Afford Anything - Sahil Bloom: Which of the Five Wealth Types Are You Neglecting?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Think about how you spend an average day. Would the 10-year-old version of yourself be impressed? And would the 90-year-old version of yourself be jealous? To answer those questions and to give us that wide-lens view on not just our lives, but on five types of wealth, we are joined today by investor and entrepreneur Sahil Bloom. Sahil is the founder and managing partner of an early-stage venture fund that invests in over 60 startups. His newsletter, The Curiosity Chronicle, is read by more than one million people. And he shares with us today how he optimizes not just for financial wealth, but for wealth across a variety of domains. Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that understands you can afford anything but not everything.

Starting point is 00:00:49 Every choice carries a tradeoff. And that applies not just to your money, but to your time, focus, and energy. This show covers five pillars, financial psychology, increasing your interest. income, investing, real estate, and entrepreneurship. It's double eye fire. Today's episode takes a wide lens view of that letter F, financial psychology, by expanding our definition of wealth. I'm your host, Paula Pant, I trained in economic reporting at Columbia, and I help you understand money so you can build all types of wealth. Let's welcome Sahil to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. Oh, well, thank you for being here. But speaking of being

Starting point is 00:01:27 places. Seheal, how often do you see your parents? It's a great opening question. I see my parents several times a month now. Oh, that is a major change because there was once a time when you thought you would only see them probably 15 times in total before they pass away. Tell us about that. Yeah. The real turning point, the inflection point in my life was a single conversation that I had with an old friend. I was living in California at the time. My wife and I were there, my family, and I had grown up on the East Coast out here in the New York, Boston area. And I was seeing my parents about once a year. COVID had happened. Life had happened. We had built our whole life out on the West Coast. I had taken a job there. I was chasing financial

Starting point is 00:02:12 success. I was chasing career success. All of these things that we're told were supposed to chase. And along the way, I had really grown distant from the people that I was closest to. My parents, my sister, all on the East Coast. And I went out for a drink with an old friend in May of 2021. And we sat down and he asked me how I was doing. And I told him that it had started to get difficult being as far away from my parents as we were, very close with my parents growing up. And it had come to the time when I saw the chinks in the armor, if you will, in their health. They were getting to an age in their mid-60s where things start to happen. You start seeing parents or friends have health things happen. I'd started to see my parents slow down. And so it had started to become difficult being so far away. And my friend asked, how old are they? And I said, they're in their mid-60s. And he said, how often do you see them? I said, about once a year. And he just looked at me and 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. The idea that the amount of time you have left with the people you love most in the world is

Starting point is 00:03:22 so finite, so countable that you can literally put it on a few hands. was just jarring to me. The next morning I woke up and told my wife that I thought we needed to make a change. And within 45 days, I had left my job on the West Coast. We had sold our house in California and moved back to the East Coast to live within driving distance of both of our sets of parents. And so now when I say that I get to see my parents several times a month, and they're such a huge part of my son's life and I get to experience the joy that they have being grandparents and being so active in his life and get to be around them as much as I am. That is a representation of this entire idea of building a life around the things that matter to you most and taking

Starting point is 00:04:10 actions to actually change the things that you don't like about where you're headed. What that reminds me of is a famous blog post that Tim Urban put out, which I know you're acquainted with as well, in which he calculates not just the number of times that we'll see our parents before they pass away, but the number of books left to read in a life, even if you're young, even if you're 30 or 40, if you read one book a year, the number of books that you're going to read throughout the course of your life is actually relatively slim, and it goes like that with almost anything that's countable. It's a beautiful blog piece.

Starting point is 00:04:52 If you haven't read it, it's called The Tail End. And it was, I think, the first time that anyone had articulated time in the context of moments or experiences, whether it was moments with the people you love most, or whether it was experiences like reading the book or going for a walk on the beach or eating your favorite ice cream or whatever those things are. And I assume it was the genesis of this old friend of mine. I'm sure he had read that piece and sort of had that articulated when he said this to me. So I'm very grateful to Tim, who is now actually a close friend because I feel like Tim sort of changed my life in that way. You know, Sam Harris, the philosopher, also has a beautiful articulation of this. He says that there is a last time for everything in life. There is going to be a last time that you do it.

Starting point is 00:05:39 So all of the things that you love most dearly in the world, the moments you have with your children, the moments you have with your parents, with your siblings, with your best friends, your favorite peaceful moments, doing whatever it is that you love doing, there is going to be a last time that you get to do those. And I write about that. We don't appreciate time as our most precious asset. Time has this characteristic where you don't think about it at all. And then at the very end, it's the only thing you think about it. It suddenly goes to the top of your awareness. But when it's too late, you can't do anything about it at that point. And so a big call to action is to consider these things to actually ask yourself these questions earlier.

Starting point is 00:06:16 Shine a light on your path today so that you can take actions to change it. And the example that we talked about of our own decision to move across the country is a perfect example of that. That number 15 times before they die went from 15 to in the hundreds by taking a simple action, a drastic action, but a simple action. And so the lesson there is that you are actually much more in control than you think. It's very easy to sit in the passenger seat in your own life and to say, oh, well, these things happen, health things happen, life happens. I don't see my best friends as much, all of these things that we bemoan later on, but you are in control of taking a single action that can change many of those. You can text the friend and say, hey, let's go out for a lunch date once a month.

Starting point is 00:07:00 You can make sure that you are the catalyst for getting your group of closest friends together once a year for that annual trip that has fallen by the wayside. You can make sure that your family comes together. You can spend those present moments with your kids while they're still young and they still want you to tuck them into bed at night. All of those things are within your control. but only if you first develop the awareness of just how finite and fleeting they are. Right, because eventually there will be that last time that you tuck your kids into bed.

Starting point is 00:07:28 And you won't know when that last time is. It's only in hindsight that typically you don't even remember when that last time was. This is probably the scariest thing in the world to me right now. I have a two and a half year old son and not to get overly personal, but for several years, my wife and I had struggled to conceive prior to my son being born. It was while we were were living in California, I was making a lot of bad decisions, both internally and externally in my own life, chasing a lot of the wrong things, drinking seven nights a week, not treating myself well, not being present with the people I loved most. And it was a strain on our life, and we were struggling in that way. We made this big life change. We moved back to the East Coast. I shifted

Starting point is 00:08:11 my focus and started prioritizing the right things in my life, and my wife got pregnant, naturally. I'm not a particularly religious person, but it felt like one of those moments in life where God winked at you. The second we've made this decision and made these changes, life came into alignment and everything fell into place as it should. And now my wife and I have so much gratitude for the fact that we were able to have our son that he's with us, that knock on wood, he's healthy and happy. And I am so deeply aware of just how short this window of time is that we have with him. where for 10 years, you are your child's favorite person in the entire world. You are literally everything to them. And then after that 10 years, they have other favorite people.

Starting point is 00:08:59 They have best friends. They have girlfriends, boyfriends, partners, spouses. They have their own children. And you will never occupy that same place in their life. But for that 10 years, you are literally everything to them. And so I am so hyper aware and focused on during that 10-year window, making sure that we are present, making sure that we do give him our energy in that way, so that we can just embrace it, so that we don't lose sight of the fact that it could be the last

Starting point is 00:09:26 time on any given day that he wants us to tuck him into bed or do those things with him. Well, if you've got 10 years and he's two and a half, that's a quarter over already. I know. And that's the scariest part of it, right? It's what makes these things so precious, though, is the fact that they are finite. There's this quote from one of my favorite movies, Troy, where Brad Pitt is playing Achilles, and he says that the gods envy us because we are mortal. And there's this whole thing of wanting to be immortal in life, but the reality is that being mortal makes every moment more beautiful. And I think about that a lot. I mean, all of these things, the fact that they are so fleeting is what makes them so beautiful. I want to come back

Starting point is 00:10:07 to that topic of mortality in a moment, because it reminds me of Momentumori, something that they used to say to Roman soldiers as they were being paraded down the street. But before we get to that, I want to relate your story to something else that you talked about. When you were in California, you were chasing money, you were drinking. And when this inflection point happened and you began that shift, you started interviewing people as a student of the human experience. And you interviewed a woman who said that in a very painful way, she learned that it's later than we think. Tell us about that. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:10:49 This is a woman named Alexis Lockhart, who has now become a friend and someone that I admire in a variety of ways in life. But while I was on this whole journey and sort of shifting my life and trying to figure out what were the things that I wanted to center my life around, what was the true north, if you will, of where I wanted to go. I started by spending time with people, people from all. walks of life, different experiences, to try to understand what were the common themes, what were the things that we all really want in life that we're all trying to head towards. And fortunately, along that

Starting point is 00:11:24 journey, I was writing a newsletter twice a week. And the thing about putting content out into the world is that it sort of becomes a magnet for people for the ideas that you're sharing. And so I received this email in response to something I had written from a woman named Alexis Lockhart, who told me a story of tragic event in her own life, which was that her son, Jackson, had been killed in a car accident just after his 20th birthday. And she wrote to me to tell me the story of the fact that she, for the longest time, had had an awareness that the amount of time we have with people in our lives is fleeting. And it had always been a theme and how she had thought about her life. And what it meant was that every single moment she had with her children, she really cherished. And so she said that just before he was killed, they had had this party for him for his birthday.

Starting point is 00:12:13 And they had really celebrated him. Even though he was too old for this type of party, they really embraced it and were really present in the moment. And so she's able to have this clear-eyed wisdom, despite this indescribably tragic event that had befallen her. she didn't have regrets about the way that she had lived, about the way that she had loved him. And there was so much beauty in that. And she shared that line, which is from one of my favorite songs, Guy Lombardo. The song is, it's later than you think. And it says, enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself. It's later than you think. So for all these moments in life, that line, I think, is something that has echoed through and is very common in the book, is to just remember that. It's later than you think.

Starting point is 00:12:57 But what do we do with that information in the context of the fact that we start. have to put groceries on the table, fill our tanks with gas, keep the lights on. I mean, many of the people who are listening to this are pursuing financial independence because they don't want to spend 60 hours a week at the office. But there is still that gap between the portfolio that they need in order to be able to have time freedom and where they are today. I think there's a few things here. So first off, this is the fundamental tension of life, which is the tension between ambition and presence, meaning presence is those moments with the people right now, where you are, where you're sitting. And ambition is the things that you want

Starting point is 00:13:45 to do. It's the fact that we do want to go and build financial freedom, financial independence. We might want to go build a big company or go make more money because we're grounded in our purpose and we're working on things that we really care about. Finding your balance across that tension point is the question in life that you need to wrestle with. But the point is that you need to ask yourself that question. It can't just be something that you default into because the default ends up being spending way too much time on the external pursuits, the chase for more, and not enough time on the presence and those moments with the people you care about. Once you ask yourself the question and you develop the awareness, you find a more happy medium

Starting point is 00:14:24 between the two. But if you don't ask the question, you default into the chase for more because it is the societal definition. It's the way that we measure ourselves in the world. So it's a very important thing to actually ask yourself that along the journey. The second thing I'll say is if you have an actual awareness of the time piece, as you are pursuing your goals and your ambitions, you will have a clear eye towards why you are doing that. The fact that you are trying to build that freedom for later, that you are going to go create a world where you do have more time freedom later in your life. Most people just say that. They say the word later gets thrown around all the time. Say, I'll spend more time with my kids later, I'll have more time for my health later, I'll

Starting point is 00:15:09 spend more time with my friends later, I'll ground myself in my purpose later. And the sad thing is that later just becomes another word for never, because those things won't exist in the same way later. Your kids aren't going to be five later. Your friends won't be there later. Your health won't be there later. All of those things will not exist in the same way later. So later becomes another word for never. Unless you are clear-eyed enough about the awareness all along the way, unless you are so grounded in understanding why you are doing those things so that you're designing them into your life slowly as you continue to progress. You said asking yourself the question is important, but there are actually a few questions that we should be asking ourselves.

Starting point is 00:15:48 And to get into what those questions are, let's first establish a framework that you have for measuring different types of wealth. Because you talked about how we just, we just, chase what we quantify, so why not quantify wealth in a manner that's not strictly financial? Yeah. Peter Drucker, the management theorist, once said, what gets measured, gets managed. And that idea is that the thing that you can measure ends up being the thing that you narrowly focus on, the thing that you sort of myopically hone in on in your own life. That has historically been money, simply because it is so measurable. You can put a single number and apply it to your life worth.

Starting point is 00:16:26 That is who you are as a human. And that is how we measure ourselves against people and against ourselves. It creates a very unhealthy dynamic, as we know, when you get into this comparison game, the keeping up with the Joneses phenomenon of these symbols of money that you're trying to accumulate. And it doesn't lead to the happy, fulfilling life that we think. Up to a point, money is very conducive to happiness because it reduces our fundamental burdens and stresses. It enables us to spend time on things that we care. about? Beyond that point, these other areas of life are what drive lasting happiness and

Starting point is 00:16:59 fulfillment. We actually know that. The science is very clear. Relationships, your health, being grounded in your purpose, curiosity, clarity of mind. These are the things that actually drive a happy, fulfilling existence. But what we think is that chasing more money is going to get us to that end. And for a lot of people, you get to that end and you realize, oops, didn't work, I made the wrong choices all on the way. It's too late. The whole goal with my mission more broadly in life is to help people ask these questions earlier so that they can ground and measure their life around the things that are actually contributing to a healthy, wealthy existence.

Starting point is 00:17:38 Money is one of those. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying money is nothing. I'm simply saying it can't be the only thing. There are five types of wealth. Money is one of them, financial wealth. The others are time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, and physical wealth. So time wealth is what we've talked about. It's how you spend your time, who you spend it with, the ability to choose. Social wealth is your depth and breadth of connection to the world around you. It's the people that you surround yourself with. Mental wealth is your curiosity, your purpose, your growth, your ability to create space to wrestle with the bigger questions in your life. And then physical wealth is your health and vitality. It's your ability to actually enjoy the other types of wealth because you're healthy enough to do it.

Starting point is 00:18:23 So measuring yourself across that broader picture is a very good way to think about what you are building towards in your own life. If you are doing extraordinarily well on financial wealth, but you have none of the others, life is not going to be particularly fulfilling. I mean, what good is having a yacht and a private jet if you're alone on it? What good is having all the money in the world if you can't move around because you're so unhealthy or overweight? All of these things need to be built in concert as you think about. building a lasting, durable, fulfilling life. So how do we check in with ourselves and measure ourselves in all of these verticals? We've talked about time wealth.

Starting point is 00:19:04 So let's just start with what is the key question that we should be asking ourselves to assess whether or not we have a healthy time net worth? I offer a sort of assessment tool. I call it the wealth score, which is a really nice way to just think about where you are as a baseline across. all of these areas. You can actually go to wealth scorequiz.com and take an online version of it. So it's sort of a circle that fills in across these different areas to give you a sense of what your baseline is. And it'll give you a score from zero to 100. And you can use that as your life net worth, if you will. What are some examples of some of the questions? Each type of wealth has five statements. You answer for each statement from strongly disagree to

Starting point is 00:19:47 strongly agree. So under time wealth, one of the questions is, I am in control of my calendar and priorities. That is a very essential piece of time wealth. If you don't feel like you are in control, you could be making $10 million a year, but if you have zero control over how you're spending your time, the meetings you're in, the things you're thinking about, you are not very time wealthy. I have plenty of friends who are like that. Tremendous financial wealth. But if they have to answer a phone call from an angry client at 11 p.m. on a Sunday night, they don't have a lot of time wealth by the definition that we're talking about. And across each of these areas, it has statements like that that will allow you to sort of think clearly about whether you are building and whether

Starting point is 00:20:27 you have that type of wealth in your life. What that does, once you measure the right thing, is it allows you to make clear decisions about changes and opportunities in your life. I'll give you an example. Let's say that you were to come and offer me $25 million to go and take a new job in Omaha, Nebraska. Nothing against Omaha, but I don't live there. On the surface in the traditional definition of wealth, that sounds like a hell yes opportunity. You're going to pay me an extraordinary amount of money

Starting point is 00:21:01 to go take this job. I would just say yes and go jump at it. Now let's think about the new definition of wealth that I'm proposing. Yes, it's a big win for financial wealth. But let's say that I'm going to have to work 80 to 100 hours a week on things I don't like doing, travel 300 nights out of the year and be living in Omaha, Nebraska. Okay, well, now I need to think about it a little bit differently because financial wealth was one. That's a clear win.

Starting point is 00:21:26 But time wealth, going to go way down because I'm not going to have any time. Social wealth, I don't know anyone in Omaha, Nebraska. I'm going to be living far away from my family. I don't have friends there. Big hit to that. Mental wealth, you're telling me I'm going to work on things that I hate. That's a pretty big hit. And physical wealth, if I'm working 80 to 100 hours a week, I just probably am not going to have

Starting point is 00:21:45 to do the things that I want to do. Plus, it's really cold there in the winter, so I probably won't be able to be outside much. So a decision that previously looked like a slam dunk in terms of the old scoreboard now looks like a slam dunk in the other direction on the new scoreboard. It sounds like an absolutely not decision. So having a sense of the overall picture of where your life, where you're trying to build towards allows you to make clear decisions across all of these as you're measuring stick. Can you talk about how in different seasons of life and in different life circumstances, your waiting of one of these five categories, whether it be social or physical, might be

Starting point is 00:22:26 heavier than you're waiting in some of these other categories, that all five are not going to be 20%, equally 20% across the board at all times? This is a brilliant question that you raise. And I would argue it's one of the most important questions when you think about this, because one of the ideas that I bring up is that your life has seasons. And what you prioritize and focus on during any one season will change. During your 20s and 30s, it is a fantastic time to prioritize and focus on financial wealth, building a foundation that you can compound off of, that you can scale over the rest of your life.

Starting point is 00:23:02 We know, and I'm sure you've had plenty of guests on this and talked about this, that money invested early is better than money invested late, simply because if you look at the equation of how compounding works, it is returns to the power of time. Time is the exponent. So that is the thing that really matters. That means that that early season of your life is a great time to start stacking those chips. As you get older, if you have young kids, if you have other considerations later in life, those focuses can change. You may want to prioritize social wealth when your children are really young, being present during those years. You may want to prioritize your physical wealth in your 40s as you start to feel the deterioration that happens as you get older,

Starting point is 00:23:43 what you focus on can shift during any one period. But the point is that you don't allow any one area to completely turn off or atrophy. The analogy that I use is that typically we've been told that these areas of our life exist on on off switches. There's this concept that's called the four burners theory that you can only really have like one burner on full at a time or maybe two on sort of half and everything else is off. I just fundamentally disagree with that. Because all of these areas exist on a dimmer switch and you can take the one or two tiny actions that compound toward the future. The exact same way

Starting point is 00:24:23 that we think about investing in financial wealth, where we say, it doesn't matter. If all you have is $10 to invest per week, invest $10 a week because it's better than zero, because anything above zero compounds. That applies to all of these other areas of life. It's better to go for a 15-minute walk every day than to do nothing for your physical wealth. That will compound positively because anything above zero compounds. It's better to text to the friend to let them know you're thinking about them. Even though you're focused on financial wealth and you're not going to see them as much as you want, send the text. Call your parents. The five-minute thing that you do when you're truly present compounds positively in those relationships. So this whole narrative of things

Starting point is 00:25:03 needing to be on or off is dangerous because it tells you that optimal is more important than beneficial. And sometimes you just need to do the thing that is beneficial, the tiny thing that is going to compound positively in your life. So rather than all or nothing thinking, it's be intentional about which areas are in growth mode versus which areas are in maintenance mode. Perfectly said. And I think that, I mean, for most people, as I said, the 20s and early 30s are a great time to be in growth mode on the financial side. You're building that financial foundation. You're building your experience. You're trading time for networks, for money, for knowledge, for experience, for all of those things. After that, you're going to be in a much better place to

Starting point is 00:25:44 work smart on those things because you have experience and knowledge and networks and money. And so now you can deploy those strategically into the right opportunities that maybe have the 10 or 100x outcomes. And then you have the freedom as a result. You have more time freedom as result of that to reinvest in some of these other areas of your life. But thinking about that full picture is what allows you to both measure and then decide and then also proactively design where you are trying to head. What should a person do? Let's say there's somebody who's listening to this right now who is 50 years old. And up until this point in their life, they didn't focus a whole lot on their finances. Right. And so now they're 50. They're staring at possibly a

Starting point is 00:26:27 negative net worth, they don't have a huge income. They're listening to this and thinking, well, it's too late for me to have spent my 20s and 30s doing that. What should they prioritize? I think there's a few things here. So first off, I would take the assessment and get a sense for where you stand today. There are millions of people in the United States and all around the world who, by a traditional definition of wealth, feel like they haven't done well in life. And by a new definition, they are doing quite well. One of my dearest friends has a degree from the same university as me. Stanford. He went to Stanford, got a great degree, decided that he wanted to move back home after that, played professional baseball, moved back home. He's now a gym teacher and

Starting point is 00:27:12 coaches high school sports teams. By the traditional definition of success and wealth, he's not doing very well. He went and got a Stanford degree and now is probably making $50,000 or $60,000. a year, which don't get me wrong, it's not bad, but he's not killing the game in the financial sense. But then you look at the other areas of his life. He lives within walking distance of both his parents and his wife's parents. He has two beautiful, healthy children. He is super fit and gets to be outside every single day, which he loves doing, goes hiking all the time, plays a ton of sports, loves what he does for work, loves working with kids, loves all the coaching that he does. The other pieces of how you think about a wealthy life, he is doing incredibly well. And he is

Starting point is 00:27:53 significantly happier and more fulfilled than a lot of my friends who are making several million dollars a year doing something that they hate. And so the first answer to your question is that I would look at the assessment and see where you think you stand on the bigger picture of life. Because there is a hopeful message for a lot of people here who feel in the traditional sense that they have not done well when in fact they are doing quite well when they would actually really look at it. The second piece here is just to say that the old Chinese proverb is very correct, which says that that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time was today. And that is how I would think about it if I had not, if I woke up and I was 50 years old and

Starting point is 00:28:33 I was not in the place I wanted to be financially, the actions that you take today are the only actions that you can control and that matter. And the first thing I would do is develop a very clear sense of the gap between my current cash inflows and my current cash outflows. I think that that gap is your most powerful asset as a financial wealth building tool. because what that means is you can take that gap and invest it into things that we're going to compound for your future. But you have to create that gap. And sometimes that isn't fun. When you're in your 20s and you're trying to create that gap, that means living below your means.

Starting point is 00:29:07 That means saying no to things that you previously would have wanted to do when your friends invite you out or when the concert tickets or movies or whatever those things are, you sometimes have to say no to those to create a gap so that you have that that you can stack. In your 50s, the exact same principle applies. is grow your cash inflows as your skills build, manage your expenses so that they don't grow as fast as your income does, and then invest the difference that is hopefully growing over time into things they compound. Given that not just our time, but our energy, our attention, our cognitive bandwidth is limited, focusing on any one given category necessarily has to come at the expense of another.

Starting point is 00:29:46 The more time that we spend focusing on the financial category of wealth, the less that we can spend on social or on physical, for example, how do we, particularly for somebody who's in their 40s or 50s or 60s, who's facing that curtailed time, how do we know if we are making the right tradeoffs? In other words, how do we inoculate ourselves against prospective regret? The overthinker's dilemma is that you think you need to make the perfect decision in any one moment. And the reality is that there's no such thing as the perfect decision. You just have to make a decision and then make it right with the actions that follow it. Most successful people in the world don't make perfect decisions. They just make decisions very quickly and then they take

Starting point is 00:30:30 action after that to make the decision right. I've heard that phrase before like make the decision, then make it right. And I've always really liked that. The point in terms of what you decide to focus on is that it should be in line with the things that you actually care about. Not what I care about, not what you care about, but what the person actually cares about. So that requires. So that requires a level of reflection. It requires actually sitting down and thinking, what do I want my ideal life to look like at age 80? Let's say I'm 50. Let's say I'm 60. What do I want my day to look like at age 80? How do I want to feel? Where do I want to be? Who do I want to be surrounded by? What do I want to be thinking about? What do I want to be doing? What do I want to be eating?

Starting point is 00:31:12 All of the questions really visualize what that life should look like. And then think about what are the actions today to go and create that future end? And when you go ask people that, I asked thousands of people that question over the last three, four years. And basically, everyone says some variation of four commonalities, time, people, purpose, and health. And the degrees to which people are focused on different ones in their change, but really those four things appear for everyone. Money is an enabler to some of those, for sure, but it is rarely an end in and of itself around them. But asking yourself that question and really clarifying what that end looks like for you will make very clear what you need to do in the present to go and build towards

Starting point is 00:31:59 it. And when it comes, you mentioned again asking yourself that question. So when it comes to those key questions in each domain, one of the questions for the physical domain on the topic of being 80 is, will you be able to dance on your 80th birthday? Yeah. This is one of my favorite ideas is this idea of like mental time travel. It's very hard to see the bigger picture in your life on a daily basis because you live in first person mode. You live so zoomed in in the weeds of your life, the day-to-day stimulus in response, the craziness, the urgency, everything that's hitting in your life. And we rarely take the time to zoom out and think about the bigger picture. And so that question, will I be dancing at my 80th birthday party? It clarifies a whole lot

Starting point is 00:32:43 about what you're doing today, your actions in the physical wealth domain. If you were to zoom forward in time to your 80th birthday, are the actions that you are taking today enabling you to live in a future where you are able to go get out on the dance floor with all of your family, loved ones, and friends on your 80th birthday? And if not, you can start changing that today. There's nothing stopping you from going out for the 10 or 15 minute walk today. Everyone can find time for a 10 or 15 minute walk. But what happens is we live in a culture and a society and social media has made this worse

Starting point is 00:33:15 where you are told that if you're not doing the fancy complex routine, you shouldn't do anything. I don't have time for an hour at the gym, so I'm just not going to do anything today. That type of thinking is what leads us down this negative spiral because you start to think that it has to be optimal for it to be beneficial. And it's not true. And ambitious people and high achievers are the worst at this. because in their mind, they're like, well, if I'm not able to do the hour of focused work, I shouldn't do the work. If I'm not able to eat the perfect meal, I shouldn't just have the junk food.

Starting point is 00:33:48 If I'm not able to do the hour workout, I shouldn't work out at all. If I don't have an hour of time for my partner or spouse, then it doesn't even matter. I should just keep working. And the tiny things, again, goes back to my earlier point, the tiny things compound positively in your life, but you have to have the mindset shift to enable that. The holidays are right around the corner, and if you're hosting, you're going to need to get prepared. Maybe you need bedding, sheets, linens. Maybe you need serveware and cookware. And of course, holiday decor, all the stuff to make your home a great place to host during the holidays.

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Starting point is 00:35:45 That's what being a fifth third better is all about. It's about not being just one thing, but many things for our customers. Big Bank Muscle, FinTech Hustle. That's your commercial payments of fifth third better. We've talked about the time domain, the social domain, the physical domain, and the financial domain. We haven't quite touched on the purpose domain yet. Can you talk about how to even assess whether or not,

Starting point is 00:36:17 the work that we're doing is aligned with our purpose or the life that we're living is aligned with our purpose. I believe the question for that is what would your 10 year old self say about your life today? Yeah. I love that again, it goes back to this idea of mental time travel. And I've often thought that there was this interesting perspective that was created both by your younger self and your older self on where you are today. So make decisions that both your 10 year old self and your 80 year old self would be proud of. Idea being your 10 year old self would probably tell you to have some fun. Your 80-year-old self would tell you to invest in things that compound for the future. And somewhere in between is the life well-lived. Your 10-year-old self is curious. Your 10-year-old self

Starting point is 00:36:59 pursues things that they're interested in. Your 10-year-old self is grounded in that curiosity and sort of wonder for the world. But we lose that over the course of our lives. A big reason is because we do not have the space in our life to pursue our curiosity. We don't have the space to think about the bigger picture questions, what we really care about, what we want to focus on where we are headed, whether we are connected to something on a higher order, or whether we're just constantly in this cycle of stimulus and response. I think the idea that your purpose has to be your work is one of the worst lies you've been told. Western culture in particular has propagated that idea, that you have to love your work. Otherwise, you're doing something wrong, that you have to be

Starting point is 00:37:46 grounded in purpose every single day when you go to work. And it's just a complete load of nonsense. Because that is a rarity. The number of people that truly love what they do every single day show up and feel like it's their purpose and that this is what they're meant to do is few and far between. And telling people that they need to do that is just a recipe for feeling unhappy. What you do need to do is connect to your purpose while you are at work. I'll tell you the distinction. I interviewed a man who works at a factory. He puts together widgets on an assembly line, basically for eight to ten hours a day.

Starting point is 00:38:22 Doesn't like his job. Works manual labor, basically doing a monotonous task over and over again every single day. But his purpose, as he defines it, is to be the father that he never had, to provide for his boys in the way that he didn't feel his father did. and to be the type of father that he wants to be. Every single day when he goes to work, he connects to that purpose. He says, I am doing this in service of my higher order purpose, which is to be a provider for my sons. So every day when he goes to work, he has real energy for the work.

Starting point is 00:38:53 Despite the fact that he doesn't like it, despite the fact that the work itself is not his purpose, he connects to something that is. That is where most of us can find the gold in life. it is by recognizing what our higher order calling is, what the thing is that we truly feel connected to, and then finding the energy in our work to align the two, to feel that connection between the two. So if your purpose is to be the best mother or father you can be, if your purpose is to be a light in your community, to provide value for people in the community, to give back to your church group, to be the brother that you want to be, whatever that is, whatever that higher order purpose is,

Starting point is 00:39:32 learn to connect your work to that, but it doesn't have to be that your purpose is found in your work. So what you're describing right now is a construct in which work is a means to an end rather than an end in itself. But what about for the people who have dreams, goals, ambitions, you want to build a business, you want to write a book, you want to have a career as an actor or a comedian, right? All of those are considered career ambitions, but they're also just quite just quite job. genuine. I think that's wonderful if you can find that. I mean, look, I'm sitting here. I feel very grounded in my purpose when I get to do things like this. I define my purpose as creating positive ripples in the world. And I think I can do that on the level that we're interacting on, which is sharing ideas with the world, the book, content, things that I put out that now reach millions

Starting point is 00:40:22 of people every single week. That feels very grounded in my purpose. I also feel I can do that on a family level by the way that I interact with people in my family can create a ripple where they are able to be uplifted to go and interact a little bit better in the world. You can find your purpose in your work. I'm just saying that you don't have to in order to feel fulfilled in order to feel happy. I also think that it is okay to allow things that you are passionate about to remain as hobbies and passions. You don't have to monetize or make every hobby or passion into your job. That is another thing that you've been told that we live in this like social media monetize the side hustle culture where I had recently an interaction with a young woman who loves dance. She does a lot of like traditional

Starting point is 00:41:08 dance and she was asking me like, do you think I should monetize it? I really love it. Maybe I could make some money from it. And my advice to her was no. Because scientifically, we actually know that the second you start monetizing something that you love, you're going to love it less. The stand Marker experiment was this famous experiment done at Stanford in the, believe, 1970s, where they went into a school with a bunch of children, and they saw children that really enjoyed drawing. And they gave half of them a reward for the drawing, and then the other half just were drawing with no reward. They came back 10 days later, and the kids who had been given a reward for the drawing actually didn't want to draw. They had lost intrinsic motivation after receiving a reward for doing it, where the other kids,

Starting point is 00:41:55 it's continued to love drawing just as much. And so it's scientific evidence for the fact that actually monetizing that passion or hobby or excitement or interest is potentially a way to make yourself enjoy it less. There's a joke, actually, about a man who he's at his home and a bunch of noisy, rowdy teenagers are walking down the street. They're coming home from school. And they're clanging on mailboxes and they're just being really rowdy. and he wants them to stop.

Starting point is 00:42:24 But rather than go out and yell at them, he goes out and says, hey, I love that percussion. I'll pay you a dollar every time you do it. And so he pays them a dollar and that goes on for about a week or two. And then he goes back out there and says, you know what? My money is tight. I can only afford to pay you a quarter for that. And the kids say, we used to make a dollar for it.

Starting point is 00:42:47 We're not going to do it for a measly quarter. And so they stop. I love that. That's fantastic. That's perfect. So what you're talking about, it feels like Elizabeth Gilbert talks about not burdening your art by forcing it to pay your bills. There are echoes of this, even from people who have engaged in work that they find meaningful. You worked in private equity. How do you survive long days at a job that isn't your calling?

Starting point is 00:43:12 I think that the answer is found in the story that I told you of the factory worker, which is find a way to connect it to something more meaningful to you. In your 20s and 30s when you were working along hours and something that may not be something you like, your higher order purpose can be as simple as I am building a foundation for the rest of my life. And whether that's financial or knowledge and experience even more importantly. And I say this to young people all the time. I have probably thousands of people who have emailed me over the last couple of years with basically some version of this same question, saying, I really don't like my job. I'm thinking of leaving.

Starting point is 00:43:48 And they've been there for six months. and my guidance is always the same, which is not liking your job is not necessarily a reason to leave. There's plenty of reasons to leave a job. That's not usually one of them if you've only been there for six months because you can learn a lot from a job you don't like. You are learning, A, you're learning what you don't like doing, which is very valuable data point and insight.

Starting point is 00:44:11 And you are also picking up data points on things you do enjoy doing. Even if the macro is stuff that you don't, there are little micro-trovated. tasks during the day that you are enjoying, which is a super helpful insight as well. And you're building learnings, you're building experience, you're building insights, you're becoming more resilient because you're doing something you don't like. There's a whole lot of value you are getting from the thing. But every day, if you show up and your energy and your attitude is, oh, I don't like doing this, you are not going to perform on a top 10% level. Guarantee it. It's almost impossible. The only way to guarantee that you make a lot of money in life is to perform at a top 10% level at everything you do.

Starting point is 00:44:48 If you do that, I can guarantee you will make a lot of money in your life. It's just very hard to keep someone down that consistently is a top performer at the thing they're doing. They find a way to expose new opportunities. They get pulled into things. You get accelerated, whatever it is. And so connecting every day at the thing that you might not like, connecting that to the idea that I am building a foundation for the rest of my life, that I am building something,

Starting point is 00:45:12 there's a muscle that's being built, there's an experience set, there's an insight, there's something that I'm doing that's connected outside on the bigger picture from what I'm actually doing on the day to day. That is a really important concept that I think carries a lot of power. Work for knowledge, work for skills. Yeah. I mean, when you're young, if there's anyone out there that's in their 20s or 30s, it's like when you are young, the only thing you have is time. You don't have money, knowledge, networks, experience, wisdom. You have none of those things.

Starting point is 00:45:40 All you have is time. And so you have to trade your time to get those things. And then once you have those things, you are in a much better position because now you can deploy them into the right opportunities to get the incredible outcomes in your life. But saying the narrative or the meme that's out there of like, oh, work smart, not hard, you can't work smart before you have networks and experience and money and knowledge and wisdom. You can't because you don't have smarts. Exactly. You don't have the smart. How are you going to work smart? You're actually just going to be working dumb and saying, oh, I'm working smart. Like you're actually just being lazy. So when people say that, they're like, well, I'm working smart, not hard.

Starting point is 00:46:16 You're 22. I'm like, no, you're just lazy. You're just procrastinate. You're just not doing the thing. You have to go do the thing in order to be able to work smart later. I feel like I learned that from my dad. It feels old fashioned to say that now, but it's just true. Now, does that translate when you leave not just that job, but that entire industry?

Starting point is 00:46:37 You've made an industry shift. Yeah. What skills were turned out. to be irrelevant and what skills were transferable to any broad application. Yeah. I would say the vast majority of the skills were transferable. There are very few jobs in the world that are so hyper-specific in the skills that you build that they're not transferable.

Starting point is 00:46:57 I'm sure there are some, like, within scientific domains or maybe, like, within coding domains, if you were to, like, completely shift. But the bigger picture on the skills you're building is often, like, some combination of IQ and EQ. and the EQ is definitely transferable across every domain. And most of the IQ tends to be like analysis and critical thinking and, you know, decision making and decision making under asymmetric information. Like those kind of things apply to any industry that you're in.

Starting point is 00:47:28 For me in particular, I was working at a private equity fund, great firm, great people, learning a ton. The biggest thing with the investing world is just learning to make decisions with imperfect information and learning to distill a whole lot of complex data into a simple story that you can tell to your investors, to the teams, to employees of the company. You have to be a great storyteller. That is basically what I do now for a living. I tell stories. I distill ideas that I'm experiencing, that I'm learning, that I'm reading about, and I try to construct a clear story that people will connect with, that they're able to take and run with in their life. So that is very transferable

Starting point is 00:48:05 and applies across every domain. And I think that zooming out what that means is your focus needs to be on the sort of meta skills, if you will, like the big picture overarching meta skills that you're learning in the job. So it might not be the very specific skill of like Excel analysis, but the meta skill of storytelling, which is what we're really doing, is very transferable. Or the meta skill of salesmanship, sales, is very transferable. When you are working in any job, sales is a key. part of it. I don't care if you're on the sales team or not. If you were working at a company,

Starting point is 00:48:39 you have to sell yourself, you have to sell your vision, you have to sell your ideas, you're selling your leadership style to the people you're working with, to your bosses. That is all sales. And a lot of life is sales. That is a meta skill that applies across everything that you're doing. When you're in the dating market, you're trying to meet a partner. That is sales. You are selling yourself to prospective mates out in the world. Sales is a very, very key meta skill across all of life. We've been talking for a while about these big, picture ideas, these very big ideas, what action should a person take? After listening to this episode, what specific actions should a person implement into their life to make sure that they are

Starting point is 00:49:28 pursuing all five types of wealth in a way that is weighted to their particular season of life? Yeah. So each section has a guide at the end of the section. So for each type of wealth, there's a guide that has real, clear, science-backed strategies for actually building that type of wealth. The first one that I would tell anyone to go and do is from the time wealth section, and it's an idea that I call my energy calendar. And basically, it's a way for thinking about where you are seeing your energy flow during the course of a week, where you are getting energy and where you're seeing your energy drained.

Starting point is 00:50:02 Idea being, when you spend time on things that are lifting you up, things that are creating energy in your life, spending time on or with people that are lifting your energy up, that is where you're going to get the best results in life. You're going to feel better. You're going to lean into those things. You're going to pursue them with great energy and attitude. But getting a perspective on what those are is really important. So the actual exercise anyone can do is take a look at your calendar at the end of a Monday workday.

Starting point is 00:50:29 Color code everything according to whether it created energy, meaning you felt good. It lifted you up either during or after. Mark that green. If it was neutral, kind of just felt baseline. Mark it yellow. And if it drained you, you felt physically drained afterwards or durs. market red. Do that for a full week. And then on the weekend, look at the calendar from the week and look for trends. What were the types of activities or the people who were creating energy

Starting point is 00:50:56 versus the types of things that were draining energy in your life? That will give you a very clear starting picture for where you want to be spending more of your time versus less of your time. You're not going to be able to make your calendar entirely green. Probably ever. It's wishful thinking. But you can make slight tweaks. here and there over longer periods of time to make the ratio of green to red significantly better. And when you do that, your life will improve. You will be spending time on things that are lifting you up. You will feel considerably different. And you'll be able to allocate energy to the things that really matter, the things that you care about, the things that are driving you towards

Starting point is 00:51:32 that North Star, that true North in your life. That's perfect for an assessment of time because truly time is not the limiting factor so much as energy, energy, attention, cognitive bandwidth is the real limitation. What is the action step in the social domain? There could be several. I think the most important starting point for people with social wealth is to create what I would call a relationship map. This is a two by two matrix. So for any of my analysis forward people that are listening out there, you love a good two by two. This is basically a way to look at your existing relationships on the basis of how healthy they are and how frequent they are. So it's a two by two that has the frequency of a relationship,

Starting point is 00:52:19 how much you see the person or how much you interact with them on one axis, and then how healthy the relationship is from demeaning all the way to supportive on the other axis. And what you want to do is sort of map the core relationships in your life, the people that are within your circle, call it 10 to 20 people, on that map, on that two by two. to get a sense for where are your opportunities, people that are really supportive and that really create energy in your life, but that you're not interacting with enough? And where are the dangerous spots? The people who are either demeaning or sort of ambivalent, sometimes demeaning,

Starting point is 00:52:57 sometimes supportive, which is very dangerous. Where are you interacting too much with people like that? And from that perspective, you can then take actions to say, okay, I'm going to try to lean into some of these relationships that are really lifting me up, that are really allowing me to think bigger, and lean away from the ones that are really harming the quality of your life. The rationale around all of that is there is scientific evidence that the people you surround yourself with determine your outcomes. The Pygmalian effect is this behavioral phenomenon that finds that we rise to the level of the expectations people around us have for us. So if you are surrounding yourself with people who think well of you, who lift you up,

Starting point is 00:53:39 who encourage you to think bigger, who tell you you're capable of more, you will rise to the level of those expectations. But similarly, if you're surrounded by people who do the opposite, you will fall to the level of those expectations. So making and taking clear actions to fill your energy cup with people who are lifting you up and to surround yourself with that and to not allow the people who are draining you to occupy so much of your space and energy is a really healthy way to change your life. And that plays to the concept of, what is it, goals and anti-goals?

Starting point is 00:54:12 There's this framing for kind of planning your life around both goals and anti-goals. Goals, we all know. These are like where you're trying to go. It's the summit of the mountain. Anti-goals is a really interesting concept in that it is the inverse. So it is Charlie Munger said, all I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there. And it's that idea. Anti-goals are your ability to avoid where you're going to die. So if the summit of the mountain is the goal, the anti-goal is the thing that you are unwilling to

Starting point is 00:54:42 sacrifice in pursuit of that goal. So getting to the summit is the goal. The anti-goal might be dying. The anti-goal might be losing your toes to frostbite along the way. An example from your professional career would be, let's say my goal is to become CEO of the company. Well, my anti-goal is spending 300 nights out of the year away from my family or losing my health because of the stress and the work. I want to achieve the goal, but not if it means having those anti-goals become real. Establishing that in your mind and having a clear perspective on what the anti-goals are associated with any goal that you set for yourself is a really important concept.

Starting point is 00:55:21 Right. And so this is where having that pygmalion effect, that supportive community comes in because you don't want the human equivalent of an anti-goal in your life. You don't want the people who are detracting. Yeah. You would not be willing to achieve some incredible financial success if it meant that you were having to be surrounded by people that you felt were shady characters. Right. I don't want to summit some mountain if it means that I have to be surrounded by people who are doing illegal things or who are critical of me or who are demeaning me or saying things to me or my family. Like, it's just, it's not a sacrifice that I'm willing to make in pursuit of these goals.

Starting point is 00:55:58 Right. And being very clear on what those sacrifices are that you are willing to make is important. Right. This actually is reminding me of two things. I was actually just complaining to a friend yesterday about how right now, I happen to be in a season of my life where I want to work on the weekends. That's what I choose to do willingly and happily. And so I'm going to the gym every day. I I still call my parents at least once a week, right? Like, I've got all of those things in balance, but I want to have a productive weekend. And I have certain people in my life who give me grief for that, who basically make me feel as though I shouldn't be. And it's just an example of an anti-goal.

Starting point is 00:56:41 It's a detractor. Here's this energy that I want to put forth. And because it doesn't fit their definition of what I quote unquote should be doing, it fits into their preconceived framework. of you're spending too much time on your work? I think Taylor Swift said, the worst people in the world are people who make you feel bad about things you're excited about.

Starting point is 00:57:01 I always thought that was so true. Exact example. You're excited about something. You're leaning into something. You have energy for it. You're interested. And for someone to come and say, like, you shouldn't do that?

Starting point is 00:57:09 Right. Why do you, I don't need that energy in my life. And we've all experienced that. It's the idea that, like, pursuing your goals is often not good for your social life. Because there will be people who you lose along that journey.

Starting point is 00:57:23 I've written about this before that loneliness is a tax on personal transformation. Periods of loneliness are a tax on personal transformation, meaning they are often a cost of entry for the transformation you are trying to create in your life because you are growing and changing. You are working hard on something that you care about. You're pushing yourself forward.

Starting point is 00:57:44 That means you are changing and your previous environment is not. You have literally moved away from your previous environment. And so you start to have these periods of time where you no longer speak the same language as the people that you previously interacted with. They can't understand you because they don't get why you're doing the things you're doing, what you're doing, and why you care about them so much. So you have this period, this long period where you're like, I have yet to attract the new people into my world, the people where I'm going, but I've left the old safety net. And that manifests as these periods of loneliness. It's the lonely chapter in your life.

Starting point is 00:58:21 I think about that all the time. And entrepreneurs experience it all the time. Right. Entrepreneurship is a lonely journey. You are on a path and it sounds so sexy when you get to talk about it later once it succeeded and everything's working out. But during the actual journey, it can be very, very lonely. Learning to embrace that as sort of part of the journey, I have personally found to be a helpful mindset shift. I was thinking about entrepreneurs when you were describing that exercise for assessing your time.

Starting point is 00:58:49 time freedom because when you ask the question of how much control do I have over my calendar, I have complete control over my calendar and I am also busy. And so those two things are not necessarily at odds with each other. They're not mutually exclusive. You can be simultaneously busy, but have a high degree of autonomy and control. Yeah, you got to choose. Yeah. The goal is not to have zero stress. Right. The goal is to have stress about things that actually matter to you. If you have stress and because you are ambitious and there's a gap between where you are and where you want to end up and it's about things you care about, that's a great source of stress. That is actually meaningful stress. The whole point is for it to be meaningful stress, not things that are

Starting point is 00:59:32 silly and self-encured. And that gets a lot. We lose sight of that a lot. I also think the whole idea of balance has been hijacked and you're told that like to have balance every single day has to be this perfect balance of like, I work out and then I have family time and then I have my work time and then I have my personal development time and then I have meditation. You know, it's like every day has to be balanced. That is so far from reality. The reality of how it works is that you want balance in the macro, not in the micro. You're going to have periods of time where you're sprinting on things, where you want

Starting point is 01:00:06 to be heads down all weekend because you're working on something you care about that's meaningful. That is not balanced. That is a season of unbalance in pursuit of a future season of balance. And all you need to think about is it's okay for me to be unbalanced now because I know that I'm going to zoom out and I have an eye towards building that balance later. I have an awareness of that. So I'm going to be able to lean into the balance when I have it. I am very much in a season of unbalanced right now. I'm traveling 30 out of the next 35 days.

Starting point is 01:00:36 I don't want to do that. I'm not joyous about being away from my son or my wife all that much, but it is part of a pursuit that really matters to me. I really want to share these ideas with the world because I think they're impactful. And so I'm going to do that with the knowledge that I'm going to follow it with a season of balance. And that is the important piece that when we zoom out, we can look at our year in quarters. Treat it like a public company. It's okay to have a quarter of real focus and craziness where you head down and you're unbalanced. As long as you start thinking about in the bigger picture, some of the quarters are more balanced.

Starting point is 01:01:08 Right. And seasons are a perfect analogy because you don't have four seasons in a day. As we're recording this, there's a massive snowstorm outside. We're in a season of winter, and it's going to last for a few months. Yeah, it's not going to be 70 and sunny later today. Right, exactly. We've talked about time. We've talked about social.

Starting point is 01:01:26 You know, we've talked about some of those exercises. What about for purpose? In the section on mental wealth, I frame up an approach for thinking about your purpose, which leverages the ancient Japanese concept of Ikega. This idea of basically finding your higher calling, if you will. Like I come from a half-Indian background, and there's this idea in ancient Indian culture of Dharma, which is your sacred duty.

Starting point is 01:01:55 And the whole point is that it doesn't have to be grand or ambitious or impressive to anyone else. It just has to be yours. And asking yourself what you love doing, asking yourself what the world needs from you. And the world needs is a really interesting question because world doesn't have to be world on a global scale. It is your world as you define it. Your world could be your family. What does your family need from you right now?

Starting point is 01:02:24 Your world could be your community. It could be your country. It could be the world. But defining that and asking yourself those questions is the exercise there for starting to think about what are the things that I want to be focusing on. Where am I going to feel more connected to this higher order purpose? And what is the exercise then for the two remaining categories, physical and financial? So within physical wealth, there are a handful of tools that you can use to start actually building a life of physical wealth. The one that I sort of propose is to do like a 30-day sprint, like a 30-day challenge.

Starting point is 01:02:56 And we lay out three levels of it. So there's a starter level, which is bronze, there's a silver, and then there's a gold level. And they obviously sort of graduate up in terms of the difficulty. But the basics within the bronze level are basically three things. There's three pillars of physical wealth, if you will. It's movement, nutrition, and recovery. So for movement, move your body for 30 minutes a day. It doesn't have to be anything fancy.

Starting point is 01:03:18 You don't have to do some like crazy regime. It could be walking, jogging, biking, dancing, whatever you like doing, just move for 30 minutes a day. Within nutrition, try to have 80% of your meals come from whole unprocessed foods, 80%. So say, like, 17 out of 21 meals in a week. And then recovery, just try to sleep seven hours a night. You don't have to be perfect, doesn't have to be like blue light blocking glasses. Start there as a baseline. If you can do that for 30 straight days, you are well on your way.

Starting point is 01:03:48 You get 90% of the benefit from just doing the boring basics. And that's an important concept that the world of social media will feed you the most complex, insane answers and solutions. Because that's what gets clicks. But the reality is that the boring basics in all these areas will work. and I can't sell you an e-book that says, hey, move your body for 30 minutes a day, but it really does just work. I can't sell you an e-book that says,

Starting point is 01:04:13 like, eat whole unprocessed foods, but it works. So while those things may not get clicks, we can rely on them, and they have sort of the Lindy effect and that they've lasted over generations for a reason, because they are effective. Within financial wealth, the exercise that I would love everyone to go through

Starting point is 01:04:29 is to clearly define what a life of enough looks like to them. The word enough is at the core of how I think about financial wealth. Expectations are your single greatest financial liability. If your expectations rise faster than your assets, you will never feel wealthy. You will never be rich because you'll just be chasing whatever more you're convincing yourself will lead to your future happiness. Clearly defining what your enough life looks like is the way. that you create a rational, clear baseline upon which you can measure yourself. Right. Kurt Vonnegut has that famous story. Absolutely famous. Would you like to tell it?

Starting point is 01:05:16 Yeah, yeah. So Kurt Vonnegut wrote this poem in The New Yorker about a visit that he and his friend, Joseph Heller, the author of Catch 22, made to this billionaire's house in the Hamptons. The way he tells it is that the two of them are at this billionaire's house at this party. And Vonnegut turns to Heller and says, Joe, how does it feel that just yesterday, the owner of this home made more money than your bestselling book, Catch 22, made in its entire lifetime? And Heller replies, yes, but I've got something that he'll never have. And Vonnegut says, oh, yeah, well, what's that? And he replies, the knowledge that I've got enough. And that is as beautiful in articulation as I can imagine, apropos for Vonnegut. But just a perfect example of exactly that. The beauty of enough is everything in life. Never let the quest for more distract you from the beauty of enough. Often we define enough as in a point in time analysis. How do we handle the reality that enough changes over the course of our life? Enough will change.

Starting point is 01:06:24 The best thing that you can hope for is for that change to be a conscious, and semi-rational one rather than a subconscious irrational one. Most people, if you don't clearly define it, that version of enough will be this like mirage. You never articulate what it is. You get there and it's disappeared to three to five X what it was today. There's this famous study, Michael Norton at Harvard Business School conducted, where he asked a group of high net worth individuals worth anywhere from a million dollars up through hundreds of millions, how happy they were on a scale of one to ten.

Starting point is 01:07:00 then he asked how much more money it would take for them to be at a 10. Across the board, whether they were worth a million dollars or a hundred million, they all said three to five X as much as they currently have. Crazy. It makes absolutely no sense defies logic, but it's a perfect example of the fact that enough has just disappeared and reappeared three to five X from where you are today. We need to make it conscious. We need to make it rational.

Starting point is 01:07:27 And you only do that by clearly articulating what that life actually looks like. Where are you? What are you doing? Who are you with? Where do you live? It doesn't have to be Spartan either. I mean, my enough life might have two houses because I love entertaining and being able to bring together family and friends for experiences. It's not saying that your enough life has to be some like very basic life, but clearly articulating what it looks like so that as you approach it and as you have it, you have more of an appreciation for it, and you're able to slowly adjust it upward, grounded in something else, not just the pursuit of more is the point. So as you pursue more, as you pursue expanding upon that

Starting point is 01:08:06 definition, it should be grounded in your purpose. It should be grounded in your ambition to continue to grow and learn and achieve, not in I need to make X more million dollars. Right. It should be rooted to components of your life rather than an arbitrary number. Yes. I want to build more so that I can create more meaningful experiences with people that I love. I want to build more because I feel so strongly that this business that I'm creating can change the world or can impact these communities or can do X, Y, or Z. But it needs to be grounded in those other things, not in the pursuit of more money. Right. I've one final question for you.

Starting point is 01:08:43 And I promised at the beginning of this interview that we would touch back on Momento Mori. And so this is where we touch back on that. Can you describe the significance of that and how, as the afford anything communities, digesting this information. How do we carry that forward into our day-to-day lives? So Memento Mori is this ancient Roman tradition where the military hero upon returning from battle would be paraded through the streets of adoring fans. People would be plodding them through the streets on this golden chariot. And they had this practice of placing one person behind the conquering hero who would just whisper in their ear the entire time, Memento Mory, which

Starting point is 01:09:27 means, remember thou art mortal. Remember, you must die. The whole idea was to remind the person of the fact that they were not a God, that they were going to die, because these adoring fans and all of this agilation could lead to that sensation of immortality. It's dangerous. That idea applied to our lives is a very powerful one. Recognizing and reminding yourself on a regular basis of your own mortality is what allows you to live in the present. It's what allows you to give your energy to the things you truly care about. Some people have taken it as far as creating these Memento Mori calendars. Ryan Holliday, the famous sort of modern day stoic philosopher has this calendar that he's created that you can go by. Your life in weeks. Yeah, your life in weeks. It's 52 rows across. So for one year,

Starting point is 01:10:15 there's a row across, and then there's columns that go all the way down for like an 80-year life. And you fill it in. So you can see how much time has passed and how much on average. time you have remaining. I think it goes to what, 90 or 100 maybe for how long your lifespan is. I have one of these. Tim Urban from Wait But Why also sells it. Oh, does he? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It is not intended to be morbid as most people take it. I think the first time I showed it to my mom, she took it as very morbid. It is intended to be inspiring, that it should inspire action in the present. This knowledge that you are mortal, this knowledge that your time is passing should inspire you to action. It should call you to action. And I have found it to be.

Starting point is 01:10:53 incredibly inspiring in my own life. It is what has sparked me to create the changes that we've created in our life. It's what's inspired my wife and I to be as present as I feel we're able to be with our son. It's what's inspired me to put so much energy towards sharing these messages, is that I want more people to be called to these ideas, to be called to question what truly matters to them, rather than default into what society has told them matters. Right. When you fill out the calendar, when I got it, I had to order a, like, gigantic Sharpie. just to cross off all of the previous weeks of my life, because there were so many that are already gone.

Starting point is 01:11:30 It's scary. Yeah. It's scary when you look at it. And I have like a caption on it that just says, this is what my Memento Mori calendar looks like today. Goalt. Yesterday I turned 34, so I'm pretty young still, but the calendar is a stark reminder.

Starting point is 01:11:45 And as you go through and you fill in one square at a time for every week, you really see those weeks take by. I know some people who they'll color in sections, this color section is childhood and this color section is college and this color section was my 20s. But it certainly puts that all, it frames that all in a very stark way. And it goes back to one of the themes that you were talking about earlier, how your life is an overall picture, but each day is a pixel. Really in Momentumory, each week is a pixel. Yeah, absolutely. And creating an awareness of those pixels.

Starting point is 01:12:21 is what allows you to build the life that you want. Right. Well, thank you for spending this time with us. Where can people find you if they'd like to know more? Thank you so much for having me. You can find me at Saw Hill Bloom on any of the major platforms. And then the book is available in stores everywhere, Amazon, local bookstores, and you can find out more at the five types of wealth.com. Thank you, Sahil.

Starting point is 01:12:44 What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key takeaway number one, wealth extends far beyond money. True wealth encompasses five domains. There's financial wealth, yes, but there's also time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, and physical wealth. The research is very clear that money has an enormous correlation with happiness up to a certain threshold. And after that threshold, it starts producing diminishing returns. Essentially, money can't make you happy, but a lack of money can make you unhappy. And so money up to a point is essential for reducing.

Starting point is 01:13:21 reducing stress and creating options. But beyond that threshold, your relationships, your health, your purpose, and your control over your time become much bigger drivers of happiness. Measuring yourself across all five of these areas gives you a more complete picture of a well-lived life. There are five types of wealth. Money is one of them, financial wealth. The others are time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, and physical wealth. So time wealth is what we've talked about. It's how you spend your time, who you spend it with, the ability to choose. Social wealth is your depth and breadth of connection to the world around you. It's the people that you surround yourself with.

Starting point is 01:14:04 Mental wealth is your curiosity, your purpose, your growth, your ability to create space, to wrestle with the bigger questions in your life. And then physical wealth is your health and vitality, to your ability to actually enjoy the other types of wealth because you're healthy enough to do it. So measuring yourself across that broader picture is a very good way to think about what you are building towards in your own life. If you are doing extraordinarily well on financial wealth, but you have none of the others, life is not going to be particularly fulfilling. I mean, what good is having a yacht and a private jet if you're alone on it? What good is having all the money in the world if you can't move around because you're so unhealthy or overweight.

Starting point is 01:14:47 All of these things need to be built in concert as you think about building a lasting, durable, fulfilling life. And so that is key takeaway number one. Key takeaway number two, later often becomes never. Do not postpone important aspects of life with promises of later because later can quickly become too late. Kids grow up, parents and grandparents age, health starts to fade. I mean, maybe right now you can go hiking in the Himalayas, but are you going to be able to do that when you are in your 80s? I hope so. I hope you're in good enough shape to scale Himalayan peaks in

Starting point is 01:15:27 your 80s, but it's possible that there's a window of time for that. And that window's not going to be around forever. So be aware of this tug of war between chasing goals and being present. because it can be really easy to drift towards external achievements and miss the present moment. Most people just say that. They say the word later gets thrown around all the time. Say, I'll spend more time with my kids later. I'll have more time for my health later. I'll spend more time with my friends later.

Starting point is 01:15:57 I'll ground myself in my purpose later. And the sad thing is that later just becomes another word for never. Because those things won't exist in the same way later. Your kids aren't going to be five later. Your friends won't be there later. your health won't be there later. So that is key takeaway number two. Finally, key takeaway number three, define your enough.

Starting point is 01:16:17 Everyone has a different definition of how much is enough. And you need to know what yours looks like. What is enough for you? What's enough in your financial life? This helps you avoid the endless treadmill of wanting more. Now, if you don't have a defined target, expectations often tend to rise along with income. And so that's the hedonic treadmill, right?

Starting point is 01:16:40 That's the perpetual dissatisfaction, regardless of how much you have. So ground your definition of enough in components of your life, in the lifestyle that you want to live, rather than in arbitrary numbers. Expectations are your single greatest financial liability. If your expectations rise faster than your assets, you will never feel wealthy. You will never be rich because you'll just be chasing whatever. more you're convincing yourself will lead to your future happiness. Clearly defining what your enough life looks like is the way that you create a rational, clear baseline upon which you can measure yourself. Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Sahil Bloom.

Starting point is 01:17:28 His newsletter, by the way, The Curiosity Chronicle, is absolutely fantastic. He has over a million subscribers. Highly encourage you to check that out. I'm so impressed by what he does. His book on the five types of wealth is a foundational staple for anyone who is interested in financial independence and living a better life, living a more complete whole, multifaceted life. Big thanks to Seheel for coming on the show today. Thank you so much for listening. As always, if you enjoy today's episode, please share it with your friends, your family, your neighbors, your colleagues, siblings, your cousins. I guess that's redundant because I already said the word family, but you you get what I'm saying. Share this with the people in your life. That's the single most

Starting point is 01:18:13 important way to spread the message of financial health and to spread the message of the five types of wealth. You can chat about today's episode with members of our community at afford anything.com slash community. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Paula Pant. This is the afford anything podcast and I'll meet you in the next episode.

Afford Anything - Sahil Bloom: Which of the Five Wealth Types Are You Neglecting?

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