Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - The 5 Types of Wealth That Will Change Your Life | Sahil Bloom

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

What if the real risk isn’t failure—it’s spending your whole life chasing a version of success that was never yours to begin with?That question sparked a radical transformation in Sahil Bloom’s life. A NYT best-selling author, entrepreneur, and investor, Sahil once had a sobering realization: he might only see his parents 15 more times in his lifetime. That gut-check moment became a catalyst for deep change—he left his high-powered career, moved across the country, and set out to architect a life rooted in meaning rather than momentum.In this conversation, Sahil shares the mental frameworks, emotional reckoning, and actionable systems he’s used to redesign his life. Together, Sahil and Dr. Mike unpack the hidden cost of conventional success, the power of mortality to clarify purpose, and how to build a life worth living.You’ll learn:Why “success” can become a trap—and how to redefine it for yourselfThe simple framework Sahil uses to make high-quality life decisionsHow to overcome fear when walking away from something “good”The role mortality plays in clarifying what really mattersStrategies to realign your life around purpose, not performanceThis one’s for anyone who wants to rewrite the script on what "success" means to you.Links & ResourcesSubscribe to our Youtube Channel for more conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and wellbeing: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine: findingmastery.com/morningmindset!Follow on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and XSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

When you've thought about measuring your life, what was the one thing that you measured? It was money. And so what I set out to do with this book was to try to create a new scoreboard, a new way of measuring your life around the pillars and the things that really do fundamentally create this good life, if you will, that we are all seeking to build. That is what the five types of wealth is about it. What if the real risk isn't failure? It's spending your whole life chasing a version of success that was never yours to begin with. Welcome back. Well, welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers.

I'm your host, Dr. Michael Jerva, by trade and training, a high-performance psychologist. Now, the whole idea behind these conversations is quite simple, to sit with the extraordinarily to learn about how they work from the inside out. Today's conversation is with Saul Hill Bloom, a former private equity investor who made a radical life shift after realizing he might only see his parents 15 more times. Within 45 days, I had left my job, we had sold our house in California, and my wife and I had moved 3,000 miles across the country to live closer to both of our sets of parents. We had taken an action and created time. That gut check moment, it led him to redefine what it means to live well for him. I never talked to anyone who said that their enough life was traveling around on a private jet by themselves. I know many people, and I'm sure you do, who have way more money than I do, but are not wealthy.

because they are constantly chasing some version of more that the world has handed them. The invitation here is to explore what you are really optimizing for in your life. Are your daily actions aligned with what you say matters most? There are two types of priorities in life. There are the priorities we say we have. And there are the priorities our actions show we have. Oftentimes there's a huge gap between the two. And closing that gap is how your life improves.

Let's dive into this week's conversation with Saw Hill Bloom. Okay. I'm really excited that you're here. We're finally here in the Finding Mastery Lab. I've wanted to sit down with you for a long time. So welcome and I'm excited for the conversation. The feeling is very mutual. I'm thrilled to be here. Okay. So I think we've got a lot of thoughts that rhyme together. I feel that way too. Yeah. And so thank you for putting together a book that it's not easy to tackle the five verticals that you went after. So let's just kind of start big picture for a minute. What's the flyover for the book? What were you trying to do? And then I want to better understand you, the person that is underneath the ideas. And then I, third part is I want to understand, you know, kind of what you hope we will take from your research and your writings. So let's start

with a flyover the book. The book is fundamentally about asking yourself what, what you want your life to look like. And what you measure around your life, I have found, dictates your ability to go and create that life. Very few people focus on measurement on our journey, but if you really zoom out and think about it, what you measure in life really matters. The things that you measure end up dictating all of your actions.

Peter Drucker is this famous management theorist. he has this quote where he says, what gets measured gets managed. It's the idea that as humans, the things that we can measure end up being the things that we narrowly hone in on and optimize around.

Put on a sleep tracking ring or band, all of a sudden you become the most annoying sleep person in the world. You start saying like, oh, I can't go out because my sleep score is going to be thrown off. Suddenly, all of your actions surround this one thing that you can now measure.

Historically in our lives, thought about measuring your life. What was the one thing that you measured? It was money, your net worth, the ability to earn and generate income and wealth. And unfortunately, if all of your actions surround that one thing, what we find societally and in our own lives is that we can win that one battle but lose the much bigger picture of war. And so what I set out to do with this book was to try to create a new scoreboard, a new way of measuring your life around the pillars and the things that really do fundamentally create this good life, if you will, that we are all seeking to build. That is what the five types of wealth is about. It is about

redefining this life scoreboard, if you will, so that we can take the right actions to win on that much bigger picture scoreboard. Yeah. So you took the old scoreboard of like money, two cars, two and a half kids, or whatever those metrics are, and said, we can do better. Yeah, we can do better. it's not about saying that those things don't matter. It is about saying that they are incomplete. They are a piece of the puzzle. Money isn't nothing. It simply can't be the only thing. Okay. So that phrase, managing and measuring, okay, it actually drove me crazy in graduate school. So there was, there's this, let me just start with like, psychology's invisible. We can't see thoughts. We don't know where they come from. We don't know how much they weigh. We

don't know where they go. We don't know how to put handles on them. Like you can't see thoughts. Just like you can't see gravity. You can see the artifact of gravity. You can see the leave behind of gravity. You can see the artifact of thoughts too, behavior. So the idea in graduate school is like, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. And I thought, what? Like there are so many things that we can't measure because we can't even see them, but we know they're powerful. It is what ultimately led me to moving from the sport science track that I started. So I started in psychology, then I get a master's degree in sport science, and then back to psychology. I did want to measure some stuff because this intangible world, this fascinating world of psychology, I wanted to

put handles and measure and understand how to get better at something. And it ultimately led me back to the invisible world of psychology and to have a love affair with the invisible. is a difficult thing to do. So I want to start with, it sounds like you are swinging to, yeah, I want to measure stuff. There's a scoreboard to finances. There's a scoreboard to the other four verticals of wealth. And I do want to measure so I can best manage. And I think manage is not the word after reading your book. It's more about optimizing. So can you just respond to that hinge idea just a little bit? Yeah, I think there's sort of two important points here that you're hitting on. One is this idea of a desire to measure is very much a double-edged sword

because a good measure is a fantastic thing. And you take the right actions, you create the outcomes that you desire. But a bad measure can be debilitating. So you can have this desire to measure something. You have a fear of this intangible, the invisible, so you go and chase something that you can measure that's tangible. But if it's a bad measure, it can actually lead to the entirely wrong set of outcomes. There's all these famous stories from history of this that are really funny. Like in colonial India, the British wanted to get rid of the cobra population that was like running rampant in the streets of Delhi. And so they put out a bounty where they said, we'll pay you for every cobra head that you deliver. So these enterprising

Indians went and started breeding cobras and then chopping their heads off and bringing them in to make money. The British realized this was happening and said, bounties off, this is not happening anymore. And these cobra breeders now had a whole bunch of cobras that were worthless, so they just released them into the streets. So this measure that was designed, this incentive that they put in place that was designed to reduce the number of cobras in the wild actually increased it. So it was an example. It's called a cobra effect, this example of like the wrong measure can actually lead to the entirely wrong set of consequences of outcomes. This is why what I really enjoyed about your writing is that, you know, that one, that story is emblematic of how you weave a deeper insight

through each of the five verticals of wealth. And you've got that right balance in your writings between storytelling and personal experience with some science and framing. So I just wanted to highlight that and say, cool, well done. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. The other piece is to just recognize that all measurement are inherently a little bit of art and science. Like when we're talking about measuring in our lives, the money one, the reason it has

been historically the measure is because it was so measurable. It's very easy to say, like, like, well, my entire life worth is this one number. And we are all operating on, generally speaking, the same scoreboard around that. So you can walk into a room and humans are, you know, status-seeking creatures. It's a very simple way to create a hierarchy around the people that you're all around. You walk into a party and everyone sort of stacks themselves up according to this one measure. When we start moving into these domains that don't necessarily have a simple of a measurement, you have to embrace a little bit of that kind of invisibility, a little bit of

the fuzziness that comes with it. How do I measure the quality of my relationships? I can't necessarily tell you, like, I have a better relationship with my kids than you have with yours. It has to be an internal measure, an internal locus of control, if you will. And I think that much of this, much of this whole idea, much of what we both talk about, frankly, is about shifting from these external locus of control to internal locus of control, meaning you are fundamentally the one that is

capable of creating the change in your world. You are capable of taking actions and creating outcomes according to the things that you want. And that, I think, is where a lot of people get stretched, where it becomes a little bit more intangible, and you need to turn inward.

You can't use these things as a way of necessarily stacking yourself against others. We're begging the question, like, what is the scoreboard and the measurement that you outline in the book for the five dimensions? Put a pin in that for right now. And let's stay on new wealth. So before, you know, digging into the more nuanced take on new wealth that you've got, I was very clear that old wealth is bank account, house, car, watch, you know, like all of the status, external things. old wealth for just a moment new wealth for me is a sense of zest for life of

vibrance there's a there's the animation of flourishing the spirit of aliveness and you know Harvard's 80 year study on that pointed to purpose and connection as two of the main threads for what I would call new wealth now you separated that idea just a little bit further and said, right, what you're talking about are these five dimensions. So do you want to hit the five dimensions quickly and then talk about how you're thinking about managing them? Yeah. So the way that I have thought about constructing this is around these five pillars, these five types of wealth. The first is time wealth. It's about freedom to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it, when you trade it for other things.

it's fundamentally based on an awareness of time as your most precious asset, the one thing that you cannot get any more of. Once you spend it, it's gone. Once you spend it, it's gone. And there's a resonance about how you spend it, meaning you and I are both in an unfolding moment right now. So time is happening. And if I am worried or anxious or intolerant, I'm spending that currency in a certain

way. It's happening no matter what for all of us. But the way that you spend that, the contour of how you fit in the pocket of this unfolding, moving moment is materially your responsibility. And so that's how, like I love that you're introducing time, wealth. But you, back to Locus of Control, fundamentally shape how you contour with the ever unfolding present moment. That, right. right there, the way you articulated it. I've never articulated it quite in that way, as elegantly as you did. That was the fundamental realization that changed my life. Finding Master is brought to you by Remarkable. In a world that's full of distractions, focus thinking is becoming a rare skill and a massive competitive advantage. That's why I've

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how to trust it when things get loud. So that's why I love this course. Finding Your Best brings together the exact mindset tools Dr. Dr. Jervais and I use with elite athletes, creatives, leaders to help you build resilience, clarity, and presence under pressure. When I retired from professional swimming, it took me some time to know myself beyond my identity as an athlete. And it's tools like the Finding Your Best course that have equipped me with ways to regularly come back to myself when I need to reignite that strength and build resilience within. So if you're feeling stuck, disconnected, or just ready to reconnect with yourself, the time is here and now. And we're halfway to 2026 and summer is upon us. So let's invest in ourselves. So if you're feeling stuck, disconnected, or just ready to reconnect with yourself, we have a great solution for you. I can't believe it, but we're already halfway through 2025, almost 2026, and summer is upon us. So let's invest in ourselves. When you use the code summer 75, you can get $75 off at finding mastery.com slash course.

Again, that's code summer 75, summer 75 at finding mastery.com slash course for $75 off. I had been marching down this very traditional path along old wealth. I took the job that I thought was the one that was going to lead me to the path, the idyllic land of success. I was going to make enough money that everything was going to go away. My internal problems, my external problems, I was going to feel good about myself. I wasn't going to be insecure anymore. If you had the right kind of external markers. Yeah, if I just had X amount of money.

What was the industry to remind me? I was working in private equity. That's right. In finance, you know, go invest and make a bunch of money, get a bunch of fancy things. And I kept doing this thing. It's called the arrival fallacy. You like build up this idea that there's some destination that you were going to get, some bonus, promotion, title, goal. You're going to get it, and you're going to feel like you've

arrived. Suddenly, I'm going to wake up in this, like, idyllic land. Everything's going to be great. And inevitably, it is a fallacy. You get the thing and you reset to whatever the next one is. You feel this familiar sense of dread, of never having enough. And unfortunately, for me, along that whole journey, I would get those things. And every step of the way, I blinded myself to the fact that these other areas of my life were starting to suffer and show cracks. Most importantly, my relationships. I was living 3,000 miles away from my parents who I'm very, very close with, and who I had noticed for the first time we're slowing down, that they weren't immortal, which is what you think when you're a kid. And the one moment that shifted this entire thing for me, the moment that I realized what you just articulated was I went out for a drink with an old friend.

We sat down, and he asked how I was doing. And I told him that it had started to get difficult living so far away from my parents. 3,000 miles away, and he asked how old they were. And I said mid-60s, and he asked how often I saw them, and I said about once a year. And he looked at me and said, okay, so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die. And in that moment, I felt like I had been punched in the gut. I mean, the idea that the amount of time you have left with the people that you care about most in the world is that finite and countable, that you can place it onto a few hands, that had really just shaken me to the core. And we took a dramatic action. We reassumed that

internal locus of control. Within 45 days, I had left my job, we had sold our house in California, and my wife and I had moved 3,000 miles across the country to live closer to both of our sets of parents. And the reason that I say the way you articulated that was so powerful for what happened in that moment was it created a recognition of the fact that you are in much more control of your time than you think. We had taken an action and created time. The time was going to pass one way or another, but the number of moments we had with these people we cared about could change. We were in control of that. So that number, 15, it's now in the hundred hundreds. We make this change and suddenly it goes from 15 like that to being in the hundreds.

I see my parents multiple times a month. They're a huge part of my son, their grandson's life. We had taken an action and created time. We had reassumed agency over this thing that we were in control of. So time is passing one way or another, but your ability to experience it, to deploy it into the moments and the windows that really count, that's up to you. So there's two parts of that. One is you increased the time with your parents. by making a decision. And I want to go back to the hinge moment one more time. And what I'm also pointing to is the way that you fit.

Like, you know, a musician or a dancer fits into the music. And there's a pocket. So musicians call it being in the pocket. Athletes call it being in the zone. You know, scientists call it flow state. But you, the moment is, is moving. So that's kind of the way we talk about time. It's not just being present with time. You and I are present right now. And if I'm frustrated and if I'm pissed or if I'm anxious,

I'm still in the present moment, but the contour of how I'm in the pocket of this moment has a tone to it. So this idea that be present, bullshit, that's not right. We are always, present, but we might just be three-quarters the way with it. We might have a prickliness with it. We might have an abundance and a joy with it. We're always in the unfolding present moment. Even when our mind is thinking about later, there's still part of us, the essence of us as well, is here. I wanted to have this part of the conversation because I know how much you value time. and you made this hinge shift in your life to go have more time, but there's also right underneath of that the way that you contour yourself in the unfolding unknown present moment.

Can you open that idea up a little bit about how you ready yourself to be your very best in the moments with your parents? You know, I think that a lot of this for me in my own life has been a derivative of this idea from ancient Greece, that there are two types of time. Ancient Greeks actually had two different words for time. They had chronos, which was the idea of chronological, linear, quantitative time, the clicking of the clock. That is the way that most of us interact with time. That's how we think of it. And then they had chiros, which was the idea. that not all time is created equal, that there are specific moments, windows that have more texture. I think of it as texture. I think of it as meaning of weightiness to it. And that energy put into those moments has greater outcomes. It actually creates on a higher level.

You speak a lot about leverage. Like input output. You know, like, is it Archimedes or Hercules? I can't remember. Archimedes. Yeah, like, you know, give me a lever, I can move the world, that type of idea. The exact quote is escaping me. It is that. Yeah. Give me, give me a place to stand and I will move the earth. Yeah. And so that idea, you speak a lot about that. And I like to think about inputs to outputs and outsized inputs have a dramatic, you know, impact on outputs. And the one one more thing here is that the way that we are spending our time holds material impact in the way we design our life and the arrival fallacy is real and this time this idea that we're going to have more time is real and those two false ways of dealing with the reality

of of the fleeting nature of time keep us into this never never land like i'll see you later okay you know as i'm walking out the door not making eye contact not addressing like i might not see you ever again and that's a really important practice for me and it helps me it sounds more but it helps me be here now because i don't know now my job right now is to be here with you and if i don't honor that and i've got this idea like we're going to see each other again like oh it's going to be great we'll have dinner hey that might not ever happen so it helps me stay here but hold on let me stay on this chiros idea for a minute i want to see what you do with this chronological tick tick tick tick can i be present get more time with the things that i like

doing with the people i want to be with tick tick tick okay and then chiros is this idea about the the animation the texture i think you said what if i were to suggest that um some moments don't have more value than others, this is the chiros idea, but blending those two, that every moment of your life is the most important moment that you'll ever have. And the Super Bowl is not a bigger moment than practice number one. Those, those, there's not a fallacy for this, but the idea that one moment matters more than the other, the chiros, I think actually sets me up for the arrival fallacy. I'll be different later. When that moment happens, I'll be prepared. And I'm going to train now to be prepared for that moment. No. Yes and no. This moment is the only moment I get.

And when you take this moment away from me and I no longer get to experience this moment, that's the end of my physical life. That's kind of how it's defined. So how do you square that idea between Chiros and Kronos? What I really think about often is that Chiros time is not some predetermined, fate-driven concept. Ditto. It is created by you. And so it's interesting. In other words, you give meaning to the moment.

Exactly. Which is to say that you can create any moment. So why not create this moment to be the most important moment? I think that is what is within your control entirely to do. And so you should do that. Does that sound exhausting to you? No, I think that it sounds like the way that we... That doesn't mean that you apply the most intense, insane energy to every moment,

but it means that you take every moment seriously. Cool. And what I would say about this idea of big moments or these windows, the reason I believe in that is because the world doesn't just revolve around you. There's everyone else that is also going about, hopefully trying to create the most of every moment that they have. And sometimes all of those forces that are out in the world, think of it as like atoms flying around in space,

collide in these very unique ways that create this incredible symphony of these things coming together in this one spot where it really counts. And everything that you've done leading up to that has built to this one crescendo where whatever it is, it's one minute left in the Super Bowl. All of these players who have spent their entire careers putting and investing energy into their given moments have led up to this very unique point in time.

And the way that you act during that point in time has significant impact on what the future looks like for the world in a lot of cases. If you think about it in certain geopolitical moments, think about the person who saw the missiles firing during the Cold War and their responsibility was to press the button and fire nuclear missiles back, but they thought for one moment about

whether or not this might be not real. They could have ended the entire world in that one moment. This is a real story. This is a real story. This happened. The person said, like, no, I don't think this is real. Chose not to follow what the protocol was, which was to fire these nuclear missiles back and saved the future of the planet in this one moment where all of these, you know... Oh, the power of discernment. And I think, you know, look, I think that reading more and going deeper down the rabbit hole of the very nature of time will break your brain in a lot of ways because what you realize is that there's no such thing as just like time existing right like there's not a present moment that you can say across the entire span of the universe there's not

really that that's not really a concept time doesn't exist time sort of exists in the mind of the perceiver of the time, what I have found personally in my own journey wrestling with these things as a not particularly religious person. That's a funny way of saying it. I don't have some dramatic belief in a single higher power. What was your family's? My dad's family has Jewish descent. My mom's side of the family is sort of a blend of like Hindu Muslim Zoroastrian. I mean, there's like a little bit of everything, Buddhist. So a real mixed bag. Is it a Persian influence? Like Zoroastrianism? Yeah, so one of my uncles is Zoroastrian, Persian, Zoroastrian. It's the kind of world's first religion, which is a, yeah, it's an ancient.

It's a beautiful. Yeah. And what I will say is that after having my son, and now he's three years old, he asks a lot of questions, he's going down a big why phase of asking why. When we talk about a lot of these things, and he's asking me why, why, why? I find that a lot of the why rabbit holes converge to something that feels like God at some point. Part of that is that it gets to the point where it feels unexplainable by physics and by what we understand about the world around us. And I always find that interesting. I wouldn't say it has made me all of a sudden feel religious, but it is interesting to me that things converge to this inability to comprehend what we are trying to articulate or comprehend.

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Again, that's skims.com slash finding mastery and select podcast and finding mastery so that they know that we sent you. I want to take a moment to tell you about a podcast I think you're really going to enjoy. It's called Think Fast, Talk Smart. It's hosted by best-selling author and Stanford lecturer, Matt Abrams. And it's all about helping you become a more effective communicator. Each Tuesday, Matt sits down with world-class experts to discuss how to hone and develop your communication skills. Skills like mastering small talk, keeping your nerves in check while speaking to large groups and science-based strategies to help boost your confidence across all types of interactions.

Think Fast. Talk Smart is a really cool podcast that teaches us how to communicate better. Take a listen. Every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts. We started with time. There was a hinge idea and experience on time. Is there an ordering between time and why you put mental as kind of the third chapter in the book or the third vertical? Time being first and financial being last was very deliberate. Yeah. The in-between was sort of a personal approach. Yeah.

Largely social was the second because it flowed naturally off of this idea of time and the amount of time you have with these people. Yeah. Flowing into social, flows into mental, flows into the physical. Flows into financial. Flows into the financial. Okay, cool. And so when you think about living a good life and you've got the five verticals, of wealth, which most people call health, you know, like so like you're, you're having fun

with modern wealth. Is financial, is it less important to you or is it equally as important as it was and you've rounded out the other four sources of wealth to have a tide that's higher than, you know, rising tide that was bigger than it was before? Or have you diminished the importance of financial wealth. I have gotten clarity on what being financially wealthy means to me. I was going to ask you about what does enough mean? That is really what I've done with financial wealth, is I've recognized that it all hinges on your ability

to clearly articulate what the life is that you are actually trying to build, what the money is for. Very few people have any ability to articulate what the money is for. You go and ask someone, hey, what does enough mean to you? And they give you a number, but they cannot tell you the life. They can't tell you where they live. What are they doing? What are they thinking about? What are they working on? Who are they with? All of these things that are really what that money is supposed to be building towards are left in this abstract place in their mind. They might feel like they know what it looks like, but they don't. And what happens to most people is if you

leave that idea of enoughness as a number, it just resets two to three X when you get close to it. I want this much in the bank thing. When you get that, it's like, wait, who is the famous, you did the quote. Oh, John D. Rockefeller, yeah, was asked, yeah, how much, how much money is enough money? And he said just a little bit more. That's haunting. Yeah. That actually haunts me. Yeah. You know, when I, when I've heard it before and when I read it in your book, I was like, there it is again. Yeah. Because it keeps resetting. So it's this poverty of more, this, you know, incessant quest for more that distracts you from the beauty that is this idea of enough. So, so open up your insight here. How would you hope

we design our life? I think it all begins with clearly articulating what that life is that you are trying to build. And I really do think it comes down to asking yourself those questions. Where are you? What are you doing? Who are you? with how are you living? What does it look like? Is it one house? Is it two houses? Is it five houses? It's not about it being Spartan or bear. It is about it being yours. And mine is going to be fundamentally different from what yours looks like. I've never talked to someone in the thousands of people I interviewed for the book. I never talked to anyone who said that their enough life was, you know, traveling around on a private jet by themselves. It just doesn't happen. No one wants that.

People want to be surrounded by those they love, doing things they find meaningful, hopefully healthy enough to do those things with some freedom. It's remarkably consistent across people. And there's some nuance to how fancy it is, what they're able to afford, all these different things. But the ability to clearly see that picture in your mind is then how you can reverse engineer, okay, what are the actions I need to take then to go and build towards that thing? The reason it's so important is because your expectations are your single greatest financial liability. We don't think about that. We don't think about the fact that expectations are the greatest risk to living a wealthy life. I know many people, and I'm sure you do, who have way more money than I do, but are not wealthy.

They are not wealthy because they are constantly chasing some version of more that the world has handed them. Maybe they live in New York City and they're making $10 million a year, but they hang out with people making $50 a year. And all they do is spend all their time feeling bummed that they can't have the house in Aspen or that they can't have the bigger boat or the bigger yacht. And I tell this story in the book of a friend who sold a company for several hundred million dollars and he was celebrating this exit by taking all of his family and friends on this trip on this yacht. And he was so excited and all his friends are coming. They're all celebrating. It's so exciting. Again, this is another haunting story.

Yeah, and one of the friends arrived and looked over at the next mooring and saw this even bigger yacht and said to my friend, wow, I wonder who's on that one. And suddenly, in this one moment, all of the excitement and joy that my friend had experienced from creating this experience with his friends had been deflated at the comparison to this other boat. And so the lesson, as I say it, is there is always a little bit. going to be a bigger boat in life. If you are measuring your entire worth on the basis of this thing, this money, this status symbols that you can achieve, you are going to be chasing this mirage, this castle in the air that just keeps disappearing and reappearing on the horizon. One of my favorite movies from childhood is Cool Runnings. This movie of this Jamaican bobsled

team. It's kind of a funny, cute movie. And John Candy plays the coach. And he has this line, he says to one of the players, a gold medal is a wonderful thing, but if you're not enough without it, you're never going to be enough with it. That line, if I could get that tattooed on my brain, I would. If you're not enough without it, you're never going to be enough with it. It's so good. Yeah. And you're describing something that, you know, as I read that passage and hearing it again. There's a CEO that I spend time with who it's a European based company and it's one of the largest companies in the world. And he's got one of the largest boats in the world. And he very candidly says, what am I doing? You know, like he's got to

keep grinding because he bought some stuff that now owns him. And I had a hinge moment early in my life where I was going to travel the world and serve and I was perfectly fine for my breakfast nook area in the apartment I was living in to be grounded on a plywood and milk crates and a vinyl cloth that I'd throw over and that was my aspiration as long as I could surf the world and so low low material possessions and really high experiential stuff. I'm really glad I didn't do that. I missed out on something by choosing the path I did, but I'm really happy in the path that I did choose.

But I did miss something that now I do want to go travel a lot to surf or ski or whatever, but my body is older. And I can't do what I did 25 years ago in a wave, 35 years ago in a wave. so I am missing something by it so I don't think that there's like this one path that is clear I can afford to go do that traveling and I'm choosing not to do it and I can't do the thing as well as I would have loved to have done it when I was younger so I don't think it's um this you know fairy tale that we write there's costs and benefits to you know kind of all the decisions but I do appreciate you ringing the bell to say, wait, wait, wait, broaden the scoreboard.

Okay, let's come back, though. I do want to understand your hinge idea that fundamentally changed your life from Stanford, private equity, making money, external rewards are kind of the main theme. That's your scoreboard. Somebody says to you, you've got 15 visits with your parents left, and you said, oh, okay, this is not uncommon. so far. But what's uncommon is that you fundamentally shifted and changed your life based on a moment of pain, of realization. Open up that moment a little bit more when your friend said that to you

and then what happened inside of you to take the actions that you did. I think that in a lot of ways, that moment was the culmination of a lot of tiny moments where I had felt that that change needed to happen. And it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. You were ready. I think I was ready because I had felt micro pain

over and over and over again for a period of at least 18 months. And why didn't you take action on those smaller micro? Because I think micro pain is easy to ignore. Yeah, there you go. Especially if you are a disciplined, driven, ambitious person who is prone to write off pain as part of your growth and part

of your sort of journey to achieve the things that you want, I think it's easy to look at those feelings, those sensations that you're experiencing and to say, like, well, I'm just going to grind, right? You kind of take pride in it. And I had gone through a pretty dark time during that 18 months with COVID being stuck at home, social life, non-existent. My wife and I, unfortunately, were struggling to conceive at the time. We had been together since we were 15 years old. It was the first time we'd ever experienced real hardship in our relationship, really creating strain, bottling that up because I didn't have anyone to talk to about it.

There were all of these forces that were sort of chipping away. and I was compounding it by drinking six, seven nights a week. There were just a lot of forces in my life that I felt were pushing that way, but nothing had been the like enormous tsunami wave that hits you and says, you have to do this. To be totally frank, I think that it is easy to say that the worst thing in the world is being on a bad path. I personally think that the worst thing in the world is being on a good path that isn't yours. A bad path is the one that screams at you every single day that you have to get off.

It is so obvious, it's so clear to everyone around you to yourself that, like, I need to get off this path because it's destroying me. But the good path that isn't yours is much trickier because there are a lot of forces that tell you to stay on it, that tell you that it's good. you're paying your bills, you have a house, like there's these things people think you're impressive, there's all these things that are saying to stay on it. And that is very much where I found myself on that good path that wasn't really mine. So all of those micro cuts, while they might have been impactful in sort of an absolute sense, in the relative sense of the bigger picture, they weren't enough. They weren't enough to actually spark action. The tsunami wave that came when I had this recognition about the time, that was what pushed it all over the edge to

recognize this isn't even a good path. If I measure on a different plane, this is not a good path. This is a bad path and it needs to get changed. So that insight shifted you from good path that's not yours to a bad path, which actually made the shift easier. How close to the surface are the emotions of that pain at that time, the depressed state that you are in. How close to the surface is that feeling now as you were just speaking? Close to the surface. And can I still feel it? How I felt?

Buried deep down. No. Or, no, I've talked about this enough that there's not a whole lot of energy or no, it's still kind of close to the surface. This episode is brought to you by PolicyGenius. If you're listening to this podcast, I know you care about living a better life, doing the deep work now to prepare for what's ahead.

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Kachava.com and then use the code finding mastery for 15% off. The pain around our struggles with fertility and how that interplayed with that moment in my life is still very raw and real. Mainly because I catch myself in the present moment struggling with this odd dynamic of complaining about things that I prayed for. You know, recently I had...

Wait, before you go to the story, what does that mean? You know, like, in life... Complaining what I prayed for. In life, we have this tendency to pray for things, like these things for the future that we want, whether it's as simple as this house that I want or this car or this engagement ring or having a healthy child in my case.

And then you get that thing and a few months go by and all of a sudden you find yourself complaining about the exact thing that you prayed for. And I have, in my own journey, felt that, that, you know, like we have this beautiful, healthy boy. And there have been several instances recently even when, you know, he's like, he's a toddler,

or he's terrorizing me in some way. I'm trying to work on something. And I find myself completely, I'm like, why is he doing this? This is so annoying. Doesn't he know I'm working? And then I catch myself. And I remember that five years ago,

I mean, I, again, I say I'm not a particular religious person, but I prayed every single night that we would one day have a healthy child. And now here I am in this moment complaining about the exact thing that I prayed for. How are you managing your emotions right in this moment? Because you're flooded. I don't really feel like I need to manage them.

They're just happening? Yeah. And you're letting it flow? Yeah, I don't mind being open about these things. Yeah. Yeah, cool. I do feel like sometimes you physically manage them. Like, I can feel it with my hands.

Like there's a tension in my hands that I'm kind of trying to bottle something. Even just thinking about it. But I think that as a... man especially who you know looks a certain way and has a certain track record of like i was an athlete i worked in this you know career and these high status things like right there is this belief or this assumption that everything is just great and you manage or bottle up whatever it is that you've felt along the journey. And you probably haven't even felt those things,

but if you have, you just kind of coast on by them and then on to the next thing. And especially with fertility, I think it's one of those things that people tend to just suffer with in silence. We certainly did. You know, this like monthly buildup to this one moment and this enormous letdown.

And for me, with my wife especially, seeing the disappointment in her was particularly challenging because I just want to be like the you know, the feeling of safety, the provider and not being able to do something in that way is a very unfamiliar feeling for someone who has always been able to do the thing

that fixes X. Like identify the problem, be the solution, the better outcome on the other side. That was my whole life, was just that. It was like, I'm just going to plan, execute, and then you get the outcome over and over again, whatever it was. And it's unfamiliar territory

when you get thrown into this position where you can't do that. Something is in God's hands in some way, as it were. And, you know, I have since felt that on a variety of different occasions, you know, most recently with my parents' health, And I would say that the moments that I experienced with my wife coming to terms with that, wrestling with that, us enduring, crawling through the mud with that, have prepared me better

than anything else for navigating what is undoubtedly going to be a painful next 10 or 15 years as my parents get older and as I have to experience that struggle that comes with that. Thank you for not just how. having clever words on a book and telling some clever stories to, you know, to share your insights from the book on this podcast, but like to be the animation of thoughts and emotions that are fundamentally important to living a good life. You're doing it now. So thank you. Okay. If you could kind of turn the corner here just a little bit, what do you hope people will get from your research and your writings or this conversation to be just a little bit better.

I hope that people will ask themselves some of these inherently uncomfortable questions. Let's tick off like concretely, a handful of important questions, and then maybe even pull on the thread a little bit to take it a little bit further, like how, what to do with those questions. The insight here is just that all of the answers that you see. in life are found in the questions that you avoid. It is the ones that you don't want to ask, that you don't want to look in the mirror. One of the most powerful questions anyone can ask is if a third party were to observe me for a week, what would they say my priorities are?

Recognition is that there are two types of priorities in life. There are the priorities we say we have, and there are the priorities our actions show we have. Oftentimes, there is a huge gap between the two. And closing that gap is how your life improves. But you need to create an awareness that the gap exists in the first place in order to take action to close it. Zooming out enough so that you can see that, I have found creates enough perspective to go and do it. Speaks to the second question that I'll offer, which is one of my favorites. If you were the main character in a movie of your life. What would the audience be screaming at you to do right now? We've all been there sitting in a movie or television show. We just want to jump through the

screen and grab the main character and chase the girl to the airport. Don't go down in the basement, look out behind you, whatever that thing is. You are that main character in the movie of your life and the audience would be screaming something at you right now. So what is it? What is that thing that is so blindingly obvious from the outside looking in that you are either choosing to ignore or have yet to create enough perspective to see. Do you know what that is for you? Slow down.

I think life often follows this like almost accordion where it's closed in and you start getting anxious that you don't have enough opportunity. Oh my God, what am I going to do? How am I going to do all these different things? Suddenly some things start going well. you're taking action, the accordion expands, all of a sudden, every opportunity in the world is in front of you. It looks like you're, you know, this enormous expanse. And because you

are still in the pattern of thinking of that small shoved in accordion, you start grabbing it everything out in front of you. It's like this buffet. And then all of a sudden, you're overwhelmed. You have too many things on your plate, and you realize you need to start shifting it back in. And then you go through that whole experience again. I have very, much on the back of this book, experience that rapid expansion. And I am very bad at saying no to things. As much as I talk about it, write about it, try to improve upon it, I self-identify as a nice person, which is one of the worst things that you can self-identify as if you were trying to say no. Because anyone that comes and asks you for a little bit of your time, like, well, I'm a nice

I should spend five minutes with this person, 15 minutes, I should respond to this, I should grab coffee with this. And every single time you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else. And in my case, what I'm saying no to is time with my son and wife. It sounds harsh, but it's the reality. That's what it is. And learning to navigate that natural accordion of life a little bit more effectively, sort of reduce the amplitude of your wave, if you will. That is where my life will improve. That's really cool, man. Because you did two things. You stayed pretty concrete about doing less, and then you took it right down into

the emotional. What I'm learning from you is that you allow emotions to move pretty transiently throughout your body, and you use words well to be able to capture what's happening. You're not run over by emotions. You're working with them. I think that that's maybe a little bit of the superhero that, um, you know, I feel from how you're showing up, you know, the special skill or trade or whatever the superhero has. And what I really appreciate about that is that I've said oftentimes in my

life is that like if I'm going to go somewhere, you're not paying me to go do the thing. I actually like the thing. I've designed my life in a way that I really like the things I get to do. So I'm not paid to go to wherever to do the thing. My rate is actually quite simply early days, it was like, how much is it cost to be away from surfing or my loved ones or like, how much does that cost to be away from that for a little bit of a time? That's not a good business model, by the way, to think that way. It should be more about the value that you're providing. But I do still, in a very simple way, think like, oh, wait, a week away from my wife and son, like, oh, hold on. You know, like, that's a big ask. So, I'm a week away from my wife and son.

like, oh, hold on. You know, like, that's a big ask. So I really appreciate the way that you're structuring your thinking. And I've appreciated how you've outlined kind of a new scoreboard to think about. And if people were to answer those big questions, what do you hope they do with them? I hope they take one tiny action against their answer. Yeah. I am a big believer that you are one year away.

from living a completely different life. Yeah. The reason I'm a big believer in that is because I experienced that. I mean, in May of 2021, I was living in about as dark a moment as I've had in my life. My wife and I were struggling with this fertility journey. I was drinking all the time. We were living 3,000 miles away. One year later, we were driving our son home from the hospital to both of our sets of parents

cheering in the driveway of this home that we had created and built. I was working on things I cared about. I was healthier than I had ever been, literally one year. And so I cannot think of a better example to share with people that you are one year of asking the right questions and taking the right actions away from living the life that you really want. Awesome. Awesome.

And one more turn before we round up here is that Dr. Butler, Robert Butler, in 2011. had a really important bit of research around purpose and longevity, and he found that people that were aligned to their purpose lived longer. And there's a handful of other bits of research around purpose that are compelling. But just the one on living longer, and if you combine that with a sense of well-being, which there's other research to support that. So higher quality and longer, health span, lifespan, how do you think about purpose? And figuring out, one, how to help people align to purpose and how to swing across all five verticals of wealth that you've talked about. I love this. It's sort of a derivative of this idea

of Ikega. You know, Ikega is this ancient Japanese concept of thinking about the kind of like concentric circles of what you love doing, what you're good at, and broadly speaking, what the world needs. I love that idea of what the world needs as being this centering concept, because the term world is often misinterpreted. World can be as small as your family. Your world can be your partner, your child. Your world could be the world in a broad sense. How you define world during the current season of life that you are in fundamentally dictates the plane on which you need to think about your purpose. I personally think that the natural progression that people go through is from thinking about their world as being themselves to thinking about their world as being the world. And you can see

that in a lot of... Octogenarians tend to think about generativity, giving back. Exactly. Acts of service of others. But it begins in this selfish state. I really think that is the first thing to get clear on when you think about defining your purpose. What is your current world in this season of life? If you are a new parent and you are just starting out on that journey. Your world is your child and partner in whatever construct. And your most baseline level purpose is to create for that unit, for that world. And as you progress from that, that shifts. But being clear on what that world looks like, I think is where most people should start to start to hone in on what that purpose looks like. Nice. Super good. And Ikega is a foundational idea in Japanese

culture that you're you're reminding us of that process yeah very cool man thank you so much um i've really enjoyed your writings and i've definitely enjoyed the conversation um one takeaway what you hope somebody will be able to do with this conversation take one small action is what you said answer some hard questions and then take one more turn of the screw there in the coming week or month, put one hour on your calendar that is going to be just you and your thoughts. No technology. Take a notebook, pen, and just think about some of the things that we've talked about during this conversation. Zoom out and think about these things. I guarantee you will come away from that hour with yourself with a new insight that will spark some action, and that may be

the one action that does change your life. Last question. What is the hard problem that you are dedicating your life to trying to solve how to share complicated mind-bending ideas in a way that actually sparks action in people's lives and it is a life mission that I find really interesting and exciting and I define my own purpose around it to create positive ripples in the world however those may come about it's funny that was almost going to be the name of our company ripples. Oh. And my wife said, it doesn't sound quite right. It sounds like it's rhyming with something else that's, yeah.

It is a tough one. I love the pebble in the pot analogy. Yeah. So that beautifully said, well articulated, clear with emotions, um, systems thinker, action oriented. You know, this was a intense conversation. How was it for you? I felt lucky to be able to have that conversation. And so I hope that other people listening to it out there

enjoy it and find as much value from it as I did in getting to have it. It really felt like a I go on podcasts, but it's pretty rare that I come away feeling like, oh, I am personally glad that I got to sit down and do that. I feel the same way. So it's a good partnership in a combo. We should figure out to do something together later. I would love to. Mate, thank you again. Thank you. Next time on Finding Mastery, we're joined by Brian Werdesim, a seasoned financial advisor who brings heart, clarity, and real talk to one of life's most emotional topics, money. No matter where you are in your financial journey, this episode offers practical, human-centered advice for building a healthier, more intentional relationship

with your finances. Join us on Wednesday, August 13, 9 a.m. Pacific for this super insightful conversation. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast. sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to finding mastery.com

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