Speaker 2
I completely agree. Do you think I should lean into being the productivity guy? I think in Snow Leopard, you talk about this kind of the whole like, you know, Ryan Holiday equals stoicism kind of thing. And if you ask people, what's the word that you would associate with Ali Abdaal? That word is productivity. That's a really good word. It's a really high value word to be associated with my name. And so do I want to go, I don't know, feel good fitness, feel good relationships, feel good spirituality, feel good parenting? Or do I want to go productive relationships, productive parenting, you know, that sort of idea? Okay,
Speaker 1
so this is an awesome question. This is going to be very advanced. So anyone who's listening, we're just going to skip straight to level 80. OK. All right. So first of all, I think it's funny, this growing trend, you see it on Twitter and LinkedIn and YouTube, where everyone's like, I am the broad category guy.
Speaker 2
Yeah. The writing guy.
Speaker 1
The writing guy, the productivity guy. Right. OK. The thing that everyone needs to internalize is that when you're thinking categorically, the goal, you are not what's important. Like the goal is actually not how do I grow the category of I'm the productivity guy. The goal is how do I grow the category itself and I am part of
Speaker 2
it. Fine. Like Ryan Holiday grew stoicism.
Speaker 1
Right. So he doesn't go, I'm the stoicism guy. He goes, I'm going to evangelize stoicism. And because I am doing that more than anyone, you associate me with that category. Right. So every person who does the guy thing, I'm like, you already misunderstood the idea. Right. Second of all is your book title. You stumbled upon something, which is, it's not all productivity. It's feel good productivity, right? So if I were you, your mega category is not productivity. You're not the productivity guy. It's feel good productivity. Then the question is, okay, so you own that now. You've planted your flag. Now, what are all the subcategories of feel good productivity? So what are all the other things that can go within that umbrella? Feel
Speaker 2
good productivity for parents, feel good productivity for writers, feel good productivity for students. So you can
Speaker 1
go the for who. The miracle morning for Dr. Dot. Exactly. Yeah. For real estate. Yeah. So you can go, you can niche down within that category by audience. Yeah. You could niche down by outcome. You could niche down by problem. You could niche down in all sorts of different ways. Yeah, what do you mean by problem or by? So I think that the mistake would be, well, I actually think you could go multiple different ways typically it's very hard so there's an old book um called positioning you ever read that book positioning i've read it ages ago but i need to read by al rice al reese and jack trout yes and they have this this concept called uh line extension or brand extension right which is you, Google becomes known for search and then they go and take the Google brand and they bring it over to social, call it Google plus, and it doesn't go anywhere, right? Because typically you can't just take a brand and then extend it into other categories, right? So I think the mistake would be you thinking, well, I'm Ali Abdaal and I've been successful in productivity. Now let me just go jump to a different mega category and just think I'll be right. You can sort of make the argument though, that it's not fully line extension. If you're extending, not the brand Ali Abdaal, but you're extending the category. So of feel good productivity. And that's where you could go feel good relationships, feel good fitness, whatever. But what I would think about first is what are the categories that are most closely related to productivity? Relationships isn't the closest next category. So
Speaker 2
what are some other? I mean, motivation would be, I mean, I guess like how do you define category?
Speaker 1
Time management. Like that's a subset of product. Productivity is so wide. So you're sort of going like, what are the largest subcategories within productivity? Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Time management would be a big one. Procrastination, motivation, definitely. Increasingly, discipline is a lot of sort
Speaker 1
of thing. So like, for example, like feel good discipline. Like that's interesting. That's interesting, yeah. And that is like a one deviation away. And you're not. That's a good idea. Yeah, I'm full of them. And so that's not you going, I'm Ali Abdaal. I can be successful at anything. That's you taking your already successful flag in the ground and going, I'm just going to extend it to this little territory that's right next to me. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Feel Good Discipline would be an interesting book to write.
Speaker 2
almost writes itself. Exactly. It just makes a lot of titles.
Speaker 1
thing that I always look for, especially with book titles, is how do you take two words that shouldn't be in the same room and put them in the same room? And feel good and discipline usually are not put together. So inevitably, you just created some magic when the person's
Speaker 2
like- Feel good in relationships. I mean, that's like so vanilla. Exactly.
Speaker 1
So you're looking for that dissonance. Oh,
Speaker 2
that's good. Anything else?
Speaker 1
Yeah, I think just to like crystallize it though, if I were you, especially because of how successful this book has been, and I sort of seen how you've adjusted some of your branding to like sort of be all cohesive with this book and the book title and everything.
Speaker 2
Website redesign stuff as well. I
Speaker 1
would, if I were you, I would 100% double down on the mega category of feel good productivity and make everything fall under that. And literally, I honestly think no one has really Oh, this better from a categorical lens as Ryan Holiday with stoicism. And that's your whole goal. It's just Ali Abdaal comes second, feel-good productivity comes first. How do I build a suite of products and a library of IP and books that falls within that category?
Speaker 2
So if I did a book called something like, I don't know, how to actually enjoy your work or something like that, how to actually enjoy your nine-to or something, that's almost like extending the category of feel-good productivity.
Speaker 1
Yeah. Sort of. Yeah, you could do that. The risk that you run with that is it's very similar to that book, the book that you just wrote. And so same like with our pricing discussion where people like put prices together. Most people, if you look at like Mark Manson's actually a good example of this, his second book and his first book are actually very similar. And so when you read the first book, you're sort of like, I don't know that I need to read the second book because it's so, you know? And so when you're thinking about the library, your goal is like, how do I create something that is farther away from my first book from a concept perspective? Yes,
Speaker 2
good point. Yeah, so feel good discipline would be one of them where people can appreciate that those two are actually different books. But they're related enough that it's like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.
Speaker 1
Or like feel-good conflict resolution. You're like, oh, that's interesting. Conflict resolution usually feels stressful. So what would that look like? So you have, I mean, it doesn't get much bigger than, the irony of feel-good productivity is that you've niched down without niching down because it's still so wide.
Speaker 1
So you've, you've found something that's the magic is like finding something specific that actually doesn't rule a lot of people out, but immediately forces people to go, well, do I want slow productivity or do I want feel good productivity? Yeah.
Speaker 2
Yeah. part of the reason to have blocks on the book cover was also that like i could imagine a world where all of our books had like blocks like colored blocks in different configurations and so i was sort of like mocking up feel good parenting being like the blocks are a bit higgledy-piggledy to look like kind of a toddler's blocks oh that's like feel good fitness is like the blocks are like a barbell or something or something to that effect. It would just be cute if like the whole thing could have like a, the whole library could have a sort of video animated reconfiguration of the blocks that would result in the things. But that's going really, like
Speaker 1
no one cares. So something else to think about too is if you wanted to like experiment with that library, you could not deploy a ton of resource and you could write smaller eBooks or even print books on Amazon with within those different verticals. outperforms the rest and then go to the publisher and go, I'm ready to do round two. I've written five different feel good category eBooks. This is the one that's clearly working. Let's do a book deal that's even bigger than the first one, but is basically that book expanded. Because Atomic Habits is just blog posts expanded. Mark Manson's book was a blog post expanded right so they are interested in the expansion of ideas once they're proven successful and
Speaker 2
i guess kind of riffing on that maybe it would be it would also be useful to just do a video talk called feel good discipline with exactly the subtitle of like how to actually how to whatever whatever the subtitle would be and see how that does i
Speaker 1
mean so a book i'm working on right now is based on our first episode together because the title i forget even the title but it was like five five ways to make a million dollars as a writer or something kind of thing and that because it performed so well sent me down the rabbit hole of well um or five paths to make something like that. And I was like, oh, it'd be really interesting to do a book around the different career paths and how each one pros and cons of making a million dollars as a writer. Like, how do you make a million as a literary writer? Yeah, that's cool. You know? And so, yeah, you should take all of these ideas and just run it through the lean writing method, create a video on it, create Twitter threads on it. feel good discipline that's a good start to percolate yeah like
Speaker 2
that could be quite a fun book to write the
Speaker 1
best part is i only take 10 yeah nice
Speaker 2
um cool what about hybrid publishing i
Speaker 1
hate it it's a hedge i think i think in life, almost anything in life that is a hedge means...
Speaker 2
Except hybrid agencies.
Speaker 1
Except hybrid agencies, exactly. Hybrid agencies, the word is in a different context, but hybrid publishing is like, you don't know whether you're playing the New York Times game or the self-publishing
