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The 20-minute rule that helps you make better life decisions

Ali Abdaal Avatar

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I’ve recently been re-reading the book Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, which applies design thinking to lifestyle design. In the book, they talk a lot about running experiments because you don’t really know what you want until you come up with a hypothesis about what you think you might want and then run the smallest possible experiment to prove the theory. Tim Ferriss also explores this concept in The 4-Hour Workweek, highlighting how small experiments can guide major life decisions.

I applied this to my own life back in 2020. I’d just taken a break from medicine and was planning to move to Australia, but then the pandemic hit and the borders shut down. That was the year I accidentally became a full-time YouTuber.

At that time, my dream life still included practising medicine part-time, about 2-3 days a week, while spending the rest of the week doing YouTube and business stuff. I’d seen first-hand that the happiest doctors I knew seemed to be those who worked part-time. This seemed reasonable. Doctors could continue practicing medicine, which they love, while avoiding burnout.

But then I remembered all these experimental stuff and then thought, why don’t I just test this instead of committing to a medical training pathway and then then requesting for permission to go down to three days a week, only to then find out that I might not enjoy that?

I decided to take extra shifts at the hospital to model what working three days a week in medicine would look like. I quickly realised, “Oh, this is actually not that fun.”

Every 20 minutes, I would start thinking, “I’d rather be at WeWork making YouTube videos or working on the business or playing table tennis with my team.” When I was working on YouTube with the gang, I felt excited. But in the evenings before upcoming shifts, I would dread going to work the next day, and really not look forward to spending hours on the phone trying to get hold of the neurosurgical registrar to refer a patient.

By running this experiment for just a few weeks, I saved myself a copious amount of time—potentially years—of chasing a path I ultimately wouldn’t have enjoyed.

This leads us to the idea of minimum viable experiments.

These days, I get questions from students, people in their 20s, even those in their 30s and above with some variant of: “I don’t like my job. What should I do? What steps should I take?”

If we run with this experimentation idea, the next steps would be to think of what you might enjoy, then run a minimum viable experiment to test it out.

For example, if you think you might want to be a doctor but you’re not entirely sure, a poor life choice would be to apply to medical school, spend 6+ years in training, and then learn that you don’t like it.

There are other lower-stakes way to test out the same hypothesis:

  • Shadow a doctor for a weekend
  • Do some medical work experience
  • Speak to other doctors about their experience
  • Chill at a hospital cafeteria, sit at a table with doctors, and ask them questions

These tiny experiments that would test your hypotheses way quicker and give you a lot more data points compared to applying to a medical school.

So in case you’re thinking of trying something new, find the minimum viable experiment that could test out your hypothesis.

I’d love to hear what you come up with. Hit reply and let me know.

Have a great week!

Ali xx

❤️ My Favourite Things

🎧 Audiobook – A couple of days ago, I finished the audiobook for The Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. It took me about 20% of the audiobook to really get into it, but when I did, I found myself finding every excuse to go to the gym / go for a run / go for a walk / take a trip to the grocery store so that I could listen to more of it guilt-free. I’d describe it as “young adult fantasy about a 20yo girl who goes to a school for dragon riders where everyone’s trying to kill her”. It’s got magic, dragons, lots of violence, and some (but not too many) steamy romantic encounters. I’m now 20% through book #2 in the series, and book #3 is due to be released 4 days from now 😊

🎥 Video – I collaborated with the lovely team at Little Bit Better to create this summary video of Feel-Good Productivity. Little Bit Better is a faceless Youtube channel with a ton of book summary videos on the best self-development books. Elvin, the genius behind the channel, reached out to suggest a collab video and it was super fun working with their team on it. If you haven’t gotten a copy of Feel-Good Productivity and would like to, the paperback version is now out in Europe, Asia, and Australia. And if you want a quick summary of the key points, check out Little Bit Better’s summary video.

Ali Abdaal Avatar