Leap Academy with Ilana Golan - Sahil Bloom: The 5 Types of Wealth, How to Find True Success and Fulfillment Beyond Money | E117

Episode Date: July 22, 2025

Sahil Bloom was living the "dream" life, climbing the corporate ladder, earning well, and hitting all the career milestones. Yet, he felt unfulfilled. During a conversation with an old friend, he mentioned how he only saw his parents once a year. His friend's blunt remark, "You're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die," hit him hard, forcing him to reevaluate his priorities and reassess his idea of success. In this episode, Sahil joins Ilana to share how to overcome the fear of career transitions, build a life that aligns with your values, and find fulfillment beyond a paycheck. Sahil Bloom is an entrepreneur, investor, and writer focused on redefining wealth beyond money. Through his newsletter, The Curiosity Chronicle, Sahil offers actionable ideas for building a high-performing, healthy, and wealthy life. In this episode, Ilana and Sahil will discuss: (00:00) Introduction  (01:46) The Cost of Chasing Traditional Success (04:33) Family Background and the Pressure to Succeed (08:41) What Baseball Taught Him About Life and Business (13:17) Unfulfillment Despite Corporate Success (18:50) Overcoming the Fear of Career Transition (23:35) Why Personal Growth and Change Can Feel Lonely (26:51) Turning Criticism into Fuel for Growth (29:34) Embracing Life’s Different Seasons (31:55) Writing The Five Types of Wealth (36:55) The Real Challenges in Entrepreneurship (41:24) How to Break Free When You’re Feeling Stuck Sahil Bloom is an entrepreneur, investor, and writer focused on redefining wealth beyond money. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling book The 5 Types of Wealth and the founder of SRB Ventures, an early-stage investment firm. Through his newsletter, The Curiosity Chronicle, Sahil offers actionable ideas for building a high-performing, healthy, and wealthy life. Connect with Sahil: Website: https://www.sahilbloom.com/#Hero  LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sahilbloom  Resources Mentioned: Sahil’s Book, The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life: https://www.amazon.com/Types-Wealth-Transformative-Guide-Design/dp/059372318X  Leap Academy: Ready to make the LEAP in your career? There is a NEW way for professionals to Advance Their Careers & Make 5-6 figures of EXTRA INCOME in Record Time. Check out our free training today at leapacademy.com/training

Wow, this show is going to be incredible. So buckle up and I'm sure you're going to enjoy it. But before we get started, I want to ask you for a favor. See, it's really, really important for me to help millions of people elevate their career, fast-track to leadership, land dream roles, jump to entrepreneurship or create portfolio careers. And this podcast is all about enabling this for millions of people to see a map of what it actually takes for big leaders to reach success.

So subscribe and download so you never miss it. Plus, it really, really helps me continue to bring amazing guests. Okay? So let's dive in. If I had wanted to just make the most amount of money, I would have stayed on the path I was on. What I care about is impact. I can't imagine something more enriching. Sahir Bloom is a New York Times bestselling author

of The Five Types of Wealth, a book that totally redefines what success really means. I had spent the first seven years of my career marching down the very traditional path. You work hard, you get the house, the car, the things that you're supposed to want. And unfortunately, along that path, while I was winning the one very traditional game,

a lot of these other areas of my life had started to suffer. My relationships, my health. I went out for a drink with an old friend and he asked how often I saw my parents. And I admitted that it was down to about once a year. And he just looked at me and said, "'Okay, so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die.'"

And in that moment, I realized that my entire definition of success had been incomplete. The worst thing in the world is not being on a bad path. The worst thing in the world is being on a good path that isn't yours. So whenever I advise anyone on making a change in their life, the first thing I say is. So today episode is massive, massive. It's what you wanted. A lot of you asked for it. So lean in. It's going to be epic.

Sahil Bloom is a New York Times bestselling author of The Five Types of Wealth, a book that totally redefines what success really means and how do you achieve it. And he's an entrepreneur, he's an investor, remarkable story and insights. Sahil, thank you for being here. Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled. I was listening to your book. I'm like, oh my God, yes, this is so good.

So right at the beginning, you said, the math that changed your life. Take me there. What is that math? In May of 2021, I had a single conversation that really changed the entire course of my life. I was, at the time, working in the world of finance. I had spent the first seven years of my career marching

down the very traditional path. I say traditional in quotes, the traditional path towards a successful life, again in quotes. The path that you're told is the one you should want. You get the job that sounds prestigious and high status, you put your head down, you work hard, your pay raises, your bonuses, you get the house, the car, the things that you're supposed to want.

One day you're supposed to wake up and just feel fulfilled and everything's good and you're in this idyllic land of success. I had marched down that path and achieved those things that we are told we're supposed to want. Every single marker of achievement, when I thought I was going to wake up with that sensation

of fulfillment and happiness and contentment, it was nowhere to be seen. I sensation of fulfillment and happiness and contentment. It was nowhere to be seen. And I really just had this very familiar sensation, this familiar dread of never doing enough, of never having enough, of there always being some new thing that I had to go do and making my happiness continuously conditional on achieving whatever that next thing was. And unfortunately, along that path, while I was winning the one very traditional game, a lot of these other areas of my life

had started to suffer. My relationships, my health, mental and physical, a bunch of areas of my life were starting to show cracks. And it all came to a head in this one conversation. It was May of 2021, I went out for a drink with an old friend. And 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. They were on the East Coast. We were living in California, 3,000 miles away. I had started to notice for the first time that they were slowing down, that they weren't going to be around forever. He asked how old they were. I said mid-60s and he asked how often I saw them.

I admitted that it was down to about once a year. And he just looked at me and said, okay, so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die. And I just remember feeling like I had been punched in the gut. The idea that the amount of time you have left with the people you care about most in the world

is that finite and countable, that you can place it onto a few hands, really just shook me to the core. And in that moment, I realized that my entire definition of success, of what it meant to build a wealthy life, had been incomplete, that I had been focusing on the one thing at the expense of everything else. I'm getting chills.

My family is back in Israel, so obviously that hit home. But let's go back in time. I want to hear, how did you grow up? I come from a mixed race background. My mom was born and raised in Bangalore, India, and my father was born and raised in a Jewish household in the Bronx, New York.

I think that the idea of this rejection of common convention was very much hardwired into my family's DNA. And that was sparked by my parents, who met in a very unlikely turn of circumstance. My mom had sort of applied in secret to come to university in the United States against her parents' wishes. My dad had this whole life planned out for him by really an overbearing, domineering father figure. My dad was kind of his golden child. And my parents crossed paths by two weeks at Princeton University in, I guess it was 1980. And my mom asked my dad out on a date,

which is always a very funny story because they went out on this first date and during the date my dad said to my mom, my father will never accept us. My mom was so blinded by his use of the word us, that she completely missed the message. Unfortunately, my dad was right. His father was not accepting of this idea of his son marrying she completely missed the message. And unfortunately, my dad was right. His father was not accepting of this idea of his son marrying

this Indian woman and told him he had to choose between my mom and his family. And my dad walked out the door and never saw his family again. To this day, I never met my dad's parents. He has three siblings I've never met. I have first cousins out there somewhere that I never met. And when I reflect on that, I really just think about the fact that they set this course or this standard of carving your own path into the earth, of rejecting the path that's been handed to you, questioning it at the very least, and choosing love, ultimately, against all odds.

Anything, right? Yeah. I mean, crazy, yeah. Crazy, totally crazy. And you know, the legacy and the ripple effect of that is hard to overstate. But what I will say is that while that may have been in my DNA, it took a long time to actually manifest in my actions and in reality. Because on the surface, I would manifest in my actions and in reality.

Because on the surface, I would say that my family and I as a kid experienced very traditional pressures coming from a half Indian, half Harvard professor family, right? My dad works at Harvard, he's a professor there for a long time. My mom is from India, very academically oriented household where we measured success on the basis of grades and on the basis of grades and on the basis of these standard achievements of building towards, again, the standard definition of a successful life. But that is standard.

That is what education does, right? Yeah. I have kids in high school now. That's how we measure. Yeah. And I think that immigrants in particular, the definition of the American dream for a lot of immigrants that come to the country is the American dream for a lot of immigrants that come to the country is that you can work really hard, get your degrees at these amazing

institutions and then go get a stable job where you're allowed to get a house and you're allowed to have kids and you can take care of them and a six-figure income. And that is amazing life. And there's nothing wrong with that life, by the way. It's incredible. But I think in a lot of ways, that is the path that gets handed to you as, oh, that is the only way to live. You have to go down and do this thing. And look, to be totally honest, neither one of my parents

is particularly entrepreneurial. You know, my dad's a tenured professor, very safe, risk averse track. Both of my parents, I would say, are very risk averse in their wiring. And so I did not grow up with this idea of entrepreneurship, go create my own thing. And so when I was going to school,

when I was going to take my first job, a lot of what was in my head was, what's the path that sets me up for the stable track to living the good life? Success, exactly. Yeah, and to me, that was about money. It was like, well, I had a bunch of rich friends, what do their dads do?

I have a good degree, I went to Stanford, I played baseball, like I had a bunch of rich friends. What do their dads do? I have a good degree. I went to Stanford. I played baseball. Like I had these things going for me. So why don't I go take that as the track? And then my life will be good and everything will work out on the basis of the idea that money is the path to living that good life. And let's go there for a second,

because you did go to Stanford. You studied public policy and then economics. Why did you choose these things? What was your thinking? You did go to Stanford. You studied public policy and then economics. Why did you choose these things? What was your thinking? I wish I had like a very good reason for this. So I played baseball. I got a baseball scholarship to Stanford.

I would not have gotten into Stanford if not for the fact that I could throw baseball pretty hard at one point in my life, not anymore. And baseball was for me, my whole childhood, my way of escaping the academic expectations of my parents. I have an older sister, very academically oriented. She was always the high achieving one. And I was always the like ne'er do well younger brother.

And baseball for me was the outlet to say, I am good at something else. My sister's gonna be the academic one. I can be the one that's good at sports. And fortunately I was good enough and hard enough working at it that I was able to get a scholarship that got me into a great school. That's amazing.

Yeah. And it was very lucky in a lot of ways. Times have changed in that regard, but I think it worked out. And when I went, when I was studying at first, my economics degree undergrad, I thought I was going to go play professional baseball. I had that youthful naivete that I think a lot of young athletes have, which is, I'm the best. I can go make a bunch of money doing this thing, I'll be famous, all those things that you think you want. And it took me several years at Stanford

to realize that I wasn't all that good, I probably wasn't going to be able to play on that level, long term at least. The public policy degree for me, the masters that I did in public policy, I stayed an extra year at Stanford, a fifth year. And the biggest reason for that degree in particular was that it had the most flexible mandate in terms of the courses that you could take. So what I said was, I'm going to stay an extra year and do another degree. But I want to be able to take whatever pulls my energy and interest, because I want to just explore academically. I've never been able to because I was always so focused on baseball. And that degree was amazing in its capacity to allow me to explore.

I will go back to the baseball because I think lessons that you get from sports are so relevant to everything in life. What do you think are some of the things that you took from the sports? Oh, gosh. It's hard to even count all the lessons. I mean, I think the number one from baseball is this level of resilience that comes from recognizing that failure is much more an opportunity

than an end destination. Because in baseball, I was a pitcher, you fail a lot. And the ability to fail, not lose confidence in yourself and come back the next day with that same level of energy and intensity and enthusiasm, that is a trait that you never lose in life. And it is a trait that the vast majority of people lack. A lot of people, when they experience a failure, they may say, oh, I'm going to learn from it, but their confidence is fundamentally harmed irreparably.

And the best baseball players I knew, the ones who really made it actually, they had an almost irrational, bordering on delusional ability to have a terrible performance on the most public stage and walk away from the field into the locker room thinking they were God's gift to baseball. It blew my mind. Across all athletes I knew, the ones who were the's gift to baseball. It blew my mind.

Across all athletes I knew, the ones who were the most successful had that. They always had this ability just completely separate from the performance and just say, oh, that was total fluke. I'm not bad. That's just what it was. And that I think is a real, real lesson. The other one, which I think few people really talk about, is playing a team sport

at a high level, you have to learn to get along with and work with a variety of types of people, backgrounds, and experiences. And in the day and age that we live in today, when polarization, I would argue, is at an all-time high, and when social media and the algorithms and the technologies that control our life are designed to tear us apart, the ability to hear someone's perspective that differs from yours, not immediately judge them for it, and see more of the commonalities

and be able to understand why someone might think that, I see the human on the other side of it, that is a powerful trait for living a compassionate and empathetic and happy life in a world that is trying to make you hateful constantly. I don't know that that maybe helps me constantly in business, but it certainly helps me for living a fulfilling and just happier existence.

And I do see that commonality, even in the podcast, even myself, between sports, between getting back up and everything, but grit, tenacity, et cetera. But now from Stanford, you go to private equity, if I'm not mistaken, right? And starting to rise up those ranks. And like you said, you're starting to tick the boxes of, oh my God, I'm living the life. And I assume initially it does feel that way. I felt that way initially. Like you're kind of on this horse of success. When did you start feeling like maybe this

is changing? Maybe this is not enough? I think the first three years, I was extraordinarily fulfilled. And a big part of that is because I am fulfilled by progress and growth as a person, I think most people are. And the learning curve in those early years of working in an industry is extraordinary. The things you have to learn, the opportunities you get, the experiences.

I was working with a great group of people that I love to this day, I love. And there were so many opportunities and people and networks. It was drinking from a fire hose, 80 to 100 hour weeks, working hard and deploying my discipline and intensity into something new. I previously, for the first 22 years of my life,

that was baseball. That was taken away from me. And I had this new thing that I could channel all of that into. And so I was loving it in a lot of ways in those early years. And yeah, as you said, money buys happiness in those early years of your career in life. I don't think any science will tell you otherwise. It is very clear.

It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs to some extent. As you come up that early curve early in your career in life, money directly buys happiness. I didn't have to stress about bills anymore. I could afford some vacations with my fiance. Life meaningfully improved in those early years of making more and more money from making $100,000 and then making $200,000 or $300,000. It's like, I was a meaningful improvement in those early years. The challenges for me started to pop up when I was probably

four or five years into it, when I first started to feel this sensation that I could map out my entire life and basically be doing the same version of what I'm doing currently without really needing to learn or expand myself in a whole ton of ways. That was one. The second piece was I noticed that so much of the entire industry, the entire network, everything about the people that I was constantly surrounding myself with was based around this measurement stick of just money, where everyone stacks themselves up on the basis of their compensation, their bonus, the houses, the cars, these fancy things. And I noticed from a very early stage that a lot of the things that people

would brag about or that people seem to measure themselves around were not things that I really cared about. You know, I grew up spending a month out of the year in India, devastating levels of poverty. Most of my dad's research and work as a professor was in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. I spent time around very different life than what I was raised. That instilled in me an understanding that the world that I live in is not the world that everyone experiences.

I've always from a young age had this thing in the back of my head of understanding that the opportunity playing field is not even, and anything that you can do to help even the opportunity playing field long term is a meaningful impact that you can create on the world. And I'm all for unequal outcomes because I think that people's effort and things that they put in should matter. but even opportunity. Everyone should have an opportunity to create uneven outcomes. And I would just say that there was a divergence around maybe year four or five,

where I started to know that this wasn't the path for me, but I didn't have an off-ramp. And the more and more you stay, the more gravity there is to staying because of the way the compensation works. And one more title up up and one more thing up and one more investment will come back. Well, one more and it's very enticing.

I think in some sense, it's a lot easier to stay than to do anything else. The way I've said it recently is that the worst thing in the world is not being on a bad path. The worst thing in the world is being on a good path that isn't yours. The bad path screams at you every single day that you have to get off. You know, like you wake up in the morning and there's all these forces saying you have to get off this path, you have to do something else for whatever reason.

But the good path that isn't yours is much more subtle. There are a whole lot of forces telling you that you should stay. Reasons that you should stay, responsibilities, demands, all of these things that are telling you, path's on the back, that are telling you that it is the right path that you should stay. And this is normal. Why do you want to be happy all the time? You're making good money, you have a home, you have a family, what more do you want? And most people will never step off for that reason. It is much easier to just stay on the path than it is to step off that good one. I love the way you said it, but also if I'm looking statistically at Leap Academy, I think most of our clients, I would say probably 80% will say that they're stuck.

They're not, oh my God, I can't survive, I'm going to be homeless. It's more of, I feel stuck in my career. I don't know how to get out of that stuckness, right? And I think that just such a good way to say it, because again, like you said, it's easier when, okay, I need a job right now. That's different than I've been on this path and maybe it was the wrong, I think you talk about it.

I climbed the mountain, but it was the wrong mountain. So at what point do you decide, that's it, I need to do something, and maybe I don't know what, but something drives you to start taking action. Yeah, it's funny. I have this idea that breakthroughs rarely feel like breakthroughs in the moment. Generally speaking, breakthroughs are something

that we identify with the benefit of hindsight. So we reflect on our lives 10 years later, five years later, and we say like, oh, that was the breakthrough. You know, like for me, that conversation that I had in May of 2021 when the friend said that, that was the breakthrough. That was the thing, and then we had the conversation and made the change.

The reality is that there were like a thousand tiny actions in the basically year The reality is that there were like a thousand tiny actions in the basically year leading up to that, that made that breakthrough moment possible. And the reason I articulate that is because I think for anyone out there listening to this, this is really important, which is to recognize this leap of faith, leaving this good path that isn't yours. If you are on that, if you heard me say that and you're listening to this and you're like, that's me, I'm on the good path that doesn't feel like mine, you are not going to solve that in a day. You're not going to just hear this, listen to this podcast and say like, well, that's it, I'm out, jump the ship, you know, leaving my safe job and I'm going to go figure it

out, right? That is terrifying. That leap of faith is terrifying. I deconstructed that problem in my own mind, again, with the benefit of hindsight, but I think this formula can really help someone out there, which is just to say, the reason that leap of faith feels so scary is because of two asymmetries. You have an information asymmetry, meaning you have a ton of information

about what your life currently looks like and no information about what your life will look like on the other side, and an evidence asymmetry. Meaning you have a ton of evidence about how you can live your life, the responsibilities, the bills you can pay, all of the things that you can do where you currently are and you have no evidence of your ability to do that on the other side. What those two asymmetries manifest as is this huge gap, this endless expanse where

you're standing on the edge of a cliff, you look down, you're like there's nothingness down below and there's something way off in the distance. And I'm just supposed to jump? No way. I'm staying on the path, right? And that, those two asymmetries, that is a solvable problem. And it is solvable through gathering information and creating evidence. What I had done over the course of a year without knowing it was exactly that. I had gathered information on a daily basis. While COVID was happening, I was spending time talking to hundreds of different people about their paths, different paths that were out there.

And I was creating evidence. I was writing every single day. I didn't know that writing was gonna be a thing that I was gonna go build a career out of, but I knew that it gave me a ton of energy. So I was doing it every single day. And slowly people started being willing to pay me for certain things. I saw little consulting opportunities coming up. I saw

that my newsletter could monetize. There were all of these things that started to create evidence in my mind that I might be able to live a life, like I'm going to actually be able to replace my income. I could pay some bills. And that built up to the point where that conversation happened in May of 2021, the breakthrough moment, and the leap of faith felt like a little step.

I was like, okay, I'm ready for this. I've actually unknowingly made this leap. Created that. Made it feel like a little step. And so for anyone that's listening, that's feeling like they're on that good path that isn't theirs, think about today. You listen to this.

What is some tiny thing that you can do that is either gathering more information about what that other path is, or creating evidence about your ability to live there? That could be as simple as having a conversation with someone, doing some online research, sketching out a plan of how you're going to create some evidence, the new business you might wanna build, build a landing page, get your first

customer. These tiny things that feel completely inconsequential on their own stack up over hundreds and hundreds of days. And I love that because I think it's the whole notion of burn the boats versus in the moment, which for me, it's more about how do I get really intentional strategic about figuring this out versus burning the boats? I'm gonna burn the boats when I'm ready to burn the boats, when I build enough evidence, when I have enough information,

when I created enough of a brand for myself that I actually make sense to burn the boats. Yeah, I've never really understood the idea of burn. Like, look, I think when you make the change, burn the boats the breakthrough you burn the boats and what I mean by that is At that point once you've gathered enough information and gotten enough evidence You burn the boats in the sense that you go all in on this new thing But getting to the point where you are ready to burn the boats is a totally different story that could take a year It could take three months

It could take a month But you need to get to the point where you have made that feel like a little scary, not the most terrifying thing in the world. If you're feeling stuck, underpaid or unappreciated, or you're simply ready to take your career and life to the next level, I have the perfect solution for you. We have a program that helps you fast track and leap your reputation and career, become the best version of yourself, get the dream role you deserve,

move up to leadership, jump to entrepreneurship, or even build a portfolio career. This program helps hundreds a year, and it will help you gain the income, influence, and impact that will transform the second part of your life. Watch our free training today at leapacademy.com slash free hyphen training. The link is in the show notes. Now back to the show. But talk to me then, at some point you need to burn the boats from private equity, big pays, lots of status.

It comes with a lot of, oh my God, how do people react to it? How did you react to it? I'm curious. I've never been someone that cared about what other people thought about me. So that's number one. Part of that's from the baseball, right?

I was a pitcher, so spotlight was constantly on you. You were gonna fail miserably at times. And I have always just been of the belief that someone's always gonna have some issue with you. There's always gonna be someone out there saying that you're an idiot saying that you did the wrong thing, whatever it is. And as long as I am happy with my few people, I don't really care. And as I got more comfortable with who I was, as my insecurities started to get chipped away at, I got even more so

entrenched in that belief and self-confidence. So that was really helpful. I would say that there were two reflections I had. One, most people that had been with me on the prior path, working in finance, I was rising through the ranks, things seemed to go well. From the outside looking in, and I think from a lot of their perspective,

I was winning the game. And I think most of them probably just assumed that I burned out and that I needed a break. And, you know, the family reasons for moving back closer to family, I think that that all lined up to say, oh, you know, worked really hard for seven years, kind of burned out. And in hindsight, looking back on it, what I would say is that a lot of those people that I spent time with, some of them that I thought were really close friends, not at my employer, but people that I had been around that were sort of friends in that

prior life weren't really my friends. They sort of liked a version of me that was fake. I had created this persona of this high flying finance guy that wasn't really me. I don't really care about that kind of stuff. I mean, I wear a running watch. I don't care about... Hey, me too. Yeah, nice.

I don't really care and I don't need hundreds of friends. I want to spend time with a few people that I'm really value and mission aligned with. And I come to that realization in my own life. And so I didn't really mind that I kind of lost friends in this change. And I'm sure you deal with this a lot with people through Leap Academy. When you are trying to drive for growth or change in your life, attacks on that growth is loneliness. You are going to experience loneliness because you changed but your environment didn't. So you are quite literally not going to be speaking the same language as a lot of the people that were in your previous life. And some of them

will understand that and you'll continue to have a relationship with them. Some of them won't. And you have yet to attract the new people on the other side of this change. And so that can manifest as this extended season of loneliness that if you fight, it makes it way worse. It's like quicksand. All of these changes, these signs of personal growth, they are like quicksand. If you try to, these signs of personal growth, they are like quicksand. If you try to fight them and resist them and push back, they only pull at you harder and get worse. And when you lean into them and you embrace them

and you recognize them as a sign of the progress that you are making in life, your entire life gets better. And you can just sit with them and realize that this is the journey. I am really in it right now. Oh my God, this is so important. So first of all, I wish I had your thick skin. I think I need a little bit of that dose.

But I think some of your friends and network are seeing a different person. But also, it's easier to hate. It's easier to get other things that maybe when you're playing sports, you've felt some of this, but I think it's so easy to get hate now and get various remarks. So do you just brush them off? It turned to my baseball experience. I do think I am much better at brushing things off now than I used to be. I personally have learned to default to a level of empathy when it comes to hate.

Main reason is I've never met a person who spends time hating on others that I wanted to trade lives with. That's true. I've never come across someone and sometimes I'll spend time with someone who has all the success in the world, super wealthy, doing great, that you bring someone up and the first thing that comes out of their mouth is negative, talking down about someone. My reaction is always, why are you so insecure? It has never made you look good to talk badly about someone else. It never knocks them down and brings you up. It doesn't do that.

I have just learned to just say, sometimes hate and criticism has a seed of truth. What I will say is that the ones that hurt the most are generally speaking the ones where you know there's a seed of truth. There's some piece of feedback that maybe you need to come down from the emotional reaction and then recognize and understand. And so it is helpful, I would say, to be able to recognize when a piece of negativity comes your way and you feel like this really sharp reaction to it, generally speaking, it's because there's some seed of truth.

If you were to call me fat, if you were like, hey, you're really fat, that would not impact me at all, because I'm not fat. Like, definitively, I just know that I'm not fat. By the way, for those seeing it on YouTube, yes. That's ridiculous. But you know what I mean not fat. By the way, for those seeing it on YouTube, yes, that's ridiculous. But you know what I mean? Like it's just... Yeah, there's things that will just don't matter.

But if you said something to me like you never have any original thoughts, there's very few original thoughts in the world because Aristotle probably, you know, like we're building on the shoulders of... Like I would have this natural reaction to fight back. The reason is because that is something that I think about. Where I'm like, I need to continue to refine and think about what are the novel frameworks that I can really build myself rather than just riffing on things that exist. It's helpful to recognize those

because then you can really make progress. But if we just default to the emotional reaction, we try to write everything off as irrelevant or useless or like screw the haters, you miss out on some valuable signal that exists within all that noise. You said something about phases and I want to go there. Your son, if I'm not mistaken, was born what, a few years ago. I'm a big believer that life is in phases.

I think you talk a little bit about those phases. I think we also have different priorities and different phases of our life. How did that impact your thinking? I'm a big believer in this idea. I call it seasons. And my fundamental belief around seasons and why it's been such an impactful concept

for both my wife and I is this recognition that what you prioritize or focus on during any one season can and should probably change. With that recognition is the understanding that you needn't be held or tied to what your focus was the prior season, nor do you need to stress or have anxiety over what your focus might be in the next season, in a future season. You can really just ride and live in the present moment and make decisions that will optimize for where you currently are.

The most salient example of that in our life was this understanding my wife and I both had that we really wanted to prioritize presence and energy while our kids are young. And being at home during that period as much as possible and really building this foundational relationship and trust with our kids was important to us. And so building our life around that, part of that was that my wife wanted to take time off work and there are sacrifices to be made around that

in other areas of life. But doing so with the recognition that it doesn't tie you to that for the rest of your life. That doesn't mean that you are now a stay at home mom for the rest of your life. That doesn't mean that you are now a stay-at-home mom for the rest of your life. It means that while your kids are young and not in school, maybe that's gonna be your focus and that that season may come to an end.

Maybe it won't, but maybe it will. And that has been a really transformative idea for us because it liberates you to just think in segments. You don't need to think for the 50-year horizon, the 10-year, the 15-year plan. You can really need to think for the 50 year horizon, the 10 year, the 15 year plan. You can really think in these shorter chunks. I love it. And I think you have a few names for them like foundation, compounding, family purpose, retirement. And for me, we also talk a lot about experimenting with what's critical for you and then experimenting with what's the right thing

for you. But again, looking at it as a smaller chunk because we're going to reinvent ourselves every year or two. We're totally aligned on how we're looking at it. So I loved when I looked at that. So what inspired you then to write the five types of wealth? It sounds like it's all of that together, but we were just like, oh my God, I have to write this down. Or you took a lot of the things from Twitter and suddenly you're writing a book.

How did that come about? There was so much that was transformed in my own life from this idea of measuring according to the things that you truly care about. We saw the transformation in our life over the course of a year, from the life we were living, where my wife and I were struggling to conceive,

experiencing strain in our relationship around that for the first time to, you know, a year later having this beautiful little boy born living close to our families, having this incredible joy and fulfillment in our work and in the things that we're focusing on having better health, mental and physical over the course of one year, right? from May of 2021, when I had that conversation, when I was as miserable as I'd been in my life, to May of 2022,

when my son was born and we brought him home from the hospital and both of our sets of parents are there cheering in the driveway, it was almost unbelievable. One year. And I just started to think to myself, I have to share this with the world because you sort of know these ideas

in the back of your mind, but the problem is that that awareness is perishable. So you might know something in a moment, but if you don't know it in the moment, it's not useful awareness. You need to be able to understand and recognize something at the testing point of that thing. And for that to be the case, you need a framework.

You need a name to put to the thing. And so my whole thought was people know these things, they're floating around in their head, oh, time is really precious, relationships are so important, your health, all these things, you kind of know it, but it needs to be handed to people so that they can actually operationalize it in their life, so that they can take it, make decisions with it, proactively design their life with it, measure the right things, start taking the right actions.

And I was called to share it because I had experienced the value of it in my own journey. And again, did you realize how the book will take off? It's been a phenomenal, it's incredible. No, I don't think you ever really know. And there was an enormous amount of anxiety with publishing my first book, putting something out into the world that's so permanent, because everything I'd done before was social media or my

newsletter. And, you know, a social media post or a newsletter post, at most it is relevant for 48 hours, and then people have moved on. So nothing is really that permanent, good or bad. And so there's a lot of anxiety of putting something out into the world and saying, this is here, and if people hate it, if the reviews are terrible, it's here. And if it's good, maybe it'll be an amazing thing

and really sticky. My whole thought was, you don't gift a newsletter to someone, you can't give a newsletter to someone for their graduation. You can't give a newsletter to someone for their graduation. You can't give a newsletter to someone for Christmas, but you can give a book. So I was like, this concept, this idea, I know it needs to exist in the world.

I didn't know how it would be received. I didn't know that there would be all these people that would come and support for no benefit to them. I've been pretty blown away. I mean, we're, I don't know, just coming in on four-ish months maybe since release and almost 300,000 copies I think sold around the world. I'm really blown away. That's incredible because that's a different level of impact. I think the most important part of that, by the way, is the numbers disappear into like anonymity.

There's some like terrible version of this quote that it might be like Joseph Stalin or someone said that one person dies, it's a tragedy, a million people die, it's a statistic. And the good version of that same idea also applies, which is impacting one person feels very meaningful. When you hear these big numbers like social media followers, likes, shares, views, whatever, they fade into oblivion in your own mind.

I'm like, 300, I don't know what that means. And the thing that's really impactful to me is getting the emails and hearing the stories from people about real actions that they've taken on the back of reading the book. Like I decided to spend more time with my family and then my mom got diagnosed with something and we created all these moments and memories prior to her passing. And it's been three months. So I cannot imagine the ripple effect of this when you play

it out over a long time. And for me in my own life and my own journey, if I had wanted to just make the most amount of money, I would have stayed on the path I was on. What I care about is impact. I care about feeling like I'm leaving a positive impact on people's lives. And for me to hear those stories from people,

see and experience those stories, get those pictures from people, I can't imagine something more enriching in my career and my professional experience. I would agree. And I think we share some of this. For me, it's in a different version of it, but I can totally understand because again

I was on the path of tech that would probably make me more money but this is massively more impactful. So right now there's some amazing things about being an entrepreneur but there's some less amazing things. Can we talk a little bit about some of the less amazing things because I think right now you're talking to an audience that they're going to soak all of this in. Like, so this is amazing. But I think a lot of them are like, what do I want to do? Do I just want to go up the ladder in my own world? Do I want to start entrepreneurship?

I also believe in portfolio career, like multiple streams of income. I think some people will create some things on the side to create that impact even if they are in the same area. But what are the things that are not as fun or a lot more challenging that you think? How much time you got? Look, there are a lot of things. The first thing that I would say is everyone says they want freedom, but most people don't actually want freedom. They want the illusion of freedom or the Disney fairy tale version of freedom. The reality of freedom is that it is very, very scary

and very, very challenging because real freedom, what we're talking about here is being up in the middle of the night, recognizing that if you don't do this thing, it is not going to happen. Real freedom is everything falling on you and you needing to eat what you kill. And the whole myth of the like four hour work week,

maybe a few people are able to pull it off, but it is not reality for the vast majority. If you go down the entrepreneurial path, I would say you have to get comfortable with the idea that you're going to work more for less money. And if you outperform that, that is fantastic. But if you're comfortable with that, because you are going to be so fulfilled

by controlling your own destiny, then it is certainly for you. I think this whole idea that you can set out on this path and like, all you have to do is bet on yourself and then you'll make way more money and work way less hours. It's just not real. And thinking that going in, you're going to be very disappointed very quickly and get discouraged.

And so I think that being realistic with yourself about why you are doing this thing and what it means to you to go and do this is important. The other thing I would say is the single greatest challenge I had and that I think most people have when they switch from a traditional path to a non-traditional Is the lack of structure lack of structure Manifests as a lot of fear a lot of anxiety a lot of stress a lot of tension On your prior path you knew what you had to do all times a day

You had all these meetings you had emails you had all sorts of stuff You had to do all this you were being told exactly what you needed to do. You switched to this path, entrepreneurial path. No one's telling you. You need to make it up, yeah. Yeah, no one's telling you what to do. You wake up in the morning, you're like, what do I do today?

I don't know. And what happens is stress and anxiety feed on idleness. So if you have nothing on your calendar and you're just sitting there like, I don't know what to do, you are going to start feeling that build. That idleness is fixed by creating structure, by having action that you are taking.

And what you find is that that creates momentum, you start keeping promises to yourself, that builds confidence, it creates movement, that builds motivation. All of these things start to happen on the back of creating some level of structure. So whenever I advise anyone on making this leap, making a change in their life, the first thing I say is, just sketch out some level of structure. So whenever I advise anyone on making this leap, making a change in their life, first thing I say is just sketch out some level of structure to what you're

going to be doing during different blocks of the day. That could be as simple as I'm going to wake up at five and I'm going to go work out for an hour and then I'm going to do this. Then I'm going to do customer calls. Then I'm going to do new research. Like whatever. Sir, can we do seven instead of five though? You can do whatever you want. Whatever you want. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

I'm kidding. I love the early morning wake up personally because it's before my son's awake. Yeah. And then look, the last thing I will say is it is a very lonely path. And I think that you need to be, again it goes back to the quicksand thing. It is important to recognize that going in

and to not resist it because being willing to grind through that valley of loneliness, you find an unbelievable enriching set of relationships on the other side of it if you are willing to grind through that period. People that are on that same journey that understand you in a deeper way, that understand these challenges that you faced and that can help you. And that is such an amazing thing when you find it. And I think it's so important to surround yourself with people who are closer to where

you want to go versus where you've been, right? Because otherwise it just doesn't work. You get exactly what you talked about. So if somebody is listening to this, and I'm sure they're getting so much out of this, but they're feeling stuck, they're feeling like I need to change. If you need to get yourself back in time to whatever, 2020 or 2021, what would you say to yourself?

I think I would just sit down and ask myself, what is one tiny thing that I can do today that creates a little bit of momentum? and ask myself, what is one tiny thing that I can do today that creates a little bit of momentum? And it doesn't need to be the right thing, quote unquote. It doesn't need to be the perfect thing. It just needs to be something. Because what I have found over and over again

is that fear is an interesting experience. Fear is really about inexperience, not incapability. You are afraid because you haven't done it yet, not because you can't do it. And that means that fear is solvable through action, through doing the thing, through having the courage to take action. And that action doesn't have to be right, it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be something. You have to sit down and make some tiny action.

You have to solve one problem. And anyone can do that where they are today. And so if you have started to think that there is a different path for you, just as I had, sit down and think about what is one tiny thing that I can do today that will leave me slightly better off tomorrow than where I am. And it could be 15 minutes, it could be five minutes, but structure a little bit of time to solve one of those problems every single day, and you'll be blown away by the momentum that creates over longer periods. I love this because I think one of the things that paralyze

people is the overthinking. I need to get the clarity. I need to get the clarity. I can't move until I know exactly how the path is going to form. And what I love about this, again, the clarity comes from action and from the momentum. And the way you started just writing about it, et cetera, et cetera, like that clarity kicked in, right? So I think that is just so, so, so important because I think this is such a fundamental area where there's a lot of procrastination around it. Yeah, my favorite quote of all time is the ancient poet Rumi who said, as you start to walk on the way, the way appears. I think that more of us need to approach our entrepreneurial journey or our life with an explorer's mentality to say you cannot plan

the perfect journey. You can't think your way to the perfect path. There's no 10-year, 15-year plan. There is only action that starts to reveal the path in front of you. Sahil Blum, thank you for being on the show. That was amazing. Thank you so much for having me. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. If you did, please share it with friends. Now also if you're feeling stuck or simply want more from your own career, watch this

30-minute free training at leapacademy.com slash training. That's leapacademy.com slash training. See you in the next episode of the Leap Academy with Ilana Golanshchuk.