How To Think Like A Life Coach - Hasan Kubba

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Ali Abdaal 0:00 Hey friends welcome back to deep dive, what you're about to hear is a conversation between me and my business coach Hasan Kubba, 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 Hassan 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'll 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. Yeah. And so I feel like once it's gotten through, 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 are we're working on a collaborative type video together about like, you being my coach for some number of months. 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 almost to this date, that 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 the 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. Hasan Kubba 1:32 Sure. Yeah. No, it was really interesting going through all of that, and looking at it. And unfortunately, we weren't recording the earlier sessions by took really extensive notes. So I was looking through the notes and stuff. What was interesting is how much you figured out just in that first session, I still remember you were you were in a cafe was 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 a session. And we also spoke about I just was asking, What do you want to achieve? And you're like, ah, you know, I don't, 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 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 over 50% of the revenue - and this was kind of the 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? We're like, No, I literally just thought of that now. And within about three months, since the launch of PTYA or or something they're about us achieve that basically, which is so cool. And also the limiting beliefs that you had was very low. 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 brought you snake oil today because you thought it was really funny. I saw it in Dubai. Yeah. And I brought you some Ali Abdaal 3:12 George, can you chuck us the bottle of snake oil that we can we can show this is like your this is snake oil. Thank you for buying me some snake oil from Dubai. Hasan Kubba 3:24 Yeah, you're welcome, man. So I hope it kills everything for you. It's gonna Ali Abdaal 3:28 cure everything. I think I'm gonna leave it in its packaging. Yeah. And then like, maybe you're trying NFT-ify 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, not at all related to the idea of snake oil. Hasan Kubba 3:43 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 had didn't have that fear at all. Basically, if you're setting especially when it comes to like information online, and usually what happens is when we develop some kind of experience expertise, especially when it comes to business, like you can be like three years into a business, you have made massive progress, but this was my experience and experience of a lot of entrepreneurs I know is you take it for granted cause 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. Ali Abdaal 4:23 Yeah it's like you're measuring the the gap rather than the gain. Hasan Kubba 4:29 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. Ali Abdaal 4:34 Wxactly, or like I remember when I when I was first setting up the YouTuber Academy and I was chatting to our mutual friends to go 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 will they were just like laughing they were like bro that's actually a large number and I was like but like you know Mr. Beast has like 50 million subscribers All right, yeah, but like, you know, like, you can teach people the process. as they used to get to 1 million subscribers, and people would find that very useful, even if there are other people out there that 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 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 he wants to make content helping other want to be 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 gonna be oh, well, I'm just a new consultant, I have to I 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 he 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. Hasan Kubba 5:55 And actually, when you have just overcome is this, that whole thing of like being a guru versus being a guide. And actually being a guru is not always the best you might be better in terms of marketing, you get people's attention more, because if you're the best if you same boat wants to teach you how to run. That's interesting, people's masterclass. But then it might come so naturally to him, that he's going to not relate to a complete beginner who just he's just like, so I think the people who are hard gainers are the best teachers. 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, 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 being. And secondly basically think, remember what it felt like to be 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 the lack the lack of context. So is that a curse of knowledge? Where when you once you know something, it's 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 worried 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 actually helping or mentoring, mentoring is actually very helpful coaching, mentoring, because then you go, 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. Ali Abdaal 7:45 So you coach a bunch of people like, what is the coaching framework? How does that work? Hasan Kubba 7:50 So coaching is really interesting, because I've had a whole journey of like coming to terms with, like, believing that coaching is valuable, because one way that 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, do you know the difference between a consultant and a coach? And I was like, no, what was the difference? She said, a consultant gives you answers and a coach gives you more questions. And I was like ok, coaching sounds really stupid. Ali Abdaal 8:20 Yeah why would you pay someone so much money just to ask me ask you questions? Hasan Kubba 8:24 What's more annoying than asking a question and getting one in return? It's like, can you just tell me what's going on? So I always thought no, you know, what coaches and unregulated term there, every Tom, Dick and Harry on like, 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 is like crap. So I always, like 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 would just kind of, we didn't have 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 an advice, you tell them okay, this is why didn't your situation. And then he stopped, I started to learn more about coaching in the value of asking questions and getting like the coachee. To figure out the answer to three, think about it. It's almost like showing you're working in like maths, when you did maths at school, like jumping to giving a student the answer straightaway isn't going to help them. So the coaching is really valuable to do that. So I think that like 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 doing keep being asked why? It's very valuable. And by the way, if you guys see some of the episodes of alley with team or not overthinking, you'll see coaching in action because we've been doing that quite a bit. And it's been fun to see. So a coaching framework. So clarity is number one. Number two is 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 you're looking to do What you're looking to achieve, what would you want? Right? Asking Why were 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? Ali Abdaal 10:12 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? Hasan Kubba 10:21 And this is this is a very simple framework called AAA achieve avoid act. Ali Abdaal 10:30 So how would how would you apply this to me? Let's say we want to sort of switch this into a session where we're in coaching mode now. How would how would that conversation start? Unknown Speaker 10:37 So I'll just be like, first I'll just get some context build some rapport, see how you're 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 you from there, you get into like, okay, so what are you looking to achieve right now? And I like to keep it quite broad and then suddenly they go in an area and it's just interesting to see what comes up. Alright, so what are you looking to achieve right now? Ali Abdaal 10:59 What am I looking to achieve right now... We are going to take a little quick break from the podcast introduce the sponsor of this podcast, which is Curiosity Stream. If you haven't heard by now Curiosity Stream is the world's leading documentary streaming subscription platform, founded by John Hendricks is the founder of the Discovery Channel. And on Curiosity stream, they've got hundreds of really high quality high budget documentaries, covering all sorts of things from science and technology to history and ancient civilizations to food and medicine and meditation. And like all of the stuff in between. 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Okay, 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 want to see 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 anglers who is not 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, 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 to kind of writers because I think it's important for me to be involved in it. And I'm thinking 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. That's like things I'm trying to achieve. Hasan Kubba 13:35 And because I know you already and we've done coaching before, I know that actually if you 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 who's got the book. And understandably, a book is a big project and you want to make it good. And it takes a lot of cognitive kind of labour 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 it's 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 not abdicate basically? So yeah then what we can go into is why and why you're getting into that. And then we can go into it. Okay, what are you looking to avoid? And sometimes that comes up already. And sometimes people when you ask them, Are you 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. So my first business was a marketing agency. And actually, these are the kinds of things that you need to figure out for your, you know, customer avatar, is to figure out what are they looking to achieve? What are they looking to avoid? And what's coming up for them in 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 in a way, is just motivation, it's clarity and then motivation. So my coach did recently. So I've been dogfooding essentially the zealot and 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 organised with notion. So my health coach recently reasserted, we're kind of getting close to the 17 week programme. So it was the end now. And I've already lost like five kilos. I'm like, you're asking me, what did I have for breakfast? Nothing, because I'm just like, I'm doing the whole thing of getting back into shape, getting back into my ideal weight, etc. So one thing is that he asked me is so remote, so why is it that you want to we went back to the what you're trying to achieve? Okay, well, I'd like to fit into by large clothes again, instead of XL felt terrible to not know what to wear, and if to feel confident from the camera to feel confident onstage, etc. And he's like, what would it feel like, if you don't get it? What would it feel like? If you do, actually, I found this beautiful, difficult questions. I felt very like, Ah, okay, after, like, touching with my emotions of how that's going to feel okay. But it really helped. Like, he forced me to do it. How would that fail if you if you had to wear XXL clothing? I'd just feel like such a failure, because I've been talking about it for so long. So one of the things about funnily enough about health and fitness and stuff, particularly nutrition, I was into this 10 years ago, and everyone needs to be like the Hassan diet before like that. 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 are starting to agree with that. I used to drink bulletproof coffee before that was like trendy. So is anybody hasn't seen me for a very long time, they're like, Oh, my God, we're having tea, because I was really slim. Yep. And so. So that, I think, is the identity thing. And this is because of a lot of introspection, I'm into self development. But I think the identity thing of like, come on Hassan 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. Ali Abdaal 17:30 So you tied your identity to the idea of being someone who is slim, who gives people advice on how to be healthy. Hasan Kubba 17:36 I mean not on purpose. If you're out there giving advice, your without meaning to be and I think you've experienced this yourself is your 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 gonna look up to you, and they're gonna 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, optimised and I'm doing so well in the maybe they're areas of your life where you need work on, but they'll still look at them. So if you're teaching people about being productive, but you're, really like overweight, people will be like, huh, 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. The you don't get really fat CEOs as much anymore. Like people who really unhealthy overweight, people really think of holistic leadership. 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. Ali Abdaal 18:47 Okay, so in that context, if I can summarise then please feel free to correct me if this is not what's going on. It sounds like you feel like you're getting fat. You have your identity accidentally tied to someone who is slim and someone who's got their life together, someone who's healthy, being fat, in your view, worldview is not that and therefore you're targeting the being fat thing. Is it 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 your weight, or you could change your the expectation you have on your weight, if that makes sense. Hasan Kubba 19:29 Of course. Yeah. And that is something that I really think about is the value system. So underneath all of that, 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 you your body just isn't as energised it isn't as energetic. So that's a big piece of it. Ali Abdaal 20:05 Why do you value productivity? Hasan Kubba 20:07 So again, I've done a lot of work on this. And I think it's it goes down. And I 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, 0kay, what am I doing this for now? I'm comfortable. And then you get into the cheesy stuff. But really, it goes back to like, I feel like, I've found my unfair advantage just taking me to 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 practising. 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 with so much self development and motivational videos and stuff. Which is 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 does it does. And you have to find yours. And it might take time and have to experiment and it might not be so obvious straightaway, etc. 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. Okay, it's it goes down to that. So once you have all your basic needs met, you have to this about self actualization. And that's why I want to be more productive, because it makes me happier, and as lame as the sounds. And this sounds very toxic, 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 6pm, like at all. I've approached the 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, etc. 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. Ali Abdaal 22:01 Oh, interesting. Hasan Kubba 22:02 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. But it makes me happy as well. And I don't think it's purely just me thinking I just need to be productive, like writing, or creating actually makes me happy. And speaking of identity, I've only recently started thinking of myself as a creative person. I never thought of myself as that. 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? Ali Abdaal 22:37 I still don't think of myself as a creative. I think I'm really bad at coming up with ideas. I think you will recreate, I'm a creator. Yeah. But I because I create things. But I'm not creative in that. I think creative the adjective feels to me like something that I'm not. I think I'm pretty productive. But I wouldn't say I'm particularly creative. Hasan Kubba 22:59 I mean, what's what's helped me get over what 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. For example, Ash, my co author, he's, he's super creative, like he could, he can brainstorm anything, and he's 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 in common actually, in terms of like, getting different ideas that we imbide and and then putting it together into our model. And that is a creative thing. I mean, people like us, we love teaching, right? We love giving advice, and we have to stop ourselves, 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 and to what we do is we assume that like us, we assume that 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, we've spent so much time trying to figure out what's the goal, what the why and all that stuff anyway, they're alone when you're coaching. So it's just one of those instincts 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 a, an online course right, I've run called transformational creator. And one of the things that I've told this 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 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 seeking to be understood. The classic line. Ali Abdaal 24:50 So you're teaching creators how to become coaches essentially? Unknown Speaker 24:53 Essentially, 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. You monetize a small audience, not by building into a huge audience and then selling a $10 product, each person or a $5, product, whatever T shirts and stuff. But instead, if you have a tiny audience, you just 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 create what emails, newsletter, subject lines to write down, because you understand how to enter the conversation going on in their heads. So it'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 as take somebody through that process as you're developing it, like a small cohort of people and see how they get on whether 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 public speaking as well as a big piece of that, see what questions you get asked. So basically, you're honing in iterating your content, to then make it into a better product. And that was the idea. Ali Abdaal 26:18 One thing I want to talk to you about, so you've done a fair bit of backpacking, travelling, you 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? 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. Hasan Kubba 26:43 Same with me. So I grew up very shy. And I remember even even when I was in university, they would be these kinds of careers events. And everyone 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, attraction, dating. I saw an advert when I was 15 on 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 about it. And I learnt so much. So it's quite interesting when nerds kind of put their mindset on the things that aren't necessarily nerdy, like social dynamics. Which is 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. 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. Funnily enough, like, an interesting story, just out of the blue that just came to my mind I saw somebody on the tube, on the London Underground, and it was this guy, and he was wearing this hoodie. And he said, Facebook on the shoulder. And this is before Facebook had a terrible reputation. Oh, that's interesting. Facebook, scared me. Maybe he's a face. So lame. Is he a Facebook fan? Like he's such a fan. And I thought, Well, 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, he was like 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's told me the story of how he used to. He was one of the founders of feed burn, I think it was he was one of the founders of feed burn or one of the early members. And then it was bought by Google when 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's 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 meeting 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. 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 is got an emphasis on developing economies, I'll be interesting I learned about China, the Middle East Africa cetera. And by 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 I didn't have. 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 this 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's just a headshot. And he was a was this professor and he was also the undergraduate admissions tutor, I went to his page, and he said, student office hours. And this is because back to the whole thing of like, bending rules as well. I've always been a bit. I've never really liked rules I have, maybe that's why I want 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. 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 can just go talk to him. So I turned up at like to 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 walk down the corridor, and I saw him walking towards me. And I was like, oh, Professor, can I have a moment? He's like, Yeah, sure, thinking, I'm a student coming for his office hours, I sat down with him. And I was like, Okay, so here's why I want to study economics. This is why I want to do this. And by the end of my little spiel, my little pitch on the train over rang 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 SOAS 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. Pushing past shyness and 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 in first dates and stuff. And 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 it's more of a mindset thing than it is about how you sit and how you talk and how you project your voice, etc, it's a whole journey. Ali Abdaal 32:19 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, point B, Hasan Kubba 32:29 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, ah, life shouldn't be this way. People should judge people, you know, on the content of their character, rather than how they look and how they come across, and I don't know how they behave and what. So it's a whole rabbit hole to go down. 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 they say in your linguistic programming, there's only about 7%, of actual communication is the words, the content, when most of it is your voice, tone, your body language, your timing, your pauses, your whatever, like. So I'm just starting to understand communication. So I've been fascinated by this persuasion, communication, it goes back to marketing, it goes back to coaching, is 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 why I was much more interested in 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 some overly simplistic way of thinking about it, because that's not how it works. That is his 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, you know, do this and you know, that that stereotype of like somebody's 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 him as 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, before I got into business. I was like this. I was obsessed with this. I was like why, too. 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. Ali Abdaal 35:13 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. How do you deal with negative reviews? Hasan Kubba 35:23 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 Russell Brand. And I'll just learn that. And I kind of 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. Like, they'll have a lot of people that really love them a lot. People really hate them. I think. So I think I've imbibed that so much, that I was okay with it. Like I was okay with negative comments. One thing that was quite challenging is when the book came out, the date was launched. So this was his whole thing. This is our first book, it's going to be published all this day, it was launched literally, like, I think it was like, I can't remember that was dozens, it was like, close to 100 review, reviews and ratings came out for the book on the day 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 will be like positive, but there will be like two stars. And then some of them were just random. Some of them were four stars. Some of them will one star. Yeah. That was weird. Yeah, there's some but something's happening. There's some bots happening or something going on, because they kind of already read the whole book, isn't it just really today, it's not like we're that famous to have this huge marketing push that people are ready to buy and stuff. So that was difficult. And then, but at the same time was just like, Oh, these must be bots, something weird is happening here. So we got in touch with our publishers. And we're like, oh, by the way, this is 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 there must be bots, because people can't read it already. And also, there are two listings, can you please merge them together, but also other 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, and the reviews came along with it. The bad reviews came along with it. I 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 overall has done really well. Now we've just hit 1000 reviews on Goodreads, and the average rating is 4.1 something. So it's like, 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 already come to terms with that, that you can't be something for everyone. And that also applies to dating that also applies to like talking to people, you just won't get along with some people. And you kind of and if you have too far have an internal locus of control. And you blame yourself for Yeah, yeah, I think this is my problem. Yeah, like you think it's all about you. It's not all about us. It's so self centred. 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, then somebody might have passed away recently in their lives. Who knows? So yeah, it was part of that. I think people have their own shit. I'm not going to appeal to everybody. Hmm. And to understand niching down to understand that actually being polarising can be a good thing anyway. Yeah. And understand that. If you're, if you want to please everybody, then you're going to be so bland and bla nosy be into what you're doing. Ali Abdaal 39:04 Yeah. So as you as you know, I'm a fan of systematically breaking things down. So it sounds like kind of your just your strategy as it were for dealing with the negative reviews. Number one, understand that you aren't for everyone. And that's okay. Understand that it's really not about you. A lot of the time. Maybe it's just it was it wasn't right for them. To You said that you had this boss issue, which you can just sort of write off. Yeah. What were some of the other things that you kind of imbibed from the Russell Brand ecosystem around dealing with haters? Hasan Kubba 39:33 I think I learned early on from learning about such dynamics and confidence and stuff is that you have to define your own self terms for what success and how to be happy with yourself and not to look to others. So the 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 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 going to be happy with and I've kind of consciously set my criteria has to be productivity based. Yeah. And as I said, I'm honestly, not that productive of a guy. And I really, really have told you this before I really relate to the whole Tim Ferriss thing where he's like, people really want to journalist always want to follow me around for the day. And I always say no, because it's so boring, I'll just be me puttering around in my underwear, wasting time, and 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, kind of, and one of my coaches been telling me, like, this is how you're creating, you're doing these other things, that in the meantime, and you in the way, I'm constantly, and I'm the to x 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 gonna I can't take away the external validation seeking thing completely. Yeah, it's gonna be there. Thankfully, the book has done well. So I'm even got awards for it, which we would not even expecting blew our minds. So it just shows that the process worked. The process of like, iterating, and starting, and we followed the whole, you know, the whole tech startup software thing of like, doing an MVP, and, and testing out and iterating and improving it. And I think that's why it worked. Ali Abdaal 42:02 Okay, that seems like a very sensible way to approach approach stuff. Because 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 is going to hit me on a level that is different to a YouTube video. Hasan Kubba 42:20 Yeah, to be honest, I expected more hate. I expected more. And therefore what little we got was like, oh that's not too bad. We expected there to be more. I over prepared the maybe it 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. Yeah. What do you mean, it's not a meritocracy? It's like I expected much more pushback. So why would I had all these like, one of the things that you try and do is you kind of just 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 emphasise, I'm not trying to say like, cheat the system or, you know, be corrupt or something I'm talking about just like basic on federal people knew that's what we meant. And I kind of so I think what helps is over like to expect to expect to get a lot of pushback, and then not to get that to be pleasantly surprised. Ali Abdaal 43:20 What's it like writing a book with a co author? Hasan Kubba 43:23 Yes, 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 advantage came about from ash, the miles framework came about for me, 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 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 what do you say to people who say working hard, is my advantage is mine? Is that an unfair advantage? Where do you draw the line between an unfair advantage and earned advantage? You spoke about his fair play in your video, which some people think is in the book, some people like to interview me, they'll be like, oh, so why do you think fair play? I was like, yeah, you've watched this video, which is 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 see you and Pressfield he was talking about how I think he was in nobody wants to read your shit, which is one of my favourite 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 his writing partner just wasn't really turn up. The time they said they were that he'd be fed up waiting for him and he, and then he realised that this this guy isn't a writer, writer, this guy's a writer, editor. And he's the writer writer. And that was what he had to do the writing. 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 actually, it was like, I did the actual writing for the most Apart, there are bits here and there that are written by him. But essentially, it wouldn't have happened. If it wasn't for him it would, 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 the 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. I am 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. Ali Abdaal 45:40 So 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 sort of 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 thinking of it, 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, like not a very helpful thing. And it's an it should be like, you know, imagine the 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 motivated 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 2700 words. Cool. Let's just keep on going. And then any time I think Oh, but like the sounds bad, or Oh, but I should probably edit it here. Oh, but like, I think nope, stay on task. Enjoy the journey. I've got a music in the background. I've got my coffee, I've got my milk, whatever. And I'm just like banging stuff out sneeze speed running, writing the first chapter. Oh, cool. 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 that, you know, atomic habits, the four things that make a habit stick, it may not matter that this my mental model is 100%. True. Yeah. But if it's a useful way of modelling 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. Yeah, like, oh, right brain is creative and left brain is not but like, it just having that model is still somewhat useful where you think, you know, someone said it describes themselves as a more like, right brained kind of person, where if someone says, Oh, I'm really high on trait extraversion, 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 pulling, 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 and like, What the hell, how do you? And I keep on kind of second guessing and guessing myself? How do you how do you deal with that? Hasan Kubba 48:00 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 it's similarly with writing. That's why writing so valuable. That's why journaling is sort of a good analogue to coaching if specifically if you follow a good structure, it's, you're figuring out what you think by writing it down. That's what's happening then. And I'm impressed that you're, you're disciplined enough to not edit as you write, because I still ended up doing that quite a bit. But as much 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 talked about that in the book. I was like, so here. So why did as I went meta and said, Okay, look, there's two, two models, extreme models. One is successes, all luck, and the other successes, all hardwork and merit isn't 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 as a tension and you could talk about how, yes, you could do HARD goals, but you can also do easy goals and he'd have to think about it. But yeah, the whole thing about mental models are fascinating. That's one thing that I got out of economics is 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 too bloody may turn your body alkaline or something like that. It's all over simplified. For the most part nonsense for the most part, even when they sound like they're using scientific language and they're saying incident Nis 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 a fairing 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 very, it's a whole other kettle of fish, but the point is that you want to have help people to change their behaviour and transform. So this goes back to the online course something so you could be a YouTuber, you can be an educational YouTube, obviously, you could do comedy, you could do whatever you can do drama. The point is to be an educational YouTuber as a whole category. And you could then teach physics and maths. But then there's another sub segment of educational, which says, transformational creators, 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 mindset and behaviour change, ultimately, is behaviour change, really, because that will also change the mindset and the identity and all that stuff. So for behaviour change, how do you motivate people to change their behaviour? You oversimplify? That's one thing. And then you make the power? Exactly, you empower and over simplify 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 a different talk about how the people go back and forth. But here's what's worked for me. And here's why I want to do so the 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 your 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 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 is sets, easy goals, as you call it, and basically using process oriented goals in that sense. Yeah, more or less. So what we were you have to do is set your own glossary and start to define your 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 realise that you're taking liberties with the word productivity. Ali Abdaal 51:50 Like intentionality and meaning, enjoyment and joy and all that jazz, which wouldn't traditionally be in a technical dictionary definition of productivity. Hasan Kubba 51:58 So let's redefine productivity to mean this. And then you've redefined it. Ali Abdaal 52:04 So when I'm thinking like screw hold goals, that easy goals, then that's like the click bait title of which kind of hooked me like, Oh, that's interesting. Or like smart goals are done. Here's, here's, here's how you set goals instead. But and then they're like, Okay, that encourages me to read on. And then it's like, okay, there's some nuance here. Like, there's a spectrum, as with anything as with everything, blah, blah, blah. Here's how I like to think of it. Yeah, there 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. Hasan Kubba 52:40 I had this exact same thing writing the book. I'd be writing a chapter and I keep going back and forth my arguments. It's just constantly hedging and caveat, and it's like, okay, but you need to figure out what you're trying to say here. But I feel like you have to go through that thrashing, as part of the process. Yeah, knowing that thrashing mode, where you're like back and forth back and forth. Ali Abdaal 53:01 Yeah, I find that as I'm writing my, my thoughts are solidifying. And I sometimes find myself just like, oh, that's actually a really good point that just made. And then exactly. And, 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 calendarly link figuring out, okay, who can I contact to help me in this 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, whatever, whatever I would love to interview you' they'd probably say yes. But then I was thinking, maybe even that it's 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 the arguments going, I can sort of team up with my editors 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. Hasan Kubba 54:04 It's not an academic paper. It's not your you know, 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 - a self development book anyway. Ali Abdaal 54:19 Yeah. I think like maybe people listening to this will find that like a tough pill to swallow. I wonder. Because I feel like there's the deck can sometimes be an attitude that like self help books are a bit of a scam. And I guess what we're saying is like, yes, they are a bit of a scam. They're not like 100% true, but it also depends on like, what's the objective, like it is a bit of a scam to say, well, the only thing you need to do to lose weight is like 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. Hasan Kubba 54:58 Exactly. Or like the insulin hypothesis 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 glucose can't be released, or the fat, the fat is trapped in the 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 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, in my experience, and in most people's, it's much harder to stick to a low fat diet is just, but then also fat is 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 what's the point of all this? It's all just, it's all just mental masturbation, as 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 complete scam. You can't it's not a hard science, it's a soft science. It's all complete nonsense. There'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, do you have the same issues? I'm not sure. But I think so. So, yeah, whatever, you even matter, that advanced level becomes extremely theoretical. You start working with imaginary numbers and stuff. But yeah, it's it's a case of like, understanding what it's for. Yeah, understanding that you're just, it's really, it's like you're on a book. It's sort of an immersive experience where it's like, it's almost like a good way to hone it down as 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 a book we helped it really helped to distil okay. What is it in a nutshell? Yeah, how do I put this across? Ali Abdaal 57:04 Yeah, so I think 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 what I would say in a video about the whole book. And in fact, over the last few months being 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 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 recognise that, you know, 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 licence to say whatever the hell I want, because it's obvious that it's this is not me trying to be an expert, and give you the 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 in writing a book, it feels harder. And so I think it kind of kind of comes back to this idea of lowering the bar, lowering the stakes. In a way, setting easier goals is an easy 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. Hasan Kubba 58:35 Whatever works, I feel like a lot of self development or getting past procrastination or productivity, whatever. It's just mind hacking. It's sort of just tricking yourself 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, they'll just do. So there's probably a kid out there who's never seen me play. He's come for the first time see Michael Jordan play. Let me show him what it's like. It's like in a relationship, you have to actively work on the relationship. Yeah, I think we all just assume that air should work. If you're in love, if you do the soul mate, 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 1000s of them and then the internet and then everything could sub niche down into niches or 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 No, this book is for introverts this book is for, you know, doctors this because for whatever like this video is for that. So I think you have to realise 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 becoming more personalised, down to people's genetics and down to how people respond to certain things. So should advice be personalised to the different types of people. And so a big piece of this is going to be what worked for you. And it's also going to be to, for you to do a dry run earlier. And 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 is that's your niche and away. The 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 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 out on them, see, where did they get stuck? See where you can communicate differently, where you can frame it differently, where you can give different metaphors and analogies, etc, for them to really ah, that makes sense and to be activated to doing it. Ali Abdaal 1:01:07 Yeah, so I think I'm going to 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 the 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 it's 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. And the other 25% is like the storytelling and the, how you deliver 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 as he reads a book and highlights something, or he makes a note, he scores that 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 like, obviously, I knew this all along, and you start to 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 counter intuitive, or in terms of being counter narrative, like, counter intuitive as in, you thought this, but actually this thing, counter narrative, everyone is telling you x, but actually why. Let me tell you, let me explain. Boom. And then people like, oh, okay, they get a dopamine hit, and they keep on reading. And what he does when he's giving, 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 gonna tell you different things. No one really knows how to get feedback. But he asked them, What did you find surprising? Then, you sorted David Pearl has this other one like the cribs method, like, you know, highlight bits that were confusing, repeated, insightful, boring or surprising, something like that. And then, and then for people to give you feedback, all they have to do is go go through the thing with a highlighter in different colours. 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 bollock of that would be probably too much effort, but feel free to disagree with me. Am I bullshitting myself? Hasan Kubba 1:03:30 Definitely. Because you keep telling me that your number one priority is the book and you want the book to be good. Ali Abdaal 1:03:38 Do you think the book would be significantly better with a live cohort then it would be with people giving me this kind of feedback? Hasan Kubba 1:03:44 100% because I think because what do you actually want from the book, like, a big piece of it is people go, this is a great book, and it's very readable and as a page turner. That's great. And that's a brilliant goal. And I completely agree with that and endorse that. But for people to actually transform their lives from this, and to get genuine long term, like, oh my god, I 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 really think about the longtail, that's when you're really thinking about value. Like ultimately all goes down to this. What is value? Ali Abdaal 1:04:22 Okay, so let's say I want to do a dry cohort, a dry run, how would you suggest I approach this? Hasan Kubba 1:04:27 You know what, like, yeah, don't forget, you can actually, you obviously need to be heavily involved. But the 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. Ali Abdaal 1:04:57 Hmm. We have five writers on the team. I'll be like hey George do you fancy reading this thing that I've read and getting my philosophy on goal setting and try teaching it a bit to some people over zoom call and see what happens. Hasan Kubba 1:05:09 But also remember that writers are not necessarily teachers. So think about teachers and think about coaches. And obviously, that can be obviously as teachable is a learnable skill, but might not be what they want to do is what I'm trying to say. Ali Abdaal 1:05:24 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, I don't want to test the book ideas on you, for example, and then there'll be several dozen to several 100 people on a zoom call, who will then be receptive to giving advice and feedback and stuff. Hasan Kubba 1:05:41 Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, you have to think about, what is the end result that people want out of your book? And you have to really figure that out, and then understand that, okay, if this maps on to the part time YouTuber Academy for people trying to start a YouTube channel, etc? If it does, then do that. But then also try and test it with people with different goals as well, just to Yeah, just to give it to give it some testing, I got a bunch of smart people that could probably point me in the direction of reason, I would totally integrate it into your syllabus. Why haven't you? Ali Abdaal 1:06:09 Good point. How can that be? Hasan Kubba 1:06:12 Just integrate what you're gonna teach in the book into the PTYA syllabus and see how people respond to it. We didn't actually use many BETA readers, we actually do that person as much. Yep. Okay. A little bit. We're not hardly, Ali Abdaal 1:06:25 Yeah, cuz 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 we like, interlude, goal setting. Hasan Kubba 1:06:32 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 just be keen to do it separately. I know you want to integrate in something else but you can make it very minimalist. You can't I run a course where the last course I ran, it was just 90 minutes a week of lessons. And then an hour of coaching. Ali Abdaal 1:06:58 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... Hasan Kubba 1:07:06 You shouldn't do that. You know why? People won't go to break rooms just to be in that session. Ali Abdaal 1:07:10 Oh, yes. Hasan Kubba 1:07:11 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. I used to literally read science textbooks. And then when I get to exercise, which is the homework for that night, when I was a kid, I'll turn the page and like, keep reading it. 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. We can come up with something. I don't mind collaborating with you on it. We'll figure out something to do some course design. Maybe coach that cohort or something. Figure this out. Ali Abdaal 1:08:00 Yeah. Just do it as like a free thing, newsletter subscribers, post on Twitter... Hasan Kubba 1:08:03 We'll figure this out. But let's say imagine I do it. So you have to then distil that knowledge to me. I'll be like, wait, what? Yeah, well, I'll give you picking holes in it just for me to understand it. Yeah. Then I'll go through another thing for me to explain to the students and then we see how they respond to it. Because it should be kind of viral like it should be able to transmissible it could be quite transmissible. Ali Abdaal 1:08:33 Okay. Interesting. Yeah, that could work nicely. Yeah. Because I kind of know what I want to say for each chapter. Hasan Kubba 1:08:40 You want to see where people get stuck when they actually try to put into practice. So and then and then you can you can turn this into an online course. Ali Abdaal 1:08:45 Yeah, I mean, yeah, I plan to at some point, but like, yeah. Hasan Kubba 1:08:49 It's even more well designed for it. But then I'm not taking anything away from how important is to get feedback on the writing. Ali Abdaal 1:08:57 Yeah. I mean, that's like the what makes it a page turner and what makes it interesting, what makes it actually good. Hasan Kubba 1:09:06 Yesh but hte stylistic bit you can hire people who really, you can hire joke writers. You can hire storytellers. You can I mean, I'm not saying necessarily this is the approach, but I'm saying the core of it. Yeah, 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. You don't have to be sometimes they just a refreshing new take on something. Ali Abdaal 1:09:26 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? What they like, if they could only take away one thing, what would it be? 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 I just need to convert that into actual stuff. Nice. Alright, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. 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