The North Star Energy Audit
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
A combined method from both hosts for working out what you should actually spend your life on, especially once money stops being a motivator. Ali's half is empirical: review past weeks in your calendar and mark each activity as energising or draining, ask whether you would do it for free, run a guided visualisation where money is permanently solved, and then block out an ideal ordinary week five years out. Alex adds the two axes that stop the audit from lying to you. The first is a spectrum from fully intrinsically motivated to fully extrinsically motivated — where does this activity sit, and is that a good reason to do it. The second is the harder correction: when something drains you, distinguish whether you genuinely dislike it or whether it is simply hard and 'no energy' is a convenient excuse.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Score past weeks from your calendar
Look back through previous weeks and ask of each block: did this energise me or drain me. For Ali, writing, talking to a camera, podcasting and brainstorming with the team energised; admin, operations and selling to advertisers drained.
Pro tip Score from the real calendar, not memory — memory smooths over the draining blocks.
- 2
Apply the would-I-do-this-for-free test
Ask whether you would still do the activity if there were no payment. For sport the answer is instantly yes; the test bites when money is involved and crowds out intrinsic motivation so you can no longer tell which is driving you.
Pro tip Ask it mid-task, in a dull moment, rather than in retrospect — Ali ran it every half hour during hospital shifts.
- 3
Run the money-solved visualisation
Close your eyes and picture life with the money problem permanently gone — the apartment, the people, no financial worry — then ask concretely how you would spend tomorrow. Whatever you still choose is signal.
Pro tip Ali found the overlap was almost total, which turned present-day number anxiety into a non-issue: act as if it were already true.
- 4
Add the legacy check
Ask what you would want written on your gravestone or said at your funeral. Beyond family, Ali's answer was to be an inspirational teacher who helps people live their best life — which points at the same activities as the calendar scoring.
Watch out Treat this as a corroborating lens, not the primary one; it rewards grand-sounding answers.
- 5
Design the ideal ordinary week
Go forward five years in your calendar, delete the recurring events still sitting there, and block out what you actually want to be doing — sport, friends, and a protected deep-work block for the work that matters.
Pro tip Then check how close your current week already is; proximity gives you real-time feedback rather than a distant fantasy.
- 6
Plot each activity on the intrinsic-extrinsic spectrum
For anything you are doing, ask where it sits between fully intrinsically motivated and fully extrinsically motivated, and whether that position is in check and a good reason to be doing the thing.
Watch out Once something becomes your livelihood it slides along this axis without you noticing — Ali describes the YouTube channel moving from play to job.
- 7
Run the hard-versus-disliked correction
Before cutting a draining activity, ask whether you dislike it or whether it is simply hard and comes less naturally to you. If it is hard, the low energy is an excuse and doing it is how you prove you can do hard things.
Pro tip Alex's test cases were planning, hiring roadmaps and running process — all things he avoided and had to interrogate honestly.
Watch out The same trap runs in reverse: something you love may just be easy, which is not the same as intrinsically motivating.
In the wild
While dabbling as a part-time doctor doing occasional shifts in the emergency department, Ali kept asking himself every half hour — while typing on the computer, or waiting five minutes on hold to radiology — whether he would really be doing this if he had won the lottery and never had to worry about money. The answer was consistently no: he would much rather be in the studio with his team working out what video could share a concept from psychology. The recurring, in-the-moment version of the question made the verdict unambiguous.
→ Ali stopped the clinical shifts and concentrated on teaching-shaped work.
Ali visualised having 100 million in the bank and asked what he would actually do tomorrow. Making videos, writing a book and recording podcasts all survived unchanged. The single exception was courses, which the business runs partly because they fund everything else — with money solved, he says he would put all the courses online completely free. That isolated exactly one extrinsically-driven activity in an otherwise intrinsically-motivated portfolio.
→ A clear north star — freedom to learn and teach on his own terms — and a concrete answer to number anxiety.
Common mistakes
Calling hard work draining
Alex's sharpest correction: work that is hard for you feels low-energy, so 'this drains me' becomes a respectable excuse for avoiding the exact skills you have not built. Test the distinction before you delegate the task away.
Mistaking easy for intrinsically motivating
An activity can score as fully intrinsic simply because it is effortless. If something is both maximally enjoyable and maximally easy, check whether the enjoyment is really about the work or just about the absence of friction.
Auditing only when a big decision arrives
The signal comes from repeated in-the-moment checks and reviewed calendar weeks. Running the questions once, at a crisis point, gives you a single noisy data point instead of a pattern.
From the transcript
“energize me or did this thing drain me and generally for writing and for talking to a camera and for doing podcasts those are the…”
“how did i know when something didn't give me energy versus when something was hard and i was making an excuse for not being good…”
“i'm always thinking in my head on this spectrum from 100 intrinsically motivated to 100 extrinsically validated”
From the episode
Lessons From Selling Morning Brew For $75 Million At 28 - Alex Lieberman
Alex Lieberman