WEBVTT NOTE This file was generated by Descript 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.796 Jason Shen: We alluded to 10 K work and it is one of the things 00:00:02.796 --> 00:00:03.817 that you're best known for. 00:00:03.817 --> 00:00:06.532 Let's get into a little bit of the matrix, right? 00:00:06.532 --> 00:00:10.967 Because I even have some questions, about the differences between the 00:00:10.967 --> 00:00:12.827 two ax axis leverage and skill. 00:00:12.887 --> 00:00:15.416 So tell us about the 10 K framework and then I'm gonna 00:00:15.416 --> 00:00:16.466 have some follow up questions. 00:00:16.976 --> 00:00:17.486 Khe Hy: Awesome. 00:00:17.916 --> 00:00:18.846 It's a two by two matrix. 00:00:19.446 --> 00:00:21.676 The vertical ax axis is leverage. 00:00:21.696 --> 00:00:25.745 The horizontal ax axis is skill, and every quadrant as you go through the 00:00:25.745 --> 00:00:27.305 four quadrants increases in value. 00:00:27.305 --> 00:00:30.635 So $10 work is low skill, low leverage, right? 00:00:30.815 --> 00:00:33.398 And the common test for low skill or leverage is, can 00:00:33.398 --> 00:00:34.448 I do this with a hangover? 00:00:34.495 --> 00:00:36.835 So if you're ever doing something and you're like, I could do this with a 00:00:36.835 --> 00:00:38.875 hangover, then you know, it's $10 work. 00:00:39.025 --> 00:00:42.535 Then when you get to the top right quadrant, it's high skill, high leverage. 00:00:42.775 --> 00:00:43.795 That's $10,000. 00:00:43.845 --> 00:00:47.085 You're not actually earning that amount of money, but you can 00:00:47.085 --> 00:00:48.735 think about it as the multipliers. 00:00:49.125 --> 00:00:51.845 So that's high skill, high leverage. 00:00:52.095 --> 00:00:53.322 You can take my course, right? 00:00:53.372 --> 00:00:55.827 I've taught it to, close to a thousand students. 00:00:55.832 --> 00:01:00.512 I've given talks on 10 K work 500 times in my life and it's generated over a million 00:01:00.512 --> 00:01:02.432 dollars of revenue for our business. 00:01:02.487 --> 00:01:04.420 That is leverage. 00:01:04.470 --> 00:01:06.942 It took a lot of time for all those things to coalesce. 00:01:07.172 --> 00:01:12.474 My teaching skills, the meme of 10 k work, the content marketing around it, 00:01:12.474 --> 00:01:17.533 me talking about it incessantly on social media, but we have this asset now and 00:01:17.533 --> 00:01:23.353 this asset, like people on my team go into companies and teach companies how to do 00:01:23.353 --> 00:01:25.323 it cuz companies don't care about Khe Hy. 00:01:25.373 --> 00:01:28.343 People on social, they care like they want me to teach it 00:01:28.343 --> 00:01:29.180 and that's why they're coming. 00:01:29.354 --> 00:01:34.664 But you go into a company and one of my associates can deliver the lecture. 00:01:34.694 --> 00:01:38.174 No one's heard of Khe Hy, they just want the outcome of that course. 00:01:38.474 --> 00:01:44.484 So that is an extremely high leverage asset that is part of Rad Reads. 00:01:44.484 --> 00:01:46.644 That would be one example of 10 K work. 00:01:46.674 --> 00:01:49.074 I just wanna go through the other quadrants really quickly. 00:01:49.494 --> 00:01:54.184 So there's a hundred dollars work, which is high leverage, low skill. 00:01:54.484 --> 00:01:57.484 So that's like when, you're amplifying the wrong thing, right? 00:01:57.484 --> 00:02:01.704 So think about like text expanders and superhuman, and 00:02:02.224 --> 00:02:04.234 even GTD, bullet journaling. 00:02:04.234 --> 00:02:05.310 Like they're great. 00:02:05.370 --> 00:02:08.820 Writing sop, standard operating procedures, they're much better than 00:02:08.820 --> 00:02:10.050 work that you could do hungover. 00:02:10.050 --> 00:02:13.500 An SOP is a very important artifact in a company. 00:02:13.800 --> 00:02:14.940 But it's not your company. 00:02:15.090 --> 00:02:18.000 Like you could have a thousand SOPs and no business plan. 00:02:18.000 --> 00:02:19.140 Your business sucks. 00:02:19.440 --> 00:02:20.460 Your SOPs are great. 00:02:20.730 --> 00:02:21.360 So you would 00:02:21.360 --> 00:02:24.955 Jason Shen: call high leverage, low skill, things that generically 00:02:24.960 --> 00:02:27.235 make stuff more productive. 00:02:27.313 --> 00:02:31.934 Like a spreadsheet that's really organized and a template that you can 00:02:31.934 --> 00:02:35.637 like, spin up quickly and spending the time to develop these things. 00:02:35.637 --> 00:02:36.978 It's there's value, right? 00:02:36.983 --> 00:02:38.058 Khe Hy: But it's absolutely, yeah. 00:02:38.058 --> 00:02:40.188 That's why it's a hundred versus 10, right? 00:02:40.193 --> 00:02:43.798 Like 10 would be like re replying to a YouTube comments if you're a creator. 00:02:43.948 --> 00:02:46.288 You might need to do it right for the algo and all that. 00:02:46.798 --> 00:02:49.750 But so yeah, a hundred, the hundred is that's the one that really 00:02:49.755 --> 00:02:53.843 trips people up because when you're responding to Reddit comments, 00:02:53.843 --> 00:02:55.493 you know that you're wasting time. 00:02:55.793 --> 00:02:59.603 When you're setting up an elaborate notion, personal knowledge management 00:02:59.603 --> 00:03:04.853 system, you might be tricking yourself into thinking that you're really 00:03:04.853 --> 00:03:08.783 being productive and you're more productive than if you are in Reddit, 00:03:09.083 --> 00:03:13.403 but you're not creating an artifact for your business or some like asset 00:03:13.603 --> 00:03:15.443 that's gonna really scale itself. 00:03:15.683 --> 00:03:21.023 Or developing a junior analyst that's going to take on 30% of your work, 00:03:21.143 --> 00:03:25.043 or reaching out to press so that some journalist is writing about 00:03:25.048 --> 00:03:26.753 your company in a major publication. 00:03:26.814 --> 00:03:29.064 Those are the things that are really gonna move the needle. 00:03:29.344 --> 00:03:32.129 You gotta be really careful with a hundred dollars work, especially in the 00:03:32.134 --> 00:03:37.176 productivity circles, because we go back to that fifth why a lot of it is there's 00:03:37.416 --> 00:03:39.006 a lot of escapism in productivity. 00:03:39.616 --> 00:03:43.456 The number of people that tell me, like I focus so much on my systems cuz I'm 00:03:43.456 --> 00:03:44.776 scared of putting myself out there. 00:03:44.926 --> 00:03:45.856 That's the fifth why? 00:03:45.856 --> 00:03:46.816 Fear of rejection. 00:03:47.156 --> 00:03:50.428 Jason Shen: Dan Shipper, who's part of Every, who's speaking earlier at the 00:03:50.428 --> 00:03:54.101 conference, he has this whole concept of productivity is emotional regulation. 00:03:54.401 --> 00:03:59.491 We create this to manage bad feelings or anxiety feelings, right? 00:03:59.510 --> 00:04:01.182 And, alcohol for nerds, , amazing. 00:04:01.482 --> 00:04:01.692 Yeah. 00:04:01.822 --> 00:04:03.112 just drink, we're the same. 00:04:03.112 --> 00:04:03.884 I hit the bottle. 00:04:03.884 --> 00:04:05.077 You're making a template. 00:04:05.106 --> 00:04:06.096 We're the same person. 00:04:06.336 --> 00:04:07.546 Khe Hy: I do both at the same time. 00:04:07.595 --> 00:04:08.495 Jason Shen: That's how you get the hangover. 00:04:08.727 --> 00:04:11.097 Let's go to that high skill category though. 00:04:11.112 --> 00:04:15.042 What's the difference between a high skill but low leverage versus 00:04:15.042 --> 00:04:16.272 a high skill, high leverage? 00:04:16.300 --> 00:04:17.710 How do you know the difference? 00:04:18.050 --> 00:04:19.779 Khe Hy: So I'll use you as an example. 00:04:19.835 --> 00:04:22.742 You said you are you're training, you're working towards 00:04:22.742 --> 00:04:24.302 becoming an executive coach. 00:04:24.842 --> 00:04:27.472 The executive coach is a very high skill position. 00:04:27.495 --> 00:04:31.905 Like you said, you need years of expertise and you need credibility and so on. 00:04:32.000 --> 00:04:37.286 But the thing about in its low leverage, because it's to be a little crass. 00:04:37.286 --> 00:04:38.246 It's time for money. 00:04:38.336 --> 00:04:38.636 Yes. 00:04:38.713 --> 00:04:42.463 So if you want to go on a six month sabbatical, your business probably 00:04:42.468 --> 00:04:46.949 will not continue to generate revenue while you're on the sabbatical. 00:04:47.137 --> 00:04:48.157 And there's nothing wrong with that. 00:04:48.187 --> 00:04:55.507 Most things that involve the transfer of your skill are a contemporaneous exchange. 00:04:55.967 --> 00:04:57.467 But that's where the leverage comes in. 00:04:57.467 --> 00:04:59.927 So let's use an executive coach as an example. 00:05:00.082 --> 00:05:06.193 You could come up with a framework and have part of your coaching be asynchronous 00:05:06.643 --> 00:05:08.323 where people go through your framework. 00:05:08.485 --> 00:05:10.200 Let's think about selling your services. 00:05:10.480 --> 00:05:14.358 A lot of executive coaching sales Is one-to-one phone calls. 00:05:14.818 --> 00:05:21.118 You could create a series of digital assets that get people into a funnel 00:05:21.118 --> 00:05:26.278 that qualify 'em, and then maybe you could close in with a 15 minute 00:05:26.278 --> 00:05:28.204 call instead of two 30 minute calls. 00:05:28.709 --> 00:05:29.009 So 00:05:29.009 --> 00:05:32.954 Jason Shen: what I'm getting from this is almost like 10 K work is 00:05:33.314 --> 00:05:37.544 high skill applied to something that has an uncertain outcome. 00:05:37.544 --> 00:05:41.984 There's like risk because you could do the work and get kind of nothing. 00:05:42.174 --> 00:05:45.113 I could spend all this time doing this funnel and like I get 00:05:45.113 --> 00:05:48.145 confused and I get stuck somewhere and it never goes anywhere. 00:05:48.161 --> 00:05:51.051 When you're just coaching, you're making money per session. 00:05:51.321 --> 00:05:55.674 And there's a guarantee that it's gonna come out positive for you, but it's 00:05:55.674 --> 00:06:00.801 never gonna be, it's the difference between investing in like high, early 00:06:00.801 --> 00:06:04.191 stage companies where a lot of them might not work out, but the ones 00:06:04.191 --> 00:06:08.013 that do, return everything that the other ones you probably came up with 00:06:08.013 --> 00:06:13.203 tons of concepts that never got the same traction as 10 K work, right? 00:06:13.203 --> 00:06:15.816 You're like, Ooh this could, people could get into now, but 00:06:15.816 --> 00:06:16.896 you, then you got the winner. 00:06:17.196 --> 00:06:17.586 Khe Hy: Yeah. 00:06:17.642 --> 00:06:18.756 So you're spot on. 00:06:18.771 --> 00:06:23.871 I'm glad you used the in investing metaphor, because what makes 00:06:24.261 --> 00:06:26.391 for a good investing portfolio? 00:06:26.931 --> 00:06:28.611 Diversification, right? 00:06:28.611 --> 00:06:30.861 You can think about $10 work. 00:06:30.991 --> 00:06:33.847 It's like cash, like you need, you don't need a lot of cash, but you of 00:06:33.847 --> 00:06:36.667 need cash to move through this world. 00:06:36.737 --> 00:06:38.387 Put your security deposit right. 00:06:38.561 --> 00:06:40.541 Then a hundred dollars work is like a bond. 00:06:40.961 --> 00:06:45.821 It's like slightly better cause it gives you like 2%, 3%, no one's getting 00:06:45.826 --> 00:06:48.881 rich off of the 3% bond yields, right? 00:06:48.971 --> 00:06:51.281 If anything, you're probably still losing money cuz of inflation, 00:06:51.286 --> 00:06:52.371 but neither here nor there. 00:06:52.671 --> 00:06:56.801 Thousand dollars work is like stocks you can get rich off of 00:06:56.801 --> 00:06:58.901 owning stocks over multiple decades. 00:06:58.901 --> 00:07:03.041 You're not gonna get spectacularly rich, but you can definitely get rich, right? 00:07:03.046 --> 00:07:05.021 Just by holding stocks for a long time. 00:07:05.321 --> 00:07:09.791 10 K work might be crypto or angel investing, or real 00:07:09.791 --> 00:07:12.330 estate or speculative trading. 00:07:12.380 --> 00:07:16.100 You don't want to just put a hundred percent of your portfolio in crypto. 00:07:16.400 --> 00:07:21.710 And now, depending on your risk appetite, maybe you put 5% or if you've been 00:07:21.710 --> 00:07:25.560 working for a while and you know your kids are in college, maybe you put 15. 00:07:25.710 --> 00:07:29.443 So everyone's gonna have their own portfolio of the four quadrants and it's 00:07:29.443 --> 00:07:33.224 very important just because $10 work is low value, you still need to do it. 00:07:33.524 --> 00:07:38.114 The question is to bring awareness to it and to not get sucked into it 00:07:38.114 --> 00:07:40.712 cuz it's a bottomless pit of work 00:07:40.862 --> 00:07:43.592 Think about your product, think about your career. 00:07:43.802 --> 00:07:45.402 Think about your marriage. 00:07:45.672 --> 00:07:47.864 Think about how you wanna educate your children. 00:07:48.740 --> 00:07:52.490 Think about what you want your life to look like in 20 years. 00:07:52.540 --> 00:07:56.290 Life or business will just suck the, it's like a rip tide if we 00:07:56.290 --> 00:07:58.450 don't spend the time to invest. 00:07:58.720 --> 00:08:00.725 And it doesn't even have to be an hour a week, right? 00:08:00.875 --> 00:08:00.965 Yeah. 00:08:00.965 --> 00:08:04.565 You can have swept away and you'll wake up 20 years later and your product 00:08:04.565 --> 00:08:08.585 will, be conquered by someone who's way more innovative or you would've been 00:08:08.585 --> 00:08:10.055 sleeping at the wheel of your own life. 00:08:10.415 --> 00:08:14.065 And so just creating that time to think is, that's ultimate 10 K work.