Sahil Bloom - Author | The Transformative Truth About Money & Happiness

The idea that the amount of time you have left with the people that you care about most in the world is so finite, so countable that you can put it on a few hands was jarring. Sahil Bloom is redefining what it means to be wealthy. A former Stanford baseball player turned private equity investor, he walked away from the traditional path to build something bigger. I was out for a drink with an old friend. He asked how I was doing, and I said that it had started to get difficult being so far away from my parents on the East Coast, and he looked at me and just said, okay, so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die, and I remember feeling like I had been punched in the gut. That one moment, that recognition, that my pursuit of money as the end all be all as the thing that was going to create the good life had been misguided. His insights on growth, wealth, and meaning now reach millions weekly through the Curiosity Chronicle, and his debut book The Five Types of Wealth is a blueprint for a richer, more fulfilling life earning praise from Apple CEO Tim Cook. As the founder of SRB Holdings and SRB Ventures, he owns 10 businesses and has invested in 40 plus startups, including multiple unicorns. His mission to help people stop trading time for money and start living on their own terms. Later, you'll be dead. If you don't build those things into your life now, you're just going to regret it later. Later, you'll be dead. Sit down and think about what actually matters to you. The only way to feel successful is if you create your own definition of success. Welcome to Success Story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. HubSpot not only supports this show, but they support entrepreneurs. That's why it's such a huge fan of HubSpot, and I'm very grateful for HubSpot for supporting the show because they help entrepreneurs. As a fellow entrepreneur, I know it takes a lot to grow your business, a lot of audience attracting, a lot of sales, a lot of marketing, a lot of lead scoring, a lot of channel management, a lot of content, a lot of long days. Late nights, a lot of weekends, a lot of wishing there wasn't easier way, but there is. With Breeze, this is HubSpot's new collection of AI tools. It's easier than ever for marketers, for entrepreneurs, to attract audiences, to increase leads, to score customers, and to close deals fast. Which means, pretty soon, your company will have a lot to celebrate. Visit HubSpot.com slash marketers to learn more. You spent three years researching, interviewing people about wealth, only to conclude that money isn't the only thing. It's one small piece of the puzzle. So what was the moment the first made you realize, and question society's definition of wealth? I was out for a drink with an old friend in May of 2021. And at that time in my life, I had spent the first seven years in my career chasing the cultural societal definition of success, which is money. I had steadily risen through the ranks in the world of finance, making more and more money each year, and become very narrowly focused on money being the key to me, eventually waking up one day in this like world of happiness and success and stress-free living. Along that journey, a lot of other areas of my life had begun to suffer. I had started drinking too much. My relationships with my parents, with my sister, with my wife had been strained. My mental health was in a rough place. And so that was the context that led into this drink that I got together with this old friend. And in May of 2021, I sat down with him, and he asked how I was doing. And I said that it started to get difficult, being so far away from my parents on the East Coast. They're getting older. I'd started to see kind of the chinks in the armor, if you will, started to recognize their mortality, health things starting to happen. And he asked how old they were. And I said, mid-60s. And he said, how often do you see them? I said, maybe once a year. And he looked at me and just said, okay, so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die. And I remember feeling like I had been punched in the gut. I mean, the idea that the amount of time you have left with the people that you care about most in the world is so finite, so countable that you can put it on a few hands. Was jarring, shook me to the core. And the next morning, I told my wife that I thought we needed to make a change in our life. And within 45 days, we had left California, moved across the country, and I left my job. And that was really the start of this entire journey, that one moment, that recognition that my pursuit of money as the end all be all as the thing that was going to create the good life had been misguided that a wealthy life was about so much more than just the pursuit of financial riches. And when you think about the sort of the steps you took, I feel like people do have that, that revelation moment in their life, but they don't take such drastic steps more often than not. So why do you think in your mind, it was so easy for you to quit the job, jump into something new. When so many people struggle with that, and they say, don't worry, I'll get to it eventually. I'll value my relations with my parents eventually. I'll value my health eventually. I'll value all these other types of wealth eventually, but then they look up and they're 80, 90 years old and their whole life has passed them by because I think that what I just described is more often than not how people actually approach that thought they don't actually take action immediately. My grandfather always used to say this one phrase that was hammered into my brain, which was later you'll be dead. And you find that life is filled with the latest, you say, I'll spend more time with my kids later, I'll spend more time with my friends later, I'll focus on the health later, I'll find my purpose later. And the reality is that later just becomes another word for never. Because those things are not going to exist in the same way later, your kids are not going to be five years old later, your spouse is not going to be there for you later, your health won't be there later, you won't magically find an uncover your purpose and freedom later. And so if you don't build those things into your life now, if you don't take actions to design them into your life now, you're just going to regret it later later, you'll be dead. And I just, I think in that moment, his words really echoed through me, he had passed away 10 years prior to that. And there's so much wisdom that I feel I've accumulated and received from him when I was a kid that still sticks with me today. And that was one of those pieces of later, you'll be dead. When you look at a lot of your work, it centered around curiosity and asking big questions, what prompted you or what helped you realize that sort of the truth that most people should live is on the other side of curiosity and big questions. I have always had this belief that the greatest discoveries in life come not from finding the right answers, but from asking the right questions, from sitting with the questions, because the realization there is actually you already have the answers within you. You just haven't asked the right questions yet to reveal them. All of these things that I'm talking about in the book actually, you know this stuff, you know that your relationships are going to be actually what create a lot of texture and happiness and wealth in your life, you know that your health is extraordinarily important, you know that building your purpose and growth into your life is important, you know these things. And yet you don't act in line with them simply because you have not sat with the questions enough to clarify that these things are a part of what a wealthy life looks like that these things should be top of mind for you. And so I think that fundamentally what that comes down to for most people is creating enough space in your life to actually sit with the questions. Most people exist in this infinite loop of stimulus and response it's like you know everything's coming in emails text messages, pings, whatever and then immediately having a response to it everything's urgent you're constantly in this loop. If you live in that world, you never have the space to sit with a question because you don't have the moment there's no moment for you to actually sit with something. And so a big part of the call to action in this whole book is go create that space in your life to actually just sit with the questions even if it's for five minutes talk about it with someone journal about it do something to create the space because when you create the space for the questions the right answers reveal themselves. So what I just mentioned at the beginning about people come to the same realization is you but then saying later later later later it's a hundred percent because they don't give them this they don't give themselves the space to ask themselves the hard questions. And I think that we are in this productivity obsessed society. And I'm a victim of it for sure because a second I have five minutes to spare I'm spinning up a new website or figuring out a new project or trying to do something new right. And I think a lot of people listed this podcast are very similar to do myself and probably you at some point as well where if you sit in silence you feel unproductive you feel less than you feel like you're lazy feel like you're not living up to your maximum potential. I think it's very wise to be able to take time and just ask what am I actually doing because we all end up on these hamster wheels whether or not it's in our own business or whether or not it's working for somebody else and it is very uncomfortable feeling to be selfish enough to take time for ourselves. So using you as an example as an avatar for how do we do this. I always ask people like what's this inflection point what's this major breakthrough that you had and it was you realize you're going to die someday you realize you only have 15 more times where you're going to see your family you're not happy with this and you took time. How did you force yourself what is the strategy that you used to separate from work and take time for yourself. Meaningful time where you didn't get that anxiety and stress and need to go do something immediately. So the actual strategy and tactic and it's one that I actually write about in the book is what I call a think day. So Bill Gates in the 1980s famously started what he calls a think week which is for a week of time once a year he would go off the grid completely shut off from all technology and all contact and just bring a whole bunch of stuff to read and think about. And he credits these think weeks with being transformative for Microsoft's trajectory. We don't have a week where we can do that necessarily in our life we have kids we have responsibilities etc. But you can carve out a few hours once a month or a few hours once a quarter to create a think day a day when you just zoom out from your life and think from the 10,000 foot view because what happens in life again is that you are first player right you are first person in your life's video game and you're living in the weeds and you're right in the game. And when you are there there's a lot of good that comes from that you're really you can narrow in on details and really nail things. But there's a lot of bad in that you can't see the bigger picture of your life you can't see true north you can't see where you're headed and what whether that's a place you want to be headed or not. Doing that zooming out and asking some of the big picture questions that the book asks you to ask yourself is the exercise that I went through and that was when I left and why left that drink and I told my wife we wanted to make a change. The journey that started was creating a whole bunch of think days basically it was zooming out I didn't have the 80 to 100 hour week job anymore I was leaving I was an advisor I was no longer in a full time capacity. I was writing on Twitter which was definitely wasn't a full time job at the time you know like I didn't have something sucking up tons of time which was very uncomfortable. And by the way I think the single greatest challenge for anyone that wants to leave a nine to five job and go and become an entrepreneur is the lack of structure. When you are in a nine to five job you have perfect structure because someone is telling you what to do at all times you know exactly what meetings to go to what work you have to do what emails you have to send all that. When you become an entrepreneur no one is telling you what to do you wake up in the morning and you have to decide and for a lot of people that is so uncomfortable and disconcerting and unless you create some level of structure you feel very lost and aimless you can wander around. The think day is a very good middle ground where it creates structure to doing something unstructured. So it's kind of a way to bridge the gap if you will in your own life between that and the necessity that you have in the calling and the pull that you feel towards structure but creating it in sort of an unstructured setting. I just want to take a quick break and thank the HubSpot podcast network for supporting success story for the past two years now the HubSpot podcast network has other incredible podcasts like my first million now. If you are an entrepreneur or you are ready to turn your entrepreneurial dreams into millions you have to listen to my first million. It's a show that is revolutionizing business podcasting. It's hosted by Sam Parr, Sean Perry. This is a HubSpot podcast network original. It brings you unfiltered conversations with self-made millionaires who actually tell you how they did it. If you want to learn how Alex Ramose built his fitness empire or how Sophia Amaruso turned nasty girl into a fashion phenomenon. These aren't just success stories. They're the blueprints for your own journey to the top. Each episode breaks down the exact strategies and hidden opportunities that you can use right now. Don't just dream about your first million learn how to make it. 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First idea, and we can talk about any of these, is the fact that you mentioned you spoke to your wife and she was supportive of this. Relationships are super important. We can talk about why that is and how relationships can totally sideline any of these ideas or any of your initiatives. Also writing. I find writing to be the most therapeutic and helpful tool to structure my thoughts. And I actually have written about how AI is actually going to be especially generative tools are going to be very detrimental when people outsource their thinking because I think writing is a lot more than just create great content people to read. But if you think about all the different things that happened in your life, whether or not it was writing on Twitter, which then led you to writing a incredible newsletter, which then led you to writing a book or the relationships you had with your parents, your wife, your kids. What do you think was the most impactful and let you become successful at your own thing, let you actually action on the thoughts that you had and the ideas that you had and the entrepreneurial vision that you had. I think that having a wife that believed in me before I really believed in myself around this shift was ultimately the unlock that enabled everything else. I've often thought about the fact that sometimes in life, the most powerful thing is when one person believes in you before you believe in yourself. It gives you the permission, it gives you the strength to go after the thing and to go create that initial ounce of momentum that you can then feed off of and run with. But in that moment, when you are at a complete standstill, when you have no evidence to prove that you can do the thing, when you have no momentum built, one person being that tiny nudge to go do it can be all that you need. And my wife was that for me. I mean, the fact that she said, yes, when I said, hey, let's go make this change, when I was leaving a lucrative job, where like, look, I had great colleagues, I had great firm, like I was doing well. There was a whole lot of reasons on the outside looking into just stay. And it's one of the hardest things, right? Like, being on a bad path is not that hard because it screams at you every single day to step off it. It's obvious. Being on a good path that isn't yours is much more difficult. And that's the one that traps most people. It's a good path. It looks good on the surface. It's just not yours. Golden handcuffs. And it keeps you there exactly. And we've seen that. How many friends you have that are stuck in that trap, right? Or they're like, yeah, they're, you know, managing director or whatever firm and they have to just keep doing it because their lifestyle is at the level where they have to keep paying the bills. And there's no other job that will pay them that much. And it traps them. And you get one life. So you're going to, I had this realization that like, I was going to wake up in 50 years and wonder what the fuck I just did with my life. And that's a terrifying thought. I mean, I would, there's, I would rather fail miserably than it, but like fail miserably is the cap that are my own ship. Then wonder what the hell I just did with my life because at the end of the day, like, I need to be able to provide for my family. I know I'm willing to do anything to do that. So if I fail miserably at the thing that I'm doing and I have to go like work at a McDonald's, I'll go work at a McDonald's to provide for my family because I take that role very seriously. But ultimately, like, that is me failing as the captain of my ship, rather than me doing okay as like some deck hand on someone else's. Well, you're, what you're alluding to and I've heard you speak with us before the regret minimization framework. That's really it. And you can talk about what that means and how it sort of applied to your life. And then I want to also understand how you discovered these five types of wealth. Where did that thought come from? Yeah, so regret minimization originates from Jeff Bezos, which he talks about when he was leaving his lucrative path in the hedge fund world at D.E. Shaw to go start this online bookstore. Seemingly completely ludicrous decision to do that was leaving like a seven figure plus a year job and a path to making, you know, multiple eight figures for sure, maybe into the nine figures if he just stayed on the safe track. To go and do this thing that had never been done before. And his logic when he did it was thinking about zooming forward to his eight year old self, would he regret not doing this thing? And if the answer is yes, then he should go do it. And it was he was going to regret not having pursued this thing. He would rather pursue it and fail than not pursue it. And so he decided to do it. I thought about that at various points in my life with my own journey of that exact same thing, whatever. But not pursuing this with everything that I have. And one of the things the interesting insights in that that everyone should take home is most decisions in life are reversible. We view them as irreversible when in fact they are much more reversible than we think if you leave your like consulting job to go try something of your own. For two years, you try it and it doesn't really work out. You can go get another consulting job. Everyone thinks like, oh, if I leave Deloitte, I'm never going to be able to go back to Deloitte Deloitte will take you back. It might not be your same team, but like those jobs exist. And now you are actually a much more interesting candidate because you've gone and experimented with something and built some skills and learned something and failed. You are much more interesting. You can go get another job. You're not going to be jobless just because you left that one track as much as your firm might want to convince you of that. It's just not true. These doors are as as Bezos calls them. They're two way doors. You can walk back through them. And so reminding yourself of that is important. Two second question on how I came to kind of this understanding of this idea of the five types of wealth. I went on a journey to immerse myself in the human experience after making that shift in my life to understand what were the things that actually contributed to a life of happiness and fulfillment. I knew that money might be one of them, but it certainly wasn't the only one. And so I went and I talked to thousands of people over the course of several years. You know that those years lead up to today now. And I took everyone through one particular visualization exercise, which was to ask them to imagine their ideal day at 80 years old. Vividly imagine it. We actually visualize and lay out what you're doing, who you're with, where you are, how you feel, what you're thinking about, all of those things, your ideal day. And what I found was that everyone basically wants the same thing. And it's basically four things. Time, people, purpose, and health. Time, they want freedom, they want to feel free people, they want to be surrounded by people they care about friends, family, purpose, they want to feel some sort of meaning about what they're thinking about and doing on a daily basis. And then health, they want to feel good body and mind. Money was an enabler to some of those, but it was not an end in and of itself. It was a tool, but not the goal, if you will. And that was very clarifying for me, that idea that, okay, all of these things are what contribute to that feeling of a wealthy life. But what I recognized was that the scoreboard in traditional society is broken. The scoreboard is money, because it is the only one that is so measurable. It's very hard to measure these other areas, but not an easy way to do that. So as a result, we just focus on the one we can measure, which is money. And so what I set out to do and what I try to do in the book is to create a better way for you to measure your life across all of these areas. And once you have the measurement, it unlocks a world of possibility. Because when you measure the right things, then you can make decisions based on that broader, more comprehensive measurement, and you can design your life on the basis of that broader, more comprehensive measurement, rather than just being so narrowly focused on money that it's the only thing that you focus in on. Out of all the five kinds of wealth, what do you think? I'll ask you personally, I guess, I guess 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 breeds 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. 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 pay attention. It's not painful, and people have a tough time internalizing a 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 up 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 Kairos 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 the social media saying, hey, you don't drive a Lambo or you don't fly private or you don't get to go to St. Bartz 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, the question I like to ask when it comes to 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 apply 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 is made into your 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 oh, yeah, it's 2004. I had no idea until I had to cite the book. That's time. Yeah. But Brad Pitt has this line in it, you know, speaking as 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, you know, rich yet miserable existence that we see all too often. You mentioned four types of professional time. So can you explain that what, 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 and 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. And 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. And 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 in accepting 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, do 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, focus 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 accepting 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, nonstop, and they think through a million different ideas and they have shiny objects syndrome, what's your wisdom for them? And once you actually graduate the level where you do act. Yeah, that's going to be the whole podcast is I mean, it's it's it's useful to us, but you know, I'm sure you see this as well. Yeah, the 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 back, back over there. And I use it because I like to write things down during the course of the day, 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 either 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. A big thank you to indeed for supporting success story because hiring people is one of the hardest things you're ever going to have to do as an entrepreneur as a founder as somebody who's trying to build a business. It's important to hire well and find the right person, but it takes so much time and it's so labor intensive. Because like most entrepreneurs, you have a thousand things going on. 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And I realized that half of my US shows weren't available in Canada. Super annoying. Fliped on Nord VPN within seconds. I got access to everything now. It's not just about watching shows what makes Nord VPN a game changer. Really just imagine having this personal security guard for your entire digital life. With just one click, you're connected to one of their 7100 servers across 118 countries. I mainly use it for accessing streaming services when I travel, but I've also saved hundreds on flight bookings by checking prices from different countries. And their new threat protection pro blocks all those endless pop ups and suspicious links before they even get to me. And what I love most is how simple it is. One account, 10 devices, so laptop, phone, iPad, everything's covered and the speed. Honestly, it's so fast that I forget that I'm even using a VPN. And the best part I've got a special offer just for success story listeners. So head over to nordvpn.com slash success. And you'll not only get their best discount, but they'll throw in an extra four months on the two year plan. And don't worry about commitment because they offer a 30 day money back guarantee. The link is in the episode description. Trust me, it's worth checking out especially if you travel or stream content regularly. That's nordvpn.com slash success. Let's talk about social wealth. So relationships. What is the concept like what when you say social wealth does it mean kids, you know, parents, which I'm sure it does, but what other what other types of relationships are involved in social wealth fundamentally social wealth is about depth of connection to a few close relationships. And then breath of connection to something bigger than yourself, your broader networks, community, spiritual networks, whatever that might be that sort of something that you were connected to that is bigger than just you. And it doesn't matter whether the depth of connection comes from parents and close family or if it's a few super close friends, people that you really love and care about. The important point there is that depth is built through long seasons of vulnerability and shared struggle honesty vulnerability shared struggle or what build that depth what cultivate that depth. We know scientifically that shared struggle releases oxytocin which is created to feeling of love and connection with someone else there's no cheating depth you can't just like wake up one day and have a deep relationship you have to crawl through the mud with people you have to have been there for them during dark times in order to cultivate that deep relationship where I can call you at three in the morning needing help and you pick up the phone that can't be faked. And the absence of that is what loneliness is the absence of those few deep relationships it doesn't have to be 10 it doesn't have to be five it doesn't even have to be three a couple of close relationships one truly deep relationship. Staves off loneliness and so that is really where where you find the foundation of social office in a few deep relationships and then building off that into something with breath something that has your connection to a bigger thing. So with social media I'm assuming that most people default to these transactional pair of social relationships that are not deep at all correct. I mean social media has made us more connected to anyone in the world but less connected to the people sitting right in front of us it's sort of the paradox of connectedness were more connected but less connected to the people right in front of us. Yeah and this is I would argue one of the most fundamental problems of the 21st century that we face loneliness is the real pandemic if you will. You know there's shocking statistics that are now coming out I recently saw that teenagers in the United States are spending 70% less time in person with their friends than they were two decades ago 70%. I mean terrifying to think about the impact that that has but you see the impact it is so you see like depression anxiety suicide anxiety all of it. Yeah and it all and covid covid just exacerbated everything exacerbated everything and look we know that relationships are the key to living a happy healthy life. The Harvard study of adult development was this study that followed the lives of 2000 plus people over the course of 85 years and they found that the single greatest predictor of physical health at age 80 was relationships satisfaction at age 50. Not cholesterol blood pressure smoking and drinking habits but how you felt about your relationships determine your physical health outcomes. And so we know again relationships relationships relationships like we know this but we don't think to invest in relationships in the same way that we think to invest in our financial future. That's one of the mindset shifts that you need to have that this book will precipitate is it's obvious you that investing a little bit of money now will compound into the future investing a little bit $10 $100 this week will continue to compound I keep doing that. The same thing applies to your relationships and arguably your relationships are an even better investment descending the one text getting together coffee with the friend calling your parents those tiny little investments you make today compound positively into the future in the exact same way with relationships as they do with financial well being. What are front row people in the social wealth section of the book the big question that frames up the section is this idea of who are your front row people and I walk the readers to this visualization exercise of imagining they have died and you're at your funeral. People are walking in people are crying they're looking around hugging each other and everyone sits down who was in the front row at your funeral really visualize them think about who those people are those are your front row people those are the people who truly matter in your life. And then you have to ask yourself the question are you cherishing those people are you being a front row person to them are you being a front row person to someone else out there in the world. That is a call to action around depth that is a call to action around recognizing who those people are in your life that occupy that sacred space. I think that part of the reason why I even like doing these in person podcasts is because I think that we are at a point where it's so easy to default to virtual everything and online everything. And I feel like it's so easy to just build these semi transactional relationships the ability to sit down with somebody in person to me is is worth the time and energy and effort and even if I'm trying to build a relationship with somebody new like I rather go to the city sit down with them in person grab a coffee in person as inconvenient as that may be because I've found that it's almost in my opinion impossible to build a relationship from scratch virtually. I completely agree I mean it's the reason I'm here right like it's just this energy it's a different energy yeah I mean it's it's totally selfish on my part but I'm like yeah I go out of my way to just fly somewhere to see someone I like I one of my dearest friends this guy I'm Ali Abdullah is like a big new type yeah I know me and he and I didn't know each other four years ago or something like that and a couple years ago I was like I like I really want to get to know him we interact a little bit on Twitter. And I sent him a text and was like hey I'm going to be in London next week you want to grab dinner on Tuesday and he was like oh yeah sure let's great let's make a reservation and then I went and booked a plane flight to London like I had no reason to be in London I just wanted to spend some time with them and I booked some meetings around it and I made it useful and like did some things but it was an example of like lower the bar for just like hopping on a plane or like just driving and going and seeing someone and incredible things get built now he's become one of my good friends we work together much stuff we started business together like there have been a whole lot of incredible things that have started on the back of me taking one like silly action like that but no like not a lot of people do that anymore it's it's even in the same city people jump on zoom calls as opposed to taking the effort to just go and sit and meet somebody in person listen we are at an interesting point in history because we've never had access to this technology before so I have no idea what the implications are of this but even if you're trying to build a business I've never built a business and tried to hire somebody completely virtual I've managed people virtual but I've always met them in person first and I think that this is going to create a lot of friction where there doesn't have to be friction because we defaulted these easy tools that allow us access all over the world. The funny irony there is that the tools that are supposed to reduce friction are creating phrase or animal sound right it's like it's it's not supposed to be easy all these things we've tried to make all these things easy it's actually not supposed to be easy the most meaningful things in life are so meaningful because they are hard precisely because they're hard otherwise they wouldn't be meaningful they wouldn't be valuable if they were easy to acquire easy to get so like the relationships you want or on the other side of a whole bunch of hard conversations and things that you don't want to do. The body you want is on the whole other side of a whole lot of workouts the you know business you want to build is on the other side of a whole lot of tough hours of work all of these things are supposed to be hard that's the point but people want easy people want instant yeah that's what that's why they're not going to win I mean it's just the unfortunate reality right is like the reason that most people will remain where they are in life is because they are not willing to do the hard thing. And so when people like I recently had a conversation with the 27-year-old I was hosting this event actually with Ali in Hong Kong and he told me that he didn't like his job and he wanted to create this big change in his life and you wanted to build his own thing and go build this impactful business and so I said okay great and he was like yeah but I don't have the time to do it I was like okay well walk me through your day give me the structure of your day because I'm big on like you just have to build structure around these things. Walk me through his day and basically at the end of the day there's an hour of like Netflix and chill and so I said well can you take like 30 minutes of that hour and put it towards work towards this new life that you're trying to build and he said no I need that time to unwind and I looked him in the face and just said do you need to unwind more than you need to change your life. And I didn't mean it to be harsh I meant it quite simply the reality that it requires trade out there are sacrifices to be made if you want to go and achieve an extraordinary outcome you have to be willing to put in an extraordinary input on one end it is a trade off between these two you either can decide you want to change your life or you can decide you need to unwind and you have to make the choice no one's forcing you to go change your life you get to decide but be honest about the choice. I think it would let me know this was you are not I remember somebody telling me this and it hit home with me because I do this activity as well so I think you are giving advice to somebody who wanted to build a business and you ask them to break down their day and first thing in the morning where they had the most energy they went to the gym. Was that you that was you okay and I was like that's very it's such simple advice but it's like really what are you prioritizing in your life because your calendar will speak you know what the calendar will speak your action speak so really if you want to build something incredible put most of your energy most of your time towards it and I think that we almost what we are very good aligned to ourselves though what if I were the best it was so good at it question in the book around the exact thing of if I if a third party if someone else were to observe you for a week what would they say your priorities are and is that different than what you would say because you often have two types of priorities you have the priorities you say you have and then you have the priorities your actions show you have and being willing to hold yourself to the fire around that asking yourself that question to zoom out and look at it requires a level of self awareness but is a really important task but it's not even like we do this purposefully so why that hit home with me is because I didn't always used to go to the gym in the morning when I was actually building I put my energy towards like eat the frog urgent important tasks I didn't want to do like that was sort of how I lived and all of a sudden you're not building anything anymore and you default to this very comfortable routine and then you try and build something new but you're only giving it a half ass effort and you're only putting energy into it in the afternoon and you fall into these patterns that are not serving you very easily without even thinking about it then it takes some you know wisdom a tweet whatever for you to wake up but I think that that's something that we have to be careful of because again even if we were high performing at one point in our life we have to find ways to maintain that high performance and I think that it gets so comfortable me and humans are inherently lazy creatures like we always default to the easiest outcome possible and if it doesn't serve us then we have to find a way to sort of bring ourselves back but what I've noticed you do very well is you obviously that work for yourself you create structure you always find a way to pull yourself back to doing the hard work things I mean even if you look at your YouTube for the longest time you're doing like cold plunges every day or so the point is if we want to build all these areas of wealth in our life I think that I think that we have to have a lot of difficult moments that will facilitate these areas of upskilling and up leveling and creating all these different kinds of wealth so what is your strategy or your framework for always forcing yourself to do the hard thing and not defaulting to this easier life I think the reality is that momentum is the most powerful force in the world and it doesn't actually require the like long valley of struggle that we think so when you are standing where you are in life and you want to get to the other side of this journey which is going to be the life that you want to build that manifests as this hugely intimidating journey I can't possibly see how I'm going to get all the way over there and you build it up in your mind as like oh my god there's a thousand steps of really challenging climbing through shit to get from where I am to where I need to go that's not really what it is all it is is you have to solve one problem you have to do the one thing today and the reason that one thing today is so important is because the one thing today creates a little bit of momentum and that little bit of momentum has extraordinary powers in your life and so the whole thing with the book and the reason I structured it the way I did is so that in each of these areas you can take some tiny action today to build that little ounce of momentum because the ounce of momentum is a catalyst for more movement it's catalyst for more action that continues to build upon it but when you stand still if you do nothing if you don't create that initial kinetic energy you're not getting anywhere well you probably start to progress yeah and in all of these areas you will you atrophy right like we know if you don't do anything for your physical health you will regress if you don't do anything for your relationships your grass so that's the important piece is like just take the one tiny action the one text the one 15 minute walk the five minute break between meetings that you start implementing those little things that create momentum that march you toward the life that you actually want to live I want to ask a couple questions about mental wealth because I think that listen people inherently understand physical wealth and we can go into it and financial wealth quite quite well I think mental wealth social wealth time wealth are more abstract concepts I'm also curious before I jump into before I jump into mental wealth is there a piece of this where spiritual wealth plays into sort of your I don't know your fulfillment in life because that's one thing that you don't discuss but that's something I think people struggle with is or does it fall under one of the other categories yeah spiritual wealth is covered in both social wealth and mental wealth in the sense of connecting with a community broader than yourself and that can be through spiritual community and then in mental wealth spirituality is a tremendous way that people create space to wrestle with these bigger questions in life to connect with something bigger than themselves and that is in both cases very important and so if it is done through spirituality I think that is a tremendous source of wealth for people but not everyone will connect with something and feel you know a spiritual presence and so it is not its own stand alone because it sort of exists across several of them I love it okay mental wealth so this is more developing cognitive ability keeping your mind quick and basically you're just maintaining your cognitive health so if you think about some of the strategies you use to sort of upskill your own mental wealth or your own cognition what would be some of the ones that sort of are the most useful for you yeah so the one ad that I would make there is that it is not just growth and sort of cognitive ability or your purpose it is the feeling of a higher order purpose or heroes journey that allows you to align short and long term decision making in your life it is your own ability to sort of maintain your distinctiveness in a world that wants you to consent to sameness Jeff Bezos in his final quarterly shareholder letter talked about the fight for your distinctiveness the actual fact that you have to fight every single day to maintain your distinctiveness in a world that wants you to just blend in that wants you to just fall into equilibrium and that is true for your own life you have to fight you actually have to put in energy to be and maintain your own path to carve your own way it is much more difficult than just consenting to the sameness that people want from you that is part of mental wealth feeling that distinct journey your own heroes journey that you were walking down in terms of actual strategies I think that we've talked about one earlier the writing piece journaling to me is one of the most powerful ways to build a life of mental wealth and I for the longest time thought of journaling as this like 30 plus minute endeavor that I had to engage in light some candles create the mood sit right and because I built it up so much in my mind I never did it and I developed something that's much simpler that I think will be really useful to people which I call my 111 method the whole idea is that three to five minutes every evening sit down right before bed and write down on a piece of paper one win from the day that is one thing you felt good about one point of stress tension or anxiety something that you want to get off your brain and onto the paper and then one point of gratitude something that you felt grateful for during the day if you do that it'll take you three to five minutes max and you will have an enormous amount of mental clarity and peace prior to going to bed it will improve your sleep quality it will improve your presence of mind your clarity of mind that is a very very powerful tool you said it extremely well earlier which is you cannot write clearly unless you are thinking clearly and so it is an incredible tool for deep thinking to just sit and write like if you are struggling with something write it write it out and clarify your thinking around it through the writing process you mentioned mental wealth is not just sort of improving your cognitive health but it's also about having clear purpose this is you define it as like having a north star so to speak right so what would be the exercise that somebody can go through to actually find their north star or their clear purpose and also is there any sort of evidence based or science based data that shows that actually articulating a clear purpose and defining it helps you achieve it I guess because it helps you live longer does it actually people who self define as having a clear purpose have lower all cause mortality incredible really yeah you know what why is that I mean it aligns what you do I would like the lack of purpose the feeling that you don't know what you're supposed to do on a daily basis is the ultimate feeling of lost I have friends who have made over a hundred million dollars hundreds of millions of dollars playing sports professional athletes at the absolute pinnacle of their craft get done they're around 30 35 years old and they are the most miserable people I've ever met and it is the saddest thing in the world they have more money than God more money than they'll ever know what to do with but they are miserable and it is because they don't have a purpose yet they haven't found what their purpose is for the season of life for the longest time they had a clear purpose a clear identity of who they were and what they were doing every day they knew they had to get up had to go to training they had to go to their game whatever was they had a purpose now they don't that feeling is you feeling lost you feeling stuck you feeling like there's no reason for you really waking up in the morning purpose you feel like you know what you have to do and that purpose changes across different seasons of your life so when you're young it might be financial wealth building you're kind of in your foundation season and it could be your family then it might be a community or spiritual thing it it changes but you need something you need something that you know you're waking up for and you know it's the reason that a lot of really old people end up getting depressed too is because they no longer feel they have a purpose they feel like a burden on their family they no longer have people that need them I was going to say just one thing so it's not you mentioned athletes that have hundreds of millions of dollars I just read a blog that the founder of loom just wrote out because he had a billion dollar exit and the blog was all about I have no purpose in my life anymore yeah I mean it's it's a common I absolutely wild it's a common thread with entrepreneurs I mean I talk to several billionaire entrepreneurs during this process and one of them talked about the fact that one of the most miserable days in his life was the day after he sold his company because he didn't know what to do he was like for 10 years I had known exactly what I was going to do every single day I was going into the trenches with my team and the money hit my count we celebrated that night and I woke up the next morning and was like I don't know what to do and he said that the next day he sent a text to the gang and was like we're getting the gang back together let's go build let's go build something yeah now he's working on you he's building you things and again it goes back to that idea that purpose purpose matters how do you find your purpose when you think about the exercise that you do to actually find your north star yeah there's an exercise in the book that leverages this Japanese concept of Ichigai which is sort of a relatively well known and famous concept and my sort of nuance take on it is there's like three overlapping circles what you love to do what you're good at and then what the world needs and what the world needs is the most interesting one there because the way you define a world really impacts how you would then think about what your purpose is I have always thought that your definition of world sort of expands over the course of your life so when you're first starting out your world is literally you it's like what do you need well you need to build a foundation as you continue to grow your world expands your family it's like you know your partner your children things like that and as you get much older usually people that have continued to achieve success their world becomes their community their local and regional community and then potentially the actual world it's the reason why so many financially extraordinarily successful people start thinking about trying to change the world and impact the world because their definition of world has expanded that is a useful exercise going through and you'll see it in the book but you can kind of go through and actually write down answers to these things as you go and start to craft what is that sort of overlap of those three worlds that might be that kind of higher order connected purpose for you listen dude you have I'm just looking at some of the things that I've written down there is so much wisdom in this book and it's phenomenal I know you took three years to write it which is also a whole mission in and of itself so congratulations if you and this is an unfair question but I have to ask it anyway so if you had to say there is one thing that I want people and it can't be action because you already said that so if there's one thing that you want people to take away from the book when they read it that would in your opinion fundamentally change their lives what would that thing be sit down and think about what actually matters to you not what culture has told you should matter not what your parents told you should matter not what your friends on your bosses but what actually matters to you what do you care about and then go take action to build your life around those things that is the whole message of the book it's not anything more profound than that it's to build a life around the things that you actually care about stop consenting to the default definitions of success that you've been handed and craft your own because the reality is the only way to feel successful is if you create your own definition of success you have to stop chasing someone else's definition of success you have to create your own create your own definition of what a wealthy life looks like and then go build your life around it have you thought about what your definition of success is five types of wealth impacting I want to create positive ripples in the world with everything that I do that is my mission that is my purpose and that can happen on a global level with things like this that I put out into the world that hopefully create this catalyst and chain reaction and it can happen on a local level with my family with my relationships and how I can lift people up to hopefully engage in their lots better but I think about that every single day how can I continue to create positive ripples in the world and if I can keep doing that for as long as I'm around that feels like a life well live beautiful life where do you want people to go obviously book will be when is when is it dropping February 4th I think it will be out by the time is it February 4th so Amazon anywhere you can get books is there a website yeah the five types of wealth dot com is the website and yeah last question ask everybody you've had an incredible life you built an incredible brand you teach incredible things to people and you help improve their lives if you're going to think about all the different pieces of wisdom that you've learnt that you've written about that you sort of garnered from people that you've interviewed and you wanted to leave and you could only leave one piece of wisdom with your children what piece of wisdom would that be never let the quest for more distract you from the beauty of enough