Sahil Bloom, a prolific creator, founder and investor, has mastered the art of translating complex ideas about wealth and success into wisdom that resonates with millions. His newsletter, The Curiosity Chronicle, grew from just 100 readers to over 800,000 subscribers in three years - a testament to his ability to cut through the noise with clarity and insight. His upcoming book, "The 5 Types of Wealth," challenges our conventional understanding of what it means to be truly wealthy, arguing that financial success is just one piece of a much larger puzzle.
Here's what makes Sahil fascinating - he's built his empire not through traditional paths (he left his high paying private equity job), but by following his curiosity and sharing what he learns along the way. Today, we'll explore the frameworks that have helped him impact millions, why traditional definitions of success might be holding us back, and how Sahil’s relationship with time reshaped the way he thinks about wealth, wisdom, and the pursuit of a meaningful life.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
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Highlights
It’s A Remarkable Time To Be A Content Creator
“I think about content, I think about idea sharing. I think about this information economy that we live in now and it is the most remarkable time to be alive. I mean there are many things that are very bad about the world, but when you just on the surface, think about the fact that I can sit at my desk here and write a newsletter every single week that reaches a million people around the world and from here I can create these ripples that extend, it could be an 18-year-old kid in India or a 90-year-old person living in Omaha, Nebraska, but they can read and engage with the ideas right now while I'm still alive. I mean, what an incredible time to be alive?”
Breaking Old Patterns Of Thinking Is Hard
“Early on the curve of income, money and happiness are very strongly correlated because you're reducing these fundamental burdens and stresses. You're getting food, you're getting shelter, you're getting the ability to take one or two vacations a year. You can take care of people that you care about. There is a very clear correlation, but what happens is we then get patterned in those early years into saying more money equals more happiness. And so we create this equation in our heads that gets firmly entrenched in those early years, and it's very hard to break that equation.”
Time Is Finite, Value It.
“There will be a last time that your friends get together for that annual trip. There will be a last time that you're able to go for a walk with your parents, and you never know when that last time is. So you have to appreciate and immerse yourself in those moments, and you have to try to create them along the way. Take the actions to actually create those moments, because if you don't, you'll find yourself regretting it on the other side of all of these things.”
Books & Articles Mentioned
Zorba the Greek; by Nikos Kazantzakis
Adventures of a Bystander; by Peter Drucker
The Anxious Generation; by Jonathan Haidt
Tao Te Ching; by Lao Tzu
Collective Illusions; by Todd Rose
The Psychology of Money; by Morgan Housel
Transcript
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
All right. Well, hello everybody. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with another episode of Infinite Loops. Today's guest I've been looking forward to for quite some time because he's written a book that I think honestly is a new and unique take on money, on wealth, on being rich. His name is Sahil Bloom. He is the founder of SRB Holdings and Ventures, the author of The Five Types of Wealth. And Sahil, your mission just seems like it's tiny. Your mission is you want to positively impact 1 billion lives. Wow.
Sahil Bloom:
I guess I believe in shooting big and if you come up short, it's still a good outcome.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
I could not agree with you more. My mom used to always say, "If you're going to do something, go big. Just don't have little goals, have huge, incredibly difficult goals." And then she would give me that exact line. If you even make it 40% of the way there, you'll be way ahead of where-
Sahil Bloom:
There's that great very cliche motivational poster that I think, I feel like I had it in my fifth grade classroom that says, shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars. It sounds like we got some version of that from our parents.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
We definitely, definitely did. But in all seriousness, how are you going to measure positive impact and why? Just again, out of curiosity, why a billion? Why not like 5 billion? Why not 8 billion? The entire-
Sahil Bloom:
It could be any number. I think, look, the stated goal is more of a long-term north star, which is really the idea of a positive impact. And in particular, I view impact as being something in the realm of ripples that you can create in the world. So when you ask about the term measurement, there's not really a perfect way to measure impact. How are you going to measure exactly whether you impacted someone's life?
So it's an amorphous goal naturally, but what I think about is if I can share ideas on a daily basis with both local people to me, like people that I have direct relationships with and then on the internet and with books and with podcasts and all of these places where I can share ideas, that sets off like a little rock that I've thrown into a pond and it creates a ripple, because if someone engages with that idea and it sparks them to live slightly more positively in their own life, if it sparks them to take some tiny action to engage a little bit more closely with their partner or child to take that walk when they were just going to sit at home to invest in their future a little bit more, that's a ripple that I have created of impact.
And whether or not that person attributes it to something they read from me or something they consumed, I don't really care. What I want to do is create a whole bunch of those ripples that extend off into the future. When I was a kid, my dad often told me the whole concept of when you're driving, let someone in if they're trying to merge into the lane because then that person will go and let someone in and then that person will let someone in and you start this chain reaction of positive energy in the world through one tiny thing that you did.
And I think about content, I think about idea sharing. I think about this information economy that we live in now and it is the most remarkable time to be alive. I mean there are many things that are very bad about the world, but when you just on the surface, think about the fact that I can sit at my desk here and write a newsletter every single week that reaches a million people around the world and from here I can create these ripples that extend, it could be an 18-year-old kid in India or a 90-year-old person living in Omaha, Nebraska, but they can read and engage with the ideas right now while I'm still alive. I mean, what an incredible time to be alive?
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Could not agree with you more completely. I think we are all winners of the Cosmic Lottery by the fact that we're just here at this particular time in human history is to me something like I literally think about that almost every day and just am incredibly grateful that I am able to be here and watch as we are making this kind of exponential leaps in so many different areas. And of course, yes, there's always going to be problems and we want hopefully to have better problems rather than old problems.
Sahil Bloom:
I like that idea by the way, of better problems that you just said. It's something that I think about a lot in the context of life and actually it relates to the book, which is the goal is not to have no stress, the goal is to have stress about things that you actually care about, things that actually matter. The goal is not to just have an easy stress-free life. The goal is to have the stress, but on things that truly matter that are meaningful to you. Meaningful stress is actually a good thing. That's marching you forward towards the future that you want. And so the goal, as you said, I think is well articulated. It's to have better problems over time, to be facing better problems in your own life or in the broader world.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And I just read something you recently wrote in which, oh by the way, happy birthday because you wrote it on your birthday I think, and you talked about a leap of faith and it made me think of Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. I don't know whether you've ever read that, but if you haven't, I highly, highly recommend it. I think you will love the book because his attitude about a lot of things seems to be very similar to yours. When I saw your piece on Leap of Faith, I thought of his quote, which was, "A person needs a little madness or else they never dare cut the rope and be free."
And so many things in life really are that leap of faith. Another thing he said is I was looking up to get the exact quote was a quote of his that I hadn't seen and I loved, and so I wrote it down, "Leave nothing for death, but a burned out castle." Which I just really, really love that because much of what we do does ripple. We don't think it does. As you were telling your story, I was thinking about my mother. It sounded like we had very similar parents because she always went to the same gas station. I'm an old, so I'm 64, so this is back before the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s and she always had me, manners were beaten into me by my mother. You treat everyone with respect until they demonstrated to you that they don't deserve it was the way she put it.
And so the guy who ran the gas station she always went to, his name was Harold, and I was always to address him and forgetting his last name, but Mr. whatever his last name was, be very polite to him, do all of those things as was she. And he was a really nice guy and when I was a kid, he would let me play around. They'd still fix cars and everything and he'd let me go and watch those guys. Anyway, so along comes the oil embargo and they do rationing, they do all of this stuff. And Harold, the owner of the mobile, closed his gas station but left it open only to his favorite customers, of which of course my mother was one. And so she never had to wait in line. She never had to do the odd even. And that was not her intention at all.
Her intention was you treat everyone with respect, you treat everyone with dignity, and she wasn't thinking about what might come about from that. And so all those little leaps of faith, all those little things that you do, I think really can impact your life much more broadly later on. But you never ever know. I want to shift to the book because as I said, I love the way you're looking at this because so many of the books about finance or money are about money. Just like, here's how you do it. Here's how you make money. This is how. Without ever saying, "Hey, there's all sorts of different types of wealth." You've got five in your book, time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth, financial wealth, and they're all very different.
And the first one really means something to me because one of the things I forever tell younger people is, you are a time billionaire. Don't squander that. Right now, it doesn't matter what else is going on in your life. If you're like in your early 20s and you're done with school, you are a time billionaire. Now is the time to take those leaps of faith. Now is the time. Because you could experiment. Because if it doesn't work, you've still got all that time. First off, how did you come up with this structure? And then I want to go through each one and have you help our audience understand why they should be thinking about things in this way.
Sahil Bloom:
So it helps to understand a little bit about my own background and how I found my way on this journey. The book is not about me, but it is a manifestation of my journey in the sense that I feel like I uncovered this in my own life and now I'm sharing this idea with the world to help others avoid some of the stumbles I'm on and also provide a context to think about your own life. I spent the first 30 years of my life really chasing someone else's definition of success. And when I say someone else's, I mean effectively the societal, cultural standard definition of success, which is money. It is achieving and externally receiving the approvals through the pursuit of financial wealth, through making money, through status associated with that. And I did that in my early years of my career working in the world of finance, where frankly I learned a ton.
I built a great base, I built a great foundation for my life. But on that journey, as I got past the early years of a really meaningful improvement in my life quality from making more money, I started to see that my narrow almost myopic focus on making money as the path to me feeling successful as the path to my happiness. I started to see that other areas of my life were beginning to crumble. I was so narrowly focused on this world where my happiness, my contentment, my fulfillment was on the other side of some financial goal. It was on the other side of making a million or 5 million or whatever the amount of money was. And every time I got there, I would get the thing and I would say, is this it? What's the next? What's the next thing? And on that journey, these other areas of my life had started to deteriorate.
Most importantly, my relationships. I was not present with the people that I love most. I was living 3,000 miles away from my parents, almost never seeing them. My relationship with my sister was nearly nonexistent. My wife and I were struggling to conceive at the time, which is something that I really regret and attribute very significantly to my own mental state at the time. I was drinking seven nights a week. I wasn't sleeping enough. There were all of these other areas of my life that were deteriorating while on the surface, on the outside looking in, "I was winning the game." Things were going well, I was making more and more money. I sounded impressive. And I started to have this sensation around the time when I turned 30 that if that was what winning the game felt like I had to be playing the wrong game. And so I went on this journey to try to understand a different way, a different way to measure your life that wasn't just grounded in this singular narrow focus on money.
Peter Drucker, the management theorist, says, "What gets measured gets managed." And the whole idea is that the thing that we measure ends up being the thing that we focus on, the thing that we narrowly hone in on and optimize around. And because money is so measurable, that is all we manage around and we don't have a way to think about these other areas of our life, even if in the back of our mind we know they impact our life of happiness and our ability to experience fulfillment. So that was the journey that I started down. I wanted to immerse myself in the human experience and understand what were these things that truly contributed to the life of happiness and fulfillment we were all after? And then was there a way that we could really measure them, that we could really make decisions, taking them into account that we could really design our lives around them so that we could build towards that future without sacrificing all of these other things along the way?
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And the idea, I love Drucker, but I love Drucker, not his management stuff. I love his book Adventures of a Bystander because it's filled with all of the incredibly interesting, often eccentric people that he knew throughout his life. And there was a guy who I think implicitly understood what you're talking about. When you read that book, the reason that book is so great is you could just feel he's writing about the things that actually mattered in his life. He wasn't talking about, oh, I wrote the book on GM, or I did this and I'm the father of management theory and all that. No. It was all about all of these other fascinating, interesting relationships in his life that really make up a beautiful book. Time wealth though. Let's get back to that. So you're still, to me, I'm 64. You're 34?
Sahil Bloom:
Yep.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
So oh my goodness, I could in fact be your father. I have a son who's turning 40, so I could be that and much more. But the idea of time wealth is something that, how did you alight on that? Was it a birthday? Was it the birth of a child? What was it that got you really thinking about that?
Sahil Bloom:
Time wealth is at the heart of this entire book and both for a structural reason and for a emotional reason. The structural reason is time is what unlocks everything else. When you have more time wealth, you have the freedom to choose how you spend your time. And that means that you can allocate that time according to these other types of wealth where you'd like to be building, where you'd like to be focusing in any given season of life. We'll get back to that. The emotional reason was during a rather challenging time in my life in 2021, all of this had come to a head, that journey that I was talking about. I was on the outside looking in, things were going well, and internally I was really suffering. That was after a year and a half, almost two year period that my wife and I were struggling to conceive.
At the time I was seeing my parents maybe once a year, we were living 3,000 miles away. There was a lot that was really starting to be tough, that was building up. And I went out for a drink with an old friend in May of 2021, and we sat down and he asked how I was doing and I said that it had started to get tough living so far away from my parents. My father, he's 69 now. At the time he was 66 and they had started to show cracks in their health. It was the first time in my life that I remembered my parents are slowing down. And I'd never felt that. When you're a kid, you just think about everyone as immortal. You think about time as infinite, that it's just this thing and I'm going to be around forever. Old people die, but they were never young.
You really don't think about it. You don't think about the fact that the old person was once a handsome young man that went to war during World War II. You don't look at the picture of them getting married and the happy honeymoon photos and recognize that's you and this is you in the future. You don't think about it. And so I had started to think about that with my own parents' lives. And I had this sit down for a drink with a friend and he asked, "How old are your parents?" And I said, "Mid-60s." And he said, "How often do you see them?" I said, "Maybe 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 remember feeling like I had been punched in the gut.
Even now it makes me emotional thinking about it. The idea that the amount of time we have left with the people we love most in the world is so finite, so countable that you can put it on a few hands is jarring. It shook me to the core. And in that moment I recognized that something had to change. And so the next morning I told my wife that I thought we needed to make a move. And within 45 days, I had left my job in California. We had sold our house and moved across the country to live within driving distance of our parents. And I reflect on that today as the most perfect microcosm of this idea of time wealth because that number 15, the number of times we had left with our parents has gone from 15 to being in the hundreds. I see my parents several times a month now. We were blessed with a son shortly after making that move. And my parents see my son all the time. They're a huge part of his life. He's brought incredible new joy into their life.
We literally created time by taking an action. We took an action and we controlled time. We created time in our lives, we created time wealth. And so it's a reminder that time is a fixed entity. You don't know, you could get hit by a bus and when your time is done, your time is done, but you have a lot of control between the lines, if you will. You have the ability to take actions that actually create time, create moments for the things that matter to you and for the people that matter to you. What we don't relate to time in that way. We don't relate to it as an asset to be invested. We don't relate to it as an asset that we can bend, that we can play with. And shifting that in your mind, recognizing that, becoming aware of how finite it is, but also how in control you are, that is such an enormous mindset shift and unlock for your entire life.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And again, resonates very much with me. I have six grandchildren, only two of them are not nearby, and we always get together with the entire family at least once a year, often much more than once a year. And we just came off one of those. And my daughter who lives in California was basically saying exactly what you just said, just like, man, it is so nice to be all together and to watch her kids play with their cousins. And just really simple little things like that, those are ultimately the things that when you're done, when that bus does end up hitting you, those are going to be the things that you're going to be thinking about. You're not going to be thinking about how many zeros are in my bank account or what did I personally accomplish through my "career" for people who are just listening and not watching.
Sahil Bloom:
And we know that. That's the important thing is we know these things in the back of our head. Everything that I'm writing about in the book, you know this, but you aren't acting on it. So it's one of those funny things where you ask people, ask a young person, would you trade lives with Warren Buffett? He's worth $130 billion. He has access to anyone in the world. He reads and learns for a living. He flies around on private jets and has all the fanciest houses, but you wouldn't trade lives with him because he's 95 years old. You wouldn't trade lives with him. You would never trade his $130 billion for the amount of time he has left. And similarly, he would trade lives with you in an instant to be young again, to have that amount of time. So you understand fundamentally that time has incalculable value and yet you take actions on a daily basis that completely disregard it.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And I wonder in your thinking about it in your researching, what is it? Because you're absolutely right, that is something that is just so objectively true that everybody gets and understands and yet, what the fuck? We don't do it. We don't see the people that we love. We don't call the people that we... What is the disconnect?
Sahil Bloom:
I think there is a big disconnect in not understanding that you can invest in these other areas the exact same way that you can invest in financial wealth. What I mean by that is we all, everyone listening to this has a basic understanding of building financial wealth, if I had to guess. They understand that investing today compounds into the future, that it builds your financial future. So putting away, whether it's a dollar today or $10 today or a hundred dollars today, is a positive thing because it will compound into your future. All of these areas of life exist in the exact same way. Actions taken today compound into the future. The text that you choose to send to a friend to just say, "Hey, I was about you." compounds into the future.
The five-minute walk that you snuck in between your meetings compounds into the future and your physical wealth. The few minutes of stillness and boredom and clarity that you experience from just sitting on a couch rather than being on your phone compounds into your future, in your presence of mind. All of these actions and these other areas of wealth compound in the same way, but we don't think about them that way. We don't relate to them in the same way as we do financial wealth. And if you just flip the switch to recognize that and also recognize that not investing in them allows them to atrophy, then you start operating differently. You start thinking about the fact that you can invest in these other areas the exact same way that you can, financial wealth.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And something that I always try to get across to people is compounding goes both ways. Things can negatively compound as well. Instead of being the five minutes on the couch, you spend the entire day or week on the couch watching Netflix, not getting any exercise, eating like shit, and oh yeah, when you're young, you don't notice. It compounds negatively, compounds negatively, and then suddenly you notice and it becomes a huge thing in your life where it was just a combination of these small negative compounding events. Same way to what you've said, do it the other way. Take the five-minute walk, send the text to the friend. All of that also contributes to your next line, which is social wealth. I don't know how manufactured in quotes it is, but it does seem that many people today, despite all the connectivity, despite all of the ability to interact with others, et cetera, there really does seem to be a loneliness epidemic. And go ahead, you talk about that.
Sahil Bloom:
I mean, an enormous one. I think the technologies that were meant to bring us closer together have torn us further apart. You are more connected via technology to all the world around you, but less connected to the person sitting right in front of you. And we see that in the data over and over again. Jonathan Haidt has his incredible book, Anxious Generation about the impact of social media and phones on children and on youth. Teenagers in the United States are spending 70% less time in person with their friends than they were two decades ago. Think about that. 70%. Think about the impact that that has on your connection with others on the texture of your life. When you think about all of these types of wealth, by the way, social wealth is the one that actually enables you to enjoy any of the others.
I mean, what good is having a yacht or a private jet if you are alone on it? What good is being super healthy if you don't have someone to go for a walk with or someone to go on a hike with or someone to go on that adventure with? Social wealth is really at the core of all of this. I mean, I actually went as part of the research for this book, I spoke to thousands of people and I asked all of them some version of this exercise to imagine your ideal day at 80 years old. Really sit down, close your eyes and think about, where are you? What are you doing? Who are you with? What are you thinking about? How do you feel? All of these questions. What you find across everyone, no matter what everyone says, they're surrounded by people they love, that they have their partner, their children, their grandchildren.
They're surrounded by people that they care about. Their friends. And then you ask them, "Okay, well what are you doing today to go and affect that end?" And it's like basically chasing money. They're doing nonsense in terms of actually creating that future. So you talk about the future that you want, but you're not taking actions to go and build that future. And so again, it goes back to that point of not thinking about how investing in those things compounds into the future that you're trying to create for yourself. And so if there's one call to action in the entire book, it's that, it's think clearly using the questions in the book and using the framing about what you really want, what you care about, not what I care about, not what Jim cares about, not what anyone else tells you to care about, but what do you care about? And then go and take whatever tiny actions today to go and build towards that future.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And I like the last part there, small steps. Small steps. I'm a huge fan of the Tao Te Ching, and Lao Tzu is rumored to have said that he might not have even existed, by the way, if you actually do the rabbit hole dive on Taoism and Lao Tzu. What Lao Tzu means is like ancient one or sage, all these things. And so whoever wrote the wonderful book, the Tao Te Ching, it compresses the knowledge into things that are really profound, but you got to read it like 75 times to really get it. But one of the ones that I was immediately got was a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And when you break it down that way, at least when I've talked to people, I've gotten much further with them with just saying, no, no, no, no, you don't have to go on a crash diet.
It's like, don't be one of the millions of people who go to the gym the first week of January and then never, ever go again despite it being their basic business model. Just do five push-ups this morning, that's all. If you've never done, do one, don't even do five, just do one and then try one the next day and then maybe try two. And the way that compounds, and I've found that people can grok it much better when you put it that way. But then it also conflicts with the both of us have these big, huge audacious goals. You want to impact a billion people. I want to do all the various things that I'm doing. And so it's sometimes it's that discount, the nature of the big goal versus the way there. How do you advise people to take that path?
Sahil Bloom:
So when you are standing at the base of an enormous wall, it's almost impossible to see how you're going to get to the top of it. And for most people, probably 99% of people, they just don't even start because they see this hugely intimidating thing and they say, "No, no way I can get to the top of that. So I'm just not going to do anything." In the movie The Martian, Matt Damon has this scene at the very, very end, which most people haven't actually watched where he's talking about how he got back from Mars. And what he says is, "You have a million problems in front of you that are so complex and terribly hard to solve, and at any point in time you want to just crumble in the face of this enormous wall of problems, but that's not what you do." He 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 in a row, you get to come home. And I think about that so often that that's really what we're talking about here. All you have to do is solve the one problem in front of you, which is to just take the little action, whatever it is. And the coolest thing about all of this is that it's not just that action compounds, it's also the feeling that it creates in you compounds, the actual sensation, the momentum, the winning mentality that it starts to instill compounds. So when I advise young people and I have my newsletter goes out to a million people twice a week, I have a lot of young people that reach out to me looking for advice, and a lot of them are feeling lost. And the first thing I say is, "For 30 days, wake up at 5:00 AM and go work out."
And a lot of them are like, "What? Yeah, I'm trying to make money. I'm trying to build... That has nothing to do with my career." And my response is always the same, which is it actually does, because what you're fighting against when you feel lost is that you don't feel in control. You don't feel you have the power to take an action and create an outcome in your life. And waking up early and working out reminds you that you do have that power because it is doing something very, very hard that requires discipline that will rewire your brain to remind yourself that you are a winner. And if you remind yourself you're a winner, it'll have ripple effects into every single other area of your life. I guarantee it. And so with all of these things, the whole lesson is exactly what you said. Do the one tiny thing that starts to move the train, that starts to actually create the positive momentum in any of these areas.
If you do that, you'll be blown away at what you can do. I mean, I've written this before, but it's one of my favorite things, which is just to say, "Your one year of focus away from people calling you lucky." And I absolutely love that because it's true. On the back end of all of this, when you change your life, when you transform, when you build the business, when you do whatever it is, people are going to call you lucky, and they're going to be totally missing the context on the daily grind of what you did all along the way, the effort that you put in. To your second point on the sort of tension between these big grand ambitions and the daily actions, I've always thought that the right approach from a goal setting standpoint is to think of the summit, the big goal.
And this is what I share in the book, it's like you have the big goal, you have the mid-climb campsite—which is the thing you're going to have to go through on the way there, which is on a micro, like on a daily basis, it's more motivating than the big one because this is so far off, it’s intimidating. The one that's in the middle is a little bit more motivating. And then you do the James Clear approach, and what you really focus on is the daily system. It's the daily action that you're going to take, the micro action that's going to be marching you slowly towards that campsite and then ultimately towards the summit.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And that also feeds into the next type of wealth, mental wealth, because again, everything you just mentioned, they seem to sound so simple and straightforward. And yet when we look at the world, we see people doing almost oftentimes the exact opposite of everything that we've been talking about here. What do you think it is about human OS? One of my ideas is that we have been conditioned to make things conditional. We've been conditioned to say, when I get X, then I will be happy. When I do Y, then I will be fulfilled. And I always say, "Don't make your life a set of conditional statements. Don't make your life conditional." And yet to me, what we're talking about here just seems so straightforward. Gosh, I used to put something up on Twitter, which was a GIF of a guy with a cloud over his head, but everywhere else it's sunny and the cloud is pouring rain down on him. And my tagline on it was, "Everything is due to luck, said the most unlucky man ever."
Sahil Bloom:
That's very good.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Why do you think it is? These things seem so self-evident, that if you act with discipline, if you do these smaller things, they compound into much bigger and better things. And that sense of agency, that sense of having a say in where your life turns out leads to also really great mental wealth. And yet, and yet we just see so many people, and by the way, so many smart people. I'm not saying that these people are dumb or confused in any way, just chasing the wrong thing. What do you think it is about human OS that makes that so?
Sahil Bloom:
I think it's really two factors, at least in terms of the typical track, which one is the lack of a appropriate way to measure these other areas, which goes back to the Peter Drucker quote. We don't have a way to measure or stack ourselves up on time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth historically. And so as a result, you focus on the one that you can. I mean, I can go into a room and stack myself up against everyone that's there. I can track myself. I can see my progress. I can feel. It's like the mouse with the cheese. You ring the bell and you get the cheese, and then you ring the bell again, and you just keep assuming you're going to get more and more. And so you get patterned into thinking that money is the kind of thing that I'm going to get patted on the back, and I'm going to continue to feel good and good and good.
Then the second piece is really a patterning thing, which I think Arthur Brooks articulates it well. In the early years of your life, money directly buys happiness. We know this scientifically. Early on the curve of income, money and happiness are very strongly correlated because you're reducing these fundamental burdens and stresses. You're getting food, you're getting shelter, you're getting the ability to take one or two vacations a year. You can take care of people that you care about. There is a very clear correlation, but what happens is we then get patterned in those early years into saying more money equals more happiness. And so we create this equation in our heads that gets firmly entrenched in those early years, and it's very hard to break that equation.
So once you got to the point where you were already past the clear relationship where we know it starts to level off, where we know your incremental happiness is going to come from these other areas, we might know that in the back of our mind, but in the front of our mind, we have this equation that says, no, if I make more money, I'm just going to be more happy. It's just the equation just continue. So I'm just going to keep marching down that path and then it's too late. And I've marched down that path for 40, 50 years. All my relationships went to hell, my health went to hell. I wasn't working things I cared about because I never fought against that equation. I never had other ways to measure these other areas. I never thought about the fact that these other areas were what was going to drive incremental happiness.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
So you have a quiz that you recommend people take in the book, and you spoke to many, many people on it. What types of questions can people ask themselves when they're trying to create this measurement or whatever for the various other types of wealth in their life that really resonate with people in like, oh, okay, now I get it. I hadn't thought about it that way.
Sahil Bloom:
Well, you can take the quiz online at wealthscorequiz.com is a fun digital version of it, which will produce this visualization for you, which is very cool at the end, to get a sense for how you stack up across these different areas, it'll give you a score from zero to 100, which I just find as a very helpful baseline to think about that you're going to build against across these different areas in your life. I think on time wealth, the most significant question I would have would be to answer whether or not you are in control of your calendar and priorities. If you are in control of your calendar and priorities, if you strongly agree with that statement, you have time wealth, because that means that you get to choose what you are spending time on, and you could choose to be working a hundred hours a week on something that you really care about.
That's great. If you really care about it, if you feel a lot of purpose around it, that's fantastic. If you choose to hang around on a beach in Bali and do nothing, also great. But the point is that you have the freedom to choose. You're in control of those things. The other question with time wealth or the other statement that I have in that quiz is that you have a deep awareness of the finite impermanent nature of time, of its importance as an asset, which goes back to what we talked about at the very outset of this, that awareness is essential to everything. Because unless you have an awareness of how important time is as an asset, you don't play the game right, you play the game all wrong because you're not understanding, you're not appreciating that time is the most important thing.
You're walking this chart that I think of in my own life, which is like most people, if you map their life in years and then against the amount that they're thinking about time, they focus on times zero, the entire way along the map, and then at the very end of their life, it's the only thing that they think about. They don't think about time the entire 70 years, and then time's the only thing they think about, but it's too late. Then they're gone. And so you get into this pattern where I've often said this, "Life is filled with laters."
Especially successful people. They'll say, "Oh, I'll spend more time with my kids later. I'll focus on my relationship with my partner, with my friends. Later. I'll work on my health later. I'll find my purpose later." And the sad thing is that later just becomes another word for never, because those things will not exist in the same way later. Your kids won't be five years old later, your health won't be there later. Your spouse won't be there for you later if you're not there for them now. And so you either build those things into your life, design them into your life now, or you just end up regretting it later because later you'll be dead.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
When I was around your age, maybe a little bit younger, I had two things taped to my colossal computer monitor back in the day, they looked like they were as big as the desk I'm sitting at, pretty much. On one side I had Memento Mori, which is, remember, you will die. And the other Latin quote, I took six years of Latin, and I got these two things out of it was Sic transit gloria mundi, all worldly glory is fleeting. And it was really helpful because every time I would think, do I really want to do this thing? I would just glance up at the monitor and go, yeah, I am going to die. Do I want to die doing this? And it was amazing to me the number of times that things I thought I probably would've liked when I put it in that refrain. I'm like, yeah, no way. No way do I want that to happen. But it was very helpful for me to have those two reminders that I looked at every day. Do you have anything like that?
Sahil Bloom:
I'm trying to see if you can see this. I have a Memento Mori calendar just up there on my wall. You can't quite see it. It's literally right there though. It's in the book as well, because it's been such a powerful reminder in my life. I thought one of the best articulations of this was Sam Harris talking about the fact that there would be a last time that you would do everything in life. And I write about that in the book, that we need to remember that there will be a last time that your kid wants you to tuck them into bed. There will be a last time that your friends get together for that annual trip. There will be a last time that you're able to go for a walk with your parents, and you never know when that last time is.
So you have to appreciate and immerse yourself in those moments, and you have to try to create them along the way. Take the actions to actually create those moments, because if you don't, you'll find yourself regretting it on the other side of all of these things. And again, I come back over and over again to one very simple idea across entire book and this journey of the last three years working on it, which is you already have these answers within you. You just haven't asked the right questions yet to uncover them in your own life. We know these things. I do not pretend to have created the idea that your relationships are what, create a meaningful life or that having free time and freedom, these things are things that are within you, but you need to ask the right questions. The greatest journeys in life come not from having the right answers, but from asking the right questions.
You need to sit with the questions and then come to the answers that matter for your life, the ones that make sense for you. Again, not for me, not for Jim, not for anyone else out there, but for you. The other piece to all of this, which is I think an important point is there are a lot of people out there, probably some people listening who feel like they're not doing well on the traditional definition of what a successful life looks like. And when you measure them according to this new definition, they are worlds ahead of many of these rich people out there. One of my dear friends played baseball together at Stanford, decided after school that he wanted to move back to his hometown. He's a gym teacher, coaches the high school sports teams, probably makes $40,000 a year, not doing great on the traditional definition of success. A Stanford degree, and now you're a gym teacher. You get the looks. People say those kinds of things.
But on the other definition, he lives within walking distance of both sets of parents. He has two beautiful children, married to an amazing woman. He's super fit and healthy, constantly outside, and he absolutely loves what he does. He loves working with young people. He loves coaching. I would say he is extremely wealthy. He's one of the happier people I know, deeply fulfilled in the things that he's doing. On the traditional definition, not doing so great. On the new definition, he's killing the game. And so I also just think there is a call to action for anyone out there to measure yourself according to the right things. Don't allow the societal default definitions of success and of wealth to tell you that you are not living a good life because there is so much more out there to living with purpose, living a content happy, fulfilling existence than just the money game.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Todd Rose wrote a book called Collective Illusions, and I thought of that as you were talking about your friend. He said, "When you ask people in surveys and things like that, what are your aspirations in life?" And the answers are all the same. I want to be rich, or I want to be famous, or I want to do all these things. And when you dig into it, you say, "Okay, what if you asked another person what they thought would make them happy in life? Then they give the real answer as to what would actually make them happy in life." And it's everything you just mentioned. I want to be fit. I want to be in love with somebody. I want to be in a good relationship. I want to have kids. I want to have a family, all of these things. But because of these collective illusions as he calls them, we get seduced into thinking that, well, everybody wants that, so that must be good. And so therefore, that's what I'm going to say, even if I don't believe it. And that's the part that really just floors me.
I would talk to a lot of young people, especially during the pandemic, and it would be, and I'd ask them, when you're out with your friends and something comes up that you don't agree with, do you say, "Oh, hey, I don't agree with that. I think this." And they're all like, "No." I'm like, "Why not?" And it's because, well, because I want to fit in. I mean, legitimate reasons. I understand. But when you get away from the falsified preferences that often come to us through media, through what we think other people think, all of that to revealed preferences like the case of your friend, who you're absolutely right, if you stacked him up against a bunch of multimillionaires that I know, he is probably a much happier person. I just wonder, is that just the glitch in our human OS that we can talk about it? Yours is not going to be the only book on this. There's tons of people who understand this, and yet when that survey comes along, you still think, yeah, I want to be rich or I want to be famous.
Sahil Bloom:
I think we need to truly rewrite the definition. And look, when I say I have a grand ambition around my own life and my purpose and trying to impact a billion lives, this is the idea that I want to impact people with. I want to truly redefine what it means to live a wealthy life. I want people to measure themselves completely differently than the way we've historically measured, because I really believe there's three planes to this. There's the measurement, which is the point in time. It's saying, where do I sit today? If previously that was just your net worth and you were like, I'm worth $10 million, change the way that we measure where we are today, how we're doing in life. The second piece is around decision, which is to say, when you make a decision about your life, factor in all of this, factor in the five types of wealth, not just one.
So if you were to come and offer me, Jim a job, and you were like, "Hey, I'll pay you $25 million next year to come work at this job, but you have to move to Omaha, Nebraska, and you're going to hate it. You're working on something that you really don't like, and you're going to be traveling all the time. Would you take it?" Previously on the old scoreboard, $25 million next year, I'm getting on a plane. Get me the ticket. I'm there. You're jumping on it. But now, make that decision with the bigger picture in mind. Okay, 25 million. So financial wealth is a big plus, but let's think about the others. Time wealth. Well, you're telling me that I'm going to be traveling all the time. I'm working 80 to a hundred hours a week at this new job. Time wealth has taken a big hit.
Social wealth. I don't know a single soul in Omaha, Nebraska. My family would be a thousand miles away. So that's a big hit. Mental wealth, you're telling me I'm working on things I don't really care about. That's be a big hit. And then physical wealth, if I'm on planes 300 days out of the year working 80, 90 hours a week, going to take a big hit, plus Omaha's pretty cold, I'm not going to be outside that much. So now suddenly when I'm making that decision, I can make it with the clarity of this bigger picture of the impact that it's going to have on my life, not just the one thing that I previously would've made, the decision, the single vector that I would've decided around.
So from a decision standpoint, it empowers you to think about your broader life and to make a decision on a broader thing. My wife and I have done that several times in the last few years. I mean, when we were making a decision after my son was going to be born and she was thinking about whether she wanted to continue working or whether she wanted to focus on being a mom, she was really worried about the financial. Well, financially, does it make sense? And we had to zoom out and think like, okay, well your relationship with our son and the impact of your proximity to him and really being immersed with him over these early years of his life, that is a form of wealth, that is social wealth.
And we know that the early years of a relationship and the bond that's built has lasting effects over the coming decades of the kid's life. And so factoring that in when we made the decision, yes, you're making a trade-off financially when you do something like that, but there's a plus that offsets the minus. So thinking about that as you're making decisions and then proactively the third piece, as you design your life and as you think about your future, factoring in the five types of wealth and thinking about how you want to prioritize or focus on different things during different seasons of your life is a really useful framing for thinking about how you actually want to live.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
When you were talking about the $25 million job offer in Omaha, I thought, have you seen the movie The Princess Bride?
Sahil Bloom:
Yes, I have actually, but it's been probably 10 years.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Okay. Do you remember the Mandy Patinkin character?
Sahil Bloom:
Yes.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Okay. And he finally finds the six-fingered man who killed his father, and he's got him at the end of a sword and he goes, "Offer me money, everything." The guy says, "Offer me power." And he goes, "You can have the entire kingdom, offer me everything that you have." And the guy does. And then he sticks it through his heart. He goes, "I don't want any of them. I want my father back." And that's it. I loved that scene just because it really distills what you just said really, really well. He doesn't want wealth power over other people. He wants his father back, and that was what that animating aspect of his character in the movie. And if people would just take that deep breath like you did with your wife.
My wife used to work, same story. We had our third child, we got married very young, and our first two kids were born when we were 24 and 27, and then my wife was working, I was working, and then we decided, well, we want a third child. And so she was born in 1995. My wife was still working, and then just one night we were just sitting there and she goes, "I don't want to work anymore. I want this time..." Because with our first two kids, she had the time for them and she was just like, really, it was wrecking all of her other forms of wealth, all of the endless hours that she was working. And when she quit, my daughter, my youngest, who was maybe two at the time, marched up and down Greenwich Avenue saying, "Hi, I'm Lael O'Shaughnessy, and my mommy isn't working anymore because I'm more important to her." Anything else? You forget that it's going to cause a lot of happiness in other people too.
Sahil Bloom:
I mean, it's the reality of the decision that I made. This entire change of my life, even just sitting here having this conversation, none of this would've happened if I hadn't made a decision to walk away from financial wealth in favor of other types. I was working on arguably one of the most lucrative risk adjusted tracks that exists. I was working at a private equity fund. It's a great firm, great group of people. I have nothing but great things to say. I was just so narrowly focused on one thing that I lost sight of the bigger picture on that journey. It wasn't anyone's fault. It was my own fault. And I made the decision to step off that, and I'm sure I gave up a whole lot of money by doing that. Being on the partner track, walking away from carry and funds, it is very hard to do that.
And the reason, it gets harder every single year of the way the economics of these funds work. But I very seriously think that I am the wealthiest man alive. I have everything that I could want right now in my life. I guarantee I gave up money by doing it. Maybe I'll make up for it in the long run, pursuing things I'm truly passionate about, and could I spin a case where that could work out? Sure. But the reality is, on a risk-adjusted basis, financial wealth exclusively, it made no sense. But in these other areas of my life, I mean even if all that changed was that I just got to live closer to my parents and be around them more in these years of their life, it would've been worth it.
Even if all that came from it was that I got to spend more time with my sister, who I now have a great relationship with as a result, it would've been worth it. Even if it was just my wife and I being in a better place in life and being able to conceive naturally and having our son, it would've been worth it. But all of these things together, getting to stand in my purpose, work on things I truly care about, getting to refine my health and my love of fitness, all of those things together, it's like the most obvious decision I've ever made in my life with the benefit of hindsight.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And coming off the holidays. I love the movie, It's a Wonderful Life, and I've watched it. My wife just makes fun of me endlessly because she's like, "You and that goddamn movie." She goes, "It just is so not you and yet you love that movie so much." And as I'm talking to you, I'm thinking about why I love that movie so much. I love that movie so much because it is about what we are talking about. George Bailey, who has this, he has big dreams and he wants to go build huge skyscrapers and everything.
The movie was made in the '40s, so it's a very, very old movie starring Jimmy Stewart, and he doesn't, and he ends up in this small town and he thinks he hates everything about it. And then this crisis comes and he faces jail and everything, and he wishes that he'd never been born. And so the angel who comes down to save him lets him see that, lets him see the world without him in it, and his brother got killed in that sledding accident. His wife never married. All of these things. And one of the reasons I love it is because it does show that totality of everything you just talked about. It's like it is a wonderful life if you look at it through that lens. And people will often say to me, "Oh, well, it's easy for you to say because you did really well in asset management and all of these things." Okay, that's a legitimate criticism.
But the fact is I know a lot of people with super, super high networks who are miserable, absolutely miserable, and I know people who are like your friend, are in modest remuneration jobs, et cetera, who every time I'm with them, I just have the best time in the absolute world because they have gotten that figured out. Again, I just keep, as I was getting ready to talk to you, I'm just like, God, I think this topic is so important, and yet why is it so hard for us to get and for us to understand? And I agree with all the reasons you presented, and yet if we could wave a magic wand, people's lives would just instantly just become so much more fulfilling, so much better in terms of their overall sense of, wow, this really is a wonderful life.
Sahil Bloom:
It's an important point, which is one of the most common pushbacks to anyone saying these kind of things is like, "Well, that's easy for you to say because you've made money or you've done these things." And I agree and I disagree. I agree in the sense that money does matter. I am not, anywhere in the book, I do not say that money doesn't matter. It's five types of wealth and the fifth type is financial wealth. It matters and there's a whole section on it, and there's tactics and strategies, and it definitely matters. What I'm saying is money isn't nothing. It simply can't be the only thing. Money is a tool but not the goal. And that is really important because that means that you do not narrowly focus on it at the expense of everything else. It means that you can view it in the right sense as a tool to help you build these other types of wealth.
It means that you can use it as a tool to buy back your time in certain cases, to have more freedom. It means you can create amazing experiences with people you love, that you can invest in your health, that you can invest in pursuing passions and pursuing your growth to build that purpose, build that mental wealth, creating space. It means that you can unlock its true utility rather than just chasing it at some end that is supposed to, from a number on a screen, bring you some immortal happiness and goodness in your life, which we know it doesn't. Michael Norton at Harvard Business School has this famous study where he went and asked a bunch of millionaires, people worth from a million on through a hundred plus million, how happy they were on a scale of one to 10. Then he asked them how much more money they would need in order to be at a 10. And across the spectrum from a million up through a hundred million, everyone says two to three times as much. It makes no sense. It completely defies logic, but everyone says two to three times as much.
And I went and did it. I tested it with people that I know that have a lot of money. No matter what, someone worth 2 million says they need 10, someone worth a hundred says they need 500. Makes no sense. But that is how your brain works if you don't reframe the goal, if you don't think about the fact that this broader set of things in your life is what truly matters. And again, it's exactly what you said, you know the rich yet miserable people, you know what that existence looks like and it's not pretty. The Forbes top 10 richest people in the world have 13 divorces among them. How many rich people do you know that don't have relationships with their children? This is not the end that I want in my life. And sitting down and thinking about what that true north is for you, what is the end that you want to create? And then taking the tiny actions today to go and work towards that, taking the tiny steps today to march towards that future. That's what this book is all about.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And it's like the quote even. Most people misquote the quote. Most people say, "Money is the root of all evil." And that people know that saying, and I often will have it quoted to me. That's not the quote at all. The actual quote is, "The love of money is the root of all evil." Completely different message. Like you say. And I agree with you, by the way. I am not saying money doesn't matter. Oh, it does. It absolutely does at certain levels to get where you want in your purpose and your desire in your own life. But when you make it the only measurement, like you say, if you make it the only measurement, i.e. if you love money, then you get to the root of all evil.
It is not money. Money itself is neutral in my opinion. It's an information system, it's a technology. It allows you to swap one thing for another. You talk about calendar and you control your calendar. If you reach a certain financial place, you can definitely control your calendar because you can have other people pay other people to do shit you don't want to do. So not saying it doesn't matter at all. I completely agree with you, but it is just that one little, missing that the love of not money is the root of all evil. I think that... One of the things that really does give me hope is I see young people like you writing stuff, like Morgan Housel is a friend and his book, The Psychology of Money, and your book, I love seeing this new way of thinking, and it's coming mostly from you young people. And I think that it's just a much more enlightened and a much healthier way to look at living your life.
Sahil Bloom:
I think it's healthier. I also just think it'll be more fulfilling. Actually, the pursuit of if you make money, the people that I know that have made the most money, the money has been a byproduct of them pursuing their purpose, them pursuing their ambition for growth, for creation, for creating value in the world. And so that's another piece is there's nothing wrong with growing your money pool or getting better at the money game, but it needs to be grounded in you pursuing something that matters to you, something that you actually really enjoy.
If what you really enjoy is getting better at the game and you are loving that, having fun doing that, and money is the score in that game, that's fine. It just can't be that you are saying, I'm making this much more because that's going to make me happier. That's not going to work. But standing in the game, standing in the pursuit of your purpose, pursuing your ambition because you like growth, you like learning, you like the development, that's great and that's totally fine. You just don't want to get caught in that loop of the endless chase for more. I mean, I have this line in the book, "Never let the quest for more distract you from the beauty of enough." And that is at the heart of this entire thing. You can't allow this quest and this chase and this endless cycle looking for whatever more to blind you to the beauty of the enough that you have right in front of you.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And what you just said about it being a byproduct, I can absolutely attest to that. In my old career of asset management, I had the opportunity to meet some of the richest people in the world, and I can count on both hands the number who told me they did it for the money, all of the people that aren't on those two hands. So in other words, hundreds and hundreds of the most financially successful people in the world who had the opportunity to meet and in some cases manage their money for them, all of it was a byproduct, all of it. It was just because I loved fill in the blank and one thing led to another and they end up quite rich. So I definitely think if you can take just one thing from this conversation to our listeners and viewers here, it is this, pursue that what you love, read this book, understand the way this mixes together, but it is a byproduct. It is not the central thing to be chasing.
I think that if more people could understand that, we'd have a lot more happiness in general and in specific cases as well. Because again, I just see so many people who have so many talents, they're ridiculously talented at a whole variety of things, and they just are doing the wrong thing. And it is just like, well, but, but, but. No, no, no. No buts. Just think about it deeply. What do you love? Follow that love and then just let it be a byproduct. I cannot underline that more because by the way, the tiny percentage of people who made it really big financially and that I spoke to who said they did it for the money, they were all fucking miserable.
Sahil Bloom:
There you go. That's a perfect summary of this entire thing.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Well, this has been absolutely a delight for me. The book is out and available everywhere when this podcast drops. Where else can people find you?
Sahil Bloom:
Well, you can find me anywhere at Sahil Bloom on any of the major platforms. The book is called The Five Types of Wealth, as we've talked about. And yes, you can get it anywhere books are sold, hopefully support your local bookstore. We love when you do that. And I'm just excited to see people take these ideas and run with them and see what actions they spark in your life and the ripples that I hope it can start to create.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
A great purpose and a great goal. Well, if you've listened to the podcast in the past, you know that our final question is always not really too much of a question. It is, we are going to be enchanting you and making you the emperor of the world. You can't kill anyone. You can't put anyone in a reeducation camp. But what you can do is we're going to give you a magic microphone and you can say two things into it, and the two things you say into it are going to incept all 8 billion.
So you're going to meet your goal, you're going to surpass your goal of a billion, you're going to get all 8 billion people are going to wake up whenever their next morning is, and they're going to have these two things in the center of their mind. And they're going to say, "Unlike all of the other times when I had an idea and never acted on it, this time I'm going to act on these two things starting today and just continue and allow them to compound." What two things are you going to incept into the world's population?
Sahil Bloom:
Reject the default definitions of success is one. And two, live by your own design.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
I love both of those. I especially love live by your own design because that was another thing. When I was actually giving financial advice to people, I realized when I was young, I was a real proselytizer, and it was like, "This is the way you got to do it, and you got to have this process and you've got to do this, and you want empirical evidence and everything." And then I realized, wait a minute, that works for me. It might not work for the person I'm giving that advice to at all. So I modified it intentionally to say, "Find something that works perfectly for you and that you know can stick with. That's going to be the right system for you." So I love both of those, but I particularly love number two.
Sahil Bloom:
So happy to hear it.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
This has been so much fun for me. Thank you so much for taking the time, and congratulations on the book.
Sahil Bloom:
Thank you.
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