Sahil Bloom Has an Inspiring Take on What Makes a Good Life—and It Offers Perspective on What Matters
"From the outside looking in, I was winning, but if this was what winning felt like, I began to wonder if I was playing the wrong game."
These words of Sahil Bloom hit the crux of his book, The 5 Types of Wealth. The entrepreneur had been living a successful life by conventional standards—he had the high-paying job, title, house, and car. "But beneath the surface," he writes, "I was miserable."
Then came a reality check when Bloom's friend said that if he kept up all this hustling and busyness, he'd only see his parents 15 more times. That sunk in. So, Bloom went on a quest to restructure his life to revolve around what truly matters to him. He traveled, studied, interviewed people, and gathered three years' worth of insight on how to live with more intention and abundance.
In the years since, Bloom has anchored his life around the principle that a rich, fulfilling life includes a wealth of five kinds—time, social, mental, physical, and financial. He's on a mission to help people clarify these pillars for themselves and take action toward them. His work takes dedication and conviction, like anything worthwhile. But as the methods he includes in his book illustrate, as does the insight he offers us here, we gain incredible perspective when we reframe how we measure wealth and open our hearts to new paths of living.
A CONVERSATION WITH SAHIL BLOOM
You have come to find in your research and personal experience that there are five types of wealth—time, social, mental, physical, and financial—that make for a fulfilling life. Will you walk us through these?
As I lay them out, time wealth is your freedom to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it, and when you trade it for other things. It's about an awareness of the finite and impermanent nature of your time and that time is, quite literally, your most precious asset.
Social wealth is all about your relationships. It's about your connection to a few deep relationships, and then to many broader relationships and things that extend bigger than the self.
Mental wealth is about your purpose. It's about growth and creating the space necessary to wrestle with life's big, unanswerable questions, through meditation, spirituality, solitude, or however you might do that.
Physical wealth is all about your health and vitality. It's about your ability to control the controllable actions and fight the natural decay your body goes through as you get older.
And then financial wealth is the wealth that we typically know and sometimes love—money—but with the very important caveat of a clear definition of what it means to have enough and what your enough life actually looks like. And this is all with the recognition that your expectations are your single greatest financial liability. If your expectations rise faster than your assets, you will never feel rich because you'll just be chasing whatever more the world is trying to convince you matters.
Now that you're on the other side of going on a massive exploration to find deeper meaning, what do you hope people take from your concept of the different types of wealth and your learnings?
We have been sold a lie, which is that money is the path to living a good life. For so many people, we march down a path that was handed to us, a default path that we're told is the one that will lead to a life of quote-unquote success, happiness, joy, and fulfillment. And how we're taught to measure our success and journey on that path is a single definition: money. It is the scoreboard that we use to measure our worth as human beings. You take this number and try to use it to establish who you are and how you stack up against other people. But the reality is money can't be the only thing. This paints an incomplete picture of what makes for a good life. But [the problem is] we don't have a way of measuring these other things. We know in the back of our heads that they matter. We talk about time and know it's precious. We talk about relationships and know they matter to us. But we've never had a way to truly measure them. And the measurement is important because when you measure the right things, you take the right actions and create the right outcomes.
My book is based on the meta point that we need to start measuring for the bigger picture of our lives—of the life you are trying to build. And I say you are actually trying to build very explicitly because it's not about what I want, it's not about what your family wants, and it's not about what culture tells you you should want. It's about what you want. It's about clearly defining what matters to you and then taking action to build your life around those things.
"Action" is a critical word because, as you write, "Thriving is a continuous journey." This points to another lie we've been sold in that we think we can hack our way to a better life. But you show that it's a continuous journey that takes consistent action.
Yes, and that is a really important point that I think gets lost. In the information economy that we live in today, we are getting dopamine from all this information gathering—and dopamine from information gathering is a pretty dangerous drug. What you really need to do is get your dopamine from action. You need to have a thin gap between the information you gather and taking action on that new information. The reason I structured the book the way I did is to try to fight back against that, which is to say that I have the guides with the things that you can actually go and do. And I hope that some of them are so simple and small that you are sparked to try them. Because I know the momentum a single, tiny action can create will change your life. It's not that the actual first action changes your life, but the momentum it creates that's a catalyst that will change your life.
We've all felt this in different ways. The first day of going to the gym is very hard, especially if you want to get into better shape. The first day is painful, but then you look at yourself in the mirror a little differently after. And you wake up the following day, look at yourself and think, I did that yesterday. If you take a moment to acknowledge it, that has ripple effects on how you act the second day, the third day, and the fourth day. And you can allow yourself to rewire your brain to view yourself in a different light, and it all started with that one tiny decision, the one tiny action you took.
You write that life is never a straight line, but rather, "it ebbs and flows and has natural seasons, each characterized by different wants, needs, priorities, and challenges." Why is this idea of seasons important?
My wife and I have found this to be one of the most liberating and empowering concepts on our journey. What it implies is that what you prioritize or focus on during any one season of your life can and will change. You are not constrained by what you are focusing on during one season, and you are not bound to that for future seasons. For example, my wife made a clear decision when our son was born that she wanted to prioritize being a mom during this season. She stepped off a high, fast-moving track as a designer in a competitive world, and she decided with clear-eyed awareness that this was one season of her life. And if she chooses to want to walk back towards this path, or to create her own thing later, or to do something else, she can do that. But it doesn't constrain her. You're not tied to the thing that you are prioritizing. Now, throughout all of the seasons of your life, you are a dynamic creature, and you're able to actually change what you're focusing on and prioritize during any one of those seasons.
Anchoring our conversation in this very moment: So many people are going through seasons of pain right now. People have lost homes and loved ones in the Los Angeles fires, and countless people around the world are facing devastation. For the person going through a tremendously hard season and facing adversity, what perspective can you offer regarding what truly matters? What would you say to the person?
Center around your true north and, most importantly, center around your people. I offer this idea of your front row people, the people who will be sitting in the front row at your funeral. These are the people that occupy this very unique and very special place in your life, who are with you across all of the different seasons. They're with you across the seasons of beauty, birth, rebirth, creation, growth, all of those incredible, bright, shining seasons, but more importantly, they're there with you during the seasons of destruction that we all inevitably face. Center around those people.
There's this concept I love from the ancient Indian traditions that I grew up around with my mom and grandmother. It's called Kalachakra. It's the idea that time goes through this cosmic cycle of creation, destruction, and then rebirth. It's this infinite cycle. Every single period of destruction is followed by an inevitable rebirth and then a beautiful period of creation. And when you are in the darkness, no matter how dark it feels, you know that the light of that rebirth is on the other side. One of my favorite quotes is related to this. Rumi, the ancient poet, wrote, "The wound is the place where the light enters you." And I love that as a reminder during these dark times. We have to allow the light to enter during that period of destruction because that is the period where the seeds of your inevitable rebirth and growth are being sown. While you are in the darkest part, you actually experience that light entering you.
Considering centering our relationships, one of the actionable tips you offer in the book is the Helped, Heard, or Hugged method, which you believe helps to deepen relationships. What is this method, and why is it so impactful?
The Helped, Heard or Hugged method is the single most impactful strategy that has helped me across both my romantic and personal relationships. It's a favorite tool of teachers, counselors, and therapists.
We all have a natural default setting in how we interact with people. It's been my natural bias to be a fixer—and frankly, I think a lot of people probably have this same natural bias. This means that when someone comes to you with a problem, you tend to deconstruct the problem, analyze the problem, and then offer solutions. That is a decidedly very positive trait in your professional relationships because you are solving problems and creating value. Unfortunately, it is mixed in a personal context. The reason for that is because people don't always want you to fix their problems. What the other person needs in a situation needs to supersede what you feel comfortable providing. If you are going to show up in a loving relationship, you need to show up how the other person needs you to, not how you feel most comfortable showing up. It took me so many years to realize this. With my wife, she would come to me with a problem—and we've been together since high school—and I would start deconstructing it, analyzing it, and offering solutions. She would say something about work, and I would say, 'Well, you know what if you handled it this way?' Inevitably, she would get frustrated, and I would be confused because I was really trying to help and provide value. What I learned is that not everyone wants that. They want you to show up in a different way.
So, the idea of the Helped, Heard, or Hugged Method is very simple: When someone comes to you with a problem, you ask, 'Do you want to be helped, heard, or hugged?' Helped is to deconstruct the problem, analyze potential solutions, and propose one. Heard is for you to listen. Just sit there and listen to the person as they explain or vent about their problem. And hugged is to provide a comforting touch and just to be there. Asking this simple question allows you to both to create a mutual understanding of what that person wants and needs from you in that situation so that you can provide it.
I have found immense power in creating that shared mutual understanding. It's a simple way to improve a lot of your relationships and improve feelings of connection with the people that you love most. Because as we've talked about, as people experience all of these tragedies all over the world, including the fires in Southern California, we are unfortunately in an unsteady and uneasy time. When people come to you with a problem, make sure that you are leaning into the way that they need you to be in that moment. And I've found that oftentimes, it is not fixing it, but it is just listening and providing that comforting touch.
Sahil Bloom is an author, entrepreneur, investor, and inspirational writer captivating millions of people each week through his insights, social platforms, and newsletter, "The Curiosity Chronicle." Learn more at sahilbloom.com and follow him at @sahilbloom.
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