Work, health, hobbies, etc… broken down into eight “buckets”

You may be asking… why are you sharing this?

3 reasons:

1. For myself, to have an organized, written out, articulated framework for how I view the world.

2. For my kids, in case I die prematurely, they’ll know more about their dad and how he looked at life. When my dad died, the fragility of life became top of mind.

3. For you. Maybe we met, but didn't get to spend enough time together. This can be a starting point for learning more about one another.

Eight buckets:

• Worldview

  • We all have some kind of worldview, whether we know it or not. As David Foster Wallace says, “everyone worships, the only choice we get is what to worship”. Here are a few things that shape me.

  • Global - Separating out, in a more literal sense, "world" and "view - we're all in this together. We’re all in this together. Just because humans have drawn arbitrary lines across the globe doesn’t mean God sees us parceled off that way. Most of the lines were drawn by colonizers long ago, but we can reimagine, and see ourselves as citizens of the world.

  • Privilege - I’m extremely fortunate to be a native english speaker, educated, come from a stable middle-class family, white, American, and feel a responsibility to do something with that privilege (and often still figuring out what executing on that looks like). 

  • Faith - One of the nice things about faith, and how it differs from science, is that it (at least attempts) to answer some of the hardest and most important questions - questions of meaning, significance, and purpose. Despite its usefulness, at this point at least in urban areas that I tend to be in, it’s becoming quite contrarian and rare to believe in a God. And I expect that trend to only continue. I guess I’m one of the few “survivors” still standing. Having grown up in a Christian home, I’ve continued with the faith but with a few nuances and variants.

    • Branding: Christianity has a profound “branding” problem. Social media has a way of optimizing for high emotions (rage, disgust, anger, etc.). Instead of hearing about the quiet sacrifices, pastoral care leading to healed hearts, deep generosity, etc., we hear about how Christians don’t believe in separation of church and state, they don’t want women to have control of their bodies, shame culture, how greedy they are, or pastors' moral failures. And we have a huge problem for the trajectory of the faith as a result. 

    • Defining “Christian”: Is someone from the rural south just as “American” as someone in NYC? Yes? But also no. The US is quite large, with very different people, and Christianity is the same way, with both awesome people and batshit crazy people (many of which you’ve seen on social media). I tend to first think of Jesus “the person”, not of Christians, “the people”. The words and actions of historical Jesus, before the words and actions of the people living today that identify as Christian. 

    • Sacrificial: Though I grew up in the more evangelical (now a highly politicized term) flavor of Christianity, I’ve come to a more progressive & sacrificial version. What I mean is “dying to oneself” to benefit others. This unique lens and set of principles has helped form the foundation for how I think about all the other buckets.

    • Logical no brainer (for me): If you're familiar with Pascals wager and it's four quadrants, or the variant Pascals mugging, which says we should focus on improbable cases with implausibly high rewards. From that angle, eternal life being improbable, but about as high of a reward as it gets, therefore we might as well act as if there is a God that is giving meaning to life.

• Relationships

  • These matter more than many of the other things on this page. What matters at the end of a life? Relationships with people, not things. People matter.

  • You are the sum of your closest friends and people you spend time with, so choose wisely (as a side note, a tangent of that concept is “you are what you do”. Want to know someone's values? See how they spend their time, their money, etc.).

  • Family: I’m fortunate to be surrounded by my favorite person each day, my wife, and we’ve pumped out some pretty cool kids too. In my experience, most entrepreneurial men like me overweight work and underweight time with their family. I’m trying the reverse (though sometimes fail).

• Health

  • We’re all gonna die. This was a line I jokingly used in my fathers eulogy. But it’s true, so we shouldn’t get too caught up in optimizing health, cause it’s going to end someday. That being said, society at large is far too cavalier, which has in part, resulted in most US deaths being arguably preventable via diet, and ultimately lower quality of life and shorter life spans (for example, someone dies every 34 seconds from heart disease).

  • Getting hit by a car while riding my bike was one of the best things to ever happen to me health wise. As ironic as that sounds. By the time I got cleared for exercise again from the doc, I was ready for the most intense exercise I could find. I did a Groupon for one month in a local Crossfit gym and have never turned off my membership since. I’ve gained 40 pounds of muscle (before Crossfit I was skinyyyyyy) and am in the 59th percentile worldwide (shoutout to my wife who is in the top 10%!). 

  • My wife and I don’t have health insurance. Why? Healthcare is broken. So instead of asking “what can the system do for me?”, we skip over insurance entirely and use a Christian healthcare Co-op, where we ask “what can we do for someone?”. Each month send a check directly to a person, skipping the middle man, pray for them and include a note of encouragement. When we had our first child we received by mail a hand knitted quilt from a complete stranger. Talk about a divergence from your typical insurance experience!

  • Avoid too much dopamine. Do hard things. Get uncomfortable. Eat more veggies even when you don’t want to. Expose yourself to cold. Follow this pyramid.

• Finances

  • When I was in high school I met Dave Ramsey. Back then he wasn’t a controversial figure like he is now. He lived in my same suburb outside of Nashville, and I began studying his principles. Live within your means/on a budget, avoid the pitfalls of debt.

  • In college I read the book Rich Dad Poor Dad and was deeply inspired. My focus shifted from Dave to this new lense - not working for the man, making money while sleeping, the differences between assets and liabilities, limiting my lifestyle budget to redirect into assets. I emailed my girlfriends mom, and asked if she would invest with me to buy my first rental property. She replied that “she didn’t invest with friends”, but I was fortunate enough to later get a “yes” when I married her daughter and became “family”. Fast forward, we were able to borrow from the “Bank of Mom” and buy our first rental property. 

  • Being landlords and managing property has been a wild ride to say the least. From literal fires, floods, break-ins, tenant mental health issues and police entanglements, pandemics, code inspectors, 3 contractor bankruptcies, 2-inch mushrooms growing on interior baseboards, a tree on our property falling onto neighbors home, and tenants being locked out of their own room, I think we’ve had pretty much everything that can go wrong, go wrong. I’ve used the BRRRR strategy for every deal (though I’ve never refinanced, so really it’s BRRRR). I don’t believe in paying down principal for young folks like me in growth mode. If I was a boomer it’d be different (though I very much believe in bi-weekly payments due to amortization schedule improvements (can save 5~ yrs on 30 yr note). If you want to learn more I recommend the Bigger Pockets communities podcast and forums. 

  • I have a faith-inspired view, and the lens I use to view finances through my faith is that “God owns it all”, and the old spiritual adage “we are blessed to be a blessing”.

• Work

  • One of the hardest things I’ve ever done is start a business from scratch. I heard about credit card processing by going out to lunch with my father in laws golfing buddy and dove in heard first. I was lucky that I was young so I was able to bootstrap it on meager means. We lived off my wife’s frozen yogurt job income, were on state benefits like food stamps and WIC, had no discretionary income, would sometimes dumpster dive for food (also to give away). When one potential friend asked about going out to coffee, I redirected us to the park, since it was free. That scrappy time of our lives shaped us significantly. I started with essentially no experience and had no idea what I was doing.

  • While most businesses fail within the first 5 years, I’m fortunate to have escaped that statistic. Polaris has really turned into more of a lifestyle business than a startup. We’re lean and scrappy, with few employees, and not too many meetings or bureaucracy. I hope that never changes.

• Altruism

  • Volunteering is what this category was originally called from the framework I’m borrowing from. It's super important to get into the real world and help others in-person rather than just writing a check. But I’ve rebranded to Altruism, to be more encompassing of larger change, beyond implying that helping someone has to be done in-person with a nonprofit.

  • Effective Altruism is an amazing framework for how to think about why and why to help people (disregard the distraction of SBF).

  • People experiencing poverty/vulnerability/marginalization is my sole focus. I see my focus on climate change as an avenue for this. I'm in the extremely fortunate position of making more than I spend. So I have a few focus areas on giving and investing (which in some ways I view as one in the same).

  • Let go of scarcity and move to an abundance mindset. I gave a talk at Open Home Church once which pulled heavily from The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist. 

  • Bias for action: it could be the most important thing in the world, but if there's no ability to do anything about it then it's just not relevant. If a key motivation is to make the world better, then the next question is “what is actionable?”, in other words “what are the needs we can meet?”, not "how scary it is”.

  • Domestic poverty: my focus is on homelessness (which is why I cofounded Samaritan) and financial education/empowerment.

  • International poverty: This is one of the best ways to maximize your ROI (return on impact) of philanthropic dollars. I’m also very interested in exploring bitcoin (more thoughts on bitcoin here) as a potential tool for financial empowerment in developing nations.

  • Climate change: Spending three months living in the woods on the Appalachian Trail, I developed a deep care for both nature, and for how challenging it can be to not have a home. I see climate change really as “climate justice”. It’s the rich countries that have done the most damage, and the poor countries that suffer the most, so it’s up to the resourced people within the rich countries to do something. My above reference to Pascal’s Wager also applies to climate change.

    • That’s why I bought an electric car, often eat vegetarian, my business is certified 1% For The Planet, etc… I owe it to my grandchildren and beyond.

    • Not every dollar should go to a “nonprofit”. Just because the IRS has classified as organization a certain way doesn’t mean “these orgs are doing good work, and these are not”. At my payment processing company we are certified 1% For The Planet members. Which means we give away 1% of our revenue. But on the personal side my wife and I are more focused on creating incentives and easy ways for consumers to go green and avoid the green premium. 

  • Longtermism is also pretty interesting, the view that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.

• Holidays

  • Spend time with folks that you love. This is a great time to cultivate the Worldview and Relationship buckets. 

  • Travel and get out of your comfort zone. Try and take an international trip at least once a year or so.

  • We spent a year and a half being semi-nomadic with our three kids, which was one of the coolest things we’ve ever done. We did a 3-month cross-country road trip, spent 3 months in Mexico, among other things. It was such a great learning experience and we hope to do more of it at some point.

• Hobbies

  • I’ve both biked and hiked across the country. 

  • I’ve played drums in a band that went on to become grammy award winning and platinum selling. I’m very grateful I didn’t continue on with the band. Why? Family life, being home with my kids and not on the road, having autonomy, avoiding fame, avoiding the strong pull of the entertainment lifestyle and debauchery that comes with it, etc.

  • I need to develop more of this bucket. Most of my time in the last decade has gone to building my businesses and family. My wife and I are gym rats, going to our local Crossfit gym about 4-5x per week. We like to talk about it. 😀

Past revisions made here. The hope is to see how over time, people change. In this case, the development of Jason Keil.

The "eight buckets framework” is borrowed from Will Little.