DDeep Dive with Ali Abdaal
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Ali Abdaal

the ongoing podcast where every week I get the chance to sit down with inspiring authors, entrepreneurs, creators, and other inspiring people.

26 episodes · 30 sourced appearances

Appearances and evidence

Short attributed excerpts only. Timestamps are approximate.

Frameworks in these episodes

Episode-linked context, not an unsupported claim of authorship.

Mindset4 steps

80% Then Optimize

Get most of the way with easy basics before chasing fine details

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Influence5 steps

Accountability Over Knowledge

Behavior change is a carrots-and-sticks problem, not an information problem

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Communication5 steps

Active Constructive Responding

Respond to others' good news with energy and curiosity to build bonds

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Mindset4 steps

Add, Don't Subtract

Improve your diet by adding good foods that crowd out the bad

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Self-Mastery6 steps

Alonement: Solitude Skills Practice

Turn time alone into a scheduled, planned, positive practice you look forward to

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Strategy4 steps

Assets Over Effort: IP, Media and Tech

Scale on intellectual property, media and technology instead of throwing people at problems

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Productivity6 steps

Boundaries and Anchor Phrases

Filter for what's essential and pre-load phrases that protect your time

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Strategy5 steps

Build One Thing That's Hard to Copy

Give viewers a tangible reason to pick you by owning something rivals can't replicate

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Byron Katie's Four Questions (The Work)

Interrogate a limiting belief with four questions and a turnaround

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Influence6 steps

Cold Outreach Friendship Method

Build a global network with three-line messages and shameless follow-up

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Comfort-Muscle Building

Kill social fear by deliberately practising small acts of boldness

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Communication5 steps

Consistency-Based Friend Making

Show up to the same activity weekly to manufacture new friendships

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Copy-and-Improve Business Starting

Don't invent; copy what already works and beat it on a specific pain point

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Cultivate Passion Through Career Capital

Don't find your passion — get so good you gain control, and passion follows

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Innovation4 steps

Dare to Be Trivial

Hunt for answers at every scale because insight ignores status

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Finance4 steps

Defining Your Enough

Write an explicit definition of enough so 'more' stops running your life by default

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Productivity6 steps

Dynamic Calendar Control

Own your calendar, book relationships weeks ahead, and stay free to move

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

Earning Power as Your Best Financial Asset

Grow what you earn before optimising what you save or invest

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Finance3 steps

Earn, Learn, Invest

Get rich in the right order: earn first, then learn, then invest

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Marketing4 steps

Engineering Psychological Value

Change the felt quality of an experience, not just its measurable quantity

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Communication5 steps

Enter the Danger

Flag a hard conversation so it lands as team-first, debate openly, then commit and align

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Strategy5 steps

Expected-Value Giving

Apply the scientific method to philanthropy to buy the most impact per dollar

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Mindset4 steps

Fear or Love

In any moment, ask which of the two forces you are acting from

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Mindset4 steps

Finite vs Infinite Games Filter

Decide by whether a move wins the round or keeps the game going forever

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Peak Performance5 steps

Follow Energy, Not Money

Optimise for what energises you to find effortless, sustainable output over the long game

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Marketing5 steps

Front-End Offer to Liquidate Acquisition Cost

Charge more for a fixed-outcome onboarding to pay back the cost of getting a customer

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Peak Performance5 steps

GABY Morning Routine

Start every day with Gratitude, Exercise, Breakfast and You

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Sales5 steps

Get in the Game

Break into any field by going where it's actually played

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Marketing5 steps

Give Away the Knowledge, Sell the Implementation

Publish everything free, monetise the high-value help a few people pay for

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Mindset4 steps

Goals as Lighthouses

Treat goals as navigational markers you steer by, not destinations you must reach

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Productivity3 steps

Goal to Calendar in Three Steps

Compress most productivity advice into: pick the goal, set the weekly action, calendar it

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Mindset5 steps

Grieve, Flick the Switch, Reset

Feel the setback fully for a fixed window, then switch to purpose and reset your goals

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Self-Mastery4 steps

Higher Self vs Lower Self Test

Before you rest or quit, ask whether it is recovery or avoidance

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Mindset4 steps

Intuition Over Mind

The mind thinks and argues both ways; the heart simply knows

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Influence4 steps

Key Person of Influence

Become the recognisable face that pulls a business from £10K to £100K a month

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Sales4 steps

LAPS Sales Rhythm

Run a weekly loop of Leads, Appointments, Presentations and Sales

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Sales4 steps

Leaks and Faucets Outreach

Exhaust your warm network before cold, and treat every contact as a lead or a conduit

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Peak Performance6 steps

Learning Through Listening

Turn dead time into deep learning by training your ears to read at speed

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Lifestyle Versus Performance Business

Use team size and profit to choose the business you actually want

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Maintenance and Emergency Toolkit

Build one routine to stay well and a separate plan for your worst days

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Self-Mastery6 steps

Master Any Field Playbook

Read 100 books, befriend the top 100 practitioners, then rewrite the playbook

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Mindset5 steps

Mental Fitness: Discipline Over Motivation

Train your mind like a muscle, with discipline that ignores how you feel

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Mindset4 steps

Metrics as Bumpers, Not the Bowling Ball

Let analytics guide the lane, but never let them replace the eye test

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Mindset5 steps

Mindfulness as Attention Training

Treat mindfulness as gym for the mind, not indulgent rest

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Entrepreneurship3 steps

OMV: Origin, Mission, Vision

Ground a business concept in your story, your endgame and today's highest-value act

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Mindset5 steps

Paying Down Ignorance Debt

Buy skills, not index funds, when your real problem is earning capacity

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Mindset5 steps

Plan A Thinking

Remove the safety net so all your energy goes into the main goal.

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Peak Performance4 steps

Play, Power, People: The Three Energizers

Make hard work energising by adding play, agency and connection

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Self-Mastery4 steps

Pleasure Versus Joy

Separate the mind's pleasure-seeking from the deeper joy worth chasing

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Poetry and Plumbing

Pair an inspiring never-finished purpose with the daily discipline that walks you toward it

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Mindset5 steps

Positive-Sum Game Audit

Ask of any endeavour: is this win-win, win-lose, or lose-lose — externalities included?

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Sales4 steps

Price the Asset, Not the Time

Sell a library and outcome divorced from hours, and widen the gap between packages

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Process-Over-Results Scoring

Grade yourself on how well you followed your best process, not on the outcome

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Peak Performance6 steps

Profession, Obsession, Decompression

Sort your whole life into three no-overlap zones so you can be world-class in more than one

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Peak Performance6 steps

Red Head, Blue Head

Spot your pressure state and use a trigger to switch back to calm and task-focused

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Mindset6 steps

Rock-Bottom Recovery Ladder

Climb out of a low point by stacking small controllable wins

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Sales4 steps

Sales as Diagnosis: The Path of Least Resistance

Sell like a doctor by moving people from current reality to desired reality

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Strategy3 steps

Sales vs Volume: Escaping the J-Curve

Pick businesses where the sale comes first, not ones that bleed cash before profit

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Marketing5 steps

Salience-Framed Value

Deliver identical value as a memorable bonus, never a quiet price cut

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Communication5 steps

Saying No Without Saying No

Use deferral, quotas, walls and calendar transparency to control your workload gracefully

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Self-Compassion for Procrastination

Beat procrastination by being kind to yourself, not harder on yourself

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Sales4 steps

Sell by Educating: The Problem-Solution Script

Anchor a buyer in their problem first so they pull the solution out of you

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Self-Mastery6 steps

Share in the Face of Fear

Notice the block, feel the fear, and express your truth anyway

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Productivity5 steps

Ship, Quit, Learn

Run tiny time-boxed experiments designed to quit to discover what energises you

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Mindset4 steps

Should to Could Reframe

Convert fear-driven obligation into curiosity-driven choice by swapping one word

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Productivity5 steps

Slow Productivity: Do Fewer Things

Cut simultaneous projects to kill the admin overhead that blocks deep work

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Influence6 steps

Sniper, Not Shotgun

Win a mentor by prepping the environment and giving before you ask

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Mindset4 steps

Taking Thoughts to Court (Thought Challenging)

Put a distressing belief on trial and weigh the real evidence

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Entrepreneurship6 steps

The 0-to-3 Million Revenue Ladder

Match your next business move to the revenue rung you're standing on

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Mindset4 steps

The 10-Year Rule

Pick one thing and work at it for a decade to reach any level of success

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Productivity5 steps

The 16 Chips Time Allocation

Spend your finite daily chips on purpose so you don't regret your life.

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Peak Performance5 steps

The 30 Plants a Week Rule

Feed gut-microbiome diversity by eating 30 different plants every week

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Productivity6 steps

The Active / Waiting List Method

Split your work into a tiny active list and a public waiting list to neutralise overhead

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Self-Mastery4 steps

The ARIA Resilience Framework

Convert emotional pain into growth by Acknowledging, Releasing, Inquiring, then Acting

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Productivity6 steps

The A-Roll-First Review Production Pipeline

Brain-dump to script, shoot talking first, then cover with B-roll and one final walkthrough

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Boring Business Cash-Flow Path

Buy boring mom-and-pop businesses for cash flow, not startups or index funds

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Peak Performance5 steps

The Brain-Nutrition Protocol

Fuel mood and focus with omega-3s, B vitamins, anthocyanins and vitamin D

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Productivity5 steps

The Bullet Journal Method

Rapid-log your life by hand, then reflect to clarify why you do what you do

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

The CHAOS Model

Take any idea from zero to £10K a month in four ordered moves

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Sales6 steps

The Charity-First Onboarding Ramp

Deliver free-via-charity first, collect proof, then convert to paid

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Self-Mastery6 steps

The Coffee Challenge

Ask a cashier for 10% off to train your asking muscle

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Mindset5 steps

The Default Path vs The Pathless Path

Trade the inherited career script for work designed around meaning and energy

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Peak Performance5 steps

The Discipline Equation

Predict whether you'll actually do something before relying on willpower.

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Strategy5 steps

The Doorman Fallacy

Never reduce a role to its one obvious function before you cut it

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Marketing3 steps

The Eiffel Tower Model

Be the attraction people gather around while a product ecosystem makes the money

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Strategy4 steps

The Explore/Exploit Balance

Keep investing in random search even when exploiting works fine

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Productivity5 steps

The Filter (Monthly Migration)

Rewrite your open tasks each month and keep only what passes three questions

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Self-Mastery5 steps

The Five Buckets Daily Balance

Touch physical, mental, practical, social and spiritual every single day

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Five Buckets of Life

Prioritise knowledge and skills first because no one can take them from you.

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Leadership5 steps

The Five Factors of Fulfilling Work

Engineer any job so it stays motivating instead of chasing the perfect role.

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Finance5 steps

The Five Principles for a Rigged Financial World

Prosper when inflation beats interest by owning real, leveraged assets

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Four Games of Business

Name which game you're actually playing before you optimise the wrong one

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Marketing4 steps

The Four Types of Products

Build a product ecosystem of gifts, prospect products, core offerings and client products

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Sales5 steps

The Grand Slam Ask

Land the role by pairing relentless persistence with a win-win offer

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Self-Mastery5 steps

The Guest House

Treat every emotion as a visitor to welcome, not an identity to become

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Hybrid Creator Flywheel

Fund the business with services, then add zero-marginal-cost products that feed each other

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Productivity5 steps

The Ideal Week Calendar

Design an ideal week to aim at, then rebalance toward it

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Information Advantage Path

Monetize the knowledge you take for granted by selling a service to affluent buyers

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Self-Mastery4 steps

The Mindful Eating Check-In

Eat a small portion attentively, then pause and ask if you want more

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Strategy5 steps

The Moloch Lens

Spot the race-to-the-bottom where each rational move makes everyone collectively worse off

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Mindset5 steps

The Monday Afternoon Feeling

Design your future by how it feels on an ordinary day, not by milestones

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Peak Performance4 steps

The More-and-Better Goal Model

Chase more and better at once, and only set goals you actually control

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Leadership5 steps

The Octopus Analogy for Building a Team

Cut off each arm you're worst at and replace it with someone better

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Self-Mastery5 steps

The Odyssey Plan

Draft three divergent five-year lives to find the goal worth chasing

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Marketing4 steps

The Perfect Book Title Formula

Category differentiator times a subtitle that says exactly what the reader gets

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Self-Mastery6 steps

The Personal Success System

Reverse-engineer your proudest wins into one repeatable method you can point at any goal

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Peak Performance4 steps

The Perspective-Zoom Reset

Beat a slump by choosing the time frame that reveals the real trend line

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Self-Mastery5 steps

The Quitting Framework

Turn a gut urge to quit into a clear stay-or-go decision.

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Mindset4 steps

The ROI of Free Work

Treat early free projects as ankle weights that pay you in pattern recognition

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Mindset5 steps

The Single Motivating Phrase

Find the one sentence that actually drives you, then engineer situations that trigger it

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Productivity5 steps

The Start-Stop-More-Less Life Audit

Beat addition bias by crossing out two boxes and only subtracting

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Stickiness Test

Judge a new product by frequency of use and reversion, not launch sales

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Self-Mastery5 steps

The Temporal Mood Regulation Model of Procrastination

Procrastination is emotion regulation, not time management

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Self-Mastery4 steps

The Third Degree Human

Grow on three fronts: civilise the mind, savage the body, build the bank

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Three Buckets for What to Sell

Mine parent trades, past jobs, and interests for the problem you can charge for

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Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Three Cheap Idea Tests

Validate a business idea for under £100 with an event, a scorecard and a WhatsApp group

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Productivity5 steps

The Three P's of Feel Good Productivity

Make work more productive by making it feel better: play, power, people.

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Marketing4 steps

The Three Services Every Business Needs

Pick one of content, email capture, or newsletter and sell it to a growing market

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Productivity5 steps

The Three Types of Burnout

Diagnose which burnout you have before choosing the fix

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Mindset4 steps

The Tombstone Test

Find your purpose by asking what legacy you'd be ashamed of

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Communication4 steps

The Trifold Thought Process

Move a raw reaction through private, semi-private and public before you publish it

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Productivity6 steps

The UNBLOCK Method

Clear the three blockers behind any task you keep avoiding

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Self-Mastery6 steps

The Unplugged Three-Night Digital Detox

Lock the phone away for three days to reset your baseline

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Self-Mastery3 steps

The Value-Cost-Trade Decision

Decide any life change by pricing what you value against what it costs

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Self-Mastery5 steps

The Values Shortlist

Funnel 200 values down to your core five to guide decisions

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Strategy5 steps

The Vendor-to-In-House Playbook

Hire the best vendor, insert an interface hire, then absorb the function in-house

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Finance4 steps

The Ventures Model: Influence for Equity

Turn a personal brand into a portfolio of equity stakes in businesses you accelerate

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Mindset4 steps

The What's Your Price Test

Expose whether you are trading your truth for external reward by naming the number

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Marketing4 steps

The "What Would I Want to Watch?" Filter

Run every content and business decision through your own taste as the audience

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Mindset5 steps

Thought Defusion (Distancing Language)

Hold a thought at arm's length so it stops running the show

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Productivity5 steps

Three Systems of Goal-Setting

Match each goal to an objective, progress or system frame

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Communication5 steps

Traffic Light Check-In

Say red, amber or green to surface how everyone is really doing

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Transcendental-Style Mantra Meditation

Repeat an effortless mantra 20 minutes twice a day to reach calm

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Mindset5 steps

Tree of Knowledge

New information only sticks where you already have branches to catch it

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Influence6 steps

Value-First Free Work Outreach

Win access to people you admire by delivering value before asking

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Values Check-In

Diagnose misalignment by scoring what matters against how you're living

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Mindset5 steps

What's the Worst That Can Happen?

Name the true worst case, then hunt for evidence against imposter feelings

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Wheel of Life Mental Health Audit

Score each slice of your life to find the one area to work on next

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Self-Mastery4 steps

Write-It-Down Intentional Spending

Log every purchase by hand to question spending without a rigid budget

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Self-Mastery4 steps

Zoom Out on Your Diet

Skip strict rules; periodically review the week and fill the gaps

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