The Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi | Episode 018: He Lost His Father, His Restaurant, and His Time. Then He Built a Life He Actually Wanted with Ryan Kimura

Episode 018: He Lost His Father, His Restaurant, and His Time. Then He Built a Life He Actually Wanted with Ryan Kimura

April 7, 2026 / 01:18:48/E18

Episode Summary

In 2019, Ryan Kimura was working seventy hours a week in a Thai restaurant he co-owned in Florida. Not seventy comfortable hours behind a desk. Seventy hours of lifting forty-pound tubs of meat, washing dishes, prepping, cooking, managing customers, running inventory, and going home so exhausted he could barely stay awake long enough to see his eight-month-old daughter before she fell asleep. He had opened the restaurant with his wife in 2016. When the head chef quit in January 2019, Ryan became the head chef too. The math on his hourly wage, when he ran it, came out to minimum wage. He already knew he was missing his daughter's firsts. He just did not know how to stop.

Then in May of 2019, five days after his birthday, he got a phone call from his brother. Their father in Hawaii had not made it through the night. There had been warning signs, chest pains his father had been too stubborn to have checked out. Ryan had talked to him about it on his birthday. Five days later, he was gone. His brother's wedding in the Bahamas was weeks away. The family had been planning to finally all be together. Ryan went back to work in the restaurant kitchen the very next day, making Thai food with tears rolling down his face, because he was the owner and there was nobody else.

Something had to break. What broke was the restaurant's hold on him. By 2020, Covid shut the dining room, Amazon exploded, and Ryan had thirty extra hours a week to pour into a side business his wife had started as a hobby. Two products took him from ten thousand to fifty thousand dollars a month. By 2022 he sold the restaurant to his brother-in-law for less than what he had put into it, and he did not look back. Today he runs a two million dollar plus Amazon online arbitrage business, works roughly twenty hours a week, takes a vacation approximately every month, has not touched his own inventory in years, and built the whole thing specifically so that when his kids want him, he is there.

This episode is for every parent who has convinced themselves they have to choose.

In This Episode, You'll Discover:

What Ryan's week actually looked like in 2019 as the sole head chef and operator of a Thai restaurant, seventy hours a week at minimum wage after the math, and how far that was from the life he wanted for his daughter
The phone call in May 2019 that told him his father had not survived his heart attack, five days after Ryan had been on the phone urging him to get checked out, and what the next months looked like cooking through grief
How Ryan's wife started an Amazon side hustle in 2019, how two products in 2020 took them from ten thousand to fifty thousand dollars a month, and the exact moment he decided to go all in
Why Ryan sold the restaurant to his brother-in-law for less than what he put into it and why he describes that decision as cutting the shackles off
The Parkinson's Law principle Ryan applied intuitively long before he had a name for it, compressing forty hours of work into four by discovering on vacation he could do double the volume in half the time
Why Ryan does not offer coaching, consulting, or courses, and how that decision is the direct result of designing a business around not answering to anyone except his wife and kids
The abundance mindset Ryan runs his entire network on, sharing every loophole, software, and opportunity he finds with his community, and why he believes gatekeeping in e-commerce is a guarantee of failure
What he told the camera when Karl asked him to speak directly to the dads who think they have to choose between financial success and being present for their family

Key Takeaways:

Success Without Time Is Failure. Ryan did not use this phrase as a motivational line. He earned it. He was making money in the restaurant and missing every first his daughter had. He ran the math on his hourly wage and it came out to minimum wage. If you cannot spend it with the people you love, the number in the account is just a number.
You Can Always Build It Back. You Cannot Buy Back the Time. Money is replaceable. The eight-month-old standing up for the first time while you are in the kitchen is not. Ryan is direct about this in a way that only someone who has actually missed those moments can be. Build the business around the life, not the other way around.
Parkinson's Law Is Real. Apply It Deliberately. Give yourself eight hours and you will use eight hours. Give yourself four and you will use four. Ryan figured this out by doing double his normal buying volume the week before a cruise because he did not want to work on the ship. Then he realized if he could do that, he could do his normal week in twenty hours. That discovery changed everything.
Focus Is Power. This is Ryan's mantra, on his vision board, and the thing he says to his daughter. Not money, not knowledge, not hustle. Focus. When you are working, be working. When you are with your family, be with your family. Full presence in each place is how you actually get to have both.
Shackles Look Like Business. Prep Was Ryan's. He hated prepping from the start. Moving inventory to a prep center was not just an efficiency decision. It was a psychological release. Every bottleneck in your business that is draining time and energy is a shackle. Find it. Name it. Pay someone a dollar a unit to remove it.
Gatekeeping Is a Guarantee of Failure. Every major win in Ryan's business came through his network. When he finds a loophole, software, or opportunity, he shares it. He networks with people who do the same. The blue ocean is big enough. If your competitor mindset is burning your energy on things you cannot control, like Amazon fees or policy changes, you are spending the one resource you cannot replace.
Who Shows Up at the Funeral. Everyone shows up at the wedding. The people in your life who show up when it is the worst, not the best, those are the people worth building your life around. Ryan's support system got him through his father's death. A text, a phone call, someone just checking in. It matters more than people realize.
You Do Not Miss Them Any Less. You Just Learn to Carry It Better. Ryan does not describe grief as something you get over. He describes it as something you learn to manage. There is no magic fix. There is time, and there is community. Having people around you who check in makes the carrying easier. Isolation makes it worse every time.

Timestamps:

[00:00] Karl introduces Ryan Kimura: lifestyle architect, two million dollar Amazon business, twenty hours a week, a vacation a month
[03:00] What lifestyle architect actually means in practice: no prep, no clients, no coaching, work from anywhere
[07:00] The eighty-five percent stat: your kids are only kids for fifteen percent of their lives, and Ryan watched an elderly woman stare at his kids at lunch and understand
[10:00] Going back to 2019: the Thai restaurant, the head chef who quit in January, and the seventy-hour weeks that followed
[14:00] What Ryan was missing: his daughter was eight months old, he was leaving before she woke up and coming home too exhausted to stay awake
[17:00] The math on his wage: minimum wage, after everything
[20:00] Karl's ad break: the Reforge Challenge at https://reforgechallenge.com
[21:00] The phone call in May: his father's heart attack five days after Ryan urged him to get checked out on his birthday
[26:00] Ryan's favorite memory of his father: falling asleep on his lap in the cab of an old Toyota truck as a four-year-old
[29:00] Going back to work the next day: cooking in the restaurant kitchen with tears in his eyes because he had no choice
[32:00] The guilt of the warning signs and why Ryan has come to accept it was ultimately his father's choice
[35:00] What the months of grief actually looked like while running a restaurant full-time
[38:00] The support system that got him through and why a text means more than people think
[41:00] Who shows up at the funeral versus who shows up at the wedding
[43:00] The pivot: Amazon starts as a side hustle, Covid closes the dining room, and thirty extra hours become the most important thirty hours of Ryan's life
[47:00] Two products, ten thousand to fifty thousand dollars a month, and the moment he decided to go all in
[51:00] Karl's ad break: the Reforge Challenge at https://reforgechallenge.com
[52:00] Selling the restaurant to his brother-in-law for less than he put in and why he called it cutting the shackles off
[55:00] Parkinson's Law discovered on a cruise: double volume in half the time, and why that changed everything
[59:00] Focus as the operating system: noise canceling headphones, hard stops, and the four-hour workday
[01:02:00] Why Ryan sends everything to a prep center and why removing that one thing changed his mental state
[01:05:00] Leverage from operator to owner: sourcing VAs, better software, and doing one hundred percent more than last year
[01:09:00] Abundance mindset in practice: sharing every loophole and opportunity with the network because gatekeeping is failure
[01:13:00] Ryan looks into the camera and talks to every dad who thinks they have to choose
[01:16:00] Grit defined for this season: perseverance, knowing there is a light, knowing you have already been through the fire
[01:18:00] Subtraction: removing limiting beliefs by getting out into the network and seeing what is actually possible
[01:20:00] The mantra: focus is power
[01:22:00] Corey's question from Episode 17: what are you really working for and what is the end goal?
[01:24:00] Ryan's question for the next guest: if you could see your death two days from now, where do you go and who do you see?
[01:26:00] Where to find Ryan and Karl's close