why I left academia to work for a YouTuber – substack.com

In September 2023, I handed in my notice to quit my "prestigious" job as a tenure-track Economics lecturer. What I didn’t mention in the email was that I was quitting academia to work for a YouTuber.
When I shared the news with my colleagues, the reactions were telling, ranging from “wow, that’s so cool” to "are you seriously throwing away all those years of hard work?!"
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I understood their concern – on paper, it does sound a bit reckless. Oxford PhD, Cambridge research fellowship, tenure-track position at a top UK university. There seemed to be a clear career trajectory and progression.
Yet here I was, hopping off to join the creator economy to work as a Head of Content for Ali Abdaal. Ali’s a doctor-turned-entrepreneur with a YouTube channel with over 6 million subscribers. He’s one of the most creative and entrepreneurial people I’ve met and I’ve learned a ridiculous amount from him and the team (thank you, boss).
This is one of the biggest career transitions in my life, so I want to share how I came to this decision.
And no, this isn’t one of those "I quit my terrible job to follow my dreams" stories. It’s more nuanced than that. A few important things to note:
I really enjoyed being a professor. Teaching bright, curious students brought me genuine joy. The intellectual sparring with colleagues over research ideas was stimulating and fun
I knew I wanted to do something more creative, but working for a YouTuber wasn’t some long-held dream
And importantly, I didn’t simply leap into the unknown. During my postdoc at Cambridge, I dabbled with a few freelance writing projects, and before long, I landed a part-time gig working with Ali. So before making the full transition, I’d already been working part-time with Ali for two years – writing YouTube scripts, crafting content strategy, collaborating on his non-fiction book, and various other bits and bobs.
So, I guess this is more about jumping from a linear career path with the safety net of career progression to a non-linear, less conventional career path.
Below are the main questions I asked myself and journaled about before making the transition. It’s roughly in order of importance to me at the time (though this order of importance has somewhat changed since).
If you’re standing at a similar crossroads – perhaps contemplating leaving a stable corporate job or an established career path for something less conventional – hopefully this piece gives you some guidance on how to think through this decision. Enjoy.
(This is Part I of a two-part series on unconventional careers. You can read Part II here.)
A mentor reminded me that you should choose a job that either lets you ‘earn’ or lets you ‘learn’ (thanks for the reminder, Liz!). In other words, you might be willing to sacrifice a high salary if the job allows you to learn a ton. Or, you might be willing to sacrifice the opportunity to learn for the sake of a higher salary.
The opportunity to learn was one of the most important factors for me when I decided to make this switch.
When I explain this to people (mainly outside of academia), they get a bit confused – ‘but surely you’re learning all the time if you’re teaching and researching at a university?’
Yes, to some degree. It’s undeniable that of all the professions out there, academia is one of the rare careers where learning and following your curiosity is built into the job description.
But, I was running into two problems. First, the further up you go, the more narrow the learning becomes. You spend years becoming frightfully specialized in one field (in my case, the economics of health and education), then dig even deeper into that niche. While I enjoy learning a skill in-depth, I couldn’t help but feel that there are so many other skills that I want to learn and that I felt I was underdeveloped in. I realized I was willing to sacrifice depth for a bit of breath.
Second, learning things in depth makes the topic repetitive. Technically, each term where I teach students how to run regression models and estimate instrumental variable equations is another opportunity to ‘learn’ and ‘deepen’ this skill (a la Protege effect). But the truth was that at some point, teaching the same material each academic year can get repetitive.
In contrast, in the creator world, every few months bring fresh challenges because things move so quickly. Book writing, content strategy, project management, email marketing – it’s exciting to feel like you’re learning something new each quarter.
More broadly, one of the beauties of unconventional jobs is that there is an opportunity to strategically select roles and experiences that allow you to build a unique skill set based on your situation. More about this in Part II of this series.
In my job as an economics professor, my week would be split between research (working with data, coding, reading papers, writing grant applications and papers) and teaching (creating lecture slides, grading assignments). I love the process of coming up with research questions and the rigor of the research process. I also loved teaching and interacting with ambitious and bright undergraduate students.
But there was something about the creative work I did – writing scripts, coming up with marketing plans, writing book chapters – that felt… differently in a really good way. It felt more aligned with what I would naturally do in my spare time.
The collaborative energy in the content world also made the academic world feel stale and stuffy. There’s an undeniable energy in working with creative minds who are passionate about creating educational content online to help others build better lives. Instead of being confined to one discipline, I found myself collaborating with writers, designers, and all manner of creators. It’s delightfully multidisciplinary. It felt like a startup where everyone wore multiple hats.
There’s a ton of academic research that has the potential to make a big impact. In fact, what drew me into economics in the first place was the ambition of changing policy. I love the work that development and public economics researchers are doing to improve policy and the livelihoods of people. Many of our modern day innovations wouldn’t exist were it not for the research done by academics.
But by the third year of my postdoc (and 5th/6th year into economics research), it was becoming clear to me that (a) I wasn’t quite enough of the academic superstar to have that level of impact through the papers I was working on and (2) I didn’t have the patience to wait – potentially decades – to reach that level (which would require not only a massive intellectual step up but making the right connections to get access to funding + data to do research that ‘matters’).
At certain points (and after rounds of rejections from journals), I couldn’t help but question whether I was really advancing the field or simply adding increasingly detailed footnotes to existing footnotes.
This leads me to the 2 main things I thought about when it came to impact: (1) scale and (2) speed.
Regarding scale, when I was contemplating this change, Ali’s YouTube channel was approaching 5 million subscribers. Meanwhile, the average academic paper gets read by approximately 10 people. (Yes, you read that right. Ten.) The idea of writing and creating something that might be read by millions out there was appealing.
Regarding speed, the feedback loop in the creator economy is pretty quick. You create something, put it out there, and the response is immediate. In contrast, the feedback in academia is not so fast. You can spend months (or years!) writing a paper, submitting it to a journal, and then entering an almost comedically long waiting period. Some papers take 5-7 years from concept to publication, which is longer than some people stay married.
There’s no right or wrong here. Some people thrive on immediate, visible impact – seeing their work directly affect others. Others prefer working on longer-term, systemic changes, even if the results aren’t immediately visible. Who knows, maybe my patience will change over time. But at the time of making the decision, it felt clear to me.
I must admit that the ‘status drop’ from ‘economics professor’ to ‘content strategist for a 7-figure creator business’ made me pause.
In academia and lots of the conventional circles I’ve spent time in, prestige and institutional reputation are currency. Oxford, Cambridge, Economics tenure-track professor carry weight. Rightly or wrongly, these badges make people take me more seriously and open doors.
Since this transition, I’ve had two important realizations. First, I’ve been conflating status with value. Status is perceived value – the degree to which other people see you (and your job) as valuable. But perceived value is not actual value. Perceived value is separate from whether the work you’re doing is actually impactful.
Second, status and prestige are relative (confirming the point that it’s really about ‘perceived’ value). In the creator economy space, it turns out, no one gives a crap about whether you studied or taught at Oxbridge (and I’ve never used this to my advantage). But many people do care that you work closely with Ali Abdaal. An analogy: in the startup world, no one cares if the founder graduated from a fancy university. But they would care if the startup got attention from Y combinator or Sequoia.
Autonomy is super important to me. Autonomy over how I spend my time and what work I do. I’m lucky that within my job in academia, I had extreme levels of autonomy. Aside from making sure that I turn up to teach when I’m supposed to, mark assignments by a certain time, and attend department meetings when I’m needed, I was pretty much free to spend my research time as I’d like. And decide what I’d spend my time researching. This autonomy and flexibility was one of the things I treasured most about academia. (Not to mention the long summer months where there was no teaching at all)
I’m also extremely lucky that my job at Ali’s is very flexible. We’re a remote team so I can work from anywhere in the world. Given the flat hierarchy, there’s considerable opportunity to ‘shape’ your role as you’d like as long as it adds value to the business. And as long as you ensure you get your work done to a high level, there’s no one micromanaging you.
I didn’t think too much about the financial side prior to making this transition. The reason is that – perhaps surprisingly – there wasn’t a big difference in terms of monthly take-home pay between my ‘prestigious’ job as an economics prof and my new creator economy job. Most UK academia can be quite poorly paid relative to the education investment you need to put in beforehand.
But I do think there are two important questions that I could have asked myself more.
First, how much money do I need? Before entertaining any career shift, you need to be crystal clear about your financial needs. This isn’t about optimizing for maximum earnings (wants), it’s more about defining your security “floor” – the minimum financial security you need to feel comfortable taking the step. You’re looking for a statement like “I need to make $X per month to cover all my necessary and leisurely expenses“
Second, how much money do I want? We’re now looking for a statement like “I want to be making $X per month within Y years” where ‘Y’ captures how patient and willing you are able to be for financial (and non-financial returns)/how long you can sustain taking an income-cut (if any) before needing visible progress. This second question is important because you want to check that your career transition facilitates these long-run ambitions.
Conventional careers like academics typically offer clearer, more predictable outcomes. Unconventional paths tend to have a wider distribution of possible outcomes – both higher potential upside and greater uncertainty.
For me, it felt important to get a sense of what exactly I was signing up to gain/lose by making this jump.
One risk was the one-way nature of leaving academia. Unlike tech or life sciences, where people regularly bounce between industry and academia, economics tends to be a one-way street. I sort of knew that if I left, it would be difficult to return.
Another risk is that the creator economy is an emerging industry and with that comes the uncertainty of patchy finances and fluid job titles/roles.
I was on track to get tenure within two years – the holy grail of job security. Was I really going to throw that away for the unpredictable nature of the creator economy? What if it doesn’t work out? What if the creators I work with decide to stop running their businesses? These were questions that I asked myself repeatedly.
One thing that helped a lot when grappling with these questions was reminding myself that even if the creator economy disappeared and I lost my job, I’d just pick myself up and apply for new jobs.
I also found a lot of great insights in Annie Duke’s book “Quit”, which my teammate Tintin (then YouTube producer for Ali) introduced me to when I was discussing this dilemma with him. A few years ago, he made a similar decision to me (quitting his corporate job as a consultant), so he identified with my concerns (he’s since left the Ali Abdaal team to set up his own business).
In her book, Annie argues that the merit of a decision lies in the quality of the process (how solid and rigorous your decision-making process was), rather than the outcome (what actually happens). Any decision can lead to unsatisfactory outcomes for reasons beyond your control. For all the reasons I’ve listed above – opportunity to learn, alignment, and more – I knew what decision was right for me at that moment.
These decisions are intensely personal.
Several of my former colleagues – brilliant researchers whom I admire immensely – would find my current role in the creator economy unfulfilling.
And I get it. For them, self-development content might feel rather superficial compared to the intellectual rigor and policy-oriented work that they’re doing. It’s a fair critique and opinion. And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sympathetic to that view.
Others might find the constant flux of a creator business maddening. There’s something comforting about the reliable rhythm of university terms: September brings fresh-faced students, January means exam marking, and summer offers sacred research time. The creator economy doesn’t offer that same kind of predictability.
And for many academics, the potential to influence policy through research is worth every moment of that years-long publishing cycle. They’re playing the long game. There’s something beautiful and admirable about that patience and persistence.
The beauty of career decisions is that there’s no universally correct answer. What looks like a golden opportunity to one person might seem like a nightmare to another. And that’s probably as it should be.
After all, we’re not all meant to walk the same path – how freaking boring would that be?
—
Ines
P.S. If you enjoyed this, check out Part II of this series where I discuss what I’ve learned about making unconventional careers work in your favor.
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This is so honest and so helpful. I find myself constantly in circles where friends want to do their own thing and I always recommend them to start doing the thing part-time / on weekends first before taking the leap. I was always worried that "oh this just doesn’t show enough entrepreneur guts" but it makes me feel like I can make more level-headed decisions bc I’m not stressing about idk everything??
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