129: The $10K Work Framework with Khe Hy

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The great thing is the power of constraints. When you focus on things that you're really good at that also align with the way that you want to work, then you get really good at them.

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Hello. Hello my friends. I am so so excited to be here today with Kay He Kay is the founder and CEO of Rad Reads, an amazing newsletter and online education company that helps professionals lead productive, examined and joyful lives. You can see why he's here. Kay is the creator of the 10K work productivity method and teaches the popular cohort based course Supercharge your Productivity. Before founding Rad reads, Kay spent 15 years working on Wall street and was one of the youngest managing directors at BlackRock. He's been called Oprah for Millennials by CNN and the Wall Street Guru by Bloomberg and his work has been featured all over the place. Kay, welcome to the show.

It is a pleasure to be here. I am so excited. Hello everyone.

Me too. My research rabbit hole preparing for this was just endlessly fun. And I heard you on a podcast saying that the way you define success has partly to do with if you've surfed that day and if you spent present time with your family. Is that still the case? How do you define success these days?

That is still the case. And I've been thinking a lot about Love is the fullness of presence. It's a quote by Tara Brock. I believe in the book Radical Acceptance and so I just have this belief that if I'm with you, I'm with you. That is you at the moment. That was my kids getting them dressed for camp this morning. You know my wife after our cleaning lady when she comes later this afternoon. So just giving this gift of Presence. And then of course, there's the surfing. Every day today I'm going to go after our call. But normally it's the window. I usually don't do meetings until 11:30 Pacific AM because, you know, it's like wine, you need to like decant it and you need to observe the way, the direction the wind's blowing and so on. So I like to leave a good four hours open to ensure I hit that window.

I love that. Well, I thought of you this morning. A, because you were in my earbuds. But B, I went on an extra two hour long dog walk with Ryder and I kept thinking, should I get back and prepare for the interview? And then I go. If anyone approves of me staying out longer in the morning before my meetings start, it's gonna be Kay. So in your honor, I was listening to you while out and about.

Amazing.

15 years working on Wall Street. I know how intense that is and also the mindset of somebody, even your schooling, your education. But working on Wall street will just drill ideas about success and money. I'm curious, now that you're, I don't know, I think you left 2015, is that right?

That's correct.

Okay, so you're seven years in. Maybe there's a seven year itch or some seven year pivot happening. Do you ever have those old notions of success creep in? So even though you're doing your own thing, do you ever find yourself in compare and despair mode? Or feeling like you should turn some burners on to monetize and scale and all the fancy business things that the entrepreneurial media talks about, Oof.

That's like a dagger through my heart. So all the time I try to live a very calm, peaceful, introspective life with a lot of reflection baked into my day. But when a friend who's an author gets, you know, a massive advance or a second book deal, or when someone's YouTube channel crosses X hundreds of thousands subscribers, or hearing about other people's newsletter sizes, or hearing about people who bought Bitcoin at $15. Absolutely. And it's funny now because I don't really have the levers to make a lot more money like I did when I was on Wall Street. So it's like I catch myself. I'm like, okay, why are you writing three extra tweets today? It's like, ugh, because I'm so envious of blah, blah, blah, who just got this major book deal. So it happens all the time. We're human, we are comparing beings by nature. Thankfully, Now I have a wide variety of practices where I can just step back and reflect. Like, hey, let's check in what's really behind the envy, right? Because what that means when there's an intense emotion like envy or jealousy, what I believe is that there's some kind of unmet desire much deeper behind that envy. And so I'll go in there, I'll meditate on that, I'll journal on it, I'll use it as a whiff of momentum. But I know that when I look at these people that are finance portfolio, they own finance companies or they have millions of YouTube subscribers, an easy hack I ask is, would you trade everything that they have in their lives for everything that you have in your life? Because I know what it takes to have 2 million YouTube followers that is recording every single day. I have no interest in that. Zero, zilch, never will do it. And so you can't just cherry pick someone's greatest hits. You gotta take the whole kit and caboodle, the whole enchilada. And trust me, when I look at anyone in the financial service industry, I mean, the surfing's gone, right? That enchilada means at your desk the minute the market opens until the minute the market closes, right?

And even if you look and say, I had this moment earlier this year where a lot of the Google colleagues that I worked with who are still there now after 15, 20 years, the level of comp and benefits that they get was kind of eye boggling to me. And then meanwhile I'm over here riding this roller coaster of solopreneurship or solo plus, and I had to remind myself, oh, as the siren song of a steady income and especially now at the levels that they've reached because they've been on that steady track, kind of up into the right in a really well paying role, I just had to pull myself back from like reaching toward those comforts because I wouldn't have chosen it for me. Not that I judge anyone else who's in that world, but I would take the grind or the daily uncertainty or what I have now. But you're right, it's so easy to kind of cherry pick. And that's looking at the grief green grass of corporate work and then that competitive nature that you probably experienced within Wall Street. It's interesting how sometimes competition can be really motivating in the worlds that we're in in terms of platform building and then sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it is just unhelpful comparison. So do you still have any sort of competitive streak or is it mostly now within yourself and towards your own goals?

I am very competitive. We were at the Children's Museum in LA this weekend and there was this exhibit where you basically jump. It's for kids, but you jump and it measures your vertical. And so, you know, my little five year old did it and she had a vertical of like 6 inches. And my 8 year old did it and she had a vertical of like a foot or 18 inches. And then I get on and I baby Lisa, take my sunglasses, take my keys, take my phone, I tighten my belt and I got into a deep squat and my wife goes, what's happening to you? I was like, well, I just want to get the highest vertical. And so I have that competitive drive. I'd say 15% of the time it's with others just again being mimetic beings who like to benchmark each other to your college roommates or the person who launched the newsletter the same year you did. I accept with grace that I'm human and I'll have those comparisons. But, but it really, it's much more, as you suggested or as you said, internally motivated. And I mean, you know, the informal Rad REITs motto is come for the productivity, stay for the existential. And I think the competitiveness and my drive, my ambition really comes from one source of fear or insecurity or of anxiety, which is I fear irrelevance. I'm not religious, I'm a very left brain, scientific based thinker and I know that, you know, when I'm dust on this earth, then that's it, you know, there's nothing else. And I think that that's still a very hard thing for me to accept. I think that's a hard thing for humans to accept, especially without other spiritual realms to enter. And so that gets channeled into a desire to stay relevant. And so I think a lot of my ambition, hence my internal competitiveness, comes from that desire to not be forgotten and try to really kind of communicate with that desire as well and treat it with grace and curiosity.

It seems like one way that that's manifested is a superpower, which is consistency. I know you've had some kind of epic streak with your newsletter. Where are you at now? Are you still keeping track?

We are. 355 weeks, yes.

Oh my goodness.

And 200 weeks of those have had an essay. It's like 200 blog posts and then 355 newsletters and they're kind of smushed together.

That is just incredible because I mentioned to you before you record. I've had a newsletter since 2010 and I can definitely say that consistency is not my strength. I can be consistent over the long arc of a decade overall. But the fact that you've never missed, what is your secret? Like, are there days where you just don't feel like doing it? But how do you get over that hump? How have you done 300 blasts in a row?

So to be fair, I have missed some days I've given myself with age. So that spans the seven years. Basically the early days I was like, I will not miss one ever. Or else, K, you're a bad human. And I'll beat myself up with my inner critic. That came from a place of scarcity, that came from a place of not trusting myself. That came from a place of not really knowing what direction this business was going. As time went by, I kind of, you know, if I really wasn't feeling it, I gave myself a week off. So there have been breaks. And last summer, I took last summer off. So that was a two month break, I think. So there have been breaks. But yes, it's still been a lot. I think that for me, the consistency and we were talking about this before, is that the newsletter? And when I say newsletter, my team helps compile and blurb the newsletter and I write the essay. So I'm not doing the entire thing by myself anymore. But the essay is usually 500 to 2,000 words. It's a creative outlet of mine and a lot of people will say, like, oh, do you have an editorial calendar? Do you do this? Do you do that? And to me, I just write what I feel like writing. I used to do it Saturday morning, so hours before I hit send, and now I try to finish it by Friday night. So I still need deadlines to get things done. But I really view that essay in a few ways. One is it's just fun. I find it really fun. The best is when a new Disney movie comes out, a Pixar movie, and they all have meaning of life questions. And so my audience knows, like, oh, new Pixar movie. Kay's probably going to reflect on one of the threads of Encanto where Luisa is carrying the world's expectation and she's exactly what we're talking this archetype that we're discussing. So that's one thing, it's just fun and it lets me respond to things that are happening. It's also a little bit of a petri dish where if I want to test out some new ideas, so it's actually funny you asked me today about the comparison trap. That's the essay for Saturday, which is why I could say it so succinctly with the whole enchilada and the cherry picking and all that. Right? And maybe because you saw it on Twitter, because I tweeted about it a few times. So I use it as a mode of experimentation for outside of our core group of ideas and potential products that we could sell because I use the response, the clicks, the engagement to just as another clue in the research process. And now as I've gone and done this for so long, if I don't feel like writing it, I just don't do it. The reality is 90% of the time I feel like writing it.

I love that. And it is so true that writing anything at all will clarify your thoughts and it kind of puts them in a place that's more easily accessible for something like this. I hadn't seen your tweets or anything about it. I just knew I wanted to ask you about this because Wall street is so intense and then now you are so much more focused on freedom and ease and presence and joy.

I want to talk about 10k tasks and your 10k training. When I first learned this concept of 10k tasks, it just changed everything for me because if I didn't know what to do on a given day, there'd be some fork in the road and I go, I could catch up on email for four hours or I could create a pivot programs PDF that could land me a six figure licensing deal. What am I going to do? And it suddenly made not just deciding what to work on easier, but it made it really exciting to look for those 10k tasks. So can you tell us a little bit, how do you define a 10k task and like give us some examples of ones that you're working on right now or that would come handy for you?

Absolutely. And so I'm sure you'll link in the podcast notes. But it's a matrix. It's a two by two matrix that has four quadrants, 10, 100, 1010K. And don't get too attached because there are people in all different countries and don't get too attached. It's not about the dollar value. But think about it, the way I say it's $10 work is checking your email. Right. As you said. And 10k work means that for that same amount of time there is an activity that's a thousand times more more impactful. The thing about those 10k activities is they combine a unique skill that you have with leverage, some kind of amplification effect. It's a force multiplier. Right. And so just this week I was thinking, I'm like, okay, what is a 10k task that I'm going to do? And I have a friend who has connections to a big, big online publication. You would know the name of the ilk of the Wall Street Journal and so on. They have invited me to write a guest blog post on their page. And so one of our strategies, we could talk about different ways of growing an audience, but one of our strategies is to focus on search engine optimization, SEO, which basically helps your content rank higher in Google. So this post is extremely leveraged because it's going to drive a ton of traffic because of the scale. But it also tells Google through this process called backlinks, that Rad Reads is a very credible site because this publication is linking to Rad Reads. And on top of that, in the article, I'm going to talk about 10k work, which is kind of this coined term that we've built. So right there you can see that article will probably take two hours to write, maybe three. And so you could see here, it's this kind of culmination of like the strategy that we have for search, the relationships that I have K with this person there, the coined term that we have with 10k work. And they're all packaged into two hours of work. And so if I could just do that, I might not even need to do much more other work for the rest of the day. That's one example of a very tactical. But you could see the different levers, right? Oh, also unique skill. I'm gonna write the piece and I'm a decent writer, so you could see the packaging of it into one activity.

How do you decide what to write when you get a big opportunity like that? Do you ever get kind of clammed up about what of your many topics or areas of expertise to write about and what would be the best angle?

I definitely right now would focus much more effort on 10k work because I meet people, rad readers, and they start giving me these long talks about how they taught their little nephew how to do 10k work. And so it is just this groundswell that's brewing. People are talking about it actively on social media. If you search 10k work, it pulls us up right away. It's just still a low volume search. So I would orient it into that, that what we call a big idea, right? Deep work, gtd Black swans, antifragile Right. Free time. So we all have these kind of terms that kind of build up our brand. Which, by the way, building up Your brand is 10k work. Right. The more people are talking about your ideas without you having to prod them to do it, that's like the dream, right? It's when something's working without you even having to do the work you did it in the past as an investment. So we'll start with there. Also, there's a tension here, but there are a lot of ideas that I care deeply about, and a lot of them involve introspection, looking within. And people would much rather read about how to use Superhuman to Save seven minutes a day on email than what insecurity your ambition is motivated by or driven by. So we'd like to sprinkle in kind of the existential stuff. And then we have a kind of a satellite of ideas. Right. What is the rad Reads official motto is lead a more productive, examined and joyful life. And so we can find ideas and topics within those kind of three buckets. And sometimes I just yolo it as a writer, I want to pick up something weird and write about it. Right. And so I'll kind of go for that as well.

That's the best. When inspiration strikes close even or ideally early enough to the deadline. But finding something that you know is unique or your own twist on something.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I heard you talking with Nathan Barry. He has a great podcast for creators about getting good at one channel. And you said that yours is email. It's not visual, which resonated with me so much because I could never get myself into Instagram or YouTube or TikTok. And hearing you say it just in that moment gave me another Dose of permission, you know, gave me another permission slip. And I even heard you say at the end, he said, where can we find you? And he said, Radreads co. And I'm not on Instagram or YouTube. Like, didn't even bother putting out a handle and have some team member putting clips. Maybe that's changed. But I just love how you embraced when you were getting started. One channel and kind of going all in on that. And that one channel representing an expression of your 10k work, but without the pressure and the dilution to be everywhere. Especially the ones that you're not good at.

Exactly. And furthermore, the ones that don't bring you joy. I hate Instagram because every time I go on it, I have, like, such a weird. I have it, but I don't really check it. My feed is like, SoundCloud rappers and tattoo artists and notebook companies and productivity gurus and entrepreneurship and some CrossFit and surfing. So it's like I get the weirdest mishmash of stuff in my feed. But there has never been a day when I've been on Instagram. And after I got off, I felt better than when I started. It's like 10 times worse than sugar. The worst sugar. Like eating two packs of Skittles. So it's like every time I went on Instagram, it felt like eating two packs of Skittles. No knock on Skittles. My daughter loves them. And so I just was like, why would I do this to myself? And I think it goes back. You know, you asked me at the very beginning, the fullness of presence is like, something I really pursue. Instagram, there is a thief of presence. And I know that if I'm gonna build a business on Instagram, it's gonna be robbing me of my presence. And to me, a sign of wealth or success is freedom of attention. Like, I get to choose where my attention is directed. And Instagram just has such a sneaky way of just, like, stealing it away from me. So now there's a cost there. Like, I'm a young Gen X, but I behave like a millennial. Most of my audience is on Instagram. People DM me on Instagram. Like, it's email. And so, you know, you could say, well, kay, aren't you leaving some money on the table? Possibly, but I gotta think of the trade off. Right. If you said, I'll give you $100 if you down two packs of Skittles every day, I'd say, keep your hundred dollars.

But. Right. And so you have choice. Yeah, like, you have choice. And the great thing is the power of constraints. When you focus on things that you're really good at that also align with the way that you want to work, then you get really good at them. And one of the reason why we like words is because, like, I don't need to have gotten a haircut to write an essay. I could have a little bit of a hangover and write an essay. I could have a ghostwriter write an essay. We don't yet, but we could have writers again. It comes back to this leverage. There's not a ton of leverage in something like YouTube for me because it needs to see me all the time. It's about me. TikTok is about me. There's leverage in the platforms, the way Discovery works. But that's why I like the leverage of writing, because it doesn't always have to be me, and the Internet might still think it's me.

It's crazy. We have the exact same take on all this because I've been really intentional about not having my two main brands. Technically, I have a third book, Life After College, but they kind of now feed into Pivot. And I'm so adamant that neither platform, Pivot, or free time be entirely about me. Like, me cavorting around the website and. Same thing. The only downside I was telling Kay before we hit record is that it's too bad we're not on video, because he has this awesome, like, super unicorn shirt on today.

There's a lot of neon in my wardrobe.

Oh, my gosh. Like rainbows and unicorns. And I thought, this is the most joyful. Talk about delight. The most joyful shirt I've ever seen.

Maybe we could put a picture somewhere in the interface.

We can, if you send it to us. The episode art doesn't show up in every podcast player, but the episode art with your bio photo. Just take a selfie with this today, all right? And that will be the Easter egg to anyone listening on Spotify who can actually see it or wherever. Some players, again, they don't show that, but that would be so fun. Yeah, I just love what you're saying. And I had the exact same feelings when I would put the phone down after doom. Scrolling. Or just scrolling at all. And I love how you put it that if someone offered you $100 a day to eat two packs of Skittles, you would say, keep the money. That's the same conclusion that I've come to, but just put less poetically and metaphorically, is that there's no amount of Money or platform growth that's worth my attention. Because without my attention and deep work and deep focus, I have nothing. I don't even have the writing anymore. It will remove what I do have. That focused spotlight of attention.

Totally. And something even more elementary. Joy. Right. If something's stealing your attention, peppering you, and these algos are really gnarly with that. No one feels better after spending time on these apps.

I know. I've heard a few people love them and they succeed at one. But even still, they're usually picking one channel that does bring them joy. And I just love being a voice. I'm so glad you are too. To give everyone else permission, guess what? If these aren't bringing you joy, it's pretty much by design. Because they are design. Those algos, like you said, are designed to keep you hooked.

Quick little side note though, I might start doing another. One of my mantras is follow the fun. And I've been having a lot more fun on video. I think I do pretty well like, not YouTube production style video, but just more like talking into a camera. And so I'm going to play a little bit with some of these video forms. But even then, I'm going to schedule all of the videos and the captions and all that so that I actually never need to enter the app. It would be a pure business decision.

Yeah, I know. With video you mentioned. I don't know if you're still doing this, but leading a lot of live trainings as well, and maybe it could even be as many as one a week. You could correct me. Maybe it's one or two a month. How does that play into your strategic growth of the business? And are you leading those for the current audience that you have, or are you somehow trying to bring in new people from the outside for these live trainings?

Yeah, we start with a 10k question. We ask this question all the time with our team is what if it was easy? And so that really gives us permission to lean into things that we are good at. Right. And where we find flow and where there's a struggle. You're like, you're grinding and you're hustling and you're sweating and your blood pressure's elevated. We don't do them. And so what if it was easy? Led us to events, live events. And I love being live from writing so long. I can freestyle in so many different topics. And for a free event, obviously we have a very high bar. But, you know, you can take more risks than like a prepackaged Paid product. We have gone through weeks where we do an event a week. We had to zoom out and we had to ask ourselves another 10k question, what is the point of events? And so our events now have three angles. One is kind of brand building or deepening engagement. The other is acquiring new subscribers. And then third is creative art. Right, like trying out new things, experimenting. And so when we create an event now we're like, well, which category does it fall in? And so if we were to do interviews with people, those would fall into audience building because you can kind of swap, you're supporting each other. Sometimes we'll do things to just these free 10k trainings or we take a lot of the B roll from our course and just do it as a free event where we walk you through an exercise. We've got like a year end review event and a lot of times people would charge money for these. We use these as list building exercises. Sometimes we'll swap. We do a lot of cross promo where we'll feature someone, whatever they want us to promote to our 38,000 person list. And then they'll promote something that you know we want them to promote. But we've found that sending them to a free event is gold because again, it's where we shine and we add a lot of free value. And so that kind of really quickly tells people what we're about. We've been using the events for those two main purposes, list building and brand building. And the key element would be to kind of swap with people. And we're actually thinking about doing some paid newsletter sponsorships with like very targeted creators that we know have similar audiences.

Speaking of paid and newsletters, I have been watching Substack in fascination because for those of us who have had newsletters longer, it's funny that it never occurred to any of us I don't think I would charge for a newsletter because that is one channel that's one to many that invites people into the rest of what I create. I've been so curious watching Substack emerge as this go to almost water cooler. As if newsletters didn't exist before that. But then something about it is really taking off. And then even Patreon existed. And even before Patreon Patreon, any of us could have set up a recurring PayPal or Stripe subscription and not have to give a cut away. So I'm just curious, like I even had someone suggest to me the other day, have you ever thought about creating a substack? And I'm thinking, I've had a newsletter for 12 years. I'm not going to go create a substack and I don't feel like charging for my newsletter. But it is interesting. Have you ever considered adding a subscription piece or how has your experience been watching Substack grow?

I think it's a beautiful thing. It has so many vibes of medium.com, which was an incredible platform. It made being creative so easy and it was beautiful and the experience was delightful for both the writer and the reader. And Substack has nailed that. And if you can reduce remove friction from people embarking into creative ventures, I am 110% for that. I will always be for that, especially if it's free. However, I'm a little and I have no insight into this, but I think it's really hard to do a paid newsletter. Really hard. When I think of paid newsletter like you need to deliver so much value that you're going to be working your butt off. Not only that, but I'd go a step further that you need to have a very, very specific niche. So you take like the gold standard. Obviously it's kind of like the uber of paid newsletters which is Stratechary by Ben Thompson. The guy writes like in depth tech commentary five days a week and it's I don't know, 200 bucks a year, I don't even know but. And he's built a multi million dollar business, but literally his entire job is analyzing tech Companies probably like 40 hours a week. And so great on him and so on. But he nailed a niche. He's an expert in that niche and he delivers. You know, in the niche that I find myself in, there's so much free content. You'd have to convince people that your content's so much better than all the free stuff out there. And the reality is it's not right in that specific packaging. It's not. You can go watch it on YouTube, you can go Google our peers and it's there. So I bet that like anything there's a power law distribution where 10% of the writers make a livable wage off substack and everyone else makes like you know, 50 bucks a month or something unsustainable. I get my Medium distribute payments because I still have some old posts there and they're like 3 cents a month.

Yeah, I feel like too if you don't already have a huge platform, it's hard for that to go viral. It's hard to get word of mouth working when you have to pay because they're going to be less likely to send you a friend with newsletters in particular. And I experience this with podcasts sometimes. And it's funny because my two main channels are newsletter and podcast. Do you ever feel that there is so much out there that people are getting tired? Like, part of the reason I stopped blogging was I wasn't convinced anyone was reading it anymore. Like, that people had the attention span. And so I just shifted that energy to podcasting. How do you deal with thoughts of. Or maybe it's just a fear and it's not real and you see your numbers are remaining strong. But what surprised me the other day when I downloaded the substack app was how many newsletters I just one clicked subscribe to. And they all looked really good and interesting. And I thought, I'm never going to read these. I'm barely going to open this to read even one newsletter, let alone all of the ones that it suggested. But they all looked awesome. So how do you deal with fears of just audience attrition? Because there is so much out there.

You know, I think that there's a reframing of what the newsletter is for in our business. The newsletter, it's a little bit like a podcast, right? It's a conversation with your reader. And that's why, you know, when I lost a friend, I wrote about losing a friend. And when my 5 year old has tantrums and we went to see a child therapist, I wrote about what the child therapist told us. And so there's one school of thought which is like, well, that's not driving sales to supercharge your productivity. And there's a much more layered question there on email funnels and things like that that we can talk about, but I won't address that right now. I view the newsletter much more as a. It's like my one directional podcast, which is like, this is my conversation with you reader and people. They tell us all the time you're a part of our Saturday morning. And it kind of doesn't even matter what you write about. In fact, they get annoyed if it's too much productivity or too much self help. They just kind of want to know, like, what are you thinking about? What's interesting to you? What are you wrestling with? And so that's how I have kept the newsletter. That's how I approach it.

We'll be right back just after this with Venmo. Stash a taco in one hand and.

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We talked before hitting record that sometimes it's challenging to juggle the identity and role of the artist at the center of your organization versus the business owner. How are you thinking about that lately? Like, what do you find is the primary tension for you around that?

This has evolved with over the years. But I never set out to build Rad Reads as a business. It was a creative project that I found deeply rewarding that people loved receiving or engaging with. And then I realized I needed to make some money. You know, we tried a bunch of different things and so I think that for a long, long time when it was my and a contractor, a virtual assistant, it was much easier for it to be just like this is what Kay feels like doing. Like Kay wants to try TikTok for three months. Like go go nuts. That changed on January 1st of this year of 2022 when I hired a team and there's so much we could talk about there. But when I hired a team then a few things changed. First of all, I was responsible for payroll right before when it was just K and a contractor. If I didn't want to make money for four months, I could just not make money for four months and do some weird creative project. You know, as long as I managed my personal finances well outside of Rad Reads. But now we have every two weeks just work takes this huge chunk of money out of the bank account and pays our employees. I want our employees to have the opportunity to participate in the profits of the growth through profit sharing and bonuses and so on. I want to be able to give the best benefits out there, paying full premiums for health insurance. I know how hard that is in this country. We are in the business of online education. I want people to Take other online courses and for us to be able to subsidize. Which all goes to say that it just changes the function that we need to make money. Not necessarily for me to get wealthier, that will be the byproduct of doing all these things well, but because our commitments have changed and so those commitments have changed. That's one thing. The second thing is that people joined the company not necessarily to facilitate K's creative experimentation. They joined because we had a product, a product that they believed in, with roles that they, they wanted to be a part of, with growth. They saw with the opportunity for themselves to gain personal stability, wealth, whatever, however you want to describe that. And so then my responsibility shifted. Right. And so the tension is there. And the tension is that's where it lies. You know, it's kind of like being a single person and then having kids. Right? It's like, sure, like you want to take a job that aligns but is a 80% pay cut. You might not be able to do that when you have kids. Right. For very pragmatic reasons. Doesn't mean you never can do it. One of the tensions is that there's a financial commitment that I've made to others that to some extent has come at the expense of my freedom to create. Willy nilly. Right. I have other stakeholders now. The second thing, and then I'll pause because I'm going on a little bit of a rant here is a large part, I couldn't tell you the percentage, but a large part of this business is driven by my creativity. Today now we have more people, so it's driven by our team's creativity, but the business still, it's my face, it's me teaching a lot of the materials, not all. And that's number is declining. When we do videos, it's me. When we host events, it's me. That also is declining. But it's still, you know, six years of building a brand around me are being deconstructed and diversified. And so there's this tension between like we need Kei's creative muscle to fuel new products, new marketing campaigns and so on. But we don't want Kay to go off the reservation and decide that he wants to be a DJ and fund that pursuit with our corporate profits. And so that's kind of the second layer of the tension.

It's tough. It's really tough. We were talking about this more before we hit record. Just that it is your unique creativity that is the driver and originated all this. And yet like you said, now I Think of it with family. I don't have kids, but getting married, having a dog, having a house, it's like just there's more browser tabs open in a certain way. And in your case with a team at least, those browser tabs that are taking more complexity are all focused on helping the business be successful. But yeah, it's not always going to line up with your creative whimsical. So it'll be interesting to see. Yeah. How that unfolds for you. And I think sometimes, I mean, I have never had full time employees, but sometimes you also don't know if you're going to like that structure or not until you try. And you'll do that for a few years and you're either going to love it and keep building out the team or have a steady state. Maybe someday you'll go, oh, what did I build myself into? I'm going to decomplexify this now. I don't know if that's a word.

And I'll share with you, Jenny, because I think this will resonate with your audience because people will ask, well, you had contractors and you were doing really well financially. Like, why make that plunge? Like, why put people on payroll? Why give benefits? Why have that? You know, with payroll it just, it's much harder to unwind than with a contractor. Right. And I would say a few things happened. One was it was very lonely to be the only person that cared so deeply about so many of these products and ideas and strategies. Now, you could hire contractors, but they're snipers, right. They come in, they do the thing they need to do and then they leave. They're very good at their jobs, but by definition they're not there to care outside of their scope. So that was one. And obviously I have employees who care a lot about the business. I'll probably be the one that cares the most just by way of how this all started. But to have people that genuinely want to see this product, this team, these ideas spread into the world full time, where I could say, like, hey, on a Saturday. I had this crazy idea of doing this event in New York schedule send to Monday because we try to keep our slack empty on the weekends. And someone else will be excited about that. Right. And someone else or someone else will shoot it down. So I think that that was one of the things. The other thing that was interesting and exciting to me was that if I built the team right, I could lean into my zone of genius and get everything off my plate that was not in my zone of genius. Now I'm definitely not there, but that was a big motivation. It's like I love teaching, I love coming up with marketing campaigns, I love writing, I don't like managing ConvertKit, I don't like managing Google Analytics, I don't like dealing with lawyers, I don't like writing process manuals. And so wow. Like, not only is there someone who wants to do those things, there's someone who can do them better than me and that is excited to do them with us. And so then it became kind of a no brainer.

That's awesome. And I have to say I agree on many of the things on that list. Okay, I have one second to last question before the one that I ask everybody because I have to ask you about this. So even very briefly, a lot of your stuff is powered by notion. You and I share a passion for notion amongst Thiago, who's been a previous guest and you said something in that conversation with Nathan Barry that really struck me because I've had similar thoughts where you said I don't want to become the Notion guy. Like, it's really interesting building and investing and teaching people about a platform like Notion. I know you have the built for you life dashboard. I have the free time operations dashboard for business owners. And yet like I've hired someone. He's incredible. Alex. To help onboard people when they buy it. Because I realized I don't want to even position myself. Even though I love notion and I love geeking out over it as a notion pro. And yet I love it and I talk about it all the time. So I would just love to quickly hear your thought process of talking about your passion for the product and really building a lot on top of it, but somehow keeping that line where you're not becoming like a technical teacher. There's a lot of incredible ones out there creating YouTube videos and all that.

It's something that I've thought about a lot. And you know, I needed that notion part of the rad reads journey because that was right around the time when we were starting to sell courses. And it's much easier, I'm sure for anyone who sells services and info products, digital products, it's much easier to sell someone a skill like I will teach you how to use notion than to sell someone a transformation like I will help you lead a more impactful and joyful life. The second one is infinitely harder to sell than the first one and create, but also the second one, the transformation, that's. I'm not saying that I'm anywhere I'M trying to do it. But that's why Tony Robbins can fill a stadium with 50,000 people paying 5,000 bucks a ticket. Right. He's promising them a transformation in that stadium. In my entrepreneurial journey, it was kind of like the baby steps. It's like, well, I have a skill and there's demand for this skill. And I'm going to teach you this skill and I'm going to sell you that I can teach you this skill better than anyone else. And we did that. We delivered on that and it worked and we had tons of satisfied customers. What happened more organically, Jenny, was that as we started to do this, this is where the newsletter part comes in. As we started to do this, people are like, wow, this is a cool tool. Kay. But this doesn't explain to us how you can surf every day at 11:30. This doesn't explain to us why you meditate every day for an hour. This doesn't explain to us how you decide what to work on. It just tells you where to put it. Right. And so there was a little bit of a natural evolution that was kind of driven by the customer and the students that said, this is cool, but because of the brand that we had built up at Rad REITs, they're like, you guys are way more than just like teaching me how to put a widget in a box in a very cool and well designed and good looking box, but still putting a widget in a box. They kind of came to us and that's where we took a risk where we're like, we're dropping notion from the course. It kind of coincided with 10k work kind of finding its footing. And then we really migrated the course to teach a philosophy and a method. And we'll show you how to implement that method. But that's just a tiny sliver. In fact, that's an add on video that's not even taught live anymore. But that is the stuff that moves the needle. That is the 10k work. Understanding those frameworks, getting those questions, being clear on your motivations, being clear on your blockers, thinking about how you're going to manage your team, et cetera, et cetera, that is what moves the needle. And then the notion of components is the icing on the cake.

Yeah. That facilitates that bigger transformation. Okay, last question. Kay. This has been so fun. If you could give fellow business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

Oh, yes. So I give you permission that great things can happen in your business without any struggle. It doesn't have to be hard to be worthwhile. And a lot of times people believe that it's like the Protestant work ethic or the immigrant mindset that if you didn't suffer, the thing by definition can't be good. The thing at the end can't be worthwhile, can't be good, can't be great, can't be excellent. I give you permission to throw that notion out the window and look for the path of least resistance. Look for the path of ease. Look for the path that brings you the most joy. Look for the path that makes you smile and you'd be amazed what will happen to the results for your business on the back end of that.

I love that. That is so beautiful. One of my favorite permission slips yet. So good. Hear, hear. I second that completely. I will put all these links to everything we mentioned in the show notes, but I know you always have cool things that you can share. Where do you want to send people if they want to learn more and keep in touch?

Yes. If you head over to Radreads co, everything happens through email like we talked about. And there's this incredible 10k training course. It's free, that walks you through all of the different questions and the methods that we've described today and that will get you signed up to our weekly newsletter. And if there is a social media platform that I'm most active on, it is Twitter and I would say just Google Twitter Khe because it's my name that's really long and hard to spell and I welcome. DMs are open. Send me if anything here resonated. I will personally answer any questions that you have via DM or on Twitter.

I love it. You can share your 10k tasks that ended up being easeful and joyful. That could be our challenge from this one. Thank you so much Kay. I'm so grateful to have you here and to finally connect after all this time. It's just great to chat with you and thanks so much to everybody who's here listening.

Yes. Thank you Jenny. Thank you everyone who made the time to listen to our conversation. I appreciate you all.

Me too. Thanks everybody.

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