Hello there,
Two weeks ago I enrolled in a $10,000 work Bootcamp ran by Khe Hy. For those who don’t know Khe, is a solopreneur and creator of RadReads which has the succinctly-liest newsletter in the productivity game powered by lots of dad jokes, hip-hop hype that just makes it a Raaaadd read. I owe it to him for creating a resource that got me started on my newsletter.
Normally I tend to ignore such kinds of courses because there is just so much hype and noise in the productivity space. Quite so evidently plagued by the Shiny New Toy Syndrome and Blanket Approach. Whereas in reality, 80% of the gains from any tool don’t actually come from the tool itself.
But when it’s Kye and when you are cultured into the monthly salary, best believe you gonna flirt with a per hour dollar dollar bill y’all.
In this issue, I’m going to share my sample notes and thoughts from day 1 of class.
Here we go!!
Linchpin
All work has an assigned value. The value oscillates depending on the task and can be as far wide-ranging as free with [no] expectations to fixed base to per hour to pay me later with [no] stocks…
But before we get carried away with if I made $10,000 per hour, then I’d be a gazillionaire now calculation. The per hour refers to the amount of leverage that closely commensurate with a dollar value if all work was paid to the miniature tasks.
This 2×2 does a fine job representing four types of work based on the dollar dollar value.
$10
This is the dopamine infused work that we love to do to cross off our to-do lists fast. The tasks favourite customer is our monkey mind and finishing tasks is akin to feeding it with bananas inducing the sugar rush feeling.
Usually, a lot of menial and execution based tasks lie here which can double as making + or – progress. Examples include:
- Updating your LinkedIn information.
- Responding to ALL emails (hello inbox zero).
- (Most) social media posts.
It is possible to have a lot of satisfied workers who do lots of $10 tasks without long term visions ($10k) through hand-me-down scenarios. Satisfiable because a slew of 120 $10 tasks over a month equals a $1200 per month pay. Not too shabby eeeyyy.
Khe litmus test for $10/hour work is: could I do this hungover?
$100
There is a great amount of energy required to organize a workflow in a way that is easily executable. The more difficult a project the more the reliance on the intricate organization of information.
A lot of entry-level, mid-level employees and especially project managers can relate. The tasks are an important and key part of project deliverability but the parts are not significantly billable per hour since they are a constituent of clerical semi-visionable work.
Beyond document related busyness, tasks can include:
- Sending follow-up emails.
- Re-organizing power point information.
- Mapping strategy meeting notes.
$1,000
This quadrant is highly skill dependant. The more unique the skill the higher the scalability of the “1” against defensible market rents over multiple cycles.
Low leverage because it is highly dependent on a person’s unique leverage that is not easily transferrable.
If a footballer takes a year off, they can’t collect their $10,000 per week for an entire year.
If a executive consultant, takes five days off, they can’t bill their $1000 per hour on their leave days.
Still, as an individual, it is a really good place to be and would surface as one of the best-paid jobs in the world.
$10,000
$10,000 per hour work is the process of identifying your highest leverage activities with an end goal of equipping you with the ability to invent, connect, create, and make things happen. A type of person Seth Godin refers to as a Linchpin.
It helps to think of the figure through the multipliers lens.
If your lowest unit value work is $10/hour, what’s something that’s 10x more impactful? How about 1,000x more impactful? For example, for an entry-level data analyst, keying in data fields is $10/hr work, but combining that with after 5 learning on emergent technology is $10000/hr work.
At Amazon, Bezos refers to it through the Executive Decision Making:
As a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do? You get paid to make a small number of high quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day.
All of the Amazon senior executives are similar in that they work and live in the future. They do not focus on the current quarter.
Right now I’m working on a quarter that will reveal itself 3 years from now. If I make 3 good decisions a day that’s enough. They should be as high quality as I can make them.
In my mind, this would make a fun dollar dollar tallying activity to calculate my daily wage based off my task completion rate.
What if we performed 4 tasks of each every day. Where would we be?✓
Best Stuff I Read
1. Poem by Rumi
“I said: what about my eyes?
He said: Keep them on the road.
I said: What about my passion?
He said: Keep it burning.
I said: What about my heart?
He said: Tell me what you hold inside it?
I said: Pain and sorrow.
He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
In 1997, as the personal computer business approached 100 million units in annual sales and the dot-com bubble began to grow in earnest, Microsoft was one of the biggest fish in a pond that was about to swamp the world. Late that summer, a Microsoft group vice president named Jeff Raikes sent a now-famous email titled “Go Huskers!” to Warren Buffett, a fellow Nebraska native, describing Microsoft’s business in an effort to get him to invest in the company.
In the email, Raikes likens the sturdiness and growth potential of Microsoft’s operation to that of Coca-Cola and See’s Candies (which Buffett had owned since 1972), in no small part because Microsoft’s revolutionary flagship product — the Windows operating system — had created a “toll bridge” that every PC maker would have to cross if they expected consumers to buy their machines.
A year after Raikes’s email to Buffett, Microsoft would surpass General Electric as the world’s most valuable company and stay in that position for five consecutive years.
—> Read the Post. For a treat on the euphemisms of the barriers to entry. Toll bridge. Moat. Pricing discretion.
What I’m Watching
A Richard Linklater film, filmed over a period of 11 years to capture the life of a character growing up and meticulously textured to the rhythm of life.
Feel free to shoot me an email anytime (muigai@solomonmuigai.com) with comments, critiques, and open-ended questions.
Till next Saturday, take care.
Happy weekend
Solomon Muigai.