Money Expert: Quit Your 9-5 and Get Rich the Easy Way. This is What I Did. (ft. Sahil Bloom)

19:30Sahil Bloom:With the wrong person. Absolutely. I think you can build a great partnership and marriage with someone where you have alignment of bigger picture values. And I don't think that's one person in the entire world. I don't believe in this notion of like, oh, you found the one, like the one person that exists for you in the world. It's kind of just mathematically, it's a crazy idea, like one in 7 billion or however many people. I think the bigger thing is when you hype up finding the person rather than the showing up and the daily action and the growth that is involved in a relationship, you lose sight of the fact that it is about the growth.

20:07Sahil Bloom:You have to show up every single day. You can actually find the right person and ruin the relationship by not showing up. You can't fix the wrong person. How do you know if you're in the wrong relationship? Or how do you also prevent lots of people who are really great people, who are in relationships with people who are destructive, who are not good for them? If you apply that same logic, then they're just going to spend years trying to fix something that inherently is broken. So I'm kind of curious what you think about that. I don't think you can fix broken big picture values. So if you are misaligned with someone on big picture values of what you care about in life, how you treat people, what you believe in, what your vision is for the future, you can't change someone's perspective on those.

20:50Sahil Bloom:And I actually just think the desire to try to fix or change another person is very different from the desire to build your connection and relationship together. There's very little that you can change about other people. If they don't want to change, they're not going to change. We can't change someone and we should generally stop chasing people who are running away from us with the way that they're acting. I think if you notice, if you're in a relationship and you notice that there is a clear misalignment of those values of what you kind of hold close, your principles, you are not going to be able to change that.

21:24Sahil Bloom:That doesn't mean that you can't improve your relationship if there's like little tension points on the margin. But I think the big picture values are very hard to change and find alignment around if they're not there. So you think that's how people should go about finding a relationship is understanding what values are important to them and finding people complementary? Yes. I think that if the big picture values are aligned, the small little details work themselves out. Like my wife and I are deeply aligned on the big picture values in life. Does that mean that we don't fight? Absolutely not.

21:57Sahil Bloom:Does that mean that we haven't had conflict and issues throughout our relationship at different times? Absolutely not. But all of those things were like minor details that you know you can sort out when you have the bigger picture that like sort of aligned. But let's play out. I'm a 20 year old. I'm on Hinge. I'm swiping. How do I screen for values alignment? Well, I've never been on Hinge, so I can't speak to Hinge in particular. But I think that, look, I think that when you are going out and dating someone and you're going out and meeting people, you are putting out into the world what your values are through the way that you act and behave and the things that you say.

22:33Sahil Bloom:And if you feel an immediate misalignment of that in the way that the other person acts, I don't think you should have tolerance for that in the people that you date over the long term. um but don't you think it's hard to really screen properly for values alignment i feel like that stuff kind of takes time i think you probably have a gut instinct very quickly i i at least in my own this isn't a romantic perspective but in my own relationships in my whole life i would say within five minutes i know if i'm gonna end up liking someone or not i i just i i think you tend to have a gut instinct about people if there's like an energy connection around the way that they put themselves out into the world.

23:13Sahil Bloom:I have very rarely, I would say, been proven wrong. I have often tried to, like my gut will say no, and I'll try to convince myself. And I'd say the worst decisions in life are made when you try to convince yourself to a yes when your gut already said no.

23:29Sophia:Is it the same way for you when it comes to hiring people? That's a good question.

23:34Sahil Bloom:Yes. Yeah. I think to me, the number one thing that people can do to stand out in getting hired is just show an ability to figure it out. I think that it's very hard to predict what skills are going to be relevant in three or five years even, which is crazy to say. Like 10, 15, 20 years ago, it was always fairly obvious that the skills were going to continue to be relevant. That's not really the case anymore. But what will continue to be relevant is this ability to just go and figure it out. And you can call that high agency, You can call that whatever you want. But that capacity to just take something that you don't know how to do, go and ask some questions about it, figure out how to do it, and then go and do it, that will always be valuable.

24:19Sahil Bloom:It doesn't matter what you're doing. It doesn't matter what degree you have. I would rather hire someone that has no degrees, that has an ability to do that, than someone that has a fancy degree that needs tons of handholding to go and get every little thing done. And so I think that for anyone that's like going out, they're trying to kind of improve their career, hone your ability to figure it out. Like we have every access to every tool in the world to do that now too. If you can spend 30 minutes a day, like learning the latest tools that are out there, you can be one of the best figure it outers in the entire world.

24:53Sahil Bloom:And you'll always be hireable as a result. Just kind of like what the Duolingo founder said to us where he said that he had two employees and then they both would point out problems. But one of them would point out a problem and then already have a solution and proactively be working on it. And the other one would just kind of say, hey, there's a problem and just do nothing about it. And so I do think there's a huge difference in attitude behind someone who's just willing to go figure it out and take action versus someone who's just complaining. And think about how that compounds over that person's career.

25:26Sahil Bloom:like that person is going to be the one that then gets called on for the interesting opportunity and then that person's going to get someone else is going to see them and be like oh you should start this company with me when i'm going to start like you're the one that then gets lucky in all these situations because you had this just like five percent better agency to go and just figure the thing out like it actually that's the interesting thing is like it doesn't take that much more work to get to the proposed solution than it does to just present the problem I could say probably another like 30 minutes of work or something like that for that person to at least come with a proposed solution to how to deal with it.

26:01Sahil Bloom:And it compounds enormously over like a 5-10 year time horizon.

26:06Sophia:You've said that teenagers should go knock on doors or buy people coffee to get jobs. But some Gen Z people said that was out of touch. Do you stand by that strategy?

26:15Sahil Bloom:This is my main character moment from the internet. The mainstream media had a field day with this. um i think that the issue uh in my articulation of that was that it was um people focused too much on the idea of knocking on doors like this the origin of this was that i i was living in a nice neighborhood in westchester new york near here and someone came and knocked on my door young young man um who was trying to make it in the music industry and he came and knocked on my door and basically was looking for business advice. And he asked me and I was like, well, I can't really say I felt bad, like saying no to someone's face where if he had sent me a cold email, I just wouldn't have replied or I would have said no if it was a bad cold email.

27:00Sahil Bloom:But to my face, I was like, sure, let's have a chat. So he came in, we had coffee, I talked to him, and I ended up mentoring this young guy in his career. And I thought about it. I was like, it was really interesting because it was such a different strategy. It was just like, everyone sends a cold email everyone sends a dm it was different and my point when i wrote that that it was interesting was doing things differently always helps you stand out it wasn't about knocking on doors like the it could be that you're driving uber and you talk to the person that's in the car or you're in a coffee shop or you're bussing tables and you talk to the person that's at the table but like those little things that you can do to kind of break out of the mold of your own life do actually create value.

27:43Sahil Bloom:And so that was the broader point that I was trying to get at, which kind of got lost in the noise of the whole chaos around it. But I do stand by that, that I think it makes sense.

27:53Sophia:What's the craziest thing someone's done to get a job with you?

27:56Sahil Bloom:That worked. Oh, that worked. Oh, that's a good question. I had an Uber driver who we chatted about business during the ride. And then he sent me an Instagram message after the fact offering to like drive me for free for business advice. And I was like, I don't take free stuff. But like we can I love like it was fun chatting, let's do it. And he's ended up becoming a great friend. And he's now like building a business that I'm sort of associated with. And he's crushed it because he has extraordinarily high agency, like he was driving cars at the time, and he created a car service. Now he's using Claude Cowork to spin up websites that just generate leads for car services in all of these like places around the country.

28:40Sahil Bloom:And he's making a couple hundred grand a month doing this, just sitting around. Now he doesn't drive. He's just like figured out how to use AI to do all these things. And this is, he's a Pakistani immigrant. Like he's not classically educated in any of these things. He just like that figure it out is so high. He's like a 10 out of 10 on that scale. So I thought I just think that's such a cool thing that we live in a world where like the the walls of credentialism have come down and the world is going to be long over the next 10, 20 years to people who just have the capacity to grab their agency by the horns and go out and do things.

29:22Sophia:That's a great question is how do you think about preparing for an AI economy? Like if you were in your early 20s today or even in college day, should you be studying computer science? Are these jobs still going to exist? Like how would you think about preparing for the next wave of the economy that's coming when we have almost this, you know, very exciting horizon in front of us, but it's destabilized and we don't know what jobs are going to be real in the next couple of years?

29:44Sahil Bloom:I think it's a terrifying time to be a generalist knowledge worker. Like I I think it is going to be a historically bad time to try to get a job as, you know, insert any like sort of path to being middle manager at like any knowledge economy job. And I think you're already seeing that. Like, I think there was some statistic like 50 percent of college recent college grads are unemployed right now. And it's crazy to see stuff like that happen so quickly. But it is an early warning sign of something that people, I think, need to be aware of, which is that companies have no clue how this is going to change their hiring.

30:31Sahil Bloom:And so they're reacting by just pausing, like, okay, let's just slow hiring and figure it out later. I think as an individual, the reaction to that needs to be, what are the skills that are going to continue to be valuable over the long run? I actually don't think you can predict like a hard skill that is still going to be valuable, like computer science, coding. I think it's very hard to say any of those things will matter. I think what will matter no matter what in any future, like if you take the Jeff Bezos model of saying like what will stay the same rather than thinking about what will change in the future, sales will always matter.

31:07Sahil Bloom:The ability to sell yourself, sell your ideas, sell things to people. Sales is everything in life. Relationships, dating, that is sales. You're selling yourself out to a dating market. Learning to sell, learning the storytelling around that will always matter. Being able to take data and come out with a clear narrative and a clear story and have that on the other side, that is a meta skill that will not change. I think that applies to sales. It applies to everything else. I would really focus on building that capacity, like that human interaction element of sales and communication and storytelling.

31:44Sahil Bloom:And I would really focus on this idea of like being good at figuring it out. And I think that comes from just spending, it can be 30 minutes a day, just like keeping yourself up to speed on the latest things that are happening so that you're at least facile with it. But I mean, I continue to think that the best side hustle opportunity in the world right now is like if you are young, you are facile and familiar with these technologies that the vast, vast majority of companies out there have no idea how to use. And that like when I think of side hustles, I always think of like what are mispriced opportunities, like an opportunity where you can kind of create arbitrage where someone's willing to pay you much more than you would otherwise be worth in the market.

32:24Sahil Bloom:it. And going in and actually deploying AI use cases into companies that have no clue how to use AI is an extraordinary opportunity. And it like you could do it at a local business down the street from you. You could do it at a bigger business. But doing that as like a services company, I think you could go make a lot of money very quickly. That's so true, because yesterday one of our friends asked us about how to do podcast clips. And she was saying how she was paying this person a crazy amount of money to do it and they were pretty bad. And it was really clear to me that that person was just using Opus straight out the gate, like AI clipping, and then charging her a premium for it because she didn't know that the AI clipping existed.

33:07But most people don't. And so it's definitely true that if you're an young, savvy person today and you know how to use AI and tools that most older people don't, you can charge and go into their businesses and make them way more efficient and be paid a premium for it.

33:22Sahil Bloom:Yeah. And there's literally hundreds of thousands of these businesses that are out there. I mean, my mom runs a small business and constantly asked me, like, how should I be using AI to do this or that? If a young person went in and mapped what she does over the course of a full day, what her and her employees do, I guarantee they would find like 100 opportunities for very simple AI efficiencies. And if you could just help a business create that and then capture like some small percentage of the value you just created but you can go charge you can charge businesses five thousand dollars a month and have three or four clients and all of a sudden you replace your entire salary at your like high paying job from a few hours a week like it's it's not that's again it's the mispriced opportunity that exists around this right now that it's a small thing for these companies if you're creating the value that it will create and it can be an enormous thing for you very quickly that was how when i when i quit my job, by the way, that was how I was comfortable doing it was because I had started writing on Twitter a year before that.

34:23Sahil Bloom:It had built this big platform. When I quit my job, there were all these founders in my network who were like, hey, you built this big thing on Twitter. Can you help us do that? And I was like, I guess I kind of know how to do that. Sure. I can advise you on how to do it. They were like, well, you charge. I was like$5 ,000 a month. I just made up a number. and all of a sudden I had like 10 people paying me$5 ,000 a month for very little work to just like help them think about the blueprints of how to grow on on Twitter I guess x now and I had to replace my entire salary from this like fancy high-paying job with less work so that I could still spend time on all of my you know actual like content writing and the things I was going to actually go and do and so again it's like there are all these mispriced opportunities floating out in the world.

35:10Sahil Bloom:And AI is the biggest one to me right now, especially because your generation already understands how to use all these things. I mean, social media is the other one. Like, no, none of these businesses know anything about how to use TikTok or Instagram to grow their business. Like, you are on this all day. You know how to do it. There's enormous opportunity to just help businesses go and do that. You can get paid a lot for doing it. You heard it here first. Well, I actually wanted to dive in on that topic because I am so fascinated by the way that you've built your content really empire across Twitter, across LinkedIn, across Instagram.

35:47Walk us through what does your content setup look like right now? So I'm probably somewhat unique in that I think a lot of people really went like super deep on a single medium.

36:00Sahil Bloom:And so like there are a lot of people who have a much bigger Instagram than me or bigger YouTube or bigger, maybe bigger Twitter, maybe not that many people there. But I've sort of gone like one by one, one at a time and built what now is a platform that has like a lot of breadth across different types of mediums with like pretty different audiences across the different ones. So X was my first platform that's, you know, now scaled up to north of a million people. that's like 85 % male. I think the, the X platform in general, Instagram, I built next and was separate. That's like 50, 60 % female.

36:36Sahil Bloom:And it's very different. My newsletter is close to a million people. And also like similarly quite different. All of that sort of is fed off of the writing that I do. Like my entire ecosystem doesn't matter whether it's video or, or written content. It all is like downstream from my newsletter. So whenever anyone's thinking about content, the way I think about it is you have a halo format and medium. And from there, you need to figure out how it gets turned into everything else. For me, I write two newsletters a week. I've done that for five years now almost. And those now we've just created a system with the team where it gets turned into everything across the different platforms.

37:15Sahil Bloom:So one newsletter will create a bunch of ideas for different tweets. It'll get turned into carousels for Instagram. It'll get turned into short image cards for Instagram. I can talk about those topics on podcasts and get video clips for them for Instagram. You know, we can make a longer form YouTube video out of it. So now you get a lot of leverage because it's like one piece of content that you're creating gets turned into a bunch of things. I think for anyone trying to go and create anything around content, they need to think about what that halo thing is for them. For me, it's writing. For someone else, it could be long form video.

37:48Sahil Bloom:They might want to do YouTube. Maybe it is shorter form content that they're really good at. But if you can figure out a way to take that halo and now turn it into 10 things, distribute it across different platforms, that I think is where you create this network effect of really getting a lot of leverage on the one thing that you created. How did you decide what you wanted to write on and has that changed over time? Um, yeah, when I first, like my, my broadest principle on anything in business is just like, be useful. Um, and so anything that I create, I'm like, is this useful to someone that's reading it?

38:23Sahil Bloom:Is this valuable? Right. If you create value, you'll receive value. That's like the golden rule around all of this. And, um, at first I was like, okay, I work in finance when I was doing this. I'm just going to write about finance. And I know there's people that want to read about that. So I was writing about like finance and money. And then what I realized is like, if I'm going to do this for 20 years, like once I quit my job, I need to be writing about things that I care about. It just has to be something I care about. I can't do something for 20 years that I don't care about. And so I started slowly then talking about more broad life things, which is what I spend most of my time thinking about.

38:59Sahil Bloom:I get to spend time with a lot of really interesting people. It's just like relationships, spending time with extraordinary people. That's always been something that I've gotten a lot of energy from. And so if I can take that and sort of like distill that wisdom set and help provide it in a way that actually people can go and take and do something with it in their life, that's a really useful thing if it can spark you to action in some way. And so I've just always taken that lens of like, okay, what can I create that is useful for people that they can go and take and run with in their life? I love that.

39:34You were also talking about how you mentored that young kid, and I thought that was amazing. So I did want to ask about how you got Tim Cook to mentor you and just generally what you think the importance of mentorship is in people's lives.

39:45Sahil Bloom:So I met Tim. I didn't knock on his door and offer to buy him coffee, but sort of the equivalent of that. When I first started my first job in 2014, I was working in private equity. So I knew the hours were going to be nuts. And I was really into working out. I played baseball for a long time. And basically, I decided that if I was going to keep working out, I was gonna have to do it really early in the morning. So I started going to the gym in Palo Alto at this Equinox at 445 in the morning every single day so that I could get done and get into the office by 615. And it turns out that there's only like five people crazy enough to show up at the Equinox in Palo Alto at 445 every single morning, morning after morning.

40:27Sahil Bloom:One of them happened to be the then new CEO of Apple, Tim Cook. Six months went by without me knowing who he was. He was like, you know, I wasn't in tech. He didn't look the way he looks when he's doing a keynote. And frankly, he wasn't quite that famous at the time yet. He was sort of like Steve Jobs's replacement at the time. He wasn't his own uh you know person in a lot of ways he hadn't built the prominence that he has now and so i talked to this guy every single day for six months without knowing who he was and one day someone came up to me and was like do you know who that is that you were just talking to i was like i don't know that's the guy that is in here and they were like that's tim cook the ceo of apple and i just thought oh shit like i've probably been saying the dumbest stuff to this guy every day for the last six months just like gym stuff like oh there's whatever like squat thing like, oh, yeah, we did this for baseball.

41:20Sahil Bloom:It was really good. Like just gym stuff, like normal, like what you would talk to any guy about in the gym. He's really into fitness and he's very fit. And so I went and that day when I found that out, we've been talking about some article and I guessed his email address. I got when I got to the office and I sent him the article and I was like, hey, you know, we were chatting about this, whatever article he replied right away. And in response to that reply, I basically just said like, Hey, you know, I'm looking for some guidance around my career and life as I think about, you know, the journey that I'm on, would love to grab coffee if you're willing.

42:00Sahil Bloom:And he was open to it. And so we went out and grabbed coffee and it ended up sparking this, you know, what is now over 10 year relationship where he's been an extraordinary influence on my life. You know, he was, um, uh, first investor and, and, a lot of things that I've gone and done. He was one of the main influences that encouraged me to go down the different path that I'm on now when I was thinking about leaving my job. He was one of the people that sort of empowered that in a lot of ways. And it was all sparked by showing up at the gym every single morning at this early hour. And honestly, I joke about it now and people lose their minds over it.

42:35Sahil Bloom:But there is no such thing as a loser that wakes up at 5am and works out. Like if you put yourself into that environment, if you're willing to go and do hard things every single day, you find ways to win in other areas of life. And so again, it's like place yourself in environments where you're highly likely to get lucky. That is one of those environments. People in the gym at that time of the morning, it was like the founding partner of General Catalyst was there and I ended up becoming friends with him and building a relationship. Like these people that are there that are working hard, that are showing up, that are showing that discipline.

43:10Sahil Bloom:You're finding ways to win across different areas of life. So I need to wake up at 5 a.m. and go to Equinox. I mean, that's what I learned. You guys seem like you're doing just fine. So whatever you're doing, I'm going to turn the mic around and ask for your advice. But it really is, I mean, working out, a lot of problems in life are solved by waking up early and working out. If you're feeling stuck, it is a very quick way to reassume agency over your life. Do you think you learned that from baseball? Do you think you have an athlete mindset? Yes. Yeah. But I think that that's not about baseball and it's not about athletics.

43:44Sahil Bloom:It's about recognizing that you are capable of taking an action to create a desired outcome. And that's from my dad. The first time I ever failed in a real way, I was 12 years old. I tried out for this all-star team and I got cut from the team. And I was like sobbing. I was so upset. I I was sitting in my room and I remember so distinctly, my dad came in, he sat down next to me and the easiest thing in the world would have been for him to say they were idiots. That was the dumbest decision. You were the best player, right? You were the best, you're the best kid there. They made, they made the wrong decision, but that's not what he said.

44:19Sahil Bloom:He looked at me and he said, I understand you're upset. Here are the three things that they said that you should work on. I'm going to go out there every single day with you this summer and we're going to work on those things. And he did. He showed up every single day and we went out and worked on those things. And when I look back on that moment, there was so much power in that message that he shared because it was a reminder that I was capable of taking action to create the desired outcome in my life. It was like he handed me my agency back in that moment. And now I always go back to it at any point, any failure that I experienced like, okay, well, what are the things that I can go and do now to change my situation?

44:57And so I just think for anyone, like, you don't need your dad to tell you that.

45:03Sahil Bloom:You can just hear it right now and recognize that you are capable of doing that. It doesn't mean that it's always going to work out, but it does mean that no matter what hand you're dealt, good or bad, you are always in control of how you play it.

45:16Sophia:Well, thank you so much for coming on The Burnouts.

45:19Sahil Bloom:Thank you.