āIf you are walking around with pebbles in your shoe you are not freeā
āI think for a course launch to be effective you need scarcity. If I know that could access an evergreen course in two months time, thereās nothing pushing me to buy. Itās one of the principles of selling ā scarcity. When you can say to someone if you have six days to buy something and you wonāt be able to access it for three months, people will be pushed into buying itā.
"For me, my personality lends itself to doing live courses and I hate editing"
āI think we find it difficult for a number of reasons - part of it is imposter syndrome, part of it is fear of rejection. One way is to ask are you committed to delivering massive student outcomes (MSOs)? If you focus on the student outcomes and you believe that you are creating all of the components for them to have MSOs then that's all you can do".
"Steph Smith has this framing of creating value and capturing value. As creators we are high on the creating value and we give away 99% of our content for free. But that 1% actually wants to pay us and we should thank them because they help fund all that free content and that 1% is the value that we need to captureā.
āA coach is someone who keeps asking whyā
"The first thing I had to overcome was my ego ā I thought I wasnāt the sort of person to see a marriage therapist but I didn't want my marriage to get worseā.
āI think my beliefs about love have changed. Thereās less of a romantic element of love in my culture and my parentās culture than there is in the USA. One of my beliefs about love was that you become closer as time goes by. That is a belief that I no longer hold ā I believe that the more time you spend with someone the drift is naturally apart - a combination of age, children and the loss of noveltyā.
āEach relationship has some form of resentment and, as if I distilled the resentment in our marriage into a nutshell both of us think we have the harder job - Khe is the breadwinner and work is hard, Lisa sacrificed her art career to run the house and raise the kids which is also hard. You can quickly see how two people who are supposed to be unified can start to drift apart".
āIām not a fan of this external CRM idea. The only personal CRM system that I would endorse is 20 names on an index card that put next to your desk and you can look at and think 'oh I haven't talked to this person in a while'. It's simple - come up with the 20 most important people in your life. Forget Roam or Notion ā write it on paper. Ask yourself am I showing up my best self to them? Do they need something from me? Just going down that list for most of us will be just picking up the phone and calling them".
"When you have fun working on something 8, 10, 12 hours per day, the output is going to be awesome. But you shouldnāt be motivated by the outcome, you should be motivated by the process which should be FUNā.
āThereās a great definition of love ā itās the fullness of presence and the presence of fullness. When I am in any activity, I ask myself is 100% of my presence focussed on the thing? Asking this helps us look for signs of misalignment. We should all explore these signs with curiosity and compassion. The key thing is to not beat yourself up about it if you are not present but recognise it and see how you can change it towards alignmentā.
āAnother key question to ask yourself is ā what is this for?ā
āA really powerful force that I try to listen to is to be motivated by fun and delight. As something starts to feel heavy, thatās not fun. Thatās my body telling me that āthis aināt cool bro, you are not in alignmentā. We shouldn't take the misalignment for the ego or the money or the vanity or to be better than your old college flatmate ā itās just not worth itā.
"I wish I had the answer. My self-worth is wrapped up with achievement. I donāt know what itās like to define my self-worth if Iām not good at something and that is a recipe for an unhappy life. But I haven't got the answer to change that - to move to the point where our self worth is not tied to external validation".
āWhen you think about it all ā YouTube followers, income etc ā the reality is that everything is impermanent. And I think thatās probably at the crux of the self-worth being tied to identity which is probably tied to secularism. If you donāt believe in god, you become the god of yourself ā this is the argument in Sapiens. This is a very egocentric way of seeing the world. Think about it - we have appropriated things like meditation - we do it because we want to feel better but really meditation was about getting rid of the feeling of 'I'. You can see how the egocentric reasoning has taken holdā.
āSo how can you start letting go of these things? One way would be to recast your motivations towards service through teaching or supporting others"
āOne question that I donāt like asking but which is relevant is what would people regret when they are on their death bed? I donāt like to use it because it triggers flight or fight and so you immediately start thinking about this from a place of fear but itās a powerful question to askā.
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone"
Blaise Pascal
āI ask this one question to people all the time ā if you woke up tomorrow and all your bills were paid for the next twenty years, how would you spend your time?ā
āAfter weād worked out what you wanted to spend your time doing, I would come back to you, work out how you are currently spending your time and then ask how are you going to fill up the extra hours in your day?"
"Next we would ask what is preventing you from currently doing those things that you'd want to do in an ideal world?"
āThen we would really start to pull at every assumption ā so the assumption is that we donāt have enough time to do these other things that we want to do but what would happen if you peeled off 30 minutes off something in your schedule to do something that you wanted to do instead?"
āOften the life that we say that we want is incompatible with the life we are livingā
"Thereās all different kinds of coaching which is why the label can lose its punch. I think a great overall coach is someone who is really good at asking questions. I get frustrated with my business coach sometimes because he doesnāt give advice but asks really pertinent questions. A really good coach helps you align your daily behaviours to your overall valuesā
"In this system, across every quadrant of this matrix there is $10/hour work, $100, $1000 and $10,000. Ten dollar is just low level things like responding to YouTube comments or Inbox zero, then you move to $100/hour work which is low skill, high leverage. $1000/hour is a career dedicated to unique skill building but there's a catch - when you stop working the income stops, there's no leverage, you're still trading time for money. This takes us to $10,000 which is high leverage, high skilled work.
Khe is a teacher, coach, and speaker who has been called the āOprah for Millennialsā by CNN and blogs about transforming our relationship with time, work, money ā and ultimately ourselves. He worked in finance for fifteen years before quitting his job in 2015 with a quest to understand āwhat it means to live an examined life.ā
š„ RadReads / š„ Notion courses / š¤ Twitter / šø Instagram / ā LinkedIn
Ali is a doctor, YouTuber and podcaster. His day job used to involve saving lives, but as of this week he's making videos about productivity, tech, education and lifestyle stuff.
š¬ YouTube / š Podcast / š» Website / š¤ Twitter / šø Instagram
03:00 Khe Introduction
04:40 $10,000 / Hour System
08:00 Coaching and the Role of a Coach
15:00 Finding Life Purpose
24:00 Why are our actions often incompatible with the life we want?
29:45 Identity, Self-Worth and Validation
40:15 Philosophical Reflection on Goals + Process
47:40 Process vs Outcome + Prioritising Fun
54:45 Keeping Track of Relationships + Personal CRMs
01:06:50 Insights from Marriage Coaching
01:16:20 Valuing Time Spent with Children
01:18:50 Getting Clear on your 'Why'
01:22:00 Charging for Courses
01:31:35 Live Courses, Evergreen Content + Marketing
01:41:30 Summary