Name: Feel-Good Productivity (Ali Abdaal) Summary?: How Joy Can Revolutionize Studying
Uploaded: 2025-11-04T18:32:19.000Z
Duration: 15 min 17 s
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What if your studies, work, and life were fueled by enjoyment?

What if by having more fun, you were more productive and more effective at everything you do?

Adverbs of degree

Jubbal medschoolinsiders.com Former junior doctor and productivity expert Ali Abdaal posits that the secret to productivity isn't discipline, grit, or grind it's joy.

In his new book, Feel Good Productivity, Abdaal uses psychological and neuroscientific evidence to illustrate how positive emotions fuel success.

When projects feel enjoyable, productivity takes care of itself.

Our team took a deep dive into the newly released book to distill its key messages and provide examples that can help you adapt Ali's findings to your own life and study techniques.

The overarching theme is that success doesn't lead to feeling good.

Ali's book is broken down into three parts Energize, Unblock, and Sustain.

Each of those parts is further broken down into three subsections.

This section introduces the three energizers of true play, power and people.

Play introduces the importance of curiosity and adventure.

Many animals, including humans, use play to learn and develop.

Have you ever seen a litter of kittens playing and testing their boundaries?

They use play to learn key skills and test the limits of their bodies.

Children do the same thing, but at some point along the way, we're told to stop playing.

We stop being curious, pushing boundaries, seeking new adventures, and allowing ourselves to fall down.

The act of being curious helps us not only retain information, but actually learn it.

It's an active learning technique that can be applied to any aspect of your life, including your studies.

Instead of memorizing, aim to understand.

If you want to become a doctor, get curious about how the body works.

You're not just memorizing how the nervous system works for a test, you're you're learning how it works because of your own curiosity and amusement.

Next, reframe failure as a learning process.

How much more could you learn if you saw failure as data points that were necessary to succeed?

You can afford to play around a little, because failure is another way to learn.

This is the way you should approach studying for a test.

Every practice problem you get wrong isn't a failure, it's a data point.

Figure out why you got the question wrong and learn from it so that you won't make the same mistakes on the real test.

If you're not sure what specialty to pursue skills, seek to collect data points.

A terrible rotation is merely one where you learn more about what you like and dislike about medicine.

A poor volunteer experience isn't a waste of time.

It's another data point to help you understand what you want from your career.

This reframing prevents regret and gives you more room to learn.

The last point in the play subsection is to not take yourself too seriously.

Instead, approach everything you do with sincerity.

If you go into a medical school interview sincerely rather than seriously, it removes some of the nerves and tension so that you can focus focus on being present and engaged.

Rather than trying to impress the interviewer with your qualifications, aim to sincerely get to know them.

This adds a lightness and ease to an otherwise stressful situation.

Acting with sincerity instead of seriousness will also help you see the humor of life.

If you fall down, literally or figuratively, have a laugh over it and pick yourself up again.

Move forward instead of ruminating on the perceived embarrassment.

Abdaal states, feeling confident about our ability to complete a task makes us feel good when we're doing it and helps us do it better.

An examination of 114 studies involving almost 22,000 participants drew a direct correlation between self efficacy and work related performance.

Believing you can is the first step to making sure you actually can.

There's incredible power to positive self talk.

Words of encouragement don't have to come from other people, they can come from yourself.

David Goggins is full of these tidbits including you don't know me son or Captain America who says I can do this all day.

What do you need to say to yourself day after day to help you keep going?

Ali shares a strategy he calls the confidence Switch.

Challenge yourself to behave as if you're confident in your task, even if you're not.

What would it look and feel like if you were really confident in whatever you're trying to accomplish?

You can add to your power by vicariously through other people's experiences too.

This is when you witness or hear about someone else's performance related to a task that you're going to undertake yourself.

You see other people's examples and it boosts your confidence.

Surround yourself with people and resources that can help you achieve your goals.

If you want to start your own business, listen to podcasts and read newsletters from people who have been down the entrepreneurial path you're about to embark on.

If you're a pre med who hopes to go to Medical School, follow YouTube channels, blogs and newsletters like the ones from med school insiders that will help you understand the doctor journey.

Reach out to people who have successfully been accepted to medical school and residency to learn from their experiences, but

Ensure you surround yourself with people who show persistence in overcoming challenges and their self efficacy will begin to rub off on you.

The Protege Effect Learning by doing is one of the most powerful forces in human psychology.

Researchers have found that the act of teaching something helps us learn it as a study method.

This is called the Feynman Technique, named after the great physicist Richard Feynman, whereby you learn material so that you can teach it to someone else.

The step of teaching a concept ensures you truly understand how it works and you'll be more likely to retain it.

Lastly, take control and ownership of your choices.

Think about what's inside your circle of control and do all that you can to focus on that.

you can control if you have an umbrella and if a little bit of rain ruins your day.

Your mindset is something you always have control over.

As Ali points out, life is more fun with friends around.

Some people naturally give us energy and boost our mood.

The tricky part is finding them, which is made all the harder when we see others as our competition instead of our comrades.

Have you ever heard the phrase you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with?

Choose to spend your time with people who challenge themselves so that you do the same.

Finding friends and surrounding ourselves with people who energize us starts with being a team player.

What can you do to make someone's life or work easier?

How can you be more helpful as a student?

How can you arrange events that bring people together?

Could you share your notes or organize small two to three person study groups?

This is also when you can enact the Feynman technique.

We often choose to see ourselves as an island instead of a connector.

We not only avoid helping people, we also avoid asking for help.

Turn your competitor mindset into a comrade mindset.

You win, I lose turns into you win, I win.

Become a cheerleader for those around you.

You'll make more friends and the act of supporting others will help you feel good yourself.

Sometimes students fall into the trap of seeing everyone else in medical school as their competition.

They pull each other down to try to get ahead.

I even remember someone in chemistry class gave me the wrong answer on purpose.

The truth is you are a team of people headed down the same path.

You have the same desire to help people and advance medicine.