Couple Things with Shawn and Andrew - Sahil Bloom: personal growth, finance, and entrepreneurship

Episode Date: July 10, 2025

In this episode, we got to hang out with Sahil Bloom—entrepreneur, investor, author and all-around deep thinker—to chat about his new book, The 5 Types of Wealth. Spoiler alert: wealth isn’t just about money! Sahil breaks down the five types of wealth and shares why focusing on all of them (and not just your bank account) leads to a richer, more fulfilling life. If you’ve ever felt like you’re chasing success but missing the mark, this conversation will help you get back on track! Sahil is so inspiring and we love how open he is about his own personal struggles to get to where he is today. We hope this episode encourages you to wake up tomorrow and invest in what really matters! Love you guys! Shawn & Andrew Order Sahil Bloom’s Newest Book ▶ https://a.co/d/3xhbG5H Sahil’s Instagram ▶ https://www.instagram.com/sahilbloom/ Beam Kids is now available online at https://shopbeam.com/products/beam-kids-greens-superpowder?utm_medium=sponsorship&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=couplethings&code=applied15&discount=COUPLETHINGS&variant=41465486508087 Take advantage of our exclusive discount of up to 40% off using code COUPLETHINGS Subscribe to our newsletter ▶ https://www.familymade.com/newsletter Follow our podcast Instagram ▶ https://www.instagram.com/shawnandandrewpods/ Follow My Instagram ▶ https://www.instagram.com/ShawnJohnson Follow My Tik Tok ▶ https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnjohnson Shop My LTK Page ▶ https://www.shopltk.com/explore/shawnjohnson Like the Facebook page! ▶ https://www.facebook.com/ShawnJohnson Follow Andrew’s Instagram ▶ https://www.instagram.com/AndrewDEast Andrew’s Tik Tok ▶ https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewdeast?lang=en #SahilBloom #Wealth #Book #TransformYourLife #Empowerment Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up everybody? Welcome back to a couple things interviews with Sean and Andrew. Today we have Sahil Bloom. I am so excited to share this interview. Sahil and I have a lot of mutual friends and I've been waiting to meet him. I feel like he's very much in the internet ecosystem that I strive to be in. And he's a wonderful author, really thoughtful with his content. If you don't follow him on social media, please do. And also check out his book The Five Types of Wealth where he talks about life is just more. than about making money. It's about relationships and stewarding your time and these different concepts that we impact in this interview. I thought this was a delightful conversation. I hope you do as well. And we'll link information down below on Sahil and his platforms as well as where you can get his book. So thank you, Sahel, for your time. And thank you all for listening. How long have you you guys been doing the show? Six years. This is our six year. Oh, gee. That's OG podcasters. We've been doing it a while. I really do love it. Yeah, he, he decided, Andrew decided, I would just love the story decided to launch the podcast okay we had our first kid and i was one week postpartum

and he launched it not a great idea a duo podcast not great and he's like babe we have to film a podcast i was like i'm gonna kill you but but it did well it's fun it's done well were you at stanford ever did you like think about were you like maybe going to be there i was committed so i what year was that because i was at stanford and i remember there being like a huge like thing i think I think Yahoo did some article about Sean's considering going to either Stanford or Vanderbilt. Okay, that's what it was. Is this 2012? Like post-Olympics?

I committed to Stanford in 2008. Oh, so it was when I was a freshman. No, but there was an article written that Chase Garnham saw. He was like, dude, like, dude, Sean Johnson. Which would have been in 2012 because I deferred. That would have been later. Okay, yes, yeah. Because what year was were your Olympics?

2008. Okay, 2008. So then I was finishing high school and I was going to go off to college in the fall of 2009 okay um and then i ended up deferring four years just kept deferring kept deferring and then ended up transferring to vandy and then didn't oh i see okay yeah i remember because i played baseball and i remember like everyone was like oh she's she's she's gonna be at stanford um and it was like this big story that had come out it was my dream school and i forgot whether it had happened or not all right sahil bloom welcome to the show thank you for having me thrilled to be here i'm curious about

you because you're kind of in the self-help guru space. And I feel like that type of content, the books and the videos on that topic tend to skew very business heavy. But your recent book, The Five Types of Wealth, pushes against just the business success. And I'm curious how you got to this point. And if you ever started with just the business focus. I hate the guru thing, just in general. Like as soon as you say that, I'm like, ah, gosh. the reason that I um this is self-help in general like my um my number one concern with that entire space is that it tends to be a man telling you the answers for how to live your life right that's like the average self-help guru when you say that is like a guy that's going to tell you here's the answers for your life whether it's here's the only way you should eat if you want to like live well and be real here's the only way you can make money here's the you know the key to good relationships whatever and it's like here's the answer and i'm going to shove it down your throat and oh by the way like here's

my course that i offer and you can come and buy the course for me if you want to go deeper and i have rebelled against that in a certain way and in the book too in general where my entire intention is to make sure a that people know i don't have the answers for your life i really don't Right? Like I'm 34 years old. I understand certain things about the world. I've spent time with a lot of different types of people. But fundamentally, no one else has the answers for your life. You already have the answers for your own life. You just haven't asked the right questions yet to actually uncover and then act on them. So what I try to do in everything that I'm sharing is help people ask better questions. I want to arm you with the questions. The things that I personally am wrestling with or in the process of wrestling with, because I really think that, the answers that you're seeking in life are found in the questions that you avoid asking. The things that you're kind of hiding from that you haven't wanted to ask about your own life

in whatever area, that's where you actually uncover the things that lead to personal growth and personal development. And so my whole journey to actually answer your question specifically has been about my own path to asking those questions that I was avoiding. The earliest years of my career, I was just marching down the path of what I thought success looked like.

My entire definition of success of what a wealthy life meant was grounded in money and status and accumulating things. And, you know, I was climbing the mountain that you're told you should want to climb, the things that you're told you should want, you know, the fancy title, the promotion, the LinkedIn post saying you're humbled and honored to take whatever job. I did all that stuff and unfortunately on that path what I started to see happening was I was winning that one game or that one battle but at the expense of all of these other areas of my life my relationships had really started to suffer I was drinking six seven nights a week my physical mental health were all over the place all these other areas of my life were suffering but I had not taken the time to ask the question about whether the mountain I was climbing was actually one that I cared to be on or if It was just one that I was accepting blindly by default. To push back on that, because we just did a podcast on this, and I agree with everything you just said, but the naysayers who say, it must be so easy for you to say that, having already reached worldly society monetary wealth status, it must be easy for you to say, oh, that's not as good as it is. how can you convince people that it actually is not just about monetary success and other things actually matter the way that I articulate this first off completely agree with that pushback I think it's the right pushback we're all you know bombarded by the story of like uh you know the multi multi

millionaire who now tells you money doesn't buy happiness yeah it's like a cliche yeah that's not what I'm saying at all actually I I believe that money does buy happy up to a point. And the science on that is actually very clear. Money directly buys happiness in the early years of your life. Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? Like shelter, food, basic human necessities, taking care of your family, basic pleasures like vacations, experiences. Money directly buys happiness. Where you get into trouble is when you think that that same linear relationship where like incremental unit of money equals incremental unit of happiness, when you get patterned into believing that continues forever. And it doesn't. There's diminishing returns above a certain

level. And so what I say is that money isn't nothing. It simply can't be the only thing. Your wealthy life is definitely enabled by money, but it's going to be defined by all of these other things. If I were to go back and rewrite my own script or my own path, I wouldn't change that I was making money and focusing on building wealth. What I would change about it was I wouldn't turn off the other areas of my life. We sort of default into this traditional wisdom of your life exists on these on-off switches. Like you're going to focus on making money early in your life. So that switch gets turned on and you say, too bad health, flip it off, too bad social life, turn it off, too bad family, turn it off. All these other areas of your life get switched off. The problem

is that for a lot of these areas of life, if you leave them off for too long, you can never turn them back on. They literally become difficult to turn back on. We know this. Like with health, if you don't invest in your health in your 20s, 30s and 40s, very difficult to get it back in your 50s and 60s. It's the same thing with your relationships. It's the same thing with finding freedom or purpose or whatever those areas of life are. And so the thing I would say is the mindset shift is these areas of your life can exist on dimmer switches. So you turn up and focus on financial freedom and financial wealth building in those early years. I think that's a smart decision. Come up that curve. But don't turn the other areas off. Just have them down low. Do the small

daily things to invest in these other types of wealth because just like with your money, anything above zero compounds, anything in these other areas. The one text you send to the friend is better than nothing. The 10 minutes of physical activity is better than nothing. But ambitious people, as most your listeners will be, as I'm sure you both are, we allow optimal to get in the way of beneficial. So we'll say, oh, I don't have an hour to work out. So I'm just not going to do anything today. I don't have two hours for deep work, so I'm just not going to work. I don't have an hour to call my mom, so I'm not going to do anything. The reality is that the tiny thing is better than nothing. Mm-hmm. Hmm. But there is a listen to him to speak forever. I'm like,

yep, yeah. There's a cost to everything. And I'm thinking about, I went to Vanderbilt, you went to Stanford, all these high achievers coming out of school, they go work in investment banking, they're working 15, 16 hour days, trying to chase that financial goal or that job, the title. And, you know, it doesn't leave a lot of room for the health. So I'm just trying to bet, like finding that balance, one, is ever changing, depending on the phase of life that you're in, but two, it is like at some point it's easy to just throw up your hands and say, well, what do I? Am I going to work out for five minutes today and maybe take care of my health dimmer? Or like, how do you approach that when it does seem helpless and

pointless? I think that a lot of this is about reassuming agency over your own life. Like, if you think about the term agency is sort of fundamentally about recognizing that you are happening to life rather than life happening to you. Agency is about feeling like you are in control, that you can take an action and create an outcome in your life. All of this is about recognizing that you do have agency over your life. Whether you are in a great place or a bad place, you are still in control of the one action that you are going to take today. And that one action can either create a little bit of positive momentum or a little bit of negative momentum, whatever it might be. You can sit passively and decide not to do the five-minute walk and allow it

to negatively compound, or you can go for the five-minute walk between meetings. You can do the phone call that you have while outside on a walk and combine two things together and make it a little bit better than it otherwise would have been. You can choose to take the one action that moves you in the right direction or be passive in it and allow it to go the other way. And I think that over and over and over again, what you find, people that are long-term successful, when I say success, I define it much more around this comprehensive view of life, are the people who have high agency. They take action because they fundamentally believe that they are in control of the future that they're going to create. Do you think that's innate?

No. Because I truly, I have met so many people where we have tried to convince them that they have agency and they're like, well, I don't. You know, I can't do that. I can't achieve that. That's too far. That's too hard. That's too. How do you relearn that if you are an adult listening and you're, you, you're, you, you,

are starting from zero 30 days every single day wake up at earlier than you're used to i'm going to say five a m but earlier than you're used to and do some small workout like 30 minutes have an accountability buddy to do that someone you're going to text i honestly if you're out there listening and you don't have someone that you can text to do that send me a DM and tell me i did it send it send a checkmark every day for 30 days i promise i will reply to you um find someone that you're going to do this with because it's very hard to do things alone and do that for 30 days. The reason that I think that that is so important for reassuming agency is because fitness and physical health, physical wealth, is the fastest way that I know

to remind yourself that you can take an action and create an outcome. If you do that for 30 days, if you're not used to doing that, you will look and feel completely different after 30 days. You'll look in the mirror and be like, I am someone that is capable of doing something difficult to create a change in my life. And you will show up better in your household. You will show up better at work. You'll show up better in your relationships everywhere. You will be different. And so I have always thought that like anytime someone is feeling down on themselves, which I totally get, I have felt that way at different times in my life. The first thing I turn to is the physical because I know it's the quickest way to get back onto that positive momentum cycle.

And it's tiny things. It's like, it could be 10 minutes. It could be, if you're used to waking up at 8, wake up at like 7.15 and go for a 15 minute walk every day for 30 days. Like, I'm not saying you have to go kill yourself at a CrossFit workout every day for a month. The tiny little thing stacks positively here to remind yourself that you are in control. I like that approach. I do struggle with in my friendships, even in my relationship with my children,

and it's such an intangible return on what I'm investing. Like, hey, I'm, I guess I'm believing that over the course of my 18 years of the children being in my house, if I daily invest and spending time with them and being intentional and teaching them what I think is important, the values, I hope that in 18 years that will result in us having a good relationship and then being responsible citizens. It's so much easier, dude, to just be like, I'm going to feel better about myself and, like, the fitness thing, I'm going to do that. Or I'm going to, I'm going to go try to earn some more business and make some more money because that is such a quicker, more tangible return. I don't know if you've thought about that or how you balance that, but I struggle with that because it's so ambiguous, you know, how that can feel in relationships.

The hardest thing in the world is to show up consistently with discipline and energy when the rewards are uncertain. Tolerance for uncertainty is probably the single most important trait in life because so few people have that. So few people are willing to continue showing up on those days for the actions when the rewards are not certain. And that could be in business. it is definitely in family and in relationships. It is much easier to show up. But when it comes to health, I'm always blown away that more people don't do this

because the rewards are so predictable. If you eat really clean and work out every day and sleep seven hours a night for 30 days, you will look and feel different. I can guarantee unless there's a physiological problem, which is like maybe 0.1% of the population has some sort of issue, it will happen. In these other areas, it's much more difficult.

What I try to ground myself in is this recognition that if you are showing up and taking the right actions on a daily basis, it is impossible to bet against the person who just keeps showing up. No one, you will not lose in whatever arena in life if you're the type of person that is just willing to keep showing up, keep getting better, keep putting in the right intentions, the right actions, acting in good faith in these relationships. Does that mean that the outcomes are always going to align with the inputs? No. You know, it's like, it's sort of like a stock market where price is not always completely correlated with the value of the company. It kind of bobs up and down across. But over time, you like to believe that the two converge. And that is true, generally speaking. Like it is not going to be the case that two companies, that a company is going to have its value and its price massively dislocated over long times. Same thing goes for your life. Your inputs and the outputs are not always. going to be perfectly aligned. Sometimes you're going to put in a lot of input. You're not going to be seeing the results. Sometimes you're going to be putting in not that much input, and the results are going to be great.

You're going to be like, oh, this is so easy. But generally speaking, over the long run, if you zoom out on your life, when you're putting intention and energy into things over long periods of time, the results follow. I like that a lot because not betting against someone who keeps showing up is not saying that I know this person will be successful, but I know this is a type of

successful person this because if you keep showing up despite the outcome despite whether i'm winning or losing if that line is going up or down it probably it probably indicates as a signal for this person feels like this is purposeful this person like this means a lot to that type of person anyway i like that take a lot i was going to say though i love this i'm a huge believer in this so we both are we talk about this a lot but in like a blunt way it's not sexy the world in society all these guru books for the lack of a better

like way to say it it's a quick fix to everything everybody wants to know how to find the one overnight and it to be the happiest most wonderful most romantic relationship they'll have every single day of their life for the rest of their life

they want to lose 20 pounds in a week they want to make a million dollars in a day they want to go viral And I feel like what you're saying is like the showing up is putting in consistent long-term work. And people have said this even about our relationship and how we speak about it, how we say, we show up every day in our marriage and work for it. And we've had people say before, well, that doesn't sound like a good relationship or a marriage. and, in my opinion, it goes across every category of life, including health and diet. There's no quick fix to it.

You literally have to show up every day and work at it. And if you don't, it's not going to last. I completely agree. And the problem is social media has lied to you about this in every area. The reason social media has lied to you, by the way, is because it is, much easier to sell you a course or an e-book or some fancy tool that sells you the hack or the quick fix, right? Like, if I'm going to go try to sell, if I wanted to try to make a million dollars tomorrow, if you were like, hey, you got to make a million dollars gun to your head tomorrow,

what am I going to do? I'm probably going to go market like some get rich quick scheme, some get fit quick scheme, some perfect relationship scheme. And it's going to be literally like, hey, you can have the perfect body and, you know, nine seconds per day for seven days, perfect abs, right? And Take a picture of your abs in front of a private jet. Be like, you'll get rich and have apps like this if you do this. A bunch of people will buy that, right? Because people want the short-term quick fix. So you have the proliferation of a ton of people selling that exact thing.

It is not a very good business for you to say or for me to come out and say in any of the stuff that I do, which is what I do. Hey, the key to building a good relationship is crawling through the mud with someone over the course of 10 years, not avoiding difficult conversations, being willing to do nothing with. them growing in love rather than falling in love. All the things that I say, I can't sell you an e-book on that, right? Like, it's crazy, but it's true. And the truth across all of this is there's this kind of fundamental tension, right? Like inherent in some of these ideas, actually. So time wealth, I talk a lot about freedom, freedom to choose what you're spending your time on. That idea of freedom has a tension built into it because you have to sacrifice short-term freedom in order to earn long-term freedom. You have to be willing to sacrifice this like instant gratification that short-term

freedom implies in order to earn the things that we really want in the long-term. Meaning short-term freedom, like you go sleep around with whoever, go like, you know, date around, go, you know, press the eject button on a relationship as soon as it's no longer feeling like the hundred honeymoon phase, you know, change diets all the time, eat the good snacks. That's short-term freedom, right? I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm free to choose whatever I want to do. But that is not going to build or earn the life that you actually want. You're never going to earn the relationship you want. You're never going to be healthy the way you want. You're never going to build the business that you want if you chase that short-term dopamine hit, the instant gratification. And so over and over again,

I think what you find is that delayed gratification is the key to love. You have to be willing to do the hard thing now in order to earn the good thing later. If I were to say one thing that I want my son to understand from me, if I were to be gone, it is that. It is that he needs to be willing to work hard on things he cares about to build a good future. And that applies to relationships as much as your health, as much as your business. It applies to every one of these areas of your life. You have to sacrifice short-term freedom in order to earn long-term freedom. I feel like it's so common nowadays for people to quote unquote want to be their own boss, right?

And like, you know, I think the early 2010s, the internet was full of videos of people saying, yo, here I am on the beach in Costa Rica. And you'll be like to, yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And that concept of freedom, I think, is in some ways the first thing people think about. But how do you view freedom in terms of freedom? responsibility. Do you correlate those two? Are they contradicting to you?

That's an interesting question. The first thing I'll say is that doing your own thing is not for everybody. There is. It's still this social media meme of like the only way to make money is to do your own thing. I personally think that for like 90% of people doing an excellent job working within another company is the best path to financial independence. You can make a lot of money if you are excellent at a job working at a company. Usually, doing your own thing, working for yourself actually means working twice as hard on whatever the thing is, because now it's on you, like no matter what it is on you. There's no one else. There's no other support. It's on you to do the thing. And that kind of glass chewing that is required do build your own thing, not everyone

wants to do that. And so, like, selling this dream of the four-hour work week on, and by the way, I love Tim Ferriss. I thought the four-hour work week was amazing. I'm not picking on the book. I'm saying, like, that idea that you can just work for four hours on a beach in Bali, maybe a few people are able to pull that off. The vast majority of people that I know that have gone down an entrepreneurial path work more than they would. They might be more fulfilled because they have agency over their own stuff, and that's great if they are. But it's not about working less and living on a beach somewhere and having this glamorous life. And frankly, a lot of my friends that went and did that felt wildly unfulfilled after a little

while of doing it and wanted to go back and work more. To your actual question on freedom and responsibility, I, um, responsibility is an interesting word because I think a lot in the context of like modern masculinity, um, the idea, of responsibility keeps coming into my mind as I think about it. So masculinity has been this like hot button topic that everyone wants to debate nowadays. And it has been hijacked by a misogynistic class of men who are espousing this idea that masculinity is about dominance and superiority over others and flexing on wealth. and money and power and that's what masculinity is. I fundamentally think about masculinity as being

about fulfilling your responsibilities, whatever they are, showing up for the people in your life, showing up for your responsibilities and being able to go and do those things, whether that responsibility is changing a diaper, whether that responsibility is taking out the trash, or whether that responsibility is going and building a big business. Whatever your responsibilities are, do what you say you are going to do. Be reliable. My grandfather used to tell me you'll achieve much more by being consistently reliable than by being occasionally extraordinary. I think about that all the time. It's just about showing up. Do what you say you're going to do. That is masculinity to me. And freedom and responsibility are kind of connected. It's like, yes, I have a choice

every single day of how am I going to show up in the world? Am I going to go and like fly around and just do whatever I want? Or am I going to show up for the people and for the things that I have a responsibility towards. That's fascinating. I'm just trying to massage this out because I feel like I have so much freedom and I am really living the life that a better life than I ever could have dreamed of, but it doesn't always feel free. Like changing the diaper or taking care of what you said you're going to take care of on day 1,000 looks a lot different and less fun than taking care of what you said you're going to take care of on day 1. You know what I'm saying? Like when you get into it, it's hard. It doesn't feel like freedom.

I'm just trying to rethink of what that word means to me and say, okay, if I want time wealth, I don't know what that means, actually, as I'm thinking about it. I mean, you're thinking of freedom. What I would encourage you to do, actually, anyone that's listening to this, and it's a note to myself as well, is you're getting caught in like a time horizon trap where you're thinking of freedom in the moment when the reality is the freedom that we are really seeking is the seasons. It's like it's the zoomed out view on your life, freedom. You build the life that you want across all of these different areas. That is what freedom is about. It's about being able to create the life that you want.

You are able to take actions to create the life that you want. That means that in the short term, zoomed in view, sometimes you are not going to feel very free because you have to do the dirty work in whatever area to earn that long term bigger picture freedom in your life. So changing the diaper, showing up for the hard conversation with your wife in whatever area, with your family member, showing up for the stuff that you don't want to go to, that sacrificed some of your potential ambitions in certain areas. Those are all short-term freedoms that you had to sacrifice in order to earn this bigger picture freedom in your life. It's almost like we need

a different word for what that short-term thing is, and it's not freedom. Freedom is about the bigger picture of your life, being able to build the life that you want. I'm going to say this and I'm like you, I'm sorry. No. I've heard it actually now that you say it like that, someone introduced me to the concept of borrowing from the future joy of whatever we're talking. Borrowing from the future joy of having a good relationship with my kid and using that now to motivate me to change the diaper. Yeah.

Borrowing from the future of having financial means in the future to encourage me to save now. I don't know. You just connected those. I have that. I love sort of. coming up with these like metaphors or things that like you're good at it visuals that like allow me to think about these topics and the one that keeps coming up to me now over and over again is this idea of like taking on a debt and when you do short term when you chase this short term freedom

on things oftentimes you are taking on a debt that you have to repay in the future and like when it comes to hard conversations when you avoid a hard conversation you are taking on a debt that you have to repay with interest in the future. Time doesn't heal anything when it comes to relationships. It just makes things worse in the long run. Those minor repairs become major repairs in the long run. So I have found that really useful to just think like, okay, here's a hard conversation that I could have. If I avoid this, just know that I'm going to have to pay this tenfold in the future because the interest is going to stack up on this debt that I've just taken on. That same idea of a debt applies to these other things. When I skip the workout, when I, you know, choose not to show up for the

family member in their time of need, all of those things are taking on a debt that I then am going to have to repay in the future. You keep talking about like delayed gratification and all these like prompts to kind of organize your life and structure your life for like long term fulfillment, long term purpose. We have talked about this as well and a common kind of flat back from people is structuring your life that much doesn't seem fun because you live a structured life and there's no room for freedom, quote freedom, impulsivity, adventure, whatever it is.

Is there a world, and I think this goes kind of into the Brian Johnson question, of is there a world in which you get too much structure and you delay too much gratification to where you wind up 30 years down the road, waiting for this gratification to come because you're trying so hard to like protect it or build it and what's the balance between not having enough? I find pretty consistently that people who embrace structure in their life

actually enjoy the structure. So like when I talk about delayed gratification, I'm like, oh, I have to be willing to do hard things today and, you know, do the workouts and show up and do the the runs and all this stuff. What I actually realize in the days is I quite enjoy having the structure and the routine. Like I have come to love the suck of all of that. I talk about this. I'm like, you know, you have to, every single thing you want in life is on the other side of something that sucks. 100 workouts, 100 hard conversations, 100 hours of focused work, whatever it

is. The best things in life are when you realize that you actually love the suck, whatever the suck is. And I think that creating structure, you start to get to a point where you do enjoy that. Brian Johnson, people love to hate on him for the soul around one particular thing, which is exactly this. It's like, well, he must hate his life because he's doing these things. I spent time with him. It's weird. He loves what, like, he loves the crazy optimization, the weirdness of his routine, all the stuff he's doing. Like, he is very honestly living his best life. doing this weird stuff. So for me, the thing that I keep coming back to, and it's the meta point of the whole

book, is like, we need to stop allowing other people's maps to impact our terrain, meaning my life is my life. I get to choose what I enjoy doing, what I don't enjoy doing, what freedoms I'm chasing, what I want to do. For me to then go on social media and look at someone else's map of reality and allow that to impact how I feel about my terrain or try to apply their map to my terrain. it doesn't really make sense. It is just a very, very different map.

So, like, I don't want Brian's life. But if he is living his best life and he's enjoying it, good for him. Like, I don't care. I'm not going to do it. I can maybe learn certain things from it in certain places. But it doesn't ever really make sense for us to try to, like, justify or rationalize how someone else is structuring their life. What we need to find is, like, what is that balance point for us?

most people on average will benefit from having more versus less structure in their life the people that say like oh you know your structure you're optimizing the life out of your life um most of those people could probably use a little bit more structure right like i'm not talking about scheduling time to chat with your wife you know from 717 p.m. to 725 i'm talking about knowing that in the morning from eight to nine is your like focus time knowing that from 10 to 11 is when you get your workout in, whatever it is, having a few windows of time so that you can take care of those kind of daily non-negotiables that allow you to feel and show up as your best self. That is where I come to think about structure. The rest of my day, like, yeah, I do like having unstructured time. I like being able to think. I like serendipity. And so I think it is just finding your own personal balance of the two. the only way you do that is by experimenting like testing add more structure slowly subtract it whatever your balance is going to be that's where you find your best your best performance

okay so if this book is not a quick fix solution to people what do you hope people take away from the book the number one thing i think um people should take away is a desire to ask these questions about their life. And the most important meta question is that. It is, what do I actually care about? What are the things that I actually care about building my life around? And then you can go and take tiny actions to go and do that. And the book is filled with tons of actions that you can go and take right now. They're not quick fixes, but they are things that you can take actions around and that will show real incremental progress very quickly. It's not going to change your, you will not change your life in a day, but if you change your days, you will eventually change your

life. And I hope that people take the time to start questioning some of these default assumptions or beliefs that we have naturally been indoctrinated into or believed about ourselves, about our lives. In particular, what success looks like to you, what wealth actually means to you? Because defaulting into the societal definition has led a lot of people down a bad path long term. So what does success look like to Sahel? What is your map? My definition of wealth is being able to take my son in the pool at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday. That is my wealthy life.

I don't think I can summarize it what I mean by wealth to me any better than that because that implies everything, right? It means I have the time, freedom to be able to decide at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday, then I'm going to go in the pool. It means that I have enough money to have a pool. So there's a level of financial wealth. It means I have a relationship with my wife and my son that he wants me to take him in the pool. He wants to have me around.

He has fun around that. And it means that I'm healthy and free and feel that purpose and growth to be able to go and do that. That to me is, like, I don't need much more than that. And so that brings you to this whole idea of what it means to have enough. It's like, okay, I can do that right now, actually. I'm like living that wealthy life for myself right now. Now, does that mean that I am no longer trying to go out and create things in the world, that I'm not chasing ambition? No, I am going and doing that. I'm here. I'm having conversations. I'm trying to spread these ideas. But it's grounded in something that goes beyond money. It's grounded in the fact that my purpose is to go and create ripples in the world. I want to create positive ripples that impact people in certain ways. And that tension of like knowing when you have enough and feeling gratitude for that, but continuing to pursue more. As long as it's grounded in something more meaningful than money, that is kind of the tension and natural balance that I am personally wrestling with now.

You interviewed a group of 80 and 90-year-olds and asked what some of their best pieces of advice to younger selves would be. What were some of your favorite? This could be a book in and of itself. I actually want to write a book on this, like down the road. Let go interview thousands of, you know, 100-year-olds, 90-year-olds. one of the most beautiful pieces of advice was from my 95-year-old grandmother who unfortunately passed away recently who said never fear sadness as it tends to sit right next to love the reason I think that's so powerful is so many of the most beautiful things in life

dance on this razor's edge where the good sits right next to the bad and if you avoid the bad, you never get the good. So many people avoid you're like terrified of the sadness. So you never experience the love. If you never open yourself up to the sadness, you're never going to experience the beauty of the love. And I think that that rule applies to so many of these different things that we're talking about. So it has these like broad, broad applications across different areas of life. The most interesting physical one, which technically applies to everything, treat your body like a house that you have to live in for the next 70 years. I, to the point of like having a visual of something that can connect and is powerful,

I love that one, just thinking about the fact that your body quite literally is your house, taking care of it, making the daily investments, making those minor repairs along the way, investing in the solid foundation, all of those things apply and clearly highlights the fact that your future self is the beneficiary or the person that is going to be moan all of the actions that you were taking in the present, whatever it is that you're doing. How do you see yourself? What do you define yourself as? Are you consider yourself a philosopher, a venture capitalist, an author?

You know, I suppose I would say author now, which feels good because I have the little like sentence now that I can say. For the longest time after I left my prior job, this is like a funny thing about jobs in general that like a lot of people take jobs because they like to have the like nice sounding little sound bite. You go to like a party and people say, what do you do? And you want to have the impressive sounding like one liner, whatever it is. Like I worked in finance. I was like, oh, I'm a vice president at this, you know, investment fund. It sounds good. Everyone's like, ooh, sounds good. And the single greatest piece of career advice I ever got was before you, you take a job, ask yourself, do I want this job or do I want other people to see me having this job? It's like a very, very different thing. A lot of times people take a job because they want other people to see them having it. They want to be able to do the fancy LinkedIn post and say, you know, I'm humbled and honored to take this role at whatever bank, whatever the thing is. And the reality is they don't actually want to do the work. I definitely was in that mold. After I left,

I had no idea what I would say I was you know I'm a writer I have a newsletter I was like investor I had all these different things and what happens is like if you start saying five or seven things people just assume you're unemployed it's like the LinkedIn bio where it's like it says like 80 things you're like investor entrepreneur whatever it says a million things you just are like oh so this person is unemployed so I feel very good now just being able to have one thing that I can just say because I hate that I don't think anyone likes being asked what do you do Yeah. No one really like feels that good about their answer in general. And so it's just like one of those questions. I try to never ask that because I just hate it. I always ask and by the way, if you're ever going to a cocktail party or like a networking event or any sort of function and if you are like me and you get a little socially anxious, the best question you can ask anyone as an opener is what are you most excited about lately? Because sometimes people take it a personal route. They're like something. about their family or their kids or something. Sometimes it's professional and it's work. But no matter what, they start getting animated, talking about something they're excited about. And that cuts the tension in a conversation you would otherwise be nervous in so much. So like that versus asking what do you do, which immediately is just like they answer and the conversation's over. It just is like it sets up a much better conversational momentum that eases the tension a lot for those situations. That's really good. I saw, did you get your master's in public service?

Public policy. Did you want to be a politician at one point? Yeah. I mean, this is pre what the last 10 years have looked like in America with politics. But I, for the longest time, I had this vision in my mind of like running for office someday. I would say a lot of that desire and vision, if I were to really be self-aware, was probably grounded in my own insecurity and this desire to like feel impressive. Most of my actions over the first 30 years of my life were controlled by my insecure self at the wheel. Chasing external affirmation, chasing things that would make me feel puffed up, whatever it was. Because from a young age, I had convinced myself that I wasn't very smart. I have an older sister who is extremely high-performing academically. And I started telling myself this story when I was like maybe seven or eight years old that she was the smart one and I was like athletic right to do something else and those stories

that you tell yourself create your reality because humans are storytelling creatures and we are very good at finding evidence that confirms whatever story we already believe about ourselves so if you tell yourself you're not smart I guarantee you will look around and find evidence to confirm that and you'll ignore every single piece of evidence that would refute that in that created a level of insecurity in me that, you know, was this like internal problem. And when you have an internal problem like that and you're young and immature, what do you do? You try to find external solutions to the internal problem because you don't know how to look yourself in the mirror, how to ask these hard questions, all of these things that I've had to do. And the best way to find

external solutions in modern society is like get achievements, accolades, you know, try to run for office, get people to say you're in, get a good job, whatever those things are. So that insecurity governed a lot of my, a lot of my younger years. How did having a kid change your life? In every way imaginable. I mean, my wife and I had a pretty long struggle prior to her getting pregnant. I was in my prior life. I was, you know, in hindsight, pretty deeply unhealthy in a lot of ways. And for two years, we really struggled. And those are a really tough experience in time. It's one that not a lot of men talk about or open up about. And that experience for anyone that's struggled with that of like every month building up to this one event and then

the letdown and the strain of that combined with the fact that I was at this time in my life where I was like so focused on this one thing of trying to make money and thinking that that was what would make me happy. I was just not showing up or being present in the way that I needed to in my relationship. And the most beautiful thing in all of this was, um, You know, I made, we made this big change. I quit my job. We moved 3,000 miles to live closer to our families. Huge change in life to kind of reset, pivot, center our life around the things we really cared about. And within two weeks of making that change, we found out that my wife was pregnant, naturally. And I'm not a really religious person, but if there was one moment in my life where I felt like God had winked at us, it was that. Like when your life comes into alignment, everything falls into place as it should. And I would just say that since then, and since our son was born, he provides a constant reminder of our center, what truly matters. And it's not always easy. That doesn't mean it's like perfect and you're just going around, flow, oh, everything's so great.

I mean, even two weeks ago, I was like, maybe not two weeks ago. Now it's probably a month ago. I was in my office working on something for the book launch and my son came barging in and he's like knocking things over, terrorizing. in our office, a two and a half year old little boy. And I started having this whole train of thought, like, so annoyed. Why is he doing this? Complaint. You know, it doesn't even know I'm trying to work, all of this stuff. And in that moment, I caught myself. And I took myself back to four years ago when we were struggling to conceive. And I had prayed every single night for two years that we would one day have a healthy child. And then here I was in this moment complaining about

the exact thing that I had prayed for. And it was a reminder to me of this fact that sometimes in life, the things that we pray for become the things that we complain about if we let them. If we don't stop ourselves, catch ourselves in those moments and recognize that sometimes you are literally living out the prayers of your younger self. I was just listening to John Maxwell speak and he said, experience is not the best teacher, evaluated experience is. I think that applies here in the sense that like I have found so much value in like journaling or reflection writing things down even in video form because like it gives you a kind of a milestone pillar to point back to and say oh shoot remember four years ago when this is what I wanted and

now now I have this so I think I think always being conscious and reflective of hey maybe things aren't as good or bad maybe as I thought they were but you always have kind of this this roadmap that shows you so you're 34 how you're viewing the next hopefully 70 years of your life like you have this revelation that money's not the thing what are you like are you going to have a midlife crisis at some point or what's this going to look like is it just every day showing up and doing the little things for all this probably a perpetual crisis that's just what life is you're just like

I heard someone say that once that, like, you never quite figure it out. You're kind of just, like, stumbling from here to the point of death. And you just, like, hope that you're, like, stumbling a little bit better than you were the day before. Sometimes life does feel that way. And I think it's, like, learning to enjoy the stumbling along the path. I think it was the author of Calvin and Hobbs, those, like, comics that I read when I was a kid, who talked about the fact that it's not about, like, the perfect route. It's about enjoying the detours along the way.

and I love that idea like I don't I I am not a planner anymore I have given up entirely on planning I used to be like a huge planner everything was about the okay I'm gonna sit down in like my five year my 10 year my 15 year plan all these things and the reason I've given up on it is because my life entire life has changed in the last five years in a way that was entirely unpredictable like if you had five years ago asked me to sit down and write a hundred scenarios for where I would be in five years. years. I would have written down a hundred scenarios. Not a single one of them would have been even approximately correct. I was working, there's no way I would have said, oh, you're going to go write on Twitter and then you're going to write a book. Like, I was working in finance. I was an investor. I was doing well. Like, there's no way. It just wasn't on the map. Yet, this is my path. Like, I have found my path and my calling. And so it's a reminder that the most interesting opportunities in life are inherently invisible to you where you stand today. You just have to start walking, and then they reveal themselves. They're kind of uncovered to you as you start

walking. Rumi, the ancient poet, wrote, as you start to walk on the way, the way appears. And so now I sort of try to pursue my life with that in mind as an ethos of, I just need to keep walking and take the right actions, the things that I believe are grounded in good faith towards the people around me, fulfilling my responsibilities. And those operations, and those opportunities will reveal themselves as I progress. I was about to ask the best piece of advice you would give someone to keep with them daily. Would it be that? I think so.

That's my favorite quote because it's a reminder that every day you just need to walk. You just need to do something. The problem that a lot of people find themselves stuck in is this desire to plan everything. Right. Like I actually think young people in particular, I think probably like average listener of this is probably similar age to me. Like this planning, this desire to plan the perfect path from where you are to the future has been ingrained in you as very important. Even like, you know, when you're in high school, you were told that you go to college, then you get a job, then you get married, then you have a kid, then you're like your path was sort of planned. We live in a very uncertain era. I would argue if you're a history. history buff, every era has felt uncertain for whoever was living in it. But right now, right? Like, AI, technology, jobs. What, like, I don't know what world my son is going to be an adult in. I genuinely, I do not know. And so for me to sit and try to plan 10, 15 years into the future is a losing prophecy. It is very hard for me to predict the future in that way.

Jeff Bezos had great advice around this. I think in 2012, he talked about the fact that everyone always asks him what's going to change in 10 years. But like, how do you plan for this changing future? He thinks the much more interesting question is what won't change? What will stay the same in 10 years? That's much easier to build your life around. Those things that you know are going to stay the same. I know that humans are still going to be looking for purpose and meaning in 10, 15, 20, 50 years.

We're still going to be looking for that. I know humans are still going to be insecure in 15, 20, 30, 40 years. I know that we are still going to desire real connection with other people in 10, 15, 20 years. All of these things are going to stay the same. And so I can prepare for that future by building and acting on a daily basis in a way that is going to position me well for that. But I cannot plan the specifics of exactly what that's going to look like. I guess uncouple not planning with also having a map of what you want your life to look like. Like, I guess Sean and I talk about goals all the time, and I guess I viewed those as slowly as we've done them for, what, seven years now.

It's like we were way off the path that we wanted to be on or that we felt like was our sweet spot. And over time doing that, like we've oscillated back and forth less and less and less. And so the value in planning has been the awareness of like, hey, this is what we're supposed to be doing. this is who we're supposed to be doing it with. And I guess I'm trying to uncouple that from, like, the value of that from overdoing it and acknowledging that it's probably not going to pan out like you think it will, you know? I think that what you're referring to is how I think about, like, a compass.

I want to know the general direction of what I'm trying to go towards. Like, sort of begin with the end in mind. Like, here's what I want my life to look like at age 80 or at age 50. general direction and that's great to have that in mind but if I'm just staring like if I'm going for a hike and I see like the top of the mountain 10 miles that way and I stare at that while I'm walking I'm probably going to trip and I'm not going to feel like I'm making any progress towards that as I'm walking it's going to be it's actually going to be meaningfully uh negative probably as I'm walking because it's I'm just going to be like oh my God I've been walking for

an hour and it still looks the same distance away from it so far I feel um you know I feel sort of like disoriented and I feel lost. What you need to do is have a general sense of like there's the thing it's inspiring, amazing, have my compass pointed that direction and then I'm sort of just walking and I'm focusing on the actions that I'm taking today and I'm prepared

for whatever happens. I know that like I brought food so if there's a storm I brought a tent like I'm prepared for whatever chaos and storms come the reason I think about that is if you think about like an explorer setting out on a journey that's kind of

view in your life, an explorer doesn't trust that they have the perfect plan to get from point A to point B. You're not saying, okay, I have the perfect plan to get from here to there. You're trusting that you are going to be able to adapt to whatever storms arise. You're not trusting that the seas are going to be calm and everything's going to go perfect. You know that you've done the work to prepare, that you're going to be able to navigate through to the other side. Preparation is really about the expectation of chaos. Planning is all about the expectation of order. You're saying like, oh, things are going to go well

and it's going to go according to plan. Nothing goes according to plan in life. We know that now with enough experience. And yet we still have this tendency to say, like, I'm going to plan out every detail to perfection. And so what happens when you are a planner is like when the first thing goes off course, you panic and you throw up your arms,

you're like, oh my God, this is not going the way that I thought. if you're the person that has just been prepared for that if you've expected that the chaos is going to come then you're like excited it's a thumbs up like i was i was built for this well said marcus aurelius said something to the effect of that we should thank the chaos that comes into our life um because it makes us stronger that it's a positive um and i really do feel that way it's like sometimes in hindsight those moments of chaos those things when you were prepared for them, those are the things that really forge the growth that you're experiencing as a human. That's really well said. I love your book. I love how you speak.

I love your perspective on life. It is refreshing. Just, you know, being 33 years old and in many ways in like the sweet spot earning potential part of my life, you know, it is such a temptation to want to press into that. And so to hear more conversation around there's more to life. I think is extremely important. And I would argue, I'm actually writing a paper on this right now about work family enrichment theory that, and I think it extends to all the five different types of wealth, that they're actually, it's all symbiotic and they all kind of build each other up. So I think if you're physically healthy, you're able to maybe be more social, to be more

productive and work in a more meaningful way. Same thing with it. If you're mentally healthy, I think if you have positive social relationships, there's all these kind of like kind of nodes that connect to other things like maybe you can be more creative with your work based off that conversation that you had and so it's kind of like this really exciting when you start seeing everything as connected and like oh shoot if I'm intentional in this area that'll help me be intentional in all these different areas and it's really like a practice and a style uh with which to approach life I think that's incredibly powerful so thank you for all the

the good conversation that you have sparked as a result of this and thank you for the conversation here today thank you for having me this was a thrill thank you