All right.
So if you would like to make more money and become financially free, then there are four key beliefs that school and society have taught you that are really, really holding you back.
And for each of these faulty beliefs, I'm gonna suggest what you can replace it with to drastically increase your earning potential.
If you're new here, hello, my name is Ali.
I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and author I did really well in school.
I went to a fancy university.
I became a doctor.
It was like what society respected.
But that journey taught me all of the wrong things about how money is actually made.
All of these beliefs are things that I had to unlearn through the process of becoming a multimillion dollar entrepreneur.
And so if you watch and apply the stuff in this video, I'm hoping it'll save you at least a few years worth of potentially wasted time of mistakes that I've made myself.
Okay, so the first belief that school instills in us is not something that's instilled consciously.
It's something that just sort of seeps into the fabric of school and society.
And it's just sort of like the water that we as fish swim in.
And that is the idea that having a job is the thing that makes you money.
If you ask people, what is the point of school?
They'll say things like, you know, making friends and being cultured and like getting an education and stuff.
But you feel like, okay, but like, what's the point of getting good grades?
What's the point of going to college?
What's the point of going to university?
What everyone will eventually say.
It's about landing a job, right?
Because if you do well in school, you are more likely to land a good job.
And what do we mean by good job?
We mean a reasonably high paying job that is relatively secure.
Those are the things that we mean when we say land a good job.
And it's just a general assumption that like, of course, if you wanna make money, you're gonna need a job.
If someone does not have a job, people are like, oh my God, how are you making money?
It's like a really scary thing to not have a job.
But this thing like job equals money yes, of course it's true to an extent, but it actually misses the bigger picture of how money is actually made.
This is the equation of how money is actually made.
Money equals value created in something like dollars, so like the currency amount multiplied by value captured as a percentage.
Now, one way of executing on this equation is through having a job, but it's not the only way to execute on this equation.
And thinking of how much money you make as this equation.
Well, I promise, improve your life and make you way more money than thinking of it as having a higher, well-paying job equals me making money.
So what does this equation mean?
All money is simply an exchange of value.
In order to make money, you have to create value.
What does value mean?
Well generally, when you are solving someone's problem or alleviating their pain or giving them what they want, that is considered value.
People value those things and it's considered value because they're willing to pay for the thing.
So, for example, if I was working in sales and marketing and I was able to bring in 200000 worth of money this month into my company, I have created 200000 worth of value in that context.
That one's a very easy example of say like, when you start getting away from like, literally making money, it's harder to quantify the value, but you can in fact quantify the value for everything.
This is a bit of a tangent, but even like saving lives, like I used to be a doctor in case you didn't know and you would think that like what's the value of a human life.
Of course it's priceless, but it's actually not because every single healthcare system in the world, at least the sensible ones, actually does have a dollar amount that they are willing to pay for someone's life.
In the UK's National Health Service, for example.
Last time I checked it was about 50000 pounds, so about 65000 per QALY.
QALY means Quality Adjusted Life Year.
So the NHS, the UK's state healthcare system, was willing to pay about 65000 to extend someone's life by one year.
And so if a medication is cheaper than that, they will generally pay for it on the state system.
So you won't have to pay for it yourself.
And now, like I don't know, this like super expensive cancer treatment costs 500000 to extend someone's life by a year.
The state healthcare system would be like, ah, it's kind of too expensive.
We don't want to pay for this thing.
It feels uncomfortable to us to put value on things like a human life, but people that run the state healthcare system do, in fact, put a particular value on a person's life.
Now, let's say you're a doctor in that system and you've managed to save someone's life.
You have created a lot of value because you know the healthcare system and the person would probably be willing to pay a lot to have their life saved.
But all that money obviously does not come to you as a doctor.
You are only capturing a small percentage of the value that you create.
In the context of medicine, this is a very good thing.
We probably don't want a system where it's sort of like doctors are more like mercenaries and you know it's like well, I saved your life.
Therefore you owe me X amount.
Although apparently that's sort of how it works in the US. with private healthcare systems.
Anyway, I digress.
You create a certain amount of value, but then you only capture a certain percentage of that value, and that is the money that goes to you.
So our salesperson, who brought in 200000 worth of sales, is probably not getting 200000 worth of commission that month.
Maybe they're getting 20000 worth of commission that month because the value captured number here is 10.
They've created 200 grand worth of value.
They've been able to capture 10% of that value and therefore they have made money.
Now, if that person's job happens to be a salesperson for the company, that's what happens here.
As a result of their job, they are creating value.
As a result of the relationship with their employer, they are capturing some percentage of that value and therefore they make money.
But if that salesperson was working for their own business rather than someone else's business which is what having a job is called they still might be creating 200000 worth of value, but they're now able to probably capture a higher percentage of that value, or at least the percentage of value that they capture for themselves or their business is more under their control.
Of course, if you've run a business, you're gonna have expenses, you're gonna have staff, you're gonna have overhead, you're gonna have all these costs.
You're gonna have to pay taxes.
But in general, if you have your own business, you are able to capture a higher percentage of the value that you create compared to if you are an employee working for someone else.
That's not to say working for other people is bad, but it's worth understanding the trade-offs.
It's worth understanding that the only way to make money is not in fact through having a job.
If you are willing to take on more of the work, in particular the work of like getting customers and the work of like running a business, which in my opinion, are quite fun skills to learn and generally more enjoyable than most jobs.
If you're willing to take on that work, you're able to capture a higher percentage of the value that you create and therefore you're able to make more money.
So my recommendation is that, if you are interested in making money, stop thinking of money as being this thing that happens as a result of a job.
Instead, think of money as a thing that happens when you create value.
You capture some percentage of that value, and then yes, maybe the thing that we call a job, ie a single contracted relationship with a single employer, might be your vehicle for creating and capturing value.
But it doesn't have to be.
There are other ways of creating and capturing value.
For example, you could be a freelancer working with multiple clients.
You could have your own business working with multiple clients, maybe having a small team.
You could build a lifestyle business, which is a business that's designed to facilitate your life.
I run an online business school where we teach people how to build those businesses.
There's lots of ways.
You could build software that you sell to people in your spare time, that creates value and you capture some percentage of it.
You could write a book that you write in your spare time that creates value and captures a percentage of it.
There are all sorts of ways to make money that are not just having a job.
And this is the key thing that I wish schools would do a better job of teaching people.
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All right.
Big belief number two that school and broadly society instills in us when we are very young is this idea.
Sales are sleazy.
When you think of the word sales, what is the image that comes to mind?
It's probably not something positive.
It's probably the image of a, you know, something like a used car salesman.
But let me ask you, You know, have you actually been screwed over by a used car salesman?
Most people have not themselves been screwed over by a used car salesman.
Most people have just sort of heard that used car salesmen like tend to screw people over.
When you see films like I don't know, The Wolf of Wall Street and stuff and you're like you see this stuff, like sell me this pen.
It frames sales as this sleazy, adversarial thing where you're trying to like hammer, bludgeon someone into like giving you money for a thing that they don't really need.
It makes sales, the word sales, seem like a scary and sleazy and weird kind of thing.
Relatedly, in the same sort of genre, there's the general idea that money is bad.
And we get this through things that we hear from our friends and from our family and from TV.
There's this guy called Dr Brad Klontz who has done a bunch of research published in the Journal of Financial Therapy, which is apparently a journal that basically looks at the money scripts that we get taught throughout childhood.
And he basically showed that, like you know, a lot of the beliefs that we build around money are just sort of unconsciously shaped by stuff that we heard when we were kids.
So when you were a kid, maybe you heard something like, all rich people are evil.
And like the only way to make lots of money is to exploit the people underneath you.
We develop this general attitude, this discomfort with the idea of sales and this very clear discomfort with the idea of like talking about money.
Like, oh, if you make money, then you must've done something wrong.
It's like it feels weird to, like you know, get a promotion because your friends haven't got promotions, so it feels weird to like talk about money.
There's all this sort of discomfort and fear associated with the idea of money and sales.
But this is a very, very unhelpful attitude as it relates to trying to make money.
And I see this a lot with students in my Lifestyle Business Academy.
They're starting businesses for the first time and they're having to sell their product or their service or their coaching or whatever, and they get really really, really scared about this because they have never actually tried to sell something before.
They all earn a decent living, they've got successful jobs, and so the only sales they've ever had to do is like negotiate a raise, which happens once, once in a blue moon.
And so then the thought of like getting on zoom calls and, like you know, building sales pages and like talking to people in the dms and trying to sell something like just fills them with this sort of dread of like, oh my God, I can't possibly do this.
This is like terrible.
I'm a terrible person for trying to sell my thing.
But what we try and do and this is kind of the reframe which is much more helpful is this idea that sales equals service.
Yes, there are some organizations and people around the world that treat selling as like sell me this pen.
Go on then, like you know, try and sell me this thing that I don't really need.
And it turns into this adversarial relationship.
But for the most part commerce and capitalism, and the world, the economy, world economy as a whole functions on the idea that when a sale happens, it is because both parties are winning.
Sales is a win-win type situation.
Earlier this morning, I went down to the local coffee shop to buy a coffee.
There was a sales transaction that happened in that event.
I handed over 30 Hong Kong dollars, which is about three pounds.
They handed me a cup of nice coffee and both parties were happy.
I was happy because I got the coffee and they were happy because they got the money.
It is a win-win.
I pay my accountants somewhere between 30000 and 50000 a year to do our business accounting and all of that kind of stuff.
That is a win-win transaction.
I'm happy because the accounting's done and hopefully it keeps me out of jail.
They're happy because they've got the money and they've got a client.
If you actually care about trying to make money and trying to improve your financial situation in life.
We got to unlearn this idea that sales is this like scary sleazy, terrible thing, and start thinking of it instead as being a service.
Whether you've got a job or you've got a business.
You are probably not, I would hope, trying to sell people stuff that they really don't need.
You're probably not trying to force people to give you their money.
You are probably not trying to coerce them with threats of violence or intimidation to give you money in exchange for a thing.
When you are selling something, you are merely making an offer.
You're not forcing them.
You're just merely making an offer, saying, hey, I've got this book available.
I spent three and a half years writing this book.
It's called Feel Good Productivity.
It'll teach you how to do more of what matters to you.
There's a lot of research that's gone into it.
And by the way, paperback version was just released.
It's literally like somewhere between $5 and $10.
You can get it at Target.
You can get it out on Amazon.
You can get it wherever books are sold if you're interested.
I'm not forcing anyone to try and buy my fricking book.
You can buy it if you want.
You don't have to, but like...
It's fine, right?
Like if you do end up buying the book and you end up reading it and enjoying it and, you know, leaving a five-star review on Amazon or Goodreads or something you know, it's great.
Like you've gotten value from the fact that you've bought this book.
Now I've got a bit of a tangent here.
So you know that thing that I just did where I like plugged my book or whatever?
What was your response to that?
Was your response like a negative response?
Did you judge me for having the audacity to like mention that I've got a book on sale?
Or was your response neutral?
Like, no, fair enough.
Or was your response positive?
Like, oh, huh.
I actually haven't read Feel Good Productivity yet.
Sounds like it might be interested.
You know, let me check it out.
Was it a negative response, a neutral response, or a positive response?
There are gonna be some people watching this video who have a very negative response.
If you have a negative response to what I just did with this book, you are probably gonna struggle to make money because you judge me for having the audacity to make an offer and tell you that I've got a book for sale.
If you're like, man, Ali Dahl's a fucking seller.
I can't believe he's got the audacity to talk about his 10 fucking book.
That took him four years to write.
If you judge me for that, you probably have an attitude that sales is sleazy, that money is bad, and you will completely sabotage yourself if you ever try and make more money, because you have this association that someone trying to make money is a terrible thing.
If however, your response was neutral and or positive, then you probably don't necessarily have this.
I mean, we all have this to some degree.
I still have some level of discomfort when it comes to sales.
But it is a pattern I've seen time and time again.
The people who judge other people for selling stuff, for the most part, are broke themselves.
I have not met a single rich successful, wealthy person in my life who negatively judges someone else for like making an offer in a nice way for a product that they have.
But I've met a lot of people in my life who really wanna make money but also judge other people who are trying to make money in a negative way and end up just sort of staying in this holding pattern of like, oh sales is sleazy and I want to make money, but I fucking hate everyone else who's trying to make money.
And like, it's this whole thing that like really, really, really holds you back.
Okay, let's move on to belief slash mindset number three.
So you know this equation that we talked about money equals value created in dollars multiplied by value captured as a percentage.
The way we create value is by using our skills.
This is not particularly controversial.
If you have a job slash have gone to school or university or learned any kind of skills, you know that certain skills can create value that can be monetized and you can capture some of that value.
That's why you get trained for having a job, for example.
But the key mindset shift that I wish more people had at least people who actually wanna make money is another one of those things that we need to unlearn from school.
So what school and society basically teaches us is that if you want skills, you need some kind of formal training.
Maybe you need to go to university to learn that skill.
Maybe you need to take a course at a local community college, an evening classes, where they teach you the thing.
Maybe you need to hire a teacher in person to teach you the thing.
This is how you learn skills, right?
No, this is not how you learn skills.
This might've been how you learned skills back in the day, but now we have something called the internet.
And so, if you care about making money, it is far more useful for you to embody this idea that the way you learn skills is through self-learning.
You teach yourself skills.
I did a video the other day and there was a comment on that video that got lots of upvotes.
And then I think the writer of that comment ended up deleting the comment because I couldn't find it again.
So this video was about like how to get rich on easy mode.
And I basically argued in that video that the way you get rich on easy mode is you learn a skill that helps another person make money.
So like something to do with sales or marketing or coding or whatever.
And there was a comment on this video saying that like this is completely unattainable for a regular person.
What, are you just expecting that a regular person is able to just learn these skills?
What if they didn't go to university?
What if they didn't go to college?
How are they able to learn those skills?
Thankfully, there were a bunch of comment replies to that being like well yes, because we have the internet.
And I'm very thankful to people in the audience for like commenting on that.
That's the thing, right?
It's not your fault if you think that skills equals formal training.
It's the fact that school and society is still structured in a way that teaches us that the only way to learn a skill is to get formal training in that specific skill.
But if you care about making money, we've got to unlearn that.
We've got to recognize learning skills is a matter of self-learning.
You can learn literally any skill that you want.
There are very few skills that in order to learn them, it's sort of like gate kept by someone else.
Yes, if you want to learn to be a neurosurgeon, you probably cannot just learn that on your own watching YouTube videos.
Rightfully.
To become a neurosurgeon, you have to go through some kind of formal training program.
You have to go through medical school, you have to be called a doctor before they'll even let you into neurosurgical residency, and you're gonna need to practice on real patients, which you'll only do in the context of a formal training program.
But that is a tiny tiny, tiny percentage of the total number of skills that are available to people.
Almost all of the others, you can just learn yourself by watching YouTube videos, by taking online courses from people who've done the thing, by reading books about the thing, listening to podcasts about the thing, trying to practise the thing without needing to ask anyone's permission for doing the thing.
There are all sorts of ways these days in the modern world to learn skills.
Now, I used to be a doctor in case you didn't know.
I might've mentioned it a couple of times.
And I went to a fancy university.
I went to Cambridge University, one of the best medical schools in the world.
I have lots of friends who went to Oxford University.
I have friends who went to Harvard, who went to Yale, all of the big name universities you could think of.
And have a guess, where was the biggest place where we actually learned the skills of being a doctor, or the knowledge you need to pass the exams?
It was not in fact through the university lectures.
It was not through the university's course material, it was, in fact, right here on youtube.
The amount of stuff you can learn on youtube these days, like it's literally like the best medical physiology lectures in the world are not inside universities, they are, in fact, here on youtube for free.
Even practical skills like learning how to do a cardiovascular exam or respiratory exam or, like you know, taking a stethoscope and being, or like doing like orthopedic examinations that you learn in med school, and like how to examine someone's shoulder or how to you know examine someone's knee for like, some joint issues in the knee or whatever.
Yeah, they teach you those in med school, but where do you actually learn them?
You learn them by freaking watching a bunch of youtube videos where sensible people on the internet have like made youtube videos, like going breaking them down in depth.
You watch those videos a bunch of times, you practice it on your friends.
You go back to the video a lot of the people who make the videos and also include like pdf resources in the description.
So you use those and sort of print those off and mark those off.
That's how you learn the skills as a medical student, even at some of the best medical schools in the world.
You learn through watching a freaking youtube video and then applying it by practicing it on your friends.
Even in that context where you would think medical school, fancy university, formal training a lot of what you learn you end up self-teaching yourself thanks to YouTube videos and thanks to the internet.
So please, I'm begging you, if you are actually interested in making your own money and becoming financially free, please unlearn this idea that, like the only way to learn skills is through formal training.
It's really not.
You can teach yourself practically anything by just following YouTube videos, taking online courses, reading books, listening to podcasts.
There's so many different ways to teach yourself stuff.
And if you don't have skills, you don't have skills yet.
You have not yet learned the skill of how to sell something.
You have not yet learned the skill of copywriting or of coding, or of AI automation or of any of these things that are like high income, high value skills in the modern economy.
You do not need to do an MBA.
You do not need to go to university to learn those skills.
You can totally just learn them by yourself in your weekends and in your evenings, if you care about growing your skillset, which you can then use to make more money.
And finally, key mindset number four that school instills in us is the idea that business and investing are very risky things.
On the business front.
School and society teaches us that man, if you start a business, you're gonna have to get all this investment, you're gonna have to put all of your own savings into it.
And what if things don't work out?
You're gonna end up broke and homeless and alone.
And then, when it comes to investing, we all have a friend, we all have an uncle, an Uncle Bob, an Uncle Tom Copley, whatever who made this big investment back in the 1970s and lost all his money because he bet it big on this thing.
And so we often associate the idea of starting a business or the idea of investing our money with the idea that we could potentially lose everything.
Now this strikes fear into our hearts, right?
Because obviously money equals security, and the thought that we might be losing our security or gambling our security away for the sake of starting a business or trying to invest just fills us with dread and stops us from taking action on starting a business or on investing.
But the truth is a lot more nuanced than that.
Yes, sometimes starting a business can be risky.
Yes, sometimes investing your money can be risky.
But the devil's in the details.
When it comes to investing.
If your version of investing is like trying to randomly pick one stock that your mate recommended and put all of your money into that, that is obviously a dumb, stupid thing to do.
But if your version of investing is what almost every sensible person says, which is invest in an index fund, ie you're spreading your money across like the top 500 companies in the US or the top 5000 companies in the world, that is not risky at all.
It's risky in the sense that if, for example, 2008 happens and then the market goes down by like 40 and then after two years it recovers again,
Or if, like COVID happens, or like tariffs happen, and then in the short term the market in general sort of takes a bit of a downturn because people are scared, but then it recovers over time.
If you do that and you are dumb and like, anytime the market goes down, you're like constantly keeping an eye on your portfolio and you're taking money out because you're worried about losing all your money then you're dumb.
And in that context, yes, you do lose money through investing.
But if you take money, you park it in something like an index fund and you just let it be.
Historically, if you look at that over the past like 100 years, that has generally been a fairly safe way to grow your wealth.
Similarly, starting a business.
Yes, if you were to take your 50 grand worth of savings and put it into this big moonshot thing where you're like man.
I really want there to be a market for recycled tote bags and I'm gonna bet everything on this one business and I'm gonna try and find a factory in China to manufacture my tote bags.
I'm gonna manufacture 10000 tote bags and then you realize no one wants to buy them.
That would be a dumb way to go about building a business.
It's not that building a business is risky, it's that building risky businesses is risky.
If however, you were to do sensible things when it comes to building a business like, for example, making sure you validated the idea before you put any money into it, maybe starting with a service-based business where you don't need investment you can just start off doing a service for someone who's willing to pay you for the service.
In that kind of world, starting a business is not that risky.
And in fact I would argue tentatively, if I may, that actually having a job is riskier than starting your own business.
Because when you have a job, you are not fully in control of your own financial situation.
Your manager, the CFO, the CEO of the company, like restructuring, mergers and acquisitions.
All of this stuff is stuff that is fully outside of your control that could drastically change your financial situation for the worse pretty much overnight.
Whereas if you have your own business and you have multiple clients that you're serving yes, you know the economy could take a downturn your business.
Could you know you could get fewer sales this quarter compared to last quarter?
But in general you have a lot more visibility and a lot more control over your financial situation when you are calling the shots rather than when you are working for someone else.
And so if you've gotten to this point in the video and you haven't yet seen my video about how to get started with investing which, shock horror, is actually not that risky then you should totally check out this video over here, which will give you a primer on how to get started with it and how you can use relatively safe investing to grow your wealth and make some passive income without taking all of that risk.
So that'll be right over here.
Thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next video.
Bye-bye.
