“Success is like an addiction,” Khe Hy told me after he quit his job as a managing director at BlackRock.
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Why a top director quit his 7-figure job
From an early age Khe Hy, a nerdy, first-generation Cambodian American kid in New York City turned his attention toward making money. Khe’s game plan was simple: if he earned enough money, he would gain status, and if he gained status, he would no longer feel like an outsider.
There were only four jobs that mattered to Khe, which is to say there were only four jobs that paid enough: lawyer, banker, engineer, and doctor. Khe chose banking.
During Khe’s recruitment process, the investment banks teased the glitz of the industry. They sent black cars to pick him up and treated Khe and his Yale classmates to meals at the finest restaurants in New Haven. Young associates bought Khe $50 whiskey shots and rhapsodized about year-end bonuses and lavish client dinners. The career ladder in investment banking followed a clear progression, from intern to analyst to associate to VP to director. Khe could already see his path to the top.
For the first decade of his career, Khe swiftly rose through the ranks. He spent his college summers and postgrad years working on Wall Street, before he settled in at BlackRock, the largest asset management firm in the world. But despite all his professional success, Khe started to notice a nagging feeling that he wasn’t playing the right game. He saw his superiors — the professionals in whose footsteps he would ostensibly follow — call into Saturday morning meetings while their kids played in the background. Khe regularly worked 74-hour weeks, and he grew resentful of his colleagues who received slightly higher bonuses. The fancy dinners and new pairs of Jordans lost their sheen.
This uneasy feeling persisted like a pebble in Khe’s shoe. But he ignored it, and set his sights on his next goal. He bought his first New York City apartment at 28. He was making a million dollars a year before he turned 30. By 31, he was promoted to be one of the youngest managing directors in the firm’s history. There was always another promotion or end-of-year bonus that temporarily anesthetized his existential dread. But each time, Khe also developed a bit more immunity to these material accomplishments.
“Success is like an addiction,” Khe told me. “The first time you get high, you start hallucinating. But if you smoke every day, you need 10 bong rips in the morning just to feel normal.”
Relying on external markers of success can leave ambitious professionals in any field feeling perpetually unfulfilled. It took a series of changes in Khe’s life for him to realize that the values by which he was living were not actually his own.
Chasing carrots
For our ancestors, status was a matter of survival. Higher status meant better access to food, mates, and safety. The same could be said today. People with high status have better luck on the dating market, better chances of getting a loan, and better access to healthcare. In her book “Status Games: Why We Play and How to Stop,” Loretta Graziano Breuning writes, “In the state of nature, social comparison has life-or-death consequences, so natural selection built a brain that responds to social comparisons with life-or-death brain chemistry.” Our brains reward us with serotonin when we achieve higher status. But serotonin is released in short spurts and quickly metabolized. As the initial rush fades, we seek more and more.
While status can inspire excellence, it can also make us dependent on it. And the work of constantly jockeying for position can leave us anxious, stressed, and unfulfilled. This dynamic is particularly visible in the workplace, where employees’ statuses are explicit. At work, salaries dictate our value. Job titles rank us relative to one another. The promise of promotions compels us to keep pushing forward. A problem occurs, however, when we enter into this game without first determining what we value beyond status. When our self-worth is tied solely to external rewards, we can spend our whole lives chasing carrots without ever feeling full.
In one of the most famous psychology experiments on motivation, three researchers, Mark Lepper, David Greene, and Richard Nisbett, observed how students at a local preschool spent their free time. After identifying which kids often spent time drawing, they divided the young artists into three groups.
When our self-worth is tied solely to external rewards, we can spend our whole lives chasing carrots without ever feeling full.
At the start of the experiment, the researchers showed one group of the students a “Good Player Award:” a certificate with a gold star, red ribbon, and the student’s name. They told the students in this group that if they drew, they would receive the award. Group two wasn’t shown a reward, but if they chose to draw, they were given one at the end of the session. Group three was not shown or given any rewards.
Two weeks after the experiment, the researchers returned to the classroom to observe the students during free time. The students in groups two and three drew just as much after the experiment as they did before. But students in the first group — the students who had expected to receive an award after drawing — spent less time drawing than they did before the experiment. It wasn’t the presence of the award but the expectation of receiving it that dampened the students’ interest in drawing.
The researchers replicated the experiment several times with other groups of students and later with adults. Again, they saw that attaching a contingent reward to an activity transformed the activity from play to work. As Daniel Pink wrote in “Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us,” his best-selling 2009 book: “If-then rewards require people to forfeit some of their autonomy … and that can spring a hole in the bottom of their motivation bucket, draining an activity of its enjoyment.”
When receiving an external reward hinges on your ability to perform in a certain way — whether it’s reading for school or driving for work — it can change your relationship to the activity. It’s something we know intuitively: working exclusively for external rewards rarely brings lasting fulfillment. As the old saying goes, How much money is enough, Mr. Rockefeller? Just a little bit more.
Off-the-rack values
“We seek status because we don’t know our own preferences,” Agnes Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, told me. “When we don’t trust our own definition of what is good, we let other people define it for us.” Callard clarified that this isn’t always a bad thing. Totems of status, like awards and recognition, can motivate us to achieve. But when we assume others’ values as our own, we undermine our autonomy. Instead of determining our own definition of success, we buy one off the rack.
As Khe discovered, jobs like investment banking offer a level of value clarity. Success is measured by how much money you make — for the firm and for yourself. Promotions, bonuses, and raises mark the path to success like dots along the Pac-Man maze.
“The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work” by Simone Stolzoff
Portfolio
These metrics are seductive because of their simplicity. You might have a nuanced personal definition of success, philosopher C. Thi Nguyen told me, “but once someone presents you with these simple quantified representations of a value — especially ones that are shared across a company — that clarity trumps your subtler values.” In other words, it is easier to adopt the values of the game than to determine your own.
For Khe, it all came to a head when, at 33, he woke up one morning to go to the wedding of one of his best friends. His girlfriend noticed a chunk of his hair had fallen out, which he would later learn was due to stress-related alopecia. They had to leave for the wedding in a few hours. Frantically, Khe Googled short-term solutions. At a local Duane Reade, he found a bottle of alopecia concealer — essentially spray paint for hair — and used it to cover his exposed scalp. After the ceremony, Khe went to the bathroom and noticed in the mirror that the spray paint was dripping down his neck.
Here was a man who had achieved the highest levels of on-paper success. He was a high school valedictorian, Yale graduate, and one of the youngest managing directors in the history of the largest asset management firm in the world. And yet, he was so stressed that his hair was falling out. For 15 years, Khe had assumed that one day his bank account would melt away all of his worries, but as he looked at his reflection — a 33-year-old balding man, with specks of black paint splattered on his pressed white shirt — it was clear that all his wealth and status weren’t going to save him.
Then, in 2014, Khe’s wife gave birth to their first daughter, Soriya. When Khe told his closest confidants that he was unhappy and considering leaving BlackRock, they’d say things like “That’s so risky” or “What about your daughter?” But thinking about his newborn daughter was an inspiration, not a deterrent, for Khe to ultimately leave the job he had grown to dread.
Fatherhood put Khe’s life in perspective. “I realized the riskier thing is my kid watching their dad be checked out and doing something just for money,” he told me. Hitting his year-end bonus was no longer his North Star. Becoming a parent inspired him to change course.
In 2015, Khe left BlackRock. Again, his bosses were dumbfounded. At BlackRock, Khe had job security, a seven-figure annual income, and a fancy job title. He was 35 years old, with a toddler, a partner who’d recently graduated from an MFA program in painting, and no next job lined up. But what his superiors couldn’t see was that Khe had lost his enthusiasm to play the finance game.
Today, he runs the newsletter RadReads which has more than forty-thousand subscribers. He surfs every day, never misses a family dinner, and always puts his daughters — he now has two — to bed. “Even if I sold RadReads for a couple of million dollars,” he told me, “it would do nothing to change my happiness.”
Simone Stozloff is an independent journalist, a consultant from San Francisco, and the author of “The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work.”
This is an excerpt adapted from The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work by Simone Stolzoff with permission from Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC copyright © 2023 by Simone Stolzoff