Ep. 124 Listen To This If You’re Feeling Stuck (In Your Life, Career Or Relationship) With Sahil Bloom

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1:40What is up and welcome back to Working Hard Hardly Working. This week I'm speaking to the incredible Sahil Bloom, someone I knew I wanted to get on whilst I was in LA. Sahil took the path for success that many would prescribe to someone who asked, how do I become successful? An Ivy League education, a career in finance. But in 2020, his life and mindset changed forever after one conversation. And I won't spoil it for you because Sahil tells it best, but this is an episode for anyone who feels stuck in their career or unsure of their purpose and wants to design a life that they've always dreamed of, but might be too scared, or they just don't quite know what the life they've dreamed of actually looks like.

2:16Before we get into the episode, if you just click on your app and subscribe to the podcast, I know it's something that you might not think of doing, but it actually helps the podcast a huge amount. I know that a lot of the podcasts that I listen to, I'm not actually subscribed to. And what it means is it's super helpful for us. But it also means that every Monday morning, you have the podcast exactly where you need it to be without even having to think of it. And it will give you the weekly boost you need. So thank you so much. And I hope you enjoy the episode.

2:46Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. This is great. I'm very, very excited. And it feels lovely to be doing it in the LA sunshine. It's streaming in. It's a very different environment from what we usually have in London where we can like hear the rain on the windows. I'm in New York, so I feel the exact same way. I was like basking in the sun like a lizard before coming in here. I feel great. Yeah, I know. It really does like, I feel like the effect on my mood just, it's like I can just feel it all lifting. I think I have seasonal depression sometimes where like when it is, those short days are what kill me, where it gets dark at 3 p.m.

3:19In London, actually, especially, it gets dark at like 3.30 p.m. honestly london it's pitch black by like 3 30 it's hard to make like it's hard to i mean you're in and you're at work the entire time it's light out so you leave like you come in it's dark you leave it's dark i mean it's miserable yeah no it truly is it's a great ad for london um i always start by asking everyone whether they feel like at the moment you are more working hard or hardly working uh working hard right now for sure i mean i'm in the middle of a i think of life as um having these seasons. It's like my just general like macro view on how I think of my life.

3:53And you have these seasons of unbalance that are necessary if you want to build towards a season of balance. Yes. And the whole idea of balance is kind of funny because people obsess over the idea of like every single day has to be balanced. They need the perfect mix of like personal time, work, health, you know, whatever all of the things are. And the reality is that sometimes you actually just have to go through the season of unbalance in order to have that season of balance later. And I'm very much in one of those seasons of unbalance. Yeah, I completely agree. Like, I think that that way of it, that's exactly how I see it as well.

4:30I also think that I worry a lot about the effect of social media on this, like, and this is, you know, going right, of course, immediately, which is what I love to do. But I worry a lot about seeing everyone's end goals of balance without seeing the work that went into getting there and of course we can kind of extrapolate and we can say okay I want you know I see this person's day in the life or I see this person's Instagram stories and I want all of this at the same time we have this like directly opposing kind of dialogue which says but you also need to as you say make sure every single day has the right amount of balance you're seeing your friends enough you're like contributing to your relationship enough like you're constantly at the gym like all of these different things and I feel like we by having those two things as this goal whilst not realizing that a lot of the times those are pretty mutually exclusive I feel like is a bit of a disservice to ourselves when we're looking at like the type of you know people coming into the workplace now and expecting both to be able to get to the highest height in their career and also be the person who has most freedom to do all of these other things.

5:47What do you think about that? I 100 % agree. There is a cost of entry to be paid for all of the things that you want. And being clear-eyed about what that cost of entry is, is really important. And so when social media contributes to deluding you, lying to you about what that is, it's a real struggle. I mean, it creates mental health challenges. I think about loneliness as an example. The entrepreneurial journey, anyone that has gone through this knows there is a long period of loneliness in that journey. And that is quite literally a cost of entry to the personal transformation you are trying to create.

6:21You are going to have a time when you have changed, you have grown, you have developed. And the people that were in your prior environment no longer speak the same language as you. You have a whole different set of values, goals, dreams, aspirations. And so you don't align with them anymore. You have kind of moved on and they are in the same place they were. And you have yet to attract the new people into your world. So you have this long period of loneliness that is very much part of that journey as an entrepreneur or just your own personal growth journey as you change. And no one shows the story of that period of loneliness.

6:56Everyone shows the other side once they've made it and things are great and it's sunny and beautiful. But those winter months, if you will, can be really lonely and challenging. But it's very hard if you're in it because you don't see role models that are in that. You have stress and anxiety in life when there is a gap between your present reality and your expectations for the future. But in particular, when you don't have a plan to close that gap. I have always found that in my life that it's okay if there's a gap, as long as you feel like you know what you have to do to close that gap. Because then it just becomes about executing, doing the thing on a daily basis, which you know you were capable of.

7:35But before you have that plan, I think that that gap manifests as that feeling of anxiety and stress that you're not doing what you know you're capable of, and you don't know how to get to that world on the other side. Yeah. And that's something I really want to focus on in this episode. We've had a lot of questions recently from people who are feeling a little bit stuck or feeling like they'll see all of this content out there that looks like their dream life or looks like what they want their dream business or their dream job or whatever it might be and the this gap between where they are now and the actual execution of that dream or just feeling really stuck I think at the beginning what it would be really useful to get is a little bit more context on kind of where your views kind of come from could you tell us a little bit about like what you were like as a young person.

8:22Yeah, I can do my best for sure. I come from a mixed race background. So my mom was born and raised in India. My dad is white from the Bronx, New York. My parents met, they crossed paths over a two week period in university at Princeton. And when my dad wanted to marry my mom, his father wasn't accepting of it and told him he had to choose between my mom and his family and he walked out the door and never saw his family again so to this day i never met my dad's parents he has three siblings i never met i have first cousins out there somewhere in the world that i've never met uh so just this crazy i mean in hindsight it's a completely insane thing uh that you would have this family breakup over something as um but it does happen a lot it happens too often probably less so now if i had to guess Just because it was 1982 and maybe certain things were different.

9:16Yeah, of course. But it was a perfect example to me of something that has become very close to me, which is the idea of rejecting the common convention, like rejecting the default path that was handed to you. I feel like my dad had grown up in this family where like the path was literally told to him what he was supposed to do and how he was going to walk it. And he hard pivoted off that path and chose his own way. and that decision to choose love above all of these other things has been this like ripple effect through my entire life so i grew up in an extremely loving and supportive household my parents i think as a result of that chose to be the most incredibly supportive parents that i could imagine having um i also grew up in a household where i had an indian mother and a harvard professor father uh so very academically oriented and like the expectation was very high I was never capable of living up to that expectation.

10:10My older sister was very capable. Always the way, Della. Always the way. Like the golden older child sister and me being the like ne 'er-do-well younger brother that I just, I like really liked sports. I was kind of dicking around with my friends. Like that was my life. And as a result, I had told myself this story from a very young age that I was not smart. And I don't know if this is something you've encountered before. I'm certain there are listeners that have. The stories you tell yourself are very powerful in determining your reality. And if they are a negative story that you tell yourself or a self-limiting one, it can really hold you back from putting yourself out there to achieve things in your life.

10:55When you have that insecurity, what happens is you start seeking out external solutions to this internal problem. And for me, that external solution was trying to get positive affirmations from the outside world. You try to go do things that will make you feel impressive because you don't feel impressive to yourself. So you go look to impress everyone else so that you can one day wake up and feel good, feel impressive. The way that I did that was through sports. I found that I had this outlet where I was good at baseball and I started playing at a more competitive level. I started really leaning into it, showing a lot of discipline around the training and was fortunate that in the United States, at least, they value baseball as a sport.

11:36And I was able to get a scholarship to go play in college. So I ended up at Stanford, which is a hilarious turn of events because it's a great school. And my mom had basically written me off as like, I wasn't going to be successful because I had gotten B pluses or whatever it was in school. And then I got into this great school and the look on my mom's face when I told her that I'd gotten a scholarship to go to Stanford is still burned into my mind as one of the funniest things that I've ever seen. Like her ne 'er-do-well, you know, playing baseball, not studying son, getting into this school, it was priceless.

12:10Makes it all worth it. It made it all worth it. It was great. My mom was super loving and supportive, but it was so funny to think about because she didn't understand. I was playing all the time. Like she thought it was just a game. And so, yeah, I went to Stanford. I studied there. I played baseball for three, four years. And then I started my career in the world of finance. And again, the reason I took that job in finance was because it sounded impressive. It was like, oh, go get the job that's going to pay you six figures, that's going to like make you sound statusy and impressive to other people.

12:38It wasn't what I wanted to do necessarily, but it was what I thought the external world would sort of value. So do you think the biggest thing that was holding you back, I guess, from this gap between where you were and where you now think your, I guess, like ideal life was, was specifically spending so much time disproving this narrative that you told yourself? I think it was an insecurity fueled narrative that I was just seeking as much external affirmation as possible. And the way that you get that in modern society is through making money. It's through like getting the accolade, getting the achievement, getting the salary or the bonus or whatever the thing is that's going to make you sound impressive.

13:19You know, in some other context, it's like luxury purchases, watches, cars, whatever. All of those things are the fastest way that we think of to get what we're looking for. Right. I often think about the fact that that insecurity and that desire to prove wrong these things out in the world and go achieve the affirmations that are going to make you feel better, that actually contributes to some of the greatest business success stories that we read books about. I mean, insecurity is rife in the billionaire class. Like if you went and just looked at a bunch of billionaires, I would guess most of them are deeply insecure.

13:57Oh, yeah. I mean, I like look the most famous people in the world right now. I could probably like get a psychologist to psychoanalyze them and say that there is some like deep seated insecurity in them. And that fuels them to go and do these things that make them feel popular or successful or great. And it can be something that actually contributes to you spiking in one area of life. But it does not contribute to building a happy, healthy, fulfilling life. Right, which is such an interesting difference because I think that the majority of people think that, you know, the whole, obviously, like, money doesn't buy happiness.

14:32There's a huge amount of, like, it's a very, very loaded statement and it's very easy to say when you come from a position of privilege. but at the same time I think everyone assumes that everyone who is in exposition must just be saying that not they're not happy or whatever it might be and it's like the maybe then it's that you spending so much energy on you know as you said the kind of billionaire class or the entrepreneurs or the best athletes or whatever all with a chip on their shoulder putting all their energy into this it's not that that's necessarily a bad thing and clearly it's a good thing when it comes to excellence but does excellence equal happiness no and would you maybe have stopped earlier and been like the opportunity cost of this isn't enough for me to sacrifice x y and z if i really worked out what happiness looks like to me yeah i mean i think that the um the unhappiness actually fuels the success for a lot of these people they are so unhappy in certain ways in their life that they continue to push themselves to achieve something that they think either is going to bring them the happiness that they've been looking for or that they just know they're unhappy and they're like, I'm just going to go amass as much of this thing, whatever the chips are on your table as possible.

15:48And I've sort of experienced both sides of that. Like, I mean, I think that most people place their happiness and their fulfillment as a destination rather than a direction. And so what you do is you say, my happiness is on the top of X mountain and it's at this amount of money or it's at this title or it's at this promotion or whatever it is. That's when I'm going to feel good and I'm going to feel happy and content and fulfilled. And when you do that, what you're setting yourself up for is what's called the arrival fallacy. It's you're going to get there and it's just going to disappear and be further up on the horizon at some new summit.

16:25And you're still not going to feel happy. You're going to get the little dopamine induced euphoria of the one moment. And then you're going to feel the dread of, okay, I haven't done enough. There's other people that have more than me. And you have to go chase the next thing. The big mindset shift for someone that actually wants to build a happy, fulfilling life is to recognize that it has to be a direction, not the destination. You actually have to build it in and design it into your life. Stopping, pausing, and asking yourself what you actually want out of life. Not what the world tells you you should want.

16:55not what your parents tell you or your friends, but what you actually want, and then take actions associated with that. So let's talk about that, because obviously at this stage in kind of what we've heard of your story, you've done what, you know, there's the narrative that you have in your head and your family has or whatever it might be. And then there's also the fact that externally, you've done a pretty traditionally, a kind of traditional path to excellence. Like you've been to an Ivy League school, you've got a scholarship, you've gone into a job in finance, like these are all, you know, you're going tick, tick, tick in whatever you're kind of, you know, we've been talking about trying to prove, but also, you know, you've done pretty impressive things.

17:36Can you talk to me about that, I guess, sort of light bulb moment then that happened for you in 2020? And what was that? And what did it change? Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right that But from the outside looking in, I was winning the game in a lot of ways. Like the way that social media age, for sure, like the way that we measure success, I was very much winning at that game. I was doing all those things. I was getting promoted. I was making money. I was working in a high status job. All these things were good. And what unfortunately happened was as I continued to progress on that journey, I grew more and more narrowly focused on the idea that money was going to be what led to my eventual happiness.

18:19that like, okay, I'm on the other side of X million dollars, whatever the thing is, that is going to be where I feel good about myself. That is going to be where I'm stress free and having this like happy, fulfilling life. And along that journey, that narrow focus led to me winning that one battle, but losing the much broader war, which was my relationships. My parents, I was never seeing them. My sister, my relationship had ground to a halt. My wife and I were struggling to conceive at the time, and that was creating strain in our relationship. My health, I was drinking six, seven nights a week.

18:53Mental and physical health were really struggling. So I was very much winning the game from the outside looking in, but I started to have this sensation that if that was what winning felt like, I had to be playing the wrong game. And it all came to a head in May of 2021. I went out for a drink with an old friend and we sat down and he asked how I was doing. And I told him that it had started to get difficult being so far away from my parents who lived on the East Coast. We were 3 ,000 miles away. They were starting to get older. They were sort of showing their own mortality. And he asked how old they were.

19:27And I said, mid-60s. And he asked how often I see them. And I said, about once a year. And he just looked at me and said, okay, so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die. And I just remember feeling like I had been punched in the gut. I mean, And the idea that the amount of time you have left with the people you love most in the world is that finite, that countable, that you can literally put it on a few hands, it shook me to my core. And that night I went home and my wife and I had a very candid conversation about making a change. That if we didn't do something, we were going to end up in a place where we didn't want to be in life.

20:09And within 45 days, I had left my job. We had sold our house in California and moved 3 ,000 miles to live closer to our parents. And that decision, that one dramatic action that we took was the spark that has led to everything in our lives. And this entire change to really find what our true north was. What were the things that we really wanted to build our life around and then go take action to actually do that. To anyone who's listening to this, who's thinking, I need to change my life, but I'm probably not going to. what would you say to them? The most challenging thing in the world is not being on a bad path.

20:49Everyone thinks that. It's like being on a bad path is the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world is being on a good path that isn't yours. Because a bad path screams at you every single day that you need to make a change. A good path, there's actually a lot that says you should stay. Your bills, different responsibilities, different things. The people that are on the good path that really isn't theirs, generally speaking, never step off that. They wake up in 50 years and wonder what they just did with their life. And the thing that you need to think about if you're young is that your most precious asset, the most valuable thing you have in your life is your time.

21:28That's it. At the end of the day, it's the only thing that you can't get more of. You can't get it back. And we don't appreciate that enough in the moment. We don't think about the fact that these years in your 20s and 30s, this is the one shot you get at making this leap, taking that leap of faith, making that change, going and doing the thing that you know you're going to regret not doing later in life. And so what I always say to people is like, just do the one tiny action. You don't need to just all of a sudden quit your job, move 3000 miles, do what I did, go do this like dramatic jump out of the airplane.

22:01But you can do the one tiny action. You can take the 30 minutes and explore what that other life could look like. Do the little bit of research, start identifying problems if you want to maybe start a business, start taking the tiny actions that allow you to generate some of that evidence that you could follow a different path than the one that you're on. I have this question in the book that says, if you were the main character in a movie of your life, what would the audience be screaming at you to do right now. We've all kind of felt that you watch a TV show or a movie and you just want to jump through the screen and like grab the main character and shake them and tell them like, go to the airport to chase the girl or like, don't go down in that basement, whatever the thing is.

22:44And you are that main character in the movie of your life right now. And there is something blindingly obvious that you are just ignoring because you don't have the benefit of that perspective. So forcing yourself to zoom out and see those things, like what are you just ignoring that's sitting right in front of you? What are you not doing that you should just change and take action on? Journaling on that, thinking on that, I guarantee you'll find some unlock in your life. The market's uncertain, revenues tied and hiring on hold. That's why results-driven companies are using Upwork to keep work moving.

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24:29Head to Bluehost.com to start now. You also always talk about the working back and starting from the end when it comes to looking at your future and building this life you want. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. One of the exercises I love to do with people is what does your ideal life look like at age 80? Mm-hmm. Like really envision it. Imagine where you are, what you're doing, who you're with, what you're thinking about, how you feel. Really sketch out what that life looks like. And then think about whether or not you are taking actions in the present to create that future. Because what you find with most people is that there are two types of priorities in life.

25:15There are the priorities we say we have, and then there are the priorities that our actions show we have. And there's a huge gap between the two. It's like people say all the right things about what their priorities are, but if someone were to watch you for a week, what would they say your priorities are? And is there a gap between those two? Are you actually taking action in the present to create your desired future? And that requires self-awareness. It requires you to zoom out, to pause for a second, and actually think about whether your actions are compounding in your life. Another question that I love to ask is exactly that.

25:48It's, if I were to repeat this day for 100 straight days, would my life be better or worse? It's a very simple way of thinking about it. But the actions you are taking today are going to contribute to making your future better or worse. Which one is it? Are you doing the tiny things today that are compounding positively or negatively in your life? And the reality for all of us that we need to accept is we only think about compounding when it comes to financial assets. We know that like, okay, if I invest$100 today, it's going to be worth a lot more later. So I should do that. 100 is better than zero because it's going to compound.

26:25The exact same thing applies to every area of your life. Your knowledge and wisdom, it compounds. Learning a little bit today is going to stack and build these skills in your life. Your relationships, taking the two seconds to send a text to a friend rather than doing nothing is going to compound in those relationships over the long run. So all of these areas, we need to create that mindset shift that we can build all of these areas with tiny little actions and investments today that are going to stack up in our life. Yeah, no, I think that's really, really valid. And I think that because we're taught to focus on certain things or we do like I can't see how happy you are internally.

27:01What I can see is what you have and like what you've bought and all of that. So we naturally aim for the things that we can see. and we know as you say that money compounds but I think that being able to really really look at that internally and say okay you know is what I am doing today if I did this every day as you said for the next 50 days like would this be better or this be worse and I think that there's a lot of times that I could have looked at my life like that and that would have been incredibly effective I want to pivot a little bit to speak about productivity um I'm very productivity obsessed I like talking about it.

27:39I like thinking about it. I like doing it. But I think that, you know, I really enjoyed your concept of tasks taking energy rather than time. Could you explain that a little bit to us? Yeah. Energy is the real resource that you need to be thinking about during your weeks. When you are working on things that are energy creating for you, you're leaning into them. You really feel this pull towards them. That's when you create the best outcomes. When you're really just diving into things, when you're interested in them, those are the 10 ,000x outcomes that create the big life changes. When you're energy drained by something, when you feel physically like it's draining for you, that's going to be the like one-for-one trades that aren't actually moving you forward.

28:25Those are the things that keep you on the hamster wheel in whatever it is that you're doing in life. And so the goal should be to lean into the things that are creating energy for you and slowly figure out ways to lean away from the things that are draining. By the way, that exact same rule applies to people. So leaning into energy creating relationships and leaning away from energy draining ones, a good rule for life. But a simple exercise you can do to figure this out, which is exactly what I did as I was trying to change my life. At the end of a day, let's say Monday, color code your calendar according to whether an activity was energy creating, meaning it lifted you up, you felt good during or after, mark it green.

29:02If it was energy neutral, mark it yellow. And if it was energy draining, meaning you felt physically drained, mark it red. Do that for a week. At the end of the week, you can zoom out and look at your calendar and you'll have a very clear sense visually of the types of activities that are creating energy in your life versus draining energy from your life. And what you can do with that is slowly make changes to try to have more green than red. You're never going to completely eliminate energy draining activities from your life. Impossible. But you can make subtle shifts that make the ratio of green to red higher, which is going to dramatically improve your life.

29:37You're going to feel better at the end of your days, at the end of the week. And because you're working on more energy creating things, your outcomes are going to start to improve. I'll give you a simple example. I did this for the first time when I was working my like 80 to 100 hour a week finance job. Everyone's first pushback is like, well, I work a traditional job. I don't have control over my time. I have to do, yeah, I have to do these things. That is actually a self-limiting belief. Typically you actually are in more control than you think of these things. And the example that I always give is I had phone calls and zoom meetings, like back to back on stacked on base, very energy draining for me.

30:14I hate phone calls. I hate zoom meetings. So it was all this red. But what I noticed was doing a walking call, going outside and taking a walk was energy creating for me. I love being outside fresh air. I was more focused because I couldn't multitask. I'm not on my computer sending emails while I'm talking to someone. And so I took half of my phone calls and made them walking calls. Now, suddenly at the end of a week, I felt so much better. And my performance on those calls was much better because I was more focused. I was actually tuned into the call and they were energy creating for me. So it's an example that like, you can take a simple, tiny intervention and have it dramatically impact your weeks.

30:53But you have to first have that assessment of the energy calendar to get a perspective on what it is. no i think that's i think that's a really really good piece of advice and i think that there's so many different ways that you can look at productivity and i think that a lot of us look at productivity specifically in the wrong way to increase work rather than to increase enjoyment from work or increase fulfillment from work or increase productivity so that you can work less and do more other things than you enjoy whatever it might be and i think that it is so true. I think we can get stuck into these cycles of really thinking, and it's easier for me to say because I do, you know, I own my businesses, but I also think that it's definitely true that we can assume that absolutely everything is not changeable rather than the balance of things and changeable is changeable or how you do them or how you prepare for them or how you stack them differently throughout your day.

31:48That's a good point too, exactly what you said. I'm sorry to interrupt you. That's a really good point on how you stack them because

31:58stacking energy draining things like bucketing them or bracketing them into a specific window of the day is really effective at avoiding having those bleed out everywhere on your calendar. I completely agree. And I think that that's actually something that I've subconsciously done because there are some certain things like you're always going to have to do things that you don't want to do. Like in every single job, anyone who says like they've got their dream job and no day feels like work and all of that, like it's not being truthful they're shit parts of every single job but it is like understanding at which points you can manipulate those a little bit to mean that actually okay well before you have to do something that you really need to perform in don't put these this one thing that you absolutely hate or like don't put it at the beginning of your day when it's going to set off the whole day i think that like i've had this false perception a lot of the time of the kind of eat the frog which i do think is important so do the hardest task first but i would often put it as like the most energy draining task and then i'm like cool well you've just set up your whole day for you being like i hate my job totally yeah it's crazy it um i have this idea in the book of um that there are four types of professional time uh there's management time which is generally the things that you hate doing it's like emails meetings processing invoices like the basic management things you have to do.

33:18That ends up being like 80 % of most people's professional life. And it bleeds everywhere in your calendar. The other types are creation, which is generally really energy creating for people. That's doing something, building something, writing, doing creative work, whatever that might be. There's ideation, which is actually time to think. Most people don't have any time in their calendar for that. And then there's consumption, which is the idea of actually consuming ideas, reading, learning, having conversations, things that kind of fill your bucket upstream so that you can create great things downstream.

33:48Most people, if you were to look at their calendar and if they were to do the exercise around this, they would see that their entire calendar is filled with management that they've allowed to sort of just bleed across all of their days. The first thing I always tell people to do if they want to create a dramatic change is try to bucket management time into shorter windows. So give yourself an hour to email rather than allowing it being to be a full day activity because parkinson's law really does work it's like your work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion if you give yourself all day to email you will email all day if you give yourself two hours you'll finish your entire inbox in two hours at a higher quality level i guarantee it so bucket management time into shorter than comfortable blocks and then allow yourself the space to have creation to have ideation to have consumption time in your week you'll feel a significantly more balanced perspective on your work and your outcomes will improve because you'll actually be taking time for those other activities that you typically haven't yeah that's such good advice and what do the first two hours of your week look like because i know they're very important to you i am big on uh creative work first thing in the morning so i i'm a i have like a 85 year old man schedule i go to bed at like 8 p.m.

35:06I have a two and a half year old. So that's also part of it. So you're either two and a half or you're 85. Basically, like I live his schedule. So like he goes to bed, then I go to bed then. But I go to bed around 8, 830 and I wake up at four and I do my cold plunge first thing in the morning, which has been a routine that I've just loved from an energy standpoint and just a mental health standpoint. And then I'm generally at my desk by about 430 and I do creative work from about 4 30 to 7 30 every morning main reason is it's like sacred time where you don't have any stimulus no one's awake no one's sending you emails no one's sending you text messages there's no you know screaming toddler in the house yet and that is really powerful for getting the most important task done so when you say swallow the frog my version of that is the night before i take 15 minutes to write down the two to three most important priority tasks for the next morning and those are the most important tasks not the ones that i'm dreading doing but the ones that actually move the ball forward in whatever world that i'm trying to create so if that was writing the book that would be one if it was something in one of my businesses that i really need to focus on if it was an investment thing i really need to think about whatever it is write those two to three things down so that when you wake up in the morning there's no friction of feeling like you need to figure out what to do it's already there it's sitting right in front of you ideally you've opened it up so you're just ready to roll on it so that's really what i focus on that first window So someone who's listening to this who is in a very traditional, for example, corporate role, and they're listening to that and they're saying, okay, well, I feel most creative first thing in the morning, but I have to report trade first thing in the morning, or I have to do this one specific, you know, management task, as you say, first thing in the morning.

36:49What advice would you give them to be able to preserve the best parts of their energy for the appropriate tasks whilst also still keeping their job because they're doing what they need to be doing? I mean, there are certain realities that you're not always going to love what you're doing during windows of time. I mean, for seven years of my career, I chewed glass on things that I didn't really love doing. But I knew that if I was excellent at them, if I just chewed the glass and was excellent at them, that it would pay off in a lot of different ways. Obviously, financially, but also just networks, wisdom, experience, all of these things that you're trying to do.

37:23As you get more and more senior and further along, you start to have more control over it. But you can also take control around the margins. So like for a lot of people, once they get to work at nine o 'clock, they are not in control until five o 'clock when they leave. But you can take control of the hours before nine and you can start doing things so that you make sure you get take advantage of whatever energy it is that you do have. It's why I think a lot of people love those couple of morning hours. If they can just get up early, they can have an hour for themselves or 30 minutes for themselves or 15 minutes for themselves, whatever it is.

37:55so if you know that from nine to five you are sort of not in control and you're going to be tapped on whatever it is you have to do find an hour elsewhere find 30 minutes elsewhere during the day when you can actually capitalize on it yeah and i think also as part of that we always assume that extra time doing something is is bad and i actually don't think that's the case if that extra hour like if so you might think that for example if you have to arrive by nine and if you arrived at 8 30 that would be a waste of your own time if arriving at 8 30 makes your day that much better because you've been able to do as you say that creative task or you like to get all your admin out the way or whatever it might be that is a net positive like it's not just automatically bad because you don't want to be in at 8 30 and i think a lot of us self-sabotage by just automatically assuming that what might be true for someone else in that they would always spend rather spend the minimal time where they need to be is true for you like it might genuinely make your day that much better but you don't think about it because you're like oh yeah well i don't really want to spend half an hour extra in the office it's also just true that um in the modern workforce you your salary your compensation is for doing your job description and if you just do your job description you're going to get your annual inflation pay raise every year and that's going to be that.

39:14And if you're happy with that, and if that's fine, and you can build a life that you like around that, and you're happy, and you're building these other areas of your life, that's fantastic. That's great. But if you are the type of person or you are saying that you want to create a dramatic change that you want to live completely differently on a different level than where you are today, you have to be willing to do something that is on a completely different level. Extraordinary outputs are created by extraordinary inputs. So there has to be a structure for those extraordinary inputs. You have to be willing to do more.

39:42You have to identify more problems that people are having. You have to create solutions to them and then you have to scale those solutions. That's fundamentally how you make money. Money is not like some big mystery. You make money as a byproduct of the value that you create. And all that comes down to is identifying problems, creating solutions, and then scaling those solutions. The more scalable the solutions, the more money that you'll make. And so if you're working in a nine to five job and you're trying to figure out how to get ahead, just think about mapping problems for an entire week. Just like write down things that your bosses are experiencing, your colleagues, customers, whatever it is during the course of a week.

40:18If you can then carve out 30 minutes a day when you're actually figuring out how to solve those problems, I guarantee you will start to rise up through the ranks at whatever organization you're at because so few people take the initiative to do those kind of things. It is absolutely true that for you doing your job description, like you just need to do your description to get what you you know get paid and that is as it should be and that is fantastic at the same time you cannot assume that you are going to get any more than that at any time ever if you don't do any more than that it's not this kind of like automatic floating through and i do think social media has done us a little bit of a disservice in this space because i think that as i've said like you're seeing a lot of people's end goals without seeing the fact that you they had to beat probably 10 people at every rung of the ladder to get there.

41:08And that's not to say that you have to do that. You do not have to do that. Like, you really do not. And, you know, we can have a whole different debate about whether, you know, the fact that it's incredibly unfair that with cost of living now, you can't just work, you know, an average job and live and have two children and be able to support them. We can have that debate. But at the same time, there is, there cannot be this expectation that by only ticking the boxes at one level, well, you can have that expectation, but I think it's doing us a disservice. And I worry that for the next generation of workforce, we have done them a little bit of a disservice by showing end goals without showing work required for those end goals.

41:50You're also just sold an absolute lie, which is that there are shortcuts or hacks or tricks to success. And social media has made that way worse because that's what gets clicks and that's what gets shared is someone saying like, here's how you can make$10 million by next year. Here's how you can, you know, make a million dollars in the next 30 days or whatever, making it seem easy. And it's almost always some guru standing in front of a private jet or in a car with a fancy watch. And they aren't going to tell you that the way that they got those things was by selling you the course on how to do it, not by doing the thing that they're telling you to do.

42:25And so it's just, it's just a lie. I mean, it's just a complete slate of hand. It's a, totally made up. The reality is that the hard way is the shortcut. That is the right way of doing it. And that is the only way to make money consistently in your life is to create a lot of value. And if you're in the top 10 % at your organization consistently, I guarantee you will make a lot of money in your life, but you have to put in the work to be in the top 10%. Yeah. And you don't have to want any of that, but the reality can therefore has to be that you don't want any of that. And therefore you don't do any of it, but you also don't expect any of it.

42:59And And I think that's where maybe the disconnect and the disservice that we're doing that's kind of selling this lie. And I think that, you know, you're totally right that when someone's saying, oh, you could make, I don't know, a hundred thousand by doing this or you could make a million by doing this. No one's then or it's easy then to not put in the work to make an extra 500 or an extra 100 because that feels like the better goal. whereas everything has steps and like you've got to learn each step to be able to i mean if you don't have to and if you manage to make that happen then fantastic but that's a very rare outcome the market's uncertain revenues tied and hiring on hold that's why results driven companies are using upwork to keep work moving go to upwork.com today and start hiring proven freelance talent fast.

43:51No bulky overhead. No rigid long-term contracts. Just the right expert right when you need them. Work smarter and faster with Upwork. Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Post a job for free and get started today. I mean, you're making a great point, which is the whole, I mean, and really the whole message of this book is you have to identify what you truly want, not what people tell you you should want, not what you think you should want, but what you actually want, and then go take action to build your life around those things. If you decide that what you want is to be the CEO of a company, of the company you're at, or to go build some extraordinary world-changing company, you have to be clear-eyed about what is required to go and do that.

44:38And it is going to be a lot of work. It is going to be very challenging. You have to create a lot of value for a lot of people along the way that is going to take extraordinary inputs. But if you don't want that, if you want to work nine to five and you want to have time to, you know, spend ample time on all of your other interests and other things in your life and really build this, you know, life of balance across a bunch of different areas, that's fantastic. And there's plenty of pathways for you to do that. You don't need to feel like you have to go down the path that isn't yours, that you have to go this default definition of success that the world has handed you, you can create your own.

45:13And if there's one thing I've learned, it's that you will never feel successful unless you create your own definition of success. Because otherwise you'll just be chasing someone else's and you'll just be chasing whatever more the world has told you you should want. And a lot of these things are, I guess, related to this big light bulb moment that you had looking back from that and looking at kind of your first few years in the workforce and at university and this time that you were trying to disprove this narrative that you had about yourself what I guess were the biggest things that you know now that you wish you'd known in your 20s i wish i realized just how fragile life is um i always say now like life is much more fragile than you think even when you take into account that statement um i have lost friends relatives close to me people that i didn't see enough didn't take the time to keep up those relationships build and you never get that back.

46:26And when I said that earlier, that time is your most precious asset, I really mean that. I mean, when you are young, you are a time billionaire. Like that is the one thing that you have. And recognizing that when you're young and appreciating that, you start to live differently. I really wish I had known that. I really wish I had taken advantage of those moments. I wish I had invested in relationships on a more ongoing basis in a way that I didn't over those years. You know, it took 30 years for my sister and I to find a relationship. I really wish that I had invested in that relationship earlier.

47:02I wouldn't change anything about my career and the path I was on because I think that it contributed to where I am today. And the pain and the challenges that I feel I faced as a result of this narrow focus on money contributed to me being here, being able to share these ideas and hopefully inspire people. But I do wish that I had understood the value of that time and that life is much more fragile than you appreciate. Yeah, no, for sure. And I think that it's easy to listen to everyone who's given that advice and shared that as their reality. And I think, again, it's one of those things that we need to keep thinking about until it truly becomes tangible to us, because I think it's so easy to lose sight of that.

47:43The way you make it tangible is ask yourself this question. Would you trade lives with Warren Buffett? He's worth$130 billion. He has access to absolutely anyone in the world. He reads and learns for a living. He flies around on private jets, has mansions all over the place. But you wouldn't trade lives with him simply because he's 95 years old. There's no way you would agree to trade the amount of time you have left for$130 billion. So you're acknowledging that your time has literally incalculable value. But then on a daily basis, you're wasting it scrolling around on your phone, looking around, comparing yourself to other people, not doing the things that you want to do.

48:24So shake yourself back into reality. Ask yourself that. Recognize just how valuable your time is now and then actually take action to work with that fact. Yeah, that's such good advice. Nice. One thing you've said before as well, because I think a lot of people will listen to this episode and be like, okay, I need to change this and I need to develop myself in this way. And, you know, this is how I'm going to get onto the path to, you know, where I want to get to. At the same time, you've talked about how personal development requires loneliness and often results in loneliness. Could you just talk about that for a second and what you mean by that?

48:58Yeah, when you are growing and changing as a human being, you are going to leave the confines of your prior people. You're going to have these long chapters of loneliness in your journey because you have changed and they have not. and the most comforting and empowering thing when you were going through that is to acknowledge that it is quite literally a tax on the transformation that you are having it is just something that needs to be paid on that journey and you will attract eventually the new people into your life the people who understand you who have those shared values who believe in you who encourage you to think bigger about yourself but it's so important that you understand that when you were in that period of loneliness and that you accept the fact that the people you surround yourself with that is the most important decision you will ever make in your life there is scientific evidence that the people you surround yourself with actually determine your outcomes the pygmalion effect is the name of this behavioral phenomenon that says that we rise to the level of the expectations that other people have for us so if you surround yourself with people who believe you are capable of more, who are encouraging you to think bigger, you will rise to the level of those expectations.

50:16So what better reason to really choose wisely about the people that you actually accept into your energy that are surrounding you? And before we end, I'd like to ask what you consider the best piece of advice you've ever been given is. I think the single best piece of advice I've ever been given is don't complain about anything. if it's within your control, go and do something about it. If it's not within your control, you're just wasting energy thinking about it or talking about it. Don't complain, just go act. I like it. Well, thank you so much. You've been great. And I feel like people will take a lot away from this episode.

51:01So thank you so much for your time. Thank you.

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