There's No Pot of Gold at the End

Gram was put on hospice the other night.

I feel a little bit weird putting that into a newsletter, but if we can't be honest with each other what's the point of doing this?

She's 87, and she's been sick for a long time. But she's still my grandmother, and I'm still terribly sad to see her leave us.

So why bring her up in a newsletter that's ostensibly about organizing what you know?

Well, I think organizing what you know — or the idea of productivity in general — requires us to take a hard look at everything in our lives. Not just the parts of our lives where things are going well, or we're feeling good.

Let me explain...

30,000 people read the last edition of this newsletter, and I asked each person who subscribed why they signed up. I heard a lot of stories: stories about getting ahead, keeping up, about finding a new system, about keeping organized, or being too disorganized.

But I also heard people ask for more realness. I heard people ask for stories about what to do when times are hard, when you fall off of your system, or you haven't done anything productive in months.

I heard people talk about being a single parent and being underwater. I heard people talk about just getting a new promotion and feeling unprepared.

I heard from people who said they were just flat out exhausted.

And all of those people talked about feeling alone.

And so that made me think that it would be worthwhile to take this time and this platform to try to talk about some of those things that we don't normally talk about in forums like this.

Because at it's best, what we're doing here isn't about squeezing more productivity out of your time. It's about squeezing more life out of your time — whatever it is that makes you feel alive.

It's not about being a productivity machine, it's about being more human.

So I wanted to spend this week interviewing someone who I think exemplifies this idea: Khe Hy.

I’ve been friends with Khe for a while now, and what I’ve learned from him is this:

The point of productivity can actually be to squeeze more work into fewer hours so that you can go surfing (if you want to.)

Or to go hang out with your family, and watch your kids grow up (if you want to.)

Or to be really productive on some other project that's close to your heart, like a book or a screenplay or whatever (if you want to.)

Or spend all of your time trying to make your startup succeed (if you want to.)

The key is to first be conscious, and second to make the hard decision to choose to live your life like it's your life, not someone else's. And to not feel bad about it. Which, I think is a reminder that everyone on this newsletter needs including, and especially, me.

You only need to hear Khe’s biography to know why I think he exemplifies this idea. Khe began his career with a bang: when he was in his early 30s he was one of the youngest MDs ever at BlackRock’s fund of funds business. BlackRock is, of course, one of the largest asset management firms in the world with over $6 trillion under management. It also happens to be notorious for its hard driving, ambitious, work-around-the-clock, success at all costs culture.

But rather than chasing the extra millions that a long-term career in finance could give him, Khe made the extremely scary decision to leave it all behind in order to pursue something more important: a happy life.

Now he spends his time running his business, writing, raising his kids, and surfing every morning in LA. He’s been writing RadReads, a newsletter which he calls a “guide to the examined life”, for the last 4 years and has amassed over 17,000 subscribers in that time. He runs a successful coaching business, helping his clients with deal with the psychology of money. And he’s a contributing editor at Quartz.

One of the things that Khe and I bonded over is this idea that there's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. That there's no amount of money or success that enables you to wake up, throw the weight of expectations and self-criticism and feeling of not-yet-enough off of you and announce, "Okay, I've accomplished enough, I'm ready to live."

There's no pot of gold at the end of your infinite todo list that will let you do that. We have to choose to do that every day, actively, for ourselves. If we don't, it won't happen.

Either we fill our days right now, as much as possible, with experiences that make us come alive, or we are putting off our lives for an illusion.

And hopefully, since you're on this newsletter, system-building, and organizing, and reading, and learning, and remembering, and making shit happen is a big part of that for you.

So I’m very happy I get to share Khe with you in this interview. Let’s dive in!

Khe introduces himself

My name is Khe I'm a father to two lovely little girls, Soriya and Amelie, and husband to my wonderful and beautiful wife, Lisa. I'm an entrepreneur, and have a mix of different activities and projects that I'm always working on.

I think of myself more as a career grazer than a sniper, when it comes to the kind of work that I do. And as you know that, that's a big contrast from the 15 years I spent on the Wall Street hamster wheel. So maybe I'm just rebelling against my former self.

I do two things primarily: I work on a group of digital properties called RadReads, and I’m a contributing editor at Quartz.

At RadReads, I write a lot in the form of a newsletter, and the blog about what it means to live an intentional life. And what happens when we shine a light on some of the darkest parts of our souls. I also write a lot about the psychology of money, and I do coaching around that as well.

Why do you build these kinds of systems for yourself

Excellent question. I think a lot about productivity. And I think just like diet pills, or iPads, productivity is a material solution to an emotional problem.

For a long time, that next productivity app that I bought and used was, on the surface for the consumption of knowledge and skill development. But on a deeper level, I was buying it to soothe some existential angst that I carried.

For my former self, productivity equaled output, equaled money, equaled status, equaled — supposedly — happiness. And it was that last part of the sequence which proved to be quite elusive.

Now, in my new life things are significantly different. I still think a lot about productivity, but the equation has shifted. For me, productivity equals more time. And the more time I can optimize, the less time I need spend on work.

If my former self were given back five hours a week, I would try to bill five more hours. But now, I would work for five less hours. And I use that time to be a dad and to surf and to meditate and to do a lot of work on myself.

But beyond productivity helping me to optimize my time, there are two other big reasons I do it. First is that I have a really, really powerful, deep-seated belief that if there's something that I know, that someone else would benefit from knowing I have a duty, I have a responsibility to share it with them. So I build systems to help me share what I know with other people.

And then second, is that I look at myself as a craftsman. A digital craftsman, but a craftsman nonetheless. I get a lot of joy out of it. And it's just hard to be a craftsman if your ideas are all over the place.

I need some type of structure to advance my creative ideas, which are which my craft. And so that's the underlying motivation to stay organized.

He uses PARA to organize everything

I use Tiago Forte’s PARA across everything: OmniFocus, Evernote, Notion, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.

PARA is a system to help you organize everything by actionability. It stands for: