The 5 Types of Wealth That Will Change Your Life | Sahil Bloom

Sahil Bloom (0:00)

When you thought about measuring your life, what was the one thing that you measured? It was money. And so what I set out to do with this book was to try to create a new scoreboard, a new way of measuring your life around the pillars and the things that really do fundamentally create this good life, if you will, that we are all seeking to build. That is what The Five Types of Wealth is about.

Michael Gervais (0:21)

What if the real risk isn't failure? It's spending your whole life chasing a version of success that was never yours to begin with? Welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training, a high-performance psychologist. Now, the whole idea behind these conversations is quite simple, to sit with the extraordinary, to learn about how they work from the inside out. Today's conversation is with Sahil Bloom, a former private equity investor who made a radical life shift after realizing he might only see his parents 15 more times.

Sahil Bloom (0:59)

Within 45 days, I had left my job, we had sold our house in California, and my wife and I had moved 3,000 miles across the country to live closer to both of our sets of parents. We had taken an action and created time.

Michael Gervais (1:12)

That gut-check moment, it led him to redefine what it means to live well for him.

Sahil Bloom (1:17)

I never talked to anyone who said that their enough life was traveling around on a private jet by themselves. I know many people, and I'm sure you do, who have way more money than I do, but are not wealthy, because they are constantly chasing some version of more that the world has handed them.

Michael Gervais (1:34)

The invitation here is to explore what you are really optimizing for in your life. Are your daily actions aligned with what you say matters most?

Sahil Bloom (1:44)

There are two types of priorities in life. There are the priorities we say we have, and there are the priorities our actions show we have. Oftentimes, there's a huge gap between the two. And closing that gap is how your life improves.

Michael Gervais (1:56)

Let's dive into this week's conversation. Okay, I'm really excited that you're here. You're finally here in the Finding Mastery lab. I've wanted to sit down with you for a long time, so welcome, and I'm excited for the conversation.

Sahil Bloom (2:14)

The feeling is very mutual. I'm thrilled to be here.

Michael Gervais (2:16)

Okay, so I think we've got a lot of thoughts that rhyme together.

Sahil Bloom (2:21)

I feel that way too.

Michael Gervais (2:22)

Yeah, and so thank you for putting together a book that it's not easy to tackle the five verticals that you went after. So let's just kind of start big picture for a minute. What's the flyover for the book? What were you trying to do? And then I want to better understand you, the person that is underneath the ideas. And then third part is I want to understand kind of what you hope we will take from your research and your writings. So let's start with a flyover of the book.

Sahil Bloom (2:53)

The book is fundamentally about asking yourself what you want your life to look like. And what you measure around your life, I have found, dictates your ability to go and create that life. Very few people focus on measurement on our journey, but if you really zoom out and think about it, what you measure in life really matters.

The things that you measure end up dictating all of your actions. Peter Drucker is this famous management theorist. He has this quote where he says, what gets measured gets managed. It's the idea that as humans, the things that we can measure end up being the things that we narrowly hone in on and optimize around. Put on a sleep tracking ring or band, all of a sudden you become the most annoying sleep person in the world. You start saying like, oh, I can't go out because my sleep score is gonna be thrown off. Suddenly, all of your actions surround this one thing that you can now measure. Historically, in our lives, when you thought about measuring your life, what was the one thing that you measured? It was money, your net worth, the ability to earn and generate income and wealth. And unfortunately, if all of your actions surround that one thing, what we find, societally and in our own lives, is that we can win that one battle but lose the much bigger picture of war. And so what I set out to do with this book was to try to create a new scoreboard, a new way of measuring your life around the pillars and the things that really do fundamentally create this good life, if you will, that we are all seeking to build. That is what The Five Types of Wealth is about. It is about redefining this life scoreboard, if you will, so that we can take the right actions to win on that much bigger picture scoreboard.