Financial Wealth Doesn't Make You Rich ft. Sahil Bloom

Financial Wealth Doesn't Make You Rich ft. Sahil Bloom Speaker 2: Just three years ago, a little over three years ago, I, on the outside looking in, would have been crushing it. You would have said that things were going great because I was making more and more money. In our societal definition, that's success. You would have been like, damn, this guy's doing really well. He's rising through the ranks. He's making more and more money. He's got the Nice house, car, whatever, all this stuff. And internally, everything was falling apart. My relationship with my wife was suffering. I was almost unrecognizable physically, health-wise. My health was suffering. I didn't have a relationship with my parents. All of these other areas of my life were crumbling as it looked like I was achieving more and more success. Speaker 1: Welcome back to another episode of Chew on This. Today we have somebody that everybody follows and probably gets motivation from, learns a bunch of different ways on how to make sure you have better mental health, how to take care of yourself better, and how to prioritize the things that matter in life. Sahil Bloom is taking time out of his extremely busy schedule to bless us here on Chew on This podcast and give our audience something that we've all been yearning for. So first of all, Sahil, thank you so much for taking time out. For the few people who may not know of you and the impact you've created, give a little bit of your background. Speaker 2: Thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be here and this is an awesome setup you have, so I'm excited. I am a Let's see, writer and entrepreneur is I guess how I would define it. How I define myself these days is probably one of the struggles that I have because I no longer fit into like the nice neat box that I used to and the path that I was on and that's been, it's like a weird thing that is honestly a little bit of a struggle when you carve your own path with things. It's like you don't have that two second elevator pitch for the cocktail party or when someone asks, oh like what do you do? What do you say? I don't really know. I think writer and entrepreneur is probably the best, although the term entrepreneur has definitely been bastardized a little bit. I still feel bad even saying it because I feel like it's one of those like semi-douchey things that people say too much these days. So maybe I'll just stick to writer for now. Unknown Speaker: That works. Speaker 1: And I think also a great call out of the fact that you've been writing a book and it's Coming up for its release, but let's get right into that. Talk a little bit about what you've been writing and the fact that you went from having zero followers, zero people in your audience to literally publishing a book. That's got to be something incredible for you, but was this always planned? Tell us a little bit about the journey of writing this book. Speaker 2: Far from planned. Look, I spent most of my life, so I'm half Indian. And I grew up with very academically oriented parents. My mom is Indian, so as you know. I'm not actually kidding. So I'm 33 years old. My mom, till this day, still asks me whether I'm sure I don't want to go to medical school. I'm like, Mom, I'm pretty sure I'm a little too far gone at this point, but she still brings it up. My dad's a professor at Harvard. And so between the two of them, I had a whole lot of academic pressures on me. And what that meant was I was a big planner for most of my life. And so like everything I feel like as I was sketching out my journey, especially up until about age 30, it was like five year plan, 10 year plan. Where are you going to be? What are you going to do? And all of my decisions were made around this idea of like fitting into that nice, neat plan that I had for myself. And Um, and really trying to seek that external affirmation, like external approval from other people that I feel like is pretty hardwired culturally, uh, especially into Indian culture, probably also into, into my dad's background as well. Um, that all got thrown out the window when, um, when COVID hit really for me. And, uh, you know, look like most people, I was stuck at home. I lived in California at the time, my wife and I, um, all of a sudden I had, Multiple hours a day that were free. I wasn't commuting every single day. I wasn't traveling three, four days a week. At the time I was working in private equity. So like a very stable long-term career path. A bunch of chaos was thrown into the system and I had to figure out like what was I going to spend my time on on a daily basis. It was no longer about planning into the future because the future was like very much uncertain at that point in time. And I started writing and really that was just something that I had always felt my energy pulled towards but it never been a part of my life. Like writing was something that I maybe took a couple of classes on in college, but it was never a career path. It was kind of a ridiculous thing to even suggest to my Indian mother at the time, especially like I was working in a high prestige career track in finance. And so I started writing. I had 500 followers on Twitter at the time. This is May of 2020. By the end of that year, I'd built maybe like 75 or so thousand followers on the platform. Speaker 1: Touch on that journey real quick. Unknown Speaker: What was the catalyst? Speaker 2: Basically, if you remember that time, there was a whole bunch of weirdness happening in markets and the economy and business. And the biggest weirdness was that the entire economy was shut down and yet markets were just going like this and just spiking. And I had a whole bunch of my teammates from my baseball playing days constantly texting me as their resident finance bro. I didn't work in markets. I had nothing to do with public markets. We were a private equity fund, but they thought of me as finance bro. And so they were like, what's going on? Why are this? What should I invest in? What stock should I pick? Whatever. They were looking for tips. And I realized that The market was basically lacking anyone that was delivering finance and business ideas in sort of simple layman's terms. What you had was this market that was sort of a barbell where you had some people that were the experts talking over your head. They wanted to sound smart, so they were using all the jargon and acronyms, all this fancy terminology, and that's way over most people's heads. Or, on the other end, you had the, like, TikTokers telling you to YOLO into GameStop call options. And that was way on the other end, right? On, like, the low end of the spectrum. And what I realized was, like, the middle, like the Toyota Camry version, was not being delivered by anybody. Just, like, basic, simple, no-nonsense information and education around these topics. And so I started doing that on Twitter. And, you know, at the time, I was sort of one of the first people that started using this like longer form style on Twitter, which now has become something of a cringe trend, like threads, quote unquote. But at the time, it was like a new medium. And there was certainly, it was like a mispriced opportunity in the market, which we'll come to throughout this discussion, I imagine, just as like a common theme, identifying those mispriced opportunities, I find as a very interesting mental model for life. But it was mispriced at the time and so you could write these longer form pieces of content. They were getting shared a lot. People were finding value in them and the whole idea is like if you're creating value for people, you're going to receive value in some form or function and At the time, the way I was receiving value was in new followers. It was growing. The platform was growing. People were coming to me, trusting me, etc. So that was that early part of that journey in 2020. It was just like I was just doing it on the weekend. It was just a little hobby. I was having fun with it. I'm still working 80 plus hours at my day job. It just sort of started to take off from there. Speaker 1: Wow. That's incredible. And then the journey from 75,000 followers to even pivoting the type of content you started to create. Tell us a little about that. Speaker 2: Yeah. So in 2021, about May, I had this idea that like Twitter was very surface level for the type of content I was sharing and that a newsletter might be a way to kind of start to go a little bit deeper. So if you think of like Funnels in any business, it's like, okay, you start with the biggest discovery mechanism for how you can collect the maximum number of people and work down from there into something more narrow and where you're going deeper with a smaller group. Newsletter felt like the natural way to progress my writing and so I started going deeper on the topics I'd written about on Twitter for a smaller sub-segment that were interested in receiving it in their inbox. The first thing I noticed In May of 2021, when I started doing that was that I didn't really care about finance, business, markets, etc. And I was writing about it, but I was noticing that it was very difficult and energy draining for me to come up with new things to write about. I was like constantly just like, oh, this is a drag. I have to write about call options or whatever. And it was mainly just because I didn't have energy pulling me towards it. It was just like at that point it started to feel like it was a job. And so in that moment, the realization I had was that if I'm going to do this and it's going to be something I care about and try to create value for people around for the next 10, 15, 20 years of my life, it has to be something that I can just do naturally, that I really feel pulled towards. And to me, what that means is that it has to be authentic and it has to be something that's just So deeply embedded in your life and how you think about the world. So deeply embedded in your journey. And so that was when I sort of shifted my idea of what I was doing to what my profile currently says, which is exploring my curiosity and sharing what I learned along the way. That felt like an infinite game to me. I was like, I'm learning things every single day. I have interesting conversations with people. I have incredible network of friends, mentors, etc. I'm doing interesting things in the real world. If I just can write and share about those things, how I'm wrestling with things, the questions I'm facing, the challenges I'm facing, That's infinite. I'd do that forever. And there's no end in sight to being able to do that in a genuine, authentic way. So let me double down on that as the kind of ecosystem that I'm trying to build, which runs totally counter to the advice you might get of like, pick a niche, stick to it. But it really worked for me because it's always come off as real along the way. Speaker 3: I mean, taking what you knew about writing for Twitter and kind of finding that ease within the information that you're putting out, translating it now to writing the book, is it one of those things where you kind of see in the movies, you open up the laptop and you're kind of just staring at it? Or did it come as naturally to you when it came to it? You know what? I have an idea. I have a vision for this. Let me just start going. Speaker 2: It was very similar to that transition that I mentioned from Twitter to the newsletter where you think about like the biggest discovery at the top to the next level of depth. The book is like the next level of depth, right? You go deeper on the topics that you're currently covering within a newsletter. That felt natural. I was like, okay, book feels like the next medium. The actual execution of writing a book is so freaking hard and different than anything that you've done. And the reason is actually just like, A neurological one, I would say, which is the dopamine cycle on it. So social media or the newsletter, the longest time you have to go between creating something and getting the dopamine hit of the feedback from people is like a couple days, right? On social media, it's instant. On a newsletter, maybe you write it on Monday, it goes out on Wednesday. It's like two days. And that encourages you, right? The dopamine is actually the motivation. So like when you sit down to write on Monday, you're like, I'm going to get feedback on this right away. The book, it's like three years. I mean, no joke, right? Like I started ideating and thinking about this in 2021. I signed the book deal in 2022. This is getting released early 2025. So you're talking about multiple years of writing in the dark and trying to motivate yourself to create something that no one's going to see for multiple years. That is very difficult and it's something that very few people ever talk about when they talk about writing a book. It's not the actual writing that's ever hard. You know what you're going to write. When you sell the book, you go through the auction process for it, which we can talk about. You have the proposal. You have the outline. You kind of know what it's going to look like. But like on a Tuesday morning in December when the book's not coming out for 18 months, motivating yourself to sit down at your desk for two hours of focused work to write is very difficult. Actually, frankly, figuring out and leveraging the discipline from other mediums, like applying the same discipline from my athletics career or from, you know, like running stuff I do or lifting stuff I do and applying that to the writing and the process around it was the only thing that got me through it. Speaker 3: Did you test any concepts like on social and then kind of bring it into the your writing of the book? Speaker 2: Yeah, all the time. I mean, I think one of the one of the like major major Mispriced opportunities or arbitrage opportunities is the ability now with multiple platforms, multiple different mediums to test and experiment with different ideas and see what framing really connects with people, which way you're going to be able to deliver the concept in the best format. Because with With a book, you really have an opportunity to make something really sticky and have people actually sharing it in perpetuity. With social media, it's like you get a day where people are maybe sending it to their group chats and sharing things and then it's gone effectively. You don't gift a newsletter to somebody at Christmas. You might read one of the newsletters and feel like it changed your life. You're not going to gift it to your sister for Christmas or for her birthday, but the book, you really might. To me, that means the burden for creating something that is truly timeless, something that really connects, where the stories are going to hit you really hard, is higher and higher and higher. Figuring out the way to precisely narrow in on what are the ideas that are sticky, but what is the story you can attach to that that really drives it home? That's an experimentation process. I would stop short of saying, you know, the vast majority of the book is entirely net new in terms of how it feels and like what hits you, but the concepts are all timeless and like you've heard me talk about them in different forms and functions, but the way that it all comes together and kind of gets combined, like the ingredients are familiar, but the actual recipe that they come together into is entirely new. Speaker 1: I love that. I'd love to talk about kind of the business side of the book. Speaker 3: Is the publishing, is that something you went and found? Speaker 1: Is that something they came to you with? I mean, you're with a big publishing house. So, was it also in your mind when you were writing the book that, you know, this is something that I have to go and do? Speaker 2: Yeah. So, it's interesting. The book publishing industry is a fascinating industry to actually understand. So, there's sort of two ways of doing this. Now, there's like the traditional publishing world and then there's self-publishing. And now there's starting to be this like sort of hybrid in between the two. So self-publishing is very easy nowadays, right? Like Amazon will allow you to do this. If you decide you want to write a book and you want to self-publish it, you can go do that. The challenges are you don't get the same mainstream marketing and awareness and distribution from self-publishing. You can sell an enormous number of books if you have a big platform and you're self-publishing, but you will not hit the New York Times bestseller list. And that's just the way that these sort of lists work and the way that they function and how they take into account independent bookstores and all these places where you need to be, which you can't really do self-publishing. Traditional publishing has existed, you know, obviously for 100 plus years. The biggest company, you know, there's sort of Penguin Random House, there's Simon & Schuster, and there's HarperCollins. They're kind of the three big ones. Macmillan's another one as well. And they all have these small independent publishing houses under them that they've sort of acquired over time. The way the process works is not dissimilar to just selling your company. So like you create a pitch on this book. It's like a proposal document, the idea, why you're the best qualified person in the world to write it, who you're going to talk to, how you're going to distribute it, all of these things. And then you either yourself or through an agent get, it gets sent out. The agents, like your investment banker, they're going and marketing it to all the publishers. The publishers that are interested say they're interested. You take meetings with them. And then there's an auction and they literally bid on the book. And the bid is like the advance, like what they're going to pay you for the rights to sell the book. That's an advance against your future royalties. So you then earn the advance. You have to earn out of it, like you have to pay them back effectively. So that's your downside, what they buy the book for. It's like the minimum amount you're ever going to make. And then once you've paid them back for that, you can earn the royalties beyond it. The rough economics, as far as I understand them, are like you're making somewhere around $4 per book. And it's different across audiobook versus Kindle versus hardcover, paperback, et cetera. But say $4 a book, you'll make way more per book if you self-publish, but you don't get the advance. So there's trade-offs in both directions on that. The traditional publishing industry moves very slowly. So like you get done, you know, I got done with the book sort of early 2024. It doesn't come out until early 2025. It's like printing, the design process, all of these things that You can do much quicker on paper if you self-publish it, but you get the benefit of these large organizations who have been doing this stuff for a hundred years. Speaker 3: And was there like a lot of creative pushback or how does that work with you working with the publisher? Speaker 2: Yeah, typically you won't partner with a publisher who doesn't have the same creative vision for the book. So like this book, you know, The Five Types of Wealth is the name of the book and it's very all-encompassing in terms of what it delivers in a single book. The entire nonfiction publishing industry, my biggest pushback on it would be that it's generally filled with books that are a 10-page blog plus 190 pages of filler. And most people's pushback on nonfiction is like, that could have been a blog or that could have been an essay, that could have been a tweet. And you basically end up, you know, you read the first 10 pages, you're kind of like, I got the point. And now you either put it down or you end up slogging through if you're the type of person that wants to finish the book. I very much did not want to write a book like that. And so when I set out to write this book, I was like, every single page has to be value added. You will have to want to read page 250 just as much as page 20. Some of the publishers didn't love that idea. They were like, you know, The Five Types of Wealth, they were like, pick one and just write the book on that, right? They were like, okay, social wealth. They're like, pick social wealth. Like you have a concept in social wealth around earned status. It's like this super interesting concept. And I agree. It's very interesting. Write the book on earned status. Just write that book. And my whole response was like, I don't want to write that book. I want to write the book on the whole thing because this is what my idea is for my whole life and it's much more meaningful to me. The publisher ultimately that I went with was the one that really understood and respected that creative vision. And the editor in particular that you're going to be working with is the most important because that's the person you're actually interacting with along the journey. And my editor, Mary, Mary Renex, was incredible in that regard. Speaker 1: What is that back and forth with the editor? Is it like, I just finished a chapter, read it? Or is it like, You kind of tap in when you feel the need. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's more like full drafts. I assume you can go back and forth on a more regular basis if you really want to. It would get pretty tedious if you were doing it every chapter. Generally speaking, it's like rough first pass, kind of like large structural feedback, dive into that. Get more detailed feedback and then you're kind of like progressing steadily towards like a detailed line review. And then the most interesting part which I thought was just fun is like they do like real like page proof editing where you get like a copy editor who comes in and is reading like line by line detail, checking like whether quotes were actually said by the person you're quoting it to, checking. You know, like references and making sure it's correct, like really detailed stuff. I can't imagine doing that job. That would have been really hard. Even reviewing their edits was tough, but it's a fascinating process. Speaker 1: One of the things that is super interesting, and I want to get into the content of The Five Types of Wealth and talk about that a little bit more, but even before that, I've always watched all your content, and some of it is so interesting because the one that always sticks with me is the first 10 years of your life with your kid. They're your best friend, and then after that, they move on, and they'll never be your best friend again. It really stuck with me a lot because it's like, That's deep and it means a lot and it shapes the way you even take on the morning with your kid. But something like that, right, that's an experience obviously you have not lived through yet. That's probably coming, and I'm assuming here, but it's coming from a mentor or somebody that has maybe shared that learning through it. How do you compartmentalize all this? It's part of your job now, I get that part, but you're meeting and getting so many different experiences. I'm sure on the other side, you've also gotten from someone who said, Hey, like the first few years of a kid doesn't matter as much, like maybe spend time building. Like I'm curious, how do you take in all of the different perspectives you have? And you say, Hey, this is the one that I'm going to personally shape myself around and also share to my platform. Speaker 2: The truth is that I have personally found the best things in life come not from finding the right answers as much as from asking the right questions. And what I mean by that is we live in a very answer-focused culture, especially these younger generations that we're a part of and younger than us. They just want the like Google search result or now like the perplexity search result, whatever it is that tells you the exact answer of how to live your life. And the challenging thing about the questions that I'm contemplating in the book is there is no one-size-fits-all answer. It's you apply your own lens to the right questions and come to your own determination because everyone has different seasons of their life, different considerations, different focus, different priorities, and you need to navigate it yourself. And so the challenge when doing research for this book or for any of the topics I talk and write about is I want to apply my own lens to these things and provide that perspective, but at the same time, My lens is not going to be the same as, you know, if I have 800,000 readers in my newsletter now, that's not particularly useful if it only fits 10,000 of those people. I need to make sure that I'm framing things in the context of the question and so the book in particular is really framed up in the context of those questions and the stories that hammer those questions home so that people can wrestle with them and come to their own determination of the answers. That being said, There are some timeless principles that I would argue are just definitively true. One of those is that if you do not appreciate and respect those short windows of time during your life, you will come to regret it later. One of those short windows of time is the years when your child is in that first 10 years of their life. One of them is when your parents are aging, if you are not around during those years and you don't have that connection with them, which was the ultimate reason that my wife and I changed our whole life to move back east. There are a few things that I would argue are definitively true in that vein. And if there are people that disagree with that, I think they're missing a big point of life in that pursuit. Speaker 1: Great words on there. I think there is one piece around that I want to talk about content a little bit more too is when it comes to creating content from what you've learned, there's also this whole element of also now marketing yourself and putting it out there and distributing it and make sure you're on TikTok. Make sure you're on Reels. Make sure you're putting all the platform and I'm sure you have a great team. But I'm curious, like even when it comes to the book, right? The marketing of even the pre-launch and whatnot, how exciting of a part is that? Or are you more so like, hey, I just like creating content. I like writing it, but maybe this part is a part that's more like tedious and you'll get to it. I'm curious, how do you balance both the things? Because it's kind of rare to have somebody that creates and is also equally just as excited to put out and distribute and whatnot. I'm curious on how you balance both roles. Speaker 2: Sure. The way I think about this is that there's sort of a spectrum that exists from like artist, pure artist on one end to pure marketer on the other end. And think about it in the modern era. You have people who are pure artists that want to create something and they don't care if no one reads it or engages with it because it's just about the art. They're just going to create it and they're going to put it out. The other end of the spectrum is the pure marketer. It's the person that doesn't have a whole lot of substance behind the thing they're putting out, but they're incredible at just getting it out there and pushing it and getting eyeballs. And you have to figure out where you exist on that spectrum. I would say that I'm probably somewhere in the middle where I love the art. I love the act of the deep writing and sitting down and thinking about the problems and wrestling with them and sharing. But I also recognize that in my mind, What's the point if it's not going to impact people? And the big part of impacting people is getting it out there. I don't want this book to impact people, you know, 500 years after I'm dead. I want to be able to see it because that means something to me. I get a lot of energy out of seeing people actually interact with an idea, see them live a little bit better, change something about their life. I mean, that makes me feel more fulfilled than just about anything professionally. And so that means getting it out and doing the work to get it out with as many people as possible. The challenging part about that marketing side is like there's sort of two pieces to it. There's the like really boring meat and potatoes stuff that you have to do. Like repurposing content, getting it out there, sharing every single day that feels really monotonous. And then there's the more creative angle to it where you're like doing kind of asymmetric. You're like going after mispriced opportunities. You guys know this. You run a brand, right? Like there's the boring, basic running ads on social media that you have to do to sell your product. Then there's the like crazy, fun, engaging stunt stuff you do. Or there's like doing a podcast, which doesn't feel like direct marketing, but it's brand marketing. It's fun. It's engaging. So within that part of go-to-market for a book just as much as for a brand, you have to find those things that give you energy creatively because otherwise it's easy to hate it. And if you hate it, you're not going to do a great job on it. So that's what I'm wrestling through now is like finding those things that I really want to do that I find really engaging and fun ways to get the book out with as many people as possible, get people to share it, get people talking about it, create community around it. And that is sort of the pursuit that I find really engaging creatively. Speaker 1: And I'm curious, so much of your audience has Received your content or consumed your content in a short form, often video form, newsletter, tweets, etc. There's going to be a shift now with this book, right? Five Types of Wealth. That's a paperback book. You're going to have to, you know, and I'm sure you have digital versions and stuff, but point is, is like, That's not a form factor that much of your audience is used to from you. How do you think about now taking that audience and saying, hey, you're going to now consume my content in a different way. Is that a priority or are you going for like just a broader reach now with this book and saying, hey, I'm going to go even larger than just my audience with the impact of this book? So talk it through a little bit of audience. Speaker 2: So there's two answers here. One, yes, much larger. I mean, I want this book to reach I'm an 80-year-old woman in Alabama that has never heard of me, never seen anything. And I've had a few pieces of content that have reached the point of, like, I think of virality and levels. Like, you kind of have the virality where you're like, oh, I got a lot of likes on this post. Then there's the virality when, like, you get a text from a random friend saying it was in their group chat. Then there's the virality that's like the peak level where it's like my 80-year-old grandmother in Alabama sent me this thing that you posted. And book, like in terms of book reach, that's who I want to ultimately end up seeing my book somehow because it's been shared in a physical form with people in that way. And I think that that's the beauty of a book is that it can. It can reach anyone. And the book buying audience is different, right? Like, frankly, in the self-help category, the average incremental book buyer is probably like A woman in their 40s or 50s. Speaker 1: It's like book clubs. Speaker 2: Yeah, book clubs. It probably is closer to that 80-year-old woman in Alabama than it is to our friends living in New York City, just on average. Because how many people do you know that are really sitting right there consuming their information on TikTok or on social media? Book is a big gap to that. The other piece here is that the structure of the book really took into account how I know people like to consume ideas, which is to say there's a lot of momentum that you feel as you read the book with shorter chapters, with Dopamine hits throughout with, you know, things that are making you feel smarter, things that you can act on very quickly and like, here, act on this, you know, do this thing so that you don't feel like you just got caught reading, you know, Leo Tolstoy or something, you know, and you're like, oh my God, you know, I'm sitting down and reading this hugely dense thing. I feel like I'm in college again. And that was really embedded into how I thought about writing the book. And at the end of each section of the book, so there's a section for each type of wealth. There's the intro section and then one for each type. At the end of each of those sections, there's a guide that is newsletter length or even shorter on each system, like proven science-backed system for building that type of wealth. Maybe eight systems in the time wealth section. There's ten in the social wealth section. And those are little like bite-sized things that you can actually go and act on and do, which again is like very different than what most books we read these days look like. It doesn't, you know, a lot of the books are like heavy on knowledge and information, low on action. So you read the book and You're like, wow, that was really good. And then you go on living the exact same way and don't make a single change. I really want to prevent that. I want people to actually go do one little thing, whatever it might be. And so the book structure enables that in a lot of ways. 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So if you're worried about the cost, the disruption or the sheer amount of work it's going to take to migrate your current marketing ops, Sendlane takes care of everything and you don't pay until they're done. We highly recommend Sendlane. And since we've moved, we've seen incredible ways to optimize all our channel strategies in one place. Now, let's get back to the episode. Speaker 3: I think I'm ready to get into the contents of the book. I mean, yourself, even us kind of having and following that entrepreneurial mindset, I think the goal for a lot of us was to and is to accumulate wealth, right? And in our terms, maybe even just financially speaking, right? But then you have others who may think of, you know, mental wealth, and then, you know, kind of pairing that with time, whereas maybe we're kind of focusing on the financial, but we're giving up our time and giving up mental, right? How did you get to that point of maybe striking a balance between all of it? And at what point in your life did you figure out, you know what? I'm not just going to focus on one. I need to focus on all five. Speaker 2: So the idea that I share in the book is First off, life has seasons and what you prioritize or optimize around during any one season can change across the different seasons of your life. It is very true that during your 20s and early 30s, that is an incredible financial wealth building season and it is the best time, just if you think about time from like a compounding perspective, it is the best time to focus on financial wealth because if you set yourself up and you create a base during that window, You can literally just coast off of the fact that you did that. And so it's very important. It's important to understand that. You'll also have seasons of your life like when your children are young or when you retire later in life where there are going to be different things you want to prioritize. That is really important because what it means is that what you prioritize during any one season doesn't need to be what you prioritize for the rest of your life. And this came to life for my wife and I in a very real way in her life because she was Like on a very clear, fast rising track as a fashion designer. She was leading up men's design at a big, big company, big public company. And she decided to step off that track to prioritize being a mom. And when you make that decision in the culture that we live in, people give you funny looks. They're like, so you're just a mom? That's the thing that people say and ask. And it's tough just socially when you make a decision like that. And the idea that there were seasons was a very comforting notion to both of us as we talked through it because the point was she can prioritize being a mom during this season of life when our son is in this window of time where he is our entire world. And then she can prioritize her professional career again later. She can prioritize different things. She can start a brand. She can do something on her own once he's in school and we have more time on our hands and he's not in this short window of time. It doesn't mean that you have all of a sudden just turned off one thing entirely if you've kind of kept it in the background. So the other idea there is All of this exists on dimmer switches rather than on-off. And what I mean by that is the traditional wisdom says, oh, you can only be flick on or you flick off. So like if I'm going to have on financial wealth, all the other switches are switched off. My health is going to go to hell and my relationships and friendships are going to go to hell and my, you know, curiosity is going to go to hell. All these other things are going to go to hell. The reality is that that's not true. You can do a couple of high leverage things in those other areas that you're not focusing on and prioritizing to keep them stable or to keep them maybe moving a little bit forward over that window. You can do a little bit of fitness and health and wellness activity to make sure that you don't fall off the map and have your whole body atrophy. You can do the little things to make sure you prioritize your most important relationships so that even if you're in the season of financial wealth building and you're like working crazy hours on your job, that your closest relationships still know how important they are to you, that they don't go away. And that is really, really important for people to internalize and understand because the fundamental truth with all of this stuff is that it doesn't exist on an infinite time horizon. If you don't think about your health during your 20s, 30s and 40s, it will not be there for you in your 50s and 60s. If you don't think about your relationships during your 20s, 30s and 40s, those people will not be there for you during your 50s and 60s. And so making sure that you do those tiny little things, those high leverage systems along the way to at least keep those things at a baseline is really important. Speaker 3: As you were kind of writing this, did you or do you feel like you've kind of mastered what you're preaching or are you still kind of on that journey yourself? Speaker 2: Living it. Yeah. I don't think there's any such thing as mastering it. So my name, Sahil, means the end of the journey. And I say in the prologue that The book sort of marks the end of my first big journey and the start of this lifelong one. And I say it's the journey of a lifetime. And that's the truth because there's no such thing as being a master at any of this stuff. We're all on our own individual journey. We're all trying to improve a little bit at how we pursue these things. I think that I've certainly figured out a lot of things and that's because I've spent so much time thinking about these questions in the book and during the writing that have led to me living very differently than I was living, led to me living and living out a very different path than the path I was on. I mean if you had met me Just three years ago, a little over three years ago, I, on the outside looking in, would have been crushing it. You would have said that things were going great because I was making more and more money. In our societal definition, that's success, right? You would have been like, damn, this guy's doing really well. He's rising through the ranks. He's making more and more money. He's got the nice house, a car, whatever, all this stuff. And internally, everything was falling apart. My relationship with my wife was suffering. I was almost unrecognizable physically, health-wise. My health was suffering. I didn't have a relationship with my parents. All of these other areas of my life were crumbling as it looked like I was achieving more and more success. And I think that is a world that a lot of people are living in. That everything about their life has been worshiping at the altar of this one God and all of the most important things in their life are actually crumbling around it. Unknown Speaker: Wow. Speaker 1: Steve. Yeah. We talked about the five types of wealth. If you don't mind spending a minute across each and maybe just talking about that one piece that makes it so impactful, whether it's from the book or just from your mind, just curious if you can touch on all five types of wealth. Speaker 2: Yeah, we've talked about financial wealth, and I don't even think everyone sort of knows what this means. The important point around financial wealth, which comes out in the book, is that Your expectations are your most legitimate financial liability. And what I mean by that is your expectations for what you need to live a great life are the thing that you really need to manage over time. If your expectations are rising faster than your assets, you will never be rich. Point Blank. You just will not ever be rich and I know more miserable people who are miserable because they continue to expect this meteoric rise and what their life should look like and it's growing faster than their ability to keep up with it. That's being poor. That's the poverty of more, right? You constantly want more. You never have enough. You're never going to be happy in that way. So within financial wealth, I think that's an important concept that comes out. Time wealth is the first section that gets covered. This is the idea of control over your time. It's the ability to choose what you do with who you do it with whom you do it and that to me is It's the most interesting place to start the book because it is very much the grounding for everything that we're talking about. Because at the end of the day, if you don't have that, you don't have anything. I mean, if you're, if you have a billion dollars, but you're just on phone calls all day, you never get to see anyone you love. You never get to go, you know, for walks, go to the gym, all these other things. What does it mean? It's like the idea, the question that I ask in the book is would you trade lives with Warren Buffett? And Warren Buffett has 130-ish billion dollars and I'm willing to bet none of you guys would trade lives with him. Why? Because he's 95 years old and you certainly wouldn't want to trade the amount of time he has left on the planet for the amount of time you have left. The flip side of that is I guarantee he would trade lives with any of you. He would trade all of his money, every single dollar that he has for the amount of time that you guys have. And so time is your most precious asset in that way and recognizing that and focusing on it as you build on your journey is really what time wealth brings to mind. Social wealth is all about your relationships in the world, depth and breadth of those relationships, your connection to your communities around you. And it's how you engage with others within that world. I mentioned earlier this concept of earned status that I bring up. I think this is a really interesting one. When we think of status, it is how we position ourselves within these social hierarchies. That's natural, right? Apes have that. It's like chest pounding. The biggest one stands out. The modern-day equivalent of that has been these status signals, right? It's the watch, it's the car, it's the fancy house. The reason we do that is because we think that it confers a level of respect and admiration on us. We think that other people are going to respect and admire us on the basis of money and these status signals. And the challenge is that those things that we acquire in order to get that respect and admiration actually don't do what we think they're going to do. I'll give you an example. If someone off the street wins a lottery and is all of a sudden a billionaire, The CEO of some big company is not going to just respect them all of a sudden because they have all these fancy things and there's money, right? They didn't build anything. They just happen to get very, very lucky. And yet we constantly take actions thinking that the thing that we just got is going to get us that respect and admiration when in reality, the true respect and admiration that you are looking for is only earned. It's earned through building things, right? Whether it's your body, whether it's your mind, whether it's your business, that is how you actually accumulate real earned status. It's much more challenging and it takes long periods of time. I think that's a really interesting concept that comes to light in the book. Mental wealth is all about growth, purpose, curiosity, the ability to create space in your life to actually slow down and think, have that mindfulness, have that space that allows you to breathe in a world that doesn't want you to. Maintain your distinctiveness in this world. And then physical wealth is about your health and vitality. It's the most entropic form of wealth, meaning it's most prone to like natural decay and deterioration as you get older. And so physical wealth is really about taking the controllable actions that allow you to actually stave off that natural entropy that we all face. So that kind of summarizes The Five. Speaker 3: Do you talk about how, I guess to your earlier analogy of having these dimmers versus like an on and off switch, kind of bringing it back to the point I had earlier where I feel like for a lot of us entrepreneurs, You're focusing on like the financial side of things and time and maybe even mental and I guess maybe the other four entirely kind of suffer, right? Do you talk about how to maybe not kind of keep things like on the lower end of the dimmer but like finding that balance? Because I mean personally I feel like that's the biggest struggle that I have is I'm so focused on like generating financial wealth and everything else starts to suffer and it's like well I have time for all that later but I kind of want it now. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, first off, it's avoiding the idea of later because later never comes with any of these things. You are definitely in a season of focusing on financial wealth. I would argue that most startup founders, at least the ones that are on a path to being successful, mental wealth and the purpose imbued work, which is a foundational pillar of mental wealth, is actually very high for you during this window. When you're working on things you really care about, that you feel a lot of purpose around, you're creating the best output. And that's where you find success. It's when you're actually working on something that really matters to you. Your mental wealth and financial wealth will be high during that period. And then the whole point is for these other areas, for time, for social and for physical, pick one or two of the systems that exist in these guides that will allow you to just keep those things on autopilot. They don't need to be the most important thing, right? In social wealth, you don't need to make a thousand new friends during this period of time while you're in the trenches, right? Like during my earliest years of my career, I was working 80 to 100 hour weeks. And I was really focused on building a financial foundation. That was it. I didn't worry about making hundreds of new friends. And frankly, I lost a lot of friendships during that window because I couldn't keep up with everybody. I was working 100-hour weeks. You just don't have enough hours in the day to do that. And so what I knew was that my most important relationships, my wife, A couple of my closest friends, I needed to do the things to keep those relationships thriving. Make sure I sent the text when I was thinking about the person. I made sure I showed up at the wedding. Those couple of things that I could control, I was going to control. And that exists in all of these different areas, but it's the awareness that you lose sight of. And so the book In large part, it drives that awareness back into the top of your mind so that like, yes, it is fine that I am prioritizing these couple of things during this season of my life, but I'm not going to lose sight of the other ones entirely. I love that. Speaker 1: I am curious and this is maybe more of like a selfish question too. It's more like there's parts to even some of these time periods, let's say like financial wealth, right? I'm curious on if you've also come across it, but I think me and Ash talk about this sometimes. It's like there are times where like you're making more money, but like you want less things now. And like is is that mean like that season is coming to like the season for that or like the time period of like that desire is coming because you probably need to shift your focus in other places or is that more so like you just don't have enough exposure to resources and things that can elevate your life beyond what you've create expectations for? Speaker 2: No, I think it's a good indication that your priorities are changing, right? Like I mean, I During my 20s, I couldn't think of anything cooler than being able to stay in like an insane hotel with my wife somewhere cool. I really couldn't like that was my idea of the best day ever. Now, like my idea of the best day ever is hanging out in my backyard with my son. And like being able to take him in the pool at 1 p.m. on a Wednesday. I've never felt richer than being able to take my son in the pool at 1 p.m. on a Wednesday. That's not flying on a private jet. There's no yachts. Like yeah, we have a house. We have a nice backyard, etc. But I don't want to get on a plane with him for six hours and go on a vacation somewhere crazy to sit in a nice hotel. I just literally want to have the time freedom to be able to do that with him. If he gets excited to go and play outside on the playground, I want to be able to go outside and do that on a Wednesday afternoon. That is wealth to me. I don't need more money to do that, actually. And so when I think about my own life and when I think about opportunities that are now coming into me, I have to think about it through that lens. Because if a new opportunity, if you came and offered me $10 million today and you were like, hey, I'm going to pay you $10 million this year, but you have to come work 80 hours a week for me, I would say no. And that, like, three years, that's a ridiculous statement three years ago for me to make. I would have taken that in a heartbeat three years ago. But my priorities have changed. The things that I care about have developed and shifted. And I care much more about the time window that I have with my son over these next few years than anything else. I mean, the amount of money you would have to pay me to go and do something like that right now, there's almost no number that would do it at some point. And that's just because the value that I place, literally the economic value in my mind that I place on that time. Unknown Speaker: I think you touched on it earlier when you talked about prioritizing energy creating tasks. What is an example of an energy-creating task? Because I think, I mean, that sounds great. But what is it that would, you know, be a task that would create some sort of energy? Is it a physical thing? Is it a mental thing? Speaker 2: It's totally case-dependent. It depends on the person. So my energy-creating tasks might look very different than yours. My greatest energy-creating tasks professionally would be like deep writing would probably be my number one. I really get a ton of energy out of sitting down and thinking and writing. I would say my biggest energy draining task would be like sitting on a Zoom call or a phone call sitting at my desk. It's really important to know what is creating energy in your life because if you can spend more time on energy creating things and less time on energy draining things, your weeks start to look way easier and that means you're doing much better work because you're spending more time on things that light you up. You're leaning into things and you're doing your best work when you feel that way. Steve Jobs always talked about this, right? You do your best work when you're feeling that energy, when you're feeling lit up by the things that you're working on. You're never gonna get to a world where you have zero energy draining tasks. But you can get to a world where you have more kind of like green than red. And I actually created an exercise about this. This is in the book. I called it my energy calendar. And what I did was at the end of every work day for a week, I color coded my calendar according to whether an activity was energy creating. I marked it green. Neutral, I marked it yellow. And then energy draining, I marked it red. And at the end of a week, you have a very clear visual perspective on the types of activities that are creating energy for you versus draining. And then you can make changes, right? Like now I'm aware of it. I know that Zoom calls are really energy draining. Okay, what can I do about that? Well, how many of those could have been a walking phone call? That might make it neutral or even energy creating because I love walking. In-person meetings I really love. Let me turn some of those Zoom calls into in-person meetings. Now they're green instead of red on my calendar. Now by the time I get through a full week and I'm at the end on a Friday, I actually feel pretty energized. The week didn't kill me in the way it used to and now I can go to my personal activities and be excited about them and charged up rather than needing to sleep for 20 hours or feel like I need to veg out on the weekend. And that shift like just creating that awareness and then executing on tiny changes around it can make an enormous difference in the way that you're actually living. Speaker 1: So interesting. Speaker 2: And so like when I say that the book has these guides in it, At the end of each section, that's the type of stuff that's in those guides. Exercise like that where you can just go do that and find that change that it'll make in your world. Speaker 1: I'm already anxious about getting this book. I know we covered a lot of different topics. I want to spend a few minutes, because we had a lot of different questions come in from our audiences, just to break those up and if you can answer those. Speaker 2: Rapid fire me. Speaker 1: Rapid fire them. Cool. So do you guys have any other questions before jumping into that? Speaker 3: I think one of my questions was something that somebody had. Speaker 1: Oh, you want to ask it? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: So I feel like we're getting this or seeing this recently where people talk about, oh, if you're building a personal brand while also building a business, do you really even have time to run your business? Is that even a focus for you? And I feel like there's this negative connotation of, Building in public now and for us, we know that we love building in public. We love writing about what we're doing and we're able to strike a balance between being productive within our business and growing that and finding time to actually share. What are your thoughts on kind of, you know, building in public while building something on the side and, you know, is that something that people should be doing? Should everyone be doing that? I'm curious your thoughts there. Speaker 2: I think if it feels natural, you should definitely be doing it. I basically think there's a separation between people who are grandstanding for ego building versus people who are doing it for the betterment of the thing that they're trying to build. And the reality is if you are sharing in public about your business, the journey you're on, what you're building, what you're creating, your thought leadership on the industry, that is hugely beneficial to the business. It drives tons of new eyeballs. It's free at scale. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of marketing that you're getting for free. And that, if done well, is an enormous advantage for the business. That being said, I think a lot of people, as it became very trendy and like as the pendulum swung in that direction, there was a massive influx of people that were using it as like their off ramp to whatever their next thing was. And so it was much more about like Um, you know, there was a meme, right? Of like tech founders, like, Oh, if you, if you're, if your founder starts, you know, posting on LinkedIn, you should write that investment off. It's like, and, and probably happened a lot, right? Like memes get created cause they're partially reality. So I think it needs to come from a place where it, where it's genuine and understood. But look like, uh, just on paper, if you're thinking about the value that it can create for the business, it's, Entirely. It should just be a part of how you think about marketing your business. And the same way that you're going to spend time on any other marketing initiative, carving out a chunk of time for writing and talking about the business publicly on your free platforms that you can is a big advantage. Speaker 3: There's a second part to that. I mean, your following is way more larger than ours, but I'm curious how you deal with kind of like that negative like chatter in the background. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I just view it as a tax on all the benefit that you get. So like, no matter what, if you're doing anything big, There's going to be downsides to it. And having a big platform, yeah, the negativity, the trolls, haters, you know, detractors, it's just a tax on all of the benefit that you get from doing it. I get some, but I would get a lot more if I was controversial, right? Like most of the stuff that I get is like, you're lame, corny, whatever, like all that kind of stuff, which like, yeah, my friends tell me that probably, so that's fine. I don't care. That doesn't bother me. Occasionally there's things where it's like, it's just not true. It's just definitively untrue. Like I've never said the thing that someone's saying I said or their, you know, whatever it might be. And again, at the end of the day, like I have a great life. I'm very blessed. I'm very lucky. It'd be hard, like it would be tough for me to allow something like that to just derail my day and not appreciate it. Speaker 3: So kind of just ignoring it and just taking it as a fact of life. Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, it's one thing if you actually did something wrong, you're like, okay, I need to take this as feedback and learn from it. And occasionally there is a seed of truth in something, right? Like if you see some feedback, your initial reaction is going to be emotional and you're going to be like, oh, screw that, stupid. But when you zoom out and you look at it from more of a scientist perspective, you're like, okay, well, why is that sentiment gathering attention? Why is that person saying that thing? Maybe I can learn something from it. But for the most part, it's like, You know, it's people in their basements throwing stones. Speaker 3: Yeah, fake accounts. Speaker 1: Vora, he's been a longtime subscriber of our channel. He asked a question around, he also has a two-year-old, when your child comes of age, what direction when it comes to like career and like You know, him or him or her choosing what they want to do with their career. How much influence do you want to have? And then what is like a piece of advice you feel like you're you probably when they again can understand it would be that first piece of advice you're going to give them? Speaker 2: I don't think you can have much influence on the direction of your kids life in a healthy way. I think It probably if I've changed my mind on one thing actually since having a child, it's been that you can't actually teach them anything. You just have to embody things and they learn from seeing you embody them. And when I think back on my own experience with my parents, I learned the vast majority of what I know about Business, life, discipline, etc. from watching them. They didn't sit down and say, discipline is important. You have to work hard. You have to do this. I like saw my dad on a plane flight with him working for 12 straight hours while I was watching movies. He was just working on some presentation or talk that he had to give and that stuck in my head. I still remember it to this day watching him do that, not eat the meals, just working on something. I think that that's the important piece. The greatest gift you can give your children is to grow up in a home where they understand the value of delayed gratification, where they understand that doing hard things now is what creates the beautiful things later. If you can do that, Everything else sort of falls into place around it. So, you know, in terms of the one piece of advice, I think it's that. I think it's like for them to know that they can literally accomplish anything they set their mind to if they are willing to do the work. Speaker 1: Ben asked, what's one thing that you're still struggling with? Speaker 2: A lot of things. I would say I struggle a lot with isolation on this journey. And what I mean by that, which I'm sure a lot of entrepreneurs that are out there listening can relate to, I feel a responsibility With my team and with my family unit, with my wife, uh, to set a certain tone and energy. And that means that I don't find it beneficial to talk about things that I don't feel like are working or going well, because I don't think it's productive. I think that, you know, telling my wife or telling my teams that like, this isn't working and I'm really stressed about it and it's not going well. And I don't know if it's going to work out, et cetera. I don't think that will benefit anybody. What I want to do is I want to set the energy. I want people to be excited. I want them to feel good and I want to put that on myself and I know I'm going to figure it out because I'm going to do the work to figure it out and that's very isolating and it's hard because you don't have anyone on your journey, on your teams that you can really open up to sometimes about those challenging things that you're really experiencing and What you need and what I've found in a lot of ways are people that aren't actually on those journeys with me that I can open up to about those things, and it's really healthy and helpful to be vulnerable in that way, but sometimes you just get lost a little bit in that isolation, and I find that challenging. Speaker 1: That's great. One last one was what do you do for fun? And what is a daily routine look like besides the 4 a.m.? Speaker 2: Yeah, I probably have the least like on paper people would probably say I have the least fun days ever, but I love my daily routine. I genuinely mean that I like an average Tuesday for me is basically living my ideal day right now. I mean I I wake up at the same time every day. I'm up at 4.15. I do my cold plunge. I do like a deep creative block from about 5 to 7.30. I eat breakfast with my son and wife. I work out from 8.30 to 10.30, like a run and then a lift. Then I come home, have lunch with my son and wife, and then I have another focused work block from noon-ish or 11.30-ish to about 4. Take my son to the playground, Hang out we all go walk get groceries make dinner And then I have like kind of a reading and ideation block in the evening after his bath time So I'll do like a sauna read think etc. And then I'm in bed by like 730 Probably asleep at like 850 because I you know, I want to get eight hours of sleep if I wake up at 415 I gotta be in bed by 815. So that's pretty much my average day and to be honest I don't deviate from that for much of anything like if you want to do dinner with me in the city Like tonight, I have a dinner in the city. Dinners are at 5.30 if you're doing dinner. I have a standing table at Coat, a restaurant in the city. It's my favorite restaurant. And I go at 5.30 and I'm home by like 7.45 so I can get into bed. Speaker 1: It's the Korean spot, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the best. So good. It's my favorite restaurant. It's awesome. But I very rarely deviate. So like even when I travel, I like do my best to set the conditions so I can basically do the same thing. I've always been very routine oriented and I'm happiest when I'm just like in my routines. Need novelty to be happy. I need routine to be happy and That for me is just like I love everything about that day. Speaker 1: I like I just love Wow Yeah, so Saturdays are like that too. Speaker 2: Saturdays are pretty similar. Yeah, I would say like They sometimes yeah if I'm training for a marathon like Saturday morning is more of like a long run early instead of that focus block or something like that, but it's it's generally pretty similar. Speaker 1: Wow. Speaker 2: Yeah It's not for everyone. Some people listening are like, that sounds like my fucking definition of hell. Speaker 1: Until when he said Monday night football, I'm going to miss. I'm probably going to have to skip that. Speaker 2: Yeah, sports on the East Coast are late, man. When I lived in California. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's so true. Speaker 2: You know, 4 p.m., 5 p.m., you're like, oh, this is great. East Coast, it's tough out here. 8 p.m. Speaker 1: games are 10 a.m. there. Speaker 2: Oh, dude, it's the best. You wake up on Sunday morning. Like when I was in college, And we would have like the rare off day from baseball on a Saturday, like a college football day. And you just like wake up from a big night partying on Friday night, roll out of bed, like get a burrito and the games are starting. Oh God, it was the best. Those are the best days. My definition of my best days has changed a little bit, as you can see. Unknown Speaker: We're going to derail him. Speaker 2: If you catch me like a year from now and I'm just massively overweight, you'll know it all started here. The Chew on This podcast. Unknown Speaker: When you saw the C4s. Speaker 2: Ripping C4s. Gotta love it. Speaker 3: I mean, we talked about so much. I'm sure I could speak for both of these guys as well, but you've given us a lot to think about and talk about later and I'm sure for the audience as well. If we had to drill it down to one thing that you want to leave the audience and listeners with to go back and chew on, what would that one thing be? Speaker 2: Think about what you want your life to look like at age 80. It's an exercise I bring up in the book of like, define your ideal day at age 80. Really think about it, what it looks like, who you're with, what you're doing, and then make sure your actions in the present are aligned with creating that future end. Because a lot of people will say what they want their life to look like, and then their current actions are in complete contrast to what that end is that they're trying to create. So make sure those things are in alignment. And if that is the case, And everything else will fall in line around it. Unknown Speaker: Chew on that! Speaker 3: If you want more from us, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Instagram, follow us on TikTok, and check out the website ChewOnThis.io.