Sahil Bloom
Appearances
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits & Hustle. Crush it!
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
into what I viewed as a successful life, like what I would look back on and say, these were the right things to measure my life around. And I needed to change that. I needed to redefine the scoreboard around the things that I truly believe lead to that feeling of fulfillment, happiness, and joy. And so we went on a journey to do that. We sold our house in California, moved across the country.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I left my job. I started leaning into the things I was getting a ton of energy from, the writing being the biggest one, and started trying to craft and build a life around those new things and that new definition of what wealth looked like to me.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
There's nothing in it that's going to, I mean, it doesn't have enough caffeine that you'd have an issue, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah. I have so many thoughts on this. So first off, you're absolutely right. Some of the richest people in the world are some of the most miserable people in the world. I mean, we all know a bunch of rich yet miserable people. You look at the Forbes top 10 richest people in the world, they have 13 combined divorces among them. Really? The top 10 have 13 divorces. So-
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Maybe it's higher. Maybe someone at like number 11 or 12 needs to sneak in and bump the numbers up for everybody because there are like one or two that have none. Look at Elon Musk.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah. You know? It's defining what you want. If what you want is to amass the greatest amount of financial wealth possible, and you don't care about being happy, and you don't care about being lonely, and you're happy to try to leave a legacy, whatever that means financially, then go do that. But the point is that that's not for everyone.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah. I feel that when I'm like four cold brews deep on any given day. Oh, I love cold brew. I only drink cold brew. Me too. And I have like an affinity for a large Dunkin' Donuts cold brew. And I don't, I actually don't drink the entire thing, but I like having the large. I can
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And so falling into that as the cultural default is dangerous because I know too many people, myself included, that I was marching down that path. Like I understand and I could see where it was going to end up. And I know I was going to wake up in 50 years and wonder what the fuck just happened. What did I just do with my life?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And I just, I mean, when I think about all of this, what I think about is it's about awareness and action. And this is like for anything that you are consuming, reading, learning about. So many people get their dopamine from the information or awareness. You're like, oh, I read a book. And so you feel good about reading the book, right? But if you didn't do anything, it doesn't matter.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
If you didn't go act on one of the ideas from the book or go and actually change your life, it doesn't matter. And similarly, if you do one tiny thing, that might be the start, the spark that actually changes your life. So I think about that constantly. It's like awareness is incredible.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And understanding this, learning that there are different types of wealth, learning to have those discussions, contemplate, wrestle with the questions that the book asks you to wrestle with, to start thinking about what truly matters to you, defining those priorities. That is a first step. But the next one is actually going and doing one tiny thing. to create some tiny change in your life.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And when you do that, that becomes the thing you're addicted to. It's no longer the information gathering. Because my biggest fear is like, you know, we all have, and we've heard these stories, right? You read like the regrets from the dying, or you read a story about some tragic loss or something, and you read it and you internalize it, you send it to a friend, you're like, how sad is this?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
How incredible, we all need to cherish our time. And then you go back and start living the exact same damn way that you were the day before. And my call to action, like what I'm pleading with anyone that reads this book, is to just take one of the thing, one of the ideas in there. And the whole book is filled with actual actions that you can do today. Go and do one thing.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
It doesn't matter what it is either. And it doesn't have to be enormous. It doesn't have to be that you quit your job on the West Coast and fly 3,000 miles, change your whole life, rip the bandaid off. Just text a friend that you've been thinking about. If you're trying to change your health, go for a 15-minute walk.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I was like, okay.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
If you're trying to like find more space in your life mentally, journal for five minutes before going to bed. It's like the tiny thing that creates the momentum that can change everything.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
just makes me feel right it feels like it's like a somatic yeah it feels good totally and so like during the course of a day i'll end up getting like three of those and i don't drink them all but i have three and so people will like dm me being like i'm gonna call an ambulance like you can't you know 800 milligrams of caffeine that's really funny because a couple things i saw you walk in but i thought you had it from 7-eleven or something i know no i'm staying at the one hotel and they have like a really nice cafe and oh is that from that okay yeah yeah
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Absolutely.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Oh, you're writing something down. I like that. The stop is in the start. Yeah. You better tag me. No, I'm joking.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
We are aligned.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
There's scientific evidence to support that, by the way, the walking thing.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Stanford researchers did a study on walkers versus non-walkers and found that people who walked had a 60% increase in their creative output and the quality of their creative output than the non-walkers. Similarly, there was a bunch of research done about people walking together and how much more connected those two people feel after walking together versus sitting still together.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
So like having hard conversations, one of the best things you can do actually is if you're going to have a hard conversation with someone, do it on a walk. Both people end up feeling better about the way that the conversation went.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah, it's why I mean, physical wealth is one of the pillars. I know it's a huge catalyst. Let's talk about it. I mean, I this is like one of my hot takes on life that there's no such thing as a loser who wakes up at 5am and works out. And totally, I say that over and over again. And people always get outraged by it every time I say it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And what I'm talking about is that it's not about the workout. It's not about it's it's about what it means. It's about the ability that you create when you go and do that is that you convince yourself that you are someone that can do a hard thing because it's very hard to wake up early and work out. It's very hard to convince yourself to do that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
The first thing I say when a young person comes to me and they're feeling lost in life, feeling stuck, is for 30 straight days, wake up at 5 a.m. and work out. I guarantee you will rewire your brain. You will immediately start identifying as a winner if you can do that because you're doing something hard. You're doing something you don't want to do. You're
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
you will feel the impact of that action after 30 days. You will look different. You will feel different. You will be more confident. You'll carry yourself. And that has ripple effects into every other area of your life.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah, it's a catalyst into everything else. I mean, I tell the story of a young man in the book Throughout the book, there's all these stories of real people that I've interacted with and tell their stories. And there's a young man who was on the path to killing himself. And he was given a month free pass to go to a gym and decided, like, what the hell? I'm going to use it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah, I've taken magic mind before.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And he went one day and felt like shit from going. He was like, all right, I'm going to go another day. And he went the second day. And then he went the third day. Then he kind of felt a little good. He felt a little sore from some of the workouts. So he went the fourth day. And he went for 30 straight days. And at the end of the 30 days, he noticed he was getting dressed for work that day.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And his belt had gone a notch in from where it was. And the way he described it was that in that moment, he recognized that he had power, that he had control over the outcomes in his life. And that was something that he hadn't felt. He had felt completely powerless in his life. That was that feeling of feeling lost, feeling stuck.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And the fitness was a catalyst because it proved to him that he actually did have that power to make an action, to create an outcome. And that had ripple effects into every other area of his life. And now today he's inspiring millions of people. He's creating content. He's doing all of these incredible things. And it all started with this 30 day window and that tiny notch in his belt.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah. I mean, I was drinking six, seven nights a week. I mean, we can put a picture in the show notes or we can put it up. I mean, I looked like a different person in a lot of ways. And
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
My awkward childhood years of going to Abercrombie and not fitting into the clothes, I feel very vindicated right now. But you were a baseball player. You were an athlete, so you had to have looked okay. I was very strong. No, I was very strong, but I was foot jacked, if you know what that means. Like fat jacked? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah, we always used to talk about the football guys at Stanford used to talk about having a shallow water body where like they had like big traps and shoulders and chest, but their abs were like disgusting. So you'd stand in shallow water and look really good. I always that always cracked me up. That's pretty good. That's a pretty good term. I like that. The shallow water body.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
You should write that down. Shallow. Water body.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
It's like sloppy lower abs, but pretty good up top.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah, fat jacked. That is so hilarious. Some good terms. Oh my God, I love it. Yeah, I'm just creating value. That's why I'm an author, you know, because I come up with these great ideas. That's so good. Yeah, no, I... Fitness was definitely a huge catalyst in my life. And refinding, A, like just the simple things of walking every single day.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I mean, I mentioned we were really struggling to conceive. And that's something, I don't know, there's probably some listeners out there that have experienced this. It's something that people don't talk about.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
you bottle it up and you internalize it because it's it feels like a stigma and for women in particular there's this assumption of fault and my wife carried that burden and unfortunately i was not there to either help or bear that burden myself and frankly in hindsight i would argue that it was probably mostly me because i was not in any sort of health or shape or stress levels or all of these things that we now know impact fertility
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
to be there for her in the way that I needed to. And the most beautiful thing in all of this was made this big change, sold her house, moved back to the East Coast. Within two weeks of getting home, my wife got pregnant naturally. And... Wow.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
It was just this like... unbelievable example. Whatever you believe in, God, energy, whatever it is, it was this unbelievable example of when energy comes into alignment, everything falls into place as it should. And I remember so vividly Coming home from the hospital after my son was born, pulling onto our street, and we turned into our driveway.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And, like, both of our sets of parents who lived in the area were there, like, cheering in the driveway. And just that moment, like, I will never forget that moment of feeling like we were truly home. Like, that feeling of having arrived in that way. Oh, that's so sweet.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Very lucky.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
She's not here with me right now. She's back home with our son. With your son. What's your son's name, by the way? Roman.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
She's still a rock star. She's the CEO of a healthcare technology startup in the Boston area. She was a physics major at Yale and then went to Harvard Business School and now is a CEO. And, you know, it's interesting. She's a real loser, you're right.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
But my relationship with my sister is, I write about it, and it's one of the most beautiful things in all of this, frankly, has been the metamorphosis of that relationship because I spent 30 years of my life
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
resenting my sister and feeling competitive and creating this dynamic with her that was fundamentally one of tension and one where like I couldn't get over the fact that she was achieving the things that I was supposed to be and that I resented that. And after my son was born,
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
i so clearly remember this one moment they came down to see him when he came back from the hospital and she has a son who is 11 months older than mine it was her first and we were together and we took a picture of the two of us holding our little boys and i looked at her and i remember this sensation that after 30 years of living together it was like i was meeting my sister for the first time
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Because we were, for the first time in our lives, we were in the same stage. We were in the same place in our lives. It was no longer this competitive resentment, all these things. We were just in it together. And it was this beautiful reminder to me that sometimes relationships blossom and bloom in a new season of your life when they haven't been there.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
in the past yeah like that relationship and the way that it has bloomed and the way that it has grown and the joy that i i find in it and that i hope she finds in it is um is really an amazing thing it's like it is really a reminder that there are people that are going to love you deeply that you have not even met yet
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I wrote it down. Now it's there.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
It's going to be in my second book. That's going to be the whole thing. That's right.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
So I had started writing on Twitter originally about a year before we made the big change in our life. And that was, I was stuck at home. Like COVID, you live in California, like I was living in the Bay Area, the lockdowns happened. I was stuck at home. I was no longer commuting every single day. I was no longer traveling four days a week.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I didn't have a social life because you weren't allowed to see anybody. And so I was like, I need something to do to fill the time. And I had always loved writing, but never had a public outlet for it. At the time, I started writing these like originally threads on Twitter that were about finance, like about business, about finance, about things I was working on.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And people had started sharing them. I'd started kind of growing, you know, 15, 20,000 followers, like from 500. And I I was like, oh, this is enjoyable. I'm liking this. But what I realized really early on was I didn't really care about business and finance. I cared about humans. Like I cared about life, the things that we talk about now.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And so I started sort of like slowly broadening, opening the aperture of what I was talking about. And by May of 2021, when that drink with a friend happened, my Twitter platform had grown to maybe like 100,000 followers. And there was like seeds of the fact that there might be businesses you could build around it. Like people were coming to me asking about how to build their platform.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Startups I'd invested in were asking about like wanting to do more storytelling around their businesses. And so I could see a path where there was something else to do other than investing. But frankly, when we left California and when we were moving back to the East Coast, my initial thought was I'm going to go work at another investment fund.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Because that was all I knew. And like I come from a very risk averse family. Right. you know, like my dad's a tenured professor, like as risk averse a track as you can have. What does he do? What kind of professor though? Economics and demography. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. So he was, he's been at Harvard for the last 20, 25 years. He was the chair of the economics department at Columbia before that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I don't know how you even handle it. But you can see like how the expectations around academic orientation were. Totally. Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Thank you for having me.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I've seen the other side of this so many times, watching your show and seeing it all over social media over the years. So it's a thrill to be in the seat. It feels weird.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Thank you. Thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
An old soul my whole life. An old soul, yeah. I feel like I am probably an old soul, like from a young age. Definitely in college, like people used to call me Grandpa on the baseball team. That was mostly because I had an affinity for waking up at, like, 4 or 5 a.m. my whole life. Oh, wow. And so that meant I would go to bed at, like, 9.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And in college, that's very weird if you're, like, not going out and partying. And so, like, my roommate would always call me Grandpa. Like, the team that was what I was known as was Grandpa Bloom. But that had nothing to do with wisdom. That was just I had a weird schedule and circadian rhythm. But I, I mean, I come from a family that... was very like storytelling oriented.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
They've tracked people. They've done studies tracking people's eyes. And it's like 95% of the time, people are just looking at themselves. It's really funny.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
It's funny that that still works.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Can you imagine the impact that that is having on an entire generation?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
My mom and my grandmother on my mom's side were incredible storytellers. I just had like an ability to captivate people. And I feel like I sort of got that gene from them to some extent. And what it meant for me most of my life was that I was always fascinated by like the human condition. I've always just been fascinated by people's stories.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah, I mean, you're removing all... This is something I think about a lot, by the way, and so I can't wait to watch your talk. Thank you. Because I think one of the biggest challenges is that we have removed all friction from our lives.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
If you go over the last 30 years, it's just like everything, right? We've tried to make dating easier, so now you can just... You don't have to go up to a girl at a bar. Nope. You don't have to deal with the rejection. You can desensitize yourself to the rejection because it's all through your phone. Yeah. And so what happens when you do that is...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Later, you realize that actually the hard things were what was necessary to achieve the great outcomes. It's like, I mean, I talk about this with relationships all the time that like to build a great relationship, it has nothing to do with the Instagram moments because falling in love is very easy, but growing in love is very, very hard.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And growing in love is all about sitting in the mud with people. It's like having the hard conversations. It's not avoiding those moments of struggle and challenge. And the moments of doing nothing are where great relationships are actually built. It's not the manicured pictures and the perfect moments and the filtered, all of that stuff. It's really in the mud that that growth is found.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
33.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah, you have to go back to the basics. Right. And it's the same principle that I think I'll adopt with my son as he gets older, which is like, there's a reason that the old fashioned things still exist because they work. Yeah. And that, by the way, goes for relationships just as much as for your health, just as much as for your money. All of the like boring, basic things really work.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And grounding yourself in those is important. And so like when I talk to friends who have struggled to find meaningful relationships, especially in big cities, it's like, well, have you tried just like going to a place where you know people will be similar values to you and just going and talking to someone?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
So like if you're a friend that's really into health, you don't need to go on Tinder or whatever app is the thing and try to like find some perfect manicured picture of some girl. Right. Go to a farmer's market and like go up, strike up a conversation with someone that's also buying whatever weird health product that you're buying because chances are they're going to have similar values to you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And it had nothing to do with like, oh, famous people or like, oh, billionaires and wanting to only talk to them. Like I will sit and chat with an Uber driver just as much as like a billionaire CEO that I'm going to meet. Right. I'm just fascinated by how people wrestle with these like universal challenges that humans struggle with. And so my whole life I've sort of been doing that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
They're going to care about some of the things. If you love dogs, go to an outdoor dog park with your dog and like go meet someone that way. It's like people have lost sight of the fact that there are, uh, real normal ways to go and do that. And it's, I mean, the biggest challenge of why you say it's like it's the real pandemic is we know that social connection is essential to our health.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
The Harvard study of adult development found that the single greatest predictor of health at age 80 was your relationship satisfaction at age 50. Like how you felt about your relationships actually impacted your health in your later years. And we have an entire generation of people that are losing sight of that. You're stuck behind a phone.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
You're interacting with people here, but not with the people that are right in front of you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I think you have to be, you have to re-find the importance of delayed gratification. And that just needs to be hammered into people's brains. I mean, like, I think the whole thing of friction or any of this stuff is fundamentally that, like, you have lost sight of the fact that delayed gratification is the key to life in all of these areas.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
The ability to do something hard now to achieve a reward later, that is where all of life comes And that's where the best things in life happen is when you're willing to do that. And so like with relationships and friendships, that is what it is. You have to do the hard, you have to show up for the person during the hard time if you want them to be there for you later and during the good times.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
This is all the book, by the way. This is good.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
The energy calendar. The energy calendar. That's a great one. I love that one. Everyone should do that. That's a really good one. Give me a few more like that. Easy to do. Yeah. So with mental wealth, I'll give you a couple. The first one is what I call my 1-1-1 method. Okay. So mental wealth, by the way, as I write about it, is your purpose, your growth.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
It's your ability to create space in your life. So Viktor Frankl talks about the fact that your power... exists in the space between stimulus and response. So when you're living a life that feels crazy, busy, running around, tons of stimulus, and you're immediately responding to all of it, you have no space in between. In that space is your ability to choose the best response.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
It's to slow things down. And creating space is the most important thing there. You have to find rituals and things on a daily basis that create that space. Maybe it's going for a five-minute walk between meetings. Maybe it's meditating. Maybe it's a prayer practice, whatever. In the evenings, I do something called the 1-1-1 method.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
It's just now I get to kind of do that for a job, quote unquote.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I always wanted to journal my whole life, but you're probably wired similar to me. I thought that journaling meant like sit down for 30 minutes with a notebook and like write all this beautiful stuff with a candle lit and like this whole environment that I was going to create. And so as a result, I never did it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I would be like, January 1st would come and I'd be like, I'm going to journal this year. And I'd sit down and I'd like, you know, for one day. And then by day three, inevitably I'd stop.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Maybe, maybe. I might be giving myself too much credit. So the 1-1-1 method was my way of breaking that. And what I did was I said, every single evening, right before bed, I'm going to write down one win from the day, something that went well, one point of stress, tension, or anxiety, something that I'm feeling, and then one point of gratitude, something I felt grateful for during the day.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
It takes two to five minutes max. And you feel this unbelievable sense of calm and energy to end the day because you're recognizing a win. You're like giving yourself credit for that thing you did well, which most of us are really bad at doing. You're getting the point of stress or tension off your mind and onto the piece of paper, which helps you go to sleep at night as well.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And then you're recognizing some tiny beauty, something that you didn't pause to appreciate on a normal basis that you're forcing yourself to stop and recognize. And if you do that, you'll A, have a great journaling practice that is now built two to five minutes every single evening. And you'll feel an immediate calm and peace that I have found has massively improved my mental health.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I did my undergrad and then I stayed and did a master's there.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
The other one, which is maybe like slightly more involved, is to do something called a think day on a either quarterly or monthly basis.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
This is derived from originally, I first read about it, Bill Gates would take like a week off when he was building Microsoft in the 1980s, go out to a cabin in the woods and just read for a week and just think about all these like big picture questions that were facing the business. And I knew that like, I don't have a week. I can't take a week off and go and do that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
It's just not what I'm able to do. But the idea of pausing to just think about bigger picture questions in your work, in your life, and the things that you're doing is really important. And we never take the time to do that. So I do it now once a month where I will just like go to an Airbnb or go to a coffee shop and spend a few hours just wrestling with like a few bigger picture questions in life.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
In public policy.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
A couple of the questions I find really helpful. Mark Twain has this quote, it ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. And that idea is that there's something in your life right now that you know for sure that just ain't so.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Like for me in my prior life, I knew for sure that making a bunch of money was going to make me feel happy and successful, but it just wasn't so.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And asking yourself that more regularly, like what do I automatically assume is correct in my life and in my approach to life that may not be? What am I marching on the path of that might actually be the wrong path? Forcing yourself to ask that question is really important. The other big one that I've contemplated a lot on these think days is, what are the boat anchors in my life?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And a boat anchor is something that is creating a drag on your progress. Like it's literally sitting down in the sea floor behind you. You're trying to drive the boat forward and it's just sitting there dragging in the mud. It won't let you go full speed. That could be people. In a lot of cases, it is.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
It's someone that's telling you to be realistic, telling you to come back home, laughing at your ambitions. It could be actions that you're taking, habits, mindsets, things that you're doing on a daily basis that are not conducive to the life that you're trying to create. So the point of all of this is create more space in your life. Create space, even if it's quarterly or if it's once a year.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Sit down and spend some time just thinking about some of the bigger picture things in your life. And the book has a whole series of question prompts for doing one of those Think Days. But I think those two questions get people started.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
You think it will, though.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
No, no, I don't know. I'm Canadian and baseball is not a big deal in Canada. We know hockey. It's only hockey.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah, habits and hustle. Come on. I know. What was I thinking? Yeah, I mean... I said this earlier, I'm a crazy morning person. I'm one of those annoying morning people that everyone gets mad at. I don't ever find it easy to wake up early. People are like, oh, you must just get up feeling excited. I'm like, no, I hate waking up early every morning, but I do it because I know how it makes me feel.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I wake up at about 4.15 in the morning. I do that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
It's only hockey. I, it's funny that you say that because, so Chris Pronger is one of my like dear friends. He's like, you know, what, probably the, one of the top few most famous hockey players of all time. And I was with him last week and he was saying the exact same thing that like no one played baseball. He was like, if you didn't play hockey, like no one, no one would even talk to you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah. Every day? Yeah, every day. On purpose.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
on purpose yeah i mean i do that because it gives me several hours before the day really starts like before my son is up before all the emails start before texts are coming in i have like a few hours of peace for myself where i can really focus on those couple of things that really matter and so like when you talk about when life gets really busy when the day starts it's very hard to deploy actual energy into those couple of things that really matter i find that in the morning
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And so for the last two years, that morning block, that morning window of work has been working on the book. And it was the only way that I knew for sure I was going to have two hours of dedicated time every single day. So I get up at 4.15. First thing I do is I go and get in my cold plunge. I see yours outside there, which I appreciate.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I use mine every single morning and have for several years now. That has been a practice that I've done on and off since like 2012 when I was in college.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Way before it was trending. And I didn't know that it was a thing. I didn't know that it improved health. I knew that it had a huge impact on my mentality and my mindset. And I knew that it made me feel like a badass. And when you feel like a badass, you operate like a badass. It's like what we said earlier about confidence. If you feel superhuman, then you're going to do superhuman shit.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah, there you go. Exactly. Exactly. It's like, you know, it's like an alter ego. Alter ego. That's the whole thing. It's all about alter ego. You're creating this version of yourself that can go and do those things. And so I get up every morning and I do that. And then I'm at my desk by about five.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Start working.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
No, no, no.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
No, no, no. I don't do like four hour morning routine. My morning routine is like I get up, I get in the cold plunge. And then depending on what time of year it is, I will take a hot shower after my cold plunge that I'm not shivering the rest of the day. Yeah. Especially in winter in Boston. But like the hardest part of the cold plunge routine is opening the door to go outside.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
It's not like actually getting into the water or sitting in the water because once I'm in it, it's fine. And everyone always asks, does it get easier? Never once have I been like excited to go and do it. And I like wrestle with it mentally, like I don't really need to do it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And so I started I film a video every single morning in it because I'm like, I was putting on I did 130 straight days of YouTube videos on it. But then I was doing I just do like an Instagram story every morning from it. And part of that is like it's accountability. It's like someone is going to know that I skipped it, skipped this morning. So I have to do it. But yeah, I do that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Oh, I thought it was a shot.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And then I go to my desk. So I get my like Dunkin Donuts, a large cold brew, and I go and sit down at my desk to work. I work out later in the morning. I'll go. I do my running and working out from about like 930 to 1130.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I'm most creative first thing in the morning, right when I wake up. And this is another just like general principle for people to take. Your energy flows happen at different times of the day. And what I find is that I'm most creative first thing in the morning. And if I don't harness that creative energy for something creative, it's not there. Like it's not like I can be creative in the afternoon.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I'm useless in the afternoon. Like if you tried to get me to write in the afternoon, useless. And so what I know is that I need to match the energy I'm feeling to the activity that I'm actually doing. It would be a waste for me to like work out during the time when I'm really creative. And similarly, like I can work out and have a ton of energy mid-morning because then I'm
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
eating something and uh you know it's a light out it's like if i'm gonna go for a run it's less dangerous too it also just allows me to like make breakfast for my wife and son and be kind of present during that do i come over here and make breakfast yeah i'd be thrilled to have someone make me breakfast for once um okay and what do you eat are you like a animal person are you like don't tell me you're a vegan no i'm not a vegan no it'd be hard for me to be a vegan yeah uh no i uh i eat
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
pounds and pounds of red meat per week. I would be the worst vegan in the world. All respect to vegans, if you want to do that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah. I mean, no, I am... And it comes across in the book too, but I am the biggest proponent of finding balance and doing the boring basics. And so with my nutrition, I make sure that I'm getting 200 plus grams of protein a day. That's a non-negotiable every single day. So what do you eat? What's your favorite thing?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I eat every single morning for breakfast, I'll have four eggs, cottage cheese, raw honey. And if I'm working out and running, I'll have some carbs with that. Either... white rice or oatmeal.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah. I have a big breakfast, like 1,000 calories probably. But I probably eat about 4,000 calories a day.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
If I'm training for something, I ran a marathon from training for that. It was up to eight to 10 miles average per day during peak of training. Right now, four. Four miles.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah, I do because I run six days a week. Yeah, me too. So I have to. So I run six days a week and lift six days a week for the most part.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Push, pull, legs, split on the weightlifting training is what I do.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I just realized.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah, the running I find is like meditative. Me too, that's my meditation. Yeah, because you're just like alone in your thoughts and in your head for a long time. And I don't, like, I'm not listening to podcasts and doing stuff when I run. If anything, I listen to, like, a sci-fi audio, but, like, something totally, like, escape the normal. I'm not doing business podcasts or, you know, nonfiction.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
How can you run to a business podcast? A lot of people do that. I'm shocked, but I can't. Oh, my God. I just need to, like, be in my thoughts. Yeah, I would shoot myself. How can you listen to that?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
i totally agree and like you're not going to take any interesting takeaways while you're running like you're going to take a note exactly i totally agree and i always run before i lift which is something that a lot of people ask about i just um what i find personally is that like i won't do it after i lift because i'm tired and so i won't have the motivation and i won't go do it in the same way or with the same intensity and so i always just run before get it done
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
But yeah, I have that for breakfast basically every single morning. And if I'm at home, I eat the exact same thing every single day. Yeah, 100% of the time. And I'm super boring. And I just view that like boredom of routine is the like cost of entry for building the life you want. Like everyone thinks that you need this like glamorous life and that that's what successful people do.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
But really what underlies all of that success is this like boring, basic drudgery of doing the same thing every single day.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
It was a shot.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Me too. I love it. I love my routines. I don't like traveling and being out of my routines. Me too. I'm so rigid. I try my best to just stay in my routines. Even when I'm on the road, I do my absolute best to stay in them.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah, I know, I know. We're going to be best friends. We're going to be BFFs. I know, I know. I mean, it's really funny.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And I struggle. I mean, it's actually, it's something that I think a lot of people struggle with where the perfectionism in you and the desire for that routine can actually be a negative because then when you get a little bit out of it, you start to feel the anxiety. Like if you're going to be up later than you'd like and you know that you're going to be tired in the morning. Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Or like you can't eat the way you want because there's oils in the food. No, I know that exact feeling. And I struggle with that a lot.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah. I mean, it's like the analogy I like for that is like when an explorer sets out on a voyage, they're not trusting in having like calm, perfect seas and the perfect plan. They're trusting in their ability to adapt when the chaos and storms inevitably come. And in your life, you are the explorer and life is your voyage and you need to trust in your adaptability and
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And your ability to navigate whatever storms come. Not that it's just going to be perfect and that your plan and course of action is going to be ideal.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
The one hotel here has the best. It's why I stay there. It has the best hotel breakfast. It does? It's so good, the cafe there. It's extraordinarily expensive. I think it was $96 for my breakfast today. By the way, I didn't want to say anything. Which is absurd.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Are you? I'd say I'm like a writer and entrepreneur is probably how I would define it. Although that's just like my cocktail party answer. I guess, you know, it's one of the challenges actually of like doing things a little bit differently is you don't have the like nice cookie cutter answer that everyone wants you to have. Someone asks like, what do you do?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah, it's offensive. The one in Miami I don't love because it's in Miami Beach, which is too touristy for me. Totally true. The one here is great because it's right next to the Equinox, so I can go to the Equinox and get my workouts in. Yeah, I saw you went to the West Hollywood one. Which is super crowded and crazy, but it's also like it's right there, so it's nice. I get it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And then, yeah, the hotel breakfast there is amazing.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I had four eggs, a piece of sourdough toast, and a bowl of fruit.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
They include gratuity, though. Oh, how nice of them. And they don't tell you that, by the way, which pisses me off when places do this, when they hand you the check. So rude. The waiter doesn't tell you that the gratuity is already included. So it's just like you don't see it. Oh, I know. And then you're putting 20% on top of 20%. I'm like, come on, just at least say it. It's just a courtesy.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I think they made like $10 million of EBITDA on that one smoothie. They did. Which is just absolutely bonkers.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I'm in the wrong business, by the way. I went there once. I did this—
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
this podcast called girls gotta eat yeah they're awesome they're really funny and i went it was my first time at arowan and then i walked over to their podcast and i there's a clip somewhere of me uh talking about this on the podcast because i spent 30 getting a bottle of water and a cold brew like a small can and a bottle of water was 30 and i was like i feel like i just got like
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I just got assaulted.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
How did this happen?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I'd say I'm a writer, first and foremost. It's what I enjoy doing most. It's what I get most of my energy from. But the journey to it, I mean, frankly, the journey to it, and this book is a manifestation of that journey. I would say for the first 30 years of my life, lived as a deeply insecure person.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
It would make some amazing social content, too. Wouldn't it, though? Great clips.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
If you go to Erewhon.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Well, thank you so much for having me. This has been a really fun time. And I'm looking forward to staying in touch now that I know that we're kindred spirits.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah, I know. Next time. Next time.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
100%.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Well, I have a weird name, so it's easy to find me, fortunately. I'm at Sahil Bloom on every platform. And you can find the book anywhere books are sold now. And always go support your local bookstore if you can. So go find it there. And more info at thefivetypesofwealth.com.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I made most of the decisions that I made in my life trying to seek external affirmation that I thought would make me feel better about who I was. I was... constantly sort of unhappy internally and thinking that, you know, some amount of external affirmation, some amount of people telling me I was great would eventually make me feel great.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
You just did what my, so when I, um, I think this is like when I was maybe like 20 years old, I went to Mexico with my parents and, And I was with my wife, oh, I guess then girlfriend and my parents. And my mom was like, let's do tequila shots. Let's do tequila shots. And I was like, mom, have you like, what are you, you know, she's kind of going crazy in Mexico.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And obviously, you eventually come to realize that you can't fix an internal problem with external solutions. It has to come from the inside. But it took me way, way too long to learn that. I mean, I grew up really in a extremely loving household with a set of parents who had very high expectations. My mom is from India, Indian culture, very academically oriented.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And then my dad is a professor at Harvard. So academic...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
excellence was sort of a standard and my older sister hit and exceeded that standard at every turn three and a half four years older than me and it was like it became a joke to me like i would get to the first day of school the professor would be like oh you're sonali's brother they'd be all excited like oh another star student and then inevitably within a week i would disappoint them
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Because I was a shithead. I liked playing sports and screwing around. And I wasn't living up to that standard. What kind of student were you? I was the type of student who didn't have to try to get B pluses. And that was like, might as well have been failing in my household.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I'm sure I would have. Okay. But what basically happened was from a young age, I created this story in my mind that I was not smart. And my sister was the smart one and I was the athletic one. And there's something about those stories that you tell yourself, those original stories, that are...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
very, very powerful and can be really damning to how you live your life because every single thing you do is in an effort to align with that story you've told yourself about who you are. And so what happened to me was I would not give 100% effort on something Not because I didn't have the effort or the energy, but because I was afraid of what would happen if I did give 100% and still failed.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I was afraid of like the hit that my ego would take if that occurred. And so instead, I just conformed with this story that I wasn't smart, that I wasn't like what my parents wanted. And they could tell me the opposite over and over again, which they did, but I wouldn't hear it because that story I had told myself was so pervasive in my mind.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
so most of my life i just kind of marched down this path of like let me do everything i can do to try to like feel good to feel impressive so i like you know went to the big school so that i could like say oh i'm going d1 and like that would make me feel good or i took a job that was going to sound impressive on the outside even if it wasn't the one that i felt i was well suited for and that was the story of the first 30 years of my life i mean i like marched down this path that you know from the outside looking in you would have said
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
looked successful and things were going well and like from all intents and purposes you would have said i was winning the game but internally slowly and steadily everything in my life was falling apart and i hid that from the world and around the time when i turned 30 kovid was happening and i was at home and what i had started to see was that I was making more and more money.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And so they bring around a tequila shots over for us. And I'm like a freshman in college at the time. I'm good at taking shots. And so I like rip the shot back and I like look up and my mom is like, like she's taking like a tiny sip of the tequila shot. I was like, mom, you were the one that wanted to do this.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Things looked great. But everything else in my life was falling apart. My relationship with my wife was really suffering. We were struggling to conceive at the time, and she was carrying that burden on her back. And I was not there for her to help carry it or to be the supportive husband that I needed to be. My relationship with my parents was almost nonexistent.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I was seeing them once a year at the time. We were living 3,000 miles apart. My relationship with my sister had really suffered because I presented the fact that she was the smart one. My health was really suffering. I was overweight. Mentally, I was suffering. All of these other areas of my life had deteriorated while on the outside looking in, everything was going great.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And it all came to a head in May of 2021 when I went out for a drink with an old friend and he asked me how I was doing. And I said,
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
i'm good busy kind of looked at me and was like come on how are you doing and i said it was tough that i was living so far away from my parents i'd been so close to them my whole life and we weren't seeing them enough and he looked at me and he asked well how old are they i said 65. he said how often do you see them i said about once a year and he looked at me and said okay so you're going to see them 15 more times before they die and i just remember feeling like i had gotten punched in the gut
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I mean, the idea that the amount of time you have left with the people that you care about most is that finite, it's that countable, that you can count it on a couple, on a few hands, was so terrifying to me and so shocking that it ripped me back into the present. And I just had this sensation that I was winning the game. Like, it seemed like I was winning the game.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
And I remember thinking that if this was what winning the game felt like, I had to be playing the wrong game. Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Yeah, there's this idea from ancient Greece that they had two words for time. One was chronos, which is just linear time. It's like the idea that you have an amount of time. And then there's kairos, which is the idea that not all time is created equal. There are certain moments or windows that carry higher importance than others. And that is fundamentally true in your own life.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
I feel like you just did that to me. You like baited me into the shot. I did.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
There are specific windows of time when people occupy your world, and those moments are much more meaningful than others. And what you're referring to is one window in particular, which is with your children, that there is a 10-year window during which you are your child's favorite person in the world. And after that, they have other favorite people.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
They have best friends and boyfriends, girlfriends, partners, spouses, their own children. And you will never be in that same position as you are in that 10-year period. And yet, it is also the time window when we happen to be chasing whatever more we're looking for professionally. We're running around, we're traveling, we're hustling and doing all of these other things. And as we do that...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
we're losing sight of the fact that those moments those very very dear moments that we have are passing by and one of the things that i you know try to contemplate in this book is like how do you navigate that tension that fundamental tension that exists between wanting to be present giving that energy the recognition that there's no such thing as later with your kids so many people say like your whole life is filled with these laters of saying
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Oh, I'll spend more time with my kids later or I'll work on my health later. And the reality is that later is just another word for never. You're never going to do those things because they're not going to be there later. Your kids are not going to be eight years old later.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
So the biggest thing in all of that was I fundamentally realized that my scoreboard was broken, meaning the way that I was measuring my life was just wrong. I was measuring success on the basis of one thing, which was money. Yeah. And the reason we do that is actually, you know, sort of logical one, which is just that money is so easy to measure.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
Peter Drucker is a famous management theorist says that like what gets measured gets managed.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 421: Sahil Bloom: How Boring and Basic Routines Can Build 5 Types of True Wealth
and it's because money is so easily measured it's a single number so as a result we focus on it's the way that we define our worth the way that we compare ourselves to others and the thing that i fundamentally came to realize in that moment when i was feeling as lost as i was and heard this thing about my parents was just that it really didn't actually relate to what i viewed as a wealthy life
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Happy New Year, man. Happy New Year. How did you spend it? Well, I have a two-and-a-half-year-old, so I'm guessing our New Years were a little bit different. I went to bed at 8.30 after a little dance party with my two-and-a-half-year-old little guy.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah, that's an important concept. It's one of those things that I think about a lot that... Once you've made it, once you've achieved success, everyone wants to call you lucky.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And if I can keep the earth in this tiny triangular window that's sitting here in front of me, it's going to allow us to enter at the proper angle. And that whole concept of like keeping the earth in the window is really what I'm talking about. It's having that one central point of focus that allows you to cut through all of the complexity and chaos that enters your life.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
How do people find that out? You have to know what matters to you. You have to know what you truly care about. Like what is your true north in life? And the question I often ask people is, what does your ideal day look like at age 80? Really think about that. Truly visualize and imagine what your ideal day looks like as an 80-year-old. And who are you with? What are you doing?
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
What are you thinking about? How do you feel? And then think, are you actually taking actions today to create that future? Because what happens is most people will say, my ideal day is sitting with people I love, feeling healthy of body and mind, thinking about things that I care about, friends coming over.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And then you ask them what they're doing on a daily basis and they're basically chasing bullshit, right? They're chasing money, they're drinking, they're, you know, partying, doing not like things that actually are not leading to that end that they say they want. It's like the adage of don't tell me your priorities, show me your calendar.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Like, are your actions actually creating the future that you are trying to create? Yes or no. Be honest with yourself, be able to look in the mirror. But those things that we want are remarkably similar. But our ability to take actions on them in the present is very different.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
All those people that were like in the dark, hating on you, all the people that were belittling you when you wanted to go and chase that dream, when you wanted to go do the thing, they're the first ones to call you lucky once you achieve it. And they didn't see all of the shit that you did in the dark. all of the struggles, all of the failures, all of the pains that you came back from.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah, your life has seasons. And... What you prioritize or focus on during any one season can and should change. And as a result, your life razor will change across these different seasons of your life. Obviously, while my son is young, my life razor can be this.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
As he gets older, when he moves on, when he's off and it's just my wife and I again, or when we have different priorities, that life razor will change just like your priorities and focus change. I mean, my 20s and 30s, early 30s were spent very much in a foundation building season of my life. I was trying to build a financial foundation, which is a great way to use your twenties.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Don't get me wrong. Like I am not anywhere in this book saying that money doesn't matter. Like that you should, Oh, go and move to the Himalayas and just like drink warm broth and meditate for 12 hours a day. Uh, I mean, if you want to do that, by all means, go do it. I just won't be joining you. I like money. Money isn't nothing. It simply can't be the only thing.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I think that the narrative around hard work has been lost, especially with the current generation. It sort of became a meme to say hard work is overrated and that you have to work smart. You cannot work smart before you work hard because you have no idea what to work smart on. You just have no clue. right?
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
But they're the first ones that are going to go around saying that you got lucky on the back end. So I think the call to action is wear that as a badge of honor. When people are calling you lucky, you've clearly done something right. Because you know what went in in the dark behind it. The other one is, I bet you had wealthy parents. Yeah, your privilege.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
You don't, it's like, um, the way that I think about it is when you're young, the only asset you have is time. It is the only asset you have. You don't have networks. You don't have money. You don't have knowledge. You don't have experience. You don't have wisdom. You don't have any of those things. You have time. So Then you can work smart because you have these things.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
You know where to deploy them for the highest potential ROI, for those extraordinary outcomes. But you can't do this before you have it. And so working hard is the investment of that time to acquire the experience, the wisdom, the knowledge, the networks, the money. And then once you have it, you can deploy it to work smart.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah, it takes a level of self-awareness to tune into that gut. I think of that gut as like your energy in a lot of ways. Our mutual friend George Mack has that thing of like treadmill or couch friends. And that's a perfect example of this exact thing of tuning into how you actually feel about something is a very good way to to make decisions in your life.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I mean, I think about the number of bad business and financial decisions I've made where I knew it didn't feel good, but I allowed myself to be talked into it by my head. The initial gut instinct, the energy was, oh, this doesn't make sense. This is not good. There's some signal. There's something that's off. I don't feel good about it.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I mean, that's been a meme over the last few years, right? It's like, well, that doesn't acknowledge the privilege. I do think that... Mm-hmm. It's mostly a byproduct of the motion that you're creating and the things that you're building, how you're actually going out and interacting with the world. Idea being, it's very hard to get lucky sitting on the couch doing nothing at home.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
But then you start the like, well, I could make this, I could do this, this could happen, what if this? And you talk yourself into it and inevitably those things go to shit and it ends up being bad. But you're allowing your head to outsmart your gut.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And so I think that just tuning into that more regularly, learning to just listen to that initial gut instinct on something, the energy and what it tells you is a great razor for life with people, with business deals, with financial decisions, with all of this.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Are you familiar with the concept of winner's game versus loser's game? No. This is one of my favorite ideas for life. So this originates from tennis, where... Amateur tennis is a loser's game, meaning you win by avoiding unforced errors. 80% of points are lost on unforced errors.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Professional tennis is a winner's game, meaning you win by hitting magnificent shots, by hitting perfect, elegant shots. It is extremely important in life to know what type of game you are playing. And the reality is that most games of life are losers games.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
You win by simply avoiding unforced errors, by showing up over and over and over again with reliability, by doing what you say you're going to do, by showing up and doing the boring basics. Mm-hmm. And so understanding when the game has changed in your own life is really important.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Like early in your life, saying yes to every single opportunity you get is a great game to play because it's what allows you to invest your time to gain the experience, to start building that gut instinct, to start building your understanding of it. But suddenly the game changes. And if you keep saying yes to everything, you burn yourself out. You take on dumb opportunities.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
You're wasting all of your time and energy on stupid 1x time for money trades when you should be focusing on the elegant, magnificent shots that are going to generate the 10x, 100x outcomes in your life.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
that the early investments in your networks and in your sort of opportunity sets are compounding. Like what you start to feel is more interesting opportunities are coming to you at an accelerating exponential rate. And when you see that start to happen, you need to take a pause in your life to recognize what you start
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
What you need to start saying no to, to open up the space to pursue those big ones. It's like ventilating your life. You need to breathe space into your life so that you actually have the bandwidth to take on those big opportunities. I often think that...
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
One of the greatest skills and one of the most common traits of the most successful people I've ever spent time around is that they have the highest tolerance for uncertainty. They are actually willing to tolerate uncertainty for long periods of time. They are willing to be static for long periods of time. Give me an example. Tim Cook when he left IBM to take a job at Compaq.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
People don't know this, don't think about his early part of his career all that much, but he spent the early part of his career rising through the ranks at IBM. He was in their executive management program, big company, rising through the ranks at this big company. But one of... Yeah, one of them. Unlimited number of fucking people. Exactly.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And Steve Jobs was recruiting for a role at Apple and saw Tim's resume and looked at it and was like, oh, big company guy, probably not a fit for Apple and their more startup culture. And so passed on it. Six months later, he was still recruiting for that role and saw the resume again.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And at that point, Tim had left IBM and the safe track he was on to take this job at Compaq, which was this small computer startup at the time. And at that point, Steve then had this pattern interrupt about the type of person that Tim was. All of a sudden, he was like this guy that had taken on something very uncertain. He had done something very different.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
So he decided to have a conversation with him. Obviously, now you fast forward 20 plus years and... trillions of dollars of value that Tim has created at Apple. And it's this enormous case study to me of someone who is willing to tolerate some uncertainty of doing something different. It didn't make sense.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
It was a pattern interrupt in his life that sparked this enormous chain of dots that were connected out into the future.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
It's much easier to get lucky if you're going out and doing something. Yeah.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I thought that was so cool. Super cool. And completely consistent with my own experience. I mean, I've been very lucky to spend a lot of time with Tim over the years. He's been sort of a mentor and friend to me for the last 10 years. I originally met him in 2014. He was the relatively new CEO at the time. And...
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
The way that I met him was because he was working out at the gym at 4.45 every single morning before going into the office. He would wake up at 3.45 and send off emails, be working, doing things, get to the gym at 4.45, work out. He was probably getting into the office by 6.15 before any of his employees were probably even awake.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And you think about that and think about the fact that you are the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world. And you are still doing that. You are literally on a daily basis, like meat and potatoes, behavior and actions. And then it becomes no surprise that someone like that has been able to do and achieve the things that he's done.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I mean, a laser intensity and focus on the things that matter.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah, there's levels to this shit. I always think that. Like sometimes you just encounter someone and you just realize there's levels to these games. And I have always thought that like if you were working for someone like that, you just have to know from the get-go that you are never going to outwork your boss. Mm-hmm. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
But you were in New York, so we were actually like a few miles apart, but we were having a very different experience. I could have been your toilet. Yeah, it could have been my toilet. Oh, we would have been asleep, so you would have to run.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
No. Diamond pricing is a perfect example of this. A 1.99 carat diamond versus a 2.00 carat diamond. It doesn't just go up by that tiny percentage. It's a huge leap because the human mind has this like ego attached to the two versus the one. No one wants to give their girlfriend a 1.99 carat. You want to give her the 2.01. So the price goes up like 20% on the slight jump. It's that exact thing.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
,,,,,,, that it was starting to get tough living as far away as we were from our parents. I was super close with my parents and they're getting older. They're starting to see chinks in the armor with their health. And he asked, how old are they? And I said, they're in their mid-60s. And he said, how often do you see them? I said, about once a year.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And he looked at me and said, 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 these people that you love most in the world is that countable, that you can place it on a few hands, was terrifying and jarring.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And it sparked real change because I was determined to not be one of those people that hears it, nods my head, and then does nothing about it. And so the next morning I told my wife that I thought we needed to make a change in our life. And within 45 days, I had left my job. We had sold our house in California and we had moved across the country to be closer to our parents.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And the most beautiful part in all of it was after two years of struggling to conceive, within two weeks of making that change and being back on the East Coast, my wife got pregnant with our son. And it was one of those moments, I'm not a particularly religious person, but it was one of those moments in life where you just feel like God winked at you.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Like things came into alignment and your whole life fell into place as it should. And the story of my life and of this book and of everything that I'm putting out into the world is really a ripple of that one decision to make that change, to prioritize the things that I knew we valued most that had been sitting in the backseat for so long.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah, and I think a big part of it for us, I have to give my wife credit because it is... very difficult to be brave on your own. And she, when I came to her and said that I thought we should make this change, was the first one to say, we can do this. Yes, let's go do it. Easily, she could have resisted. She could have said like, what are you talking about? We have a good life. We have a house.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
You're making good money. All of the reasons to stay on the path. And I often say that the worst thing in the world is not being on a bad path. Being on a bad path, it screams at you every single day to change, right? Like you're on a bad path. You have to make a change. It's so abundantly obvious. The worst thing in the world is being on a good path that isn't yours.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And that was very much where we were. It was a good path from a societal definition, but it was not the one that was leading to the place where I wanted to go. It was like that Japanese proverb that says, if you get on the wrong train, get off as soon as possible, because if you don't, the trip back is going to be a lot longer. That was where we were.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And my wife was the one that sort of infused me with the courage that we could actually go and do that.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
yeah trying to trying to conceive and not being able to do it is this weird silent social epidemic that no one really ever wants to talk about all that much especially men I mean it is weird I went on you know Dr. Rangan Chatterjee in the UK and I had a conversation with him and I shared those struggles to conceive and he said that in 10 years of doing his podcast I was the first man to ever talk about that on his show and
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah, and you take the time to zoom out at the end of the year, no matter what, like no matter who you are. And part of that's because you have the space to do it, right? Like because of whatever you're doing for work, it slows down. Whether you're an entrepreneur or whether you work for someone nine to five, you actually have space in your life to zoom out and think at the end of the year.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I think about it a lot because infertility is something that immediately gets placed on the woman. When you're struggling to conceive, the assumption that everyone has is that there's something wrong with the woman. And that is just not the case scientifically. Nearly 50% of the cases, it's the man. Exactly. And stress is a contributor. Your body will not want to
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
conceive if they're really high stress levels. There's a variety of internal factors that contribute to fertility. Drinking seven nights a week does not help. Not sleeping a whole lot because you're stressed or because you're anxious doesn't help. So when I think about my own life and the actions I was taking, I think it's a totally fair assumption to say that I was a major part of it.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I'm the problem, right? And obviously like also the back end of that, of like making this change, me feeling this enormous weight lifted, reprioritize my, all of these things that shifted. Yeah. All of a sudden I'm like, man, we could have pen kids really quick. Just start going out and spread the seed. Everyone around me all of a sudden got pregnant.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Uh, no, but it is, um, I just think that there's a lot of people out there and probably some people listening who are struggling with this right now. And, uh, I held it in silence. We did. And it placed an enormous burden on our relationship as a result because you're just suffering with something alone.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And if you two aren't talking about it a lot, which tends to happen, it becomes this weight that you're just carrying. Did you go to see urology, fertility? We had not. My wife had. I had not gone and seen anyone. I had resisted it. And this is, you know, me being in a bad place in my life and the way that I was approaching everything in life, frankly, was, no, we're young. This is stupid.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
We have plenty of time. At the time, frankly, I was like, I was so narrowly focused on making money as the end, as the, you know, means to me feeling successful and feeling good that I was like, I don't want kids. That's just, that seems like a distraction. Yeah.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
It seems like it's not going to help me get to this end that I'm trying to chase of making all this money and being this success story in my life. And now I think about it and it's the only thing I care about. Everything that I do is in service of being an incredible father and wanting to teach my son these lessons that I think are so important in life. Can I ask a difficult question?
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
We will definitely try. I mean, frankly, like, are now going to start trying for more. I think that... You know what I mean?
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And so people do it then, it's natural. And as a result, you have a comparison point that is very natural from year to year because you were able to zoom out. on an annual basis. I mean, I think about that all the time of just how much can change in a year. It's very easy to say that things take 10 years.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
You know, I would say almost in the opposite direction that... My wife and I feel such extraordinary gratitude for the fact that we were able to have our son and knock on wood that he is healthy and happy. And to me, I'm like, if we have any more kids, I'm like, it's a cherry on top of this incredible blessing that we have. If it were up to me, we'd go have five. I mean, I love kids.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I'm like, this is the best thing in the world. It's hard to imagine.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah. I mean, it's hard to imagine after you have one that your heart can expand enough to love another thing as much as you love your kid. I cannot... I had been selfish my entire life. And I think that we are all, even when you get married, you are fundamentally, until you have a child, you are a selfish being. You might love your spouse, but you don't love them more than yourself.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
You would not, in most cases, like truly, you know, Shoot yourself in the head, press the button and kill yourself to save your spouse. In a lot of cases, I really think like that would be more of a question that people would ask with your kid. If you had a button that you could press and save their life and immediately exterminate yourself, you would press it without thinking about it.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
That is a great question. I've never thought about it. And yes, 100%. I think about it now. If I could press that button and save my wife and my son, I would press that in a heartbeat. Because I see the two of them and I know... And that's... I think as a father and as a husband, the single best feeling in the world is knowing that my son would be great if I died.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Like knowing that if I am flying home tonight and my plane crashes and I die, my son is going to have an amazing life because he has the most incredible mom that loves him so much. And he's surrounded by love and support.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I think Bill Gates was the one that said that most people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in 10 years. And I've often thought that that same exact quote applies to a year. I mean, it will blow your mind. If you actually sit down and are focused every single day for a year, your entire life can change.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah, I had that feeling when my son was born, the first time I held him. And again, this comes from someone who was not a kid guy. It wasn't like I spent my whole life being like, I want kids. And when my son was born, I held him for the first time and he looked up at me.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And I remember just having this sensation that I had spent the first 30 years of my life trying to understand the meaning and purpose of all of this. And then it was staring right back at me. I had this experience actually shortly after he was born where I took him out for a walk.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
You know, kids like sleeping obviously is a shit show and he wouldn't sleep other than basically when I walked him around in his stroller. And so I was walking him early one Saturday morning and I was standing on the sidewalk and this old man walked up to me and he came over and he said, I remember standing here with my newborn daughter. She's 45 years old now. It goes by fast. Cherish it.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And I took him back home and I brought him into bed. My wife was still asleep and the sun was kind of coming through the blinds. And he had this like little perfect smile on his face. And I had this sensation that for the first time in my life, I had arrived. but there was nothing more that I wanted. Like my whole life had been spent chasing some more.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
There was something like I needed more money or more promotions or more status or more whatever the thing was. And for the first time in my life, I was just content. Like I truly felt like I had enough. And it was this idea that we can never let the quest for more distract from the beauty of enough. Finding those moments where you truly feel like you have enough.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
That is what a wealthy life looks like.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah, if your expectations rise faster than your assets, than the things you have, you will never feel wealthy. You will constantly be on this chase for whatever more you're looking for. There's that famous story of... Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. Have you heard that story?
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
So Kurt Vonnegut, famous American author, Joseph Heller, another famous American author, author of Catch-22, the satirical work. And the two of them Vonnegut and Heller were at the house of this billionaire in the Hamptons. And Vonnegut asks Heller, how does it feel that just yesterday, the owner of this house made more money than your book, Catch-22, made in the entirety of its lifetime?
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And Heller replies, I've got something that he'll never have. And Vonnegut says, yeah, what's that? And Heller says, the knowledge that I've got enough. And it's that exact lesson that that is true wealth, the knowledge that you have enough, that you don't need to chase more, and that if you do chase more, it needs to be grounded in something more meaningful than just chasing money.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
If you are chasing ambition because you're grounded in your purpose, because you want to go and create something meaningful for the world. You want to go create a more meaningful life for your family because you feel like you can spread ideas that will positively impact people. That's a great reason to go and chase something bigger. But chasing more money is just a road to nowhere.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Peter Drucker, famous management theorist you might know, once said, what gets measured gets managed. And it's this idea that the thing that you can measure becomes the thing that you optimize around, the thing that you very narrowly focus on, myopically focus on. And for us in our own lives, that thing that we can measure is money. It's so easy.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
That was this viral Reddit post that...
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And the challenge with all of this is a simple fact, which is for 10 years, you are your child's favorite person in the entire world. And after that 10-year window, they have other favorite people. They have best friends. They have boyfriends. They have girlfriends. They have partners of their own. They have children of their own. Sports team coaches. Sports team coaches.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
you will never occupy that same place in their world. But for that 10-year window, you are literally everything to them. And yet, we live in a culture where that 10 years also coincides with the time when you are supposed to chase every more that is out there, chase all of your professional ambitions.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
So navigating that tension, figuring out how to balance your pursuit of your fullest potential with the desire to be present with your kids during that magic window that you have, that is the fundamental tension of being a parent in the modern era. It's finding your unique balance of those two.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I think that it is a couple of things. I think one, I'm sort of of two minds on this. One, I think that being present during that window of time with your kids is the most important thing. But two, I think it is extraordinarily important for your children to see you work hard on things you care about. That's interesting.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I think that is the most important lesson I learned from my father was that growing up, I saw him work so hard on things that lit him up intellectually. And the important point there is that you have to be included in the why. Meaning, I always knew why my dad was working hard on things.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
He always took the time to explain to me what he was working on, why he cared about it, why he felt it was important, why I was part of that mission with him. And that always meant that I knew when he was traveling, when he was gone, when he was working, when he was doing things, I knew why. And it wasn't that he'd abandoned you. It wasn't that he didn't care.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And that's the important point is if you don't fill the why with the correct reason, your kids will fill it with the worst reason. Your kids will fill it with the abandoned. They'll fill it with the dad doesn't want to be around. Dad's never around. But you can fill that with the correct reason. But you have to actually think about it. You have to be aware enough to say those things to your kid.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Even when my son's two and a half, is he really understanding it? Maybe not, but he's understanding it enough that when I'm going somewhere, he's saying, dad, I work. He's like looking at me. He's helping me with things. He's helping me pack. He goes and sits at my desk. He like tries to type things. He understands when I'm writing stuff.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
So they absorb a lot more than you think, but it requires being intentional about creating that understanding in them.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
You can put a single number and apply it to your entire life. So you know your worth, so you can compare yourself to others. And money's measurability is a feature, not necessarily a bug. It's really useful. And as a result, it's perpetuated through society. But because it's so measurable, it becomes the entire focus of our lives.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And they see it, right? Like you can teach. This is something I've changed my mind on for sure in my own life with my son, which is you can't really teach your kids anything. You just have to embody the things and they learn from seeing you do it. Don't tell them, show them. And it's true for all things in life, right?
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Like it goes back to the Tim Cook and all those stories of what we were talking about. Like you're not talking about the morning routine. You're just showing the output. Show me the output. And I think about my own experience with my dad, like some of the most formative learning moments I had with him of what it meant to work hard, what it meant to have discipline. We're just observing him do that.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I got to go when I was a kid on this trip with him as like his plus one. My dad's a professor at Harvard and he was giving a talk at this conference in Asia and And my mom couldn't go. So I got to be the plus one. And it was my first time ever flying business class because I was his plus one for this thing. So I have like movies and food and all this stuff. It's like 15 hour flight.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
It's the only thing that we think about when we try to progress on the life scoreboard, right? When we try to win the game, it's the thing that we focus on. But unfortunately, it is not particularly well aligned with trying to build a meaningful, happy, successful life. It is up to a point very useful as a tool to reduce fundamental burdens and stresses. I know you've had Arthur Brooks on here.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And my dad sat there and worked for the entire 15 hour flight. And when we landed, I turned to him and I was like, dad. you didn't watch a single movie on that whole flight. And he kind of just laughed and, you know, we moved on from it. But I remember that moment so clearly that for 15 hours he worked.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And that was what was required for him to be the type of person that would get invited to give a talk at a conference, for him to be able to bring his son to something like that. That was the work that he had to put in. And so now when I think about my own experience and the things that I want to work hard on, that I want to put my head down, like, I'm in a season of unbalance in my life, right?
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Like you have these periods where you have to be willing to embrace the idea that you are in a season of unbalance. You are in a season where shit is just crazy and chaotic and you have to lean into it because worrying about, oh, I don't have perfect balance in my day is lose a sight of the bigger picture, which is this season of unbalance is required for me to have the season of balance later.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Have you ever seen the Family Guy episode where Peter gets the pajama pants that have the like trap door in the back? Yeah, you should have just worn one of those.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I think of my years in quarters. I like to view my life as like a public company. It's like, I'm going to live Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. And if I am in a crazy quarter of focus and head down on something that matters, that's okay. I don't need to stress about that. As long as I have the knowledge that I'm going to be able to pull back and have a quarter where things are
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
a little bit more balanced where I'm able to reset. And that is an important point because that whole idea of balance has been hijacked, right? Like balance has been hijacked by the day optimizers of saying like, you have to have the perfect balance of rest, family, workout, work, deep work, all of these things, right? Every single day. And when you don't have that, you start getting stressed.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
If that's what you think balance looks like, you start freaking out when you don't have that or when you're traveling a lot or when your head's down on things, right? And viewing balance on a seasonal basis, on a quarterly basis, is a much healthier way to look at it. Because then you give yourself the freedom to actually focus on something.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
We all know that the most incredible outputs in history have all been created by these extraordinary bouts of focused attention. Sir Isaac Newton had the year where he was locked down because of the plague in Europe. He had to leave school at Cambridge and go home and live in his little town for a full year. He was just completely locked down.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
He's done a bunch of research around this. At the lower levels of your life, we know you can reduce a bunch of stress by having money. You can take care of the people around you. You can pay for food, shelter, all those basic things. But once you get past that point, the science is pretty clear that it's not going to be money that drives incremental fulfillment and happiness.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And during that year, he formulated all of the laws of gravitation. He invented calculus. He like did a lifetime's worth of work because he had a focused year of attention on a single set of problems that he was trying to solve. And that's great. Like that is how extraordinary outcomes are created. So we have to give ourselves the freedom to do that.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
So luck surface area is the idea that at any point in time in your life, you have a physical literal surface area on which lucky events can strike. The best, uh, sort of visual for this that I have is from the movie interstellar. Uh, yeah, it's one of my favorite movies. Uh, you know, and they go to that planet that is right on the edge of the black hole and it has the perfect conditions for life.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
They're like, Oh, this, this planet should have life. And they're trying to figure out why it didn't. And what they talk about is the fact that it sits right next to the black hole. So all of the lucky events that could have struck the planet, all of the little asteroids that might have contained life, got sucked into the black hole.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
So there was something that was making the luck surface area of that planet zero. It was minuscule. You and your own life are kind of that same idea. You need to think about how can you expand your luck surface area to be as big as possible so that when the lucky events come, they are striking your life and you're able to capitalize on them. The perfect example is what I said earlier.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
It's very hard to get lucky sitting on the couch watching TV at home. how can you possibly get lucky versus going out, meeting people, having conversations, working on things, contributing value to other people. Now, all of a sudden I'm expanding my luck surface area because there's all of this motion that's been created. There's all this action that's created.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
The lucky events actually have an opportunity to strike. I no longer have a black hole of Netflix sitting next to my entire life.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Isn't there that quote, fortune favors the bold? Sort of that idea, right? Of like when you are bold, when you are leaning into things. I think it's C.S. Lewis that talks about the fact that Courage is like the highest form of every virtue. It is like when the virtue is tested, that is what courage truly is. Because it's very easy to express a virtue when there's nothing on the line.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah, when times are good, it's very easy to be loyal when, you know, nothing's happening. Is that like wind momentum, do you think? It's very similar. Yeah. It's very easy in your whole life to continue to do the thing when it's working and when the rewards are certain.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I often think that the most dangerous man in the world is the one who can remain disciplined, show up and do the work, even when the rewards are uncertain. The person who can tolerate the most uncertainty is the person who will ultimately win.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah. It's a funny thing too. Have you ever... Uh, do you know anything about, uh, like aviation planes? Um, so like a plane, when it starts stalling out, it starts falling out of the sky, right? Like you have moments in your life where you, you've hit stall speed and you start just stalling and you're falling out of the sky. And there's this insane, just like collapse towards the earth.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And the funny thing about a plane stalling is that your bias when your plane is stalling is to pull back. You're like, Oh, I'm going to pull back. Cause I'm, I'm falling out of the sky. I when actually how you save a plane from a stall is that you lean into it. You actually have to go nose down to generate the speed through the air to get back to using the wings for lift.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And so it's this funny paradox of life that in the moments when you are collapsing, when things aren't going well, that's actually when you need to lean into things. What does that mean? When you need to lean into the risky thing, when you need to do the challenging thing, to have the courage in those moments when it's most challenging to do it.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Um, it's like the, you know, the startup that's collapsing that cuts everyone from their team in order to make their runway four weeks longer when in reality they probably should have like invested more heavily to try to get the sufficient speed to get out of it. You're just prolonging the inevitable if you pull back. I think about that a lot in life.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah. Basically, all of the research is summarized around three points. At lower levels, money does buy happiness. At the lower levels of, let's say, annual income, money directly buys happiness. And it's very clear that it does that because it reduces those fundamental burdens and stresses. above a baseline level, which you can argue over what that baseline level is.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Like at those moments, we need to have the courage to lean into the thing and see our way to the other side.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah, this goes back to the courage point that so many of us get trapped in this self-created prison of, not being willing to step out of our zone of comfort in our world. We just sit in the confines of what feels natural and what feels real and what feels normal. And we hide behind our talent or intelligence. We say like, well, yeah, but I'm, you know, I'm really talented. I'm really intelligent.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I could go do this and that. But if you're not doing the thing, it doesn't matter. If you don't actually take the step to confront the fear and go and do it. And Abraham Maslow has this quote that our greatest fear is in our highest possibility. And I think that that's such an interesting idea that there are actually two types of fear.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
There's the fear of failure, which is the fear that we all know. That's the fear that we are going to go after something and it's not going to work out, that everyone's going to see us fail, that we fell off. But then there's the fear of success. There's the fear that we go and do the thing and it works out greater than we ever expected.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And we're never able to live up to that highest possibility again, that we're going to achieve the thing and never be able to experience that high high again in our lives. Sometimes it is our light that we most fear. I think about that all the time. Do you hold yourself back because you were afraid of what will happen if you actually succeed beyond your wildest expectations?
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
The first and most formative study was Daniel Kahneman. He said $75,000 a year. Then everyone went nuts and said, no, it's not 75. Then there was one that said $200,000 a year.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
The number is sort of beside the point because if you live in New York City with two kids, that number is going to be significantly higher than someone living in Omaha, Nebraska or Mississippi or a random place somewhere in the world. But the point is that at that baseline level, Once you get above it, if you are unhappy and you're at that baseline level, more money doesn't make you happier.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And if you're happy at that baseline level, more money is not going to make you happier. So your natural disposition at that level is more important. And the other things in your life are what are going to be driving incremental happiness. It's going to be free time. It's going to be people. It's going to be purpose. It's going to be health.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
It's these other things in life that drive the incremental gains above it. I think Arthur Brooks does an incredible job summarizing this well when he says, we are sort of like rats. We're sort of like mice with cheese, where early in our life...
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
you ring this money bell and you experience this happiness because you're on that early part of the curve and because it is actually improving your life in a meaningful way. But we create this pattern in our mind that that natural linear relationship between money and happiness is going to continue forever.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And we hit the point where it is no longer doing it, but we think it's going to continue to. So we go our entire lives continuing to try to ring the money bell, thinking it's going to bring us those same gains from early, even though it doesn't.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Yeah. Michael Norton is a Harvard Business School professor, and he did this study with high net worth individuals. So anyone worth $10 million up through hundreds of millions of dollars. And he asked them on a scale of one to 10, how happy they are. And they all answered. And then he asked, how much money would you need in order to be at a 10?
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And across the board, whether they were worth 10 million, 100 million, a billion, they all said somewhere from two to five X as much money as they currently have. So no matter what, it didn't matter if they were worth 10 or worth 100, they all said two to five X. And I've gone and anecdotally asked successful people in my own life. I did it in our group chat. I asked everyone.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I went and asked hundreds of people this question. And across the board, you find this. Like someone worth 10 million says they need 30 because then they could fly private more. Someone worth 100 says they need 500 because then they would get invited to the cooler yacht parties. Whatever the thing is, we just naturally reset to three to five X.
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#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
I mean, that's exactly what I'm trying to do with this book. You know, the whole idea of... creating a measurable tool for these other areas of life that we know are the ones that create meaning and fulfillment. We know what they are. I'm not giving you a new answer here. I'm helping you actually ask the question so that you can figure out how to build your life around those things. We know...
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
That having meaningful relationships makes you happier and more fulfilled, right? Actually, the science on this is abundantly clear. The Harvard study of adult development was this study conducted over 85 plus years, 2000 plus participants, and they found that the single greatest predictor of living a good life was the strength of your relationships.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And actually, the single greatest predictor of their physical health at age 80 was relationship satisfaction at age 50. It was more impactful than whether they smoked or drank, whether they had high blood pressure, cholesterol, any of those things. It was your relationships that actually impacted it. But we don't have a way to measure that.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
how we feel about our relationships or where they are in the same way that we do money. Or we don't have a way to measure how we feel about our purpose and whether we're pursuing things with curiosity and growth. We don't have a way to measure whether we feel good about our health in the same way, although that's getting a bit better.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
But all of these things we need to factor into like an overall life wealth score so that you can have them alongside money on that journey. What's the life raiser? This is one of my favorite concepts from the book. So for anyone that doesn't understand what a razor is, a razor is a rule of thumb to simplify decision-making. The most famous razor that people talk about is Occam's razor.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
It's the idea that the simplest possible explanation is often the best one. Basically, simple is beautiful. And in the book, I propose this idea of Having a life razor, a single decision making heuristic that allows you to cut through the noise in your own life, something that allows you to navigate whatever chaos ensues to just have a simple way to make a decision in those moments.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Was it one of those bathrooms that had like a person that would hand you a towel after you washed your hands?
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And the best example of that that I've come across was Mark Randolph, the CEO of Netflix, posted this tweet. tweet several years ago where he said, my definition of success. And it was all about the fact that every single Tuesday throughout his entire career, he had founded some of the most transformative technology companies in the world.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
He had a hard rule that at 5 PM on Tuesday evening, he would take his wife out for a date. No matter what. Started one of the biggest companies in the technology world. He would leave at 5pm to take his wife out on a date. And when I spoke to him, the one thing that became very clear to me was it didn't have that much to do with the date or any one particular evening with his wife.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Okay, good. Because that would have been rough.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
It had everything to do with what it implied about who he was as a person.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
what it meant for his identity as a human being, that he was the type of person who left at 5 p.m. to take his wife out for a date, that he had these clear priorities in mind. And it implied things to the people around him. It was ripple creating in his life. We all need a similar idea to that in our own world, something that defines who we are as a person.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
So my life razor would be that I will coach my son's sports teams. For me, that is in some ways about the type of father that I am to him, that I have to be the type of person that my son wants to be around. It also means that I'm the type of person that will never sacrifice my integrity or character for the pursuit of... some new thing, some more.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
Because if I do that, my son won't want to have me around. He won't be proud to have me coaching his teams. My wife won't be proud to have me out in the community. The community won't want me around. So in a moment when I have a decision to make, I can ask myself, what does the type of person who coaches his son's sports teams do in this moment? And
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
That helps a lot. Yeah. I mean, the space example is a good one. The Elon example, because the example I give in the book of where I started to think about this was from Apollo 13. You know that movie? So in the like climactic scene of Apollo 13. They're trying to reenter the atmosphere and they're having to do a manual burn of the engines because the computers are all shut down.
Modern Wisdom
#899 - Sahil Bloom - The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness
And if they come in too steep, they're going to like blow up. If they come in too shallow, they're going to skip off into space and they don't have a way to figure out the perfect angle. And Tom Hanks has this heroic moment where he's like, well, I just have to keep a fixed point in space.
Something You Should Know
How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
The idea is you take a piece of paper, and at the end of your day, right before bed, you write down one win from the day. That's something that you felt good about, something that went well. One point of stress, tension, or anxiety, something that you want to get off your brain and onto the paper. And then one point of gratitude, something that you felt grateful for during the day.
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How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
It takes three to five minutes, and it truly does provide a calming sensation in the evening before going to bed. And it forces the highly ambitious go-getter to actually acknowledge the things that are going well in their life, which for very ambitious people is something that tends to be difficult to do.
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How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
And then finally, in the world of physical wealth, an investment you could make is to take yourself for a 30-minute walk without technology. If you just go out and get a little bit of movement in that you previously weren't going to do, that will stack a positive win in your life that compounds into the future.
Something You Should Know
How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
there was this investor named Graham Duncan, who several years ago raised this idea of the time billionaire. And when I spoke to him recently, I asked how he came up with that concept. And what he said was that he interviews hundreds of young people to join his firm, and that he noticed that all of them have this common goal of wanting to become billionaires.
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They all want to become dollar billionaires. And what he noticed was that They are all billionaires in one very important way, which is they are time billionaires. They are literally rich with time. But until you start relating to yourself that way, you don't understand just how much that is your most valuable asset that you have.
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Because when you're young, especially, time is quite literally the only asset that you have. You don't have the networks, you don't have the money, you don't have the resources, the experience, the wisdom, any of those things. And so you actually need to take your time and trade it for those things so that you can live well in those other areas as you progress in your life.
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But starting to relate to yourself in that way is a really powerful thing for how you live. And frankly, you're a time billionaire up through, you know, on a technical basis, 50 plus. I think a billion seconds is about 30 years, if I'm correct. And, you know, so at 20, you maybe have 2 billion seconds-ish left, depending on life expectancy. And at 50, you have maybe a billion seconds left.
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So we are all time billionaires. We're doing quite well in that one regard.
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time has become this funny thing particularly in western culture where uh being busy uh is like this interesting almost pseudo-dystopian status flex you go to a you go to a cocktail party and people ask how you're doing and you say i'm busy and you say it with this you know intense pride as if being more stressed and more strained is something to be proud of because it's an indication for a lot of people
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You're saying it because it means that you are working on a lot of things like you must be doing well. And, you know, oftentimes in a more toxic workplace culture to being busy as a protection mechanism, because it shows to your superiors and the people around you that you are working on things that you are doing a whole bunch of stuff.
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And unfortunately, that busyness treadmill, if you will, is actually not conducive to making a whole lot of progress. Because what you find is that you are working on a whole lot of the things that are sort of the one for one trades that are not actually moving you forward. You sort of become like a rocking horse, if you will. You're moving a whole lot, but you're not really getting anywhere.
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I mean, a shocking, shocking statistic. And when you overlay that with the robust body of scientific research that supports the fact that relationships are the key to living a healthy, happy life, it's even more terrifying. The Harvard Study of Adult Development was this incredible study done over the course of 85 plus years.
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How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
They tracked the lives of 1,300 original participants plus their 700 plus descendants. And they found that the single greatest predictor of physical health at age 80 was relationship satisfaction at age 50. It wasn't blood pressure. It wasn't cholesterol. It wasn't smoking or drinking habits. It was how they felt about their relationships that determined their long-term health outcomes.
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I think it is stuff that we all know in the back of our minds, but that has never been brought to the front. That's at least how I've thought about it historically. It's like you already have these answers within you, but you just haven't asked the right questions yet to reveal them in your own life.
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and that is really what i want to do it's i want to encourage people to ask these questions identify what truly matters to you and then start taking tiny actions to build your life around those things and i say tiny actions i really mean it it doesn't take a lot to start building your social wealth it is as simple as sending the one text to the friend that you haven't caught up with in a while it's being the catalyst to get that group of friends together for the annual trip so that it doesn't just fall by the wayside
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I mean, I think about that one all the time. How often do you get together with your group of friends from your college years? It was very easy in the years during college. It was very easy in the years right after when people were getting married and there were bachelor or bachelorette parties. But it starts to become harder and harder.
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How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
It is the idea of understanding your definition of enough, that your expectations are actually your greatest financial liability, because if you allow them to grow faster than your assets, you will never feel rich.
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How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
And unless one person is the catalyst for bringing that group together, it just stops happening. and you start to lose that social wealth because of the natural decay during your life. But you can be that catalyst. You can take that one tiny action today that, again, compounds positively into the future.
Something You Should Know
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People know what you find is there are two types of priorities in life. There are the priorities people say they have, and then there are the priorities that people's actions show they have. And for most of us, There is a large gap between those two. So you sit people down and you ask them for the priorities and they say all the right things. They say these five types of wealth.
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They'll talk about the fact that their relationships and the people and their freedom and their health and all of these things they'll talk about as being priorities. And then when you ask what they do during a week or you go look at their calendar, there is a big, big gap in what their actions are actually showing their priorities are.
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How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
And so the whole idea here is to start closing that gap, to take the priorities that your ideal self has in mind and start aligning your actions with building toward that set of priorities.
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How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
Thank you, Mike.
Something You Should Know
How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
Thank you so much for having me.
Something You Should Know
How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
I think it's best framed through a quote, which is one of my favorite quotes from the management theorist, Peter Drucker, who said, what gets measured gets managed. And I've always loved that quote because what it implies is that the things that you measure end up being the things that you focus on, the things that you optimize around. And money has been the sole way that we measure our lives.
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It has been our focus and the way that we establish our worth as individuals and as people and as professionals. But unfortunately, money is just one piece of a more complete picture that contributes to a healthy, happy, fulfilling, wealthy life.
Something You Should Know
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The five types of wealth are time wealth, which is the idea of the freedom to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it, and when you trade it for other things. Social wealth, which is the idea of your human connection, your relationships, the people with whom you are going to go on these journeys with.
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How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
Mental wealth, which is your purpose, your pursuit of growth, and your ability to create space to wrestle with bigger questions in your life. Physical wealth, which is all about your health and vitality, your ability to control the controllables, as it were, in your own life, in your pursuit of health. And then finally, financial wealth, which we all know.
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How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
But in the context of financial wealth in particular, it is the idea of understanding your definition of enough. The idea that your expectations are actually your greatest financial liability, because if you allow them to accelerate and grow faster than your assets, you will never feel rich.
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I think of Rich as really about living your version of enough, which is funny to say, but there's a famous story that I love that really brings this to light. Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, two very famous American authors, were at the home of this billionaire in the Hamptons. And Vonnegut says to Heller, Joe, how does it feel that just yesterday,
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The owner of this home made more money than your most famous book, Catch-22, made in its entire lifetime. And Heller replies and says, yes, but I've got something that he'll never have. And Vonnegut says, what's that? And Heller says, the knowledge that I've got enough. So really, that is at the heart of all of this.
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How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
It's the idea that you need to define what your version of your enough life looks like. What does enough truly mean to you?
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How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
Because when you get to that version of your life, when you've achieved the things that you view as enough, you will no longer find yourself on that incessant treadmill, that hedonic treadmill, the Sisyphean quest of continuing to push the boulder up the hill that so many people find themselves on.
Something You Should Know
How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
you will never feel successful until you create your own definition of success. That is just a reality. As long as you allow yourself to default into the definition of success or the definition of wealth or the definition of richness that the world and that culture and that society hands you, you will never feel successful because
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How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
We live in a consumerist world where you'll just be bombarded by exactly what you said, which is more and more information on the next thing that you need to truly achieve the lasting happiness that's just on the horizon. It's just that mirage that you keep getting to. And unfortunately, most people allow themselves to accept that default definition.
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We accept those things blindly that are handed to us and we don't take the time to stop and ask ourselves the question of what do we truly want in life and how can we take actions to build around that? And part of this also just comes down to clearly defining the actual life that is around that definition of enough. It's not about the number.
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The thing that people do is they say, oh, it's once I make a million dollars, then I'm going to be happy, then everything's going to be good. And then they get to a million and then they say it's three million and then they get to three and it's 10. There's actually studies around this.
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Michael Norton, a famous professor at Harvard Business School, did a study where he went and talked to high net worth individuals worth anywhere from a million on through 100 million plus. And he asked them, how happy are you on a scale of one to 10? And then he asked, how much more money would you need to be at a 10?
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And across the board, whether they were worth a million or 100 million plus, everyone said two to three times as much money. So because we attach it to a number, it becomes this very easy thing to naturally inflate.
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When you attach it to an actual life, to an actual vision of the lifestyle that you are going to be living, what it does is it makes it a much more conscious and rational upward movement rather than a subconscious irrational one.
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Usually what happens is that people focus on financial wealth at the expense of the other ones, that they have this early in life patterning or conditioning that convinces them that incremental unit of money is going to equal and incremental unit of happiness. And that patterning actually gets cemented quite legitimately early in your life.
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Early on the curve, money is a great driver of happiness because it reduces fundamental burdens and stresses. We can start to afford things. We can take care of the people around us. We can have two vacations a year. Those things really do drive it. Beyond that, what you find is that the incremental unit of money does not drive that same incremental unit of happiness.
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But because of the patterning that we've now reached, we continue to think it will. And as you continue to more and more narrowly pursue money as the means to your happy end, you start to see these other areas deteriorate. You see that people start to sacrifice their relationships or that they start to sacrifice their physical health or they start to sacrifice their mental clarity.
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How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
All of these other areas start to deteriorate along that pursuit. Part of that is because we don't think to invest in these other areas in the same way that we think to invest in financial wealth. When it comes to financial wealth, we know that investing $100 today will compound into our future.
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We know that investing $100 today is better than investing zero today because of that compounding, that anything above zero compounds. But we don't think of that. We don't actually have that mindset around these other areas when, in fact, an investment in your relationships, I would argue, is the single best investment that you can make.
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Investments pay dividends just like financial investments throughout the entirety of your life. So that simple mental reframe to tell people that investments in these other areas are just as powerful and just as important is a really simple and oddly effective way of getting people to understand this.
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Absolutely. So time wealth, we can start there. An investment in time wealth, the first step would be simply developing an awareness of the finite, impermanent nature of your time, understanding that time is your most precious asset. I say that that is an investment in time wealth because that awareness is what allows you to then use your time more effectively.
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If you don't develop an awareness of just how valuable your time is, you will never treat it accordingly. And so the question that I love to ask people to start this investment cycle is, would you trade lives with Warren Buffett? He's worth $130 billion. He has access to anyone in the world. He flies around on private jets and has mansions all over the place. He reads and learns for a living.
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It sounds pretty good, but you would not trade lives with him simply because he's 95 years old. There is no way you would agree to trade the amount of time you have left for $130 billion. So you acknowledge and understand that your time has quite literally incalculable value. And understanding that, developing that awareness is the first investment you can make in your time wealth.
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Now you have an unlock. You have a mindset shift to recognize that your time is truly your most valuable asset.
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How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships
social wealth the idea of investing is as simple as sending a text to a friend that you haven't talked to in a while or getting together for a cup of coffee with that person that you've been wanting to see but have been neglecting it could be a 15-minute truly present moment with your partner or spouse social wealth investments are as simple as recognizing that
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Being present in a single moment is something that is going to compound positively into your future. And it's an important concept to internalize just that these investments don't have to be dramatic actions. They can be very, very simple and anyone can do them. We all have time to send that text to the friend or make that phone call when we think about them.
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Mental wealth and an investment that you could make in mental wealth, I would argue, is as simple as taking three to five minutes to do a very, very simple journaling exercise in the evening to create a bit of clarity and help yourself with winding down and going to sleep at night. You could do what I call my 1-1-1 method.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
Yeah. Something permanent about a book versus anything else that you do, social media, writing, et cetera, just does feel different. Something very analog in a digital world, for sure.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
So the five types of wealth that I talk about in the book, time wealth, all about freedom. Social wealth, it's about your relationships. Mental wealth is about purpose and growth. Physical wealth is about your health. And then financial wealth is about money, what we all know and love.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
Yeah, the whole idea- As well, anyway. Exactly. The whole idea is that our default scoreboard, the way we have traditionally measured our lives, has been incomplete. And that has been entirely based around money. And that is part of building a wealthy, a fulfilling life, but it's not the only part.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
And for a lot of people, the chase and the obsessive quest to do the one thing comes at the expense of everything else. You get the Pyrrhic victory. You win the battle, but you lose the much bigger picture war.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
And so focusing on a more comprehensive scoreboard, a way to measure your life across all of these areas, that's how you go and build the comprehensively wealthy life that we all really want.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
No, I totally agree with you. The whole idea of even saying work-life balance fundamentally places the two things in tension, and that tension is made up. The reality is that the two can actually be part of a harmony, right? I mean, your family... is on the mission with you that you are on when it comes to your work.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
And they should feel that way because it's part of building a life together that you're on that journey. Your wife did the cover of the book. My wife did the cover of the book. Exactly right. We're all on this mission together. I do think that the... The mindset of on-off switches in life is one of the most dangerous mindsets we all have. We say, oh, I'm going to be focusing on making money.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
So too bad, you know, health, too bad, family, friends, all those things get shut off. The reality is that you can just have them on dimmer switches. Just because you're prioritizing making money and getting out of the paycheck to paycheck cycle doesn't mean you shut off these other areas.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
Anything above zero compounds in all of these areas of life just as much as it does with your financial future.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
Over and over again, we find that physical wealth, your health and vitality is a catalyst for every single other area of your life. When you take care of yourself, fundamentally what you're doing is taking back agency over your life. You believe that you have the ability to take an action, do something for your physical health and create a desired outcome.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
That belief that you have instilled in yourself through the physical pursuits applies to everything else that you do. You now believe that you can take an action at work and create a desired outcome, that you can take an action financially, create a desired outcome, that you can do that in your relationships. All of that is about reassuming agency.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
Yeah, absolutely. And you become a different person by taking these actions. So as a result, you were doing one thing, but it has those ripple effects into every other area of your life.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
I think that for a lot of people out there, success has become something that they don't feel they have access to. And that is fundamentally giving up your agency, right? You are saying that other people have the opportunity to do things and create success, but I do not. And so I'm going to be moan that success because I don't feel I have access to that.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
If you change one thing about your life, you create that one tiny piece of momentum, reassume that agency, you will no longer believe that. You will recognize that you have the capacity to take an action and change your life.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
It is all about taking deliberate daily actions to actually go and build the life that you want. The tiny action that you do today is going to be the thing that creates the momentum for tomorrow. The problem is that when you stare at this big wall, you're trying to go create this enormous change in your life. It's too intimidating.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
You look at it and you say, like, I can't possibly get to the other side of this thing. You don't have to do that. It's just about creating a little bit of awareness and then taking a tiny bit of action. Because again, that tiny action is what creates the momentum for you to get a little bit better tomorrow, a little bit better the day after that.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
Absolutely. And again, anything above zero compounds the 10 words that you write today, the 10 minutes. But successful, ambitious people are the worst about allowing optimal to get in the way of beneficial. They say, I don't have an hour to work out today, so I'm just not going to work out. I don't have two hours to write, so I'm just not going to write.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
I don't have an hour to call my mom, so I'm not going to call her. The reality is that a five-minute call is better than nothing. A 10-minute walk is better than nothing. Five minutes of writing is better than nothing in all areas of your life.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
No podcast right now, but maybe one to come soon. Okay, very cool.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
Newsletter several times a week, and you can get the book anywhere books are sold. How do we get the newsletter? Newsletter is at sawhillbloom.com.
The Ramsey Show
Discipline Is the Key to Building Wealth
I love the whole idea of enough because fundamentally enough is where you build your best life. The chase for more is a plague. More is the most dangerous word. The minimalists would love you.