7 Obsessive Habits That Turned Me Into a Multi-Millionaire

0:00 In this video, we're going to [music] be going through seven habits

0:02 that made me a bunch of money when I was in my 20s.

0:04 They were all [music] unhealthy in one way or another.

0:07 Yes, it's very good to become financially free and make all the money and stuff,

0:10 and it is also good to have [music] a balanced life and not be

0:12 sacrificing the things that are more important

0:15 than money on route [music] to getting there.

0:17 Oh, and by the way, if we haven't met yet, hello.

0:18 My name is Ali.

0:19 I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur, and on this YouTube channel since 2017,

0:22 [music] I've been documenting the journey from being

0:25 a broke-ass medical student to then working

0:27 full-time as a doctor to then becoming

0:28 a multi-million dollar entrepreneur [music] and best- selling author.

0:30 And my goal with this channel is to document the lessons

0:32 that I've learned and the lessons I'm continuing [music] to learn,

0:34 partly as a reminder for myself,

0:36 and also in the hope that you will find something that is

0:38 useful on your own journey of building a life you love.

0:40 All right, habit number one is what I like to call the zero downtime habit.

0:44 And to this day, I carry this laptop bag, this what, camera bag everywhere I go.

0:48 And I've been doing this for years, so much so to the point that when

0:50 my wife and I started dating like many years ago,

0:52 she referred to it as my safety blanket because, like a child,

0:54 I had to carry my safety blanket everywhere I went,

0:56 otherwise I would feel weird.

0:57 And the reason for this is that, in particular,

0:59 while I was in my 20s grinding away on building my business,

1:01 I would not allow myself to have any downtime.

1:04 Anytime there was a spare moment or where a normal person more likely

1:08 would take out their phone and like scroll Instagram or TikTok or whatever,

1:10 I would instead bust out the laptop,

1:12 and I would try and do as much work as I possibly

1:14 could in that time and almost like play this as like a challenge

1:16 or a game a game with myself where I'm like squeezing out

1:19 productivity and efficiency out of these like

1:21 minutes of downtime here and there.

1:22 There was almost no moment that I gave myself when I was sort

1:26 of in the build phase of building the business

1:28 of like actually allowing myself to chill out.

1:30 Now, the obvious benefit to this is that you actually just end up with a way

1:32 more time to grind on the thing that you want to be grinding on.

1:35 One of my friends, Matthew Dicks, he's a great writer and a teacher,

1:38 and he tells the story of how like whatever you're trying to do,

1:41 you probably don't have huge amounts of free time

1:43 on your hands to be able to work on the thing,

1:44 especially if you're trying to like if you've got a day job

1:47 and you're trying to do a side hustle at the same time,

1:48 like trying to build your business or I don't know, write a book or whatever.

1:51 And so, actually squeezing out productivity and efficiency out of those tiny

1:54 ass moments of time here and there that we [music] get

1:56 throughout the day instead of using that time scrolling or using

1:58 that time merely enjoying enjoying the taste of a cup of coffee.

2:01 That time actually does make a difference [music] in how

2:03 much progress you're able to make in your business,

2:05 and it does genuinely add up.

2:06 As with all of the habits in this video, this kind of habit comes at a cost.

2:10 [music] The cost is obviously you lose some sense of presence.

2:12 You lose some sense of like dancing through

2:14 life and actually just being able to take

2:16 [music] a moment to rest and reflect and like just be present in the moment.

2:19 And what it results, at least for me,

2:21 and speaking to a lot of my entrepreneur friends,

2:22 is you [music] end up training this muscle

2:24 to the point that it genuinely becomes difficult to switch off.

2:27 I now have to set rules for myself where I'm like,

2:29 Ali, you're not allowed to work on the weekend.

2:31 And then I get around those rules to be like,

2:32 well, it's not really work if you consider it fun, right?

2:34 So then I I literally change the rule for myself so I'm like,

2:37 I'm not allowed to do anything on the weekend

2:39 that would look like [music] work to someone else.

2:41 So I'm not judging what what work is.

2:43 An impartial, reasonable,

2:45 objective observer is judging does that thing actually look like work.

2:48 And I find that rule to be very helpful because then I'm like, okay, well,

2:50 that means I can't do quite a lot of things I would want to do.

2:52 Okay, maybe I'll read some Harry Potter fan fiction or I'll like,

2:54 I don't know, go for a walk without my phone or something like that.

2:57 Should you adopt the habit of having no downtime into your life?

2:59 I don't know.

3:00 This video is not a advice.

3:02 It's not a video about whether you should do anything or not.

3:04 I'm just giving you the information be like,

3:06 this worked for me when I was in my 20s, and it also had some, how do we say,

3:09 unhealthy implications [music] that I'm trying to unlearn now.

3:12 And so, up to you.

3:13 You can take it or leave it.

3:14 Now we come to habit number two.

3:15 Habit number two is the habit of constant consumption.

3:17 This is a habit that really helped me when I was,

3:20 you know, in the first like many years of building my business,

3:22 which is that if I was in a situation

3:24 where I physically couldn't get out my laptop and work,

3:26 I was always consuming something often related

3:29 to work or related to the business.

3:31 So I'd be listening to podcasts about business,

3:33 I'd be listening to audiobooks about business,

3:34 I'd be listening to YouTube videos at double speed about business.

3:36 If I was in bed, I'd be reading books on my Kindle about business

3:39 and about how to make more money and how to grow YouTube channels and you know,

3:41 all that kind of stuff.

3:42 And so for absolutely years, I basically didn't have many moments of like rest.

3:48 Even when I was doing things like commuting

3:50 to work [music] or like on the toilet,

3:51 I would always have my AirPods in and always be listening to something or other,

3:54 like constantly getting like injecting [music] all

3:56 of this business advice and stuff into my veins.

3:58 Now, the benefit of this is that, especially if you're a noob

4:00 to the world of business like I was back in the day,

4:02 you actually end up leveling up quite a lot by learning

4:05 from other people that have been on the journey before.

4:07 That was super super super helpful

4:09 in drastically leveling up my knowledge of business.

4:12 Not my skills, cuz skills require practice,

4:13 but at least my knowledge of like stuff.

4:15 It was also really helpful because then I was able

4:17 to do all of those things without actively making time for them.

4:19 It just sort of happened while I was doing all these other things.

4:21 But again, the downside and what makes this feel slightly unhealthy,

4:23 especially now that I'm looking back on it in hindsight,

4:25 is that A, it's not a particularly present or mindful way to live

4:29 where you're constantly injecting information through

4:31 your AirPods at like 3x speed.

4:33 It's very easy to miss any kind of nuance

4:34 and to really like reflect and engage deeply

4:36 with what you're listening to when it's like

4:38 just firehose of information into your into your brain.

4:41 The other downside, which is something that I'm I'm now realizing,

4:43 is that more information does not actually result in more progress.

4:47 For many years while I was in my 20s, I thought that like the thing that was

4:51 [music]

4:51 stopping my business from growing was that I just didn't know enough stuff.

4:53 And so the more books I would listen to or the more

4:55 books I would read or the more pop- podcasts

4:57 I would listen to, maybe there would be this like magical

4:59 idea out there that like I just hadn't come across before.

5:01 Even if I was thinking about [music] the business,

5:02 thinking about what is the bottleneck right

5:04 now that's stopping us from 10xing the business,

5:06 and then just thinking about that for an hour

5:07 rather than listening to an hour worth of audiobook,

5:10 that probably would have actually resulted in a greater a greater impact

5:13 on the business rather than me listening

5:15 to the 500th audiobook about business like, you know, in that decade.

5:20 All right, by the way, if you're at this point in the video,

5:22 then you're probably a very intelligent, you're probably very good-looking,

5:24 and you're probably serious about leveling up in your work and in your life,

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6:26 Habit number three is the habit of constantly thinking about your work.

6:30 For me, the way this manifested was in a few different ways.

6:32 Firstly, I'd be thinking about work all the [music] time,

6:34 I'd be thinking about it in the shower,

6:35 I'd be thinking about it while when driving to my actual day job,

6:38 I'd be thinking about it on my lunch breaks.

6:39 All of those things are fine.

6:41 But where it became [music] more unhealthy, shall we say,

6:44 was when I would be thinking about

6:46 it while spending time with friends and family.

6:48 A lot of the times I was physically present, but in hindsight,

6:51 I was not actually present because either I was thinking about [music] work

6:55 or I was literally like busting out my laptop on the dining table,

6:57 on the kitchen table rather than hanging out with my mom and grandma.

7:00 And if you decide to incorporate this kind of habit into your life,

7:02 the benefit you'll get is that basically

7:04 the more time you're spending [music] consciously

7:07 or subconsciously thinking about the thing that you need to do to make money,

7:10 your business, whatever the thing might be,

7:11 that level of focus often results in interesting ideas.

7:14 Most people will have breakthroughs in their business

7:16 not when they're sitting on their desk,

7:17 but when they're maybe in the shower or maybe driving to work.

7:19 But obviously, the cost of this is that [music]

7:21 it can often cost um something in your personal relationships.

7:26 And this is a difficult habit to [music] break.

7:28 I am currently trying to unlearn

7:30 the habit of constantly thinking about work stuff.

7:32 I have some friends and mentors who are also

7:34 entrepreneurs and who have kids that are older than mine,

7:37 and so it's they've been parents for longer.

7:39 And [music] one thing they've advised is that like, you know,

7:40 having a kid is the way is like a very good like reason to try

7:44 and actually learn the habit of being present

7:45 and not just having the sub-routine of like,

7:47 what's the next thing to do in the [music] business and running all the time.

7:49 So these days when I'm like spending time with my daughter,

7:51 I'm trying my best to approach it with true presence rather than

7:56 putting in the time without really putting in the sort of mental headspace,

7:59 if that makes sense.

8:00 Okay, so let's talk about habit number four,

8:02 shirking your other responsibilities.

8:04 In my case, and as is the case for a lot

8:07 of entrepreneurs I know who are now quite rich,

8:10 it's very very rare to have a fully, shall we say,

8:13 balanced life while you're in the grind phase of building up the business.

8:17 So for me, I started building my first

8:19 successful business while I was in medical school.

8:20 Honestly, I kind of half-assed medical school for 6 years because my mind

8:26 was always focused on this other thing of of building the business.

8:29 Similarly, when I was working as a doctor,

8:31 the discretionary time that I had at work,

8:33 like in lunch breaks and after work and like

8:35 on the on the way to work and, you know, all that kind of stuff,

8:37 my friends who were really really really

8:38 into medicine and who were whole-assing their medical careers,

8:41 they were using that additional time to boost up their CV or to do

8:45 research projects or to do audits

8:47 or to create like presentations for conferences and stuff.

8:49 And I was sort of doing the bare minimum of that just to sort of tick the boxes,

8:53 and I was spending all of the rest

8:54 of that discretionary time working on the business.

8:56 And to be honest, this is a pattern you see

8:57 amongst [music] any sort of outlier success in any field,

9:00 whether it's entrepreneurship or sports or acting or music

9:02 or anything like that, which is it's really really

9:04 hard to do something at a really high standard

9:07 if you're focusing on more than just that one thing.

9:09 Now, for most people who watch my stuff, if you are building business,

9:11 it's probably something you're going to start out

9:13 building on the side of your like main gig,

9:16 like whatever the things you're doing at university, whatever your career is.

9:19 And so you kind of have to recognize that probably,

9:22 unless you're particularly superhuman at this, cuz I certainly wasn't,

9:26 like your main thing is going to suffer

9:28 as a result of you building your side thing.

9:30 Whether you want to make that trade is entirely up to you.

9:33 I'm personally glad I made the trade for myself, but also survivorship bias.

9:36 It worked out for me.

9:37 But if for whatever reason the business thing didn't work out

9:39 or I did want to go back to medicine, I have I'm behind.

9:44 Relatively speaking.

9:44 All right, let's talk about habit number five, the health sacrifice.

9:47 So, when I was in the early days of building the business,

9:50 actually for for many many years,

9:51 I realized that shopping for groceries and cooking healthy food

9:55 were things that were taking up way too much time.

9:57 And I decided that I would rather invest that time into stuff

9:59 in the business rather than into cooking and eating healthy food.

10:02 The benefit of this was that it saved me many,

10:04 many hours every single week that I was able [music] to then

10:06 put into the business to grow the business and make more money.

10:08 The downside obviously is that I then ended

10:10 up living off takeaways for most of my 20s.

10:13 And so there is a certain level of health sacrifice that I

10:15 made in my 20s for the sake of grinding on the business.

10:18 Now that I'm in my 30s,

10:18 I'm trying you know I've got a personal trainer, I see a physio,

10:21 I'm trying to reverse the damage of like guys did

10:22 to my posture and like trying to activate [music] my glutes

10:24 and hamstrings cuz I never knew what those were because I

10:26 was just like sitting and grinding on a computer all the time.

10:28 My cardiovascular health is worse than it would have

10:30 been had I sort of taken better care of like

10:32 my arteries and stuff by not eating like fatty

10:34 and healthy foods when I was in my 20s.

10:36 Do I think you have to make that sacrifice?

10:37 I don't think so.

10:37 These days there are a lot of like super healthy takeout options,

10:40 but for me when I was in my 20s it just wasn't really a priority.

10:42 It wasn't really something I thought about.

10:44 If I had my time again, I would still do takeouts,

10:46 but I would find a way to really optimize the health side [music] of the takeout

10:49 so I wasn't living off of like kebab rolls and and you know, that kind of stuff.

10:53 Habit number six that I developed which was

10:55 slightly unhealthy is being okay with wasting money.

10:57 So if for example I wanted to buy something like a tech

11:00 purchase or something for work or something for the studio or like whatever,

11:03 instead of spending ages doing the research to figure out

11:05 like what's the best thing that I would want to buy.

11:07 If it was if it was below a certain price point,

11:09 I would just order the thing without thinking about it.

11:11 Then I would forget about it.

11:12 Then it would arrive in the post and then I would try it out

11:14 to see if it actually fulfilled fulfilled the needs that I wanted it to fulfill.

11:17 Now quite a lot of time, I would say maybe 80% of the time,

11:19 the answer was no and I didn't end up continuing to use the thing.

11:22 And so then I've got this tech which I've

11:24 just bought that's just sitting there doing absolutely nothing.

11:26 And so I would either give it away to a charity shop I

11:28 had like a donations box where I would like drop things off to Oxfam

11:30 every now and then or I would give it away to a friend

11:33 or if it was something low value I would just stick it in the bin.

11:35 Now the benefit of adopting this kind of attitude

11:37 into your life is that again you just get very,

11:39 very ruthless about how you are spending your time.

11:41 And if you think something is not worth your time,

11:43 then you don't bother doing it.

11:44 Which means that you probably have more time to be

11:46 able to focus on like revenue generating activities in your business.

11:49 The downside is that it ends up creating waste.

11:51 It's probably bad for the environment and it's probably

11:53 not good for the soul to just be able

11:55 to press a button and buy whatever you want

11:57 and then try it out and then almost like discard it.

11:59 And you know I would I would I would reason

12:00 with myself I'd be like oh I'm giving it away

12:01 to a charity shop or I'm giving it away

12:02 to a friend and like so it's not like fully wasted.

12:05 But even so, there is something about

12:06 that wastage that is probably suboptimal for the soul.

12:10 And so that was like the cost I paid

12:11 for having this attitude of being okay with waste.

12:14 It's something my wife and I clash about to this day.

12:16 She's very anti-waste.

12:17 I am still struggling to unlearn the habit of like being put wasteful when it

12:21 comes to like buying things cuz I'm still ingrained in the mindset of like well,

12:24 why would I bother spending two hours doing the research if

12:26 it's like it's not worth the time of doing the research.

12:28 You know, you know all of that kind of stuff.

12:29 And then habit number seven relates to this point of is this worth my time?

12:33 Now there is advice [music] in the world of entrepreneurship that says that you

12:36 should figure out what is your effective

12:38 hourly rate or your aspirational hourly rate.

12:41 So if for example my hourly rate is $100 an hour and I've ordered a $25 thing,

12:45 but it would take me half an hour to like

12:47 try and return the thing if I don't actually need it.

12:49 That half an hour is costing me $50,

12:51 but I'm only getting back $25 and so why would I bother?

12:54 You know, that kind of idea.

12:55 I thought this was great because then I realized

12:57 I figured out what my effective hourly rate was based

12:58 on how much money I was making in the business

13:00 at the time when I was in my early 20s.

13:01 I figured out what my aspirational hourly rate

13:03 was which was a lot higher than that.

13:04 And it gave me license to just to not do a lot of things and to be

13:08 okay with like wasting a lot of money because

13:10 I reasoned that it wasn't worth the hourly rate.

13:12 The benefit of this is that you then actually delete quite a lot of errands

13:16 and chores here and there that actually end up taking quite a lot of time.

13:19 So for example based on this was why I decided

13:21 to hire a cleaner fairly early on in my like professional career.

13:24 However, as with all of these habits, it does come with a cost.

13:27 And the cost is that it becomes very easy to start [music] thinking

13:30 of everything in life from this lens of what is the hourly rate.

13:33 I tried my best when I was a wee

13:34 lad to try and not over apply this particular razor,

13:38 to not think about it in context

13:39 of like French friendships or relationships or anything

13:41 like that because you really don't want to be starting to think of like oh well,

13:45 you know, I hung out with my mate for two hours.

13:46 That's [music] 500 pounds that I've just wasted.

13:48 You know, you you really don't want to be

13:49 thinking in in in those ways, but it is hard.

13:51 It is something that you have to actively fight against.

13:53 And it sort of runs the risk of turning time that you spend

13:57 on anything into like into a pure time equals money kind of trade.

14:01 And then when you start running this calculation, you're like huh,

14:03 is it really worth me I don't know reading a book

14:05 for half an hour because like you know, that's 250 quid.

14:08 Is it really worth me driving all the way

14:10 to see a friend because maybe the driving time.

14:12 So can I be productive in the driving time or do I really want to go?

14:14 It's kind of far away.

14:14 I could be working on the business instead to earn more money.

14:16 And so even this is I think a good habit

14:19 and I certainly wouldn't change it if I had my time again.

14:22 Like with all these habits,

14:23 it can be a double-edged sword that it's worth that's worth keeping in mind

14:27 if you're going to start adopting that kind of philosophy into your life.

14:29 Now ultimately for me,

14:30 all of the habits that I've talked about here actually did end up serving me.

14:34 They allowed me to build a business while I

14:36 was in med school and then later build a business,

14:38 grow my YouTube channel while I was working full-time

14:40 as a doctor and all of that has allowed me

14:42 to become financially free and be able to kind of do

14:44 what I want and live a life that I love.

14:45 So I don't regret any of that.

14:47 However, one thing that I've realized is that these sorts

14:49 of habits I think are useful for a season,

14:51 but they're not very useful when you apply them to your whole life.

14:54 And the habits that help you get rich seem to conflict

14:58 from what I've learned with the habits that actually lead to a happy,

15:01 fulfilled and peaceful life.

15:02 It's very useful to constantly value your time and only and never do

15:05 anything that's beneath your hourly rate when

15:07 you are trying to build a business.

15:08 But man, if you're trying to run a household,

15:09 if you're married and you have a wife and you

15:11 have a child and like stuff in the household

15:13 needs to be done and you're running everything

15:14 by that calculation of like is this really worth my time?

15:16 Takes you to places that you don't really

15:17 want to get to in in your relationship.

15:19 When I speak to entrepreneurs who are much older

15:21 than me like in their 50s or 60s or whatever,

15:23 almost all of them say that like it's okay to take

15:25 a break on the weekends and in fact it's a good thing because

15:27 like it helps you come up with more creative ideas and it

15:29 helps you rejuvenate you and rest and all that kind of stuff.

15:31 Like no one who is in their like 50s or 60s that I've

15:33 spoken to about this says even once you've made it made it,

15:35 you're still like grinding away on the weekends and stuff

15:37 even even while you have like a wife and a kid.

15:39 It sort of feels like the muscle of being productive and grinding away

15:42 on the business is is like for me that muscle has been overtrained.

15:46 So it's sort of like unlearning that is not

15:48 as straightforward as I would have thought it would be.

15:51 Still a journey that I'm I'm trying to navigate

15:53 because I do want to grow the business.

15:55 It is super fun and it does fund like the lifestyle that we have.

15:58 And also it's not the most important thing.

16:00 I have a wife and a kid.

16:00 I do want to take care of my health.

16:02 I do want to explore more home more hobbies.

16:03 So I guess maybe a takeaway from this video

16:05 is that if you are actively trying to get rich,

16:07 in general the more time you spend thinking

16:08 about and working towards the goal of getting rich,

16:10 the more time and effort and energy and focus you

16:13 spend on that, the more likely it is to happen.

16:15 However, time, energy and focus are a finite resource.

16:17 And so the more time you spend working on the goal of getting rich,

16:20 the less time you're going to be spending on everything else.

16:23 For me, I'm very glad about how I spent my 20s

16:25 grinding away on the business and trying to maximize productivity.

16:28 But at the same time, it does come with costs.

16:30 And so either you're willing to pay those costs

16:31 or you've actually ideally you find a way

16:33 to grind on your business and get rich without

16:35 having to sacrifice other things that you particularly care about.

16:38 I think ultimately whatever game you're playing,

16:40 whether it's the game of trying to build a business

16:42 or trying to get forward in your career or trying

16:44 to get better better grades in school or trying

16:45 to get rich or not like what whatever game you're playing,

16:47 one lesson that I'm learning right now is

16:49 that there are different strategies that work for different seasons.

16:53 And ultimately what I'm trying to remember for me,

16:55 we're not optimizing for trying to maximize the dollars in the bank account.

16:59 We're actually optimizing like all of us are optimizing for peace,

17:02 happiness, fulfillment, joy, all of that kind of stuff.

17:04 Dollars in the bank account, yes it does lead to financial freedom which

17:06 can lead to time freedom and creative freedom.

17:08 So it's amazing.

17:09 It's fantastic.

17:09 And it is also not the only thing that matters.

17:11 Like for me my 20s was like

17:12 strategically imbalanced in favor of like making money

17:15 and less in terms of like turning the dials

17:17 down in terms of like health and relationships.

17:18 But now that I'm in my 30s, I want to dial down the focus on making of the money

17:22 while still maintaining that and dial up the focus on health,

17:25 relationships, joy, family, peace, fulfillment, all of that kind of stuff.

17:28 And if you go into this point in the video

17:29 and you haven't yet seen my video about my 168 hours spreadsheet,

17:33 it's basically about like how to make time for everything where like

17:36 the key takeaway from that video is that you cannot make time for everything.

17:38 And so if you're interested in that one, that'll be linked right over there.

17:41 Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.