Systems for Living the Good Life with Khe Hy
This month, we were very excited to have Khe Hy as our special guest. Khe is the founder of RadReads, a community dedicated to transforming our relationships with time, work, money, and ourselves. His latest course, "Supercharge Your Productivity," teaches how to use Notion as an interface to discover and elevate what is truly important in your life.
See below for the audio recording, resources mentioned, topics, 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:
focus@will (preshow music)
RadReads: How to Overcome the Scarcity Mindset
RadReads: Escaping the “When-Then” Trap
RadReads: How to Say No
For previous Forcing Function Hour episodes, click here.
Topics:
(10:20) The when/then trap
(17:53) Productivity as a gateway drug to existentialism
(27:09) The purpose of human biases
(35:29) The cost of comparison culture
(39:40) Q&A
(52:00) Applying pragmatism to our daily lives
Conversation Transcript
Note: transcript is slightly edited for clarity.
Chris (00:05): I'm very, very excited to introduce my co-host for today, Khe Hy. Kay is someone who I admire a great deal. He escaped the finance world after fifteen years to write and start RadReads, a community exploring our relationships with time, work, money, and ourselves. I think many of you in the audience today are a great example of how strong the RadReads community is, how supportive, how much great content there is on there, and you know, discovering a life full of fulfillment and purpose. And that's really something that we want to talk about today.
Khe's latest course, "Supercharge Your Productivity," which I'm a proud member of, has been really paying dividends for me so far. It teaches you how to use notion as an interface (these are my words, not Khe's) to discover and elevate what is truly important in your life. And I think that's something that's gonna be front and center today, is first that discovering what is important to you, and then how can you elevate it so that you don't forget, so that you're moving it forward. After realizing that he was (his words) just "going through the motions," Khe decided that he was no longer going to try to achieve the dreams that he didn't actually want, and he set out to design a life that was more aligned with his values, which we're going to talk about today. Now Khe pursues life's larger questions. He spends lots of time with his family, and most importantly he gets to surf in the Pacific Ocean every morning.
Today we're going to talk about creating systems which nudge us towards pursuing our real goals, and how we can appreciate what's most important. And I love this concept of systems, is that it takes a lot of the work off of our shoulders. We have these one-time setup costs, and then we're continually nudged to do what we actually want to do. It's something that makes what we want to do easier to do, and I think Khe is really a master of how you can make these systems approachable and work for you.
Before I kick things off, just a couple of housekeeping items for you guys. First, I see many of you guys in the chat. Please talk it up. You're on mute just for final sound quality, but we'd love to have this conversation go. Obviously keep it clean. I don't doubt that you will. Remember to turn on "all attendees." You can see that the default option is "all panelists," so if you have a secret for just Khe and I that's awesome, but probably share it with the rest of the class.
Now, we're gonna save about half an hour at the end for questions, and so you can see on the bottom bar there where it says Q&A, so you're just going to click on that, and using that you can ask a question. And we're going to be monitoring that throughout our conversation. You also have the option of upvoting other questions. We're going to try to make this as democratic as possible, because we might not get to all questions, and so we're going to start with the questions that you want to hear the answer to the most. So whatever's been upvoted. If you see something that you definitely want to hear the answer to, make sure you upvote it so I can make sure that I answer it.
Now everyone's favorite question. "Hey," like, you know, "I wanna come back to this, I have to leave early." You know, if you have to leave early no worries, we're recording this and you're going to be sent an email from Zoom that has a link to this video recording as well as a full transcript in case you wanna read over it later. You know, Khe and I are both a big proponent of searchability, so in case there was a particular part of the conversation you wanna go back to, you can search, go right back to it. Our plan for the day is to be together for about seventy-five minutes, so that means we're going to go until 1:15 PM Eastern. So it'll be about a half-hour conversation between Khe and I and then about a half-hour for audience Q&A. So yeah, keep the chat and the questions going, and without further ado, I'd love to hand things off to Khe. Any initial thoughts before we dive in?
Khe (02:54): Well first, what a joy. I mean I couldn't be happier to be wearing my favorite sweatshirt hanging out with you, Chris, who—I've long, long admired and respected your work, and just the depth and the precision, but also it's relentlessly pragmatic. So I've learned a ton from you. So it's just really awesome to be a guest of yours. And I will say to everyone in the chat that Chris's book, Experiment Without Limits, (A) it's mind-blowing that it's free, (B) I got the paper copy and it sits next to Julia's The Artist's Way, and it's a little less dog-eared than The Artist's Way, and next to David Allen's GTD. So that just shows you how really I think Chris is a genuinely unique thinker. So I'm just greatly excited to be here.
Chris (03:50): Thanks—So Khe, I mean, I cannot express how excited I am to have you here. I think you're the perfect person to talk about this topic with. Just to kind of give people some background, I would love to kind of put you in that mindset of where you were the moment that you decided to make this life pivot. So maybe if you could kind of take us back to this moment where you know, you'd been in the finance world for fifteen years, you're pursuing many of these values that society has told you are right. You know, you're going to get rich, you're going to acquire power and status, and you're working for, you know, I think it's the largest fund in the world at this point. And there had to be one moment where you just took the red pill and you noticed like, "Oh, no. This isn't what I wanted at all." Can I get a—Put us there in your shoes.
Khe (5:26): Yeah. I will. Can I take you like—Can I time travel a little bit?
Chris (5:32): Love it, yeah.
Khe (5:34): I wanna time travel back to Khe as probably like a thirteen-year-old. And so a child of immigrants, and—A few things you need to know about me. My claim to fame was that I was really, really good at Magic: The Gathering. So that was one thing you needed to know. When I graduated high school and went to college, I weighed a hundred and thirty-five pounds. So I was very, very, very skinny. And the extent of my dating life had been a few fortunate rolls of like spin the bottle or like 33 Minutes In The Closet. Whatever those games were back then, but really just like kinda awkward. Like I was the guy that everyone wanted to—All the girls were just like, "Oh, he's just a really nice guy."
And so with that came this like deep, deep—And I think my parents lacked the confidence of being like born Americans, where they were just always trying to get into whatever that system was. And so I hatched up a system or a plan, and I was like, "I don't like feeling like an outsider, I don't like the fact that I can't get a date, and I don't like the fact that my parents have this insecurity in their daily existence of like not belonging. And so how will I solve that plan? I'm going to be rich, and I'm going to be successful, and then the world will bend itself to my will." And that was the plan that I set out when I was kind of sixteen, seventeen years old. And we could talk about the things that kind of worked and didn't work, but—So that was the plan. And that was like, if you take my life from high school up until I left BlackRock, you could say I executed on that plan, but that was the singular focus.
And I'll give you a few little details about why that was—How singular that focus was. I didn't read fiction for ten years, because fiction was a quote/unquote "waste of time." And so instead I just read like, white papers. That doesn't make for like a fun, interesting person to be around. I guess it worked, so that could be one fun fact. The second was I drank a ton. I drank a lot. It was kinda like, you work your butt off and then you black out the week for like three days. You know, Thursday night at Don Hill's, in New York City, if you guys remember that 80's club. You know, so you kind of forget the week that just happened because it was so miserable, and then you kind of start it again, like sprinting and not reading fiction and all that. So there was like, that was kind of carrying me through my 20s. And in my 30s, you know, I met my wife, I had my first child, but you know, I often get asked the question, "What was that singular moment when it was kind of time to leave?"
And it was—I would say it's more like a snowflake drops and then leads to an avalanche. You know, so there's a bunch of things that happened. But I very vividly remember in one of my year-end reviews, it was probably like two years before I quit, my boss said to me, he's like, "Khe, you're doing a great job. You're doing this, you're raising money, this, blah blah blah, all these things are great, but you spend too much time mentoring your team." And I was like, "What?" I spent too much time mentoring my team? And they're like, "Yeah, you should spend more time on money-making activities." And I was like, "Oh, that's funny that you should say that, because my team is the most sought-after team." And like, internally people were always trying to poach my analysts. So like, you're telling me to do this—And then it just hit me. I'm like, "This is a zero-sum mindset. This is a world where there are winners and there are losers, and that if I get a little bit—The pie is fixed. If I get a little bit more of that pie, then that means by definition someone gets a little bit less.” And that brings out the worst of human instinct.
And that—If I had to think about one specific moment, like—That is not the way I see the world. I believe in a rising tide lifts all boats, I believe in pie-expanding activities, I believe that we can both win. You know, we—And I just want to opt-out of that system. And so that's like kind of one very specific item. I threw a lot at you.
Chris (10:20): A couple of themes that really jump out to me, I think first this concept of 'blacking out', that if it feels like a need to almost forget what's happening that that should be kind of a warning sign. But I think the bigger theme is this idea of delayed gratification, because I think you probably realized that you weren't completely happy in all of these moments, but that was expected. Right? I imagine the culture that you're in, it very much reinforces that, "Hey, you're going to work your ass off and you're gonna reach this carrot and at point like all of this suffering is going to be worth it." And that seems to be something that comes across really well in your writing, maybe from this somewhat traumatic experiment, this notion of putting off getting what you want and putting off doing what you want is a bit of a trap. I think you kind of refer to it, what is it? The "when I, then I"? Does that resonate?
Khe (11:29): "The When/Then Trap."
Chris (11:31): Yeah, right. So in this position, it was like, "Oh, well when I reach financial security, well then I'll be higher in the ladder and I can push work down rather than up, or I won't need to be working these eighty-hour weeks." Is that something that you see a lot?
Khe (11:46): Well I think—The one, and I am constantly guilty of it, and I will write you, share a list of times that I have used this trap on myself, but I'll use a very, very real example right now that I've been getting from a lot, which has to do with the Coronavirus, right? So all of a sudden no commutes, no Monday morning meetings, no travel. And boom, all this time is just delivered upon you. And again, I'm not saying this from the lens of like, "You have to make every moment of Coronavirus a productive one." But the number of people that had said, "If I just had three extra hours a day, I would meditate for three hours." I'm like
Chris: Yeah.
Khe: I, my clients, I'm like, "It's here. It is here.” And no, and so there's always that like, "Okay, this one thing that's missing that will snap everything into place." Another one that I've seen, and it comes more from men, is, "Well, I work so hard, because at a later date I want to spend a lot of time with my kids." Time with kids is here. You can have lunch with them now, you can have dinner with them, you can have coffee with them, they can join your conference call, your Zoom calls. Like, your kids are here. And a lot of them have said like, "I actually don't want this much time with my kids." So think about what they're doing. They're justifying (and again, I say "they" but I do this all the time), they're justifying working so hard, being on their phones during dinner, traveling relentlessly, not taking care of their health, for some future moment where they're just going to magically just jive and vibe with their kids effortlessly.
And then it's here. I mean, this is—That's why Coronavirus in that regard is just so—It just snapped many things into place. And again, I say that for people on this call who can do Zoom calls about living the good life in the middle of a pandemic, but then they realize that thing, and are like, "I didn't really want that thing in the first place, or I didn't want it the way I thought, and it was just a convenience post-hoc rationalization of my unhealthy behavior in that moment." And so I'm getting a little bit away from your question, but that—
Chris (14:21): Not at all.
Khe (14:22): —I think that that reckoning is something that I love to do on myself, I love to do with the RadReads community. I always say, I mean like, I want you to leave—As a writer I've done a good job writing if you leave my post feeling like a little bit unsettled and a little bit provoked. Right? And then I don't want you to use that as a way to beat yourself up or to start that vicious cycle of self-loathing, but just approach that question with compassion and curiosity, right? So let's take the dad—And again, it's a dad because most of my clients are men, so I'll use that—But a dad that says like, "Oh, I'm working so hard because I want that future time where I can just be kind of totally vibing with my kids." And then the moment comes during Coronavirus, and then you don't enjoy it, or it doesn't feel like what it thought.
Where do you think—Where was your initial assumption wrong? Right? What were you doing in that, when you were working so hard, was it something you were running from? Were you competing with your college roommate who had a seven-figure exit? Are you, you know, or is it more existential? Like Blaise Pascal. "All of mankind's problems stem from their inability to spend fifteen minutes by themselves." Like it’s there, you know?
And so again, this is the fun texture of being a human, right? That you have these kind of openings to explore them, where I think that in our culture, specifically Western culture, when those things come, when those feelings arise, we have a few tools. We like self-medicate, right? Alcohol, weed, whatever. Or we distract. Try, you know, Iron Man and Crossfit and all that. Or we just believe that work is the answer. More success. More success will just make that feeling go away. But we know that that's actually not true, right? We know so many successful people who are miserable. And we know a lot, a lot of people who are not 'traditionally' successful who are super happy. Right? So what can we do to find and to strike that balance, right? That question of like, "The good life," right? How can we strike that balance? And so that is you know, that's something I would ask everyone on this call, right? That—If you notice some sort of incongruence in your life—You say something or you think something, but when it comes time to act, you act differently.
That's a gift. And play with that gift. And see what it reveals about you, about what's going on in your mind, about what motivates you.
Chris (17:53): That's so good. I just want to underline a few things which you said in there, which I think—Super-compressed advice. Thank you. It clearly encapsulates this notion of using productivity as a gateway drug for Existentialism. That this treadmill of self-improvement that all of us have found ourselves on at some point is just a vehicle for discovering, "Why are we here? Why do we do this work? Why does this work matter?” And I love what you said about having this sense of curiosity, that all of our actions are just signals about what we find important, and that generally, our behavior is a more accurate indication of what we find important than what we believe, because our beliefs in many ways can be a warm, soothing blanket that justifies what we're already doing, and that cognitive dissonance you're talking about, your father who didn't actually want to spend more time with his kids, but that thought of, "I'm working so hard and not spending time with my kids by choice," was too painful of a thought until he had to confront it, because that excuse that was so convenient had been removed.
And the key there is this sense of curiosity, that you can't punish yourself for feeling guilty, for wanting certain things. But the most important thing is that continuous process of discovery and realigning your life in line with those values, whatever they may be. And I really key in on this cultural notion of success, because I think it leads us to pursue so many things that we want because other people want them. That we're not actually operating from this inner scorecard of what do we really want, we see other people going after this rabbit, and thus we decide that that rabbit is desirable. And that many of the people, as you said, who are happiest, most fulfilled, they don't have biographies written about them. You ever read a biography of a rock star or even someone who's like an inventor like Einstein, or you know, Musk gets talked about a lot these days. Like, you respect them, but do you really want to be them? I think that's a—
Khe (20:28): Steve Jobs.
Chris (20:30): Yeah. That's the question, is—You can't, until you know what someone is optimizing for, you can't determine whether they're successful or not. And you know, I think that kind of brings up the question for me. Obviously you kind of had this accumulation of snowflakes that started this cascade, where, "I'm going to try to take steps towards something that's in more alignment." And we have this notion of "the good life." You know, what comes up for you? Maybe like today, you know, Khe 2020, what is your version of the good life?
Khe (21:05): That's a good question. I would say—So I think the big shift that is slowly starting to happen in my own kind of way of thinking is a shift away from scarcity. From a scarcity mindset into an abundance mindset. And so those are kind of like frou-frou terms, so let's actually put some meat on what that means. So the scarcity mindset is very much just like, there is not enough. Okay? There's not enough time, there's not enough money, there's not enough opportunity, there's not enough books you can read, and so it's operating from this place of want. Like, "I need more." Right? And so I'll give you an example. We have a nice, we live a walking distance from the beach, and thanks to many of the people on this call I had a very successful course launch. By far the most successful course launch. I turned to my wife, and I was like, "Hey, do you think we should move?" But, I love our house. Like we would just be getting a new house because we have slightly more finances than before.
So there is this kind of like—And I see this a lot. And I mean I think this gets to the heart of many of the stories of capitalism and of Western economies. And I'm not like anti—I'm not an anti-capitalist, but there is a point where the marginal utility of the value of the next dollar do you is quite low. And really, and that point's going to vary for everybody, but really understanding where that point is for you is quite liberating, right? And so you know, scarcity is like there's never enough money, there's never enough time. And so I always operated from that, right? Never enough time, that's one—I mean, why are we in the world of productivity, right? Squeezing more water out of the stone. Right? Why do we use Alfred and text expanders? You know, we can eke out twelve minutes here, seven seconds here, you know, and again I'm kind of joking at myself, as like someone who prides himself on not using a mouse. Right? So like I play that game as well. But what—Like what is the fear of more time? Of not having enough time?
I mean, now I'm just going to get super existential on us, and if you've read RadReads you know where I'm going with this, it's like at the end of a lot of this is we're—In a secular economy where you are recognized by outward achievement, at the end of the day we're all going to be dust. And so can you put that, you know, can you take the Peter Thiel-ean approach and you know, drink human blood to live to be two hundred years old? Like, sure. I'm not opting for that path. Or can you fight tooth and nail to protect your relevance, or to grow your relevance, so that your relevance lives on beyond you? And I think that for me was a big internal switch where I kind of like realized, "Holy shit, everything that I do is like this kind of backdoor way of (A) like extending my time on this earth, and (B) amplifying my relevance. And it's a fool's game.” Right? That is a fool's game, and we all know that that's a fool's game. But we play it. And so I think to me—And I'm sorry, I actually forgot the original question—
Chris (25:10): Doesn't matter. (laughs)
Khe (25:12): But I think that a lot —It was freeing to not—To kind of opt-out of that game. Because you can see how the slippery slope can quickly extend. Like "Oh, if I do the Kona Ironmen, then I will like be held on a pedestal" and all that. Like it's a damn big sacrifice of your life, especially if you don't love it, to train for an Ironman. I mean that is some intense shit. So you better truly want that. So again, I think kind of there is this process of kind of like letting go, and again just like being motivated by this fear of not having enough.
And again, so what is happiness now? And one thing, one statement that I often use, like, "What is wealth to me? Wealth is not feeling rushed." And when I tell that, there's a lot of entrepreneurs on this call, they immediately call time out. They're like, "That's not, you can't do that. That's not—You're an entrepreneur, you're a solopreneur, you can't do that." Almost like breaking a golden, universal truth about time. Right? And I will say like, you know, yes. You can always come up with systems and text expanders and Zapiers to feel less rushed, but that's just you know, treating the symptom versus looking at the root cause. What is the activity that made me feel rushed? Am I a people pleaser? Right? Do I over-deliver on my commitments because I'm scared of letting people down? Like, that's where the juicy questions are. That's the fat pitch right there.
Chris (27:03): Man, that's deep. It reminds me—I was listening to an interview with Daniel Kahneman, who some of you guys might know is kind of the father of bias. And every interview people are asking him, you know, "How do I be less biased," and I think he was just fed up with the question, and he said that you can't. That no matter how much you know about bias, that we're human, and a lot of these biases serve us. That these beliefs which can feel irrational have ways of protecting us and allow us to move forward in the world, and that all you can hope to do is gain an awareness of these sources of bias. And I think that that really kind of comes across in your answer. As much as you pursue these truths, we're still going to fall prey to cultural biases from time to time, and that all we can hope to do is shorten that gap. You put it, kind of this—How did we have it? This gap between the perception of scarcity and the realization of abundance, that we can catch ourselves earlier in the process and you know, to use a meditation metaphor, bring ourselves back to the posture we want to go about through the world.
And I love this idea that we have all of these assumptions that live in caves of darkness. [Khe] said the entrepreneur, for whom the concept of having an abundance of time, of not needing to feel rushed all the time, is just a belief that is never questioned and would never even want to question that. But if you have that ability to cast light on these untested assumptions, there's a lot of power in that, because it brings a lot more conviction to your daily life, that you are living in accordance with these values. And something comes to me. We were talking right before this call, that in a lot of ways RadReads is experiencing an inflection point right now, and that it seems to me that we're always in danger of falling in this "When I/Then I" trap. I know a huge milestone for you was reaching sustainable profitability with RadReads, and that—You know, one of the reasons I admire you the most is that you've been very public in sharing this process and this journey, and all of the work that you know, over the last five years that made it possible, which both makes it approachable that, "Hey, anyone can do this," but also, "Hey, you know, it takes five years of work." And now that you've reached this milestone, the danger (as you said) is to move that goalpost and put off what you were actually trying to get at.
How do avoid moving that goalpost, where you've reached this milestone that you put in place, you didn't know if you would get there? Now you're here. How do you stay committed to the cause?
Khe (30:12): Yeah, well it's funny. You know, you opened it, and you're like, "Tiago"—who's a mutual friend—"Tiago had three hundred fifty people [at his Lunch Hour]," and I'm like, "I got fifty-one." I'm like, "Fuck. He's like seven times better than me?" So I would say it's always—Like the goalposts are always moving. And I adore Tiago. We talk all the time. And this morning I was thinking, like, "Oh, Tiago got a book deal, I got rejected at a book deal. Is it time to go at it?" Again, but it reminded me that I have to come back to that inner scorecard. Right? And that inner scorecard to me is— Actually, I've written it down, 'cause I've done this often, is I have what I call a success statement. Which is like, "How will I know what success means to me?" And so one of them is never feeling rushed.
And that is, you know, it kind of ebbs and flows in my life. I definitely am in a moment where I feel more rushed because of like this great launch of the course and all the amazing questions that all the students have been asking. And so, that's okay. But really honing back, at like a bigger level question is like, will I continue to take on commitments that exceed my ability to service them? And how will I put guardrails on? And how will I even know that that's happening, right? So if I zoom out to my success statement, it is to be around people who I can give an inspiring energy to, and who give that energy back to me. Basically it's a fancy way of saying like, I have a no-asshole policy. And again, people might say, like—“You just became profitable. How can you say, like, an asshole client is offering to pay you 3X your market rate, and you're not profitable? Like, how are you going to say no to that client?” And it's like, I'm going to say no because it's just not worth it to me. It might take me longer to become profitable, but it gives me, you know, it's a much more sustaining wind in my sail than you know, trying to jerry-rig some system to just kind of get up over the line.
So if I zoom out to my success statements. Being around inspiring people who I can inspire and who in turn inspire me. The other is to use my creative gifts every day. And that's kind of deliberately vague, but it is creative to be on a call like this and to tell stories and try to motivate and inspire people and answer difficult questions. So that is another one. The third is related to the first, it's the ability to have complete command of my schedule so that I can show up as the father and husband that I want to be. Right? I can give them my best attention. And again, that's not—Many of these are aspirational, and I'm getting there but I kind of step back. And so, and then the last one is the ability to surf every day.
And so what happens is when I start to, you know, when I go down that path of like, "Why does Tiago drive 7X more traffic than me?” I quickly go back to those points. It's like, "Khe, when you were outside of that fight or flight tribalistic high-heartrate mindset, and you know, you had a cup of tea and you were calm, you actually know very well what's important to you." And whether you have three hundred-fifty people on a Zoom or fifty people on a Zoom is definitely not one of those things that matters, that you give two shits about. And just remember that, right? And remember why—Again, approach it with compassion and curiosity. Like, what was it about it that mattered? Is that that quest for relevance? Is that that nagging relevance chasing that you do? And if so, let's reexamine that.” And again, I've got spiritual teachers. I've got coaches, I've got journaling practices where I'll reevaluate, like, "What does it actually mean?" And by the way, I hope you can see the futility of this exercise, where if you have three hundred-fifty—Okay, sure. Like if you had James Clear on, he would have, you know, two thousand people would be here, right? And if you had Bill Gates on you'd have a million people on this call.
There is literally no end to that game. It never stops. And so having ways to again, inquire about the root cause versus the symptom that you're trying to paper over. And again, I encourage everyone to really define like, "What does success mean to me on my own terms when no one's looking?"
Chris (35:29): I think that last part is the key, "When no one is looking," because it helps us avoid this comparison culture, which is kind of the driver for moving these goalposts and pursuing things that other people are pursuing. And I love that you said that a lot—Kind of inherent to this comparison culture is that we look what others are doing and we envy their results, but we don't want to pay the cost that they paid. That we've made these discrete choices in our lives, I think in both of our cases, that we've chosen a life of more balance and alignment, and said "no" to a lot of other things others have chosen to say "yes" to, and thus it's not fair to ourselves to want the benefits without paying the costs. And I think that that's really the key to this, what would we say here? The success statement is the, you know, what am I willing to say "no" to in order to get what I want to say "yes" to? I think Dalio puts this as life as one giant buffet, where everything at the buffet is great, but you can't eat it all. You have to give up some things that you want in order to get other things that you want more. And that's really kind of the driver, is what do you want most? What are you willing to give up?
Khe (36:51): And I gotta add, I just got a really kind note from a Rad Reader the other day. Someone who's been following me for a while, who I've never met in person, and he said, "I've just watched what you built from the sidelines, and I gotta tell you I am impressed by how you've done it by yourself and like the consistency by which you do it. And just like the sheer intensity of the work you've put into it." He's like, "But that's actually not for me." And he said, "What I'm really impressed by is that you are very clear about what you want and what you don't want." And I was like, "Oh, wow." It was just nice to have someone reflect that back to you, because I get so caught up in like—And a lot of my posts are about like consistency, and this, and showing up, and you know, be a fast tortoise, and all that. But behind all that was like clarity in your desires or lack thereof, which, again. Something I strive to discover, but I often forget because it's not front and center every day.
Chris (38:06): That reminds me, so when I was in New York a few years ago I went to an event which was "have tea with a monk." And you know, getting past this whole cultural glamorization of, given we are an attention economy, we all have these fantasies of going and living on top of the mountain and meditating all day, and I thought I was going to have tea with this monk and he was going to hand off some wisdom from all his years of meditation and I could just shortcut all of that, that I could just absorb some of his wisdom that he accumulated. And I asked him the question, you know, "What is something that I would find most surprising about the daily life of a monk?" And he said, "The questioning." Right? Because from the outside, someone who has made very clear lifestyle sacrifices, you know, giving up material possessions, spending long periods of time without stimulation, it seems like he is very clear in what he prioritizes in life and has made clear actions to support that, but he says, "Every day I question whether I am doing the right thing, but the important thing is that I am asking those questions."
And I think that that's something that I really admire, is what feels like struggle, if it's reframed, is curiosity. There's a lot of meaning there. Those are the questions that matter.
Khe (39:29): Yeah. "The quality of your life is measured by the quality of your questions." That's a quote, unattributed, that I've heard before.
Chris (39:33): So I mean, I would love to continue this. We've got some really good questions—
Khe (39:39): All right!
Chris (39:40):—In the Q & A that I wanna make sure we get to. So I'll start with Ramses here. "Do you have advice on how to find what we really want, or do you know how to pinpoint how we can add value to other people's lives? How do you instill this process of discovery?"
Khe (40:02): You know, Julia Cameron has an exercise, right next to your book, Chris, where she asks you to write down—Like, if you went into your childhood bedroom, what are some of the things that made you light up as a child? Is it baseball cards or skateboarding or space or military history, airplanes? And what happens is in an achievement-oriented culture we look at those things and immediately it's like, "How can I turn this into a business? How can I turn this into a blog post?" And so I think we're actually—Like, there are clues about this all the time. Right? Like you just kind of look around, like, "Oh, that thing was—That was a really cool use of that font." You know? And our mind immediately goes to, "Oh, should I convert it to my blog?" And all that. But if you just observe these things—And a philosopher had this interesting—This comes into philosophy of like atelic activities versus telic activities. And so, telic activities have an end goal. So you train for a marathon to run the race. Like, atelic activities, the activity itself is just joyous. You know, listening to music. Making love. Going for a beautiful hike, a beach. You know, there's no end goal to that.
And I think that what we've done in an achievement-oriented culture is that we've taken anything that's atelic and tried to convert it into something telic. I do this all the time. I watch a Pixar movie with my kids where I should just get lost in the story, I'm like, "Okay, where's the Hero's Journey? Okay, is that the, like, is this the gnome that helps him? Is this the fairy? And like, can I use this anecdote in a future blog post?" It's like I've taken this thing that's supposed to be just joy in and of itself and tried to convert it into something that's achievement-oriented. So the answer to that first question is to just kind of follow things that you find joyful and you find light in, and don't worry about like leading to something.
So that would be how I answer the first one. And as an entrepreneur I would say that like if you had said that starting an email and newsletter would lead me to like a deep, deep sense of appreciation of design, I would have said you're crazy. But as I followed that, like, "Oh, this is beautiful," and like I love strolling airports and looking at like the giant advertisements—The HSBC ads, because they're just beautiful ads. Forget the fact that it's a global bank. And so if you just follow those things, the curiosity and again, not like, "How can I use this," but like, "This is beauty," you'd actually be surprised that it could lead you to some very interesting places. And the second part of the question, was how do you add value to other people's lives?
Chris (43:15): Exactly.
Khe (43:17): Yeah. I mean, I think it's quite simple. It's you have to listen and you have to genuinely care. Right? So like Ramses asked that question, and I know Ramses through the class and through Twitter, but I also know that like Ramses has got like a style. We always joke about sweatshirts, and all that. So it's just an observation I've made about him that, I don't know. It's probably not going to lead to anything, but there is just this curiosity like, "Oh, I can just tell from his aesthetic that he sees the world in a certain way." And so if I ever saw like a cool article about like Virgil Abloh, who's Kanye's designer, the Off-White guy, there's like a good chance that Ramses would be interested in that article, and so I might just send it to him. But again, I'm not like jerry-rigging some elaborate CRM system and Notion to do that. The source is the curiosity and the observation. And so if you just do that over and over and over again over a lifetime, and yeah, use technology to supplement it, but not to replace it, then like just your world will explode with possibility.
That's how RadReads started. I just sent a Gmail, like, "I read these five stories and I thought you would like them." And people were like, "When's the next one?" Right? That's literally how it started. So that, so I think it's there. The common answer to both of those questions is that it's actually just there, and just opening your eyes and paying a little bit of attention more, and to do that it's kind of like removing your own agenda from it. Your own bias. That is like the catalyst.
Chris (45:17): Removing your own agenda allowing you to see rather than look. And I want to just give a big pen flick, full thumbs up to the technology as supplement, not as replacement. I know that's something that we've talked about, and I think in both of our audiences there's a danger there of mistaking the means for the end, that you know, these systems are meant to support what we want to do, but they aren't a replacement for it. So, love that. Arvit, I hope that was an answer to your question on whether your definition of success is healthy. If not, let me know in the chat. I'm gonna go to David Cook's question. "Khe, you've defined at least two shifts. Environment and mindset. The environment was moving from investing to entrepreneurship, the mindset was moving from scarcity to abundance. Is the combination of both necessary to find the good life, or is it fundamentally a mindset shift, as all environments can provide limitations?"
Khe (46:18): David, man. He's always like breaking things down in our Slack channel. I would say—I actually think that it's quite—It's actually much simpler, and more complicated, in that yes. I think leaving finance left these kind of cultures of fear and zero-sum—You know, zero-sum, macho-driven environment. So like absolutely that impacts the good life. But I will say that you know, I think that that's almost the—That's like the skin layer, the surface layer. It actually doesn't go much deeper. So for example, below that surface layer, like am I an investor or am I an entrepreneur, there is something like the inner critic. How do you talk to yourself when you screw up? All right? So my inner critic, my entire life leading up to leaving and thereafter, was ninety percent—I call this, there's probably a bunch of New Yorkers on, I call this "the Metro Card incident." Where I had the unlimited Metro Card, right? But then you're lazy, and you leave it in your pocket and you put on a different pair of pants, you go to the turnstile, and it's not there. And so we all have good systems, we all have the backup pay-per-use card. So you use your pay-per-use card, but you're like really pissed because you've amortized the cost of a monthly card, and you know the break-even, and you've stepped one transaction away from the break-even.
And I would do that like every four weeks or so, and I would beat myself up. Like I mean, the punishment did not fit the crime. And it would get to the point, like, "You're an idiot, you're so irresponsible, your systems are broken," and then by like the fortieth minute of like, "You'll never be a good entrepreneur if you can't remember to change your Metro Card." Right? (laughs) And so—And I say that to David's question because you can change the environment, but that inner critic will always—You know, whether you're an entrepreneur or whether you work in finance—Yes. There are more catalysts for it to show up in finance, but the reality is the baseline that it's ninety-five negative, five percent positive. And so the mindset, and this has taken years, but the mindset is to go from—Now it's ninety-five positive. And it's not like, "Okay, don't worry, you're good." The mindset is like—Evaluate what you did wrong, and move on. Curiosity and compassion.
Versus—And then, and that mindset—Not having to, I mean I dealt with that voice for thirty-five years of my life. I'm convinced that that's the reason why I started losing my hair early, was because of that voice. And so I think that the—I think that a lot of it really does come from, I guess to use David language, I would say mindset trumps a lot of it, but I would go even further and say just like, it is kind of these root fears that we all have that we're either trying to paper over or run from. And if you want to call that mindset, then I would say mindset is like, that is the 80/20. Yes, leaving finance will definitely help, but it's not going to make you go from 95/5to 5/95 on the inner critic.
Chris (50:25): Yeah. I think if I can echo that a bit, I do tend to think that our behavior is somewhat determined by our environment, and so that heavy lift of completely transforming our environment will have a really big immediate impact, but the compounding effect comes from that mindset, as you said. Shifting that ratio of the self-talk or the feedback that we receive. Are the people who are around us supportive, or are we competing over the same pie? And are others around us actively rooting for us to fail? And that compounding effect over the long term probably has the biggest effect.
Khe (51:09): And you see that often with people who—Right? The Eat, Pray, Love story? Like you quit the high profile finance job and travel for a year and not give two fucks about anything in the process? Like you talk to most people, that wasn't a great year for them.
Chris (51:27): I went for that.
Khe (51:29): It was better than being in finance, but it wasn't what you thought—It definitely didn't solve any like, below-the-surface angst that you are feeling.
Chris (51:43): Yeah. If anything it—So quick backstory, I quit my job in New York a few years ago to travel around the world for what ended up being eighteen months, and everyone from the outside is, "Hey, you're living the dream." And I was like, "Well, why does the dream feel so empty?" Instead it—Finally achieving what you thought you always wanted kind of reveals the shallowness of it. And it doesn't solve any of these inner questions that you're asking. If anything it just brings them to the surface.
I'm gonna hand it off to Stephen Flavell next. Stephen says, "I find a lot of the moments in my life where I'm lying to myself and using hypocrisy as a comfort blanket"—love that—"are moments that I don't have agency to change the behavior of a larger organization or a culture"—something like a BlackRock, I imagine—"that I have to interact with any day. Khe, do you have any best practices for resolving a point of friction? Like, I don't like working for this company but it gives me a platform, or it gives me money. How do you reconcile this inconsistency?"
Khe (52:50): Yeah, it's a really good question, because I think lost in all this there is a pragmatism that we all need to apply to our daily lives, our financial situations, and so on. I would say one helpful step would be being very clear on the "nice-to-haves" and "need-to-haves." Right? So you could be in a bad work situation, and a "need-to-have" might be a boss who is ethical. Right? Or a boss that's not verbally abusive. Right? That's the red line. Right? I will not work for somebody who's verbally abusive. And I'm willing to jeopardize my financial situation to not work for someone. 'Cause, you know, you could even argue that like my safety is at risk, or my mental health is at risk. So I think oftentimes we coalesce, like we just throw all of our gripes into a bucket of gripes. And again, there is an analysis to be done. So you might work for an energy company, for Exxon, and be passionate about stability, but that would be a "nice-to-have." To have a job that is aligned with your sustainability worldview. That's a nice-to-have, but the need-to-have is to have a boss who's not verbally abusive.
Right? So you can kind of start to clarify those things and see where you're actually willing to draw the line. Right? Not having bureaucratic lethargy might be a "nice-to-have," right, and financial security, you know, having a paycheck that's over X dollars a month is a "need-to-have" based on my financial situation. Now, like anything, pressure test these assumptions, right? Where, okay. If the paycheck is like, let's say it's 100K. Just pick a round number. Would you trade one summer vacation for sustainability as a corporate mission being a need-to-have? Like, is there flexibility between those two? That's a trade-off. There will be trade-offs there. And so I would say—And again, only the person can answer that themselves, but know that once you've kind of separated them into "nice-to-have" and "need-to-have," that you can also pressure test each assumption. Right? Is 100K the number 'cause you want to be known as a six-figure person, and like being known as a five-figure person is not compelling to you?
Okay. That's fine. But be clear about that, versus like, again. People—I see this all the time with finance folks who wanna go join startups. That they—There's an allure to it, but they realize like the average finance salary compared to the average venture-backed salary is very, very different. So you need to be willing to see, it's like—Is that gap, (A) is it financially possible, but (B) is there like maneuverability in there, because do you, will it elevate some of your nice-to-haves into the need-to-have camp?
Chris (56:27): I love that. I think just like in any negotiation, and the most important negotiation is the one you have with yourself, it's important to decide what you actually need, and what are you telling yourself that you need? Because at certain points those two are going to come into conflict, and you're going to have to choose. And so it's better to have that litmus test upfront so that you don't choose wrongly and negotiate poorly with yourself.
Khe (56:53): And I would also add to—Sorry to barge in, but like bringing your spouse, your partner, your kids into these conversations, right? So if you have a verbally abusive boss, there is a chance that you take out that aggression that that boss takes out on you onto your loved ones. There is a—There's definitely a price to that. I would say there's an economic value to that. But even if there's a non-economic value, it is one of the variables that has to be considered.
Chris (57:27): Yep. And how some of these prioritization questions—"Hey, I'm going to prioritize the happiness and health of my family," leads downstream to personal choices. I know for me that's been a big one, in a long-term relationship, going from making decisions on what do I want versus what's best for us, and how making one big decision like that kind of percolates down into other decisions becoming apparent, where I think as you were saying, Stephen, some of these things kind of feel like tiebreakers. Which value do I elevate above the other one? And sometimes bringing the other people into the equation who are affected can kind of make that a little bit more clear as far as what are the downstream or second-order effects of these choices that you're making.
We've got time for one more. I would love to answer all of these. I think I'll hand these off to Khe afterwards, and maybe we can see if we can do it offline. You know, we've really dived into the existential, and hopefully Khe's shaken you up a little bit and you're kind of going over in your head some choices that are pending. Let's break it down into the pragmatic. Let's kind of end it on an actionable note. So Thomas Najar asks, "Once you're clear on what constitutes quality of life for you, what is the first system that you should have in place to support this?"
Khe (58:55): It's gonna be a tie. But, so I'll give two answers. I would say that one is just having good habits. Like having good habits to kind of give that way of being the best chance to flourish and thrive, and just having good habits is just a very basic pillar to being content on a daily basis. So I would say habits, because it kind of moves everything into the background. Right? If you just wake up and you know you meditate, then you don't have to like create any tasks or anything. And you've identified meditation as an important activity. You know, you center your day around the things that bring kind of the best life to you. So that would be one. And I would think—I was actually just watching this video this morning which—There is—It was about the Pareto Principle, the 80/20 rule. It was a different take. It was actually Tiago interviewing the guy from Great Assistant, about hiring Executive Assistants, and he said, "Well it's actually more like an hourglass. So it's like ten percent planning, eighty percent execution, and ten percent review."
And I think we get—And this is, you know, I've borrowed this from kind of GTD, but I think that we get so focused with output and system design that we never actually go back and check if it's working. And review is very unsexy. Right? Because you don't get a dopamine rush from reviewing if your system works. You get a dopamine rush from executing on it. You get a dopamine rush from like, crafting the thing. But like going back—But the review, and so like having some kind of deep reflection process, which can be as simple as asking yourself the same three questions every week. Right? "Did I live my values?" "Where was I stuck?" And "Where did I thrive?" Right, or "How can I show up to be —You know, did I show up as the dad and husband that I wanted to be? How did I? How didn't I?" All right? It's, the questions are actually quite straightforward, but the commitment to doing that and not treating —And I struggle from this a lot, is that I treat it like a task that needs to be completed.
Like, but it really is almost like a glass of scotch. Right? It's really to be savored and analyzing the texture of your week, your month, your quarter. And I think that (A), it takes a lot of discipline to do that regularly, and then once you do it, it takes a lot of discipline to really probe, versus just being like, "Yep, did that, did that, did that, okay. Let me go do some kettlebell swings." Like because of its non-dopamine-producing function or characteristics. So that would be something, like having some kind of a review. And again, not a fancy system. A few questions that you think are important. But to analyze if you're living in the good life, or your path towards it, and then doing it with regularity.
And then I would add that they are such a joy to go back to and read. With time. Like it is effectively like the—It becomes like the story of your life. Like the internal story of your life. And you can see growth, you can see challenge, you can see adversity. Like it actually becomes a very special act.
Chris (01:03:10): I love that. There is a commitment to be disciplined, but say at least my definition of a system is something that makes it more likely to happen. So it makes it easier, reminds you, reduces friction, this type of thing. I love, Khe, your concept of a life dashboard. Something that you're forced to see regularly that just reminds you of what's important, and you have these blanks that you're having to fill in on a regular basis that are just check-ins with yourself that create these time capsules or milestones of where you were in moments in time, and that allows you to discover who you really are, is connecting those dots. Seeing the different decisions that you made at different inflection points, and how those turned out, how they made you feel, how satisfied you were with those choices that you made. Because we are, after all, the sum of our choices. And so that those systems we put in place, first that habit of, "I'm going to be reviewing regularly, I'm committed to it, I'm going to make that review as easy as possible in order to get out of it what I need in order to define what I do next," but to just enjoy that process. Not make it another task to check off, another thing to do, but something to be savored, something to just be curious about whatever comes up.
And I think that's probably been the biggest theme for me. We've been talking about mindset today, is how can you engage that sense of curiosity, especially about yourself?
Khe (01:04:52): Yeah.
Chris (01:04:54): Khe, I mean this has been a wild ride, this has been, you know, a lot of wisdom. Thank you so much for showing up today, for sharing some things that you've learned and some lessons that we continue to relearn. You know, it's been such an honor to have you here. Any final thoughts? Anything that you'd love to share with the group today before we wrap up?
Khe (01:05:20): Well first, thank you. There's no better way to spend a morning. You know, I'm going to go to the beach after this. But I would just say to everyone, thank you. Seeing the names in the panel, like there's—You guys get a lot of RadReads, you get a lot of Khe, so thank you, and sorry for all the email. But I would say its really, so much of it is all in you. Right? It's not in Notion, it's not in that next win, it's not in you know, Chris's book, although Chris's book has a lot of good questions that will prompt you to ask these. But like so much of this is actually already in you. And it is just like—You know, maybe it's a little bit of a corny way to end, but it's like the Simon Sinek, like, "Start with why." You know, why do I want to be more productive? But the key is to follow up with that question behind. Like, there's the second why, and the third level why.
Because like the first why is going to be like, "because I want more free time." And then so the next why is like, "Well, why do I want more free time?" "Like, with more free time I could earn more money. Or I could spend more time with my kids." "Why do I wanna spend more time with my kids?" Asking those questions is actually—That is the 80/20 rule, and we all have it within us, just a few simple whys with like a dose of curiosity and compassion with a dose of self-accountability, you know, it's just there. And then finding communities like the ones that Chris and I have created, finding coaches like Chris and others, those add heat to the process. And so—But everyone can start right now.
Chris (01:07:29): Let's start. So hey, guys, thank you so much for joining us for Lunch Hour. We do these conversations once a month, so if you're not already on the Forcing Function newsletter, I encourage you to go to theforcingfunction.com to sign up so you can stay in the loop about future Lunch Hours and other online events like this one with amazing speakers like Khe, and I would highly encourage you if some of the things that we've said today provoked you and shook you a little bit to check out RadReads. I'm gonna link some of my favorite posts that Khe has done that explore some of these questions in the show notes. And maybe that is our assignment. To sit with ourselves, be curious about what comes up. And the system is whatever allows us to answer those questions. So again, yeah. Thank you so much for joining us live or either via recording. I look forward to seeing you on the next Lunch Hour, and thanks again, Khe, for joining us.
Khe (01:08:30): Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Have an awesome day.
Tasha (01:08:33): 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.