E135 - What Ambitious Men Get Wrong About Wealth, Success & Life

0:00Sahil Bloom:Look, pessimists sound smart, optimists get rich. So I am always going to lean being optimistic. That being said, I think that it is going to be the best period in history to be one of the most influential thought leaders on wealth, relationships, and what actually matters in life. A New York Times bestselling author. My guest is Sahil Bloom. There are the priorities we say we have, and there are the priorities our actions show we have. And oftentimes there's a big gap between those two things. You'll say all the right stuff about what your priorities are, someone comes and watches you for a week and you're not doing a damn one of those priorities in the way that you act and live.

0:33Sahil Bloom:This financial success, money has to be a tool, but it's not the goal in and of itself. It's an enabler to create these other types of wealth and we invest in it accordingly. What you lean into during any one of those chapters or seasons is going to change. In your 20s and 30s, it's a great time to lean into financial wealth. You set yourself up in your 20s and 30s, you can really coast in a lot of ways because of how compounding actually functions. The challenge and what you need to get through your head from a young age, actually no matter where you are is that just a quick one guys we have an offer running on the thirst app right now and for those who don't know this is an app which i built to give you everything that you could possibly need in order to get yourself in shape so this is everything which i've learned over the past 18 years of training speaking to all of the experts and coaching thousands of clients since the launch of the app we've helped over a hundred thousand people to get one step closer to achieving their goals.

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1:59Sahil Bloom:Let's get into the video. What's up guys and welcome back to First Things Thirst. We are in Miami and today's guest is Sahil Bloom. How are you doing? I'm great, man. Thank you for having me. How's everything in life going? Is it all good? Life is good. Life is good in flow. Nice. What are you working on these days? working on my next book always doing some writing doing a bunch of investing trying to figure out what the hell is going on in the world with ai yeah it's about it is this something you've been working on and investing in recently ai yeah i mean i i have an investment fund that i invest out of and so i'm constantly spending time with the founders that are on the forefront of building this stuff and it has just been blowing my mind seeing in real time the things that are like three to six months away that I think are both like completely terrifying for what the future looks like as well as unbelievably energizing.

2:52Yeah. Are you generally optimistic about it?

2:54Sahil Bloom:I'm an optimist. Like, look, pessimists sound smart. Optimists get rich. Yeah. And so I am always going to lean being optimistic. That being said, I think that it is going to be the best period in history to be high agency, curious, enterprising. And I think it could be one of the worst decades to be someone that just wanted to, you know, set the thing on autopilot and assume you were going to be okay. There's just so much changing. And in times of uncertainty, you can't just default to the status quo of the way things worked from a career and a job standpoint. I think what you're going to see is this enormous rise of solopreneurs and entrepreneurs going off and building their own thing simply because the way that we always used to work is going to be disrupted and change yeah i always wonder how it's going to affect my industry or at least the the fitness scene because i mean i've i've tried to see if like chat gpt can replicate the knowledge of a well-qualified coach and sometimes it gets it right but a lot of time there's still like these little bugs and errors that it will it will say and it kind of doesn't make much sense.

4:04It needs an expert to just tweak a few things for it to actually make sense. But I think it's going to have a big impact in the industry for sure.

4:11Sahil Bloom:Yeah. I always, like my heuristic for this is always whenever I find myself saying like, well, it's not doing this perfectly right now. I just assume that it's going to be doing that thing perfectly in a few years. Because like, if you think about it, four years ago, ChatGPT didn't even exist. And now here we are today and it can do the things that it can do. And so play it out. What is four years from now look like? It's probably going to be able to do most of the things quite well that we think of as like at least get to the 90 percent good version of it. What I don't think it can ever replicate is the things that are uniquely human, right?

4:48Sahil Bloom:Like this, the elements of taste of, you know, real agency of human interaction of like actually being able to look someone in the eye and have that face to face interaction. And so I think leaning into those things as a person is where you're going to end up thriving. It's like, what are those skills that are always going to be relevant? Selling, storytelling, those kind of things don't go away just because this new technology exists. Yeah. Are you using it much in your personal life, which is purely business? I now have like a fairly high functioning set of column agents I suppose that run in the background doing a whole bunch of like back office operational stuff so like if I want to book a flight I have an AI agent that I send here's the like hey send me flight details uh it'll pick flights out for me and I'll say book that one I created its own credit card for it it has its own phone like it can go make bookings for me on flights it can make dinner reservations for me all of those things to just kind of like streamline my life and that all happens for very little money right relative to like having a full-time person doing that and it's quite easy so i have all of those things on the back end um now starting to run a lot of that was because i was trying to learn it i just wanted to know what the capabilities were on my creative work i do everything myself yeah i I do not...

6:09Sahil Bloom:No, chat, GPT, posts, any of this stuff. No, because I don't want to outsource the thing that I actually enjoy doing. There's this story that I absolutely love of... It was Rory Sutherland. He's like a British advertising executive, right? He's on the podcast. Yeah, so he's amazing. He has this thing of, you know, imagine you're the owner of a five-star hotel. And you hire these consultants to come in and tell you how your hotel can be more efficient. The consultant comes in and is like, you know, Mike, you know, that doorman, he costs you$40 ,000 a year and you can replace it with an automatic door opener.

6:44Sahil Bloom:And now you save$40 ,000 a year. So you replace the doorman, you put in the automatic door. And two years later, your hotel is a complete disaster because the doorman was doing more than just opening the door. They were providing prestige to the hotel. They were providing security. They were doing a whole lot of other things. And so my concern as it relates to AI is that we only judge things on the basis of the surface value of what you can see, like, oh, the doorman that opens the door. And so we replace the thing. You rip it out, you fire the person, you, you know, optimize your life in some way with some new technology, not realizing that there was a whole lot of things beneath the surface that that was providing for your life.

7:24Sahil Bloom:And for me, with writing in particular, writing is not about the output that it creates. Writing is about the thinking that I have to do in the process of doing it. And so if I used ChatGPT to do all my writing, I would no longer be thinking. And as a result, my life would deteriorate over a period of time. so tell me uh for someone like me who needs some advice when it comes to just getting i think more so in the the correct zone and flow state for writing what have you found works best for you let's see there's a few things so um i think of it being like a uh like a power-up sequence like if you think of like turning on your computer your computer runs like through a sequence to power up in order to start.

8:10Sahil Bloom:You kind of need the same thing for getting into a flow state. So if you were to think about in a given week, like what were the moments that you really felt in flow in your own life? What were the things that then contributed to that flow? I think for most people, there's an element of like caffeine, some sort of stimulant that sort of gets you into that locked in state. For me, it's always like a cold brew coffee. Figure out what that thing is for you. Like what is the taste sensation that you need to have? What are the sounds that get you locked in. Like I am an unbelievably productive worker in a coffee shop for some reason.

8:43Sahil Bloom:And so I went and found a playlist that is coffee shop sounds that literally I could put on my headphones and feel like I'm in that environment. And then similarly, like playing on the senses, what are the smells and the sights that create that locked in state for you? Now, what you do with that is say, okay, what is a routine that I can use around those senses to kind of build out this like flow state Buddha. So I know if I drink my coffee or I have my nicotine pouch or whatever that thing is, put on my headphones with this same playlist on, you know, and I have whatever scent it is or whatever site is around me, I can create that locked in state on a dime.

9:22Sahil Bloom:No matter where I am, I can go and create that. Do you have the intention of writing about a specific topic God, you just, you wait for something to come to you. I don't, I'm not like enough of a, uh, inspiration driven creative that I can do that. I, the night before, so I write early in the morning. My whole book was written from 4 30 AM to 7 30 AM over the course of a few years. And what that means to me is that the night before I actually have to sort of have a approach of like, what am I going to be generally looking at the next morning? I open it up on the screen so that when you actually go to sit down, there's no friction.

9:59Sahil Bloom:Like you have to remove ruthlessly any friction that is loading your brain with something that's not the work itself. So if you're going to try to write and you know that like what you want to be thinking about is, you know, how to structure an optimal gym routine as a as a digital nomad, like, hey, I'm going to be traveling. How do I structure a routine? The thing I was asking you about before we got started here, you have that in mind. You pull up a piece of, you know, Google doc or whatever with that title at the top. So that when you sit down in the morning and create the locked in environment, you know, Hey, I'm just diving straight into this thing.

10:33So how did the idea come about for the first book? Five types of wealth.

10:38Sahil Bloom:Yeah. I, um, I spent the first 30 years of my life just marching down the most traditional path to what you think of as a like successful life. I come from a background with Indian mother and then a Harvard professor father. So like crazy academic pressure in my household. Like everything was about success looks like this. Success is getting great grades, getting into the brand name college, getting the fancy sounding job, you know, going and making money. Like that was the path. And I went and did that over and over again, convincing myself that if I just kept doing that, I would wake up one day and feel good about myself.

11:16Sahil Bloom:And as I marched down that path, You know, like I took the job that was the high paying job in finance because I thought it would sound good and make me impressive. And every year while I like progressed in that career and I was winning in that one area, everything else in my life started to slowly fall apart. I mean, I was 40, 50 pounds heavier than I am today. I was drinking seven nights a week. My mental and physical health were a mess. And most importantly, like my relationships were starting to show cracks, man. I was living 3 ,000 miles away from my parents. My wife and I were struggling with infertility at the time, just creating strain in our life.

11:53Sahil Bloom:And it all came to a head for me at the end of 2020. Like, you know, COVID, we're stuck at home. And I started to have this sensation that from the outside looking in, it looks like I'm winning the game. I'm doing the things that you're supposed to want to do. I'm making all this money. I got a fancy house. I got a car. I got all these things. But if this is what winning feels like, I've got to be playing the wrong game. Yeah. And a single conversation changed everything. You know, I went out for a drink with this old friend, sat down, 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.

12:28Sahil Bloom:It's the first time in my life I had noticed they were slowing down. They weren't going to be around forever. You notice they age more when he's, there's long periods of time from seeing them. You're like, whoa. COVID did that for a lot of people too. You know, it was like, you didn't see them for a while and And then you see them and they're like moving slower, driving a little more tentatively. And you're like, ah, something's up. And this friend asked me 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 just looked at me and said, okay, so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die.

13:00Sahil Bloom:And that was a moment that changed everything. You know, in that moment, I realized that my entire definition of success had been incomplete. I was focusing on this one thing of making money at the expense of everything else. And we took a dramatic action. Within 45 days, I had quit my job, this like high paying, fancy sounding job. We had sold our house in California and moved 3000 miles across the country to live closer to both of our sets of parents. and the last thing I'll say there as it relates to the book is like that was the spark for that journey to say money is not everything like we know that we talk about that but what is the bigger picture scoreboard for what your life can be built around it's not just about this financial success money has to be a tool but it's not the goal in and of itself it's an enabler to create these other types of wealth and we invest in it accordingly.

13:58Sahil Bloom:I, in that decision, had done a really important thing. When we moved across the country, we had created time. That number 15 more times before my parents are gone. It's now in the hundreds. I see my parents multiple times a week. They're a huge part of my son, their grandson's life. We had reassumed agency over our own lives. That idea that you are capable of taking an action to create a desired outcome. and that is such an important thought for anyone to take home because it's to recognize 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 and oftentimes there's a big gap between those two things you'll say all the right stuff about what your priorities are someone comes and watches you for a week and you're not doing a damn one of those priorities in the way that you act and live we had taken an action to close that gap.

14:51Sahil Bloom:And everyone is capable of doing that. But it requires you holding your feet to the fire enough to acknowledge that the gap exists in the first place. Yeah. So what are the main five that you outlined? So the five types of wealth are time wealth, which is all about time as your most precious asset. Social wealth is about your relationships. Mental wealth is about purpose. Physical wealth all about your health and vitality. And then financial wealth is about money. Yeah. Do you think it's something where they can all be in a balance with each other? Or do you go through life almost in chapters where you allocate more focus on trying to build one of them, then you kind of move on to the other?

15:33Sahil Bloom:I don't believe in balance. Your life has seasons. You call them chapters, seasons, like that idea that what you lean into during any one of those chapters or seasons is going to change. In your 20s and 30s, it's a great time to lean into financial wealth because of how compounding works. You set yourself up in your 20s and 30s, you can really coast in a lot of ways because of how compounding actually functions. The challenge and what you need to get through your head from a young age, actually no matter where you are, is that you cannot turn any of these areas of your life off. The common way of thinking about these things is like, yes, I know these different areas of my life exist, but I'm focused on this one right now.

16:14Sahil Bloom:So that switch gets flipped on and the other ones are just like you flip them off. So you say, OK, I'm going to focus on my on my career. Too bad physical health, too bad mental health, too bad relationships. And you just flip them all off. the reason that's so dangerous is because for most of these areas of life if you leave them switched off for too long you cannot switch them back on later in life like they are fragile i mean ask anyone you know tons of people like this like if you didn't invest in your health or relationships in your 20s 30s and 40s how hard it is to refine to those things in your 50s and 60s yeah it's almost impossible and so the antidote is just have them turned on low like it doesn't have to be perfect for it to drive you forward.

16:58Sahil Bloom:Ambitious people, one of our worst traits is we constantly allow optimal to get in the way of beneficial. We say like, oh, I don't have an hour to work out today, so I'm just not going to go to the gym. Not going to work out. I don't have, you know, an hour for deep work, so I'm not even going to send emails instead. And the truth is that anything above zero compounds. You just do the tiny thing well. 15-minute walk is infinitely better than doing nothing. Treating those other areas of your life that way, it doesn't have to be the focus of the season you're in, but you don't need to turn it off.

17:29Sahil Bloom:Just have it on low. The tiny thing done well every day, infinitely better than doing nothing. Yeah. Even with the, with the fitness and health aspects of it, if you just lift weights two, three times a week, stay active, walk around as much as you can do, and then just don't eat crap. If you can get somebody to make your food for you or just you know do it yourself but find a a way that you can do it where it doesn't take up all of your time and then i think the hardest thing which i probably struggle with i think i think everything's not necessarily in balance but instead of focusing on one for like an entire year what i'll do is there'll be a couple of weeks where it's like right here let me just lock in i do my work do the thing i want to do but i noticed that i have this sense and need for adventure and travel and having fun and you know being with my friends and usually like i've just done that now it'll be a week or maybe two weeks where i can do that usually one week is enough and then i can come back and get back into my routine again um but i think the the family thing is a is an issue because we're i'm based in dubai they're based in the uk i was supposed to see them in dubai before i came here but obviously with everything happening they had to cancel that trip and i obviously didn't go through dubai so i'm thinking damn you know when is actually the next time i'm going to see them i'm gonna have to make an effort to go probably go back to the uk to see them um so that's something which i think in the future i'll need to figure out for sure because as you said when you actually put it on paper and you see how many times you can see them like it's not a lot yeah i mean the fact that you think about it is 90 of the battle what happens to most people is they, you get on autopilot in life, right?

19:09Sahil Bloom:Like that is autopilot in your life is the single greatest risk to you living the life that you want. You like, how many people do you know that get out of college, they take the nine to five job, they wake up in 40 years and wonder what the hell they just did with their life. Like at some point you have to realize that that is not what life is meant to be. And it requires courage to say, you're going to step off that, right? You're going to make an adjustment to that. There's like, you know, the hero's journey is this narrative arc that everyone talks about, you know, like all the movies, Pixar, whatever.

19:43Sahil Bloom:They're all based on this idea. The hero leaving the safety of their home to go off on this voyage and, you know, trials, tribulations, change for the experience. Joseph Campbell, the philosopher, has this whole idea of like the reluctant hero. That like the hero actually at the very beginning of the journey does not return the call to adventure. and the reason you don't return the call is because there's an internal resistance to it. It's painful. It's scary to go and do something different than what the world has told you that you should want to do right now. But the benefits of going and doing that, of running into that fear, are enormous if you're willing to do it.

20:19Sahil Bloom:And so I just think for everyone out there, it is to say, no one can tell you how to live the life that you want to live. I can't give you the answer. You can't give them the answer for how to live. but you can give them the framing of how to think about it. Like here are the things you should be thinking about. Now you go and take that and run with it in your own life. However you think makes sense. Yeah. Well, what I've noticed with a lot of people I've spoken to is there's, there's the fear of uncertainty and stepping into the unknown. Like they have, even I've experienced it. You have like a pretty stable life.

20:53Money's good. Like you'd probably be nice to have more but things are okay and if things stayed the same you could live happily ever after now some people they they're ambitious and they want more and they generally find it easier to just be like nah like i know that i'm capable more i know i deserve more i'm gonna go and do it like i don't care if it's scary or i don't know how it's going to turn out i'm just going to do it there's other people who they're really resistant to that unknown how how do you kind of encourage them and give them confidence into leaving the thing that they're doing to try and pursue something that will either reward them more financially or just emotionally.

21:33Sahil Bloom:So there is actually clear science around this exact thing that you're saying. It's called the region beta paradox. It's this idea that humans have a tendency to stay in okay situations much longer than really painful situations. What it means is that like, if you are in an intensely bad situation, if you're living like a two out of 10 life or three out of 10 life, that's so bad that you immediately know you need to make a change. So you do, you make a change and your life improves, but the like five or the six out of 10 isn't bad enough to trigger that corrective response. And so people get stuck in the five or six out of 10 rather than making the adjustment because it's not painful enough.

22:15Sahil Bloom:Why it's so hard for most people is sort of two reasons. One is it often looks like coming down off a peak before you go find the higher peak in your life. That is really hard for people to do, right? Like you, you have scaled some sort of mountain, you're sitting at the top and what it would look like to get to the higher mountain is walking down a few steps prior to going back up. Most people aren't willing to do that. Like you, you, you've built up your whole life to meet your expectations have sort of like met at the exact level of what your life is. And so you can't like you, you, you, your whole lifestyle is built up at that exact level.

22:50Sahil Bloom:You don't have any margin of freedom to go take that step down. That's really difficult. I think the restricting, restricting of spending is probably one of the hardest things though. Okay. Now you're going to have to, you know, spend less and save a little bit more. That's why on the way up, not having your spending match every single rise in income is important because then you have a little buffer, right? Then you can take a step back in earnings and still not be in a bad, bad spot. The other thing is there's this idea called the end of history illusion, which is a psychological phenomenon that we assume that we are not going to change in the future.

23:26Sahil Bloom:We've changed a lot in the past. We know that, but we assume that the version of us today is like the final version. It's obviously not true. You know, like if you were to think back at your own beliefs five years ago, you would cringe at them. You're like, I'm so much better at in every way today than I was five years ago. Well, five years from now, you're going to cringe at yourself today. And we don't appreciate or respect that. And so when we think about uncertainty in the future, when we look at AI and all this disruption, all these things that are happening, we assume that it's going to be today's version of us trying to face those future challenges, but it's not.

24:03Sahil Bloom:The challenges are going to change you. You are going to grow and develop and be better equipped to handle whatever it is that comes. You're going to be ready for it, just the same way you have been in the past as you grew. Reminding yourself of that, that tomorrow's challenges don't ask for today's version of you. You get to grow and change and develop. You are capable, and your track record for doing that is perfect to get you to where you are today. I always find that that flips this mindset switch in people's heads and really helps break them free of the shackles of believing that they're not capable of going and doing the thing all right guys quick pause here i've got a question for you how is your summer physique coming along we're only a couple of months away before you will be gracing the beach the pool are you in shape are you not in shape is there work to do most likely if so i have the tool for you which is going to help you out massively it's the thirst app this is something which i personally use myself when it comes to my training and my nutrition I have all the programs in there which I use on a regular basis and for those who are just looking to lose a bit of body fat the same thing goes for women as well a lot of people don't realize that I used to coach for a large chunk of my life so all of my coaching experience has been put inside of this app I want you to learn as much as possible about how to get yourself in shape there's exclusive videos in there telling you how to do it how to execute exercises properly the foods which I eat and a newly added nutrition section where you can track your meals and your daily macros is pretty much this pocket-sized version of myself which I'm going to carry around with you all day every day so if there's something which might interest you which it definitely will do I highly suggest to check out links in the description head over to the thirst app get it downloaded you will not regret it let's crack on with the episode are you all 35 at 35 yes we're the same age yeah yeah i wonder because right now when people ask me so usually like kids in their teens or in their 20s asking for advice and i say sort of like you know things get a lot easier in your 30s because you just have a lot of life figured out and it's a pretty good place to be and as you said sometimes you you might get caught in the trap of thinking like i pretty much know everything now like surely this is the final state but i do wonder what my 45 year old self would think about my current self do you think your 45 year old self would think approvingly or disapprovingly of how you do things at the moment i think approvingly but naively yeah too right like i i where i think i am naive and i sort of know this now is i have not yet been hit by the truest depth of struggle of loss in life.

26:58Sahil Bloom:And when you look at most people's lives, the thing that really changes them and shapes them is how they respond to those like real crushing losses. And sometimes that's health related. You lose someone that you love, but it could be, it could be anything. Yeah. Losing a parent, losing a sibling, losing a loved one in any way that was that close to you, I think it is naive to assume that you have experienced and understand real struggle before you have experienced that. It's a reason why I think like people who lose a parent when they're young are forced to grow up in a way that is an can be an unbelievable asset in their lives.

27:37Sahil Bloom:like that struggle that you face if you come through that yeah you are so well equipped to handle whatever it is that life throws your way and it's a terrible thing but we're all going to face it at some point yeah and you know if i if i were to guess like what's the thing that i feel like is going to be a real testing point in my life that's going to change the way that i think and view the world it's going to be something like that that you know the unexpected that frankly shouldn't be unexpected yeah i think yeah i definitely agree because it's almost as though you've especially if you if you lose a parent when you're young you have arguably already gone through one of the hardest things that you'll ever have to go through and then anything else after that is it's kind of not as bad it's like you you are mentally prepared in a way it's like when guys they first fall in love and they have their first heartbreak like that is usually a time in their life where they change character building where they you know they're faced with the reality that like oh okay this person that you thought you were gonna be with the rest of your life get married and have kids with like that's not happening and you're like oh okay or maybe you get that person cheats on you arguably it's even worse but it can turn you into a monster either in a good way or a bad way yeah i do i mean i think it's it's the reason that going out and failing at things is a great way to prepare yourself and to go and achieve success, right?

29:03Sahil Bloom:It's like, call it the paradox of failure. Like you have to fail more to succeed more. If you're going to give someone dating advice, it's like, go and just try to talk to a girl at a bar and get rejected. Like there's nothing that makes you feel more invincible than getting rejected five times and realizing that you are still standing. You're not dead, right? Like nothing happened. Everyone, you're still fine. I constantly tell myself that like, if I were to give one single piece of advice to any 20-year-old in the world, it would be that nobody cares. Nobody is thinking about you. The spotlight effect is this psychological phenomenon that we assume that everyone else is staring at or judging our actions or behaviors.