Life Update: Building My Business And Writing My New Book
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Oh, by the way, before we get into this episode, I would love to tell you a little bit about Life Notes. Now, Life Notes is a weekly-ish email that I send completely for free to my subscribers, and it contains my notes from life. So notes from books that I've read, podcasts I'm listening to, conversations I'm having, and experiences I'm having in work and in life. And around once a week, I write these up and share them in an email with my subscribers. So if you would like to get an email from me that contains the stuff that I'm learning, almost in real time as I'm learning it, you might like to subscribe. There is a link down in the show notes or in the video description.

I know that me as an individual, I only really have 15 minutes of fame or maybe a few years at best in the limelight. What are the things that I can do to diversify away from me as an individual so that the business that I make has more longevity than just whether people care about my personal life? I have stumbled into this ridiculously incredible career or making stupidly large amounts of money. How do I continue to live that kind of life where I'm just spending my time reading, writing and teaching?

Turns out that it's not just my experience. There are all sorts of kind of scientific studies backing this up. This idea that certain types of work is energizing and certain types of work is depleting. Just like, you know, certain types of people you hang out with are energizing and certain types of people just completely drain your energy. That's the same thing happens with work. Now, one solution to that conundrum is, oh, well, just quit your job and follow your passion because that will energize you. But I think that's the wrong solution. I think the right solution is

- Hey friends, welcome back to Deep Dive. If you're new here, my name is Ali and in each episode, I normally chat to entrepreneurs, authors, creators, and other inspiring people about how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools that can help us all along our shared journey of trying to live our best lives. But this is an episode in the off season. We have just wrapped up season two of the podcast and we have not yet started season three. And so we're doing this little bit of an episode, which lots of you have requested,

as a Q&A where Angus, one of my team members actually interviews me and it's kind of a life and business update to kind of show you where we are with this creative printer business that we're running and how things are going and the challenges that we're facing along the way. As some of you might know, Angus started working for me about two years ago and he started off as a part-time writer. He actually cold emailed me out of the blue and said, "Hey, I wanna join your team as a writer." And he started off,

working with me like one project at a time, and then one day a week, then two days a week, then four days a week. And now he has become our general manager, integrator, director of operations, whatever you want to call it. And he's basically my right hand man. He basically runs the entire business side of things so that I can have my own time freed up to focus on the creative side, which is awesome. And now the running joke is that Angus works eight days a week. Anyway, in this conversation, we talk about things like how we got to where we are right now, how we're thinking about the business and the podcast and the YouTube channel and all the other stuff that we're doing and the

book, how we've ended up with a team of 18 people and what that's like. I'm going to stop talking now. I hope you enjoy this episode. Talking about like the studio, though, and the team, is this what you expected? So it was kind of weird moving to the studio, moving to London, and suddenly like starting this whole, actually building a physical business with like, almost like a corporate structure around it. Because A, I would have assumed that everything has to be remote, weirdly. And I would have assumed that like,

How does a business that fundamentally just makes YouTube videos, why does that need so many people? But it's been fun and it's nice having the space and the space is cool. And I do enjoy coming to work every day.

which is nice. And it's really nice not having camera equipment in my own flat, just like clogging everything up and wires all around the floor. Now we have those all around the studio, which is a better place for them to be than at home. But overall, pretty solid experience, I would say. There's people that kind of question why you need so many people to run a YouTube channel.

Does that ever make you question the size of the team and the business and the direction you're going? It does, yeah. It often does. You know, sometimes I see, like, videos of Graham Stephan reacting to some of the videos that I've made. He's like, he's got 18 people on his team. What the hell are you doing with 18 people on your team? Similarly, we've got other friends, you know, Aaron Menny, Mr. Who's the Boss, who has a team of, like, three people and, like, 10 million subscribers. So part of me thinks that, like, when we have a team of 18 people, are we...

Like on the surface, that seems a bit much for quote, just making YouTube videos. But then I stop and think about it. I think like if you want to grow a business beyond a certain size, I think if you want to, for me as the kind of business owner, I only really want to do the things that I really enjoy doing and that I'm really good at.

And there's a bunch of stuff that moves the business forward in terms of helping add value to people's lives and increasing our revenues, which is not in that category of things that I love doing and things I'm great at. And so the next question becomes, okay, cool, let's hire people to do that thing. And as you know, being sort of official employee number one, but like employee number two in the team, like with a small team,

then everyone is kind of doing a little bit of everything and there's a bit of delegation and then as we realize that oh things are growing we want to do this other thing and this other thing and this other thing we very quickly run into capacity issues where it's actually more than two people's full-time jobs to be able to do all the stuff that we want to do if we're thinking courses are doing really well why don't we release a course every quarter it's actually quite a lot of work putting a course together and we think the channel is doing really well let's double our output of videos that's actually quite a lot of work if we're thinking let's launch a podcast that's quite a lot of work there's a lot of stuff

That happens as you add more and more lines to a business. And I think most creative businesses with significantly smaller teams, they are quote, just making YouTube videos. Whereas for us, YouTube videos, courses, podcast, or YouTuber Academy, which is its own ridiculously high, takes a lot of work to run a six week life cohort three or four times a year, writing the book, doing all the social media stuff, doing all the website stuff. There's quite a lot to do. And even now, even with a team of 18 people, it still feels as if we're running into capacity issues.

So I think what we're trying to do here is, yeah, 18 people is actually probably too few for that. Yes, you said it's not just YouTube videos. I think that's a good point because you have them very well in terms of pivoting and reinvesting in the team and things like that. I guess that's the things that we see in other creators who are successful, like MrBeast and that kind of thing, is that reinvestment into the business, which some creators just don't seem to want to do or are fearful about doing, which might limit their success.

Yeah, it's interesting and thinking back to where when I joined, as you said, employee number two, it was just like three of us really just making YouTube videos. And that was fine. When Skillshare courses started to come on and other stuff started to come on, then that's when Teamist kind of needed because you reach that capacity. Yeah, I think at every stage it was about thinking like, where's the bottleneck at this stage?

What's an area which if we had more capacity, we would be able to do more stuff?

or to do stuff better. And so initially it was a case of, kind of you, Christian was brought on initially as a sort of head of content plus editor. So someone who could help edit videos, but also who could help ideate and help maybe write stuff and help kind of maybe repurpose articles for the website. And then you sent me a cold email being like, can I join as a writer? And I was like, oh great, well I actually need someone to help me write videos because I have all these video ideas I want to do, but I physically don't have the time to research and write them all myself.

And so some of the videos you did, you know, is coffee good for you? The journal club staff, should you study with or without music? I think there were a few things here and there. Then I was editing as well. Then you were editing some stuff as well. And then it was like, oh, let's make a Skillshare class. Let's make another one. This course is doing well. Let's do more of this kind of stuff. And Elizabeth came on as a kind of personal assistant, part-time personal assistant fairly accidentally. And then when we started our YouTuber Academy, at that point,

Was that still when there was still just four of us? Four of us in the business, Elizabeth very part-time. I had just quit my job as a doctor then. And then we were thinking, okay, this YouTuber Academy took a lot of work. What if we, like, where is the bottleneck now? And the bottleneck ended up being, again, in terms of like idea generation and writing for the YouTube channel and also repurposing for social media and the website. So we brought on Gareth and Jakob and then we did some, you know, more and more stuff happened. There was another bottleneck. And so at each point,

at each bottleneck juncture, it's like, okay, where do we have a capacity issue? And could we potentially hire to fill that capacity issue? And I think this is something that we sort of did very accidentally over time without really having a hiring process, without knowing anything about hiring. But over the last two years of slowly building up the team to 18 people now, I think we've learned quite a lot along the way. Yeah, and it was probably that YouTuber Academy moment that, because we were four people for about eight months, it was that YouTuber Academy moment and the fact that we realized that that worked.

and we were going to do it again. Which then raised the capacity issues around, well, who's going to write the videos then if Angus is helping doing the Academy and all of that. In terms of having enough time, when you mentioned when you bought me on, you didn't have enough time because you were still a doctor and that kind of thing. It's now like six to eight months since you left medicine. How, officially, how do you feel now having made that decision now that you're kind of full-time being an entrepreneur and...

hopefully an author. - Yeah, I feel pretty good about it. I think one of the nice things about medicine is that it gives you a very certain career path. And one of the less nice things about this is that it feels very uncertain. But I think over time I've become embracing of that uncertainty. And you know, we were having a conversation with our

mutual coach Liz Wright earlier today and I was thinking that like one of my biggest fears is slowly losing irrelevancy, slowly losing relevancy over time. And one thing that you and she said which was very valid is that like, you know, we've managed to do this several times already. Like so we've changed directions, we've built, you know, even before this YouTube stuff, I'd built a business helping people get into med school which was pretty profitable and did pretty well. Like building businesses and creating content, these are all skills.

And I think in the past I had underappreciated the value of those skills. Whereas over time, I've realized the value of the skills, realized that actually uncertainty is good. Everyone has uncertainty in their lives, whether you're an entrepreneur or an employee in any kind of capacity, there's always a level of uncertainty and being embracing of that and recognizing that, hey, if the winds change, then the winds change and that's okay. I do kind of feel that we have a sort of, kind of like an athlete does, like you have kind of the proverbial 15 minutes of fame.

And so, A, how do you capitalize on that as much as possible? Recognizing that, hey, this ain't going to last forever. Let me make hay while the sun shines. And what we're doing right now, trying to make loads of money while also trying to help people. And what I'm doing kind of behind the scenes, reinvesting that into real estate and into other asset classes that are decoupled from the internet.

But at the same time thinking, okay, given that I know that me as an individual, I only really have 15 minutes of fame or maybe a few years at best in the limelight. What are the things that I can do to diversify away from me as an individual so that the business that I make is sort of

has more longevity than just whether people care about my personal life. And I think this is one of the things that a lot of lifestyle-y type YouTubers have struggled with, where you grow big initially because you're a lifestyle-y type YouTuber, and then the audience grows up and they realize that they don't really care about the lifestyle-y makeup beauty type content, whatever the case might be, and then the views start to decline. And if there isn't a solid business built around that, and it's all based on YouTube AdSense and brand deals and stuff like that, it's a very fragile business that I think doesn't really stand the test of time.

So everything that I've been trying to do is just really thinking like, in a way being very, very risk averse. It's like I have stumbled into this ridiculously incredible career where I can do whatever I want. I have the freedom to learn stuff and teach stuff on my own terms or making stupidly large amounts of money.

How do I continue to live that kind of life where I'm just spending my time reading, writing and teaching? And what does the business look like to support those activities? You mentioned a word like career. Do you see, like, how do you define what you do at the moment as a career? I don't really think of it as a career. I don't really use the word career when I think of my own life. I think career is, in a way, an anachronism of like, oh, I have a career as a banker. That's kind of why I picked up on it as like it feels...

Yeah, I kind of felt a bit off using the word career. I just kind of view all of this as like my life. And part of my life is work. I don't even think of it as work. Like even when I said the phrase, I enjoy going to work each morning. I really don't think of it as going to work. It really does feel like an extension of my life. And I think for me that works because I am the sort of business owner and the founder. What's it like for you?

Oh, this doesn't feel like work. Okay. I love it. Generally, I'm not just saying that because I'm on camera. But I guess, like, do you see it as I do, as, oh, this is just an extension of my life? Or is it, like, do you consider it that, oh, this is the thing that I do for work? Good question. I think, as we've discussed at length, and you've pointed out to me at length, that the work does become my life, probably too much, but that's just more about my personal social life than anything else. But I don't...

I've never felt like this is a chore. I see it as a job because it pays a salary every month. Therefore, by that definition, it is work. But it's fun, it's enjoyable. And as I said, I've never come in to this office, for example, since we've been here since October. And even before then, when we were in WeWork, and even before then, when we were working from home during the pandemic, I never got up thinking, oh, God, I've got to write another script for Ali today. Or I've got to go and...

I don't know, take Ali's bins out for him or whatever else I've done. Like I've never felt like that. And so it's never felt, I've never worked in a corporate role.

But I would imagine it's never felt like that going in and clocking in at nine o'clock, clocking out at five o'clock. It's never felt like that. Yeah. So I wonder if like we were looking at the results of our employee survey for this quarter earlier today and a bunch of people basically saying that they really struggle with the work-life balance. And I found that baffling because I'm like, oh, why are people struggling with work-life balance? Like I really couldn't give a...

less of a shit about when people come in and when people work and whether people work. - But that's like, we've got a team now. That's why we need to consider it more. - No, exactly. - When we were working together, like two of us, three of us, four of us, whatever, it was like, oh, we're all in this together, we're kind of making this work and it's good. Don't know how long it's gonna last. It's not really a business really yet, 'cause it's only four of us really. But now it's like a team.

those kind of things matter. Yeah, but I guess my point was that because I don't view it as work and because you clearly don't view it as work, it's very easy for us to just be here all the time. And for other people in the team who have maybe a healthier relationship with the job as being a job, which as it well should be because it is just a job at the end of the day, I think

I don't know. I need to be more mindful of, hey, this actually is a job. And, oh, I'm going to take time off. And in my time off, I'm not going to check Slack. And I'm not going to go on Zoom calls and stuff. Because I guess when you're a doctor, you didn't ring up the hospital on your days off going, what's happening, guys? Yeah.

You forgot about it until you went in the next day. Yeah, although, having said that... Unless you're cool. If you're, for example, the consultant and you're responsible for the ward, then even on their days off, they'd be messaging like, hey, I need a station support, how's my patient doing? So I think there is an element of when you have that level of ownership, you kind of feel like it's your baby. You feel like, I don't want to leave my baby alone with these strangers for a while. I want to make sure baby's doing all right. Given that kind of approach to not seeing it as a career...

and seeing it just as your extension of your life, where do you kind of see it going? Obviously, you're writing a book at the moment. Is that the direction you want to take things? Is it more seeing how far the YouTube thing will go? Where do you see the next three to five years panning out? So the first thing to say is I have no idea, like, who can predict the future. But if I think, you know...

when we do our like kind of vision building for the business and thinking about what does the three year picture look like? What I think is like, you know, the book is out, the book does really well, people really like the book. I'm working on a second book because I do like the idea of writing and sharing knowledge in that kind of way. The YouTube channel is continuing to do well, the podcast is continuing to do well. We have a slightly bigger team, not a significantly bigger team, but maybe a slightly bigger team. We maybe have a studio in London that has multiple filming sets. So maybe a set for YouTube, a set for podcast, a set for something else.

our students for our YouTuber Academy become our kind of students for life. And maybe once a week we host a sort of

weekly lunch where anyone who's ever been a student of ours can rock up to the office studio and we'll buy them lunch and we just hang out and making almost this community of other like creator creatorpreneurs creator entrepreneurs I like I'm kind of imagining that we have a sort of research team that is you know because ultimately what we're about is just really trying to help people live their best life in the field of personal development and

So having a research team that's constantly subscribed to all of the latest scientific journals, the psychology journals and sociology journals and the health journals and stuff to figure out, are there any interesting new studies that have come out recently? Could we maybe interview the academic who's written this new book that's out recently? How do we as a business basically document and take what other people are doing in the realm of personal development? And how do we package it up

and give it more airtime and present it to a more mainstream audience. Maybe what I kind of imagine is that I spend one of my days hanging out with a team, a few hours with the researchers, a few hours with our writing team who are looking through a script of like, oh, there's this really cool book that, I don't know, David Sinclair has written on Lifespan 2.0, and we're going to do a video where we've interviewed him for the podcast and we're summarizing the insights from this book so that more people can understand

how to live until the age of 150. And we have this genuine expert on the topic who's actually lending his expertise and credibility to the video that we're going to make. And we'll encourage people to buy the book and stuff. So he's happy because he's getting more book sales and more exposure. We're happy because our YouTube channel is doing well. Everyone's happy because they're getting this knowledge. That feels pretty cool. I sort of imagine myself maybe spending one day a week doing that team stuff, one day a week filming, maybe half to one day a week recording a podcast. And the rest of that time is fairly free to kind of reading, writing,

continuing to come up with ideas and just generally living life on my own terms. That's sort of what I imagine the three-year kind of horizon looking like. And in terms of the business side of things, do you still imagine it being

the sort of courses, paid content funding, a much larger delivery of free content to a wider audience as possible. Yeah, so I often say that if we had unlimited money, we wouldn't bother making any courses. We would just put everything out there for free. But, I mean, we need to have a profitable business. And the way I think of it is like 99/1/1. 99% of our content is free and 1% of our content is paid and that appeals to 1% of our audience.

And if we can fund the entire business of producing tons and tons of really good free content off the back of selling courses to over 1%, then that feels like a pretty sustainable business model for the long term. And I guess, you know, over the past year, we've read tons of different business books and things like that. But that whole model and that thing you've just outlined for three to five years, whatever it was, still feels very almost like new and very creator-focused, creatorpreneur-focused content.

So what, do you think that kind of business model is gonna be replicated across other people or do you think this is unique to our business or is it somewhere where other people can start to move in that direction moving forward? - Yeah, I don't think it's particularly unique. I think people have been doing this for kind of probably, I mean I guess,

This is basically what Tony Robbins does and has been doing since the 1960s or whenever he first came onto the scene, creating content for a mass audience through his books and his audio tapes and stuff back in the day, and then selling high-priced retreats and stuff. And then that funds his whole business. And he's changed millions, if not tens of millions of lives all around the world through his content. And obviously some people will be like, "Oh my God, Tony Robbins, what a snake oil salesman." But there's always going to be people like that. But for the people who are in his core audiences, the people that he's targeting with his stuff, he's had an enormous impact.

I think this sort of business has been around forever, I say forever, for at least like 70 years at this point, 60 years at this point. As content platforms come on the scene, I think there's always going to be a case for some way of distributing stuff for free to the masses and then some way of monetizing that on the back end to a smaller number of that audience. This sort of free content

helps drive traffic to paid content, paid content helps drive revenue to the business to produce more free content, and you get this sort of free content to paid content flywheel. - So what's always interested me about you and kind of your ambitions is with that outline, why is it that you don't, and I kind of already know the answer to this, but like why is it that you don't want to build a media company akin to Gary Vee or

maybe not that big, but like a bigger media company around your name and your brand, why is it that you want to keep it as...

kind of as big as it needs to be, I think you've said in the past. Yeah, so the thing with Gary Vee is Gary Vee has like 25 people on his team. That's not radically different to ours. Gary Vee has like a whole like thousand person company which does like social media consulting and advertising for clients. But that, yeah, that's kind of the larger Gary Vee empire then is what I was kind of referring to. Yeah, so I think for me, the thing that I fundamentally care about is teaching. Yeah. And I have zero interest in running an advertising agency.

probably could, but like the thought of running, I don't know, a social chain or a VaynerX or whatever these companies are, it's just like, it does not excite me at all. Whereas the thought of actually just being able to be a teacher ultimately at the end of the day, where I can learn stuff that I find interesting, I can teach stuff that I find interesting, I can hopefully help people and be stupidly profitable at the same time with a team to support those functions. That is the thing that filled me with excitement. And that's like, when I think of

I sometimes think of the question that if I won the Euro millions and had like 100 million in the bank, what would I do with my life? And I think it's broadly the same stuff that I do now. I wouldn't make courses, granted, because the only reason we do that kind of broadly is to make money that funds the free content. But I still would be making YouTube videos. I'd still be wanting to write books. I'd still be wanting to do loads of reading. And that's basically why I spend my time doing these things. But the courses are still teaching, right? The courses are still teaching. I guess I would, you know, we're working on a course about camera confidence. We're working on a course for creatapreneurs.

I would just shove all of that on YouTube for free rather than charge people for it. Even though in the interest of the business, those courses are going to be very good. Of course, yeah. And worth the money. They're going to be sick. But if we didn't need to make money to fund the business, they'd just go online for free. So if anyone, any very wealthy funders are listening to this and want all of our stuff to be free forever, if someone gave us funding and said, you know, just put everything online for free forever, I'd be like, sick, this is...

Yeah, let's do it. That would be an interesting proposition. Very new. I don't think I've ever seen anyone else do that before. Very novel. Even though there are other brands out there like Creator Now who have source funding. I know that they're moving towards a very different business to what we want to create, but...

There is funding going into creative businesses now, which I don't know whether that was the case five, 10 years ago. Yeah, probably not. I think there were always like, you know, these like maker studios and these content companies with loads of funding behind them who would kind of present, like represent a creator and make them kind of make them blow up and then monetize them up for brand deals and stuff. I think that's been a thing for a while, but yeah, I think we're in a new-ish generation where creatives,

creator businesses are generating kind of seed funding, series A funding as if they were proper startups, which they are. So on the topic of the book, how is that going? And

because it's been a while since probably anyone had any update on it. What's the timeline now for when that's coming out, what the general thesis is, that kind of thing? Yeah, so tentative publication date is probably in January 2024. We're hoping to have a decent draft of the manuscript done by July, August this year.

And so, you know, a lot of the last kind of 12 months or so has been around massaging the concept, figuring out what do we actually want to say. And I think we're now pretty close to having worked out what we want to say. And so the research is underway. Some of the writing is underway. And yeah, basically it's a book about productivity. But the core thesis is that, you know, the secret to productivity

sustainable productivity, meaningful productivity, is to find ways to harness energy from the work that you're doing so that it energizes you rather than exhausts you. And if you can do that, then all the productivity stuff kind of takes care of itself. You don't need to worry about hacks and to-do list management and stuff. All that stuff works. But generally when people come to me and ask for advice around productivity, they're not saying,

I have 300 emails in my inbox because I'm a law partner at like some fancy law firm and I need a method for inbox zero. What they're saying is I don't have the energy when I get home from work or when I get home from my university lectures. I don't have the energy to do the things I want to do like start a business or start a YouTube channel or learn that language or even don't even have the energy to hang out with my friends and family in like an appropriate way. How do I get that energy? How do I get that motivation? Those tend to be the issues people struggle with. How do I focus when I'm doing something that I feel isn't really kind of particularly interesting?

And so I think that's where this kind of idea of energy and finding ways to harness energy from the stuff that you're doing anyway really, really helps. So is that something that you've felt over the last 10, 15 years when you've run businesses that you've never felt that

lack of energy? Yeah, essentially I have felt like a lack of energy but I have often tried my best to find ways to make whatever I'm doing more energizing and I sort of accidentally found ways to do that just through trial and error but then through the research process for the book when I really sat down with the editor and stuff and figured out like what is actually my thesis for productivity that was the thing that we kind of landed. It's like oh yeah it really is about energy and

And turns out that it's not just my experience. There are all sorts of kind of scientific studies backing this up, this idea that certain types of work is energizing and certain types of work is depleting. Just like, you know, certain types of people you hang out with are energizing and certain types of people just completely drain your energy. That's the same thing happens with work.

Now, one solution to that conundrum is, "Oh, well, just quit your job and follow your passion because that will energize you." But I think that's the wrong solution. I think the right solution is find ways to make whatever you're doing more energizing. Find ways to make it more interesting so that it energizes you. And if you've tried all the various methods that we talk about in the book and you still can't do it because it really does suck, at that point you can think, "Maybe I should quit my job." But until then, there's a lot that we can do within our control to help

A, be more productive, but also have more energy at the end of the workday, which we can then use on our dreams or our passions or on just being more present with our friends and family. By the way, I wanted to take a quick break from the podcast to say that if you like the sound of this book, then I would love it if you could sign up to my book email newsletter. It's completely free. And every two weeks, I just send a quick email with a little update about what we've been working on in the book.

me and my team of researchers and writers and like what interesting insights from the world of productivity or like psychology or behavioral economics we've discovered that week or in that last two weeks that we're trying to slowly figure out how to incorporate into the book and how we can incorporate it into our into our own lives and in the book newsletter we also often ask you the audience for stories and input and ideas on the concepts that we're sharing and

And over time, I think we've got about 25,000 people on that list right now. And it's great because every time we send one out, we get loads of people replying with some really interesting stories. And a bunch of those stories are actually going to feature in the book. So if you would like to share some stories that would maybe get featured in the book with credits to you, of course, or you just want to see what the book journey process has been like, or if you want to be kind of, if you want to get up to date on what these productivity hacks and like life hacks are as they're hot off the

press, then do please sign up to the book newsletter. That'll be linked in the video description and in the show notes if you fancy following along. And like I said, it is completely free and you can unsubscribe at any time that you like. Yeah, I think the whole advice of, yeah, just quit your job and follow your passion, it also is a bit reductionist as well in terms of the actual... Yeah, maybe it works if you've got a trust fund, but most of us have to work in some capacity. What impact would you want that book to have? I don't like to think too much in terms of numbers, but if...

There is like one person who reads the book and it kind of changes their relationship with their work where maybe before they were like not really enjoying their job, not really enjoying the studies and like felt that they were drained at the end of the workday and couldn't really bring themselves to have the energy or the motivation to do the stuff they actually wanted to do to live their best life. If they apply some of the stuff from the book and they find it useful, then...

What I'd love for is that they get to the end of the workday feeling actually energized, like as if they've got some energy left in the tank, and then they can use the energy in whatever they want. And I love it when people start YouTube channels. So if someone were to email me afterwards and be like, hey, I applied the concepts in the book, and

you know, it made me more productive in my job. It made me enjoy my job more, but it also made me realize that actually maybe the job isn't for me, but you know, it gave me the energy to, in the evenings, start my, I don't know, web design side hustle or start my YouTube channel. And now I've gotten to the point where I can go part-time. I can use that time to spend more time with my friends and family because I've built these streams of passive income. That would be like a really cool result, but I am...

What I'm trying to keep in mind is that the impact of the book is outside of my control. And this is one of the things we're going to talk about in the book, the idea of setting goals that are input-based. For me, I always find it way more energizing to have a goal that's fundamentally within my control. Like, I want to write the best book I can, or I want to write a book I'm proud of, rather than a book that's outside of my control of like, I want this book to have this certain type kind of impact, or I want this book to hit the New York Times bestseller list. So I do...

In a way, a sort of double think kind of situation where I know the kind of impact I would like to have, but I'm not trying to think about it too hard because I know that will deplete my energy when it comes to actually creating the thing. - That makes sense, that makes sense. But the point you made about you wanted to have an impact on how change people's relationship with work, kind of interesting given what you said earlier about your own relationship with work. So do you want more people to have relationships to their work more akin to what you do now?

Um, not necessarily in terms of like ownership in terms of like, I feel like this is an extension of my life and this is my baby. That's probably only really confined to like entrepreneurs and like general partners and stuff. But certainly the sort of relationship where it's a sense of my work can be fun. My work should ideally be fun. And there are things that I can personally do to make it more fun, to make it more energizing. Whereas I feel like,

A lot of, I don't know, people our generation, millennials and stuff, they would love to enjoy their job. They would love to have work that feels energizing. But in a way, they don't know what the roadmap is to actually doing that beyond quit your job and follow your passion. And I think there are lots of things you can do. You can apply to a job to make it actually become more energizing. So are there themes of more empowerment, control, personal...

I don't know. Yeah, personal control over how you use your energy, how you're spending your energy, how you control your own work, that kind of thing. Yeah, control is certainly part of it. You know, in our section one, we're going to talk about like the four, the four kind of streams of renewable energy that you find in work and that you can tap into to recharge your energies. You know, one of those is power. So the idea of like autonomy, the idea of

responsibility, the idea of like sort of understanding and taking ownership and understanding how things work. We're still trying to figure out the exact terminology behind it. That's the challenge right now over these next few weeks to basically bullet point outline every single chapter. But we kind of know like roughly what is the thesis of each chapter? What are the strategies? And now we're doing a whole deep dive into the research to make sure that like, A, there's sufficient scientific evidence to back this up. And B,

If there isn't, then well, we change the thesis. And you mentioned you want this to be one of more books. Yeah, I like the idea of writing more books. To me, it's one of those things where

There's a chap called Ryan Holiday who you I'm sure have heard of. He's written a bunch of books over here. He seems to have a pretty solid lifestyle. He wakes up, he lives on a farm near Austin, Texas, I think. He wakes up, he goes for a walk, he goes into his study, he reads and writes for about four hours, and then from lunchtime onwards he hangs out with his kids and does stuff in nature and things like that.

And every year or two, he bangs out a book and books are really good. And they're sort of stoicism-y type books and that introduced the ideas from like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and stuff to a mainstream audience. Seems like a pretty good lifestyle. And I can imagine like the longevity of being an author being far greater than the longevity of being a quote YouTuber. If he has to choose for Suma too, what would you choose? If I could be an author forever or a YouTuber forever? Write or make videos. Let's make it broader.

I think, okay. So I think I am, I have no personal. I know it's a bit of an unfair question, but. So yeah. So I have no personal horse in this race. Okay. In that for me, teaching is the ultimate one. Yeah. Um,

Whether that teaching is best done and best meaning it's fun and it's profitable and it's useful to other people Whether that's best done through writing books or through writing articles or writing tweets or making videos or doing it in real life I'm fairly agnostic about those things. I really do enjoy teaching in real life So I always want some element of like in-person interaction to be part of my thing whether I make a video or whether I write I don't really care right now The video thing is way more profitable, but the writing thing is sort of like a slow burn over time. Mm-hmm. Okay, so the book January 2024 hmm

Fingers crossed. Yeah. In between that, in terms of the business side of things, we're launching this new brand, hopefully in the next month or so, Create-A-Preneur. Are there any other aspects that you see kind of developing over the next 18 months that we can sort of talk about now? Aspects of the business. That's going to grow at all. Yeah. So I think right now everything we do is pretty okay.

But there are ways to consolidate and systemize and make it better. Yeah. So that's what I see as sort of the job for this year. Like how do we, now that we have this team of 18 people, potentially even hiring a few more to fill more holes, how do we then make it so that everyone is rowing in the same direction? Right now, we're sort of directionally going in the same direction, but actually this...

I think this is kind of a failing on mine and your part in that we have not kind of done the four obsessions of an extraordinary executive as per Pat Lencioni's book of communicating, sort of creating organizational clarity, over-communicating organizational clarity and creating people systems to reinforce organizational clarity. I think the job for this year is to basically get our house in order, consolidate, make sure our systems and processes and like people all know what they're doing so that we can systematically create decent YouTube videos and decent courses and decent like

The website articles and podcast episodes and stuff like the more systemized we can make the whole thing, the kind of safer it becomes. And the less I hopefully need to be involved in like shaping things with a heavy hand and actually giving autonomy to more of the team members to shape their projects however they want, provided it's in line with the core values of the business and the tone and the branding and all that kind of stuff.

I think one area that we want to do a lot in is just making more courses. I think right now most of our revenue comes from courses, it comes from our YouTuber Academy and it comes from Skillshare. 20% of it roughly comes from YouTube channel in terms of brand deals and AdSense and basically the podcast just about breaks even at this point. Maybe it's slightly profitable. So I think we can increase our revenues and our profits by creating more pre-recorded courses.

Because right now it's like, you know, nearly 3 million subscribers on the YouTube channel, loads of people listening to this podcast. But there's not a lot that we do to monetize it, actually. Like, despite the fact that we're probably going to make 5 million this year with like maybe 3 million profit or something like that. We're still leaving so much money on the table in terms of the monetization angle. And

And so I think if we can just churn out maybe a really good course every quarter, now we have our own products that we can send people to rather than necessarily relying on brand deals that this podcast is brought to you by Brilliant. Great. I mean, Brilliant is fantastic. But like if we can plug, if we can send enough

customers over to Brilliant to warrant them paying us however much they pay us, which I don't think I'm allowed to share, we can probably send customers to our own thing. And so we kind of own more of that customer journey. So I think it's that monetizing on the back end that we currently are under-monetized in. And so can we make more courses that are really good so that in the future,

we can just turn our attentions to just be like, all right, great. Now we're making enough money from courses on the back end. Now we know that every time we make a YouTube video, maybe 0.01% of that audience will convert to a course, but actually that's more than enough to fund the continuing production of the YouTube videos. And we create almost this sort of infrastructure

infinite machine whereby we're putting all of our effort into making free content and by default it's making money because some people are buying the courses. I think it's that second bit of it right now that is a little bit under levered and I'd like to work on that. - Yeah, 'cause I think it's gone through various different stages, hasn't it? 'Cause when I joined, the main revenue was coming from kind of small scale brand deals 'cause you just joined an agency.

then it's kind of skillshare starts to take off and when that was becoming so big we thought i need to do something else then p2a happened yep and now that's come to a certain position and now i think yeah we are at a stage where the pre-recorded courses are probably the way forward in terms of both the effort for for you and the time that you have as well as the effectiveness in terms of their kind of evergreen nature and recurring revenue aspect one other thing that

we launched earlier this year in January was the stationary brand. What part does physical merchandise have in how you see the future of the business? I like the idea of physical merchandise, but I know it's outside of our core focus. I know the thing that we're really good at is creating educational content. The thing we're not really good at is creating physical merchandise and shipping it and dealing with printing and logistics and manufacturing and customer service and all that crap that's associated with physical products. But at the same time, it's really cool to make physical products. So I think, you know,

- The way I think of it, it's sort of like a side quest. Our main quest line is the content, but every now and then we'll do a side quest of it would be cool to make our own stationary brand, just 'cause it's cool. It would be cool to make our own mechanical keyboard, 'cause why not? It would be really cool to make our own bag, maybe partner with a company like Peak Design or something to make our own bag, 'cause why the hell not? That would be really cool. - If any mechanical keyboard companies or bag companies are listening, please do get in touch. - Yeah, that would be the dream. I've got Peter McKinnon's backpack that he made in collaboration with Nomatic.

that seems really cool. It would be great to do something like that with some kind of bad company who have expertise in making the thing. I think if there's one thing I've realized is that it's actually really hard to do something well

And the thing that we do well is content. And if we try and over index on like, oh, well, we can do content, therefore we can also make a keyboard. It's like, probably not. We should probably try to work with a company to make that happen and apply our own. Maybe we can help input on the design. Like I have pretty strong opinions about keyboards and about bags and what a good bag should have. But we certainly don't want to be trying too hard to manufacture things in-house, for example.

That makes sense. It makes sense. I think the stationery looks great and has done reasonably well, but I think it is a bit of a side quest as well in terms of the effort required and the capacity and resources required as well for it is different to what we've got currently available. But even if we had the capacity, even if we hired, we could, for example, say, let's hire a full-time person to just make stationery. It's a core focus. It's a core focus. It's outside of our core focus. Therefore, we probably shouldn't do it too much. In terms of those courses that we are developing at the moment,

We've also got the Creatorpreneur one coming out in a month or so's time. How do you see that developing at the moment? How happy are you with that? I think they're absolutely sick. I think a lot of the stuff we put on Skillshare as well is really good. We recently released a YouTube for beginners course on Skillshare, which I think is like way, in a way, almost too good for Skillshare because it is a course that we probably could have sold for several hundred dollars ourselves. But we decided, oh, let's put it on Skillshare so more people can access it for free because why not? Link in the video description or in the show notes if anyone wants to check that one out.

So I just really like putting courses together, especially if it's a topic that I'm very familiar with. And so this Creatorpreneur stuff, basically teaching creators how to think more like entrepreneurs, like business owners, basically sort of combining everything that you and I have learned about this business stuff over the last two years into a course, that felt really cool. And it's been amazing to see, for example, Gordon and Sean and Gareth and the people managing, helping out with the Creatorpreneur project, that like

I can show up for the initial phases and to deliver the content. And then the back end of it is taken care of where like the videography is sick, the editing is sick, the landing page is sick, the marketing funnels are sick. Like all of those things are things that I am personally not an expert in and don't necessarily want to spend my time worrying about because I want to spend my time teaching.

And in the past when making courses those things would detract from the time that I've got available to teach. Whereas now I can just rock up and teach and then all the other stuff is taken care of. So that feels enormously exciting and I'm very excited to see how this project comes together. Because I guess it's our first real course product that we've put together where it's been owned by someone else and I have basically just rocked up for the writing component and for the talking to camera component. So going back to one of my initial questions, is this what you expected? I'm not really sure I had expectations.

I was kind of like, we'll try this out and see how it goes. I think... But I guess what I'm getting at is the business whereby you can turn up, do your thing, and everything else, all the other bits, all the filming and everything that I dealt with by someone else. Yeah, that was a dream. And I think we're fairly close to that dream. I still feel I get probably too involved in some stuff. But also, I think there is a risk of...

And maybe this is one of the mistakes I made earlier on of just being like, "Hey, Amber, we want to launch a podcast, go." And just being like, "Cool, whatevs." But actually, one thing I've realized over time is that there probably needs to be some level of direction from me, some level of vision of like, "What do we actually want this to be?" Otherwise, then Amber, who produces our podcast and does a fantastic job, is like kind of going down one line because

because she thinks that's the right thing to do. And then I see and was like, "Oh, actually, let's change of mind." And then she's wasted like two months of work. So there's a lot that I should do in setting out the vision

more clearly and then I'll happily leave it to you and the team to execute on that. Okay. So it's all sort of about business stuff and business vision and that kind of thing, but in terms of like personal side of things, how are you? How are things going? Are you content with where you are in life more broadly? Yeah, genuinely. I honestly can't imagine being any happier, but that's sort of the thought that I've had for the last several years of my life. Okay. I think beyond my first year of university, every year felt like it was better than the last.

And when asked or when I would check in with myself of how content I am with life, am I with life, it would just broadly be a 10 out of 10. I think I'm very lucky in that I haven't really experienced any profound setbacks, any major like life difficulties, any major like mental health issues. So yeah,

enormously grateful for that. And I think also like part of the, you know, the benefit of having like coaches and stuff, there's a chap called Corey who I work with each week. We just hop in a little coaching call. And like the thing with, it's like business coaching ends up basically being therapy. Yeah. And it's like, what's on your mind that you're struggling with? Well, I'm not really sure about our organizational chart design. All right, cool. Let's talk it through.

Or I'm not really sure if we're maybe doing too many things in the business. Okay, let's talk it through. I'm not really sure if like I really enjoy showing up to 20 hours a week of YouTuber Academy live events. Okay, let's talk it through. And just having someone as a sort of impartial third party to talk it through from a sort of business bro perspective, I think has been helpful for me to figure out like,

anytime I sort of find myself looking at my calendar and thinking, oh, then I think, okay, that's a sign that the thing that I maybe, the way my calendar looks is actually not in alignment with the way I want to live my life. And so what can I do about that? And I'm very lucky now that I am in a place where I can just do what I want. And if there is something on the calendar that I don't like, I can just say, okay, this is, we need to change this. Whereas a lot of people are not in that position. And that's partly why I'm so bullish on people, you know,

building multiple streams of income and stuff. Because if you are reliant on a single source of income, i.e. your job for survival, it does limit your autonomy. It does limit your ability to potentially live your best life. Unless you happen to be working in this team, of course, because everyone has a great time. Although not necessarily as evidenced by the employee survey. Things we need to work on. Things we need to work on, yeah. But yeah, probably 10 out of 10, contentment, loving life. And living in London? Yeah.

Living Cambridge for six five years six years nine years. No, no, of course. Yeah, I'm working on my my time there nine years Yeah, how's living in London? I love living in London London is great Like I think it's less about London itself and more about the fact that it's so central and like people are around London So there's always people coming through London. There's almost never people coming through Cambridge There's always always friends around like if I ever have a free evening and I want to hang out with people I just need to text people be like hey Do you want to grab dinner? What do you want to come over to mine for a gym session or a spa session or a takeaway and

And people will be like, yeah, sure. So that's the really cool thing about London. Yeah, so I think I definitely want to be here next year as well. And then beyond that, who knows? Maybe you want to travel the world at some point. But, you know, I try not to plan too far ahead just because life changes. Yes, okay. On that point, though, the traveling aspect has always been something that you've mentioned in various videos, as people know about the moving to America, not moving to America, and other times you've mentioned it. Is that a long-term ambition to travel or is it just kind of a...

thought that you might want to do it at some point in the future? Yeah, it's a thought that I might want to do it at some point in the future. And the thought that like everyone I know who's ever done extended travel has said it's been really helpful and interesting and useful and just like good life experience. And so yeah, while I'm young and relatively unencumbered without kids and a mortgage and stuff, although actually we do have a mortgage. Yeah, relatively unencumbered without kids, it feels like a good time to at least try out that kind of style of living, that kind of adventure.

But then again, there was this chap I spoke to who was one of our students on our YouTuber Academy, who's like a doctor who left medicine and is now traveling the world with his wife and three kids and is currently living in Cape Town. So, I mean, it's certainly possible later in life, but I think it's a cool experiment to try out earlier in life as well. Wrapping up and thinking more about this podcast specifically, do you have any regrets about starting this podcast? Nope, not at all. Not at all. What's like the number one lesson that you've taken from

The very first interview that I guess we might have recorded back in May of last year. Yeah. With the founder of Muzmach, I'm forgetting his name. Shahzad. Shahzad, yeah. And then we did Ben Francis at your old flat. Over that sort of 11 months, what's kind of the number one thing that you've taken from meeting people? Or what have you gained from talking to all these people? Yeah. I think A, it's just been fun. I just enjoy having conversations with people. I think B...

it's helped me realize that like no one really knows what they're doing and everyone's just trying trying their best and making it up as they go along which is cool i think in a previous life i would have actually no that's probably not fair i was i was gonna say i would have cared about like actionable life advice and i still do i still really do care about actionable life advice like if ben francis or james softman or julie smith or anyone tells me something where i think oh crap i didn't know that i'm gonna i'm gonna start using that right now uh it's been good in terms of

Actually, you know, when I'm interviewing people, I get to ask them the questions that I want to know the answer to. You know, for example, when talking to James Hoffman, it's like, what's it actually like making a coffee shop? I have this vague dream in my mind that, oh, I'd love to have a coffee shop someday. Is it fun? And he's like, oh, God, no, it's not fun at all. Oh, that's interesting. You know, I'm learning something that I didn't know otherwise. So I kind of view the conversations as A, making friends, B, just having vibes in a conversation, and C, basically,

basically being able to talk to someone at length about something that I'm interested in them about, like what their journey was like to, you know, Julie Smith, for example, like, you know, quitting her job as a psychologist to become a TikToker. That's a bit random. Let's talk about that. Yeah, I think it's been fun. Where do you see it going now? Obviously, season three is starting in a few weeks. Do you see it just continuing season by season? And where do you see it building to? Like, who is your dream guest? Do you not have a dream guest? Ah, the whole dream guest thing. It's all very like... Do you have a list of people that you would want to interview?

It's all very outcome focused and I don't really like thinking about outcomes.

I do have, you know, someone like Deron Brown would be on my dream guest list. Someone like Alain de Botton would be on my dream guest list. Probably those two. Tim Ferriss at some point might be cool, but also, you know, they say don't meet your heroes. So, you know, if I never end up talking to Tim Ferriss, it's not a major loss for either him or me. I think, like, the way I approach all of these things is really just, like, focusing as much as I possibly can on what can I do that's within my control. Yeah.

And having even the idea of having like a dream guest just to me feel, yeah.

I don't really have a dream guest, but it would be nice to interview Derren Brown at some point. - Talking of things within my control, I can control when this interview ends, and so I think we'll bring it to an end here. It's been good to talk about the business and things moving forward. I'm sure there'll probably be other videos on the main YouTube channel at some point giving a broader life update. It's been a few months since we last did one. - We need to figure out a name for that series, like backstage or behind the scenes or something. - Yeah, yeah. But we are starting, just a quick final thing, we are starting a daily vlog, right, on the second channel.

- I think so. - You think so? - As of the 2nd of May, we'll see what that looks like. - Yeah. - And yeah, final thing I guess is just wanna kind of

shout you out publicly for all of the stuff that you do for this business. It's just pretty freaking mental that like, I think it was almost two years ago now? - Yeah, over two years ago. - Two years ago you cold emailed me saying like, "Hey, do you need a writer for some of your videos?" I was like, "Yeah." And now you have kind of ascended the ranks as it were and basically created the ranks over the last two years to the point that you're the general manager of the entire business. And you really do kind of keep the trains running on time and make sure things are getting done.

And that really frees me up to do the things that I love. So thank you for allowing me to live my best life through the fact that you do all of the stuff that I don't want to do. Thank you. And do it really well. Yes. No, thank you. Yeah, it's been fun. It's been fun. It's weird to think that that was like before the pandemic. There was a time before the pandemic. But yeah, no, it's been good, especially like PTYA. That's kind of probably been the most...

gratifying thing that I think we've done together because that started with just like sticky notes on the floor of your old flat and now it's this sort of behemoth of a course so yeah but yeah it's been good excellent nice good stuff let's wrap it there

Wonderful. All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. So yeah, thank you very much for listening. I'll catch you hopefully in the next episode.