? How do I put this across? And yeah, so it's... Yeah, so I think I've got the 20-minute TED Talk version because the way I was thinking of it is what would I say if I were making a video about this? And then now my next question is, okay, I know what I would say in a video about the whole book. And in fact, over the last few months, I've been interviewed on a few podcasts where I have basically...

Delivered the book in 10 minute bite-sized format. Okay, cool. This makes sense on a broad level Now what I'm thinking is like, okay for each individual chapter, what would I say? How would I make a video about this topic and for me the mental model of like I'm gonna I'm making a video about this thing feels so much easier having

A, because I've done it before, but also in my head, a book is a big deal. Whereas when I'm making a video, I trust myself more. I recognize that I wouldn't make a video called how to set goals. I'd make a video called how I set goals. And all of a sudden, I have artistic license to say whatever the hell I want, because it's obvious that this is not me trying to be an expert and give you the goods academically. This is my personal philosophy. This is the things that have kind of worked for me and my own personal journey of transformation through this whole goal setting stuff.

And so when I think about it in video format, I think I give myself more permission. When I think about it in writing a book, it feels harder. And so I think it kind of comes back to this idea of lowering the bar, lowering the stakes. In a way, setting easier goals. It is an easier goal for me to set just to say, I'm going to make a video about this topic of goal setting. It's a lot harder goal for me to say, I'm going to write a book chapter. And so can I hack my brain into thinking that really what I'm doing is creating a video and then leave it to the editors to remove the in this video and replace it with in this chapter and all that kind of stuff.

Whatever works. I feel like a lot of self-development or getting past procrastination or productivity or whatever is just mind hacking. It's sort of just tricking yourselves with little things, tricking your mind. I think I read about Michael Jordan. He would find a way to motivate himself for every single game that he played. He'll just do so. There's probably a kid up there who's never seen me play. He's come for the first time to see Michael Jordan play. Let me show him what it's like. People

People you have to actually actively it's like in a relationship. You have to actively work on the relationship Yeah, I think we always just assume that it should work if you're in love it should be the soulmate and it should work You have to actually actively do it and the same thing with just getting our brains to work how we want them to work We have to fool our brains. It's a weird concept because it's like isn't our brains ourselves, but it's not it's So we have to do what we can and whatever works works

and you have to understand that that you're going to appeal to a certain audience like this is one big thing about like the way i see it is like we've gone from broadcast mediums where there was like one channel on television two channels three channels and then it started the proliferation of different cable channels and thousands of them and then the internet and then everything could sub niche down into niches and niches and if you look back on like

self-development world in the 80s, 90s, it was like Tony Robbins with cassette tapes. And he would try to do a one-size-fits-all for everybody listening. But nowadays, you could try to pin it down to

this sort of person, you know, this book is for introverts, this book is for, you know, doctors, this book is for whatever, like this video is for that. So I think you have to realize that who it's going to connect with, and we're not all the same. And that's a big thing is like, I say is like, as like medicines are becoming more personalized down to people's genetics and down to how people respond to certain things. So should advice be personalized to the different type of people. And so a big piece of this is going to be what worked for you.

And it's also going to be for you to do a dry run, Ali. I'm going to push you again to do that because you have to try it on a group of people. And it's fine if it's your fans because that's kind of who you're targeting. That's your niche in a way. I mean, the biggest growth hack to finding your niche and your target audience is to look at your audience, if you have an audience. And you look at who are they? Who are my most, you know, the best audience, the people who really love what I do, who really get a lot of value from it. Yeah.

Get them and see what systems can help them in what you're teaching in your book. Test it out on them. See where do they get stuck. See where you can communicate it differently, where you can frame it differently, where you can give different metaphors, analogies, et cetera, for them to really, ah, that makes sense, and to be activated to doing it. - Yeah, so I think I'm gonna have a large amount of sort of beta testing each draft of the chapter on a subset of the audience. I was watching Julian Shapiro's writing masterclass yesterday, which is really, really good.

and he talks about, he just invented these terms but they're really helpful. Again, like fake knowledge that is actually really helpful. The dopamine intro and the dopamine line count where his model is basically what makes good nonfiction writing?

And 75% of it is novelty. Like if someone feels like, oh, that's novel, they get a dopamine hit and they want to keep on reading. Interesting. And the other 25% is like the storytelling and how you deliver it and stuff. But really it's about starting with novelty. And so his thing was when he's deciding what to write about, if he's researching something, he's...

as as he reads a book and highlights something or he makes a note he scores it out of five in terms of how novel he found it at the time because inevitably a year later when you look at the same information you're like obviously i knew this all along and you start to you get hedonically adapt to your own level of knowledge so what he does is that the introduction needs to be sufficiently novel either in terms of being counterintuitive or in terms of being counter narrative like counter

Counterintuitive as in, you thought this, but actually this thing. Counternarrative, everyone is telling you x, but actually y. Let me explain. Boom. And then people are like, oh, OK. They get the dopamine hit, and they keep on reading.

And what he does when he's asking people for feedback is that he just sends a doc to each person and he says, all I want you to do is just highlight the bits where you thought, whoa, that's interesting. That's literally all I want you to do. Because he was like, asking friends for writing feedback is kind of hard. Like everyone's going to tell you different things. No one really knows how to give feedback. But he asked them, what did you find surprising? Then bang, you sorted.

David Perala has this other one, like the Cribs method, like highlight bits that were confusing, repeated, insightful, boring or surprising, something like that. And then for people to give you feedback, all they have to do is go through the thing with a highlighter in different colors. So I'm definitely planning to do a lot of that style of things. I think in an ideal world, I would have like my own coaching cohorts and take them through the process and get real time feedback and stuff.

I feel like I have little enough time in my life already that adding the additional ball ache of that would be probably too much effort, but feel free to disagree with me. Am I bullshitting myself? Definitely. Because you keep telling me that your number one priority is the book and you want the book to be good, but then you won't, it's too much effort to make the book good. Do you think the book would be significantly better with a life cohort than it would be with people giving me this kind of feedback on the writing? Because I think, because what do you actually want from the book? Like,

Like a big piece of it is people going, this is a great book and it's very readable and it's a page turner. Okay, so that's great. And that's a brilliant goal. And I completely agree with that and endorse that. And you'll get that from people. The writing feedback, Yvonne. Yeah. But for people to actually transform their lives from this and to get genuine long-term like, oh my God, I've really got to recommend you this book. It changed my life. As opposed to, yeah, it was a great read.

Now that is when you're really thinking about the long tail. That's when you're really thinking about value. Like ultimately it all goes down to this. What is value? Okay. Okay. So let's say I want to do a dry cohort, a dry run. How would you suggest I approach this? You know what? Don't forget, you can actually, you obviously need to be heavily involved, but you don't need to literally be in every single part of it. Actually, in a way, if you delegate some of the,

teaching or coaching or whatever however we find that delineation between teaching and coaching because there are different things obviously but you want your system to actually be teachable by somebody else as well so that's an extra layer

We have five writers on the team. We have five writers. It could be like, hey, George, do you fancy reading this thing that I've written and getting my philosophy on goal setting and try teaching it to some people over a Zoom call and see what happens? But also remember that writers are not necessarily teachers. Yeah. So think about teachers and think about coaches.

And obviously that can be, obviously it's teachable. That's a learnable skill. But it might not be what they want to do is what I'm trying to say. Okay, so let's say I'm, because like, for example, we've got a live cohort of YouTuber Academy running right now. At the end of the live sessions, I could just be like, guys, feel free to stick around for an extra half an hour and I want to test some book ideas on you.

for example. And there'll be several dozen to several hundred people on a Zoom call who will then be receptive to giving advice and feedback and stuff. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. You have to think about what is the end result that people want out of your book. Yeah. And you have to really figure that out and then understand that, okay, if this maps onto the part-time YouTuber academy for people trying to start a YouTube channel, et cetera. Oh, it does actually, yeah. If it does, then...

Do that, but then also try and test it with people with different goals as well, just to give it some testing. I mean, a bunch of smart people, they could probably point me in the direction of resources. I would totally integrate it into your syllabus. Yeah. Why haven't you? Good point. I could do that. How hard can that be? Yeah, just integrate what you're going to teach in the book into the PTYA syllabus and see how people respond to it.

Yeah, we didn't actually use many beta readers. We didn't actually do that process much. A little bit, but hardly. Yeah, because I've kind of got some of the ideas in my head, and so I could just incorporate them into some of the sessions and be like, interlude, goal setting. Yeah. Or you can just do an internal launch. You could just do it to your newsletter subscribers. Say, hey, if you want to join this cohort, I would kind of, I would, it'll just be cleaner to do it separately. I know you want to integrate into something else, but you can make it very minimalist. Yeah.

you can't i ran a course well the last course i ran it was just uh 90 minutes a week of lessons and then an hour of coaching oh i've got it i've got it during our live sessions when people are in breakout rooms we always have a bunch of people left in the lobby because they're at work or they're like kids or whatever you shouldn't do that do you know why why people won't go to breakout rooms just to be in that session oh yes they won't go into the breakout rooms i know that because whenever there's more content people think they just want more content yeah you know why because it's less effort

Yeah, let's have just sit there rather than I'd rather just consume content. Yeah, give me the choice This is quite no, they said literally read science textbooks and then when it gets to the exercise Which is the homework for that night when I was a kid I'll just be like yeah, and I'll turn the page and I'll keep reading science Yeah, and I think one of the reasons that I did well in science is because I used to like reading the textbook But I didn't used to like doing exercises and I would have been better if I had done. Yeah, but it's alright. Okay Yeah

I really think, well, we can come up with something. Maybe we can, I don't mind collaborating with you on it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. How do we do it? We'll do it. We'll figure out something. Cool. We'll do some course design, maybe coach that cohort or something. Yeah.

Figure this out. Yeah, just do it as like a free thing, newsletters, subscribers, post it on Twitter. If you have to then explain, let's say, just as an example, I don't know about my schedule, et cetera, but we'll figure this out. But let's say, imagine I do it. So you have to then distill that knowledge to me and I'll be like, Ali, wait, what? I'll already be picking holes in it just for me to understand it. And then I'll go through another thing for me to explain to students. And then we see how they respond to it. Yeah. Even more hands off for you. That's very good. Because...

it should be kind of viral. Like it should be able to transmissible. It should be quite transmissible. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, that could work nicely. Yeah, because I kind of know what I want to say for each chapter. You want to see where people get stuck when they're actually trying to put into packages. And then also, you can turn this into an online course.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I plan to at some point. But then it's even more well-designed for it. But then I'm not taking anything away from how important it is to get feedback on the writing. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's the whole separate thing. That's like what makes it a page show and what makes it interesting, what makes it actually good. But actually, if you think about it, that's actually easier. Yeah.

Yeah, it is easy. The stylistic bit. You can hire people who really... You can hire joke writers. You can hire storytellers. I mean, I'm not saying necessarily this is the approach, but I'm saying the core of it is how you can help people to transform and to change their mind. You know, books don't have to be like an online course where you literally...

Change your life. They don't have to be sometimes. They're just a refreshing new take on something Yeah, like one of the things my writing coach says is that just think about what is the smallest? Transformation that you want the reader to have one day like if they could only take away one thing What would it be and for that it would be the phrase make it fun if they couldn't take away two things It would be make it easy and make it fun And honestly if they just take away those two concepts that will transform their productivity forever and

And now I just need to convert that into actual stuff. - Nice. All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast.

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