Lessons - The Currency You Can't Earn Back: Mastering Time Management | Sahil Bloom - Newsletter Creator & Investor

In this lessons episode, explore why time is our most undervalued form of wealth and how ignoring its fleeting nature leads to lasting regret. Learn how recognizing yourself as a time billionaire shifts your priorities. Learn why consuming and ideating without action traps you in illusion and learn how restructuring your professional time can lead to greater purpose and clarity. What do you think? I'll ask you personally. I guess I could ask what people have the most trouble with but it's more fun to ask what you have the most trouble with. So what is the one kind of wealth that you think is the most difficult for yourself? I think time wealth is the one that most people struggle with. And it's for a few reasons. First off, time wealth is first and foremost about an awareness that time is your most precious asset, about an awareness that it is finite and impermanent, that if you don't think about it until the very end, it's going to be the only thing you think about but when it's too late. That is a very tough switch to flip in a lot of young people's minds in particular. Time has this characteristic for young people where you think about it none and then at the very end of your life it's the only thing you think about but it's too late or you think about it none until your parents are dead and then you're like oh shoot I should have thought about it more. And it's hard to get that across to young people. The question I love to ask is would you trade lives with Warren Buffett? He's worth $130 billion. He has access to anyone in the world he flies around on private jets, he's got plenty of houses, he reads and learns for a living but you wouldn't trade lives with him. Because he's 95 years old. There's no way you would take $130 billion to be a 95 year old today. Of course not. You wouldn't do that. And so you're recognizing and by the way on the other end, he would trade lives with you. He would give up $130 billion in your age in a heartbeat. And so you're recognizing that time has incalculable value and yet on a daily basis you take a bunch of actions that disregard your time. You sit around scrolling on social media, you work on nonsense, you say yes to things that you don't actually want to do, you know, you catch yourself in these like time for money trades that don't make any sense in your life anymore. So you sort of know it in the back of your mind, but then you don't take actions to. That's not legal attention. It's not painful and you don't people have a tough time internalizing a like future reality in the present. So yeah, it's exactly that. It's like it is you don't recognize the fact that the time is just slipping away, right? Like you are a time billionaire. There's this concept in the book that I bring out from this investor Graham Duncan. You are a time billionaire when you were young. You literally have billions of seconds left in your life, but the seconds are just ticking away. And importantly, there are certain seconds. There are certain moments in your life that are more important than others. There are windows of time that actually have more importance. Ancient Greeks had two words for time. Chronos was the linear sort of normal version of time and then Kyros was this idea that there were certain windows that were more important than others that had more texture, more meaning. That is true in your own life. And energy and attention deployed into those moments is more impactful. As an example, when your kids are young, that is a window of time that is going to be very short that you are never going to get back. Not recognizing that being present during those moments is something that you will regret for your entire life. But if you don't think about that, if you don't sit with that question, if you don't think about the tension that you're going to have to navigate, if you don't ask yourself, ask your spouse, ask your partner how you want to navigate that tension, you just allow it to slip by. It just becomes part of the thing, part of the layers that we end up living. It's interesting because I think that a lot of the focus on traditional wealth, on money wealth, and I just thought of this as we're chatting now is because you feel the pain when you can't afford rent, you feel the pain when you can't afford the school that all your friends are sending their kids to. And also, content in general and media that we're exposed to is just sort of tripling down on the fact that we don't make enough money. There's no social media saying, hey, I have better relationships with my parents than you. There is that social media saying, hey, you don't drive a limbo or you don't fly private or you don't get to go to same parts on vacation, that's social media. So we're just inundated with all this negativity, only focus on one kind of wealth. And it's becoming probably even harder and harder for young people to focus on the other four kinds. Yeah, and it's very flimsy, right? You ask people like, the question I like to ask when it comes to like sort of shows of wealth is, would you buy this thing if you couldn't tell anyone or show anyone that you have it? So like, you're going to buy some fancy watch. Would you buy that watch if you couldn't show it to anyone or tell anyone that you had it? Like, usually not, right? Usually you're buying it because you want to exhibit the fact that you have achieved some level of wealth. And then it becomes this sad question of how much of your life are you simply living for the pleasure of others? I really ask yourself that how much of your time and life are you living to please other people, to impress other people? And in order to try to make yourself feel impressive, right? Like we focus so much time, energy and attention on trying to be impressive to others. When in reality, what you should do is try to be impressive to yourself. That's what really matters at the end of the day. Being impressive to others is overrated. Being impressive to yourself underrated feels much better. And I mean, people don't really care about you that much either. No one's thinking about you. No one's thinking about you. I'm dead up before. There are two big mistakes in life. One is worrying about what other people think about you. And the other is believing that other people think about you in the first place. The spotlight effect, right? It says that we overestimate the degree to which other people are noticing or observing our actions or behaviors. No one is thinking about you. Everyone's just worried about themselves. So focus on in terms of these really important moments of time with kids. You sort of alluded to parents as well before. Does stoicism, the thought of your own death, those kinds of concepts, do they sort of influence how you think through time? Absolutely. There's a chapter in the book called A Brief History of Time. I sort of play on Stephen Hawking's famous book. And at the start of that, I have this quote from one of my favorite movies, Troy. I don't know if you've seen a Brad Pitt, which is hilarious because my wife jokes and me that like, she can't escape that movie because I've watched it literally hundreds of times. And she was like, what's the center of the screenshot of it in my book? She was like, what's this made an interior book? But it's this line. Good movie. It's a great movie. And it's 20 years old now, which is crazy to me. But yeah, it's 2004. I had no idea until I had to cite the book. That's time. Yeah. Yeah. But Brad Pitt has this line in it, you know, speaking as a Achilles where he just says that the gods envy us because we are mortal. And he says, everything is more beautiful because we are doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. And that is such a powerful line to me of that exact idea that like the fact that you will never experience these moments again, make them so much more beautiful, so much more important because you don't know when it's going to be the end, you don't know when there's going to be a last time to use Sam Harris's idea. All of these things are inherently fleeting. And that's what makes them so special and so important. When you interviewed all these people, what would be one thing that you noticed was incredibly different from interviews with young people versus old people? It's perhaps cliche to say, but the young people almost unanimously across the board assume that the linear relationship between money and happiness is going to continue into perpetuity. And the old people know that it doesn't. Arthur Brooks is this famous happiness researcher. He's a friend of mine, one of the early readers of this book, which I was very grateful for. And he talks about the fact that early in your life, money does directly buy happiness. It reduces fundamental burdens and stress. It affords you kind of early pleasures, which really directly drive happiness. And so what happens is we create this pattern that when the money bell rings, we get the cheese, right? Like we're like the little mouse. And that creates a very strong mental pattern that convinces us that that relationship, money bell ring, get cheese is going to continue into perpetuity. And it's very hard to crack that patterning that we have from our early years. So even once you get to the point where there are diminishing returns where it no longer drives that incremental happiness where you should be focusing on these other types of wealth that you can use money as a tool to hopefully unlock. You don't realize that. And so you keep marching down the path thinking that money is going to continue to drive happiness until it's too late. And that's where you end up in this rich yet miserable existence that we see all too often. You mentioned four types of professional time. So can you explain that? What those mean? Because I think that a lot of people understand, okay, fine. I have to spend time on things outside of work. But within the context of work, how do I allocate my energy in time? Yeah. So this idea of four types of professional time is the idea that in a regular professional schedule, there are four ways that you can spend your time. One is management, which is basic tasks, emails, meetings, processing things, like very simple management tasks. That probably ends up being like 80 plus percent of most professional people's time. The second type is creation. That is when you're actually creating or building something. That could be making a deck. It could be doing analysis. It could be coding, but it's creating something. That ends up being the rest of the time for most people. These other two types of time basically get forgotten, but they are so important for changing your outcomes. The third type of time is consumption, meaning this is when you're actually consuming things at the top of the funnel. This is reading. This is learning. This is listening to things. This is where you're actually incepting new ideas into your brain. Most of us spend zero time on that structurally, and then the fourth type of time is ideation. That's when you're actually thinking. That's when you're creating the space, as we talked about earlier, to zoom out and actually ask yourself the bigger questions about the things you're working on. Consumption and ideation get lost in a typical professional calendar. You spend the vast majority of your time on management, a little bit of time on creation, and consumption and ideation are nowhere to be found. The problem is that when you are in that management-focused loop, that's when you end up being like the rocking horse. Where all you're doing is emailing and sitting in meetings, and you're not actually making forward progress. Consumption and ideation are what enable you to have the 10 or 100X outcomes on things, because that's where you're incepting new ideas, where you're actually thinking about what really matters, the bigger picture questions, where you can focus in on the things that matter, and work smart, not hard. Management time is like very much the time for money trade. It's the endless loop that we get stuck in, and so thinking about this in your own calendar, the exercise I walk through in the book when I talk about this is to color code your calendar across those four types of time. Color code things, according to whether it was management, creation, consumption, or ideation, and then look at what your mix of time is across the week. And once you have a sense for what your current mix is, then you can try to more strategically put together a calendar that actually does carve out windows for consumption ideation, and hopefully reclaims a little bit of the management time to put it towards creation. So I would say that what you described is the majority of people, but the people that have bought into the concept of consumption and ideation, which I think is a lot of your audience and a lot of people listen to podcasts as well. I have discovered another problem, which is over consumption and over ideation and no action. So to people that do nothing but consume podcasts, read newsletters, read books, non-stop, and they think through a million different ideas and they have shiny objects syndrome, what's your wisdom for them? How do once you actually graduate the level where you do the act? Yeah, that's going to be the whole podcast. I mean, it's useful to the ice, but you know, I'm sure you see this as well. Yeah, I mean, the reality is that the answer you seek is found in the action you avoid. Information gathering is a dangerous drug. A lot of people in this day and age are getting all their dopamine from information gathering. They read atomic habits and they think they're good at habits. You know, they go and read the book and they think they get the thing. When in reality, you need to get your dopamine from action. So you need to consume some, but then act a whole lot on the back of it. The rule that I have, which is just kind of a funny rule is I carry around this little pocket notebook, sitting in my backpack over there. And I use it because I like to write things down during the course of the day. I'm going to have an interesting conversation with someone write something down, spark some idea, read something or write something down. My rule with the notebook is that I have to act on anything I write down within 24 hours. Meaning I have to year go deeper on it. I have to log it somewhere. I have to learn more about it. I have to, or I have to mark it as like not interesting and cross off, but I have to do something with it. So it can't just become this mindless loop of like, oh, I'd write down everything that I come across. There has to be an action attached to the thing that I log is interesting. And I have found that simple sort of triggers like that really help with reminding me that I have to go do the thing. It's not talking about the thing. It's not brainstorming the thing. It's not asking questions about the thing. You literally have to do the thing. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.