

Not Overthinking
Ali & Taimur Abdaal
The weekly podcast about happiness, creativity, and the human condition. It's us, Ali and Taimur Abdaal, occasionally joined by guests, talking about things to help us think, do, and be better.
Things like social interaction, lifestyle design, mental models... Things that are hard to examine, but important to explore. And hopefully, things that make for a fun and interesting chat every week.
We'd love for you to join us.
Things like social interaction, lifestyle design, mental models... Things that are hard to examine, but important to explore. And hopefully, things that make for a fun and interesting chat every week.
We'd love for you to join us.
Episodes
Mentioned books

7 snips
May 24, 2020 • 58min
68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice
This week, we dig into Kevin Kelly's recent blog post "68 bits of unsolicited advice". We go through the list and talk about a bunch of the advices (?) that resonate with us.
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May 17, 2020 • 1h 11min
Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships
This episode is Part 3 of 3 in our Transactional Analysis series (make sure you listen to the last 2 episodes before this one!). We dig into many of the different social games that people play: "If It Weren't For You", "Why Don't You — Yes, But", "Courtroom", "Uproar", "Blemish", and a few others.
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May 10, 2020 • 1h 9min
Life Positions & Games - Transactional Analysis Part 2
In this episode, we continue our discussion about Transactional Analysis. We recap the Parent, Adult and Child zones of thinking that we mentioned last week, and move on to talking about the 4 different Life Positions and the Games People Play.
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May 3, 2020 • 1h 7min
The Parent, The Adult and The Child - A Discussion of Transactional Analysis
In this episode, we discuss transactional analysis. Taimur talks us through the ideas behind the theory, and how your internal mind can be split up into three parts - the Parent, Adult, and Child with examples taken from the book I'm Ok, You're Ok by Thomas Harris. Enjoy.
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Apr 26, 2020 • 1h 1min
Money, Stories, and Old People
In this episode, we talk about a few different things — how to think about giving money to those in need, whether it's helpful to view our lives as stories, and how Taimur has been trying to develop more empathy with old people.
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Apr 19, 2020 • 59min
Vision, Leadership and Winning the Lottery - An open-ended discussion
In this episode we take a ramble through a number of topics from statistics to value propositions to what we'd do if we won the lottery to Animal Crossing. Enjoy!
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16 snips
Apr 12, 2020 • 1h 2min
The Principles of Productivity
In this episode, we talk about Ali's favourite thing - productivity - much to Taimur's joy! Or, more precisely, we talk through the structure and some of the key points from Ali's upcoming Skillshare class on productivity including Parkinson's law, the Pareto principle amongst other myths, laws and principles...
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Apr 5, 2020 • 49min
Taimur Teaches Maths - The Flaw of Averages
In this episode, Taimur gives us a maths lesson. We learn about why it's bad to rely on 'averages' when making plans, and about how we can make better decisions by accounting for uncertainty. Sorry for the poor audio quality — Taimur had some technical difficulties this week.
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16 snips
Mar 29, 2020 • 1h 7min
Note-taking and quarantining
In this episode, we mostly talk about note-taking — reasons to do it, and different systems and apps to facilitate it. We also talk about how quarantine life is going so far, and how we're trying to make the most of it.
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Mar 22, 2020 • 53min
Not Overthinking: Coronavirus Edition
This week we talk about the only thing there is to talk about right now — the Coronavirus crisis. We look back over the past few weeks to see how our thinking about the virus has changed, and we try and figure out how to get ourselves to emotionally care about things that are distant from us.
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