By the end of 2021, Dr. Ali Abdaal was — like so many healthcare professionals — burnt out. The job was no longer satisfying, and he hung up his stethoscope. However, Abdaal found an unexpected second career by sharing productivity, study, and relationship tips on YouTube.
Abdaal now has a full-time staff of 13 to help him plan, produce, and distribute videos to over 5 million subscribers. His new book Feel Good Productivity encourages readers to infuse professional tasks with joy. Abdaal told b. how to turn your daily grind into a daily grin.
b.: The theme of your book is that finding joy in work, not discipline, is the key to productivity. What do people get wrong about discipline?
Abdaal: It was through browsing around on the internet and looking at a few research papers that I found this idea around feeling good and positive emotions leading to more productivity and more creativity and less stress. … Discipline is like forcing yourself to do something you don’t want to do. And that is OK in very small doses, but it’s not a recipe for sustainable productivity; it’s a recipe for burnout.
Finding joy in your work is sort of like going downhill, whereas trying to discipline yourself is like going uphill all the time, which is just absolutely exhausting.
Was there a notion that you changed your mind about while writing the book?
Abdaal: I realized that the quest for meaningful work is a luxury for a lot of people … because most people are not in a position to be able to just quit their job and do what they love, do what they find meaningful. But there’s so many things that we can do to make what we’re already doing feel more enjoyable and energizing.
b.: You suggest acting less seriously. This can be counterintuitive to a leader who may want to be taken seriously.
Abdaal: When I used to assist in operations in the operating room, even though it was literally life and death … the surgeons would still have this atmosphere of lightness in the room. It’s serious, but we also have music in the background, and we’re cracking a smile every now and then.
I think it’s less about being silly and more about how do we make you just feel a little bit lighter? And when the mood is light — in a meeting or anything else — people perform better; they’re more creative and more productive and less stressed, and it’s an environment for collaboration and creativity.
b.: What are some ways to adapt the individualized messages of the book to an entire workplace?
Abdaal: One of our core values in the team is to level up, and that directly comes from an idea … that leveling up in video games is how game designers get you to be addicted. Because the feeling of leveling up in a video game and also in life is really intrinsically motivating. And so we have one hour every week, which is the “level-up hour,” where everyone is on a Zoom call, but Slack has to be closed. And in that hour, your only goal is to level up one of your personal or professional skills.
The team absolutely loves that. It means that they’re more engaged; they feel like they’re improving, which is good for them. But also, it’s good for the business because now everyone is becoming at least one hour better every single week.
Feel Good Productivity is available now.
