Sahil Bloom: The 5 Types of Wealth You Need to Design Your Dream Life | E335

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0:01:13 at indeed.com/profiting. Terms and conditions apply. As always, you can find all of our incredible
0:01:21 deals in the show notes or at youngerprofiting.com/deals. What is our life razor? What is our
0:01:27 identity defining rule for our life? A razor is a rule of thumb that allows you to cut through the
0:01:31 noise. During the course of your life, the things that you prioritize or focus on will change.
0:01:37 You can reinvent your story at any point in your life. You can’t plan entrepreneurship. The whole
0:01:43 idea of creating a business plan is a joke. You have to go do the thing. Every single time I thought
0:01:48 I was too late, it was still early. And all it took was for me to actually lean into the thing
0:01:52 and just do it consistently every single day. If somebody wants to learn more about how to buy
0:01:58 companies, what do you suggest? I would definitely go and… What is your idea around mentorship
0:02:04 and community with other entrepreneurs? I think networking is dead. What you are really seeking
0:02:27 to do is when you end up getting the best returns. Young Improperters, welcome back to the show.
0:02:32 And today we’ve got an exciting live interview in store for you. And before we get started,
0:02:37 I want to ask you a question. What if building a wealthy life had nothing to do with the amount
0:02:42 of money that you have in your bank account? Well, today, Sahil Bloom is going to tell us
0:02:48 exactly why that’s true. And he’s on admission to define what it means to exactly have a wealthy
0:02:54 life. Sahil is an entrepreneur, investor, and the author of the Curiosity Chronicles newsletter,
0:02:59 as well as the author of the new book, The Five Types of Wealth. In today’s conversation,
0:03:04 we’re going to uncover Sahil’s entrepreneurship journey. We’re going to discuss his business
0:03:09 ecosystem and how he makes his money. And then we’re going to go on to discuss the five dimensions
0:03:13 of wealth besides financial wealth. You guys are going to want to hear this, especially
0:03:18 all my entrepreneurs out there. So without further delay, here’s my awesome conversation with Sahil
0:03:23 Bloom. Sahil, welcome to Young Improfiting Podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I’m
0:03:27 thrilled to do it. I’m so excited for this conversation. I love doing in-person interviews,
0:03:31 and I feel like we have so much to talk about. So the first thing I want to ask you, I’m just
0:03:37 going to jump right into it. When I was reading your book, I learned about your life razor,
0:03:42 and you’ve got a personal life razor. So first, I wanted to ask you what is a life razor and tell
0:03:51 us what your personal life razor is. This concept, I came upon originally via the founder and first
0:03:58 CEO of Netflix, a man named Mark Randolph, maybe familiar with. Mark posted this really interesting
0:04:02 thing, I think this is probably about two years ago now, where he talked about the fact that
0:04:06 throughout his entire technology career, extraordinarily successful technology career,
0:04:11 made oodles and oodles of money, built these amazing businesses. The thing that he was most proud about
0:04:17 was that he had this rule that every single Tuesday at 5 p.m., he would leave work and go out on a
0:04:22 date with his wife. He says that what he’s most proud about from his career is not that he founded
0:04:26 these incredible companies or made all this money, but that he managed to do that while
0:04:31 having an incredible marriage and having kids who love him and like spending time with him.
0:04:38 It struck me when I first read that the idea of leaving at 5 p.m. to have dinner with his wife
0:04:44 was not really about any one date or about the dinner itself. It was about what it implied about
0:04:49 who he was as a person, about the boundaries that he was creating, about what his priorities were in
0:04:53 life, and about the ripple effects that that idea created into other areas of his life.
0:04:59 That was where I came to this term in talking to Mark about a life razor. A razor, if you’re not
0:05:06 familiar with it, is the idea of a single point of focus, a rule of thumb that allows you to cut
0:05:11 through the noise when you’re making a decision. For Mark Randolph, he was the type of person
0:05:16 who left work to have a 5 p.m. dinner with his wife. That was his life razor. It was a single
0:05:21 point of focus that, no matter what, allowed him to cut through the noise in his life. Anytime
0:05:28 something came up, he could identify himself as that type of person. If an interesting career
0:05:34 opportunity came up, he could say, “No, I’m the type of person who leaves work at 5 p.m. to have
0:05:39 dinner with my wife.” That is an important part of who he is as a human being. That is something
0:05:46 that we all need to think about in our own lives. What is our life razor? What is our identity defining
0:05:53 rule for our life? Mine is, “I will coach my son’s sports teams.” It’s a similar concept to Mark
0:06:01 Randolph’s in that I define myself as the type of person who is a husband, a father, a community
0:06:07 member, a leader in all of these ways. Being able to say, “I am the type of person who coaches my
0:06:12 son’s sports teams” means certain things about who I am and how I interact with the world around me.
0:06:16 It means that I’ll prioritize family ahead of certain financial opportunities. It means I’ll
0:06:22 be willing to make sacrifices to prioritize those in my life. I encourage other people to think about
0:06:26 that. I walk through an exercise in the book to identify your own, how to come to your own life
0:06:31 razor. It’s a really important way to cut through the noise and make decisions in your life.
0:06:37 Razor comes from shaving off time and saving time with decisions is so important. Do you have
0:06:43 multiple life razors? I feel like I heard you once say that you like to wake up and do hard
0:06:50 things. That’s another life razor of yours. The idea of your own life, of having these different
0:06:55 seasons of your life is a really important concept to me. That concept says that basically,
0:07:00 during the course of your life, the things that you prioritize or focus on will change.
0:07:05 During your 20s and 30s, that is a great time for you to focus on building a financial foundation
0:07:09 for the rest of your life. As I talk about some of the concepts of the book of building a life of
0:07:13 wealth across all of these different areas, that doesn’t mean that your life is going to be perfectly
0:07:18 in balance across these five areas throughout your life. What it means is that you need to think
0:07:23 about all of them as you consider building. But what you’re prioritizing, what you are really
0:07:29 focusing on during any one season will change. What that means is that your life razor may change
0:07:33 across these different periods of your life. Because when you are 20 or when you’re in your
0:07:38 early 30s and you’re really honing in on doing hard things, building a business, building a
0:07:43 financial foundation for your life, it might be something like waking up and doing hard things.
0:07:47 That’s your life razor. Then as you have kids and as you are prioritizing family,
0:07:51 it may become something more like Mark Randolph that you leave to have dinner.
0:07:59 So now you wake up at 4.30 a.m. You take cold plunges. You are a big self-improvement influencer.
0:08:03 You help people improve their lives. But I learned that when you were younger,
0:08:07 you were actually quite insecure as a kid. And so first, I want to ask you,
0:08:11 where do you think those insecurities came from when you were growing up? And what were you like?
0:08:20 I think a lot about the fact that the stories we tell ourselves about who we are are so important
0:08:26 to how we interact with the world. And especially those original stories that you tell yourself
0:08:30 about the type of person you are and your capabilities and your competencies. Those
0:08:34 stories are very hard to break. And so if it is a negative story that you are starting to tell
0:08:39 yourself, you will look around the world and you’ll find all of the information that confirms that
0:08:44 story. And if there’s things that refute that story, you won’t see it. You’ll reject it. It’s
0:08:48 called the narrative fallacy. Humans are storytelling creatures. So we look to confirm
0:08:53 the stories that we understand. I had told myself from a young age, a story that I wasn’t smart.
0:09:00 I have an older sister who was extraordinarily high achieving academically. And at the first sign
0:09:06 of me not being able to easily do that same thing that she was doing, I started telling myself,
0:09:10 I’m not the smart one. I need to find a different thing. I need to be athletic or something else,
0:09:16 but I’m not smart. That bred within me an insecurity that was very, very hard to crack.
0:09:19 And no matter how much my parents told me that it wasn’t true, no matter how much my sister told
0:09:25 me it wasn’t true or teachers, it was the story I told myself and I was not willing to break it.
0:09:31 And it took, frankly, like 30 years for me to finally reject those original stories and truly
0:09:38 create the space for introspection to actually break some of those original stories I had told
0:09:44 myself. So you ended up becoming a collegiate baseball player. I think you went to Stanford,
0:09:50 is that right? And you went into finance afterwards. So talk to us about your early career
0:09:56 and what led you to end up making a big change. The early years of my career were very much spent,
0:10:02 head down, focused on building a financial and sort of experience and knowledge foundation for
0:10:09 the rest of my life. I loved my early years in finance. I went and worked at a private equity
0:10:13 fund, which for those that aren’t familiar, it’s a fund that raises a pool of capital and you go
0:10:18 and buy and sell companies and you make money along the way. It was an extraordinary learning
0:10:22 experience. And when I give advice to young people, what I say is when you are young,
0:10:28 time is the only thing that you have. It is your only asset. You don’t have networks, you don’t
0:10:32 have money, you don’t have experience, you don’t have knowledge, you don’t have any of those things.
0:10:37 And so as a result, you need to take the time that you do have and trade it for all of those things.
0:10:41 Once you’ve done that, then the whole world has opened up to you because now you have networks
0:10:45 and money and experience and you can deploy those into the most interesting, asymmetric,
0:10:50 high upside opportunities. But until you do that trade, you wouldn’t know how to work smart.
0:10:54 When young people say, “Oh, I’m going to work smart, not hard,” you can’t really do that until
0:10:59 you work hard because you don’t have the assets to work smart. So my early career years, I was just
0:11:05 working 80 to 100 hours a week and that was very much the trading time for all of these other things
0:11:12 phase of my life. And it was fantastic for three or four years. And what happened to me was I started
0:11:18 to make money. I started to convince myself that my happiness and fulfillment was on the other side
0:11:24 of some arbitrary financial milestone. Basically, I started marching down the path of, “I’ll be really
0:11:28 happy when I make my first million dollars,” and then I did that. And then it was, “I’ll be really
0:11:33 happy when I make three million dollars,” and then I did that. And I was not happy. None of the things
0:11:38 that I thought were going to magically appear in my life had materialized. It was just this feeling
0:11:44 of disappear and reappear into the horizon. And along that journey, a lot of areas of my life
0:11:49 that are more important had started to crumble. And that was my relationships had started to really
0:11:55 be strained with my parents, with my sister, my wife and I were struggling to conceive at the time.
0:12:00 My health, I was drinking seven nights a week, unfortunately. Mental and physical health were
0:12:05 really suffering. So all of these other areas of my life were starting to deteriorate while on the
0:12:09 surface. You would have said I was winning the game. I was getting promoted. I was making money.
0:12:15 Things were going well from the outside looking in. And I just started to think as I approached turning
0:12:22 30 that if that was what winning the game felt like, I had to be playing the wrong game. And I knew
0:12:26 I needed to make a change. And so it was just figuring out what was that change.
0:12:30 When did you start your newsletter? Was that a side hustle while you were in corporate?
0:12:39 No, I started that the month I left my job. That was in May of 2021. I launched my newsletter.
0:12:44 Originally, I launched it just as a way to send the things I was writing on Twitter, which I had
0:12:49 been writing for about a year at that time. From May of 2020, I started on Twitter because I was
0:12:54 stuck at home. Like a lot of people I was like, during lockdowns, I was stuck there. And I started
0:12:59 writing on Twitter. And then I started sending those out to people via emails in May of 2021.
0:13:03 And that was really the spark of, okay, maybe there are businesses that you can build off of
0:13:07 this stuff, which I’m sure we’ll start talking about entrepreneurship. But that was really
0:13:12 the first lever of all of that. Yeah. And your newsletter is huge now. So how many subscribers
0:13:16 do you have? Now it reaches a little over 800,000 people twice a week, which is such a huge newsletter.
0:13:22 So it’s such an awesome business that you created doing that. So then you ended up wanting to make
0:13:28 a big change. I learned that you wanted to move closer to your parents and you ended up pivoting
0:13:35 your career at the same time. So talk to us about that. I had a single conversation in May of 2021
0:13:40 that really changed the course of my life. I went out for a drink with an old friend. This was at
0:13:45 the time in my life when I had started to question whether I was playing the wrong game. And he
0:13:50 asked how I was doing. And I said, it had started to get difficult being so far away from my parents
0:13:55 who were on the East Coast. Started to see them getting older and being so far away. And he asked
0:14:01 how old they were. And I said mid-60s. And he asked, how many times do you see them? And I said,
0:14:06 maybe once a year. And he just looked at me and said, okay, so you’re going to see your parents
0:14:13 15 more times before they die. And I just remember feeling like I had been punched in the gut.
0:14:17 I mean, the idea that the amount of time you have left with the people you love most in the
0:14:23 world is so finite and countable that you can put it onto a few hands is just terrifying.
0:14:28 And so the next day, I told my wife that I thought we needed to make a change. And within 45 days,
0:14:33 I had left my job. We had sold our house in California and moved across the country to be
0:14:38 closer to both of our sets of parents. And in hindsight, that was really the spark that sent
0:14:43 me on this entire journey that has culminated in even being here and talking about this in the book,
0:14:48 because there was a key realization there that a wealthy life may involve money,
0:14:54 but really, it is built around these other things. And no job will ever pay you enough
0:14:59 to be far away from people you love. So true. That was the single greatest change that we ever
0:15:04 made was picking up and moving across the country to live closer to them. And now that number 15
0:15:08 times before they die is in the hundreds. Like, I see my parents multiple times a month now,
0:15:13 they’re a huge part of my son’s life, all of these things. And so that was the spark that
0:15:16 really ended up snowballing into all of these things that have happened.
0:15:21 I have to say, when I was studying you, that was one of the most impactful stories that I read about.
0:15:27 And it really made me think about my decisions because I’m thinking about moving to Austin or
0:15:32 Miami to save on taxes, my whole family’s in New Jersey, New York. And at the end of the day,
0:15:37 do I care about saving $100,000 a year? Or do I want to spend time with my family and just hearing
0:15:41 that from you, you know, 15 times left to see your parents? When you think about it that way,
0:15:48 it’s really eye-opening. And it also reminded me of the fact that my father died during COVID.
0:15:56 It’s okay. But I was really happy that when I was 28, I made the decision to go get my MBA.
0:16:02 And it was in New Jersey, my MBA school. And so I decided that I was going to live with my parents.
0:16:05 And I remember my boyfriend, my friends, they were all like, “Why are you going to live with
0:16:11 your parents that’s so lame?” And honestly, I’m so thankful. I spent two years living in my parents’
0:16:17 house because I got to reconnect with them at 28 years old. And in your book, you were saying how
0:16:22 in your 20s, you end up not seeing your parents. I was like a stranger to my parents by the time
0:16:27 I was 28 because from 18 to whatever, I was just never home. And then I got to reconnect with them.
0:16:31 And then it just made me always want to come home because I felt closer to them.
0:16:38 And then my father passed away like two years later. And so it was definitely the right move.
0:16:43 I don’t regret it, one bit. And I encourage everybody who’s young out there right now,
0:16:47 if you have an opportunity to go spend more time with your parents, go live closer to them,
0:16:52 even live with them if they want you to, to save money and grind and do whatever you need to,
0:16:54 I would say go for it.
0:16:59 Yeah. And look, it all starts with awareness. The fact that you are aware enough to make that
0:17:03 change is a huge thing. We don’t think about time. Like when you’re young,
0:17:07 time is not a thing that ever crosses your mind. You don’t think about the fact that time is your
0:17:11 most precious asset. It is literally the only thing that matters. And when you’re young,
0:17:15 you’re literally a time billionaire. You have billions of seconds left in your life.
0:17:16 I love that time billionaire.
0:17:20 That is the only thing that you truly have. And we don’t relate to ourselves that way.
0:17:25 We don’t actually treat time as that precious asset. And so then we don’t think about it at all
0:17:29 until it’s the only thing that we think about, but then it’s too late, then you’re dead.
0:17:36 And what happens is that life ends up being filled with laders. You spend time saying,
0:17:39 “Oh, I’ll spend more time with my kids later. I’ll spend more time with my parents later.
0:17:44 I’ll spend more time on my health later. I’ll find my purpose later. I’ll pursue my passions later.”
0:17:48 And the sad thing is that later just becomes another word for never,
0:17:51 because those things are not going to exist in the same way later.
0:17:55 Your kids are not going to be five years old later. Your parents are going to be dead later.
0:18:00 Your health won’t be there later. You won’t just magically find your passions or purpose later.
0:18:04 So unless you build those things into your life now, design them into your life now,
0:18:07 you’re just going to regret it later.
0:18:12 So speaking of regrets and getting started, one of the things that I hear you say pretty often
0:18:17 is that it’s never too late to start. And you often kick yourself for not starting certain
0:18:22 things early enough. So talk to us about that. And to all the young people out there listening,
0:18:28 what do you want to tell them? Every single time I thought I was too late,
0:18:33 it was still early. Every single time, over and over and over again, I convinced myself
0:18:37 that I wasn’t going to do something because it’s too late. Oh, you can’t start a YouTube channel
0:18:42 now. Oh, you can’t start on Twitter now. All these things, it’s too late. Every single time,
0:18:46 it was still early. And all it took was for me to actually lean into the thing and just do it
0:18:51 consistently every single day. You are the only one that determines that it’s too late and it’s
0:18:55 made up in your own mind. The reality is if you have energy for something and you are willing
0:19:01 to put energy towards it on a consistent basis to get better at it over time, you’re never too late.
0:19:06 There’s no such thing. You can reinvent your story at any point in your life if you decide to.
0:19:11 But what you do need to do is put the energy into it every single day. It can’t be like a,
0:19:16 oh yeah, I’m half in, half out. You have to go all in on these things. And if you do, it’s never
0:19:21 too late. I totally agree. I remember when I started my podcast almost eight years ago now,
0:19:28 I think seven years ago now, everybody told me I was too old to start a podcast. I don’t even know
0:19:33 what that means. How old were you at the time? I was like, 28 was what, I was like, you’re too old
0:19:39 to start a podcast. I was like, okay. And it turned out I was super early. So, you know, it’s all in
0:19:44 your head to your point. You got to put in the energy. Let’s stick on energy for a bit. Why is
0:19:49 energy so important as an entrepreneur and how can we protect our energy? I think the difference
0:19:54 between time and energy is one of the most important distinctions to understand as an
0:19:59 entrepreneur or just as a human. And the insight here is that we think about time and how we’re
0:20:05 allocating time, but really the way that you allocate your energy is what matters. Energy is
0:20:09 the finite resource that we need to be aware of because you may have 24 hours in a day or you
0:20:15 may have 16 hours while you’re awake. The reality is that you don’t have that much energy. You’re
0:20:20 not just even energy throughout the day. And the things that you deploy your energy into,
0:20:24 especially the things that create energy for you, where you feel really drawn to them,
0:20:29 those are the things that create the incredible 10x, 100x, 1000x outcomes in your life.
0:20:34 We all know this in our own experience. The times when we have generated incredible outputs and
0:20:39 incredible results, it has always been when we felt pulled towards something, when we were able
0:20:44 to put our head down and not even realized time was just disappearing. You lost yourself in the
0:20:49 thing you were doing. We need to tune into that more because when you lean into things that are
0:20:55 creating energy in your life in that way, relationships or business endeavors, that is
0:20:59 what creates the most incredible outcomes in your life. And so in the book, actually, I have an
0:21:04 exercise that I love people to walk through to actually identify the things that are creating
0:21:10 energy in your life. I call it the energy calendar. And all you have to do is at the end of a weekday,
0:21:14 take a Monday, at the end of a Monday, color code your calendar according to whether the
0:21:19 activity created energy, meaning you felt lifted up by it, market green. It was neutral,
0:21:24 market yellow. And if it was draining, if you felt physically drained by it, market red.
0:21:29 At the end of a week, if you do that every day, you have a very clear picture of the types of
0:21:34 activities and the types of people who are creating energy in your life versus draining energy in your
0:21:40 life. After you have that insight, you can slowly reposition your calendar to be focused more on
0:21:46 energy creators than energy drainers. That will change your entire life because you’ll be spending
0:21:51 more of your time on things that are lifting you up on things you are pulled towards and less on
0:21:55 things that are killing you. That will lead to better outcomes. It’ll lead to better relationships.
0:22:00 It’ll lead to an improved business. All of the outcomes we want in life will follow as a result
0:22:04 of leaning into those energy creators. And for the entrepreneurs out there, we’ve got control
0:22:10 over it. And if you’re still working a nine to five, what do you suggest? You have more control
0:22:14 than you think, even in a nine to five. I’ll give you an example. I did that exercise for the first
0:22:20 time when I was still working my 80 to 100 hour week finance job. The biggest energy drainer I found
0:22:26 on my calendar was phone calls and Zoom meetings. And while I could not just start saying no to
0:22:32 those, I was an associate at the time, like I was still pretty junior, I could slightly tweak the
0:22:38 way that I was doing them in order to make them more energy creating by doing some of them while
0:22:43 out on a walk. So what I noticed about myself was that sitting at my desk doing a phone call or a
0:22:49 Zoom is about as energy draining as I can get. But doing that same phone call or Zoom while walking
0:22:54 was very energy creating for me. I love being outside. I’m more present because you can’t
0:22:58 multitask when you’re on a phone call on a walk. And so as a result, I actually show up better on
0:23:02 those calls. Like you and I were doing one, you would notice I felt more present and I feel much
0:23:07 better after doing them. So I took half of my calls, the ones that I was able to, and put them
0:23:13 into walking calls. Now suddenly at the end of a week, I feel way, way different. I feel way more
0:23:17 uplifted by the entire week. I show up better on those calls, the outcomes are better, that compounds
0:23:23 in your life. The insight there is, that’s one example of a way where you would say, “Oh, I have
0:23:27 no control. I’m working a nine to five and normal job.” But you have more control than you think.
0:23:32 You just have to be willing to scrutinize a little bit some of the activities and ask,
0:23:36 “Can I do these a little bit differently than I currently am?” Yeah, I love that. Energy calendar
0:23:42 is such a great hack. Okay, so let’s talk about your entrepreneurship. You have a media business
0:23:47 and I want to stick there for a little bit. Start it off with this newsletter. Talk to us
0:23:52 about how you first became an entrepreneur. What was the first thing you did as an entrepreneur?
0:23:57 I laugh about this a lot because my most entrepreneurial friends, and I’m lucky to have
0:24:02 some incredible friends out there, when you go ask them what their journey with entrepreneurship was,
0:24:06 most of them will be like, “Well, when I was eight years old, I started this lemonade stand.”
0:24:10 And then it was a lemonade enterprise across multiple times. I just dicked around when I was
0:24:14 a kid. I played baseball. I was just screwing around. I didn’t have an entrepreneurial bone
0:24:19 in my body. My dad is a professor. The least entrepreneurial track you can follow. And so
0:24:24 we didn’t have it in our blood in any way. So when I was thinking about leaving my old job
0:24:29 to pursue this entrepreneurial path, that was weird. I didn’t have a supportive family around
0:24:33 that telling me, “Oh, you should definitely do that.” My wife was very supportive, but
0:24:37 to be honest, I didn’t know if I could do it. I didn’t even know what entrepreneurship really
0:24:43 meant. And if I can do it, anyone can do it because I was not wired for this. It wasn’t like
0:24:53 I was a great risk taker. I’m very risk averse. The insight I have around this is you can’t plan
0:24:56 entrepreneurship. The whole idea in business school, you went to business school. The whole
0:25:00 idea of creating a business plan is sort of a joke. You don’t need to create a business plan
0:25:05 to go launch your first thing. You need to create evidence. You need to create evidence that you
0:25:10 can do it, which is just done by taking a little bit of action. You have to go and do the thing.
0:25:13 You can’t talk about the thing or brainstorm the thing. You have to go do the thing.
0:25:19 And that was all I did. I started writing the newsletter in May of 2021. And there was no
0:25:25 monetization plan. There was no strategy to it. I just started writing it. And by the end of that
0:25:31 month, I had 15,000 or so subscribers. And I sent a text to a founder of a startup that I knew
0:25:36 and asked if he would want to sponsor one. And he said, sure. And I think he gave me $500 to
0:25:40 put out the first sponsorship. And that was this little bit of evidence that I created that I was
0:25:46 like, oh, man, okay, so I’m sending one a week and it’s making me $500. What if I send two a week?
0:25:51 Now it’s going to be $1,000 a week, $4,000 a month. I was like, man, if I scale it,
0:25:56 if I grow the new, like I started to see a path. And I don’t know if you know the ancient poet,
0:26:04 Rumi once said, as you start to walk on the way, the way appears. As you start to walk on the way,
0:26:09 the way appears. And I love that because what it reminds you, especially as an entrepreneur,
0:26:14 is that you cannot figure it out standing still. You start to walk and then the path becomes clear.
0:26:19 And so that was really the story for me. With anything that I’ve done, it’s been,
0:26:24 I start moving, I start doing something, whatever bad version of it looks like. And then the answer
0:26:30 start to become clear to me. Yeah. So it goes back to following your energy. You followed your energy,
0:26:35 you found the evidence, you tried to replicate what was working, and then you felt more comfortable,
0:26:40 you probably got more motivated because you saw some success and it gave you some more motivation
0:26:46 to keep going and going. Motivation is a byproduct of movement. Yeah. Your energy that you put out
0:26:51 into the world literally creates it. So the whole idea of you need to be motivated to act is actually
0:26:55 the inverse. You need to act and then you become motivated. So you mentioned that you’re not
0:27:00 naturally an entrepreneur. We’re opposites. I’m the type of person who is creating businesses at
0:27:06 four years old. I’m jealous. I’m jealous. I’ve always been an entrepreneur. So not being naturally
0:27:11 an entrepreneur, and I’m sure there’s plenty of people listening in that want to be entrepreneurs,
0:27:16 but feel like I just have always worked a regular job. I’ve never even thought about being an
0:27:21 entrepreneur, but I want the freedom. What do you think the hardest obstacles are going to be for
0:27:26 them and how did you overcome your hardest obstacles? The single greatest obstacle I have
0:27:31 faced and that I think most people face when they dive into the entrepreneurial journey is
0:27:37 they overcomplicate what it means to be an entrepreneur. All it means is that you are going
0:27:42 to solve problems for people. You are going to create value for people via solving their problems,
0:27:49 and you will get paid. You will receive value in return. Overcomplicating that, thinking about
0:27:53 all of these things around structure and business plans and all of these big questions that you
0:27:58 can get bombarded by on social media is actually losing sight of the most important thing. The
0:28:02 most important thing is just figure out how to create value for other people. If you do that,
0:28:07 you’ll receive value in return. All it comes down to is that it is identify a problem,
0:28:12 create a solution, and then scale that solution. The more scalable the solution,
0:28:17 the more money you will make. If you distill it down to that and deconstruct it down to that,
0:28:22 it actually feels quite simple because then it’s one of those three things that you need to be
0:28:25 thinking about. When you’re starting and you’re trying to find your journey and what you might
0:28:30 be interested in, all you need to focus on is identifying problems. Literally take out a notepad,
0:28:34 walk around for a week, and just write down every problem you perceive of the people around you
0:28:38 that you’re interacting with. That’s literally the first place I would start if I wanted to go
0:28:42 create a new business and I didn’t know what to do. Just identify problems. Then once you’ve done
0:28:47 that, start to think about solutions. How might you be able to solve that problem for that person,
0:28:51 whether it’s with a service or a product or something you can put out? Then think about
0:28:54 how you would scale that solution. How would you reach more people? How would you make the solution
0:28:58 more scalable through the internet, through social, through whatever it is, whatever means?
0:29:04 But that’s what it all comes down to. That is what stalls a lot of people is they overcomplicate
0:29:10 it so then they do nothing. Once you have your business idea, it’s all about focus and consistency,
0:29:15 putting in the reps, getting the work done. When you work a nine to five, you’ve got a boss telling
0:29:21 you it’s used with priorities, spend your time this way. You know what to do. You might even be
0:29:25 taking over a job from somebody else who does exactly what you need to do. As an entrepreneur,
0:29:31 you need to create your day job. How do you recommend that people go about that when they’re
0:29:35 used to so much structure? You have to create your own structure. I think what you’ve hit on
0:29:40 there is actually the biggest challenge for most people when they actually do start, when they do
0:29:45 take the leap and they’re diving into it is you’ve known historically exactly what you had to do at
0:29:49 all times of the day. You knew what meetings, what work you had to do, what emails you had to send,
0:29:55 and now no one is telling you what to do. I think the first activity I would go through is to actually
0:30:00 create a clear routine and structure to your day. I do that straight into the calendar because I
0:30:06 think that your energy will really flow with what you put onto your calendar. Your priorities are
0:30:11 really just an outflow from your calendar. Keith Roboy, the famous investor said, “Don’t tell me
0:30:16 your priorities. Show me your calendar.” I love that quote because it’s true. You can’t say your
0:30:20 priorities are building a business and then your calendar is a whole bunch of busy work meetings.
0:30:23 You need to have time on their structure to actually work on the things that matter.
0:30:29 Structure your day. Become a disciplined routine person for a period of time where you
0:30:33 really break down your day according to the type of activity that you’re going to be doing during
0:30:38 that window. It’s called time blocking. It works really well. It doesn’t need to be down to the
0:30:44 minute, but have windows of time. If you know, for example, that you are very creative early in the
0:30:49 morning, wake up and have a block of time for creative work. If part of your business is going
0:30:54 to be creating content to drive the top of funnel like it is for us and you’re most creative in the
0:30:57 morning, you should probably have a window of time in the morning when you are focused on creating
0:31:02 content, creating things that are going to drive that top of funnel. Have a window of time when
0:31:07 you’re going to be processing emails and doing basic management tasks like invoices or meetings,
0:31:14 whatever those might be. But have real structure on a daily basis and then you won’t feel that
0:31:20 anxiety and aimlessness that naturally happens. I’ve written this before that stress and anxiety
0:31:28 feed on idleness. When you take action, when you have movement, you literally starve them of the
0:31:33 oxygen they need to breathe. When in doubt, you just have to act. You have to have that clear
0:31:38 structure so that you know you’re doing something throughout the day. I feel like time blocking
0:31:45 on your calendar is just such a life hack. I’ve now scaled this to my team. You’re probably familiar
0:31:51 with Leila Hermosi. She’s got this thing called Monday Hour and Chill. Monday Hour, One Hour and
0:31:56 Chill or something like this. They have an SOP online if you guys want to find it. Basically,
0:32:01 it’s like for one hour a week, you sit down with your team and everybody time blocks their calendar,
0:32:07 color codes it based on the activity and then shares it with their manager. It helps me see,
0:32:13 okay, why are you working on this for three hours? You shouldn’t do this or you need to take a break.
0:32:18 You have no breaks in your day or you’ve got too many calls and it just helps you see what
0:32:22 everybody is working on because to your point, you can have to do lists and project management
0:32:27 tools, but if what’s not on your calendar doesn’t reflect that, you’re not getting what you need
0:32:32 to do done. I feel like it’s such a great hack that you brought that up. Yeah, that works well.
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0:37:07 So it’s the start of the year right now. This is going to come out in February,
0:37:11 but we’re talking now in January. And I learned that you have this annual tradition
0:37:17 of asking people for advice. So talk to us about this tradition. How did you get started with it?
0:37:23 And how has it evolved over time? I have always been someone that is rather reflective. I try to
0:37:30 accumulate insights and wisdom from people who I feel have a lot of it. And I’ve been very fortunate
0:37:35 to have a number of mentors and people in my life, many of whom are significantly older,
0:37:39 some of whom are just a little bit older, but who have unique experiences and have
0:37:45 taken the plunge in different ways in their life. And I like to, on an annual basis,
0:37:50 create a reflection exercise where I go and ask them, what advice would they give to their younger
0:37:56 self at whatever age I’m at? I kind of started when I was around 30. And I asked a whole bunch of
0:38:00 people, what advice they would give to their 30 year old self? What do they wish they knew then
0:38:09 that they know now? And it ends up creating this incredible map of how to live a life and a beautiful
0:38:15 life. And so I share some of it in the book in this upfront section of, especially from this one
0:38:21 year on my 30th birthday when I did it with all people that were 80 and 90 years old, actually
0:38:29 like 100 year old. And it created this incredible clear vision in my mind of what matters and what
0:38:33 doesn’t. The things that I was stressing over and how I need to just be able to look through those
0:38:37 and see the bigger picture, see the real true north of what we are all trying to drive towards.
0:38:40 And how did it end up influencing you to write this book?
0:38:47 It was a huge part of creating this idea of the five types of wealth, of thinking about the fact
0:38:52 that money was an enabler to a lot of the ends, but it was not an end in and of itself. In other
0:38:58 words, money is a tool, but not the goal. And it brought to light the fact that there were really
0:39:04 four things that kept coming up for everyone. It was time, people, purpose, and health. Those
0:39:08 were the four things that everyone really focused on. And again, money was an enabler to some of
0:39:14 those, but it wasn’t really an end in and of itself. And that ended up creating and being
0:39:19 the early structure and skeleton of this idea of the five types of wealth. Financial wealth is one
0:39:24 of the five types of wealth that is very important. But these other four of time wealth, of social
0:39:29 wealth and of mental wealth and physical wealth are how that all got rounded out into this new
0:39:35 scoreboard for your life. I want to stick on one of the types of wealth, time wealth, because I
0:39:39 feel like that’s one that I haven’t really heard of. And so I’d love for you to break that down
0:39:46 and how do we build it? Time wealth is the freedom to choose. It is all about having the freedom to
0:39:51 choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it, when you trade it for
0:39:56 other things. And it all starts with what we were talking about earlier, which is an awareness of
0:40:02 time as your most precious asset. I often ask young people, would you trade lives with Warren
0:40:08 Buffett? Think about it. Would you trade lives with Warren Buffett? He’s worth 130 billion dollars.
0:40:12 He has access to anyone in the world. He flies around on Boeing business jets. He has houses
0:40:16 all over the place. He reads and learns for a living, but you wouldn’t trade lives with him
0:40:22 because he’s 95 years old. You would never trade the time you have left for 130 billion dollars.
0:40:29 So you know your time has incalculable value. And yet on a daily basis, how much time are you
0:40:34 really wasting? Scrolling on TikTok, flipping around on your phone, comparing yourself to other
0:40:39 people, worrying about little busy work tasks, urgent things that don’t really matter, that
0:40:44 aren’t driving you forward. We all do that. And so creating an awareness of just how important
0:40:49 your time is, just how precious it is, is what allows you to then say, okay, I’m going to take
0:40:54 this really seriously. I’m going to deploy my precious attention and energy into the few things
0:40:58 and into the few relationships that really matter, that are really creating those outcomes in my life
0:41:03 that I want. That is what time wealth is all about. It’s about deploying your attention and
0:41:08 energy into the few things that really move you forward that really matter. I love that. Is there
0:41:13 any sort of activity that you recommend to figure out what our priorities are? Yeah, there’s a few.
0:41:17 And a few are shared in the book. The energy calendar is a great start for figuring out
0:41:22 where am I getting my energy from so that I can focus in. There’s another one that actually comes
0:41:28 from Warren Buffett, where he asks you to create a list of your 25 priorities in life. Go write down
0:41:34 all of your priorities. And then he says, okay, now you have to circle only five of them. And you
0:41:38 have to go and try to figure out on this long list of things you’ve just written down, what are the
0:41:43 five things that actually matter? So now you have a list of five things circled and 20 things that
0:41:48 you didn’t circle. And what he says is the five things you circled are your true priorities.
0:41:53 Those are the things that you need to put energy towards. The other 20 things are your avoid at
0:41:59 all costs list. Because every single ounce or energy that you put towards those is just a
0:42:03 distraction. All of those things are just a distraction pulling you away from the things
0:42:07 that are really going to drive the outcomes, the things that really matter. And so it’s a critical
0:42:12 exercise for thinking about that exact thing of what does really matter and where do I need to
0:42:17 avoid the distraction in life? Because that’s where we really get lost on these journeys is we get
0:42:22 pulled by the little shiny object that’s floating over here when the thing right in front of us is
0:42:25 the thing we need to hammer in on. I love that because it just goes to show that there’s things
0:42:31 that you might want to do that seem really exciting that you would love to do if you had the time,
0:42:35 but you’ve got to be able to say no, even if it’s something that you kind of want to do.
0:42:42 And as entrepreneurs and as ambitious people in particular, we have a bad, bad tendency to take
0:42:46 on too much. And when you take on too much, you aren’t actually getting more done, you’re getting
0:42:50 less done because you’re pulling yourself away from the thing that’s really going to create the
0:42:55 incredible outcomes. And so there’s a moment in every entrepreneur’s life, anyone who has achieved
0:43:00 extraordinary success when they realized that actually they figured out what the one thing was
0:43:05 that really mattered and they were going to put all their energy into that one thing and just keep
0:43:10 chipping away at it over a long period of time. The whole idea of like, I’m going to have 15 income
0:43:15 streams is a little bit of a farce because every single one of those is like you’re going to have
0:43:19 a little bit of attention on each one of those rather than, okay, I’m going to have a lot of
0:43:25 attention on two or three things that could be the really big one. Social wealth is another one of
0:43:31 your elements when it comes to the new scoreboard that you’re putting out in your book. And as
0:43:34 entrepreneurs, we can really suffer with our relationships. I remember when I first started
0:43:40 my company at media, I worked for four years straight. I lost a lot of close friendships,
0:43:45 we’re friends again, but I wasn’t talking to my best friends. I was with somebody for 10 years
0:43:52 and we broke up and like just a lot of relationship shambles that I had to take a lot of time to like
0:43:57 proactively rebuild in the last two years, right? And I had to basically start from scratch.
0:44:02 So talk to us about relationships and in the context of entrepreneurship, what we need to keep
0:44:09 in mind. There are going to be long periods of loneliness on your entrepreneurial journey.
0:44:17 And that’s okay. That is a necessary cost of entry to the personal transformation that you
0:44:23 are trying to create in your life because literally what happens is you start changing and growing
0:44:28 as you were with the things you were building, the things you were focusing on and your environment
0:44:33 that you previously existed in has not changed. And so there comes to a moment when it feels like
0:44:37 you are actually speaking a different language than the people that you used to be close to.
0:44:41 And they will not understand the way you were living and the things you were doing.
0:44:46 And they may belittle you, they may tell you to be realistic, they may laugh at your ambitions.
0:44:52 Taylor Swift once said, “The worst people in the world are the ones who make you feel bad for
0:44:56 being excited about something.” I think about that all the time. There are people that have
0:45:02 done that on your journey. We know who they are. So that period of loneliness before you have
0:45:06 attracted new people, because you haven’t quite gotten to the place where you’re going, you haven’t
0:45:12 attracted your new environment yet, is long and sometimes really painful. But understanding that
0:45:18 it is the cost of entry for building the life you want allows you to feel empowered on that journey.
0:45:22 Understand this is normal. This loneliness is actually a normal part of my entrepreneurial
0:45:27 journey. That’s an important mindset shift that I have had to have and that I’ve shared with people
0:45:33 along this path. All of that being said, the understanding that your life has seasons is
0:45:37 critical here. You actually articulated it really well in describing your own journey, which is
0:45:42 you went through this really focused part, this focused season as you were building the foundation
0:45:46 for the rest of your life, building the foundation with your business, which you’ve now done. And
0:45:50 you are now in a season where you can rekindle these new relationships and build this incredible
0:45:56 social wealth. That is exactly how life works. Your 20s, early 30s, maybe into your 40s are
0:46:01 really spent building this foundation. And that’s okay for social wealth to exist on the
0:46:06 back burner during those times. It doesn’t mean you want it to completely shut off. It would still
0:46:12 be great for you to be able to cultivate family relationships or one or two close friends during
0:46:16 those periods, still send the text, still do the one annual trip, do the little thing, the tiny
0:46:21 little investment that compounds, but you don’t need it to be the primary focus of your life
0:46:27 at all times. The important realization there is that the exact same way we know that investing
0:46:32 a little bit in financial wealth compounds into the future, the exact same principle holds for
0:46:37 social wealth. You can invest a little bit in social wealth and still have it compound into
0:46:42 the future. The little text that you send, the one coffee that you get with the old friend,
0:46:47 the birthday with the parents, all of those things are tiny little time investments that really do
0:46:52 keep those relationships flowing in a healthy way into the future. You don’t need to be the
0:46:56 social butterfly life of the party during those years when you’re head down. It’s just true.
0:47:01 And that’s okay. You can feel liberated by that idea of these seasons coming and going.
0:47:06 One of the things that really impresses me about you is your huge network, right?
0:47:11 We were talking offline before this interview. You just had dinner with Cody Sanchez yesterday
0:47:17 and you always meet all these awesome people. What is your idea around mentorship and community
0:47:24 with other entrepreneurs? I think the networking is dead. The concept of networking implies a
0:47:31 transaction that is not conducive to building genuine relationships. What you are really seeking
0:47:38 to do is build genuine connection with people. If you go into a new interaction with someone,
0:47:43 trying to get something out of it, you will never build a real relationship with that person.
0:47:47 Especially if that person is ahead of you. If it’s someone that has achieved the things that
0:47:52 you’re looking to achieve because everyone can pick up on that. It is very blindingly obvious
0:47:55 when you interact with someone that just has their hand out. They just want something from you.
0:47:59 Now you experienced that on the other end of it. We’ve been that way in our own lives.
0:48:06 It is such an important idea to say as you go into an interaction with someone for the first time,
0:48:10 how would I interact with this person if I assumed that I was going to know them for the next 50
0:48:15 years? Think about that in your mind. How would I interact with them? I would not be transactional
0:48:18 with that person because I’m going to have to spend time with them for the next 50 years. I will
0:48:24 probably really start to listen. I will really lean into understanding who they are as a person,
0:48:28 creating a map in my mind of the type of things they’re excited about, the values that they hold.
0:48:33 Those would be the things I would focus on. I would try to create value for them so that they felt
0:48:37 connected to me in some way. Approaching relationships in that way where you are really
0:48:43 genuinely seeking to give with no expectation of return. That is when you end up getting the
0:48:48 best returns, which is the funny paradox of relationships. When you give with no expectation
0:48:53 of return, you get the best returns in life. I have found that time and time again. Some of my
0:49:01 mentors that have provided extraordinary value in my life are people that I didn’t even know
0:49:05 they were impressive when we first met. I just wanted to be friends with different people. I
0:49:10 was trying to learn from the people that were around me and it ended up sparking these incredible
0:49:15 relationships because there was no networking in mind. It had nothing to do with a transaction.
0:49:19 It was just I genuinely want to get to know people. Yeah, and like you said, people can feel
0:49:24 that, right? Immediately, especially people who are very successful because again, it’s very lonely
0:49:29 at the top. They are used to just having people come with a handout. If you want to stand out to
0:49:33 those people and if you want to build those connections, you have to be the opposite. You
0:49:37 have to be the person that comes with the thing. You’re providing the value. It’s the same as
0:49:43 when people are trying to do cold outreach to get a job or to connect with someone. Come with
0:49:50 some value and it’s not that hard to figure out how to create value. If I was trying to meet you,
0:49:56 I could probably spend an hour doing some research about you and identifying a couple of areas that
0:50:02 I know from you talking about it on podcasts or trying to focus on and build in your business.
0:50:06 I could do a little bit of research, figure that out, and then I could try to work on
0:50:10 some sort of proposal or solution to that problem that you were facing. Maybe you’re saying you’re
0:50:15 trying to build your podcast network and you’re trying to reach new potential podcasters. I could
0:50:19 reach out to some of them, create some sort of connection there, recognize that I could make
0:50:24 an intro and now I would come to you with some level of value. You would take me so much more
0:50:28 seriously. Then if I just came being like, “Hey, I’d love to meet you. Pick your brain,” right?
0:50:35 Totally. Jordan Harbinger was my early podcast mentor and when I first started podcasting,
0:50:40 he was like top of the food chain. He knew everything about growing pot. He knew so much
0:50:46 more than me and I really wanted him to be my mentor. I remember I would just every once in a
0:50:50 while message him on Instagram. He came on my podcast. We kind of stayed in touch and I would
0:50:56 just give him growth strategies. Hey, I just tested this new platform and I got paid this much per
0:51:01 subscriber and it retained this much and I would just give him all this little information. Then
0:51:05 finally, he was just like, “You really know what you’re talking about and you keep giving me really
0:51:13 good advice. Let’s hop on a call.” Then one day, he was like, “Hala, my scriptwriter bailed on me.
0:51:16 I think you’re really good at this stuff. Can you write me my ad?” I was like, “Sure,
0:51:20 I’ll write you your ad.” I didn’t say, “Oh, it’s going to cost this much. I need this or that.”
0:51:26 I just did it. Sent it to him before I knew it. We were taking calls. He was my mentor and that
0:51:32 was that. We’re the closest industry friends. You really do, like you said, have to try to provide
0:51:38 some value and try to actually connect with people. Yeah. That is something that in hindsight,
0:51:44 people will call you lucky. You’re so lucky for having Jordan Harbinger be your mentor and be a
0:51:49 connection that you have. There’s no luck involved in that. You were hustling for a year. I say this.
0:51:55 I’m like, “You are one year of focus away from people calling you lucky.” You putting in focus
0:52:01 daily effort for a year led to the luck that other people see on the surface. It’s just the truth.
0:52:04 You continue to put forward the effort. You continue to put forward the hustle, the energy,
0:52:10 the motion, and now the lucky thing happens. Yeah. But then when you do secure the mentor,
0:52:14 it can help you speed along so far. Because then once you trusted me and was like, “Okay,
0:52:18 you help me. I’m going to start giving you some insights of how to rank your podcast,
0:52:23 how to do this, how to do that, really helped me.” You talk about something called a brain trust.
0:52:32 What’s that? Similar idea. Basically, the idea is that mentorship is a fading or dying concept.
0:52:36 It’s funny. We just talked about mentorship. I would argue what we’re really talking about is
0:52:42 more the brain trust. A mentor, in the traditional sense of the word, is the idea that you would
0:52:48 identify a single person who was going to be your mentor. They were going to help you navigate all
0:52:51 of the challenges in your professional career that you were going to face, and maybe your
0:52:58 personal life as well. That is a crazy concept because it implies that there is a single person
0:53:03 out there who has all of the answers that can help you navigate the terrain that you are facing,
0:53:09 that their map will match your terrain. It implies a really high level of commitment on
0:53:14 that person’s part to be willing to do that. It sounds like a big burden. If you go ask someone,
0:53:18 “Will you be my mentor?” Oh, that sounds like a lot of work, especially if it’s someone high
0:53:24 up that has a demanding job or demanding path. I think of the concept of the brain trust as
0:53:31 the 21st century alternative to the 20th century idea of mentorship. A brain trust is a group of
0:53:37 people from different backgrounds and experience sets that you can call upon for advice or guidance
0:53:41 about different areas of your life. They are people that have ideally domain expertise in
0:53:46 these different areas that you can turn to at different inflection points in your own life
0:53:50 and journey. The origin of the concept is from Pixar. They do a brain trust for every movie
0:53:54 that they are creating. It’s a bunch of people that aren’t involved in the creation of the movie,
0:53:59 that pressure test and help make the movie better along the way. They make sure that the storyline
0:54:04 is good and that they’re tugging on hard strings the right way, all of those things. You can develop
0:54:08 a brain trust for your own life. It doesn’t need to be formal. No one needs to know they’re even
0:54:13 a part of your brain trust, but they’re people that you go and call upon whenever you’re facing
0:54:18 whatever challenge, who have that unique set of insights, who have that perspective and who are
0:54:23 willing to tell you the truth, give you the hard feedback along the way. You know what’s funny?
0:54:28 Psychologically, people love to give advice. If you don’t overstep this, if you’re not asking
0:54:33 somebody a question every day, but it’s somebody that you respect, that you want to have in your
0:54:38 life and you’re asking them some advice, you connect with them and that actually probably
0:54:43 strengthens your bond over time and makes sure that your network is warm and all the people that
0:54:50 you want to keep warm stay warm. It’s an easy way to naturally stay in touch with people that you
0:54:54 want to stay in touch with. Someone that you have connected with once or twice and you want to continue
0:54:59 to foster the connection, the relationship, the same way you did with Jordan, it’s an easy way to
0:55:05 say, “Hey, this thing came up. Have you ever faced anything like this?” You create a natural
0:55:10 touch point and it could end up being like once a quarter or once every six months. It doesn’t need
0:55:15 to be so often because they’re not your only person. You can turn to other people along the way,
0:55:20 but it’s been a great practice for me and the people that I would consider to be on my brain
0:55:25 trust, I’ve just gotten so much value from them over the years. Let’s move on to financial wealth.
0:55:28 So, we talked about your business ecosystem a little bit. You’ve got a media business,
0:55:33 you’ve got a holding company, you’ve got a fund, right? So, talk to us about the different elements
0:55:39 of your business and how you prioritize them. So, the media business I think of is existing
0:55:44 sort of over the top of everything. It’s a little bit of a halo in that it provides value to all
0:55:49 the other businesses. It is a self-sustaining business that is profitable and as we all know,
0:55:54 media businesses can be very profitable and very high margin. The media business functionally
0:55:59 today is newsletter and book. There are a few other things that exist in there and there will
0:56:04 be more things that get added there post the book, but it’s really just been those to date.
0:56:12 The holding company is a number of partially owned businesses that have CEOs that are running them.
0:56:16 And these are businesses that I am involved in at a board or strategic level, but not on an
0:56:21 operational level on a day-to-day basis. The entire idea there was to create businesses around
0:56:27 things that I could naturally drive value to via my media platform. So, things that I have
0:56:32 sort of a unique set of experiences in that I can naturally drive leads towards. So, it would be
0:56:39 like newsletter businesses or design development businesses, other things within those spaces.
0:56:46 Those all have profitable financial profiles. So, none of them have been like money losing
0:56:51 venture-like investments. They’re all profitable from day one, largely bootstrapped. A couple of
0:56:55 them have been things that we’ve seeded, but generally speaking, bootstrapped and they shoot
0:56:59 off distributions every single month and their cash flow straight up back to the holding company,
0:57:03 which is great because then you can reinvest across different things. And then the venture fund,
0:57:08 I raised that in 2022. I had worked in the world of investing for the first seven years of my career,
0:57:13 mostly later stage private equity stuff. This is all early stage technology companies. So,
0:57:19 I raised a $10 million venture fund from a whole bunch of LPs and investors and have been investing
0:57:24 out of that, have made 50 or so investments and will likely raise a second fund here in the next
0:57:32 year or so. We’ll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. Hey, YapBam. I’ve been
0:57:37 counting down the days to Valentine’s Day because on that day, I’ll be speaking at Funnel Hacking
0:57:44 Live alongside Tony Robbins. I’ll be speaking next to Tony Robbins, YapBam. It is such a big deal for
0:57:50 me and I’ve been on the hunt for the perfect red dress. It took a while to find exactly what I was
0:57:57 looking for, but I finally found the perfect dress and it was in my size on an overseas website.
0:58:02 Everything looked good. The pricing was good and then I went back to checkout and the price
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0:59:01 plan. There’s no risk with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee. The link is in the podcast episode
0:59:10 description box and that’s NordVPN.com/profit. I really want to dig deep on the holding company.
0:59:15 It’s really interesting to me. Something that I learned that you do is you tend to use vendors
0:59:20 that you actually use that you might like actually pay. You try to turn those cost
0:59:24 centers into profit centers. And I just thought that was so smart. So walk us through how you
0:59:30 actually invest in these companies. Do they exist already? Are you creating these companies?
0:59:35 What’s the structure typically look like? I remember coming across the case study of Amazon
0:59:43 web services in maybe like 2018, 2019. And for those who aren’t familiar with that story, basically,
0:59:48 Bezos, as they were building Amazon, the bookstore and the e-commerce platform,
0:59:55 had to build an extraordinarily large platform of compute power basically on the back end to
1:00:00 power the entire e-commerce business that they were doing. And so they built this whole back
1:00:04 end thing that was a huge cost center for the business. And what they realized was that there
1:00:11 were a lot of people, as the technology ecosystem grew, that needed that type of enormous compute
1:00:16 power. And so they started renting it out, effectively charging people to use this
1:00:21 extraordinary compute power that they had created. That became an enormous profit center for Amazon
1:00:26 now in the hundreds of billions of dollars. That is a separate company called Amazon Web Services.
1:00:32 That idea sparked in me whether there was a micro, micro, micro version of that same thing
1:00:36 that I could adopt in my own world, where things I was spending money on on an ongoing
1:00:40 monthly basis as a creator and as a business person could be things that I could turn into
1:00:46 profit centers for my business. So turn my cost centers into profit centers. And that has been
1:00:51 an overarching mental model of how we’ve approached our different businesses that we’ve launched.
1:00:56 The first example of that was a newsletter business where I was paying a team to manage
1:01:01 the back end of my newsletter. So I decided all I want to do is write the newsletter. I don’t want
1:01:05 to deal with lead magnets. I don’t want to deal with paid ads. I don’t want to deal with segmentation,
1:01:09 funnels, any of those things. I’m just not good at that and I don’t really care. So I’m going to pay
1:01:14 someone to do it. That team turned out to be really good at doing that. And so I went and partnered
1:01:19 with them and a friend of mine who is a founder of a business called Kit, which is a newsletter
1:01:25 sending platform. Yeah, ConvertKit. And we partnered to launch this as a business. I continue to pay
1:01:30 them every single month to do the back end of my newsletter. And now it is also a massively
1:01:35 profitable business. I shouldn’t say massively. It is a very profitable business where we serve
1:01:39 the back end of newsletters for some of the largest newsletter writers out there in the world,
1:01:44 turning a cost center for me into a profit center for me. Similar versions of that across
1:01:50 different areas of my business have materialized over the last two or three years. Content agency
1:01:55 business, design development business, video businesses, embedded talent business that if
1:02:00 you need to hire offshore talent into your business will do that. And it has become a really cool way
1:02:06 of coming up with the ideas for the things because I can see them on my own P&L. I’m looking at my
1:02:10 P&L. I can see what I’m spending money on and thinking, okay, is there a way where I can actually
1:02:15 own the business rather than just having this be a cash outflow every month? Yeah. I feel like
1:02:20 entrepreneurs that come from the private equity space like you and Cody Sanchez, you’ve got such
1:02:26 an advantage over everyone because you really know how to buy companies. So just walk us through
1:02:32 the process of how you’re actually doing this. Are you just investing in these companies or just
1:02:36 buying these companies? Are you creating some of these companies? It could be any of those. So it
1:02:41 depends where you catch them in the life cycle. In the case of the newsletter one, that was a
1:02:45 brand new business. That was a guy I was friends with who was just doing this on the back end for
1:02:50 me as a consultant. And he was just an independent freelance consultant doing it. Got it. And I said,
1:02:55 we should productize this and make it into a service and a real business. And so we founded
1:03:00 that from the ground up. There are examples now of businesses like the design development business
1:03:06 where you can make an investment both in cash and then also in the form of your platform. So
1:03:11 when I say that, what I mean is I can drive a lot of leads to these businesses via my platform.
1:03:16 That is a form of investment in this person’s business that they’ve already started. And so
1:03:22 you can do a combination kind of structure of cash plus my energy, my platform, audience,
1:03:26 distribution, if you will, that you can kind of invest in it. The third way that you could
1:03:31 do it is just go buy a business. And Cody obviously does that. I will do more of that
1:03:35 in the years to come at the holding company level that will sort of use holding company cash flows
1:03:40 to go buy bigger businesses. And we can raise quite easily probably anything up to like $50
1:03:46 million to go and buy a bigger business if we saw something that was really exciting where we felt
1:03:51 like we could really bring unique value add to the table. If somebody wants to learn more about
1:03:56 how to buy companies, what do you suggest? There’s a lot of resources out there now for learning
1:04:03 about buying businesses. I would definitely go and read a bunch of the books that exist about
1:04:07 private equity on like the more traditional versions of private equity. There’s a great
1:04:12 book called King of Capital about Steve Schwartzman, who was kind of the first person within private
1:04:16 equity world that really built Blackstone, which is a huge private equity fund. Cody obviously
1:04:21 has a new book out about buying smaller businesses and sort of main street businesses, which is a
1:04:26 great resource. But there’s plenty of free online resources that you can go and look at and find
1:04:32 about investing in buying businesses. And again, the thing to think about is are there creative
1:04:38 ways that you can do it? And if you have a platform or if you have built some unique distribution or
1:04:43 some unique strategic perspective, or if you have a unique SEO capability or unique paid
1:04:49 marketing capability, there’s a way where you can actually invest via your energy rather than cash.
1:04:55 So the art of the deal, if you will, is really about identifying what is that unique edge that
1:05:01 you might have to make this business bigger than it is today, where you can invest that into the
1:05:06 business in addition to or instead of any upfront capital. And I love that you take the approach
1:05:10 of being a customer first, so you really can see how well the company performs if they’re really good
1:05:16 and then you invest. I just think that’s so smart. It opened my eyes of like, oh, maybe I can invest
1:05:21 in XYZ vendor. Yeah, I mean, you probably have, I bet there are 10 businesses that you’ll think of
1:05:25 over the next month now that you have this in mind that you’ll see and say, oh, I could probably
1:05:30 actually like invest in this or be a part of it and drive business into it. That as just an idea
1:05:37 comes from Peter Lynch is this very famous Wall Street legend who wrote this book, I think it’s
1:05:42 called One Up on Wall Street. One of the best investing books of all time. It’s sort of a legendary
1:05:47 one. And one of his best investments of his career was he invested in Haynes, the underwear company,
1:05:52 and he invested in it because his wife came home from CVS or something and she had picked up a pair
1:05:58 of Keynes pantyhose and she was raving about it to him. And so he was like, oh, I’m going to go pick
1:06:02 up some shares of that company. She was raving about this like tiny little company and he ended up
1:06:07 making like an a hundred X return on this public market investment. And so the idea there was
1:06:12 like invest in things you love. If you uniquely love an experience or a product, it’s probably
1:06:16 going to be something that ends up being profitable. So speaking of investments, you’ve got this barbell
1:06:21 strategy when it comes to your investments. Can you tell us about that? The barbell strategy
1:06:27 as a model says that on a risk spectrum, if you think about the most risky things on one end and
1:06:32 the least risky things on the other end, that you want to be weighted on both of those ends.
1:06:36 So I basically want to have a handful of things that are highly risky. And for me, the highly
1:06:41 risky things are investments in myself and in my own businesses. And then on the other end,
1:06:47 it’s going to be super boring, basic stuff. For me, stock market index funds. I don’t want
1:06:52 things in between that I don’t really understand. My whole goal is I really only want to invest in
1:06:57 things that I can really touch and feel and understand. And so the riskiest stuff is always
1:07:02 going to be creating your own businesses. And the fun thing about that as risky is that you
1:07:08 actually control it to an extent versus me investing in, let’s take another really risky
1:07:13 thing like crypto. I don’t control the price of Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever. I don’t control.
1:07:18 And so yes, it might be a great investment, but I have no ability to influence the outcomes.
1:07:21 I have a high degree of ability to influence the outcomes of my own businesses,
1:07:26 things that I am actually driving. And so I would prefer to invest my time and energy into
1:07:31 things that I have some degree of controller over. And if I don’t have a degree of control over them,
1:07:36 I want them to be super safe and basic and boring. And so that’s why for me, the best
1:07:40 plan is that it’s the personal things that I do that I have control over on the riskier end.
1:07:45 And then I’m putting money in the Vanguard S&P 500 index fund on the other side.
1:07:51 So let’s go back to your five types of wealth. There’s a lot of balancing that needs to go on.
1:07:57 And I learned that you used to drink a lot. You decided to cut back on your drinking,
1:08:03 but you’re not totally cutting drinking off. You still actually drink in some social situations.
1:08:10 So you are basically balancing your physical wealth with your social wealth and doing trade-offs
1:08:16 sometimes. So maybe talk to us about some examples of trade-offs between the different
1:08:24 types and how we can think about balance. All of life is about deciding the price you are willing
1:08:32 to pay for the things that you want. And what I would argue is that to perfectly optimize
1:08:38 any one area of this, you would need to completely shut off every other area.
1:08:43 And some people do that. And most people that do that do it to perfectly optimize financial wealth
1:08:48 at the expense of every other area of their life. They lose all their relationships. Their health
1:08:53 goes to hell. They have no clarity of mind. They’re stressed all the time. They have no time,
1:08:58 freedom, and they make a lot of money, but an extraordinarily high cost to these other areas.
1:09:03 What I try to find is what is the place where I’m able to build across all of these things,
1:09:08 where I am able to build great big businesses, but not at the expense of not being able to spend
1:09:13 time with my wife and son, not at the expense of not having time to work on my body or take care
1:09:18 of myself or have the freedom to take my son in the pool at 1 p.m. on a Wednesday. I’ve written
1:09:23 that before that the wealthiest I ever feel is when I’m able to take my son swimming at 1 p.m.
1:09:28 on a Wednesday. Because it implies that I have the freedom to do that, that I have a business
1:09:33 that’s big enough, that’s working where I’m able to have free time. I don’t have calls all of a
1:09:37 sudden in the middle of the day. I can go do that. You are always going to face these trade-offs,
1:09:42 and what you need to decide is what trade-offs are you willing to make. Not the ones that people
1:09:46 tell you you should make, not the ones that the normal path says are the ones that matter,
1:09:52 but what you truly care about. If all you care about is building an enormous business,
1:09:55 that’s great. I’m happy for you, and you should build your life around that.
1:09:59 But the point in the book and the point that I’m trying to get across with everything that I do
1:10:05 is you get to decide. You get to define what matters to you in your own life, and you have to
1:10:10 ask these questions, and then take action to build your life around those things. It’s no one else’s
1:10:16 job to tell you what matters to you. You get to decide, and that I think is the really important
1:10:21 critical message in all of this. It’s just I want people to identify and really think about
1:10:24 what matters to them, and then go build their life around those things.
1:10:29 I love this conversation. The last thing I want to touch on on your book is mental wealth.
1:10:33 I know that a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with their mental health. Actually, on average,
1:10:39 we’re more likely to suffer from depression, loneliness, ADHD. There’s a lot of mental health
1:10:44 issues in entrepreneurship. It’s just an uncertain, risky thing to do, and it’s very stressful.
1:10:49 So what advice do you have for entrepreneurs in terms of building their mental wealth?
1:10:55 Create more space in your life. Create deliberate practices around space.
1:11:00 The idea of space comes from Victor Frankel, who is the famous Holocaust survivor, the author of
1:11:06 Man’s Search for Meaning, and he has a quote where he says that our power exists in the space
1:11:12 that we can create between stimulus and response. Entrepreneurs in particular live in this constant
1:11:17 loop where stimulus is coming in and they’re immediately responding to it at all hours of the
1:11:22 day, at all times. That is a very dangerous place to be because it makes you reactive.
1:11:26 Everything in your life becomes a reaction. There’s just things coming in and you’re immediately
1:11:32 shooting things out. You find incredible power and presence if you can just create a little bit of
1:11:38 space between the two. That can be found through a five-minute walk in between meetings or a 15-minute
1:11:44 walk after lunch or taking one day per month to just zoom out and go journal for a few hours at a
1:11:50 coffee shop or just making sure you give yourself one evening a week where you’re not going to work.
1:11:56 Creating a little bit of space in your life has dramatic, dramatic effects, but you have to be
1:12:00 deliberate in how you structure it into your life. It can’t be something that’s floating in the back
1:12:05 of your mind. To the point earlier on time blocking and structuring, put it on your calendar. Actually
1:12:10 have a window where you’re going to create space. You cannot be on your phone scrolling during that
1:12:16 time. It needs to be truly shut off and just give yourself that freedom to just turn off.
1:12:20 For a short window of time and you’ll experience incredible benefits.
1:12:22 How do you do that? What’s your schedule like?
1:12:26 Five-minute walks in between meetings. If you have a bunch of 30-minute meetings on your calendar,
1:12:31 make them all 25 minutes. This is actually scientifically proven. Microsoft did a study
1:12:36 where they put EEGs on people’s heads and had them go through a set of back-to-back meetings
1:12:41 or a set of meetings where they had a five-minute break in between each. The people that went through
1:12:47 back-to-back meetings saw stress build up steadily across the meetings and performance deteriorated
1:12:51 across the meetings. The people that had a five-minute break, zero stress build up and
1:12:57 consistent performance. It makes an enormous difference with a tiny intervention. 25-minute
1:13:02 meetings instead of 30. Honestly, all that happens is you remove the banter about the weather that
1:13:05 meetings start with. You just can get rid of that. You’ll be more efficient. You’ll get it done.
1:13:10 The second practice, which I walk through in the book, is once a month or once a quarter
1:13:16 at a minimum. Do what I call a think day, where you give yourself a four- to eight-hour window
1:13:22 to step out of your normal ecosystem, go into a new environment, whether it’s at a coffee shop,
1:13:28 or rent an Airbnb, or go to a hotel, or go to a spa, do something. Bring a journal, bring a pen,
1:13:32 and walk through. I have eight question prompts in the book. Walk through some of those question
1:13:37 prompts that force you to zoom out and just look at the bigger picture of the things you’re doing,
1:13:42 professionally and personally. That will naturally create this incredible ritual for
1:13:46 space in your life. If you do the micro level of the five-minute breaks and if you do the macro
1:13:50 level of a think day once a month or once a quarter, you’ll get a ton of benefit.
1:13:57 I find when I step back and do a strategy day, you call it a think day, I call it a strategy day,
1:14:02 my stress and anxiety as an entrepreneur just melts away. Suddenly, it’s like all these open
1:14:06 loops, all these things should I do, this should I do that. You make decisions, you have your road
1:14:11 map and you could just action on it instead of worrying about things so much. I’ve always thought
1:14:17 that you have stress when there’s a gap between your present reality and your expectations,
1:14:23 but in particular, when you don’t have a plan to bridge that gap. That strategy day or that
1:14:28 think day allows you to create that plan for bridging the gap and then it just becomes about
1:14:32 execution. You’re an entrepreneur. You know you can execute. You know you can show up and be
1:14:37 disciplined and do the thing every day, do the hard thing. It just allows you to create enough
1:14:41 space to create that plan and the stress, as you said, melts away. This is a perfect way to close
1:14:46 out. We can bring it up right from the beginning. We were talking about waking up and doing hard
1:14:51 things. Talk to us about your morning routine and how it structures your day. Yeah, I’m an early
1:14:57 riser. I have a 90-year-old man schedule. I go to bed at about 8, 15, 8, 30 and I wake up at 4.
1:15:02 I love the early morning hours because I’m partially because it’s the only time of day I get
1:15:06 when there’s no stimulus. There’s nothing coming in. My kid’s not awake yet. I have a 2.5-year-old.
1:15:11 He’s not up. You’re not getting emails. No one’s texting you at 4 in the morning. I get this two or
1:15:16 three-hour block just to myself. I first thing out of bed, get into the cold plunge. I have no idea
1:15:21 if it has any health benefits, but it definitely has cognitive benefits for me. I get an incredible
1:15:25 energy boost from it and definitely a mood improvement from it. The dopamine, I think,
1:15:31 really does impact me. I get out of the cold plunge and I’m usually at my desk by about 4.45
1:15:36 or so. I always do a writing block to start the day. That’s when I feel most creative. This book
1:15:41 got written from about 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. over the course of two or three years. After that,
1:15:46 my son is awake. I would do breakfast with the whole family and then I go into my workouts from
1:15:51 somewhere between 9.30 and 11.30. Amazing. It’s working really well for you.
1:15:56 We’ll see. Okay. In my show with two questions, I ask all my guests. It doesn’t have to be
1:16:00 related to what we talked about today. What is one actionable thing our young and
1:16:03 profitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?
1:16:12 I would create an evening three to five-minute journaling ritual. This reflection, I think,
1:16:17 really helps you make more money, allowing yourself to just pause and reflect a bit.
1:16:22 And the thing I do is I call it my one, one, one method. You write down one win from the day.
1:16:25 That’s something that you feel good about that went well. One point of stress,
1:16:29 tension, or anxiety, something that was bugging you that you need to get off your brain and onto
1:16:33 the paper. And then one point of gratitude, something you felt grateful for during the day.
1:16:38 It takes three to five minutes max and it forces you to recognize a win and just feel
1:16:41 better before going to bed at the end of the day.
1:16:45 I love that. What would you say your secret to profiting in life is and it doesn’t have to be
1:16:52 financial? My relationship with my wife and son, for sure. I get more joy out of seeing him grow
1:16:56 and the relationship that he and my wife have than just about anything else in the world.
1:17:00 That’s so sweet. And where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?
1:17:06 Well, you can find the book anywhere. Books are sold and more information at the5typesofwealth.com.
1:17:09 And then I’m at Sahil Bloom on every major platform.
1:17:13 Awesome. Sahil, it was such a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us on Young and Profiting
1:17:24 podcast. Thank you. Wow. So many thoughtful insights from Sahil. And I especially enjoyed
1:17:30 how he thinks about time. Time is truly your most precious asset. But when you’re young,
1:17:36 it’s also your only real asset. It can take years and years to accumulate money,
1:17:42 connections and knowledge. And there’s no good shortcuts to acquiring those things.
1:17:46 But when you have time in your back pocket and if you hustle and you work hard,
1:17:52 you can trade time for all those things and more. You also have the freedom to choose how you will
1:17:57 deploy your time. And if you want to make the most out of that freedom, then lean into what
1:18:04 energizes you. Like Sahil put it, motivation is a byproduct of movement. In other words,
1:18:09 you need to act first and then you will become motivated. And the energy you put into the world
1:18:16 now is what will fuel your future efforts. Even if you’re rich in time and filled with energy,
1:18:21 the entrepreneur’s path can still be an extremely lonely one. You may lose friendships,
1:18:27 squander relationships, burn bridges and more bad things may happen for a while. Believe me,
1:18:33 I’ve been there. But in the big picture, over time, you’re building a foundation for your business
1:18:38 and for the rest of your life. Just be aware of the tradeoffs and what you’re compromising
1:18:45 along the way. And remember, hustle is just for a season. Don’t put off spending time with your
1:18:52 parents, your loved ones or friends for too long. Part of what makes time so precious is an understanding
1:18:57 of its limits. Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast. If you
1:19:02 listen and learn to profit from this conversation with Sahil and consider it time well spent,
1:19:07 then please share the wealth and this episode with somebody who will find value in it too.
1:19:12 And if you did enjoy this show and you learned something, then why not drop us a 5-star review
1:19:19 on Apple Podcasts. I love to read your reviews. I read reviews every single day and nothing helps
1:19:24 us reach more people than a good review from you. And if you’re a new listener of Young and Profiting,
1:19:29 make sure that you subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. If you want to watch
1:19:34 us on video, you can find all of our episodes up on there. I’ve been doing a lot more in-person
1:19:39 interviews with Mel Robbins. This interview with Sahil was in person, so go check out
1:19:45 all of our awesome videos on YouTube. You can also find me on Instagram @yappwithhala or LinkedIn
1:19:50 by searching my name. It’s @halataha. And of course, I gotta shout out my YAP team. I’ve got rock
1:19:56 stars at YAP Media. Everybody is hustling and working so hard. You guys are the best. This is
1:20:12 your host, Halataha, a.k.a. The Podcast Princess, signing off.
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