The paperback copy of my book, Feel-Good Productivity is available now. Pick up your copy today.

110,000 People Registered for This Workshop: Here’s What We Learned

Ali Abdaal Avatar

/

/

Share:

Big thank you to everyone who attended Spark 2025 over the weekend, the 2-day free online workshop that my team and I hosted. We had 110,000 people registered for it, and around 18-20k concurrent attendees for each of the sessions. Pretty insane number – for context, Wembley Stadium in London holds 12,000 people, so we had like 1.5 stadiums worth of people joining in on Zoom from all around the world, all doing various reflection and goal-setting exercises together.

Solid vibes throughout – and if you’re interested, you can see some of the “testimonials” of sorts that people left for the event here. The team and I have been reading through these over the past couple of days with big smiles on our faces.

In this email, I wanted to share some of the journaling prompts we went through (along with some of the results of the interactive quizzes we did), so that if you didn’t get a chance to attend, you can maybe have a stab at doing some of these yourself. And if you did attend, (a) hopefully you got value from the session, and (b) you might like to see this list as a reminder + maybe some more things come to mind the second time you think about them.

✍️ 2024 Reflections

We started Day #1 off with a visualisation exercise to re-experience the year, and feel into the most salient moments of 2024. There was a few minutes of this, with some vibey music. Then, we spent 3 minutes on the following prompts.

  1. 🏆 Major Milestones – What were the most significant events or achievements in 2024 for you? How did these impact your life?
  2. 🙏 Gratitude – What are you most grateful for in 2024? Think about people, experiences, or opportunities that enriched your life.
  3. 💪 Challenges – What were the biggest challenges or obstacles you faced in 2024? How did you overcome them, and what did you learn from these experiences?
  4. 🎓 Professional Growth – How did you progress in your career / work in 2024? What were the key learnings and how have they shaped your future aspirations?
  5. 🌱 Personal Growth – In what ways have you grown or changed as a person over the past year? Consider changes in your beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours.
  6. ❌ Unfulfilled Aspirations – Were there goals or aspirations you had for 2024 that you didn’t achieve? Reflect on why they were not met and how you feel about it.
  7. 👥 Relationships and Connections – Reflect on your relationships in 2024. How have they evolved? Were there new relationships that had a significant impact on you?
  8. 🚀 Looking Forward – Based on your experiences in 2024, what would you like to do differently in 2025?
    1. What would you like to continue doing?
    2. What would you like to start doing?
    3. What would you like to stop doing?

When we did an interactive word-cloud poll asking: ”What’s 1 small action you’ll commit to taking TODAY to make a start towards your dream 2025?”, the most common answers were: planning, journaling, reading, meditation, going for a walk, waking up early, sleeping early, goal-setting, exercising.

🪦 Write your Own Eulogy

We then moved into a morbid-at-first-glance-but-really-useful exercise involving visualising your own funeral (in a world where you live to be 100 years old in great physical and mental health), and imagining what you’d like different people to say at your funeral.

  • Today, we gather to honour the life and legacy of [name]
  • [Name] was a…
  • In his personal life, he…
  • Those closest to him remember him as…
  • In his professional life, he…
  • His work will be remembered for its contribution to…
  • He was an inspiration to others because…
  • The story of his life teaches us that…
  • He’ll always be remembered as someone who lived with…
  • Finally, if [name] were here with us today, he’d remind us that…

When we did a word cloud interactive poll thingy to ask how people found that experience, the top responses were: inspiring, emotional, motivating, enlightening, clarifying, sad, thought-provoking and insightful.

And when asked: “Based on your eulogy, what would you like to START doing in 2025?”, by far the most common answer was “taking action”. Other common answers were: living, learning, connecting, planning, writing, travel.

✨ Dopamine Hacking

We then had a wonderful workshop from neuroscientist TJ Power themed around taking control of our dopamine. TJ’s book The Dose Effect is out next week – I’ve preordered and can’t wait to read it 😊 The session had a lot of interactive stuff in it around actionable, tactical ways to break our addiction to fast-and-easy dopamine. This video “How to Reset your Dopamine and Change your Life” is one I made in collaboration with TJ a few months ago, if you’d like to get a sense of what we covered in the workshop.

🤑 The 5 Types of Wealth

We ended Day #1 with a fantastic workshop by entrepreneur and investor Sahil Bloom, about the 5 Types of Wealth – physical wealth, social wealth, time wealth, mental wealth and financial wealth.

Spark participants all took the Wealth Score Quiz (you can take it here if you’d like) – this image shows our collective results for each type of wealth. Broadly, Spark attendees had pretty good scores for Mental Wealth and Social Wealth, but Financial Wealth was a little sparser than the others.

Sahil’s book of the same name The 5 Types of Wealth is also coming out in February – I’ve preordered this one too 😉

We wrapped up Day #1 by revisiting our action points and commitments to ourselves, with some homework over the next 18 hours in preparation for Day #2.

Hopefully you got some value out of seeing what went down in the workshops – if you’d like a summary of what we did in Day #2 as well, please let me know by replying to this email and if there’s a good amount of interest, I’ll do a write-up of Day #2 too.

Have a great week!

Ali xx

Ali Abdaal Avatar