Rethinking Our Relationship with Time and Money with Khe Hy

Joe Casabona: All right. I’m here with Khe Hy, and I’m so excited to talk about our topic because hustle culture, honestly, is like something I super hate. So, Khe, first of all, thanks for being here today. I really appreciate it.

Khe Hy: Thank you. It’s an honor to be here.

Joe Casabona: Thanks so much. I’ve really been enjoying your podcast, which I will link to in the show notes, of course. But the first thing I wanna dive into is actually as we record this, your most recent episode, which is your interview with Amanda Goetz. You talked a lot about boundaries and being ambitious while also being a parent.

I personally think that a lot of, like, the business advice that we hear from a lot of people is, like, for single people or for not single, for, like, non-parents only, right? Like, even Marie Kondo, like, stops doing her, like KonMari method thing after she had kids. So, I think it’s easy to hustle when you don’t have a lot of other obligations. And I just, I would just love to hear, like, your point of view on that as someone who’s come from Wall Street, and now you’re running a successful business, and you seem to still have a lot on your plate.

Khe Hy: Yes. So first, thanks. thanks so much for having me. Thanks to all the listeners tuning in, and y’all are awesome.

So, it’s probably in my origin story, but to repeat it or reiterate it, I hustled very, very hard for a large season of my life. So, I will not, I really do believe that there are seasons of life for everything. Right? Just like there’s a season for planting seeds, and there’s a season for collecting seeds, and there’s a season for eating the fruits that your seeds, you know, yielded. Right? And I do believe that life is like that as well.

Now, obviously, for some people, those seasons tend to coincide with, you know, having kids, not having kids, being young and energetic, having to caretake elder parents or not care for other parents. So, I just believe that as a starting point, there’s a season for everything. And I pass no judgment on what season you’re in. I’ll just share the way I approach the seasons.

My season of hustle was age coming out of the womb. So age 0 to age 35. So 35 years of hustle in many different facets. I was a very, very kind of driven kid. Very entrepreneurial like I taught myself HTML when I was 15. So it was just in like 1993.

Joe Casabona: Okay. Wow!

Khe Hy: 28.8 modems back then. And I would go to the local businesses and say, I think you need a website. And then I would charge $20 an hour in 1995, which I don’t know, probably $40 an hour today, cash, to make websites. So that was a hustle. I think that well.

And then I went to college. I went to a school that has, you know, high academic standards. I went to Yale for undergrad and then I worked on Wall Street. And in all those instances, I kind of, I dove in head first. Right? I really worked my butt off. I kind of prioritize work above everything else. I was extreme about a lot of things, and I’m happy to share the things that I was extremely about like for example, one day I have chicken legs and I didn’t, I know I don’t like that, like really skinny calves. You know, I’m Asian American. if you don’t…if you can’t see the video, and I just didn’t like that I had really skinny legs. And so one day, I decided I’m not gonna have skinny legs anymore. And so I did. A 1,000-calf elevated calf raises every day for 6 months.

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Khe Hy: It didn’t work. You can’t change your genetic programming. Chicken legs are genetic, not earned. But that was the kind of ethos that I would bring. I literally had a piece of plywood. I don’t know if it’s plywood, but a piece of wood that was taped on little, you know, smaller pieces of wood to give some, like, a portable elevation, you know, for your, for the calf raises. And I would just bring that thing everywhere. Just bust out calf phrases in the library, bust out calf phrases, you know, when people aren’t looking. So that’s pretty intense. And I would say that those things serve me really well professionally. \

But 2 asterisks and this is where it’s hard to have some, like, revisionist history on this. 2 things were that it definitely had long-term consequences. Like I’m pretty sure that I started losing my hair early because of that level of intensity. My teeth, I’ve grind. I grind through like all of them. I’ve been a serial teeth grinder since I was 10. So I have like, no, I have no enamels left on my teeth. I was maybe an alcoholic, borderline alcoholic. I don’t know the exact definition, but I coped a lot with substances. And my motivation for all of those things always was from a place of I’m not good enough. So it was just a starting deficit. Like, I am not a good enough person, which I think I couldn’t say it with words, but I think I can say it now as an adult, as an older, a middle-aged adult. I’m 45, turning 45 this year is, I just didn’t think I was worthy of love. And I don’t know where that came from because I have very loving parents. I have a great group of friends. I have an amazing wife and 2 amazing kids, but I think I had this fundamental belief that I wasn’t worthy of love. And so I had to go out. Love was earned. And the way I earned love was by showing people that I was very capable of doing stuff.

Joe Casabona: Wow. Well, thank you for sharing that. That’s, it’s interesting because, just as well, like, doing research for this episode, I went to, I mean, I tweeted it, so it’s like, not a big secret. Like, I went to Alex Hormozi’s Twitter, and like, one of the things he said was like, you don’t need a therapist. You need to stop thinking normal life is a problem. And I’m like, what a toxic this is like, and I have, like 20 let’s say, 25-year-old me. I’m 38 now would have been, like men don’t need therapy. Like we just muscle but, like that’s such, like a narrow, like toxic worldview, and like I’m in therapy now, and it’s been like amazing. And like, even on weeks where I don’t have a lot I’ve like, I feel like I don’t have a lot to talk about like it’s just kinda good to get, like an outside point of view.

And so first of all, like when you say like, I pass no judgment. I think this is like one of those things that’s lost on social media advice, which is, like that’s like kind of framing this whole conversation. Right? Because like people say things on social media to get engagement. And, but it’s always very judgy, right? It’s like, you’re… I saw a tweet that was like, if you’re employed by somebody, like you have no freedom. And I’m like, that’s, what a wild thing to say. Like….

Khe Hy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Casabona: So, I really appreciate you sharing that, and like, you know, I kind of agree wholeheartedly, like when I was, before I met my wife, really, I was very much like I don’t care if I’m married, if I have kids, as long as I’m, like rich or successful, like whatever, I thought like, success was.

I also started making websites in high school like very, very similar path. I also sold mixed CDs like, I have, like a…

Khe Hy: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Joe Casabona: I had, like, a dedicated DSL line at home, because my dad worked for the phone company. And so, like, I would use Napster and download songs overnight and bring the CDs. It was, it’s really good. So, I’ve kinda felt the same way like, the more money I make, the more successful, and then, like the more, not like people will like me. Like, I don’t think it was that, but it’s, like, money will solve my problems.

Khe Hy: Mhmm. Yeah.

Joe Casabona: And then I kinda saw, like, working for a Web Development agency where, like, I had to work weekends or like, I had to skip a concert to work late for them. Then I’m like, this is not the life I wanna live.

Khe Hy: Mhmm. So what concert?

Joe Casabona: It, well, it was I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about it, but it was Louis C.K, before Louis like, before we found out about Louis C.K.

Khe Hy: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: And so, yeah. It was, like, I skipped that, and I was so mad. And, like, I’m like, this is not… this is not how I wanna work like my girlfriend just drove like an hour to be with me, and now I can’t spend time with her because some guy decided that we had an emergency. And I hated that.

And I guess on that topic, right, we kinda see, like the celebration of creators making a lot of money. Right? And it it makes sense. Right? I’m not like pooh-pooh ing anybody like, I got the ConvertKit email today that was, like Ali Abdaal made $5,000,000 in 2 years or whatever. But I feel like it almost fed us.

Khe Hy: First of all, though, all those numbers are always revenue numbers. They never say profit numbers.

Joe Casabona: I love that you say that. Right? Because like, I can like if I’m spending $1,000,001 to make a $1,000,000, I’m not making any money. Right?

Khe Hy: Exactly. Yeah. You’re not making a $1,000,000.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I love that. And so I’m really glad…

Khe Hy: Can I just, can I just interject here?

Joe Casabona: Yes.

Khe Hy: Because, Tiago Forte, who’s another creator, Forte Labs building a second brain.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. second brain. Yeah.

Khe Hy: He posted, he tweeted something. We could try to find it for the show notes, but he basically said, I think he said something along the lines like over the past decade, my business has made $10,000,000 in revenue. He’s like, most of it has been in the last 3 or 4 years. So keep that in mind. But if you smooth it out, it comes out in I forget what he said. Then he gave the profit number. I forget what the profit number was. But, basically, what he and his wife, because they’re partners, they take home 300 over a 10-year period, they’ve taken home $350,000 a year of profit, which is really good.

But he said in the tweet, he’s like, that’s basically what you get paid as an average Google product manager. Right?. And so and then he did the thing with taxes and all that. I forget the exact numbers. But basically, he said, once we pay for childcare, we pay for our mortgage, we put away money for retirement, we basically have nothing left to save. And, look, he lives in LA, so it’s a Long Beach high cost of living city. Everyone in the comments, like move to Texas. Move to Texas. Yeah. But you could see the headline number was $10,000,000. Okay. $10,000,000 over 10 years. Right? So $1,000,000 a year. Right. The bottom line number was 350,000 for 2 people. Right? Husband and wife team. So 175 per person, pretax, take into tax, 2 people working, you need childcare, take out childcare. You basically are covering your mortgage and your retirement savings and nothing else. And like, and he said, he’s like, I travel nice.

Joe Casabona: Right.

Khe Hy: So you go from $10,000,000 to I travel nice. And by nice, I think he means, like the nice Airbnbs and couch.

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Khe Hy: Not like not private jet nice or not

Joe Casabona: Right. Right. Yeah.

Khe Hy: Yeah. Premium. Not even first-class nice.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Was it you who tweeted about it first, like flying first class on a long flight?

Khe Hy: Probably. I, my wife and I fight a lot about this. It’s there’s a bit of a fundamental disconnect. I’m a child of first generation immigrants.

Joe Casabona: Mhmm.

Khe Hy: And so I have trouble enjoying the money that I earn. I feel a lot of guilt. I hear my mom and dad’s voice being like, that’s a 4-hour flight. Why would you send you know, why would you pay triple? But in certain cases, I can afford it. And so I struggle with that tension, and so I tend to not do it. Look, I treat myself nice, surfboards, cameras like it’s funny someone asked me what’s the most expensive thing you’ve bought. I was like, well, my wife’s engagement ring. My car. I rent my house. And then after that, all I could think of was a Macbook, like the nicest Macbook Pros. I always get them. I get like a $3,000 MacBook Pro every 3 years. I have something like I’m on my computer every minute of the day.

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Khe Hy: You better make it nice.

Joe Casabona: Absolutely. I just bought the souped-up MacBook Air M3. Right?

Khe Hy: Nice. Yeah. I got the M3 Pro. It’s like, it’s freaking dope.

Joe Casabona: So psyched. Yeah. And, like, that’s, like I’ve got like a Mac studio. That’s like my main machine. But yeah. I mean, I’m gonna have that thing for 4 years. I’m gonna use it every single day like, it should have 24 gigs of RAM or whatever.

Khe Hy: Yeah. Exactly.

Joe Casabona: Right. I love that. So, yeah. So we’ve like really touched on this, but like, it really feels like we fetishize the top level let’s be rich revenue number. Right? And I mean, you walked away from a 7 figure salary, I think from when you worked on Wall Street. Like, how do you redefine success for yourself? Right? Like, because I think people would be like, that’s insane. Like, how could you do that?

Khe Hy: Yeah. It’s… So, I also I wanna say that I feel very lucky in the situations that were presented to me. So for example, my parents put me through college without any student loans. So I kind of at 21 years old, even though I had money, you know, I was making those websites. I think I probably entered college with 20 grand of savings from my web design practice. And, but my parents were like, nope, that’s your money. You know, our parental responsibility, we pay for college and then you go on free life. So I feel very blessed there. I know that’s an advantage of not a lot of people can start with, say they started with. And then I went, and then I worked on Wall Street which is just this crazy outlier industry where if you and look, we can talk about the trade-offs, but if you’re an average person at a major Wall Street firm, at 30, you’re making 700 grand.

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Khe Hy: Average. And the outliers are making like 2,000,000.

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Khe Hy: So, imagine that’s at 30. So imagine at 50. Right?

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Khe Hy: The outlier is making some 5,000,000 a year. The average person’s making 1.7 or something. So it’s just, now, you gotta keep in mind that you live in New York where a studio apartment would have cost you about $800,000 to buy like a 500-square-foot apartment.

Joe Casabona: Right.

Khe Hy: So New York’s just a freaking expensive place. So anyway, I say that because I think that my creator journey is unique. And the reason why I say is I had 3, 4, 5 really good years on Wall Street, and I invested all that money. And then I, and that was the if I just grow that money 5, 6% S and P 500, my family is good for the rest of our lives. My retirement’s good. My kids’ college is good. Whatever we need, you know, in, you know, not I wouldn’t even say modest, but like, living an upper-class lifestyle is taken care of there. And then all I need my creator business to do is to basically cover my living expenses. So it’s not about, you know if you contrast with what Tiago said in his tweet, he needs his creator business to build him wealth, right? Because he didn’t have, this is my second career, and I’m really lucky that my first career was way more lucrative than my second career. So, I say that just to put context on the question that you had asked which is like, what’s it like taking a huge pay cut?

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I’ll also just say, like, I mean, you were also like, I made a bunch of money in high school too, and I like, squandered it because I was an idiot. Like, because I’m like a white guy. Right? I didn’t like to think about any of that.

Now I will say my grandfather came over from Italy in 1949, and he like, lived like, the immigrant lifestyle in New York, and saved every penny. And thanks to, you know, my inheritance from him, I also have no student loan debt. Like I was able to pay that off thanks to what he left me and my 3 younger brothers. And so, I feel very…

Khe Hy: I love to do that for my grandkids.

Joe Casabona: I know. Right? Like, same. Right? Like, my wife’s like, should we start like a $529 or whatever? And I’m like, I don’t know. Like, call who knows what college is gonna be like in 18 years. But we did start a save like, you know, an interest-yielding savings fund, but you’re also smart with your money. Right? Like, which I think a lot of young people like when I got my first job out of college at the University of Scranton, I was asking about my retirement from my investment fund, and, like, the HR person was very impressed that somebody my age was asking about that. And I’m like, we should all think about that. Like, I feel like, so, I mean, it is unique, certainly. I won’t take that, but, you know, I think that we can make good decisions no matter where we are in life too.

Khe Hy: Yeah. Yeah. No. And again, I feel blessed. I think part of it is I’m like an extremely curious person that doesn’t leave any stone unturned. Part of it is that I’m intense about things, but I also, as I’ve gotten older, I know when to dial back my intensity and when to dial it up. Right? And I think when I was younger, it was just a 10 out of 10 all the time, which is why I needed to drink so much and which is why, you know, I was coping in other ways. And now I feel way more balanced about that. And again, I think it just goes goes back, to the seasons thing that we talked about earlier.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. For sure. I mean, something my therapist told me about, like, just yesterday actually. Because, like, I was telling her how like, you know, there’s I was always, like, mouthy in real life and on the Internet, and I’m like a lot less like that now. And there was an incident where, you know, I got like kind of a weird threat from like someone online, and I was really worried. I’m like, I’ve got kids to think about now. And I was like, that’s so different from the way I was when I was like 26 and not attached. And I was like a kid, not I didn’t care. I did not care about my personal safety, but I was willing to put that at risk way more easily. And she was like, yeah. Well, as you get older, like you’re, you know, you’ve got a prefrontal cortex that develops better, and you are better at regulating stuff like that too. So it’s…

Khe Hy: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: It really is interesting when you think about stuff like that. So okay. So, okay. So let’s do this. How do you, like read or how did you redefine success for yourself as you got older?

Khe Hy: Yeah. It’s not easy. And I asked this question often to the people whom I coach and teach. I think that, you know, I have a deep, deep meditation practice. So I’ve been meditating forties to 60 minutes a day for a decade now. And so to me, a lot of what I want in life is to be present. And so, you know, I have a saying that, you know, I tell myself is when I’m with you, I’m with you. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a podcast interview, my wife, my kids, my employees, my coaching clients, I’m just fully present. There’s a spiritual teacher, Tara Brach, B-R-A-C-H. She says love is the fullness of presence. And so I feel like for me, success is just being present.

Now, I can give you more, a little bit more, put more meat on that bone, for example. So I actually think I’ve written out kind of my success statement. And so one is the ability to express myself creatively every day. And that’s obviously writing, podcasting on the internet, but also in how I dress and cooking. And, you know, I just, I love, I think creative expression is just one of the most beautiful traits of humanity. And so I try to build my life around creative expression.

I love being outdoors. I live in LA. It’s 68 degrees, 0 humidity, no clouds in the sky, 360 days a year. And so I surf, I run, I go for beach walks. I play pickleball and play basketball with my kids. I’m outdoors. And so for me, success is just moving my body outdoors a lot. I’m outdoors 2 to 4 hours a day.

Joe Casabona: Nice.

Khe Hy: And again, that’s just the weather is so dang good here.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Yeah. I’m on the East Coast where it’s like, it was like 50 degrees yesterday, and we were like, yes….

Khe Hy: Losing your eyes. Yeah. I mean, I grew up in New York City, so I kinda know that…

Joe Casabona: Oh, yeah. Right.

Khe Hy: So, moving my body. Then the other is just being around people who are good energy. Being around good energy, giving it, giving out good energy, being around good energy. So, I kinda have a no hole policy. If someone, you know, is on Twitter, I’ll block them. I won’t engage. I’ll block them. If there’s a client who I can tell a prospect that I could see might have some pushy, you know, vibes, I’ll just say no. I respectfully say no. You know, people I engage with on the Internet, just people in my life are positive energy. And so being around good vibes.

I want time freedom, right? So, I work a lot, but I want to work when I want to work. And I want to be, you know, my daughter, like I volunteer at the school every week at Science lab and or lunch. So noon every once a week, I volunteer at one of my daughter’s classes. And so I just want it’s just all I ask for is the hour, but I wanna know that you know, if the hour slot is on a Thursday, I can go on a Thursday. If the hour slot is on a Tuesday afternoon, I can go on Tuesday afternoon. So, time freedom.

And then a subset of being outdoors is I wanna surf every day. So I live walking distance to the beach. So, I basically try to surf every day.

Joe Casabona: That’s amazing. And that’s so like, it’s important, like, you know, you understand yourself, and you know that. Like…

Khe Hy: The crazy thing too is that very few of those things require a lot of money.

Joe Casabona: Right. Yeah.

Khe Hy: Like, you know, that’s the thing about time freedom, which I interrupted you. You were gonna ask a question about it. But people oftentimes people want money to buy back time. Right? So you might work really hard and then you will order DoorDash. Right? So you save an hour of cooking or you have a cleaning person. You save an hour of cleaning or you have your trainer come to you. You save an hour of commuting. Right? That’s cool. But then you could also invert that where you’re like, well, I actually have more free time. And so I don’t actually make less money, but I don’t need it. I can just drive to my gym instead of having a trainer come to me. And the effect is the same. It takes me more time, but that’s okay. Cause I have plenty of time and I’m not constrained by like needing to work, needing to make more and more, more, more, more money.

So I’ve really, really worked hard to design my life that way. And I tell people like, if you and again, part of this is because I had that first career where I had built that nest egg that can grow over multiple decades in just, in the S and P 500, nothing fancy. But if someone was like, hey, Khe Hy. Someone said to me, hey, Khe Hy, I’m gonna pay you $10,000 to do $10,000 a week to do 5 hours of data entry. I’d be like, I don’t really, I think I’m gonna say no because I would take that $10,000 and then try to turn it into more free time.

Joe Casabona: Right.

Khe Hy: So instead, why don’t I just keep the 5 hours and not just engage in that trade? Now, again, I’m in a position where I don’t, you know, most people would probably take that. They’d, that money could really move the needle for them. And so, again, no judgment, but that’s why I try to point out my financial situation in advance because I’m not a typical creator in that, like, I’m just trying to run this as some breakeven lifestyle business, whereas most people are trying to do this to grow their nest egg.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I think your like, your relationship with time and money is good, though. Like, what you said here reminded me of 2 other interviews I did. One with my friend, Nev Harris, who said, like the best way you can earn more money in your business is by, like cutting expenses you don’t need. Right? That’s, like the fastest way to do it. And like the same thing, like when I saw how much money we were spending with DoorDash, I almost died. Like, I couldn’t even believe it. And I’m like, I’ll just…

Khe Hy: It’s crazy.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Like, I’ll just drive to the pizza shop or whatever. Right? Like, I’ll drive to get the Chinese. Like, that’s fine. Plus, like, I mean, 3 small kids, like a 5-minute drive is quiet. It’s like a good quiet time. Right?

And then the other one is, a more recent one with Maggie Patterson where like, there’s this notion that certain things mean you’re not trading, like time for money or you’re not trading hours for dollars or whatever. Right? In work. And she’s like, you’re always trading hours for dollars in work. Like, it doesn’t, it’s just like with a membership, maybe here trading for fewer dollars. Right? Versus, like coaching.

Khe Hy: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: And so I like this relationship. And we’ll talk more about this in a little bit, but I recently made the decision, and I talked about it on a recent episode where I’m not gonna do LinkedIn Learning courses anymore. Even though it, like, based on the hourly rate I want, like it totally works out. It’s not the kind of work that I feel is high leverage for me.

Khe Hy: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: And so, I can take that time and use it elsewhere or, you know, knock off early and go see my kids play or, like, go to my kids, like Christmas parade or whatever. Right? And so, I think that’s really important.

I wanna get into, like, do we need to hustle? But first, let’s take a quick break for our sponsors.

And we are back. Maybe I didn’t leave a long enough gap there for Joel, so I’ll just…Joel, you can edit this out.

And we’re back. So let’s get into, like the big question. Right? Don’t we need to hustle to grow our business? Like, I know Justin Moore asked Dickie Bush this in your debate, which I’ll link to the show notes. We’ve referenced that a few times. You can find them at [streamlined.fm/410]. That’s 410. And I like how you called hustle culture escapism, but we didn’t really get your answer to that question. Right? Justin went into, like designing your life, intentionally. So, don’t we need to hustle to grow our business a little bit?

Khe Hy: I think you gotta start with the end in mind. Right? And so what’s the end goal? Right? And so the end goal, so why, I mean, I can start with myself. I think I’ve shared this a few times. I started a business to enable a certain lifestyle. Right? So if I hustle, does the hustle bring me closer to that lifestyle?

Well, one of the things that I said is that I really wanna be present. And so to me, hustle and presence might be at odds. Right? Definitely, like beating up my body for work is at odds with being a 44-year-old guy who, you know, is starting to feel the effects of aging and so on. And so I think that, I think that it is all, it all depends.

So let me, I’ll give you another example is, I was one of the fastest promoted folk at the entire company BlackRock, the company that I worked at. So I was a Managing Director at 31 years old. I was one of the youngest ever. That’s kind of a made-man in the company. There are probably 500 in a company of 100,000.

Joe Casabona: Wow!

Khe Hy: Right. It’s kinda like becoming a like a junior partner would be an equivalent, But you’re a made-man, and it’s a very well-known thing. So, I hustled. You could make the argument that I hustled for, you know, so at 21, I entered the workforce. I hustled for 10 years to get that. Right? And you could make the argument that a lot of the reason why I don’t need to worry about building wealth at this phase of my life is because of the hustling that I did from age 21 to 31. Right? So I’m not I’m not against hustle. I think that there’s a time and place for hustle. Usually, it’s when you have more energy and then and less commitments. So, basically, when you’re single.

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Khe Hy: Or without kids. Now, I think the asterisk that I wanna put on hustle is what again, it starts with the end in mind. Right? For me, I think I’ve always had these plans. Like, I told my mom when I was a kid, I was like, I wanna be a millionaire by the time I’m 30. And so that was the end. Right?

Joe Casabona: We are so the same. I said the same exact thing. Like…

Khe Hy: Totally. I think it’s a pretty common thing to say as a kid.

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Khe Hy: And I achieved it. And so, you know, that was the end. And then look, here’s where things get dicey. It’s like sometimes you hustle towards an end. And then when you get the end, you realize that the end like, let’s say, like, I wanna be a millionaire by the time I’m 30. You become a millionaire at 30, then you’re like, well, I wanna have $5,000,000 by the time I’m 40. Right? The goalposts are moving, the hedonic treadmill. So then what was a 10-year window of hustle somehow turns into a 20-year window of hustle with a very different, you know, 20 to 30, no kids. You know, maybe you’re dating your spouse. 30 to 40, probably got some kids in that window if that’s on your trajectory.

Joe Casabona: Right.

Khe Hy: Right? 40 to 50, start losing friends. Start losing parents. And so what I have seen is that someone says, I’m gonna hustle for this goal, which is a very I’m fully supportive of that. I’ve done that many times.

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Khe Hy: But what happens is when they hit the goal, the goalposts move, and then they continue to hustle. And then the hustle becomes the water that they swim in, the oxygen that they breathe. It’s almost like they don’t know an existence without hustle because it becomes the baseline. And so then you get into this very strange relationship that, you know when you just said you just wanted to be a millionaire at 30. Now you wanna have $10,000,000 at 50, and you’ve just committed 30 years of your life to some goal that you may not actually truly care about.

Joe Casabona: Right.

Khe Hy: Right? And I think that’s where it gets dangerous.

I’ll give you another example of when I like to use a parable for this example. Some people hustle because they’re competitive. They wanna win. So this is a story about 2 merchants, competing at a market. And an angel comes down to 1 of the merchants and says, I can make any dream of yours come true. And the merchant says, great. He’s really competitive. And he said, but the angel said, but there’s just one catch. Whatever I do for you, your competitor gets double. So if you want 1 bar of gold, your competitor gets 2 bars of gold. If you wanna live to be a 100, your competitor gets to lift to be 200. If you want 10 spouses, your competitor gets 20 spouses, old ages, you know, polyamory, and so on. And, the person who’s so competitive, the merchant, he thinks deeply. He goes, make me blind in one eye.

:

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Khe Hy: A lot of people do that. The person that’s chasing the goal that’s not really even theirs for 30 years, beating up their health, sabotaging their relationships, being an absentee parent, they’re poking themselves in their eye hoping, you know, to beat the other person.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Wow. That story gave me chills. I was like, you’re like, how’s this gonna end? Like, what’s he gonna do? Like, want nothing, and then the guy gets double nothing? Nope. Even worse. That’s worse. And it’s it’s interesting. Right? Because, like, okay. I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in May 2021.

Khe Hy: Oh, yeah.

Joe Casabona: And I, like it ran in my family. Like, even my dog had it. Like, I knew it was kinda…

Khe Hy: We’re similar. Oh. I was on the cusp and miraculously veered off.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. That’s like…

Khe Hy: I talked about that offline or whatever.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. But I know. So but, like, what I mean, like the pandemic is what did me in because, like, I just like, stopped kinda like, , ate ice cream every night. But, like, after that, I like, went like full no carbs for like 6 months. I got my A1C down to, like, 5.2, which for those…

Khe Hy: We’re twins. Yeah. I was 5.7, and I got mine down to 5.2. No carbs, no sugar for a year.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. So, and, like, so my A1C diagnosis was 11. It’s real. That’s real bad, my friend. You gotta like, below 6 is what you want. Yeah. And so but, like…

Khe Hy: 11 to 5.2. That’s insane.

Joe Casabona: It’s wild. And, like, I felt better. Like, I wasn’t falling asleep at my desk. I had more energy, and I’m like, is this what it feels like to eat healthy? Or like to feel good, like, and not like, you just got shot with a tranquilizer dart. And like, honestly, like I had a moment like I did the whole 30 in my twenties. Right? And then like, I had kids and I had like, I was working from home more, and I was just like, oh, I guess this is just like what getting older and being sleep deprived because of kids is… But then, like I eat and, like now I also have sleep apnea, and so, like I got a CPAP. And like, the life I’m living now is a life I like that was unimaginable before that. Because I knew nothing else, which is wild.

Khe Hy: Yeah. Yeah. And it just, it shows that you know, there are, first of all, kudos to you for getting it down that way because I know the sacrifices that have to be made to move the knee. I went from 5.7 to 5.2, and that was a year’s worth of sacrifice.

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Khe Hy: Most people, like most people I talk to, they’re like, there’s no way. I would never do would just give me a medicine or something. I just wouldn’t try.

Joe Casabona: Well, that’s, like I have metformin, but, like, I’m like, I’m not going on insulin. Like, and I have kids. Like I’m not losing a foot. Like, are you kidding me? Yeah. So…

Khe Hy: And I think that’s it. Like, that’s one of the interesting things about time freedom. Right? It’s like, you don’t have time freedom, so you have to snack or you’re always stressed, you’re stressed eating. And that’s the whole thing. The data entry example that I give you where it’s like, oh, I’ll give you 10, you know, $10,000 if you do 5 hours of data entry. This is like, I’ll give you type 2 diabetes if you work your ass off for 5 years.

Joe Casabona: Right. Right.

Khe Hy: And then you’ll make all this money. And then it’s like, well, actually, I rather not have type 2 diabetes. I’d rather make less money. And so, you know, I think that that’s where the goalpost moving and hustle culture kind of making you blind. And I think there’s another thing about hustle culture. This is changing now, but, let’s just say, like, untethered or unhinged ambition. Maybe that’s a nicer way of saying a hustle culture.

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Khe Hy: I think, untethered ambition is really celebrated in Western society. So like you, you know, you talk about the Elons or the Bezos’s or the hedge fund managers that, you know, that they’re notorious on how much they work and people like, wow, can you believe he’s 60? And he still pulls all-nighters and looks. That again, I make no judgment to anyone’s decisions. People would look at my, a lot of my decisions and judge me for them. So, look. I’m, I just own, I own my decisions. But you could see how when you celebrate less about the hustle culture, I think it’s a little bit more subtle. It’s you glorify these entrepreneurs and these, you know, Mr. Beast, like, you know, Mr. Beast giving his talks of, you know, how he skipped high school and they would watch, they would watch YouTube videos and critique them on a Skype thread call for like 18 hours a day. Yeah. While he was in high school. I’m like, great. I have no judgment on that. Not for me.

Joe Casabona: Right.

Khe Hy: And your level of success makes tremendous… if you’re willing to watch 18 hours of YouTube videos and analyze them with your friends on Skype, as a high school dropout, you deserve to be the biggest YouTuber in the world.

Joe Casabona: Right. Right.

Khe Hy: And, like I don’t want that.

Joe Casabona: But even like coming back around to that, like he recently talked about how he’s been doing fewer videos, and they’ve been more story-driven. And like, it’s a better quality over just like pumping out a bunch of videos where he’s yelling at a camera. Like…

Khe Hy: the seasons. Right?

Joe Casabona: See, yeah. I was just gonna say, it’s like, it’s a season. Right?

Khe Hy: One day, Mr. Beast will have kids, and he’s gonna be like, he gave this story once where he basically cannot be anywhere in public because someone will spot him, we’ll send out Instagram stories, Snapchat, or a tweet. And within 15 minutes, there’s like 5,000 people around him.

Joe Casabona: Wow. That was…

Khe Hy: So imagine that. Like that’s stressful enough when you’re a single dude.

Joe Casabona: Right.

Khe Hy: Imagine you have a newborn. Like, you have to live in a gated compound.

Joe Casabona: Right.

Khe Hy: That’s not like what kind of way. Again, everyone makes their own decisions. But that’s like, I think people look at someone like him. Like, I want his life. I’m like, do you realize that you can never be in public probably for the rest of your life?

Joe Casabona: Right.

Khe Hy: You’re like a president.

Joe Casabona: Right.

Khe Hy: Like, you need armed security around you for the rest of your life. And some people will be like, that’s a trade-off I’d make to know that my videos are being watched by billions of people and other people are like NFW.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Yeah. I really, it’s like, you know, the grass is greener syndrome. Right? Like they see the good. They don’t see the bad. I know we’re coming up on time here. I love that you said untethered ambition.

If you want to hear more, of Khe Hy talking about that with Amanda Goetz, I will link to the episode of his interview with her in the show notes. I keep wanting to call your podcast RadReads, but that’s like your company, and, I know that’s not the case. So can you just say the name of your podcast?

Khe Hy: The Examined Life podcast.

Joe Casabona: The Examined Life podcast. This is like I did a bunch of research, and I didn’t write that down.

Khe Hy: That’s right.

Joe Casabona: But I’d like to kind of wrap up here with, you know, we kinda talked about redefining success. I like to give people actionable advice on the show. Most of the people who listen are busy solopreneurs. They’re probably parents, though I’ve always been worried to say that, like, I’m hedging in the niche area there. But I’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about $10,000 work. Right? I saw you speak at, Crafting Commerce a couple of years ago, and you really like, I loved your framing on this. So, can you talk about that? How crucial that has been to we didn’t say work-life balance, but, you know, about living the life that you see as successful, let’s say.

Khe Hy: Yeah. And so, we could link to the manifesto in the show notes. So basically, it’s a quadrant that has four levels of work. $10, a $100, a $1,000, and $10,000 work. And basically, there’s skill, low skill, high skill, low leverage, high leverage. And obviously, the low-skill loan leverage is $10 work. That’s, you know, color coding your calendar or downloading your Kindle highlights into, you know, Zapier. And then the $100 work is kind of you’re kind of doing something more productive, but still the wrong thing, like a TextExpander or, you know, a Zapier automation and so on. $1,000 work is that, and it’s not the actual value. It’s just think about the multipliers.

Joe Casabona: Right.

Khe Hy: $1,000 work is the thing you’re paid to do. So if you’re a podcaster, it’s having podcast interviews. If you’re a writer, it’s writing. If you’re a software engineer, it’s writing code. If you’re an investment banker, it’s doing spreadsheets, making deals. Then the 10k work is this thing that’s like a force multiplier. Right? And so this is going to sound a little bit meta, but this matrix is such a powerful force multiplier. It’s just a 2 by 2 matrix that people in companies, they’re like, oh, what’s your $10 work today? What’s your 10k work? It’s become mummified of sorts in kind of the knowledge worker community.

And if people just peel a little bit back the onion bit, you know, peel the onion, they see Khe Hy. They see my blog. They see they get a, you know, they sign up to my newsletter. And so if you think about the leverage, I’ve given that talk that you saw at ConvertKit. I’ve given, I don’t know. I’ve given it 100 times in my life, 150 times. Same talk. It’s dialed in. It’s a good talk. And I can just go in, drop it, and then whatever, you know, in the back in the day, we had a course that we sold off of the back of that. And so it was just like the marketing was marketing without even because people were writing blog posts about it. And so they were marketing my idea. It’s not trademarked or patented. And then indirectly they were leading to the things that the, you know, the CTAs that we wanted them to lead to. So I’m always trying to think about that leverage.

In fact, today at 1 o’clock, Pacific, I have a call with a reporter at a major publication for the next kind of thing that I’m trying to mummify, which is called, which I call the post-achievement professionals, which is what we’ve been talking about often is these people that enter this new season of life and all of, a lot of the tools from the prior season, not only are they not serving them anymore, but they’re actually hurting them. Right? And we talk about this, like…

Joe Casabona: I have that post up in my browser right now.

Khe Hy: Yeah. So, again, that idea is earlier, but, I started talking about it with people, and they just heard it. They heard the name. They’re like, woah. Say more. What’s that thing you just said? What did you just say? And the marketer in me and I’m an entrepreneur, but I have a decent marketing brain. The marketer in me is like, when you see that light bulb moment in people’s eyes, you lean into that. You find out what’s going on in their heads when they hear that term. And so I just started playing with thatterm post-achievement professional, post-achievement, and professional and made a few videos about it.

I made a podcast episode. We can link to it, wrote the manifesto. You know, if you search post achievement for a professional, my link things all come up first. It’s not a competitive search term, but people are searching for it. I know. And then lo and behold, reporter at a major, major publication were talking, like top 3, like New York Times type caliber. Cold email is like, Hey, I stumbled on your idea of the post-achievement professional. I’m writing an article that references that idea. Boom.

Joe Casabona: I love that.

Khe Hy: And so think about the leverage there. It’s like I said, it’s not the New York Times, but imagine it was the New York Times. There’s an article, and it’s like Khe Hy who writes about post-achievement professionals, who happens to be an executive coach, the eyeballs that that thing’s gonna see are insane.

And so the leverage on that. So I have, I think a lot about and they’re not just with marketing. I think a lot about another example I’ll give you on the leverage is that I have a Chief of Staff/Product Manager, but we basically, we record a podcast, and then we have one person who’s trained just to look for clips. We have another person who’s trained to edit, who’s an Eclipse editor. And then we have a third person that’s a social media manager, and they’re all contractors. So I record a podcast and then 4 clips, but not just like bad, like, 4 really good clips because one person is trained just to find, we have a person trained just to find clips.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Yeah.

Khe Hy: And that little machine and all I do is I record my podcast for 55 minutes an hour, and then boom. It’s on TikTok. It’s on every single channel. It’s in the newsletter. It’s so on. And because it’s with contractors, it’s not particularly expensive, but we had to set up the machine. And so setting up the machine was the 10k at work.

Joe Casabona: Love that. And I love that you ended with that example. Right? Because I think I have, like the opposite for me. Like I was in the Atlantic recently because I, like, tweeted about how upset I was about the wire cutter, like the quality going down.

Khe Hy: Oh, yeah.

Joe Casabona: And they wanted to talk about that. And I’m like, man, imagine if like, they wanted to talk about like podcast automation, which is like the actual work I do. So, I love that. The 10k, if we would like to turn this into a thesis statement, would you say, like the 10k work enables you to do your 1k work more efficiently? Or…

Khe Hy: Exactly. It allows you to basically do the thing that you’re skilled at without you doing it.

Joe Casabona: Love it. Love it. I love that. Well, Khe Hy, this has been great. If people wanna learn more about you, where can they find you?

Khe Hy: Thank you so much, Joe. You ask amazing questions. Thank you to all the listeners. Y’all are awesome, man. [radreads.co]. Definitely sign up for my newsletter. I write twice a week. I’ve been writing weekly. One of those is a 500 to 800-word essay I’ve written for 250 consecutive weeks. So I like to write. Examine Life podcast, where we get your podcasts, including YouTube. And I’m most active on Twitter. It’s my full name. We’ll put it in the show notes. But if you just do Twitter, Khe, which is my nickname, it will land on me.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. I love that. I will link it to all of that in the show notes over at [streamlined.fm/410]. If you wanna get ad-free extended episodes, you can again join the membership over at[streamlined.fm/410]. Or if you’re listening to Apple Podcasts, you could just hit that subscribe button. We’re gonna do a speed round where I’m gonna ask Khe Hy about the effective use of stories.

So thank you so much for listening. Thanks to our sponsors.

And until next time. Get out there and build something.