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Hello friends, welcome back to the vlog. The day starts at 8:00 a.m. when I wake up, get out of bed, take a shower, take care of my skin, and play with my daughter a little. I wave goodbye to the other girl and head to the office to start my workday. I start work at 9:00. I usually start at 10:00, but on Fridays from 9:00 to 10:00, I host a live session called "Friday Get-togethers" for students of our Lifestyle Business Academy, our online business school. I host a masterclass every Monday, and then twice a Friday I host more casual Q& A sessions where I help our students with their business issues in any way I can. Steeply. Great job, gang. Have a nice day.
Good luck in business and life, see you next week. See you later. We just finished "Friday Get-togethers." It was quite pleasant. We only had four people on the call, so it felt like I could really dive deep into the details. So, these are our very casual question and answer sessions that we do. They can just ask me anything and we just chat about their business, giving feedback on content, sales pages, deals or offers. In this group was Charlene, who had already made $100,000 in the past few months. There was Carlos, who had just joined us and was trying to figure out his niche. So yeah, the atmosphere is great. Then we chat a bit with the team about this vlog format and look back at some old vlogs I did many years ago while studying medicine.
Me. I used to save lives in different countries, and now I make videos for YouTube. I really enjoyed doing this before. So I'm experimenting, potentially trying to recreate that format. Let's see how it goes. That's cool, dude. Give me five. A 6-minute vlog, edited by me, filmed by me. So that's how I stayed consistent in content while having a real life as a student and a doctor. As the day goes on, I kind of compose a vlog in my head from the footage, thinking, " Okay, where should I put a short montage here?" Where is it appropriate to add voice-over? And then I'll write this voiceover. I want to experiment with this format for business purposes, because it's essentially like "learn with me," only for productivity, not learning. I'm like, I
don't know, trying to create a landing page or, hell, I don't know, whatever. Trying to figure out an ad for Superfocus or something like that. If we can master this format, it will be a huge breakthrough, because it means that, for example, Wednesday can be dedicated to filming, where we are with the camera and all that. But on Friday I can just do things, we'll film it, I'll explain how I do it, and it'll be just a blast. Because then I can actually do things, not just be a professional content creator. That's the trick. After discussing the vlog, one of our new team members, Anne, shows me process diagrams she has been working on to improve the operations of our Lifestyle Business Academy.
Anne and I have been talking for some time about how we almost need a roadmap for students. Yes. Some nice page in Figma where we could say, "Here's your roadmap, here's where you are now, and here's your next step." Yes. That would be cool. So they are Yes. A document with a roadmap for students. Yes. Which then ties into the student experience, and which ties into the work with coaches, and everyone acts in harmony, even if students never see a coach in the system. We know that this is in line with the roadmap Yes. And so if we change the map, everything else has to change too. And anyone in business will be able to look and ask: "What am I doing today and what stage am I responsible for?
How do I help and how does this fit into the bigger picture? Yes. Perfectly. And if I'm going to spend half an hour or half a day on something that doesn't relate to any of these stages, is it worth doing it, even if it seems interesting or important, but doesn't help our positions? Perfectly. At this point it's around 11:00, time to get to work. Time to start working on Life Notes. Life Notes is an email newsletter that I have been sending out since around April 2018. So, how old is it? Eight years. There is a technique I learned from a writing coach called " splashing out." Here's how this splash works. You just set a timer for 10 minutes. Conveniently, I have exactly 12 minutes left until my next meeting.
Almost with your eyes closed, unable to press the backspace or delete key, you just blurt out whatever comes to mind. Here's what it might look like. Good. The idea is to do this for the entire 10 minutes with your eyes closed. See how crooked it looks. But it's a great way to silence your inner critic and figure out where you want to go and what to say about a certain thing. So, literally writing everything down, I actually settled on a topic that seems good to me, and I'll continue to spill out my thoughts about it. This will be like a draft for the mailing. And then, if I want, I'll just throw it in Claude and ask, "Hey, can you
clean this up so there's no errors or other [__]?" Or I can just edit it manually if I feel like it, but we'll see how it goes after this splash. Oh, my God. There was supposed to be a call with Nathan. Oh no, Nathan. Trouble. Well, okay. So, just finished talking to Nathan, one of our coaches. Nathan is in Australia, which is convenient for Hong Kong because he is a few hours ahead, so it is very easy to call him. Uh, Nathan is actually our outreach specialist at Lifestyle Business Academy, because he ran his own marketing agency for 12 years before joining us, and he got all his clients through outreach, a combination of warm and cold outreach, sending messages and cold emails, which is really cool. As far as I
know, he has never created content. He doesn't have a special personal brand, so he didn't get clients through his online reputation. And he didn't get customers through advertising either. He literally got them by just writing people messages and emails like, " Hey, want to work with me?" Of course, doing it a little more elegantly than I just said. So, um, what we do-it was originally conceived as, um, a kind of coaching conversation for coaches, where Nathan, you know, I have these meetings two or three times a week with all of our coaches, where a few of them reach out to me, and we model it like a doctor's round, where the coach talks, and we discuss any of the students that they're having difficulty with. So, in this context,
Nathan was having difficulty with one of his students. Let's call this student John. John is having an existential crisis regarding his niche and business model. It's like, "Oh, do I want to choose this particular business model and this niche, but it's not quite right for me, or maybe it's worth doing this, but I know it's going to make less money?" And when people feel something like, "Oh, I'm being pulled in different directions," it's a really hard struggle for them. So we identified this as the main problem. Then we also go through the Dr. method. CPR stands for: personal messages (DMs), replies, calls, offers, and revenue. I consider these to be the five vital early-stage business metrics that help the coach, the student, and I diagnose (again, medical analogy-
diagnose) exactly where the problem is so we can prescribe a solution or propose an experiment for that specific problem. We did this with one of Nathan's students. Then we had half an hour left, and I said, " You know what? Let's keep it simple, as I'm working on a module on personal messages for a new curriculum. Let me get Nathan's opinion on this, because Nathan is a pro at private messaging. And it was actually a very productive conversation that yielded a lot of new material that I realized we could incorporate into the curriculum, and that's just cool. I love it when a Zoom call is transformed into learning content,
which ultimately makes our students' experience better. Okay, if you like this video, I'd like to tell you about WeWork, who are kindly sponsoring this episode. So, if you run a small business like me, you know what a nightmare renting an office can be . Commercial leases are usually concluded for at least 2 years. This is extremely expensive. You have to deal with office set-up, toilet cleaning, plumbing, and other similar tasks on your own. Pure horror. That's why my team and I have been WeWork clients since 2020. At the time, it was just the two of us working at WeWork in Cambridge with our general manager, Angus.
We went there every day. It had an extremely nice interior design. There were marker boards everywhere. And much of what businesses do now was designed in those WeWork conference rooms. Today, our team is much larger and mostly works remotely. So we have people working from all over the world. And we don't have a physical office anywhere except Hong Kong. So instead, everyone on the team has a WeWork All Access subscription. No matter where you are, you can come to the nearest WeWork and work to your full potential. And when I go back to London or someone from the team happens to be in the same city, we can book a table or a meeting room and work together in real life, which is
just great. A great advantage of WeWork is that it is also extremely flexible. The contract is month-to-month, and you can easily add or cancel memberships as your team changes. So, especially for our remote team, WeWork takes care of all the office issues, which means that my team and I can focus on running the business, not on being a part-time office manager. And wherever you are, you know exactly what to expect. If your business is ready for this format, go to we.co/aliabdaal and book a tour at your nearest WeWork. And if you use the codes on the screen, you will receive a 10% discount on a monthly membership or 25% on the payment for tables and meeting rooms upon use.
Links and codes are also in the video description. Thank you so much to WeWork for sponsoring this video, and we're back to business. It's 12:25, I have 15 minutes before lunch with the team. So I'll use this time to add Nathan's ideas to the DM curriculum, as well as polish this week's Life Notes issue. Well, this issue of Life Notes is ready. I am really proud of him. It's strange, of course, because I had very little time to write all this. I think it made it a lot better than when I sometimes agonized over it for two or three hours and all that. And yes, not a single drop of artificial intelligence was used when writing Life Notes. I used to use our Voice Pal app. I walked around and kind of dictated what I wanted to write about.
Then I threw it into Claude and spent hours talking to the artificial intelligence to come up with something. And when I discovered this " splash" method, I just realized that I preferred the craft of writing with my fingertips on a keyboard. So I'll still use AI dictation for things that aren't creative output, but for things that are creative, I actually prefer to write on my own rather than trying to get AI to find my voice and all that, you know, all that nonsense. Now Sean and I, well, the team went to lunch. They go to a local Thai restaurant. And they are going to place an order for us. And then we'll join them as soon as we visit the DJI store, because we want to buy some new equipment.
What are we buying? Yes. New microphones because we want to be able to record more things in a more honest style, not just in the formal desktop format. So, yes. Time for a quick trip to the DJI store, followed by a team lunch. Multi-colored magnetic front cover. Well, we came back after lunch. We made a good purchase of equipment from the DJI store, which we are currently charging for a four-way microphone system with a single transmitter. This means we can do four- person podcasts, have roundtables, record conversations that happen over dinner, so it's really cool. And now I have a call with Angus. It is 20 minutes to three.
I have a call with Angus at 3:00, so I'll be focusing on Super Focused marketing for the rest of the day. So, Super Focused is our app. And I think of it as magnetic marketing and easy sales. We want marketing that is magnetic, meaning it effortlessly attracts our ideal customers while also repelling those we don't want. And we want easy sales, sales that feel effortless. I don't like it when it feels like we're trying to sell something and it feels hard. I want it to feel effortless, because selling is service, and sales is just educating a person about your product, and if it's right for them, they'll naturally buy it, right? And if not, no offense. So I'm trying to figure out: how do we introduce and position Superfocus to attract the right people to become our first
members? Because we only have a few weeks left until the Superfocus Founders Program runs, which actually gives you a huge discount that will last you a lifetime as long as you're a subscriber. You get a money-back guarantee and join our community where you can share product reviews. By the way, if you watch this until Saturday, September 26, 2026, I'm hosting my quarterly "Fall Reboot" seminar. It is completely free. I conduct it for thousands of participants from all over the world, and the main idea of this free live workshop is that together we summarize 2026 and set goals for the last 90 days to end the year on a high note.
I have been holding these meetings every 3 months for the past few years. This is about 2 hours of communication on Zoom. People benefit greatly from this. So, the link to free registration will be in the description if you're interested. At 3:00 PM, I have a 45- minute one-on-one Zoom meeting with Angus, our General Manager, where we discuss various issues and chatted with Anne for half an hour because she had to go. We outlined a plan of operations and processes for Lifestyle Business Academy, including the student journey and the work of coaches, trying to find gaps in the system. After all, we are trying to understand what exactly should be done from the many options to improve the experience of
students and coaches at Lifestyle Business Academy. But the discipline lies in determining the priority and most effective tasks, which requires a clear understanding of the entire current picture. One of the unique features of Lifestyle Business Academy is that I initially had my own vision of what the student experience should be like. And then students started studying it. And almost from day one, we started getting data about what people were struggling with. Actually, there were many more problems with starting a business than I expected, as the students faced various mental, emotional, and psychological barriers. So even though I thought they knew what to do and they supposedly knew what to do, they did n't. And all of
these things are now coming to the surface, especially over the last few months, as we think, "Okay, there are many ways to solve these problems." Let's figure out what the problems are, and then put systems in place to solve them. So there was a lot of drawing diagrams on paper, mapping processes, and the like. It's 4:47 PM and I have my next " Friday Fireside Chat" with LBA students. So that's the next item on my schedule. Then we have our second " Friday Conversation" of the day, this time I'm talking mostly to our students from Europe and Australia. And the day ends with a casual conversation with the team in the office.
Yes, I feel like I've been carrying the burden of some business since I was 18, for 14 years now. Because even with the first business, the first successful business, the Six Med courses, something always went wrong: either the books weren't delivered on time, or the student was dissatisfied, or the student was very satisfied, and I didn't take the feedback. Or the site simply didn't work. And there was a period of time when I sold that business and when the YouTube channel was just a part-time job, and then it didn't seem difficult to me. It was like playing for casino money, like, oh, this is a winning bonus round. I already have a main job. I have no intention of quitting my main job. So this YouTube is just a cool thing that I do on the side.
But then it got so big, and I liked it so much, that I decided to quit my job and make it my main business. But it added some weight. Now this is my main business. And so this business is what I do to make a living professionally. And ultimately, every decision comes back to me. Having a team is great, because it definitely takes away a significant part of this burden. And if it weren't for the team, and if Angus weren't the general manager, things would be much worse than they are now. But this whole thing is on me: I continue to create content, figure out the OBA curriculum, and everything else. We still don't have a team of top managers who could truly take responsibility for their department. Because historically we have only hired young and
inexperienced people. So in these circumstances, since I can't hand over the management of the department to a senior manager, Angus and I are simply carrying the entire business. At least, that's how it feels. But I hear from more experienced entrepreneurs that as soon as experienced professionals appear who can truly steer the direction, this burden seems to be lifted from their shoulders and distributed more evenly. But at the same time, it's strange to talk about it, isn't it? Because I don't want it to look like I'm complaining, and I don't want it to be perceived as a complaint within the company. After all, this is the life I chose for myself, and it is simply incredible-much better than the one I would have had if I had
worked as a doctor. So, as they say, choose your difficulty. If you want to be a business owner, you sign up to feel the full burden of responsibility on your shoulders. If there are co-founders, it seems like the workload is distributed better. I had a friend who had four co-founders in a business. He said that four was probably too many, but it felt like the burden was shared. Whereas when you are the sole founder or there are only two of you-yes, it can be difficult. One of the challenges is constantly switching between tasks. When we have an LBA seminar in the morning, then immediately operational issues with Ann, then a conversation about the YouTube channel, and then- yes, we need to deal with the curriculum. Oh, and a meeting with Nathan
that escalates into a discussion of the curriculum. And then-okay, lunch with the team. We need to set up our audio process. And during lunch we try to come up with content for today's vlog. It's like somewhere in the background, I need to focus on Superfocus. And then I start working on Superfocus, and I have a meeting with Angus. On the one hand, I like this diversity, but on the other hand, I think: "Oh, so much is happening, and all in one day." And that's why I almost prefer an empty calendar so I can just dive into one thing. It's a kind of nirvana state that I'm always trying to reach, where you can work on one task for hours, instead of constantly being distracted by another. So today was a little difficult. It helps me to set
rules for myself. For example, the rule is: I am not allowed to work after 7:00 PM. And that's not my definition of work, it's someone else's. That is, what looks like work. If it looks like work for someone else, I can't do it after 7pm. It's very helpful because I say to myself, "Okay, this is like going home after a shift where you say, ' Yes, the patient is bleeding, but there's nothing I can do about it.' " That's not entirely true, because in my case I can actually do something while I'm there. And I can always just open the code or do something else. And sometimes I do. I do this, especially when inspiration strikes.
I think for the most part the balance feels good. For the most part, I feel happy, fulfilled, and joyful in business. But at the same time, it also feels like a burden. To some extent. But at the same time, no, because we have a great team, and often everything feels easy. And if it were harder, I would n't say, "Oh my god, I can't, I can't go to lunch with the team because it's." Well, that's okay too. I'm definitely better off than most business owners because of the team structure, because the product is high- margin and we have an audience. So we have many significant advantages on our side. Who knows how long this will last, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
