How to Have Time for Everything

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1:33There's no safe like SimpliSafe. From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

1:59If I promised you that this podcast episode could make you successful, what do you think that that would mean? Well, I mean, you'd probably just think that sounds ridiculous. That is a over-promise for a podcast episode, but let's just take it at face value. What does success mean? I mean, for many people, it means one thing. I spent the early years of my career chasing a very narrow definition of what success looked like and chasing the standard default definition of success, if you will. And that default definition is to make money. That is Sahil Bloom. And he was very, very good at making money.

2:36He spent the first seven years of his career in finance, serving as a vice president at a private equity fund with $3.5 billion in assets under management. And, you know, that pays pretty well. But that is not how he describes himself today because that is not what he does today. I am Sahil Bloom. I'm an author, writer, entrepreneur, and investor. And I primarily spend time writing and creating content that reaches people all around the world related to how to build a healthier, wealthier life. You may know Sahil from, well, a whole bunch of things. He's got an extremely large social reach. He also has an extremely large newsletter called The Curiosity Chronicle.

3:19It's really excellent. Suggest checking it out. Sawhil and I have gotten to know each other. We have a bunch of mutual friends, and I just find him to be so thoughtful and so insightful. And speaking of, did you hear the thing that he just said there at the end about a wealthier life? That's actually what we're going to zoom in on today. because Sahil, after spending part of his career just chasing money, discovered something. Which, and I know this is going to sound cliche, but that wealth isn't money. And money doesn't bring you wealth. We focus entirely around optimizing this one thing. And unfortunately, that optimization and focus comes at the expense of many other things.

4:02We march down this one path trying to win this one battle, but we lose sight of the much bigger picture war, which is all about living a happy, fulfilling, joy-filled life. Money is a tool that can help with that, but it is not actually an end in and of itself. And if we focus on it at the expense of other things, we find out all too late that it was not the end that we were actually trying to create. So what does create that end? Sahil argues that there are actually five types of wealth. It's what he writes about in his new book, which is called The Five Types of Wealth, in which he breaks down how to pursue a truly wealthy life by thinking about more than just money as wealth.

4:48I want to encourage people, and I want to help them ask the questions to identify what truly matters to them and then go take action to build their life around those things. I want them to reframe the scoreboard, to build a scoreboard that is actually conducive to measuring the things that will lead you to the fulfilling, happy, joyful life that you are after. Because when you measure the right things, you take the right actions and you create the right outcomes. And everybody either is themselves a cautionary tale or knows people who are the cautionary tale, who optimized for money, who declined all other forms of joy, got the money because it's actually quite gettable.

5:31and then discovered that they were absolutely miserable. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. We all know too many stories in our lives of either people that we read about in books that we celebrate as these amazing success stories that we would never want to trade lives with. I had that realization several years ago that the people that I read books about are actually not people I would want to trade lives with because while they may have achieved extraordinary success in one domain, they have done so at the expense of several of the others. And what I'm looking to do is choose my own path. I don't want to walk down the default path that everyone else has told me is the one that matters.

6:08I wanna be able to have the freedom to choose and to create my own and to build a life of wealth according to my own terms. And so what I say with this book and what I say in general is, I don't have the specific answers for you about the way to live your life. What I do know are the questions that you need to ask, the questions you need to wrestle with so that you can uncover the answers from yourself that matter to you. So today on Problem Solvers, we are going to dig into this idea. And in particular, I wanted to talk to Sahil about one of his five types of wealth, which is time. Thinking of time as wealth, because I'll be honest, that feels like the part that I am most impoverished in.

6:52And maybe you feel that way too. So we are going to selfishly explore with Sahil, take a little bit of his time to figure out how we can get some more of ours. Today on Problem Solvers, The Five Types of Wealth with the author of The Five Types of Wealth, Sahil Bloom, and in particular, How to Create More Wealth in Time. All coming up after the break. Okay, we're back. Today, I'm talking with Sahil Bloom, author of the great new book, the five types of wealth. And we're going to zoom in on one of those types of wealth, which is time. But before we get there, I wanted to pick up on something that he said just before the break.

7:34You might remember, he said that we all know these people, whether in person or we just know them through pop culture or reading or whatever, these people who made a lot of money and who seemed miserable and how we wouldn't want to change lives with those people, even though they have made so much money. And when he said that, it reminded me of something that I have thought about quite a lot as I have struggled to compare or not compare myself to others. And so let's start there because I wanted to share with you what I said to him and his very insightful response. Here's what I said. Something that really helped me as I got deeper into this world that both of us occupy and meet these people who seem to be paragons of success in many ways is I started to think about the things that they had to do or had to sacrifice to get the thing that I am now feeling some level of jealousy over.

8:37And then I started to think, would I want to make that same decision? Would I want to, depending on who we're talking about here either. Would I want to just put in that number of hours? Would I want to decline all of these other personal satisfactions? Would I want to treat people the way in which this person has been treating people in order to get this level of success? And I realized over and over again that the answer is no, I don't want to do that. And that has actually helped me feel very grounded as I meet people who have things that I would like, but whose path I don't want to take. The way I articulate this is that there is a list price for success, and then there is the real price of that success.

9:18And the list price is sort of the things you see on the surface. It's like the hard work, the hours they had to put in, the lucky breaks, all those things that kind of had to go right to achieve the success. The real price is all of those sacrifices. It's the relationships that fell by the wayside. It's the physical health. It's the stress. It's all of those things. And sometimes things that look good on the list price are actually a ripoff when you consider the real price. And I think that's what you're getting at. And I completely agree. There are a lot of cases where, you know, I know that I could do certain things.

9:50I could optimize one specific area, but I'm not willing to pay the real price that's required to do that. And so a lot of this comes down to going in eyes wide open on the path that you are on. Really acknowledging and having a self-awareness to understand what the real price is of that thing that you claim you want. And if you're willing to pay it, great. The world needs some crazy ones that are willing to pay those prices. We all benefit from those crazy ones. But you don't need to feel pressured to be one of them if you don't want to. You don't have to be that. That is not the definition of success.

10:22You get to create your own definition of success. And if there's one thing I've learned, it's that you will never feel successful unless you create your own definition of success. Because otherwise, you'll be defaulting into someone else's, and you'll just keep chasing whatever more the world tells you that you should want. So let's look at the framework that you have here. The five types of wealth, that's the name of the book, but that's also basically the list you're about to provide here. You identify five types of wealth outside of what we've just been talking about here, which is either financial wealth or however people...

10:55visualize success. Break it down for me. What are the five types of wealth? So the five types of wealth are one, time wealth. This is all about the 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 an awareness of the finite, impermanent nature of your time. The fact that time is your most precious asset. The second type is social wealth. This is all about your relationships, the people in your world, the few close, deep relationships, and then the broader network of looser relationships, connection to something bigger than yourself.

11:29The third type is mental wealth. This is about purpose. It's about growth. It's about creating the space necessary to wrestle with some of the bigger picture, unanswerable questions in your life through meditation, through religion, spirituality, through solitude. The fourth type is physical wealth. This is all about your health and vitality. It's about your ability to control the controllables, to fight against the natural decay and atrophy that your body will experience. And then the fifth type is financial wealth, which we all know, money, net worth, with the one caveat that it is particularly focused on the idea of enough, what it means to build your enough life, with the recognition that expectations are your single greatest financial liability.

12:14Because if you allow your expectations to grow faster than your assets, you will never feel wealthy. You will just be chasing whatever more is sitting out there on the horizon. So that construct creates this new scoreboard that I think is the one that we need to measure against in our life to track, to have a baseline and to go and build against. So I think that's a really, really useful way of breaking out what a wealthy life truly is. The one that I relate to the most in that it's the one that I struggle with the most is time wealth. So that's where I wanted to focus our conversation. And I want to start by telling you this, and I'm sure it will prompt lots of thoughts and ways in which people can think about how to reclaim time wealth or find time wealth.

13:05I, like you, like so many people listening to this, feel stretched way too thin in way too many directions. A whole day will go by. I will not have left the computer. I will not have had a meaningful conversation with anybody outside of, you know, often something like this, where it's like, we're talking, but really we're recording content. And I hate that. I really, really hate that. And so I set this goal for myself, which I am absolutely nowhere near achieving. And that goal is so pathetically simple. that goal is every day I want to feel that I am able to walk away from work long enough to have a leisurely coffee with someone that that to me has become a definition of time wealth because if I can do that then I have the the daily personal experience that I want it feeds into some of the other things that you're talking about right to do that is also to build up your your like social wealth.

14:02But I cannot get there. And part of the reason that I can't get there, I think is because I keep filling time with work. So for example, last year, Sahil, my kids, my youngest son was too young to take the school bus. So my wife and I had to trade off on manually taking the kids to school, which meant that my workday would start around nine. And I kept thinking, boy, next year, kids are gonna be able to take the school bus. They're going to be out the door at 7.30. That is so much time in the morning. I'm going to spend that on walks. I'm going to get morning coffees with people. You know what I do?

14:35They get out in the morning at 7.30 and I just start working. And I don't know how to solve this problem. So tell me how you have found approaching TimeWell to be an accomplishable thing. I think for someone like you, there are probably two things I would actually recommend tactically. The first one is to establish a baseline understanding of where your energy is going during the course of a week. And the reason that's important is because when you feel a natural energy or inclination or interest in something that you're doing, you create the best outcomes. When you are chewing glass on something, you are never going to do your best work.

15:14When you are feeling that excitement around it, you will do your best work. The goal that we should all have is to work towards a world where we are spending most of our time on energy creating tasks and leaning away from the things or delegating or deleting the things that are draining our energy. You can't do that until you establish an actual understanding of the types of activities that are doing that. So in the book, I have this framework that I call my energy calendar. And the whole idea is at the start of the week on a Monday, at the end of the day, color code your calendar. According to each activity, color code it, whether it was energy creating, meaning it lifted you up during and after, mark it green.

15:48If it was neutral, mark it yellow. And if it was energy draining, you felt drained from the activity, mark it red. Do that for a full week and you will have, when you zoom out, a very clear visual perspective on the types of activities that are creating energy in your world versus draining energy. What that allows you to do is make slow, steady adjustments over a period of time to work away from the red and into the green. You are never going to completely eliminate the red. It's not. It's a pipe dream. But you can improve the ratio of green to red, which will improve the actual quality of your outcomes and the quality of your life because you will feel more energy.

16:26You will feel more life-giving activities during the course of your week. There are simple ways to do it. I like, you know, phone calls and Zoom meetings, very energy draining for me. Doing the same phone call on a walk, energy creating for me. Totally. Changed half my phone calls into walking calls, my whole life changed. Quite seriously, I'm not even exaggerating. It changed my life, changed my weeks. Very simple changes can make dramatic impact here. The second piece of advice you have to learn to say no more effectively to things. We are in a culture where being busy is something that we take pride on.

16:58You go to a cocktail party, people ask you how you're doing, everyone says, I'm busy. And you're supposed to get patted on the back and people are like, oh, you must be important because you're so busy. It's become this weird pseudo-dystopian status flex. And the reality is that being anti-busy is actually a much bigger flex. Having the freedom to choose is where to deploy your 110 % energy and effort is really what you want, because then you can deploy that into the things that really matter. That only happens when you start ruthlessly eliminating things that actually aren't moving the needle forward in your life.

17:32Now, that's going to get easier as your career progresses. In the earliest years of your career, you probably have to say yes to the vast majority of things. As you get a bit older, you need to get much better, especially in your personal life, about not allowing things that you don't really want to do to just grab and pull at all of your time. You don't owe anybody else your time. You are basically gifting things your time in a lot of cases. And you can say no to those things. So I have two tests in the book that I like to go through. One is for more personal life things, which is ask yourself whether you would do this thing tonight.

18:04So someone invites you to something a month from now, say in your head, would I do this if it were tonight? And if the answer is no, say no to it. Because you're not going to want to do it a month from now. Right. Just the reality. We are very cruel. Yeah, we're very cruel to our future selves. We keep pushing things off to our future selves. Yeah, and it's an actual psychological bias. We always think we're going to have more time in the future, and it's incorrect. We're not. We're really bad at discounting that. And then the second one is a professional thing, which is sort of two layers. The first layer is, is this a hell yes?

18:32That's like Derek Siver's special, I think. You know, is this a hell yes opportunity? If the answer is yes, move to step two. The step two is, if I assume that this opportunity will take twice as long and be half as profitable as I currently think, would I still want to do it? That is really important because we are naturally wired to be overly optimistic at the outset of some new opportunity. We get the shiny object syndrome. We see it. We're like, oh, wow, super exciting. Okay, I'm going to say yes to this. You dive into every new thing. That fills up your calendar with a bunch of stuff that inevitably doesn't quite work out the way that you thought because most things don't, right?

19:09And so what you want to know is that even if this ends up taking a lot longer and it ends up being something that is less profitable than I think right now, I would still be excited about taking it on because it's that interesting of an opportunity to me. If you do that, you'll find that you end up having more space in your calendar if you follow those two tests. Those are great approaches. And I'd love to hear you make it personal in some way. A lot of these things are so easy to say, and then they're much harder to do. And I'm sure you, again, like me, like so many people have a lot of opportunities to do a lot of really interesting things.

19:49And some of those things probably pay a lot of money. And yet you don't have the time for all of them. And it can feel hard to balance. And this is maybe where I end up losing that 7.30am time, which is like, okay, I could go have coffee with a friend. Or I could do this thing that's going to make me some more money and allow me to do it. And it's like, oh, how much can I, sacrificed for the coffee with the friend. And suddenly these comparisons get really hard to do. So how have you navigated this for yourself? Or how have you learned to say no to things that I'm sure were probably pretty cool and probably paid good money and yet you said no anyway?

20:28I have learned to have a very clear binary reaction grounded in what is my yes. So my number one yes in life is time with my son and wife. That's my number one yes. It's the only thing that I'm like, that's an automatic yes for me in my mind. And what that means is that anytime a new opportunity comes, the lens that I view it through is, okay, am I willing to say no to time with my wife and son for this opportunity? And sometimes that answer is yes. It's that interesting or incredible an opportunity. This book launch, I'm saying no to significant amounts amounts of time with my wife and son for this book because I believe so strongly in it.

21:09It's so important to me and the message is so important. It's part of my purpose. But there's a lot of opportunities that come where they're interesting. Don't get me wrong. It's like, oh, some interesting speaking gig or a podcast or some business opportunity. And my immediate thought is, okay, am I willing to spend five hours a week less with my wife and son in order to pursue this thing? Because that's what I'm saying no to by saying yes to this new thing. And when you frame it that way, you start to view everything with a lot more clarity than before, because it starts to be clear what you are saying no to by saying yes to this new thing.

21:41If you don't have that clarity in mind, it's very easy to just say yes, because you're like, no, there's no trade off here. And it's just time for this new thing trade. But the time doesn't just magically appear. It's taking it from something that you really care about and putting it into something new. You know, I have started to do a version of that specifically with speaking opportunities where I'm extremely explicit about it to the people who reach out to me with inquiries. And here's how it goes. I found it to be useful for me, and I found it to be useful actually for them, which is for me to go and speak somewhere, which I love doing, but I can't do it all the time because I've got a wife and two kids.

22:23For me to go and speak somewhere, I have to, very similar to what you're just describing, I have to basically be paid enough to be worth what I think of as the added stress on the family of me being gone for my kids and my wife having to juggle two kids, which is not easy. So we have a number. We have a number of what is worth it. And I just keep raising that number. And when people come to me with opportunities that are interesting, but are less than that number, what I say to myself, right? Like that that is not worth it for my family. But also I now say it to them, the people who reach out to me.

23:02I say, look, this sounds really wonderful and I'd be very interested in doing this. But for me to travel, that means that my wife is at home by herself watching our two kids. And that's a lot of strain on the family. And so we always have to make sure that the financial value of me leaving is worth that strain. And so I apologize. is like, this just isn't, doesn't match that. Whatever I say. And what I found is that number one, that makes it clear for me on what to say yes or no to. Number two, it actually turns out to be a kind of humorously great negotiating strategy because people will totally get it and they will actually often raise the rate.

23:44But three is that it makes saying no easier and more logical. I think sometimes the reason that people don't say no to things is because they almost can't conjure the logic in their heads or they feel bad saying no to somebody else. But when I'm just really clear, this is my priority and this is how I value my family time, that helps people understand why I am saying no. And they then become more respectful of my time as I am respecting my time. It also just as a team leader sends a message to everyone around you about the boundaries that you are allowing them to create. By doing that, you create a ripple effect of other people who are willing to create these healthy boundaries around their family and the things that they need to protect from a time perspective.

24:28And that engenders more loyalty among your teams. It makes people more present and focused at work because they know that there's this clear line and compartmentalization that they can create. And it ends up creating a positive ripple effect into all of these professional areas. Yeah. So I'm going to tell you a quick anecdote, and I just want to hear your reaction to it as a kind of way to bring this in for a landing. I was talking with a friend of mine. Her name is Catherine. She's a psychotherapist. And she was asking me why I do the number of things that I do. I juggle a lot of different projects.

25:00And I say that what I'm ultimately trying to build towards is this line that I've come up with myself, which is full autonomy of my time. That's what I want. full autonomy of my time. And she said, well, what does full autonomy of your time mean? And I was like, well, I guess it means that I can kind of go wherever I want, whenever I want. And I feel like fully in control of how my time is spent. And people can't like come out of nowhere and just like jerk time away from me. And then she said to me, you know, don't you kind of have that? Like, don't you have a version of that right now? you know you I'm the editor in chief entrepreneur magazine I have like a boss there to answer to and so there are certainly times in which my time is not always my own but also a lot of my time is my own I just told you I you know if I could emotionally leave for an hour and a half and get coffee I could nothing is really stopping me from doing that I can travel around and I take these speaking engagements if I feel like it's the right fit for my family I had been this conversation was really interesting to me because it it showed me the gulf between what I think I want and what I already have.

26:09And I started to realize that this is true in many of the other forms of wealth that you talk about. I, for example, keep feeling like I need to make more money. But if I step back and ask myself if I'm making the amount of money that I need, the answer is actually yes. and I don't exactly know how to recognize and process this gulf between what I have and what I think I need. And I wonder what you make of that. It all comes down to gratitude in the present. I have experienced this in a number of ways. I mean, I recently had a moment, I was working in here focusing on something and my son came in through that door in the back and two and a half and he started terrorizing my office, throwing things around.