# The Cost of Getting Rich

- Channel: [Ali Abdaal](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoOae5nYA7VqaXzerajD0lg)
- Published: 2026-04-30
- Source video: [Watch on YouTube](https://youtube.com/watch?v=9rRvmcDpWwA)
- Read on ReadTube: https://www.read.tube/p/videos/9rRvmcDpWwA
- Language: English

## Summary

**7 Unhealthy Rich Habits**

The video argues that seven unhealthy habits helped Ali Abdaal become rich in his 20s by maximizing work, learning, and focus at the expense of rest, health, and balance. He explains that habits like eliminating downtime, constantly consuming business content, thinking about work all the time, neglecting other responsibilities, sacrificing health, tolerating waste, and treating every task as an hourly-rate calculation accelerated his progress but also created costs he is now trying to unlearn. The main takeaway is that these habits can be useful for a season when building wealth, but they conflict with the habits needed for a peaceful, fulfilled life long term.

Ali argues that seven “unhealthy” habits helped him get rich in his 20s: using all downtime to work, constantly consuming business content, always thinking about work, neglecting other responsibilities, sacrificing health, tolerating wasteful purchases, and judging everything by hourly rate. Each habit increased focus, speed, and output, but each also carried real costs in presence, relationships, health, and peace of mind.

His main conclusion is that these habits are useful in a specific season of life, especially when aggressively building a business, but they should not become a permanent lifestyle. The same intensity that helps create wealth can undermine happiness and balance later on. He now sees the goal as using money to support freedom and fulfillment, while deliberately shifting more attention toward health, family, and overall well-being.

## Article

### Seven unhealthy habits that made me rich in my 20s

In this video, we're going to go through seven habits that made me a bunch of money when I was in my 20s. They were all unhealthy in one way or another. Yes, it's very good to become financially free and make all the money and stuff, and it is also good to have a balanced life and not be sacrificing the things that are more important than money on route to getting there.

Oh, and by the way, if we haven't met yet, hello. My name is Ali. I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur, and on this YouTube channel since 2017, I've been documenting the journey from being a broke-ass medical student to then working full-time as a doctor to then becoming a multi-million dollar entrepreneur and best-selling author. And my goal with this channel is to document the lessons that I've learned and the lessons I'm continuing to learn, partly as a reminder for myself, and also in the hope that you will find something that is useful on your own journey of building a life you love.

### Habit number one: the zero downtime habit

All right, habit number one is what I like to call the zero downtime habit. And to this day, I carry this laptop bag, this what, camera bag everywhere I go. And I've been doing this for years, so much so to the point that when my wife and I started dating like many years ago, she referred to it as my safety blanket because, like a child, I had to carry my safety blanket everywhere I went, otherwise I would feel weird.

And the reason for this is that, in particular, while I was in my 20s grinding away on building my business, I would not allow myself to have any downtime. Anytime there was a spare moment or where a normal person more likely would take out their phone and scroll Instagram or TikTok or whatever, I would instead bust out the laptop, and I would try and do as much work as I possibly could in that time and almost play this as a challenge or a game with myself where I'm squeezing out productivity and efficiency out of these minutes of downtime here and there. There was almost no moment that I gave myself when I was sort of in the build phase of building the business of actually allowing myself to chill out.

Now, the obvious benefit to this is that you actually just end up with way more time to grind on the thing that you want to be grinding on. One of my friends, Matthew Dicks, he's a great writer and a teacher, and he tells the story of how whatever you're trying to do, you probably don't have huge amounts of free time on your hands to be able to work on the thing, especially if you've got a day job and you're trying to do a side hustle at the same time, like trying to build your business or, I don't know, write a book or whatever. And so, actually squeezing out productivity and efficiency out of those tiny ass moments of time here and there that we get throughout the day instead of using that time scrolling or using that time merely enjoying the taste of a cup of coffee, that time actually does make a difference in how much progress you're able to make in your business, and it does genuinely add up.

As with all of the habits in this video, this kind of habit comes at a cost. The cost is obviously you lose some sense of presence. You lose some sense of dancing through life and actually just being able to take a moment to rest and reflect and just be present in the moment. And what it results in, at least for me, and speaking to a lot of my entrepreneur friends, is you end up training this muscle to the point that it genuinely becomes difficult to switch off.

I now have to set rules for myself where I'm like, Ali, you're not allowed to work on the weekend. And then I get around those rules to be like, well, it's not really work if you consider it fun, right? So then I literally change the rule for myself so I'm like, I'm not allowed to do anything on the weekend that would look like work to someone else. So I'm not judging what work is. An impartial, reasonable, objective observer is judging whether that thing actually looks like work. And I find that rule to be very helpful because then I'm like, okay, well, that means I can't do quite a lot of things I would want to do. Okay, maybe I'll read some Harry Potter fan fiction or I'll, I don't know, go for a walk without my phone or something like that.

Should you adopt the habit of having no downtime into your life? I don't know. This video is not advice. It's not a video about whether you should do anything or not. I'm just giving you the information, like, this worked for me when I was in my 20s, and it also had some, how do we say, unhealthy implications that I'm trying to unlearn now. And so, up to you. You can take it or leave it.

### Habit number two: constant consumption

Now we come to habit number two. Habit number two is the habit of constant consumption. This is a habit that really helped me when I was, you know, in the first many years of building my business, which is that if I was in a situation where I physically couldn't get out my laptop and work, I was always consuming something often related to work or related to the business.

So I'd be listening to podcasts about business, I'd be listening to audiobooks about business, I'd be listening to YouTube videos at double speed about business. If I was in bed, I'd be reading books on my Kindle about business and about how to make more money and how to grow YouTube channels and all that kind of stuff. And so for absolutely years, I basically didn't have many moments of rest. Even when I was doing things like commuting to work or on the toilet, I would always have my AirPods in and always be listening to something or other, constantly injecting all of this business advice and stuff into my veins.

Now, the benefit of this is that, especially if you're a noob to the world of business like I was back in the day, you actually end up leveling up quite a lot by learning from other people that have been on the journey before. That was super, super, super helpful in drastically leveling up my knowledge of business. Not my skills, because skills require practice, but at least my knowledge of stuff. It was also really helpful because then I was able to do all of those things without actively making time for them. It just sort of happened while I was doing all these other things.

But again, the downside and what makes this feel slightly unhealthy, especially now that I'm looking back on it in hindsight, is that, A, it's not a particularly present or mindful way to live where you're constantly injecting information through your AirPods at like 3x speed. It's very easy to miss any kind of nuance and to really reflect and engage deeply with what you're listening to when it's just firehose of information into your brain.

The other downside, which is something that I'm now realizing, is that more information does not actually result in more progress. For many years while I was in my 20s, I thought that the thing that was stopping my business from growing was that I just didn't know enough stuff. And so the more books I would listen to or the more books I would read or the more pop-podcasts I would listen to, maybe there would be this magical idea out there that I just hadn't come across before.

Even if I was thinking about the business, thinking about what is the bottleneck right now that's stopping us from 10xing the business, and then just thinking about that for an hour rather than listening to an hour worth of audiobook, that probably would have actually resulted in a greater impact on the business rather than me listening to the 500th audiobook about business in that decade.

### Sponsor break: Skillshare

All right, by the way, if you're at this point in the video, then you're probably a very intelligent, you're probably very good-looking, and you're probably serious about leveling up in your work and in your life, which is where the sponsor of this video comes in, and that is Skillshare.

Skillshare is a wonderful online platform with thousands and thousands of creative classes taught by real people, including me. I've been teaching on Skillshare since 2019. I've got a really good class on video editing, if I say so myself. I have a class on how to get started with Notion. I have a class on productivity for creators.

But recently, I've been getting into drawing because I decided I wanted to have more things that were less productive. And so I took the how to draw class by Brent Eviston, and it's been a nice way to get started with learning how to draw and doodling in the evenings and sketching things out, and that has been a very nice way of switching off from screens and reconnecting with my soul and my creativity and stuff.

Skillshare is nice because it genuinely is humans connecting with other humans, and they don't just teach you the skill, they also give you a class project that you can work through alongside learning the skill, and then you can share your class project with other people, and you can see what other people's projects are, and you can learn from them.

So if you're interested in trying out Skillshare, and if you're one of the first 500 people to use the link in the video description, you will get 1 month completely for free. So thank you again, Skillshare, for sponsoring this video and for being the place that I've been putting my online classes since 2019. So it's been a very long time. Anyway, thank you, Skillshare, and let's get back to the video.

### Habit number three: constantly thinking about your work

Habit number three is the habit of constantly thinking about your work. For me, the way this manifested was in a few different ways. Firstly, I'd be thinking about work all the time. I'd be thinking about it in the shower, I'd be thinking about it while driving to my actual day job, I'd be thinking about it on my lunch breaks. All of those things are fine.

But where it became more unhealthy, shall we say, was when I would be thinking about it while spending time with friends and family. A lot of the times I was physically present, but in hindsight, I was not actually present because either I was thinking about work or I was literally busting out my laptop on the dining table, on the kitchen table rather than hanging out with my mom and grandma.

And if you decide to incorporate this kind of habit into your life, the benefit you'll get is that basically the more time you're spending consciously or subconsciously thinking about the thing that you need to do to make money, your business, whatever the thing might be, that level of focus often results in interesting ideas. Most people will have breakthroughs in their business not when they're sitting on their desk, but when they're maybe in the shower or maybe driving to work.

But obviously, the cost of this is that it can often cost something in your personal relationships. And this is a difficult habit to break. I am currently trying to unlearn the habit of constantly thinking about work stuff. I have some friends and mentors who are also entrepreneurs and who have kids that are older than mine, and so they've been parents for longer. And one thing they've advised is that having a kid is a very good reason to try and actually learn the habit of being present and not just having the sub-routine of what's the next thing to do in the business and running all the time.

So these days when I'm spending time with my daughter, I'm trying my best to approach it with true presence rather than putting in the time without really putting in the mental headspace, if that makes sense.

### Habit number four: shirking other responsibilities

Okay, so let's talk about habit number four, shirking your other responsibilities. In my case, and as is the case for a lot of entrepreneurs I know who are now quite rich, it's very rare to have a fully balanced life while you're in the grind phase of building up the business.

So for me, I started building my first successful business while I was in medical school. Honestly, I kind of half-assed medical school for 6 years because my mind was always focused on this other thing of building the business. Similarly, when I was working as a doctor, the discretionary time that I had at work, like in lunch breaks and after work and on the way to work and all that kind of stuff, my friends who were really, really, really into medicine and who were whole-assing their medical careers, they were using that additional time to boost up their CV or to do research projects or to do audits or to create presentations for conferences and stuff.

And I was sort of doing the bare minimum of that just to tick the boxes, and I was spending all of the rest of that discretionary time working on the business. And to be honest, this is a pattern you see amongst any sort of outlier success in any field, whether it's entrepreneurship or sports or acting or music or anything like that, which is it's really, really hard to do something at a really high standard if you're focusing on more than just that one thing.

Now, for most people who watch my stuff, if you are building a business, it's probably something you're going to start out building on the side of your main gig, like whatever the things you're doing at university, whatever your career is. And so you kind of have to recognize that probably, unless you're particularly superhuman at this, because I certainly wasn't, your main thing is going to suffer as a result of you building your side thing. Whether you want to make that trade is entirely up to you. I'm personally glad I made the trade for myself, but also survivorship bias. It worked out for me. But if for whatever reason the business thing didn't work out or I did want to go back to medicine, I'm behind, relatively speaking.

### Habit number five: sacrificing health

All right, let's talk about habit number five, the health sacrifice. So, when I was in the early days of building the business, actually for many, many years, I realized that shopping for groceries and cooking healthy food were things that were taking up way too much time. And I decided that I would rather invest that time into stuff in the business rather than into cooking and eating healthy food.

The benefit of this was that it saved me many, many hours every single week that I was able to then put into the business to grow the business and make more money. The downside obviously is that I then ended up living off takeaways for most of my 20s. And so there is a certain level of health sacrifice that I made in my 20s for the sake of grinding on the business.

Now that I'm in my 30s, I'm trying, you know, I've got a personal trainer, I see a physio, I'm trying to reverse the damage of what guys did to my posture and trying to activate my glutes and hamstrings because I never knew what those were because I was just sitting and grinding on a computer all the time. My cardiovascular health is worse than it would have been had I taken better care of my arteries and stuff by not eating fatty and unhealthy foods when I was in my 20s.

Do I think you have to make that sacrifice? I don't think so. These days there are a lot of super healthy takeout options, but for me when I was in my 20s it just wasn't really a priority. It wasn't really something I thought about. If I had my time again, I would still do takeouts, but I would find a way to really optimize the health side of the takeout so I wasn't living off of kebab rolls and, you know, that kind of stuff.

### Habit number six: being okay with wasting money

Habit number six that I developed, which was slightly unhealthy, is being okay with wasting money. So if for example I wanted to buy something like a tech purchase or something for work or something for the studio or whatever, instead of spending ages doing the research to figure out what's the best thing that I would want to buy, if it was below a certain price point, I would just order the thing without thinking about it. Then I would forget about it. Then it would arrive in the post and then I would try it out to see if it actually fulfilled the needs that I wanted it to fulfill.

Now quite a lot of time, I would say maybe 80% of the time, the answer was no and I didn't end up continuing to use the thing. And so then I've got this tech which I've just bought that's just sitting there doing absolutely nothing. And so I would either give it away to a charity shop, I had a donations box where I would drop things off to Oxfam every now and then, or I would give it away to a friend or if it was something low value I would just stick it in the bin.

Now the benefit of adopting this kind of attitude into your life is that again you just get very, very ruthless about how you are spending your time. And if you think something is not worth your time, then you don't bother doing it. Which means that you probably have more time to be able to focus on revenue-generating activities in your business.

The downside is that it ends up creating waste. It's probably bad for the environment and it's probably not good for the soul to just be able to press a button and buy whatever you want and then try it out and then almost discard it. And you know I would reason with myself, I'd be like, oh, I'm giving it away to a charity shop or I'm giving it away to a friend and so it's not like fully wasted. But even so, there is something about that wastage that is probably suboptimal for the soul. And so that was the cost I paid for having this attitude of being okay with waste.

It's something my wife and I clash about to this day. She's very anti-waste. I am still struggling to unlearn the habit of being put wasteful when it comes to buying things because I'm still ingrained in the mindset of, well, why would I bother spending two hours doing the research if it's not worth the time of doing the research? You know, all of that kind of stuff.

### Habit number seven: calculating everything by hourly rate

And then habit number seven relates to this point of is this worth my time? Now there is advice in the world of entrepreneurship that says that you should figure out what is your effective hourly rate or your aspirational hourly rate.

So if for example my hourly rate is $100 an hour and I've ordered a $25 thing, but it would take me half an hour to try and return the thing if I don't actually need it, that half an hour is costing me $50, but I'm only getting back $25 and so why would I bother? You know, that kind of idea.

I thought this was great because then I realized I figured out what my effective hourly rate was based on how much money I was making in the business at the time when I was in my early 20s. I figured out what my aspirational hourly rate was, which was a lot higher than that. And it gave me license to just not do a lot of things and to be okay with wasting a lot of money because I reasoned that it wasn't worth the hourly rate.

The benefit of this is that you then actually delete quite a lot of errands and chores here and there that actually end up taking quite a lot of time. So for example, based on this was why I decided to hire a cleaner fairly early on in my professional career.

However, as with all of these habits, it does come with a cost. And the cost is that it becomes very easy to start thinking of everything in life from this lens of what is the hourly rate. I tried my best when I was a wee lad to try and not over-apply this particular razor, to not think about it in context of French friendships or relationships or anything like that because you really don't want to be starting to think of like, oh well, I hung out with my mate for two hours. That's 500 pounds that I've just wasted. You know, you really don't want to be thinking in those ways, but it is hard. It is something that you have to actively fight against.

And it sort of runs the risk of turning time that you spend on anything into a pure time equals money kind of trade. And then when you start running this calculation, you're like, huh, is it really worth me reading a book for half an hour because like, you know, that's 250 quid. Is it really worth me driving all the way to see a friend because maybe the driving time? So can I be productive in the driving time or do I really want to go? It's kind of far away. I could be working on the business instead to earn more money.

And so even this is, I think, a good habit and I certainly wouldn't change it if I had my time again. Like with all these habits, it can be a double-edged sword that's worth keeping in mind if you're going to start adopting that kind of philosophy into your life.

### The habits that got me rich also had costs

Now ultimately for me, all of the habits that I've talked about here actually did end up serving me. They allowed me to build a business while I was in med school and then later build a business, grow my YouTube channel while I was working full-time as a doctor, and all of that has allowed me to become financially free and be able to kind of do what I want and live a life that I love. So I don't regret any of that.

However, one thing that I've realized is that these sorts of habits I think are useful for a season, but they're not very useful when you apply them to your whole life. And the habits that help you get rich seem to conflict with what I've learned, the habits that actually lead to a happy, fulfilled and peaceful life.

It's very useful to constantly value your time and only never do anything that's beneath your hourly rate when you are trying to build a business. But man, if you're trying to run a household, if you're married and you have a wife and you have a child and stuff in the household needs to be done and you're running everything by that calculation of whether this is really worth my time, it takes you to places that you don't really want to get to in your relationship.

When I speak to entrepreneurs who are much older than me like in their 50s or 60s or whatever, almost all of them say that it's okay to take a break on the weekends and in fact it's a good thing because it helps you come up with more creative ideas and it helps you rejuvenate and rest and all that kind of stuff. Like no one who is in their 50s or 60s that I've spoken to about this says that even once you've made it, you're still grinding away on the weekends and stuff even while you have a wife and a kid.

It sort of feels like the muscle of being productive and grinding away on the business has, for me, been overtrained. So it's sort of like unlearning that is not as straightforward as I would have thought it would be. Still a journey that I'm trying to navigate because I do want to grow the business. It is super fun and it does fund the lifestyle that we have. And also it's not the most important thing. I have a wife and a kid. I do want to take care of my health. I do want to explore more hobbies.

### The takeaway: different seasons require different strategies

So I guess maybe a takeaway from this video is that if you are actively trying to get rich, in general the more time you spend thinking about and working towards the goal of getting rich, the more time and effort and energy and focus you spend on that, the more likely it is to happen. However, time, energy and focus are a finite resource. And so the more time you spend working on the goal of getting rich, the less time you're going to be spending on everything else.

For me, I'm very glad about how I spent my 20s grinding away on the business and trying to maximize productivity. But at the same time, it does come with costs. And so either you're willing to pay those costs or ideally you find a way to grind on your business and get rich without having to sacrifice other things that you particularly care about.

I think ultimately whatever game you're playing, whether it's the game of trying to build a business or trying to get forward in your career or trying to get better grades in school or trying to get rich or not, whatever game you're playing, one lesson that I'm learning right now is that there are different strategies that work for different seasons.

And ultimately what I'm trying to remember for me, we're not optimizing for trying to maximize the dollars in the bank account. We're actually optimizing, like all of us are optimizing for peace, happiness, fulfillment, joy, all of that kind of stuff. Dollars in the bank account, yes it does lead to financial freedom which can lead to time freedom and creative freedom. So it's amazing. It's fantastic. And it is also not the only thing that matters.

Like for me my 20s was strategically imbalanced in favor of making money and less in terms of turning the dials down in terms of health and relationships. But now that I'm in my 30s, I want to dial down the focus on making the money while still maintaining that and dial up the focus on health, relationships, joy, family, peace, fulfillment, all of that kind of stuff.

And if you go into this point in the video and you haven't yet seen my video about my 168 hours spreadsheet, it's basically about how to make time for everything where the key takeaway from that video is that you cannot make time for everything. And so if you're interested in that one, that'll be linked right over there.

Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.