Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Sahil Bloom: The 5 Types of Wealth You Need to Design Your Dream Life | Entrepreneurship | E335
Fri, 07 Feb 2025
Sahil Bloom felt empty despite crushing his career and financial goals. His health, relationships, and well-being were crumbling, until one conversation made him realize that at his current pace, he might see his parents only 15 more times before they passed. This realization hit like a punch in the gut. Within 45 days, Sahil quit his job, sold his house, and moved across the country. Free from corporate life, he started The Curiosity Chronicle, a newsletter with over 800,000 subscribers, where he shares insights on building a high-performing, healthy, and wealthy life. In this episode, Sahil breaks down the five types of wealth every entrepreneur should acquire and how to redefine success beyond money. In this episode, Hala and Sahil will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:14) Life Razor: A Simple Rule to Clarify Priorities (05:41) Breaking Free from Limiting Beliefs (07:38) Building Wealth but Feeling Empty (11:09) The Wake-Up Call That Shifted His Priorities (17:32) The Energy Calendar Hack to Maximize Time (21:26) Why Execution Beats Business Plans (27:03) Time Blocking Tips for Entrepreneurs (30:29) The Five Types of Wealth (40:35) Why a Brain Trust Is Better Than Mentorship (48:49) Turning Business Expenses into Profit (53:58) Unconventional Investment Strategies (59:32) Balancing Health, Wealth, and Well-being (01:06:31) Sahil’s Daily Routine for Productivity Sahil Bloom is an entrepreneur, investor, and writer focused on redefining wealth beyond money. A former private equity professional, he left the corporate world after a wake-up call that redefined his view of success. He now runs The Curiosity Chronicle, a newsletter with over 800,000 subscribers, sharing insights on entrepreneurship, investing, and personal growth. As a managing partner at SRB Ventures, he invests in early-stage startups and helps founders scale. Resources Mentioned: Sahil’s Book, The 5 Types of Wealth: amzn.to/40XzrQL Website: sahilbloom.com/#Hero Sahil’s Newsletter, The Curiosity Chronicle: bit.ly/3EsRmH5 King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone by David Carey and John E. Morris: amzn.to/4hhG8Uo One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In The Market by Peter Lynch: amzn.to/4aFpVWT Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl: amzn.to/42yQdry Main Street Millionaire: How to Make Extraordinary Wealth Buying Ordinary Businesses by Codie Sanchez: amzn.to/4jE8PMY Sponsored By: Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify Airbnb - Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com/host Rocket Money - Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to rocketmoney.com/profiting Indeed - Get a $75 job credit at indeed.com/profiting RobinHood - Receive your 3% boost on annual IRA contributions, sign up at robinhood.com/gold NordVPN - Get the best discount plus 4 extra months on the 2-year plan at nordvpn.com/profiting Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new All Show Keywords: Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship podcast, Business, Business podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal development, Starting a business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side hustle, Startup, mental health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth mindset.
Chapter 1: What is a life razor and how can it clarify your priorities?
Every single time I thought I was too late, it was still early. And all it took was for me to actually lean into the thing and just do it consistently every single day.
If somebody wants to learn more about how to buy companies, what do you suggest?
I would definitely go in.
What is your idea around mentorship and community with other entrepreneurs?
Chapter 2: How can you break free from limiting beliefs?
I think networking is dead. What you are really seeking to do is that is when you end up getting the best returns.
Young Improfiters, welcome back to the show. And today we've got an exciting live interview in store for you. And before we get started, I want to ask you a question. What if building a wealthy life had nothing to do with the amount of money that you have in your bank account?
Chapter 3: Why can building wealth lead to feeling empty?
Well, today, Sahil Bloom is going to tell us exactly why that's true, and he's on a mission to define what it means to exactly have a wealthy life. Sahil is an entrepreneur, investor, and the author of the Curiosity Chronicles newsletter, as well as the author of the new book, The Five Types of Wealth. In today's conversation, we're going to uncover Sahil's entrepreneurship journey.
We're going to discuss his business ecosystem and how he makes his money. And then we're going to go on to discuss the five dimensions of wealth besides financial wealth. You guys are going to want to hear this, especially all my entrepreneurs out there. So without further delay, here's my awesome conversation with Sahil Bloom. Sahil, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to do it.
I'm so excited for this conversation. I love doing in-person interviews and I feel like we have so much to talk about. So the first thing I want to ask you, I'm just going to jump right into it. When I was reading your book, I learned about your life razor and you've got a personal life razor. So first I wanted to ask you, what is a life razor and tell us what your personal life razor is.
Chapter 4: What was the wake-up call that shifted Sahil's priorities?
This concept, I came upon originally via the founder and first CEO of Netflix, a man named Mark Randolph.
I know him.
You may be familiar with. And Mark posted this really interesting thing, I think this is probably about two years ago now, where he talked about the fact that throughout his entire technology career, extraordinarily successful technology career, made oodles and oodles of money, built these amazing businesses.
The thing that he was most proud about was that he had this rule that every single Tuesday at 5 p.m., he would leave work and go out on a date with his wife.
And he says that what he's most proud about from his career is not that he founded these incredible companies or made all this money, but that he managed to do that while having an incredible marriage and having kids who love him and like spending time with him. And it struck me when I first read that, that the idea of leaving at 5 p.m.
to have dinner with his wife was not really about any one date or about the dinner itself. It was about what it implied about who he was as a person, about the boundaries that he was creating, about what his priorities were in life, and about the ripple effects that that idea created into other areas of his life. And that was where I came to this term in talking to Mark about a life razor.
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Chapter 5: How can you maximize your time with the energy calendar hack?
A razor, if you're not familiar with it, is the idea of a single point of focus, a rule of thumb that allows you to cut through the noise when you're making a decision. So for Mark Randolph, He was the type of person who left work to have a 5 p.m. dinner with his wife. That was his life raiser. It was a single point of focus that no matter what allowed him to cut through the noise in his life.
And anytime something came up, he could identify himself as that type of person. You know, if an interesting career opportunity came up, he could say, no, I'm the type of person who leaves work at 5 p.m. to have dinner with my wife. That is an important part of who he is as a human being. And that is something that we all need to think about in our own lives. What is our life razor?
What is our identity-defining rule for our life? Mine is, I will coach my son's sports teams. And it's a similar concept to Mark Randolph's in that I define myself as the type of person who is a husband, a father, a community member, a leader in all of these ways.
And being able to say I'm the type of person who coaches my son's sports teams means certain things about who I am and how I interact with the world around me. It means that I'll prioritize family ahead of certain financial opportunities. It means I'll be willing to make sacrifices to prioritize those in my life. And so I encourage other people to think about that.
Chapter 6: Why does execution beat business plans?
I walk through an exercise in the book to identify your own, how to come to your own life razor. It's a really important way to cut through the noise and make decisions in your life.
And razor comes from shaving off time, right? And saving time with decisions is so important. And do you have multiple life razors? Because I feel like I heard you once say that you like to wake up and do hard things. And that's another life razor of yours.
The idea of your own life, of having like these different seasons of your life is a really important concept to me. And that concept says that basically during the course of your life, the things that you prioritize or focus on will change. During your 20s and 30s, that is a great time for you to focus on building a financial foundation for the rest of your life.
As I talk about some of the concepts of the book of building a life of wealth across all these different areas, that doesn't mean that your life is going to be perfectly in balance across these five areas throughout your life. What it means is that you need to think about all of them as you consider building.
But what you're prioritizing, what you are really focusing on during any one season will change. What that means is that your life razor may change across these different periods of your life because when you are 20 or when you're in your early 30s and you're really honing in on
doing hard things, building a business, building a financial foundation for your life, it might be something like waking up and doing hard things. That's your life raiser. Then as you have kids and as you're prioritizing family, it may become something more like Mark Randolph that you leave to have dinner.
So now you wake up at 4.30 a.m. You take cold plunges. You are a big self-improvement influencer. You help people improve their lives. But I learned that when you were younger, you were actually quite insecure as a kid. And so first I want to ask you, where do you think those insecurities came from when you were growing up? And what were you like?
I think a lot about the fact that the stories we tell ourselves about who we are are so important to how we interact with the world. And especially those original stories that you tell yourself about the type of person you are, and your capabilities and your competencies, those stories are very hard to break.
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Chapter 7: What are the five types of wealth every entrepreneur should acquire?
And so if it is a negative story that you are starting to tell yourself, you will look around the world and you'll find all of the information that confirms that story. And if there's things that refute that story, you won't see it, you'll reject it. It's called the narrative fallacy. Humans are storytelling creatures, so we look to confirm the stories that we understand.
I had told myself from a young age a story that I wasn't smart. I have an older sister who is extraordinarily high achieving academically. And at the first sign of me not being able to easily do that same thing that she was doing, I started telling myself, I'm not the smart one. I need to find a different thing. I need to be athletic or something else, but I'm not smart.
That bred within me an insecurity that was very, very hard to crack. And no matter how much my parents told me that it wasn't true, no matter how much my sister told me it wasn't true or teachers, it was the story I told myself and I was not willing to break it.
And it took, frankly, like 30 years for me to finally reject those original stories and truly create the space for introspection to actually break some of those original stories I had told myself.
Mm-hmm. So you ended up becoming a collegiate baseball player. I think you went to Stanford, is that right? And you went into finance afterwards. So talk to us about your early career and what led you to end up making a big change.
The early years of my career were very much spent head down, focused on building a financial and sort of experience and knowledge foundation for the rest of my life. I loved my early years in finance. I went and worked at a private equity fund, which for those that aren't familiar, it's a fund that raises a pool of capital and you go and buy and sell companies and you make money along the way.
It was an extraordinary learning experience. And when I give advice to young people, what I say is, when you are young, time is the only thing that you have. It is your only asset. You don't have networks. You don't have money. You don't have experience. You don't have knowledge. You don't have any of those things.
And so as a result, you need to take the time that you do have and trade it for all of those things. Once you've done that, then the whole world is open up to you because now you have networks and money and experience, and you can deploy those into the most interesting, asymmetric, high upside opportunities. But until you do that trade, you wouldn't know how to work smart.
When young people say, oh, I'm going to work smart, not hard, you can't really do that until you work hard because you don't have the assets to work smart.
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Chapter 8: How do you balance health, wealth, and well-being?
And just hearing that from you, you know, 15 times left to see your parents, when you think about it that way, it's really... eye-opening, and it also reminded me of the fact that my father died during COVID. It's okay. But I was really happy that when I was 28, I made the decision to go get my MBA, and it was in New Jersey, my MBA school. And so I decided that I was going to live with my parents.
And I remember my boyfriend, my friends, they were all like, why are you going to live with your parents? That's so lame. And honestly, I'm so thankful I spent two years living at my parents' house because I got to reconnect with them at 28 years old. And in your book, you were saying how in your 20s, you end up not seeing your parents.
I was like a stranger to my parents by the time I was 28 because from... 18 to whatever, I was just never home. And then I got to reconnect with them. And then it just made me always want to come home because I felt closer to them. And then my father passed away like two years later, you know? And so it was definitely the right move. I don't regret it one bit.
And I encourage everybody who's young out there right now, if you have an opportunity to go spend more time with your parents, go live closer to them, even live with them if they want you to, to save money and grind and do whatever you need to, I would say go for it.
Yeah, and look, it all starts with awareness. The fact that you are aware enough to make that change is a huge thing. We don't think about time. Like when you're young, time is not a thing that ever crosses your mind. You don't think about the fact that time is your most precious asset. It is literally the only thing that matters. And when you're young, you are literally a time billionaire.
You have billions of seconds left in your life. That is the only thing that you truly have. And we don't relate to ourselves that way. We don't actually treat time as that precious asset. And so then we don't think about it at all until it's the only thing that we think about. But then it's too late. Then you're dead. And what happens is that life ends up being filled with laters.
You spend time saying, oh, I'll spend more time with my kids later. I'll spend more time with my parents later. I'll spend more time on my health later. I'll find my purpose later. I'll pursue my passions later. And the sad thing is that later just becomes another word for never. Because those things are not going to exist in the same way later. Your kids are not going to be five years old later.
Your parents are going to be dead later. Your health won't be there later. You won't just magically find your passions or purpose later. So unless you build those things into your life now, design them into your life now, you're just going to regret it later.
So speaking of regrets and getting started, one of the things that I hear you say pretty often is that it's never too late to start. And you often kick yourself for not starting certain things early enough. So talk to us about that. And to all the young people out there listening, what do you want to tell them?
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