The Harsh Truth About Money & Happiness - Sahil Bloom - #899

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Happy New Year, man.

**Sahil Bloom** (0:01)
Happy New Year.

**Chris Williamson** (0:02)
How did you spend it?

**Sahil Bloom** (0:04)
Well, I have a two and a half year old, so I'm guessing our New Years were a little bit different. I went to bed at 8.3 after a little dance party with my two and a half year old little guy.

**Chris Williamson** (0:13)
Okay, well, I had norovirus. I was in a three piece tuxedo at the New York Athletic Club, running back and forth from shedding my brains out in the toilet, so.

**Sahil Bloom** (0:22)
But you were in New York, so we were actually like a few miles apart, but we were having a very different experience. It could have been my toilet. Oh, we would have been asleep, so you would have to run.

**Chris Williamson** (0:29)
Me and a two and a half year old sharing a bathroom together at three in the morning.

**Sahil Bloom** (0:33)
Yeah, we actually have someone that does that on a frequent basis, so you wouldn't have been alone.

**Chris Williamson** (0:37)
That's good. Just if you do have a stomach bug, my advice is don't wear an outfit that requires three minutes to undo.

**Sahil Bloom** (0:44)
Have you ever seen the Family Guy episode where Peter gets the pajama pants that have the like trap door in the back? Yeah, you should have just worn one of those.

**Chris Williamson** (0:52)
That would have been a solution. But the problem was that the guy at the front, the toilet-attending guy at the front, must have thought, this man, I'm in an event filled with rich bankers and like dynasty money and all the rest of it, probably quite a lot of cocaine going on.

**Sahil Bloom** (1:08)
Yeah, that's what I was going to say.

**Chris Williamson** (1:09)
He must have looked at me and thought, that is the fucking king of cocaine.

**Sahil Bloom** (1:13)
For sure.

**Chris Williamson** (1:13)
That man is shoveling some good stuff in there. Because I was back and forth every seven minutes or so.

**Sahil Bloom** (1:20)
Was it one of those bathrooms that had like a person that would hand you a towel after you washed your hands?

**Chris Williamson** (1:24)
Mercifully not.

**Sahil Bloom** (1:25)
Okay, good.

**Chris Williamson** (1:25)
Because that would have been rough. He was outside.

**Sahil Bloom** (1:28)
That's always a little embarrassing.

**Chris Williamson** (1:29)
Speaking of the new year though, I saw a tweet from you that said, you're one year of focus away from people saying you got lucky. And yeah, I know exactly what you mean.

**Sahil Bloom** (1:40)
Yeah, that's an important concept. It's one of those things that I think about a lot, that once you've made it, once you've achieved success, everyone wants to call you lucky. All those people that were like in the dark, hating on you, all the people that were belittling you when you wanted to go and chase that dream, when you wanted to go do the thing, they're the first ones to call you lucky once you achieve it. And they didn't see all of the shit that you did in the dark, all of the struggles, all of the failures, all of the pains that you came back from. But they're the first ones that are going to go around saying that you got lucky on the back end. So I think the call to action is wear that as a badge of honor. When people are calling you lucky, you've clearly done something right, because you know what went in in the dark behind it.

**Chris Williamson** (2:22)
The other one is, I bet you had wealthy parents.

**Sahil Bloom** (2:26)
Yeah, you're privileged. That's been a meme over the last few years, right? It's like, well, that doesn't acknowledge the privilege.
I do think that you think about your own life and the life cycle. The early years of your life are governed by type one luck, blind luck. The base circumstances of your life, acts of God, where you're born, who you're born to, all of those things. But beyond that, your luck is mostly a by-product of the actions that you're taking in your life. It's mostly a by-product of the motion that you're creating and the things that you're building, how you're actually going out and interacting with the world. Idea being, it's very hard to get lucky sitting on the couch doing nothing at home. It's much easier to get lucky if you're going out and doing something.

**Chris Williamson** (3:10)
Yeah, you've got a bracket that your world exists within, and much of that bracket has actually been determined by things that were outside of your control. But within that bracket, almost everything is within your control. And the fact that people can't hold two thoughts in their mind at the same time is where that gets confusing. And you get accused of victim blaming or not fully understanding the challenges that people face, or pandering and not giving people sufficient motivation and giving them a hard enough kick up the ass to get them to go and do the thing. So ultimately, I think that it's very difficult to please anybody, frankly.