9 Systems To Build A Life Of Abundance - Sahil Bloom
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Oh, by the way, before we get into this episode, I would love to tell you a little bit about Life Notes. Now, Life Notes is a weekly-ish email that I send completely for free to my subscribers, and it contains my notes from life. So notes from books that I've read, podcasts I'm listening to, conversations I'm having, and experiences I'm having in work and in life. And around once a week, I write these up and share them in an email with my subscribers. So if you would like to get an email from me that contains the stuff that I'm learning, almost in real time as I'm learning it, you might like to subscribe. There is a link down in the show notes or in the video description.

A friend of mine said to me, like, how many times do you see your parents per year? I said, you know, maybe once. And he said, okay, so you're going to see them 15 more times before they die. I remember hearing that and feeling like I got punched in the gut. Hey friends, welcome back to Deep Dive, the weekly podcast where every week it is my immense pleasure to sit down with authors, entrepreneurs, creators, and other inspiring people

and we find out how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to help us build a life that we love. Sahil has been one of the most requested guests on the podcast for ages, and the reception to his first appearance on the podcast was so strong that when he decided to come over to London, we thought, you know what, let's do a part two for the podcast. So in this episode, we talk about how to systemize life. We talk about strategies and tools for building better health

and relationships. - I'm not prideful about trying to make progress in my relationship. So if I can find ways, if I can find systems, tools, frameworks, whatever it is that allow us to grow over time and that allow us to find the space to grow over time, that's impactful to me. - We talk a bit about Sahil's journey from a finance bro to a content creator. And we talk about a few life hacks and mental health tactics that we can use to help build a life that we love. - If I am not growing in some way as a human being, that's when I'm gonna be dead.

for me personally. I just want to be around people who push me to be slightly better than I was at whatever it is. Now, before we get into this episode, I've got a very quick announcement, which is that I'm launching a Telegram community for the podcast. Now, I'm going to be honest. Initially, the reason for starting this podcast was quite a selfish one in that I wanted to learn from cool and interesting people and apply their insights to my own life. And it's just generally easier to hang out with people if you invite them onto your podcast rather than if you just want to have a chat with

them. But over the last 18 months of running this podcast, it's grown ridiculously fast. And actually, we've had so many messages and YouTube comments and emails and Instagram DMs and stuff from people talking about how much value that you guys have gotten from the episodes as well. And so we're planning to change direction a little bit in that instead of me just treating these conversations as a personal therapy session with the guests, which we might still do a little bit of, I actually want to learn more about you guys who are listening to the podcast or watching the podcast and understand what are the things that you would like to see from the podcast.

And I really want to better understand what challenges you're going through, what struggles you're going through, so that we can then kind of tailor the guests and tailor the questions to that. So that's why we're starting up this completely free Telegram community. If you hit the link in the show notes or in the video description, wherever you're watching or listening to this, you'll be able to sign up completely for free. It's always going to be free. You will never have to pay.

pay a penny. The group is called the Deep Divers, which I think is kind of funny. And it's basically a group where I'll be posting some of the behind the scenes stuff from the podcast. But also as we get new guests coming on, I'll be asking in that group if you guys have any specific questions for the guest so that can help inform the direction of the interview. I'm also going to be posting a few polls and questionnaires and surveys in that group. So if you're interested in kind of sharing more about you and about your life,

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Welcome back to the podcast. We are meeting in person for the first time. So great to see you. How are you doing? In person is so much more magical and I am stoked to be here with you. This is going to be great. I would love to start off with a little bit of controversy that you've sparked on the internet recently. On Twitter, you tweeted something that actually my girlfriend sent me. Uh-oh.

That's never good. And we actually did this thing like last night, actually. Okay. We had our first life dinner. Oh, there you go. So your tweet said, my wife and I recently started a monthly check-in ritual. It's been incredible for our relationship of the life dinner.

What is the life dinner? And then why has this been particularly controversial? The why has it been controversial question is going to be an interesting discussion. So the life dinner is basically a system for a little bit of structure in developing your relationship over time, particularly when life gets hectic. And so I tend to think this happens a lot for either

A couple that has both people that are really like in kind of driven career roles and are really pushing and running and traveling in different directions or after having a kid when your life becomes infinitely more hectic because you have a crazy person and a crazy human running around and developing.

So I read about this for the first time several years ago. It was an entrepreneur named Brad Feld who had written a blog post, I think, about it and published it. And I had read it and sort of just like logged it in the back of my mind as something that was interesting. Basically, the idea is you set, in his version, you set a single monthly date. Like call it the first Monday of every single month.

my wife or my partner and I are going to sit down over a dinner at some special place or at home, make a dinner, just the two of you, and really have like a semi-structured discussion of important things in your life. Like what's the most important thing in your professional life right now? What's the most important thing in your personal life? What are you focusing on? What are the kind of like things that are bugging you? What's the tension in your life, etc. Just really have like

an open, thoughtful hour plus discussion one on one. And the idea is that life over time becomes more and more chaotic, and you're not able to do that. And so having a true line in the sand that you're going to do this at least once a month is a good way to just make sure that it's happening and continue to progress your relationship. Yeah.

So why was it so controversial? So I think in general, relationship advice tends to be controversial because it's the same as like relationship advice, parenting advice, political commentary, you know, these things that like...

tend to elicit the reaction of like, don't tell me what to do. I know everything. I've already figured this out. And the funny thing to me about why it became controversial was I wasn't telling everyone to do it. I was simply saying, I have found this beneficial, and here's how we do it. And if you find it interesting, try it. Otherwise, just ignore it. And that's totally fine with me, which is sort of the case with all of my content.

So I'm always blown away when I get responses that are like, you're an idiot or like you're a devil. You know, you're the devil. Like, I hope you get divorced. You know, like there were people that were replying to this. Like, if you have to do this, you're already going to get a divorce. This isn't going to work. Which to me, like I can just laugh off because I have a beautiful and healthy and happy marriage. And I personally just think like if you're not growing in your relationship and if you're not finding time for these discussions, you're going to struggle. And

I'm not prideful about trying to make progress in my relationship. So if I can find ways, if I can find systems, tools, frameworks, whatever it is that allow us to grow over time and that allow us to find the space to grow over time, that's impactful to me. Yeah, I love it. I'm big on systemizing relationships. I think it's such a big hack. And one of the things that my brother and I often talk about is that

A lot of gains in our personal life can be found through treating it more like a business. And actually, a lot of gains in our business can be found through treating it more personally. And there's like a little bit of a middle ground. Because for example, no one bats an eyelid if you write down birthdays in a calendar to remind yourself of birthdays. But that is systemizing a relationship. If you really cared, you'd remember the birthday. You probably wouldn't. You recognize that sometimes you need a little bit of a reminder. People say that, by the way, about personal CRMs. Like you did the whole idea that...

There's Salesforce, which is a CRM tool for businesses to remind you of people you need to ping and where they are in your sales cycle, et cetera. And a bunch of companies have tried to do that for personal things, like birthday reminders or when's the last time you spoke to so-and-so for your network development. And a bunch of people push back against that. People say, oh, you're making it unnatural. You're making it this automated. You're just managing human beings. And those are humans. You shouldn't do that. And so it just depends on where you sit on the spectrum of wanting to do that.

or not. I actually don't care if I give this piece of advice and I say that the Life Dinner is something that helps me. If it's not for you, that's totally okay. If you don't want to systematize your relationship, that's fine. And I'm not going to tell you that I think you're going to get a divorce because you're not doing it. I just won't say anything. If you have a great relationship without doing these things, I think that's awesome. If you talk to your wife tons and you somehow with a newborn find time to have these discussions daily, you're like a superhero in my book. That's amazing. We don't do that.

It's very difficult, I find. And so doing these things, finding these little systems, I find is just super, super helpful. Yeah, mate, I'm fully on the same page with you on this. I've tried so many different systems for personal CRMing over the years, never quite stuck to one. But the thing I come back to is I actually have a list in my Apple Notes just of people I want to stay in touch with. And the other day I was inviting some friends over for dinner and I was thinking, have I invited everyone? I think I've invited the people that I think I want to group up with this thing.

And I just thought, you know what, let me just consult the list. And I realized, oh, I actually should invite this person, but I didn't think of them in that group because that group is university friends. And university friends I lump as like a category in my mind. But this person I met sort of outside university, but he gelled with the group. So I saw his name on the list. That's a great idea. Messaged him and he's coming. And now he's going to meet my uni friends. And just by virtue of the fact I have a list of friends I want to stay in touch with, it is now possible.

encouraging those connections to happen. I did this at one point with people in cities. So once college ended and I was no longer like with my core group of friends in one place, everyone had moved all over the place. Like people were starting jobs in different cities, different countries, whatever. I realized that

I needed to be deliberate when I traveled about making sure that if I was in London, I need to make sure that I see my couple of friends that are in London that I know I really want to see. And so I made a list of in these big cities that I might be going to, who are the five people that I know in those cities? And

it's a reminder for me because like LinkedIn is okay for that. You can sometimes like search who do, you know, who am I first year connections, but you know, this at scale, LinkedIn becomes a travesty. Like it's, it's a real disaster for me at this point. And so I can't really use it for that. And so having like a little list of that, like what's my little black book of people that I know in these different cities is actually a, you know, remarkable little hack. You mentioned people like this, sorry to cut you off. The systematizing, uh, relationships thing does really bother some people. Um,

And I'm just a big believer that like systems is actually a misnomer. People, when they hear systems, they start to think like, oh, we're becoming robots and we're not going to have a normal conversation. And like, you know, when people read my content, they're like, oh, you know, he must not be normal in person because you're not able to just like have a conversation with someone. That's not what it is to me. It's like.

finding little heuristics, shortcuts, ways to save yourself time and energy that make your life easier in some way, that make your life better and easier at whatever it is you're doing. And so why not have those for relationships the same way you would for work? Yeah, absolutely.

I think it's sort of like, yeah, like for example, systemizing workouts. If you have a list of the exercises you're going to do, I'm going to do these exercises three times a week and I'm just going to follow the plan. That's systemizing your health in a way that really leads to results. Whereas the alternative thing of like spontaneity when I go to the gym is not really going to get anyone anywhere unless of course they want to be the person that

I don't know, just goes for a run when they go to the gym or whatever they might like. I mean, your natural bias as a human being is to do the easiest thing. Like our natural bias is towards slothdom. I always say that about myself for sure. Like I consider myself an extremely disciplined and hardworking person, but my natural bias is still to be a sloth.

Like if I wake up in the morning and I don't know what my first task is going to be of the day, I end up doing the easiest, dumbest task that doesn't actually drive anything forward. So what I had to do to systematize and make sure that that doesn't happen is the night before I decide what I'm going to do the next morning and I get it set up. Like if I need to work on a particularly challenging section of my book, I'm

I'm going to open up that section and I'm going to be zoomed in on that section so that when I get to my desk and open it up, that's the only choice that I have. It's sitting right there. And that's just like you're creating systems so that things get a little bit easier for you to go and tackle to fight that natural tendency to just be a sloth. Yeah. There's a great book I read over the weekend or listened to the audiobook of called Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell. Yeah. Yeah.

And one of the things he is very bullish on, actually, and also yesterday, I listened to the audiobook for Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, which is absolutely mind-blowing, really good. And in both those books, they talk about systemizing relationships to some extent. In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg talks about kind of making sure that she has a system for when she's going to go home from work and that time with her family is blocked out and things like that. And what Dan Martell says in the book, which I found myself fully agreeing with, is that

The system does not reduce spontaneity and creativity. It actually increases it because it means you now don't have to think about that. Like I know when I have like my date nights pre-scheduled with the girlfriend in the calendar for the next like three months based on our various schedules, that means that every other evening...

If you're coming over, I can be like, oh, I've got this evening free. I don't have to think in the back of my mind of like, ah, I've just got to make sure we've got like some time for the relationship scheduled that week. But because it's all pre-scheduled and it's just like so liberating and like a weight's taken off my shoulders when I know that we've got date night scheduled for the next two or three months. Yeah. I found that once I got more disciplined about my time and about blocking time for activities,

I all of a sudden also had more free time within my day for those spontaneity, like that all of that spontaneity to kind of bleed in. And so like an example of that, you know, Parkinson's law, the idea that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. I used to email all day.

Because I didn't have a block of time when my email time was. And so I would literally just email. Like I'd pop open email and shoot some emails off and then I'd close it and do a little bit of work and then pop back into email. And what happened was my entire day, all of the like liminal moments, those little like the flex time in between calls or in between meetings or in between deep work was email because I was just filling it.

And so suddenly you like you lose the breaks and you lose your time for those creative, interesting thoughts that are getting sparked or you lose the conversation you had with your wife or the little playtime with your son or whatever it is because it's being filled by this like sponge like creature that you're not naturally limiting. Once I started taking advantage of Parkinson's law and actually shrinking and forcing the time for those activities into little windows, creating a real system around them, I

That unlocked my creativity 100x, I think. Nice. What are some other areas in which you found systemizing helpful for personal or professional life? So many. Let's see. So health, for sure. Having...

I think having a set of non-negotiables has been a system for almost everything in my life. You know, I say health, but having a set of non-negotiables for your health, for your relationships, for your kind of like just daily existence, for your professional career, I think is extremely important. What I mean by that is here are the three to five things that I must do every day to function at my best. So for me personally, like on the physical side,

I'm a big believer that in order to show up as a husband and as a father in the way that I want to, I have to take care of myself physically and mentally.

And that is love for those other people around me just as much as it is love for myself. Because if I'm not doing those things, I'm not the type of person that I want to be. I'm not taking care of myself in the way that I should, and I can't show up for them. And for me, that means I need to do 60 minutes of physical activity a day. I need to get in the cold plunge every single morning. And I need to be outside and going for a couple of walks every single day. If I do those three things, I know no matter what, everything else can go to shit because

And my day is great in that regard. And I'm able to show up in the way that I want to. So having that set of non-negotiables, like no matter what, I'm going to do these couple of things is really important in every area of your life. In my professional life, all I need to do to feel that I checked my non-negotiables off the list is an hour of deep work, like true deep work focused on something that I find meaningful. If nothing else happens during the course of the day, I can just like sit back and say, okay, well, at least I did that.

And when you have a young kid, sometimes days do just go to shit. It happens even before you have a kid, but it only gets worse over time. And so for me, what that means is that I'm up early because I know that before my son wakes up is the time when I can guarantee I can get that. For me now, it's two and a half hours. I can get that two and a half hours in from 5:00 to 7:30 in the morning.

And if he's sick or fussy during the day, my wife needs help or my family's in town, whatever it is, the chaos that just naturally happens, I at least got that period of work done. My non-negotiable was checked off the list. So having that across the different areas of your life, and for me, literally writing it down and checking it off, whether in Notion or on a piece of paper, whatever it is, has gone a long way for making sure that I'm making progress on the things that matter to me. Nice. Yeah.

What other, um, other than the life dinner, do you and your wife or, and other relationships, do you have any other systems that you found super helpful? I try to make sure that I'm checking in and having a conversation with one person every single week is a big one for me with friendships. Um,

Again, like a system for making sure that you actually keep up with the people that matter to you in life. This isn't about networking to me. I've never been much of a networker. Networking was like a big thing in the finance world where I previously was. Like you had to have a big Rolodex. That was like the thing everyone said. Like, man, he's got a great Rolodex, whatever it was. I always hated the transactional nature of that. What's a Rolodex? A Rolodex is like that old-fashioned, you should have a Rolodex.

You would love a Rolodex. It was that old-fashioned thing that they used to have in offices that had someone's, like, information on it, or you would put their business card in, and it was literally, like, a spinner. So it was alphabetized, and so you'd, like, open your Rolodex, and you could go to, like, the Bs, and you would have, like, Sahil Bloom was in there. You'd go to A, and you could have Ali Abdaal, and, like, you would scroll through your Rolodex. It was like a, you know, it was like a contact list. Oh, that's clever. But it was physical. It was physical.

And so everyone used to say, like, you got to have a big Rolodex in order to succeed in finance. And I just always hated this sort of fake transactional nature of those kind of those kind of mentalities and relationships. And so my thing is, there is, you know, maybe 20, 30, 40 people in your life that are friends that, you know, you feel have impacted you and will continue to over a period of time. And you want to make sure that those friendships don't atrophy.

And it's very easy to let them atrophy. And we're all guilty of that in some way, shape or form because life takes over. You just are like doing things and stuff's happening. You don't live in the same place as the person, whatever. But it's very easy to find 10 minutes when you're out on a walk to just like text someone or call them and just say like, hey, what's thinking of you? What's going on? How are things? But if you don't have...

like a forcing function to do it. We just don't. You forget. Like life just happens. And so I'm, I mean, this is one of my new things from 2023 is I'm trying to do that at least once a week. Just call someone and just say like, hey, what's going on? I was thinking about you. What's new in your life? And the challenge with calling is a lot of times people don't pick up. So sometimes it turns into a text and then it leads to an interesting conversation, whatever it might be. Just finding a reason to kind of like ping those people that you don't necessarily talk to every single day and catch up with them.

How do you feel about proximity to family and friends? In what sense? In the sense of the value of... Okay, so relationships with people that we care about always atrophy over time if left to their own devices. Often people will move away from their parents or move away from the friends they grew up with. And then that just decimates the amount of time you get to spend with them. Mm-hmm.

To what extent do you think it's important to have kind of physical proximity to people that you love as a thing? Or do you think that it's broadly taken care of through like phone calls and visiting occasionally and that kind of stuff? I don't think there's any replacement for in-person interaction with people in

in terms of actually building and fostering relationships. I'm sitting here with you because I would much rather do this in person than do a Zoom. I literally flew to London so that I could get to do a few of these things in person and actually build relationships because that's what matters to me most in life. The single greatest predictor of health at age 80 is relationship satisfaction at age 50.

The Harvard study of adult development found that. Longitudinal study, 80 plus years, that was what they found. The single greatest predictor of health at 80 was relationship satisfaction at 50. What does that mean to me? It means that I really, really care deeply about building and fostering deep relationships with people. I think there's certain breadth to it and you build relationships over time, but I want to meet the people that I can go deep with and that I can work with and that I can love in different seasons of my life. For me, that means spending time in person with people.

And it's, you know, when you talk about your parents, that's the first one. This is the biggest life change I've made in the last several years. My wife and I dropped our entire life in California and moved back to the East Coast because we realized that our parents weren't going to be around forever. You know, both of us had grown up in the Boston area. My parents were, you know, getting into their mid-60s. And a friend of mine said to me, like, how many times do you see your parents per year? I said, you know, maybe once. And he said, okay, so you're going to see them 15 more times before they die.

And I remember hearing that and feeling like I got punched in the gut. And the countable nature of the number of times you are going to see someone as close as your parents is

before they die is terrifying. It's terrifying to think that you can actually just count that on like, you know, almost on two hands at that point, especially when you feel as close to them as I did. And so within 45 days of hearing that, we sold our house in California, moved back across to the East Coast and bought a house in the New York area so that we could be closer to our parents. And now, you know, we have a young kid. They get

They get to be a part of their grandson's life. They're around all the time. I see my parents, you know, at least twice a month, maybe more. And it's an amazing thing, just getting to have those like nothing moments where you're just hanging out, where you're just talking to them. It's like there's absolutely no replacement for that. And it's something I will never regret as long as I live. So with parents, I think it's really important to realize they're just not going to be around forever. With friends, I think it's a little bit of a different story because, you know,

You have seasons to your life. There's not one, you know, one act to your life play where you're the same person for the entirety of your life, nor are your friends the same person over the entirety of their lives.

And so there are some friends who are a great fit for one season of your life and aren't going to be there in the next one. And that's okay. You don't have to keep trying to jam them in there. I have some amazing friends from my high school years who I'm no longer close with. I think they're lovely people. They're great in their own different ways. But we're just in different worlds now. We've gone about different paths and are doing different things. And I think that's totally fine. I think continuing to try to live with...

and be around people that aren't actually a match and that aren't developing you, and you aren't developing them, is actually a bad thing. And so being aware that it's okay to leave things behind, to like shed your old shell and move on to the new one like a hermit crab does over the course of its life, is totally a positive thing in certain cases. Yeah.

What do you mean by developing? A cynic might say that the tech productivity bros like you and me would think that every relationship needs to be developmental in some way. What about just enjoying time with your mates from high school? I just think that enjoying time is developing. I think if I am not growing in some way as a human being, that's when I'm going to be dead for

For me personally, that's not maybe for everyone. Maybe some people don't feel that way and they don't feel like they need to grow. I just want to be around people who push me to be slightly better than I was at whatever it is. And if that's slightly better at being able to let loose and have fun, that's a version of getting better for me. I'm not great at that sometimes. Sometimes I'm like so wired to be in the weeds on whatever it is that I need to get better at that.

And so I do have some friends who are really good at letting me let loose. And I consider that to be developing in a way. They're helping me develop in a different way in my world. And maybe I'm helping them buckle down a little bit more in certain areas of their life. So...

I don't say development in the sense of like scoreboard and, you know, here, look, here's how I develop. Here's how this person developed me. And if they didn't help me develop in this way, then I'm going to cut them out of my life. I really say it in the holistic sense of building a comprehensively wealthy life. Like I'm not trying to be the richest person in the world. I'm by any stretch of the imagination. I'm not gunning for that. I don't want that. What I want is to have an unbelievably balanced and fulfilling life and really spend it with people that I care about. Yeah.

Nice. So coming back to the controversy of this relationship stuff. Yeah. You mentioned that when you see people responding to your thing to saying that you're the devil or that you're kind of wishing you get divorced, you mentioned that you just laugh it off. Yeah. How do you do that? Because the concern about hate on the internet stops a lot of people from

putting themselves out there. Yeah. Yeah. How have you, well, what strategies have you developed over time? What are my systems for the hate? When I write about systems, what are my systems for dealing with the hate that comes from the talk on systems? It's very meta. No, all jokes aside, I mean, there's a few things that I've learned from the greats that have come before us, like the Tim Ferriss's of the world and people who have written about this in the past. And then there's a few things that I've

I would say, developed on my own. I mean, one of the biggest ways is to just avoid reading comments when you see things taking a turn for the negative. So like with that Life Dinner one, I saw some of the early quote tweets. And normally, like, you know, for people that don't know Twitter that well, once you start seeing quote tweets ticking up, like really fast alongside retweets, you know that there's some shit going down. Like you got it. You're like, ooh, OK, there's something happening. And for me, I was like, OK, I stand by this. I think this is a great idea. So I actually...

I don't really care. It's fine. Like quote tweets are actually going to drive more people to positively see the idea. And what it led to was tons of messages from people that are like, hey, this is a great idea. I tried this like you that are going to benefit from it in some way. So in any case, I saw the quotes you started to take up. First thing I did was I muted it. So I muted the conversation so that I would never get a notification about it. Because for me, that's like, OK, out of sight, out of mind.

People can say whatever they want about me. Fine, I don't care. And it was funny, like you messaged me and you were like, hey, hope you're good. And I was like, I'm blissfully ignorant. Like I'm waving around. Like I have no idea what's going on. It's totally fine. So that's number one. Number two is when someone writes something mean about you who they don't know on the internet,

That person is not a happy person. I've never met someone happy who has sat down and written something extremely negative about a person they don't know. It just doesn't happen. That person has some sort of pain or trauma or something in their life that is leading them to react the way that they are to this. And the most powerful thing I've ever read on this is like, you should default to empathy.

when you see someone react that way, because there's something going on in their life. I just had a conversation with a friend who had encountered this, who said that he shot a message to the person that had sent the negative thought and said like, hey, I hope you're all right. I hope everything's fine. And the person replied and said, basically, sorry, my wife recently got diagnosed with cancer. And so the way that you worded this thing, it really rubbed me the wrong way. And that's why I reacted negatively. And

And he said to me, like, you know, what a thing, because I would have replied really negatively to his response. But instead, I defaulted to empathy and realized that there was this really challenging moment in this person's life. So that's the second one. The third one for me is like a little bit more of like a, I don't know, flex or a slightly arrogant version of this, which is.

I had a moment maybe like, it might be like six months ago now where someone said something really mean and negative to me on the internet. And I was like in the bathroom, I read it and I was pretty bummed. I was like, man, this person doesn't know me. And then they said all these mean things about me. What is this? And I came back into my room and my son was in there. You know, my beautiful wife was in bed. I like got into bed. I have this nice house and I was sitting there and I was like, huh,

Yeah, this is okay. Like, you know, like, here I am, this person's probably sitting in their mom's basement talking crap to me on the internet. And I'm like, I'm life's pretty good. This is all right. Like, I can deal with it. I can take the heat. Like if I if I wasn't comfortable taking the heat, I should get out of the kitchen. So there's a little bit of just like the man in the arena, you know, the Teddy Roosevelt thing of when you're going to put yourself out there, and you're going to be in, you know, in the arena and on the arena, on that stage, these

these things are gonna happen. You're going to draw some of it. People are gonna be negative and that's okay. - All right, we're just gonna take a quick break from the podcast to introduce our sponsor, which is Huel. Now this is very exciting because I've actually been a paying customer of Huel since 2017. I started eating Huel in my fifth year of medical school and I've been using Huel regularly ever since because I like to be productive. My calendar is full with a lot of things

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I, on a scale of one to 10, one being, you know, ultra controversial person, you know, Donald Trump.

and 10 being flowery, you know, just posting pictures of beautiful fields of flowers. I'm probably like an eight and a half. Like my content is so uncontroversial on average and positive. I know. And I never attack people back. I basically just take it and whatever it is. The most controversial thing I can say is that you should have a week, a monthly date night with your wife to talk about things. That's controversial for me. And like, I didn't even realize that was good, but that's, that's an eight for me. Um,

Because of that, I don't worry about it as much as I otherwise would. If I was like a five, I would worry about there being angry people that are getting mad about things that I'm doing. You know, I'm not like selling things. I don't do conferences. I'm not, you know, doing things where there's going to be someone out there that feels like I hurt them or scammed them. All my stuff is free, you know, with the exception of an eventual book, which no one has to buy if they don't want to. Yeah.

I tend to think that at least now, I don't worry about it a lot. But there are instances where it kind of hits me. Like, you know, I'm in the grocery store with my wife and son and someone comes up and they're like, oh, is that Roman? You know, a random person that I've never met before that recognized me, him from Instagram or something. And that kind of makes me think where I'm like, hmm, once he no longer looks like an ambiguous baby, this might not be the best and smartest thing to do. So,

you know, kind of long way of saying I haven't really thought about the downsides and the risk to date, but will there be downsides and risks in the future? Yeah, probably. What about you? Yeah, it's something I've started increasingly thinking about. Like, I'm fairly public about my

Personal life? Well, I'm fairly public about things like my finances on the internet. So it's easy enough for people to figure out how much money the business owns, which they then extrapolate to how much money I am, how much money I own, which then they then extrapolate to how much money is in my personal bank account. I don't do that. I never talk about money, really. I don't post too much about it because I do think that that draw... There's a plus side to it. People love that kind of transparency and they learn a lot from it and they get inspired by it.

Everything is risk and it's just trade-offs. But anyway, sorry, continue. Yeah. So I do that kind of stuff. And increasingly, now each year when I come to making the video, like I was talking to my girlfriend about it for the 2022 video, and she was saying that, is this still a good idea? And that kind of made me think that like, hmm, I haven't really thought about it to date, but you're right. Now that like, especially if I have a wife and child and family and stuff in the future,

I mean, I don't own anywhere near as much as like footballers do, and everyone kind of knows where they live based in London. But, you know, London is a fairly safe city. There are other places in the world that are a lot less safe. Tim Ferriss had a blog post about reasons not to become famous, where he talked about potentially, you know, getting kidnapped at random airports and random places that he would go to, which is why he has to use an alias and a fake name and book hotels under a fake name because they sell their data sometimes to the kidnappers and all of those things.

kind of made me think, huh, I wonder if I should reassess my approach to sharing stuff online, especially when a family gets involved with this kind of stuff. So I was just curious what your take on that was. I mean, it's a tricky question because I think that in an era where AI will increasingly replace the actual content that is being created, especially written content first, then video over time,

personality and human connection is really important. And I personally think that as robots and as AI becomes more and more of our life on a daily basis, people are going to have this like pendulum swing where they're going to really starve for and crave true human interaction. And so for me,

I have wanted to create that depth of connection with the people that are in my community that are following me. I still reply to emails that people send me. I reply to DMs. I have all this stuff open, even though my audience is now probably too large to do that in a scalable sense. But it's important to me because I want people to know that I'm a real person and that when they send me, hey, I'm wrestling with this, this, or this, that there's a person that's actually reading that and trying to respond to them.

I mean, I had I literally had someone a few weeks ago reply to me and say they were really concerned about their physical health and they were worried they weren't going to be around for their kid, you know, 10 years from now if they didn't get their weight in check and and they were having trouble motivating. And I said, all right, well, do 15 minutes walk just like walk for 15 minutes tomorrow and email me back and tell me that you did it. And they did that. And then I said, all right, do it again tomorrow. And then they did it again tomorrow. And.

It's just, it's interactions like that, that I really love. Like, that's why I do this. It's because I feel like I can actually create an impact and create value in people's lives from my desk in New York, which is unbelievable to me. It's a crazy, crazy thought relative to the path I was on previously. Giving that up by not being as human as I feel like I naturally am feels like I'm giving in to dark and negative forces that I don't want to give into.

Yeah, that's a nice way of putting it. I've kind of been feeling the same thing where, you know, in an ideal world, I would like to share more because I think there's value in sharing transparently about things and that human connection. But there is that. Yeah, I guess it's just about weighing up the risks and the benefits. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, look, yeah.

I have made plenty of money. I'm doing well. I'm not the richest person in the world. Like if you want to go rob someone because they're super rich, there's plenty of people on the internet that are richer than me that are like really public about stuff they're doing with money. And I'm sure people can find them. Um, so I don't, and I don't strive to, I'm not trying to be the richest person in the world either. That's just not like what I really write about or what I talk about. It's just not part of my thing. Um,

I want to be extremely balanced and I want to share ways that people can think about their life so that they can build that same comprehensively wealthy existence that I feel like I've found. And if that pisses people off along the way, I'd be surprised. I don't... I just...

I really try to avoid things that I think are going to piss people off because I don't see a ton of value in it. I'm not one of the people that's going to like intentionally throw out rage bait controversy just so that I can get a bunch of views. There's plenty of ways to get views and that's not really one that I find fun. So you mentioned this idea, I guess like comprehensively wealthy a couple of times. What do you mean by that? So wealth beyond money, changing the scoreboard, right? Like, you know, this is what my book is about that I'm working on now. It's basically this whole idea that

We have been so narrowly focused on money as the sole definition of wealth throughout the last several hundred years because it's so easily measured. You look up at the scoreboard and your money scoreboard and you can see it ticking up and down on a daily basis, right? I don't know if you've ever used Mint or Personal Capital or any one of these platforms, people refresh that thing daily just to see like, oh, did my number go up? I feel good. Did it go down? I feel bad. And that's how they measure their whole life. And that's how they stack themselves up against everyone else. It's a

It's a daily scoreboard that you can look at. And I think we need a new scoreboard. I think that in order to live a truly happy and

and fulfilled existence, we need to expand what is on our scoreboard. And we need to think about these other areas of life. We need to think about our physical health and vitality. We need to think about our mental health, mental fitness, mental vitality. We need to think about our social wealth, cultural environments that we're in, the people, the depth of relationships. And we need to think about our time, most importantly. We need to think about being time wealthy and being able to actually use our time while we can use it.

there's this tendency of humans of like deferred happiness syndrome. Like, oh, I'm going to do all those things once I get to this point in my life. I'm going to

go on that vacation, travel the world once I can afford it, or once I've saved up this amount of money, or once I've reached this phase of my career because I don't want to sacrifice a year of my career trajectory now and then have to start back there next year. And the reality is you're never going to do those things. And if you do do them later down the line, you're just going to enjoy it less. Time in the future is worth less than time today. It's just discounting. What do you mean?

You know, it's the same as money right like a dollar in the future is worth less than a dollar today It's the same with time like, you know a year a year-long trip around the world at age 55 is less fun than a year-long trip at age 35 because the things you can do as a 35 year old single person traveling the world are unbelievable like I had a friend recently who I had this discussion with and

who is 27 years old. He was on a path, you know, consulting, getting promoted, patted on the back, McKinsey, like things are great. You're at, you know, you went, you're winning the game. Like you're going to be a partner by 30. And that's like, you're calling card to life, like Indian parents, man, you're like really, really nailing winning the game. And he wanted to go travel for a year rather than doing an MBA. He wanted to go travel and see different cultures. He had never traveled much.

And he said, all of the partners are telling me it's like the worst decision because I'm going to miss out on this year's this year of growth. And then I'm not going to make partner by 30. It might take until I'm 32. And so I don't think I'm going to do it. And I was like, dude, you're an idiot. I just was like, that is the dumbest reason to not do it. Because

Those years, you're never going to do this again. This is your one chance to do this. You can tell yourself, oh, I'm going to do it. I'll do it once I've been a partner for a while and I made a bunch of money. I'll do it when I'm 50. You won't because you're going to have kids that are in school. You're going to have kids that you're going to have to pay to go and do all sorts of different activities. You might have a wife. You're going to be all over the place. And your career is just going to have this gravity. It gets harder and harder to do over the course of your life. So if you don't do it now, you're not going to do it.

So if you're comfortable with that, then that's fine. You can make that decision, but don't convince yourself that you're not doing it today because you'll do it later. I like to be, I like to be aware whenever I find myself in that, in that model of thinking, uh, I've been doing it a lot recently because we're now in the sort of final month of editing for the book. And so I keep on thinking in my mind that like, Oh, this is a thing for after the book is done. And the other day, um,

It felt a bit awkward to admit it. But the other day, actually, like a couple of days ago, my mum, me and my grandma, we were invited to drive to an old friend's house to have a dinner party. And I was thinking, oh, I really don't want to go. And it was like 4pm. And I was like, oh, you know, we've got to be there for seven. I'm gonna have to drive for two hours. And then my mum and grandma don't enjoy listening to music in the car either. So just like literally driving in silence with the occasional bit of chatter. I have this book deadlines coming up and all these things I need to do on the book.

And I initially called my mum saying that, yeah, how important is it that I go to this dinner? I don't really want to go. And she was like, oh, well, you know, think about it. It'll be nice if you come. And then I thought like,

I reflected on the thing that Tim Urban has written about like the tail end, like the last few times you're going to spend with your loved ones. And I was thinking in the future, will I ever think, damn, I really regret not spending an extra three hours on the book? Or am I more likely to think, damn, I really wish I could have one more road trip with my mom and grandma. And I was like, obviously the road trip. Who cares if it's going to be a bit boring in the car for some of the journey. I'm so glad I made that decision.

And it was quite fun at the dinner as well. I met some new people. But I keep finding myself kind of catching myself being like, oh, if I'm trying to defer something for when the book is done, because in my mind, when the book is done, it's just around the corner. And, you know, life will be easier then. But then I remind myself, no, hang on. Life's never going to feel easier. There's always going to be more stuff coming up. And so if it's important, then it's going to be, if it's important, then it should be important now rather than important in the future.

The yes damn effect. Have you heard of this? No, what's up? The yes damn effect is this idea that...

we say yes to things and then later say, damn, why did I say yes to this? And it's so true with most people. Like you say yes to something with the assumption that you're going to have more time a month from now. So you say like, oh yeah, I'll do that call next month or yeah, I'll do that speaking engagement next month because I'm going to have much more time after the book. I'm going to have much more time after X, Y, or Z finishes. I'm going to have much more time after the semester ends or whatever it is.

And then you get there and you're like, damn, why did I say yes to that? So the rule with the yes, damn effect is anytime you say yes to something under the assumption that you're going to have more time for that thing in the future, you should just say no instead.

Because you're never going to have more time in the future unless there's something actually structurally changing in your life where you're going to like make a whole bunch more time or you're quitting your job and you like there's something massive structurally changing. You're not going to have more time in the future, especially not as an ambitious person. You're just going to take on some new thing that is going to fill that time.

Yeah. I found that while I was still working full time, I kept on deferring a lot of things. I was like, oh yeah, once I quit the job and I'll have all the time in the world to be able to do this and this and this and that. And I ended up working more hours on like the YouTube stuff and the business stuff than I ever worked as a doctor.

And suddenly all that free time disappeared. I was like, whoa, shit. Where did all that free time go that I promised myself I would have to be able to play more World of Warcraft or whatever? It was just all gone. I mean, Tim Ferriss, I think, was one of the first people to ever really talk about this in 4-Hour Workweek. He talked about how there's this massive class of professional workers who work in banking or consulting or doctors or whatever it is.

where you ask like, hey, why are you working so hard? Why are you doing this? And their answer is so that they can do X, Y, or Z when they retire, so that they have the money to do X, Y, or Z, so that I can retire in Greece or so that I can like buy a vineyard and go retire on this vineyard in Napa or whatever it is at the end of all that time. And the vast majority of them don't do it.

The Wall Street Journal just released, I don't know if you saw this, the Wall Street Journal released a breakdown of how people spend their time in retirement. And it was horrifying because it was like four and a half hours a day of watching TV was one of the things on the list.

And it was basically a call to action of if you think that you're doing all of this work today because you're going to have this glamorous retirement living on the beach and sipping piña coladas, you're kidding yourself. What you're going to end up doing is sitting around and watching television because you're going to be 70 and you're not going to have the energy and the physical health to go do all those things probably. You're going to have to be stuck at home.

And for me, what that means is I really want to enjoy the present. Like I want to be able to jump on a plane on Monday morning, fly to London, see you, have a great dinner together, and then fly back. And I have the flexibility to do that in my life. So why not do it? Because I want to do that now. I don't want to wait until I finish my book or until I hit some financial milestone that's arbitrary, that's just going to change as soon as I get there to whatever the next thing is. I want to really embrace and really enjoy this present moment.

There's got to be a balance there, right? So you might have come across the book, The Defining Decade. Oh, there are friends of mine that are reading it recently. I can't remember who it's by, but basically The Defining Decade argues that your 20s are the defining decade. And actually...

your 20s are, you know, to quote Gary Vee, your 20s are for hustling. Well, actually, I don't know if that's what Gary Vee says these days. But your 20s are for hustling and trying to get ahead in your career so that you can actually set yourself up financially to be more chill and have more free time and stuff in your 30s when you have a kid for the first time and have the flexibility to spend more time at home. And it feels to me like

That's kind of one side of the equation. Actually, it's worth working the extra hours at McKinsey to get ahead, to build up that flexibility versus, hey, I just want to travel the world for five years. And then what if you end up in a place where actually financially you're not able to hop on a plane on Monday and-

chill in a restaurant with your mate in London. I mean, I'm 32. So I'm after my... And I did that. I did the 80 to 100 hour weeks from the time I was 22 until the time I was 30, basically, until I was 29. It seems like now you're chilling. Yeah. And that built a financial foundation that mattered. And it allowed me to actually see where the gold was on my playing field. If I had a map that I was uncovering as a video game character around my map...

I spent those years working so much that I found all of the different areas of my map and where I thought the gold was, like where my highest leverage opportunities were to go deep. And then I'm able to dig in those areas, which might not take more than a couple hours a day and do much better because I'm just digging up gold. I'm not digging up a bunch of crap.

And so that matters. I really do believe that. The problem is the people that say, I'm going to hustle in my 20s so that I can chill and spend time with my kids in my 30s, they are not going to do that. They are not going to chill and spend time with their kids in their 30s. They're just going to keep hustling. Because you get to your 30s and you're on a track, like at a McKinsey or at an investment bank or as a doctor or whatever. And then what you say is like,

oh, well, now I'm doing well. I want to do even better. Like now I made my first million. I want to make three million. I want to make five million. Because what it is is it's a mirage. You're like, it's not just an age where all of a sudden you wake up and you're like, now I'm going to spend time with my kids. Everything's great. No, you're like a VP.

and you have tons of responsibilities, and the gravity of that career track has only increased, keeping you in it, and the golden handcuffs have only increased because your lifestyle has crept up over those years. So now, you might be making half a million dollars a year feeling rich, but your whole life has crept up. You're living in a nice apartment. You've got high tax rate. You got the nice car that cost you $1,000 a month. And all of a sudden, you're like, well, crap, I actually got to make a million dollars for myself to feel rich. And then you make a million, and you're like, damn, I got to make $2 million to actually feel rich.

And so what happens is you don't get to 30 and start chilling to hang out with your kids. You hustle through your 30s thinking, I'm going to chill at 40. And then you get to 40 and maybe you are ready to chill, but your kids don't want to hang out with you anymore because they're 10 and they have friends. Like the time from by the time they're zero to 10...

I've seen someone call it the magic years, like that period from zero to 10 where they actually care about you so much. Like you are their favorite person in the entire world. And yet we work so hard during that period of time. We have no time. We're traveling. We're doing whatever it is.

And that's a real travesty in my opinion. And so if you could actually do that, if you could hustle in your 20s to build the foundation, to figure out your highest leverage opportunities, and then dive in to where those high leverage opportunities are, that's what I'm doing. And I think it's amazing if you can make it work. But most people won't do that. Most people will just continue to work harder and harder because they see whatever the next version of more is, whatever the next mirage is on the horizon, and they just keep blindly walking towards it. Yeah.

Have you seen the, or have you read the This Is Water speech, David Foster Wallace? Yeah, I've come across it from a few different sources. Okay. So, you know, it's like he starts it with this parable that these two fish are swimming along in the water and an older fish swims on up to them and is like, hey boys, how's the water? And the two other fish kind of continue swimming along. And then one of them looks at the other one and says, what the hell is water?

And it's this whole idea, like, you know, tongue in cheek, cheeky comment of we're very much blind to our most obvious realities. And when you are on that hustle phase and when you're continuing to progress and doing all those things, you are blind to

to these obvious realities of the things that you're missing. You've grown accustomed to what that track is and you need to continue feeding that track because our culture just tells us that success means getting promoted every two years, that success means getting a pay raise of 10% every year, that getting the big bonus, that's what success looks like. And so that's what you have to actually go and do in order to continue to feed that beast in your life. Yeah. I'm just thinking like, is there a...

Is there an easy mental model for this to kind of balance out on the one hand, the idea that you got a hashtag hustle in your 20s to build a foundation versus you actually do want to chill? Yeah. I mean, I think it's the way I've always thought about it, the like simple heuristic for it is you work hard first so that you can work smart later. Okay. Those two were always played off of each other intention. It was like you're either working hard or you're working smart first.

And I just don't, I don't think they're intention. I think they're sequential. I think they're sequential.

I think that it's really important to work hard early in your career. I will never tell anyone, like, oh, don't-- just work smart early in your career. Bugged me to no end when people would join our firm as 22-year-olds and want all this balance and want to be able to spend time with all their friends and have the high paying job. But it's like, I just think you have to pick one. You can spend time with tons of your friends and go work at the cushy Google gig or whatever, but that wasn't the career track we were in. You need to work hard if you want to accelerate and build great things.

And then you can work smart once you've done that, once you've built that base, once you've built that foundation. The hard work is important because of what I said earlier. You need to uncover the map. You need to uncover what the high leverage opportunities are for you because you don't know. When you're starting at age 22, you have no idea what's out there. You don't know what you're good at. You don't know what you're bad at. You don't know where the gold is on the map. You don't know where the gold is going to be on the map in the future because you have no heuristics. You have no tools at your disposal. You're just starting to learn.

And the hard work, the saying yes to tons of opportunities that come your way, the hours that come with that, that's what allows you to see the map. I mean, the same goes for content creators. It's like,

I don't know a single content creator that has become big, that didn't grind in the early days of getting things going. There's no easy way to do it. There's no like hack to building one of these things. You spend hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours creating and banging your head into a wall and frustrated because something didn't take off the way you thought it should. But all of those little things contribute to where you are in the end. It's like the stonecutter analogy of, you know, the stonecutter is...

chipping away at the stone over and over again. You don't see a single, you know, chink in the stone and then suddenly the whole thing breaks. And you would never say that those hundred cracks at it had no impact. They clearly were just doing a little bit of damage, a little bit of damage, a little bit of damage that you just couldn't see, but they were an integral part of actually splitting the thing open at the end.

And so I think that exact same thing applies to the way that we work in our lives. You have to do all of that hard work upfront because that's what allows you to effectively work smart once you get to that point. Nice. There's another way I've been sort of slowly thinking about it. I think prompted by something that Naval once tweeted, along with my own kind of thoughts on what does retirement mean? And

I think I kind of sort of synthesize this into like three things. Retirement is either where you have so much money that your expenses are taken care of and therefore you don't need to work or where

your expenses are so low that the money you do have coming in is like, you know, the lean fire and all that kind of stuff is so low that actually you're functionally retired and you don't need to work. Or where the stuff that you're doing for work is the stuff you would be doing anyway. And therefore you feel like you don't need to work. And I feel like for me, I've been, I've spent my twenties trying to kind of tick all three boxes, um, doing a bit less well on the sort of lifestyle inflation front, but that's kind of always a little bit in the back of my mind.

let's try and make money preferably through hashtag passive income so that it's not directly tied to my time. But at the same time, let me try and move to a place where the work I'm doing is the work that I actually would choose to be doing even if I wasn't being paid for it. Yeah.

And so these days I feel so grateful because like it's a Tuesday morning today. I got up, I had a shower and I was so excited to do a one-on-one with Angus, my general manager. And then I was so excited because we had some team meetings. We're planning out content. And then I was super excited for this, that we're going to hang out afterwards for dinner as well. I'm just like, damn, I can't believe that this is what I get to do for work. It's a cool feeling, isn't it? Yeah, it's mental. And people looking at my life would say, oh, you work too hard.

But I'd be like, it really doesn't feel like it. And I played loads of Hogwarts Legacy over the last couple of weeks. It's really good. And that's kind of been the future that I've been trying to work towards ever since the age of 18 when I read the four-hour work week for the first time. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think the points you made are really good ones, right? Like my whole setup and what I've been trying to build is very similar. It's like I have all this media stuff that I do, the writing, the creating, you know, the brand building that...

part of what I do and a challenging part in terms of the time and the energy that I put into it. But I'm untethered from having to do that because I have this holding company that owns, you know, today six businesses under it that are cash flowing a whole lot and that are continuing to grow and that I don't have to operate every single day because there are competent people running all of them. And so there's this amazing cash flow engine that I don't touch and that I actually shouldn't touch because I'll probably go screw something up with it if I do that.

unlocks me to go and focus on the things that I really enjoy on a daily basis so that I can fly to London for a day to go see some people and do things like this and not have to worry that I'm not like replying to emails or you know getting something done or posting on the cadence that I necessarily need to post on because it has no impact on my overall financial status and that's an amazing feeling

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The other way that I think about this is in the context of tabletop board games. Games like Catan and these other more fancier ones, there's always some kind of production engine or some kind of economic engine. Whether it's in Agricola, you have your little workers in the farm and you're generating units of food, or you've got your little sheep and you're generating units of sheep, or in Catan, like wood and hay and stone and all that crap.

And whenever you're playing one of these board games,

You have to have an economic engine of some sort. You can't just play the game and just be like, "I'm just going to build an army." With what? You've got to have some kind of production machine. In the back of my mind, there's this analogy of everyone needs an economic engine of some sort. Either that's the trust fund from your parents or from your grandparents or whatever that might be, in which case, great, or rather not so great. But you've got to figure out what's going to drive that engine.

And preferably, and I guess this is the place where you've gotten to with your holding company, the more you can untether that from your physical hours invested, the more you're able to unlock freedom and optionality for yourself. And that means you can choose to move across the country to hang out with your parents or come to London. It just unlocks freedom in your life. And that's the freedom to choose to invest in the things you actually want to invest your time in. Because the objective isn't to sit on the beach sipping pina coladas. The objective is to...

You know, at least for me to, you know, have freedom away from the things I don't want to do and freedom to do the things that I actually do want to do without feeling like I'm shackled to a job that is forcing me to do a certain thing. Do you ever feel that way with creating videos? Do you ever have to like feel like, oh man, I have to create a video this week and I'm not excited about what I have to create? Yes. And that whenever I feel that, like that's always a little bit of like a, yeah.

I was feeling that a lot for our part-time YouTuber Academy, which is the life course that I've been running for the last two and a half years, which is why this is like we're in the middle of the very last one, because I realized that, yes, it's making a couple million a year, but like it's not worth it because when it comes around to it, I do feel like I'm having to do it. This time around, it's different because I'm like, I'm doing it for the last time. So now I'm really bringing all the energy and it's like so good. Sure. I go back to the, you mentioned Naval earlier. There's a Naval quote that has been,

That is like always really resonated with me and it kind of defines what I'm actually going after in life. And it was a fit body, a calm mind, and a house full of love. These are things that cannot be bought. They must be earned. A fit body, a calm mind, and a house full of love. And that to me is like my guiding light when I think about things. Like what do I want? I want to achieve things that have to be earned, that cannot be bought.

And that's what I want in life. I want to go after the things that I have to earn. I just think there's this massive importance of actually going out and earning things rather than being given to you or rather than just being able to buy them and manifest them through money. It's like if you were to be placed at the top of a mountain today, like we picked you up out of here, out of this chair and dropped you off at the top of a mountain, you would pass out because you wouldn't be acclimatized to the altitude. You would literally pass out.

And the same goes for anything in life. If you haven't earned it through actually going through the climb, you're going to get there and you're going to get knocked out cold because you haven't grown acclimated to the altitude over time. It's the reason, in my opinion, people that win the lottery often go bankrupt or people that come into a ton of money like athletes often make a ton of money at a very young age and end up going bankrupt.

Because if you feel like you haven't earned it, you haven't had those incremental steps along the way to actually build up that understanding of what it is and what you need and what you're kind of acclimatizing to it over time, it's really challenging when it's all of a sudden dropped into your lap. And so I'm really focused on those things that I have to earn and really going after those and pursuing those in a deep way. My way of thinking is similar. It's less about things I have to earn and more about...

somewhat similar because it's more about will I personally learn something from doing this? And so, for example, in this recent cohort of our course, like I read a load about sales and marketing and now I feel I have leveled up my own personal stock price or personal like money-making power because I now understand at least something about sales and marketing and I've applied it in this context.

And now, Dan Coe and Dickie Bush were talking about it in a podcast the other day. I really vibed with the idea of rather than financial security, financial confidence.

So financial security, I think, is the thing that I've been chasing for feeling like a 4% withdrawal rate. And let's have a couple million in the S&P 500 and all that kind of stuff. But I've never felt financially secure because it always feels like I need more and more money to build up more and more of a safety net. But since I started thinking more in terms of financial confidence, it's more about regardless of what happens, I have the skills needed to make money if need be, because I know how to build a business.

for example, and that has given me more confidence to be able to adapt to other kind of environments. And I found that since switching my thinking there, I've gone away from the scarcity thinking of, oh, but I really should film this YouTube video because we've got a sponsor deadline and like, oh, I kind of feel like I have to do it. And more towards, okay, like, you know, right now things are going well. If things end up not going well, I've got the skills to be able to

build something up from scratch completely from scratch if I wanted to and the more I feel like I can embody that financial confidence the more it frees me up because I do sometimes feel like I'm on a bit of a hamster wheel with content creation and all that kind of stuff I think that's natural yeah something that I see in a lot of content creators I mean I asked like

every content creator that i spend time with do you ever feel though i i've felt that way from time to time yeah although i don't make a whole lot of money off my content you know my newsletter i sometimes feel that way but i only you know i send it twice a week the friday one is more of like a kind of curation so that never feels like a ton of work because i'm it's just things i'm consuming during the course of the week it's relatively easy the wednesday one now and then but i have so many things i think about on a daily basis it never feels like i'm stretching to write something um

So I never feel like it

It's the core of my economic engine, which prevents me from feeling like there's a hamster wheel. Sometimes I feel it in the context of growth because I'm so growth oriented that I just want to be growing on all the platforms, which means you have to create on all the platforms. You need to be putting out a tweet, a YouTube or Instagram video, a LinkedIn post like every single day. And if you don't have anything to say, well, it's like, well, shit. OK, what am I going to post? What am I going to have to think? I got to think about it. And that sometimes can feel that way. But again, I come back to like, OK, so what?

Like, I'm just not going to post anything. It's okay. It doesn't matter. What motivates you? Like, when you talk about...

When you talk about wanting to, you know, level up your skills and, you know, you say like, because then I can, you know, earn money no matter what. And if things go bad, I can make money. Like, what are you, are you trying to make a certain amount of money? Like, what is the, what is the goal? Like, what are you really trying to do underlying all of this? It's a good question. I think I am trying to do, essentially, I'm trying to play, I'm trying to keep on playing my infinite game in the sense that

Right now, I feel like if I won the lottery, there is very little that would change about my schedule. Other than the fact I wouldn't run courses anymore and I would not take on any sponsorships. Those are like the two areas where the reason I'm doing the thing is for the money. But I would still make YouTube videos. I would still do podcasts. I would still hang out with people like you. And I would still want to have a team that would help me create content and share it with the world because that's the thing that brings me intrinsic joy in some capacity, like teaching and sharing and stuff.

And so given that that's the infinite game, what I'm trying to optimize for is just being able to continue living that kind of life where I can wake up every morning and think that, yeah, I don't have to do something. And I think the reason I feel I'm so tied to that idea is because throughout my time in medical school and throughout my time working, I saw so many examples of doctors who hated their lives. Mm-hmm.

And the reason they hated their lives was basically because they didn't have enough money. They would choose to go part-time if they could, but they couldn't go part-time because they had a certain lifestyle, mortgages, etc., etc.,

A lot of them would have wanted to quit the job completely and like take a break from medicine to travel the world or to do something else or to build a business or whatever the thing might be or even spend more time with their kids. But they couldn't because they didn't have enough money. And so I've seen firsthand that future where being a doctor is supposed to be a fulfilling job where you help people and all that kind of stuff. Actually, I'd say at least half the doctors I've ever met were just like so chronically dissatisfied with their life that it made me feel like, damn.

I never want to be in that position where I feel like I'm shackled to a job for the sake of the money. And so right now I feel great because it's like the thing that I'm doing for fun is also the thing that makes money. But the thing that keeps me up at night is what if this all crumbles down? What if the YouTube channel starts to decline? Because every YouTuber has a growth phase and then a plateau and then a slow decline over time. You become a has-been. No one cares about your content anymore. AI is taking over. Why does that happen? I've always wondered that. Yeah.

From the very early days of doing my creator stuff, I started building these like businesses that are underneath the holding company because I had had that realization that like no one really wants to create for longer than some period of time. And it's probably not how long I'm going to be wanting to do things for earning money for. And so I need to be building things that have either enterprise value or they have, you know, that I can sell or they have cash flow that I can be converting into other things that are going to generate income in the future.

And I need that because I know I'm not going to be wanting to do the things that make money from a media standpoint forever. There's going to be some point where either I'm burned out or, you know, whatever it is. So what do you think contributes to that, you know, that natural curve that people have, like the growth phase, the plateau? Yeah, I feel like... Okay, so...

I haven't really thought about it too hard, but let's think out loud. So I think the people in entertainment, like the lifestyle-y type vloggers and things, have a way steeper rise and steeper decline because it's so based on like...

people following their personality or their vibe at a certain stage of life. Like for example, the people that most people watched when they were teenagers, the vloggers and stuff that were doing pranks are probably not the same people as the ones watching when they're 25 years old. And so in some cases, the audience literally outgrows the creator. I think in other cases, and I see this often in education, if for example, you are a

Gary Vee and people are consuming your stuff at some point they get the message and they do their own thing and they stop consuming Gary Vee stuff because it's no longer relevant for them. And so there's natural churn in the Gary Vee audience where you no longer need to consume personal development.

Like I would say Tim Ferriss is the one person outside of my family who's most changed my life. But these days I consume 0.1% of his content. But if I ever met Tim Ferriss in real life, I'd be like, oh my God, mate, you've changed my life so much. Like I've listened, I listened to every episode of the podcast from like zero to 150. And then I stopped because then I built my own thing based on the inspiration I took away from that.

So there's natural churn in the audience in that sense. I think tech YouTubers have done a good job of staying relevant for a long time. Like Marquez and Linus and stuff have been around 15 years and still ensure no signs of declining. Because I think then the focus is on the tech and every year a new tech comes out and therefore there's new stuff to cover. And so their expertise on this new thing of tech becomes more valuable over time rather than less valuable. But I think there's, yeah, I feel like there's just a,

I think there has to be a just like natural burnout. Not necessarily burnout in the sense of like, oh my God, I'm burnt out. But it's just a lot of work to continue to create videos over a long period of time, to continue to feel like you need to be on, to be like, in a sense, performative. Like it is, you're performing, you're like acting in a certain way. And we all play a character in our lives, right? Like at some point during your day,

when you turn on the cameras for us to come in here, like we perk up a little bit and we're smiling and we're talking and not that we weren't doing this before we turned on the cameras and like all of a sudden it's this big acting show, but you turn on and that's tiring when you do that day in and day out for 10 years. It's just, it's just a lot. And so not only is there like,

potentially a demand side thing of you know people not necessarily wanting your content after a certain period of time but there's also the supply like you the supplier of it might be tired at some point of doing you know the same type of thing or feeling like you're creating the same video like personal finance or finance people it's like how many dividend videos can i possibly make before i've like talked about dividend stocks and like i know what i'm creating and for me

You know, I would say that like at the very early days of creating my content online and when I was writing on Twitter, it was like,

It was very much about niche finance stuff. And I was writing about that. And I just realized very quickly, like, man, I don't like writing about this stuff. I'm bored. And I, cause I didn't care about it. It didn't matter to me. It wasn't a big part of my life. It was what I was doing for a job, my day job. And so it felt natural that I had credibility to write about it. But I realized like, if I'm going to have longevity in this, I need to expand my circle of things I can talk about. And yeah,

You get yelled at every single time you expand your circle. Someone will say, stay in your lane, bro, whatever. When I wrote about mental models, people were like, oh, stay in your lane. Why are you writing about mental models? Or when I started writing about philosophy stuff, people were like, whoa, you can't write about that. You're a finance guy, whatever it is. Yeah.

I've been pretty intentional about trying to just write about my own life struggles now. You know, like I'm kind of on a journey now where like I went from writing about like the hustle bro type stuff of the early days to like,

you know, relationship things. And my wife and I going through having a kid and now like being a dad and contending with like what that looks like and balancing that across wanting to perform well as a professional person, but also being an amazing dad. And there's a lot of people on that journey, as it turns out, like there's a lot of people who are trying to wrestle with that and are going on that same life journey. And so my bet is that I actually don't have to ever give anyone answers. Like everyone is always saying, you know,

Oh, you know, like, you know, that you're teaching things like for you, for YouTube, like you're teaching things, right? Like people say like, oh, you're a great teacher. You're doing all this stuff. I actually don't feel like either of us. And I certainly don't feel it for myself that I'm a teacher. I feel like I'm learning things and I'm sharing what I learned along the way. And I say that on my profile, but it really means something to me because no one has the answers to offer you for your life. There's no one in the world who can

who can say, hey, here are the answers that I can give you. And if you do this, this, this, this, and this, you're going to be on the path to a successful life and there, go off and you're going to be successful. What I can do is help you ask the right questions and give you tools, give you frameworks, give you systems for asking those questions so that you can wrestle with them and figure out what your answers are. Because your answers are going to be different than mine. And

And what you want and what your definition of success looks like and what motivates you, your idol of what you're being motivated by on a daily basis, it's just going to be different than mine. And that's great. That's the beauty of it, actually, is that we're all on our own journey. And so I am just so much more focused now. And it's what's allowing me, I think, to be excited after these couple of years and to have longevity around it, hopefully, is...

Thinking more about questions and struggle than about answers and like I've accomplished anything. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's pretty, pretty similar to how I think about it. I came across an interesting way of thinking about this through my writing coach a couple of years ago, which was you don't need to be a guru. You can be a guide instead. My guide versus guru.

And you sometimes don't even need to be a guide. You can be a fellow traveler along the same path. Yeah, stumbling traveler along the path. And I think about that a lot. This is why still to this day, a lot of our videos are titled like How I Do X. Like I was working on right now about how I manage my time. Where I was thinking, yeah, in this video, I'm just going to share three strategies.

strategies plus like a Google Sheets template that I've been getting a lot of value out in the last six months to help me take better care of my time. And maybe the more better thing would be like, you know, 10 tips to manage your time or 10 tips to level up your life. 10 life-changing tips for managing your time. That kind of stuff. You won't believe number seven. There's just part of me that feels that that kind of stuff, it doesn't feel authentic because I don't like, just like you, I don't feel like I figured anything out. I just have a few things that work for me having tried lots of things.

Share them online. Why not? The one thing that we take for granted for sure is we might feel like we're just a traveler alongside on the path. But from someone else's perspective, we might look like the expert alpinist that's on the path next to them. And we might be next to them and traveling the path. We might not be the guide or the guru or whatever it is.

But we look different than them in terms of how we're pursuing it, and that's inspiring. And so if you can share, like, you know, you have the good equipment and the poles and the, you know, the good technique of how you're climbing or how you're hiking, that's really valuable to other people. If you can just share that while you're walking alongside them, that's an amazing thing. And we live in this world where there is effectively zero bounds to doing that. It's just our energy. You know, I like, I joke about this a lot that when you're young, you have infinite energy, right?

Like when you're 25, think about when you were 25. Like when I was 25, I had infinite energy. And I assumed that I was always going to have infinite energy, that my whole life I was just going to be like this fired up about everything. And I could work for so many hours and do all this stuff. The reality is that as you get older, your energy becomes more and more finite. And the whole game becomes figuring out how to deploy that finite energy and create the greatest output, create those nonlinear outcomes that exist.

And getting better and better at that over time is what the real focus should be. It should be figuring out how to deploy that finite energy into the 10x things, into the areas that create the most leverage that you can achieve those nonlinear outcomes. We were talking about the idea of kind of comprehensive wealth, like wealth in all areas of life. And we talked a bit about wealth in terms of time.

We've talked a little bit about physical wealth, I guess. What sort of stuff do you think about when it comes to mental clarity, I guess mental health and wellbeing and that kind of stuff? Yeah. I sort of bucket this into, I suppose, three areas. I mean, one is on the mental side, feeling like you are working on things that light you up.

That like, you know, people say light your soul on fire. I think that is one of the highest mental callings that any of us can have. You know, like the whole fire movement, you know, financially independent, retire early. The retire early part sounds shitty to me. I don't want to retire. Like, I don't want to be 40 and not working on anything meaningful again. I've had friends who have done that. I got a friend, this guy Val Katayev, who you might have seen on Twitter, who probably made $100 million by the time he was 30. And he tried to retire.

And he started gardening because he was so bored. He started gardening. And he said he drove himself nuts. Like he didn't know what to do with himself. He had retired, but he was a driven entrepreneur. Like he was really thoughtful. He wanted to be working on something. And so now he's like doing, you know, 100 things again. He has no financial reason to, but he's doing all these different things. Yeah.

And so that's one for me on the mental wealth side is like just working on things that you find meaningful and that you find exciting and that really light you up on a daily basis. The second one is like what I call mental fitness, which is decision making, you know, learning and growth, you know, the ability to kind of like cut through the noise and really make sound decisions, non-emotional decisions and decision

Accumulate knowledge over time so that you can make better and better decisions I think like Shane Parrish's work Farnham Street is like the master of this like where I learned mental fitness from was like reading all of his writings and his his different work over time and Absorbing the best lessons from the smartest people in the world like you talk about Tim Ferriss and all you learned from him There's probably 20 people on my list that I feel like I've learned so much from and that I'm now excitingly getting to kind of meet and tell them and thank them for that and

But building up that base where you feel like you're learning and growing and developing your mental acuity and mental fitness. And then the third piece is mental health.

And, you know, for me, I bucket mental health with like mindfulness, spirituality, like an ability to, you know, to both look within and to think about my own position, you know, within the broader world and contend with the bigger questions of meaning and life and purpose. But that's the third area that I really think is important to get around. And frankly, one that like men traditionally have not

thought about and have neglected. And me, you know, coming from an athletic background, I never would have talked about mental health 10 years ago. In a locker room, you're talking about mental health. And now in hindsight, many of my teammates and myself, like we were struggling with things mentally. And we didn't feel like we had people we could open up to. I saw this stat recently that 50% of men don't feel like they have a single friend that they can open up to about vulnerable things.

And that is a massive travesty. I mean, really, it's a loneliness epidemic. We feel alone. Whether or not, we can be surrounded by people in a pub and you can feel totally alone. And that's really, really sad that we don't have people that we can open up to in that way. And it's damning and impactful negatively on our lives. Mm-hmm.

What are your practices on the mental health front? Mindfulness, meditation, do you do any of that kind of stuff? I've never been able to get myself to meditate on a daily basis. I have, I would say two. One has been the cold plunge. You know, I go and get into freezing cold water at about 4.30 in the morning, every single morning. How and why does that work? What's going on there? So, I mean, the cold plunge has now become this like very trendy thing because Andrew Huberman, you know, has made it really popular and it's become this...

very polarizing thing on Twitter and on all the, you know, different platforms of like doing the cold punch. Part of the reason it's been polarizing, by the way, is because there was a period of time where if you just posted a video of yourself doing a cold plunge, like every day on Instagram, you could like pretty reliably build like 50,000 follower audience just because they were like popping off. Like every single video would just take off. The cold punch for me, there are all sorts of things

physical health benefits that are purported, you know, that like different studies have found. That to me, like if any of that is true, that's all upside and bonus.

I view it as a purely mental activity where I wake up first thing in the morning and I have to exert a degree of mind control in order to get myself to do this because I don't want to do it. It's miserable. You go and you're getting into freezing cold water out on my deck, which is outside in the cold. I got out of my warm bed for 30 in the morning. It's pitch black and I have to go outside on my deck and go get into this water.

And for me, every single morning, I, you know, the mental gymnastics starts. I'm like, I don't need to do this. I can do it later. It actually be better for me if I do it later, because then I'll like really stay in there longer, whatever you start convincing yourself. And I have to exert that control over myself to say like, nope, I said, I'm going to do this. I'm going to go outside and I'm going to do it. And when you do that,

It's like a little bit of confirmation bias in your life where your beliefs start creating your reality. Your beliefs about yourself as a disciplined person that does the things that you say you're going to do start getting confirmed by evidence that you're accruing. You create like a little positive momentum of this piece of evidence that you just put on the board that you are doing the things that you say you're going to do. And that momentum starts bleeding out into everywhere else in your life.

And so I do that every single morning as a way to just like get uncomfortable and take on some level of voluntary struggle so that whenever the involuntary struggles of life happen, I'm more well prepared for them. Mm.

I also find it to be the most peaceful gratitude practice that I can have. I like go and I sit in the water and you're like feeling this crazy experience of like the sensations of like your body's kind of screaming, stressful situation and you need to force yourself to just slow down. And every morning when I do that, I just list off things that I'm feeling particularly grateful for, you know, my son, my wife, family, you

you know, a bird that's flying overhead, whatever it is, like things that I'm just observing or noticing in the moment. And it just forces you to like really slow down your world and stop for one moment every single morning prior to the whole day going into chaos. Um, so that is one thing. And the second big mindfulness practice I've found is just going for walks every single day. Um, I probably walk for about three hours every single day. Um,

Partially because I have a son who refuses to sleep other than on walks during the course of the day. And so I will take him on two, you know, hour and a half long walks all around our neighborhoods. And that time, you know, while also being with him because we're like connected in some way is just like,

The time when I kind of slow down and I can just think, and I don't, I'm not listening to podcasts. I'm not listening to audio books. I know you're probably like cringing. What do you mean? You're not listening on three hours. Yeah. That's like two audio books a day. Yeah. So, you know, and I could, I could read 20, you know, I could read 20 books a year. I'm sure by doing that. But for me, that time is for thinking like that's when all the ideas are sort of like mingling in my mind when I'm able to actually, um,

you know, just like let my mind run free. And that has been a massive, massive positive for my mental health. Finding that time. Nice. A couple of weeks ago, I started turning the shower to cold after a warm shower. And now I feel like that's kind of become too easy and I don't, I don't fear it anymore.

Have you ever tried getting into a cold shower? I've not tried getting into a cold shower. That'll be hard. That's the next level of that. I think cold showers, by the way, are actually harder than getting into a cold plunge. A cold plunge is full immersion. Something about the shower for me is really hard with like the beads of water hitting you. It's almost like sometimes the cold plunge, you know, it's on my deck. And so there were times when it would like be freezing rain or snow. And...

It's actually worse sitting there when you have like rain hitting you in the face than if you were just underwater. So like sometimes I would be sitting there and the cold rain would be hitting me in the face while my whole body was submerged in water. And the rain hitting me in the face was more unnerving than the actual cold on my body. So I would just like take a breath and go underneath in the freezing water. So I actually think cold plunges are...

a little bit easier than the cold shower. Also just the ability to just turn the knob, like, you know, it's there, you can stop it at any point is mentally quite jarring. Yeah. As you were describing that, that mental challenge of like putting in the discipline and doing the thing, even though you don't want to do the thing I was thinking, I sometimes feel that about YouTube videos. And that's kind of what I was thinking when, when you, when you, when you asked me if it, if it feels like, like a grind sometimes or however we were talking about it.

Because there is that inertia to getting started. But usually once I've gotten started, then I enjoy the process and then I film the video. And afterwards, I'm always so glad like, oh, damn, that was like an hour of filming. I feel like I shared something valuable, which at least one person is going to find helpful. I get to just give the SD card to our editor who's amazing and then deals with it. And then a couple of weeks later, a video will come out on the channel and there'll be comments from people being like, wow, this was super helpful. But

It does feel like, you know, I have to do a lot of procrastination beforehand. I'll make like multiple cups of coffee and I'll be like, anyone on the team need me for anything while we're here? It's like, all right, let's maybe go for a walk. People say going for a walk is good. Eventually I'll come down to sit down to doing the video and I'll be really glad I did the video. And there's part of me that's like, I sometimes wonder if I'm bullshitting myself in that I tell myself that the life I'm living now is the life I would choose to live if I wasn't concerned about money.

But yeah, I still make kind of three videos a week. And I don't always enjoy the opening process of making those videos. I'm always glad I did it at the end. And I kind of think that like, I don't know the answer here, but I sometimes wonder, should I just make fewer videos so that I only film videos when I feel like it? Or is it actually a good thing for me that I am pushing myself to do this thing that feels uncomfortable initially, but I'm always glad for it in the long run?

What do you reckon? I think doing hard things is important. I mean, you're doing something hard, like you're doing something challenging and you're pushing yourself through it. I don't think it's... I don't think you would find incredible meaning in a life where you only did things that you were like super excited to do. That's just not...

That lacks texture, right? Like that lacks those feelings, the tension, the struggle on a daily basis that actually creates some level of meaning in our lives. Like when we don't embrace friction, we've lived in this world where friction has been consistently reduced over our entire lifetimes.

technology has just reduced the amount of friction in everything. You no longer have to go to the store if you don't want to. You no longer have to talk to people if you don't want to. If you want to go out and date, you don't have to actually take on the fear of approaching someone at the bar. You can just do it through an app and decide if you like each other before actually having to meet in person. Friction has just gone like this over time. And at some point,

Friction actually was what created meaning in our lives. It was what led to the funny stories of like, oh, I walked up to that girl and she rejected me and then I slipped and fell. And it's really fun. You later get to talk about that. And I often wonder, are our lives going to be significantly less interesting than our parents and grandparents? When I hear my mom, who grew up in India, tell stories about her childhood or my grandmother in India tell stories about her childhood,

They are so interesting. Their day-to-day lives, because they didn't have phones. They didn't have anything. They were out. They had to do things. They had to go roam through the streets and meet up with friends and get into all sorts of hijinks. And I kind of got to do that when I was a kid. We're the last generation that got to do that when we were kids. Now everyone is kids.

are sitting on their phones all day. They're like playing video games all day. They're on their computers all day. They're not allowed to go anywhere without tons of supervision. And I really wonder, like with my own son, what is he going to do? Like, what is he going to tell people at a cocktail party? Like, what stories, what funny moments is he going to have from his childhood? Because...

I think we're just steadily reducing the friction that exists. And as a result, steadily reducing the interesting things and the interesting moments that are happening on a daily basis. That's probably the one thing I miss most about medicine, where they're just like the stories and the interesting moments. Like when I hang out with my medic friends,

I don't miss anything about the lifestyle other than the fact when they're like, oh, you know, the other night, like it was a nightmare. We had three patients that were bleeding out in front of me and we were understaffed and like people were on strike. And so, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah happened. And then like, yeah, one of the patients ended up dying and that wouldn't have happened if we'd had enough staff. And it's like bloody hell. Real stuff. Things like that where I'm like, fuck, like that was my life. Yeah. And now my life is this very chill place.

I get to rock up in a cushy house with a camera's preset up for me and do podcasts with people who I enjoy chatting to. There's no real sense of challenge. Do you stress about views? Do you stress about engagement and views? And like, are you, do you kind of feel, this is the one thing I hate. The reason I ask is because this is the one thing I hate about social media and about the platforms in general is that

I have at times, and I'm getting better about it. Now I'm quite good about it. I'm in the stretch where I'm quite good about it. I've at times like allowed it to truly impact my day and my mood of like something that I did or spent a bunch of time on. It's not going the way I wanted it to, or it hasn't taken off. And I thought it should. And I'm in a bad mood and I'm not present with my wife or with my son. And then something does really well. And I'm all of a sudden like, you know, chipper, chipper saw hill over here, like talking, everything's great, whatever. Yeah.

And I realized that, and I had to have like, come to Jesus talk with myself of like, well, you can't let that kind of thing impact you. Do you find that? Like, are you, when a video doesn't take off the way you think it should, do you feel drained, bummed? How does it impact you? I've definitely gotten better at it over time. And it does sort of sine wave a little bit. These days, I'm at a phase where I almost never even look at the numbers. Like videos will come out on the channel and I wouldn't even realize it.

it. I'll just go on YouTube on my phone because I'm browsing something. I see, oh, there's some notifications. Oh, people are commenting. Oh, the video's out. Oh, that's cool. Let me get off the toilet so I can actually watch the video while I've got a loom recording so I can give our editors feedback and just be like, yep, sick. Oh, nice. That was sick. That was cool. Nice. Well played. That was really good. Packup music here could be a little bit different. And I broadly don't look at the numbers. I will occasionally look at them.

But right now we're in a period where the channel is growing faster than it's ever grown before. And so it's easy for me to be like, oh, I don't like the numbers. But if the numbers were going down, I'd probably have a lot more existential crises and journaling sessions with myself in a coffee shop on my own or for a walk being like, where's this going? Everyone do this? Is this the beginning of the end? If that's the case, then a lot of like mental gymnastics and CBT-ing myself out of the...

concern about that and the fear of uncertainty and the fear of the future towards, you know what, it's fine. And Lewis Hose, who actually you made connection with recently, I asked him this when I was interviewed on his podcast like a year and a half ago. And he said that, hey, look, man, I've been in this game for like 10 years and I've realized it's just like a sine wave. And there are some months where it goes up and other months where it goes down. The same thing has happened for 10 years. So he said he's now stopped

yeah caring about the sine wave and so i do sometimes think of that phrase that it's just a sine wave it's just right it's just the way it goes i think it changes with financial security too um you know i think i think a lot of creators really ride really ride the roller coaster because it's that's it for them it's like i'm living this great life because of this and if it doesn't go well maybe the gravy train stops you know like especially people that were like

crypto creators or like very niche around one particular thing that might have been you know a boom bust cycle and now it's gone and you're like oh my god all my sponsors walked out the door all my because you know because they all went bankrupt or they ran out of money and you realize that nothing none of this stuff is permanent yeah and i think that's scary for a lot of people absolutely yeah i think especially like the creator that i speak to who's like 80 percent of their revenue comes from brand deals and the other 20 percent from adsense

and they're not selling their own products and not trying to build a business around it, that's really scary. Yeah. Because you're so, your lifestyle is dependent on the whims of people that are outside of your control. Yeah, you can't control it. Totally. Yeah, sometimes the way I think about it is like, if I worry about that too much, then it becomes not fun anymore. And so my way of getting around that is thinking, you know what?

Right now, things are good. And while things are good, it's fine that I have a team of 13 people that I love working with because it's great vibes. If things ever become not good, I mean, then we just downsize the team. I can do it myself. I can do it myself. Me plus an assistant and an editor, that three-man setup can literally make probably a million a year for at least the next 10 years without too much difficulty. Yeah.

If that doesn't work out, even just me, great, let's say I lost everything. Now I'm doing the Peter Levels thing. I'm going to get back into coding and become an indie developer. And that would be quite fun. It's like I tell myself these stories as a way of kind of hedging against the inherent uncertainty that's in a career like this. Yeah. It's nice to know that if you had to, you could do with very little. Yeah. It's just like a good feeling. I'm not a particularly...

I'm not a materialistic person. I'm not into fancy things. I don't have a watch. I wear a whoopin', I suppose. I have a running watch that I wear. A crappy running watch. You wear an Apple watch. I'm not into cars, necessarily. I just don't spend money on fancy things. And my wife is not into jewelry. And we don't give each other jewelry presents. She's not into bags and fancy clothes. And so I often think about that. If everything went to shit, like if we were in the Great Depression, 1928,

how long could we just like, you know, default alive with things that we have today? And the answer for me, at least today is like literally almost in perpetuity. Like businesses could all go to shit. Like everything goes out the door because we're just not that high cost of a life. And like, I know that I can kind of like hermit if I need to, and like do grimy things. I could be a cockroach if I needed to. Um,

I'm into really nice experiences. And I like to fly first class when I fly places, and I like to stay in nice places, and I do all those things. But I don't have to do any of that. I would just not travel, or I would just not do those things. And so I do think-- it's like Paul Graham had this essay of default alive versus default dead. And he was talking about it in the context of startups. Is your startup default alive or default dead? If you were just to stop growing, would you eventually run out of money or not?

And I think about that a lot in the context of my own life. Like, is my life set up in a way that is default alive? If we stop growing, if like the channel stops growing in your case, or if businesses stop growing, products stop growing, selling, you're not doing it anymore, whatever, are we going to be okay? Like, can we find a way to just like be all right in perpetuity? And if the answer is yes, there's a lot of comfort that's drawn from that. Yeah.

you can kind of separate yourself. Yeah. Like I found that when I sat down and figured out what does my skeleton crew look like? Yeah. And I realized that it's a fairly lean team. And if I needed to, I could just become a web developer myself. Yeah. I was like, okay, cool. Now I can enjoy the fruits of this and not think too hard about like our headcount or things like that. The idea of one day, I think you mentioned too and alluded to is something that I've found really powerful in my own life as a system. And that's like,

I really struggle with the five and ten year plans. I don't like thinking that far in advance. Every time I've tried to over the course of my life, I've been hilariously wrong.

And so all I try to do today is I literally sat down and I wrote down what are the elements of my ideal day? Like what does an ideal day look like to me? And it's not necessarily specifically like the routines and the exact time when I do it, but it's like what are the elements of it, the core kind of deconstructed elements? And if I do those things over the course of a day, it was like a beautiful day, a perfect day, seven out of seven, whatever the number is.

And what I have found is that if I optimize for that, having an ideal day, then having another one, then having another one, and just stacking together ideal days, I will progress in the direction that I'm trying to progress in. And it takes so much complexity and noise out of my entire life and system. I don't have to think about five, 10 years. I don't have to think about all a million things if I just have one ideal day and just focus on that. It removes so much intimidation for me that it's...

It's been really empowering. Yeah, for me, I've had that same feeling, except it's an ideal week. So I literally have my ideal week on my Google Calendar, which is color-coded with little rainbow colors. And does it sit alongside your actual calendar? No, it is my actual calendar. Oh, it is your actual calendar. Good. In that...

Like, for example, this is what it was this morning. One-on-one with Angus this morning, three and a half hours of book time, various team meetings, filming block, and then this podcast and dinner. Because Tuesday evenings I've earmarked as this is my default hangout with friends time. Oh, nice. So this week we've got this. We planned it well. Yeah, absolutely. Next week I've got some uni friends coming over for dinner. The week after we've got some more friends coming over for dinner. And then that's also where I force myself to cook normally, except you.

Wanted to go to restaurants. Michelin star Indian restaurant instead. Because I like fancy experiences. Whereas for me, I'm trying to learn how to cook. And I feel like the forcing function of having friends over encourages me to cook and it becomes an adventure and all this kind of stuff.

I like that ideal week. Yeah. I like that. And it means I can be like, okay, cool. Wednesday evenings, I want to go visit my mom. Tuesday evenings, I want to have friends over. Thursday, I want to go kickboxing. Gym three times a week. Cool. Yep. On a weekend, let's keep that free just because why not? And then I want to do these blocks of work, of deep work in the morning. Yeah. How often do you actually stick to it? How often are you getting derailed from it? Oh, like I stick to it 90% of the time. That's great. Like it's been a challenge over time. Yeah. But every...

One of the real upsides of the whole team stuff is actually like a couple of weeks ago I was saying to the team, you know, guys, I feel like, yeah, things are just kind of busy. I'm not making, I just, I'm not making enough time in the calendar to like film videos and like write the book.

One of the members of the team was like, why not? That's literally the thing that we're all relying on. You filming videos means that the business does well. You writing a book means that hopefully the business does well. What's stopping you? I was like, shit, you're right. We actually did a group brainstorm. I saw that in your newsletter. It was great. A little whiteboard. It was great. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Then we were thinking about it. I was like, okay, right now my coaching session with Eric is on a Tuesday and that derails filming on a Tuesday. They're like, can't you just move it to a Wednesday? I was like,

That's a great idea. What if Wednesdays was all my call? And I was like, but I want to have time. I want to have a calendar where if a cool person wants to connect over Zoom, it's like, I want to be able to talk to them. They were like, what about just doing those on Wednesday afternoon? And I was like, oh my God, you're so right. So now I have Wednesday afternoons. It's like my calls, which I'll take on Zoom while going for a walk around Hyde Park, because why not? And yeah,

When I follow the ideal week, I'm just like, life is great because I've literally decided what are the elements I want in my life. And they're literally in this week. And it's also great then because if I want to add something new, I know it needs to fit in the calendar somehow. Like I kind of burned myself out a bit post quitting the job when I was like, I'm going to take singing lessons three times a week and guitar lessons three times a week and art lessons three times a week because I really want to get better at guitar and singing and art. And then after about a week, I was like, oh my God, like I'm not looking forward to this anymore, et cetera, et cetera.

is now i've decided that like yeah if there's no space for in the calendar that means there's no space for in my life and it becomes a very easy kind of by like by virtue of the fact that it's a calendar you can't overlap things and so it's just such a nice way organizing my time i love that i mean we make time for the things we care about and it's never a lack of time it's always a lack of priorities and so if something really matters to you you'll make time in the calendar for it it'll become a part of your of your ideal week i do think

that that weak framework is a really good adaptation of my day. I'm going to go and sit down and look at it now. I think it's like a good way of thinking about it. Yeah, having a kid and being married, I'm like, I want to see you on this whole journey because...

Like even now when I hear you say, you know, like three and a half hours on book and the time filming, I'm like, man, I wish I could find three and a half. And maybe I don't wish because I'm terrible. Like I have such bad focus. I can't focus for more than like an hour on something. And I'm in the earlier stages of writing my book where it's quite painful because I'm not, I don't have the like close enough deadline that I feel the urgency yet. I'm in the like a

abyss of like, well, it's due in six months. Like that's so far away. I'm fine. It's going to be like two, three years. Yeah, exactly. Um, which I'm dreading if that's the case, because I'm just like, Oh God, I can't have something hanging over my head. Um, but it is, uh, I really liked the week framework. That's a good way of thinking about it.

Sahil, thank you so much. This has been wonderful. This has been wonderful. Any parting pieces of advice, wisdom, anything you would say for the people who have listened to this far to our two and a half hour long discussion? My only piece of parting wisdom, because I think it relates to a lot of things we've said, is never let your quest for more distract you from the beauty of enough. So I'll end with that. Never let your quest for more distract you from the beauty of enough. Good stuff. Thank you so much. Thank

Thank you. All right. So that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode.

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