The 5 Types of Wealth: Sahil Bloom On Why Time, Friends, Mind & Body Always Come Before Money

26:34It's kind of the stock response that we give people, you know, the like punt the question. And he looked at me and sort of just looked through me and said, how are you doing? And I told him that it was starting to get challenging being so far away from my parents. Wasn't seeing them. Our relationship was withering. And he asked me, how old are they? And I said, they're in their mid-60s. And he said, how often do you see them? I said, about once a year. And he looked me square in the face and just said, okay, so you're going to see them 15 more times before they die. And I remember just feeling like the whole room closed in.

27:14Like I got punched in the gut. And it wasn't about our relationship in that moment. It wasn't about anything other than the fact that I had the realization that the time I had left with the people that I cared about most was so finite night that I could count it on a few hands. And I realized in that moment that if I continued living the way I was living, I was going to wake up in 50 years and wonder what the fuck just happened. And that night I went home, had a few more drinks, and I passed out on the floor of our house.

28:02The next morning, my wife found me there and obviously was concerned. And I got up and just told her that I thought we needed to make a change.

28:18And this came at a time in my relationship with my wife, that was really challenging. We had been trying to conceive for about the prior year and unfortunately had been unable to. You know, and that's a, it's something that a lot of people don't talk about publicly. There's a stigma associated with it. We bottle it up, we keep it to ourselves. And that's what we had done. And I felt like my wife was carrying that as her burden. And I was not man enough at the time to help carry that burden or to accept it as mine to carry with her. So in that moment, her acceptance of this idea that we needed to make a change was the most powerful thing in the world to me.

29:12This idea that she sat there with me in the mud, she was there in that moment. She saw the pain that I was experiencing and she recognized it. And we had built our entire life in California. She had a job. I had a job. Things were good. Within 45 days, we had left California, sold our house. I had left my job and we moved back to the East Coast to be closer to our families. and the most incredible thing in it all was that within two weeks of getting home my wife got pregnant it was just this full circle moment of when your life is out of alignment when energy is out of alignment nothing is possible and when it comes into alignment suddenly everything falls into place as it should.

30:06I apologize for getting emotional. No, I appreciate the candor and the openness, man. It's a very relatable thing to go through. I think a lot of people go through, you know, their version of what you just explained. And, you know, we were talking earlier and you mentioned, you were talking about this idea of the arrival fallacy, right? This premise, you know, that we make so many big decisions on is that we're aiming our compass in a certain direction on the assumption that when we arrive at that destination, that whatever it is that we're searching for, we will find it and it will make us feel how we've always wanted to feel.

30:45And when we discover that it doesn't, you know, it's an existential crisis and that can be your rock bottom moment or you can delude yourself that it's, you know, it's just over the next peak on the horizon. And that's what most people do. And the fact that you were able to kind of see this early in life, frankly, much earlier than I was able to, is a credit to your self-awareness, but also like the depth of your value system. Because it's one thing to say, oh yeah, I'm only gonna see my parents 15 more times. Well, I'll convince myself that I'll double that or whatever and just continue along your path.

31:25But to make that kind of significant life change is not a small thing. And the fact that your wife got pregnant after that, Like, yes, you know, alignment is important. And I've seen that get played out so many times. When you're out of alignment, you're banging your head against the wall and things just don't come easy if they come at all. And once you kind of course correct and you create that alignment between your actions and your values, suddenly there's a sense of ease and things come towards you rather than you having to chase them. It's a beautiful way of saying it. The arrival fallacy is one of my favorite concepts and ideas because I felt my life was really a perfect example of that.

32:07There was always, you know, the end of your bonus, right? Like, oh, I'm going to feel so different. That's when I'm going to have really made it and you're going to get it. And then you get there and you immediately start just looking around like, what did other people get? Oh, why didn't I get this? Why didn't I get more? Oh, next year is going to be even better. I can get more that next year. And you constantly have that feeling of the never enough. It's every area of your life. You're just feeling like it's this constant treadmill. And after my son was born, I had this experience. I was walking him around out for a walk one afternoon.

32:41He wouldn't sleep other than when we pushed him in a stroller. So I was out for a walk with him and this old man came up to me and approached me on the sidewalk and just said, I remember standing here with my newborn daughter. She's 45 years old now. It goes by fast. Cherish it. And in that moment, I had this sensation of, this is it. The good old days are happening right now. I'm going to be 90 years old someday, hopefully, and look back on this as the good old days that I'm living in. I have actually arrived in this moment and there's nothing more that I want. And I can't fully articulate the feeling of peace that comes with that, the feeling of acceptance that comes with, this is where I want to be.

33:24There's no place I would rather be than in this present moment with these people. And I feel like since then, I've been able to harness that. I've been able to find that in different areas of my life. I'm no longer sitting one-on-one having a conversation with someone worrying about the email I'm missing or checking my phone or thinking about what the next thing is that I need to do, having that stress. I can be present with people. And the impact that that has, The ripple effects into every area of your life are profound.

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39:15Well, as somebody who has kids that are older, I can tell you that that's true. You know, my oldest isn't 45 yet, but he's 29. And my youngest is 16 already. And it is like, I can't, you know, she was a baby yesterday. And you talk about this in the book, this idea also that you think I think that your kind of role as a parent is a more extended period of time than it actually is. Because by the time they get to be 12 or 13, like it's kind of, in a healthy way, start to differentiate from you and then their life becomes about their friends and other things as it should. But the point is like, you don't have that much time and those moments are really precious.

39:56So to be able to see that and value it and follow it up with like, not just actions, but like big decisions that basically drive your life in that direction. Yeah, there's this concept from ancient Greece that there are two types of time. They had two words for time, chronos, which is linear, kind of the normal way that we think about time. And then kairos, which is this idea that there are specific moments in time that have higher importance. They're elevated moments. It's this qualitative textured nature. And that is very true for your own life. There are moments, there are windows of time where certain people, certain things carry higher importance.

40:36And unfortunately, we live in a world where people love to say later, right? You're on the chase for something. You're on the chase for whatever your professional ambition is. So you say later a lot. You say, well, I'll spend more time with my kids later, or I'll focus on my health later, or I'll build these relationships later, spend time with my parents later. And unfortunately, later is just another word for never. because by the time you're ready to do those things, they're no longer there. Your kids aren't gonna be eight years old later. You're not gonna have your health in the same way when you're 60.

41:06Your parents may not be around later. And that is the fundamental tension that we all need to ask more questions about to navigate. It's like, how do I balance my desire to build something, my desire to go after some of these ambitions that I have for myself with the fact that these moments are passing you by if you're not present in them? Sure. So you contextualize all of this in terms of these five different pillars of wealth and your own journey kind of emerged out of realizing that by focusing on this singular idea of what wealth was, was driving you away from being truly wealthy, which is to be happy and fulfilled and purpose driven and the like.

41:46The first pillar of which that is the first one in the book is time. I'm like, I want to dig into that because I think that's the most interesting of all of these pillars. but in your kind of synthesis of how you practice or kind of set your life up so that all five of these types of wealth are getting properly nourished, you talk about the difference between looking at it like an on-off switch and more of like a dimmer switch and where you're kind of focusing your energy in terms of your relationship to these various pillars is very much a function of what stage of life you're in. Yeah. So this is a really important concept because the traditional wisdom, go back to the idea of like the cultural standards around these things, is that your life and these different areas of your life has to exist on an on-off switch.

42:35People will tell you, you can only pick a couple, right? You have to pick professional life and social life, or you have to pick your health and your professional life. And you can't have the other things. You can't have the family that you want during this window. You can't have the health you want if you're focusing on one area. And I just fundamentally reject that. The reason is because I think you can operate on dimmer switches. And what do I mean by that? Well, there are ways where you can make progress in every area of life by just focusing on the one or two things that have real leverage to them.

43:09You don't need to go to every single friend dinner or cocktail event or party in order to progress your social wealth, in order to build relationships. what you need to do is send the text when you're thinking about the person. What you need to do is take time to call someone for five minutes to check in on them. It's the tiny little actions that we can make progress in all of these areas. So again, viewing them as a dimmer switch, not falling into the trap of saying, well, if it's not optimal, then it can't be beneficial because that's just not true. We know it's not true for health. If I don't have an hour and a half to go work out, that doesn't mean I should do nothing.

43:46It means maybe I should go for a 15 minute walk. or a five-minute walk. Because in all of these areas of life, the reality is that anything above zero compounds. But you have to do it daily. You have to actually show up and punch the clock on all of these things. And the other concept you allude to, which is really central to the whole idea of the book, is this idea that your life has seasons. And what you prioritize, what you focus on in any one season may change. And the important part of that is you don't have to optimize everything at every point in your life. Your 20s are actually a great time to prioritize building financial wealth, building a financial foundation that will compound for the rest of your life.

44:31Your 30s and 40s when your kids are young may be a great time to prioritize the time and energy you give to them because they're not going to be 5, 10 years old for the rest of your life. And you can shift across them. The most real example I have of this is my wife. She's a high-powered fashion designer, was rising through the ranks in a very competitive industry, working at Gap and a bunch of the different companies underneath that umbrella. And when my son was born, she made the decision that she wanted to really prioritize being a mother. That is something that comes with a lot of stigma attached to it in the society we live in today, particularly if you live in certain areas of the country.

45:15A lot of people were constantly questioning her about that. They say, oh, you're just going to be a mom. Just a mom is the phrase that people use, which by the way is a very hurtful phrase that I think we just need to abolish because from having seen it now and understanding what that means, the hardest job in the world and the most important job in the world and not valued by society in the way that it should be. Taking that aside, the idea that life has seasons was extremely empowering to her because it's a reminder that she can prioritize my son during this season and any other children we may have and then return to these other areas of focus in a later one.

45:55She can go start her own line in a later season. She could go back and work in a later season. You're not making a decision that has to perpetuate for the rest of your life. You have these comings and goings. The idea that you can turn this dimmer switch and that there are these seasons or chapters in your life is an important story to replace the more traditional story, which is, well, if I do this, then I can't do that. Or if I do this, it comes at the cost of this. Or the case of the very ambitious 20-something, who's approaching this decade doing exactly what you're recommending, which is like, I'm gonna go all in.

46:37I'm gonna start to build my career and create a foundation for kind of financial viability. But the problem is that all of the sort of incentives that surround that young person begin to capture them and then you get stuck. Like you're, I mean, just imagine the associate at a law firm and then it's just up the partner track And the higher you move up, the harder it is to leave. And often if there's unhappiness with that person, they're going to compensate by overspending, further imprisoning themselves to a life that is at odds with the thing that is ultimately gonna make them happy. And that just becomes more and more distant.

47:21So that's the trap. And that's the trap that a lot of people fall into that I'm so grateful that I was able to find an escape hatch from, and as did you. It's pretty common, and all of your social environment at that point is keeping you stuck in that, because if you leave, then you're threatening your status within your tribe, and it's also not well-received, because if the people that you're working with also aren't unhappy, then suddenly you're a threat, because if you could do it, then they can do it. And it all comes back to the scoreboard. Maybe it's because I come from an athletic background, but I think of scoreboards with all of this.

47:59And money was the default scoreboard. It is the default scoreboard, partially because it's so easily measured. It's very easy to just put a number to money and to say like, okay, here's my scoreboard. And what happens is, Peter Drucker said this, what gets measured gets managed. The thing that you can easily measure ends up being the thing that you optimize around. It's the only thing that you focus on. And part of what I'm trying to get at is that we need to fix our scoreboard. The scoreboard is broken. There are all of these other areas of your life that are not on your scoreboard. So as a result, you play the game wrong.

48:31You do the thing. You continue to chase whatever the nicer thing is. You chase the C.S. Lewis, the inner ring. You keep peeling the onion and keep going further and further until there's nothing left. And I really think that what I'm trying to push and what I'm trying to make sure that people understand when they come away from this book is this idea that your scoreboard has much more than money on it. And when you make a decision, when you think about designing your life, when you manage these different seasons, you need to factor in all of the different types of wealth. If someone came and offered you$100 million today to do something for the next three years, you would, if on the old scoreboard, say, hell yeah, right?

49:09$100 million, that's the only thing that matters to me, money. But now if you were to tell the person, well, you're gonna have to work 120 hours a week, you're gonna be away from your family 350 days out of the year, you're going to work on things that you absolutely hate and you're not going to be able to work out well hold up now the whole calculus changes right there's a whole lot of money yes that's good but there's a whole lot of bad on these other types of wealth i'm not seeing my family social wealth takes a hit my purpose and meaning and my growth is going to take a massive hit because i'm working on things i hate my health is going to take a huge hit my time is going to be effectively zero so a decision that felt really obvious on the old scoreboard feels obvious in the other direction on a new scoreboard.

49:49And so it's an importance of understanding what that scoreboard is for your life, the things that you are going to prioritize and think about as you make these different decisions. You say in the book, there's this idea that when you have that kind of awakening moment that you realize, like the sort of standard thing to sort of say about it is, I realized I was playing the wrong game. And you're like, no, you were playing the game wrong. Like there is a game, you're just thinking about what that game is incorrectly. And the game is what? I presume if you were to define it, it's to lead your life in a way that you're moving in the direction towards happiness, love, connection, meaning, purpose, like all of these things that the happiness scientists, people like Arthur Brooks are talking about are the drivers of feeling like you're fulfilled in the life that you're living.

50:41I wanna wake up on an average Tuesday and be excited to live my life. Honestly, at the end of the day, that's how I think about it. Because Tuesdays normally suck in a normal world. And Monday, you kind of have some energy, but Tuesdays usually suck. I wanna wake up on Tuesday morning and be excited to live my life. And that's by the things that I'm doing, the people that I'm gonna be around. And this book is really like a thesis on like, okay, let's work our way towards this in a very systematic way that involves pillars, techniques, and this scorecard like idea. But it really begins with this idea of having a, like all of it snaps into focus when you have this, what you call like life razor.

51:23So explain what that idea is. Have you seen Apollo 13? Sure. So in Apollo 13, the climactic scene, they're in space and they have to reenter the atmosphere and they have to do it without the help of any of their computer equipment. And so they're trying to figure out how they're going to do this like series of complicated, you know, calculations in order to do this. Because if they come in too shallow, they're going to skip off into space. And if they come in too steep, they're going to explode. And there's this one moment where Tom Hanks says he thinks he knows the way to do it. He kind of pans the ship and all you see is this tiny triangular window and he pans it and the earth just comes into the center of the window.

52:03And what he says is that if he can keep the earth in the window as they go, it's going to keep them on the exact right trajectory in order to reenter the atmosphere safely. What that really is, is what I refer to as a life raiser. It's a single point of focus that allows you to cut through the noise in life. It allows you to navigate through whatever chaos, whatever storms might hit your life and come. And I think the best tangible example that I've seen recently was Mark Randolph. He's one of the founders of Netflix shared this piece that he had this concept of never missing a Tuesday dinner.

52:40And that no matter what he was starting Netflix, things were crazy, chaotic, running this startup, no matter what at 5 p.m. every Tuesday, he would leave and go have dinner with his wife. And when I spoke to him, the thing that really comes across is that it's not about the dinner. It's not about the date. It's about the ripple effects into all of these other areas of life. It's about the identity that it defines about who you are. And so when I talk about this life raiser concept, what I talk about is the concept that you need something like that. You need your version of the Tuesday dinner or the earth in the window.

53:15You need the single defining statement that you can make about who you are and about how you are going to make decisions in your life. Mine is that I will coach my son's sports teams. And there's really three characteristics that I would say come across with that. One is that it is controllable. I can control whether or not I am able to make the time to do that and show up and be there. The second is that it is ripple creating, meaning that has ripples into every other area of my life. It means that I have to be the type of father that he wants to have around. It means that I'm the type of husband that my wife is proud to see with my son.

53:55It means that I'm the type of community member that shows up and supports the other children. It has ripples. And then the third one is that it is identity defining, meaning I can say, what would the type of person that coaches my son's little league teams do in this situation? If someone comes and offers me an attractive financial opportunity that may come with some hit to my character or may be morally ambiguous, well, what would the type of person who coaches my son's sports teams do? I probably wouldn't do that because I will never jeopardize my relationship with my son and how he thinks of me and the respect he has for me in this moment for whatever amount of money.

54:34You're creating an archetype and then you can measure your decision-making against that archetype, which I think is super helpful. And you have all these examples of other people's versions of it. Like I'm the kind of person who would never let a friend cry alone, or I'm the kind of person who reads my kids' bedtime stories or whatever it is, it's a rubric, right? So when you have those difficult decisions where it's not a 10 or a one and you're in that middle place and it's easy to talk yourself into something that you probably shouldn't do, it's a measuring stick that kind of tells you exactly where you're at.

55:07Although I will say, Sahil, there is a little bit of a flaw in your life razor. And it has to do with the control piece. One is your son's two, right? Two and a half. So it's presuming, it's presuming that your child is gonna wanna play sports. Totally. It could be anything though. It could be that a coach is drama. If I know anything, it's that God is gonna throw you, like to use a baseball analogy, is gonna throw you a curve ball. I believe that. I believe he's already thrown several. Obviously it's adaptable. Like the ethos of it I get, and I think it's easily applies to anything. It creates like a very clean visual.

55:45And I'm sure if your son decided he didn't wanna play sports and he wanted to be a theater kid or whatever, it's the same idea applies, right? Yeah, I'm excited to be a ballet dad. As the new kind of young dad who was a college athlete, it's like, well, of course he's gonna play. Yeah, I mean, we create our own, we definitely impose our own will on how we think our kids are gonna, what they're gonna be excited about. If there's one thing I've learned, by the way, about being a dad that I've changed my mind on, it's that you can't teach your kids anything. They come out with a kit and you just have to hope to embody the values that you want them to learn.

56:21You share a set of values, you put guardrails up and you rush in to support where their curiosity leads them. That's a beautiful way of articulating it. It's not going to lead in the direction that you suspect. Or that you want it to. Or that you, yeah, so. My mom still wants me to go to medical school. Yeah, me too, I'm 58. I mean, I swear to God until I was 30, my mom would annually ask me, am I sure I don't wanna go for medical school? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Indian genes die hard. So yes, your job is to rush in and to support their curiosity, but it sounds like you had really good role models for that.

57:01Your parents did that for you, right? Yeah. And then, and this is the key, is detaching from any kind of expectations around what that might look like. And that's where you run into issues around like, because when you have a kid, you're always imagining like, oh, it's gonna be like this or what happens if this happens or whatever. And in my experience, it's always different from that. And your kids become your greatest teachers and they push you in directions that you didn't see coming. And like anything, those are your growth opportunities. Yeah, I think we also either reject or amplify what we experienced with our own parents and how we parent our children.

57:50And I think about my own father and my relationship. And my dad is in many ways, my best friend in the world. I don't tell him that. I don't feel like I've articulated that to him. Even now I'm reflecting in this moment that it's a shame that I say this to you and not to him. And I should probably leave here and tell him that. And I just think about our relationship and how so much of who I am as a person has formed through seeing the way that he showed up for my sister and I as a father and as our number one cheerleader. The way that he worked as hard as he worked on things that lit him up throughout his life, but then always had time to come in the backyard and play catch with me in the evening when I'm sure he was exhausted, when I'm sure that he didn't want to, and I'm sure that he knew he had work to do late at night.

58:42And I remember a formative moment in our relationship when I called him to tell him that I could no longer play baseball. My shoulder was hurt. This is my last year at Stanford. And I was so scared to make that phone call. I had totally come to terms with it. I mean, my arm hurt so bad every time I threw. I knew I couldn't do it anymore. but I was so nervous to make that phone call because so much of our relationship had been built on a baseball field. From the time I was two years old playing catch with him until the time I went to college and all of those years, he had been my throwing partner.

59:16He had been my coach. He had been my supporter. He came to all of our games. And I was scared that he would be disappointed that it was gonna hurt him that I was walking away from this. And I remember calling him and telling him and he just said, I don't care. I can't wait to be in the front row cheering you on and whatever you do next in your life. And the way that he's lived that out, he showed up at the finish line and surprised me at my first marathon. Like stupid, right? Like I'm just an adult running a marathon. The way that he shows up at the front row of like events that I do now when I'm speaking or something that's going on, he's sitting there taking notes in the front row so that he can give me feedback so that he can be a partner to me.

1:00:06That is just amazing. And I know that it's because he's rejecting what he felt he was missing from his father. And I'm the beneficiary of that. So now when I think about my own relationship with my son, it's amplify the hell out of that. Do those things to the 10th degree. Continue to push that legacy forward in time. Because that relationship, I mean, that father-son and connection is such a powerful one if we allow it to be. Yeah. You guys went to India, I know, recently also. And yeah, you shared with me, he's like taking notes at some talk you were giving or something like that. I was like, wow.

1:00:44He was sitting in the front row. Someone took a picture of him taking notes in the front row of my event. And you're like, my dad's a Harvard professor, right? He doesn't need a whole ton of advice, right? It's like a Harvard professor sitting there studiously taking notes. And it's because after the event, he's gonna sit down with me He's going to say like, oh, I really liked how you said this. I made a note that I thought you could have articulated this slightly better. He's giving me feedback, right? He's a truth teller in my life. And that goes back to what I said at the beginning, high expectations.

1:01:11He has expectations of me that I'm going to be the best speaker in the world, that I'm going to deliver this message better than anyone else. But he's pairing that with high support. He's sitting there actually doing the work and spending the time to help me meet those expectations that he has. High expectations are tricky though. You know, it is interesting that when you got injured playing baseball, that you had trepidation around calling him. Like even with all of that support, high expectations are, you know, come with all kinds of pressure and that sense of, you know, disappointment that comes if you can't measure up.

1:01:48I felt a lot of pressure my whole life. I still feel pressure. A lot of it self-imposed. I fundamentally have always believed that I was capable of more than what I was doing. And... That's a double-edged sword, man. and you probably see it in almost everyone you talk to on the other side of this table. I know you've felt it in your own life that like that desire to go and perform, to build, to execute, to do those things. It's challenging to wrestle that beast in the other areas of your life because you have the tendency to just go head down on something and wake up a year from now and you let every other area of your life get hurt.

1:02:37And so it's why this book has been such an important idea to me. I mean, what I say is that it's a manifestation of my own journey. It's me wrestling with this stuff every single day. I by no means have figured everything out and live the perfect life. And I try to get that across in everything that I share. I'm not a guru. I don't have all the answers for you to live the perfect life. What I can do is help you ask the right questions. I can help you wrestle with the questions because that's the journey I'm on. It's wrestling with the questions every single day, screwing up, coming back from it, getting better, hopefully over periods of time.

1:03:15Yeah, to be somebody who knows that they have a certain amount of potential and if they plug in in the right way, it could be a certain thing, but the cost of that, like weighing that against the cost of that, and the value set around parenting and your marriage and all those other things that you know will get sacrificed as a result and still making the decision to step back from that thing and perhaps not lean all the way into your potential and direct it in a different way that is consistent with these other values so that they don't get sacrificed. A big part of it for me, what has helped and I'll offer it in case there's someone out there listening that this might help is shifting my purpose away from being something that was my job to something that I can connect to every area of my life has been really helpful.

1:04:12There's this common tendency to say that you have to find purpose in your work. And I just reject that fundamentally. I think you need to be able to connect your work to your purpose, but your purpose can be a higher order thing that you can connect to multiple areas of your life. My purpose, as I define it today, is to create positive ripples in the world. And I can certainly connect that to my work, writing to things I share that I think I can create action in people that will improve their lives. But I can also really connect that to the house I am building, to my family, to the people, to my wife, to my son, to the ripples that I can create in their lives, my parents' my sister's life and our relationship, how it's transformed.

1:04:54That is really important to me because then I can channel ambition towards any of those areas. It's not only towards work. Right, that mission statement is like a holding company for all the other sort of things that, all the other aspects of your life, like it's an umbrella concept, it's broadly applicable such that, you can measure your decisions against it and your mission is not exclusive to some type of vocation. Yeah. One thing I do want to say and mention, because I just said it, now it's triggered the train of thought, is I alluded to earlier the fact that I created this really harmful dynamic with my sister for many years of my life.

1:05:39Almost entirely my fault in hindsight, because I had created this story that she was the smart one and I wasn't. And that manifests as a lot of resentment and competitiveness towards her, where I constantly felt like she was making me look bad. And like, why was she achieving all of these things? And I wasn't able to do those. And it made me feel a sense of resentment towards her. And as a result, we almost had a non-existent relationship for the first 30 years of my life. And it made my parents so sad. My mom I can't imagine the sadness that she felt around that for many years because your sibling is the one person who knows you from start to finish.

1:06:21They are there through your entire life. Your spouse won't be, your parents won't be. That's the person that you're in the trenches with your whole life. And something really beautiful happened after this whole life transition, which was that my sister had a young son 11 months before my son was born. Roman was born in May of 2022, my sister and her husband and their son came down to visit us. And I was holding my son and she was holding hers and we took a picture together. And I just remember in that moment, having this crazy sensation that my sister and I were meeting for the first time. This idea that you can know someone for your entire life, but have never met them truly, never seen them in the way that they are meant to be seen.

1:07:14And it was a reminder to me in that moment that there are going to be people and relationships that for no apparent reason, blossom in a new season of life in a way that they never did. People that are going to love you deeply that you literally have never met yet. What does your sister do now? She is an entrepreneur. She remains very high achieving. She is a great, great mom and the CEO of a health technology company in Boston. Yeah. I'm in the process of reconnecting with my sister. We weren't out of communication, but that relationship has not been as nurtured as it could have been. And I'm in the process of trying to reconnect that.

1:08:06it's a really powerful thing i mean i um i would say i would have characterized my sister in my relationship the same way you just did it wasn't an outwardly you know there wasn't outward animosity it was just this under the surface bubbling where you feel this layer of tension that exists and i had to explicitly say i mean i had to say something to end that just say like look i for many years of my life i felt this way it was created through my own stories that i was telling myself I'm now come to terms with that, change that, and have shifted the narrative in my own life. And I apologize. And I want us to be there for each other.

1:08:48You know, that's the person who my son will go to if something were to happen to my wife and I. I mean, it's such an important relationship. And there's just so much beauty in that recognition that just because a relationship hasn't been there doesn't mean that something can't change, that you can't take an action to change. So much of our feeling of being stuck in life, my own sensations of being stuck in life prior to this transformation are driven by this idea that you cannot, you don't feel you have the power to take an action and create an outcome in any area of your life. You don't feel like you can do something and create the desired outcome.

1:09:29And once you start to feel that, you start to change that and realize that you can do something, you can create an outcome in your life. It doesn't matter where that starts, that bleeds into every other thing that you do. Because that recognition changes everything. You reassume the power in that moment. You recognize that you do have control over the outcomes that you have in your life.

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1:11:33You strike me as somebody who has a lot of self-awareness and always has had a lot of self-awareness. You wrote this open letter to yourself like 10 years ago. And there was one sentence in it that stuck out for me and where you write to yourself and you say, you have a lot you hide from the world. You're insecure. You compare yourself to everyone but yourself. You're so afraid to fail that you always seem to choose the safe path. You've got work to do. Don't run away from it. So it takes a lot of self-awareness to even think about the idea of writing an open letter to yourself to be open 10 years later.

1:12:17And it takes a lot of self-awareness to have that sense of who you are and what your challenges are at a younger age. And you seem to now have a lot of self-awareness around the sort of growth that awaits for you. And I'm bringing this up because I'm interested in your thoughts It's around the relationship between self-awareness and the ability to change. There's this sort of adage in recovery that self-awareness will avail you nothing. And I don't know if that's true. Like, I think self-awareness is really important because you can't make that change until you can kind of see yourself clearly.

1:13:02But self-awareness is not enough. It's sort of like going to therapy and just talking about your problems and never actually putting them into motion. And I think sometimes self-awareness can get in the way because you're just talking about the thing and you delude yourself into thinking you're actually doing something when you're just sort of like engaged in some kind of mental masturbation about it. Yeah, it's almost like the mental model I would frame it around is like this idea that there's an awareness action gap. And the goal in life is to have a razor thin gap between your awareness and the action associated with that awareness.

1:13:41Most of us and me for most of my life, you referenced that 10 year old letter. There was an enormous gap between awareness and action. I didn't do anything about that for 10 years or almost 10 years. That was in 2014 I wrote that letter to myself. It was 2021 when I made the change, before I'd even opened the letter, in my own life. And this is the problem with all self-help content, self-improvement in general, is it's dopamine from information. It's dopamine from awareness. You go read a book. You're like, oh, I read a book. I'm smarter now. Well, you didn't do anything about the book. You didn't do anything about the one thing that you learned.

1:14:22And it's the same for me when I write that letter. You get the awareness and you feel good about yourself because you have the awareness. Or you go to the therapy session and you feel good about the awareness. But what are you doing about it? Where is the action? You need to shrink that gap that exists. And what I try to get across in everything I put out is what is the one tiny action that you can take right now. Because sitting around and planning out the perfect action and how I'm going to, you know, change the trajectory of my life in 10 years, I'm going to do this, this, and this, doesn't matter.

1:14:53What you need to do is create the like little bit of momentum today, whatever that tiny little thing is that you can do. And as I said, that's how you change your life. That's where you convince yourself that like, oh, I took that tiny action and something happened. So I changed in some tiny way. It's the first thing I say to any young person who comes to me and says they're feeling lost in life is wake up early and work out for 30 straight days. You set your alarm at 6 a.m., 5 a.m., whatever time and wake up and do a workout. And it has nothing to do with making money. It has nothing to do with your career.

1:15:26It has nothing to do with any of those other areas. What it has everything to do with is rewiring your brain to recognize that you can do a thing and create an outcome. And when you do that, when you convince yourself of that, you become completely invincible, unstoppable. It changes your relationship with your own potential because you see the results and in the context of fitness and exercise, like you physically see yourself change, and 30 days is enough to have some kind of change that then kind of plants the seed and gives you that encouragement to then apply that skill across the board into other areas of your life.

1:16:02But truly the only time that you can practice it is in the immediate moment. We're so captured by stories about who we are based upon the past and imagining, sort of caught up in a fantasy of what might happen. And we're asleep at the wheel in terms of actually living our life because the only moment it's actually happening is right now. And this is the only moment in which you have any agency to do anything about it. So we love to cast our gaze and talk about what we're gonna do tomorrow or these grand plans or what our to-do list is. But the brass tacks of it is atomic habits. That's what moves the needle.

1:16:40It's the tiny things that you do every single day anonymously that aren't sexy and aren't gonna get traction on X where you're like a big rock star. But the truth is it's like, it's really mundane bullshit that actually moves the needle of your life. Yeah, I say that the boredom of routine is a tax on long-term success. We all create this impression that like the most successful people in the world have these glamorous, gorgeous lives, like event to event, gala to gala, jets, yachts, all those things. When in reality, what underlies all of that is this boring daily grind of the basics. Just every single day executing against those little things, those things that add up.

1:17:25And the big challenge is that the inspiration that you get, the feeling, the dopamine hit from awareness or from information is perishable. If you don't go act on it right now, you will not act on it. It's like the whole idea of later. Not only is it perishable, it actually works at cross purposes with your goal because it convinces you that you actually already did something. That's the problem, right? Like pull any self-help book off the shelf. If you actually did everything it said, your life is gonna get better, right? So why do we have a new one? Like every week there's a new, there's just like thousands of these books, right?

1:18:02They're all valid in some regard. I'm sure there's universal truths that you can find on in every single one of them. The problem is we read them and to your point, like sort of think that we've actually done something when all we've done is load ourselves up with information that ultimately is useless unless it's translated. It was funny because in the actual writing and publishing process, this was a fairly significant point of contention that I really wanted this book to be filled with things that you can actually go and do. So you get the theory and the construct and the idea that these five types of wealth matter and you get all the awareness that comes with that, the information that comes with that.

1:18:45It leads to the questions that you're talking about with people. But I want people to go and actually build these other types of wealth. And the construct that I had around, that was to include these guides at the end of each section, these sort of battle-tested science-backed principles that can lead you to building these types of wealth and have this idea of like, here's the one week jumpstart. Here's the thing that you can do right now. And a lot of the publishing houses when I was originally pitching the book started to feel like it's too broad. It's getting too big. And you know this, the traditional publishing industry really wants you to get laser focused on a single topic.

1:19:19And it's why I think the meme has perpetuated that most of these books are 15 page blog and then 175 pages of filler. And I really didn't want to do that. I wanted something where people would actually change. I say that my purpose is to create these ripples. Ripples aren't created through awareness, through information. Ripples are created through action. It's the actual rock hitting the pond creates the ripple. And you need people to go out and take action. You need, if it's normally 5 % of people that act on a book, what does it look like for it to be 10? How does that change way more people's lives?

1:19:54How does it change the lives of the people they go out and interact with? Because if you read something and you go interact with your partner a little bit more effectively, or you go spend a little bit more present energy with your child, or you show up to work with a little bit more energy, that has lasting effects for other people in your world as well. What do you think is the differentiator between somebody who could read your book and then turn around the next day and start taking action and the person who reads it and doesn't. Like, do you have a sense of the qualitative difference between those two people?

1:20:34Like, what is it that gets in most people's way? And what is the kind of unifying quality that people who actually, you know, know how to like kind of move their lives forward, hear the information and go, oh, that'll make my life better. I'm gonna do that. Accountability. One person in your life that you're gonna be on the journey with. around these concepts. I have time and time again found that environment is the thing that holds people back from making actual change, from taking action in their life. And there is scientific evidence that the people you surround yourself with impact your outcomes.

1:21:08The Pygmalion effect is this idea that when people around you have high expectations for you, you rise to the level of those expectations. So the people you surround yourself with are actually impacting your ability to change your trajectory. And if you can find one person that you're going to enact change with, that you're gonna have the little group text with where all you say is like done at the end of the day when you did the one thing, that changes everything. It's the reason 75 hard is such a self-perpetuating idea. It's not because the workouts are great or because reading 10 pages a day.

1:21:43It's because you create a community of people that are trying to grow together. And then you stick to it. You don't wanna let the other people down. You don't wanna be the one person that doesn't say done in the group chat. So you keep doing it. But when you lack that, when you're on your own, it takes an incredible amount of energy when you're solo to do something. I mean, again, it's like, how hard do you work out when you go to a gym and there's a lot of people looking at you versus in your own house by yourself? The quality of the people that you surround yourself with is when you talk about environment, I mean, that's a core piece to that, obviously.

1:22:16and you're somebody who's been very conscious about the people that you kind of surround yourself with. And you also like in the book, like how many people, like you went out and like talk to so many just normal people, right? Elderly people, people from all walks of life. And you tell these stories throughout the book, like what you learned from all of these people. So you're like actively soliciting wisdom and input but from a wide swath of sources. Like, you know, I know that like you're friends with Tim Cook and he's sort of a mentor, but to me, you know, what speaks to your character more is like all of these other kind of like anonymous people that obviously there was some commitment on your part to like go out into the world and spend time with tons of different people to help you figure out like how you were going to, you know, direct your energy.

1:23:09Yeah, I mean, do we really need another book about how billionaires are successful? It's funny, whenever I tell people that I wrote this book, they're like, oh, so did you interview, you know, Tim Cook? Or did you interview like all these really wealthy people? And I'm like, not really. Because how is that relatable? How is that interesting in terms of how you can change your life today? It's aspirational, maybe, but it's not relatable to what you are going to do. The billionaire's life is not relatable to me, by the way, let alone to anyone else that's out there reading. What is relatable is Alexis Lockhart, who reached out to me in response to a newsletter, who experienced a tragedy of really impossible to comprehend proportions in her life, and who found a path coming out of that.

1:23:58and through that path has redefined what a wealthy life looks like to her, who exemplifies the things that I'm trying to talk about in the book that I'm trying to get across. And when I think about, again, creating action, those are the stories that create action because you see yourself in them. The most important piece with all of this is I need to be able to find myself in someone in that book. I need to be able to see myself in someone, in someone's story so that I can see, okay, there's the path, there's the thing, there's the thing I'm gonna attach myself to to actually go and create change.

1:24:29It shrinks that gap between the awareness and the action. And if there's one thing I've learned, it's that you can learn just as much, if not more, from the conversation with your Uber driver than you can the conversation with the billionaire. It just goes back to that idea of asking the right questions. And when you're interested in questions and not necessarily their answers, you'll be amazed what you can discover. And you talk a lot about listening, which I think is a skill most people are really poor at. Me included, by the way. But if you learn how to do it well, it becomes like a superpower and the world becomes your university.

1:25:14Yeah. I recently spent time with the gentleman that founded Humans of New York. You know, that thing. He goes up to people on the street. Brandon Stanton. Goes up to people on the street and just asks them questions. And he articulated it as when you are truly listening in a conversation, it's as though you disappear and the other person is free to be their full self and to share things. I thought that was such a beautiful way of articulating it because the tendency and the standard is what's called level one listening. It's me listening, which is like I sit here and as you're talking, I'm just running these trains of thought.

1:25:51Everything you say, I'm relating to myself. You're talking about some run that you did. I'm like, oh, I should really run today. I haven't run yet. I need to do this. It's like a form of conversational narcissism. I'm relating everything you're saying to something in my own life. And the point is recognizing it so that you can shift it, so that you can default to level two listening, which is you listening. It's me actually hearing everything you're saying, creating this map of who you are and of your interests, of the things that you care about. That's when I'm able to disappear and just allow you to show up as your full self.

1:26:26What was the most surprising thing that came out of all of those conversations that you had that ended up being an idea in the book that you didn't foresee? I mentioned Alexis Lockhart. I was turning in the book. I was about a week away from turning in the book when I got an email from a woman in response to one of my newsletters. and I read the email and she told it, articulated some of her story. And I emailed my editor 10 minutes later and just said, I'm not turning it in next week. I need to spend more time with this woman. That story, I would argue, is the most impactful story that's told in the book because the way that she articulated the loss that she experienced and the impact that it had on how she has navigated life and on the message that she wants to share with the world was so powerful.

1:27:23And I felt so much gratitude for the fact that she was willing to allow me to tell that story. It was a beautiful example too of when you share things with the world, you sort of cast out these like magnets. And every piece I've ever written, anything that I've ever shared is this tiny little magnet that is sitting out in the world, working for you without you knowing it. She responded to a piece that I had written 12 months before. It wasn't like some new thing that I had sent out. She happened to send it back to me right at this point when I was about to turn in this book. And I think the book is made significantly better for the fact that that happened.

1:28:03It was like you expand your luck surface area by sharing things, by putting these things out. The chance event, the lucky event of her seeing and responding, it was lucky, but at the same time, I sort of engineered that luck. For sure. I wanna talk a little bit more about time. You were talking about like Kronos and Kairos, the difference between the linear progression of time and time more as a function of like energy and attention and intentionality. And it was really interesting the way that you kind of, you presaged this whole idea by talking about the history of humanity's relationship with time, which is one that went from worship, I wrote it down, from worship to measurement, to understanding, to control.

1:28:51And this notion that we have now today, like more time and this advanced ability to make productive use of it. And yet the control that we desire remains elusive. And of course, we're surrounded by more distractions and more kind of addictive things that are like vying for that attention that makes it more difficult, of course. But among all of the kind of pillars, this is the one that I struggle with the most. I love this idea of time as wealth, but nature abhors a vacuum and distraction is always a convenient sort of way to fill the vacuum of those in-between moments in your life. And it's something that kind of eats away at your soul if you're not really intentional about carving out and protecting and creating boundaries around your time so that you can not just deploy your attention where you want it to go, but also to enjoy the experience of your own life while you're living it.

1:30:00There's this scene in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass where Alice and the Red Queen are running together and they keep running faster and faster. And Alice has this realization that although they're running faster and faster, they're not actually moving. They're not actually passing anything. And the Red Queen says, oh, you actually have to run twice as fast in order to get anywhere. We are really living in that reality in many ways. We're living in this world where you are having to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. And I think many people feel that way. It's called the Red Queen effect.

1:30:35It's the idea that you actually do have to run faster than your environment. in order to make progress. It's from evolutionary biology. It's like you have to actually evolve faster than your competitors, your surroundings in order to survive. And the challenge is people spend their time and invest their time into what I would call and what I do call low leverage activities. You spend your time on things that actually aren't progressing you in the direction of your goals, in the direction of the things that are going to move the needle. And I think the best example of someone who does the opposite that we can learn from is Lionel Messi and the way he plays soccer.

1:31:12If you go and actually Google search, Lionel Messi walking, you'll get a half a million hits. He has probably the most talked about walking habit in the world. Before the World Cup, there was all of these articles about how you were going to see him just like lazing around the field. And even in the World Cup final right before they won and before that goal that tied the game, he's like walking or he's literally walking around the field if you go and watch the replay and kind of just like looking around staring off into space it looks like a scene from before the game started or after it ended and it's actually the most important match of his life in the like 107th minute it's strategy not laziness he's conserving all of his energy to deploy it into the one moment that really counts into the one action that he knows is going to drive the highest leverage and going to create the outcome that he wants.

1:32:02It's the exact same thing as Warren Buffett and the way that he makes investment decisions. He focuses all of his energy on the things where he can actually make a difference and says no to everything else. The challenge is that most of us view no as something that we don't understand. It's like a foreign language to us saying no to things. We say yes, we default to yes. Every commitment, every new thing we're asked to do, every email, every cell phone notification, everything that comes in is a stimulus and we immediately owe it a response. There's this fake urgency that we create. And I think Cal Newport has done the best job of shifting the paradigm around this.

1:32:40Slow productivity, his new book is fantastic to just say, and deep work as well, to just say that the tried and true way to create extraordinary outcomes is not by doing more. It is actually by doing less but better. It's like essentialism at its finest. Isaac Newton and his miracle year. It's like locked in a room for one year, focusing all his attention in one spot and one point in time creates a lifetime worth of outputs. That might not happen if not for the epidemic that they were facing, the plague ravaging Europe. But that concept and then spending the time actually thinking about what are those activities in your life?

1:33:23what are those two or three things that are really going to progress you forward so that you can shift your time and energy to be focused on those makes a big difference. What's the relationship with discipline in that equation though? Because it's one thing to say, look, you gotta put this down and this is where your attention needs to go if you wanna move forward on this thing that you're claiming you care about, right? In practice, we're human beings, we're flawed. We like shiny objects and red wagons and things like that. and it's very easy to like throw us off track. And so, yes, you need discipline, you need accountability to your point earlier.

1:34:01What are the drivers of like putting that into practice for somebody who actually struggles with this? Yeah, I struggle with this, by the way. I have very low attention span. The biggest thing that has changed the game for me has just been adding a real structure around time boxing my day. What I mean by that is just having windows of time during the course of the day that don't need to be super long, I do an hour, that is going to be focused on a specific thing. And what you can make sure when you do that is that you have enough blocks during the day that are really hyper-focused on those couple of things that matter.

1:34:36And the other thing that you benefit from there is you leverage Parkinson's law, this idea that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. Email is the biggest example of that. It's very easy to email throughout the entire course of the day if you just graze on it. You end up grazing on these low-value tasks. By time blocking things out, you give yourself one window or two windows during the day when you're going to email, when you're going to respond to texts or notifications. You condense all of that activity. You end up actually doing it more efficiently and better. You send better responses because you're focused.

1:35:10But also, you don't allow it to bleed into the time that should be deployed into those things that matter. What is the thing that you struggle with the most with this? Is it the phone? Is it saying yes to cool stuff that you get invited to go do? I don't have a problem with saying yes because I've fundamentally given up on being liked by everyone. I spent 30 years of my life wanting to be liked. And what I realized is that people will like you when you say yes to everything, when you avoid hard conversations, when you let things slide, when you never create boundaries. And real ones actually love you when you do the opposite of those things.

1:35:47So I've given up on being liked and just focus on my real friends, the people that I really care about. The one that I really struggle with is compartmentalizing that barrier between work and family. I really struggle with turning off to make sure that when I'm with my son or with my wife, I'm really with them. Because you work at home, right? I work at home. So you're around it all the time and that becomes, yeah, it's difficult to have those hard outs on that kind of stuff so that you can attention shift. And your kids pick up on it. If you have your phone in between you, I mean, my new rule is that I don't want to have my phone between me and my son.

1:36:26And if I'm going to do something, it needs to be in another room because I realized I was just having too many moments where he was trying to play with me or say something and I was doing something right here. And what I realized is that time and energy are not the same thing. So like, yes, I was with him in that moment from a time perspective, but my energy was somewhere else. and kids and people in general pick up on energy, not time. You can spend an hour with your spouse, but if you're on your phone or you're doing email the whole time, that was not an hour of value that you got out of that versus 10 minutes where you were truly disappearing because you were listening to them can be extremely powerful.

1:37:03Yeah. What is your rubric for making decisions about where you invest your time and what kind of boundaries you create to separate work from the other parts of your life beyond like I'm the guy who's gonna coach my kids sports teams. Like that's fine as a kind of macro, you know, kind of global rule. But in the day-to-day of like, should I do this? Should I do that? I need to call this person back, but this thing is happening. Like the kind of brass tacks of just daily life that all of us have to kind of navigate. Yeah. I have, one, given up on the idea of urgency. Very few things in life actually need to be replied to right now.

1:37:50I used to be someone that prided myself on responding to every text right away or responding to every email that same day. I swerved off the road one time trying to respond to an email from a partner on my computer while I was driving. Crazy shit that we do to try to feed that urgency monster. And I've completely given up on that. I've just recognized, frankly, that there's nothing in life that's truly that urgent. And if you know what your two or three things are that really matter, maybe one of those is my relationship with my wife and son. Maybe one of those is this book project. And maybe there's one other thing.

1:38:26Those things can get my attention. I'll reply to them very quickly. And the rest of the stuff, maybe it's going to take a week. But really just giving yourself that grace to recognize that like, I don't need to be stressed if I don't reply to someone's text right away. The unfortunate thing is that sometimes that leads to people not liking you, or it leads to people feeling like you're no longer as close as you once were. And that is just a reality of life that you are going to lose friends when you kind of change the way that you're living. along these journeys. The other just like simple rule that I have now is one that I use to fight my natural optimism around new opportunities.

1:39:06I don't know if you do this too, but like whenever a new opportunity comes my way, I have a tendency to be like, this is the most exciting opportunity in the world. And to fight back against that, I always ask myself, if this is going to take twice as long and be half as profitable as I currently think, would I still do it. And if the answer is yes, then it might be something that I'm going to lean into. But normally that like initial new opportunity optimism, you get proven wrong because things do just take way longer. Like a book project. I thought I was going to write this book in a year. I'm sitting here three years later and we're just having it come out.

1:39:41You need to fight back against that optimism. We never have more time later. It's called the yes damn effect. It's this that like we say yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is like a major malfunction of mine. Like if it's far enough off in the horizon, like I'll say yes to like anything, right? And you have that rule around like, would you do it if you had to do it today? And would you do it like today, even if it, what is it like it's twice as hard? Yeah, it takes, it's gonna be twice as long as you think it's going to. Yeah, which is, I think that's a really good kind of like. We always think we're gonna have more time in the future and you inevitably will not, you will get there and be like, oh shit, why did I say yes to this thing?

1:40:20I shouldn't have. And we've done that over and over again. So it should be an easy rule for people to follow because you felt that in your life. Back to this transition that you made during the pandemic. So the pandemic happens, you're at home, you're navel gazing or like, you know, you know, having a moment about like how you're living your life. How did you actually make that transition of getting out of finance when, you know, you have a family and you have expenses and all of that, I'm sure you had money put away or whatnot, but going from that and stepping into this kind of unforeseen relationship with risk to do something different where maybe it wasn't even clear what that actually looked like.

1:41:06I had taken a lot of tiny actions over the year before that in hindsight, I can connect the dots and say that I was kind of setting myself up. In the moment, I was just following my energy. And that was in the form of writing. I had started writing on Twitter, I guess what's called X now, in May of 2020. And from then until the time when I made the big transition, May of 2021, I had grown my platform from being, I don't know, roughly 500 followers when I started to 150 or so thousand followers. And on the back of that, there had been some seeds of business that had started to pop up. A lot of founders, either friends or people that I'd invested in were coming to me asking like, how do I grow a platform?

1:41:51It's valuable for fundraising or employees or whatever it is. And so I'd started doing a little bit of just on the side, talking to people, helping. And in the moment where I had to make the transition, the fact that I'd taken all of those actions for a year was really empowering. People call these things like a leap of faith, right? You're taking this big leap of faith to make a change. And the reason a leap of faith is so scary is because you have a fundamental asymmetry of information and evidence, meaning I know a whole lot about my life where I am right now. I know that I can live the life.

1:42:27I have all the information and I have all the evidence to suggest I can live here. The other side of that leap, I have no information and I have no evidence that I can build a life there. So it feels like this like 100 foot leap with this enormous chasm down below. You can shrink that a whole lot by gathering information and by creating tiny little bits of evidence. Because every single ounce of information and evidence you create shrinks it. It makes it feel like a more manageable step. So when I actually had to functionally do that, I was scared because I had never been an entrepreneur. I had never, frankly, even thought that I could be one.

1:43:02And when I said we need to move, my initial thought was, I'm going to go join another investment firm. And I said that to my wife. I said, I think I'll just interview. I should be able to get a job on the East Coast. And she said to me, can't you just do this thing you've been doing on the weekends full-time? You're writing the things you're doing. Can't you just do that? I had literally never thought about it. The idea of being an entrepreneur, doing my own thing never crossed my mind. And it was only through her belief in me and through her questioning that foundational assumption that I had had about what was next that I was led to like, oh, I can actually remake my entire life.

1:43:40It's not just a geographic change. It's a geographic change, a career path change. I mean, it's going to be my entire life that I'm going to go and make a shift around. Yeah. The sort of behind the scenes kind of thing at play here though, is when you describe like the asymmetry and, you know, all of that, it's like, I'm looking at you and I'm like, this guy's such a quant, you know what I mean? He's like trying to like, he's trying to like write the code, you know, for this whole thing. And in truth, what really moved the lever was your wife who has this heart-centered perspective and isn't thinking in terms of risk analysis and asymmetry.

1:44:20Funny how that works, right? She's just like, that doesn't light you up. This does like the emotional kind of like spiritual piece here, which is, yes, I have all this evidence about what my life is like right now. And that keeps me stuck. But I also know how it makes me feel. And I know the extent to which is, you know, kind of degrading my soul. And this other thing that is Kairos oriented, that's like giving me life force and energy. Yeah, there's not a lot of evidence, but your wife sees what you couldn't, which is that's all the evidence that you need in order to kind of motivate that leap into something that is unknown.

1:45:07I have never until this moment had that articulated to me or understood that as well as I do now. We had known each other since she was 14, I was 15 years old. And so in thinking about that even, what you recognize is she probably knew me and could see me better than I could see myself. And the reality underlying all of that and the energy underlying all of that and the heart that was not exposed in the work that I was doing prior, she could see that. There was nothing wrong with the work I was doing. And I loved the people I worked with. And it just wasn't for me. The energy, the life force, as you said, it wasn't there.

1:45:50And sometimes in life, all it takes is one person believing in you, understanding you in those moments when you can't see yourself. And if you have that, if you have one person in your life like that, you're lucky. And for her to say, I'll go on this ride with you, even though, yeah, it might be uncertain. Yeah. It will be uncertain. It will be uncertain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like you were like this crazy Twitter superstar, Like you have like a million followers there, right? And I think you were sort of first well-known because you were one of the first people to like do threads before like threads were a thing.

1:46:27And that got like a bunch of attention and traction, but you've really built this powerful community around these ideas that you share, which clearly you think a lot about and write extensively now and now in this book and in your newsletter. But that was sort of the backbone upon which you kind of created this architecture. for everything that you're doing now, right? It all began on Twitter. All began on Twitter. If you create value, you receive value in return. I feel like this is something that gets lost in all of the career advice that you see out there. It's like, everyone wants to give career advice and no one wants to say that like these basics actually still hold true.

1:47:06Create value for people. You'll do great in your life and in your career if you create value for everyone you're around. I mean, that's a long-term strategy, right? So I'm curious around how you immunize yourself from the incentives of audience growth that seem to capture a lot of people and then begin to drive them into directions that are contrary to their kind of value set. You say long-term games. I think that everyone likes to say they're playing long-term games until they actually have to do long-term stuff. uh it's like there was a meme going around a while a while back that said that like everyone likes to wear car heart but no one likes to do car heart shit uh you know no one wants to actually do that um the way that i've always thought about this cosplay yeah the way that i've always thought about this with having a platform is that in the path i was on there was a there was a track right you knew that like from lawyer days There's a track.

1:48:07There's a 30, 40-year career track from joining as an analyst to becoming a partner and riding off into the sunset. Retiring, you get your gold watch and you're kind of done. There is no path in the world that we operate in. No one is setting up a track for you. There's no retirement plan. There's no like, okay, here's what I'm going to do in years zero to 10. And then here's where I'm going to be years 10 to 20. That doesn't exist. And that's really disconcerting. And so when I went into it, the first thing I asked myself was, what is the thing that makes this a 20 or 30 year journey that I'm on?

1:48:41What is that? To me, that is trust. Trust is the atomic variable. It's not likes, views, follower growth. It's not any of those things. It's trust. You need some group of people to deeply trust you. The only way that you can build trust is through real, raw authenticity. It's not through growth hacks. It's not through whatever the latest, greatest trend is or whatever that fancy thing is that people want to do and jump on. It's through building real authentic connection with people. And that extends to one-to-one connection. Maybe it's one-to-many, but whatever it is, it's trust that has to be the focus.

1:49:20You can build a whole lot of commerce on top of trust. That's what, go back 50 years, P &G, Johnson & Johnson, they owned trust because they They owned all the airwaves. They owned radio, TV, magazines, all of those things. So they built commerce on top of it. Now we're in a world where the trust is decentralized rapidly. And you can build a node of trust for yourself, but it has to be that you are focusing on trust, not on those other things. And so on my whole journey, you can go back and look at anything I've ever done. I was never following some trend. I've never like jumped on the, hey, let me do a thread on TED Talks that'll change your life or like Chrome extension.

1:49:57I just never done it because I don't care to grow a bunch of followers that don't know who I am. I want people to know the values that I am all about, to know about my family, to know about the journey that I've been on. And there are going to be people that don't like that and don't want to follow me, and that's fine. If I'm not for you, that's great. You should find people that lift you up, that you feel energized by. That shift in focus has been, at least in my own mind, what has allowed me to avoid the perils of audience capture, as some people have called it. Yeah, trust is the most valuable asset.

1:50:32And it's also the thing that most people who are creating and sharing on social media have the loosest sort of relationship with. It's also the easiest thing that can be destroyed, right? And so I think for that reason, it's the thing that's most important to like preserve and protect. Yeah. It's like Warren Buffett has that quote about it takes like 20 years to build a reputation and just 10 minutes to destroy it. Right. It's the same thing. I mean, you're a perfect example of this. And you've seen this now because you've been around and doing this for so long. The number of people that have come and gone during the time that you've been creating and doing this.

1:51:10Yeah. It's hundreds, hundreds of big people that were like really well known and that were crushing it and that everyone thought was going to be the next big thing. But it's hard if you're chasing trends and if you're losing. Honestly, it all connects because I felt like for so many years of my life, I was just playing a role and fulfilling someone else's definition of what my life should look like. I didn't want to do that again. I can't. That's exhausting. You might be able to do that for a year, three years, maybe five years, but eventually you are going to get tired of putting on an act, putting on a show.

1:51:44And so if you were going to share genuinely and authentically about your life, it has to be real. It has to be the journey you're on. And the benefit of that is you can do that forever. I never run out of content because the content is how I'm living my life. It's what I'm doing. It's the people I'm talking to. Mm-hmm. So when you interface with social media, you know, as somebody who, you know, is kind of creating, you know, in that ecosystem consistently, like it's a shifting landscape also. And most of the kind of discourse is around like what's working and what's not. To your point of me being around for a minute, like, yeah, like I just, I do my thing, dude.

1:52:22You know, I'm a tortoise. I just show up every week. You know what I mean? and I have seen a lot of people come and go. Sometimes that's because of a reputational issue, but often it's because people are caught up in the kind of short-term gains and they haven't created something that has real value, let alone a kind of workflow that is sustainable for the long haul. So I'm always thinking about the other kind of types of wealth because if my marriage falls apart or I'm not there for my kids or I don't have time for my friends or my fitness or the other things that nourish my life, then there's no way that I'm gonna be able to continue to show up for this, which is something I've been doing for like 12 years now.

1:53:07And I still love it, but I love it because I have to pay attention because I have dimmer switches, you know, in these other areas of life. Like, I think there's this binary idea, you know, on this on-off switch sort of thing about how you have to be and how you have to live in order to do something great. You have to go all in and you gotta block out the world. And maybe, yeah, maybe there is a brief season of life in which that is important, but you have to create counterbalances for that, like in the way a pendulum has to swing. Like it's either it's a dimmer switch or a pendulum, like it has to swing back into balance.

1:53:47So we think of it as these on-off switches, you go all in, or there's this other pressure that your life has to be perfectly balanced every single day, right? Like all five of these types of wealth have to be boxes checked before your head hits the pillow every night. And I think that that creates a pressure that people can't really sustain or live up to. Yeah, it's balanced in the micro versus the macro, right? Like it doesn't necessarily - What is your timeframe, right? Like, yeah, like my life is not balanced on a day-to-day or even week-to-week basis, but on a yearly basis. Absolutely. And you know yourself well enough to create that in your life, right?

1:54:27Like I know right now, I am in a season of unbalance during this window while I'm gonna be trying to push this book out into the world and I'm trying to impact millions of people. And this is a big part of what I wanna be able to tell my son that I do and the impact that I'm creating in the world. And that means that I'm away, right? I'm away right now. I'm away next week. I'm away the week after that. And that's tough. That's not balance in the micro, but it is in the macro because I know what it's going to imply. And I know that I'm going to be able to reset, make sure that you do have the week when you're just there, when you're present.

1:55:03Putting too much pressure on yourself to be perfect in the days is kind of a waste of energy. You want to be perfect in the years. You want to be perfect when you zoom out because the days look like this. And what really matters is the trend line. People obsess over their current location and not enough on like, okay, but what is the trend line of where you are? You're going to sit in your current spot and look around at all the people around you and say like, well, I'm not doing great because I'm 30 and I haven't, I didn't hit Forbes 30 under 30. So I'm not doing great. Well, if your trend line is going like this and you're in this spot, that's pretty damn good versus the person that like is way above you, but their trend line is flat.

1:55:42You're going to pass them. You're going to continue to do better and better. And so shifting that narrative in your own head away from like the comparison of where do I sit relative to everyone else? Like worrying about how everyone else's grass looks rather than focusing on watering yours. You reference Arthur Brooks a couple of times in the book. And specifically you kind of quote this thing that he always says when people ask him, like what are the drivers of happiness? And he says, friends, family, and a relationship with the divine, right? Right. Arthur is a deeply religious person. His faith is very important to him, but his evidence-based work also supports the idea that faith is kind of a crucial element in happiness.

1:56:31So I'm curious around like what that looks like or means to you. I mean, it's not one of the pillars in your book. So how would you, you know, kind of couch yourself in that context? I am a very spiritual person. I am not a religious person necessarily in terms of one particular faith, but I grew up in a household that had everything. I mean, my mom grew up Hindu. My dad I grew up in a Jewish household. We have a number of Muslim family members. My mom has a lot of Buddhist tendencies. I mean, we grew up with everything and I am deeply connected to a variety of different cultures as a result. And I feel very lucky for that.

1:57:15And it's sort of in my like mutt background, my mixed background to be connected to all these different types of people. My view on spirituality is that it runs the gamut across of several of these types of wealth. I talk about the idea of space in mental wealth. This idea that you need to create space in your life. Viktor Frankl talks about our power being in the space that we can create between stimulus and response. So much of our life is like this, immediate response to every stimulus. And spirituality is probably the primary way that most people do create that space. It's through connecting with God, through your higher power.

1:57:52It's through prayer. It's through meditation practice. It's through walking. Any way that you can create that space in your life creates mental wealth. The other thing, and why I think personally that faith is such a key connection point for happiness is because of the feeling of community. It's the feeling of connection to something bigger than yourself. And we've seen that time and time again, that acting in the service of others, acting in the service of something bigger than just you is probably the most tried and true pathway to being happy. It's one of the steps in the 12 steps. Yeah. You know, service, community, unity.

1:58:30Yeah, I mean, your life expands in lockstep with your commitment to serve others. And the premise behind service to others is this humbling notion. It's like a dose of humility that you're not the center of the universe. And it's a cure for your self-obsession that there are more important things at play. And so to practice service is to humble yourself to that notion. And that can take the form of some faith doctrine, but just being available to other people, I think is sort of a religious act in and of itself without a doctrine. Yeah, I've also just found interestingly that when I focus on money, I make dumb decisions and I do dumb things.

1:59:22When I focus on service, I focus on creating value. When I focus on ripples, I actually make more money too. And I'm happier. You also create time. It's that inconvenient thing that you think is occupying time you really need for something else. But when you practice it, suddenly all those other things end up getting done and they get done in a more neatly packaged way than they would have otherwise, in my experience. That idea of creating time is a really good one. And one that I often reflect on because people will say like, oh, you can't create time. You have your window and you never know when it's gonna be up.

2:00:04And one day you're gonna wake up and you're gonna die. And it couldn't be further from the truth, right? Like at the very beginning of this, we had the conversation about, I had 15 more times that I was gonna see my parents. We took an action. We moved back across the country. That number 15 is now in the hundreds. I see my parents every other week. They get to spend tons of time with my grandson and experience all the joys and the love that comes with that. I mean, we literally created time. We created moments with the people that we care about by taking an action, by doing something. We bent, I have these graphs in the book that show how much time you have with different people.

2:00:41We bent the curve by taking an action. And again, it goes back to that idea. Like you have to know that you have the power to actually change things in your life. You're not a victim that just has to, you know, kind of give in to these twists of fate that come your way. You can actually take actions and change how time operates. So what is your message to the person who says to you, well, this is all great, but like, look at you and you went here and you had this and you don't understand how complicated my life is. And, you know, I don't have the agency that you have and it must be nice. Or, you know, I just can't get my head around how I could actually make those decisions and do it in a way that wouldn't be irresponsible because of, you know, the way my life is set up.

2:01:30Yeah. I mean, the first thing is it doesn't have to be dramatic. dramatic change is what captures attention but as we've talked about the tiny changes are the ones that actually create outcomes and you are always in control of taking a few tiny actions that will lead you to be slightly better off tomorrow there's this um the last scene in the movie the martian which is one of my favorite movies matt damon is talking about how he survived his time on mars and he just says you just solve one problem and then you solve the next one and then you solve the next one. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home.

2:02:05I love that phrase because it really is true. When we're in a bad spot or when you have some huge problem in your life, it's just this enormous wall in front of you. And that is the reason people don't act. It's this huge wall. You can't imagine going and scaling this big wall, but all you really have to focus on is just the one little step. It's just solving the one problem. And so for anyone out there that feels that way. It's just that. It's take the one tiny action today. It's like, wake up early and do the workout. Text the friend. If you feel like you don't have a relationship with someone that you should, send them a text.

2:02:40Give them a call. If you feel like your body is not where it should be, do the one workout. If you feel like your time is not in the place where it should be, audit your calendar. Look at where your energy is going during the course of the day. Do the one tiny thing that is going to leave you slightly better off tomorrow. And what is the core idea beyond that that you want people to take away from the book? Your wealthy life will involve money, but in the end, it is going to be defined by everything else. Recognizing that today and then taking actions to actually drive yourself in the direction of that is the most important thing.

2:03:25I wish I read this book 25, 30 years ago. Well, you read it now. Amazing, man. Thank you. Like I said, at the outset, the book is really quite an accomplishment and it's incredibly thorough. Like it's not a short book. It's easy to read, but there's a lot in there. There's a lot. And I think it's, you know, I said, I wish I'd read it when I was younger, but I think there's something in there for every single person at whatever stage of life that you find yourself in, whether you're an empty nester or a kid who's, you know, looking at graduating from school and trying to figure out what's next.

2:04:03So thanks for writing it and thanks for coming and sharing with me today. Thank you so much for letting me share.

2:04:25That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment.

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2:06:17Thank you.