How to Build a Business that Lets you Quit your Job

Ali Abdaal
By the way, in case you haven't heard, my brand new book, feel good, productivity is now out. It is available everywhere books are sold, and it's actually hit the New York Times and also the Sunday Times bestseller list. So thank you to everyone who's already got a copy of the book. If you've read the book already, I would love a review on Amazon. And if you haven't yet checked it out, you may like to check it out.

It's available in physical format and also ebook and also audiobook. Everywhere books are sold. At late 2018, you have that realization that, like, oh, oh, shit. This needs to be my. I need to sort my life out.

You speak to Kehe. He says, write a newsletter every week for 52 weeks. So from January 2020, you're like, weekly newsletter, nothing's happening. Nothing's happening. You do this for nine months, up until September, and you're like, literally nothing is happening.

I've got 100 subscribers on my weekly newsletter. I'm saving away writing this thing, man. Khi's advice is not working. What the hell's going on here? While you're working full time in September, you decide, screw it, I'm going to do it on Twitter just to accelerate my feedback loop.

You do 27 days on Twitter, nothing really happens. You have small amounts of traction, but nothing major. Day 28, you're like, I'm just going to get to my 30 days. And your 28th day, something good happens. Your tweet thread about Balaji goes viral.

And now there's all this traction. 500 subscribers. Five x to your newsletter subscribers. Overnight, you've got more Twitter followers, and you decide, shit, I need to capture this attention. So you may make a $19 notion template that summarizes podcasts.

Make $600 off that, which breaks your brain. And then a couple of days later, you make five k for doing a copywriting client person, ghostwriting for that person. And that breaks your brain again because you're like, shit. I've gone from making nothing for nine months to within the course of, like, two weeks, making $5,600 from literally just writing on the Internet what the actual fuck is going on? And then quickly after that, you start thinking, okay, what about a 30 day accountability thing?

You put it out on Twitter, 50 people sign up and pay you $49 to do this accountability thing. And then every day, you're like, on Zoom calls and shit, like slack groups and keeping people accountable, helping them do the thing. And at the end of that, you decide, you know what? I'm going to have 51 on one Zoom calls with everyone in this group, understand the product here and then that eventually within a few months becomes ship 30 for 30. We then start making forty k a month in addition to your day job.

And that takes us to like five hundred k a year ish. So we're halfway there to our kind of million dollars, million dollars goal. But zero to 500k is also just like a fucking huge journey. And I imagine a lot of people listening to this are like, bloody hell, if I get a five, I'd be happy with five hundred k a year. That's pretty good.

I had lots of questions. Yes. So you've said a bunch of things throughout this whole journey that I've been taking some notes on. I'd love to just riff on some of these. Absolutely.

So you said early on, if you want to quit your job, don't quit your job. I wonder if you can expand on that a little bit. Yes. There are three types of ways to be compensated in the world. You have jobs, careers and businesses.

Dickie Bush
So a job, you trade dollars for hours. So you show up, you're a Starbucks barista, you get paid $12 and you give them some of your time. A career is similar, but you're trading performance for dollars. So you are in some way generating revenue for the business, whether that's through sales or whether that's through highly productive work that legitimately. If they fired you, that business would make less money and you're harder to replace.

And then you have a business which is you're trading other people's time and performance for your own money. So in the beginning, you should only ever work a job where you're trading time for money if you are getting paid to learn. So you need to be learning skills during that time. A career you should stick with and try to get to as quickly as possible. So first step, don't quit your job, but try to get into a career versus a job.

So if you're listening to this and it's, hey, I'm only trading dollars for hours, find a way to get into a career that has somewhere down the line where you're going to have some kind of ownership or aligned incentives. Now, why I say don't quit your job is because then I said this at the beginning, you operate purely from scarcity rather than abundance. So if I had quit my job and I made that $400 selling podcasts, I would have said, oh man, I need to go make way more on this. So I got to double down on it. But that was the wrong vehicle.

That would not have gotten me to where I want to go. So you end up. I had to say no to that, and I had to say no to more ghostwriting clients. That would have taken me to probably five k a month. If I really double down on selling podcasts summaries, if I really doubled down on ghostwriting, I probably could have gotten to ten or 15 or 20.

But I had to say no to both of those. Why? Because they weren't going to be enough to replace the full time job income that I had, which was my whole goal at the end of the day. So I say, don't quit your job. Instead, set a goal to make two times as much income from your side hustle than your full time job.

Ali Abdaal
Ooh, why? Before you quit, that seems like a tall order. Because it's going to force you to think a little bit bigger, because you're not going to able, you're not going to ever quit your job. If this is truly your goal. Like, you want full entrepreneurial ownership over your trajectory, that's not for everyone.

Dickie Bush
And I don't. I'm not someone who's like, everyone's an entrepreneur. Not everyone's an entrepreneur. Not everyone wants to have the risk and volatility that comes with it. Some people want to execute a roadmap and be a part of a team that has shared upside, but less downside.

You don't lose that, you don't lose the whole business. You could go get another job or another career, just switching industry. So why two times? Two times is enough that due to the natural volatility of side hustles and Internet income and things like that, there's going to be ups and downs. If you can prove to yourself that you can get to two times, which I think for most people, you set the goal of like ten to month.

I think for most people it's like two times. For me, that was around. I wanted to get to like fifteen k a month, 15 or 20. And that forces you to say, I'm not gonna quit until I get there, which is gonna force me to think different, and I'm going to leave from a place of security rather than scarcity. So I left Blackrock and my monthly income, this was, I didn't leave until May of 2022.

So the story we just told, where I was at month in January 21, I worked full time, remotely, for another 15 months because I was still terrified. I was like, this is all going to go away. No way. This thing is real. I had to really prove to myself.

So I was like, two or three times as much where it was now, more of a personal financial risk for me to stay rather than to leave. And I'm grateful for that because I patiently waited. I really built something sustainable rather than, hey, I just need to get to two times, and then I'm going to squeeze all the juice out of this, and then I'm going to quit my job. And then what? No, so I force you, forces you to think long term, and so I say two times as much sustainably for three to six months before you quit, which I think goes against most people's advice, like, you got to burn the ships and you got to go all in on your passion.

It's like, no, lean on that security, a little bit of the job you have, make sure you're still learning something, and then use the extra time, because, to be honest, you have a lot more time than you think. If you brought the level of intensity that I think is required to build something on the side, and you're going to force yourself to be more efficient because you only have that many hours, whereas if you were to quit, and I found this out the hard way, when I did eventually quit, I thought, oh, I have all this time, now I'm going to go make way more. It's like, no, you just find work that you probably shouldn't have been doing in the first place. Yeah. So instead, take that Parkinson's law of, I only have 4 hours a day, 2 hours before work, 2 hours after, and I have to give this thing to two times income.

What does that look like? You immediately think differently than if you had all day, which is a good forcing function to build an efficient, highly leveraged compounding business, rather than something that isn't going to get you eventually where you want to go. Okay. I know a lot of people who are doing the side hustle thing on the side, and they say, oh, I get home from work and I just have no energy. I just cannot bring myself to, like, grind on the side hustle.

Ali Abdaal
But if I quit my job, I would have all this spare time, and I've got savings, and I can dip into my savings if I need to. And people say, you should invest in business, right? So, like, you could quit, and it's like all this kind of stuff. What would you say to the person who says, man, I'm so knackered working my day job that I get home and have no energy and I just have to flop in front of the tv and watch Netflix, because that's the only thing I have the mental energy to do at that point. Time and money are similar in that most people think having more of it will change your behavior, but it's just going to expose and amplify your bad behaviors.

Dickie Bush
So if you are inefficient and unable to be energized enough to work 2 hours before and 2 hours after work, more than likely when you have the full day to work on that thing, you're still not going to be able to do what you think you're going to. Oh, it's tough love. It's true. And I recognize this, it is tough love because that is usually an excuse of once I have this time, then I'll be able to do it. Once my job slows down, then I'll be able to do it.

But I live by this simple thing that no one is coming to save you. Every outcome in your life is 100% your responsibility. So if you can't muster up the energy to take control of those extra 2 hours, if you're given your entire day to do it, you're still not going to. So why not start with taking control of the four extra hours you have before you try to take control of your whole day? Because it's way harder and you're going to find that you're not quite as efficient as you thought you were.

Ali Abdaal
Yeah. So yeah, I like, I like the two x rule. Um, for me I, so I quit the job two years into it, but it's because there was a natural breakpoint two years into it. Where in the UK at least for people who aren't aware, it's like you, you do the first two years and then, and then your paths open up because you have to do the first two years to unlock all the other paths and so loads of people take a break at that point to travel to Australia and that was my plan, but it was 2020 and so Australia closed all their borders. But people were asking like, well you were making all this money, why didn't you quit the job sooner?

And it was because I wanted the security. I was like no, this is still a side hustle, this YouTube thing. And I was making like forty k a year in the day job and it was only the point where I was making forty k a month that I considered quitting where I was that mean I was going to quit anyway and stuff. But like that, its so nice having a solid backup option. Yes.

And operating from a place of security where its like all the money im making with my side hustle is pure upside because my basic expenses are covered by the day job. And I think that kind of overlap where you overlap the day job with the side hustle is generally a pretty solid way to do it. If you have all day, youre not going to make ten times as much more. And that's where people go wrong, is they think, oh, if I had ten times more time, I'd make ten times as much money. Not true.

Dickie Bush
You have to be thinking, how can I get the most out of those 4 hours? How can I deploy those in a high leverage way where because you have less time, you're not going to do all the superfluous stuff that you end up doing when you have all day. So I got 4 hours. What is the highest single usage of that time to move the business forward? It forces you to only address the bottleneck of your business at any given time.

Not, I need to go build a logo and I need to have this perfectly optimized blog post page. It's like, no, I have 3 hours today before I got to go sell my soul again. What am I going to go work on that's going to help me eventually escape this? Yeah, there's no time for waste. There's no time for any of that.

So this goes back to an overarching problem that if you don't have the energy to spend 3 hours working on a side hustle because you're tired from your full time job is exactly why you should go spend 6 hours working on your side hustle. Because if your full time job is tiring you out that much, you have to get out of there. But you can't just quit because then you're completely on your own. So it's even more important. So you should instead look at it like a indicator of if I am this tired, it means I'm spending 8 hours of my day getting my energy zapped by this full time job vampire.

I need to do everything I can, which is going to take an uncomfortable amount of effort and intensity. If I had looked back on the amount of work I did during 2021, I don't know if I could go do it again. If you told me this is what it's going to look like to really scale this thing while still working full time, I'd probably say that sounds kind of horrible. Like, that sounds definitely uncomfortable and a grind, but I'm on a completely different life trajectory because of short. Just stuffing as much effort and intensity into that year as I possibly could, that then changes your entire opportunity set.

Ali Abdaal
Yeah, like one plug I'll do for this little book feel, feel good productivity. It's basically about how to solve this problem of like, feel like, if you feel like you don't have, if you feel like you are completely drained from the end of your workday, the principles in this book are basically, if you can find a way to make it feel good, generate positive emotions. Positive emotions generate energy. Then you end up being more productive in your day job, but you also end up having way more energy to give to your side hustle or your friends or family, whatever the thing might be. Lots of signs, lots of stuff.

Check out the book link down below. I've interviewed so many millionaires on this podcast, and I always like to ask the question of like, they all talk about work life balance once they're already a multimillionaire. And I always like to ask, literally 100% of them had that grind intensity phase as they were building the thing up. And I like to ask, do you think you could have done the thing without the grind and the intensity? Could you have had work life balance, taken care of your health, maintained your social relationships, slept eight to 9 hours a day, gone to the day job, performed well, done your hobbies, done your self care and your yoga and your meditation, your journaling and your ice baths, and also built this business at the same time?

Dickie Bush
No. And if you think you can, I think you are wrong. Because the amount of effort and intensity it takes to take something from zero to enough to quit your full time job is more likely more than ten times more than you currently think. And that is going to mean sacrificing things now for the ability to unlock them in the future. So, for example, I cut out a lot of.

I didn't drink alcohol for two years. During that time. I didn't party, I didn't do any really social events. Luckily, this was during 2021, where things were still kind of up in the air. But I sacrificed a lot during that time.

But it's the single greatest sacrifice I've ever made. And so I like to think of work life balance, not through going through the middle, but purely operating at extremes. So I achieve balance from being at both ends of the barbell rather than this middle path, halfway on, halfway off, where I think all mediocrity comes from spending time in that grayscale of not fully working, but not fully resting, not sprinting, but not, you know, fully recovering. It's I'm halfway in and I'm halfway out. Whereas instead it's, I want to bring full effort and intensity now and then I'm going to be fully relaxed when I want to.

So, for example, it was during my 2021, it was 04:30 a.m. To 07:30 a.m. I was building ship 30. I'd work all day, Blackrock and then 430. I'd stop working pretty early there.

You know, just, I was working on my computer in a different state. So for, for all intents and purposes, I was just logging off and then doing the side hustle. And then I did that pretty much every day for the entire year. If I hadn't have done that, I wouldn't have been able to shorten the eventual growth loop. Yeah.

To hit that escape velocity where things could change. And you never know when opportunities are going to go away. So you have to bring all of that just effort into whatever opportunity you presently have because you don't know how that's going to change. Yeah. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal
Like, one way of thinking about it that I like is that most normal people have a job. Like, it is unusual to be able to make enough money on the side to double your income, to be able to quit your job to do that. That is an audacious, outrageous outcome, and outrageous outcomes require outrageous inputs. There's just no getting around that fact. I'm curious, to what extent did this feel like a grind versus, if you look back on it, like, how much.

How much did it feel like a grind to you, versus how much it looked like a grind to other people? It never felt like a grind because all I was doing was considering the opposite world if I wasn't putting in that amount of effort. And so I think this goes back to your question of, like, oh, if I can't bring myself to work on my side hustle, you need to figure out how to project forward the way you feel right now, five years into the future, and feel that visceral reaction of how horrific that would be to look back on and then bring that motivation back to the current moment and then go work on that thing. Because for me, this was all I would think about was if I was too tired or if I was, you know, lacking self belief or whatever, all the different obstacles that could prevent me from scaling that work on the side. I just put myself in that 38 year old shoes, or if I have a son and I'm not able to spend as much time with him as I want, go to his little league game, just make.

Dickie Bush
Be the best father I possibly could, I'm going to be maximally full of regret, and then I would fast forward to that person, feel that feeling of just immense pain and then come back to the present moment and I'd start working. Oh, interesting. So, yeah, I think my approach to this was a little different. So that sounds like you're motivating yourself through the avoidance of a painful negative outcome. So for me, the way that I was always trying to do it was recognizing very early on that this YouTube thing, we're doing it on the side with a day job and everything like that.

Ali Abdaal
It's only going to be sustainable if it in fact generates energy and does not feel like a grinder. And so what I tried to do was try my best to recognize that if, like, humans fundamentally do the things that they want to do and we don't do the things that we don't want to do. So how do I make myself actually want to do the YouTube thing? How do I build systems and processes and add in these little sprinkles of stuff that makes it become more fun? And so in the early days, while I was editing my videos, that involved treating it like a bit of a video game.

How can I speed up? How can I challenge myself to only use keyboard shortcuts for this edit? How can I challenge myself to add in a new transition every time? How can I, while I'm driving to work, watch YouTube videos like in the background at double speed that are all about editing tutorials? So I feel like I'm learning, because learning is one of those things that drives intrinsic motivation.

And I recognize a lot of these little levers that I could pull. How can I, like, while I'm on the toilet in my day job, plan a video or notion on my phone so that when I get home, I can film the thing in record time, I can turn it into a bit of a game. Like, there are all those sorts of psychological processes I was doing to be like, I need to find a way to make this fun. Similarly with the gym, at the moment, I don't enjoy going to the gym and therefore I don't go as much as I know I want to. And so constantly I'm thinking the thing for me, imagining a future, my body is fine.

It's not going to be, it's not terrible. It's in that sort of region, beta paradox, where the thing is not sufficiently bad, at least for me, because I quite enjoyed medicine. It's not so bad that I'm just like, fuck, I have to take action. But it's that middle ground where it's like, I know that for me at least, motivating myself through positivity is the way. And so I tried to make sure that it didn't happen 100% of the time.

There were days where I didn't feel like filming the video and I filmed the video anyway and I was glad for it in the long run. But like 90% of the time I actually think I enjoyed the process. Yeah, I think you need both. So in one case, you do need the cost of inaction to be high enough where you show up when you don't want to. But then on other days you need to design whatever it is you're doing in a way that is fulfilling and you are growing in the process.

Dickie Bush
So I like to think of when you're evaluating a new opportunity, you should think about three questions before you say yes to it. So if you're thinking about building a side hustle or thinking about writing on the Internet or whatever it is you're evaluating, should be able to answer three questions. One, is there no way that this is a failure? And when I ask that it's is there upside no matter what happens? So I'm going to use the example of writing on Twitter.

The downside, if I wrote every day for a month, was that I better understood the podcast that I listened to. Is that downside? No, zero. So when I took on that 30 day writing challenge, when I took on the year long newsletter, it was the downside is there is none. Worst case, I learned.

So you should have a worst case scenario that is still a positive outcome. Second, you need exponential upside if you are able to stick with it for the long term. So exponential upside if it works out. So writing on newsletter, writing on Twitter, that's exactly what happened. I unlocked that exponential upside.

And then third, you need to be able to stick with it. Can I stick with this long enough to see the benefits of compounding? Nice if you can say yes to all of those. So there's no downside. I still learned something.

There's exponential upside. And I can stick with this long enough. You have a potent combination to eventually do something that you could do for the rest of your loan, your life. So if you do that same thing with YouTube, worst case, you got better at public speaking, you explored your curiosities, you read more books, you listened to more things. Pure exponential upside.

Exactly what happened. You hit 5 million subscribers or whatever. And then lastly, would you be able to stick with this? In the beginning, you made one video a week, something like that, and you could definitely have stuck to that for at least you say it's 1st, 20 videos or 30 videos or oh, like. One video week for two years.

Right. I was thinking two years. Exactly. And so all you said was, all I have to do is stick with this long enough to see the benefits of compounding and then that number two gets unlocked. Yeah.

So I think that way when you're evaluating something, don't get into it. If you know that you couldn't stick to it for two years. Was I going to be able to write a newsletter every week? I sure hope so. I sure hope I could spend 3 hours.

And I designed it in a way that when I set out to it initially, all I was doing was taking work I was already doing and putting it out there on the Internet. So the marginal increase of time was not much. And so I think as you're evaluating, anyone listening to this evaluate something where you're spending time packaging work you're already doing in a way that there's no downside, exponential upside, and you could stick with it sustainably. Yeah, yeah. One of the tricky things I find when people are trying to build a YouTube channel on the side of a day job is if that YouTube channel requires a lot of extra research, it's never going to happen.

Ali Abdaal
Whereas if they're tapping into pre existing expertise, like in my case, I was documenting what I already learned and I was already listening to books. And so it's not that hard making videos about them. But if I started a crypto channel, for example, because that was big at the time, it was like, okay, I'm going to have to research every bloody coin that I. It's going to take 20 hours of research for every video. I'm not inherently doing those things by default.

So now it just like Ten X is the amount of effort I have to put into a video. And that's unsustainable. And it's sort of like projecting this two years out. Like, what is the format that I can actually stick to, to stick to for the next two years? Yes.

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Dickie Bush
We call it the two year test. And so it's what should you create content around? You should look backwards two years and reflect on skills you built, hobbies you've picked up, life transitions you've made, jobs you quit job you started. All of this knowledge that's now extremely obvious to you, but would be incredibly valuable to yourself two years before, all of that is sitting in your head. Now you just need to go and share it and distill it and crystallize it.

Or you can look forward two years. So your first two years of YouTube or your first YouTube videos or study videos. Correct. You had already learned and done that for two years before that. All you did was spend a little bit of extra time packaging them up and sharing it.

Ali Abdaal
Yeah. Or you can take the reverse and say, I want to look for two years. What are all the things I want to go learn and then make your creation and all the ideas you share, documenting that process of going and learning that thing. So there's really two paths. And I think that infinite game, and we're playing this right now, it's moving ahead, documenting the journey to the people behind you, and then learning something ahead of you, documenting yourself, learning that, teaching it to people behind you, and that is the infinite.

Dickie Bush
I can continue to progress and play this forever while getting all the upside of learning, meeting people, building valuable things. And that's been my driving framework, where for two years, all I talked about was how to write on the Internet. All I did, I wrote hundreds of threads, built hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. Just talking about one thing. How do you write?

Well, I studied all the people in front of me, distilled all those frameworks, and now I'm at a point where what's next for me? Well, I'm trying to get the business to this point. I'm going to go learn from the people ahead of me. I'm going to distill that and then continue to kind of document this journey all the way to 100 million beyond. Yeah, nice.

Ali Abdaal
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm doing with stuff. It's like starting off with studying where it's documenting, looking back productivity was initially documenting looking forward because it was like I was having to learn the principles to apply to do the stuff with my day job. But now I consider myself and people call me a productivity expert. And so I'm not really reading more productivity books, tbh. Correct.

But I'm reading books about business, health, fitness and relationships. Yes. And so that's the stuff that I'm documenting, looking forward. But I continue to make productivity study stuff looking back some of the time and how to grow on YouTube stuff looking back. And our products are about the stuff that's looking back that I have genuine expertise in future products and stuff is, I suspect, will be the stuff looking forward.

Or I'd love to make. I'd love to write a book on fitness, on relationships, based on the things I'm now learning about these things, you're. Going to go learn them yourself, and then the eventual product that you sell will be the distillation of everything you learned on that journey. And that's why you're going to be able to scale forever because you're eventually going to have kids and what are you going to write about? Feel good parenting.

Dickie Bush
There you go.com dot. Need to register that.com before someone listens to this. Exactly, exactly. And that, I think, is the path of sustainable, long term compounding value creation on the Internet is how can I put myself where I'm continually learning, distilling, learning, distilling, learning, distilling. And you're just leveling up, leveling up, leveling up until you reach the end game.

You've documented the entire journey all the way there so people can watch the full thing. And then you're sitting there like, all right, time to keep going. And you just keep it up. There's a. So in, I think in like Zen Buddhism or something, there's a phrase of, like, before enlightenment and after enlightenment.

Ali Abdaal
And before enlightenment, it's like, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. And I was thinking what? I was like, I really like that idea. Like, for the last year, last three years working on this book, I've had in my mind, like, once the book is released, then dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

But now the book's done and we're just waiting for the publication date. So I was thinking, in my mind, it's like before the book and after the book as like, before enlightenment. After enlightenment, before the book, learn stuff, make videos. After the book, learn stuff, make videos. Nice.

That's the infinite game. Exactly. Learn stuff, make videos, write a book. Every now and then that's the method. It's a dream life, and it's something that every single person on earth can do.

Yeah. Every single person listening to this, watching this, can say, what do I uniquely already know? Talk about that. What do I really want to know? Go learn that and then talk about it, and then just do that for.

The rest of your life. There's a lot of people that have the limiting belief are like, oh, but like, I don't know, like, why would anyone want to hear from me? Like, do you get that sort of question a lot with your students? Yes. And it's, first, you're underestimating the scale of the Internet, where you don't need that many people listening to you and being interested in what you're doing.

Dickie Bush
And then second, you're underestimating the amount of experience and the value of that experience that you already have, where every single decision, lesson, mistake, hour you've put in has led to where you are now. The people who would most be interested are the ones that are on your journey two years behind you. So that's why we call it the two year test, because imagine you get to sit down right now with Ollie from two years ago. Oh, man. What would you do in that?

So how grateful would two years ago Ollie be to be like, all right, man, tell me everything. I screwed up. Tell me where I was wrong. Tell me the surprises. Tell me all that.

And that's what the Internet allows you to do, is put your ideas in front of those people who are at that same point on the journey two years ago, and they're going to be overwhelmingly grateful that you're distilling everything you've learned and sharing it with them. Yeah, I think that's a thing that I still don't. Don't quite appreciate, because whenever I sit down to film a video, I have the imposter syndrome of like, but is this really valuable enough? There's that blocker. So many other youtubers that I know are writers.

Ali Abdaal
It's just like, why would anyone want to hear this? It's just. Is it too obvious? It's like, oh, I don't have enough evidence. I need more research.

All this kind of stuff, it's. Would it have been valuable to you two years ago? Yes. Publish it? No.

Dickie Bush
Make it better. Yeah. Simple. And you'll know. You'll know the answer if you've done a good enough job that this would be valuable.

All of the ship, 30 was just distilling everything I learned to that person who started the newsletter and bashed his head against the wall for an entire nine months, seeing no success. What is everything that I wish he knew. Getting started. And that's what ship 30 teaches. So it accelerates that entire painful process.

Ali Abdaal
Yeah. And so that's kind of the job of us creating on the Internet. We go do that hard work and make those mistakes and live that life and whatever, and then save everyone else all the time. And that's actually what they're paying for when they buy a product or subscribe to a newsletter or read something you've done. It's that value exchange that I wouldn't front loaded all of these.

Dickie Bush
Why is this valuable to you now? Because you're getting to borrow that expertise and lessons and failures for free or for a marginal amount of money compared to what I had to go find out on my own. Okay, so I wonder if this could be an interesting challenge for anyone who's gotten to this point in the podcast. We are, I think, around an hour and a half, 2 hours in whatever it is. If you like the idea of creating content on the Internet, whether it's writing or videos, create a list of everything, like the big categories of things that you have learned in the last two years that you wish you could go back and tell your two year old self yourself from two years ago.

Ali Abdaal
And also make another list of all of the cool things you want to learn over the next two years. And email them to us aliyah.com dot. Or leave a comment. Or leave a comment. Oh yeah, if you're watching this on YouTube, leave a comment down below.

That's a good idea. Keep on thinking of podcasts like how do we get. Yeah, don't email us, leave a comment underneath the YouTube video with your two lists. And we would love to read them. And here's.

Dickie Bush
I'll just give a point. For anyone who has made it this far, I think 95% of content consumption is a complete waste of time. I think it's procrastination, disguise as productivity. You should be able to answer two questions if you are listening to this right now. One, is this helping me create more in the future?

So when I sit down to listen to something, I'm going at it with a lens through one of two lenses. One, is this going to help me create more in the future? So this is going to inspire me. And if you're not at a point right now where you are creating, you should curate the insights you learned from every single thing you sit down to listen to, because you're going to learn it better this was my way. I got started with writing 30 days of curation threads.

So that's number one. If that's, yes, great. But just make sure you actually go and create more because of it. Don't just listen to this and then say, oh, that was helpful. Like, next, actually sit down and distill your takeaways.

Or number two, it's is this helping me remove the bottleneck in my business or personal life that you've identified is like the thing holding you back. And if you consciously ask yourself those two questions going into everything you consume, you'll realize, like, yeah, maybe this Tim Ferriss episode is helpful, but it's really not doing either of those two things because I'm not going to do anything with it, and it's not really helping me. It's kind of just entertainment. And if that's fine, if you accept that, but I think I'm always wary of people who are procrastinating. Disguises productivity just listening and watching and reading all these things that aren't really helping them move the needle.

Ali Abdaal
Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. It'll be interesting to see, like, we'll be able to see on the retention how many people listen to this point in the podcast and how few people are actually going to leave a comment down below with the stuff that, with those two lists of things. Yep.

Dickie Bush
But if you do, you are. So you could do that. Or you could say, hey, here are the five things I learned from this podcast. Tweet it out. If you tweet it out, guess what you and I are going to do?

We're going to share it. Right? Because at the end of the day, you're saving us time. Because I'd love to go relisten to this. Well, I probably, but I'd rather just have someone go and distill, just like I did for my original ghostwriting gig.

And then I still point to so many of the frameworks that guide my life back to that 30 day challenge because I thought so deeply about all of them. I had to distill them in a way that was tight, concise, crisp, and they're still some of the guiding ones that I think about, all because of writing and sharing them. So challenge to everyone. Do something. If you made it this far, I think we still want to talk about some things, but if you've made it this far, don't just get to the end and do nothing with this.

Actually put some of it into practice somehow. Nice. Absolutely. So many questions. One point I want to say on the whole, like, I don't have enough energy when I get home from work situation is that every parent I've ever spoken to says that, oh, shit.

Ali Abdaal
You know, I didn't think I had enough time before I had the kid, and then I had the kid and suddenly I realized I was so inefficient with my time before I had the kid, and I found a way to make it work with the kid. It's like, right now, if you're listening to this and you don't have kids, you probably think you don't have much time in your week. You think, oh, you know, I'm very rarely sitting around just twiddling my thumbs. Yes. And everyone, every parent I've ever spoken to is like, oh, my God, when you have a kid, you realize how much time young people have and youth is wasted on the young and all that kind of thing.

Exactly. And reminder to us, we both don't have kids right now. The fact I think about that all the time of if I feel busy right now, I'm not. Yeah, I'm not. Because five years in the future, me, who hopefully has children and a wife and a great family and all that, it's like I still want to be building things, so I'm going to have to figure it out.

Dickie Bush
Then I look back, I know five years in the future, me is laughing at any time I feel stressed or busy, it's like, dude, you have no clue what you're getting into, so relax a little bit. Yeah, I kind of. It's like the experience everyone has. Like, you know, there's these high schoolers that complain about not having enough time and you're like, oh, just you wait. There's college students, university kids that came and complained about not having enough time.

Ali Abdaal
And you're like, and I'm just like, bro, just wait until you start a real job and then you'll see that you had all that time. Similarly, the whole, I think time is more malleable than we think it is, but I think energy is also more malleable than we think it is. Like, if someone's listening to this right now and thinking, oh, man, I really want to quit my job and make a million dollars on the Internet, but I don't have the energy. It's like, that's actually just limiting belief. Like, if you're listening to this, you are probably not working to the point, like lifting physical things to the point that you physically are depleted of glycogen stores and you have no ATP left in your and that's not what's going on.

There is this other form of energy that is so psychological where you have convinced yourself that when you get home from work, you don't have enough energy to do the thing. Therefore, all you can do is sit down and watch Netflix and TikTok. And actually, you know, here's another strategy. It's in the book that I like to do. So I like to just think, what are the things that genuinely re energize me?

And then what are the things that I actually do when I am drained? And the things I actually do when I'm drained are TikTok scrolling, Instagram, browsing, Twitter for no reason, just lying on the couch, doing nothing. What are the things that actually energize me? Going for a walk, playing guitar, hanging out with friends, calling my grandma. Like, the things are very different.

And so if you're doing stuff, that is, if you're doing stuff because you are drained, because you think you can't do anything else, ask yourself, is this activity that I'm doing really bringing more energy into my life? And if it's not, find a thing that's giving you energy, like going for a walk, then you'll be energized. And now you can sit down and, like, write a Twitter thread or whatever the thing is that you want to do. I think the behaviors you just mentioned, what do I do when I'm drained? I doom scroll, I eat worse foods.

Dickie Bush
Whatever it is, those are actually the activities that are keeping you drained. Yeah. And so it's a vicious cycle, right? You get home from work and it's, I'm exhausted. So I'm gonna crack open a beer and watch Netflix.

And then I wake up the next morning where I could have gotten up 2 hours earlier and worked on my side hustle. I didn't. Now I'm guilty throughout the day. I'm sitting through my work day. Now I'm even more tired when I get home.

And that, for a lot of people, is 20 years of a hamster wheel. Low energy when they get home. Activities that would drain their energy the next morning, wake up the next morning, low energy zombie their way through the day, get home zombie with their way through the night, on and on and on and on. And so if it's. I don't have enough energy to build my side hustle, it's like, what are all the things you're doing that a high energy person doesn't do?

You don't have to do anything new. You just need to stop doing all the things you're doing that are leading to that state. Yeah. I think the screen time thing on a phone is just so telling. It's just like sickening.

Ali Abdaal
Yeah. Put it as your background, put it as a widget, and it's like, I had 6 hours on Instagram today. What the heck? What did I do? That's why I feel horrible.

Dickie Bush
I'm comparing myself to people all day. Okay, moving on. Okay, so let's say someone's like, cool, I want to write stuff, but how do I find my niche? How does one find a niche? Does one need a niche?

Ali Abdaal
It's like, oh, the market's already crowded. It's like, I want to make YouTube videos. I want to write stuff. But every Tim Ferriss episode has already been summarized. Every atomic habits has been summarized ad nauseam to the point where you don't even know where the circle begins.

The stuff that a lot of people who vibe with us would read or listen to is probably in a fairly small group of things that if they were to just summarize things, they would end up just recreating what other people are also summarizing. Like, how do you think of this idea of niche or trying to get a unique angle or anything like that? So there are a couple ways you go with this. First, if you're creating content and you want to niche down, the easiest way to do it is just use your personal credibility. Apply to whatever.

Dickie Bush
Whatever it is you're summarizing. So sure, atomic habits has been summarized by a thousand people, but you're the only person who's applied it in the way that you applied it. You're the only person who's listened to that Tim Ferriss episode and then ran the experiment like you did yourself. So rather than say, hey, I'm gonna go just summarize, I'm going to summarize the work. And then how I used it, because that is 100% unique.

And that's the same thing I did. I would learn and then I'd say, here's how I'm applying it. And that was what people were actually the most interested in because they summarize it. It's like, great. Now what'd you do with it?

Oh, that's what you did with it. Cool. Now I can go try that. Nice. So that's the number one way to stand out is just recognize that your interpretation of anything that you would summarize is the niche itself.

So that's on the content side, but then on the service side, I think you should niche down as specifically as possible where your ideal client or ideal target customer can 100% say with certainty, this is for me or this is not for me. Hmm, okay, so an example, if I were to go back for my ghostwriting services, I wouldn't just say, hey, I ghostwrite Twitter threads because a lot of people probably saw that when like, yeah, this was granted two and a half years ago. So this was very early in that stage, but I would have niched down and say, I write worldview summary threads for CEO's of copywriting agencies or something like that. Something hyper hyper specific. Where you go, there's no way that there are enough people on earth that would handle that service.

But I'd say, well, first off, I don't need that many people because I'm charging $5,000 for it. And then second, if ten people, ten knocked on my door and were like, hey, could you do this for me? I'd be overwhelmed. And so that broke my brain around how big of an audience do you actually need when you're providing a high value service? You do not need that many.

You just need one or two or three or four. And that should change the way you think about creating content where it's not how many people can I attract, but it's how many of the ideal person can I have come across my profile and my content, or whatever it is I'm offering and say, I don't know how you got so specific and really felt like you were creating this for me, but that's exactly what I need. Where do I wire the check? Hmm, nice. I like that.

Ali Abdaal
I like the sort of, and here's how I applied the thing as well. That's really good, because I think a lot of people are worrying like, what about AI? What about AI? Summaries of stuff. Is that going to put the thread boys out of business?

I think the answer is yes, if the thread boys are just summarizing. But if the thread boys are summarizing and applying and sharing insights from a human's life, then it's very difficult for AI to kind of recreate that. AI will not replace you, but someone using AI will replace you. Hmm. Can you finally, so just like you said, are the thread boys going away because AI is going to summarize?

Dickie Bush
No, the ones who are summarizing things faster and then using that extra time to run more experiments or like combine things in new and novel ways, or just bring things into their own way of operating because of the amount of time saved that if I could go back instead of taking all the notes myself. I would use AI to summarize that podcast and then say expand more on the personal side of how I applied it. So I would have stood out even more versus competing with myself back then who had to spend 5 hours doing the summary on my own and then so I would be able to create twice as much or run twice as many experiments, that kind of thing. Nice. What are your thoughts on summarizing curating stuff versus creating original stuff?

I think no one is creating truly original things right now. You're always looking back on someone dating back to philosophers. Everything at the end of the day is some kind of, some derivative of socrates or Buddha or whatever brought all the way to the present moment. I mean, you look at quotes from tens of thousands of years ago that are just all about being consistent and getting started, and those are just repackaged. I think, like Rumi, I think has a quote of the journey is not revealed, or some like, you do not see the full journey, but it reveals itself along the way or something like that.

I was like 5000 years ago, people were still saying, you should just get started and you should be consistent. So more or less everything is a remix of something in the past. Now I think you need to go and inhale a lot of different worldviews to come up with your own frameworks. So for example, I studied Gary Halbert and David Ogilvy and Tim Ferriss and Brene Brown and all these great writers looked at the way that they, their writing habits and their routines and the way they constructed sentences and the way they came up with their own frameworks. I wrote Twitter threads summarizing all of those for an entire year and built up a couple hundred thousand followers on Twitter just doing that.

I had probably written 100 threads about other people's writing frameworks before I one time came up with my own. So you have to start with curation in some way and then use that to just kind of remix and say, how do I actually apply these? And then you can eventually get into creating your own things. Yeah, so it's not an either or. I'm still in a curation phase, but this goes back to looking back two years or looking ahead.

If you're looking back, you can create because you've done things through that personal credibility perspective. Then you can repackage and say, here's my framework for x, here's how I did it. But if you're looking ahead, you don't know. Like for example, for you, you're going down the fitness rabbit hole. You could not write a thread of, like, here's how to get jacked, or here's how to do all these other things.

Ali Abdaal
No, but I will be able to eventually. Yes, exactly. So for now, you're going to curate and distill the people ahead of you. Yeah. And then 2 miles, you're going to write a book called two years.

Yeah, two years. Once I'm jacked, then feel good fitness is coming up. Exactly right. And then it'll be Ollie's framework for feel good fitness. Yeah.

Dickie Bush
And that's the whole path. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. If I think back to the early days of the YouTube channel as well, it was literally just curation.

Ali Abdaal
It was like, well, here's a paper that explains all these study techniques. Here they are. And productivity as well. Like this productivity book that one. Make time getting things done.

All of these were just me summarizing and curating and saying, and here's how I applied this to my life. Yes. And then three years later, I now have enough knowledge to be able to write my own book that has my own frameworks, which are heavily borrowed from other people's and stuff, as everything is. But it's like my personal take on this thing. Whereas even when I got the deal, I got the book deal three years ago, I was like, I don't have any original thoughts about this.

Dickie Bush
Yes. But through immersing myself in that thing, and I realized that, oh, actually, I've been reading about this for ten years. I've done a psychology degree. I can understand papers. Like, I know how to make videos and how to summarize things.

Ali Abdaal
Like, I can now kind of pull all the threads together and weave them into a framework, taking my own personal experiences into account and stuff. And that's where we get original stuff. The way we think about this in chip 30 is picture yourself as a third grader. The coolest people in the world are not 8th graders. They're fourth graders.

Dickie Bush
They're the people one year ahead of you. Because all you want to do is go, wow, what's it like to have ten minutes extra recess? Or you're at the new lunch room, what's the new lunchroom like? Or what's this teacher like? If you tried to go talk to an 8th grader?

They're living a completely different life where you can't even have the conversation with them. So, on the Internet, we are all third graders. We have people right ahead of us that we can learn from, and we have people right behind us that we can teach. You don't have to be an expert to talk about whatever it is. Eventually you'll be in 8th grade and you can write the feel good productivity book.

But wherever you're at now, just pick the people marginally ahead, distill them, pick the people marginally behind, educate them. And we've kind of drilled on this quite a bit, but that's the whole path. Yeah. Nice. Um, we mentioned a couple of things that have broken your brain.

Ali Abdaal
That making that first $600, um, getting that five k Paypal check from the copywriting client. Can you think of any other things that have had such a sort of like, whoa, my kind of moment for you. So the first dollar, the first 5000, the first time something went viral when I didn't have that many Twitter followers, that was one that broke my brain. The first time you have someone sell something else on your behalf, the first time you have an employee do something you used to do, it's basically, as I talk this out out loud, it's the first time you recognize a new piece of leverage your brain should break. Yes.

Dickie Bush
So the first time you publish something on the Internet and someone across the world reads it, that's new. The first time you make a dollar that you've never met the person, that's new. The first time someone handles 10 hours of work that you use to do yourself and that unlocks a new 10 hours. The first time you sell something, when someone else does the actual sale for you or an email does the sale for you. I think where I'm going from here is the first time I take a stake in a business that I'm not the face of and that generates, that's going to break my brain.

The first time I sell a business for ten times its revenue multiple and realize that I front loaded ten times my ten x of cash flow and sold it at once, that'll probably break my brain. So I'm looking forward. There's a bunch of things that I want to accelerate the brain breaking by going and doing. And I think, as I say it out loud, it's each time you feel leverage in a different way. I was a computer science major, and in college I was creating apps.

The first time I put an app on the App Store and had other people use it, and it was like, wow, I wrote that and now it's on 500 people on campus's phone and they're using it. That's kind of crazy. And so it's all about feeling leveraged for the first time, and it's addicting. Yeah. The second you feel you're like, oh, that's part of my life forever.

Now I'm going to always have that. And then we're just kind of stacking that as we go. This episode of Deep Dive is brought to you by brilliant. Brilliant is an amazing learning resource that allows you to level up your skills and your knowledge and understanding in maths and data science and computer science. Now, what I like most about brilliant is that it's a super fun and engaging way to learn.

Ali Abdaal
It's not based on dry lectures and dry theory. Instead, what it's based on is engaging and interactive quizzes and games and problems to solve. And so you try and solve a problem and then they give you the information you need. And through the process of getting that information, you then learn enough to be able to solve the problem. And so it's a really engaging and dynamic way to learn that's actually really fun.

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So thank you so much, brilliant, for sponsoring this episode. There was one time in my third year of university, I was, like, 21. I was giving a talk for the Islamic Society, like, in the local prayer room for, like, seven people called how to study for exams an evidence based guide. This is when I was 21. Four years before the YouTube channel.

No, three years before the YouTube channel. And we had a Facebook event for it. And that Facebook event went viral and, like, it had 30,000 impressions, a Facebook event. And, like, 300 people clicked attending on it because they were like, what the shit? That's cool.

And that was like a brain breaking moment of like, wait a minute, like this one talk that I was gonna get for, like, seven of my mates because I researched this stuff and knew a little bit about it. Now all of a sudden, 350 people have clicked attending, and we have to hire a big lecture theater for me to give this talk. And seeing, like, 100 or so people show up to this talk and get value from me. Giving a PowerPoint presentation, talking about evidence based study techniques, that was a moment that I kept on thinking back to as I started the YouTube channel. I was like, if a talk for a local audience of students can have that impact, what if I make a YouTube video about this?

And I recognized it cannot be the first video or the 21st or the 51st. It has to be, like, the 101st video so that I get good enough at making videos before I release that banger. And that was the first video on the channel that went viral, like video number 90 something 94 or something like that. So it took you 94 videos to see success? Yeah, it took 94 videos for me to think, you know what?

I'm now ready to do this. And, like, the stars aligned. I also had a collab with a bigger youtuber, like video number 91. So I was like, I was going to make this video as video number 100. But hang on, I've got some eyeballs on the channel.

Let me make this video right now. And I've poured so much editing effort and research effort into that one video, knowing that this is my shot, this could be the thing. And that was like, yeah, unlocking the leverage and realizing I can give a talk and 20,000 people can see the event and 300 can click attending and 100 can show up. Okay, there's something here, and you seize that opportunity. Yeah.

And then the other one, I remember this vividly when I outsourced my video editing for the first time. And it's like I would film a video. I went to work, I came back home and the video was edited. I was just like, oh, my God, how the hell did this happen? And how the hell did I not know this sooner?

And I speak to people, to your point about buying businesses and having stakes in businesses, Daniel Priestley, Cody Sanchez, they're all like, hey, man, why are you bothering selling courses? Like, come on, how much are you going to make? Like 3 million? Think about buying businesses instead. You make 30 million.

I'm just like, wait, what? No, that doesn't compute. No, no, no. That can't be right. And I know that when it happens, I'll be like, why was I in the info product space?

Dickie Bush
Yeah, but you have to get there. You have to do all the things we talk about on this journey to get to here. I think there's a lot of these entrepreneurs are starting to document their days of like, here's how I spend my time. And I think a lot of beginners are going to go watch that and say, oh, I need to live like that and be thinking like these big deals. No, you need to start at level zero and put in the work where go and study what that person was doing.

And that's why I liked explaining my whole journey is because they might look at what we're doing now and say, oh, I just need to live like that. So, you know, to get to here, you probably have to do a completely different way of what I'm doing now. And that's 100% true and same with you. Yeah, nice. Rewinding a bit.

Ali Abdaal
So you did your first sort of cohort where you charged $49 and you were going to give it back. If people did the thing and you get 50 people, go through the thing. How many people completed the thing successfully in that time? I think it was 35 out of 50 or something like that. Okay, so you refunded 35 people?

Dickie Bush
Yeah, and I think I refunded everyone because I got so nervous at the end. I was like, someone was like, I wrote 28 days. I'm like, yeah, but it was 30, but just take it back. I'm so sorry that I even charged you to begin with. I was still in that, that mode, and I held 51 on one interviews with them because I wanted to know what worked, what didn't, what could be improved, and I wanted to soak as much information out of that cohort as I possibly could.

And this is actually how I advise people to launch a product. And we're making a video on this right now of, you should first have a small group of people that you could potentially offer the service or product to. That was my Twitter following at the time. You could have an email newsletter. You should say, hey, I'm thinking about launching this thing.

I'm thinking about launching a daily writing habit challenge. If I were to go back. Yeah, join the waitlist here if you'd be interested. That's pretty much what I did. Then I would send them a survey and say, hey, what's one thing that you really want me to cover doing this?

Because I'm still working on it, and that's going to give you a bunch of content to create that would provide value to that person. And then afterwards, after you go through it or sell it or whatever, you want to go to everyone who went through it and say, what was the best part? What should I remove? What should I definitely not remove? And you want to iterate your product with as much live feedback as you can, because the only way you can get a product to scale is if all their friends tell people about it.

Every person who takes it tells every one of their friends, and that's what happens with ship 30. Someone joins it, transforms their life. They become consistent in multiple areas. They start to write. We have people who have wanted to write for 40 years, never got around to it, and then finally hit publish on something and go, oh, my God, I got to go tell every one of my other potential writer friends to go take this.

The only way we did that was by honing in on something and eliminating all of the problems that kept people from having success and doubling down on the things that people liked the most. And the only way to do that is through those one on one interviews where you really get to sit right in front of the person and go, tell me about this. Why'd you join? What made you want to quit? And then we iterated the curriculum, and we did that for the first six or seven cohorts, and that was all the work in the beginning that didn't scale.

That allowed us to now be at almost 20 cohorts where the curriculum hasn't changed in about a year and a half because we've handled all those problems. It took us ten cohorts to do it. But once you have that done, you know that the problems aren't going to change, and you kind of have that product set in stone. Yeah, nice. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal
I'm reading a book at the moment called notes from a fellow traveler by Derren Brown, who's a big sort of magician guy here in the UK and a little bit in the US. And he talks about how, for all of his stage shows, like, there's so many changes that happen between, like, day one and day 31. And he has his directors and his crew and stuff watching the show every single night, giving them notes so that they can tweak things and iterate, because it's all based on audience feedback, and you can just tell how people are reacting to things. And so that informs what you add, remove, iterate. And so it's like, even for this ridiculously famous stage performer, there's tweaks that are happening as a result of audience feedback.

Dickie Bush
So two frameworks I want to talk about on that one. How do you actually find out what to improve at any time? There's one bottleneck in your business or in your product or in what in your life that is keeping you from achieving that next goal. All the other work that you could potentially do is a waste of time if you're not working on the most important bottleneck. So what do you mean by bottleneck?

Okay, so picture the word bottleneck comes from. Think about a beer bottle. Yeah. How it gets thinner at the top. If you try to pour it out, it, like, kind of clogs up and it can't pour out all at once because the amount that's in the top trying to pour all the way through the bottom, can't get through fast enough.

So even if you pour more on the top, the bottleneck is limiting the output. That makes sense. So the bottleneck is whatever. I could do a better job explaining this, but the best book on this is the goal by Eliahu Bruhat. Totally.

Go back to brain breaking moments when you realize what bottleneck thinking is of. The way he tells the story is think about a factory. If every piece of equipment is humming, but there's one with a giant backlog that moves way slower than everything else. If you improve every other part of the system, it's still not going to have more output because that one machine is holding everyone else back. And so he has a great.

He's got a great example of this. He's walking with, like, a group of Cub scouts going through. They're on a hike, and there's this chubby kid, I can't remember his name, but it's like Hurley or something like that. And he is trying to keep everyone together and Hurley is sitting in the back, and he's, like, sweating, and he can't keep up with everyone. And so all the kids are dispersed, and he can't keep track of all of them on this hike because he's trying to keep them all in a line, but, like, one keeps falling back, and then they fall back with him.

So the bottleneck of the whole system is the chubby kid who's moving the slowest. So he moves him to the front of the line and makes everyone else fall behind him. So now, you see everyone is not allowed to pass early, and he's the bottleneck. And then they say, how do we fix that? Well, we should probably take his big backpack off and move it to everyone else behind so he can walk a little bit faster.

So they do that, and then they get a little, like, trike and put Hurley on it, and then he's moving even faster and everyone else can continue to keep up. And so it's this idea that unless you're working on the thing that's limiting everything else, you're wasting your time. So that requires you to have a goal, right? Because otherwise, how would you know what the bottleneck is? It always starts with a goal.

Ali Abdaal
Okay. Yes. And then you. So we call this identify, inhale, and iterate. First, you need to identify the goal and the bottleneck to achieving that goal.

Dickie Bush
So let's just paint a like. Like for my business, for example. Correct. Let's do it. Yeah, sure.

So. And this is where it gets a lot of fun. Yeah. The bottleneck is going to be in one of three places. Any way to improve a business, it's.

You can get more leads, better conversion of those leads, or tighter operations to fulfill the product or service. Okay, nice. So your bottleneck is going to lie in one of those three things. So if you don't have enough people buying, you either can tell more people, so you can get more leads, or you can convert them better. If people don't like your product, you need to improve the product before you go and get more leads or try to convert more people, because that's the eventual bottleneck.

Ali Abdaal
Yeah. So you can apply this to business. You can apply it to your personal life. Like, let's say your goal is to write on Twitter every day, but you're not writing on Twitter every day. Well, what's the bottleneck?

Dickie Bush
I'm tired after work. I don't have time. I'm not sitting down and writing. I don't have good ideas. Whatever that is.

You need to identify that and solve it. How do you solve it? We call that step two, which is inhale, which is take in as many resources as you can to remove that bottleneck. So let's go back to your business, and we'll use both these examples because I think it's helpful. If we go back to your business, we need more leads.

How do we get them? Well, we could run paid ads, we could run more Twitter threads. We could do 50 different things. And the whole goal is to pick the most efficient way of removing that bottleneck. So you could go buy a course on how to write better emails.

Ali Abdaal
Could read hormones. New book. Exactly. You pick all the different ways that you could remove that bottleneck, and then you inhale those resources. Then once you have learned enough, and this goes back to the productive procrastination, once you've learned enough to put that system into practice, you need to iterate doing it.

Dickie Bush
So you go read the whole book. I don't think you need to read the whole book. I think you surgically go in and read the one chapter that's going to help you create a better lead magnet and then go apply that. Then you iterate and you go, all right. Is my bottleneck removed?

Yes. Great. Now the business keeps growing. Can I go do that again? Can I go do that again?

So this framework has completely guided my health and fitness journey, my business journey, my relationships. It's everything. I figure, what's the number one bottleneck to getting to where I want to go? How do I remove it? And why aren't I working on it?

And that's my number one journal prompt. I'm thinking about that all the time with every area of my life, because the people who move the fastest aren't doing more work. They're just continuing to. Continuing to apply the right efforts to their bottlenecks faster than everyone else. When you're only removing the bottleneck, every single ounce of effort that you're putting in is spent in the highest leverage way.

So it's knocking things down. And that's why people are leveling up faster than other people who are just thinking they need the perfectly designed logo and landing page before they can launch anything. It's like, that's not the bottleneck. You just need to put it for sale and tell people about it. This is good shit.

Ali Abdaal
I've also used this journaling prompt after seeing you write about it on Twitter, and I've always found it helpful, but just hearing you explain it as well just is hitting in a different way. And I'm just thinking there's a friend of mine who's recently trying to build a business growing a YouTube channel.

I often find her doing things where I'm like, is that really the bottleneck? And the answer is, well, no, but then there's all sorts of, like, well, no, but it's nice to have. And it's like, it's important to have a website and obviously probably stop posting on Instagram. But is that really the bottleneck? If the goal is, like, I don't know, ten k a month, whatever, the thing is posting on Instagram really gonna unlock some magical.

Is that really the bottleneck to getting ten k a month? Well, no, but it's nice to have. And then I, like, it's so easy for me to see it in other people when they're working on things that are clearly not the bottleneck. Whereas seeing it in myself, like, involves a figuring out what the goal actually is, which feels hard because it's like, is it views? Is it book sales?

Is it revenue? Profit? Is it, like, enjoyment? Like, what's the. What's.

What's actually the goal? And then I think I'm good at bottleneck analysis when it comes to our, like, YouTube production pipeline. Because what I say to the team is, I am the only one who is allowed to be bottleneck. Figure out a system such that I'm the one who's the bottleneck. No one else needs to be bottleneck.

And so if we, like, Angus is very good at being, like, editing is currently a bottleneck. Cool. We need another editor, or we need a faster process or whatever, or I don't have enough scripts to film, or I don't have enough ideas coming in, then as long as I'm the bottleneck, that's fine. But then, even then, the next stage is because currently I'm a bottleneck. Because I don't film enough videos.

Because I film three videos a week. What if I just filmed six videos a week? What would happen then to the business? Would it help? Probably.

Why am I not filming six videos a week? I don't know. I just sort of assumed that, like, three is a maximum and we don't want to overload the audience and all that kind of stuff. But is that a fair assumption? Is that actually true?

Dickie Bush
Like, bottleneck might be a belief or it's a skill, or it's a lack of leverage. So the way the bottleneck presents itself is always different, but in the business world, I think it's leads conversion operations. So in that example, it might be, how do we make more money. We just need more people to know about our products. How do we do that?

Just make more videos? How do we make more videos? Well, I probably need to have more script writers so I can have them working in parallel. Okay, great. Now everything I should do would be go find better script writers and then put everything else in the business on maintenance mode and then apply all the new efforts to let's go find a world class third script writer so I can have more videos.

And then when you solve that, you'll say, now it's time to film the videos. Well, I need to go figure out how I can remove other things. And this bottleneck thinking as it guides your decision making. Yeah. Is what allows you to scale rapidly.

Ali Abdaal
Yes. And it's so easy to say and so impossible to do. So I might sit here and sound like, oh, this guy knows what he's done. But, like, all I do is work on the wrong thing. And so most of these are a reminder to myself to, like, what's the bottleneck?

Dickie Bush
Why aren't you working on it far more than how do I remove it? It's just getting yourself to recognize, like, why am I ignoring the thing that's most important? Yeah. And that's the hard thing to confront, mate. Love this.

Ali Abdaal
Love the bottleneck analysis. Like, if I think back, I recognized very early on in the. In the whole YouTube journey, while I was doing it full time, while I was working as a doctor as well, was like, uh oh. The bottleneck is, it takes too long to film a video. How do I fix that bottleneck?

I mean, I didn't use the language of bottleneck. It's like, where's the friction point? I was thinking, like, what's the highest? Like, why is it so high friction to film a video? It's because I was trying to script it word for word.

What if I just don't do that? What if I go to bullet points, boom. Twice as fast. Okay. What else is annoying?

It takes. At the start, I was. I didn't want to buy a tripod, so I was like, stacking up medical textbooks and putting the camera on it, because I was like, who needs a $30 tripod? I was like, let's just buy the tripod next. It takes an hour to set up the cameras and lights and shit.

Why don't I just leave it up at all times? Good. It's like, all of the points of, like, reducing the friction for me filming videos. And then at some point, it was like, I don't have enough ideas through the system. Okay, cool.

How do I build a system for it that I can do it myself? Because systems create leverage. And then two years down the line I thought of hiring someone. I was like, oh shit, people add leverage as well. And so at each point it's like that thing.

But I think I've gotten not good at doing that thing. Yes, because now it's like, oh, I have all this time on my hands and I only want to film a couple of videos a week, but actually I could film way more and it'd be fun. I just do other things that are not that. Right. And the bottleneck's always going to change.

Dickie Bush
And your new bottleneck might be, how do I sustainably do this forever? And you have to go solve that problem. So the bottleneck's always going to change. Now, just to get tactical on the business side of how do I actually come up with a framework for getting to a million dollars in a year? I think laying that out will be helpful because you can apply bottleneck thinking only to a system that you know is going to get you to where you want to go.

So let me explain. I think there are. I got a good chunk of this from Alex Formosi, some other Internet marketing, just in general, to get to a million dollars a year in something. It's four layers of specificity. So a specific platform, a specific person, a specific problem, and a specific way, four things.

And I'm going to use ship 30 as the example for this. So specific platform is you need to market your product on one channel, one platform. That could be Facebook ads, could be Instagram ads, could be Twitter organic, it could be LinkedIn, it could be threads, it could be YouTube. One product, one platform, that's it. Until you get to a million dollars in a year and people go, but I need to be a no one.

Why? Because you concentrate all of that attention on getting good at that. One platform that allows you to market the thing. So platform, pick a platform, whatever you like to do. If you like to make videos, make YouTube videos, if you like to write, pick Twitter.

If you like, you know, LinkedIn, whatever, specifically platform. Check. Got it. All right. Specific person.

I actually think you should start with problem and then go to person. So let's go. Problem. Ship 30 was so you need to pick a specific problem to solve and people will exchange money for that problem. I'm going to paint the full picture of ship 30.

We marketed on Twitter. That was the platform. The person was beginner writers who wanted to start writing on the Internet. The problem was they didn't know how to get started. And the way it was, writing every day for 30 days.

Writing every day for 30 days. So ship 30 helps beginner writers person start writing on the Internet. Problem. By writing every day for 30 days, specific way. We got all that, we marketed it on Twitter.

That was it for all of 2021, and we got to over a million dollars. And that was the full solution. So I can look back and recognize that. So, same with PTYA. It was.

We helped aspiring youtubers make YouTube channels by making you guys make four to eight videos. Yeah. Like six videos, six week course. Exactly. Yeah, right.

In a specific way, yeah. How'd you market it? YouTube, to start. Yeah, right. Actually, it was a Twitter initiation.

Okay, so Twitter initially. Exactly. I want to post on YouTube. I'm selling something. Exactly.

Ali Abdaal
So it was Twitter first and it was like, cool, that's fine. Then you got there and now you can talk about on YouTube or LinkedIn other places. Right? Yeah. So when you have this framework, you can go, all right, how can I apply the bottleneck thinking to that?

Dickie Bush
Well, the bottleneck is, I don't know this specific person. So I need to launch the product and then figure out who had the most success and then niche it down to only talk to that person. Or it's. I don't know, the platform. Well, you should just pick one and figure out which one you like and run an experiment.

So, interesting. That's the full framework. That's good. Neither of us are yet at 10 million a year. Like, do you have a sense of what it would take to get there?

Yes. So to get to 10 million a year, I like to call it 12 million, because that's a million a month. Million a month? Yeah, why not? So a million a month, you need to reverse engineer what a million dollars in a month looks like.

Well, I need to figure out all the different pricing and services and products that I offer and do the math. Most people picture, like, how do I get to ten k a month? It's like, well, you could sell one person a $10,000 service. You could sell 100 people a $100 service or product or something like that. Like, what does that look like on a daily basis?

Well, okay, to make a million dollars in a month, let's say the only product I sell is worth $5,000. I need to sell 200 of them. That means I need to sell six a day. What do I need to sell six a day? I need this many people to see the landing page.

I need this many people to read the emails the path is extremely there. We just have to put the full equation out. And right now for us to get there, it's unlikely that we'd be able to fulfill the products and services that we currently offer to get to a million a month because of the amount of labor that would go into it. So instead you have to think, okay, how could I launch a more valuable product or a more scalable version? So you just sit there and say, how do I get to this number?

And what I don't want to do is people listen to this and go, all right, a million a month. Now I need to go think about that. It's like, no, start with 1000 or 100 or. And do the bottleneck analysis that way because you have to get to here to do it. But that's the whole game right now is figuring out, okay, what is that bottleneck?

And if I had the answer, the frustrating part is most of the time I know what the answer is. I'm just not doing it. Do you know what the answer is for you guys? It's launching a higher value service on the back of our ghostwriting coaching program. Okay.

Because when you do that, you double the customer LTV. Then we know. Exactly. We don't have to do anything new. We just provide more value to the people we're already servicing, and then we'll get there.

Ali Abdaal
Okay, interesting. That's good shit, man. That's good stuff. Yeah. At some point, I was talking to the team about this yesterday.

At some point, the business becomes less about doing creative things and more about just doing the maths. Mm hmm. Like, even now we have these products, we're doing a few million a year. But, like, if anyone sat me, if I was speaking to Brendan Burchard or someone who just makes more money than we do, like ten x, he'd be like, what are your funnels and what are your percentage conversions? And I'd be like, I have no clue.

Yeah. Have we installed Google Analytics? Who knows? Have we? Like what?

It's obvious. It's like we've kind of made it. And. And that's the thing. Like, I hope that makes other people who hear this, like, we do not have it all figured out.

Dickie Bush
Certainly, like, you kind of just go day by day and make it all up as you go, and then you kind of end up in a place of like, okay, maybe we should look backwards and clean up some of this mess. Yes. And the way we think about this is like three months, you can get to a new level, and then you really spend six months getting comfortable at that level and fixing everything that just broke to get to that new nice. So when you, every time the business triples, all your infrastructure is going to break. And that has happened to us every single new level.

So you can get to a new level with like three months of intense effort and then all the things you left behind and overlooked you need to go fix. And then you keep doing that. And I think this is, this speaks to like, again, the power of like a coach or a mentor who's done the thing before. Because like if you were advising yourself three years ago, you probably would have saved a lot of time. You'd be like, okay, here's what you do.

Ali Abdaal
This and this. Just do those things. Because you would have gone through the process and done it. Yes. And I still undervalue the value of that because I'm always like, oh, my business is unique.

And it's like, it's really not like people are making tens of millions doing content equals info product or ads equals info product businesses for decades. Like, it's not that hard. Like people have done it. Yes. And it's now when you get to a certain size, it's not that hard to get in front of those people.

It's not that expensive to get in front of those people. So why don't I just do it? To be honest, it goes back to personal money beliefs. Because if someone came to you and was like, hey, I'm going to charge you a hundred thousand dollars for one day of coaching, but it's going to remove the bottleneck to help you guys make 200,000 tomorrow. It would still be extremely uncomfortable to put that hundred thousand out there.

Dickie Bush
But at a certain point, the only way you get to the next level in business is by spending that. So I saw like, Alex Formosi paid grant cardone $200,000 for an hour of consulting just to hear about the way he thinks about like branding and whatever, and that was to everyone else would not be a high financial return. But the only way to unlock that next level is to pay that amount because of the return, you're going to get on it, right? So in the beginning it might be a $19 product that you need to go buy and that's the only thing you need to buy to get to the next level. But then you probably need to buy a more specific $5,000 coaching program or we joined a $68,000 mastermind.

Why? Because it was the only way we were going to get the information that we needed to go and put a new product into practice, and we saw the return on it immediately. But that was the only way we were going to get that information. Was it actually the only way? Like, could you, like in hindsight, have found that information for free somewhere on the Internet?

But you're going to pay with your time, and your time is far more valuable. And that's the second belief that you have to understand is you're either going to pay for anything in two ways. You can buy it or you can pay with your time. And if I've learned anything over the last three years, it's I regret every moment that I paid with my time. Rather than investing my money, rather than investing your money in the S and P 500, that's going to earn you 3% and sit there forever.

Take every single dollar. And this is advice to me now, reinvest it in a way that is going to take you to the next level of earning potential. Yes. Save some, save a good chunk, get comfortable with a nest egg, whatever you need to do to kind of feel like I'm still saving and following the traditional path, but the returns you put into education of yourself and information are far outweighing anything you're going to get from the market. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal
And the other thing on this, just thinking to something that I heard again, Alex Formosi say in one of his random videos, because he signed up to Russell Brunson's like, 50k mastermind, and he said his, like, all his spiel, and Russell Brunson was like, stop selling infra products, like, do this instead, or whatever the thing was. And initially, Alex was like, I'm not really sure. And then he was like, wait a minute, I've paid fifty k to be in this room. If I don't take this advice from the guy who's richer than me, I'm literally pissing that 50k away. And so it's like at each level, the cost of education rises more and more.

So, like right now, if someone's a complete beginner, thinking loads of advice from free YouTube videos, they can just listen to espresso hour, listen to this podcast about how to start. But at some point, you might pay dollar 200 for a course. Yes. Now, if you pay that dollar 200 and you do not take action, you have wasted that money. At our level, I'm about to pay 50 to 100k for a mastermind.

If I do not take the advice in that mastermind, I have to, like, I might not want to take the advice. I might think, you know what? I accept. I've paid 100k for this advice and I'm going to choose not to take it because it's not the lifestyle I want. But if I don't act on it, even though it's going to help me get to the goal, I've just pissed away the.

It's like at each level the cost and the value of the education increases. Because the value of the time it is saving you increases. Yeah, right. So a beginner paying for a 50K mastermind is a negative return because their time is not worth it. They should spend 100 hours watching YouTube videos for free because they're 100 hours.

Dickie Bush
But someone who's way further in the game, who can pay with money instead of time to inhale that information. And that's the whole I think about the information product world as you're not selling information because people don't pay for information. All that is free. People pay for packaging speed, implementation and outcomes. Packaging speed, implementation, outcomes.

Ali Abdaal
Okay? Yeah, right. So if you are trying to sell information, don't sell information. Give that all away for free because people are going to learn it. And most people don't do anything with information when they learn it.

Dickie Bush
They need it packaged up and given a step by step guide. And so if you go and read through my twitter for a couple of years, you'll find probably the whole ship 30 curriculum. We give away most of it in our free ultimate guide. But what you don't get is the accountability, the check ins, the templates, all the things that are actually going to get you to put that information in practice. And that's what people pay for.

And then the amount you pay for, it just goes up because the amount of value it's providing goes up. Nice. What are your thoughts on? It's easier to make money if you sell something to rich people. I agree.

It's true. I mean, how do you make a million bucks? You can make someone who's making 100 million on 1% increase to 101 million, or you can try to sell 100,000 people a $10 product. It's a lot harder. Right, but the.

No, yeah, I think that it's 100% correct, but not necessarily something that you have to do. Ship 30 is not marketed to rich people. It's for beginners. But the higher value, the Cert like it is harder to provide that much value to get a hundred million dollar company a 1% boost in conversion. It's probably pretty hard because they probably optimize a lot of the things to get to $100 million.

So it's harder to provide a lot of value to someone rich because they've solved a lot of the problems already. So the problems you have to solve are much harder. Yeah, but I do also think there is something there in the sense of if you're a personal trainer and you're teaching and you're training like normal people, you're kind of doing the same thing if you're training a CEO. But the CEO will pay way more than a normal person would. That's a different way of thinking.

Yeah, because you're providing the same service. So health and fitness is everyone faces the same problem, but the resources they have to solve it are different versus business. Not everyone faces the same problem because it's. Yes, but also provide the service. You provide a beginner fitness person, they'll probably pay.

That's an interesting example, because, like a professional bodybuilder, there are fewer people who could really provide that service but not necessarily going to pay more. Yeah. Because they might have fewer resources. Absolutely. Health and fitness has different.

You know why? I'll tell you why. The exponential upside of value that it can. That it can create is less. Yeah.

So there are very, very few people who pay their personal trainers a million dollars. Right, because. But there are a lot of people who pay their business coach a million dollars. Yeah. Because they're gonna make way more.

Like, there's probably, like two or three people on earth who pay a fitness coach a million dollars. Like LeBron. Right. He actually has the exponential upside, but it's way easier for a business to have that much, which is why there are more people who provide that service. You mentioned you applied the bottleneck thing to health fitness relationships.

Ali Abdaal
How does that work in your life? Okay, so let's take an example of I want to lose weight. So I used to weigh 280 pounds. I played football in college. I was an offensive lineman.

Dickie Bush
I needed to lose weight. So what was the goal? I needed to lose 100 pounds to get to. I'm like 190 now. So about 100.

What's the bottleneck? Well, if I need to lose weight first, I need to know how to do that. So I didn't know how to do that, so I inhaled information to go and do it, and it's like, hey, eat less than you burn. Simple, easy. There's the answer.

Now, why aren't I doing that? Well, I like these kinds of foods, and I'm eating too much of them. Why am I doing that? Well, I didn't learn how to eat something that is more satiating. Why didn't I learn that?

So you just keep doing this, like, why? Bottleneck analysis. Until I realize, well, first I need to find a diet that allows me to not be hungry all the time and eat less than I burn. Pretty simple solution. What does that look like?

I had to go iterate and try a bunch of different ones. I tried every single thing out there. Keto, carnivore, high carb, low carb, vegan, everything, until I found I lost, like, 75 pounds on the ketogenic diet. Why? Because I could eat steak and eggs and feel very full and still eat fewer calories than I burned.

Very simple. So that was how I applied it to that. If you apply it to lifting weights in the gym, it's like, I want to put muscle on. How do I do that? Well, I need to do a certain first.

I need to find out how. Almost always the first bottleneck is an ignorance tax. It's, you don't know what to do and. Okay, so I do have a framework for overall improvement. You're either don't know what to do, you are not doing what you need to do, or that there's pretty much the only two things.

Ali Abdaal
Yeah. Either you don't know it or you know you're not doing it. Yes, exactly. So first you need to figure out what to do. If you don't know what to do, figure out what to do, and then figure out why you aren't doing that thing.

Yeah. And if the bottleneck for personal improvement is one of those two. Yeah. So we talked about, for business, it's more conversion or more leads, better conversion, tighter operations. For personal improvement, it's what to do.

Dickie Bush
Why aren't you doing it? Okay, repeat, repeat, repeat. And inhale the information or do the self development work, reflection, journaling. Necessary to go and do that? Yeah.

Ali Abdaal
I think that's like people, like, a lot of times ask me, like, hey, you spend all this time journaling, like, what the hell do you journal about? It's like, actually, if you just ask yourself that question of, like, what do I need to do and why am I not doing it? Just that will take you down a rabbit hole where it just leads to very clear action points. If you took your own advice and did all the things, and this is reminded of myself. Yeah, same thing.

Dickie Bush
If you took all the advice and did everything you know you should be doing on any given day, you'd be in a much better spot than you currently are. Yeah. Why aren't you doing that? Yeah. I don't know.

It's human nature. It's hard. Yeah. But it's not even. I don't know.

Ali Abdaal
So it's like, in my case, if we take health, for example, like, my goal is to be able to, I don't know, lift my grandkids when I'm. Whatever, whatever. The thing is, my goal used to be getting six pack abs. I decided that it's no longer really. I don't really care about it.

And so what are the things I need to do? I could spend more time in the gym, but actually I'm at a reasonable level of muscle mass. I don't actually need more. But the thing I suck at is flexibility and mobility in terms of hips, hamstrings, neck. I went to.

So the bottleneck there was like, I actually don't know what the problem is. So I went to a physio last week who has told me that those are the three areas of tightness and has given me some exercises. Am I doing them? No. Why am I not doing them?

Well, because I haven't built. I haven't built a habit. They're not in the calendar. It's not a thing. It's not that fun.

Okay, cool. Next thing. Great. How do I make myself do those things? I literally just need to go on YouTube and just find a 15 minutes follow along for those specific problems.

And if one does not exist, literally just make one and then just do the goddamn thing. The answers are always painfully obvious when you do this kind of bottleneck thinking where you're just like, it all comes back. Like, I'm just not doing it. Why aren't I doing it? Let's do the self reflection.

Dickie Bush
And that's the single number one prompt. I did it this morning of like, what's the number one goal? What's the bottleneck to achieving that goal? And why aren't I working on it? And I didn't get very far because I was kind of in a rush this morning.

But I'm going to do it on the train. Nice. And start to think about. And I do that at least once every couple of weeks. And that is where I do it.

I just take this exact journal, I write those three questions out, and most of my journaling is spent on that bottleneck analysis of whatever problem I'm unsatisfied with in my life currently. And how do you get to the. How do you. Is that how you figure out what the goal is? Because it's also like, do you like, smart goal it, or do you like, just fake go late or setup?

I don't have a perfect. I am working on kind of distilling my framework for setting goals, but I don't have a perfect one. I think you just need some kind of direction where you know, all right, I'm just going to point that way. I know where the end goal is, and then I'm going to get to where I am. To get anywhere, you need to know at least a rough idea of where you want to go.

And you need inconvenient, harsh truth, clarity of where you are currently. Yeah. And if you can't accept that first one, or if you don't know where you're going, you're not going to be able to point yourself in the right direction. And if you can't confront the inconvenient truth of where you currently are, you're not going to make the improvements to. Get to the next step.

So I always start with, where do I want to go? Where am I? And then what's at least the next step that I know is in the right direction. And then I apply that bottleneck thinking of, okay, I need to go learn this. I need to go talk to this person.

I need to go pay for this program. I need to. Whatever. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal
One thing I took a lot of inspiration from that actually features in this book, to a degree, is your thing. You tweeted at one point where the goal is x, the method is y, and also to enjoy every step along the way. I wonder if you can talk about that. What's the story there? Okay, so that was, I think, when I was setting goals back in like 2021, it was, yes, at any time I kind of had three goals, and that was back then.

Dickie Bush
It was like, get income to x, amount for the business, get health and fitness to this level because those were really the only two things I focused on for all of 21. The whole story we talked about. Yep. We didn't even get to really talk about 22 and what we've done, which is fine because we'll just do it again. But the third most important part of when you set those kind of goals is to enjoy every step along the way, or at least some way, because I look back now at that grind of a period getting shipped 30 to where it was, or the grind of health and fitness.

And there were probably some times where I didn't sit back and say, enjoy what it is you're doing now. And I know that I can look backwards on former me and say, you should have enjoyed more of that. So I know five year in the future, me is looking at us, do this podcast right now, and like, maybe I was nervous about it heading over here or was like, oh, what am I going to say? Or like, oh, afterwards. I could have said that better.

Instead, just enjoy it. Enjoy and be extremely present during that. And that has to be the goal to make everything you do sustainable. So it's like, set these ambitious goals, do the hard work, show up and execute, but make a way to just smile during those really hard moments. Because the way I remember this is, I know, ten years, 20 years, 50 years in the future is looking at me right now and saying, those were the glory days.

And I think I'm going to be in the glory days for a long period of time. So why not recognize that right now and just soak in it? I'm here in London on a trip, my first time in Europe. I'm going to remember this trip for a very long time. These are the glory days.

And so I'm trying to bring that to every goal I set of enjoy the entire journey along the way. Nice. That is basically what the book is about in a whole book. Glad I could play a part. Enjoying every step of the journey along the way.

Ali Abdaal
Yeah. Like, sometimes I like to think of, what do startup founders do once they exit that company? Generally they either start a new company or they write self help books. And so I'm like, well, if startup founders with like 100 million in the bank will just start a new company, they're, they're trying to recapture some of the old glory days. And I'm like, shit, I think I'm in those glory days right now.

It's a good time to enjoy. Yeah, we are. And so a reminder to us because it's, it's easy to get caught up. And so the way I try to remember this is growth is having problems today that you would have begged to have had two years ago. So I look at the problems I have right now today and I reflect on that of two years ago.

Dickie Bush
I do anything to have my biggest inconvenience that, like, I was stuck in a little bit of traffic on the way over here to record a podcast with Ali Abdall in London. It's a great problem to have where my biggest stressor is, like, I'm going to be five minutes late, but where am I going? I'm doing something really cool. Yeah. And growth is also saying no to opportunities today that you would have said yes to two years ago.

And so if you can kind of reflect on that, of I'm saying no to something that I would have begged to have had. And now I get the the chance to turn that down because I want to newer things, that's proof that I've grown. And for me, the way to enjoy the journey is to constantly reflect on where I've came from. Which is why I liked starting this interview where I almost got a little bit emotional saying that out loud right at the beginning, because I was like, damn, five years ago, that's where I was. And now I get to be here.

Talk to you about all this today. Yeah, that was so good. I think there's also, if I overlay another quote onto that, which is that your identity lags two years behind your circumstances. And so it's like, right now I'm thinking of decision I'm making of, like, flying to Florida for this Tony Robbins event. And I'm like, I could fly business class, but it's like eleven k.

Ali Abdaal
Or I could fly economy, but it's like two k. Or like, me and plus one. Is it really worth the nine k is the kind of stuff it's like, I know my future self is telling me, dude, just take the business class. Come on. It's a business event.

You can expense it. Literally. Come on. Like, stop trying to scrounge that nine k. But I'm lagging two years behind where nine k was a lot two years ago.

Dickie Bush
Yes. And still feels like a lot now, to a degree. Wow. And I'm like.

I've never heard that quote before. And I just had a visceral reaction to that because it's so true. When you accelerate an area of your personal life or business life in any way, that is exactly what happens where you then get there and then you have to adjust in a bunch of different ways. So whether that's if you lose a hundred pounds, like I did, the physical, like, change that happened, the I have to catch up mentally to like, okay, now I'm in better shape. What does that mean?

What? How does that change the way I go about my day to day? Or if you're making more money, just like you said, and that's far more difficult than the external work. I think doing the internal work to catch up your identity is harder than actually the external work to change your external circumstance, because so much of it's ingrained, you have to untrain it. And you can always justify it to yourself.

Ali Abdaal
Like, I can always justify economy. Rather, it's easy to justify, why the hell would you spend an extra nine k on a flight when you don't have to? And all of the conditioning of my childhood and adolescent like that is an absurd amount of money for a lot of people. But every business owner I know says, just fly business. Yeah, it's obviously worth it.

Dickie Bush
Someone gave me this. It's just like a simple, like, you. Can'T have business class thoughts unless you're in business class. That's nice. It's true.

And so if you plan on thinking about your business at all, like, I. Think about my business a lot when I'm on flights. Yes. And so if you're in economy, you're not going to have business class flights in business, in a county business class take. So as someone who just came over here via business class for the first time, it's worth it.

Ali Abdaal
Yeah. Nice. I think also, just like, I stick on this business class point a bit because I think it's such an interesting, like, I like to ask, I like to ask this to basically every entrepreneur that I meet. Like, I sometimes have dinner with people, I'm like, what are your thoughts on, like, economy versus business versus first? And everyone has thoughts on this because it's like a very visceral and tangible thing where you are paying for a minor convenience upgrade.

You're paying a lot for a minor convenience upgrade. And for some people, it's a no brainer to always fly business. I don't speak to many people for whom the choice is first in private, but it's like right now I'm in sort of economy versus business kind of territory. It's such a no brainer to fly business for some people. Some people are in my position where we sort of feel bad about it and have to justify it every time.

And some people are in like, well, there's no fathomable way that would ever fly business class. And it's one of those, like, things where everyone can relate to choosing a class during the, during the flight check. But like the success of your business and all that, there's so much stuff tied up in it of like, do you choose to pay the, buy the ticket for two k or do you choose to buy it for ten k? There's a lot of information out there about how to get rich. There's not much about how to be rich or spend money.

Dickie Bush
So said another way, there's a lot of information about there about how to make more money, not much about how to spend it. And that's why I think everyone's got their own opinion because no one's done a great job kind of distilling that. Yeah, but I try to just ask people and say, like you said, what is your framework for it. And the one of like anytime now I sit in economy, I go, I can't have business class thoughts here. I can't have business thoughts in economy.

And like that to me, I had someone tell me the second you can afford it. And I guess afford is like a different way of thinking, you should fly business. Why? Because you're going to just sit next to people. That normalizes the fact that other people are spending that amount of money to do that thing.

And I think that's a lot of goes back to the beliefs where a lot of the money beliefs you have are holding back your business or personal life or whatever it is you're trying to get to. So you need to actually pay that money as an investment to see that there are other people who also do that. Right. The people you sit next to in business, you're going to look at and go, oh, I wonder what he does. And I wonder if he thought about that for this trip or if it's like an absolute no brainer because he makes a hundred million dollars.

Ali Abdaal
Yeah. And you're never going to get there unless you continue to expose yourself to new people. Yeah. Like I stayed at, in a the nicest hotel I've ever stayed in while I'm staying in London. Why?

Dickie Bush
Was it extremely uncomfortable to do? Yes. Did I want to spend less at a different place? Yes. Did I level up my belief system just because Bentley's were rolling in and out of that place?

And I'm like, I wonder how that guy owns that. Well, he's probably done a bunch of different things and I bet he doesn't have it all figured out and he might not be that much smarter than me and he's just older and that kind of normalized things. And I think you have to pay for that in some way. To take that next step is normalize all the people ahead of you in some way. And business class is an easy way to do it, especially if you are from someone like, I'm from extremely humble financial background, supports kid of all my friends.

I was always the kind of kid who the other parents were like, oh, make sure my real name's Richard and I went by Richard when I was younger. Make sure Richard has money. Make sure he's got $10 or whatever. And I like feel that when I say that out loud because that has been a money belief to untrain of. Like I was always scrounging around to make sure I had like seven or $8 so I could go to lunch with my friends after school.

And then you have to untrain that and you recognize that that probably was a bottleneck to my business in some way. And you were always the bottleneck to your side hustle. So this kind of paints a nice full picture of why you should start a side hustle to begin with is because when you're working a full time job, the bottleneck is not your personal growth. Because if you spent ten times more or had ten times more skill, you're not going to make ten times more money. It's capped.

But when you have a side hustle, the bottleneck to it growing is always you. Like the macro bottleneck is you in some way, your skills, are your beliefs. Yeah. And so you need to put yourself in some kind of vehicle that allows you to see that of, oh, I need to go build this skill, otherwise I'm not going to make more money or I need to go be more disciplined or else I'm not going to make more money. I need to be more consistent, I need to learn to write, I need to learn how to edit.

And if you don't have that, and 99% of people in this world don't have that, which is why they don't see the level of personal growth that they could. But if you do something that you have full ownership of, it's only going to grow until you're the bottleneck and then you have to remove it. Yeah, I guess final thing I'd love to talk about is like, on this, on this point, you know, as a flu, flu a couple weeks ago from can't remember where, la. Yeah. And there was a family of five, like mom, dad, three kids, all flying business.

Ali Abdaal
And I was like, huh, that's interesting. I wonder how they could afford that. I wonder how much. And then I was thinking, I wonder when I have kids, would I like to fly business every time I go on a holiday? Yeah, of course I would.

That would be sick. I'm like, huh? I'm actually, our business is not so successful that I can just do that without thinking about it. And then it got me thinking, is it not easier to curb my own desire? And I'm going holiday with a family who cares if we fly economy, business and sort of tied up in the questions of like, you know, we're not yet at a million a year or a million a month, but do I really need to get there?

Like, do I really want to get there? Is that really what I want? Like business growth and make more money because I've got enough money and everyone says there's like a cap the happiness and like, do I really want to spend more time doing this thing? And I'm like, but it's really fun. I enjoy it, and I like learning new things.

But also in my life, money is not a bottleneck. Probably what I see the bottleneck being is relationships and health. Time spent on relationships, time spent on health, time spent on money, will always. It'll always take care of itself because I just love working. And so I'm just, I'm trying to disentangle that for myself to think, do I actually, should I be trying to go for a million a month for the sake of being able to fly business with a wife and kids without having to worry about it?

Or should I be content with one hundred k a month, which is still fucking absurd about money, right? And actually spend the time on health and relationships? If. If it's a. And if it's a trade of, like, where do I want to spend my time?

I don't know if you think about that at all. Yeah, let's talk. Let's talk through this. So I'll start. I think a lot about crafting a personal ethos, which I think about is your life mission, your values, the character traits you want to embody, and kind of the principles you live by.

Dickie Bush
And I read that every morning in the first, like, two or three minutes of being awake, where I try to just remind myself. And my current life mission that I think I could play forever, is to relentlessly pursue a life of abundance, harmony and gratitude. So abundance is having more than you need of anything. So there's two ways to create abundance. You can have more or need less.

Ali Abdaal
Yep. So we'll come back to that because I think that paints the picture of the, what do you pursue? Harmony is when every piece of your life is working together, so there's nothing competing with one another. Everything improves every other area. Yep.

Nice. And then gratitude is the feeling of those first two. Yeah. So abundance goes back to this question. I think about it a ton of.

Dickie Bush
To create abundance, you can go get more or you can need less. And I want to always be in a state of abundance in any area. So financially, I either want to make more money to the point where I feel like I have enough, more than I need, or I need to change my lifestyle and need less. If your priority is to eventually have a family where you all fly business class, which sounds sweet, but, you know what sounds sweeter is fly private with your full family. Right.

Ali Abdaal
So. But it goes back to levels of thinking of, like, you saw them fly business class. You're like, oh, I might want to fly business, but, you know, who you didn't see was the family of five flying private. Yeah. Which is a totally different way.

Dickie Bush
And so you could say, that's where I want to get to, which is going to require a totally different way. Or if all you want is to be able to fly business, different level, you need less. So you have to earn less. Need less or want less. Yeah, exactly.

Right. So I think whatever, I'm picturing how healthy do I want to be, or how much money, or how many friends do I want to have? Whatever those relationships is, how many do I need? How many can I go get or can I need less? And so creating abundance in every area is kind of my mission right now.

Ali Abdaal
Nice. On the financial side, I think you need to figure out, do I need to go make more, or can I be okay with less? Yeah. Nice. Okay, that's interesting.

I think there's also, as I think about this, I think I'm drawing a bit of a false dichotomy here, where I'm saying, well, I could either get my business to a million a month or I could spend more time on my health and relationships. But, like, realistically, most people will work for about at least 4 hours a day. Like, I would want to work for at least 4 hours a day. And I could, if I really thought about it, I can get to a million a month working 4 hours a day. So that's.

It's not like the, the time I spend on the thing is not the bottleneck. The reason I'm not going to yoga classes and mobility training with a one on one mobility coach is not because I'm trying to get the business to a million a month. It's just because I haven't thought about it. Certainly now I'm saying it out loud, I'm like, I could just do that. It's not that hard.

The reason I think in the future I might not have the relationships I want is because I've read all this stuff around male loneliness and staying out of touch with the boys. But that's just because I don't have a system for staying in touch with the boys. I mean, I kind of do, like quarterly retreats and all this kind of stuff. And actually taking a page out of Bill Perkins book money does solve a lot of these problems. Because if I had 100 million in the bank and I was like, I want to hang out with the boys, I can literally fly all of us to Bali for a week.

But if I only have a million in the bank, flying everyone, all of us, to Bali for a week becomes impossible. And therefore, I have to give up more of my time and organizational faff. And, yeah, I think in my mind, I'm drawing, like, it's, I'm, ah. I think the limiting belief is to get to make more money is inherently hard, would require me to do things I don't want to do, and is also morally bad because, like, who am I to not be satisfied with a couple million a year? Like, why do I need 1020 million a year to be satisfied?

It's like there's all these thoughts wound up in that, all these limiting beliefs. So your wealth is always going to be a function of the value you create for other people. So if you get the wealthiest people in the world right now, Elon, Jeff, Bezos, all them, have, by definition, created the most value for other people and just captured a handful of it. So you can reframe. And this has been very helpful for me.

Dickie Bush
I grew up and my parents would say, oh, rich people do this. Oh, that's for rich people. And there was this kind of negative connotation of, like, rich and making money was evil. But when you reframe it, as I will get extremely wealthy if I create enough value for other people and then capture some of that value. Yeah.

So the pursuit of wealth has turned into a positive sum game for me, where every extra dollar that I make means that somewhere down the value chain, I've created more value for other people. Nice. So it's mission driven of the pursuit of wealth becomes a positive game of, I can go get to where I want to go because of all the people it's going to help along the way. Why do I feel like that? Like, I feel like there's, like, a blocker that's blocking me from, like, accepting that belief.

I think I know why. Yeah, it's hard for you to recognize all the value you created. So let's take, for example, the meetup we did yesterday. How many people came up to you in this small, you know, maybe at 75, 80 people, people we had came up to you and were like, thank you so much for all the things you've helped me do. XYZ, XYZ, XYZ.

That was a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the number of people who've seen your YouTube videos in the world. So imagine you filled the entire stadium up with all 5 million of your subscribers. You know how many stadiums that is? It's like a thousand. Like, a 1000, 50,000 person stadiums?

Or maybe is that a thousand? No, it's 100. 100. 100 NFL stadiums are all your subscribers and they all got a microphone and could come up to you and say, hey, Ollie, you've helped me do XYZ, XYZ, XYZ. You'd probably think I should go pursue this more.

And, like, the pursuit of making more money on the back of this is okay, because I know the downstream effects of all the value. It's great. Or rather, I know that the. The downstream effect of the value is the money. Yes.

Ali Abdaal
So it's like, in order to make 10 million or a million a month, I would need to generate way more than that in value. And in my mind, I'm sort of thinking of it as like, okay, help me figure this out. I'm sort of. I think I'm drawing a false thing in my mind of saying that our business is basically content and courses, free content leading to paid courses, and most of the revenue comes from the paid courses. And I'm kind of thinking like, yeah, but if I had unlimited money, I wouldn't do courses.

I just put all that content out there for free. And so it feels to me like there is a balance between, like, well, if I was just satisfied with only making a couple million here, I just give more away for free. Whereas if I wasn't, I would charge for stuff. And charging feels inherently less morally good than just giving it away for free. People who pay, pay attention.

Dickie Bush
So the outcomes and results that you've delivered are disproportionately to the people who've paid you money and invested in. In themselves. And that's difficult for a lot of people because I remember the first course I bought for $150. I went back and forth. I was like, texting my friends, hey, we split this with me, it's like $75.

It's a lot of money. But that is single handedly generated millions just based on that one thing. So the return on that is absurd. And so I think recognizing that the amount of value you're packing into a $1000 course is going to give someone the earning potential for 50 years of x. So say it helps them make $5,000 a month from their YouTube channel.

It's 60,000 a year. 50 years. $3 million to 3001 or 300 to one ROI. So then you should feel like, I know in my bones that what I'm selling is going to help you. I have to feel morally obligated to go and help you make that purchasing decision.

Yeah, and if I didn't charge you for it, you're not going to do it. Yeah. You're not going to put it into practice. The number of people who, like, they're kind of my friends or acquaintances, and they messaged me like, hey, can I, you know, I'm looking at the next ship, 30 co work and I'm like, yeah, go ahead and join for free. Like, hop on.

They've never, ever, ever completed it and ever said, like, that was amazing. Yeah. But the people who go, I saved up for two years to join this and I'm in a third world country and this completely changed my life. And now I'm making five k a month in India as a ghostwriter, which puts me as like a top .1% earner in my country. Thank you.

Completely different. And so I always over tilt to those examples of, like, I know that this product I'm creating, I feel very strongly about. I have to charge for people to go and get that outcome. Yeah. All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive.

Ali Abdaal
Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down, 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. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching. Do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already, and I'll see you next time. Bye.

How to Build a Business that Lets you Quit your Job - Dickie Bush

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1. Initial Struggles and Breakthrough

2. Scaling the Business

3. Strategic Advice on Quitting

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