Hey friends,

Quick thing before we get into today’s issue – we’ve just officially launched VoicePal 🚀 It’s an app my team and I have been building for the past 8 months, and it’s now ready for the world to try out. If you haven’t about it yet – VoicePal is a Ghostwriter in your Pocket. It does 3 core things:

1. It listens to you when you hit record and speak into it
2. It asks you sensible follow-up questions based on what you’ve said
3. It turns your rambling thoughts into a first draft of writing that sounds exactly like you

We built VoicePal to solve my own issues when it comes to writing – namely writer’s block (staring at a blank screen wondering what to say), and the fact that I wanted a way to write while getting 15k+ steps per day 😂

I’ve been using VoicePal practically every day for the past 6 months as we’ve been building it out and testing it with beta users. It’s totally transformed my approach to writing specifically, and creating in general.

It’s now available on the iOS App Store, so if you’d like to try it out for free, you can click here. And if you do try it, I’d love to know what you think of it – please do hit reply and let me know what you like, and what you’d like for us to improve 🙂

Anyway, this week I wanted to discuss a quote that I shared a few months ago, but that I’ve been reflecting a lot on this week. It’s a quote I really wish I’d come across a year ago, so that I could’ve included it in Feel-Good Productivity… but alas, I only heard it a few months ago from friend and mentor, Joe Hudson.

If you’re trying to do something well, don’t focus on trying to do it well. Instead, simply focus on enjoying yourself. You’ll probably find that you’ll do it better that way.

Another Joe Hudson banger (which again, I wish I’d thought of myself) is as follows:

Enjoyment is Efficiency.

One measure of efficiency is how quickly you can get something done. That’s time efficiency.

But there’s another that’s often even more useful – energy efficiency.

Being able to get something done without wasting a lot of energy in the process is an excellent way to go about our work. When we force ourselves to try, to push through, to employ discipline, to resist distraction – all these are very energy-inefficient ways to get something done. Sure, we might get the thing done… but we end up wasting a lot of energy along the way, feeling drained by the end of it (assuming we even manage to finish it at all).

The alternative, as the first quote suggests, is to focus on enjoying ourselves.

When we’re enjoying ourselves, we waste less energy trying to push through. When we’re enjoying ourselves, our work becomes a source of energy, rather than a drain of it. When we’re enjoying ourselves, productivity takes care of itself.

In theory anyway…

Earlier this week, I decided (perhaps against my better judgment) to look at the analytics and view counts of the videos we’ve made so far this year. I generally avoid looking at analytics for videos, because I find that (especially when views are “down” relative to previous performance, as they are currently) fixating on analytics (or even looking at them at all) sucks some of the joy and motivation out of making YouTube videos.

But I decided to look at the video view counts anyway… and found something interesting. Our highest performing video was also the most enjoyable video that I filmed… interesting…

It was a video titled: “My Honest Advice to Someone Who Wants Financial Freedom” (or something like that), and it was a from-the-heart, minimally-prepared recounting of a conversation I’d had with someone who (unsurprisingly based on the title) wanted financial freedom. I actually wrote out some of the conversation initially as an issue of this very email, and the following day decided to film a video about it.

The thing is – I quite enjoyed filming that video. I felt like I had useful things to say, and I said them in a way that felt authentic. The video ended up going fairly viral with over 1M views in under a month. Maybe this was a sign that I should just focus on enjoying the process, and the results would take care of themselves?

But then again… I repeated the title format with another video titled: “My Honest Advice to Someone Struggling with Perfectionism” (or something like that), where I also enjoyed filming that video, but it didn’t perform nearly as well. Naturally, I’d expect a video about financial freedom to have more viral potential than a video about perfectionism, but even so… clearly, it’s not just the enjoyment factor that leads to a video performing well…

And it’s very possible that I’m misremembering how fun it was to film the financial freedom video. Maybe I’m retrofitting the narrative of “enjoyment is efficiency” to a video that I know performed very well, and in knowing that, my retrospective memory of the experience is more positive?

There’s another data point that might be interesting here – of our 10 best performing videos of 2024, 8 of them weren’t particularly scripted. I tend to enjoy filming unscripted much more than scripted videos, because I feel they’re more authentic, I can share from the heart, I have the freedom to play around in the moment etc.

But beyond the view counts (which I aspire not to care about anyway), I’ve been asking myself: “What’s the sort of YouTube channel and business that I really want?” If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you’ll know that this is a question I seem to struggle with on a quarterly basis, and have done for the past 6 years lol.

If I really think about it, I want a YouTube channel and a business, and a book, and a newsletter, and products which I personally enjoy creating. That’s the true goal here. It’s no longer money (at least, not primarily). It’s not even really impact (although impact is a nice-to-have, but I’d be lying if I said that I’m primarily motivated by altruistic goals). It’s mostly “having fun”. I want to enjoy my work, I want to make stuff that I think is worth making, and where the process of making it is enjoyable and energising.

It’s interesting that there seems to be a bit of a correlation between me enjoying creating a video, and that video performing well. But even if there wasn’t… I’d still much rather approach my work in a way that made it enjoyable, than in a way that was focused on efficiency or effectiveness instead.

All these are rambling thoughts I’ve had this week. I guess if there’s something I’m taking away, it’s this:

1. Enjoyment really does seem to be a form of efficiency. When I’m having fun with my work, I’m more likely to produce content that resonates with my audience. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s a pretty good starting point.
2. Authenticity matters. Those unscripted videos that performed well? They were probably more authentic, more ‘me’. And that seems to connect with people.
3. It’s okay to keep questioning and evolving. The fact that I’m still asking myself what kind of YouTube channel and business I want after 6 years isn’t a failure – it’s a sign that I’m growing and my priorities are shifting. At least that’s what I’m choosing to think 😉
4. The process is the point. If I’m not enjoying the journey, what’s the point of the destination? Creating content that I find fun and meaningful is its own reward, regardless of the view counts.

So, moving forward, I’m going to try to lean into this idea of enjoyment as efficiency. I’m going to focus on making videos, writing newsletters, and creating stuff that I genuinely enjoy producing. I’m going to trust that if I’m having fun and being authentic, that energy will translate to my audience.

And hey, if a video about perfectionism doesn’t go viral? That’s okay. Because I enjoyed making it, I probably learned something in the process, and it might have really resonated with the people who needed to hear it.

Hopefully there was something in here that might’ve resonated with you too.

Have a great week!

Ali xx

My Favourite Things This Week ❤️

(1) Audiobook 🎧 – I’ve just finished listening to Yumi and the Nightmare Painter, another one of Brandon Sanderson’s “Secret Project” books that he wrote during the pandemic. I loved Tress of the Emerald Seas as I mentioned last week, and Yumi was the next on the list. And boy – Sanderson knocks it out of the park again. Literally everything this man writes is a total banger. I literally had tears running down my face at the ending. Again, this is my usual reminder that if you haven’t yet gotten into Brandon Sanderson’s fantasy works, you should start with the Mistborn series. And if you enjoy that, follow this reading order to navigate his various works.

(2) Book 📕 – I’m in the midst of reading Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life’s Biggest Decisions by Myra Strober and Abby Davisson. I got the recommendation from friend and fellow author Nir Eyal, when we hung out a few weeks ago (pod coming soon) and I mined him for life advice. It’s definitely opened my eyes to the more practical sides of relationships that I often don’t think about, like the division of household chores, emotional labour, whether, when and where to move etc. If you’re in a relationship (or would like to be in one someday), it’s worth going through 🙂

(3) Video 🎬 – My friend Sahil Bloom’s vlog continues to be ridiculously inspirational. Inspirational because he wakes up at 4:30am, does his cold plunge, goes for a 12 mile run, does an intense weights session, gets home to cook breakfast and hang out with his kid, and then gets started with work at 8am, all the while being absolutely jacked. Ridiculously because… well, all of the above. And the fact that he’s a really nice guy. And the fact that I was watching him do all these things in his video, while I was lazing on my phone in bed at 10am…