Watch our conversation with entrepreneur and author Sahil Bloom, where we will explore the transformative framework from his book “The 5 Types of Wealth” on building a life portfolio that embraces five types of wealth: time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth, and financial wealth.
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Seth Green: Welcome all – We are thrilled to have you here for our conversation on the 5 types of wealth with Sahil Bloom, a New York Times bestseller, entrepreneur, and investor. My name is Seth Green, and on an afternoon like this one I am incredibly privileged to say I’m the Dean here at the Graham School at the University of Chicago. Welcome, Sahil! We are thrilled to have you with us, and really excited for the conversation ahead.
Sahil Bloom: Thank you so much for having me.
Seth Green: You’re an entrepreneur. You’re an investor. You are someone who’s very creative. But this is your debut book. Can you talk a little bit about why you decided to write it? And what led you in particular to investigate the good life?
Sahil Bloom: Yeah, I guess I will just open by saying that I am of the belief that the most interesting and beautiful opportunities in life are typically invisible to you where you stand today, and the only way they are revealed is through action. The reason that I open with that is because if you were to go back in time 5 years and ask me to sketch out a hundred scenarios for where my life would be in 5 years, not a single one of them would be correct, and not a single one of them would be sitting here having an opportunity to talk about a book with the world.
I was working in finance. I was very much on one of those paths that you stick on that has gravity to it that you kind of put your head down, and you wake up in 50 years and wonder what you just did with your life. And it was only through a little bit of chaos, and then a whole lot of energy behind it that I found myself where I am today.
The reason that I open with that is because if you were to go back in time 5 years and ask me to sketch out a hundred scenarios, for where my life would be in 5 years not a single one of them would be correct, and not a single one of them would be sitting here having an opportunity to talk about a book with the world. I was working in finance. I was very much on one of those paths that you stick on that has gravity to it that you kind of put your head down, and you wake up in 50 years and wonder what you just did with your life. And it was only through a little bit of chaos, and then a whole lot of energy behind it that I find myself where I am today. I was basically stuck at home at the start of Covid didn’t have a social life because of the lockdowns, and had a whole bunch of time on my hands that I had previously not had. I was working 80 to 100 hour weeks the first six to seven years of my career and doing so with this deeply ingrained surety that on the other side of those long hours and those years was the good life was me making enough money that I would one day wake up and feel good about myself. All of my insecurities would be gone. I’d be able to afford everything, and that would equal happiness. I’m not quite sure when that belief was ingrained in me. I do believe that a lot of these things are sort of just cultural osmosis, as David Foster Wallace called them in his famous Commencement speech. I think they’re default settings that are sort of wired in us from a young age but I had never taken the time to question those when Covid hit suddenly. There was this infused chaos into my life, and I had to decide which sort of path to go down there. I could have just been at home, and, you know, not done much with that extra time. But what I decided to do was pursue something. I’d always had a ton of energy for writing. I come from a family where writing was a big part of our sort of family culture. My mother and then my grandmother, both on my Indian side, were great storytellers, and so I’d always grown up kind of sitting on the floor listening to these 2 amazing women tell stories and storytelling was very deeply ingrained into my core. And so I thought “Well, why don’t I start writing?” I have this extra time I’m going to start sharing things. And what I found pretty quickly was that the writing that I was putting out into the world was resonating with people, and even more importantly, I was getting a ton of energy from it. So I started walking the way, if you will. I started writing more and more following that energy and there was never a plan… I never set out saying “Oh, I’m going to do this and then I’m going to build a platform. Then I’m going to do this. Then I’m going to write a book.” That was never in the cards, and that is why I sit here and say you cannot predict you cannot plan. There’s No. 5 year, 10 year, 15 Year Plan for the most beautiful journeys, because they are inherently invisible to you as I started to create more, and as I started to see the impact it was having on my own journey and on my own awareness of the world around me, the deep thought that it was requiring me to go through about my own path, and what was bringing fulfillment or lack thereof. That was when it started to clarify in my mind that there was a concept here that needed to be heard by the world.
Seth Green: Let’s dive into the book. You start with a story that really resonated for me. I am grateful and incredibly lucky to have both of my parents living and well. But you start with this observation that you realize your time with them may be finite and that kind of reshapes you’re thinking about the choices you’re making in your life, and how you’re balancing between the work that you care about, and then a family that you love. Can you tell us that story and the observation, and wake up call and your experience for how it got you to think beyond just one type of wealth potentially and toward a broader conception.
Sahil Bloom: I had spent those early years of my career marching down this path where the entire focus was on making money, accumulating status, getting things with this belief that that would eventually get me to the promised land, the idyllic land of success and happiness. And unfortunately, along that path. What I started to see and experience was that a lot of other areas of my life were showing cracks, that I was achieving the things in the one domain. I was winning the battle, if you will, but losing the much bigger picture, war my relationships with my parents. I was living 3,000 miles away from them. Not seeing them very often at all. We were very close growing up. My relationship with my sister had effectively ground to a halt. My wife and I were unfortunately struggling to conceive at the time that was creating strain on our relationship. I was drinking 6, 7 nights a week. My mental and physical health were in a bit of disarray, and by the end of 2020 it came to a point where I recognized that from the outside looking in. It seemed like I was winning the game. I was doing the things that you’re supposed to want to do. I was achieving the things you’re supposed to want to achieve. But I started to have this sensation that if that was what Winning felt like I had to be playing the wrong game and it all came to a head in this one conversation, in May of 2021, I went out for a drink with an old friend, and we sat down, and he asked how I was doing, and I told him that it had started to get difficult living so far away from my parents. They were on the east coast. We were living in California, 3,000 miles away. I had started to notice them, slowing down for the 1st time in my life that they weren’t going to be around forever, and he asked me how old they were, and I said mid sixties. He asked how often I saw them, and I admitted that it was down to about once a year, and he just looked at me and said, “Okay, so you’re going to see your parents 15 more times before they die.” And I just remember feeling like I had been punched in the gut. The idea that the amount of time you have left with the people that you care about most in the world is that finite, that countable that you can literally place it onto a few hands just shook me to the core. And in that moment I realized that my entire definition of success of what it meant to build a wealthy life had been incomplete that I was focusing on the one thing at the expense of everything else, and coming out of that conversation the next day my wife and I had a very candid talk about what we wanted to build our life around what our center really was, and within 45 days we took a dramatic action. We sold our house in California. I left my job that I had been at for 7 years, and we moved 3,000 miles across the country to live closer to both of our sets of parents and in that one decision was a very important and powerful realization, which is that you are in much more control of your time than you think. We had taken an action and fundamentally created time that number 15 more times before they’re gone is now in the hundreds. I see my parents multiple times a month. They’re a huge part of my son, their grandson’s life. We had taken an action and created time, and that was the spark that was the catalyst that led me on this entire journey to rethink this scoreboard that we have for our lives to broaden it, to actually encapsulate the true pillars that contribute to the life we are really trying to build.
Seth Green: I want to jump into the framework that you provide to give a picture of another way to look at wealth, and as we do. I’ll just give a bit of context to our community. We are a group of individuals primarily who are in midlife, and many because of some of the initiatives we have are thinking about transitions, and I would say there are many different ways. People come to this transition. There are some who, I think, have your experience, and David Brooks is a faculty member here, and talks a lot about how you may have accomplished your 1st mountain reaching a valley, and then you are now looking at your second mountain in a different light. There are others, though, I want to say, who have worked incredibly hard and feel really fulfilled by it, and would not trade how they were doing things over those 4 decades for a moment, but are coming to a place where they’re no longer going to live that same way and are beginning to broaden. So I think it’s a range of experiences that bring people from reaching a valley to reaching a climax and loving that climax, but saying. I know that I’m not going to climb the same mountain, and so I want to think about what that broader set of wealth looks like. So when you think about that transition point, your observation is that you want to think about 5 types of wealth. And can you talk a little bit about how you categorize these 5 types, and then we’ll jump in further to each of them over the course of the conversation.
Sahil Bloom: The 5 types of wealth that I contemplate that sort of capture this bigger picture in your life are time, wealth that is about freedom to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it, when you trade it for other things. It’s about control over your time and over those decisions. Social wealth is about your relationships. Mental wealth is about purpose, about growth, and about creating the space necessary in your life to wrestle with some of the bigger picture, more unanswerable questions, whether through religion, spirituality, solitude, meditation, what have you? Physical wealth is the 4th type. It’s about health and vitality. And then financial wealth is the 5th type of money with the specific nuance of understanding your definition of what it means to have enough financially in your life. And the important point that I would really hone in on as you think about this as a construct is to recognize a couple of things. Number one, your life does have seasons. So you talk about the second mountain. I really think in the context of seasons, what you focus on or prioritize in terms of those different 5 types of wealth during any one season will change. You may in your twenties, early thirties, maybe even into your early forties have a season of financial wealth building when it is very important to build a financial foundation so that you can take care of your responsibilities. Take care of the people around you. Come up. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, that point in time in your life where, candidly, money does directly buy happiness. In those early years. The science on that is quite clear at this point but after that season you may have shifting focuses and priorities, and you are never tethered to what a prior season’s focus was, or what a future season’s focus may be. But the important nuance to all of this is to recognize that these areas of your life cannot exist on, on, off switches. The traditional wisdom around this idea is that there are different areas of your life that exist on these switches that you flip on and off. So if I’m going to focus on financial wealth in my career, in my twenties and thirties. I flip that on, and I say, too bad family and friends flip it off. Too bad health! Flip it off. Too bad mental health, flip it off. And the challenging and dangerous thing about that mindset is that many of these areas of life, if you leave them turned off for too long you cannot turn them back on, or they become very difficult to ask anyone who did not invest in their health or in their relationships, in their twenties, thirties, and forties. How hard it is to bring those back in your fifties and sixties! The truth is that all of these areas of your life can exist on dimmer switches. You can and should have one. That is the primary focus that is going to be turned up. But that doesn’t mean that the other areas are turned off. It just means that you have the dimmer turned low, and the dimmer turned low is infinitely better than the switch turned off because anything above 0 compounds in your life. The tiny action done well on a daily basis is infinitely better than doing nothing. But ambitious people don’t think that way. The problem, with most ambitious people, myself included, is that we constantly allow optimal to get in the way of benefits. So we say things like, I don’t have an hour to work out today. So I guess I’m just not going to work out, or I don’t have 2 h for this deep focus work. So I’m just going to send emails instead. I don’t have 30 min to call my mom. So I’m not even going to text her. The reality is that anything above 0 compounds the 15 min walk is better than doing nothing. The 15 min of deep focused work on a priority task is better than doing nothing. Sending the text to the person when you’re thinking about them is better than doing nothing, because all of those tiny actions stack and compound the exact same way an investment in your financial future does so. The reason I think this idea of categorizing these other areas of your life as wealth is so important, just as a mental framing is to recognize that they all compound in the same way that financial wealth does. That is such an important and simple nuance is to recognize that the tiny actions done well today will stack and grow into your future, and they pay dividends in the exact same way. In fact, some of these areas of life, I would argue, pay more significant dividends than any financial investment that you can make, but recognizing it that way and really thinking about it. That way on a daily basis is the unlock.
Seth Green: I find this framework to be really powerful. But I want to ask a critical question about it, Sahil, because I think one of the challenges is that when we think about relationships, when we think about mental health. A lot of the research I’ve seen is that one of the best things we can do for both of those is to be selfless, like truly, to care deeply about the other people in our lives like you care about your family, and to do so as a value rather than something that we see building as an asset, if that makes sense and so is there a danger of of kind, of a financial asset approach to some aspects of this in the sense that it begins to kind of put it almost as the goal of this relationship is to pay back and compound. Obviously you want the relationship to build. But there is a way in which it is almost because when I think of finance, I think of it as transactional. How I manage my finances, I think of it as something that I’m trying to maximize and trying to. I’m just. I’m curious if that has come up in your discovery framework, that yes, you want each of these if we think about them, though, as an asset that is almost like a financial asset do we present any potential harms, and how that almost like shapes our brain and thinking about what this thing is that it’s not just a friendship where I invest in you because we have this deep care for each other, but but almost something that I’m doing to put money in the bank for the future. If that makes any sense, I understand the context and the help that it gives me to realize this is really important to my life. I’m curious. If you, if you’ve had a conversation about that question over the course of writing the book and getting feedback on it.
Sahil Bloom: Candidly, anything within the domain of self-improvement tends to be. This question of, you know, like optimization that actually reduces life. You’re like, okay, well, if you’re so focused on optimizing everything, are you really living? And the reality is with most things, comes down to sort of shades of gray, and your own personal sort of angle and approach to these things. I’m certain there are going to be people that take it to an extreme that you know create, you know. Now, there are companies where you can have, like a personal Crm that reminds you to send a text to someone and reminds you to send birthday wishes to people, and I have always hesitated or resisted those things because it feels like you’re turning something that is more art in relationships into a real science. And it starts to feel less human. To me it’s the same reason that, like AI bots that reach out to people and send messages to them on your behalf, feels weird to me, and I would not do it. But some people will find real utility from those things, and who am I to judge their own experience with it? So my personal perspective on this is that it is ultimately, and everything in this book and everything in the ideas is about what works for you in increasing your sort of net happiness or fulfillment in your own life, your net meaning in your own life. Personally, when I think of financial wealth, I do not think about transactions. I think about things that allow me to fulfill my responsibilities and create experiences with people that I love like when I think about stacking and building financial wealth. It’s not so that I can experience a level of power or prestige. It’s so that I can take care of my wife and son at the end of the day like that is my entire goal of making any sort of money is to make sure that my son is taken care of and so that is sort of the bias that I take with everything that I am looking at, and the other side of me, to be honest, just says like, if you are building and creating meaningful relationships, even if it is not an entirely altruistic reason for you doing that if you are building and showing up for people in their time of need, because you are thinking that it is going to increase your lifetime net happiness and fulfillment. It’s not a bad thing to me that you are doing it. For that reason we never really know someone else’s motivation and the way that they’re approaching things. But if people are doing good things for the world. You know a lot of philanthropy. People are like they’re doing it because it makes them feel good, not because they’re truly, you know, trying to help in some way that is actually probably a side benefit of the thing that they are really trying to do. Which is, it makes them feel good about giving back to the world. So it’s an interesting question, and one worthy of deeper, deeper exploration. But those are kind of just my initial off the Cuff thoughts.
Seth Green: Wonderful. Let’s jump into the 5 types of wealth I mean. So time is the 1st one that you go into. You’ve already described it a bit. But you have this great metaphor of a time billionaire in the book. Can you just talk about what that is, and kind of how you see time as so valuable in a world where I think, especially the subgroup that you’re probably thinking of for this book that may be in a place where they have some financial wealth right, and are thinking about these other assets, where time is often scarce and and not fully present.
Sahil Bloom: Yeah, the idea behind this entire concept of time. Wealth is just the recognition, the awareness that time is your most precious asset. We don’t think about that on a daily basis. We sort of have that awareness in the back of our head, but it’s very rarely in the front of our consciousness in order to act on it. And the truth is that life is really just a game of awareness and action. You need awareness, and then you need to act on that awareness and awareness in the back of your head is actually not all that useful? Because if you can’t act on it in the moment when it’s tested in the testing point. Then, it’s not a particularly useful form of awareness. This idea of time. Wealth is to recognize on a daily basis that time is truly your most precious asset. The question that I love to bring to light is, would you? Trade lives with Warren Buffett. He’s worth 130 billion dollars. Last I checked. You know, he flies around on a Boeing business jet. He has access to absolutely anyone in the world. He basically reads and learns for a living. But none of you would. Trade lives with him simply because he is 95 years old. There’s no way you would agree to trade the amount of time he has left for all of that money, and on the Flip side he would give anything. All of the money in order to be in your shoes, to have the amount of time that you have left. So with a simple question, you are highlighting the fact that your time has quite literally incalculable value. And yet on a daily basis, how much of that time are we really wasting? How much of it. Are we disregarding it? How much are we spending, scrolling on our phones, comparing our lives to other people, stressing about the past, anxiety about the future? All of these things that are fundamentally disregarding this one most precious asset that we can never get back.
Seth Green: I want to jump into social wealth. And here we’re coming to this idea of these deep relationships. And you just showed your phone. We’re in an age dominated by technology. Can you share a little bit about what you think social health looks like in our current moment, and where we’re missing from the perspective of building that asset.
Sahil Bloom: I think this is arguably one of the most terrifying trends that we are experiencing as a society today, which is to say something quite profound, because there are a lot of things that I think are quite scary that we’re facing. And that is really this idea of loneliness in the era of technology that, I think, is only going to get worse. As you see, AI and technology start to dominate more of our interactions with one another bunch of terrifying statistics out there. Jonathan Haight has done a great job with the anxious generation bringing this to the light. You know teenagers are spending 70% less time in person with their friends than they were 2 decades ago. 70% scary scary stuff, especially when placed in the context of the robust body of science that exists, that talks about the fact that relationships are the single, most important, determining factor in living a happy, healthy life. The Harvard study of adult development is a study done over the course of 85 years. They followed the lives of 1,300 original participants, and another 700 or so of their descendants. They found that the single greatest predictor of physical health at age 80 was relationship satisfaction. At age 50. It wasn’t your cholesterol, your blood pressure, your smoking or drinking habits. It was how you felt about your relationships that determined your health outcomes. So we know that our relationships are fundamentally the thing that is going to lead to the happy, healthy life that we all want. And yet on a daily basis, when we get busy relationships are the 1st thing that falls by the wayside. It’s the 1st thing that starts to slip when we get busy. And we’re no longer prioritizing. We have these blockers, this friction that exists between us, that is preventing us from actually building in real life in-person connections. And so the call to action around all of this is to go back to the basics. It is to recreate some of the kind of olden days, if you will, the golden days in some ways of what it looked like. 1015, 20 years ago, when I was growing up. We would just go hang out at the Mall, I’m sure a lot of other people have had these experiences like you grow up. You go to the local mall, and you’re hanging out with your friends for hours on end, or I would go out on a Saturday morning with my friends to play sports, and we would just come back in the evening like that was the whole day you would just be out playing with your friends. And now the experiences of a lot of our children are going to be very different unless we really push it, because the status quo is to lean into these technologies that exist, that reduce all of this friction and that pull the friction out of our lives. The truth that I think we’ve started to learn along the way is that sometimes the friction was actually what created meaning in our life. And so, when we’ve grown increasingly obsessed with removing and sucking all of the friction out of the system with all of these technological improvements, that in some ways have improved our lives. It’s quite possible that along the way we’ve sucked a lot of the meaning out of it as well.
Seth Green: University of Chicago, Professor Nick Epley, who’s done a lot of research on how to overcome some of those frictions. Even just when you’re on a train, engaging the person sitting next to you turns out you’re happier. They’re happier. Even have small relationships, and then he does a lot on the big conversations that you can have, and that we have missed those questions in some ways, because we’re on our devices and not in the world. So it’s a very real phenomenon. I’ll just acknowledge last night here, and so I brought my older daughter to a soccer game, and then had to be called off the field every couple of minutes, and they spent almost the entire time on the sidelines and the parents were talking the whole time. Because I guess we’re in a generation where we do that. But I’m looking over, and our daughter doesn’t have a phone that she had at the moment. But everyone else is on their phone. So they’re sitting next to each other, but on their devices, and you know I have so many memories of getting called off the field, or, in my case, the tennis court, and then you just sit on the sidelines and talk, right? And so it’d be useful. And it took friction out, you know, that they all could have this, but it really meant that they weren’t having that conversation so just interesting to see that. And then what are the down, you know consequences of that from a domino effect later on. I want to ask one more question. Then we’re going to come to the audience. I want to come to mental health, you know. I think there’s a lot that’s covered broadly on this topic. It’s such a huge area. Let me double down on one specific piece of mental health because you look at this idea of identity transitions in the book and how we can think about identity in the context of mental health and the identity reformation process, and so many of the people that are in our network are thinking about these transitions, often between their career and that next chapter of life. And you obviously also understand this because you’ve kind of gone through a transition in your identity as part of this next chapter. Can you talk about the mental health framework? But how to think about how that intersects with identity and potentially the practices that support major life transitions.
Sahil Bloom: Yeah, I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of these identity shifts because I played baseball most of my life. I went to college on a baseball scholarship, played at Stanford for 4 years, had the great pleasure of playing with a lot of incredible players who went on and had long careers playing professionally, some of whom are still playing professionally, you know, was around a lot of high performing athletes, and one thing that I’ve seen both in my own life, and with a lot of them is that the biggest struggle is this shift that happens whenever the sport is no longer a part of your life when it’s sort of taken away from you. And it’s a funny thing for a lot of them, because the peak of your career in those sports is like 25 years old, and then you’re done by your early thirties. And right at the time when the compounding really starts in a normal career. You are sort of done, and there’s a really challenging and painful period from that shift. If you haven’t prepared for it, or if you weren’t ready for it in some way. One thing that I have always thought was interesting is just this idea, that there is no real before or after when it comes to you as a person or your identity, you are in a constant state of change. There is no prior identity or new identity. You are just constantly changing, learning and growing and embracing. That idea brings a lot of solace in this journey. It’s embracing the idea that you can be multiple things. You can change, you can grow, you will constantly change and develop. It’s sort of the human manifestation of this concept of the ship of Theseus. This thought experiment of Theseus comes back from battling the Minotaur, and leaves his ship in the hands of the people of Athens, and for a thousand years they maintain the ship, and they maintain the ship by every single time one of its boards gets rotten they replace it with a new board, and after a thousand years every single board of this ship has been replaced, and the thought experiment is asking the question of whether the ship that is now floating in the harbor is still the ship of Theseus, or if it is something entirely different and the point, at least in my own mind, is that it doesn’t really matter, because you are in a constant state of change as a human being, and you need to just embrace that along the journey. You don’t need to feel this pressure to attach to a prior identity, or to find a new identity. You can be in this constant state of change and flow in the same way that your natural human body is in replacing its own cells on an ongoing basis.
Seth Green: That resonates for me. I will say that I think the double challenge of this is one recognizing your internal change, and I think that is fair to say we are always changing, and we notice, I mean, I know, I notice I’m in a constant flux of change. But then, when you’re in a career transition, there’s a single moment where the outside world and it is a bit of a light switch sees you differently. Right? So right now, in most contexts, I say, I’m the Dean of the Graham School at the University of Chicago. That is my way of explaining myself. My identity in an external environment as I interact. And then, if you’re not that anymore, I do think that it may be that I’m always changing. I’m always evolving. But suddenly there is a bit of a night or day in how the rest of the world understands my identity, and then how I interact with that if that makes any sense and it reshapes kind of overnight, potentially your identity, your community, and your purpose, because so much of how I define my purpose, even though it is inner in my journey right it is to serve this extraordinary institution and so I understand my purpose in relationship in some ways to that, because, you know, I try to bring my best self. But to this higher calling of this incredible truth seeking institution. And so, even though I’m constantly evolving. I feel like these moments of change can be these kind of epic disruptions where you are now having to reimagine how you serve that purpose outside of this context, how you introduce yourself outside of this context. And I think we constantly are grappling with, okay, people are always growing and evolving. They should have a growth mindset, they should be aware of that and embrace it. But then, how do we give them tools around those disruption points to be able to navigate what may be great and generative opportunities, but which are also very meaningful moments of change, if that makes sense, that almost require new tools. I want to come to the questions in the chat. We have one from Shayla. What was the most challenging type of wealth to write or research about? And I’m going to add the question of why? To that question.
Sahil Bloom: This is a good question. I personally found the financial wealth topic to be the most challenging arena to add to, perhaps partially because it has been written about at nauseam. The idea of like, okay, how do you build financial wealth has really been written about for the last 100 plus years personal finance has been a well-known category. And so the angle that I ended up taking on it was really this whole angle of understanding enough what enough means to you? Because I personally think that that is really at the core of where you leverage financial wealth to build a good life. The question I constantly find myself asking in my own life, and what I tried to then infuse into the writing and into the research around that section is, what is the money for really like? What is the money for in your own life? Because so often what happens is that people just make the assumption that, like, okay, more money equals better. So I’m just going to continue to pursue this thing because it creates more money. But asking yourself the question of, for what? To what end? What is it being used for? Like, what is the life that we are actually trying to build ends up being a really clarifying exercise for people. And so it’s the reason that I open that section with this question of what? What is your definition of enough? And even more specifically, what does life actually look like? That is enough for you. It’s not about it being Spartan or bare or simple. It is about recognizing the life that you are really trying to build towards. So that then you can create a plan and create actions that are going to contribute to it. It is also about recognizing that the human mind does not do well with numbers. When you put a number out, as your definition of enough, all that happens is you get close to it, and then it’s 2 to 3 x as much. Michael Norton, Harvard Business School Professor showed this in a bunch of studies? He asked. High net worth individuals worth anywhere from a million through a hundred 1 million, plus. How happy are you on a scale of one to 10. Then he asked, how much more money would you need to be at a 10 and across the board, whether they were worth a million or a hundred 1 million, plus. Everyone said 2 to 3 times as much. It makes no sense right? There should just be a number that is like the happiness number. But the reality is that the human mind does not do well with numbers. We just inflate them as we get close to hedonic adaptation, right? But enough life. A real visual of the life you are trying to create is not subject to that same subconscious inflation. It will probably naturally inflate as you get close, but it won’t do it so subconsciously of this 2 to 3 xing. It’ll be a more slow, steady, rational improvement and expansion, and that’s a really important and simple shift that you can make by just identifying what that life is that you’re really trying to build what the money is actually for.
Seth Green: We have another question here, Sahil, about whether or not you believe it is a cultural phenomenon that we have in the Us. Tend to align ourselves and identities so much with our profession. And maybe, if you can talk a little bit, if you do believe that there may be some distinctiveness, and how we approach that here, or maybe in Western culture, more broadly, to what difference does that potential close connection between profession and identity potentially mean? For how we might be able to balance these different types of wealth. I certainly think there are cultural differences. And my research and all of the conversations which were very global in nature, exposed a lot of cultural differences. You know the attachment it’s sort of in the ethos of American culture like this whole idea of the American dream of coming and working as hard as you possibly can to go and create a better life in this new land is woven into the DNA of American culture. In a big way.
Sahil Bloom: Americans cannot comprehend the idea that Europeans take a month off every summer to go and do nothing. It makes no sense to a lot of Americans. It creates all these memes on the Internet. And similarly, in different areas, different cultures really shine. Indian and a lot of African cultures really shine when it comes to social wealth and the family connections and creating real close ties with family networks that create a lot of social wealth. As you age, America has definitely been a nation that is over, indexed on financial wealth as a sole source of meaning, career, success, and financial wealth. Although I would say that there is a subtle shift happening under the surface. If you’re an observer of social media trends and things that people are talking about on the Internet. A, you can obviously see a pushback in society against extreme financial wealth. And B, you can also see that there are people that are starting to glamorize, living a different way. It’s no longer just about the pictures of the private jets and the yachts that people are putting up. It’s also about living simply, you know, homesteading, homeschooling people living on farms, people living simple lives that are starting to build, you know, real traction. And in sharing those messages. So I do think that there are cultural differences that are very significant, and where people come from the sort of base that people are coming from tends to differ.
Seth Green: We have a question here from Cynthia. What practical exercises or activities would you suggest to people who may be stuck in their life and work, but do not want to take risks, or do not have the courage to move on entirely.
Sahil Bloom: The book itself has these guide sections at the end of each major type of wealth which are exercises for building that type of wealth into your life. If I were to recommend one from any of those sections that anyone should do as a starting point here. It’s what I call the energy calendar, which is in the time wealth guide section. The idea with this is to identify the types of activities that create energy versus drain energy in your life. The reason that’s important is because your outcomes in life tend to follow your energy when you’re leaning into things that create energy in your life. You typically generate the best outcomes that apply to both activities and people. When you’re spending time with people who create energy in your life, the best things happen when you’re spending time with people who drain energy, bad things tend to happen but identifying what those things are is very important. So this energy calendar idea is a simple exercise that you can do using your calendar to identify those activities. Basically the end of a Monday. Let’s say, like this coming Monday. Look at your calendar at the end of the day and color code activities according to whether they created energy meaning. They lifted you up. You felt a pull or interest from them, mark them green. If they were neutral, mark them yellow, and if they drained energy, if you felt physically drained during or after. Mark it red. If you do that for a week you will have a clear visual perspective on the types of activities in your life that create energy versus drain energy from your life. What that allows you to do if you’re feeling stuck is have some sort of plan in mind for the types of things that you are going to be slowly trying to position more of your time towards, and the types of things that you are going to be slowly trying to adjust, tweak, delegate, or remove from your life. You’re never going to have a life that has 0 red 0 energy draining. There are going to be things that are responsibilities that you have to do, but improving your ratio of green to red will improve the quality of your life and improve the quality of your outcomes, you will feel less stuck. That is fundamentally what I did. This, you know, was battle tested in my own transition from the path I was on to the path. I’m on today, and it makes a big difference, and it’s very low cost, low risk, you know. 5 min of your time, probably to get a starting point here.
Seth Green: I want to end with a question that I feel like I’d be remiss if I didn’t put into the mix here. We’re a home of lifelong liberal arts. We really believe in all of the different disciplines and the expansive journey in people’s education to really help them to think beyond. In some ways the debates and the demands of the current world. And one facet of that is what we sometimes call great books. Education. These kinds of texts that you look at across time and space, and that help you to think about the big questions that anchor our lives. I don’t know how much you’ve been able to look at this question. But how do you think that that type of liberal arts experience may help people to have a wider aperture and see multiple forms of wealth as valuable meaning when you’re reading about how people across time and space, in literature, in philosophy, in these other domains, and it in some ways showcases the value of relationships what it means to die with legacy, what it means to value your time. How does that potentially impact people because it’s 1 thing to see a framework and to believe in that framework and to say, yes, this book is right. And you know, I buy into it. But it’s another thing to kind of convince your mind if that makes sense, and to train it, that all 5 matter, and that you want to embrace them. I’m curious if liberal arts education, in your view, could be a part of that journey into kind of full buy into this multifaceted form of wealth.
Sahil Bloom: Yeah, I think I mean, personally, I am of the belief that in the AI era that we are entering a liberal arts, education is actually going to be more valuable than ever before. I, personally, if I could go to school again and do it again, I would study classics, and I would probably do a much more broad-based liberal arts education than anything else, because at the end of the day I think that the ability to question defaults, to have the courage to ask questions that are challenging about these things, to wrestle with, how you think about the world, to fight your own natural arrogance about your belief set and about why you believe those things. I think that those are the things that lead to living a better life and allowing you to be a more empathetic human being, understanding people, and where they come from in the world and why they believe the things they believe, even if they differ from you in those beliefs or values. So I do think I personally am a huge, huge proponent of the humanities and of liberal arts in general.
Seth Green: On that note we will finish our conversation with you with great gratitude. This has been a fascinating conversation. We are pleased that you are sharing your experience of how you’ve built your purpose and how you’ve really begun looking across a portfolio approach. And we’re grateful that you’re sharing that with our community, and it gives us food for thought, as each of us build a future that hopefully encompasses all 5 in our lives. I thank you again for your time and your insights.
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