Shownotes Transcript
All right, Sahil, welcome to the Man Talks show. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. It's a pleasure to be here. Likewise, man. Likewise. I really appreciate your content and-
I saw your interview with Mr. Williamson. I've been on a show a couple of times and you guys had a great conversation. So I'm looking forward to this. Where do you think that most people go wrong or what do they misunderstand about success, especially in the vein of money and wealth? I think the most common trap is pretty simple, which is this patterning that happens in the
Every incremental unit of money leads directly to an incremental unit of happiness or fulfillment.
That is not incorrect in the early years of your life. That is the reason it becomes a pattern. There's this whole meme of people saying, "Oh, money can't buy happiness." And it's total nonsense. Anyone that has come up the curve of income knows that money very directly buys happiness in those early years. You're able to afford basic food, shelter, take care of people around you.
it's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Like the earliest levels of it, there's a very direct correlation. Incremental unit of money equals incremental unit of happiness.
The trap is that that equation no longer holds in the same linear form at some point. And when you have patterned yourself to believe that it does, you will continue to chase that incremental unit of money, thinking that when that money bell rings, you're going to get the happiness cheese, but it no longer does. And that is the path that a lot of people find themselves on when you continue marching
forward towards this future that you envision as the land of arrival when everything is going to be great. And unfortunately, a lot of other areas of your life suffer in that pursuit. That is what I talk about and write about when I call it the Pyrrhic victory, this idea of a victory that comes at such a steep cost to the victor that it might as well have been a defeat. It's the battle won, but the war lost. We don't have to look very far
around us to find examples of the Pyrrhic victory in other men. It's the person that has made hundreds of millions, maybe a billion dollars that we celebrate and admire and pat that person on the back. And we ignore the fact that they have three ex-wives and four kids that don't talk to them. And we might write books about that person and tell them that they won the game. And the call to action that I have for all men out there is to ask the question, is that actually a game that I care to win?
I love that. I've heard you talk a little bit about the research on money and happiness. Can you just expand on that a little bit? Because I've definitely seen that in myself, being just tremendously in debt, not having a lot of money or savings, and then
the ease in which has come along with earning more, saving more, getting out of debt, all those types of pieces. It has made life a lot easier in a lot of ways and brought happiness. But I'm curious about what the research says about some of that stuff. The research is fairly clear at this point.
The most sort of formative and cited study on money and happiness was this Daniel Kahneman study that famously said that above $70,000 a year, there's no longer incremental happiness gains from more money. And obviously, A, that was a pre-inflation number. It was a long time ago. And B, that number has now been disputed. There's more recent research that says it's $200,000 or $300,000
But the point is that there is a level above which the sort of diminishing returns to money and happiness set in. And the important point is to recognize that it's impossible to really pin down what that number is across a blanket of society because all of these studies are an average. I think it was Nassim Taleb that once said that you should never cross a river if it's four feet deep on average.
because averages are a little bit silly. Like, you would never risk your life because you would know that at some points it's going to be 30 feet deep and you're going to drown. You know,
applying a $200,000 a year average, that might be more than you need if you live in rural Alabama and way less than you need if you live in New York City or London. It really depends on the environment where you live, cost of living, all of these things. But the important takeaway from all of that is incremental money is not going to be what drives the significant gains in happiness above that certain level. So the takeaway from that is to say,
I should focus on earning money as I am continuing up that steep part of the curve. And once I am getting through that, once I am no longer feeling that incremental gain from just making more money, then it needs to be these other areas of life that are going to be driving the incremental happiness that I'm actually seeking.
How can men begin to approach their own relationship with money and wealth in a way that starts to bring satisfaction, that starts to bring fulfillment? Are there key pillars that we should be on the lookout for? Some people talk about paying off debts. Other people talk about starting to invest or save.
Is it just a matter of even starting to gain financial literacy? Like where should people sort of begin? Yeah, I would just say tactically. So, you know, this whole conversation on like building financial wealth that, you know, this bucket, it ends up skewing into mindset related things in a lot of cases where people will start saying like, well, you just need to change your relationship with money. And look, I like I'm a mindset guy. I believe in a lot of that stuff. But tactically speaking, the principles of building financial wealth are quite simple.
You have income, which is cash inflows, and that is from primary employment. That could be from secondary employment. That's any side hustles that you build. Those are both going to be a derivative of skills that you are able to create. So you want to be building skills that can be leveraged to create primary employment, secondary employment. And then you have expenses, which are cash outflows, the things you are spending money on every month.
The gap between those two, between your cash inflows and your cash outflows, is your single most important wealth building vehicle for financial wealth. That is really what you want to think about because that gap is what you're able to invest into things that compound for the long term. And the compounding creates the long term financial independence.
So the focus on that gap is always tactically where I point people when they're trying to come up that curve. What you need to focus on there is you want your income to be growing. So that is, again, you're building skills that you're able to leverage to grow your income. And then you really need to focus on not allowing your expenses to grow at the same rate as your income. Awesome.
That's the mistake that a lot of people make, where they grow at the same rate. So the gap never changes. The gap is the same throughout their life. And that's fine. You can continue to invest that small gap. But in an ideal world, the income grows faster than the expenses. So the gap is growing and you're investing that into things that are going to compound over long periods of time. That's where you get the runaway wealth creation that creates the step function improvements that fundamentally change your life.
Preston Pysh : It's interesting because as you were talking about that, I think you just identified the challenge that I've heard so many people talk about in the last four or five years, which is that people's income have stayed relatively the same, but everything has become so much more freaking expensive. And so that gap has started to shrink. And I think that's part of what people are feeling. Is that an accurate assessment?
I completely agree. I mean, that's the challenge with an inflationary environment or even a stagflationary environment, right? Where income wage growth is not rising in lockstep with expense growth.
The counter to that, and if you were going to fight that, you can point fingers, play the politics game, get upset about whatever party is doing whatever the thing is in the moment, or you can figure out how to fight back yourself through things you can control. And the way that you fight back against that is by building skills that you can leverage to increase your income outside of maybe whatever your natural wage growth is going to be from your primary employment.
Side hustles and secondary employment have never been easier than they are today. I'm not even one of these like, you know, I don't have a course to sell anyone on starting side hustles. Like I have nothing to gain from this. All I will say is that it has never been more abundant how you can educate yourself and how you can start very quickly.
small side businesses that can scale to something meaningful that offsets or even more than offsets the expense growth that you're experiencing in your life. Access to AI, access to technology, access to education on all of these topics, it is free and abundant. And it is literally sitting out there for anyone who is willing to reach out and grab it.
as it goes by. If you think of it like it's kind of floating by on a river and it's just up to you to reach out and grab the pieces of education and then go and run with them.
Now, that isn't always easy. I'm not saying any of this is like, oh, okay, it's easy to go make an extra couple thousand dollars a month. It's easy to do this. It's easy to do that. But it is possible. And there is countless people out there that are giving away the roadmap, the blueprint, et cetera, for free, not just course sellers, but for free on exactly how to do that and a playbook to take. The easiest way for most people, if you're a knowledge worker in particular, is you have real skills that
and expertise from your primary employment that someone else would be willing to pay for in some sort of fractional capacity. So like a high-end service consulting type advisory work can be a really good way to make an extra thousand or $2,000 a month, which is really meaningful in an environment like this over the long term. So what you're saying is you don't have a
high ticket $5,000 program teaching how to do drop shipping. I do not have any of those, nor will I ever have anything like that. I mean, look, the, um, this is sort of the fundamental, I just have a massive issue with this in general, because I think that, um,
The vast majority of like how to make money content on social media is being shared and propagated by people who are selling you a lie, which is, hey, look at me in front of this insert fancy car, private jet, whatever. If you want this, because this looks really good, do what I did. And the way that you do what I did is by joining the Discord server where I teach you how to do it.
When the reality is that the person is paying for whatever that thing is behind them by selling you the community, not by doing the thing that they're supposedly teaching you to do. You know, it's real estate. Oh, I'm teaching you how to flip houses. But by the way, I'm making money on the seminars, not on the flipping of houses. And that is...
I mean, look, let's not sugarcoat it like that. There's a fine line there where where it crosses the line into immoral territory if you're not actually doing the thing that you're then charging people to learn how to do. And so I I would I mean, for me personally, like I think there are just much simpler ways to do it that don't involve needing to tell people that it's easy or that you can get rich quick. Anyone that tells you you can get rich quick on anything is
Whether it's money or relationships or your body or any of these things, there is no four easy payments of $19.99 to change your life in these areas. You have to work hard at it. It is probably going to take longer than you thought and be more challenging than you thought, but it is possible. You have the agency to take action and go and do these things, but it requires building skills, which takes time. It requires building skills and then leveraging those skills to solve problems for people. And that takes time.
There's a couple of different threads in there that I would want to pull on. I think there was a time in the sort of like personal development, self-help, or even just like the online space where so many people were selling courses on how to sell courses. And that was just sort of like this
Aurora Boris, sort of like the snake eating its own tail. And there's a bunch of people making money off of teaching you how to sell courses. And that's how they were making their money with this sort of promise of the jet and all those types of things. But I think it speaks to something that I see with a lot of guys
I'll speak to my own experience. There was a very large period of time in my life where one of my biggest obstacles, and I couldn't quite see it at the time, but I saw it in hindsight. One of my biggest obstacles was this lottery mindset. And I just was constantly stuck in this notion of I got to find the thing that's going to help me hit a big.
And I see that within a lot of guys of like, oh, I got to find the thing that's going to just help me explode and be this massive phenom overnight. And I think that lottery mindset has become really pervasive within our culture and our society. And I think when you look at the actual lottery data, it's the majority of the poorest people that are investing in the lottery.
And then when you see the people that win the lottery, something like, what is it, like 80% of people within the first three to five years will be bankrupt after winning the lottery. And so how can somebody start to address this lottery mindset? Maybe just speak about the role of it and then how we start to actually address it. This is an important thread to pull on, so I'm glad you're in here. First off, let me just say, I would argue that winning the lottery could be one of the most challenging victories to have won for a very specific reason.
If I were to put you into a helicopter and fly you to the top of Mount Everest and drop you off at the top of that mountain, you would get out and you would take a few breaths of air and you would promptly pass out and maybe die because you had not acclimatized to the altitude from the climb. The climb is necessary because it prepares you for having the summit.
It prepares you for actually reaching the summit. The exact same thing is true when it comes to wealth building or when it comes to any of these areas of life. You cannot just be handed the prize and not have downsides associated with that. That is the reason that you see lottery winners go bankrupt. They are not prepared for having a billion dollars because they haven't had to actually earn it and ascend through that path. On another note there,
People assume that having the thing is going to bestow upon them the respect and admiration of people around them. You think that having the nice thing is going to get you the respect and admiration, but that's not the case. Earning it is what gets you the respect and admiration. Otherwise, lottery winners would be the most respected people in society. They have a whole lot of money, right? If you win the lottery, Jeff Bezos doesn't all of a sudden think that you're an incredible person.
You have to have built a billion dollar company and then he might because you have earned it. You have gone and done the hard thing to achieve that end. The last thing I'll say on this lottery mindset is when you think about happiness at a very distilled level, happiness is all about expectations and reality. You have these expectations and then you have wherever your reality comes out.
If you have extraordinary expectations and your reality comes in short of those, but still at an amazing level, you will be unhappy, which is a crazy thing about humans. If you have these lower expectations and you outperform them, you will be extremely happy.
The optimal path for a very happy life, in a funny way, is a slow, steady improvement over long periods of time. If you were to map out the perfect course for being happy, content, fulfilled over a long period of time, it would be this slow, steady growth and ramp. That feeling of growth, you're making progress, but your expectations never shoot to the moon. You're able to continue to rise and grow.
This is the reason you see high incidence of depression, anxiety, stress in lottery winners, in athletes who have this enormous spike in their earnings and in their fame at a young age, in child actors who have this enormous spike in their young age. One of the biggest challenges is when you come down from this extraordinarily high expectation set that's been set
for whatever reason at some point in life. It's called the Nova effect. There's a scientific phenomenon that happiness tends to crater, fulfillment tends to crater after these sort of chance lucky events because you're having this very visceral resetting of these expectations in your life. So the lottery mindset is something that we chase, but we don't
actually want to win the lottery. It is not really a good thing. If someone came and handed you $10 million, you think, oh, this would be the most amazing thing for me. But again, we've seen people who inherit large sums of money are not happier. There is a lot of motivation and fulfillment that comes from working hard on things. The hard-earned win feels better than anything else in life. It is one of the reasons doing hard things is so important.
And so I have been guilty of this at times in my life too. I've gone and chased what I thought was the quick win, go do whatever the trend is, whatever the fad is. I get punched in the face by it every single time. Whenever I'm trying to chase the quick fix, the shortcut, whatever the thing is, when you're chasing the cheapest short-term fix, you end up paying the steepest long-term price. You might not know what that price is right now, but you're going to find out in the long run.
Yeah, I like to call it the 10 paradox, right? Every guy thinks that they want to get with the 10, but what they don't realize is the very specific problem set that comes along with that and all of the insecurities that it would likely evoke should they find themselves in that position. But I mean, I get what you're saying because I think
Whenever my wife and I drive into the city, because we live a couple hours north of Manhattan, whenever we drive into the city and we're on the way back, there's this massive billboard there and it always shows the Powerball. And sometimes the Powerball is like $360 million and a billion dollars and shit like that.
And I, you know, I still get caught in the game sometimes with my wife. I'm like, well, what would we do? You know, like if we, and we never buy lottery tickets, but it was like, what would we do if we, you know, if we won that money and like, how would our life look and what would we buy? And why is that trap so appealing for us? Like what psychologically draws us to just like get hooked on that illusion? And I think the, um,
The powerful realization when it comes to that, my wife and I do that too, right? It's fun to imagine like, what would I do? What would we spend the money on? What would we do? The most powerful realization is if you come to the appreciation that you wouldn't really change much about your life. I'm genuinely being serious. This is not because I have a ton of money. I'm doing great. I have enough. I feel great, but we're not extraordinarily rich or something like that. But
But if I won a billion dollars, like if you handed me a billion dollars, I would still get up tomorrow and do my cold plunge. I would still get up tomorrow and go to the gym. I'd probably still do my writing that I was going to do. I'd still write books because I genuinely get energy from these things. It would not change that. I would probably have a few more houses where I would entertain people and bring people together that I really care about. But I wouldn't be like buying...
a million random car. I don't really care about cars. So that wouldn't give me any energy in any way. And I would be a little embarrassed because I didn't earn it. I think there's something that feels amazing about being able to show something to the world or to people that you love that you really earned. I get so much joy from owning this house that we live in because
because when I host my family and when they wake up in the morning and I can make everyone breakfast in the kitchen of the house that I built, that to me feels better than almost anything else in the world. And if my parents had bought this house for me, I would not feel the same way about it. It would not have that same feeling of pride associated with it. So again, I think it all comes back to recognizing that
There is something fundamentally more valuable in life about the hard-earned win than anything that can just be handed to you. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, I think, what is this? The most successful people were once children who were taught and sort of prioritized around developing competency versus having things done for them.
and that that development of competency actually leads to the confidence that we want to instill into our kids. And I've seen this in my four-year-old. I taught him how to wash dishes the other day, and he was ecstatic. He was so excited.
excited, you know? And so he'll pull his like little step stool over now whenever dinner's done and he'll take his little plate over and he'll climb up the little step stool and then he'll turn, he'll reach over and he can barely turn the water on and turn it on. And then he's kind of like rinsing it and washing it. And he's so jazzed about it, you know?
But it's like in those little moments where I'm reminded of how important developing competency actually is for us as human beings in order to feel like we are contributing, like we have meaning, all those different pieces. So I guess that kind of brings me to this notion of what you were talking about before is the skill development. So what skills can we develop or should we develop?
around finances and money that are going to be important? Is it just external side hustle stuff or is there skills around financial literacy? Talk to us a little bit more about that. We are in a very interesting time in this regard. You'd have to be living under a rock to not appreciate the level of uncertainty, the level of change, the pace of that change that we're experiencing. One side of me feels like, well,
at all times in history, there was a whole lot of uncertainty. I'm a huge history buff, so I could point to any era of history and be able to tell you a whole lot of things that would have felt really uncertain if you were living through them at that moment in time. But the other side of me says, well, maybe this time actually is different and things are fundamentally changing at a pace that we do not understand given technology and given how capable these AI tools and agents are becoming at an extraordinary pace.
So I've been thinking about it a ton in the context of my son and in any future children we have of like, what does work look like for them in the future? Will they have to work? Is work not even going to be a thing? I don't know. Does society collapse if there's no work? I have one side of me that is very pessimistic and has grave fears about what the future looks like because I don't think anyone will have an incentive to slow things down and avoid what could be a catastrophic end. The other side of me is very optimistic that
Humans leveraged with this extraordinary intelligence and technology can accomplish incredible things.
What I come out to on all of that is drawn from an old quote from Jeff Bezos, where he got asked about the future and how Amazon builds for the future. And he said, everyone always asks me what's going to change in 10 years and how do we build for all of that change? I think it's a much more interesting question to consider what won't change. What are the things that are going to be the same and how do we build for that? What will stay the same? That is really the question that I frame up when I think about skills.
I think of it like, you know, use the analogy of like a lighthouse. So a lighthouse allows you to navigate uncertainty. You can see it, you kind of hold to it. It's going to stay the same. It's a fixed point in space and you can navigate as a result of having that lighthouse. Think of these as like your lighthouse skills, skills that will be valuable and useful in any environment in the future.
The biggest ones to me would be storytelling, sales, and EQ, like interpersonal skills. I no longer think that a lot of these technical skills are going to be things that stand out. I think the ability to have taste and design and the ability to navigate prompts technology is going to be useful. But actually coding technology, I think the AI tools will code themselves in the very, very near future. And we're starting to see that happening.
So I think that there is a real case for focusing on what I would argue are some of the old fashioned things. So if you think about sort of a pendulum swing, it was like for a long period of time, we were told that kids should be focusing on STEM and math and science and coding. But now you have this pendulum swing where it's like, oh, actually, being able to get along with other human beings, tell stories, be able to sell.
be able to speak to others in a way where they like you and they want to have you around. Those are going to be skills that are still valuable no matter what. I'm not so sure about coding and math and science and all of those things. I think computers are probably going to do all of that, but these are always going to stand out. So how do I invest in building those things? How do I invest in my storytelling skills? How do I invest in sales? How do I invest in my ability to...
have high emotional intelligence and interact with other humans because I know that those will continue to be valuable in any environment. How I want to just pause for a moment and like double click on parenting for a moment because this is this is something that I've really thought about when kids have a PhD level professor in their pocket with any subject in human existence.
how do we then approach education? And this is something that I've thought about because it's so clear, like our education system was kind of dilapidated and outdated as it was. And now with AI coming into picture, it's like, man, like that system and stream just seems to be so antiquated, it's not even funny. And so I'm curious about how you are thinking about education with regards to your son. The ability to think clearly is,
is what will stand out in the long run. It is no longer going to be about facts, memorization, brute force knowledge in the way that our education was growing up. I look back and laugh at the history classes that I took and how why did it matter
that I knew what year the Ming dynasty fell. I mean, what possible value could it have had, me memorizing that, versus me understanding the trends, the common themes across what led to the rise and fall of different dynasties, across what were some of the lasting impacts of these different dynasties? How did that trace into the future? What are some of the things that I can
harken back to the past of those eras. That is what is really valuable. Having that kind of understanding and broad-based understanding of the world, of where we came from, of history, of science, of math, being able to think, create logical arguments, understand people and things deeply, that's what's valuable in, I would argue, in the past, but also even more so in the future when all of that brute force stuff will be done more effectively and efficiently with technology.
So as it relates to education, I mean, with my son, I really want him to understand how to think. I think a lot of that comes from writing. I personally believe that writing is the single best thinking tool.
Writing and teaching things via writing is how you have to hammer away at your own understanding of them. I write because it helps me think clearly. If I started using ChatGPT to write my newsletter or to write my books, I would not have any understanding of these ideas because I wouldn't have written it. So yes, could I do that and write 90% as well right now? Probably. But I would think 10% as well.
And that's not a trade-off I would ever be willing to make because I wouldn't have gone through the hard thing to develop an understanding of the topic to the point where I could articulate it, have a conversation with another human about it like we're doing right now. So that's really important to understand, I think, for our kids is that, yes, you can cheat on any test. You can do all these different things with technology. All of it exists. But you can't cheat deep thinking. You really can't cheat your own deep thought and understanding of something. And
That is, again, the cheap short-term fix that you pay the steep long-term price for. That's so good, man. I mean, I've really been...
on this notion of teaching my son how to learn. How do you learn? Because I think one of the things that the education system missed for me personally was it didn't actually teach me how to learn, it just taught me how to memorize. And it wasn't until later on in life where I actually started to learn how I learned or learn how to learn effectively that everything started to open up for me in a wildly different way.
And I think what you're saying around being able to critically think and have some of those conversations is very important. I remember we were having dinner with friends of ours that the husband is incredibly successful and they have five kids.
And one of the things that I noticed was whenever a topic, whether it was politics or environment or money would come up, the dad who's much older, he's like in his 60s, did such a good job of just facilitating conversation between his five kids. You know, of like, well, why do you think that? And why do you believe that? And he was...
Because instead of, and this is a man who is by all means has the right to kind of be like, well, here's how I think. And so that's right because I have all of this wealth and experience and time and blah, blah, blah. But he just continued to facilitate conversation between his children to elicit them to think more deeply about the things that they were talking about. And that really hit home with me. And I was like, oh man, I want to do that with my kids.
So anyway, I really appreciate you going down that path with me. What are anti-goals? I've heard you talk about this before and I was like, this is brilliant. So what are anti-goals? Charlie Munger has this famous quote, all I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there.
That is basically anti-goals in a nutshell. It is knowing where you are going to metaphorically hopefully die so that you can avoid going there. I mentioned earlier at the very outset of this, this idea of the Pyrrhic victory, the victory that comes at such a steep cost that it might as well have been a defeat. It's the battle won, but the war lost. Anti-goals are about avoiding the Pyrrhic victory.
We all know what goals are. You set goals for the year, for the quarter, whatever, to say, here's where I want to go. Here's the summit of the mountain. Anti-goals are the things that you are not willing to sacrifice during that climb in reaching that summit. So my goal might be, I want to become CEO of this company. I want to be the CEO. That's the summit of the mountain. My anti-goal may be spending 300 nights out of the year away from my family.
or allowing my health to completely crater in pursuit of this. I want to achieve the goal, but not if it means having these other things become real. Those are the guardrails. And so what you think about is, okay, knowing my goals and knowing my anti-goals, that is how I achieve this beautiful state of winning the battle, which is my goal, and winning the war by avoiding these bad things that could have happened in the pursuit. It is to say that
I want to be able to go and achieve extraordinary things and build around my purpose and go and create something big and create jobs and chase these ambitions that I have, but also have an incredible life around it. I want to be healthy. I want to have loving relationships with my partner, with my children, with my friends, with my family. I want to feel...
a sense of health and purpose. I want to have those other things. I'm not willing to sacrifice those in the pursuit of the one thing. So setting anti-goals alongside every goal you set is a really important way to provide those guardrails so that you can win the battle and the war.
Can you maybe just give an example of what that might look like? Like if somebody had a goal of whatever it is, like a promotion or starting a company, can you just give some examples of what an anti-goal might sound like or look like? Yeah. I mean, I'll give you one from my own life. Like I say my goal is, you know, I want to impact a hundred million lives over the next five years across everything that I do. Books, any of the writing, all this stuff, big ambitious goal. My anti-goal might be
not being able to coach my son's sports teams. So I want to achieve this goal of reaching 100 million people, but not if it means that I have to travel so much and be gone so much that I no longer have the relationship or the time to coach my son's sports teams. I want to go achieve the goal, but not if it means these other things happening. And if it means these other things happening, you can count me out on the goal. I'm willing to sacrifice the goal because I don't want that to happen. That is my important thing.
Thinking about that as you start out on these journeys, what am I not willing to sacrifice and have lost in this pursuit is really important. For some people, by the way, you might decide like, I'm basically willing to do anything. I'm so obsessed with this pursuit that I'm willing to do anything. That's just not me. You know, my entire life changed when I realized that I would never want to trade lives with the people that I read books about.
You read all these books about these famous people from history, you know, John Rockefeller, Carnegie, all of these like famous magnates that did all of these things. And I just realized personally, my definition of wealth is being able to take my son in the pool at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday.
And I probably can't go and build multiple billion dollar enterprises and do that while he's this age. Maybe I would have the time to do that when I'm 60, but he's not going to be three years old when I'm 60. He's not going to be five years old when I'm 60. So I need to do those things now because I'm never getting these moments back. I'm never going to have this time back. So maybe the call to action is that we
sort of invert this whole model that we have of like hustle and growth and chase. Maybe the time to really lean in and hustle is when your kids are in their teenage years or going to college when they're not as interested in you as they are when they're five years old. If we're being completely honest, they have their own lives. They've moved on. They have a whole lot of things going on. Maybe that's the time when I want to be on planes a lot more, when I'm not going to be coaching his little league teams, when he doesn't want me to take him in the pool at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday, when he
when he doesn't want me to go, you know, like right before this, I was outside playing bubbles with my son at 1130 in the New York suburbs. It's a beautiful day out. We live in Westchester. It's like gorgeous, gorgeous day out. The weather's incredible.
I was outside playing bubbles with them. I couldn't have done that in my old job or in my old life. That is my definition of wealth. And so I know what I'm not willing to sacrifice to go and chase some new thing. Love that. Well, I think that kind of ties into one of the things that you've written and talked about, which is the notion of time wealth. So maybe you can just unpack that first and we'll go deeper into it. Time wealth is fundamentally about the 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
A recognition of time as your most precious asset. This for me was sparked by a single conversation that changed the course of my life. It's the first line of my book for a reason. It was the spark that changed everything. I was living 3000 miles away from my parents. My wife and I had built our whole life in California. My family was on the East coast and I was chasing money at the expense of everything else in my life.
And I sat down for a drink with an old friend and he asked me how I was doing. And I told him that it had started to get difficult living so far away from my parents. I had noticed that they were slowing down, that they weren't going to be around forever. And he asked how old they were. I said, mid-60s. And he asked how often I saw them. And I said, about once a year at this point. And he just looked at me and said, okay, so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die.
And in that moment, I just got smacked in the face by this recognition and this realization that my entire definition of success of what it meant to build a wealthy life had been incomplete. That time was not factored into it. And in the aftermath of that conversation, my wife and I made a dramatic choice, which was to make a change. I left my job. We sold our house in California and we moved 3000 miles across the country within 45 days. Uh,
to live closer to both of our sets of parents. And in that one decision was a very important realization, which is that you are in much more control of your time than you think.
We had taken an action and fundamentally created time with the people that we cared about most. That number, 15, is now in the hundreds. I see my parents multiple times a month. They're a huge part of my son, their grandson's life. We had taken an action and reassumed agency over our own lives.
And that was the spark that led to everything else, all of the other changes in our life. I love that. I think you talk about there sort of being like three pillars that you lay out around how we can actually build wealth in our time. Can you just dig into that? Yeah, the three pillars of time wealth are awareness, attention, and control. And I sort of think of them as building off one another. So awareness is this understanding that time is your most precious asset.
If I were to ask you, would you trade lives with Warren Buffett? He's worth $130 billion. He has a Boeing business jet. He flies around all over the place. He reads and learns for a living. He has access to anyone in the world. That all sounds pretty great. You might want to trade lives with him. Except for one very important fact. He is 95 years old. So no one that's listening to this should want to trade lives with him because there's no way you would agree to trade the amount of time that he has left
for all the money that he has. And on the flip side, he would give anything to be in your shoes where you are today. He would give up every dollar that he has. So you recognize that is the awareness that time has quite literally incalculable value.
On the back of that awareness, the action that you need to start taking is to deploy your precious finite attention into the things that actually matter. We're saying yes to so many things that don't matter in our lives. Commitments, parties, get togethers, networking, social media, comparing ourselves to other people. We're spending all of this time and attention on these things that are fundamentally important.
low value, and detracting from our lives in a lot of ways, which is then taking that attention away from the things that really do matter. If you're saying yes to everything, that means you're saying no to something that really matters along the way. Deploying your attention into the few opportunities and people that truly matter in your life is how you ultimately unlock control, which is the third pillar.
Control is the ability to then choose exactly where you're deploying your time. You get to that point by really concentrating your attention into the few opportunities that create 10x, 100x, 1000x outcomes in your life. I know this might sound like a sort of like an arbitrary or silly question, but when I start talking about values with guys,
or what matters, a lot of the times the question is like, well, how do I even know what matters to me? How do I even know what my values are? And so I'm hoping that you can maybe just dig a little bit, pull on that thread and start to outline like how can a man start to really determine what he values and what really matters most to him so that he can start to prioritize his life towards those things. Usually what I find in working with people who say that
is that they've never actually thought about it. And the reason they haven't thought about it is not really through any fault of their own. It's that we do not live in a culture or society that creates space to think. We live in a perpetual loop of stimulus and response. You get all the things coming in, you know, emails, text notifications, social media, all these things. And you're told that everything's urgent. So you're responding to everything right away. You wake up in the morning, within 30 seconds, you probably grabbed your phone. You let a million people come into your bedroom. Uh,
And from that point until the point where you go to sleep at night, you are in this fixed loop. There is no space there to think about what you actually care about. You know, to think about what is the race I'm running? What is the mountain that I'm climbing? And is it one that I actually want to be on? Creating and carving out space to sit with that question. Not with your phone. Leave your phone at home. Bring like a piece of paper or a journal and just sit with these questions. Journal on these questions to say,
What are the things that I care about? The question that I love asking is, what does my ideal day look like at age 80? Let me just start there. What is my ideal day look like at age 80? Where am I? What am I doing? Who am I with? How do I feel? What am I thinking about?
Those questions imply a certain set of actions in the present that you need to be taking to march towards that future. If you know what your ideal day looks like at 80, it could be 50 if that's too far out in the future for you. But if you know what that ideal day looks like, you can start reverse engineering into the actions in the present, whether they are aligned with creating that future or moving you further away from it. Where does risk play into all this? Because I think
We're in this generational gap where there are some people that were encouraged to take risks. And then I think that there's a lot of people who have been raised to be risk averse or risk avoidant. And I see this within a lot of the men that I work with, just a lot of people in general, that there's an unwillingness or just a lack of competency in knowing when to take risks. So where does risk fit into...
Monetary wealth, wealth of success and fulfillment, time wealth, where does that play a factor? I am, I would say, a very risk-averse person in general. My dad's a tenured professor, so I think it's part of me is like it's the most risk-averse track you could possibly follow. I have tended to take what I would characterize as like a barbell approach to my own life and finances, which is to say, I now have a world where
My employment is very risk on in a certain sense in that I, it is me. You know, I have a team now we've built out, you know, there's different revenue streams. There's a lot of things going on, but fundamentally it is, it is me. It's levered to me and speaking and writing and doing all these things that I do, which I really enjoy doing, but it is, it's self-employment. And so it's, it's risky. The other side of my life, if I, if I'm going to do that as my primary, I'm
then I want everything that I am putting money into any other places where my wealth is being stored to be very safe. That's the barbell, right? You're like on one end of the spectrum of risk here, I'm going to be on the other end with the other stuff. And so money that I put away, like I'm most boring investor. People will come and ask me like, Oh, what new stuff are you investing in? I'm like, uh,
Vanguard index funds. I don't know what to tell you. A dollar cost average into Vanguard index funds. I have a venture fund that I invest out of. That's part of my risk on stuff. I have plenty of fun, risky stuff we can talk about, but I am much more interested in how I can take cash flows from these things and put it into the safe stuff that continues to create this base of independence for the long term. I
I think that everything about risk comes down to this idea of your risk-adjusted base. Where do you average out across everything that you are doing? If you do have naturally riskier things on the primary and secondary employment side, having a base of investments that are on the risk-off side is a good idea because it balances you out. If I was investing all the money I was making into crypto, that would feel very scary to me.
Because if something catastrophic happens, I don't know if my family would have a whole lot of runway if that was the case. So I really think that you need to take kind of the bigger picture, 10,000 foot view when you think about risk across the broader spectrum.
Look, the reality, this is probably me being more paranoid and risk averse as a human. But when you go look at stories of people who have sort of fallen from grace in some way, people who were very successful, very high highs, and then lost it all.
It was very rarely more than like one little thing that sort of went wrong and it was the cascade that came off of that. You know, they were over levered and then something went wrong and it all came crashing down. And knowing that is very empowering because what it means is, okay, I'm going to avoid those common mistakes that people make. Being over levered is a big one. But these common mistakes, these blind spots that people have
that become increasingly hard to spot as you have more success and as people are patting you on the back, as you're sort of having the Icarus paradox come true in your life. That is really what I want to avoid. I want to know, again, I want to know where I'm going to die so I can avoid going there. What would you say to the average man that's out there listening to this?
and is wanting to just take a couple incremental steps towards building a wealthier life, whether that's in time, whether that's in money, whether that's in relationship. Where should he begin if the choices are endless and the slate is blank? Where should he start? I'll say two things. Number one, ask yourself this question, sit with it, take a piece of paper and just sit with this question.
If a third party were to come and observe you for a week, what would they say your priorities are? The question there is to recognize that there is a big gap often between what we say our priorities are and what our actions show our priorities are.
There is a big gap for a lot of people between the two and recognizing that gap, taking actions to start closing it is how you improve your life. It's like ask that third party, how serious am I about my goals? If you were to watch me for a week, how serious would this person think I am about my goals? The things that I say are my goals. Am I actually taking action to go and go after those? Holding your feet to the fire a little bit with that third party perspective can be really helpful. The second thing I'll say, which is an incremental step that will help in every area of life
is you need to identify the things that are creating energy in your life, the things that are causing you to sort of lean in, giving you this pull of interest and energy, because those are typically the things where outcomes will follow. Outcomes follow energy. When you are leaning in, when you're feeling pulled by something, that's when you create the 10, 100,000x outcomes. The way you do that is what I call my energy calendar. This is a section in the time wealth section of the book.
And the idea is look at your calendar at the end of a weekday, let's say a Monday. Color code your calendar according to whether an activity was energy creating, meaning it felt that pull, that interest, that energy towards it. Market green. If it was neutral, market yellow. And if it was energy draining, if you felt physically drained during or after, market red.
At the end of a week, if you do that every day, you'll have a very clear visual perspective on the types of activities that create energy versus drain energy in your life. That information is an incredible starting point for starting to create small, tiny adjustments and tweaks to lean more into the green and lean away from the red, whether
whether through adjustments, delegation, potentially deleting things from your life, so that you can have a better ratio of green to red over periods of time. That will improve your life. That will allow you to start building more wealth across all of these different areas.
Amazing, man. Well, I feel like we were just getting started, but we're going to have to pause our conversation here for today. This was such a blast, man. I really appreciate you and the work that you've been doing and putting out. Where can people learn more about you? Grab the book. Just give them some insight on that. You can find me at Sahil Bloom on any of the major platforms. And then the book is called The Five Types of Wealth. It's available on Amazon or anywhere books are sold.
Awesome. We'll have the links for all that in the show notes. Sahil will actually be coming into the Alliance to talk about some of these things. So if you're a member in the Alliance, you're going to get some direct access, which is great. And then don't forget to man it forward. Share this podcast with either wife, girlfriend, partner, a buddy that you want to discuss some of these topics with and take action on one of the things that really stood out to you. Don't just let this be one of those conversations that you listen to and it's cool. And there's some things that are conceptual that you loved about it. Actually take some action on some of the things that we talked about.
As always, thank you so much for tuning in. Until next week, Conor Beaton signing off.