Ryan's Personal Reboot: 5 Types of Wealth with Sahil Bloom

Transcript:

Ryan:
[0:00] Welcome to Bankless, where today we explore the frontier of wealth. This is Ryan Sean Adams. It's just me today. I'm here to help you become more bankless. So today's episode is kind of personal. I did this episode for myself, but also in hopes that it will help the entire bankless community. Maybe my story will help some of you guys if you're grind-addicted overachievers like myself. Some context for this, at the end of January this year, some of you may know that I took a sabbatical. After five years swimming the crypto media ocean and another public lynching, I realized I was feeling kind of cooked. Something had crashed out in my operating system. I felt exhausted. I felt burnt out. I felt done. And I talked to David and I said, David, I've got to leave. And truthfully, I wasn't even sure if I'd come back to Bankless. Sahil's book, which is the one we're talking about in today's episode, was essential for me. It's called the five types of wealth. And a lot of the lessons here are how I uncooked myself and came back from my sabbatical with renewed purpose. Now I wrote this, freedom was why I started the bankless journey. Crypto as an escape hatch from the systems that run our lives. Yet somewhere along the way, I chained myself to a price chart. I forgot to define enough.

Ryan:
[1:18] Today's episode is about defining enough. It's how to measure wealth and how to dollar cost average into the areas of wealth that will provide you real compounding returns throughout your life. Please enjoy.

Ryan:
[1:33] Bankless Nation, we have Sahil Bloom on the podcast today. Sahil, how are you doing?

Sahil:
[1:36] I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

Ryan:
[1:38] Hey, I wanted to thank you for writing this book. It came to me at the right time. So I don't know if you probably recall, we had a podcast booked, I think it was like in February with the launch of your book, in February, I wasn't working at Bankless. So, I had actually taken a three-month hiatus from Bankless due to burnout. And so, I got this book in the mail at a time I think I needed it most. And you wrote this on a, you know, I don't know if you remember this, but you wrote this handwritten note to me in the book itself. You said, Ryan, thrilled to share this with you. Marked a few spots I think you'll love. Please share it if you find value in it. I did find value in it. We are now sharing it on Bankless. It was actually kind of my burnout book, right book at the right time, and it taught me a lot. So I wanted to begin by saying just like, thank you for writing it. And thank you for this note and bring it to my attention.

Sahil:
[2:33] Well, I'm glad that it hit you at the right time. It is, It's one of those funny things in life that I have found that sometimes you can hear a message a hundred times, but for it to really create an impact and a chain reaction and a ripple, it needs to hit you in the right moment. One of the things I often think about is the fact that awareness is perishable. And what I mean by that is it's not enough to know something in the abstract sense. You need to know it at the moment when it counts. You need to know it at the testing point, right? And so, you know, people often say like, well, I already know this thing, but knowing it at a moment is much less important than knowing it at the moment. And so I'm glad that, you know, in your the moment, when it was really important that these ideas hit you.

Ryan:
[3:17] Yeah, there was also an opportunity to apply it. Like the book is very practical. It's not just knowledge, but it's also like implementing systems in your life. And so I had time and space to actually implement some of these systems. But let's hope we meet some of the bankless audience at kind of the right time with this message, because I think it's pretty important for investors, for people in the crypto community. The core element of the book is how we measure wealth. And I want to begin with this question. How do you think most people measure wealth today and where do they go wrong?

Sahil:
[3:45] It's pretty simple. money. Look, historically, our scoreboard, if you will, for our entire lives has been money. You may factor in other things. You may think about other things. But at the end of the day, when you walk into a room and you're trying to create a hierarchy among the people that are in there, you're trying to stack yourself up. You're trying to measure your entire worth as a human being. How do you do it? It's around this one figure. It's around your net worth, you know, the amount of money that you have or that you make. And my big call to action around this entire idea is to recognize that what you measure in life really matters. That is not something that we talk about a whole lot, but what you measure really matters. Peter Drucker, the famous management theorist, once said, what gets measured gets managed. That is the idea that the thing that you measure ends up being the thing that you narrowly hone in on and optimize around. And look, you don't have to look very far to find examples of that in your own life. Like, you know, anyone that you know, or maybe you've done it, you put on one of those like sleep tracker bands or rings, all of a sudden they become the most annoying sleep person in the world. Oh, yeah. Oh, no, I can't go out because I, you know, my sleep score, all these things, right? All of your actions suddenly surround this one thing that you are now measuring.

Sahil:
[5:07] And historically, for us in our lives, that has been about money. It was the one thing that we measured that we tracked against. And so as a result, all of your actions go in a line around this one thing. And unfortunately, while money is a part of building a good, wealthy, fulfilling life, it is far from the only part. And so when all of your actions go to surround this one thing that you are measuring, you may end up with a situation that I talk about, I call the Pyrrhic victory, The idea of the battle won, but the bigger war potentially lost.

Ryan:
[5:39] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think people, investors and people in crypto, their scoreboard is often their net worth. And in particular, you check prices and you look at net worth on almost a daily basis. The entire Bankless podcast was sort of based on this concept of freedom and freedom through growing your crypto net worth, essentially. And like one of the things I've realized, like I knew this, but I also realized during my hiatus period of time was I was actually measuring wealth in a myopic way. So if the purpose of this podcast is freedom and freedom equals just net worth, that wasn't like enough. And so I guess one of the misconceptions I had probably going into this period of my life was that I could focus on net worth first, get that out of the way, get to a number that I'm comfortable with, and then I could go focus on the other areas of wealth. And we'll get to those areas of wealth because I want to be very deliberate

Ryan:
[6:44] to guide folks through this content. But things like time, things like more mental space, more time with my family, work on my relationships, I could do that all later. What's the flaw in that logic? Because I think a lot of people are grinding for net worth right now. But where can that go wrong?

Sahil:
[7:03] So there's really two sides to this. The traditional logic is exactly what you said, which is, look, it's Maslow's hierarchy. of needs. In the early days, money directly buys happiness. Anyone that tells you otherwise is just flat out lying to you. I'm never going to say money doesn't matter because it does. We know that. We've experienced that in our own lives. We've seen it where it reduces fundamental stresses and burdens. In a way, what money actually does is it doesn't buy happiness. It reduces unhappiness. And so you remove those things that were making you unhappy, the stresses, the burdens, the things. Maybe it starts to allow some like incremental pleasures, like, you know, a couple of vacations a year, you know, making sure that you can take care of all of those people around you. That is happiness.

Sahil:
[7:48] Beyond that level, though, it starts to show diminishing returns. And these other areas of life are what are going to contribute to all of the incremental gains and happiness. So the traditional logic has been exactly what you said, which is, okay, well, I'm going to just focus on money. I'm going to flip that switch on and everything else is going to be turned off until I get to my number, quote unquote. Then I'm going to switch. Later, I'll worry about all these other things. The reason that logic is flawed is because it relies on this idea of on-off switches in life, that you can turn one on and that all the others get turned off, and that just later, you're going to have the wherewithal, the self-awareness to be able to adjust what switches you have on and off. The reality is that that whole idea of later is flawed. My grandfather used to say, later will be dead.

Sahil:
[8:35] And it's really true. Later just becomes another word for never. You say things like, I'll spend more time with my kids later. I'll focus on finding my freedom and purpose later. I'll focus on my relationship with my partner, with my friends later. I'll invest in my health later. And later just becomes another word for never because those things are not going to exist in the same way later. Your kids are not going to be five years old later. Your partner, your friends won't be there for you later if you're not there for them right now. You won't magically wake up with freedom and purpose later. You won't be able to find your health later. So either you find a way to design those things into your life right now in some tiny way, or you're just going to end up regretting it later.

Sahil:
[9:21] And so the call to action around that and the actual framework or system that I would think about is stop thinking of your life as existing on these on-off switches. Start thinking of it of these dimmer switches, right? This idea that, yes, I'm going to focus primarily on financial wealth building on my career during this season of my life. In your 20s and 30s, great idea. Turn that dial up. But the other areas don't get switched off. They just get turned down low. The recognition being anything above zero compounds. You don't have to do something dramatic to make steady incremental progress. You know that when it comes to your money. You know that dollar cost averaging a tiny amount into any of these assets is going to benefit you in the long run because it's going to stack. It's going to compound. Exact same principle. That mindset shift needs to occur. The exact same principle applies to these other areas of life. The tiny investment in your relationships on a daily basis, stacks and compounds. Tiny investment in your physical health, in your mental health, in all of these areas, it stacks and compounds. So figure out a way to dollar cost average into all of these things in your life, and you'll benefit from it in the long run. I'm wondering, Sahil.

Ryan:
[10:32] Does it take people, most people to realize that they're sort of allocating their wealth in the wrong ways? does it usually take some sort of life catalyst to have them wake up and realize it? I feel like there's an element of that for me was the symptom of burnout and this feeling of loss of purpose. But I can imagine other people wake up to this, some kind of sickness or medical scare, perhaps maybe a death in the family, maybe like kind of a mental breakdown. It just feels like when you were talking earlier about you need to hear the right message at the right time in your life. Sometimes these catalysts can be pretty key. Is this how most people realize that they've allocated wealth in the wrong places?

Sahil:
[11:14] I would say that most people need that jolt. It's like anything, right? You know, you guys talk a lot about financial markets on this podcast. You know, if you're going to make an investment in a stock or in a crypto asset or anything, you always think about what is the catalyst for this to have a big price change.

Sahil:
[11:31] It's no different for your life. You know, like, you know, what is the catalyst going to be? The sad thing is that that catalyst is often something traumatic. And we shouldn't need in life a traumatic event in order to make steady incremental changes. You're like, I write about in the book, my own personal traumatic event experience that led to the big life change that I made. And the sad reality is that that didn't need to happen. We could have been making steady incremental changes from four or five years before it and avoided the entire thing.

Sahil:
[12:04] You know there are plenty of examples in life of things that we don't need to learn the hard way in order to understand that they're going to be painful to us if we keep doing them i don't need to you know electrocute myself in a socket to know that i probably don't want to do that right like there's certain pieces of information that we seem to internalize and understand i don't need to get bit by a shark to know that i probably shouldn't like you know go chumming up some waters and swimming around with a shark and that's really what we're doing when we march down these paths in life, you know, focusing entirely on the one thing at the expense of everything else. We are swimming around in shark infested, chummed up waters, thinking that we're not going to get bit. And it's ridiculous.

Ryan:
[12:45] For me personally, I feel like the last couple of years, I knew something in the background was kind of wrong or off that I was slowly kind of losing purpose, getting to like just time poor. And the way I sort of was able to describe it in words, you know, in the last couple of months is I felt time poor, relationship light, mentally scattered and physically soft. But I think there is a trap for people who are maybe like me, who are kind of grind addicted overachievers, I would say, which like life has kind of taught me that, hey, sometimes you will achieve incredible results if you just grind harder and you have to stick it out and you have to grind. You have to have sort of the, you know, long-term gain mindset if you are to get to the other side and achieve some level of success in your life. And so what can happen and what I realized was happening to me was I was getting caught in this grind cycle where each day, I would kind of wake up and be like, wait, okay, why am I doing this again? Put that aside. Don't ask that question. Just continue the grind and keep going. How does someone who's a grind addicted overachiever like myself, like what are some of the symptoms that they might be going on the wrong path or allocating their wealth in the wrong ways?

Sahil:
[14:01] One of the most important concepts to internalize here is this idea of creating space in your life. The grind addict, I would bucket myself into that, is very bad at creating micro space, meaning like little pockets of space on a daily basis to recharge, you know, and to zoom out.

Ryan:
[14:19] That feels like you're not doing anything during those moments.

Sahil:
[14:21] It feels like you're not doing anything. You know, like the greatest challenge for any ambitious person is to reframe rest and recovery as a part of your performance rather than as a reward for your efforts.

Sahil:
[14:34] Like the grind addict, which again, I would categorize myself as that for much of my life, is convinced that rest and recovery are a reward. So, okay, yeah, I worked a year straight grinding on this thing. Now I get my reward of the like two week vacation where I do nothing. And what that person finds when they take that two week vacation, when they do nothing, is that they're miserable for some reason. You know, maybe they get sick. Maybe they're there and they're restless. They don't know what to do. They feel like it actually doesn't provide the relief that they think. The much better way to do it is to on a daily basis, have a few things that you know, provide that recharge. So that you don't really feel like you need that enormous macro break on some recurring basis. People always ask me that, like, you know, how do you prevent burnout? I'm like, well, on a daily basis, like every single evening, I try to get in my sauna and do some reading. I love doing that. Recharges me every single night. I feel a level of relief going to bed. I do a little bit of journal, like three, five minutes of journaling, get in my sauna. if I can like handle these couple of daily non-negotiables that provide that sensation of recharge and rest, I could do that every day for the rest of my life. Sure. Am I working hard during the course of the day? Absolutely. But I also have built in that rest and recovery. It's no different than how you would expect an elite athlete to live. Like we all need a little bit more of that elite athlete mindset. You like watch Lionel Messi playing soccer. He walks around the field. 95% of the game, he's just walking.

Sahil:
[16:03] People get mad. They're like, oh, it's laziness, right?

Sahil:
[16:06] It's not. It's strategy.

Sahil:
[16:08] He's conserving energy. He's creating space. He's creating a mental map of the field. And then he's deploying energy in the exact right angle in the right moment to create the 10 or 100x outcome. We all need to operate a little bit more like that in our own lives if we want to thrive across multiple seasons. You can grind your way to success over a very short burst, but it's really hard to do over multiple seasons.

Ryan:
[16:33] Sometimes just creating that space and just forcing yourself to create that space, whether it's like on a vacation or like on a daily basis, which you like I would encourage, or even if you like me, you get to a point where you're just kind of you collapse due to burnout, you just sort of need to take some time away. But part of why it's helpful is I think it breaks the addiction cycle for grind people like myself, I didn't actually realize, Sahil, that I was rationalizing the grind, acting like, oh, this is what working hard looks like. This is what you need to do to achieve incredible outcomes. But really, this was a rationalization for an addiction that I had, an addiction to just being busy. And so I think forcing yourself, even if you don't want to, even if it doesn't feel right to create that space, is something that can break the addiction and help you realize that you've been addicted this entire time. Because sometimes that just occurs in the background without you realizing it.

Sahil:
[17:32] Absolutely. And the other thing to realize is that... There are many times in life where the grind is really just an avoidance mechanism. You are grinding because you are afraid to ask the questions that will really push you to grow. It's much easier to just continue doing the things that you've done, that blind consistency of just continuing to show up. Blind consistency is ignorance masquerading as a virtue.

Sahil:
[18:02] Over and over again, you show up and you pound your head into a wall and you convince yourself, yeah, like I'm grinding, right? You know, you kind of pump a fist. You're like, I'm grinding. But really what you're doing is that you're avoiding asking the challenging questions that would force you to confront parts of yourself or parts of your vision or parts of your actions that are not aligned with what you're trying to create. I did that. I did that for seven years. I just, I convinced myself that all of my happiness, contentment, and fulfillment was on the other side of some achievement, some bonus, some promotion, some goal, some title, some fancy thing. And it's called the arrival fallacy. You know, you convince yourself that you were going to feel like you have arrived once you get that thing. So you put your head down and you grind to go get it. And all you find is that it is a fallacy. You get it, you immediately reset to whatever the next horizon is. You feel a dread of never having done enough, of needing to do more. And the truth is that if you allowed yourself to slow down, you would be able to ask those questions. Am I actually...

Sahil:
[18:59] On a mountain that I care to be at the top of? Like, is this a race that I chose? Or is this one that I was just handed that I have stepped into by default? Are my actions actually leading me to the future that I want for myself? Those are hard, uncomfortable questions to ask. And the truth is that the answers that you are seeking in life are found in the questions that you avoid. So if you just keep grinding over and over and over again, day in, day out, pounding your head into a wall, and you don't create the space to ask those questions, You're never going to find those answers that you're looking for.

Ryan:
[19:32] That's such a good point. I think your message is being so much more intentional with the way you live and the way you dollar cost average across these wealth categories, right? And it's like, yeah, addiction is one aspect of why I grind, why people grind in general, but so is avoidance. And that resonates for me. I realized I was kind of like, I was doing the financial wealth thing, net worth thing, investing thing, work thing, because I was good at it, like really good. And I was like, not so good at some of these other areas. It was harder for me. So I was basically avoiding them and putting them off, procrastinating, saying I could get to those elements of wealth later. And again, the trap being later, you know, can never come. And you can find yourself living a life without purpose. Yeah.

Sahil:
[20:18] I mean, look, we live in a culture. We have not helped this as a problem. And even with positive intentions, we have not helped this, right? I don't know if you've read the book Mindset. Carol Dweck, very, very famous, has probably sold multiple millions of copies now. It was the origin of this whole idea of growth mindset versus fixed mindset. And the culture around growth mindset, I mean, the idea says that basically, you know, you should focus on inputs and effort because you have an ability as a human being to grow and change and be dynamic and that we should praise effort rather than outcomes, especially in kids to instill in them this idea that that's where they should focus and that's what they should focus on, not the outputs, you know, intrinsic versus extrinsic.

Sahil:
[21:02] And that only works up to a point because, you know, look, look, if we continue to praise input and efforts, we create a culture where everyone is just entirely focused on those efforts. It's all about the grind. It's all about showing up and pounding your head into a wall. And the truth is that you may feel good about your inputs, about your effort, but the world is going to judge you on your output. And so it doesn't matter how you feel about your inputs. I had a conversation once with Adam Grant, the author and professor, and he was talking about the fact that he had a student who turned in a paper and he gave the student like a B on the paper. And the student came to him and, you know, at the end of the semester and was like, hey, you know, I don't agree with this grade that you gave me. It doesn't adequately, you know, capture the effort that I put into this class and into this paper. And his point and his response to the kid was, I'm not grading you on effort. I'm grading you on the output that you put together. So it doesn't matter if you grinded your butt off on this paper or you put in so much effort because outcomes are what actually matter in life. And the key to outcomes is balancing the push with the recovery, with the space, with the rest. And so unless you find that balance in your life, if you obsess over just the input and the effort and the energy that you're putting into the thing, you miss out on a really vital part of all of this.

Ryan:
[22:29] All right. So let's talk about those outcomes and the revised scoreboard that you put forward in your book, The Five Types of Wealth. So if Bankless listeners are with us this far, they hear sort of what we're saying. They hear the message, okay, net worth isn't the only thing that matters. It is one thing that matters as one measure of wealth, but it's not the only thing. So what are the other four besides financial? What are the other four categories of wealth that you talk about?

Sahil:
[22:58] Time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, and physical wealth are the other four. So time wealth is all about freedom, to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it, when you trade it for other things. It is about an awareness of time as your most precious asset. Social wealth is about relationships. Mental wealth is about purpose, about growth. And it's about creating that space to wrestle with some of those bigger picture questions, whether it's through spirituality, religion, meditation, solitude, what have you. And then physical wealth is about your health and vitality. It's about taking controllable daily actions to promote that vigor over long periods of time.

Ryan:
[23:43] And are all five of those equally important or how do you kind of like rank them?

Sahil:
[23:47] Your life has seasons and what you prioritize or focus on during any one season will change. The key is that you consider all five as you make decisions across those different seasons of your life. But you will have seasons when you have the dial, the dimmer switch that we talked about earlier, way turned up in one area and turned down in the others. And then in a future season, that may adjust and change. But the important point is that you consider and factor in all of them across these different seasons of life.

Ryan:
[24:19] Now, how fungible are these things? I want to go back to my earlier comment, and maybe you could disabuse me of this previous perspective I've had. But the perspective that once you have the financial wealth, they're fungible with the other types of wealth. So you could basically buy your time. So why do most people not have very much time wealth? Well, they work a demanding job. They have 50, 60-hour weeks. And in order for them to graduate from wage slave type status, right, they need to be in a state of financial freedom. And so you get financially wealthy, and then you can kind of like buy time. And then with time, you can invest further in your social wealth, you can invest further in your income. Physical wealth, you can invest further in your mental wealth. So it seems there's an element of like financial and time might be like more

Ryan:
[25:05] important than the others or provide kind of a base pad for the other types of wealth. Anyway, how do you read this and how do you think about the fungibility of these different things?

Sahil:
[25:14] Financial wealth is important in two ways here. First off, yes, you need a baseline amount of financial wealth to be able to think about any of these other types of wealth. Maslow's hierarchy of needs definitely applies here. Like if you cannot take care of basic needs, food, shelter, security, safety of the people around you, you're probably not worried about your purpose or about your time at that point. You're really focused on this core set of needs. The second point here is that financial wealth can be an extraordinary tool for building these other types of wealth, but very, very few people treat it as such. What they do is they become a slave to it. And so the financial wealth, rather than being a tool, which we all know it should be. In the back of our mind, we all say like, well, I'm going to make money and then I'm going to be free, right? You're like, okay, so you're saying I'm going to make money and then it's going to be a tool to get me my freedom. What actually happens is that money along the way, whether you realize it or not, becomes the goal in and of itself. The goal is the freedom. The goal is not the money. Like money on a screen doesn't do anything for you, right? People don't dream of just having a bigger number on a screen. What you dream about is having the freedom to go take a month and go sail around Croatia on a nice sailing boat because you earned a whole lot of money.

Ryan:
[26:32] Exactly.

Sahil:
[26:33] But that same person that said that that was their dream is the person that sits there staring at the screen once they have way more than enough money to go and do that thing. Because what they actually got addicted to along the way was the idea that money was the goal. And they got to $10 million and then they convinced themselves that 30 was the number that they needed. Then they get 30 and they convinced themselves 90 is the number. And we have science to prove that. Michael Norton, this Harvard Business School professor, ran this study where he went and asked a bunch of high net worth individuals, you know, worth anywhere from a million through a hundred million plus, how happy are you on a scale of one to 10? Then he asked, how much more money would you need to be at a 10? And across the board, whether the person was worth a million or a hundred million plus, they all said they needed two to three times as much money to be at a 10.

Speaker2:
[27:18] It makes no sense.

Sahil:
[27:21] There should be a happiness number at some point, but that's not what humans do. Those numbers reset. Money becomes the goal along the way, rather than being recognized as a tool to get to that thing that you really want.

Ryan:
[27:33] Why do you think that is, Sahil? Do you think this is greed? Is it just like the G word? Is it that simple?

Sahil:
[27:39] No, it's what we can measure. It goes back to the scoreboard. It's the thing that you can measure, and it's the way that you measure your life. It's the way that you measure how well you are doing at the life video game.

Ryan:
[27:49] So it's not like a Scrooge McDuck, like I just want to swim, like dive into pools of gold and kind of swim around with it. It's more about like a high score in a video game,

Sahil:
[28:01] Basically. Yeah, you feel like you're getting better at the game and you see it and you can track it and you can measure it. And you're like, wow, I'm getting better. It's very hard to measure the quality of your relationships and you can't flex on that. Or it's harder to, at least. It's hard to flex on your, you know, free time necessarily. It's hard to flex on your mental health, on your physical health. You kind of can now with, you know, biomarkers and, you know, shirtless pictures. But really, money is kind of the way that people do this. And so people hone in on and focus on that thing. The other thing to realize is that money does not equal freedom. That's a thing. You look, how many times on this podcast have people said or thought that? how many of the listeners assume, oh, money equals freedom. I'm going to have money. Therefore, I am going to be free.

Ryan:
[28:49] I think I was one of them. And I think that has been part of the fallacy of this, which is like, it's part of freedom, but it's incomplete. But yeah, continue.

Sahil:
[28:57] Yeah, I think it was in Fight Club that there was the line, the things we own end up owning us. And that is true.

Sahil:
[29:06] Over and over again, what you find is that you get caught on this endless cycle, this treadmill. I mean, I have a friend who's a senior executive at a big public company, probably making about $10 million a year, you know, net worth 200 million plus, like endless, endless money. And he could not leave that job and cannot leave that job because he's afraid of what will happen if he removes that income because their lifestyle has inflated to the point where they're basically spending all of it. He can't go take, you know, like a cool new job or something that he really wants to do or go start a new startup or do something like that because he's afraid of giving up the, you know, stable treadmill running income and cash flow that he's creating. That is not free. he has all the money in the world like for me i'm like if i had that i would be the you know you you wouldn't catch me anywhere like you couldn't get me to do anything but if if you were in that situation you do not feel free i mean i have friends who make an extraordinary amount of money working at hedge funds in new york that if they get a call on a saturday night you know from an lp or from their boss or from anyone to do something that you know the kids like recital the little league game that they were supposed to go to too bad right they're working and they could be worth $100 million. They could be making $10, $20 million a year, but that is not free. So the money doesn't equal freedom. A thoughtfully free designed life can lead to freedom.

Sahil:
[30:31] Recognizing that money is the tool to get you freedom and designing that along the way to be free is what's going to lead to that.

Ryan:
[30:38] Yeah. I mean, the case of the hedge fund manager who doesn't go see their kids recital, right? Money doesn't equal freedom. Money also does not equal wealth because that is an individual who's probably relationship poor or at least not as relationship wealthy as they could be. And that's why the message of your book is so important. We've got to completely redefine how we measure and how we see wealth. I actually want to tackle, we'll tackle each of the areas of wealth individually, but I want to talk about financial first. It's actually last in your book with some purpose. Let's talk about it first here, because I think you're speaking to a lot of folks who are looking at screens for price charts more than they need to be, more than they should be. Perhaps they're addicted to it. Perhaps they're kind of in a place that I was where it's like money equals freedom. And it's either for me, it was not very much by way of lifestyle inflation. It was more about kind of the game, the thing I measured for success. And so that that became my barometer of how free I was and how well I was doing, basically. The number one thing I think people can do who are listening to this is do something that you recommend in your book, which is define enough.

Ryan:
[31:51] Define what enough actually means. And I'm guessing there's a lot of people listening to this podcast, maybe who've been with us for years listening to this podcast, who actually don't have a definition. I'm talking about like a numerical definition of what enough means in their own life. Can you talk about that, Sahil?

Sahil:
[32:12] Yeah, there's this famous story that I love of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, these two famous American authors, walking around the like palatial estate of this billionaire in the Hamptons. And they're walking around in these gardens and Vonnegut turns to Heller and says, Joe, how does it feel that just yesterday, the owner of this home made more money than your most famous book, Catch-22, made in its entire lifetime? And Heller thinks about it and looks back at him and says, yes, but I've got something that he'll never have. And Vonnegut says, what's that? And Heller replies, the knowledge that I've got enough.

Sahil:
[32:50] That is this idea in a nutshell. The knowledge that I've got enough. What does that mean? An understanding of when you have enough. It is about the fact that your expectations are your single greatest financial liability. If your expectations rise faster than your assets, You will never feel wealthy. You'll never feel rich. We don't need to look far to find examples of that, right? It's the rich yet miserable person that never seems to have enough, that continues to chase the thing. It's the billionaire that commits suicide because they chased the next thing, made way too many levered bets, ended up losing it all, and their whole life comes crashing down. Why did they do that? Because they didn't understand their own definition of enough. They were lost in the chase for more, that treadmill. And when you say define enough and you say numerically, really understand it, there's an addition here. The number has a tendency to disappear and reappear. I talked about that study, Michael Norton did. You know, it does the two to three X-ing dance. So what I would add to that, in addition to having some sort of number in your mind, is really visualize the life. What does your enough life look like?

Sahil:
[34:00] Because one of the most important and overlooked concepts on your entire journey, as you're making money, which by the way, I love making money. I want to make a lot of money. I enjoy it. I find it fun, you know, playing the game, doing things better. I'm not saying money's bad and my enough life is not a Spartan life. But it's very important to not overlook what is the money for? Like, what is the money for? Why am I doing all these things? What am I actually trying? What is the life I am actually trying to build? What does it look like? Where am I living?

Sahil:
[34:33] How many houses do I have? What am I, you know, what am I thinking about on a daily basis? What am I working on? Who am I surrounded by? What am I able to do or work on?

Sahil:
[34:44] That is your enough life. It doesn't have to be Spartan or Bayer. I could have multiple houses. You could have all sorts of nice things, be surrounded by people. But the important point is that it is clearly defined. Because when it's clearly defined, it doesn't do this like subconscious, irrational disappearing act where it reappears on the horizon. You actually appreciate it when you're coming into it. And I know this from experience. Like, you know, when I was making this big life change from, you know, the prior track that I was on, feeling really miserable, seeing a lot of areas of my life starting to fall apart to this new life that I'm currently living. When we went and bought our house, this new place, I had this sensation when I was looking at it and we were about to close on this house. I was like, man, this is it. I don't need anything else. That doesn't mean I'm not going to go try to build things and I'm going to chase my purpose, try to scale the impact that I can create. I think I will make more money in the future, but it was enough. And all the time, I find myself just appreciating it as a result. Like my enough life is being able to take my son in the pool at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday.

Sahil:
[35:58] If I can do that, like this is it. That's what the money was for so that I could build a life where I could do that, where I had healthy, loving relationships, where I had enough money to have a pool in my backyard. So that's nothing to laugh at. You know, where I had the freedom to be able to do that control of my time in that way, healthy enough to go in and do that.

Speaker2:
[36:18] And so I just really encourage people to take the time to really ask that question.

Sahil:
[36:23] What is the money for? What is the life I am really trying to build?

Ryan:
[36:26] Yeah. So I actually took this exercise very seriously. And you've got some steps in your book that I encourage people to do is literally coming up with an enough plan. That's what you call it. And so if you have a relationship or someone in your life, for me, it was my spouse, basically, where I sat down with her and we talked about what we're doing this for and what the number we need to achieve in order to make what we're doing this for possible. So like one of the guiding things of, I think, why I got on the grind in the first place, my own personal life is I got married young, you know, in my twenties, we had kids very early. I had a son with some, you know, special needs, he had some difficulties. And so my life was about, okay, how can I make sure that my family is taken care of? And, you know, my son in particular, that he has everything that he needs. And then I just got in this grind cycle where I was just kind of stacking up points you know playing the game and I'd never stopped to actually create a number around okay what does my what do the my loved ones what do the people in my life my family what do they actually need in order to have what they need through us throughout the rest of life and through this plan I actually went and we came up with numbers around this okay so like my son what's he going to need throughout the rest of his life okay that's a number now I have a goal which is take care of my family, make sure he's supported. And I have a number that goes along with that. And it's kind of enough.

Ryan:
[37:48] That's the sort of granular detail that you can get to and you can advocate. It really creates time to think about what's important to you and why you're

Ryan:
[37:58] doing this in the first place. And it was awestrucking to me that I had never done this exercise before. In all the time where I've been on a financial podcast, talking about crypto, talking about building wealth, I had never gone through the exercise of defining like what was actually enough for me. And so I just did that. And it removed a like a burden and a weight in my life, just even going through this exercise and having a plan around like what is enough.

Sahil:
[38:26] Yeah. And it's funny because there is, again, to the point we made at the very outset around this whole like grind set, you know, the mentality, the grinder's ambition. There's an element in you that is going to feel uncomfortable when you go through this. Because you're going to be fighting this urge of like, what do you mean enough? You know, enough is when I'm dead. Like, I'm just going to keep, you know, I'm just going to keep grinding. I'm just going to keep working. And again, it's not about giving up your ambition. Like I, it just, it's a reminder that when you do chase more, after you get enough, when you chase more, it has to be grounded in something more meaningful than money. You know, like, I got this life. I built this. I created things to earn this in a lot of ways. And again, I'm not a super fancy person, so it's not like some crazy, crazy life that I live, but...

Speaker2:
[39:15] That wasn't the end of my ambition.

Sahil:
[39:18] I wrote my book after I already had that life. Like I did all of these things that I'm doing now after I had that life. It was a reminder that as I went and chased more, it had to be grounded in purpose. It had to be grounded in something more meaningful to me than money. And as a result, what I have found is that I actually make a whole lot more money when I'm grounding things in the right reasons.

Ryan:
[39:38] I want to ask a question on the financial wealth piece before we leave it. You know, the story of you're talking about the Catch-22 author who says, I'll have something he'll never have. Speaking of the billionaire hedge fund manager, I have enough, basically that whole story. There is a deep cynicism, I think, in financial wealth circles and certainly in crypto that says something like this. Yeah, Sahil, that's what like, that's cope. That's what people who don't know how to make money say. That's kind of an excuse. What's your response to that?

Sahil:
[40:10] I guess my response is that this is entirely individual. So like I don't judge anyone else's definition of enough and I don't expect anyone to judge mine because it's individual. Like I actually don't, if a hedge fund manager that makes hundreds of millions of dollars wants to build a life and chooses by design to live a life where they're not able to make it to their family or kid stuff. And what they really care about is trying to like leave a legacy and, or like make the species interplanetary or go and do these things that'll force them to sacrifice all of these other things in life. As long as they do that by choice and not by default, that's your prerogative, right? Like you go and build the life that you want. What I want everyone to do is to ask these questions. If you have asked the questions and you've come to the determination that you want to go and chase building in one area with all obsession, I think that's great. Go and do you. It's not what I want out of my life. It's not my definition of a successful wealthy life. But if it's yours, that's perfectly okay. And so I think that that is really the point here. It is this recognition that I had personally that... I would never want to trade lives with the people that I was reading books about. Like I spent my whole childhood and young adulthood reading these like biography. I mean, still have them sitting around like all of these great men from history.

Ryan:
[41:34] Have you ever read the Walter Isaacson, like Steve Jobs bio?

Sahil:
[41:37] Yeah, Steve Jobs, you know, like Titan about Rockefeller, like all of these books you can go and read. And we're taught that this is success, right? Like I'm going to celebrate these success stories. and we pat these people on the back and we admire them and we celebrate them and then we tell them that they won the game and we ignore the fact that they had three ex-wives and four kids that don't talk to them. And I had to ask myself in my own life, is that actually a game that I care to win? Because for me personally, that's not what success or wealth looks like. If it's your definition, that's totally fine. No judgment, but it's not mine. And so I do not feel a need And I don't think it makes sense for culture or the way that we define things or social media to pressure me into chasing and running that race. I'm just going to opt out of that and choose to run my own, create my own by design and go and live that way.

Sahil:
[42:31] And it's weird to people. Look, like, I'm not saying this is easy because the thing is, a lot of people won't understand it. Like when you start living differently, when you kind of opt out of some of these games that everyone wants you to chase and play, it looks weird to a lot of people on the surface. Like, what do you mean you're not doing that? You know, like, look, I have a big platform. Reaches, you know, several million people every single week. And I don't have courses. I don't sell courses. I don't have a mastermind. You know, I don't have some coaching offering. Could I make $10 million a year doing those things? Probably. Like, look, I'm just being completely honest. Probably. I could probably sit down, come up with a bunch of stuff, sell a bunch of things like that, have a mastermind, have a Discord group, have all these things, make a whole lot of money. A lot of people don't understand why I don't do that. They're like, well, what's the game? What's the launch? I'm like, dude, I just don't care to do that. I don't need that money. And so if I don't need the money and I don't want it and I don't want to do it that way, then I don't need to play that game. No one's forcing me to do those things. And trust me, the second I need the money because my family needs it for some reason, I'll go work at McDonald's if I need to make the money to go and take care of my family. But I don't need it right now. And so my whole thing is like you get to design and choose the games that you actually want to play, the races that you want to run. You do not have to step by default into the ones that other people hand you.

Ryan:
[43:53] Okay. Well, let's talk about that. If the system default is really wired towards wealth being measured by financial net worth, Let's talk about the other areas. So time is next. I think a lot of people feel time poor in today's society. Actually, maybe they would describe that as kind of like attention poor. Why do people feel this way? Why is there time poverty?

Sahil:
[44:16] There's this scene that I love in Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to Alice in Wonderland, where the Red Queen is running hand in hand with Alice and they're running faster and faster and faster. And Alice notices that they're not actually passing anything. Like nothing's moving even though they're running really fast. And this became known as the Red Queen effect. It's the idea that you actually have to run faster and faster than your surroundings in order to make any progress. It was like an evolutionary biology concept of like you actually have to evolve faster than your predators and the people around you if you can hope to survive. Applied to our own lives, this is the idea that we are constantly having to run faster and faster and faster just to stay in the same place. And you have to run even faster than that if you hope to make progress. That is the sensation that many of us, I think, have in the modern day and age. It's like the treadmill, this invisible hand is just turning the treadmill up. You're running faster and faster. You're not actually getting anywhere. One of the biggest reasons for that is because we're wasting most of our time on stupid low value things that aren't really making progress in our life. We say yes to every single thing rather than focusing in on the two to three things that really drive the progress and outcomes in our life. Goes back to the Lionel Messi analogy that I gave you earlier. Like, he doesn't sprint at every single ball that rolls his way all over the field because if he did, he wouldn't have any energy for the one moment when it really matters.

Sahil:
[45:41] There's this ancient Greek concept, these two words for time. Kronos is the idea of like chronological linear quantitative time. All time is created equal. And then there's kairos, which is the idea that certain moments, certain windows have more texture. They have more meaning. They're more important. And that time or energy invested into those moments actually creates dramatically better outcomes. That is really an analog for how we all need to live. We need to focus on what are those moments or opportunities or windows when energy deployed into them, concentrated attention and energy deployed into those specific moments or opportunities can create those dramatic outcomes. That's how you break free of some of this time poverty trap that we find ourselves in.

Ryan:
[46:27] Speaking of breaking free, just as we were talking earlier about having to break the grind addiction, I think there's another type of addiction that maybe a lot of people listening can relate to. Is something I certainly found myself in, which is like the dopamine addiction of being on a phone or being like too online, I would say that led to this attention poverty. And you're talking about not spending your time in the right places. Like, so before my break, I couldn't go 15 minutes without checking like prices or Telegram or Discord or Twitter.

Ryan:
[46:59] And I didn't even realize, like, again, it was a trap where I felt like that was productive because I'm learning something, right? I'm keeping up with the tip of the latest and I can use that to inform my investing. I can use that in a podcast. I can see a guest maybe we want to have on the show. And there was this dopamine drip addiction, this pressure of urgency. And so what I had to do in order to create space for myself and time to think about the rest of the life plan, as it were, is I had to just flat out cold turkey break that addiction. So for me, it was just like, okay, I'm going to actually delete apps from my phone. I'm going to go into my time settings of my phone and 60 seconds a day is all you get on Twitter, if that, right? And so, I actually did that. I treated myself as almost like a toddler in this way or like how I might put constraints on a young child or something like that. And I had to do that in order to break this addiction. There's a lot of things like that that are vying for our time and stealing our time, things that we're not even aware of.

Sahil:
[48:06] Yeah, I think that what you did... Is a good example of forcing the sort of like discomfort to break you free of these underlying assumptions that you've had about how you have to operate and the things that you have to do. And it's very uncomfortable to make those changes. I mean, one of the big ones for me was that I think a lot of people probably experience is I'm very bad at saying no to things, especially, you know, when things are going well. Like what I find is that when things aren't going well, you don't get a lot of opportunities. And when things start going well, all of a sudden you get a million opportunities.

Sahil:
[48:43] And it's sort of like, you know, you're in high school and if you don't have a girlfriend, it's like impossible to find a girlfriend. But the second you find a girlfriend, every girl wants to date you. You know, it's like, it's the exact same thing for professional opportunities. Like all of a sudden when you're, when you're gainfully employed or you're occupied with a whole bunch of stuff, all of these opportunities come out of the woodwork, wanting your attention and vying for it. And so like in the aftermath of my book launch, all of a sudden there's all these amazing opportunities. And one of the things that I've learned and had to really struggle with is that the single greatest threat to your progress is distractions masquerading as good opportunities. Like there's all these things out there that are good opportunities, but they're not the opportunity. They're not the right one for you. They're not the main point of focus. And if you chase all of those good opportunities that are around you, you never have headspace or bandwidth to capitalize on the one great opportunity that comes your way. And so learning to say no, creating better systems and embracing the sort of just space that that creates in your life, even if it's uncomfortable, is a real challenge that creates a whole lot of time wealth.

Sahil:
[49:56] And for, again, the person that is ambitious, it feels very uncomfortable because what it creates this weird middle period where you feel like you don't have enough going on, but you know that you're just waiting for that one juicy pitch, as the Warren Buffett likes to say, to come along so that you can really hit one out of the park.

Ryan:
[50:16] There's a lot of systems in your book that are basically exercises to help you discipline yourself and create space that you can own your calendar again, basically. One of them I liked was the two-list exercise. We could talk about that. What is the two-list exercise?

Sahil:
[50:31] This is a byproduct of a fabled conversation between Warren Buffett and his personal pilot, a guy named Mike Flint. And the story goes that Flint was basically complaining to Buffett about the fact that he had way too many, you know, goals and priorities, and he didn't know how he was going to accomplish all of them. And so Buffett asks him to write all of them down on a piece of paper. So Flint goes and writes all these things down. He comes back with this list of 25 things. And Buffett says, okay, now circle the top three to five most important things out of that entire list. So Flint kind of struggles and goes and spends a half an hour and comes back with five of them circled. And Buffett says, okay, well, what are you going to do with the other 20 items? And Flint says, well, you know, then after I kind of get through these five and I'm working on these five, but after I get through those five on a day, then I'll do the other 20. And Buffett says, wrong. That's incorrect. Those are your avoid at all costs items because those 20 things, any time spent on those is just a distraction. It's just pulling you away, pulling away your energy from the things that really matter that you've already identified. So he tells him to split the lists, split it into two lists. You've got your priorities and you've got your avoid at all costs. So now when something new comes in, you can look at it and say, does this fit into my priorities or is it one of these avoid at all cost items that I just need to say no to?

Sahil:
[51:56] Creating that for yourself is a really helpful framing to allow you to say yes or no much more effectively and efficiently.

Ryan:
[52:05] Another thing that I found very useful, I've added to sort of my daily regimen is the morning boot up sequence. So before I had kind of a morning boot up sequence, I would fall into defaults, kind of like grind over achiever defaults. And I think maybe some people can relate to this. So you wake up, you're, you know, you get hit by your alarm. The very first thing you do is you grab your phone and you check on things. So you check your email, right? And like, oh, what are the things I need to work on navigate? You check maybe your socials. You check like all the different communication tools that you have. You're just like, you wake up, eyes open. You don't even have a minute to reflect and you're already on the grind train and like the gears are turning. Maybe you go downstairs, you have some time for a coffee, you know, big breakfast, whatever. But that's the very first thing I used to do. Now I have a different boot up sequence, much more. It's like so much of your book is about being intentional with how you are living your life and what you are dollar cost averaging into. Tell people about the morning boot up sequence.

Sahil:
[53:06] Yeah, this is an idea of just creating a sort of like fixed sequence or set of rituals that get you into your kind of like primed state. You know, everyone always talks about flow state. You're like, oh, you gotta get into flow when you're working. But very rarely do we think about like, okay, what are the couple things I can do to reliably get into that state? And why don't I just make it like a boot up sequence the same way my computer has a boot up sequence to get started or any program that I run? Why don't I just incorporate those into a very short, hopefully easy to execute ritual? It's not super useful if your boot up sequence is like, you know, I need to spend four hours like, you know, Brian Johnson-ing or Kuberman protocoling my way into a flow state. If you have four hours and you've achieved that level of mastery, then good for you. My boot up sequence cannot be that long because, you know, I have a three year old who wakes up in a couple hours and I need to make sure I get some work done before then. But I think that just like a couple of very simple rituals, like what are you drinking? What are you listening to? You know, are you doing a quick cold shower or a cold plunge or a few pushups or a walk or some movement or something like that to kind of lock you into that and prime you for whatever the important thing is that you're going to work on? That's really important.

Sahil:
[54:26] We've sort of lost the plot when it comes to these morning routines in general. You know, like we're living in this and recording this sort of in the aftermath of this. You know, morning routine craze of like the Saratoga water and dipping your face into ice water.

Ryan:
[54:40] Right. Yes.

Sahil:
[54:41] You know, all of these things that we see on the internet. And the truth is that a lot of the routines that were designed to serve us end up owning us. And, you know, if you have a routine, but you get stressed the night before about your ability to execute the routine the next morning, that's not a good routine. That is the paradox of routines, right? The best routine is the one that you can actually break and still get work done. My entire life changed for me personally, when I realized that if I need to, I can just wake up in the morning, grab a coffee two seconds after I get out of bed, go to my desk and just get shit done. And it still gets done and I can still work. I don't need to do my cold plunge and pushups and go for a walk and do a million different things. If I have the space to do it, I'd love to. But if not, I can just go get work done and do those couple of tiny little things of my boot up sequence to feel good and ready to go.

Ryan:
[55:33] Yeah, my boot up sequence is really simple now, right? It's basically wake up at six, don't hit the snooze, do not check my phone, like no screen until like basically after seven. You know that you go downstairs, drink some water, basically, you know, 16 ounces, vitamins, take the dog for a walk. And then by seven o'clock, make sure I have some time with the family for a kind of like a daily sit down and breakfast. So it can be very simple and you can change it over time. It's just the key for me was just like, Thank you. Don't do the overachiever thing first thing you wake up and just start you know grinding away like you're some kind of a machine okay

Sahil:
[56:10] So fight dogmas yeah just like in general everything we're talking about is like fight dogmas both internal and external dogmas that other people tell you to follow you should definitely question and ask but also the ones that you have in your own head about the way that you have to do things just question them every now and then and test something different and see if it doesn't work better. Like, you know, I used to have a very focused morning routine that was the exact same every single day for many years. And I've recently experimented with like reading first thing in the morning when I get out of bed for 20, 30 minutes, just like whatever kind of grabs me. And I've loved it. Like I've found that it opens up my mind in a completely different way than some of the stuff that I used to do. And so I think that, you know, you change, you adjust, and it's important that you allow yourself to do that.

Ryan:
[56:57] So if you're saying no to things, if you're prioritizing the few things that matter, if you've got things like a boot up sequence so you don't get stuck on tracks, we didn't mention the energy calendar, but you've got this concept of like you track a week of your activities and you categorize things as either they create energy or they drain energy or they're neutral. And then you just eliminate the things that drain energy and are neutral and you focus on the things that create energy and then you basically work those things into your calendar moving forward. There's a lot of that goes into being much more deliberate about how you spend your time. And I would encourage folks, if you feel like you've got some sort of a screen addiction where you're always checking prices, let that be the first thing, right? Just like cut that and see what happens. And you'll know, by the way, if you sort of get the urge to like, just like pick up your phone that you were way too addicted in the first place and should have done that a long time ago. Okay, so that's time. And the idea here is once you have time wealth, then you can invest that into other areas of your life, including this next one, which is social. So there are a lot of people out there who feel what I would call maybe relationship poor, lonely could be one example of this, or even the relationships that they do have, they're not dollar cost averaging into those relationships and maybe the way that they should be. And so those relationships are not thriving, not blossoming. What are the symptoms of this? And why do you think so many are feeling relationship poor?

Sahil:
[58:24] I think that the biggest mindset shift is the recognition that investments in your relationships are the single greatest investment you can make. We don't often think that way. Relationships are really, for most people, the first thing that fall by the wayside when we get busy. You get busy, life gets chaotic, shit hits the fan, and you stop texting the friend. You stop going for the walk with your parents. You stop getting the old group of friends together for the annual trip. You stop having the call with your sibling. All of those things fall by the wayside, when in reality, the science and our own anecdotal evidence suggests that relationships are the single greatest predictor of a happy, healthy life. The Harvard study of adult development, I would argue the most important study of the last 100 years, followed the lives of 2,000 people over the course of 85 years. They found that the single greatest predictor of physical health at age 80 was relationship satisfaction at age 50. Not blood pressure, not smoking or drinking habits, not cholesterol. How you felt about your relationships was what determined how well you aged. And so what better reason do you need to invest in your relationships, to design those tiny investments, to dollar cost average into your relationships on a daily basis? We know those are the things that make life worth living in the long run.

Ryan:
[59:47] One way you describe the key relationships in your life is the front row funeral people. So these are the people who are going to be in the front row at your funeral. So when you say optimizing for your relationships. There's kind of a prioritization system here. And who are the people in the front row of your funeral? Are you investing in those? Can you talk about that?

Sahil:
[1:00:10] Yeah. I mean, the idea is to recognize that relationship wealth means something different to every single person. One person can feel really relationship wealthy, social. You can feel like a social billionaire if you have like two deep close friendships hmm, Some people need 20, some people need 15. It's just a natural disposition of, you know, extroversion versus introversion and where you kind of sit on a spectrum in that sense. And so the point is you need to identify who are those people that are really going to hold this esteemed place in your life. And what are you doing on a daily basis to recognize, to cherish them? And what are you doing to be that to someone else that's out there? Because that's an important recognition that over and over again in your own life, we say there are all these things that we want, but then we are not embodying those things. You know, like I have friends that are in the dating market. They'll make these long elaborate lists of all the things they're trying to find in a partner, but then they're not living by any of those things that they want to find. You can't expect to find things that you're not embodying yourself, right? Like the best dating advice I've ever heard is make that long list, then go out and embody those things yourself and you will attract that into your life. Mario Quintana wrote, don't waste time chasing butterflies, mend your garden and the butterflies will come.

Ryan:
[1:01:35] So how do you do this practically? Is it basically identifying the key people in your life, you know, family, friends, and almost coming up with a connection plan for each of them? So like, hey, I'm going to call my mom, you know, like every, you know, week at this time, and I'm going to put that in my calendar. I'm going to make that happen. Is it things like this? You create kind of a connection plan for each relationship in your life and make it very deliberate?

Sahil:
[1:02:01] I think it depends on your natural personality type. There's a lot of cynicism around making and systematizing relationships. Like anyone that talks about having like a personal CRM and things like that, it gets turned into memes. There's people who do that?

Ryan:
[1:02:14] Wow.

Sahil:
[1:02:14] Yeah, there are personal CRM companies. And you get like all these companies have tried to raise money on that thesis in the past. It depends on like, you know, kind of how you operate. If you need things to be on your calendar, your schedule in order to do them, then by all means, go do that. I personally just like to operate on a few default rules. Like one of my default rules is when I think something nice about someone, I let them know right then. So if you go through your day, think about how many times you have like a random thought about someone in your life, something that you thought they did well or nice or like, oh, I haven't thought about that person a while. If you just send that person a text just saying, hey, I was just thinking about you, hope you're doing well. Not like, doesn't have to be a prompt to catch up. Doesn't have to be a like, hey, would love to get drinks sometime. it can just be as simple as just letting someone know you were thinking about them or like tell them the nice thing that you thought about them. It goes a long way to just creating these little touch points with relationships. The iPhone has this like a photo memories feature. I love just like scrolling through that on a ride to the airport and sending some of those photo memories to the people that are in the pictures. Again, just like a super easy touch point that creates a level of connection with people on an ongoing basis. So that rather than having these relationships that feel like they're atrophying over long periods of time. You have these relationships where you've created these simple, innocuous, very low time requirement touch points that makes them feel fresh and present.

Ryan:
[1:03:43] What's more important? Is it quantity of connection points or is it quality?

Sahil:
[1:03:48] Quality, quality, quality. I mean, you could have a hundred loose connections and it's less meaningful than one truly deep one. But again, you know, for the individual who needs more in order to feel really wealthy in this regard, it's important that you kind of just like find what your baseline needs are in life. There's a lot of people who can feel very lonely, surrounded by 20 loose connections at a bar, but they don't have that one person that they could call at three in the morning when they're down and out. So understanding who those people are, who your roots, you know, your front row people really are in life is critical.

Ryan:
[1:04:24] What's the big impediment here? Like, why don't, why don't people do this by default? If I were to kind of guess, at least for my own life is you, you tend to sort of just let, you were talking about this earlier, but you tend to let relationships go on the back burner. And because you're so time poor and you're allocating your time in other ways, you just don't carve out the time to kind of like, I don't know, tend to the relationship garden, you know, pour water on to make sure it gets sun. Like it takes time to invest in these things. And I think people just take them for granted and maybe let them atrophy. Is that the main impediment? I guess it's different for every single person, but for me, that's kind of the way life gets busy and then suddenly your relationships go in the background and you're not tending to them in the way that you should.

Sahil:
[1:05:12] I think there's a couple of things. I think for existing relationships, that is very often the case. We get busy, we lose sight of it. We don't place it in the same regard as these other areas of life. And so we don't invest in it. We don't do the tiny actions. We also just constantly think that, something has to be perfect for it to be beneficial. So, you know, if we don't have 30 minutes to call our mom, we just don't even text them. We allow optimal to get in the way of beneficial. When the truth is that the tiny thing is better than nothing. You know, like I once called my dad for like two seconds. I was on the way into something and I just had this thought. So I called him and just said this two second thing. And like a few weeks later, my mom mentioned to me how my dad had talked about that two second conversation all night at dinner one night, because he was like excited about the thing that I had told him. And it led to this like entire dinner conversation that my mom and dad had about this two second interaction. So this tiny thing that I otherwise wouldn't have done had been so meaningful to him in some way. And it was a reminder of that exact fact that like the tiny thing that you don't think about can really mean a whole heck of a lot to someone else.

Sahil:
[1:06:19] But we very easily allow those moments to pass by. We allow that inspiration to just disappear.

Ryan:
[1:06:25] Let's talk about mental wealth, which is another category of wealth. Okay, so what are the pillars of mental wealth?

Sahil:
[1:06:32] I think of the three pillars of mental wealth as being about purpose, growth, and space. Purpose is really this idea of the hero's journey. It's like the idea that you sort of leave the confines and safety of home, go off on this journey, experience these struggles, trials, and tribulations, and then come back better for the experience. It's a tale as old as time, right? We all go on our own version of that hero's journey in life and the degree to which we embrace it being our own and not consenting by default into someone else's is the degree to which we truly experience that feeling of purpose. Purpose scientifically is one of the keys to living a good, healthy life. A whole lot of science now has developed that shows that people who have a clear sense of purpose live longer. It reduces all cause mortality. So that's the first one. Growth is about...

Sahil:
[1:07:30] What we talked about earlier, the feeling of being dynamic, of changing, of the ability to learn and grow over periods of time, being curious, engaging in that growth mindset so that you can change and develop. It is very much like the fountain of youth in a real sense. You know, when you stop learning, you start dying. I think it was Einstein maybe that said that. Very, very true. And then the third pillar is space, which we talked about earlier. This ability to create these moments and pockets of space, both on a micro and macro basis, to zoom out and create more perspective in your life to wrestle with some of these bigger picture, unanswerable questions.

Ryan:
[1:08:09] One of the things I was feeling earlier in the year when I went on the sabbatical was a sense of like lost purpose, like just like waking up and being like, okay, wait, remind me, why am I doing this again? Why am I in this grind? And one of the tools that I found helpful in your book about, you know, kind of like finding your purpose, finding your true north was this concept of a life raiser, which is like, yeah, I think of it as a couple sentences, no longer than a paragraph description of like what you're about, your life. Maybe you could put words to this. What is the life raiser?

Sahil:
[1:08:42] I really think of it as this kind of single identity defining statement for how your ideal self shows up in the world during this season of life. So to kind of give you an example, I mean, like my life raiser is that I will coach my son's sports teams. He's three years old, so he's not actually on any sports teams yet. This is all about how my ideal self shows up in the world, that I am the type of person who coaches his son's sports teams, that I prioritize my family, my community, these relationships above chasing every new shiny object out there, that I'm the type of person that my husband or that my wife and I'm the type of husband and father that my wife and son would want to have around and community member in that way. So that is like this idea of, understanding how your ideal self operates can allow you to cut through the noise much more effectively. Like when you are facing different challenges or opportunities, you can ask yourself, like, what is the type of person who coaches his son's sports teams do in this situation? And you can put yourself into that mindset, into that frame of mind to then go and answer that question more effectively.

Ryan:
[1:09:52] Yeah. I realized for me, it was like, when I went through this exercise, creating my life razor, it had nothing to do with my work or my job, right? It's like my Twitter bio, like professionally, it's like crypto investor, you know, on the bankless journey, something like this. I found that that was not anything to do with my life razor. Like mine, you know, turned out to be, I show up with love for the people who matter most. And this was an emphasis on, I'm the type of person who's there for my family, prioritizing relationships, like trying to be better each day, failing, but then getting up and trying again, staying grateful and grounded and choosing connection over distraction. And Maybe that's just because that's kind of the area that I felt was kind of missing in my life, or at least the area that I had under allocated to, but that's what it turned out to be. I guess for some people, it could be their profession, depending on the season of life that they're in. Others, it could be something else. For you, it was being coached for your son's baseball games, and that was your identity and your life raiser. But it was a fantastic exercise to see through like the purpose, like why you're waking up, like why you're actually doing the things that you do and viewing it through that lens.

Sahil:
[1:11:04] Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

Speaker2:
[1:11:06] Okay.

Ryan:
[1:11:06] Is there anything else in like the mental wealth category, right? Having kind of a calm mind that comes to mind here. I mean, we could talk about zone of genius mapping, which I found to be a useful exercise myself. What comes up in your mind? What's the most useful tool?

Sahil:
[1:11:23] I really think that if we're just going to talk about like a very simple tactic that anyone can take today, I think this idea of like the one, one, one journaling method. Okay. It's probably the thing that anyone can go take and go do now to experience

Sahil:
[1:11:37] a benefit in their mental wealth. This is the idea of just before bed, before you get into bed, take a piece of paper and write down one win from the day, something that you felt good about, one point of stress, tension, or anxiety, something that you want to get off your head and onto the paper, and one point of gratitude, something that you felt grateful for during the day. It takes two to three minutes to do that in the evening before going into bed, and you will feel an immediate sense of calm, reduction in anxiety, you'll feel better, you'll fall asleep quicker. It has helped me enormously. And it is such a high ROI activity, given how low the time investment is.

Ryan:
[1:12:13] That's great. All right, let's finish with the last category here. So we're at number five here, which is physical wealth. So, and I guess this is, you know, that Naval quote, a calm mind, a fit body, a house full of love. You know, these are the things that can't be bought, they must be earned. I think Naval says that. I guess we've talked about the calm mind and the house full of love and now we're on the fit body part of things. But it's not just like fitness. It's also about sleep. It's also about nutrition. What are the pillars of physical wealth that you measure?

Sahil:
[1:12:46] Movement, nutrition, and recovery are the three pillars that you talk about here. Sleep is a piece of recovery, obviously. I think the important point here is that, All of the sort of content and social media fodder related to physical wealth is a little bit overblown and slightly dangerous in a certain way in that it convinces you that what it looks like to be healthy or vital is this like complex, very expensive series of routines and protocols that you need to follow. And the truth is that this is really more like a video game. And if those are all like level 100, you don't need to worry about that.

Sahil:
[1:13:26] You need to start at level one, and then from there you can kind of slowly work your way up. But the truth is that level one is basically freely accessible to anyone, and it'll get you ahead of 90% of people out there. Level one is what I would think of. Movement, just move your body for 30 minutes a day. Doesn't matter whether it's walking, biking, hiking, jogging, dancing, whatever you like doing. Move your body for 30 minutes a day.

Sahil:
[1:13:51] Nutrition, just eat whole unprocessed foods at about 80% of your meals. That's 17 out of 21 meals during the week. And then recovery, just try to sleep seven hours a night. If you can do those three things on a consistent basis, you're ahead of 80, 90% of people out there. From there, you can start thinking about doing more complicated, fancy things, starting to add resistance and different types of cardio and any of the recovery therapies or fancier diets and nutrition. But the truth is that that baseline level is where it starts and anyone can go out and do that.

Ryan:
[1:14:23] The biggest blocker for me was always back to like, I'm too busy to do this. Other things get in the way. I mean, do you find that that's the case for a lot of people who don't prioritize their physical wealth?

Sahil:
[1:14:32] I think that that is grounded in the mentality of it needs to be optimal for it to be beneficial. You know, we'd say things like, well, I don't have an hour to work out, so I'm just not going to work out today. And the truth is that a 15 minute walk is better than nothing. Anything above zero compounds positively in this domain and in all of them. So the tiny action done well is better than doing nothing. So you never have a real excuse that you truly don't have time. Five minute walk around the block, a few pushups in between phone calls, all of those things stack and compound positively and they contribute to the positive change that you were trying to experience in this domain.

Ryan:
[1:15:11] So time, social, mental, physical, financial, we've gone through them all. Is it really possible to do all five of these at the same time? I know we talked about the idea of dimmer switches and different kind of seasons of life where you might spin the dimmer switch up on one and down on another, but is it possible to do all five well throughout the course of your life?

Sahil:
[1:15:34] I think you can do all five well. I don't think you can optimize all five at the same time. Your life is going to have seasons when you have different dials turned up and different dials turned down. That is the reality of life. You're going to have seasons of unbalance that contribute to future seasons of balance. And stressing yourself out over those seasons of unbalance doesn't make a whole lot of sense. What you need to do is just lean into them, recognize that they are a part of reality, that they're going to exist, and that's okay. And you can and should have those seasons of unbalance as long as they are in service of a future season of balance that you are building towards. That's really how I view that.

Ryan:
[1:16:15] So is it okay to say, you know, you're kind of in your thirties establishing a family or something and you're, you're really focusing on, look, like I gotta, I gotta, I gotta work, right? I gotta, you know, set myself up for the future compounding returns. And so that's going to be one of the areas I'm dialed into. Also, maybe you're having a family. And so like you have small kids, there's like any parent with small kids realizes that they just like, there's no time. They have no time to do anything else. And so you're maybe like time poor, invest in your relationship, but you're not, you let the physical side slip a little bit. It's like, you don't exercise as much as you'd like to. Maybe that hits a back burner. Is that okay in the Sahil Bloom, you know, five types of wealth framework?

Sahil:
[1:16:57] Yes. As long as it is by your design, right? Like that is... A perfectly reasonable and normal arc that I think a lot of people face. If that were me, here's what I would do. I would say, okay, I'm going to have the dial way turned up on financial wealth in my career. And I'm going to have the dial turned up on time with my kids. That's kind of the remainder of my time. I'm probably not going to have a whole lot of time wealth during this time in my life because I'm really focused on those two. I'm probably not going to have a whole ton of time to spend with friends. I'm probably not going out for six hour golf rounds with the buddies on the weekends. That is a sacrifice that I'm willing to make for this time that I have with my kids and for my career that I'm really trying to progress for this future. Mental wealth, it's kind of going to be neutral. You know, I'm hopefully working on something that I kind of enjoy. If not, maybe that's going to be turned down slightly, but hopefully I'm growing. I'm able to create little pockets of space. And then in my physical wealth, I'm just going to try to do the like 15 to 30 minutes thing each day. I'm going to like wake up a little bit earlier and go out for the 30 minute run, or I'm going to do the 30 minute hit body weight workout in the basement or in the garage. And like, is that optimal? Is that the one and two hour workout that I really want to do to feel perfect?

Sahil:
[1:18:03] No, but it's what's required during the season of my life. And as I come out of this season, as my kids are in school and I have a little bit more time and things are changing, maybe I can adjust that. I can turn that dial up a little bit, but it's not an excuse to have it turned all the way off.

Ryan:
[1:18:16] So say someone has gotten to this point in the episode and they're convinced they go out and they create a wealth plan. They're much more intentional with where they're allocating all of their resources to these different areas of wealth. How do they keep to the plan? So what often happens in life is just like you have a great plan, there was a Mike Tyson, yeah, everybody's got a plan till they get punched in the mouth. Life punches you in the mouth, like something happens, just it could be an illness, it could be a sickness, you get let go from your job, just life interferes and throws your plan into utter chaos. How do people stick to the wealth plan that they have once they draw up these intentions?

Sahil:
[1:19:00] You just need to create monthly check-ins. You know, course corrections are necessary no matter what. No matter how well things are going, you're going to have course corrections that you need to make. And you just need to create a cadence on which you can see that they need to be made so that you can start to make them. That could be monthly or quarterly, but make sure you are doing something that allows you to zoom out so that you can see a little bit of the bigger picture about what your trajectory is about where you're heading, about how your course looks, so that you can make those sort of micro adjustments along the way.

Ryan:
[1:19:30] Sahil, this has been so great. Thank you so much for writing the book. I want to maybe end with kind of a personal question. So three years ago, we actually had you on the Bankless podcast. We're talking about something totally different. I think it was about China's crypto ban, or there was a real estate bubble, something like that. In the last three years, you've had a tremendous amount of success, including recently. Over the last year, I've just seen you sort of blow up and it's well-deserved. I think to a lot of people, it looks like an overnight success. But I know you've been working on kind of these ideas in this platform for a very long time. And so I guess I'm curious, when you think about like your success, how do you feel at this moment in your life and how do you stay grounded?

Sahil:
[1:20:12] Well, I don't feel successful. I will just say that. I mean, I don't, my goal is impact. My goal is to feel like the ideas that I'm sharing with the world are creating these positive ripples, that people are taking them and running with them, that there are stories like yours of people reading the idea at the right time and then going and making changes in their life. And I feel very good about that. I feel very lucky that I was able to share a book that is so permanent that is going to hopefully help people for a long, long time and a long, long ways into the future. But I don't feel like I've changed in any way. Like, I still have... You know, feelings like there are things I could be doing better, like I'm trying, you know, trying to improve at things, games, you know, things that I don't feel like I've created or that I've done. I, you know, I always sort of have this, it's the underlying, you know, grind set mentality that's stuck in me of like, man, I got to go faster. I got to do more of these things. And look, I think the overlay to all this, which we could do a whole nother episode on is all of the stuff happening with AI and the changes that are coming, which to me create a sense of urgency and a desire to just do more and share more because the future feels so uncertain.

Ryan:
[1:21:22] Maybe we'll end with that. And that's kind of a to be continued. Actually, I think you clued me into a blog post called, it was like high agency post that was written earlier this year. I think it had an impact on you. And it's basically the idea that high agency people are the ones that are going to like do very well in this world. And I think that this particularly true in the world of of AI, right? Where just like high agency people are going to have much more leverage over AI. Like in this world of AI, how do you think the, I guess, the five types of wealth and high agency kind of apply?

Ryan:
[1:21:57] Is it just, is it different or is it all the same principles just in kind of with new technology?

Sahil:
[1:22:03] I think it's going to be even more important to identify the things that you really care about and the life that you want to build, because I no longer think it's going to be a really viable option to just coast through life and just accept things as they are. I think the world is going to change so quickly that if you don't define the things that you want, you're going to be handed a life that you don't really like.

Ryan:
[1:22:25] Well, let's end it there. A lot of homework in today's episode for you guys, including living a life that you really contemplate, something that's intentional. Sahil Bloom, thank you so much for joining us today.

Sahil:
[1:22:35] Thank you for having me.

Ryan:
[1:22:36] Guys, got to let you know, crypto is risky. We didn't even talk about it today, but you could lose what you put in. We are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

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