The Personal Finance Podcast - The 5 Types of Wealth With Sahil Bloom

Episode Date: February 3, 2025

In this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to talk to Sahil Bloom about the five levels of wealth. How Andrew Can Help You:  Don't let another year pass by without making significant strides toward your dreams. "Master Your Money Goals" is your pathway to a future where your aspirations are not just wishes but realities. Enroll now and make this year count! Join The Master Money Newsletter where you will become smarter with your money in 5 minutes or less per week Here! Learn to invest by joining  Index Fund Pro! This is Andrew’s course teaching you how to invest!  Watch The Master Money Youtube Channel! , Ask Andrew a question on Instagram or TikTok.  Learn how to get out of Debt by joining our Free Course  Leave Feedback or Episode Requests here.  Thanks to Our Amazing Sponsors for supporting The Personal Finance Podcast. Shopify: Shopify makes it so easy to sell. Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at  shopify.com/pfp Chime: Start your credit journey with Chime. Sign-up takes only two minutes and doesn’t affect your credit score. Get started at chime.com/ Thanks to Fundrise for Sponsoring the show! Invest in real estate going to fundrise.com/pfp Thanks to Policy Genius for Sponsoring the show! Go to policygenius.com to get your free life insurance quote. Go to joindeleteme.com/pfp20 for 20% off! Indeed: Start hiring NOW with a SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLAR SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to upgrade your job post at Indeed.com/personalfinance Go to Acorns.com/pfp and start automating your investments and get a $5 bonus today! Connect with Sahil Bloom Website Instagram Linkedin Youtube X The 5 Levels of Wealth by Sahil Bloom - Book Connect With Andrew on Social Media:  Instagram  TikTok Twitter  Master Money Website  Master Money Youtube Channel   Free Guides:   The Stairway to Wealth: The Order of Operations for your Money  How to Negotiate Your Salary  The 75 Day Money Challenge  Get out Of Debt Fast  Take the Money Personality Quiz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm your host, Andrew Founder of MasterMoney.com. And today on the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to be diving into the five types of wealth with Sahel Bloom. If you guys have any questions, make sure you hit us up on the Master Money newsletter by going to mastermoney.com slash newsletter. And don't forget to follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whatever your favorite podcast player is. And if you want to help out the show, consider leaving a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And you can also watch this on YouTube. Just search the name, Andrew Jankola, which is my name, and you will find us on YouTube as well. Now, today we're going to be diving into the five types of wealth with Sahil Bloom.

And Sahil wrote this absolutely fantastic book about the five various types of wealth. which we will be diving into here in today's episode. We're going to dive into time wealth and strategies for aligning our calendars with our priorities. We're going to dive into social wealth and how we can actually define meaningful relationships in the context of social wealth. We're going to be talking through mental wealth and how we can actually cultivate curiosity, which is so important when it comes to mental wealth. And obviously, we're going to be talking a lot about financial wealth as well.

Now, Saha is an amazing author. I recommend every single person pick up this book, The Five Types of Wealth. It is one of the best books that I have read in the last year. It might be the best book that I've read in the last year. And I got tons of insights. And some of the stuff that I love about this book is that he dives into various exercises that he takes you through. That really makes you think. It makes you think twice about the way that you're currently operating.

And it can be life-changing for some of you. So I'm really excited for you guys to read this book. Sahel and I have been talking for a long time about him coming on the show. Finally got it done. And I'm really pumped for you to listen to this episode. Let's welcome Sahel Bloom to the personal finance. podcast. Thahill, welcome to the personal finance podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's a thrilled to be here. So we are so excited to have you because you wrote this book that I think

encompasses a lot of the things that we talk about on this show. And we talk about the various types of wealth. And you are redefining how most people think about wealth. And that's what I absolutely love about your book. And we're going to dive more into it here in a second. But can you tell us your story and kind of why you decided to write this book? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I appreciate the invitation to be here and to share this message. And I think that, you know, for a lot of people out there, especially money-minded people, which I would bucket myself into, it's a really important message. So the work that you are doing, I highly appreciate and excited to be able to share the message. I would just say that I spent the first 30 years of my

life chasing someone else's definition of success, if you will. A lot of my life was really grounded in this pursuit of external achievements, external affirmations that I thought would one day be the thing that made me wake up and feel that glorious feeling of success and happiness and fulfillment that we're all after. And I got to a point in my own life where I had achieved many of those things. And unfortunately, the feeling that I was looking for, that satisfaction, that fulfillment, that happiness was absent. And I think this is actually a common theme that a lot of people come to in their own life after achieving some financial milestone. And it gets categorized into this bucket of like unteachable lessons where people just think, oh yeah, like, you know, you kind of hear

that when you haven't yet achieved the success. And you say like, okay, yeah, sure, I'll be happy when I have the thing. And so you just chase after it blindly. And then you inevitably come to that same conclusion, but only after incurring this load of misery along the way. And so in my own pursuit, I feel like that was the case. I feel like I heard that for many wiser, older people along the way. And I had been so indoctrinated into this idea that money was the way for me to feel that I had accomplished something and that money was the definition of a wealthy life, that I blindly followed that path. And what I've come to learn in my own journey is that you will never feel successful unless you create your own definition of success. Because if not, you will just be chasing someone else's. You'll just

be chasing whatever more people are trying to convince you is the thing that matters. And that was my journey. I spent the first seven years of my career working in traditional finance, working in the world of investing, learning a lot, working a lot. And really, as those years went, more and more narrowly focusing in on money as the means to achieving the good life. And along the that path, all of these other areas of my life had started to suffer. And it came to ahead in 2021, which I'm sure we can talk about when I realized that if I didn't make a change, I was going to end up in a really bad place on my journey. And I think so many people out there are kind of utilizing money as basically what the only scoreboard that they have to move forward in life. And I think for most

of us, it's a big struggle that even I have where I get to the point in time where I achieve kind of all of my financial goals and my enough number just kept moving. It just kept going. It just kept going up over and over and over again. And kind of figuring out what your own scoreboard is is really, really important. And you talk about something called the broken scoreboard, which I absolutely love the way that you frame this out. How can we identify that we're kind of using the wrong metrics in life, kind of how you figured out as you went through your journey? Peter Drucker, the management theorist, once said, what gets measured gets managed. I absolutely love that quote. Because what it implies is that the thing that you can measure ends up being the thing that you focus on. It's the thing that you

narrowly hone in on you optimize around. Money is very measurable. It has historically, as a result, been the default scoreboard that we use to measure our life. We take a single number and we apply it to our entire life's worth. It's how we stack ourselves up. It's how we measure our progress. It becomes the sole measurement of your life. And as a result, because it's so easily measured, it becomes the thing we optimize around. It's the only thing, the only vector that we make decisions along. So when an opportunity comes along in life, we just think about, okay, the money impact of this decision, and we pursue whatever seems like it'll benefit that most. It's the person that takes the $10,000 a year raise, even though it's going to take them 10,000 miles away from their family.

Because it is so measurable, it becomes the thing that you optimize it on. And so when I say that the scoreboard is broken, what I mean is that money does not alone lend itself to the war that you actually want to win. in life. If you think about your life, you think about the battle of money being one single battle. It's one thing. But the war is about a whole lot more. Money is a piece of the war. But in reality, there are all of these other things. There's your relationships. There's your freedom. There's your health, mental and physical. There's your purpose. There are all of these other things that contribute to the broader war of a life well-lived. And so if you only focus on measuring for the battle, you may win that battle, but you will lose the war.

And so what I hope to do and what I set out to do in this book is to create a better scoreboard. Create a scoreboard that involves money, but is defined by a whole lot of other stuff as well. And that's what I love because you reframe kind of what the idea of wealth is, which is really how we all need to be thinking about things in our life, because wealth is so much more than just money. And you dive deeper and deeper into the book. So what was the most pivotal moment for you where you realized that you were playing their game, wrong? Like, you went through life and you were going through this process of trying to get to the

top of the ladder. When did you realize that you were just playing the wrong game? I went out for a drink in May of 2021 with an old friend. And at that time in my life, I had been kind of steadily rising through the ranks in the world of finance. From the outside looking in, you would have said I was winning the game. You know, I was getting promoted. I was making money. Things were good. internally, there was a whole lot that was starting to crumble. My relationships with my parents, I was living 3,000 miles away, barely ever seeing them, with my sister, effectively had ground to a halt. My wife and I were experiencing some strain from struggling to conceive at the time.

Physically, I was drinking almost seven nights a week. My mental health was not great. There were all of these other things in my life that were really starting to show cracks, but on the surface, everything was going great. And I got to this drink with an old friend, and he asked how I was, doing. And I said that it had started to get tough being as far away from my parents as we were, you know, that they had started to show chinks in the armor, that their mortality was starting to show they were slowing down. And he asked how old they were. And I said mid-60s. And he asked

how often I see them. And I said, about once a year. And he just looked at me and said, okay, so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die. And I just remember feeling like I had been punched in the gut. I mean, the idea that the amount of time you have left with the people you love most in the world is so finite, so countable that you can put it on to just a few hands. That shook me to the core. And the next day at home, I sat down with my wife and we had a candid conversation about needing to make a change that if we didn't step off the path and step on to a different one, we were going to end up in a place that we didn't want to be.

And within 45 days, I had left my job, we had sold our house in California, and moved 3,000 miles to be closer to our parents on the East Coast. And that was really the start of this entire journey that's led to being here and publishing this book, that whole idea of rejecting that default definition of success and stepping on and trying to create our own path, trying to understand what were the things that we truly cared about so that we could build our life around them. And that's really what the message of this entire book is. It is not telling you the answers for how to live your life.

It is giving you the questions so that you can come to the answers for yourself, so that you can define what matters to you and then go build a life around it. And for those listening, the questions that Sahel has in this book make you really think deeply. I mean, you go through your entire life and there are so many different ideas that you can just spark from asking yourself these questions. And so I love going through some of those questions. is just kind of really thinking deeply about them because it really can't absolutely change your life. And what I love about what you did is you went from, you know,

going on this path of, you know, climbing up the ladder and doing all these different things were on the surface, it looked really good. And then you realized and kind of did a life assessment and you took action and in 45 days made a massive change in your life based on some of the information that you kind of figured out. So I absolutely love how quickly you took action. So for anybody out there listening who's going to listen to kind of some of the things that we're talking about here and who's going to read this book,

I think that just seeing how quick saw his, took action is just such an inspiring thing. So first, one of the areas that we talk about here is time wealth. And time wealth is something that is so incredibly valuable for a lot of people. We need to understand kind of how to utilize our time wisely and there's so many different factors that go into that. So why is time wealth so often overlooked? And how can we reclaim our busy lives? I think everybody out there is kind of talking about how busy they are. Everybody I talk to, every friend that I have is just says, oh, I'm just so incredibly busy. So how do we kind of reclaim some of our time back. Well, busy has become this kind of pseudo-dispopian status flex in modern, especially

Western culture, where being busy has been like held with this badge of honor. Like you, people ask you at a cocktail party how you're doing and you say, oh, I'm busy. And that's like, I'm important. And I'm, you know, I must be doing well if I'm so busy. And it's funny, right? Like it's, I would think the goal should be to be anti-busy, to have freedom to, you know, or if you I guess if you are busy, it should be on things that you truly care about that are like truly motivating to you, not, you know, sitting around emailing and being in meetings all day with people that you don't necessarily like. So there is a reframe that needs to happen there. When it comes to time wealth, I think the first piece of this is awareness. And it's awareness

of the incalculable value of your time, how time is your most precious asset. You kind of hear that. especially when you're young, people tell you, oh, your time is so valuable. And you hear it, and it goes in one ear and out the other. And it's sort of one of those pieces of wisdom that you're like, uh-huh, you nod your head and then you continue living the same way. So I like to ask young people, would you trade lives with Warren Buffett? He's worth $130 billion. He has access to anyone in the world. He flies around on Boeing business jets and, you know, has mansions all over the place. He reads and learns for a living. But you wouldn't trade lives with him. Simply because he is 95 years old. There's no way you would agree to trade the amount of time you have left for $130 billion.

So you acknowledge that your time has literally incalculable value, $130 plus billion worth of value. You wouldn't trade any amount of money to be 95 years old today. And that is a really important piece of awareness because what it tells you is that your time is your most precious asset. And the way that you deploy that time, the way that you invest that time is incredibly important. So sitting around on this thing, scrolling, TikTok memes, comparing yourself to other people's lives, all the things that we find that are wasting that time, that are just throwing it away, that are spitting on it, are really spitting on your most valuable asset. So I really think that time wealth comes down to first and foremost that awareness. Second, it's all about attention. It's about concentrating your attention into the handful, very small handful of things that truly, truly,

matter, both personally and professionally. We kind of know this professionally. Again, it's one of these things that we hear and it goes in one year and out the other as we get stuck on meetings and things all day. But we need to create really deliberate practice of saying no to things that aren't driving us forward in that way, or at least adjusting them so that they're sort of managed within the context of our lives. Absolutely. And that is one of the most important things. we always kind of talk about how valuable time is, and it's one of your greatest assets that you're ever going to have. And most people need to realize that the way that they're spending their time is it's so finite. And especially, like you said, when you're young, I did the same exact thing. People would say that all the time. And you don't

realize how much time you have left. And so you start to kind of go through life. And you're like, man, life just flew by. I'm in my 30s now. And it is one of those things where it's like an instant. And so when you go through that process, you start to realize how short life really is. And so you really need to focus your energy on taking some of that time back and really making sure that you are allocating your time towards the things that you actually value. So what strategies do you recommend for kind of aligning our calendars with our priorities? My favorite actionable thing that anyone can go do right now after listening to this is what I call the energy calendar exercise. It's in the time wealth guide of the book and it is probably the fastest, easiest way to dramatically change your time wealth.

All it is is pull up your calendar and at the end of whatever workday this is that you're listening to this on, let's say it's a Monday. Color code your day and the activities according to whether they created energy for you, meaning you felt lifted up either during or after, market green. If it was neutral, market yellow. And if it was energy draining, meaning it pulled you down, it drained your energy, mark it red. Do that for a week and zoom out. On the weekend, look at the calendar from the week, and you will have a very clear visual perspective of the types of activities that were energy creating versus energy draining in your life. That allows you to do something very powerful, which is make slow, steady improvements to the amount of green versus the amount of red on that calendar. You are never going to completely eliminate red.

If you can, I want to trade lives with you. Red and energy drainers part of life sometimes. But you can work to improve the ratio of energy creators to energy drainers, which has a dramatic impact not only on how you feel, but also on your output. Because when you lean into things that create energy for you, you drive the best outputs in your life. That is a fact of life. The things that pull you, the things that you are very interested in, which are the energy

creators, those are the things that are going to drive the asymmetric outcomes in your life. So by leaning into them more and leaning away from the things that are draining you, you can create better outcomes, the 10,000 X outcomes in your life. The most common pushback I get, especially from people working in a traditional corporate job, is, oh, I can't do that. I'm not an entrepreneur. I don't control my time. I have to do these things. You are always more in control of your calendar than you think. I first did this when I was working an 80 to 100 hour a week finance job. And I'll give you an example of a simple way that I did it. I found when I first did

this exercise, that phone calls and Zoom meetings were the most prevalent energy drainer in my life. What I knew, though, was that walking calls, taking the same phone call while on a walk, was energy creating for me. I like being outside. I was more present. I couldn't multitask and send emails while I was on a phone call if I was on a walk. So for a variety of reasons, much better. I was able to take about half of my phone calls from a week and start doing them out on walks. So suddenly, my calendar, which had previously looked like a lot of red, had a whole lot more green on it, which at the end of the week made me feel a lot better. I had better phone calls with those people because I was more present, more active on them, and it starts to create better

outcomes. So even when you are in a traditional track, even if you're an analyst on a traditional track and very junior on the ranks, you can still really think critically and make small tweaks that improve the quality of your energy during the course of the week. And I love those small tweaks and just you talking about, you know, doing the phone calls while you're walking. You're doing a number of different benefits right there. A, you're working on your health wealth, which is one of the best things that you can do overall. But B, just kind of making those minor tweaks can make something so much better and just make your day so much more improved, which I absolutely love. Now, one big thing is when it comes to our time, and you kind of alluded to this early on, is the big question that you asked yourself was kind of, you know, I only have so much time left to be able to see my parents and just be able to see my family.

So when you go through that, how do you reframe your personality? perspective on time by asking yourself that big question. How can people kind of do this same exact exercise that you did, which seemingly changed your entire life and the change your entire trajectory of how you live your life? How can people ask themselves that same question to figure out, hey, how much time do I have left with my family? And how do they reframe that so they can change the way they spend their time? The first time I came across this after that was a blog post from an author who's now become a friend named Tim Urban. And Tim had this whole framing that the amount of time you had left is not just time. It could also be framed in moments, a number of times that you do certain things.

It could be moments with a loved one. It could be the number of walks on the beach, the number of ice cream, your favorite ice creams that you get all of these things. Really what this comes down to is just simple math. And that was the simple math that my friend had done when we sat down and had that drink, which was my parents were 65. I was seeing them once a year. Average life expectancy, let's just say, is 80 years old. You subtract 80 from 65. There's 15 years. I was seeing. them once a year, 15 times once a year is 15 times. You can do that same math, either in your head or on a little piece of paper, for a lot of these things in your life. And it's not just the number of times you're going to see your parents before they're gone, although I think that's very impactful. It could also be like the number of annual trips you're going to do with your best group of friends. I mean, I think about that all the time. Since leaving college and not being all together again,

how often are you able to get together with your group of best buds from those years? It starts to dwindle. And like, you know, you get the wedding years where you all get together for the weddings and the bachelor parties. But now we're in our 30s and we don't have those moments as regularly. You know, maybe we get a set of second weddings. Maybe we don't. But like, you know, you start to basically realize that unless someone forces the issue,

you're not going to see these people that many more times in your life, which is really a scary thought. And so the call to action around all of this is you can be the catalyst. You actually, again, have much more control over these numbers and over this math than you think. I had 15 more times with my parents before they were gone. We took an action, a dramatic one at that. And that number now is in the hundreds. I see my parents multiple times a month now. They're a huge part of my son's life. I mean, we dramatically impacted that number by taking an action. And so as you said at the beginning how quickly we took an action. There's an important point here, which is, you need to take

an action, but the action doesn't have to be so dramatic. I didn't have to move across the country. It could have been as simple as we're going to commit to seeing my parents four times a year. We're going to make an increased effort to make that a more significant priority in our life. We're going to reframe how much we focus on that in our life. And the 15 would have turned to 60, a meaningful improvement on that. So we didn't have to necessarily. take such a dramatic action, we just had to take an action. And that rule applies to all of these areas of life. I'm not telling you that you have to completely uproot your entire life and change all of these things. What I am telling you is you need to do something. You need to do something

to invest in each of these areas in the same way that you know to invest in your financial wealth. Because, you know, we're all money people, everyone listening to this. You know that if you invest $10 today, it's better than investing $0 today. Because it's going to compound into the future. that anything above zero is going to compound into the future. That same rule, that same mindset, applies to all of these areas of life. Doing some tiny thing today, some tiny action for your social wealth, your relationships, that is going to compound into the future. Doing some tiny thing for your clarity of mind.

That is going to compound into the future. Doing some tiny thing for your physical health. Going for the 15-minute walk instead of doing nothing is going to compound into the future. So you need to create that mental shift. You need to reframe this in your mind to understand that all of these areas compound in the exact same way that any financial asset will. 100% agree. And I think just taking those small actions up front, the ones that you really want to focus

on, just start taking those steps towards improving in those areas that it can make a massive, massive difference long term in your life. And you mentioned Tim Urban talking about, you know, even the time value that he talked about. When I originally read that blog post where he kind of colored in all the different blocks of how many weeks you have left, I remember I printed out my own and I went through in like kind of did the whole thing. And it is absolutely amazing when you visually see just how much time you have left in weeks and you kind of map it all out. It is just so crazy to see it. It kind of changes your perspective on pretty much everything. It definitely does. It's crazy.

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So how do you kind of define creating meaningful relationships and the context of social wealth? I really think of social wealth as being about your depth and breadth of relationships. It's depth with a few and then breath with something larger. The larger circles, whether it's looser friends, acquaintances, communities, spiritual groups, Things that are sort of bigger than the self that you are connected to. And social wealth is governed by those two things primarily. And, you know, it starts with the foundation of depth. It is a few people that you have true, deep, meaningful, loving relationships. So, have people that you can call at three in the morning and they will show up for you. And that's not going to be 10 people. So you don't need to

worry about it being 10 people. It might be one person. It might be two. It might be three. If you're lucky it's five. And the reality is, you need to know who those people are so that you can cherish them and invest in those relationships in a very methodical and a very pronounced way. Because those relationships are the ones that are going to be the roots in your life. They're going to exist across the different seasons and they're going to persist. That depth is only built through vulnerability, shared struggle, through truly being in the mud with people. You don't just magically have depth. with someone. It's found through shared struggle. Shared struggle scientifically releases oxytocin, which creates feelings of love and connection. It's very important. That's why when you go through

traumatic events with certain people in your life, you actually come away with a feeling of connection with them oftentimes. It's why, you know, military vets, when they come back, those teams are so strong in those bonds because they've shared this really powerful struggle. That is a really overlooked area of life. And it is so critical, both scientifically and anecdotally, to building a happy, healthy, wealthy life. There is scientific evidence that the strength of your relationships actually determines your health outcomes. The Harvard study of adult development is this incredible study conducted over the course of 85 plus years. They followed 2,000 plus lives. They found that the single greatest predictor of physical health at age 80 was relationship satisfaction. And

at age 50. It wasn't cholesterol, it wasn't blood pressure, it wasn't smoking or drinking habits. It was how you felt about your relationships that impacted your physical health outcomes. So we know that the people we choose to surround ourselves with determine our health and happiness in so many ways. And yet, we don't invest in those relationships in the same way that we think to invest in financial things. We have a friend of the show who comes on. His name is Jordan Grummet, and he is a hospice doctor. And so when he comes on, we have conversations about what people regret at the end of life and some of the things that they kind of talk through. And one of the biggest ones, it's always social wealth. It's always that they didn't develop the relationships that they wanted. And it is so interesting to kind of listen to some of those things that they kind of talk through. And I think you are absolutely right. It is one of the most neglected areas for most people's lives is because they don't think through this process. And so what we see a lot is a lot of people kind of chase social status instead of genuine connections. How can we make sure that, A, we're not chasing that social. status, but be that we're actually creating these genuine connections with other people.

Status is an interesting thing because it is a part of life, a natural part of life, and it is reality that we are status-seeking creatures. It's how we've organized ourselves historically, and it's actually a really useful social tool. And it's something that I explore in the social wealth section of the book is this distinction between bot status and earned status. So the whole reason that you seek status is because you are seeking the respect and admiration of people you care about, people around you. You want their respect and admiration. And that will help you in a variety of ways in your life.

But a lot of people seek to buy that by getting fancy things, right? It's the watch that you buy or the car or the house or the club membership, whatever those things are. And C.S. Lewis, the author, has a really beautiful framing of this, as he calls it the inner ring, is the idea that at every single layer, there's just another inner ring that you decide is what you need. So you kind of, you're outside the club, and you see there's a velvet rope area. And so then you want to get there. And you get to the velvet rope area. And then you see there's a back room and you're like, oh, I really want to get there.

And then you get to there and you see there's a private. And so at every layer, you continue to peel the onion until there's nothing left. And you've chased this thing that was really flimsy. So the idea of bot status is basically that. You are chasing respect and admiration via the wrong means because we know this very clearly. Those things that you can go by do not confer upon you the respect and admiration on a lasting basis that you really want. They don't.

They don't work. No one has ever garnered themselves deep lasting respect and admiration via some fancy thing. What does confer upon you that respect and admiration are things that you have to earn. It is the true deep things. Building something of value will confer upon you that respect and admiration. Having a whole lot of money will not. Actually, the best example of this is like a person who wins a billion dollar lottery will not suddenly be respected and admired just because they have a billion dollars. The person who builds a billion dollar company and earns a billion dollars will be respected and admired because it was earned. It was through real long-term hard effort versus luck. And that is an important. distinction for your life because it means that you should be chasing the things that require you

to earn them, the things that are more lasting as I talk about in the book. Absolutely. And that is one of the most important things is just kind of making sure that you don't neglect that area. I think it is really, really important for a lot of people. Now, you kind of talk through the Harvard study of development in the book as well. And why do you consider it to be the most impactful study of 100 years, the last 100 years. I just think that that idea of the fact that relationship satisfaction was the most important thing in terms of determining your health and happiness in life is so profound. We all chase all of these other things. We neglect relationships. We actually turn off relationships and you're told that you should turn off relationships while you focus on these other things when in reality

an investment in relationships is what is going to pay dividends for the entirety of your life. Exactly. And I think that is one of the things that when you dive into that in the book, too, I think it's just so powerful, just kind of seeing the message that comes out of that for sure. Now, the next one I want to talk about is mental wealth. Now, mental wealth is one, I don't think a lot of people think about as much as they probably should, because mental wealth is something that can really, you know, create fulfillment in your life in a bunch of different ways. And one thing you mentioned Buffett and Munger, we are huge fans on this podcast of Buffett and Munger and just kind of think through, you know, I love the way that they kind of have, they read all the

time, they get to learn all the time, and they're curious about so many different things. And so why is it important to kind of cultivate curiosity and why is it so integral to mental wealth? Curiosity is the real fountain of youth. Fortune really does favor the curious. People that are curious throughout their lives that pursue their interests with no real end in mind, end up achieving the greatest ends. And you don't really know how it happens, but it just does. does, people that lean into their interests. Success really follows interest in life. And so, you know, I often think that, like, we spend all this time and energy trying to be

interesting when in reality, the success in life that you are looking for comes from being interested. It comes from leaning into things, comes from pursuing things that really matter to you, that energize you. I think Charlie Munger is one of the greatest examples of that. And it was true throughout his entire life and career. Leaning into things that you were interested in, creating space in your life to actually pursue those things is the challenge. Most people don't actually have the space in their life

to pursue the things they get curious about. And so you go like watch a little kid and how they pursue the world. They're so curious. And they have the space to pursue those curiosities. There's nothing stopping them. We need to make sure that we have that space in our lives where we can pursue our curiosities, where we can wrestle with these bigger questions, where we can dive down those rabbit holes. That is what allows you to kind of pursue this hero's journey life arc that you are on. Absolutely. And I think it is one of the things that has made just a massive difference in my life for sure. I remember in my early 20s, I just started to say, myself, when I graduated college, I'm like, I'm just going to start reading a book every single week. And I started to kind of develop

that habit over time. I take the number of pages in a book. I divide it by seven and I read that many pages every single day. It's a really simple process and I still follow it to this day. And it is one of the things that I think absolutely changed my life. It accelerated my path in career development and accelerated my path in business and so many different things that I've done. it was just having that curiosity and wanting to understand more about very specific things and then taking action on that has been so incredibly powerful. So people even, like you said, if you don't even have a ton of time, carve out 30 minutes, an hour a day, and then find ways to develop your mental wealth to grow yourself going forward over time. I think it's one of

the most powerful things that you could do because you're investing in yourself when you do that, which is so important. So when someone is kind of going through this process and they want to start developing, you know, more curiosity, they want to develop their mental wealth, What are some questions you start to ask yourselves regularly to unlock some of that growth in your life? Yeah, I have this monthly ritual that I call a think day. It's an adaptation of Bill Gates who started in, I believe the 1980s doing something that he called a think week where he would go off the grid, rent like a cabin, and spend the entire week just reading, thinking, and learning. And it gave him the space to contemplate some of the bigger questions around Microsoft's trajectory. and he attributes these think weeks to a lot of the progress that they made along their journey. You can do something similar in your own life, both personally and professionally, and that's what

the think day is. You take a couple hours once a month and go somewhere that's outside of the norm for you. Go to a coffee shop, rent a house if you want to, just get out of your normal routines and normal headspace, and ask yourself a handful of bigger picture questions about your life. I'll share a couple here, but in the book, there's these eight question prompts in the think day guide item that I really like to use. The couple that I think are really impactful. One, if a third party observed you for a week, what would they say your priorities are? This is interesting because there are two types of priorities in the world. There are the priorities you say you have, and then there are the priorities your actions show you have.

And sometimes there's a big gap between the two, what you say versus what your actions are showing. but you are not aware enough in the present to be able to identify that gap and close it. So this question forces you to zoom out and say, am I actually acting in line with the things that I say matter to me? And if not, let me start bridging that gap, changing my actions. Another one that I absolutely love is, 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 sort of like watched a movie or television show where we just want to jump through the screen and grab the main character. and shake them and say, like, you know, don't go down to that basement or like, chase the girl to the airport, don't let her leave, whatever the thing is. You are that main character in the movie of your life, and the audience would be screaming something at you right now. What is it? What is the thing that is blindingly obvious from the outside looking in that you are just ignoring, that you're too close to the details on, so you haven't been able to see the bigger picture? Asking yourself things like that, and there's, you know, eight questions, as I mentioned,

will allow you to zoom out and just see the full field so that you can start to make changes so that you can start to spark growth in your own life. And what I loved about those questions too is it makes you, like you said, zoom out, and then you kind of look at your time in the way that you're spending your time, and it kind of shows, hey, I'm voting with my time

on some of these specific things. I want to change some of those things because my priorities are pointing in one direction and you might want to change the direction of where you're going. So I loved that exercise. And that's something I do every single year as well, as I take at least one day and kind of think through some of this stuff, some of my priorities, how I want to direct those priorities. Usually it's

really early in the year and then kind of thinking through that process too. So I love those questions in that book. It really kind of just makes you think through all of this, which is absolutely great. Now, you also talk about something called the Power Down ritual, which I absolutely love. Can you talk about the benefits that it can create just from utilizing the Power Down ritual and tell us kind of what it is, too? I first came across the idea of a Power Down ritual from Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, one of my favorite books that he's written. And he's also, you know, has been writing this blog for, I don't know, it's probably been 15 plus years. And I think I first read about the power down ritual, maybe in like 2010 when I was in college.

So it's been around for a while. And the whole idea is to actually have a sequence of events that sort of mark the end of your professional day that allow you to power down at the end of a professional day. And the whole idea is that you can create a separation with this sequence of events where both sides of the line and, benefiting. The work side benefits because you were actually closing loops to end the day. The work side on the other side of it benefits because you're fresh the next day. And then your personal life benefits because you've actually created a clear boundary that you're going to uphold for your family life or your friends or whatever it is. Whole concept is you create, you know, whatever, a short sequence of event. So it could be doing a quick scan through your emails

and to do list, you know, closing the loop on any like very quick things that you can close the loop on. and then creating a list of the two to three priority items that you're going to hit on the next morning. Do those couple simple things and then initiate this power down ritual. So then you kind of just shut it off. And then once you're done with that, you're done with that for the day. Having that kind of ritual where it becomes a routine, similar to any morning routine that you create, is a really nice way to create that separation, create more space in your life and get the benefit, as I said, on either side of it.

It is a huge thing that I do now, too. It was one of the things I originally at the same time about Reddit and deep work. And I think it is just one of those things that has changed my life as well. Because for the longest time, I would just kind of continue slowly working throughout the night and just keep on going. But when you have that shutdown, it is a really, really great ritual to go through every day that helps you kind of have that mental clarity. So you can have time, especially when you have kids, you want to focus your time with your family and being present with them. So I think it's so powerful. Absolutely.

Now, the last one is financial wealth. So a lot of us who listen to this podcast, know, this is what we talk about all the time, is financial. financial wealth. And there is a lot of really great stuff that you have in this book on financial wealth as well. And one big one is the definition of enough. Now, this is something admittedly that I have struggled with pretty much my entire life. Like I said at the beginning, every time I feel like I set up my enough number or just what is enough, the scoreboard always continues to move. And one of the biggest struggles I have with money, and it has been for the longest time. And so why is it crucial to achieving financial wealth, understanding what your enough number is and figuring out what that is.

I've always loved that story about Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, the two authors, going to this billionaire's home in the Hamptons. And Vonnegut asks Heller, how does it feel that the owner of this home made more money just yesterday than your most famous book, Catch 22, made in its entire lifetime? And Heller replies, yes, but I've got something that he'll never have. And Vonnegut It asks, what's that? And Heller says, the knowledge that I've got enough. That idea of enough is such a powerful one, because in the absence of a sensation of enough, you just keep chasing more and more and more. And that chase for more when it's financial is a very dangerous one. It leads people off the kind of rich yet miserable cliff that we see so many people go down.

Understanding your enough life is really where I ground things. things. An enough number is very challenging because the human brain, what we do is we just kind of reset to the next baseline. So we hit a number and then we reset to whatever the next number is. Michael Norton, this Harvard Business School professor, actually did research around this where he asked a bunch of high net worth individuals worth from a million on through 100 million how happy they were on a scale of 1 to 10. And then asked how much more money they would need to be at a 10. And across the board, no matter what they were worth, from a million on through 100 plus, They all said two to three times as much, which makes no sense, right? It's like, you know, you just are resetting. It's this mirage that, you know, reappears off in the distance. So I really define it. And the reason that I lay out the exercise in the book is to understand what the enough life actually looks like. What are you doing? Where are you? How do you feel? Where do you live? What are you living in? Who are you living with? Who's around you? What are you thinking about truly identifying and understanding what that life actually looks.

looks like. And the reason I think that's important is because then that life is clear in your conscious mind. So when you start to get close to it, while I do still think that is natural for it to creep up, that creep up will be a rational conscious movement rather than an irrational subconscious one. And that becomes much healthier because you're able to manage it. You're able to navigate it. And the other point that I would make here is just, none of this is to say that you should stop pursuing financial success, that you should stop pursuing these things. It is to say that in order to achieve a win across the war of all of these areas in your life, the chase for more needs to be grounded in something beyond the financial.

If you are going to chase building something incredible because that is your purpose, because that's what matters to you, that is a great use of your time in life. If it really matters to you and you're going to push on it, it just can't be that you We're trying to make money for the sake of making money. Exactly. And I think that is one of my favorite parts of kind of what you talk about is having that enough life. And one way that I kind of even look at this a lot of times is when I feel my life kind of

spiraling and my enough numbers keeps creeping up more and more and more. I know it's hard to target that number is I'll go through, hey, in that time frame, in my enough life, what does my perfect day look like? And you kind of map that out. And I'll do this multiple times a year just to kind of keep myself grounded in terms of like what I want my days to look like. And when you do that over and over again and you go through that exercise, all of a sudden, it kind of helps you just think back through the process of what exactly that enough life needs

to look like. And I go it over and over and over again. And I think it's really, really crucial just to just figuring out that number. I always have to re-center myself when it comes to this thing. And I think it's really, really powerful the way that you talk about it in the book. And now, how do we shift our financial mindset to use money as a tool? Because we talk about this all the time on the podcast is we say money is a tool. And it helps you get that enough life. Get to that point in time where you want to be. So how can you kind of utilize money as a tool in your eyes? I think measuring all of these other areas is the really important piece, because as you start to measure these other areas of your life, you start to recognize that you can use money to drive

growth, measurable growth in these other areas. And so in the book, I lay out, I call the wealth score, which is the new scoreboard of measuring this broader picture of your life. You can also do an online version that'll give you a cool visualization at wealthscorequiz.com. And that's the whole concept is that as you start to measure these other things, now you can look and say, like, well, that extra $100, I can actually deploy that into an investment in my health that's going to really improve my physical wealth. And I'm going to have a real routine there. Maybe it's a personal trainer. Maybe it's a meal prep service. You know, maybe it's that I want to invest in social wealth right now. And so I'm going to use money to create more experiences with

people that I care about. Whatever those things are, measuring for the broader picture of your life is what unlocks you to actually think about them as investable assets, as things that you can actually invest in to compound for the long term. It's so important to kind of identify what you truly value in life, especially in these various areas. And then like you said, investing more dollars towards those things. That's an amazing way to spend your money and utilize it as a tool. Now, one big thing when it comes to building wealth is increasing your income over time and generating more income. And this comes down to really developing your skills and investing in yourself so that you can increase your income. In fact, I think income is probably the most important component when it comes to building wealth.

Obviously, you've got to keep your income once it comes in, but it is one that you really want to be growing over time. So what are some of those skills that someone can build to improve their income generation? I really think that salesmanship is the single most important skill. We overcomplicate a lot of things in life. And the reality is that at the core, there's like a few meta skills that really matter. Sales is a big one of those. You have to sell yourself in anything you do. I don't care what role you are in, both in your personal and professional life.

You are selling your ideas. You are selling to customers. You are selling yourself to your bosses. You're selling yourself if you're a manager to your team below you. In the dating market, you're selling yourself to prospective mates. Like, sales is at the core of everything. So really honing your ability to sell whatever it is is critical. That goes sort of hand in hand with another meta skill that I think is important, which is storytelling.

The ability to aggregate data, turn it into something that is a concise story, and then have that come out on the other side, is essential. And I would argue that it's probably the meta skill that the most successful people in the world really have in spades. They're not the smartest people in their organizations, just brute force intelligence. They probably are the best storytellers. They probably do show the best ability to have a whole bunch of disparate data come in and turn it into something that makes sense on the other side. Is there anything that you've done? Because you're an amazing storyteller yourself. And I think the way that you do, especially if nobody's ever read your newsletter before, it is absolutely amazing.

amazing the way that you tell stories and integrate them into your frameworks. How can you improve your storytelling? I think that the fastest way is always practice. And the important thing with storytelling practice is as you practice and as you get reps, watch what makes the other person lean in, meaning watch what actually makes someone's eyes light up. If you were telling your story and your version and you notice that some little way that you said something gets the person and it kind of go like this. Like, they just lean forward a little bit, or you see their eyes brighten

or their eyebrows raise. It stands to reason that that really connected. And so as you continue to create reps and as you continue to iterate, hone in on that thing. I could sort of deconstruct what it was in that moment that really sparked their interest and then lean into that over time. So really what that is is just the idea of like,

you're gathering data points and you need to learn from those data points that you're gathering and seeing what makes someone lean in is a really good way to do that. I love that because it's focusing on their cues and kind of the way that they respond to different things. So that's absolutely amazing for sure. Now, a lot of people right now, and it's very interesting to kind of watch, are stuck on that treadmill of financial comparison. You know, they want to keep up the Joneses. You see all this happening all the time.

And a lot of us are guilty of this. I've saw this just recently where I saw a neighbor get a brand new car and then three houses in a row got brand new cars within the same month. It was so interesting to watch that whole thing happen. And so there's a lot of financial comparison going on with social media, with anything else in life. So how do people kind of combat if they're stuck on this treadmill of financial comparison so they can stop, you know, feeling bad for themselves and kind of focusing on their own journey? It's a really funny thing about us as humans. You know, you start asking yourself, how much of my life am I living for the pleasure of someone else? You're like, how many of the things that I'm doing or chasing are just to impress someone else out there? I have this test in

the book that I call the bot status test. And it's, uh, before you buy, something, ask yourself whether you would still buy it if you couldn't tell anyone that you did. If you couldn't show it on social media, if no one would ever see it. Like, would I still buy this watch or would I still do this private jet flight or would I still buy this car, whatever it was, if no one could see it. Usually the answer is no. And that's a call to action to stop living your life for the benefit of others. If you love watch engineering or if you love cars because they make you really happy, great use of money. Great, great, great use of money

because it'll actually create utility for you internally because you care about it. But if you're purely doing it because the neighbor got it and you want them to think you're cool, just rest assured that's going to be a race to nowhere worth going. 100% agreed. I love that question because it just reframes the way that you even make purchase decisions

when you're kind of going through this. And for most people, the answer is going to be no. Morgan Housel has a great quote where he kind of talks through someone coming up in driving up in a Ferrari. And most people, what they think about is what they would look like in that Ferrari instead of actually thinking of how interesting or cool that person would be who he's driving the Ferrari.

And I think just kind of reframed. I remember seeing that. Sorry to cut you off. I remember seeing him talk about that at one point from his days as a valet. And I never can tell if it's true or not in my experience. I actually think sometimes you do think, oh, look how cool that person is. Or you think like, oh, who is that? Who is that person in that car?

But the thing that I have learned is that you're never impressing the person that you want to impress with that kind of thing. You know, you're like, the person that you want to impress is like already very successful. And really successful people are not impressed by your like fancy thing. They're impressed by you creating something of value or doing something interesting. And so it's actually counterproductive. You know, you're like, I feel like I heard this articulated somewhere. Like when you flex on a fancy car, you're impressing poor people. It's not impressing the person that you are really trying to impress.

And I remember thinking that that was actually an interesting articulation of it, that like, you know, the people that do that on social media that like stand in front of private jets or like flex on cars, usually they're trying to sell a course to people that don't have money. Yep. Because no CEO of a big, well-known company sees the person doing that and it's like, oh, wow, that person's really cool. So it's not really an effective way for getting, again, that respect and admiration that you really want. 100% agree. And I think especially if you see a wealthy person or a CEO of a huge company, they are not impressed whatsoever. In fact, one of my closest, he's now one of my closest friends,

he's a multi-billionaire and he drives a Ford Explorer around. And anytime he sees someone like with a supercar or something like that, he actually thinks, you know, they're most likely just kind of live in paycheck to paycheck or there's a lot of different things happening there. But it's interesting to kind of go through that process and the psychology behind all of that is so fascinating to me. Absolutely. This has been absolutely amazing. And one big thing I want to kind of talk through is if someone wanted to take an actionable step right now and they wanted to redesign their life. You went through it. You did it really, really quickly. But what would be like one actionable step that you'd give someone? I think that the energy calendar exercise we talked about

is a great first step. I really think that the most important thing that you can do is get a baseline assessment of this wealth score of how you're doing across this broader set of areas. You can do it, as I said, you can put it in the show notes. There's this online version. Obviously, I would love for you to buy the book and do it, but you can do a free online version as well, WealthscoreQuiz.com, and it'll give you an assessment of your baseline, where you stand on this broader life score across all of these areas. That then allows you to say, where do I want to focus during this season of life? It might be that you're in your 20s and 30s, and you do want to focus on building financial wealth, which, by the way, in that season of your life is a great thing to focus on.

But while you focus on one thing, you can't lose sight of everything else. You need to understand that anything above zero compounds. So while you might be really leaning into building your financial future, that doesn't mean that you should allow every other area to turn off. It just means you need to do the simple, tiny little daily investments that continue to compound those other areas. And then when you're in your 30s, 40s and you know, you're in a more stable position financially, you may want to prioritize and focus on other things like your relationships or your health or your purpose or whatever it might be. But the point is you get to decide and what you choose to focus on to prioritize during any one season of your life is up to you.

But until you establish that baseline, it's very hard to figure out where your energy is best deployed. Couldn't agree more. And I think just compound happens in every single area of life. It is one of the most powerful things. And we talk about it in the financial sense, but it literally does happen in every single area of life. Now, I'm going to shift to a rapid fire of some of these questions that we love to ask some of

our guests. And I think you're going to like some of these as well. What part of your work of your life makes you come alive? Spending time with my son. Absolutely. I have three kids and it is the most amazing thing. That is a huge energy producer for me as well. What is your biggest fear when it comes to money? Getting blindsided by something that I hadn't thought about. That is a huge one for me as well. How do you plan to level up your finances this year? Lean in and invest in things that I think can be really big rather than wasting a bunch of energy chasing a bunch of

of little things. I love that. What legacy do you want to leave behind for your son? Legacy of love and desire to positively impact other people's lives. What is the best money advice you've ever received? No amount of money is worth losing your peace of mind. I love that one. And then the last one, and you are probably the best person to answer this question.

What does wealth mean to you? It means building your life around a broader set of pillars that truly creates lasting fulfillment and happiness. It means defining your life around the five types of wealth. That is absolutely amazing. Sahel, this was incredible. I know the listeners are going to love this. Let us know where we can find out about your book,

about your newsletter, everything else. But you can get the book anywhere. Books are sold. Support a local bookstore if you have one that you really like. If not, Amazon always works. You can find more information on the book at the Five Types of Wealth.com. and you can find me at Sahel Bloom on every major platform. Absolutely.

I encourage every single person to go out and get this book. It was by far the best book I've read in the last year. I absolutely love it. So I encourage every single person to reach out and grab that book. Sahel, thank you so much for being on this podcast. Thank you. That means a lot to me. Thank you so much.

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