The 5 Types of Wealth That Will Change Your Life | Sahil Bloom

16:56Sahil Bloom: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, 3 ,000 miles away. And he asked how old they were. And I said mid-60s. And he asked how often I saw them. And I said about once a year. And he looked at me and said, okay, so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die. And in that moment, I felt like I had been punched in the gut. I mean, the idea that the amount of time you have left with the people that you care about most in the world is that finite and countable that you can place it onto a few hands.

17:37Sahil Bloom:That had really just shaken me to the core. And we took a dramatic action. We reassumed that internal locus of control. Within 45 days, I had left my job. We had sold our house in California, and my wife and I had moved 3 ,000 miles across the country to live closer to both of our sets of parents. And the reason that I say the way you articulated that was so powerful for what happened in that moment was it created a recognition of the fact that you are in much more control of your time than you think. We had taken an action and created time. The time was going to pass one way or another, but the number of moments we had with these people we cared about could change.

18:23Sahil Bloom:We were in control of that. So that number, 15, it's now in the hundreds. We make this change, and suddenly it goes from 15 like that to being 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. We had reassumed agency over this thing that we were in control of. So time is passing one way or another, but your ability to experience it, to deploy it into the moments and the windows that really count, that's up to you.

18:53Dr. Michael Gervais:So there's two parts to that. One is you increase the time with your parents by making a decision. And I want to go back to the hinge moment one more time. And what I'm also pointing to is the way that you fit. like, you know, a musician or a dancer fits into the music and there's a pocket. So musicians call it being in the pocket. Athletes call it being in the zone. You know, scientists call it flow state, but the moment is moving. So that's kind of the way we talk about time. It's not just being present with time. You and I are present right now. And if I'm frustrated and if I'm pissed or if I'm anxious, I'm still in the present moment, but the contour of how I'm in the pocket of this moment has a tone to it.

19:51Dr. Michael Gervais:So this idea that be present, bullshit, That's not right. We are always present, but we might just be three-quarters the way with it. We might have a prickliness with it. We might have an abundance and a joy with it. We're always in the unfolding present moment. Even when our mind is thinking about later, there's still part of us, the essence of us as well is here. I wanted to have this part of the conversation because I know how much you value time. and you made this hinge shift in your life to go have more time. But there's also right underneath of that, the way that you contour yourself in the unfolding unknown present moment.

20:37Dr. Michael Gervais:Can you open that idea up a little bit about how you ready yourself to be your very best in the moments with your parents?

20:48Sahil Bloom:you know i think that a lot of this for me in my own life has been a derivative of this idea from ancient greece that there are two types of time ancient greeks actually had two different words for time they had chronos which was the idea of chronological linear quantitative time the clicking of the clock that is the way that most of us interact with time that's how we think of it. And then they had Kairos, which was the idea that not all time is created equal, that there are specific moments, windows that have more texture. I think of it as texture. I think of it as meaning of weightiness to it.

21:30And that energy put into those moments has

21:34Sahil Bloom:greater outcomes. It actually creates on a higher level.

21:38Dr. Michael Gervais:You speak a lot about leverage, like input-output. You know, like, is it Archimedes or Hercules? I can't remember. Archimedes. Yeah, like, you know, give me a lever, I can move the world. That type of idea. The exact quote is escaping me. It is that.

21:54Sahil Bloom:Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.

21:57Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah, and so that idea, you speak a lot about that. And I like to think about inputs to outputs. And outsized inputs have a dramatic impact on outputs. And the one more thing here is that the way that we are spending our time holds material impact in the way we design our life. And the arrival fallacy is real and this time, this idea that we're going to have more time is real. And those two false ways of dealing with the reality of the fleeting nature of time keep us into this never, never land. Like, I'll see you later. Okay. As I'm walking out the door, not making eye contact, not addressing, like, I might not see you ever again.

22:48Dr. Michael Gervais:And that's a really important practice for me. And it helps me. It sounds more, but it helps me be here now because I don't know. now my job right now is to be here with you and if i don't honor that and i've got this idea like we're going to see each other again like oh it's going to be great we'll have dinner hey that might not ever happen so it helps me stay here but hold on let me stay on this kairos idea for a minute let's see what you do with this chronological tick tick tick tick can i be present get more time with the things that i like doing with the people i want to be with tick tick tick okay and then Kairos is this idea about the animation, the texture, I think you said.

23:26What if I were to suggest that some moments don't have more value than others?

23:33Dr. Michael Gervais:This is the Kairos idea. But blending those two, that every moment of your life is the most important moment that you'll ever have. And the Super Bowl is not a bigger moment than practice number one. those those um there's not a fallacy for this but the the idea that one moment matters more than the other the kairos i think actually sets me up for the the arrival fallacy i'll be different later when that moment happens i'll be prepared and i'm going to train now to be prepared for that moment no yes and no this moment is the only moment i get and if when you take this moment away from me and I no longer get to experience this moment, that's the end of my physical life.

24:18Dr. Michael Gervais:That's kind of how it's defined. So how do you square that idea between Kairos and Kronos?

24:25Sahil Bloom:What I really think about often is that

24:31Sahil Bloom:Kairos time is not some predetermined fate-driven concept. Ditto. It is created by you. And so it's interesting. Which you give meaning to the moment. Exactly. Which is to say that you can create any moment.

24:50Dr. Michael Gervais:So why not create this moment to be the most important moment?

24:53Sahil Bloom:I think that is what is within your control entirely to do. And so you should do that.

24:58Dr. Michael Gervais:Does that sound exhausting to you?

25:00Sahil Bloom:No, I think that it sounds like the way that we... That doesn't mean that you apply the most intense, insane energy to every moment. but it means that you take every moment seriously. And what I would say about this idea of big moments or these windows, the reason I believe in that is because the world doesn't just revolve around you. There's everyone else that is also going about hopefully trying to create the most of every moment that they have. And sometimes all of those forces that are out in the world, think of it as like atoms flying around in space, collide in these very unique ways that create this incredible symphony of these things coming together in this one spot where it really counts.

25:47Sahil Bloom:And everything that you've done leading up to that has built to this one crescendo where whatever it is, it's one minute left in the Super Bowl. All of these players who have spent their entire careers putting and investing energy into their given moments have led up to this very unique point in time. And the way that you act during that point in time has significant impact on what the future looks like for the world in a lot of cases. I mean, if you think about it in certain geopolitical moments, like think about the person who saw the missiles firing during the Cold War and their responsibility was to press the button and fire nuclear missiles back.

26:28Sahil Bloom:But they thought for one moment about whether or not this might be not real. They could have ended the entire world in that world. This is a real story. This is a real story. This happened. The person said, like, no, I don't think this is real. Chose not to follow what the protocol was, which was to fire these nuclear missiles back and saved the future of the planet in this one moment where all of these, you know. Oh, the power of discernment. And, you know, look, I think that reading more and going deeper down the rabbit hole of the very nature of time will break your brain in a lot of ways. Because what you realize is that there's no such thing as just like time existing, right?

27:14Sahil Bloom:Like there's not a present moment that you can say across the entire span of the universe. There's not really that, that's not really a concept. Time doesn't exist. Time sort of exists in the mind of the perceiver of the time. What I have found personally in my own journey wrestling with these things as a not particularly religious person that's that's a funny way of saying it you know i i don't have some dramatic belief in a single higher power what was your family's um my dad's family has um jewish descent uh my mom's side of the family is sort of a blend of like hindu muslim zoroastrian i mean there's like a little bit of everything.

27:58Sahil Bloom:Buddhist. So a real mixed bag. Is it a Persian influence? Like Zoroastrianism? Yeah. So one of my uncles is Zoroastrian, Persian, Zoroastrian. It's the kind of world's first religion, which is - Yeah, it's an ancient - It's a beautiful - Yeah. And what I will say is that after having my son, and now he's three years old, he asks a lot of questions. He's going down a big why phase of asking why. When we talk about a lot of these things, and he's asking me why, why, why, I find that a lot of the why rabbit holes converge to something that feels like God at some point. Part of that is that it gets to the point where it feels unexplainable by physics and by what we understand about the world around us.

28:44Sahil Bloom:And I always find that interesting. I wouldn't say it has made me all of a sudden feel religious, but it is interesting to me that things converge to this inability to comprehend what we are trying to articulate or comprehend.

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32:00Sahil Bloom:Time being first and financial being last was very deliberate.

32:05Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah.

32:06Sahil Bloom:The in-between was sort of a personal approach. Yeah. Largely social was the second because it flowed naturally off of this idea of time and the amount of time you have with these people. Yeah. Flowing into social, flows into mental, flows into the physical. Flows into financial. Flows into the financial.

32:28Dr. Michael Gervais:Okay, cool. And so when you think about living a good life and you've got the five verticals of wealth, which most people call health, you know, like so like you're having fun with modern wealth. is is financial is it less important to you or is it equally as important as it was and you've rounded out the other four sources of wealth to have a tide that's higher than you know rising tide that was bigger than it was before or have you diminished the importance of financial wealth

33:06Sahil Bloom:I have gotten clarity on what being financially wealthy means to me.

33:12Dr. Michael Gervais:I was going to ask you about what does enough mean?

33:15Sahil Bloom:That is really what I've done with financial wealth, is I've recognized that it all hinges on your ability to clearly articulate what the life is that you are actually trying to build, what the money is for. Very few people have any ability to articulate what the money is for. You go and ask someone, hey, what does enough mean to you? And they give you a number, but they cannot tell you the life. They can't tell you where they live. What are they doing? What are they thinking about? What are they working on? Who are they with? All of these things that are really what that money is supposed to be building towards are left in this abstract place in their mind.

33:56Sahil Bloom:They might feel like they know what it looks like, but they don't. And what happens to most people is if you leave that idea of enoughness as a number, it just resets two to three X when you get close to it.

34:10Dr. Michael Gervais:This much in the bank. And when you get that, it's like, wait, who is the famous? You did the quote.

34:15Sahil Bloom:Oh, John D. Rockefeller. Yeah, was asked. Yeah. How much money is enough money? And he said just a little bit more.

34:22Dr. Michael Gervais:That's haunting.

34:23Sahil Bloom:Yeah. That actually haunts me.

34:25Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. You know, when I've heard it before and when I read it in your book, I was like, there it is again. Yeah. Because it keeps resetting.

34:33Sahil Bloom:It's this poverty of more. This, you know, incessant quest for more that distracts you from the beauty that is this idea of enough.

34:44Dr. Michael Gervais:So open up your insight here. How would you hope we design our life?

34:51Sahil Bloom:I think it all begins with clearly articulating what that life is that you are trying to build. And I really do think it comes down to asking yourself those questions. Where are you? What are you doing? Who are you with? How are you living? What does it look like? Is it one house? Is it two houses? Is it five houses? It's not about it being Spartan or bear. It is about it being yours. And mine is going to be fundamentally different from what yours looks like. I've never talked to someone in the thousands of people I interviewed for the book. I never talked to anyone who said that their enough life was, you know, traveling around on a private jet by themselves.

35:30Sahil Bloom:It just doesn't happen. No one wants that. People want to be surrounded by those they love doing things they find meaningful, hopefully healthy enough to do those things with some freedom. It's remarkably consistent across people. And there's some nuance to how fancy it is, what they're able to afford, all these different things. But the ability to clearly see that picture in your mind is then how you can reverse engineer, okay, what are the actions I need to take then to go and build towards that thing? The reason it's so important is because your expectations are your single greatest financial liability.

36:07Sahil Bloom:We don't think about that. We don't think about the fact that expectations are the greatest risk to living a wealthy life. I know many people, and I'm sure you do, who have way more money than I do but are not wealthy. They are not wealthy because they are constantly chasing some version of more that the world has handed them. Maybe they live in New York City and they're making$10 million a year, but they hang out with people making$50 a year. and all they do is spend all their time feeling bummed that they can't have the house in aspen or that they can't have the bigger boat or the bigger yacht and i tell this story in the book of a friend who sold a company for several hundred million dollars and he was celebrating this exit by taking all his family and friends on this trip on this yacht and he was so excited and all his friends are coming they're all celebrating so exciting again this is another haunting story Yeah, and one of the friends arrived and looked over at the next mooring and saw this even bigger yacht and said to my friend, wow, I wonder who's on that one.

37:12Sahil Bloom:And suddenly in this one moment, all of the excitement and joy that my friend had experienced from creating this experience with his friends had been deflated at the comparison to this other boat. And so the lesson, as I say it, is there is always going to be a bigger boat. in life. If you are measuring your entire worth on the basis of this thing, this money, this status symbols that you can achieve, you are going to be chasing this mirage, this castle in the air that just keeps disappearing and reappearing on the horizon. One of my favorite movies from childhood is Cool Runnings. It's this movie of this Jamaican bobsled team.

37:51Sahil Bloom:It's kind of a funny, cute movie. And John Candy plays the coach. And he has this line, he says to one of the players, A gold medal is a wonderful thing, but if you're not enough without it, you're never going to be enough with it. That line, if I could get that tattooed on my brain, I would. If you're not enough without it, you're never going to be enough with it.

38:17Dr. Michael Gervais:It's so good. Yeah. Yeah. And you're describing something that, you know, as I read that passage and hearing it again, there's a CEO that I spend time with who it's a European-based company and it's one of the largest companies in the world. And he's got one of the largest boats in the world. And he very candidly says, what am I doing? You know, like he's got to keep grinding because he bought some stuff that now owns him. And I had a hinge moment early in my life where I was going to travel the world and serve. And I was perfectly fine for my breakfast nook area in the apartment I was living in to be grounded on a plywood and milk crates and a vinyl cloth that I'd throw over.

39:10Dr. Michael Gervais:And that was my aspiration as long as I could surf the world. And so low material possessions and really high experiential stuff. I'm really glad I didn't do that. I missed out on something by choosing the path I did, but I'm really happy in the path that I did choose. But I did miss something that now I do want to go travel a lot to surf or ski or whatever, but my body is old, older, and I can't do what I did 25 years ago in a wave, 35 years ago in a wave. So I am missing something by it. So I don't think that there's like this one path that is clear. I can afford to go do that traveling and I'm choosing not to do it.

39:57Dr. Michael Gervais:And I can't do the thing as well as I would have loved to have done it when I was younger. So I don't think it's this, you know, fairy tale that we write. There's costs and benefits to, you know, kind of all the decisions. But I do appreciate you ringing the bell to say, wait, wait, wait, broaden the scoreboard. Okay, let's come back though. I do want to understand your hinge idea that fundamentally changed your life from Stanford, private equity, making money, external rewards are kind of the main theme. That's your scoreboard. Somebody says to you, you've got 15 visits with your parents left.

40:37Dr. Michael Gervais:And you said, Oh, okay. This is not uncommon so far, but what's uncommon is that you fundamentally shifted and changed your life based on a moment of pain, of realization. Open up that moment a little bit more when your friend said that to you and then what happened inside of you to take the actions that you did.

40:59Sahil Bloom:I think that in a lot of ways, that moment was the culmination of a lot of tiny moments where I had felt that that change needed to happen. And it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. You were ready. I think I was ready because I had felt micro pain over and over and over again for a period of at least 18 months.

41:29Dr. Michael Gervais:And why didn't you take action on those smaller micro?

41:33Sahil Bloom:because i think micro pain is easy to ignore yeah especially if you are a disciplined driven ambitious person who is prone to write off pain as part of your growth and part of your uh sort of journey to achieve the things that you want i think it's easy to look at those feelings those sensations that you're experiencing and to say like well i'm just going to grind right you kind to take pride in it. And I had gone through a pretty dark time during that 18 months with COVID, being stuck at home, social life non-existent. My wife and I, unfortunately, were struggling to conceive at the time. We had been together since we were 15 years old.

42:18Sahil Bloom:It was the first time we'd ever experienced real hardship in our relationship, really creating strain, bottling that up because I didn't have anyone to talk to about it. There were all of these forces that were sort of chipping away. And I was compounding it by drinking six, seven nights a week. There were just a lot of forces in my life that I felt were pushing that way. But nothing had been the like enormous tsunami wave that hits you and says, you have to do this. to be totally frank i think that it is easy to say that the worst thing in the world is being on a bad path i personally think that the worst thing in the world is being on a good path that isn't yours a bad path is the one that screams at you every single day that you have to get off it is so obvious it's so clear to everyone around you to yourself that like i need to get off this path because it's destroying me.

43:22Sahil Bloom:But the good path that isn't yours is much trickier because there are a lot of forces that tell you to stay on it, that tell you that it's good, you're paying your bills, you have a house, like there's these things, people think you're impressive. There's all these things that are saying to stay on it. And that is very much where I found myself on that good path that wasn't really mine. So all of those micro cuts, while they might have been impactful in sort of an absolute sense, in the relative sense of the bigger picture, they weren't enough. They weren't enough to actually spark action. The tsunami wave that came when I had this recognition about the time, that was what pushed it all over the edge to recognize this isn't even a good path.

44:09Sahil Bloom:If I measure on a different plane, this is not a good path. This is a bad path, and it needs to get changed.

44:15Dr. Michael Gervais:So that insight shifted you from good path that's not yours to a bad path, which actually made the shift easier. How close to the surface are the emotions of that pain at that time, the depressed state that you're in? How close to the surface is that feeling now as you were just speaking?

44:38Sahil Bloom:Close to the surface and can I still feel it, how I felt?

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46:18Sahil Bloom:The pain around our struggles with fertility and how that interplayed with that moment in my life is still very raw and real. mainly because I catch myself in the present moment struggling with this odd dynamic of complaining about things that I prayed for. You know, recently I had this...

46:52Dr. Michael Gervais:Wait, before you go to the story, what does that mean?

46:54Sahil Bloom:You know, like in life... Complaining what I prayed for. In life, we have this tendency to... pray for things, right? Like these things for the future that we want, whether it's as simple as this house that I want or this car or this engagement ring or having a healthy child in my case. And then you get that thing and a few months go by and all of a sudden you find yourself complaining about the exact thing that you prayed for. And I have in my own journey felt that, that we have this beautiful, healthy boy. And there have been several instances recently even when he's a toddler. He's terrorizing me in some way.

47:41Sahil Bloom:I'm trying to work on something. And I find myself complaining. I'm like, why is he doing this? This is so annoying. Doesn't he know I'm working? And then I catch myself. And I remember that five years ago. I mean, again, I say I'm not a particular religious person, but I prayed every single night that we would one day have a healthy child. And now here I am in this moment complaining about the exact thing that I prayed for.

48:10Dr. Michael Gervais:How are you managing your emotions right in this moment? Because you're flooded. I don't really feel like I need to manage them. They're just happening?

48:18Sahil Bloom:Yeah. And you're letting it flow? Yeah, I don't mind being open about these things.

48:22Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah, yeah, cool.

48:23Sahil Bloom:I do feel like sometimes you physically manage them. Like I can feel it with my hands. Like there's a tension in my hands that I'm kind of trying to bottle something, even just thinking about it. But I think that as a man, especially, who, you know, looks a certain way and has a certain track record of like, I was an athlete, I worked in this, you know, career and these high status things. Like there's this belief or this assumption that everything is just great and you manage or bottle up whatever it is that you've felt along the journey. And you probably haven't even felt those things, but if you have, you just kind of coast on by them and then onto the next thing.

49:17Sahil Bloom:And especially with fertility, I think it's one of those things that people tend to just suffer with in silence. We certainly did. You know, this like monthly buildup to this one moment and this enormous letdown. And for me, with my wife especially, seeing the disappointment in her was particularly challenging because I just want to be like the, you know, the feeling of safety, the provider. and not being able to do something in that way is a very unfamiliar feeling for someone who has always been able to do the thing that fixes x like identify the problem be the solution the better outcome on the other side that was my whole life was just that it's like i'm just gonna plan execute and then you get the outcome over and over again whatever it was and it's unfamiliar territory when you get thrown into this position where you can't do that.

50:23Sahil Bloom:It's something is in God's hands in some way, as it were. And, you know, I have since felt that on a variety of different occasions, you know, most recently with my parents' health. And I would say that the moments that I experienced with my wife coming to terms with that, wrestling with that, us enduring, crawling through the mud with that, have prepared me better than anything else for navigating what is undoubtedly going to be a painful next 10 or 15 years as my parents get older and as I have to experience that struggle that comes with that.

51:02Dr. Michael Gervais:Thank you for not just having clever words on a book and telling some clever stories to, you know, to share your insights from the book on this podcast, but to be the animation of thoughts and emotions that are fundamentally important to living a good life. You're doing it now, so thank you. Okay, if you could kind of turn the corner here just a little bit, what do you hope people will get from your research and your writings or this conversation to be just a little bit better?

51:41Sahil Bloom:I hope that people will ask themselves some of these inherently uncomfortable questions.

51:49Dr. Michael Gervais:Let's tick off like concretely a handful of important questions and then maybe even pull on the thread a little bit to take it a little bit further, like how, what to do with those

51:59Sahil Bloom:questions. The insight here is just that all of the answers that you seek in life are found in the questions that you avoid, right? It is the ones that you don't want to ask, that you don't want to look in the mirror. One of the most powerful questions anyone can ask is, if a third party were to observe me for a week, what would they say my priorities are? Recognition is that there are two types of priorities in life. There are the priorities we say we have, and there are the priorities our actions show we have. Oftentimes, there's a huge gap between the two. And closing that gap is how your life improves.

52:40Sahil Bloom:but you need to create an awareness that the gap exists in the first place in order to take action to close it. Zooming out enough so that you can see that I have found creates enough perspective to go and do it. Speaks to the second question that I'll offer which is one of my favorites. If you were the main character in a movie of your life what would the audience be screaming at you to do right now. We've all been there sitting in a movie or television show. We just want to jump through the screen and grab the main character and chase the girl to the airport. Don't go down in the basement, you know, look out behind you, whatever that thing is.

53:22Sahil Bloom:You are that main character in the movie of your life and the audience would be screaming something at you right now. So what is it? What is that thing that is so blindingly obvious from the outside looking in that you are either choosing to ignore or have yet to create enough perspective to see. Do you know what that is for you? Slow down. I think life often follows this like almost accordion where it's closed in and you start getting anxious that you don't have enough opportunity. Oh my God, what am I going to do? How am I going to do all these different things? Suddenly some things start going well.

54:01Sahil Bloom:You're taking action. The accordion expands. all of a sudden every opportunity in the world is in front of you. It looks like you're, you know, this enormous expanse. And because you are still in the pattern of thinking of that small shoved in accordion, you start grabbing at everything out in front of you. It's like this buffet. And then all of a sudden you're overwhelmed. You have too many things on your plate and you realize you need to start shifting it back in. And then you go through that whole experience again. I have very much on the back of this book experienced that rapid expansion. And I am very bad at saying no to things.

54:40Sahil Bloom:As much as I talk about it, write about it, try to improve upon it, I self-identify as a nice person, which is one of the worst things that you can self-identify as if you were trying to say no. Because anyone that comes and asks you for a little bit of your time, like, well, I'm a nice person. I should spend five minutes with this person 15 minutes. I should respond to this. I should grab coffee with this. And every single time you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else. And in my case, what I'm saying no to is time with my son and wife. It sounds harsh, but it's the reality.

55:11Sahil Bloom:That's what it is. And learning to navigate that natural accordion of life a little bit more effectively, sort of reduce the amplitude of your wave, if you will, that is where my life will improve.

55:27Dr. Michael Gervais:That's really cool, man. Because you did two things. You stayed pretty concrete about doing less, and then you took it right down into the emotional. What I'm learning from you is that you allow emotions to move pretty transiently throughout your body, and you use words well to be able to capture what's happening. You're not run over by emotions. You're working with them. I think that that's maybe a little bit of the superhero that I feel from how you're showing up, the special skill or trait or whatever the superhero has. And what I really appreciate about that is that I've said oftentimes in my life is that if I'm going to go somewhere, you're not paying me to go do the thing.

56:14Dr. Michael Gervais:I actually like the thing. I've designed my life in a way that I really like the things I get to do. So I'm not paid to go to wherever to do the thing. My rate is actually quite simply early days. It was like, how much does it cost to be away from surfing or my loved ones or like, how much does that cost to be away from that for a little bit of a time? That's not a good business model, by the way, to think that way. It should be more about the value that you're providing. But I do still, in a very simple way, think like, oh wait a week away from my wife and son like oh hold on you know like that's a big ask so i really appreciate um the way that you're structuring your thinking and i've appreciated how you've outlined kind of a new scoreboard to think about and if people were to answer those big questions what do you hope they do with them i hope they take one tiny action against their

57:11Sahil Bloom:answer. I am a big believer that you are one year away from living a completely different life. The reason I'm a big believer in that is because I experienced that. I mean, in May of 2021, I was living in about as dark a moment as I've had in my life. My wife and I were struggling with this fertility journey. I was drinking all the time. We were living 3 ,000 miles away. one year later we were driving our son home from the hospital to both of our sets of parents cheering in the driveway of this home that we had created and built. I was working on things I cared about. I was healthier than I had ever been.

57:53Sahil Bloom:Literally one year. And so I cannot think of a better example to share with people that you are one year of asking the right questions and taking the right actions away from living the life that you really want. Awesome.

58:10Dr. Michael Gervais:Awesome. And one more turn before we round up here is that Dr. Butler, Robert Butler, in 2013, had a really important bit of research around purpose and longevity. And he found that people that were aligned to their purpose lived longer. And there's a handful of other bits of research around purpose that are compelling. But just the one on living longer, and if you combine that with a sense of well-being, which there's other research to support that. So higher quality and longer, healthspan, lifespan. How do you think about purpose and figuring out, one, how to help people align to purpose and how to swing across all five verticals of wealth that you've talked about.

58:59Sahil Bloom:I love this. It's sort of a derivative of this idea of ikigai. You know, ikigai is this ancient Japanese concept of thinking about the kind of like concentric circles of what you love doing, what you're good at, and broadly speaking, what the world needs. I love that idea of what the world needs as being this centering concept, because the term world is often misinterpreted. World can be as small as your family. Your world can be your partner, your child. Your world could be the world in a broad sense. How you define world during the current season of life that you are in fundamentally dictates the plane on which you need to think about your purpose.

59:48Sahil Bloom:I personally think that the natural progression that people go through is from thinking about their world as being themself to thinking about their world as being the world. And you can see that in a lot of

1:00:00Dr. Michael Gervais:octogenarians, you know, tend to think about generativity, giving back. Exactly.

1:00:04Sahil Bloom:Acts of service of others. That's right. Yeah. But it begins in this selfish state. I really think that is the first thing to get clear on when you think about defining your purpose. What is your current world in this season of life? If you are a new parent and you are just starting out on that journey, your world is your child and partner in whatever construct. And your most baseline level purpose is to create for that unit, for that world. And as you progress from that, that shifts. But being clear on what that world looks like, I think is where most people should start to start to hone in on what that purpose looks like.

1:00:41Dr. Michael Gervais:Nice. Super good. And ikigai is a foundational idea in Japanese culture that you're reminding us of that process. Yeah, very cool, man. Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed your writings and I've definitely enjoyed the conversation. One takeaway, what you hope somebody will be able to do with this conversation. Take one small action is what you said, answer some hard questions, and then take one more turn of the screw there.

1:01:11Sahil Bloom:In the coming week or month, put one hour on your calendar that is going to be just you and your thoughts. No technology, take a notebook, pen, and just think about some of the things that we've talked about during this conversation. Zoom out and think about these things. I guarantee you will come away from that hour with yourself with a new insight that will spark some action. And that may be the one action that does change your life.

1:01:38Dr. Michael Gervais:Last question. What is the hard problem that you are dedicating your life to trying to solve?

1:01:44Sahil Bloom:How to share complicated, mind-bending ideas in a way that actually sparks action in people's lives. Very cool. And it is a life mission that I find really interesting and exciting. and I define my own purpose around it to create positive ripples in the world, however those may come about.

1:02:10Dr. Michael Gervais:It's funny, that was almost gonna be the name of our company, Ripples. Oh. And my wife said, hmm, doesn't sound quite right. It sounds like it's rhyming with something else. Yes, it is a tough one. I love the pebble in the pot analogy. So that beautifully said, well articulated, clear with emotions, systems thinker, action oriented. You know, this was an intense conversation. How was it for you?

1:02:34Sahil Bloom:I felt lucky to be able to have that conversation. And so I hope that other people listening to it out there enjoy it and find as much value from it as I did in getting to have it. It really felt like a, I go on podcasts, but it's pretty rare that I come away feeling like, Oh, I am personally glad that I got to sit down and do that.

1:02:58Dr. Michael Gervais:I feel the same way. So it's a good partnership with a combo. So we should figure out how to do something together later. I would love to. Mate, thank you again.

1:03:06Sahil Bloom:Thank you.

1:03:07Dr. Michael Gervais:Next time on Finding Mastery, we're joined by Brian Werdersheim, a seasoned financial advisor who brings heart, clarity, and real talk to one of life's most emotional topics, money. No matter where you are in your financial journey, this episode offers practical, human-centered advice for building a healthier, more intentional relationship with your finances. Join us on Wednesday, August 13th, 9 a.m. Pacific for this super insightful conversation.

1:03:58Dr. Michael Gervais:Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to findingmastery.com slash newsletter to sign up. The show wouldn't be possible without our sponsors and we take our recommendations seriously. And the team is very thoughtful about making sure we love and endorse every product you hear on the show. If you want to check out any of our sponsor offers you heard about in this episode, you can find those deals at findingmastery.com slash sponsors. And remember, no one does it alone.

1:04:33Dr. Michael Gervais:The door here at Finding Mastery is always open to those looking to explore the edges and the reaches of their potential so that they can help others do the same. So join our community, share your favorite episode with a friend and let us know how we can continue to show up for you. Lastly, as a quick reminder, information in this podcast and from any material on the Finding Mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only. If you're looking for meaningful support, which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional. So seek assistance from your healthcare providers.

1:05:09Dr. Michael Gervais:Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode, be well, think well, keep exploring.