Retire In Reverse & Live Your Best Life Today | Ali Abdaal

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show.

0:10What were the keys for you to switch your mindset from just having one stream of income with your career to having passive multiple streams of income? I can probably trace it back to when I was 17 years old and I first read the four hour work week and came across the idea of passive income and immediately my mind was blown. It seemed to put a terminology on something that I'd sort of been feeling anyway, that just the traditional career path of medicine maybe wasn't quite for me, but it was reading that book, The Parable of the Mexican Fisherman, which he talks about as well, that made me realize, okay, what I really want to do is I want to do medicine for fun.

0:42And then I want to make enough money to sustain myself through multiple streams of income. The Parable of the Mexican Fisherman is one of my favorite stories. The story is that there's an American investment banker and he goes to this small coastal Mexican fishing village. And he sees this Mexican guy on the boat and the guy's like fishing a few fish. And he has some of the fish. He's like, oh, this tastes amazing. And the guy's like, yeah, you know, it's enough to support my family's immediate needs. And the American asks, well, why don't you go and fish more? Like, why are you only fishing like five fish a day?

1:12And he says, well, you know, I'm quite happy. I'm making good money. I get to spend time with my family. I get to have a nap in the afternoons. I get to go down to the pub in the evenings to play the guitar with my amigos. And then the American investment banker goes on some big rant about how he's a Harvard MBA and he can kind of transform this into a business empire and how he can then get the Mexican to move to New York and then open up his own warehouse, open up his own like empire and eventually make millions 30 years down the line. And then the kind of long story short, the Mexican kind of, you know, asks the American, okay, what next?

1:42What next? What next? The clincher at the end of the story is that the American says, well, that's great. You know, once you're 65, then you can retire and you'll have all that money. And then you'll be able to live in a village. You'd be able to like have a nap with your wife. You'd be able to play the guitar with your friends in the evenings. And that story really hit me hard because it really shows the importance of building a life day to day that we enjoy and get value out of, rather than the deferred life plan of working really hard and grinding and hustling to get to the point where we have lots of money and then we're retired.

2:14And then kind of going back to that life that we could have had when we were younger. What were the keys for you building passive income in the beginning when you started it? And how many recurring streams of income do you have today? Today, there's probably around somewhere between eight and 10 kind of big categories. And within those eight to 10 big categories, there are sort of like dozens, if not hundreds of smaller categories. One of the keys at the beginning was actually learning to code. I still think learning to code is just a ridiculously valuable thing that anyone can do and anyone can learn.

2:44And it just immediately unlocks the ability to generate income from the internet, which you just don't really unlock when you don't know how to code. Kind of in two ways. Number one, I think when you learn how to code, then anytime you have an idea for something. So for example, when I was in med school, I had an idea that, hey, I want to help other people get into med school. The non-coder way of approaching that is, okay, cool, let me run a course, let me create my materials and let me advertise it to my local neighborhood and see if one or two students will, you know, bite and take my course.

3:14Because I knew how to code, because I knew how to make websites, because I'd been doing freelance web design since the age of like 13, I knew that I could make a website for this. and I knew something about marketing. I knew something about ads. I knew something about content marketing. I knew something about SEO. Those are all things that I learned through the learning to code web design trajectory, which meant that when I had this idea for a business, immediately it had a scale far greater than anyone else could have done who didn't know how to make websites and didn't know about this world of the internet.

3:39Later on, a few years down the line, again, in medical school, sort of on the side while I was preparing for my med school exams, me and my brother, we both knew how to code. Neither of us did a degree in computer science or anything, but we kind of dabbled with it on the side. And so we created this software program, again, helping med students because that was the niche that I was in. It was like an online question bank with subscription billing and an interactive kind of system with JavaScript and like React. And if we didn't know how to code, that wouldn't even have been a possibility, let alone something we could have created for ourselves.

4:06Even if you do hire someone. So since then, lots of people have reached out to me saying, hey, I don't know how to code, but I have this idea. How much would it cost to hire a developer to build this thing? And that's always a hard question. It's like, well, it could be 10 ,000, could be 50, could be 100 ,000. And usually that number scares people off. They're like, whoa, I was hoping it would be like$200 for someone in the Philippines, you know, following the Tim Ferriss method. Having tried to outsource things in the past, it's genuinely really hard to outsource something, especially when you don't know about the thing that you're trying to outsource.

4:32You know, I know how to edit videos being a YouTuber. And therefore, when I outsource editing to an editor, I know what I'm doing. Equally, when you know a little bit, at least the basics of how to code, that doesn't mean you necessarily have to code everything from scratch yourself. But it means that you're more able to outsource that because you now have an understanding of the landscape. The other thing of it is when you learn to code, it unlocks an aspect of your brain and opens up your mind to ideas that you just wouldn't have had before. So for example, let's say when people talk about coming up with startup ideas, they say that you shouldn't just try and sit down and think of a startup idea.

5:04You want to find a problem in the world, preferably a problem that you're having yourself, and then think about how you might solve that problem. So let's think a few years ago, let's say you were to think, you know what? It's a real pain in the bum trying to get a taxi because, you know, taxis are expensive. They don't take card. You know, it's an absolute nightmare. If you're not a coder, you think, OK, this is a problem. I wish someone solved it. But if you're a coder, you think, huh, this is a problem. What would it take to solve this problem? Well, I guess all we really need is a middleman app that connects taxis with people who want taxis.

5:33And I suppose you could build that by essentially making a database, by having one table of taxi drivers, having one table of passengers, figuring out some kind of integration with Google Maps API, figuring out some kind of payment system, maybe using Stripe. And all of a sudden, you've built a very prototype version of Uber or Lyft in your head because you know how to code. If you don't know how to code, your mind wouldn't even go in that direction. But if you do, it does. And that is where a lot of the most interesting and most profitable businesses over the last two decades have come from. People who know a little bit about how to code, being able to apply that knowledge to a problem they're having.

6:05And then the rest is history. What is the top three revenue streams that you have on a monthly basis? so i'd say the top one is a live online course that i teach called the part-time youtuber academy that's something that started about a year ago in that time we've taught over a thousand students i think we've done about two million dollars in revenue of which about 1.5 1.6 million dollars is profit which is pretty good and it's been really fun i wouldn't really call that passive income it's very like active in that it's a six-week live course i'm on zoom all the time helping people out it's a very high touch uh very accountability and community focused so that's revenue stream number one.

6:43Revenue stream number two is actually Skillshare. This is completely passive and it is completely mind blowing how much money you can make from Skillshare. So I started making Skillshare courses in September, 2019. The very first course I made was just how to edit videos in Final Cut because I'd been doing it for two years at that point. I didn't really have any experience beyond that, but I just filmed myself editing one of my own videos and talking through it. That class took me one day to film and I hired a freelancer for two days to edit it for about$500. And that class has been making somewhere between$2 ,000 and$5 ,000 a month, every single month since September 2019 for the last two years, without me doing anything marketing at all.

7:21I just have a link to it in my YouTube descriptions and people find it through YouTube, people find it through Skillshare itself. And it's just insane how much money just that one class makes. There's just an endless amount of stuff to teach. And because for me, teaching is the thing that I'm most passionate about and the thing that brings me like intrinsic joy, far more so than saving lives as a doctor or even even the coding thing and so it's pretty easy for me to like learn something and then teach it to other people through camera and i enjoy doing it so it's that perfect match of a thing that pays well a thing that adds value to the world and a thing that i personally enjoy doing as well probably third biggest is actually youtube adsense so i think these days we're making somewhere between 30 to 50 000 a month off of youtube adsense most of that money comes from our older videos so videos that i made three years ago four years ago two years ago are still generating money each month.

8:10And that's why anytime I make a YouTube video, I sort of consider it as their own asset class. It's sort of like an investment, you know, real estate or crypto is an asset class. And you put money in and you expect that money to grow over time. It's sort of the same that if you make a YouTube video, you put the effort in once over a few hours to make the video. And then once it's on the platform and hopefully it's evergreen, people are just watching that as long as it's good. And then you just keep on making money. And so we've got like, I don't know, 400 videos on the channel and each one brings in a few dollars a day.

8:35but you know at scale that ends up being somewhere between 30 and 50k every month it really is just about adding value consistently over a very very very long time and then you just kind of automatically make money you don't even have to think about it very hard if you're doing stuff like youtube one mistake i see a lot of people make is that they focus on the income side of it too early and they don't recognize that ultimately money is just an exchange of value and so the more value you add to the world the more the market rewards that you don't need to be sensational about it you don't need to be too clickbaity you just need to make stuff that's useful that's helpful to some people and it just adds up over time.

9:12I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. And if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you want to make it easier. You want to make it flow. You want to feel abundant. then make sure to go to makemoneyeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is gonna help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following. And thank you for listening to this episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

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10:46Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show. Thank you.