Main Quest, Side Quest
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- —
Ali uses a game metaphor to decide what the business takes on. The main quest line is content — the thing they are genuinely good at. Everything else that sounds cool, like a stationery brand, a mechanical keyboard or a bag, is a side quest: worth doing occasionally because it is fun, but never allowed to become a core focus. The mechanism is a competence check rather than an opportunity check. Being good at content does not transfer to manufacturing, shipping, printing, logistics or customer service, and he says it is actually really hard to do something well. The resolution is to partner with a company that already has the expertise and contribute what you do have — strong opinions on design — rather than building the capability in-house. Notably he rules out solving it with headcount: even if they could hire a full-time person for it, it stays out.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Name your main quest explicitly
Define the one thing the business is genuinely good at. For Ali it is creating educational content, which he separates cleanly from everything adjacent.
- 2
Test the new idea against actual competence
Ask whether you are good at the thing itself, not whether you are good at something nearby. Ali lists what physical products actually require: manufacturing, printing, logistics, shipping and customer service.
Watch out Assuming competence transfers — we can do content therefore we can make a keyboard — is the specific error he calls out.
- 3
Classify it as main quest or side quest
If it sits outside the core, label it a side quest. That is not a rejection; Ali happily makes cool things occasionally, he just refuses to let them become the focus.
Pro tip Being able to say a project is cool and still deprioritise it is the whole point of the label.
- 4
Partner rather than build for side quests
Bring in a company with the expertise and contribute the part you genuinely add. Ali cites Peter McKinnon's collaboration with Nomatic as the model, and offers his own strong opinions on what makes a good bag or keyboard as his input.
- 5
Refuse to fix it with headcount
Angus raises the option of hiring a full-time person to run the side quest. Ali's answer is that hiring would make it a core focus thing, and since it is outside the core focus they probably should not do it too much.
Watch out Hiring against a side quest quietly promotes it to a main quest, along with all the attention that implies.
In the wild
The team launched a stationery brand in January. Ali says he likes the idea of physical merchandise and thinks the products look great, and Angus confirms it has done reasonably well. But both agree it is a side quest: the effort, capacity and resources it requires are a different shape from what the business currently has available, and the hard parts — printing, logistics, manufacturing, customer service — are precisely what the team is not good at.
→ The brand exists and is enjoyed, but stays deliberately small rather than absorbing team capacity from content.
Ali floats making his own mechanical keyboard or backpack, and immediately routes it through the rule. Rather than manufacturing in-house, the move would be to partner with a company like Peak Design that already has expertise in making the thing, with Ali contributing design input since he has strong opinions about what a good bag should have. He points to Peter McKinnon's Nomatic backpack as an existing example of the pattern.
→ A fun product becomes possible without the business acquiring a manufacturing and logistics operation it would be bad at.
Common mistakes
Assuming competence transfers across categories
Ali names the exact failure: reasoning that because you can do content you can also make a keyboard. Doing anything well is hard, and each new category carries its own unglamorous operational tail.
Hiring to make a side quest work
Adding a full-time person to run a non-core project converts it into a core focus by default, pulling management attention and capacity away from the main quest.
Confusing cool with strategic
Ali repeatedly says the products are cool and that coolness is a legitimate reason to do them occasionally. The mistake is letting that be the reason to scale them.
From the transcript
“our main quest line is the content but every now and then we'll do a side quest”
“i think there's one thing i've realized is that it's actually really hard to do something well and the thing that we do well is…”
“it's a cool thing it's outside of our core focus therefore we probably shouldn't do it too much”
From the episode
Life Update: Building My Business And Writing My New Book
Life Update