in the early years of your life money directly buys happiness you're getting food you're getting shelter you're getting the ability to take one or two vacations a year you can take care of people that you care about there is a very clear correlation but what happens
is we then get patterned in those early years into saying more money equals more happiness and it's very hard to break that equation I was drinking seven nights a week I wasn't sleeping enough there were all of these other areas of
my life that were deteriorating while on the surface on the outside in I was winning the game money itself is neutral in my opinion it's an information system it's a technology it allows you to swap one thing for another oh I'll spend more
time with my kids later I'll uh focus on my relationship with my partner or with my friends later you either build those things into your life design them into your life now or you just end up regretting it later because later you'll be dead oh well hello everybody it's Jim o
shanesy with another episode of infinite Loops today's guests I've been looking forward to for quite some time because he's written a book that I think honestly is a new and unique take on money on wealth on being rich uh his name is sahil Bloom he's the founder of
SRB Holdings Adventures the author of the five types of wealth and said hell your Miss is just seems like it's tiny your mission is you want to positively impact One Billion Lives wow I guess I believe in shooting big and if you come up short it's still
a uh it's still a good outcome I could not agree with you more if you're gonna my mom used to always say if you're gonna do something go bake just don't don't have little goals like have huge incredibly difficult goals and then she would give
me that exact line if you even make it 40% of the way there you'll be way ahead of where you there's that great uh like very cliche motivational poster that I think I feel like I had it in like my fifth grade classroom that says uh shoot for the moon even if you miss you'll land
Among the Stars it sounds like we got some version of that from our parents we definitely definitely did but you know in all seriousness how do you how are you going to measure positive impact um and and why just again out of curiosity why a billion why
not like five billion why not eight billion the entire it could be any number I think look the um the stated goal is more of a long-term North Star which is really the idea of a positive impact and in particular I view impact as being something uh in the realm of
like ripples that you can create in the world so when you ask about the the term measurement there's not really a perfect way to measure impact right like how are you going to measure exactly whether you impacted someone's life so it's it's an
amorphous goal uh naturally but what I think about is if I can share ideas uh on a daily basis uh with both you know local people to me like people that are I have direct relationships with and then on the internet and with books and with podcasts and all of these
places where and share ideas that kind of sets off like a little rock that I've thrown into a pond and it creates a ripple because if someone engages with that idea and it Sparks them to live slightly more positively in their own
life if it Sparks them to take some tiny action to engage a little bit more closely with their partner or child to uh take that walk when they were just going to sit at home to uh invest in their future a little bit more that's a ripple that I have created of impact and
whether or not that person attributes it to something they read from me or something they consumed I don't really care what I want to do is create a whole bunch of those ripples that extend off into the future when I was a kid my dad uh often told me the the whole concept
of like uh when you're driving let someone in uh if they're trying to merge into the lane because then that person will go and let someone in and then that person will let someone in and you start this chain reaction of positive energy
in the world through one tiny thing that you did and I think about content I think about idea sharing I think about this uh information economy that we live in now and it is the most remarkable time to be alive I mean there are many
things that are very bad about the world but when you just on the surface think about the fact that I can sit at my desk here and write a newsletter every single week that reaches a million people around the world and from here I can create these ripples that extend it
doesn't it could be an 18-year-old kid in India or a 90-year-old person living in Omaha Nebraska but they can read and engage with the ideas right now while I'm still alive I mean what an incredible time to be alive could not agree with you more
completely uh I think we are all winners of The Cosmic Lottery by the fact that we're just here at this particular time in human history is to me something like I literally think about that almost every day and and just am incredibly grateful that I'm able to be here and
watch as we are making this kind of exponential leaps in so many different areas and of course yes there's always going to be problems and you know you we want hopefully to have better problems rather than old problems and I like that
idea by the way of better problems that you just said it's um it's something that I think about a lot in the context of life and I actually it relates to the book which is the goal is not to have no stress the goal goal is to have stress about things that you actually care
about things that actually matter the goal is not to just have an easy stressfree life the goal is to have the stress but on things that truly matter that are meaningful to you meaningful stress is actually a good thing that's marching you forward towards the future
that you want and so the goal as you said I think is well articulated it's to have better problems over time to be facing better problems in your own life or in the broader world yeah and I just read something you recently wrote in which you it was you
oh by the way happy birthday because you wrote it on the on your birthday I think and you talked about a leap of faith and it made me think of uh zor the Greek and Nikos kazakis I don't know whether you've ever read that but if you haven't I highly highly recommend it I think it
will you will uh love the book because his attitude about a lot of things seems to be very similar to yours in what when I saw your your piece on leap of faith um I thought of his quote which was a person needs a little Madness or else they never dare Cut the
Rope and be free and and so many things in life really are that leap of faith another thing he said as I was looking up to get the exact quote uh was a quote of his that I hadn't seen and I loved and so I wrote it down leave nothing for death
but a burned out Castle which I just really really love that because much of what we do does Ripple right we we don't think it does I as you were telling your story I I was thinking about my mother sounded like we had very similar parents because we she always
went to the same gas station I'm an old so I'm 64 so this is back before the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s and she always had me manners were beaten Into Me by my mother you treat everyone with respect to until they demonstrated to you that they don't
deserve it was the way she put it and so the guy who ran the gas station she always went to his name was Harold and it was always I was always to address him and forgetting his last name but Mr whatever his last name was be very polite to him do all of those things as
was she and he was a really nice guy and when I was a kid he would let me play around they they still fix SCS and everything and he'd let me go and watch those guys anyway so Along Comes the oil embargo and they do rationing they do
all of this stuff and Harold the owner WR the mobile closed his gas station but left it open only to his favorite customers of which of course my mother was one and and so she never had to wait in line she never had to do the odd even and that was not her intention at all
right her intention was you treat everyone with respect you treat everyone with dignity and and she was thinking about what might come about from that and so all those little leaps of Faith all those little things that you do I think really can impact your life much
more uh broadly later on but you never ever know I I I want to shift to to the book Because as I said I I love the way you're looking at this because so many of the books about uh Finance or money are about money right just like here's
how you do it here's how you make money this is how without ever saying hey there's all sorts of different types of wealth you've got five in your book time wealth social wealth mental wealth physical wealth Financial wealth and they're all very different and the first
one really means something to me because one of the things I forever tell younger people is you are a Time billionaire don't squander that right now it doesn't matter what else is going on in your life if you're like in your early 20s and you're done with school
you are a Time billionaire now is the time to take those leaps of Faith now is the time because you could experiment because if it doesn't work you still got all that time what come first off how did did you come up with this structure and then I
want to go through kind of each one and have you uh help our audience understand uh why they should be thinking about things in this way yeah so it helps to understand a little bit about my own background and how I kind of found my way on this journey the book is not
about me but it is a manifestation of my journey in the sense that um I feel like I sort of uncovered this in my own life and now I'm sharing this idea with the world to help others sort of avoid some of the stumbles I'm on and also provide
uh a context to think about your own life um I spent the first 30 years of my life um really chasing someone else's definition of success and when I say someone else's I mean effectively the societal cultural standard definition of success which is money uh it is
achieving uh uh and kind of uh externally uh be uh receiving the approvals through the pursuit of financial wealth through making money through status associated with that and I did that in my early years of my career working in the world of Finance
where frankly I learned a ton I built a great base I built a great foundation for my life but on that Journey as I kind of got past the like early years of um you know a really meaningful Improvement in my life quality from making more money I started to see that
my narrow almost myopic focus on making money as the path to me feeling successful as the path to my happiness I started to see that other areas of my life were beginning to crumble I was so narrowly focused on this world where my happiness my contentment my fulfillment
was on the other side of some Financial goal it was on the other side of making a million or five million or whatever the amount of money was and every time I got there I would get the thing and I would say is this it what's what's the
next what's the next thing and on that Journey these other areas of my life had started to deteriorate most importantly my relationships I was not present with the people that I love most I was living 3,000 miles away from my parents almost never seeing them my relationship with
my sister was nearly non-existent my wife and I uh were struggling to conceive at the time uh which is something that I really regret and uh attribute very um significantly to my own mental state at the time I was drinking seven nights a week uh you know
I wasn't sleeping enough there were all of these other areas of my life that were deteriorating while on the surface on the outside looking in I was winning the game quote unquote things were going well I was making more and more money I sounded
impressive and I started to have this sensation uh around the time when I turned 30 that if if that was what winning the game felt like I had to be playing the wrong game and so I went on this journey uh to try to understand a different way a different
way to measure your life that wasn't just grounded in this singular narrow focus on money uh you know Peter Ducker the management theorist uh says what gets measured gets managed and the whole idea is that the thing that we measure ends up being the thing that we focus on
the thing that we narrowly hone in on and optimize around and because money is so measurable that is all we manage around uh and we don't have a way to think about these other areas of our life even if in the back of our mind we know
they impact uh our life of happiness and our ability to experience fulfillment so that was the journey that I kind of started down I wanted to immerse myself in The Human Experience and understand what were these things that truly contributed to the life of happiness and
fulfillment we were all after and then was there a way that we could really measure them that we could really make decisions uh taking them into account that we could really design our lives around them uh so that we could build toward that future without sacrificing
all of these other things along the way I love Ducker I but I love Ducker not his management stuff I love his book Adventures of a bystander because it's filled with all of the incredibly interesting often eccentric people that he knew throughout his life and um there
was a guy who I think implicitly understood what you're talking about when you read that book that the the reason that book is so great is you could just feel he's writing about the things that actually mattered in his life he wasn't talking about oh I did I
wrote the book on GM or I did this and I'm the father of management Theory and all that or no it was all about all of these other fascinating interesting relationships in his in his life that um really make up a a a beautiful book time wealth though let's get back
to so you're still to me I'm 64 you're 34 right so I oh my goodness I could INF fact be your father um the I have a son who's turning 40 so I I could be that at and much more but the idea of of time wealth is something that how how did you
light light on that was it just yeah was it a birthday was it the birth of a child what what was it that got you really thinking about that time wealth is at the heart of this entire book and um both for a structural reason and for a sort of emotional reason the
structural reason is time is what unlocks everything else uh when you have more time wealth you have the freedom to choose how you spend your time and that means that you can allocate that time according to these other types of wealth
where you'd like to be building where you'd like to be focusing in any given season of Life we'll get back to that the emotional reason um was during a rather challenging time in my life um in 2021 all of this had sort of come to a head that Journey that I
was talking about I was uh on the outside looking in things were going well and internally I was really suffering um that was after a year and a half almost two-year period that my wife and I were struggling to conceive at the time I was seeing my parents maybe once
a year um we were living 3,000 mil away um there was a lot that was really starting to be tough that was building up and I went out for a drink with an old friend uh in May of 2021 and we sat down and he asked how I was doing and I
said that it started to get tough living so far away from my parents you know my my father's he's 69 now at the time he was uh 66 and um they had started to show cracks in their in their health it was the first time in my life that I remembered like my parents are slowing
down um and I'd never felt that when you're a kid you just think about everyone as Immortal you think about time as infinite that it's just this thing and I'm going to be around forever you know old people die but I they were never young like you know you really
don't think about it you don't think about the fact that like the old person you know was once a handsome young man that went to war uh during World War II like you don't look at the picture of them getting married in the happy honeymoon photos and recognized that's
you and this is you in the future you don't think about it and so I had kind of started to think about that with my own parents' lives and I had this sit down for a drink with a friend and he asked um how old told to your parents and I said mid-60s and he said how often
do you see them I said maybe once a year and he just looked at me and said okay so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die and I remember feeling like I had been punched in the gut um even now it makes me emotional thinking about it
the the idea that the amount of time we have left with the people we love most in the world is so finite so countable that you can put it on a few hands is jarring it shook me to the core and in that moment I recognized that something had to change and so the
next morning I told my wife that I thought we needed to make a move and within 45 days I had left my job in California we had sold our house and moved across the country to live within driving distance of our parents and I reflect on that today as the most
perfect microcosm of this idea of time wealth because that number 15 the number of times we had left with our parents has gone from 15 to being in the hundreds I see my parents several times a month now we were blessed with a son shortly after
making that move and my parents see my son all the time they're a huge part of his life he's brought incredible New Joy into their life we literally created Time by taking an action we took an action and we controlled time we created time in our lives we created time wealth
and so it's a reminder that time is a fixed entity you don't know you could get hit by a bus and when your time is done your time is done but you have a lot of control between the lines if you will you have the ability to take actions that actually create time create
moments for the things that matter to you and for the people that matter to you but we don't relate to time in that way we don't relate to it as an asset to be invested we don't relate to it as an asset that we can bend that we can play
with and shifting that in your mind recognizing that becoming aware of how finite it is but also how in control you are that is such an enormous mind mindset shift and unlock for your entire life yeah again resonates very much with me I have six grandchildren o only two
of them are not nearby and we always get together with the entire family at least once a year often much more than once a year um but and we just came off one of those and and my daughter who lives in California was basically kind of saying
exactly what you just said just sort of like man it is so nice to be all together and to watch her kids play with their cousins and just really simple little things like that those are are ultimately the things that you know when
when you're done when that bus does end up hitting you those are going to be the things that you're going to thinking about you're not going to be thinking about like how many zeros are in my bank account or you know what what did I personally accomplish through my in
quotes career for people who are just listening and now watching um and and we know that that's the important thing is we know these things in the back of our head everything that I'm writing about in the book you know this but you aren't
acting on it so you know it's one of those funny things where um you know you ask people ask a young person would you trade lives with Warren Buffett right he's worth $130 billion do he has access to anyone in the world he reads and learns for a living he flies around on
private jets and has all the fanciest houses but you wouldn't trade lives with him because he's 95 years old you wouldn't trade lives with him right like you would never trade his $130 billion for the amount of time he has left and similarly he would trade lives with you
in an instant to be young again to have that amount of time so you understand fundamentally that time has incalculable value and yet you take actions on a daily basis that completely disregard it yeah and I I wonder and you're thinking about it in you're
researching what what is it because you're absolutely right that is something that is just so objectively true that everybody gets gets and understands and yet what the we don't do it we we don't see the ones the people that we love we don't call the
people that we what is the disconnect I think there is a big disconnect in not understanding that you can invest in these other areas the exact same way that you can invest in financial wealth what I mean by that is we all everyone listening to this has a
basic understanding of building Financial wealth if I had to guess they understand that investing today compounds into the future that it builds your financial future so putting away whether it's a dollar today or $10 today or $100 today is a positive thing
because it will compound into your future all of these areas of life exist in the exact same way actions taken today compound into the future the text that you choose to send to a friend to just say hey I was thinking about you compounds into the future the 5 minute
walk that you snuck in between your meetings compounds into the future in your physical wealth the few minutes of Stillness and boredom and Clarity that you experience from just sitting on a couch rather than being on your phone compounds into your future in your
presence of mind all of these actions in these other areas of wealth compound in the same way but we don't think about them that way we don't relate to them in the same way as we do Financial wealth and if you just flip the switch to
recognize that and also recognize that not investing in them allows them to atrophy then you start operating differently you start thinking about the fact that you can invest in these other areas the exact same way that you can Financial wealth yeah and something that
I always try to get across to people is compounding goes both ways things can negatively compound as well doing the uh instead of uh being the five minutes on the couch you spend the entire day or week on the couch watching Netflix not getting any exercise eating like
and oh yeah when you're young you don't notice you at it compounds negatively compounds negatively and then suddenly you notice and it becomes a huge thing in your life where it was just a combination of these small negative compounding events same way to what
you've said do it the other way take the five minute walk send the text to the friend all of that also contributes to your next uh line which is social wealth I don't know how manufactured in quotes it is but it does seem that many people today despite all the
connectivity despite all of the ability to interact with others Etc that there really does seem to be a loneliness epidemic yeah I mean an enormous one right I think um the technologies that were meant to to bring us closer together have torn us further apart um
you are more connected uh by a technology to the all the world around you but less connected to the person sitting right in front of you um and we see that in the data over and over again Jonathan hey um you know has his Incredible Book anxious generation about
the impact of social media and phones on on children and on youth teenagers in the United States are spending 70% less time in person with their friends than they were two decades ago think about that 70% think about the impact that that has on your connection with others
on the texture of your life when you think about all of these types of wealth by the way social wealth is the one that actually enables you to enjoy any of the others I mean what good is having a yacht or a private jet if you are alone
on it like you know what good is being super healthy if you don't have someone to go for a walk with or someone to go on a hike with or someone to go on that adventure with social wealth is really at the core of all of this I mean I actually went as part of the research
for this book I spoke to thousands of people and I asked all of them um some version of this uh exercise to imagine your ideal day at 80 years old really sit down close your eyes and think about where are you what are you doing who are
you with what are you thinking about how do you feel all of these questions what you find across everyone no matter what everyone says they are surrounded by people they love that they have you know their partner their children their grandchildren they're
surrounded by people that they care about their friends and then you ask them okay well what are you doing today to go and effect that end and it's like basically chasing money right like they're they're doing nonsense in terms of actually creating that future so you
talk about the future that you want but you're not taking actions to go and build that future um and so again it goes back to that point of not thinking about how investing in those things compounds into the future that you're trying to create for yourself and so if
there's one call to action in the entire book it's that it's think clearly using the questions in the book and using the framing about what you really want what you care about not what I care about not what Jim cares about not what anyone
else tells you to care about but what do you care about and then go and take whatever tiny actions today to go and build towards that future yeah and I I like the last part there small steps small steps I'm a huge fan of the dowy Jing and LSU is uh rumored
to have said he might not have even existed by the way if you actually do the rabbit hole dive on Daoism and LSU what LSU means is kind of like Ancient One or Sage all these things and so whoever wrote the wonderful book The Dow Jing it compresses the knowledge into uh
things that are really profound but you got to read it like 75 times to really get it but one of the ones that I was immediately got was a journey of a Thousand Miles begins with a single step and it when you break it down that way at least when I've talked to people I've
gotten much further with them with just saying no no no no don't you don't have to go on a crash diet you know it's like don't don't be one of the millions of people who go to the gym the first week of January and then never ever go again
uh despite it being their their basic business model just do you know do five push-ups this morning that's all you've never done do do one don't even do five just do one and then try one the next day and then maybe try two and and the
way that compounds and I found that people can can grocket much better when you put it that way but then it also conflicts with the like both of us like have these big huge audacious goals you you want to impact a a billion people I I I want to like do all the various
things that I'm doing and so it sometimes it's it's that kind of like discount the the nature of the Big Goal vers the way there right how do how do you advise people to take that path so um when you are standing at the base of an enormous
wall it's almost impossible to see how you're going to get to the top of it and for most people probably 99% of people they just don't even start because they see this hugely intimidating thing and they say no no way I can get to the top of that so I'm just not going to do
anything in the movie The Martian Matt Damon has this scene at the very very end which most people haven't actually watched where he's talking about how he got back from Mars and what he says is you have a million problems in front of
you that are so complex and terribly hard to solve and at any point in time you want to just crumble in the face of this enormous wall of problems but that's not what you do he says you just solve one problem and then you solve the next one and then you solve the next one
and if you solve enough problems in a row you get to come home and I think about that so often that that's really what we're talking about here all you have to do is solve the one problem in front of you which is to just take the little action whatever it is and the
coolest thing about all of this is that it's not just that that action compounds it's also the feeling that it creates in you compounds the actual sensation the momentum the winning mentality that it starts to instill compounds so like when
I advise young people and I have you know my newsletter goes out to a million people twice a week I have a lot of young people that reach out to me looking for advice and a lot of them are feeling lost and the first thing I say is for 30 days wake up at 5:00 A.M and
go out and a lot of them are like what yeah I'm trying to make money I'm trying to build that has nothing to do with my career and my response is always the same which is it actually does because what you're fighting against when you
feel lost is that you don't feel in control you don't feel you have the power to take an action and create an outcome in your life and waking up early and working out reminds you that you do have that power because it is doing something very very hard that requires
discipline that will rewire your brain to remind yourself that you are a winner and if you remind yourself you're a winner it'll have Ripple effects into every single other area of your life I guarantee it and so with all of these things the whole lesson is exactly what
you said do the one tiny thing that starts to move the train that starts to actually create the positive momentum in any of these areas if you do that you'll be blown away at what you can do I mean I've um I've written this before but it's one of my favorite things which is
just to say um you're one year of focus away from people calling you lucky uh and I absolutely love that because it's um it's true right like on the back end of all of this when you change your life when you transform when you build the
business when you do whatever it is uh people are going to call you lucky and they're not they're going to be totally missing the context on The Daily Grind of what you did all along the way the effort that you put in to your second
point on the sort of tension between these like big Grand Ambitions and the daily actions um I've always thought that the right approach from a goal setting standpoint is to sort of think of uh the summit uh you know the like big goal and this is what I share in the
book it's like you have the Big Goal you have the mid climb campsite which is sort of the thing you're going to have to go through on the way there which is on a micro like daily basis it's more motivating than the big one because this is so far off it's intimidating the one
that's in the middle is a little bit more motivating and then you do the James Clear approach and what you really focus on is the daily system it's the daily action that you're going to take the micro action that's going to be marching you slowly towards that
campsite and then ultimately towards the summit yeah and that also feeds into the the next type of wealth mental wealth because uh again everything you just mentioned they they seemen to sound so simple and straightforward And yet when we look at
the world we see people doing almost often times the exact opposite of everything that we've been talking about here what what do you think it is about human OS I one of my ideas is that we have been conditioned to make things conditional right we've been conditioned
to say when I get X then then I will be happy when I do why then I will be fulfilled and and I always say don't make your life a set of conditional statements don't make your life conditional right and yet to me what we're talking about here just seems so
straightforward gosh you know I used to put something on Twitter which was a uh gift of a guy with a cloud over his head but everywhere it's sunny and the cloud is pouring rain down on him and and my tagline on it was everything is due to luck said the most unlucky man
ever that's very good so why do you think it is these things seem so kind of self-evident right that if you act with discipline if you do these smaller things they compound into much bigger and better things and yet and that that sense of agency that sense of having a
say in where your life turns out leads to also really great mental wealth and yet and yet we just see so many people and by the way so many smart people I'm not saying that these people are dumb or confused in any way just chasing the
wrong thing what do you think it is about human OS that makes that so I think it's really to factors um at least in terms of the typical uh track which one is uh the lack of a appropriate way to measure these other areas which goes back to the Peter joer quote we we don't
have a way to uh measure or stack ourselves up on uh time wealth social wealth mental wealth physical wealth historically right um and so as a result you focus on the one that you can I I mean I can go into a room and kind of like stack myself up against everyone
that's there I can track myself I can see my progress I can feel uh you know it's like it's like the mouse with the cheese you're like you get you kind of ring the bell and you get the cheese and then you you ring the bell again and you
just keep assuming you're going to get more and more and so you you get patterned uh into thinking that uh money is the kind of thing that I'm going to get patted on the back and I'm going to continue to feel good and good and good uh and then the second piece is really a
patterning thing which I think Arthur Brooks articulates it well um in that in the early years of your life money directly buys happiness we know this scientifically like early on the curve of income money and happiness are very strongly correlated because you're
reducing these fundamental burdens and stresses you're uh you know getting food you're getting shelter you're getting the ability to take one or two vacations a year you can take care of people that you care about there is a very clear
correlation but what happens is we then get patterned in those early years into saying more money equals more happiness and so we create this equation in our heads that gets firmly entrenched in those early years and it's very hard to
break that equation so once you got to the point where you were already past the like clear relationship where we know it starts to level off where we know your incremental happiness is going to come from these other areas we might know that in the back of our mind but in
the front of our mind we have this equation that says no if I make more money I'm just going to be more happy right like it's just the equation just continue so I'm just going to keep marching down that path and then it's too late and I've marched down that path
for 40 50 years all my relationships went to hell my health went to hell you know I wasn't working on things I cared about because I never fought against that equation I Never Had other ways to measure these other areas I never thought about the fact that these other
areas were what was going to drive incremental happiness so what kind you you have a Ser you have a quiz that you recommend people take in the book and you spoke to many many people on it what types of questions can people ask themselves when
they're trying to create this measurement or uh whatever for the various other types of wealth in in their life that really resonate with people in like oh okay now I get it I hadn't thought about it that way yeah well you can take the quiz online at
wealth score quiz.com which is a fun uh V uh s sort of um digital version of it which will produce this visualization for for you which is very cool at the end to kind of get a sense for how you stack up across these different areas it'll give you a score from 0 to 100
which I just find as a very helpful Baseline to think about that you're going to build against across these different areas in your life I I think um you know on time wealth the most significant question I would have would be uh to answer whether or not you are
in control of your calendar and priorities if you are in control of your calendar and priorities if you strongly agree with that statement uh you have time because that means that you get to choose what you are spending time on and you could choose to be working 100 hours
a week on something that you really care about that's great if you really care about it if you feel a lot of purpose around it that's fantastic if you choose to hang around on a beach and Bali and do nothing also great but the point is
that you have the freedom to choose you're in control of those things the other question with time wealth or the other statement that I have in that quiz is um that you have a deep awareness of the finite impermanent nature of time of
of its importance as an asset which goes back to what we talked about at the very outset of this that awareness is essential to everything because unless you have an awareness of how important time is as an asset you can't you don't play the game right you play the game
all wrong because you're not understanding you're not appreciating that time is the most important thing you're you're walking this um chart that I think of in my own life which is like most people uh if you map uh uh sort of uh their their life in years and then
against like the amount that they're thinking about time they focus on Time Zero the entire whale on the map and then at the very end of their life it's the only thing that they think about they don't think about time the entire
like 70 years and then time is the only thing they think about but it's too late then they're gone and so you you get into this pattern where I've often said this like uh life is filled with lers you especially successful people they'll
say oh spend more time with my kids later I'll uh focus on my relationship with my partner or with my friends later I'll I'll you know I'll work on my health later I'll find my purpose later and the sad thing is that later just becomes another word for never because
those things will not exist in the same way later your kids won't be 5 years old later your health won't be there later your spouse won't be there for you later if you're not there for them now and so you either build those things into your life design them into your life now or
you just end up regretting it later because later you'll be dead I when uh when I was around your age maybe a little bit younger I had two things taped to my colossal computer monitor um back in the day they looked like uh Matt you know they were as big
as the desk I'm sitting at pretty much on one side I had momento Mo which is remember you will die and uh the the other Latin quote I took six years of Latin and I got these two things out of it uh was sick Transit Gloria Mundi all worldly glory is
bleeing and it it was really helpful because every time I would think like do I really want to do this thing I would just glance up at the Monitor and go yeah I'm am G to die do I want to die doing this amazing to me the number of times that things I thought I probably would have
liked when I put it in that reframe I'm like yeah no way no way do I do I want that to happen but it it it was very helpful for me to have those two reminders that I looked at every day do you do you have anything like that trying to see if you can see this I have
a moment momentto Mory calendar like uh just up there on my wall you can't quite see it it's literally right there though it's in the book as well um uh because it's been such a powerful reminder in my life I um I thought one of the best um
one of the best articulations of this was Sam Harris um talking about the fact that there would be a last time that you would do everything in life and I write about that in the book that we need to remember that there will be a last time
that your kid wants you to tuck them into bed there will be a last time that your friends get together for for that annual trip there will be a last time that you're able to go for a walk with your parents and you never know when that last time is so you have to
appreciate and immerse yourself in those moments and you have to try to create them along the way take the actions to actually create those moments because if you don't you'll find yourself regretting it on the other side of all of these things um and again I just I
come back over and over again to one very simple idea across this entire book and this journey of the last three years working on it which is you already have these answers within you you just haven't asked the right questions yet to uncover them in your own life we know
these things I I don't like I I do not pretend to have uh created the idea that your relationships are what you know create a meaningful life or that having free time and freedom like these things are things that are within you but you
need to ask the right questions the greatest Journeys in life come not from having the right answers but from asking the right questions you need to sit with the questions and then come to the answers that matter for your life the ones that make sense for you again not
for me not for Jim not for anyone else out there but for you the other piece to all of this which is I think an important point is there are a lot of people out there probably some people listening who feel like they are not doing well on the
traditional definition of what a successful life looks like like and when you measure them according to this new definition they are worlds ahead of many of these rich people out there uh one of my one of my dear friends um played baseball together at Stamford uh decided
after school that he wanted to move back to his hometown he's a gym teacher um coaches the high school sports teams probably makes $40,000 a year not doing great on the traditional definition of success right like a Stanford degree and now you're a gym teach like you know you
get the looks right people say those kind of things uh but on the other definition he is lives within walking distance of both sets of parents he has two beautiful children married to an amazing woman he's super fit and healthy constantly
outside and he absolutely loves what he does he loves working with young people he loves coaching I would say he is extremely wealthy he's one of the happier people I know deeply fulfilled in the things that he's doing on the traditional definition not doing so
great on the new definition he is killing the game and so I also just think there is a call to action for anyone out there to measure yourself according to the right things like don't don't allow the societal default definitions of success and of wealth to
tell you that you are not living a good life because there is so much more out there to living with purpose living a Content happy fulfilling existence than just the money game yeah um Todd Rose wrote a book called Collective Illusions and I
thought of that as you were talking about your friend he he said when when you ask people in like surveys and things like that what you know what are your aspirations in life and and the answers are all the same I want to be rich or I want to be famous or I want to
do all these things and when you dig into it you say o okay what if you asked another person what thought would make them happy in life then they give the real answer as to what would actually make them happy in life and it's everything you just mentioned you know I
I want to be fit I want to be in love with somebody I want to be in a good relationship I want to have kids I I want to have a family all of these things but because of these Collective Illusions as he calls them we we get seduced into thinking that well
everybody wants that so that must be good right and so therefore that's what I'm going to say even if I don't believe it and that's the part that really just Flores me I would talk to a lot of young people especially during the pandemic um and and it would be and I'd ask them
like would you're out with your friends and and uh that you know something comes up that you don't agree with do you say oh hey I I don't agree with that I I think this and they're all like no like why not and it's because well because I want to fit in I mean
legitimate reasons I understand right but when you when you get away from the falsified preferences that often come to us through media through you know what we think other people think all of that to revealed preferences like the case of
your friend who you you're absolutely right if you stacked him up against a bunch of multi-millionaires that I know he's probably a much happier person right I just wonder like is is that just the glitch in our human OS that we can talk about it there's other it's yours is not
going to be the only book on this there's tons of people who understand this and yet when when that that survey comes along you still take yeah I want to be rich or I want to be famous right yeah I think we need to truly rewrite the definition and look that's when I
say I have a grand ambition around my own life and and my purpose and trying to impact A Billion Lives this is the idea that I want to impact people with I want I want to truly redefine what it means to live a wealthy life I want people to measure themselves completely
differently than the way we've historically measured because I I really believe there's three planes to this there's sort of the measurement which is the point in time it's it's saying like where do I sit today if if previously that was just your net worth and you
were like I'm worth $10 million change the way that we measure where we are today how we're doing in life the second piece is around decision which is to say when you make a decision about your life factor in all of this factor in the five
types of wealth not just one so if you were to come and offer me Jim a a job and you were like hey I'll pay you $25 million dollar next year to come work at this job but you have to move to Omaha Nebraska uh and you're going to hate it you're working on something that you
really don't like and you're going to be traveling all the time um would you take it previously on the old scoreboard $25 million next year I'm get on a plane get me the ticket I'm I'm there right you're jumping on it but now make that decision
with the bigger picture in mind okay 25 million so Financial wealth is a big plus but let's think about the others time wealth well you're telling me that I'm going to be traveling all the time I'm working 80 to 100 hours a week at
this new job time wealth is taking a big hit social wealth I don't know a single soul in Omaha Nebraska uh my family would be a th000 miles away so that's a big hit mental wealth you're telling me I'm working on things I don't really care about that's going to be a big hit
and then physical wealth if I'm on planes 300 days out of the year working 80 90 hours a week going to take a big hit plus Omaha's pretty cold I'm not going to be outside that much so now suddenly when I'm making that decision I can make it with the clarity of this
bigger picture of the impact that it's going to have on my life not just the one thing that I previously would have made the decision uh you know like what the single Vector that I would have decided around so from a decision standpoint it empowers you to think
about your broader life and to make a decision on a broader thing my wife and I have done that several times in the last in the last few years I mean when we um when we were making a decision after my son was going to be born and
she was thinking about uh whether she wanted to continue working or whether she wanted to focus on being a mom um she was really worried about the fin like the the financial well well like financially does it makes sense and we had to zoom out and think like okay well
your relationship with our son and the impact of like your proximity to him and really being immersed with him over these early years of his life that is a form of wealth that is social wealth and and we know that like the early years of
a relationship in the bond that's built has lasting effects over you know the coming Decades of the of the kids life and so factoring that in when we made the decision yes you're making a trade-off financially when you do something like that but there's a plus
that offsets the minus um so thinking about that as you're making decisions and then proactively the third piece as you design your life and as you think about your future factoring in the five types of wealth and thinking about how you want to prioritize or focus on
different things during different seasons of your life is a really useful framing for uh for thinking about how you actually want to live yeah when you were talking about the $25 million job offer in Omaha I thought have you seen the movie The
Princess Bride yes I have actually but it's been probably 10 years okay do you remember that Manny P character okay and he finally finds the six-fingered man who killed his father and he's got him at the end of a sword and he goes offer me money
everything the guy says offer me power and the and he goes you can have the entire Kingdom offer me everything that you have and the guy does and then he fcks it his hard he goes I don't want any of them I want my goddamn father back and like that's it right it's it I loved that
scene just because it really distills what you just said really really well he doesn't want wealth power over other people he wants his father back and like that was that was what what that animating uh aspect of his character in the movie and if if people would just
take that that deep breath like you did with your wife right my wife used to same sort of story we had our third child we got married very young and our first two kids were born when we were 24 and 27 and uh then we had uh a my wife was
working I was working and then we decided we want we wanted a third child and um so we she was born in 1995 my wife was still working and then just one night we were just sitting there and she goes I I just I don't want to work anymore more I I I want this
time because with our first two kids she had the time for them and she was just like really it was wrecking all of her other forms of wealth all of the uh endless hours that she was working and when when she quit my daughter my youngest who was maybe two at the time
marched up and down gr Avenue saying hi I'm Le oasy and my mommy isn't working anymore because I'm more important to her than anything else you forget that it's going to cause a lot of happiness in other people too yeah yeah it's um I mean it's the reality of the
decision that I may I this entire change of my life even like just sitting here having this conversation none of this would have happened if I hadn't made a decision to walk away from Financial wealth in favor of other types right like I I was
working on arguably one of the most uh lucrative risk adjusted tracks that exists I you know I was working at a private Equity Fund it's great firm great group of people I have nothing but great things to say I was just so narrowly focused on one thing that I
lost sight of the bigger picture on that Journey it wasn't anyone's fault it was my own fault and I made the decision to step off that and I'm sure I gave up a whole lot of money by doing that right like being on the partner track walking
away from carry and funds like like it is very hard to do that and the reason you know it gets harder every single year because of the way the economics of these funds work but I very seriously think that I am like the wealthiest man Al lot I have everything that I could
want right now in my life I guarantee I gave up money by doing it maybe I'll make up for it in the long run by pursuing things I'm truly passionate about and you know could I spin a case where that could where that could work out sure but the reality is on a risk
justed basis Financial wealth exclusively it made no sense but in these other areas of my life I mean even if all that changed was that I just got to live closer to my parents and be around them more in these years of their life it would have been worth it even if
all that came from it was that I got to spend more time with my sister who I now have a great relationship with as a result it would have been worth it even if it was just you know my wife and I being in a better place in life and
being able to conceive naturally and having our son it would have been worth it but all of these things together getting to stand in my purpose work on things I truly care about getting to you know refind my health and my love of Fitness all of those things together it
was it's like the most obvious decision I've ever made in my life with the benefit of hindsight yeah and you know coming off the holidays um I I I love the movie It's a Wonderful Life and I've watched it like my wife just makes fun of me
endlessly because she's like you in that goddamn movie like she goes it just is so not you and yet you love that movie so much and and as I'm talking to you I'm thinking about why I love that movie so much I love that movie so much because it is about what we are talking
about right George Bailey who has this he he has Big Dreams and he wants to go build you know huge skyscrapers and everything the movie was made in the 40s so it's a very very old movie starring uh Jimmy Stewart and and he doesn't and he ends up in this small town and he
thinks he hates everything about it and then this crisis comes and he faces jail and everything and he wishes that he'd never been born and so the angel who comes down to save him lets him see that lets him see the world without him in it
and like his brother got killed in that sledding accident his uh wife never married all all of these things and like it it one of the reasons I love it is because it does show that totality of everything you just talked about right it's like it is a wonderful life if you
look at it through that lens and you know people often say to me oh well it's easy for you to say right because you did really well in asset management and all of these things and I okay that's a legitimate criticism but the fact is like I know a lot of people
with super super high net worths who are miserable absolutely miserable and I know people who are like your friend are in modest uh renumeration jobs Etc who like every time I'm with them I just have the best time in the absolute world because they
have gotten that figured out again I just keep what what's been as I was getting ready to talked to I'm just like God I I think this topic is so important and yet why don't why is it so hard for us to get and for us to understand and I
agree with all the reasons you presented and yet like if we could wave a magic wand people's lives would just instantly just become so much more fulfilling so much better in terms of their overall sense of wow this this really is a Wonderful Life yeah yeah it um it's an
important point which is one of the most common push backs to anyone saying these kind of things is like well that's easy for you to say because you've made money or you've done these things and um I agree and I disagree I agree in the
sense that money does matter I I am not anywhere in the book I do not say that money doesn't matter right like it's five types of wealth and the fifth type is financial wealth like it it matters and there's a whole section on it and there's tactics and strategies and uh it
definitely matters I'm not saying what I'm saying is money isn't nothing it simply can't be the only thing money is a tool but not the goal and that is really important because that means that you do not narrowly focus on it at the expense of everything else it means that
you can view it in the right sense as a tool to help you build these other types of wealth it means that you can use it as a tool to buy back your time in certain cases to have more freedom it means you can create amazing experiences
with people you love that you can invest in your health uh that you can invest in uh you know pursuing passions and pursuing your growth to build that purpose build that mental wealth creating space it means that you can unlock its true utility rather than just
chasing it as some end that is supposed to from a number on a screen bring you some Immortal happiness and goodness in your life which we know it doesn't Michael Norton uh at Harvard Business School has this famous uh study where he went and asked a bunch of uh
millionaires people worth from a million on through 100 plus million um how happy they were on a scale of 1 to 10 then he asked them how much more money they would need in order to be at a tent and across the Spectrum from a million up to
100 million everyone says two to three times as much right like it makes no sense it completely defies logic but everyone says two to three times as much and I went and did it I tested it with people that I know that have a lot of money no matter what like someone worth
2 million says they need 10 someone wor 100 says they need 500 makes no sense but that is how your brain works if you don't reframe the goal if you don't think about the fact that this broader set of things in your life is what truly matters and again like it's exactly what
you said you know the rich yet miserable people you know what that existence looks like and it's not pretty right the the Forbes top 10 richest people in the world have 13 divorces among them uh you know how many rich people do you know
that don't have relationships with their children like this is not the end that I want in my life and sitting down and thinking about what that true north is for you what is the end that you want to create and then taking the tiny actions
today to go and work towards that taking the Tiny Steps today to March towards that future that's what this book is all about yeah and you know it's it's like the quote even right most people misquote the quote most people say money is the root of all evil right and and
that people know that saying and I often will have it quoted to me that's not the quote at all the actual quote is the love of money is the root of all evil completely different message right like you say and I agree with you by the way
I am not saying money doesn't matter oh it does it absolutely does at certain levels to get where you want in your purpose and your uh desire in your own life but when you make it the only measurement like you say if you make it the only measurement I.E if you love
money then you get to the root of all evil it is not money money itself is neutral in my opinion it's an information system it's a technology it allows you to swap one thing for another right like you talk about calendar and you control your calendar if you reach a
certain Financial Place yeah you can definitely control your calendar because you can have other people pay other people to do you don't want to do so not saying it doesn't matter at all I completely agree with you but it is just that that one little they missing that
the love of not money is the root of all evil I think that I I I one of the things that really does give me hope is I see young people like you writing stuff like Morgan hell is a friend and his book the psychology of money I I and you're I love seeing this new way of
thinking and it's coming mostly from you young people and I and I think that it's just a much more enlightened and a much healthier way to look at living your life yeah I think it's healthier I also just think it'll be more fulfilled like I I
actually um the pursuit of if you make money like the people that I know that have made the most money the money has been a byproduct of them pursuing their purpose them pursuing their ambition for growth for creation for creating value
in the world and so that's another piece is like there's nothing wrong with um growing your money pool or like getting better at the money game but it needs to be grounded in you pursuing something that matters to you something that you actually really enjoy like if what you
really enjoy is getting better at the game and you are loving that having fun doing that and money is sort of the score in that game that's fine it just can't be that you are saying like I'm making this much more because that's going to make me happier that's that's
not going to work but standing in the game standing in the pursuit of your purpose pursuing uh your ambition because you like growth you like learning you like the development that's great and that's totally fine you just don't want to get caught in that Loop of
the like um endless Chase for more I I mean I have this I have this line in the book um never let the Quest for more distract you from the beauty of enough and that is at the heart of this entire thing you you can't allow this Quest and
this Chase and this endless cycle looking for whatever more to Blind you to the beauty of the enough that you have right in front of you yeah and what you just said about a being a byproduct I can absolutely attest to that in my old career of asset management I had the
opportunity to meet some of the richest people in the world and I can count on both hands the number who told me they did it for the money all of the people that aren't on those two hands so in other words hundreds and hundreds of the most financially successful people in
the world who I had the opportunity to meet and then sometime cases managed their money for them all of it was a byproduct all of it it was just because I loved fill in the blank and it just and one thing led to another and and they end up uh uh quite
Rich so I I definitely think if you can take just one thing from this conversation to our listeners and viewers here it is this pursue that what you love read this book understand the way this mixes together but it is a byproduct it is not the
central thing to be chasing I think that if more people could understand that we' just have a lot we'd have a lot more happiness uh in general uh and in specific cases as well because again I just see so many people have so many talents they're ridiculously talented at
a whole variety of things and they just are doing the wrong thing and and you know it's just like well butt butt butt no no no no butts just think about it deeply what do you love follow that love and then just let it be a byproduct I cannot I
cannot underline that more because the by the way the the very the tiny percent percentage of people who made it really big financially and and that I spoke to who said they did it for the money they were all miserable there you go that's a perfect summary of this entire
thing well this has been absolutely a delight for me um the book is out uh and available everywhere when this podcast drops um where else can people find you well you can find anywhere at sahill Bloom on any of the major platforms um
the book is called the five types of wealth as we've talked about and yes you can get it anywhere books are sold uh hopefully support your local bookstore uh we love when you do that um and I'm just excited to see people take these ideas and run with them and see what
actions uh they spark in your life and the ripples that uh that I hope it can start to create great a great purpose and a great goal well if you've listened to the podcast in the past you know that uh our final question is always not
really too much of a question it is we are going to be enchanting you and making you the emperor of the world you can't kill anyone you can't put anyone into a re-education camp but what you can do is we're going to give you a magic microphone and you can say two
things into it and the two things you say into it are going to incept all eight billion so you're going to get you're going to meet your goal you're going to surpass your goal of a ion you're going to get all 8 billion people are going to wake up whenever their next
morning is and they're going to have these two things in the center of their mind and they're going to say unlike all of the other times when I had an idea never acted on it this time I'm gonna act on these two things starting today and just continue and allow them to
compound what two things are you going to incept into the world's population reject the default definitions of success is one and two live by your own design true I I I love both of those I especially love live by your own design because that was another thing when I
was actually giving Financial advice to people I realized when I was young I was a real protier and I was like this is the way you got to do it and you got to have this process and you've got to do this and you want it empirical evidence
and everything and then I realized wait a minute that works for me it might not work for the person I'm saying giving that advice to it all so I modified it intentionally to say find something that works perfectly for you and that you
know that you can stick with that's going to be the right system for you so I I I love both of those but I particularly love number two so happy to hear it this has been so much fun for me thank you so much for taking the time and congratulations on the book Thank you