Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Kate’s week of yeses
Kate is an HR manager who runs a podcast on the side, for people changing careers in their 40s.
Her podcast gets three requests a week, and she says yes to all of them.
A guest who wants to come on, a listener who wants an hour of advice, a friend who wants an intro edited.
By Friday the week is gone, and the episode she actually wanted to record is still not recorded.
🧩 Her struggle:
She never figures out what each small request will cost her, so saying yes feels free.
In the middle of a recording, the guest she said yes to tells her the real story of an investor
who also had to decide which small requests got his time,
and who co-founded a company worth $4 billion.
That investor says no a lot more than you’d expect.
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💵 The rate he charges himself
Naval Ravikant charges himself $5,000 an hour.
Nobody pays him that.
He co-founded AngelList, a company that lets ordinary investors put money into startups, and which reached a $4 billion valuation in 2022.
He was also an early backer of Uber and Twitter, well before anyone knew what those were.
And his advice for how he got there sounds like a joke the first time you hear it.
Pick an hourly rate for yourself that’s absurdly high.
Make it higher than anyone would pay you, and higher than you can justify.
Then use it on everything.
The rate isn’t a price he charges anyone else.
It’s a filter, and its only job is to force one question onto every small request.
Is this worth $5,000 an hour?
A two-hour favor that used to feel free now costs $10,000.
An afternoon rearranging a folder structure costs $20,000.
That doesn’t make the favor or the folder a bad thing to do.
The cost was always there, and nobody had written it down.
Plot twist: the number being unreasonable is the whole point.
A realistic rate lets you talk yourself into things, because at $150 an hour a two-hour favor is only $300.
At $5,000 an hour, the same favor costs $10,000, and that is an easy no.
A task that costs too much today can still be worth doing later.
It’s a no for now, not a no forever.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Absurd Hourly Rate
Naval prices every hour of his own time at $5,000, so most small requests are an easy no.
This approach is called The Absurd Hourly Rate.
He didn’t judge each request as it came in.
He put a price on his time first, once, so every request after that answered itself.
So a small request has a price, and you know it before anybody asks.
You say no without having to think about it, and those hours go to your own work.
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🛠️ Kate’s turn
Now, back to Kate, who says yes to every request her podcast gets,
and still hasn’t recorded the episode she wanted to.
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email,
and gives it everything she did outside her job last week, with the hours each thing took.
The reply from her AI sidekick is short:
At $1,000 an hour, your three small favors last week cost $6,000,
so say yes only to what’s worth that price.
On Monday, a listener asks for an hour of advice.
She says no, kindly, and records the episode that evening instead.
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🌅 Eight weeks later
Kate still gets three requests a week, and most of them are a quick no now.
She has put out a new episode every week since,
and more listeners write in to say the show helped them change careers.
Every small request has a price, even when nobody tells you what it is.
Put a price on an hour of your time before the next request arrives.
That’s it, my fellow mavericks!
Yours ‘helping you build a smart AI sidekick so you can work less and enjoy life more’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below prices your actual week at a rate you pick, then tells you which hours
were never worth it — and what to do with each one.
🧰 What you’ll need
An hourly rate that’s absurdly high, and everything you did outside your job last week, with rough hours
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. $1,000 an hour. 3h giving a listener career advice, 2h editing a friend’s intro, 1h on a call with a guest, 4h on the podcast, 2h answering DMsThe one thing you actually want to be building, and what you said yes to that you didn’t want to
- e.g. the next season of my podcast, half-planned since March, and I said yes to the advice, the intro edit and the callWhat you won’t drop, whatever the math says
- e.g. anything involving my sister, and Sunday mornings
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my episode list, my show notes, or my download numbers, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my readers are, write for them. Otherwise assume people in their 40s who want to change careers.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written.
- Necessary work cannot be "cut". Sort it into batch, automate, or hand off — never delete.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
My absurd rate, and everything I did outside my job last week with rough hours:
{e.g. $1,000 an hour. 3h giving a listener career advice, 2h editing a friend's intro, 1h on a call with a guest, 4h on the podcast, 2h answering DMs}
The one thing I actually want to be building, and what I said yes to that I did not want to:
{e.g. the next season of my podcast, half-planned since March, and I said yes to the advice, the intro edit and the call}
What I am unwilling to drop, whatever the math says:
{e.g. anything involving my sister, and Sunday mornings}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The bill — every item above priced at my rate, with a total, and the total for the things I did not want to do.
2. Above the rate — which hours genuinely cleared it, and why.
3. Below the rate — for each one, whether I can pay somebody less than my rate to do it, or simply not do it. Say which, and what the first step is.
4. What I would have to accept — for anything I said I am unwilling to drop, say plainly what it costs me at this rate, without telling me to drop it.
5. My sentence — one line in my own words for the small stuff, the way Naval's is "I don't do that. That's not a problem that I solve."
Then tell me how many hours the thing I actually want to build would have got last week, if I had used this.