Become a Time Billionaire with Khe Hy
Khe Hy is the founder of RadReads, a community dedicated to transforming our relationships with time, work, money, and ourselves. Khe joins Chris to discuss why true wealth is measured in time, not money, and to share systems and practices for living a balanced and aligned life. If it feels like you are constantly juggling your career, hobbies, relationships, and family, this conversation is for you.
See below for audio, resources mentioned, and conversation transcript.
If you’ve enjoyed listening today, please take a moment and subscribe to Forcing Function Hour on your favorite podcast platform, so you’ll stay up to date on new episodes.
Love the show? Pay it forward by leaving us a review, and help us share these performance principles to impact more listeners like you.
Links and resources we mentioned during our conversation:
Additional Forcing Function links:
Experiment Without Limits (peak performance workbook, free download)
Performance Assessment (quiz to reveal your greatest opportunity for growth)
To check out our previous Forcing Function Hour episodes, click here.
Topics:
(00:00) Intro
(02:15) The definition of wealth
(06:24) Creating structure around non negotiables
(09:28) Discovering your top values
(17:27) Committing to a ritual for incremental change
(27:28) Ego, identity, and Difficult Conversations
(30:20) Expectations are a prison
(46:18) Prioritizing in a systematic way
(51:36) Creating a practice to bring you back to stillness and reflection
(58:05) Parting words and ways to take your first step towards becoming a time billionaire
Conversation Transcript:
Note: transcript is slightly edited for clarity.
Chris (00:05): Welcome to Forcing Function Hour, a conversation series exploring the boundaries of peak performance. Join me, Chris Sparks, as I interview elite performers to reveal principles, systems, and strategies for achieving a competitive edge in business. If you are an executive or investor ready to take yourself to the next level, download my workbook at experimentwithoutlimits.com. For all episodes and show notes, go to forcingfunctionhour.com.
Today, I am honored by the return of Khe Hy, the founder of RadReads. RadReads is a community exploring our relationships with time, work, money, and ourselves. Khe escaped the finance world to find more time with his friends and family, catch some waves, and live a life of greater impact, happiness, and purpose. I admire Khe a great deal, and think he is one of the most balanced and aligned humans that I know. If you enjoyed today's episode, I would also encourage you to check out episode three, "Systems For Living The Good Life," and episode twelve, "A Modern Approach For Getting Things Done." Now, this is very exciting because Khe is about to offer once again his online course, "Supercharge Your Productivity," which has been completely instrumental to how we do things here at Forcing Function. "Supercharge Your Productivity" teaches you how to use Notion as an interface that will help you discover and elevate what is truly important in your life. The next cohort is opening up January 17th. I highly recommend it.
Today, Khe and I are going to discuss time wealth. In fact, you already are a time billionaire, you just don't know it. So if you feel like you are constantly juggling your career, your hobbies, your relationships, your family, this conversation is for you. Through proper prioritization and scheduling, it is indeed possible to achieve all of those ambitious goals of yours and not feel so rushed and stressed all the time. I think that's something we can all get behind, so let's get started. Thanks for joining us, Khe. Very honored to ring in the New Year with you on such a topic.
Khe (02:08): Thank you so much, Chris. Wow, what an awesome introduction. And I didn't realize this was the trifecta. Three's the lucky charm.
Chris (02:15): Just gets better every time. Not to put any pressure, but I'm really, really excited for this one. So let's start by talking about wealth. We all know these people who I think society would deem as successful, these portfolio managers, these CEOs who have lots of money in their bank account but maybe they don't get to spend any time with their kids or maybe they never got to take that trip they wanted or to take up painting or surfing, all these things they once wanted to do, so they're wealthy by a definitional sense, but in terms of time they can be quite poor. And you told me that your favorite definition of wealth is never feeling rushed. So tell me about your definition.
Khe (02:57): Absolutely. So, well, I was one of those time constraint burnt-out burning-both-sides-of-the-candle professionals back in the day, so I can definitely relate to that feeling, but it's quite simple. You and I both work with high-performing, high-achieving investors, entrepreneurs, and executives, and when I tell them that my definition of wealth is never feeling rushed, it blows their mind. It's like, "No, no, no. That's not allowed." It's like that's not a possible definition. Then I take it a step further. It's like, "You know I don't have email or Slack on my phone." Then they're like, "You're kidding me." And by the way, let me just state up front, I am not independently wealthy. I need to work. I tend to like living in really expensive places, like DUMBO, Brooklyn, and Manhattan Beach, California. So I'm probably gonna have to work for a long, long time, but again I'm anchored to this concept of never feeling rushed. I want to just beat my own drum at my own pace.
Chris (03:58): What does that feel like? It sounds like such a strange question, but it's a foreign concept for me, sometimes, to just go through life not feeling rushed. Can you describe it to us?
Khe (04:09): Well, I will start by saying that I'm a hard-charging peak performer, or aspire to be, so I don't always not feel rushed. But I think you could start with some really simple things. Like, I haven't used an alarm in many, many years. So my body just wakes up naturally after eight and a half hours of sleep. I don't have any meetings until 11:30 Pacific, and that's because I want to monitor the tides, the wind, and the waves, to surf. So I always have my mornings open. We live one block from my kids' school, so I walk my daughter, I pick her up, and I drop her off at school every single day. At 5:15 I come up and I help to cook and set the table and sit down with the kids. And so I meditate first thing in the morning, last thing in the evenings. There are just like a bunch of different anchors in my day that are truly non-negotiable. So you basically block out all of those items, and then with all the remaining space, then you're like, "Okay, then I'll do my work." That's the starting point.
And in fact, I just went through this exercise with my wife, because it's a new year and so, you know, young kids' schedules change and all that, and I went to my wife and I was like, "What day does my eldest get home from school early?" And that was Wednesday, so Wednesdays at 2:30 we go rock climbing, and that's protected as if I was meeting Jeff Bezos at that time. Like, nothing can move that meeting. What day does my little one get home from school early? Tuesday afternoons. Library time with her. Just block it. It's a meeting. But the crazy thing, Chris, is I still work forty to fifty hours a week. So you could hear this and not know my story and be like, "Oh, this guy, he's a crypto-bro, he's just living off some staking stuff." No. You can craft your day, especially in this world of hybrid, Zoom-based, with the right tools. We talked about Notion, Pulp, Slack, Loom, Zoom. You can actually set those boundaries and then fill in around that.
Chris (06:24): It's remarkable, because so many times we have these so-called non-negotiables that we negotiate around all the time. And something that I like to say is people will respect your boundaries as much as you respect them, and so if you're always finding something urgent, you're always able to find an excuse, because if you're looking for one you'll find one. And what was this process like? I imagine that creating this structure where surfing, your family, sitting down to have dinner in the evening, these things came first didn't happen overnight. How did you start to put these pieces in place?
Khe (07:06): I think that it really involves are your values aligned with your activities? Are your activities in line with your values? But there's a really interesting piece here: you have to know your values. Oftentimes people's values will be very either lukewarm, like, "integrity" or "compassion" or "love." Those are more like virtues. Obviously when you act you want to act along your virtues. But your values are like, what actually matters to you? And so it's much easier to align your activities to your values if you know what you stand for. And to know what you stand for, that's the hard part. All this scheduling and prioritization stuff and using Loom and Slack and Notion, that's easy. That's table stakes. But knowing what you stand for, knowing what makes you come alive, knowing why you're here so that you can then align all of your activities in complete unison, that's a lifetime's worth of work.
Now, I can't say that I've cracked the code to a lot of those questions, but I've invested the time to explore them, I've invested the time to explore them through some kind of intense coaching, which is more like therapy-type work around my own insecurities, around my fears, around my motivations, around my desires. I've done it with business coaches around choosing to build a lifestyle business versus some other business. And I could tell you a story about lifestyle versus venture-funded business, if that's helpful. I've chosen where I live. I pay a premium, a significant premium, to live by the beach. But I was thinking about it the other day, if you surf three hundred days a year, whatever that premium you're paying, if you amortize it, it's probably not going to be that much.
So once you know these values and these guiding principles, then you can more easily align your career around it, align your hobbies around it, align your health around it, align your family around it. And then one of my favorite quotes, it becomes effortless. A non-negotiable, when it's truly non-negotiable, doesn't require any fidgeting. It's just non-negotiable, full stop.
Chris (09:28): I love that concept of effortless. I was doing some deep reflection not too long ago trying to, let's say, refactor my code around effort. All this judgment around feeling lazy and not trying hard enough at these things that were supposedly worth doing that I wanted to do, and realizing that I was coming at it from completely the wrong angle, was that if I really truly internalized how important these things were, to see these people and spend time with them, to pursue my mission, to learn, to grow, that if I really internalized the importance of these activities, they wouldn't feel so effortful. It wouldn't take all this effort to do them, so rather than trying harder, to just get in tune with the "why." And I love how you describe that this process is a lifetime of work. It never ends, you only approach it, get closer, and you iterate.
We have an exercise that we love here at Forcing Function that's available, it's called the Top Values Exercise. I run through this with every client. This comes out of a great book called the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. And you start by checking all the boxes on all the values that are important to you. All the really hand-wavy ones, and maybe a little bit more specific ones. A long, long list. And maybe you come up with fifty values, all the things that are important to you, and little by little you have to eliminate them. "Okay, what's your top ten values? What's your top five? What's your top three? What's your top two? What's your top one?" And the really powerful thing is when we're in a conversation and let's say that they said that family is their top value, but I know they haven't been seeing their family as much as they'd like to, I'd say, "Hey, is this your top value or not? You're acting as if work is your top value, but you said it was family, so which one is it? Should we do the exercise again?"
It's a really good catch, because you can always come back to these values as a litmus test. It's like, "If this is really most important to me, I'm going to have infinite opportunities to reaffirm this importance and make sure that I'm living in alignment with this." But a question that comes to mind for me, this process of discovery—I just wanna know what that feels like when you've stumbled upon something that really resonates, like, "I wanna live my life in alignment with this," do you have an example of that discovery and how you knew you found it?
Khe (12:06): Well, like you said, it's an ongoing journey, so it's constantly evolving. And also I think life goes in seasons as well. So I'm in a season of life with young kids. My kids need me physically a lot. They need me to carry them and to buckle them into their car seats and to hold their hands when they cross the street. They need me to cook for them and clean for them and lay with them when they go to bed. That's just a season of life. At some point, my kids will not need me physically that way, and they'll probably need me way more emotionally. So, my values—Or, I don't know if values is the right word, but my priorities, my alignment might change. So, I always make this joke, like, I have two girls, so when they're teenagers they're going to want me out of the house. I'm in the house all the time now. Like, when they're teenagers, I'm going on surfing trips, down south, Brazil, Nicaragua, El Salvador. Right now I'm not. Right now all my surf trips are driving, 'cause they need me around, they need me physically, and I want to be here. When they stop wanting me to be here physically, I'm out. I'm out for a couple days.
So, that would be the first thing, is that it's non-stationary. It kinda moves with the seasons. The other thing I would say is you gotta look for clues. Like, you mentioned the clue there, where someone says, "My family is a priority," but then they're on a plane three days out of five every week and they keep saying "yes" to conferences and speaking gigs and all that. So I call that, and I got this from one of my spiritual teachers, Andrew Taggart, "the pebble in the shoe." It's when you know—We're all smart. It's when you know that you're slightly off-center. It's like you're walking and there's this uncomfortable pebble in your shoe, and it doesn't hurt enough to stop, diagnose it, take off your shoe, take out the pebble, put the shoe back on, tie the laces. So you just absorb like this low-grade anxiety, or low-grade suffering, as the Buddha would say. And you just kinda accept it. Everyone listening to this, every human has some version or many flavors of this pebble. The pebble is the first clue of misalignment. So as you look at the pebble, then you can start to realign.
But you know what? It's so much easier when that pebble comes to outwork it. Work harder. Put your head down. Distract, numb. Alcohol, weed, sex, pornography, whatever. Work. Work being the ultimate distractor for this audience. So, the pebbles, though, they're there. If you stopped numbing and stopped distracting, the pebble would actually be quite clear. It's actually trying to get your attention. So once you can start to converse with this problematic pebble, then you can start the process of realigning yourself. But because we're so rushed and because we think that the next Bitcoin run-up is going to make that pebble go away, we forget about the pebble. But guess what, the tracks harden. Whatever the pebble—Pebbles don't grow, but that pebble becomes more painful, or the wound that it's been putting into your foot becomes more punctured. That's when you really hit like the mid-life crisis and you're like, "What the F have I been doing for this long? I can't believe I ignored this for this long."
Chris (15:41): Powerful stuff, and yeah. It brings up a few things for me. I mean, first that objective awareness is the first step. Having systems for reflection or people who can call us out, ways to get out of our own head as far as what's going on, and particularly where we have something that we want and having to compare with what we're getting. We have a vision that we're moving towards and we have to compare that with the creative tension of where we are, what our current trajectory is, that if we can start with where we want to be and where we're heading, that forces this reconciliation, this reckoning of, "What I'm doing is not going to get me there." And like you said, it only gets worse with time, the more that we look away. So for me the way that I discovered this, I'm neck-deep in it right now, because the end of the year for me is a, "I am just going to wipe the slate clean. I don't have to do anything that I was doing last year. What do I want to do from this clean slate this year to come?"
It's a really important reminder. I have to shake people all the time and say things like, "You are the author of your own life. You can do whatever you want." Because as you're talking, I can hear it in my own voice and in my own head, so I know people have the voice in their own head, it's like, "Well, that sounds really great for them, but I can't, because—" And you'll always have an excuse if you're looking for one. So if you take responsibility—I don't use that word lightly—if you can choose, it's really interesting to see the structures that you can create to support that, because anything is possible.
Khe (17:27): I think that what people will hear, they'll say, "Well, Khe, Chris, you both own your own companies. They're small companies. I work at Facebook. I need email or Facebook Messenger on my phone. I work on Wall Street. I need to—Like, if I don't check my email every three minutes, my boss is going to yell at me." What I want to emphasize is that going from New York City Wall Street to this life that I've created, that's been a seven-year process. So it all starts with incremental changes. So, the classic one is the over-busy person who wants to see their kids more. So my question is, here's the incremental change. Can you commit to a ritual—not even a habit—a ritual? Like, rituals are like pancakes on Saturday morning, or movie night on Friday night. Can you commit to one ritual where you give your kid or kids a hundred and ten percent of you? And if not, why can't you do that? And that "why not" is probably the pebble.
So I don't want people listening to be like, "Oh, like Khe and Chris said that I have to quit my job and become solo-preneurs and internet businesses and play poker and surf." No. GTD. What's the next action? And every single one of us has that next action.
I'll tell you a story. I used to coach a lot of hedge-fund zillionaires. And they would always look at me and they're like, "Khe, you're so lucky. You get to do X or do Y." Like, you have a thousand times my wealth. Financial wealth. Like, you can do this. You can do this easier than me. I've still gotta pay the bills for this house. And I would have them run this exercise. And it would be, "What's your ideal ordinary week?" I actually borrowed this from Ali Abdaal, where he basically—Imagine all your expenses were paid for for twenty years. And I make them allocate a spreadsheet. Like, what are you gonna do each hour? Like, say you sleep nine hours. You have fifteen hours to allocate. Okay. So you exercise for one and you hang out with family for two and then you meditate for one and then you read for two. You still have eight hours a day. And by the way, in this hypothetical scenario, there's no concept of a weekend. So you still have fifty-six hours to allocate each week. What the F are you going to do with those hours?
And they're like, "I don't really need to think about that now, I'll think about that now when some hypothetical milestone happens." And then with a little bit of prodding it comes out, like, "Well, I'd take a cooking class, like once we raise our next round." Why do you need to wait till you raise your next round to take the damned cooking class? Take the cooking class today, or be honest with yourself why you refuse to take the cooking class today. That's probably the more salient question, the latter one.
Chris (20:15): And the surprising result, when we ask those things, is maybe we don't want it. Maybe it represents something that we think, maybe it's that we don't think we deserve to take a cooking class, all these things that come up because we're willing to look or willing to ask. And the exercise that you talk about, this ideal week, it's really nice to have that north star to head towards. And I really recommend anyone who hasn't, I do it once a year at least, to just track where your time is going, to start to poke a hole in this bubble of "I don't have any time," you'll start to find all of these pockets that are getting filled one way or another. And if you aren't intentional, presumably they're getting filled with ways that you wouldn't have chosen. One thing that I'm trying on—I'm curious to hear what you think about this—I think that a lot of our experience, and I think about the subjective experience of being here in this chair and having this conversation is framed, framed by our beliefs about this experience.
And one really powerful belief that I've uncovered is around our experience of time, where on one hand if we have this belief of, "I don't have enough time," we start to find evidence everywhere we look. "If only I had more time, I would be able to do blank. I would have more blank." Well, what if (this is something I would challenge everyone to try, it's really interesting), is you just go about your day with a different belief that's slightly different, say, "I have as much time as I need." And see how everything changes, where, well, if you have as much time as you need, you don't need to rush. Everything will happen at just about the same speed, but you won't have that experience of like, "Oh, I need to get there, I need to get there." It's like, "Well, if it's important I'll fit it in. If I don't fit it in, it probably wasn't that important." Just that subtle reframe of seeing things in a different way completely changes your experience and will probably even change the results.
Khe (22:12): I have three reactions to that, one that will go from most pragmatic to deeply existential, and if we want we can take the existential path.
Chris (22:20): Trojan Horse.
Khe (22:21): But the first one is, with my clients I don't allow them to say, "I don't have enough time." And what they have to say instead is, "I have chosen to not make this a priority." And so words matter a lot, as you know very well. So that'd be the first one. The second one, it's a little bit more nuanced, is there is this kind of scarcity mindset. It's not that there's not enough time, it's that there's not enough opportunity, it's that there's not enough money, it's that there's not enough joy. And I think that there's some theories that human beings need, you know, it's like the saber tooth tiger theory of evolution—We needed to feel like everything was scarce or else we wouldn't have thrived as a species. But come on, if you're responding to emails at 2:00 in the morning, that's not the same saber tooth problem that our ancestors faced on the tundra. But again, that's like more than a pebble.
But where does this belief come from that there's not enough time? You could actually invert this, which is, "If I'm not growing, I'm regressing." That's a very meaty topic that maybe we'll talk about. Probably need two episodes just for that one. And then the third thing in the existential path is there's not enough time. Well, there's a truth to that, because we're gonna die. And whenever people ask me, "I wanna learn more about productivity, what's the best productivity book I should read?" I point them to Ernest Becker's, The Denial of Death. Because I think so much of our productivity, time-management, goal-setting, OKRs, all that self-improvement stuff, is this inability (and I've suffered from this, I'm not raising my hand to die), but this inability to grasp the fact that we're finite beings. And you can hack your way for like seven extra minutes using a text-expander, but that's not gonna change the fact that you and I and everyone listening is a decomposing body with time. Scary thought. Sad though, maybe. Some cultures find that a beautiful thought. But you can't disentangle the fact that so much of our desire for productivity and performance is driven by the fact that we are afraid of our own mortality. They're inseparable, especially in a very secular world.
Chris (24:27): Yeah, I just got this image of, I'm trying to reach this point on the infinite horizon but I'm running and I look down and I realize I'm on a treadmill. I push the speed, I try to accelerate the treadmill, but no matter how fast the treadmill goes, how fast I'm running, how much I'm sweating, I'm not actually getting any closer, because what I'm doing is not getting me there, and maybe there is no there.
Khe (24:51): That's the thing. I turned forty-two—and I think you're considerably younger than me—but when I turned forty, things stopped working internally the way they used to work. And you go to the doctor and they're like, "You should consider this pill or you should consider this or have you thought about this?" Like, I hurt my ankle surfing, it took me nine and a half months to recover. It was a bad injury, but I used to play soccer on those types of messed-up ankles when I was eighteen. And there's a few ways to deal with that. You can treadmill it. That's the longevity crew. And I've nothing against the longevity crew, but I hate to ruin it for y'all. It's not going to work. Not in your lifetime. You can run faster on the treadmill with the longevity, like go see all the doctors and this and whatever, freeze your—Drink blood, and do whatever the F you do. Or, you can, again, distract and numb, which is the same thing. It's like alcohol, Reddit, but for most people on this channel listening to this, it would be like, get promoted more. But it's like if you really step back and you're like, if human frailty is the thing you're afraid of, is an extra comma in your bank account really going to make a difference?
And that can be viewed as terrifying, or that can be viewed as beautiful, because it means that that extra comma doesn't matter. So what does? And it gets back to that question that we asked at the very beginning, right? How do you align your daily activities with what you value and what's important to you?
And again, I don't want people listening to this—I'm an entrepreneur, I work my butt off on my own terms to build something that I'm proud of that I wanted to make a lot of money. But it's just not it. It's just a thing that I do that's in service to something bigger, which is again this core set of values and priorities.
Chris (26:41): Yeah, it does feel like we get our identity entangled in what we do, where we're just trying to describe it to someone else and if they're not into it, it's like they're not into us. If my business fails, I'm a failure. If I don't get that promotion, I'm a failure. And trying to realize that, I use this term, subservience. Is that like, what I do is subservient to who I am, because this is just one aspect, temporary, of me that I have chosen, and I can take it off like a pair of clothes at any time, but if I don't maintain that separation it becomes very fragile and everything that I do is a threat and of course I have to run on the treadmill faster because if I fall off that's it. It's really key.
Khe (27:28): You raise this wonderful, beautiful question about ego and identity, and in the book Difficult Conversations, they call it an identity quake where you're just shook to your core. Like, what if you could live your dream life? I ask this to a lot of my clients. You could live your dream life, you could do whatever you want, but when someone asked you what you did for work, you had to say an—I don't want to name a job, but find an activity that you found below you. You know how many people say "no" to that? I get it, we're social beings. Social acceptance motivates so much of what we do, but if you could start to peel away from that, that's a really powerful thing.
The other thing I wanted to share, Chris, is that I think another thing that people listening will say is, "Well, Khe, your kids are four and seven. I'm working really hard right now so that in ten years I can get them a mountain house for our family." Or to pay for their college, or all these future reasons, and what you're doing, you're basically buying time tomorrow. So you're kind of suffering today. In that, this could be the person on the MD track at Goldman or the partner at the—You're trading today's time for money, which you will then buy back time at a later date. And I think you gotta be careful with that, because first of all the obvious that tomorrow's not guaranteed, but as that window starts to stretch, do you want to buy time in twenty years? I mean, look at the two years we just came out of. If those two years were possible, what's possible in the next eighteen?
And you see this all the time. You see people who save for their forever home, and they get it, and it's more of a headache than a joy. You see people who save for retirement, and when they retire they're miserable. You know what people want when they retire? The top three things they're happy about—this is from Teresa Amabile, from Harvard. When people retire the three things that make them happy: they don't have to commute, they don't have to go to meetings, and they get to pursue a hobby. And I always make a joke. You know what that's called? That's called remote work with a good boss. Why do you have to wait twenty years for that? Especially today, because of the way companies are built. So, look. I save for my kid's college, but I also know that if they have to take out loans for their college, who cares? I'm not gonna work two extra hours so that they don't have to take out a loan. I'd rather give them those two hours today. And everyone needs to be making those calculated trade-offs.
But again, you gotta know the destination. If you don't know the destination, it's just easier to say like, "Oh, I'll make more money." That's what everyone says. "Make more money." It's an easy plan.
Chris (30:20): Man, yeah. I mean, this brings up one of my favorite sayings, that expectations are a prison. The huge danger with punting your happiness to the future is you put a lot of pressure on it. "My wedding day is going to be the greatest day of my entire life." Ooph. Man, if it rains, that's gonna be tough. A lot of times the more that you build something up the more it's likely to disappoint, and that's why all of the advice givers out there, like, happiness is in the present. You don't need to put it out into this infinite future. But you made me think of something that I think is really interesting.
You were talking before about the importance of one step at a time. Take where you are. What's that next action, what's that one ritual that you can put in place now to start to move towards this vision? And that it's important—I used to talk about this idea of an experiment, is that you commit to it, just for a little while, just to see how it is. Try it out, see how you like it. Sometimes, maybe that cooking class you thought was gonna be amazing, turns out you don't actually want cooking. Maybe you just want a little bit more of a sense of control. Who knows? But you try it, you see what you think, and if you like it then you can decide, "All right, what is that next step? How do I double down on that?" If not, you can always come back and try something new.
Something that I have to caution everyone against is that we are pattern-driven creatures. That if we aren't careful we'll keep putting ourselves in the same situation, and thus keep repeating the same pattern. So I see this regression pattern often where someone takes a really big step towards the life that they actually think they want, away from all the things that culture, friends, society, family are telling them that they should want, and they get a little bit scared, because they look down and maybe there's not as much ground under them as they thought and they immediately look for ways to get back to their convenient excuses.
I had a client just the other day, finally sold his business after years, and what do you know, he's already on the market to buy a new one, because it's really uncomfortable with all the time in his schedule, he needs something to fill it. So be careful. This experimental mindset, I think, is really useful to just commit to it for a while, see if it runs, and if it's running you can double down. If not, you can always return to where you were. It's not going anywhere.
Khe (32:40): Totally. Can I give a real-time case study on that?
Chris (32:44): I love it, yeah.
Khe (32:44): So, you just described my entrepreneurial philosophy. And you know, I've been an entrepreneur now for seven years, almost, and for the one person on this listening to this who doesn't know my backstory, I worked on Wall Street for fifteen years, I had like a mid-life-ish crisis of like, I was on a treadmill where I was running harder instead of looking at the pebble, and I just quit. But I didn't have a plan, I didn't have anything, I didn't have an audience. I just had some savings that I was willing to incinerate in the process of discovering what I wanted to do. And so my mantra, still—we can talk about how that's changed a little bit with time—is "follow the fun." If it's fun, I'll keep doing it. If it's not fun, I'll stop doing it. And that may sound like a bad business strategy to many people, and maybe it is. It's worked out fine for—I'm not like a Jeff Bezos type entrepreneur, but by many non-financial standards I'm extremely wealthy, time wealth being a primary one. But follow the fun.
And to follow the fun was like a little rinky-dink newsletter, Gmail, bcc, thirty-six subscribers. Then it turned into blogging. I was like, "Oh, this is kinda cool." Then some press hits, then teaching people how to use productivity software. Now like a full-blown life design course and a team of multiple people. Seven years, incremental, but I really—when things stop being fun—I hate Instagram. I'm just like, "No, I'm not doing Instagram." I refuse to do Instagram even if all the audience is there, the eyeballs are there, the money is there. I refuse. Remember what we said in the beginning? If your non-negotiables are clear, then life is actually much easier. I'm not doing Instagram. Full stop. I wanna delete my account. I hate that service so much.
So along the way, closing doors, I podcasted for a while. I liked it, but it just didn't make me come alive, and things that—AB testing and all the like data—you'd think that as a Wall Street guy I would love like web analytics. I hate that stuff. I hate Google analytics. I hate all that AB testing and running experiments and like with data—I hate it so much. I love live events, so I just do live events all the time. And our live events are elite gym. And I just show up with my surfboards in the back, tell some funny stories, and people like it, and then they buy our products. So this mantra, "follow the fun," might seem indulgent, it might seem haphazard, it might seem irresponsible—but man. I mean, I have come close to burning out here and there, but every day I wake up and I'm like, "If I won the lottery, I would have the exact same day today." And that goes back to that question of the ideal ordinary week, because what would I do, what would I want if I won the lottery? I'd have fifty-six hours to fill out each week. I'd wanna meditate twice today, I'd wanna go surfing, wanna drop my kids off at school, I wanna have interesting conversations with interesting people whose names rhyme with "arks" and build something cool.
Chris (35:44): Our mutual friend Ali Abdaal and I were talking about this on Episode Eleven. The way that he puts it is you can't beat someone who's having more fun. And if you think about this not even in a competitive sense, if you have one person who's having a blast and the other person is doing an obligation, is just trudging their way through it, and like, "Ah," gritting your teeth, "All right, I guess I'll get through another day." Who do you think is going to make it in the long run when everything in this life compounds? The person who's super excited to be there. Something that I like to say is the greatest constraint that we have as an entrepreneur, the greatest bottleneck, is having a great reason to get out of bed in the morning. Just being excited to be here. And I think this sense of fun is our intuitive self. We intuitively know a lot more than we would consciously like to admit. This is an emotional signal from our subconscious that this is something to keep moving towards. And it's really important to not only have these signals but to learn to trust them over time, because man, there are just so many things that we could do in this world and like, might as well choose a few of them that are a little more fun.
There are so many paths to the top of this mountain of success. Like, you don't need—there are some things, exceptions—taxes, et cetera, that you just have to do in order to remain a well-adjusted member of society, but there is a whole lot of latitude beyond that, and you don't really have to do a lot of things that you don't find that fun, or at least particularly don't need to do things that you find detestable. So I love that as a signal, as a north star. I would share just a quick case study with you as well. For those of you guys who don't know, I try to play a little poker. I take off my suit and I put on my cape when the sun sets and play poker for a living, and I've been playing this game for almost twenty years now, and it's like, you think you've seen it all, and especially when you go play in person and it's really slow and you have all these people who you're sitting next to for twelve hours who maybe you wouldn't choose to sit next to them if you had that opportunity, but here you are, and for I don't know however many years, I would put my headphones on and just try to zone out and make it through the day.
And the last time that I went to play poker, and I went to a tournament series down in Miami and then Puerto Rico, I was like, "I am just going to go there and have the most fun that I can." And what do you know, not only do I play way better—because people let their guard down, give off a lot more information—but all of a sudden I'm being invited into games, people are like, "Hey, I'm gonna let you have this one," and folding to me. It's like, "Wait a second here, if I have more fun, not only do I have more fun, which is worth it in itself, but I actually do better. Maybe I should do this more often."
Khe (38:43): Totally. I'm sure you've heard this Derek Sivers story where he wrote in his blog—he actually lives near us, I think in Marina del Rey, in LA—he would bike to work. And he biked to work and then he'd have like a high-speed bike and worked so hard and he would just put his headphones on and measure his Stroma and all this stuff to get to work and like all this to get to work so he could start working. And then one day he was like, "You know what? I'm gonna take my beach cruiser, I'm gonna soak it in, I'm gonna enjoy myself, I'm not gonna get to work all sweaty and observe the surfers and the seagulls and the palm trees and all that." And the intense way took him forty-three minutes. The beach cruiser way, forty-four and a half minutes.
So that whole performance, all the equipment, all the—for a minute and a half. And I think about this, because everyone listening on this call does some version of that in their lives. It could be the way they overcomplicate prep for a meeting. It could be the way they over-manufacture their GTD Second Brain PKM systems. It could be the negative self-talk that they give themselves before they have to give a presentation. Everyone does that to themselves, but again when fun or maybe like joy is a better word, 'cause like 'fun' feels like so ephemeral but 'joy' feels like kind of this enduring sense, when joy is part of the process, then you just realize, you're like, "Oh my god." To use a computer analogy, it's like, "Man, I wasted a lot of cycles on this thing that didn't matter." And what a shame it would be to reach the end of life and to look up and be like, "Man."
That's the five regrets of the dying, right? I wish I hadn't worked so hard, I wish I had lived a life true to my conviction, I wish I had seen my friends more, I think I wish I had laughed more—It's basically like, "I wish I hadn't wasted all those cycles doing things that didn't really matter in the grand scheme of things." Which again, is why—why am I here? That's the highest-leverage question, and it's the most impactful one. It's also the thorniest one, and it's not the one that you're gonna be able to find a Goodreads quote. You're gonna have to sit with it, you're gonna have to meditate on it, you're gonna take some ayahuasca on it, but you're gonna have to sit with that question, and it's gonna be uncomfortable for a long time. There will be no release of dopamine, no badges, no gameifications, no network thoughts, you just gotta sit with that question for your entire life and make the iterations to move forward.
Chris (41:26): I'm working with a spiritual teacher as well, and the way his guru had put it is, "It's my duty to inform you that it's hopeless."
Khe (41:34): Heh. Yeah.
Chris (41:35): My interpretation of that, other than just not getting your expectations caught in things, is that that next milestone, that next badge is not going to solve all of your problems. All of the meditation in the world is not going to help you escape from you are only going to be shuffling along on this earth for some finite amount of time, and the sooner that you reconcile the reality of things, the sooner you can start to live a life of alignment, live a life where you're free from some of that suffering. But don't give yourself the illusion that complete freedom is a possibility. It's going to be a struggle, it's going to be uncomfortable, it's going to be hard, but it's worth doing regardless.
Khe (42:18): Yeah, absolutely.
Chris (42:20): Sorry to interrupt, one more thought. You brought up this notion of performing, and because we're in the business of peak performance, I just can't help but reflect that difference between performing and performance. It's a question that I just asked myself just now, who are you performing for? Is it to have a nice photo to post on Instagram or Twitter to impress the friends on the internet? Is it to prove it to that bully back in high school or that girl who you dated who said you'd never amount to anything? Who do you have to prove things to? To prove it to yourself because you're worried that, "Hey, I'm not worthy, I'm not capable, if I fail it's because I haven't tried hard enough." When you answer that question, you'll start to peel back these layers of—
Khe (43:08): Yeah. "Why are you here?"
Chris (43:10): "What do you want?" Because you won't have everyone else's answer filling your head.
Khe (43:14): As we were talking, I kept going back to the listener, and it's like, "Yeah, but you guys own your own company, so you don't work with Microsoft and deal with Joe Boss that's ribbing me 24/7." But here's a question. You mention—I think a lot of this does stem from this question of self-worth, of human worth, and here's a question that is worth pondering for anyone listening to this, and one that I ponder all the time that I still struggle with, is, "Who am I without my achievements?" And you can think of achievements as the knowledge worker's safety blanket. It's like our binkie. We can't function without it. But achievements, like, achievements are so fleeting. Sure, like, okay. I was an MD at BlackRock, and trust me, I will use that achievement seven years later, like I just did now. But does that really bring me peace and joy? Even when I got the promotion, it was like, "Cool." Like, got a good paycheck and all that, bought some fancy wine and went to a fancy hotel with my then-girlfriend (not my wife), and okay. You're still left with that question. What's your ideal, ordinary week?
And so, this question, "Who am I without achievement?" This is a really prickly question, because we think that with more achievement we will increase our self-worth. I think we all, like, at the end of the day want to be loved. You mentioned the example of the person who got shunned by the prom date and wanting to prove them wrong. Okay. So let's think this through. To be loved you need to be worthy of love. So, you work, work, work, work, work, work, work, and achievement, achievement, achievement, achievement, achievement, and then people love you. Hmm. That seems tenuous at best.
And we can take that even one step further. Let's say—imagine you have two kids. You have twins. And one is a ski bum. Ski bum, bartends, part-time actor, Uber driver, wonderful kid. Just, that's what that twin's into. The other one is on the founding team of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine. Same age. As a parent, do you love one kid more than the other? Absolutely not. That's unthinkable. But when you yourself fail to clear the achievement bar that you set for yourself, you love yourself less. So you're actually doing what in that example—you're actually loving the ski bum less because their achievements have not hit the bar that you hold to make them worthy of your love. We do that to ourselves all the freaking time.
Chris (45:54): We give ourselves abuse that we would never expect from anyone else—
Khe (45:58): Totally.
Chris (45:59): —because we think we can, we think in some part of ourselves that we deserve it, that if we don't give it to ourselves we will never deserve it.
Khe (46:07): Totally. Seth Godin's like, "The world's worst boss is you. If anyone ever talked to you that way you would quit, you would never talk to them." It's so true.
Chris (46:18): Regardless of what someone decides their top values are, or what they are going to choose to prioritize in their limited time in their day or on this earth, what recommendations do you have for someone listening to make the time, to feel wealthy, to put these important priorities first? How does someone go about doing that in a systemic way?
Khe (46:44): That's a great question, and I would start with—we already talked about the pebble. So set up your pebble radar. So when you really kind of find the pebble, don't go light a joint. Sit with the pebble. And there's a few ways to sit. You can use different kind of journaling techniques, and oftentimes when you write it out it will become more clear to you what that pebble is. But again, this is a moment for coaching, this is a moment for therapy, this is a moment for a men's group or different types of circles, things like that. But be willing to engage with the pebble. We call them 10k questions. Like, as an easy journaling exercise, one that your audience might enjoy would be, "Am I playing the right game?" Infinite finite games. I'm more or less like—my spiritual teachers asks like, "What's beyond games?" Whoa. That's intense. And I'm not saying—don't start with that question, but, "Am I playing the wrong game?", is a powerful one. Another one might be, "Where is there unnecessary struggle?" That's sort of the other side of the "follow the fun" coin. What if this was easy?
A lot of people don't like the "what if this was easy" 'cause it feels too indulgent for the reasons we discussed, but where is there unnecessary struggle? That's probably a little more targeted way of asking, like in a very real sense, where is the pebble in the shoe.
Another one would be "look for your zest for life." What makes me come alive? I think we stomp out the thing—my wife makes so much fun of me, anytime there's a person skateboarding, I make noises, and I'm like, "Ooh, ahh, check it, yeah!" And she's like, "Why do you get so—" I'm, skateboarding makes me come alive. I'm not a good skateboarder, I never was, I never will be, but there's just something about skateboarding that just lights me up. I love skateboarding. I used to be a skater, not that good. I don't really skate now, I'm scared of breaking my wrists as an internet entrepreneur and 42-year-old skateboarders are not the hippest thing around. But anytime I see a skateboarder in the street, I like, "Oooh," and, "Ah," and like, "Oh!" And I like to sit and watch, and my wife Lisa is like, "What are you doing? Like what, what, it's just a skateboarder."
I'm like, "You don't understand. Like, there's something about that that makes me come alive." Now, that's a clue. And I don't know exactly what that clue is, so if you're listening, the clue is not to start a skateboarding E-commerce company. That's not the clue. The clue might be—yeah, maybe it is the time. Like maybe there's an older guy skateboard, or a Boosted board, or maybe it's a reminder of how much you love board sports, or maybe you just want to dig up some old skateboarding videos on YouTube and just give yourself permission to watch them, or maybe you wanna teach your kid how to skateboard (without being that parent that translates their inadequacies towards their kid). Whatever it is, it's a signal. It's a zest for life signal. And stop ignoring it. That's all we've got. That's what we live for. So that would be another approach, this zest for life.
And I don't wanna get too much, 'cause it's not my place to talk about it, but I think meditation plays a huge part in this. Blaise Pascal said all of mankind's problems come from their inability to spend fifteen minutes in a room with their own thoughts, and it's true. If you've never meditated before, your thoughts will hit you like a sledgehammer propelled by a rocket ship. But again, like, you start to realize that so much of our lived reality, the experienced moment (as you talked about earlier, Chris) are our thoughts. And if you can just observe them and, again, have a non-judgmental relationship with them—again, I don't want to get too far into this, 'cause it's not my area of expertise, but creating that space for stillness from quiet is just—The way I describe, especially if you're scared of death, and scared of people you love—I know that inevitably I'm going to lose people who I love, and I know that my meditation practice will be home for me in those moments. It's home for me now. And it's taken years to get to that place, and again it's a practice. I'm trying to meditate for two hours a day.
So that would be another one. Those are probably the main ones—I mean, there's so many. I could give such a comprehensive way to catalyze—one would actually be, again, this is not meant to be a plug, but our course. There's a joke: "Come for the productivity, stay for the existential," and as you saw in this conversation, that's what we did. We started talking about time boundaries and then you were like, "Where does your self-worth come from?" And our course is not the only course that does that. There's tons of ways you can do that.
Chris (51:36): Yeah. The way I like to picture it is just turning down the volume on all the noise that's distracting us. So some of the—you talked about meditation, you talked about having reflective questions which force you to slow down and think about what you want or what's holding you back, and to listen for an answer, even if it doesn't come immediately. Maybe it comes to you in the shower, or as you're falling asleep or on a long walk, but it will come to you at some point if you're willing to keep asking those questions. As my improv teacher likes to put it, repetition is not redundancy. If you keep asking the question, it will come up. You just have to trust that. And it's something that I am really trying to sit with, from someone who in a very recent past life would schedule his life in fifteen minute increments, that I move at maximum speed by slowing everything down, because this is how I get most in touch with what I'm trying to create in this world, and the universe conspires to present me a most direct path towards that, but only if I'm paying attention. Only if I'm listening, only if I've taken the noise level down enough to discern these subtle signals.
So yeah, whatever your practice, spiritual course, otherwise, having something that brings you back to stillness, brings you back to reflection so that these answers can present themselves.
Khe (53:12): And the truth is that you actually never answer these questions. It's the dialectic process of engaging with them that brings deeper clarity with each passing moment.
Chris (53:22): Exactly.
Khe (53:24): What is happiness? There's no answer to that. Who am I? There's no answer to that. But as you engage with those questions and sit with them, and in fact the more you engage with the question the more you realize that you can't actually answer them with words. And so that's where the meditation practice really kicks in, because there's this whole inner landscape that is just—you can't use words. Words don't matter in them. For the left brain kind of secular technologists like us (I assume that's you, apologies if it's not), that's quite hard at first.
Chris (54:01): And that's usually a sign that there's a lot of gold there. If it's really hard, there's probably something buried. Man. I want to hear more about it. I'm sure it's evolved and this is cohort number nine. The iterations that have come. So, I was one of the early cohorts of "Supercharge Your Productivity," and I don't take many courses. I'm very particular about where I invest, and man, the investment that we made as a team—I have everyone on our team when they join Forcing Function, one of the first things they do when they join is to go through that course. It completely changes everything. And the course is based in the tool of Notion. Which is wonderful. We have everything we do in Forcing Function and now personally headquartered in Notion as our essential database. But it's not a Notion course, it's about how to discover and elevate what's important to you. And that feels really relevant to this conversation where the first step to living the life that you want to live is identifying those aspects that are important to you. What you value, and having those presented and reminded to you when you come at life's litmus test. When you approach the fork in the road, what do you prioritize when you can't have both? I would love to hear a little bit about what you have in store for everyone this January.
Khe (55:26): I will always be grateful to our early adopters. And man, you took that course, it was so early. We have a full team of seventeen people supporting it, now. There's a lot of contractors and mentors, but I would say—It's definitely not a Notion course. I say Notion is where we turn insight into action. And so so much of it is identifying the insight. And so there's actually a running joke, it's like, session three of eight, people are like, "Oh yeah. Aren't we supposed to talk about Notion?" And what we spend time talking about are, what are these 10k questions? What are these reflective questions that we should be asking? What if this was easy? Where is there unnecessary struggle? Who am I without achievement? Start to get to those questions. Where do I derive my self worth from? Then you go down one layer, and then you get into the land of habits and goals. So what can I do to make this effortless, these rituals? With family, if one of your questions is, "How can I be a loving parent," then what is the habit and the goal that needs to support that? Again, you're not really—I mean, you're writing it down in Notion, but that's about it.
Then you get down one step lower and you get into projects and domains. Domains are our areas or horizons of focus, which is okay. Like, how do we deal with all these parts of our lives that don't have due dates? Take French lessons with my daughter, plan my bucket list, date night with my wife, ten year anniversary plans, no due dates. We're very strict about no fake due dates. D-U-E dates. So then we start to get into like a little bit more of tactical, and that's really like the land of weekly reviews of like having a tight but not overwhelming review process, and then you get down to the bottom of the pyramid, which is the 10k task management, and that is really, "Where do you find the most leverage in your daily activities?" But again, none of this matters if you're not pointing in the right direction. You could pull the arrow back with the extreme arm strength and the best bow, but if you're pointing at the wrong target it doesn't matter. So it's not until we've established—and no one knows what the exact target is, but we know directionally where the target is.
And to be honest, that's what people find the most useful about the course, is that it's like no one's challenged them to identify the target, and so they're just shooting arrows furiously as fast as they can in all different directions, and that's where you get the burnout, that's where you get the anxiety, that's where you get this like nagging sense that, "Is this really it?" But then when you put them together, when you put the tactics together with the vision and then you like build like a cool setup to make it all work, then that's where the magic happens.
Chris (58:05): Can't wait. And you know, so proud, and I'm honored to hear of how it continues to take off. Some of these questions we asked today, as we said, they can't necessarily be answered, and to sum up the ground we covered feels like doing a disservice, but you've impressed and surprised me before. If you had a kind of parting words to share for someone who's made it so far, maybe where they can start, what step you'd recommend that they take after they hit "stop" on this episode, what comes to mind?
Khe (58:37): I won't redo the pebble, because I think I even used that in one of our prior episodes, but I would say this question of, "What if it were easy?" Where is there unnecessary struggle? It could be like, "Why do I get so angry every time my wife asks me to do the dishes?" What's behind that struggle? Because it's probably not about the dishes. It might be about resentment, it might be about this like concept of there's not enough time. So every time there's this kind of unnecessary struggle that you're just grinning and bearing it—could be the stupid process your boss asks you to do every Thursday that is just laborious, what's behind that struggle? Is it some kind of fear? A fear of rejection, like a fear of financial safety, financial security? Is it shame in this kind of like your inability to challenge the status quo? Is it boredom, like you're just so uninvested in the outcome that you just like can't be bothered? Oftentimes you're just tired. Are you just tired? Are you just so tired that you can't be bothered?
So whenever there's that unnecessary struggle, just imagine that there is a path where this thing could actually be easy. It might not be easy in the current constructs and the current environment and the current constraints, but just imagine—like think of it as a door shut. Just imagine you open the door one inch open for the possibility that this thing that is so struggle-worthy could actually, you could just like glide through it. You could just smile your way through it. And what gets you from that place of struggle to that place of smile?
And again, it's a thought exercise. It's not necessarily the answer, but it will bring you one step closer to the answer.
Chris (1:00:32): Easiest to navigate a moving ship.
Khe (1:00:34): Exactly.
Chris (1:00:35): Khe, it's such an honor to have you here. Thank you so much for sharing with us, for getting vulnerable, for helping to illuminate the path for so many people. If what we said today resonated and people wanted to learn more, where would you send them next?
Khe (1:00:54): People should just head over to radreads.co. Sign up for our newsletter, you'll get everything there. Twitter, if you google K-H-E space Twitter you'll get my name. I won't try to spell my full name. And yes, the course, if you're listening to this before January 25th, if you go on our webpage, there's "Supercharge Your Productivity" in the top-right corner. We would love to have you in this cohort or in a future cohort.
Chris (1:01:23): Highly recommended. Guys, thank you so much for listening. Khe, honor as always. Thank you so much for being here, pleasure as always. Guys, really excited to have you as part of our community here at Forcing Function, and can't wait to share what we have in store for you guys with future episodes. So, please, check the newsletter, stay tuned. Khe, pleasure as always.
Khe (1:01:48): Thank you, Chris. Thanks everyone. See you soon. Appreciate you all.
Tasha (1:01:53): Thank you for listening to the Forcing Function Hour. At Forcing Function, we teach performance architecture. We work with a select group of twelve executives and investors to teach them how to multiply their output, perform at their peak, and design a life of freedom and purpose. Make sure to subscribe to Forcing Function Hour for more great episodes, or go to forcingfunctionhour.com to sign up for our newsletter so you can join us live.