The habits that made me rich in my 20s were not pretty. As a doctor-turned-entrepreneur who went from broke medical student to multi-million-dollar business owner, I can tell you exactly which habits drove that transformation — and also why I'm spending my 30s actively trying to unlearn most of them. This isn't a hype piece. Every habit on this list worked. And every single one came with a cost worth knowing before you adopt it.
What 7 Habits Actually Made Me Rich in My 20s?
Here they are, ranked by how foundational they were — along with the honest downside of each.
01:15
Ali shows the laptop bag he carried everywhere — his 'safety blanket' for squeezing productivity out of every spare moment
Watch at 01:15 →
1. The Zero Downtime Habit
Everywhere I went, I carried a laptop bag. My wife called it my safety blanket when we started dating — because, like a child, I genuinely couldn't function without it. Any moment a normal person would scroll Instagram or TikTok, I'd pull out the laptop and squeeze in work. I treated idle minutes like a game: how much can I get done right now?
The benefit is real. Those stolen minutes genuinely add up. If you have a day job and a side hustle, you don't have huge blocks of free time — so using the small windows matters. The cost, though, is that you train yourself to be incapable of switching off. I now have a rule: if a reasonable outside observer would call it work, I can't do it on weekends. It's a rule I still have to fight myself to keep.
2. Constant Consumption
If I couldn't open a laptop, I had AirPods in. Podcasts at 2x speed. Audiobooks on the commute. YouTube videos on business, productivity, YouTube growth — constantly. Even on the toilet. Especially on the toilet.
06:42
Ali explains why constant content consumption has a ceiling — more information past a point doesn't equal more business growth
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For someone new to business, this is legitimately powerful. You level up your knowledge fast without carving out extra time for learning. But here's what I got wrong: more information does not equal more progress. After the 500th business audiobook, I'd have done better spending that hour actually thinking about my business — identifying the bottleneck, working through a problem — rather than hoping the next podcast episode would contain the magic idea I'd been missing.
3. Thinking About Work Constantly
In the shower. Driving to the hospital. On lunch breaks. That's fine. Where it got unhealthy was when I was physically present with friends and family but mentally running through my content calendar. I was there in body only. Most entrepreneurial breakthroughs don't happen at a desk — they happen in the shower — so this habit has genuine value. But it silently drains your relationships before you even notice.
How Do You Build a Business While Working Full Time?
The honest answer: you half-ass something else. I built my first successful business during six years of medical school. I half-assed medical school. When I was working as a doctor, colleagues who were serious about their medical careers were doing research, building their CVs, presenting at conferences. I was doing the bare minimum to tick boxes and pouring every spare minute into the business.
That's Habit 4: shirking your other responsibilities. You see this pattern with almost every outlier success — in entrepreneurship, sport, music, acting. It is extremely rare to do something at a genuinely high standard while splitting your focus. If you're building a side hustle, accept that your main thing will probably suffer. Whether that trade is worth it is entirely your call. It worked out for me — but survivorship bias is real. If the business had failed, I'd have been behind in medicine with not much to show for it.
14:30
The effective hourly rate framework explained — and the moment it starts working against you in relationships
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Is Sacrificing Your Health for Success Worth It?
This is Habit 5, and it's the one I feel most in my body right now. Grocery shopping and cooking felt like wasted time, so I lived off takeaways for most of my 20s. That decision bought me hours every week to put into the business. It also bought me poor cardiovascular health, a wrecked posture, and glutes and hamstrings that had basically never been activated because I was sitting at a desk for years.
Now in my 30s, I have a personal trainer, I see a physio, and I'm working to undo the damage. Do I think you have to make this sacrifice? No. There are healthy takeout options that didn't really exist — or that I didn't think about — when I was 22. If I could go back, I'd still do takeaways. I'd just be smarter about which ones.
Does Consuming More Business Content Actually Help You Grow?
Up to a point, absolutely. But there's a ceiling, and most grinders blow past it without noticing. The trap is believing that the reason your business isn't growing is that you haven't found the right piece of information yet. So you consume more. And more. When actually, the bottleneck is rarely knowledge — it's execution, clarity, or a specific skill that only practice builds. An hour of focused thinking about your actual business problem will, past a certain point, beat an hour of audiobook every time.
What Is Your Effective Hourly Rate (And When It Backfires)
Habit 6 was being comfortable wasting money, and Habit 7 is what justified it: the effective hourly rate mindset. The logic goes like this — if your time is worth £250 an hour, and returning a £25 item takes 30 minutes, you're losing £125 to save £25. Don't return it. This also meant buying tech impulsively to test it, and if it didn't work (which was about 80% of the time), donating it or throwing it away rather than spending time on a return.
The benefit: you become ruthless about protecting your time for high-value activities. It's part of why I hired a cleaner early. It frees you from dozens of low-value errands that quietly eat your week.
The danger: this mental model starts bleeding into places it was never meant to go. You catch yourself calculating whether it's worth driving to see a friend. Whether reading a novel for 30 minutes is really the best use of that time. Whether the two hours you spent at dinner with your family was a productive allocation of your finite hours. When the hourly rate calculator invades your relationships, you're in trouble — and it's a genuinely hard habit to quarantine.
Why Can't Entrepreneurs Stop Thinking About Work?
Because we trained the muscle so hard it won't switch off. This is the thread running through all seven habits. Each one is a form of optimization — squeezing more output from finite time. Do it for long enough and it becomes your default operating mode. The muscle, as I'd describe it, gets overtrained.
Every entrepreneur I've spoken to in their 50s or 60s says the same thing: taking proper breaks makes you more creative and more effective, not less. None of them are still grinding on weekends with a spouse and kids at home. That perspective is genuinely useful to have now rather than 20 years from now.
Can You Balance Entrepreneurship and Personal Life?
In the grind phase? Probably not fully — and pretending otherwise sets you up for guilt without solving the problem. But there's a difference between strategic imbalance and permanent sacrifice. My 20s were strategically imbalanced toward making money. My 30s are about rebalancing — dialling back the obsessive money focus while maintaining what I've built, and dialling up health, relationships, presence, and joy.
The habits in this article work for a season. The mistake is assuming the habits that get you rich are also the habits that keep you happy. They're often in direct conflict. Time, energy, and focus are finite. The more you pour into building wealth, the less you have for everything else. Knowing that trade-off going in — and deciding consciously what you're willing to exchange — is the difference between regret and clarity when you look back.
Whatever game you're playing right now, optimize for the right thing. Dollars in the bank can create financial freedom and time freedom, which are genuinely wonderful. They are also not the only things that matter. Peace, presence, health, relationships — those aren't consolation prizes for people who didn't make it. They're what most of us are actually after. The money is supposed to serve that goal, not replace it.
