Ali Abdaal

Ali Abdaal is a popular productivity YouTuber.

He has more than 5M subscribers on his eponymous YouTube channel.

Ali is also a blogger, podcaster, entrepreneur, writer, and a former doctor.

Introduction-

Ali Abdaal was born on 11 May 1994 in Pakistan.

His mother is a doctor.

Ali’s younger brother, Taimur Abdaal, is the founder of ‘Causal’, a business planning platform.

They were raised by a single mother.

Pakistan, Lesotho & UK-

After living in Pakistan for a couple of years, Ali along with his family, moved to Lesotho in 1996.

Lesotho is a landlocked country in Southern Africa.

His mother worked as a doctor in Lesotho and here, Ali attended a local school and grew up for five years.

Then, he moved to Pakistan and lived there for a year and during that time, his mother moved to the United Kingdom to attempt an exam to secure a medical job in the UK.

During that time, Ali was raised by his grandmother who was a teacher and she taught him English and maths.

In 2003, he along with his brother moved to the UK after his mother secured a job as a psychiatrist in the National Health Service.

A nerdy kid-

At 12, Ali started learning web design and Photoshop CS2.

While studying in high school, he became addicted to the internet.

Later, Ali started learning PHP to develop a game, but later, he quit the idea of game development as he felt it to be very demanding.

The silver lining was that even though he gave up the game development idea, he learnt PHP.

Then, Ali started doing freelance gigs on RentACoder (now Freelancer.com).

Education-

Ali did his schooling from Westcliff High School for Boys in Southend-on-Sea, England.

After completing his schooling in 2012, he joined University of Cambridge to study for a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in preclinical medicine and psychology.

Initially, Ali wanted to study computer science but realised that he only loved computers and coding as a hobby and didn’t want to make a career in it and so, he chose to study medicine.

After completing his B.A. in 2015, he studied MBBS from University of Cambridge and graduated in 2018.

Career & startup-

From 2008 to 2012, Ali worked as a teaching assistant at Kumon at Southend-on-Sea, Essex.

In July 2013, while in his second year of B.A., he started 6med, a medical tutoring startup.

After graduating in MBBS in 2018, Ali worked as a doctor at the NHS Foundation Trust for a couple of years with a focus on obstetrics and gynaecology.

Confidence for initiation-

For many years, Ali wanted to start a personal blog but a lack of confidence in putting himself on the online world held him back.

On 2 January 2016, he chanced upon the book ‘Show Your Work!’, which greatly inspired him to start his blog.

In 2016, Ali started his eponymous personal blog and started blogging.

This confidence later also helped him to start working on his YouTube channel.

YouTube channel, inspirations & hockey stick growth-

Even though Ali started his eponymous YouTube channel on 21 November 2007, he began working on it only from March 2016.

He published his first video, ‘All of Me (John Legend) – Duranka Perera’ on 28 March 2016.

After a few song videos, he started publishing videos of his life as a medical student.

At that time, Ali was inspired by Gary Vaynerchuk and his content marketing strategy and so, was publishing a lot of educational videos for free with an intention to sell the 6med courses.

After publishing a few videos, he discovered the vlogs of Casey Neistat, Peter McKinnon and Sara Dietschy and got inspired by them and so, started vlogging, specifically medical vlogging.

On 5 April 2018, Ali published a video titled ‘How to study for exams – Evidence-based revision tips’ and this is the first video of his channel to become viral.

Thanks to this video, his YouTube channel started experiencing the hockey stick growth.

On 7 September 2021, Ali started his podcast YouTube channel by the name ‘Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal’ and here, he interviewed many famous YouTubers like Marques Brownlee, Max Fosh, etc.

He also has a couple of other YouTube channels namely, ‘Ali Abdaal – Appendix’ and ‘Not Overthinking’.

Ali worked on all these channels alongside working full-time as a doctor.

Quitting his job for YouTube-

After working as a doctor for a couple of years, in January 2022, Ali quit his job to become a full-time YouTuber.

On his primary channel, he focuses on productivity, tools, books, earning money, apps, etc.

He uses Sony Alpha ILCE-6400L, Sony Alpha ILCE-7CL and Leica Q2 cameras.

Ali also runs various courses like Part-Time YouTuber Academy and several Skillshare courses.

He extensively uses tools like Notion, Evernote, Notability, Ulysses and other applications to plan his videos and daily life.

A successful YouTuber-

As of January 2024, he has 5.15M subscribers on his eponymous YouTube channel, 729K followers on Instagram, and 340.8K followers on X (Twitter).

Ali earns through a variety of sources, advertisements and ‘Super Thanks’ on his YouTube videos, courses, merchandise, 6med, sponsorships, affiliate marketing, etc.

Thanks to all these, he became a millionaire.

On 28 December 2023, he published his book, ‘Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You.’

Personal life-

Ali hasn’t revealed much of his personal life.

He lives in London, United Kingdom.

Book recommendations-

The following are some of the books which Ali recommended through his YouTube videos-

• The 4-Hour Workweek
• Show Your Work!
• Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur
• Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results
• Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life.

Some interesting facts about Ali Abdaal-

• After being inspired by Graham Stephan and Property Hub podcasts, Ali got interested in real estate.
• Harry Potter is his favourite book and his favourite YouTube channels are CGP Grey and Tim Ferriss.
• Ali collaborated with popular YouTubers, Lana Blakely, and Sheen Gurrib.
• He loves playing the piano and guitar and singing covers of pop and Disney songs.
• Ali is a polyglot as he knows English and Urdu.

So, how are you inspired by the success story of Ali Abdaal?

Share with me in the comment section below.