Diversifying Away From Yourself
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Ali starts from an assumption most creators avoid: as an individual he has fifteen minutes of fame, or a few years at best in the limelight. From that premise he derives two moves. First, make hay while the sun shines — capitalise on the current window as hard as possible while helping people. Second, use that window to build things that do not depend on people caring about him personally: business lines that survive his relevance, and assets deliberately decoupled from the internet. He describes the failure mode he is designing against precisely — lifestyle creators who grow large, whose audience then grows up and stops caring, and who have nothing but AdSense and brand deals underneath. He calls his own approach very risk-averse, which is a striking framing for someone in an inherently volatile career.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Assume your personal relevance is time-limited
Start from the premise that attention on you as an individual will fade, comparably to an athlete's career. Ali says this fear of slowly losing relevance is one of his biggest.
Watch out Planning as if current attention is permanent is what makes the eventual decline fatal rather than survivable.
- 2
Capitalise hard on the current window
Treat the period of attention as a resource to be used, not coasted on. Ali's framing is make hay while the sun shines — earn well while genuinely helping people.
- 3
Audit how much of the business depends on you personally
Identify revenue that exists only because people care about you. Ali's cautionary case is the lifestyle creator whose entire business is AdSense and brand deals, which he calls very fragile.
- 4
Build lines that outlive personal relevance
Create products, brands and teams whose value does not depend on the founder's fame — courses, an academy, a separate creatorpreneur brand, a book, and a team that can produce without him.
Pro tip Systemising the business, so team members can shape projects within the core values, is part of decoupling output from the founder.
- 5
Move earnings into assets decoupled from the internet
Take profit off the platform. Ali describes reinvesting behind the scenes into real estate and other asset classes that are decoupled from the internet.
- 6
Anchor to a durable activity, not a platform
Ali says he is agnostic about the medium — books, articles, tweets, videos, in-person — because what he cares about is teaching. He notes the longevity of being an author is likely far greater than that of being a YouTuber.
In the wild
Ali describes the pattern he is designing against. A lifestyle or beauty creator grows big initially because of who they are. Then the audience grows up and realises they no longer care about that lifestyle, and views start to decline. If there is no solid business built underneath — if everything rests on YouTube AdSense and brand deals — the whole thing turns out to be very fragile and does not stand the test of time. This is why he describes everything he is doing as, in a way, being very risk-averse.
→ The diagnosis drives his entire diversification strategy: products, team, brands and off-platform assets built during the good years.
Ali points to Ryan Holiday's setup: living on a farm near Austin, waking up, walking, reading and writing for about four hours in his study, then spending from lunchtime onwards with his kids and out in nature, and banging out a book every year or two. The books introduce Stoic ideas from Seneca and Marcus Aurelius to a mainstream audience. Ali's read is that the longevity of being an author is far greater than the longevity of being a YouTuber, even though right now video is much more profitable and writing is a slow burn.
→ Writing becomes a deliberate long-horizon bet run alongside the higher-yield, shorter-lived video business.
Common mistakes
Building a business only on rented attention
AdSense and brand deals depend entirely on current view counts. Ali calls this a very fragile business, because a decline in relevance removes the revenue at exactly the moment you need it most.
Keeping profits inside the same fragile system
If earnings from an internet-dependent business are reinvested only into that business, the whole balance sheet correlates with one attention cycle. Ali's counter is moving money into real estate and other asset classes decoupled from the internet.
Identifying with the platform instead of the craft
Ali refuses to define himself as a YouTuber or an author, saying teaching is the ultimate thing and he is agnostic about the medium. Tying identity to a platform makes any platform decline feel like a personal ending.
From the transcript
“what are the things that i can do to diversify away from me as an individual so that the business that i make has more…”
“reinvesting that into real estate and into other asset classes that are decoupled from the internet”
“if there isn't a solid business built around that and it's all based on youtube adsense and brand deals and stuff like that it's a…”
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