If you've probably had periods in your life where you romanticized working brutally long hours

while surviving the intense suffering that comes with it. For me, it was starting my first business.

I distinctly remember falling asleep with my laptop on my stomach,

only to wake up six hours later and immediately get back to work where I left off.

In a world that glorifies hustle culture and emphasizes the grind, it's easy to make the assumption that hard work must fundamentally suck.

It's not supposed to be fun, we're told.

After all, if it was easy, then everybody would fucking do it. But what if it didn't have to suck? What if it wasn't painful? What if it was actually kind of fun? Today I'm talking to Ollie Abdahl, a former medical doctor turned

Yituber and author of the new book, Feel Good Productivity. Ollie graduated near the top of his class at Cambridge and went into practicing medicine full time in his 20s,

when he realized something both dumb and profound, that it wasn't very fun.

So Ollie decided to make it fun and as a part of making it fun

he created a YouTube channel to share some of his ideas around making it fun. Today he is more than

5 million subscribers and runs one of the largest educational channels in the entire world.

Ali has achieved incredible success in two of life's most intensely demanding and challenging domains.

Yet, he claims that his success stems less from his hard work

and willingness to suffer, and more from his creativity and ability to make even the most intense drudgery fun.

In this episode, we're going to talk about how productivity got its bad reputation, how most

of the so-called productivity advice actually makes it worse.

We'll discuss why working more hours isn't always more productive and how sometimes the most useful thing you can do is not work at all. We'll hear Ollie explain why the

optimal number of distractions is actually not zero and how he chooses goals in

his life to make failure impossible. We'll also learn how the biggest thing holding most people back is that they actually take their work too seriously.

This episode is more than just a conversation. It's a journey into rethinking how we view work, time, and our lives.

It's about breaking down the barriers of conventional productivity myths and discovering a path that

...