#25 - Peter Kang: Habits, Investing, and Building a Digital Agency
Listen Here: Apple | Spotify
My guest today is Peter Kang. Peter is the co-founder of Barrel, a creative and digital marketing agency. He writes a personal blog where he meticulously documents his habits, his investments, and his thoughts on running a digital agency.
In this conversation, Peter and I discussed habits, mental models, reading, investing, the origin story of Barrel, and much more.
Selected links from the show:
Peter's website, Twitter, and Barrel website
2020: Habits that Stuck by Peter Kang
One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way by Robert Maurer
Entropy by James Clear
How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens
Sell Your By-products by Jason Fried
Reviewing my 2020 Stock Investing Activity by Peter Kang
Recent Stock Buys #1 by Peter Kang
The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge
10k Diver on Twitter
Show notes:
01:24 - Peter's masterful habit tracking
07:42 - How discipline can give you freedom
09:55 - Entropy as a mental model
11:49 - The hardest, but most beneficial, habit Peter built
"If you have a system to help facilitate the writing process, you can be more prolific."
15:07 - Where Peter finds his motivation
16:54 - Peter's most valuable operating rules
20:42 - Reading deeply vs. reading broadly
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." - Goodhart's Law
28:38 - Peter's college and early career experiences working for the NFL and Lehman Brothers
33:27 - The beginning of Barrel
40:45 - What is a digital agency?
42:35 - Building the skills necessary to run a successful business
48:26 - What is the most important problem for an agency owner to work on?
52:21 - The story behind Agency Docs
57:17 - Peter's financial journey from college to present
1:06:28 - How Peter's investing strategy is informed by his business, Barrel
1:10:50 - How Peter invested $300k in less than 10 months
1:18:08 - Peter's investment thesis on Stitch Fix
1:21:40 - Peter's thoughts on cryptocurrency
1:24:43 - The most important lessons Peter has learned about being a dad
"Parenting is an exercise in logistics, planning, and communication. The more systems, planning, and routines you can have in place, the more smoothly things will run."
1:31:09 - The things Peter cared about in his 20s that didn't matter in his 30s
1:36:19 - Peter's advice to a recent college grad
1:37:42 - Peter's favorite mental models
1:40:35 - Peter's favorite Twitter follows
1:41:55 - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for Peter
1:44:00 - Where you can connect with Peter
