Happy New Year, man.
Happy New Year. How did you spend it?
Well, I have a two and a half year old, so I'm guessing our New Year's were a little bit different.
I went to bed at 8 .30 after a little dance party with my two and a half year old little guy.
Okay, well, I had norovirus.
I was in a three piece tuxedo at the New York Athletic Club running back and forth from shedding my brains out in the toilet.
But you were in New York, so we were actually like a few miles apart, but we were having a very different...
It could have been my toilet.
Oh, we would have been asleep.
me and the two and a half year old sharing a bathroom together at three in the morning yeah we actually have someone that does that on a frequent basis so you would you wouldn't have been alone that's good just if you do have a stomach bug my advice is don't wear an outfit that requires three minutes
to undo have you ever seen the family guy episode where peter gets the uh pajama pants that have the like trap door in the back yeah you should have just worn one of those that would have been a solution but the problem was that the guy at the front the toilet attendant guy at the front must have thought
this man i'm in a event filled with rich bankers and like dynasty money and all the rest of it uh probably quite a lot of cocaine going around he must have looked at me and thought that is the fucking king of cocaine for sure that man is shoveling some good stuff in there because i was back and forth
every seven minutes or so was it one of those bathrooms that had like a person that would hand you a towel after you washed your hands.
Mercifully not. He was outside.
That's always a little embarrassing.
Speaking of the new year though, I saw a tweet from you that said, you're one year of focus away from people saying you got lucky.
And yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
Yeah. That's an important concept.
It's one of those things that I think about a lot that once you've made it, once you've achieved success, everyone wants to call you lucky.
all those people that were like in the dark hating on you all the people that were belittling you when you wanted to go and chase that dream when you wanted to go do the thing they're the first ones to call you lucky once you achieve it and they didn't see all of the shit that you did in the dark all
the struggles all the failures all the pains that you came back from but they're the first ones that are going to go around saying that you got lucky on the back end so i think the call to action is wear that as a badge of honor when people are calling you lucky you've clearly done something right because you
know what went in in the dark behind it the other one is i bet you had wealthy parents yeah your privilege i mean that's been a meme over the last few years right it's like well that doesn't acknowledge the privilege um i do think that um you think about your own life and like the life cycle the early
years of your life are governed by type one luck blind luck right like the base circumstances of your life act of god where you're born who you're born to, all of those things.
But beyond that, your luck is mostly a byproduct of the actions that you're taking in your life.
It's mostly a byproduct of the motion that you're creating and the things that you're building, how you're actually going out and interacting with the world.
Idea being, it's very hard to get lucky sitting on the couch doing nothing at home.
It's much easier to get lucky if you're going out and doing something.
Yeah, you've got a bracket that your world exists within.
And much of that bracket has actually been determined by things that were outside of your control.
But within that bracket, almost everything is within your control.
And the fact that people can't hold two thoughts in their mind at the same time is where that gets confusing.
And you get accused of victim blaming, or not fully understanding the challenges that people face, or pandering and not giving people sufficient motivation and giving them a hard enough kick up the arse to get them to go and do the thing.
So ultimately, I think that it's very difficult to please anybody, frankly.
But Yeah, the fact that one year of focus, it is absurd to look back as you get a little bit older and find individual 12 month periods where you say, wow, the difference between the beginning and the end of that.
And for me, you can probably track it from the beginning of the year as well.
It doesn't happen June to June.
It does tend to happen January to December.
And that's an interesting thing about resolutions.
I know it's cool to hate on resolutions to kind of take a more holistic view and say, well, there's nothing particularly special about January 1st.
Why couldn't you have done it on December 31st?
Because the human brain is irrational and it uses loads of random motivation.
Look at the, you'll have seen this, the split times for marathon, and they all cluster around important milestones.
They cluster around three hours and 3 .15 and 3 .30.
But there's not a big spike at 3 .37.
Have you seen diamond pricing?
no diamond pricing is a perfect example of this a 1 .99 carat diamond versus a 2 .00 carat diamond it doesn't just go up by that tiny percentage it's a huge leap because the human mind has this like ego attached to the two versus the one no one wants to give their girlfriend a 1 .99 carat you want to give
her the 2 .01 so the price goes up like 20 on the slight jump it's that exact thing yeah yeah and i you know i that's why i i'm we're at the start of the year i'm all for someone carrying the new year's resolution thing forward and uh yeah you can achieve an awful lot in a single year yeah and you take
the time to zoom out at the end of the year no matter what like no matter who you are and part of that's because you have the space to do it right like because of whatever you're doing for work it slows down whether you're an entrepreneur or whether you work for someone nine to five, you actually have space
in your life to zoom out and think at the end of the year.
And so people do it then, it's natural.
And as a result, you have a comparison point that is very natural from year to year because you were able to zoom out on an annual basis.
I mean, I think about that all the time of like just how much can change in a year.
It's very easy to say that things take 10 years.
Like I think Bill Gates was the one that said that most people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in 10 years.
And I've often thought that that same exact quote applies to a year.
I mean, it will blow your mind.
If you actually sit down and are focused every single day for a year, your entire life can change.
Yeah. What's the problem people have when they look at the scoreboard of their lives?
You know, we're kind of hinting toward what it means to live a good life, how you sort of create the constituent parts of that.
What do people get wrong when they think about that scoreboard?
Peter Drucker, a famous management theorist you might know, once said, what gets measured gets managed.
And it's this idea that the thing that you can measure becomes the thing that you optimize around, the thing that you very narrowly focus on, myopically focus on.
And for us in our own lives, that thing that we can measure is money.
It's so easy. You can put a single number and apply it to your entire life.
So you know your worth, so you can compare yourself to others.
And money's measurability is a feature, not necessarily a bug.
It's really useful.
And as a result, it's perpetuated through society.
But because it's so measurable, it becomes the entire focus of our lives.
It's the only thing that we think about when we try to progress on the life scoreboard, right?
When we try to win the game, it's the thing that we focus on.
But unfortunately, it is not particularly well aligned with trying to build a meaningful, happy, successful life.
It is up to a point very useful as a tool to reduce fundamental burdens and stresses.
I know you've had Arthur Brooks on here.
He's done a bunch of research around this.
At the lower levels of your life, we know you can reduce a bunch of stress by having money.
You can take care of the people around you.
You can pay for food, shelter, all those basic things.
But once you get past that point, the science is pretty clear that it's not going to be money that drives incremental fulfillment and happiness.
Yeah, it feels like you've spent a lot of time looking at the relationship between money and happiness.
It's too trite to say, being poor can make you miserable, but being rich might not make you happy.
Summarize that for me.
Yeah. Basically, all of the research is summarized around three points.
At lower levels, money does buy happiness.
At the lower levels of, let's say, annual income, money directly buys happiness.
And it's very clear that it does that because it reduces those fundamental burdens and stresses.
Above a baseline level, which you can argue over what that baseline level is.
The first and most formative study was Daniel Kahneman, he said $75 ,000 a year.
Then everyone went nuts and said, no, it's not 75.
Then there was one that said $200 ,000 a year.
The number is sort of beside the point because if you live in New York City with two kids, that number is going to be significantly higher than someone living in Omaha, Nebraska, or Mississippi, or a random place somewhere in the world.
But the point is that at that baseline level, once you get above it, if you are unhappy and you're at that baseline level, more money doesn't make you happier.
And if you're happy at that baseline level, more money is not going to make you happier.
So your natural disposition at that level is more important.
And the other things in your life are what are going to be driving incremental happiness.
It's going to be free time.
It's going to be people.
It's going to be purpose.
It's going to be health.
It's these other things in life that drive the incremental gains above it.
I think Arthur Brooks does an incredible job summarizing this well when he says, we are sort of like rats, we're sort of like mice with cheese, where early in our life, you ring this money bell and you experience this happiness because you're on that early part of the curve and because it is actually
improving your life in a meaningful way.
But we create this pattern in our mind that that natural linear relationship between money and happiness is going to continue forever.
And we hit the point where it is no longer doing it, but we think it's going to continue to so we go our entire lives continuing to try to ring the money bell thinking it's going to bring us those same gains from early even though it doesn't what was that study that you told us about in our chat to do
with when you ask people how much money they want to would make them happy yeah and it continued it continues to go up can you explain that yeah michael norton is a harvard business school professor and he did this study with high net worth individuals so anyone worth $10 million up through hundreds
of millions of dollars.
And he asked them on a scale of one to 10, how happy they are.
And they all answered.
And then he asked, how much money would you need in order to be at a 10?
And across the board, whether they were worth 10 million, a hundred million, a billion, they all said somewhere from two to five X as much money as they currently have.
So no matter what, it didn't matter if they were worth 10 or worth a hundred, they all said two to five X.
And I've gone and anecdotally asked successful people in my own life.
I did in our group chat.
I asked everyone, I went and asked hundreds of people this question.
And across the board, you find this like someone worth 10 million says they need 30 because then they could fly private more.
Someone worth a hundred says they need 500 because then they would get invited to the cooler yacht parties, whatever the thing is, we just naturally reset to three to five X.
Yeah. It's fascinating about the what's get what it is that we can measure is the thing that we care about the most.
And money is just the best game at that.
Is that an argument to try and gamify the other areas of your life?
Should you have a dashboard that's tracking everything else?
I mean, that's exactly what I'm trying to do with this book.
You know, the whole idea of creating a measurable tool for these other areas of life that we know are the ones that create meaning and fulfillment.
We know what they are.
Like, I'm not giving you a new answer here.
I'm helping you actually ask the question so that you can figure out how to build your life around those things.
We know that having meaningful relationships makes you happier and more fulfilled, right?
Actually, the science on this is abundantly clear.
The Harvard study of adult development was this study conducted over 85 plus years, 2000 plus participants.
And they found that the single greatest predictor of living a good life was the strength of your relationships.
And actually, the single greatest predictor of their physical health at age 80 was relationship satisfaction at age 50.
It was more impactful than whether they smoked or drank, whether they had high blood pressure, cholesterol, any of those things.
It was your relationships that actually impacted it.
But we don't have a way to measure how we feel about our relationships or where they are in the same way that we do money.
Or we don't have a way to measure how we feel about our purpose and whether we're pursuing things with curiosity and growth.
We don't have a way to measure whether we feel good about our health in the same way, although that's getting a bit better.
But all of these things we need to factor into like an overall life wealth score so that you can have them alongside money on that journey.
What's the life razor?
This is one of my favorite concepts from the book.
So you know what the, for anyone that doesn't understand what a razor is, a razor is a rule of thumb to simplify decision -making.
The most famous razor that people talk about is Occam's razor.
It's the idea that the explanation, the simplest possible explanation is often the best one.
Basically, simple is beautiful.
And in the book, I proposed this idea of having a life razor, a single decision -making heuristic that allows you to cut through the noise in your own life, something that allows you to navigate whatever chaos ensues, to just have a simple way to make a decision in those moments.
And the best example of that that I've come across was Mark Randolph, the CEO of Netflix, posted this tweet several years ago where he said, my definition of success.
And it was all about the fact that every single Tuesday throughout his entire career, he had founded some of the most transformative technology companies in the world.
He had a hard rule that at 5 p .m.
on Tuesday evening, he would take his wife out for a date.
No matter what, he started one of the biggest companies in the technology world.
He would leave at 5 p .m.
to take his wife out on a date and when i spoke to him the one thing that became very clear to me was it didn't have that much to do with the date or any one particular evening with his wife it had everything to do with what it implied about who he was as a person what it meant for his identity as a human being
that he was the type of person who left at 5 p .m.
to take his wife out for a date that he had these clear priorities in mind and it implied things to the people around him.
It was ripple creating in his life.
We all need a similar idea to that in our own world, something that defines who we are as a person.
So my life raiser would be that I will coach my son's sports teams.
For me, that is in some ways about the type of father that I am to him, that I have to be the type of person that my son wants to be around.
It also means that I'm the type of person that will never sacrifice my integrity or character for the pursuit of, you know, some new thing, some more.
Because if I do that, uh, my son won't want to have me around.
He won't be proud to have me coaching his teams.
My wife won't be proud to have me out in the community.
The community won't want me around.
So in a moment when I have a decision to make, I can ask myself, what does the type of person who coaches his son's sports teams do in this moment.
The single ordinating principle thing, I seem to remember two examples, one from Bezos, one from Elon.
The Bezos one was every question through Amazon went through the filter, does this make the customer experience better?
And I think Elon's was, does this get us closer to Mars?
And yeah, when you think that there's a lot of ways that the world can be chaotic and bringing that under a single variable, one dimension, does this achieve, does this get us closer to x does this make me more likely to be the sort of father that would be able to coach my son's sports teams does this make
me more likely to be able to leave at 5 p .m to go on a date with my wife that helps a lot yeah i mean the space example is a good one the elon example because the example i give in the book of where i started to think about this was from apollo 13 you know that movie um so in the like climactic scene
of apollo 13 uh they're trying to re -enter the atmosphere and they're having to do a manual burn of the engines because the computers are all shut down and if they come in too steep they're gonna like blow up if they come in too shallow they're gonna skip off into space and they don't have a way to
figure out the perfect angle and tom hanks has this heroic moment where he's like well i just have to keep a fixed uh point in space and if i can keep the earth in this tiny triangular window that's sitting here in front of me it's going to allow us to enter at the proper angle and that whole concept
of like keeping the earth in the window is really what i'm talking about it's having that one central point of focus that allows you to cut through all of the complexity and chaos that enters your life how do people find that out you have to know what matters to you you have to know what you truly care about what is your
true north in life?
And the question I often ask people is, what does your ideal day look like at age 80?
Really think about that.
Truly visualize and imagine what your ideal day looks like as an 80 -year -old.
And who are you with?
What are you doing?
What are you thinking about?
How do you feel? And then think, are you actually taking actions today to create that future because what happens is most people will say my ideal day is sitting with people i love feeling healthy of modern body and mind thinking about things that i care about friends coming over and then you ask them
what they're doing on a daily basis and they're basically chasing bullshit right they're chasing money they're drinking they're you know partying doing not like things that actually are not leading to that end that they say they want it's like the uh the adage of don't tell me your priorities, show
me your calendar. Are your actions actually creating the future that you are trying to create?
Yes or no? Be honest with yourself, be able to look in the mirror.
But those things that we want are remarkably similar, but our ability to take actions on them in the present is very different.
Is it a challenge, especially as people maybe a little bit younger in their life is in more flux because the thing that you want right now might be to get a partner?
That's really what I want.
what I really, really should be focused on.
Does this make me more likely to be attractive to the sort of person I would spend the rest of my life with?
Well, after a while, presuming that you managed to be successful in that, that needs to fall by the wayside.
And then there's another one.
And maybe that's an even shorter window.
Like when your son is 18, I mean, unless you end up going to the jets or something and you're like, wow, this is fucking sick.
I've like transitioned again um that's gonna have to change yeah your life has seasons and what you prioritize or focus on during any one season can and should change and as a result your life raiser will change across these different seasons of your life obviously while my son is young my life raiser
can be this as he gets older when he moves on when he's you know off and it's just my wife and I again, or, uh, you know, when we have different priorities, that life razor will change just like your priorities and focus change.
I mean, my twenties and thirties, early thirties were spent very much in a foundation building season of my life.
I was trying to build a financial foundation, which is a great way to use your twenties.
Don't get me wrong.
Like I am not anywhere in this book saying that money doesn't matter, like that you should, oh, go and move to the Himalayas and just like drink warm broth and meditate for 12 hours a day.
I mean, if you want to do that, by all means go do it I just won't be joining you I like money uh money isn't nothing it simply can't be the only thing we'll get back to talking to Sahil in one minute but first I need to tell you about Nomatic traveling should be about the pleasure of the trip and not the stress
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to work smart yeah i think that the narrative around hard work has been lost uh especially with the current generation, it sort of became a meme to say hard work is overrated and that you have to work smart.
You cannot work smart before you work hard because you have no idea what to work smart on.
You just have no clue, right?
You don't, it's like the way that I think about it is when you're young, the only asset you have is time.
It is the only asset you have.
You don't have networks.
You don't have money.
You don't have knowledge.
You don't have experience.
You don't have wisdom.
You don't have any of those things.
You have time. So what you need to do is you invest your time to gain knowledge, networks, money, wisdom, experience.
Then you can work smart because you have these things.
You know where to deploy them for the highest potential ROI for those extraordinary outcomes, but you can't do this before you have it and so working hard is the investment of that time to acquire the experience the wisdom the knowledge the networks the money and then once you have it you can deploy
it to work smart yeah another one that I loved from you the worst decisions in life are made when you allow your head to talk you into something when your gut already said no and that I think even if you haven't done the formal exercise of the life razor you have an idea about where you want to be and there's
this little voice in the back of your mind that keeps a tally you know that um what's like game where like hot or cold and someone's trying to work out what it is that you've hidden in the room and you're going warmer warmer colder colder colder and there's just a little radar gps ticker in the back
of your mind that goes hey you moved yourself further away from the person you want to be today and if it's poorly defined i think that probably causes um discontent because fuck like what what is that thing what is that place I'm going to I know I moved further away from it today with my actions but I
don't I can't specifically tell you why maybe or maybe I can but I can't tell you what it was that I moved further away from I just know that I acted like a bit of a dick today but yesterday perfect example I got off the plane and I'd had like a fucking norovirus so a bad 48 hours the plane journey
had been long I'd been traveling and I had to get in it was all rushed and uh i wasn't as courteous to the uber driver as i should be and uh i remember thinking like huh that that's not the sort of person i want to be so like sort of shook his hand and wished him a good day and tipped him and stuff
afterward and was like okay like that kind of rids me at least a little bit of this agitated state uh but yeah the everybody knows like you know you've got this little conscience or daemon or whatever sat in the back of your mind knowing if you're moving yourself further toward that or further away
regardless of whether you've designed and defined your life razor or not yeah it takes a level of self -awareness to tune into that gut i think of that gut as like your energy in a lot of ways our our mutual friend george mack has that thing of like uh treadmill or couch friends uh and that's a perfect
example of this exact thing of tuning into how you actually feel about something is a very good way to make decisions in your life.
I mean, I think about the number of bad business and financial decisions I've made where I knew it didn't feel good, but I allowed myself to be talked into it by my head.
Like the initial gut instinct, the energy was, oh, this doesn't make sense.
This is not good. There's some signal.
There's something that's off.
I don't feel good about it.
But then you start the like, well, I could make this, I could do this, this could happen.
What if this? And you talk yourself into it.
And inevitably, those things go to shit and it ends up being bad.
But you're allowing your head to outsmart your gut.
And so I think that just tuning into that more regularly, learning to just listen to that initial gut instinct on something, the energy and what it tells you is a great razor for life with people, with business deals with financial decisions with all of this so yes but more so when you have more experience
because again in the first instance if you're 20 what what do you I mean unless you've had a very experiential teens what the fuck are you listening to yeah what what experience are you drawing on here that is where you would look at it and maybe call it impulsivity sort of irrationality, emotionality.
You're not being driven by making logical, illogical decisions.
But yet, as you start to accumulate some battle scars and some experience and some decades under your belt, I think that's when you can.
But again, this is periods of your life, seasons of your life, right?
The tools that got you here won't get you there.
And one of the tools that got you here was being very deliberate, very thought through, very top down.
You're like dictating to the rest of your body.
This is what you're going to do.
You're going to push hard.
You're going to train more.
You're going to et cetera.
And after a while you go, Hey, body's saying it needs to take a rest.
And the last time this happened and I didn't listen to it, I, that was when I injured my knee.
That was when that I got burned out.
That was when I got sick and fucking got norovirus at New York athletic club.
Uh, I think again, one of those periods where the tools need to change.
Are you familiar with the concept of winner's game versus loser's game?
No, this is one of my favorite ideas for life.
So this originates from tennis where amateur tennis is a loser's game, meaning you win by avoiding unforced errors.
80 % of points are lost on unforced errors.
Professional tennis is a winner's game, meaning you win by hitting magnificent shots, by hitting perfect, elegant shots.
It is extremely important in life to know what type of game you are playing, and the reality is that most games of life are loser's games.
You win by simply avoiding unforced errors, by showing up over and over and over again with reliability, by doing what you say you're going to do, by showing up and doing the boring basics.
But the challenge in life is identifying when the game changed, because if you keep trying to play an amateur tennis loser's game, but now you're playing professionally, you're going to get smoked because you're going to be trying to play like a backboard.
You're going to be trying to avoid unforced errors while the other person is just killing you with incredible shots.
And so understanding when the game has changed in your own life is really important.
Like early in your life, saying yes to every single opportunity you get is a great game to play because it's what allows you to invest your time to gain the experience, to start building that gut instinct, to start building your understanding of it.
But suddenly the game changes.
And if you keep saying yes to everything, you burn yourself out.
You take on dumb opportunities.
You're wasting all of your time and energy on stupid 1x time for money trades when you should be focusing on the elegant, magnificent shots that are gonna generate the 10x, 100x outcomes in your life.
Have you got any idea about how people can recognize when that's happening to them?
I think you start to see that the early investments in your networks and in your sort of opportunity sets are compounding.
Like what you start to feel is more interesting opportunities are coming to you at an accelerating exponential rate.
And when you see that start to happen, you need to take a pause in your life to recognize what you need to start saying no to to open up the space to pursue those big ones.
It's like ventilating your life.
You need to breathe space into your life so that you actually have the bandwidth to take on those big opportunities.
I often think that one of the greatest skills and one of the most common traits of the most successful people I've ever spent time around is that they have the highest tolerance for uncertainty.
They are actually willing to tolerate uncertainty for long periods of time.
They are willing to be static for long periods of time.
Give me an example.
Tim Cook, when he left IBM to take a job at Compaq, like people don't know this.
Don't think about his early part of his career all that much, but he spent the early part of his career rising through the ranks at IBM.
He was in their like, you know, executive management program, big company, you know, rising through the ranks at this big company.
But one of, yeah, one of unlimited number of fucking people.
And Steve jobs was recruiting, uh, for a role at Apple and saw Tim's resume and looked at it and was like, ah, big company guy, probably not a fit for Apple and their more startup culture.
And so passed on it.
Six months later, he, uh, saw it was still recruiting for that role and saw the resume again.
And at that point, Tim had left IBM in the safe track he was on to take this job at Compaq, which was this small computer startup at the time.
And at that point, Steve then had this pattern interrupt about the type of person that Tim was.
All of a sudden, he was like this guy that had taken on something very uncertain.
He had done something very different.
So he decided to have a conversation with him.
Obviously, now you fast forward 20 plus years and trillions of dollars of value that Tim has created at Apple.
And it's this enormous case study to me of someone who is willing to tolerate some uncertainty of doing something different.
It didn't make sense.
It was a pattern interrupt in his life that sparked this enormous chain of dots that were connected out into the future.
I have a friend who worked for a big recruitment company for a while here in Austin, and they place very, very high level tech execs around the world.
And it meant that he was able to have access to some of the first and second round interviews that they did with the best candidates on the planet.
And Tim Cook was one of them.
Susanna was another one of them, too.
And I was asking him this question.
I was saying, hey, man, so what's the difference between, you know, these people that go on to earn obscene packages and then the best in the world, the people that lead the, you know, FTSE 100 companies?
and he said well I can tell you what the first line of the first word of Tim Cook's summary was remembering that these people they spend their time trying to find holes trying to pick holes and what is it the psychographic profile what is it to do with their childhood that's coming up what is it to
do with their work ethic where oh they've got an inability to deal with criticism or they're too concerned about the opinions of others or whatever it might be and uh the first word the top of the summary of Tim Cook just said, rockstar, full stop.
In a sea of the best candidates on the planet, there is still a step difference between everybody and then the best.
I thought that was so cool.
Super cool and completely consistent with my own experience.
I mean, I've been very lucky to spend a lot of time with Tim over the years.
He's been sort of a mentor and friend to me for the last 10 years.
I originally met him in 2014.
He was the relatively new CEO at the time.
And the way that I met him was because he was working out at the gym at 4 .45 every single morning before going into the office.
He would wake up at 3 .45 and send off emails, be working, doing things, get to the gym at 4 .45, work out.
He was probably getting into the office by 6 .15 before any of his employees were probably even awake.
And you think about that and think about the fact that you are the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world, and you are still doing that.
You are literally on a daily basis, like meat and potatoes, behavior and actions.
And then it becomes no surprise that someone like that has been able to do and achieve the things that he's done.
I mean, a laser intensity and focus on the things that matter.
Have you ever heard Dana White talk about what it's like being friends with Donald Trump?
now dude it's wild dana says trump will come to one of the ufc events and he'll watch you know he rocks up toward the beginning of the main card and he'll walk out with him and he'll do that and fucking kid rocks with him or whoever uh elon jumping about in the background and um then he'll watch the fights
and he'll like shake the hands and do the thing and he'll leave and then Dana will be on the way home and he'll get a call from Trump because he wants to talk about the fights and he wants to discuss stuff and then they'll get on to something else he'll go to bed and by the time that Dana Dana is a guy
to me that seems very very high energy uh by the time that Dana's gone to bed and got back up Trump's already on his flight and he'll have messages from him about shit that they spoke about the night before and I don't know man it doesn't matter whether you like him or not whether you agree with his politics
or not for a guy that's 78, 79, something like that.
That's fucking terrifying.
I don't, none of my friends in our thirties are able to do that.
And, uh, yeah, that's when you realize that there are builds to people that are kind of inevitable.
Uh, Peterson's got this line about, um, like conscientious people are crazy.
If you put them in a, uh, abandoned forest with an axe, they're just running around chopping down trees for no reason.
And, um, yeah, that's the kind of tim cook like trump energy like just chopping trees yeah there's levels to this shit i always think that like sometimes you just encounter someone and you just realize there's levels to these games and i have always thought that like if you were working for someone
like that you just have to know from the get -go that you are never going to outwork your boss and there's something about that like being that type of person that just sends a signal to the world through your actions it you got to keep in mind like tim doesn't ever i mean it very rarely does interviews
very rarely you know speaks publicly about his habits or his routines it's not like you know he's not he's not a thread boy uh you know like on twitter being like here's my morning routine doing it's just his actions and you know what he's doing on a daily basis through the output and we lose sight
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No one cares. And at the end of the day, your deeper routine and your morning routine may get you social media likes, but your quality and quantity of your output is what gets you paid.
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I always think if you're talking that much about what you do, how the fuck do you have time to do what you say you do?
It blows my mind, you know, productivity, business, corporate gurus that seem to have an unbelievable amount of spare capacity to do Instagram stories and to talk.
I'm like, when are you ever actually fucking working?
Because it's my job to make content and I don't have time to do that much stuff.
And also very little desire to do it as well, which kind of makes me skeptical about whether you can do the things that you say you can do or whether you can only say that you can do the things that you say that you do.
Yeah, it is like it's it's the meme of social media in general around these things.
Like the other day, I someone posted about start wanting to wake up earlier in the new year.
And I commented on it and just said that for the first six years of my career, I woke up at 345 every single morning uh and that was because i was working in finance i was working an 80 to 100 hour a week job where i wanted to be really successful at it and uh if i wanted to work out before going to
the office i'd be there at 6 30 i had to wake up and go go to the gym and do that and i did it for six years and i still wake up at 4 4 15 in the morning because those early morning hours are like sacred to me and someone replied i sort of posted my daily routine and how many hours i was at the office
and someone replied from what a decade ago something yeah this is from uh 2014 to 2020 before covid and uh someone commented was like how many of your 14 hours at work were deep work and I replied semi -seriously actually quite seriously I don't even know what that means like I don't know what deep work
means I just had to get a lot of shit done there was no like ritual I wasn't like sitting down with some perfect you know coffee ritual I just had to do a lot of work.
I just had to get a lot of shit done.
And if I had been worried about my deep work routine or if I had been worried about like needing to cold plunge before doing that, frankly, and this is coming from a guy that I am into stuff like that, I just I wouldn't have been able to get things done.
And so if you're focusing on all those things rather than just focusing on creating incredible output, quality and quantity, you're just studying for the wrong test.
Yeah, I brought it up with George over Christmas.
Again, probably one of my favorite things I learned from him last year i think it's a uh michael grove quote that says there are so many people working so hard and achieving so little and uh yeah it look i i come from a productivity background when i first started the show i was chatting shit about pomodoro
timers and notion external brains and and ebbing house forgetting curves and all of that right i've been through the ringer which is why i'm allowed to say it and um you realize after a while that it ends up being this weird superstitious rain dance you're doing this sort of odd sort of productivity
rain dance in the desperate hope that later that day you're going to get something done and some of that stuff does really help and you kind of need to go through this process of ah it wasn't the the 15 push -ups before i do my calls oh it wasn't it was this thing that's the highest point of leverage
and i get rid of everything else and that's the highest point of leverage and i get rid of everything else you create the sort of very very high leverage points for each of those individually, but we're talking about time.
What, what do you think is the big question that people have when it comes to time wealth?
If the two things that people probably realize that they need most in life is some form of money and time when they're thinking about at least objective metrics, why, why do we struggle so much to sort of use our time effectively?
Why does it slip through our fingers?
The lack of awareness of time as your most important asset and your most valuable asset is the most damning problem that people face.
I often ask young people, would you trade lives with Warren Buffett?
He's worth $130 billion.
He has access to anybody in the world.
He reads and learns for a living.
He flies around on private jets and stays in mansions all around the world.
But you wouldn't trade lives with him because he's 95 years old.
There's no way you would agree to trade the amount of time you have for the amount of time he has, even for $130 billion.
And so you simultaneously acknowledge subconsciously that your time has incalculable value.
It's worth more than $130 billion.
And yet you take actions on a daily basis that spit on that.
You disregard it. You spend time on low value, stupid activities.
You sit on your phone scrolling around doing nonsense.
You don't focus on the things that really matter.
You move around like a rocking horse, right?
You're like rocking back and forth, but never going anywhere.
And so really recognizing that time is the most important asset.
It's not any of these other things.
And the way that you invest and spend your time is the most meaningful decision that you're gonna make in your life.
That is the first step to unlocking any level of time wealth.
How do you come to teach people about this?
What is it? You've got somebody who for the first time is beginning to think about their time.
You're like, huh? Here's some ways that we can audit how you're spending yours.
I think I offer this in the book, this idea of the energy calendar.
So at the end of a workday, look at your calendar and color code activities from the day according to whether they created energy, meaning you felt good during and after them, they were neutral, mark them yellow, or they were energy draining, you didn't feel good, mark them red.
So it's green, yellow, red.
At the end of a week, if you do that for a week, you have a very clear sense of the types of activities you are spending time on that are conducive to your energy that means you're feeling good from them or that are draining, that are like killing you in whatever way.
If you can slowly work toward a world where that calendar looks more green than red, you are going to feel significantly better and as a result you're going to create significantly better outputs.
We all know that the activities that are pulling us that we feel drawn towards are the ones where we produce the best outputs where we produce those like 10, 100x outcomes that actually meaningfully change our lives.
You wouldn't do three podcasts a week for the last however many years if you weren't drawn to having conversations with people.
I wouldn't have written two newsletters a week for the last three, four years if I wasn't drawn to writing about these problems.
You can't fake things over long periods of time.
So leaning into those things where you have energy naturally for them and leaning away from the things that are killing you is a really good way to just naturally reposition in your time.
Because you could wait long enough and see what stuff stuck about because after half a decade, the only things that you're continuing to do that training, if you don't like the gym that much, your training is going to be inconsistent over a long enough time period because white knuckling your way through
something that you hate just doesn't work given a broad enough time horizon.
Yeah, you have to find the version of it that is authentic and real for you.
But you can get to this realization sooner by doing an audit on a daily basis.
I quite like that. I'd imagine that many people's calendars would look terrifyingly red if they were to go back and do it.
Yeah, and you can actually make real changes immediately.
Like the first thing when I say this to people, they're like, well, I just work in, you know, I work in a job.
I have to do a bunch of things that are energy draining.
I totally understand that and agree with it.
When I first did this, I was working in my finance job, 80 plus hours a week.
And the biggest energy draining activity for me still to this day is the like chit chat, phone call, pick your brain meeting, like either Zoom or phone call sitting at my desk.
I would rather staple gun my stomach and go to the hospital than sit on a day of Zoom calls.
I just, I cannot stand it.
And so I had blocks of those that were just all red.
But what I noticed was that taking a call on a walk is actually pretty energy creating for me.
I actually think the first time you and I spoke, we were both out on walks while we were chatting because we both feel that way.
So suddenly if I just change half those phone calls to walking calls, my calendar goes from being this like enormous block of red to more green.
And it's a small change that you can make immediately that makes you feel dramatically different at the end of the week and you show up with more presence on those calls.
You're actually going to have a better outcome on the call because you're focused, you're present.
So it's like I push back against people when they have the immediately cynical, I can't do that viewpoint on whatever these ideas are because you actually have a lot more control of these things than you think.
What else do you learn about time?
The amount of time you have remaining with the people that you love most in the world is far more finite and terrifyingly countable than you think.
We have all, at different times in our lives, experienced some...
traumatic event of someone we love getting sick, dying.
And those moments are this spark.
They're this little like flash of light from the other side to recognize that there are things that matter so much more that we're not thinking about on a daily basis.
And it sort of shines this like light of wisdom onto your path where you are today.
And the sad thing is that for most of us, you see that wisdom, you kind of nod your head, and then you go back living the exact same damn way you were before.
And in my own life, my own journey, everything changed for me with a single conversation that I had with an old friend.
In May of 2021, I was at a point in my life where things were pretty dark.
I had sort of been playing the money game, I guess, for seven years to start my career.
And I had gotten so narrowly focused on money as the path to me feeling good about myself.
Everything was about, okay, on the other side of this bonus or this promotion or this whatever status symbol, I'll feel good about myself.
And unfortunately, that narrow focus had led to a lot of other areas of my life starting to fall apart.
My relationships, my parents, uh, with my sister, my relationship with my wife, uh, was strained.
We were struggling to conceive at the time, uh, which is, uh, a thing that a lot of people don't talk about, sort of a burden that people carry in silence that, um, is a very solitary journey that was tough and a strain on us at the time.
My health was suffering.
I was drinking seven nights a week.
I mean, there were all of these other areas of my life that were suffering while on the outside looking in, you would have said, like, I'm winning the game.
And I went out for a drink with an old friend in May of 2021, and he asked how I was doing.
And I said that it was starting to get tough living as far away as we were from our parents.
I was super close with my parents, and they're getting older.
They're starting to see chinks in the armor with their health.
And he asked, how old are they?
And I said, they're in their mid 60s.
And he said, how often do you see them?
I said about once a year.
And he looked at me and said, so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die.
And I just remember feeling like I had been punched in the gut.
I mean, the idea that the amount of time you have left with these people that you love most in the world is that countable, that you can place it on a few hands, was terrifying and jarring and it sparked real change because i was determined to not be one of those people that hears it nods my head and then
does nothing about it and so the next morning i told my wife that i thought we needed to make a change in our life and within 45 days i had left my job we had sold our house in california and we had moved across the country to be closer to our parents.
And the most beautiful part in all of it was after two years of struggling to conceive within two weeks of making that change and being back on the East coast, my wife got pregnant with our son.
And it was one of those moments, I'm not a particularly religious person, but it was one of those moments in life where you just feel like God winked at you.
Like your things came into alignment and your whole life fell into place as it should and the story of my life and of this book and of everything that I'm putting out into the world is really a ripple of that one decision to make that change to prioritize the things that I knew we valued most that had
been sitting in the back seat for so long it's an interesting the bravery component there like it's so important the uncertainty that you were talking about before and how much can you tolerate of that how much you tolerate of fear and how brave can you be to sort of overcome that?
Yeah. And I think a big part of it for us, I have to give my wife credit because it is very difficult to be brave on your own.
Uh, and she, when I came to her and said that I thought we should make this change was the first one to say, we can do this.
Yes, let's go do it.
Easily, she could have resisted.
She could have said like, what are you talking about?
We have a good life.
We have a house. You're making good money.
All of the reasons to stay on the path.
And, you know, I often say that the worst thing in the world is not being on a bad path.
Being on a bad path, it screams at you every single day to change, right?
Like you're on a bad path.
You have to make a change.
It's so abundantly obvious.
The worst thing in the world is being on a good path that isn't yours.
And that was very much where we were.
It was a good path from a societal definition, but it was not the one that was leading to the place where I wanted to go.
uh it was like that japanese proverb that says if you get on the wrong train get off as soon as possible because if you don't the trip back is going to be a lot longer that was where we were and my wife was the one that sort of infused me with the courage that we could actually go and do that in other
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yeah it's an interesting i don't know and the sad point is people become increasingly lonely or increasingly single then uh yes sometimes you can't pull the pin all on your own and uh it's awesome dude i'm so i'm so happy for you guys and uh what a like inspiring story to have had that but the uh conception thing
i think is so true as well i read this really harrowing article about, um, the crisis of, uh, childless men.
Uh, you know, a lot of the time women have a biological window and, and, uh, you know, rightly a lot of the, um, priority and attention is focused on them.
Uh, but the same happening for men, whether it's that they get to an age where sperm count is so low that it's no longer viable, uh, whether they get to an age where they're not able to date quite so easily or the only partners that they can date now are too old And, yeah, trying to conceive and not being
able to do it is this weird, silent social epidemic that no one really ever wants to talk about all that much.
Especially men. I mean, it is weird.
I went on, you know, Dr.
Rangan Chatterjee in the UK, and I had a conversation with him, and I shared those struggles to conceive.
And he said that in 10 years of doing his podcast, I was the first man to ever talk about that on his show.
and i think about it a lot because um it is infertility is something that immediately gets placed on the woman when you're struggling to conceive the assumption that everyone has is that there's something wrong with the woman and that is just not the case scientifically nearly 50 cases it's the man exactly
and stress is a contributor your body will not want to conceive if they're really high stress levels there's a variety of internal factors that contribute to fertility and so when seven nights a week drinking seven nights a week does not help not sleeping a whole lot because you're stressed or because you're
anxious doesn't help so when i think about my own life and the actions i was taking uh i think it's a totally fair assumption to say that i was a major part of it it's not the only problem i'm the problem right um and obviously like also the back end of that of like making this change me feeling this enormous
weight lifted reprioritize my all of these things that's fertile as fuck yeah all of a sudden i'm like man we could have pen kids really good just start going out spread the seed everyone around me all of a sudden got pregnant yeah uh no but it is um i just think that there's a lot of people out there
and probably some people listening who are struggling with this right now and i held it in silence we did and it placed an enormous burden on our relationship as a result because you're just suffering with something alone.
And if you two aren't talking about it a lot, which tends to happen, it becomes this weight that you're just - Did you go to see urology, fertility?
My wife had. I had not gone and seen anyone.
I had resisted it. And this is me being in a bad place in my life.
And the way that I was approaching everything in life, frankly, was, no, we're young.
This is stupid. We have plenty of time.
At the time, frankly, I was like, I was so narrowly focused on making money as the end, as the, you know, means to me feeling successful and feeling good that I was like, I don't want kids.
That's just, that seems like a distraction.
It seems like it's, you know, not going to help me get to this like end that I'm trying to chase of making all this money and being this success story in my life.
And now I think about it and like, it's the only thing I care about.
I like everything that I do is in service of being an incredible father and wanting to teach my son these lessons that I think are so important in life.
Can I ask a difficult question?
Given the challenges that you had conceiving once, what are your feelings about trying to conceive again?
We will definitely try.
I mean, frankly, like, are now going to start trying for more.
I think that... You know what I mean?
Just that sort of maybe PTSD thing, like fuck we we made it do I really want to get my hopes up again yeah and then maybe I wondered whether that was the sort of thing that lingers yeah you know I would say almost the in the opposite direction that my wife and I feel such extraordinary gratitude for the fact
that we were able to have our son and knock on wood that he is healthy and happy um and I just to me I'm like, if we have any more kids, I'm like, it's a cherry on top of this incredible blessing that we have.
Um, if it were up to me, we'd go have five.
I mean, I love kids and I'm like, this is the best thing in the world.
It's hard to imagine.
Absolutely converted.
Yeah. I mean, it's hard to imagine after you have one that your heart can expand enough to love another thing as much as you love your kid.
I cannot, I had been selfish my entire life.
And I think that we are all even when you get married you are fundamentally until you have a child you are a selfish being you might love your spouse but you don't love them more than yourself you would not in most cases uh like truly uh you know shoot yourself in the head press the button and kill
yourself to save your spouse in a lot of cases I really think like that would be more of a question that people would ask with your kid if you had a button that you could press and save their life and immediately exterminate yourself.
You would press it without thinking about it.
Do you think that it also changes whether you would do the same for your partner now that the kid's there too?
100%. That's a great question.
This sort of blast radius that's fed back up from the child.
That is a great question.
I've never thought about it.
And yes, 100%. I think about it now, if I could press that button and save my wife and my son, I would press that in a heartbeat Because I see the two of them and I know, and that's, I think as a father and as a husband, the single best feeling in the world is knowing that my son would be great if I
died. Like knowing that if I am flying home tonight and my plane crashes and I die, my son is going to have an amazing life because he has the most incredible mom that loves him so much.
And he's surrounded by love and support.
and that I think is like the highest calling as a man to feel that you can leave this legacy that exists beyond you where your child is going to be okay.
I think as well you're right the selfish thing is something I've thought about a lot especially as I reflected on last year and every time that I see kids more and more of my friends are getting pregnant at the moment in one form or another and in one form or another what are the other forms well like
as in there I'm just giving you shit.
They're at varying stages of pregnancy and also varying stages of, how do I say, announcing it, which is why I'm not saying.
There's a number of people that have been on the show a good bit.
You can only be stealth pregnant for so long.
Fuck, dude. I mean, it's starting to show on a couple of the girlfriends and wives.
So a lot of the pursuits that I think me and a good chunk of my friends have done for you know the first 15 years to two decades out of university full -time education have been basically just surrogate family building i'm going to start this project i'm going to create this brand i'm going to pursue
this passion of some kind i'm going to get good at this thing and you're just pouring energy and care and focus and obsession uh and emotion uh into this thing which kind of feels a little bit like a baby people even refer to i'm sure you you at some point in your past you've referred to your newsletter
as like my baby my writing is my baby uh but it's not and one of the best things that i can think of is if you do end some worlds in your 20s and put yourself in a position where you go hey, I financially am stable and I've acquired some skills and I've got some scars, but I feel good about them.
And I actually think that I'm now ready to sort of pay this forward.
That makes the selfishness in your 20s feel way less selfish because you go, maybe it wasn't about me just doing things for me.
Maybe those were the important lessons that I needed so that when the next generation comes along and it's me that's coaching them I can tell them exactly all of the different pitfalls that happened and I know how to deal with this emotional ups and downs and swings and turbulences that they've gone
through and I've got the life experience and we've got the financial stability and we've got you know I've closed all of the different loops all of those questions about oh I wonder what it would have been like to have traveled to Bali and now we've got three kids and I can't go to Bali anymore and you
go you went to Bolly twice.
All of these things have been closed off.
So yeah, I love the idea of, and it'll be fascinating to see just how much having kids totally reframes the way that I look at everything that happened before.
I think Russ Roberts says there's two types of people in the world.
There's pre -kids and post -kids.
And he said the two will never be able to talk to each other fully about what life's like yeah I had that feeling um when when my son was born the first time I held him and again this comes from someone who was not a kid guy it wasn't like I spent my whole life being like I want kids doting and uh when my
son was born I held him for the first time and he looked up at me and I remember just having this sensation that I had spent the first 30 years of my life trying to understand the meaning and purpose of all of this and then it was staring right back at me um i had this experience actually shortly after he
was born where i took him out for a walk you know kids like sleeping obviously is a shitshow and he wouldn't sleep other than basically when i walked him around in his stroller and so i was walking him early one saturday morning and i was standing on the sidewalk and this old man walked up to me and he
came over and he said i remember standing here with my newborn daughter she's 45 years old now.
It goes by fast. Cherish it.
And I took him back home and I brought him into bed.
My wife was still asleep and the sun was kind of coming through the blinds.
And he had this like little perfect smile on his face.
And I had this sensation that for the first time in my life, I had arrived, but there was nothing more that I wanted.
Like my whole life had been spent chasing some more.
There was something like I needed more money or more promotions or more status or more whatever the thing was.
And for the first time in my life, I was just content.
Like I truly felt like I had enough.
And it was this idea that we can never let the quest for more distract from the beauty of enough.
Finding those moments where you truly feel like you have enough.
That is what a wealthy life looks like.
Yeah. You said, uh, expectations are your biggest liability.
And that kind of feels like the same thing.
Yeah. If your expectations rise faster than your assets, than the things you have, you will never feel wealthy.
You will constantly, beyond this, chase for whatever more you're looking for.
There's that famous story of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller.
Have you heard that story?
So Kurt Vonnegut, famous American author, Joseph Heller, another famous American author, author of Catch -22, the satirical work.
And the two of them, Vonnegut and Heller, were at the house of this billionaire in the Hamptons.
And Vonnegut asks Heller, how does it feel that just yesterday the owner of this house made more money than your book, Catch -22, made in the entirety of its lifetime?
And Heller replies, I've got something that he'll never have.
And Vonnegut says, yeah, what's that?
And Heller says, the knowledge that I've got enough.
And it's that exact lesson, that that is true wealth, the knowledge that you have enough, that you don't need to chase more.
And that if you do chase more, it needs to be grounded in something more meaningful than just chasing money.
If you are chasing ambition because you're grounded in your purpose, because you want to go and create something meaningful for the world, you want to go create a more meaningful life for your family because you feel like you can spread ideas that will positively impact people that's a great reason to
go and chase something bigger but chasing more money is just a road to nowhere public service announcement 20 years from now the only people who will remember that you work later your kids so true um that was this viral reddit post that i think it is probably the most viral thing I've ever shared.
It is entirely true in my experience.
And the challenge with all of this is a simple fact, which is for 10 years, you are your child's favorite person in the entire world.
And after that 10 year window, they have other favorite people.
They have best friends.
They have boyfriends.
They have girlfriends.
They have partners of their own.
They have children of their own.
Sports team coaches.
You will never occupy that same place in their world, but for that 10 -year window, you are literally everything to them.
And yet we live in a culture where that 10 years also coincides with the time when you are supposed to chase every more that is out there, chase all of your professional ambitions.
So navigating that tension, figuring out how to balance your pursuit of your fullest potential with the desire to be present with your kids during that magic window that you have, that is the fundamental tension of being a parent in the modern era.
It's finding your unique balance of those two.
Is that an argument to front load the life and wealth acquisition and to really try and send it as much as you can in your 20s so that some of that price, that overhead has been paid a little bit before the kids come along?
I think that it is a couple of things.
I think one, I'm sort of of two minds on this.
One, I think that being present during that window of time with your kids is the most important thing.
But two, I think it is extraordinarily important for your children to see you work hard on things you care about.
That's interesting.
I think that is the most important lesson I learned from my father was that growing up, I saw him work so hard on things that lit him up intellectually.
And the important point there is that you have to be included in the why, meaning I always knew why my dad was working hard on things.
He always took the time to explain to me what he was working on, why he cared about it, why he felt it was important, why I was part of that mission with him.
And that always meant that I knew when he was traveling, when he was gone, when he was working, when he was doing things, I knew why.
And it wasn't that he'd abandoned you.
It wasn't that he didn't care.
Exactly. And that's the important point is if you don't fill the why with the correct reason, your kids will fill it with the worst reason.
Your kids will fill it with the abandoned.
They'll fill it with the dad doesn't want to be around.
Dad's never around.
But you can fill that with the correct reason.
But you have to actually think about it.
You have to be aware enough to say those things to your kid.
Even when my son's two and a half, is he really understanding it?
Maybe not, but he's understanding it enough that when I'm going somewhere, he's saying, dad, I work.
He's like looking at me.
He's helping me with things.
He's helping me pack.
He goes and sits at my desk.
He like tries to type things.
He understands when I'm writing stuff.
So they absorb a lot more than you think, but it requires being intentional about creating that understanding in them.
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That's draw that line from why I'm doing this work to the outcome that I'm going to get.
I played a lot of sport when I was a kid and I never was taught as a, when we were training, this sounds so dumb, but I was never taught that the reason that you went to practice wasn't to enjoy the team building and to do drills for no reason.
It was that these were the individual components that when you stepped out onto the field of play would make you a better player.
And I just hadn't drawn that lineage between preparation and performance.
Like, obviously it's there.
And I think I'd had it, it was there sort of vaguely, but to really, really understand the dopamine that comes, the reward that comes from, okay, this is why you're going to break this down into its component parts.
You're not just doing it so that you can do it right now.
You're doing it so that when the game time comes, you're actually going to be better.
And I think humans are driven by little more than they're driven by dopamine.
And if you can say, hey, this is the playbook for how it works.
This is the playbook for how reward works.
I'm doing this thing because I care about it and it's hard, but it makes me feel good.
And I think that it makes the world a better place.
This is how it works.
And you just drill that blueprint for a decade and a half.
If your kid is built even remotely like you they're going to be very very well set and they see it right like you can teach that this is something i've changed my mind on for sure in my own life with my son which is you can't really teach your kids anything you just have to embody the things and they
learn from seeing you do and don't tell them show them and it's true for all things in life right like it goes back to the tim cook and all those stories what we were talking about like you're not talking about the morning routine you're just showing the output show me the output and i think about my
own experience with my dad, like some of the most formative learning moments I had with him of what it meant to work hard, what it meant to have discipline, we're just observing him do that.
I got to go when I was a kid on this trip with him as like his plus one.
My dad's a professor at Harvard and he was giving a talk at this conference in Asia and my mom couldn't go.
So I got to be the plus one.
And it was my first time ever flying business class because I was this plus one for this thing.
So I have like movies and food and all this stuff.
It's like 15 hour flight.
And my dad sat there and worked for the entire 15 hour flight.
And when we landed, I turned to him and I was like, dad, you didn't watch a single movie on that whole flight.
And he kind of just laughed and, you know, we moved on from it.
But I remember that moment so clearly that for 15 hours he worked and that was what was required for him to be the type of person that would get invited to give a talk at a conference, for him to be able to bring his son to something like that.
That was the work that he had to put in.
And so now when I think about my own experience and things that I want to work hard on that I want to put my head down, like I'm in a season of unbalance in my life, right?
Like you have these periods where you have to be willing to embrace the idea that you are in a season of unbalance.
You are in a season where shit is just crazy and chaotic and you have to lean into it.
Because worrying about, oh, I don't have perfect balance in my days loses sight of the bigger picture, which is this season of unbalance is required for me to have the season of balance later.
Dude, I think about this all the time from how much you zoom in to the little duration.
Nobody looks at a single minute and says, I didn't really balance that minute enough.
You know, was I really fully embracing my fun side during that minute?
But across a day, we do.
We say, you know, today I didn't really do enough X or Y.
But that's not how your life is lived.
yes if you're not careful can you get to the end of a month and look back on that month and realize that there was a big missing gap but really you should be doing it across an entire 12 month period and looking back and saying well this year i uh i focused a little bit too much on this thing but i'm
glad that that was the case we periodize weightlifters periodize their lifting they're not trying to max out all the time they pull back they do deloads they go up they peak for competition then they lift then they come back down again then they go back up like that's the way that life's supposed to
be lived and uh it's odd that across single day we can get agitated ourselves for not having enough time for dot dot dot you go well you don't need to like what if all of wednesday is spent on that thing that you think last week you didn't spend enough time on you go would that be enough would like
one day out of 14 be enough you go absolutely okay well you're going to have periods of imbalance, but you're going to have large cycles of balance.
I think of my years in quarters.
I like to view my life as like a public company.
It's like, I'm going to live Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4.
And if I am in a crazy quarter of focus and head down on something that matters, that's okay.
I don't need to stress about that.
As long as I have the knowledge that I'm going to be able to pull back and have a quarter where things are a little bit more balanced, where I'm able to reset.
And that is an important point because that whole idea of balance has been hijacked, right?
Like balance has been hijacked by the day optimizers of saying like you have to have the perfect balance of rest, family, workout, work, deep work, all of these things, right?
Every single day. And when you don't have that, you start getting stressed.
If that's what you think balance looks like, you start freaking out when you don't have that, or when you're traveling a lot or when your head's down on things.
And viewing balance on a seasonal basis, on a quarterly basis, is a much healthier way to look at it because then you give yourself the freedom to actually focus on something.
We all know that like the most incredible outputs in history have all been created by these extraordinary bouts of focused attention.
Sir Isaac Newton had the year where he was locked down because of the plague in Europe.
He had to leave school at Cambridge and go home and live in his little town for a full year.
He was just completely locked down.
And during that year, he formulated all of the laws of gravitation.
He invented calculus.
He did a lifetime's worth of work because he had a focused year of attention on a single set of problems that he was trying to solve.
And that's great. That is how extraordinary outcomes are created.
So we have to give ourselves the freedom to do that.
And after that year, people called him lucky.
Exactly. What does it mean to expand your luck surface area?
so luck surface area is the idea that at any point in time in your life you have a physical literal surface area on which lucky events can strike the best uh sort of visual for this that I have is from the movie interstellar uh movie yeah it's one of my favorite movies uh you know and they go to that planet
that is right on the edge of the black hole and it has the perfect conditions for life.
They're like, Oh, this, this planet should have life.
And they're trying to figure out why it didn't.
And what they talk about is the fact that it sits right next to the black hole.
So all of the lucky events that could have struck the planet, all of the little asteroids that might've contained life got sucked into the black hole.
So there was something that was making the luck surface area of that planet zero.
It was minuscule. You and your own life are kind of that Same idea.
You need to think about how can you expand your luck surface area to be as big as possible so that when the lucky events come, they are striking your life and you're able to capitalize on them.
The perfect example is what I said earlier.
It's very hard to get lucky sitting on the couch watching TV at home.
How can you possibly get lucky versus going out, meeting people, having conversations, working on things, contributing value to other people.
Now, all of a sudden, I'm expanding my luck surface area because there's all of this motion that's been created.
There's all this action that's created.
The lucky events actually have an opportunity to strike.
I no longer have a black hole of Netflix sitting next to my entire life.
Yeah, it's really interesting what you said before as well about God winking at you.
I love that line. And it does seem that luck very rarely comes into your life when you're being timid, when you're only listening to your head.
You could probably write out a bunch of times when you felt the most lucky and what were the sort of behaviors, what was the kind of energy that you were bringing to the world.
And it would probably be leaning forward, brave, courageous, hopeful, aligned, like humble as well.
It's probably very rarely when you're full of ego and bouncing around.
isn't there that quote fortune favors the bold sort of that idea right of like when you are bold when you were leaning into things i think it's cs lewis that talks about the fact that courage is like the highest form of every virtue it is like when the virtue is tested that is what courage truly is because it's
very easy to uh express a virtue when there's nothing on the line yeah when times are good it's very easy to be loyal when you know nothing's happening Is that like wind of momentum, do you think?
It's very similar. Yeah, it's very easy in your whole life to continue to do the thing when it's working and when the rewards are certain.
I often think that the most dangerous man in the world is the one who can remain disciplined, show up and do the work, even when the rewards are uncertain.
The person who can tolerate the most uncertainty is the person who will ultimately win.
That's why we love underdog stories, right?
We love the underdog story because there is nobody that is never going to be at that bottom position.
If you're in the fortunate situation of things being better for you, then good.
You catch the trajectory halfway up the staircase.
But if you're at the very, very bottom, you think, wow, that was when things were hardest.
That was when gravity was at its strongest.
That was when your launch velocity was at zero.
And you needed to rip this fucker off the launch pad one inch at a time uh that's inspiring that's something that i hope for in me or that i hope that more people are able to achieve in themselves or if i fall from grace and i hit rock bottom again that means that that's the place that i can sort of bounce
back from uh but yeah talk more about wind of momentum i like that yeah it's it's a funny thing too like have you ever um uh do you know anything about uh like aviation planes so like a plane when it starts stalling out it starts falling out of the sky right like you have moments in your life where you
you've hit stall speed and you start just stalling and you're falling out of the sky and there's this insane just like collapse towards the earth and the funny thing about a plane stalling is that your bias when your plane is stalling is to pull back you're like i'm gonna pull back because i'm i'm falling
out of sky i gotta pull back when actually how you save a plane from a stall is that you lean into it.
You actually have to go nose down to generate the speed through the air to get back to using the wings for lift.
And so it's this funny paradox of life that in the moments when you are collapsing, when things aren't going well, that's actually when you need to lean into things.
What does that mean?
When you need to lean into the risky thing, when you need to do the challenging thing to have the courage in those moments when it's most challenging to do it.
It's like the, you know, the startup that's collapsing that cuts everyone from their team in order to make their runway four weeks longer when in reality, they probably should have like invested more heavily to try to get the sufficient speed to get out of it.
You're just prolonging the inevitable if you pull back.
And I think about that a lot in life.
Like at those moments, we need to have the courage to lean into the thing and see our way to the other side.
The worst prison in the world is having the talent and intelligence to achieve something great, but lacking the courage to go out and do it.
Yeah, this goes back to the courage point that so many of us get trapped in this self -created prison of not being willing to step out of our zone of comfort in our world.
We just sit in the confines of what feels natural and what feels real and what feels normal.
And we hide behind our talent or intelligence.
We say like, well, yeah, but I'm really talented.
I'm really intelligent.
I could go do this and that.
But if you're not doing the thing, it doesn't matter.
If you don't actually take the step to confront the fear and go and do it.
Abraham Maslow has this quote that our greatest fear is in our highest possibility.
And I think that that's such an interesting idea that there are actually two types of fear.
There's the fear of failure, which is the fear that we all know.
That's the fear that we are going to go after something and it's not going to work out, that everyone's going to see us fail, that we fell off.
But then there's the fear of success.
There's the fear that we go and do the thing and it works out greater than we ever expected.
And we're never able to live up to that highest possibility again, that we're going to achieve the thing and never be able to experience that high high again in our lives.
Sometimes it is our light that we most fear.
I think about that all the time.
Do you hold yourself back because you were afraid of what will happen if you actually succeed beyond your wildest expectations?
Well, one of the ruthless things about ever having a very successful day is that the new baseline for your next most successful day just got raised by a massive amount.
It's like, you know, one of the worst days of your life in an odd regard would maybe be the day that you won the lottery.
So you think, well, how are you going to have a better day than that?
And what you want is to basically plan your entire existence to just slowly step change up.
And then the day that you die, the final payment check for the fucking home bounces, right?
Like that's where you want to get to.
But what people have are these, I spoke to Dan Bilzerian about this.
He's like, you've been to the top of the hedonic mountain.
What would you give me some of the insights?
And he said, you know, like quickly accumulating a lot of pleasure is a really, really bad idea because where'd you go from that?
It's called the Nova effect.
Uh, it's a psychological phenomenon that you, uh, experience a massive decline in your happiness after a great event, uh, as a result of exactly that it's like winning the lottery or you get the you go on the extraordinary vacation and then your normal life sucks and you're so pissed because you go
back to normal the ibiza blues yeah in the uk no exactly that's also the come down yeah it um it reminds me of um uh that idea of the climb like you know it's it's the the cliche that everyone says is like you have to find joy in the process.
Everyone says that over and over, you find the joy in the climb.
But the climb is also very important for a critical structural reason, which is it acclimatizes you to having the thing.
If you were to get dropped at the top of Mount Everest right now, you would pass out and die because you wouldn't have been acclimatized to the altitude from the climb.
So the climb is actually important because it's what prepares you for being able to be at the summit.
So true. I sort of reflected on this the first time that I moved out to America and then a lot of, you know, big, scary opportunities that were super exciting came along.
And I'd thought for a long time that I wanted those things to happen, these invites or to, you know, do these shows or speak to these guests or do whatever.
And it was only after it happened that I realized that I wasn't ready for the opportunities that I desperately wanted.
And you basically you're not ready until they come.
And that sounds like God winking at you again, but you're simply not.
And when the opportunity finally arises and you do take advantage of it, it does go well.
Think, huh, I'm glad I waited.
But there's also an insight here, which is, I was trying to come up with a name for it, unteachable lessons.
So a particular unique category of insight that nobody will believe unless they learn it for themselves there's certain ones that you can probably teach people about like reheating chicken and you know there's like bits and pieces you go i don't need to go through the salmonella which i've had uh in order
to learn that that's something but if you're going to tell somebody that money's not going to make you happy or that success won't fill that internal void or that perhaps having kids is going to make everything else in your life just fade into uh obscurity these are lessons we go yeah but you know like
not for like i'm i'm gonna the way i'll do it the way i'll use my wealth the type of fame that i would have the particular pathologies that i'm carrying with me that would be healed by the recognition from the people around me the the amount of passion that i have for my work so it's nice for you you
know because you had your thing you had your little like fucking million person newsletter and you i had like your little writing and stuff but you don't understand the strength of my pattern then the situation comes along and it's only after someone has been able to go through it that they go yeah
unteachable lesson yeah i the the pushback i have against that is we constantly learn things from other people's experience uh that uh sort of become obvious right like you don't need to teach uh you don't need to tell me that putting my finger into an electrical socket is going to hurt, uh, for me
to not do like, you tell me that once and I don't need to do that or experience that to know that that is probably true.
And I I'm good. Like you, you taught me it.
The one with money is like, I'm not saying that money won't make you happy.
I think money will make you happy, but only up to a point.
And what I want you to do is take the thing that you know, in the back of your mind, which is that these other things are also a very important piece.
The book is called The Five Types of Wealth.
One of those is money.
Financial wealth is one of the five types of wealth, and it is a whole section in the book for a reason, because it is a key part of living a wealthy life.
But the other things cannot get lost on that journey.
Money isn't nothing.
It just can't be the only thing.
It is a tool for building these other types of wealth, and you should use it that way.
It just can't be the goal in and of itself beyond those early years.
And so I think that like, yes, sometimes you have to experience these like challenging pains or see these fails along the way.
But we are humans and our incredible capacity as humans, as a species has been that we can learn from knowledge that is passed down from others.
That is what has allowed us to survive and thrive as we use language to write and tell stories that could help the next generation so that we can build upon it.
This is a story that we need to start learning from.
We need to understand.
We need to hear those stories of wisdom.
And rather than just nodding our heads and going on living the same damn way we were before, we need to take some tiny set of actions to actually internalize them and change.
Talk to me about operationalizing some of your favorite concepts from the book.
lots of good conceptually stuff now let's get some tactical bits yeah i think the first thing you should do is assess where you are so uh in the book there's a uh wealth score quiz so it this is the way of actually assessing where you exist on this broader definition of wealth beyond just money it's
a way of actually on a scale of zero to 100 giving yourself a number for your wealth across these broader set of areas you can actually go to wealthscorequiz .com and we have an online version that creates this nice visual for you as a baseline.
That is what I did in May of 2021 to get a baseline sense of what I wanted to build off of.
So in the same way you have a net worth tool, like you can use this to actually track how you are performing across these other areas of life.
That's a great starting point for everyone.
The next thing is to actually go through the questions that the book asks you to wrestle with and wrestle with them, because the entire book is about asking the right questions for your life.
It's an odd thing, but it is a self -help, self -improvement book where in the first opening pages, I say that it will not give you the answers.
And it's a little scary to say that at the start of a book, but it's the truth because you already have the answers.
You just haven't asked the right questions yet about your life.
You haven't revealed those answers from you.
And so going through and actually asking the big questions that each section forces you to ask and contend with, talking about them with the people that you care about and love that are around you, it will give you a clear sense of what that compass, like what that true north is in your life that you
are trying to build towards.
Once you have that in mind, it just becomes taking actions on a daily basis to build towards that and tiny actions.
The whole point is financial wealth is an obvious area where you know you can invest daily or on a regular basis and compound towards a positive future.
Every single other area of your life is the exact same, but we don't think about it that way.
When it comes to your relationships, you don't think about investing on a daily basis in your relationships, but your relationships are arguably the best investment you can make.
Your relationships pay greater dividends and returns than any financial investment.
Think about the people that you have invested in building relationships with.
That is where your greatest business opportunities are going to come from.
Those relationships are what is going to lead to the most fulfilling purpose, the meaning, the financial opportunities.
That is where all of that's going to come from.
So investing in relationships, the same way you think about investing in the stock market or crypto or whatever it is you're into is a great way to think about it.
But you need to have that mindset shift that these areas can be invested in on a daily basis.
What's a think day?
This is probably my favorite practice from the whole book.
So in the book, each section for each type of wealth has a guide.
And in that guide, there are sort of the science backed proven strategies for building that type of wealth.
Think day is in the mental wealth section of the book.
And the whole idea stems from Bill Gates, who in the 1980s started this practice of a think week where he would go off the grid for an entire week with a whole bunch of reading and would completely shut off, not be communicating with anyone.
He would just read and think and learn and think about the biggest picture questions facing Microsoft at the time.
And Bill Gates now credits those think weeks as being the most transformative thing for Microsoft's development over the years into the gargantuan company it is.
Not all of us, very few of us, in fact, can take a week of time to go and just think about things.
I certainly can't. But can you carve out a day, once a month, or once a quarter to take a few hours to just zoom out and think about the bigger picture questions and things in your life?
The idea being create the space to zoom out and think about those questions.
Think about what are the most important things in my life right now?
Are my actions on a daily basis aligned with those things?
What would the audience be screaming at me to do if I were the main character in this movie right now?
I think that's my favorite question in the whole book is if you were the main character in a movie of your life, what would the audience be screaming at you to do right now?
We've all had that experience you go to a movie you watch a tv show and the main character is doing something and you just want to jump through the screen and be like go chase the girl to the airport or like don't go down into that basement whatever the thing is that's you right now in a movie of your
life and the audience would be screaming at you to do something right now or to change some action and you're ignoring it what is that thing create the space in your life to actually think about what that thing is and then change accordingly.
Fuck yeah. Dude, let's bring this one into land.
Where should people go?
They want to keep up to date with everything you're doing.
Check out the work.
Yeah, the book is out now everywhere.
Books are sold. The5typesofwealth .com.
You can find more info, get it on Amazon, wherever it is.
And I'm at Sahil Bloom on every major platform.
Having a weird name, that's one of the benefits.
Damn right, dude. I appreciate you.
Appreciate you. Thank you very much for tuning in.
Mmm, tasty Sahil episode.
Want a little bit more?
How about tasty Alex Hormosey?
Over here. Go on, press it.
