[00:02:24] Clay Finck: Yeah, I want to start there actually, because you’ve had a very interesting kind of career transitions you started out, I guess before you started your career with NPE, you were a college baseball player and you were very focused on that. And then you went into PE and you were very successful at that.

[00:02:40] Clay Finck: And then you seemingly made this transition to building a very successful newsletter, having a following of over 1 million people, and then building these businesses around that, that I’d like to talk about as well. And you’ve talked about how working in private equity. It was a great career path, but it wasn’t the path for you.

[00:02:57] Clay Finck: And I ran across something very similar in my own life. And I’m sure many in our audience are questioning whether they’re on the right path. So I was curious if you could walk us through your thought process on how you decide if a line of work is right for you or not. 

[00:03:12] Sahil Bloom: I think there’s no easy answer to this.

[00:03:14] Sahil Bloom: It’s a real like self-reflection process over a long period of time. And the way it works in my mind is that careers tend to have this like gravitational pull that accelerates over time. And so if you start down a career path, like private equity as an example, or investment banking or like hedge funds all these areas of investing, they have a natural plus an actually compensation oriented gravitational pull.

[00:03:37] Sahil Bloom: And what I mean by that is like year one, you could easily leave. You can make a change and it’s like not a huge deal to go jump. Year five, it’s quite a bit harder. Like you’ve built all this institutional knowledge. So that’s like this natural gravitational pull. And your compensation starts to be tied to these long dated things like in the private equity world, you start getting into the carried interest of the fund, which means probably like a 5 to 7 year vesting period on that carried interest.

[00:04:01] Sahil Bloom: So people tend to stay in order to actually reap the economic rewards. So making changes later and later on in your career in those tracks becomes very difficult psychologically and economically, especially if you have kids, you have mortgages like bills to pay, things like that. So what happens is people tend to stay on these paths.

[00:04:17] Sahil Bloom: And oftentimes that’s a real shame because oftentimes it’s not something they really want to be doing. They don’t love it. It doesn’t light them up. They don’t get a ton of energy out of it. And really, that was my story was like I was having a great time with the people and with the learning, but the work wasn’t really for me.

[00:04:37] Sahil Bloom: But, the actual work, long term, was not going to be something that I looked back on my life and said, ‘Oh my God, I’m so glad I did that with my one precious life. For COVID, frankly, I would have just done that. And it would have been one of those situations where I woke up. in 30, 40 years and said What the hell just happened?

[00:04:55] Sahil Bloom: I just did that. I made a bunch of money. So like people would have patted me on the back along the way and I would have looked successful, quote unquote, but I wouldn’t have actually felt fulfilled by the thing I was doing on a day to day basis. And so as I think as I give advice to younger people that are starting their careers, I just think that it’s the time of your life in those early years to explore broadly, like before that gravitational field starts to really pull you down into a single path before you have all the responsibilities of.

[00:05:19] Sahil Bloom: Kids of mortgages, of all these bills, it’s like the perfect time to go and explore. Derek Thompson, the writer at the Atlantic, talks about this like model that he has that’s explore, then exploit from a career perspective. And I think that’s so sharp because basically it says in those early years you explore and you can spend a year or two somewhere, go jump ship, go do something else, try a different thing.

[00:05:40] Sahil Bloom: All of this like exploration that happens. And then once you figure out what you really love, once you figure out what you get a ton of energy from, which is really gonna be the. Thing that you actually excel at the most long term too. That’s when you exploit, that’s when you go deep on the one opportunity.

[00:05:54] Clay Finck: And I think this relates well to something you’ve said in the past. You said before you join the game, always ask first, do I know the game I’m playing? And second, do I want the prize for winning that game? And I think that’s such an insightful way of thinking about it and whether that game suits your goals, your skill sets, your knowledge, and the lifestyle you want, because a PE type lifestyle has its pros and cons in terms of, there’s so much of the external side that plays in where like externally, it looks like you’re doing very well, but internally is where you really have to do that reflection that you mentioned.

[00:06:25] Sahil Bloom: The idea of the video game is one like the analogy of the video game is just one I love because it applies really directly to a lot of things that you end up pursuing in life. Oftentimes, the like, quest you’re on, if you will, is something that you’ve defaulted into. Like you’re in college, you’re taking classes.

[00:06:40] Sahil Bloom: Everyone around you starts recruiting to go to investment banks or consulting firms. If you’re working if you were studying economics or business, like that’s usually what like the high performing kids are starting to want to go into. And so you just assume oh, that’s what I should focus on.

[00:06:53] Sahil Bloom: I should focus on going into consulting so that I can get into private equity, or so that I can get into hedge fund world, or so that I can get into banking, whatever it is. And you step into that by default. You never really thought about, oh, okay, do I actually love what that game looks like? Do I love what the prize at the end of that game looks like, et cetera.

[00:07:08] Sahil Bloom: You just have jumped into it. And then if you. close your eyes, you’ll wake up in 20 years and you’ll have that feeling that you climbed a mountain, got to the top, got to the end of the video game, whatever it is, you won it and you’ll say, oh shit, I actually didn’t want to win that game. The prize wasn’t something that I really wanted.

[00:07:23] Sahil Bloom: And so for me, COVID was like the shock to the system that forced me to actually take a step back and think about that exact thing. Was I enjoying the game I was playing and was I going to be happy with winning that game? What the prize looked like at the end. And I think it was for a lot of people. You saw.

[00:07:37] Sahil Bloom: The Great Resignation was like this huge movement, right? Hundreds of thousands of people resigned, quit their job, left, moved, did all these big changes. And I think the biggest reason, in my mind, was just because it was the first time they’d actually had the space to think about it. You really, on a day to day basis, you were so busy, and you were taking pride in being busy, for most of these people, that you never had the space to actually think about…

[00:07:59] Sahil Bloom: those questions and actually zoom out and look at the bigger picture of the things you were doing. And so with the whole world starting to shift to remote and hybrid and having the opportunities to actually think about those questions people came to a lot of different conclusions than what they otherwise would have.

[00:08:13] Clay Finck: And you’ve also talked a lot about the importance of leverage when it comes to a career success. You’ve mentioned your father who was or is a professor, which you described as something that’s lower leverage because oftentimes you’re the way to excel is contributing more time and. You only have so much time in a week or in a day.

[00:08:31] Clay Finck: And the path you’ve taken in recent years is very high leverage. So when you’re looking at a specific career, what types of leverage can exist that we can utilize to our advantage? 

[00:08:41] Sahil Bloom: I think the number one piece of career leverage is working on the right. And when I say that it’s working on the thing that lights you up.

[00:08:50] Sahil Bloom: Like it’s working on the most important thing. Like I think it was Stephen Covey, the author that said the main thing is keeping the main thing. It’s like a funny tongue and cheek comment, but it’s very true. It’s like figure out what that main thing is and focus on it and say no to everything else.

[00:09:04] Sahil Bloom: Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are famous for talking about this, famous for the idea of they don’t. Try to jump over every single hurdle. They try to find like the one that’s a couple inches high and just step over it. Like the really easy main important thing they should be focusing on.

[00:09:18] Sahil Bloom: Warren Buffett has this famous story of him talking to his pilot who’s bemoaning his kind of lack of progress against all of his career goals. And so Warren Buffett asked him to write down his like top 20 career goals on a piece of paper and he writes them down. He writes down 20.

[00:09:32] Sahil Bloom: Things. And he’s okay, now circle the top five things on that list. And the guy circles the top five on the list. And then he says okay, that’s your priority list and what are you gonna do with the other 20? And the guy’s I’ll focus on those after I get through these five. And Buffett says, no, that’s your problem.

[00:09:47] Sahil Bloom: What it is that those 20 things that you didn’t circle are your avoid at all costs list. Like you should always say no to those things because they’re not. The main thing, they’re not the priority item. And I think most of us need to go through a similar exercise to that. Figure out what your main thing is, what your most important thing is, and just spend all your time on that and say no to everything else that comes along the way.

[00:10:10] Clay Finck: You also have this concept for those that are on a path they actually want to be on. You refer to it as swallowing the frog. And It’s 

[00:10:20] Clay Finck: Yeah I think about just so many people I’ve ran across. It’s just easy to be the guy that does as little as possible just to get by, just to just enough to get the promotion, but you’re flipping on its head where you’re trying to figure out, okay, what’s the Biggest problem I can solve for my boss.

[00:10:35] Clay Finck: So talk more about this. 

[00:10:37] Sahil Bloom: Yeah. There’s been this like in vogue movement in general, I don’t know, probably over the last five or 10 years of like strategic incompetence is good or like work smart, not hard. All of this advice that’s given to young people about hard work being overrated. And my general opinion on that kind of stuff is it’s like a bull market phenomenon.

[00:10:55] Sahil Bloom: Like people start saying hard work is overrated. You should probably like. Sell whatever equities you have because it’s like it’s time for the cycle to turn. And I think that actually has played out like I think 20 20, 20 21 was when everyone started like peak market saying hard work is overrated.

[00:11:09] Sahil Bloom: Everyone’s wearing casual clothes. My mind, and it comes from my athlete background, is like hard work is never overrated. I’ve never seen something bad come from working hard. Something always happens. You might not actually excel at the one thing you were working hard at, but something good comes from it.

[00:11:22] Sahil Bloom: I always was taught that by my parents. And when you’re starting out in your career, the swallow the frog concept is the idea that there’s something that your boss hates doing your job. When you start your career is to figure out what that is, learn how to do it and take it off their plate. And if you do nothing else your first year of work, other than that, you will put a win on the board and you will make career progress.

[00:11:41] Sahil Bloom: And in my mind, it’s just the most tried and true. And the. Easiest way to guarantee that you continue to make progress in those early years of your career. It’s figure out what they hate doing, take it off their plate, learn to do it well and just start doing it. And if you keep doing that, if you develop a reputation for being reliable, for working hard and for basically just getting shit done, it’s very hard to go wrong early in your career doing that.

[00:12:03] Clay Finck: Just before we started recording here, you mentioned that you were listening to Precedent, Stig early on, and I think a lot of their success was people tuned into the show. They just see that there’s no hidden agenda here. They’re very authentic and they want to help people and they want to educate people as much as they can.

[00:12:20] Clay Finck: And when I look at a lot of what you’re doing, I think authenticity is a really important thing. So I wonder if you could expand more on your thoughts around this. 

[00:12:29] Sahil Bloom: Yeah, I think it’s very hard to excel at anything that you don’t authentically care about. And that goes to my point earlier of working on the right thing.

[00:12:40] Sahil Bloom: The thing that really lights you up that you’re going to get excited about. And so when I think about like content as an example of like the path I started going down, I knew that I had to create content around things that I actually cared about. Because if I was writing hacky stuff about Hey, here are a bunch of TED talks that are amazing.

[00:12:56] Sahil Bloom: Or here’s some chat GPT prompts that’ll change your life. Or here are some Chrome extensions that’ll change your life. If I was doing that, I would have burned out so damn fast and it might’ve worked. Like I might’ve grown really quickly out of the gate or done something really Flash in the pan type success, but you can’t do that over long periods of time if you don’t actually care about it.

[00:13:13] Sahil Bloom: It’s one thing if I’m obsessed with AI and I’m like immersed in it and spending time around it, and so I’m writing about that, but I knew that what I needed to be sharing were things that were authentic to me, things that I was genuinely struggling with, that I was figuring out better ways to approach.

[00:13:26] Sahil Bloom: And so as I thought about my own trajectory around content, around creating impact with the content I was doing, I knew that to have longevity, it had to be real, credible and authentic for me. I’m not an 80 year old. I don’t have wisdom from the last 60 years of my career. So what I share is things that I’m struggling with on a daily basis.

[00:13:44] Sahil Bloom: When I’m writing anything about these frameworks, mental models, like different ideas for ways to live your life in a better way, they’re all things that I am personally wrestling with in real time. And that I feel like I’ve started to figure out a better way to think about, or the questions a little bit better, whatever it might be.

[00:13:59] Sahil Bloom: I’m not sharing like, hey, do this. I’m gonna teach, I’m gonna teach you the exact thing. I’m sharing something real about my life. And I think that comes across and it’s what has been a big driver for me of the growth and really like the steadiness of the growth. I haven’t had one thing that has vaulted me from zero to a million or like one thing that took me from zero to 500, 000 it was just showing up every single week.

[00:14:21] Sahil Bloom: With new ideas, new insights that were authentic and credible and real for me, have you ever heard the story of Max Planck and his Chauffeur? It’s related to this, so humor me. So there’s this story about Max Planck, the German theoretical physicist, and his chauffeur. And basically the story goes like this.

[00:14:38] Sahil Bloom: Max Planck wins the Nobel Prize, and he starts touring around Germany giving this one lecture about his theories and the things that he had worked on. The same chauffeur is driving him to all these lectures, and so he’s preparing in the car and doing all of these presentations. The chauffeur is there watching all of them.

[00:14:52] Sahil Bloom: So about a month goes by, a ton of these talks, and the chauffeur says to him on the ride to one of the lectures, Hey I’ve heard you do this same lecture over and over again. I can actually go up and do this lecture. I’ve memorized it. So why don’t you let me go up on stage and do the lecture at this one?

[00:15:05] Sahil Bloom: No one will know. You wear my chauffeur hat. I’ll go up and deliver the presentation as Max Planck, the famous theoretical physicist. So he goes up on stage, the chauffeur does. Max Planck puts on the chauffeur hat, the chauffeur goes up on stage, gives the entire lecture beautifully, like perfectly memorized.

[00:15:21] Sahil Bloom: It gives this lecture on theoretical physics incredibly well. Applause comes and at the very end, it’s in Munich, a professor stands up and asks a pretty simple question and the chauffeur looks at him and says that question is just so rudimentary. I would have expected much more from an audience in such a sophisticated city as Munich.

[00:15:39] Sahil Bloom: I’m actually going to allow my chauffeur to answer that question because it’s so simple. So it’s this hilarious tongue in cheek story, obviously, and the moral of it, actually, is there are really two types of knowledge. There’s real knowledge, which is what Max Planck had, and then there’s chauffeur knowledge, which is fake.

[00:15:54] Sahil Bloom: It’s flimsy, right? It’s nothing. He memorized it, and You either know the thing or you know how to talk about the thing, and it’s a totally separate thing. And so what I’ve always thought about is I want to develop real skills, real knowledge, and real insights. And that applies to everything in life, if you think about it.

[00:16:10] Sahil Bloom: It applies to, obviously if you’re learning new things, learning new skills, you want to have the real depth that goes beyond that surface level. But it also applies to relationships. It applies to like building a deep relationship, something that goes beyond the surface level. You can’t fake that.

[00:16:24] Sahil Bloom: You have to go and earn it. It has to be earned through hours and hours of work at that thing. So with a relationship, it has to be earned through real depth, conversations, connection, whether it’s with your kid, with your partner, whatever it is, fitness, you have to earn the level of depth. You can’t have some like hacky fitness belt that zaps your abs to have a six pack.

[00:16:42] Sahil Bloom: It doesn’t work. You have to go and earn it. And so I just think about that so often, like with Everything that I’m pursuing, I want to be developing the real depth, not just that surface level thing that sounds good. 

[00:16:52] Clay Finck: This hits on another point that you’ve talked a lot about recently is this idea of something that has to be earned rather than something that can be bought.

[00:17:01] Clay Finck: You can go buy a mansion, you can go buy various things, you can go buy an NFL team, but every day you’re chasing those things that you have to earn. 

[00:17:09] Sahil Bloom: I think Naval was the one that I first saw talk about, I think he said like a fit body, a calm mind, and a house full of love as things that have to be earned that can’t be bought, and it really started making me think about the difference between earned status and bought status, and we’re hardwired societally to chase status, like it’s how we align ourselves in society, there’s a lot of purpose behind status actually in terms of how we all organize and communicate, and that’s fine, but my The idea is basically that you should be focusing on earned versus bought The bought status things, they lead to this unbelievably unhappy chase Because you can never have enough You get the mansion, and there’s someone with a bigger mansion You need to go get that You get the boat, and there’s someone with a yacht And you have to go get that And there’s always this sensation that you’re not enough When you’re doing things that are chasing that bought status Whatever you have, there’s someone that has more Earned status, on the other hand, has a lot more depth to It’s a lot more fulfilling When you go and achieve something You know, like I just trained for this marathon, aaand Running a sub three hour marathon is like a status thing, right?

[00:18:08] Sahil Bloom: It’s like you broke this big barrier around it. So I really wanted to do that and it was a goal that had you know No real impact on my life, right? There was no reason for me to go and do something like that But to me, it was like this earned status thing. I was gonna have to work I was gonna have to run Thousand miles in training in order to try to get to that level from a standstill where I was starting and so that to Me when I went out and did it I was like it’s an earned status thing Like I feel proud to share this because I know what went into it.

[00:18:33] Sahil Bloom: I know what was behind it. 

[00:18:35] Clay Finck: I want to touch more on the marathon a little bit later. So one of the things I really admire about you, and I think you see a lot of parallels in the way we try and operate here at the investors podcast is just how long term you think. You recently had a newsletter write up where you talked about your three forever holds or three things you’re investing in forever.

[00:18:54] Clay Finck: And those are purpose driven work, your relationships and your personal health. And you’re not just saying these things just to. Just to say them, you’re actually living this out. And I just find it so interesting how, especially someone like you, you have all these pressures just from like people wanting to throw money at you that are advertisers or just all these short term things, people wanting your time and your attention.

[00:19:14] Clay Finck: And in a world that’s shifting more and more towards this short termism, I think you’re someone who really just. lives out and teaches just in a lot of ways, just by example, this long term mindset and approach.

[00:19:29] Sahil Bloom: I appreciate it. I try to, I just think it’s much more fun to play long term games.

[00:19:33] Sahil Bloom: Like I think it’s much more interesting. There’s really much more strategy behind it. It’s less stressful because you’re not getting caught up in the FOMO of the moment on every last thing that you’re missing out on. It’s very easy. Whether you’re on like a finance career track or on a content career track, it’s very easy to get caught up in FOMO of so and so got a bigger bonus than me or so and so is growing faster than me on the vanity metrics of followers or whatever it is.

[00:19:56] Sahil Bloom: But when you’re playing long term games, you actually don’t care. You know what you’re focused on the meaning behind it the purpose that you’re connecting to, why you’re doing it. And that’s a really liberating feeling. That doesn’t mean I’m perfect about this, by the way. Like I still feel those.

[00:20:09] Sahil Bloom: Pings of envy or jealousy where you’re like, ah, man, why am I not doing that? Why why haven’t I pursued this, or this? But Rever being able to zoom out and just think about the long-term game and what you’re doing and why you’re doing it is really powerful. The other day I had a conversation with my wife about this.

[00:20:25] Sahil Bloom: We were out on a walk and I’d gotten an email from a subscriber. Yeah. I get all the emails, like everyone that replies to my newsletter comes into my inbox. So I see them and read them. And I gotten an email from a subscriber who had lost his partner of many years and. Basically was saying how like something I had written had connected with him around this loss and how it had helped him navigate the grief of the moment and I was just reflecting on how unbelievable it is that I can sit at my desk and write something that means something to me and have there be people around the world who I don’t know that feel like it connected with them and that it positively impacted their life in some way and I can do that and I can make money somehow doing it and live a life that I want to live.

[00:21:07] Sahil Bloom: That to me was just mind blowing and it really re centered me at a time when I was like, Oh, should I be doing this? Should I be doing that? On this long term game of impact. And actually being able to create impact and having that as a razor of anything I’m putting out content wise. Is this going to positively impact someone’s life or is it just some BS that I’m putting out for the sake of putting out?

[00:21:27] Sahil Bloom: That was really powerful to me. 

[00:21:30] Clay Finck: Have you found it difficult to stay consistent with something like a newsletter where on the one hand, you really have to put something out to some degree, or you want to remain consistent with what you’re doing. But on the other hand, you also want to make sure you’re actually impacting people’s lives.

[00:21:45] Clay Finck: Has that been a difficult thing to balance? 

[00:21:48] Sahil Bloom: Yes and no. It’s like Isaac Newton’s law of motion. An object in motion tends to stay in motion. And I really feel that about writing. If you just write every day, ideas come somehow. And I can’t explain how I actually don’t know how I come up with the ideas for the newsletter because generally speaking, I don’t know what I’m writing about the next week.

[00:22:07] Sahil Bloom: Like on Sunday, I’ll get in the sauna in the evening and I’ll be sitting there and thinking about it. And then I’ll come up with an idea. And that’s what I sit down on Monday morning and write for my newsletter that week. But I don’t have some massive Pipeline of content that I’m planning to write for the next three months in the newsletter.

[00:22:21] Sahil Bloom: Like it’s real time inspiration driven. That’s the way that I have to operate. But I think that when you’re creating the movement and like flexing the muscle on a regular basis, ideas come and so the whole thing becomes this positive loop. I’m sure there will be a time when I say oh, sending two newsletters a week feels like too much.

[00:22:37] Sahil Bloom: I can’t hit the quality bar on all of them the way that I want to. I haven’t felt that yet. James Cleary used to write two newsletters a week for the first three or four years that he was writing his blog, maybe even five years. Then he released these. Book and he has switched now to a much easier one time a week cadence.

[00:22:50] Sahil Bloom: So would I do something like that? Maybe. I really love writing it and I love the interactions that it creates with people. 

[00:22:57] Clay Finck: On Twitter, you wrote harsh truth. Your big goals are destroying your happiness. What do you mean by this? 

[00:23:04] Sahil Bloom: This was something that I felt after the marathon actually. Basically, there’s this paradox of goals, which is we set them, we set these big goals to go and chase, and we think that.

[00:23:16] Sahil Bloom: Achieving that big goal is going to make us happy. We basically think, okay, when I get X, whatever the goal is, then I’ll be happy. It’s like the syntax in our mind. And what actually happens is we’ve set ourself up for a perfect storm of unhappiness, which is either we miss, we fail to achieve the goal, and we’re obviously unhappy because we created this binary outcome where you’re like, oh, I’m going to be happy if I hit it.

[00:23:37] Sahil Bloom: I’m obviously not going to be happy if I don’t. So you miss it and you’re not happy or you achieve it. You get this like momentary high from achieving it where you feel great. And then you wake up the next morning and you’re like Okay, I don’t feel any different. What now? What now? What do I do?

[00:23:51] Sahil Bloom: And you feel this unhappiness of not having a goal. You have to reset to the next thing. All the purpose kind of dissipates because you were previously driving towards this one thing. And so it’s a real challenge of setting these big goals. Big goals are important in setting our direction in my mind, like they’re like a compass, like you have this one big goal that you’re driving towards.

[00:24:09] Sahil Bloom: It really helps in terms of setting the direction of what you’re trying to head towards, but they can be really challenging and actually of regulating your happiness levels over long periods of time. And my realization in writing that piece was I need to refocus myself on what I think of as micro goals along the way, which are like truly short term, small, little goals that aren’t something that you tie to your happiness in some big way.

[00:24:33] Sahil Bloom: You’re not saying when I achieve this tiny micro goal, then I’m going to be happy. They’re just little things along the way that kind of keep you pushing and keep you moving forward. Because I just, I really think that Focusing entirely on big goals is a really tough thing because big events It’s the exact same idea to oh my wedding is a perfect example of this You like spend a year planning this whole thing.

[00:24:55] Sahil Bloom: You’re like everything is about this one event this one party It’s gonna be so amazing and it is I had a best time in the world at my wedding But then you wake up the next morning. You’re like Okay. Oh, that was it. Like now we have our life and that’s great. But when you’ve built up so much for this one moment, sometimes it can really, you can feel this like massive lull right after it.

[00:25:13] Sahil Bloom: Fortunately you might have the honeymoon after, so you get the second push. But that’s really how I’ve thought about big goals recently. 

[00:25:20] Clay Finck: So you ran a marathon this year and you did it in sub. Three hours. And I think back to when I was running , this isn’t an easy thing and it’s not something that happens by accident.

[00:25:30] Clay Finck: That’s . That’s for sure. So walk us through how this works in practice. 

[00:25:34] Sahil Bloom: So I hated running my whole life. You mentioned it at the outset. I I was a baseball player, so I played baseball. My old childhood. Was fortunate to get a scholarship to play at Stanford. Went out there in 2009. Played four years at Stanford, had a great experience.

[00:25:46] Sahil Bloom: Running, I was a pitcher. Running was like our punishment. So my whole life, my like like connection, it’s like a mouse. You’re like you’re getting punished for something. And so you start to avoid it. Running was my punishment. Like when you did something bad practice, you lost a game, you had to run.

[00:26:00] Sahil Bloom: That was the thing. And so I don’t think I had ever had a positive association with running. I thought basically if you had told me that I was ever going to run in my life, I would have told you like. Hell no. Yeah, I loved lifting, loved training, I was physically fit, but always hated cardio and hated running.

[00:26:13] Sahil Bloom: At the beginning of this year, I was feeling a little listless, like physically, just, yeah, I’ve been doing the same lifting for a long time, wasn’t really making any real progress at this point in my life, unless I wanted to go on steroids, which I’m not going to do. I met this neighbor of mine who is a fitness influencer who’s really into hybrid training, as they call it, which is lifting so you can be big and jacked, but then also running to be.

[00:26:36] Sahil Bloom: Physically fit cardiovascularly. He started getting me into the idea of running. So basically it started as you have a friend, you’re going out for a jog, whatever. And within a few weeks, I noticed that there was like a big jump in my fitness level and in my running performance.

[00:26:50] Sahil Bloom: And so that kind of got me hooked where I was like, Oh, I’m making progress at something physically. Again, this is fun. I’m going to keep trying to push at this. So that was back in March that we started and basically I decided then I’m going to try to run a sub three hour marathon in Six months like within six months of starting to run was the goal I’d set I had never run more than five miles in My life by the way is like just to have a frame of reference So the idea of running 26 and a sub three hours means you have to run it at a sub 651 pace for the whole marathon for 26.

[00:27:19] Sahil Bloom: 2 miles So basically I like set out this like massive training plan to go and achieve that And over the course of six months ran, I don’t know, 1200 miles or so in training through the like brutal summer, humid season and heat. I was like going out at five in the morning on Sunday mornings to do these 20 mile runs and really like focused on it was super, super driven around this.

[00:27:41] Sahil Bloom: And then I went out and did it. I ran my first marathon September 10th in Erie, Pennsylvania, which was. Beautiful. It’s on this like amazing state park and I ran 2 57, 31, nearly died doing it. Don’t wanna run another marathon. My entire life was miserable, hated it. Everyone says like you run one and then you get hooked and you’re gonna wanna run so many more.

[00:28:00] Sahil Bloom: I was like, Nope. Count me out like I did it, I’m done. I’m happy to stay like half marathon and under. ’cause running, I still like, but marathon distance. tellmeouton that going forward, but it was a hell of an experience. 

[00:28:13] Clay Finck: One of your frameworks, mental frameworks that has really stuck with me is, does this give me energy or does this take energy away?

[00:28:20] Clay Finck: I think what you’re getting at with the running is the tradeoffs of it just not giving you enough energy. And there are other physical activities that you can do that give you enough energy. So is that something you apply universally? 

[00:28:34] Sahil Bloom: Yeah. I think I like the original.

[00:28:36] Sahil Bloom: Idea around this was actually with my calendar. Like work-wise, I wanted to figure out what were the activities that gave me energy versus drained my energy. And so I color coded my calendar. I like went after an event on my calendar and marked it red if it drained my energy or marked it green if it created energy, and yellow if neutral.

[00:28:51] Sahil Bloom: And I basically looked at my calendar, like what were the things that were killing my energy? And for me that was mostly like Zoom calls. And what were the things that were creating a lot of energy, which was generally around like thoughtful, strategic work, like talking to founders sometimes on the venture side, and then creating things, writing, creative work, reading, etc.

[00:29:09] Sahil Bloom: And so that encouraged me to start to reshape slowly what my calendar looked like to focus on more of those energy creating activities, because what you find is If you’re working on and spending time on things that create energy for you, you feel great. You’re excited the next day, you’re not like, totally gassed at the end of the day, you feel good.

[00:29:24] Sahil Bloom: The same rule applies to anything that you’re taking on. With relationships, it’s a massive one. If you’re spending time with a bunch of people that drain your energy, whether romantically or friends, it’s just a bad… It’s a bad thing for you. If your partner drains your energy, it’s probably not going to work out longterm because it’s really hard to overcome that feeling.

[00:29:43] Sahil Bloom: And with friendships, it’s the same way. I had friends from like prior lives who I just noticed after spending time with them, I was drained. Like it was. It was hard for me because we were clearly pulling in different directions. There was different energy to us. And those aren’t necessarily friends that you need to keep for your whole life.

[00:29:59] Sahil Bloom: And that’s okay. Like that sensation of realizing that it’s okay to shed relationships over time. That’s okay to go different ways on things. You don’t need to just accumulate in a relationship context. It’s a really actually enabling and an empowering thing to realize. 

[00:30:15] Clay Finck: And I think there’s something really interesting there where.

[00:30:18] Clay Finck: You’ve color coded your calendar or whatever. I think some people can fall into a trap where they say they need to do this exercise regimen or they need to go into the office for this many hours and not thinking about it in that way where are these actions giving me the life that I want.

[00:30:34] Sahil Bloom: Yeah. There’s a, we like create a lot of default assumptions about things we need to do just because they’re the way we’ve done them for a long period of time. Like in most organizations, there’s a whole set of. Just like core operating principles that no one has thought to question whether that’s actually the best way to do the thing because it’s the way we’ve always done it or this is the way we do things and you have those kind of things in your own life like things that you assume I mean I for the longest time assumed that if I didn’t have an hour to work out might as well not work out because I wasn’t going to get done what I could get done and having a kid really changed that perception in my mind because I realized that oh at 15 minutes I can actually get a pretty darn good workout in if I have to and it’s better than doing nothing.

[00:31:12] Sahil Bloom: James Clear was the one I think I first saw say this like never let optimal get in the way of beneficial. I think about that a lot, like anything above zero compounds. And so if you go and do 10 pushups, it’s better than none. If that’s all you have time to do on the day, if you can only do 30 minutes of work, but you can really focus and lock in on it, you can get a whole hell of a lot done.

[00:31:33] Sahil Bloom: I have days now where like I probably work for two hours. But it’s hyper focused work. And I get way more done than I used to in 10 hour day, sit and scroll on ESPN between every meeting or whatever it was that I was doing. 

[00:31:46] Clay Finck: Let’s transition to talk more about how you think about business, how you think about investing.

[00:31:51] Clay Finck: So I think the first question I want to ask here is generally, how do you think about asset allocation? 

[00:31:58] Sahil Bloom: My background is in private investing. I spent the first seven years of my career at a middle market private equity fund. Fairly traditional. We were doing leveraged buyouts. We were value oriented, which was somewhat atypical at the time because you’re talking 2014 through 2021.

[00:32:15] Sahil Bloom: I was there. There weren’t a whole lot of middle market private equity funds doing value investing. There might’ve been some that Said they were doing value investing, but then they were paying 12 to 14 X ebitda. That’s not really value necessarily, at least in a traditional sense of the word.

[00:32:27] Sahil Bloom: We were like really doing value investing and so I come from this background of having spent time on the far end of the risk reward spectrum, if you will, where we were like, you knows, a higher risk asset class, but we were driving really exceptional returns. The funds were returning over 20% annual IRRs, and that was where I Learned about investing in a more formal context.

[00:32:47] Sahil Bloom: I had spent time like reading buffet shareholder letters, like learning in general terms when I was younger and in college. But that was really my first kind of formal training with investing. So what I’ve tried to do personally in my own life is basically like the tale lab kind of barbell strategy, where I realized that like my core job was coming from this thing that was really far out on the risk spectrum.

[00:33:08] Sahil Bloom: So I wanted the rest of my life to be really far on the other end of the risk spectrum, where it was basically, that didn’t mean for me, like treasuries by the way, I mean at the time when I was first getting started with work you were getting zero percent in Treasuries effectively. So it wasn’t that, but I was doing the most boring, basic stuff from an asset allocation standpoint, like Vanguard ETFs and market index funds to balance out risk profiles.

[00:33:31] Sahil Bloom: So I generally as I think about asset allocation, I just think about. What’s like your overall mix of risk in your portfolio. Usually you have a riskier mix than you think too. I think like most of my friends, if I were to look, I would say they probably have too much risk in their portfolio and it probably because all of the sexy stuff is risk, like it’s all risk on and you’re young and like the bull market gets a lot of people and you just start like pushing into stuff and you don’t realize that if you actually looked at the percentages, like 80 percent of your portfolio is allocated to like highly risk on things.

[00:34:02] Sahil Bloom: And really, I like, as I think about it, it should be like 80 percent is market tracking and 20 percent is like the play risk on stuff. So that’s how I’ve tended to think about it just in my own personal life along the way. 

[00:34:14] Clay Finck: Yeah. I’m really curious about this because you’ve adopted what you essentially called Jeff Bezos approach of turning cost centers and a profit centers where you’re starting these various businesses where you’re paying for these certain services and then starting businesses around them.

[00:34:28] Clay Finck: So how does a. Maybe you could talk about how this framework applies to your business. 

[00:34:34] Sahil Bloom: So I’ll backtrack a little bit. So Jeff Bezos, Amazon, what I’m referring to basically is the whole story of Amazon Web Services and how it came to be which basically like you go back to the 1990s, Amazon was building as this e commerce giant.

[00:34:48] Sahil Bloom: At the time, it wasn’t necessarily a giant, but it was growing to become one. As they were doing that, Amazon was having to build all of this. In house infrastructure to enable all of the e commerce things on top of it that they were doing. All sorts of like compute power storage, all of those kinds of things.

[00:35:02] Sahil Bloom: They were having to build in house. All of their different teams were having to like individually build it. And so what they realized was they could build a shared services layer within the company that Everyone would be able to draw on in order to benefit from. Soon after that, what they realized was that there were a lot of other people like startups software developers that were becoming this like massive growing population that actually could really benefit from this shared services layer of storage, compute power, all this stuff that they had built.

[00:35:28] Sahil Bloom: And so they turned it into a business unit. It was a.

[00:35:33] Sahil Bloom: This was a cost center for them that they could actually turn into a profit center for the business. Fast forward to today, Amazon web services is a gargantuan business, stand alone, it would be a fortune 100, maybe fortune 50 company, enormous. It has enabled The enormous explosion of startup, rather than having to buy servers and build them out in house can just rent capacity from a company like AWS in order to go and grow.

[00:35:57] Sahil Bloom: And so they really became an arms dealer to this massive movement and massive growth of the startup ecosystem, which is amazing in and of itself, as it applies to me and my own ecosystem in life, what I thought about was that model of cost centers into profit centers. And so as I was building out this like business around my content and my platform, I knew I didn’t want to do it the traditional way.

[00:36:17] Sahil Bloom: The traditional way of being a quote unquote influencer or content creator is you build an audience and you sell things to that audience. You sell courses, you sell products, you sell ad space, whatever it is. That’s the traditional way. And the challenge with that is it’s a treadmill. You have to keep selling a new course.

[00:36:34] Sahil Bloom: You have to keep selling a new product. You have to keep selling a new thing to the audience. You have to keep getting new ad in order to feed your family. And how long can you really do that for? There’s not a really robust set of case studies of people that have done that for 20 years, 10, 20 years, right?

[00:36:50] Sahil Bloom: There’s a few, maybe like Tim Ferriss has maybe now done it for 15, 20 years. Very few though, because you burn out, like it’s hard. You have to keep creating new content. If you’re going to do that every single day, over and over again, very challenging to do. I knew that if I was going to do this, I wanted to create something that lasted a long time, that had real longevity.

[00:37:07] Sahil Bloom: And it wasn’t tied to me creating new content, selling a new product. Doing a new course whatever it was. So I wanted to do things differently basically that was when I turned to this model that Bezos had with this cost center to profit center. I looked at my own sort of P& L and said what am I spending money on a daily weekly monthly basis.

[00:37:24] Sahil Bloom: Some of the things that jumped out to me were like video. I was doing all these short form video clips. You’ll probably see a lot of this podcast in short form video. I was spending a ton of money on that. I was spending five grand a month at the time it accelerated. It was growing. It was more than that.

[00:37:37] Sahil Bloom: I was spending money on like newsletter operators, people to work on the back end Of my newsletter to help with growth stuff there. I’d helped a lot of friends find like ghost writers for their content and for growing their own Twitter and LinkedIn presence. And I basically realized that those were all businesses I should own rather than me spending money on them.

[00:37:55] Sahil Bloom: I shouldn’t I should turn those cost centers into profit centers. So I partnered with incredible operators. I’m not, I don’t want to go run one of these businesses. But I know I can drive leads to a business like that via my platform because I know that a lot of the people like me follow me. So what I did was I found those operators, spun up these businesses and have now built a holding company.

[00:38:14] Sahil Bloom: It’s now 10 companies like video services is one of them. Newsletter growth services is one of them. There’s a kind of content creation, ghostwriting business is one of them. A YouTube production studio. There’s a bunch of these businesses, design businesses, et cetera that collectively are now doing over 10 million in.

[00:38:28] Sahil Bloom: In revenue at really high profit margins ’cause they’re high ticket services businesses and my only involvement is driving leads into these businesses via my platform. So I was effectively able to like separate my need to create on a daily basis from where I actually make money, which untether me to Play long games like what we talked about earlier.

[00:38:46] Sahil Bloom: I don’t have to think about courses and products and all these things. 

[00:38:50] Clay Finck: So if someone else is operating in the business, I can imagine some difficulty coming in with that. So I’m curious, has it been difficult for you to align the incentives of you and the operator? 

[00:39:02] Sahil Bloom: No, they own the majority of the business.

[00:39:03] Sahil Bloom: My like. Big operating principle with all of this is I want someone to really be compensated extremely well for doing great work. And if I was going to find A plus operators, they were going to need to make A plus money for doing it. And so my whole like mantra from the get go was all I really want to focus on is strategy and like kind of direction around this.

[00:39:21] Sahil Bloom: Stuff and driving distribution leads to the business. I don’t wanna be involved in like calls I don’t want to do management team, people management, all those things that’s this is your baby, you’re gonna run this and grow it and I want you to be incentivized to do that. And so my whole thing is like they should own over 50% of the business.

[00:39:36] Sahil Bloom: They shouldn’t have to call me to make decisions. If I owned 70% and they owned 30, they would feel like they needed to call me if there was a big decision. I don’t want that. I want them to be empowered to go and make the decision. ’cause they are incredible operators. I’m not actually. would not function well in that role.

[00:39:51] Sahil Bloom: And so I have been fortunate that I had a lot of those great operators in my network, there were people that I had met that I developed relationships with over the years that I trusted, most importantly, but that has been a key unlock for me, because I do think if you were in a situation where it was like, Hey, I want to own a hundred percent, I’ll pay you a hundred thousand dollars salary.

[00:40:08] Sahil Bloom: Clay, you go run this business. I’m going to be taking a million dollar a year distribution from it. You’d start looking at it like what’s in it for me. So I’ve avoided that because these people are making great great money.

[00:40:20] Clay Finck: So tying back to my question on asset allocation you mentioned the barbell approach, ideally a lot of your assets are in something like an index fund, so you don’t have to stay up at night worrying if your business is going to make it over the next five, 10, however many years.

[00:40:35] Clay Finck: How does work in practice when you have this holding company, you have or these other things you’re doing in terms of business and then, and you also have your passive investments as well. 

[00:40:45] Sahil Bloom: Yeah. My overall asset allocation today. Okay. I still have the like significant chunk towards the private equity investments, right?

[00:40:52] Sahil Bloom: I have all my investments from that fund. I still have carried interest in those funds. I have my venture fund. I run a small venture fund, 10 million venture fund. I had personally made maybe 30 or 40 venture investments prior to starting that fund. That fund has about 40 investments in it.

[00:41:07] Sahil Bloom: So there’s a whole allocation to private across private equity and across venture. My businesses I think of as probably like the thing I’m most in control of on a day to day basis and that I can that I’d love to reinvest in frankly any Profit coming from my newsletter. I reinvest into the growth of the newsletter.

[00:41:23] Sahil Bloom: That’s like a long term game for me I basically reinvest every dollar pre tax and just let that thing run with a zero net income and keep it rolling I do take you know, my whole structure my whole holding company is set up as an S Corp So today I have Quite a lot of leeway in terms of taking distributions from it on an ongoing basis, and investing that into safer things.

[00:41:42] Sahil Bloom: And so if you were to ask me at the end of every year, You take X profit out of all these businesses. What are you doing with it? I’m not putting it into a bunch of venture investments and private equity today. Like I I’m taking a lot of that more risk on stuff that I think exists there, and I’m putting it into things that I think are safer.

[00:41:57] Sahil Bloom: Right now with Treasuries paying five and a half percent or whatever they’re paying. That’s pretty attractive to me as far as just like holding cash and feeling like you’re in a, you’re in a stable position. 

[00:42:08] Clay Finck: So as the businesses with the holding companies, has those tended to work out pretty well just because you’ve built out a relationship with someone you believe it’s a high quality business person have a high degree of ethics.

[00:42:20] Sahil Bloom: Yes. The biggest businesses within the holding company today are services based. So there are kind of two failure points with a services based business. Like with this type of one that we’re running, one would be failure to scale, like very easy to get to call it a million of annual revenue with one of those businesses.

[00:42:37] Sahil Bloom: If it’s a five to $10,000 a month service, it’s just not that many clients. And so you can get to that. The big challenge is going from a million to five and then five to 10. That’s where do you actually have systems in place? Do you have a team? Do you have all the things you need to really build a real business?

[00:42:51] Sahil Bloom: A million that could be a one person business. There’s a lot, there’s plenty of people I know that are running a little $1 million like. Personal businesses super happy. They’re taking 500 grand a year in profit. That’s an amazing life. You can do great doing that if you have that one core skill.

[00:43:04] Sahil Bloom: It’s not that interesting to me, right? I don’t want a whole bunch of million dollar businesses in this portfolio long term. I want it to be an a hundred million dollar plus holding company. And so that it’s not gonna, you’re not gonna get there doing a million dollar business. It’s just a headache.

[00:43:15] Sahil Bloom: So that’s one failure point. The other failure point is you, are poor at servicing clients and you actually just do a bad job. Clients churn, it’s reputation risk. It’s all of those things. I’m much more focused on that. If that is happening, there’s a huge issue. If there’s a failure to scale maybe we part ways, maybe buy someone out Hey, this is you should keep running this, but it doesn’t really make sense for me.

[00:43:36] Sahil Bloom: That’s like an easier issue to address. Failure to really deliver on a client value proposition is what I’m much more focused on and what I want to make sure we remedy very quickly with any of these companies. Haven’t really seen it yet. There’s always churn with services businesses, but never what you really want to focus on is like bad faith churn, like did you not deliver on the thing you said you were going to deliver on?

[00:43:56] Sahil Bloom: And most of the time it’s like expectation setting at the outset is what kind of fixes those issues. But we haven’t had a bunch of issues to date, which is great. I’m I’m very fortunate again that these are… There’s some incredible operators that are doing a really good job and they’re building a service that is valuable fundamentally.

[00:44:12] Clay Finck: As we’ve touched on here, you’ve been incredibly successful in many of these different areas and phases of your life. And you seem to be really driven to want to operate at a high level. And I’m actually currently reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography on Elon Musk. And it’s so clear when you look at someone like Elon, he’s just…

[00:44:31] Clay Finck: So successful in these business pursuits, but you look at the other areas of his life and he’s making some tremendous sacrifices and just off the top of my head, he’s been married a few times, countless periods of his life where he’s had this mental and physical stress and he’s so many sleepless nights.

[00:44:46] Clay Finck: So there’s really no balance with someone like Elon. All he does is just work on his. Tesla, SpaceX all the time. And then he goes and buys Twitter. And then I look at you and you’re spending all this time with your family. I saw just yesterday, you posted a video of you and your son sitting on the sidewalk, just watching the trucks go by.

[00:45:03] Clay Finck: So it’s amazing to me how you found this balance where you’re operating at a really high level, yet you’re still able to make time for things like your family, make time for the people you care about. So has it been difficult for you to find that balance and strike the right balance of what is right for you .

[00:45:20] Sahil Bloom: It’s definitely difficult. The first thing I would say is that the world needs Elon Musks very much. People like Elon Musk, like Steve Jobs, like Leonardo da Vinci way back in the all these Isaacson biographies that he’s written, the world needs people that are willing to sacrifice everything else in their life.

[00:45:36] Sahil Bloom: to drive humanity forward, to drive technology forward, whatever it is. And we all benefit from the people like that existing. I don’t want to be one of them. And that is liberating for me to realize. For many years, I thought I wanted to be one of them. But it was driven by ego. It was driven by a desire to sound successful externally, not by what I actually wanted.

[00:45:55] Sahil Bloom: And so that, like separating that and realizing that I can derive meaning and purpose from something entirely different from What mainstream success might look like is really liberating. The wealthiest I ever feel is being able to like at 10 a. m. on a Tuesday, sit on the sidewalk of my son, watching trucks go by, because I have the flexibility that I’ve built into my life to do that, that I can actually go and do that.

[00:46:20] Sahil Bloom: And spend time with him and be there during this period of his life when I’m like a huge influence and we have a huge connection. So that’s the first thing. It’s, there’s no wrong or right way to live your life. In my mind, the whole thing is figure out what you want. What do you actually care about and try to design a life that prioritizes those things.

[00:46:39] Sahil Bloom: It’s also the realization. that your life has seasons and it’s okay to optimize and prioritize different things across different seasons of your life. I’m writing a book about this right now about the different types of wealth and how to build and balance wealth in these different areas. And that is the big thing that keeps coming to the top of my mind is that concept of seasons and that early in your life, you might want to prioritize building.

[00:47:02] Sahil Bloom: Financial rails, and financial stability, and structure for the rest of your life. It might be that you have to sacrifice your friendships, you have to sacrifice some of your physical health, you have to sacrifice some of these other areas of your life in order to do that. But there will be a season, like, when your kids are really young when you might wanna sacrifice the financial pursuits.

[00:47:18] Sahil Bloom: In order to really develop that depth of connection with your child, with your spouse, whatever it might be. And having the flexibility and thinking about that along the way so that you can make an actually clear, rational decision is everything to me. It’s not me telling you what the right answer is.

[00:47:33] Sahil Bloom: You might not want to do the things that I’m doing. You might not want balance in the way that I define it. What you need to do is figure out what your balance is that you want and then try to design a life that fits around that. I also just think separating purpose from job is so important. for everybody to do.

[00:47:48] Sahil Bloom: We’re told as we’re growing up and by different gurus here and there that you have to find your purpose and you have to be working on your purpose. And I think it’s stupid. The idea that your purpose has to come from work is just, it’s dumb. It’s not true. You can have a purpose that’s tied to you being a provider for your family.

[00:48:04] Sahil Bloom: Do you bring a protector and a provider for your family? And you might want to connect that purpose to your work. You might want to say I’m going and I’m working two jobs right now because I am a provider for my family and that’s connecting it to your purpose, but your purpose had nothing to do with the work itself.

[00:48:17] Sahil Bloom: You might be working on an assembly line. You might hate that work, but if it’s connected to the purpose of providing, you might take a lot of fulfillment and a lot of joy from that. So separating those two is really important. 

[00:48:29] Clay Finck: One thing that’s also interesting, I think, I just recently went on a trip, a number of entrepreneurs and people I’m connected with through the podcast here attended this and got to know a lot of amazing people.

[00:48:39] Clay Finck: And someone that’s very financially successful and done very well. And I’m sure he’s like you were, he just enjoys helping people out and doing advising and consulting type roles. And everyone had a question set they had to answer. And one of the questions was, what’s your most difficult challenge right now?

[00:48:54] Clay Finck: And for him, it was. saying no to things and I’d imagine that’s a struggle for you too where people are constantly wanting your time, your attention, your expertise. Are there any tricks you have to dealing with saying no to things and respecting those boundaries?

[00:49:12] Sahil Bloom: Yeah, I’m getting better at it. I would say I’m still not great at it. Part of that is because I self define as being a nice person and There’s a challenge with self defining as being a nice person, which is you default to yes on things when people ask for help, especially young people, because it’s not I’m 32.

[00:49:28] Sahil Bloom: It’s not that long ago that I was in their shoes and asking for help from people. And so when someone reaches out to me and asks for a 30 minute call or coffee or whatever it might be, my default is to feel like I should say yes to that. What I’ve only recently realized is that every yes to one of those things is a no to my son and to my wife.

[00:49:44] Sahil Bloom: And that has been the most helpful way to think about it that has completely changed how I’ve been able to do it because my wife even will say to me like, Oh don’t be a jerk. You should say yes to these things. And I try to explain to her recently. Every time I do that, it’s energy directly taken away from energy that I can give to you and Roman, our son and framing it that way makes it much easier to say no to these things because you realize it’s not like I’m creating energy and then deploying into this thing.

[00:50:09] Sahil Bloom: It has to come from somewhere. You have a fixed amount of energy in your day. And so if you’re already feel like, Oh, I’m tapped, I’m full. It has to get reallocated. And if it’s right now getting reallocated from time with my son, from being able to sit there and be present with him, cause my mind is elsewhere.

[00:50:22] Sahil Bloom: That’s not worth it to me in most cases. So that has been really helpful. It’s just figuring out like what has to give. If I’m going to say yes to this, what am I going to say no to by saying yes to this new thing? And if that’s something that really matters, no, I don’t want to. I don’t want to make that trade off.

[00:50:36] Sahil Bloom: I don’t want to say no to that thing. So that has been really helpful. The other one that’s just like a really simple heuristic is when someone invites you to something, think about if you would do it today. If I get invited to something a month from now, if you say Hey, do you want to come to this dinner a month from now?

[00:50:49] Sahil Bloom: Even actually this podcast, right? Like you said, Hey do you want to do this podcast? I think this was like three months ago that we scheduled it. And you said, do you want to do this podcast? And I thought about in my mind. Would I do it? If he said, Hey, come on this podcast tomorrow, would I go do it?

[00:51:01] Sahil Bloom: And the answer was yes. So I said yes to it. If the answer is no, if you wouldn’t do it tomorrow, you’re not going to want to do it three months from now. And one of the biggest issues in our own mind decision making wise is we have a terrible time thinking about what we’re going to be like in the future.

[00:51:14] Sahil Bloom: So we always assume we’re going to have more time and energy in the future. We’re like, Oh, things are really busy now, but yeah, in December, I’m going to be like. I’m going to feel free. Everything’s going to be great. Like I’m going to have gotten through this big project that I’m working on. I’m going to feel great.

[00:51:25] Sahil Bloom: So yeah I’m gladly going to commit to that dinner. Then inevitably December comes, you’re miserable, busy low energy. And you’re like why did I agree to go into this thing? And so thinking about that, like what I say yes to this, if it was tomorrow or today is a really helpful heuristic as well.

[00:51:41] Clay Finck: And another thing I’ve realized, I’ve recently interviewed Shane Parrish for his new book and you guys, I think you’ve really, you understand what’s most important. And then you’re making time on your calendar for those things. You need to write your newsletter or consume content or whatever else you’re taking that time block and putting on your calendar.

[00:51:58] Clay Finck: And then you’re also huge on Parkinson’s law work expands or contracts to the amount of time you give it. And I think that’s just so powerful where you’ve prioritized these things outside of work. You’re sure you’re making time for those, but then you’re using Parkinson’s law to your advantage, blocking out that time and setting a cutoff for that work to be done.

[00:52:18] Sahil Bloom: Yeah. I try to create. Yeah. I think Arthur Brooks, who I’ve admired for a long time, and now I’m fortunate getting to work with him on a few things, has talked about ventilating your schedule. I’ve actually never seen him write about this, but I went to his happiness seminar that he does at Harvard Business School once, and he talked about this ventilating your schedule creating space in it, almost like blowing air into it, where you have these kind of flex periods in between things that are on there.

[00:52:40] Sahil Bloom: Because the alternative is jam back to back stuff, where you never really recover, you never have those like, moments of that kind of allow you to experience new things, think, and frankly just like experience daily beauty in your world. There’s this famous story of the world renowned violin player Joshua Bell.

[00:52:58] Sahil Bloom: He had just performed at Boston Symphony Hall to a sold out audience. Thousands of dollars a ticket, and he took his $3 million violin and went into a Washington DC Subway and started playing, sitting there like wearing a hat, and out of a thousand people that walked by him, like five people stopped to hear the best violin player in the damn world playing in the subway.

[00:53:18] Sahil Bloom: And it was just an example to me of two things really. One presentation matters. So you take the beautiful thing, and it’s put in this different context, and you don’t notice how beautiful it is. But two, we’re too damn busy. People don’t have the time to stop and listen to the most beautiful music in the world being played right in front of them.

[00:53:35] Sahil Bloom: Because we’re just constantly rushing from point A to point B. Everything has a destination. Everything has a purpose that we’re driving towards. And we’re not able to enjoy that flow in the interim along the way. There’s this poem that I love by Constantine Cavafy. It’s called Ithaca. It’s about Odysseus at the end of the Trojan War it’s the Odyssey.

[00:53:55] Sahil Bloom: Like he has to come home from the Trojan War back to Ithaca his homeland. And the poem is all about that concept of don’t be mad at Ithaca because Ithaca gave you this journey. If not for Ithaca and the thing that’s pulling you to home, you wouldn’t have had this incredible journey along the way.

[00:54:10] Sahil Bloom: And it’s really that Moral of it, the concept is like this concept of enjoy that journey and enjoy that process and those like moments along the way are what everything is about, not the destination. I think we all need to do a better job of internalizing that, like just creating space in our lives to actually enjoy those day to day moments.

[00:54:29] Clay Finck: How do you, Think about content you consume, how do you ensure you’re continually consuming high quality content? 

[00:54:37] Sahil Bloom: I would say I have a pretty consistent list of 10 or so people that no matter what they put out, I’ll read it. That keeps a good like baseline, downside protected level of content per week that I feel like is really good and interesting.

[00:54:53] Sahil Bloom: And beyond that, then I really rely on like the wisdom of the crowd. from a content perspective where tons of people send me stuff now. I get like my email list. People send me tons of articles. I get tagged in a bunch of stuff like, Hey, this is interesting. People send it to me. I have a bunch of friends who I really trust who send me things that they’re reading.

[00:55:10] Sahil Bloom: That’s interesting. And I’ve basically put it out to all these people that I think are really smart, interesting thinkers, different thinkers from how I think about the world, like different perspective sets. I basically asked them like, anytime you come across something interesting, send it to me. Don’t hesitate.

[00:55:22] Sahil Bloom: Like I might not reply to you, but I got it. Just send it to me. And that has really helped a lot. Just like having basically like this, like army of consumers out there that’ll send me things that they come across that are already pre vetted, but I know are interesting. 

[00:55:36] Clay Finck: Is there anything in the business or entrepreneurship realm that comes to mind?

[00:55:41] Sahil Bloom: I’m trying to think of one that would be different from what everyone would already know. There’s a woman, Ann Lee Kunf, I’m going to mispronounce her last name, that writes, it’s called Nest Labs is her blog. That is fantastic. She’s an incredible writer. I think she’s writing a book right now, which I’m excited about.

[00:55:56] Sahil Bloom: She’s probably one that’s like more off the radar that I really enjoy. 

[00:56:01] Clay Finck: And then talk more about your book and what you’re working on and when that might be coming out. 

[00:56:07] Sahil Bloom: I don’t really want to publish it in the middle of the presidential election, which is what the normal timeline would be based on manuscript delivery.

[00:56:13] Sahil Bloom: So I need to think about whether we try to pull it up in front of that, like more like summer 2024, or if I wait until like more January 2025, but the book is about wealth and redefining wealth beyond money. Something we’ve talked about and in various terms, but really thinking about. Building out a broader framework for thinking about how to build and balance wealth across the different seasons of your life and ideas for it to be both theory and tactics.

[00:56:36] Sahil Bloom: And so every section of the book has a set of what I would consider the gold standard tactics for building that type of wealth within your life. So the things that I’ve battle tested along the way that I know work and that that I think the implementation of one of them would really impact your life and 10 of them would dramatically impact your life.

[00:56:55] Clay Finck: Got it. Sahil, thanks so much. This is the first in person interview and really appreciate you coming down and before we close it out, how can people get connected with you if for some reason they don’t follow you already? 

[00:57:07] Sahil Bloom: Yeah. Fortunately I have a weird name, so it’s easy to find me.

[00:57:10] Sahil Bloom: I’m at Sahil Bloom basically on every platform. And then my newsletter is called the Curiosity Chronicle. You can find it at my website, which is sahilbloom. com. 

[00:57:20] Clay Finck: Awesome. Thanks again so much.

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