Sahil Bloom: How Entrepreneurs Build Real Wealth Beyond Money | Entrepreneurship | YAPLive

Entrepreneurship often promises freedom, but for many high performers, success can come at the cost of time, health, and relationships. After years in private equity, Sahil Bloom realized that money alone doesn’t guarantee fulfillment, freedom, or a meaningful life. That realization deepened when he learned he might only see his parents 15 more times before they passed if he stayed on his current path. Within 45 days, he left his job, sold his house, and rebuilt his life around what mattered most. In this episode, now on Spotify Video, Sahil breaks down the five types of wealth entrepreneurs need to acquire to win in both business and life. In this episode, Hala and Sahil will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (02:01) Life Razor: How to Decide What Matters (06:34) Breaking Free from Limiting Beliefs (08:22) The Turning Point That Changed Sahil’s Priorities (18:24) Protecting Your Energy as an Entrepreneur (22:20) Starting Entrepreneurship Without a Plan (27:47) Time Management Tips for Entrepreneurs (31:23) Understanding the Five Types of Wealth (46:41) The Brain Trust Approach to Mentorship (49:43) Building Wealth Through Business Ownership (01:00:30) Balancing Wealth, Health, and Life (01:03:11) Sahil’s Daily Routine for Success Sahil Bloom is an entrepreneur, investor, and writer best known for his newsletter, The Curiosity Chronicle, which reaches over 800,000 readers worldwide. He is the founder of SRB Holdings, a holding company that builds and invests in media and operating businesses. A New York Times bestselling author of The 5 Types of Wealth, Sahil focuses on helping entrepreneurs redefine success beyond money. Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/PROFITING Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Spectrum Business - Visit Spectrum.com/FreeForLife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Northwest Registered Agent - Build your brand in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes at northwestregisteredagent.com/paidyap Framer - Publish beautiful websites. Go to Framer.com/profiting and get 30% off their Framer Pro annual plan. Intuit QuickBooks - Take control of your cash flow at QuickBooks.com/money Quo - Run your business communications for free plus get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to quo.com/profiting Working Genius - Take the Working Genius assessment at workinggenius.com and get 20% off with code PROFITING Experian - Manage and cancel unwanted subscriptions and reduce your bills. Get started now with the Experian App and let your Big Financial Friend do the work for you. Huel - Get all your daily nutrients from Huel and get 15% OFF with code PROFITING at huel.com/PROFITING Resources Mentioned: Sahil’s Book, The 5 Types of Wealth: bit.ly/5TypesWealth Sahil’s Newsletter, The Curiosity Chronicles: bit.ly/3EsRmH5 Sahil’s Instagram: instagram.com/sahilbloom Sahil’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sahilbloom King of Capital by David Carey: bit.ly/KingCapital One Up On Wall Street by Peter Lynch: bit.ly/UpWallStreet Main Street Millionaire by Codie Sanchez: bit.ly/-MainStreet Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl: bit.ly/S4Meaning Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Passive Income, Online Business, Solopreneur,

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hala Taha?

  Today's episode is sponsored in part by HeyGen, Shopify, Life at the Speed of Play, and Indeed. HeyGen helps you create AI avatar videos without constantly being behind the camera. Get your first three videos free at heygen.com/profitting. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you grow your business. Start your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com/profitting. Life at the Speed of Play by Mark Pincus helps entrepreneurs quickly test ideas and find the ones worth pursuing. Get two books for the price of one at GetMark'sBook.com/Yap. Indeed helps you attract, interview, and hire all in one place. Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/podcast.

• 0:45Hala Taha?

  As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or at YoungAndProfiting.com/deals.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Every single time I thought I was too late, it was still early. You're never too late. You can reinvent your story at any point in your life. But what you do need to do is put the energy into it. We don't think about time. When you're young, time is not a thing that ever crosses your mind. It is literally the only thing that matters. And when you're young, you were literally a time billionaire. You have billions of seconds left in your life.

• 1:15Hala Taha?

  What does it actually mean to live a wealthy life? That's exactly what we're exploring today with Sahil Bloom. In this conversation, he introduces his powerful framework for the five types of wealth.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Entrepreneurs in particular live in this constant loop where stimulus is coming in and they're immediately responding to it at all hours of the day, at all times. That is a very dangerous place to be because it makes you reactive. Everything in your life becomes a reaction. So what you need to decide is-

• 1:41Hala Taha?

  What is your idea around mentorship and community with other entrepreneurs?

• 1:46Speaker 01

  I think networking is dead. What you are really seeking to do is that is when you end up getting the best returns.

• 1:54Hala Taha?

  Young and profiteers, what does it actually mean to live a wealthy life? Well, that's exactly what we're exploring today with bestselling author, entrepreneur, and investor Sahil Bloom. Sahil introduces a powerful framework for the five types of wealth: financial, time, social, mental, and physical, and explains why money alone is a flawed scoreboard for a meaningful life. From walking away from a traditional career path to building a purpose-driven business, this episode challenges how we define success and encourages you to be more intentional about how you spend your most valuable resources. It's a thought-provoking conversation that will make you pause, reflect, and rethink what winning really looks like, and it's a perfect episode to kick off the new year. And if you're new here, make sure to subscribe to Young and Profiting and follow the show

• 2:38Hala Taha?

  so you can listen, learn, and profit in business and life. Now, here's my amazing conversation with Sahil Bloom. Sahil, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to do it.

• 2:50Hala Taha?

  I'm so excited for this conversation. I love doing in-person interviews, and I feel like we have so much to talk about. So, the first thing I want to ask you, I'm just going to jump right into it. When I was reading your book, I learned about your life razor, and you've got a personal life razor. So, first, I wanted to ask you, what is a life razor? And tell us what your personal life razor is.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, this concept I came upon originally via the founder and first CEO of Netflix, a man named Mark Randolph, maybe you're familiar with. And Mark posted this really interesting thing, I think this is probably about two years ago now, where he talked about the fact that throughout his entire technology career, extraordinarily successful technology career, made oodles and oodles of money, built these amazing businesses, the thing that he was most proud about was that he had this rule that every single Tuesday at 5:00 PM, he would leave work and go out on a date with his wife. And he says that what he's most proud about from his career is not that he founded these incredible companies or made all this money, but that he managed to do that while having

• 3:55Speaker 01

  an incredible marriage and having kids who love him and like spending time with him. And it struck me when I first read that, that the idea Of leaving at 5pm to have dinner with his wife was not really about any one date or about the dinner itself. It was about what it implied about who he was as a person, about the boundaries that he was creating, about what his priorities were in life, and about the ripple effects that that idea created into other areas of his life. And that was where I came to this term in talking to Mark about a life razor. A razor, if you're not familiar with it, is the idea of a single point of focus. It's sort of a rule of thumb that allows you to cut through the noise when you're making a decision.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  So for Mark Randolph, he was the type of person who left work to have a 5pm dinner with his wife. That was his life razor. It was a single point of focus that no matter what, allowed him to cut through the noise in his life. And anytime something came up, he could identify himself as that type of person. He could say, you know, if an interesting career opportunity came up, he could say, no, I'm the type of person who leaves work at 5pm to have dinner with my wife. That is an important part of who he is as a human being. And that is something that we all need to think about in our own lives. What is our life razor? What is our sort of identity-defining rule for our life? Mine is I will coach my son's sports teams.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  And it's a similar concept to Mark Randolph in that I define myself as the type of person who is a husband, a father, a community member, a leader in all of these ways. And being able to say I'm the type of person who coaches my son's sports teams means certain things about who I am and how I interact with the world around me. It means that I'll prioritize family ahead of certain financial opportunities. It means I'll be willing to make sacrifices to prioritize those in my life. And so I encourage other people to think about that. I walk through an exercise in the book to identify your own, how to come to your own life razor. It's a really important way to cut through the noise and make decisions in your life.

• 6:00Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and razor comes from like shaving off time, right? And saving time with decisions is so important. And do you have multiple life razors? Because I feel like I heard you once say that you like to wake up and do hard things, and that's another life razor of yours.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, the idea of of your own life of having like these different seasons of your life is a really important concept to me. And that concept says that basically during the course of your life, the things that you prioritize or focus on will change during your twenties and thirties. That is a great time for you to focus on building a financial foundation for the rest of your life. So like even as I talk about some of the concepts of the book of building a life of wealth across all of these different areas, that doesn't mean that your life is going to be perfectly in balance across these five areas throughout your life. What it means is that you need to think about all of them as you consider building. But what you're prioritizing, what you're really focusing on during any one season will change.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  What that means is that your life razor may change across these different periods of your life because when you are twenty or when you're in your early thirties and you're really honing in on like doing hard things, building a business, building a financial foundation for your life, it might be something like waking up and doing hard things. That's your life razor. Then as you have kids and as you're prioritizing family, it may become something more like Mark Randolph.

• 7:23Hala Taha?

  That's so interesting.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  That you leave out dinner.

• 7:25Hala Taha?

  I love that.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:27Hala Taha?

  So cool. So now you wake up at four thirty AM, you take cold plunges, you are a big self-improvement influencer, you help people improve their lives, but I learned that when you were younger, you were actually quite insecure as a kid. And so first I want to ask you, where do you think those insecurities came from when you were growing up? And what were you like?

• 7:45Speaker 01

  I think a lot about the fact that the stories we tell ourselves about who we are are so important to how we interact with the world. And especially those original stories that you tell yourself about the type of person you are and your capabilities and your competencies, those stories are very hard to break. And so if it is a negative story that you are starting to tell yourself, you will look around the world and you'll find all of the information that confirms that story. And if there's things that refute that story, you won't see it, you'll reject it. It's called the narrative fallacy, like humans are storytelling creatures, so we look to confirm the stories that we understand. I had told myself from a young age. A story that I wasn't smart.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  I have an older sister who is extraordinarily high achieving academically. And at the first sign of me not being able to easily do that same thing that she was doing. I started telling myself, I'm not the smart one. I need to find a different thing. I need to be athletic or something else, but I'm not smart. That bred within me an insecurity that was very, very hard to crack. And no matter how much my parents told me that it wasn't true, no matter how much my sister told me it wasn't true, or teachers. It was the story I told myself and I was not willing to break it. And it took frankly, like 30 years for me to finally reject those original stories and truly kind of create the space for introspection to actually break some of those original stories I had told myself.

• 9:13Hala Taha?

  So you ended up becoming a collegiate baseball player and I think you went to Stanford, is that right? And you you went into finance afterwards. So talk to us about your early career and what led you to end up making a big change.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's sort of what I said earlier, which is the early years of my career were very much spent head down focused on building a financial and sort of experience and knowledge foundation for the rest of my life. I loved my early years in finance. I mean, I went and worked at a private equity fund, which for those that aren't familiar, it's you know, it's a it's a fund that raises a pool of capital and you go and buy and sell companies and you make money along the way. It was an extraordinary learning experience. And when I give advice to young people, what I say is when you are young, time is the only thing that you have. It is your only asset. You don't have networks, you don't have money, you don't have experience, you don't have knowledge.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  You don't have any of those things. And so as a result, you need to take the time that you do have and trade it for all of those things. Once you've done that, then the whole world is open up to you because now you have networks and money and experience and you can deploy those into the most interesting asymmetric, high upside opportunities. But until you do that trade, you you wouldn't know how to work smart. So people like when young people say, oh, I'm going to work smart, not hard. You can't really do that until you work hard because you don't have the assets to work smart. So my early career years, I was just working eighty to hundred hours a week. And that was very much the like trading time for all of these other things phase of my life. And it was fantastic for three or four years. And what happened to me was I started to make money.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  I started to convince myself that my happiness and fulfillment was on the other side of like some arbitrary financial milestone. Basically, I started marching down the path of, okay, you know, I'll be really happy when I make my first million dollars. And then I did that. And then it was, I'll be really happy when I make three million dollars. And then I did that. And I was not happy. Like, none of the things that I thought were going to magically appear in my life had materialized. It was just this feeling of like disappear and reappear into the horizon. And along that journey, a lot of areas of my life that are more important had started to crumble. And that was my relationships had started to really be strained with my, with my parents, with my sister. My wife and I were struggling to conceive at the time.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  My health, I was drinking seven nights a week, unfortunately. Mental and physical health were really suffering. So all of these other areas of my life were sort of starting to deteriorate. While on the surface, you would have said I was winning the game. I was getting promoted, I was making money. Things were going well from the outside looking in. And I just started to think, as I kind of approached turning thirty, that if that was what winning the game felt like, I had to be playing the wrong game. And I knew I needed to make a change. And so it was just figuring out, what was that change?

• 12:07Hala Taha?

  Yeah. And when did you start your newsletter? Like, was that a side hustle while you were in corporate?

• 12:13Speaker 01

  No, I started that the month I left my job. So that was in May of twenty twenty one, I launched my newsletter. Originally, I launched it just as a way to send the things I was writing on Twitter, which I'd been writing for about a year at that time. Like, from May of twenty twenty, I started on Twitter because I was stuck at home, like a lot of people. I was like, during lockdowns, I was just stuck there. And I started writing on Twitter and then I started sending those out to people via emails in May of twenty twenty one. And that was really the spark of like, okay, maybe there are Businesses that you can build off of this stuff, which I'm sure we'll start talking about entrepreneurship, but that was really the like, the first lever of all of that.

• 12:52Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and your newsletter is huge now. So how many subscribers do you have?

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Now it reaches a little over eight hundred thousand people twice a week.

• 12:59Hala Taha?

  Yeah, which is such a huge newsletter. So it's such an awesome business that you created doing that. So then you ended up wanting to make a big change. I learned that you wanted to move closer to your parents and you ended up pivoting your career at the same time. So talk to us about that.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had a single conversation in May of 2021 that really changed the course of my life. I went out for a drink with an old friend. This was at the time in my life when I had started to question whether I was playing the wrong game. And he asked how I was doing. And I said, it had started to get difficult being so far away from my parents who were on the East Coast and started to see them getting older and being so far away. And he asked how old they were, and I said, mid sixties. And he asked, how many times do you see them? And I said, maybe once a year. And he just looked at me and said, okay, so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die. And I just remember feeling like I had been punched in the gut. I mean, the idea that the amount of time

• 13:58Speaker 01

  you have left with the people you love most in the world is so finite and countable that you can put it onto a few hands is just terrifying. And so the next day I told my wife that I thought we needed to make a change. And within 45 days, I had left my job. We had sold our house in California and moved across the country to be closer to both of our sets of parents. And in hindsight, that was really the spark that sent me on this entire journey that has culminated in even being here and talking about this in the book.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Because there was a key realization there that a wealthy life may involve money, but really it is built around these other things. And no job will ever pay you enough to be far away from people you love.

• 14:40Hala Taha?

  So true.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  That was the single greatest change that we ever made was picking up and moving across the country to live closer to them. And now that number 15 times before they die is in the hundreds. Like I see my parents multiple times a month now. They're a huge part of my son's life, all of these things. And so That was the spark that really ended up snowballing into all of these things that have happened.

• 15:00Hala Taha?

  I have to say, when I was studying you, that was one of the most impactful stories that I read about. And it really made me think about my decisions because I'm thinking about moving to Austin or Miami to save on taxes. My whole family's in New Jersey, New York. And at the end of the day, like, do I care about saving $100,000 a year? Or do I want to spend time with my family? And just hearing that from you, you know, 15 times left to see your parents. When you think about it that way, it's really, you know, eye opening. And it also reminded me of the fact that my father died during COVID. It's okay. But I was really happy that when I was 28, I made the decision to go get my MBA. And it was in New Jersey, my MBA school.

• 15:44Hala Taha?

  And so I decided that I was gonna live with my parents. And I remember my boyfriend, my friends, they were all like, why are you gonna live with your parents? Like, that's so lame. And honestly, I'm so thankful I spent two years living in my parents' house because I got to reconnect with them at 28 years old. And in your book, you were saying how in your 20s, like, you end up not seeing your parents. So like, I was like a stranger to my parents by the time I was 28 because from 20, from like 18 to whatever, I was just never home. You know, and then I got to reconnect with them. And then it just made me always want to come home because I felt closer to them. And then my father passed away like two years later, you know? And so it was definitely the right move and like, I don't regret it one bit.

• 16:26Hala Taha?

  And I encourage everybody who's young out there right now, if you have an opportunity to go spend more time with your parents, go live closer to them, even live with them if they want you to, to save money and grind and do whatever you need to. I would say, go for it.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, and look, it's, it's all starts with awareness. Like, the fact that you were aware enough to make that change is a huge thing. That most people, we don't think about time. Like, when you're young, time is not a thing that ever crosses your mind. You don't think about the fact that time is your most precious asset. It is literally the only thing that matters. And when you're young, you were literally a time billionaire. You have billions of seconds left in your life.

• 17:02Hala Taha?

  I love that time billionaire.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  That is the only thing that you truly have. And we don't relate to ourselves that way, you know, we don't, um, we don't actually treat time as that precious asset. And so then we don't think about it at all until it's the only thing that we think about, but then it's too late, then, then you're dead. And what happens is that life ends up being filled with laters. Like you, you spend time saying, um, oh, I'll spend more time with my kids later. I'll spend more time with my parents later. I'll spend more time on my health later. I'll find my purpose later. I'll pursue my passions later. And the sad thing is that later just becomes another word for never, because those things are not going to exist in the same way later. Your kids are not going to be five years old later. Your parents are going to be dead later. Your health won't be there later. You won't just magically find your

• 17:47Speaker 01

  passions or purpose later. So unless you build those things into your life now, design them into your life now, you're just going to regret it later.

• 17:55Hala Taha?

  So speaking of regrets and kind of getting started, one of the things that I hear you say pretty often is that it's never too late to start. And you often kick yourself for not starting certain things early enough. So talk to us about that. And to all the young people out there listening, what do you want to tell them?

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Every single time I thought I was too late, it was still early. Every single time, over and over and over again, I convinced myself that I wasn't going to do something because it's too late. Oh, you can't start a YouTube channel now. Oh, you can't start on Twitter now. All these things, it's too late. Every single time, it was still early.

• 18:31Hala Taha?

  Yep.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  And all it took was for me to actually lean into the thing and just do it consistently every single day. You are the only one that determines that it's too late and it's made up in your own mind. The reality is if you have energy for something and you were willing to put energy towards it on a consistent basis to get better at it over time, you're never too late. There's no such thing. You can reinvent your story at any point in your life.

• 18:53Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  If you decide to. But what you do need to do is put the energy into it.

• 18:57Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Every single day. It can't be like a, oh yeah, I'm half in, half out. You have to go all in on these things. And if you do, it's never too late.

• 19:05Hala Taha?

  I totally agree. I remember when I started my podcast, almost eight years ago now, I think seven years ago now, everybody told me I was too old to start a podcast. I don't even know what that means.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  How old were you at the time?

• 19:17Hala Taha?

  I was like 28, it was, but it was like, you're too old to start a podcast. I was like, okay. And it turned out I was super early. You know, it's all in your head. To your point, you got to put in the energy. Let's stick on energy for a bit. Why is energy so important as an entrepreneur? And how can we protect our energy?

• 19:35Speaker 01

  I think the difference between time and energy is one of the most important distinctions to understand as an entrepreneur or just as a human. And the insight here is that we think about time and how we're allocating time. But really, the way that you allocate your energy is what matters. Energy is the finite resource that we need to be aware of because you may have 24 hours in a day, or you may have 16 hours while you're awake. The reality is that you don't have that much energy. You're not just even energy throughout the day. And the things that you deploy your energy into, especially the things that create energy for you, where you feel really drawn to them, those are the things that create the incredible 10x, 100x, 1000x outcomes in your life. We all know this in our own experience.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  The times when we have generated incredible outputs and incredible results, it has always been when we felt pulled towards something. When we were able to like put our head down and not even realize, like time was just disappearing. You lost yourself in the thing you were doing. We need to tune into that more because when you lean into things that are creating energy in your life in that way, relationships or business endeavors, that is what creates the most incredible outcomes in your life. And so in the book, actually, I have an exercise that I love people to walk through to actually identify the things that are creating energy in your life. I call it the energy calendar. And all you have to do is at the end of a weekday, take a Monday, at the end of a Monday, color code your calendar according to whether the activity created energy, meaning you

• 21:03Speaker 01

  felt lifted up by it, mark it green. It was neutral, mark it yellow. And if it was draining, if you felt physically drained by it, mark it red. At the end of a week, if you do that every day, you have a very clear picture of the types of activities and the types of people who are creating energy in your life versus draining energy in your life. After you have that insight, you can slowly reposition your calendar to be focused more on energy creators than energy drainers. That will change your entire life because you'll be spending more of your time on things that are lifting you up, on things you are pulled towards, and less on things that are killing you. That will lead to better outcomes, it'll lead to better relationships, it'll lead to an improved business. All of the outcomes we want in life will follow as a result of

• 21:47Speaker 01

  leaning into those energy creators.

• 21:49Hala Taha?

  And for the entrepreneurs out there, we've got control over it. And if you're still working a nine to five, what do you suggest?

• 21:56Speaker 01

  You have more control than you think, even in a nine to five. I'll give you an example. I did that exercise for the first time when I was still working my eighty to hundred hour a week finance job. The biggest energy drainer I found on my calendar was phone calls and Zoom meetings. And while I could not just start saying no to those, I was in, you know, associate at the time, like I was still pretty junior, I could slightly tweak the way that I was doing them in order to make them more energy creating by doing some of them while out on a walk. So what I noticed about myself was that sitting at my desk, doing a phone call or a Zoom is about as energy draining as I can get. But doing that same phone call or Zoom while walking was very energy creating for me.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  I love being outside. I'm more present because you can't multitask when you're on a phone call on a walk. And so as a result, I actually show up better on those calls. Like if you and I were doing one, you would notice I felt more present. And I feel much better after doing them. So I took half of my calls, the ones that I was able to, and put them into walking calls. Now, suddenly, at the end of a week, I feel way, way different. I feel way more uplifted by the entire week. I show up better on those calls. The outcomes are better. That compounds in your life. And so the insight there is, that's one example of a way where you would say, oh, I have no control. I'm working a nine to five, a normal job. But you have more control than you think. You just have to be willing to scrutinize a little bit some of the activities and ask, can I do these a little bit differently than I currently am?

• 23:22Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I love that. Energy calendar is such a great hack. Okay, so let's talk about your entrepreneurship. You have a media business, and I want to stick there for a little bit. You started off with this newsletter. Talk to us about how you first became an entrepreneur. Like, what was the first thing you did as an entrepreneur?

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I laugh about this a lot because my, like, most entrepreneurial friends, and I'm lucky to have some incredible friends out there, when you go ask them what, you know, their journey with entrepreneurship was. Most of them will be like, well, when I was eight years old, I started this lemonade stand. And then it was a lemonade enterprise across multiple times. Like, I just dicked around when I was a kid. I played baseball, like, I was just screwing around. I never, I didn't have an entrepreneurial bone in my body. My dad is a professor, like, the least entrepreneurial track you can follow. And so we didn't have it in our blood in any way. So when I was thinking about leaving my old job to pursue this entrepreneurial path, that was weird. There was not, I didn't have like a supportive family around that telling me, oh, you should definitely do that. My wife was very supportive, but to be honest, I didn't know if I could do it.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  I didn't even know what entrepreneurship really meant. And if I can do it, anyone can do it. Because I was not wired for this. It wasn't like I was a great risk taker. I'm very risk averse. The insight I have around this is you can't plan entrepreneurship. Like, the whole idea in business school, you went to business school. The whole idea of creating a business plan is sort of a joke. Like, you don't need to create a business plan to go launch your first thing. You need to create evidence. You need to create evidence that you can do it, which is just done by taking a little bit of action. You have to go and do the thing. You can't talk about the thing or brainstorm the thing. You have to go do the thing. And that was all I did. I started writing the newsletter in May of 2021.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  And there was no monetization plan. There was no strategy to it. I just started writing it. And by the end of that month, I had 15,000 or so subscribers. And I sent a text to a founder of a startup that I knew and asked if he would want to sponsor one. And he said, sure. And I think he gave me $500 to put out the first sponsorship. And that was this little bit of evidence that I created that I was like, oh, man. Okay, so I'm sending one a week and it's making me $500. What if I send two a week? Now it's gonna be $1,000 a week, $4,000 a month. I was like, man, this newsletter could be like, if I scale it, if I grow the news. Like, I started to see a path. And I don't know if you know the ancient poet Rumi once said,

• 25:51Speaker 01

  As you start to walk on the way, the way appears. As you start to walk on the way, the way appears. And I love that because what it reminds you, especially as an entrepreneur, is that you cannot figure it out standing still. You start to walk and then the path becomes clear. And so that was really the story for me of like with anything that I've done. It's been, I start moving, I start doing something, whatever bad version of it looks like. And then the answers start to become clear to me.

• 26:18Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I love that. So it goes back to following your energy. You followed your energy, you found the evidence, you tried to replicate what was working, and then you felt more comfortable. You probably got more motivated because you saw some success and it gave you some more motivation to kind of just keep going and going.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Motivation is a byproduct of movement.

• 26:38Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Your energy that you put out into the world literally creates it. So the whole idea of you need to be motivated to act is actually the inverse. You need to act and then you become motivated.

• 26:47Hala Taha?

  So you mentioned that you're not naturally an entrepreneur. We're opposites. I'm the type of person who is like, you know, creating businesses at four years old.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  I'm jealous.

• 26:56Hala Taha?

  I've always been an entrepreneur. So not being naturally an entrepreneur, and I'm sure there's plenty of people listening in that want to be entrepreneurs, but feel like I just have always worked a regular job. I've never even thought about being an entrepreneur, but I want the freedom. What do you think the hardest obstacles are going to be for them? And how did you overcome your hardest obstacles?

• 27:17Speaker 01

  The single greatest obstacle I have faced and that I think most people face when they dive into the entrepreneurial journey is they overcomplicate what it means to be an entrepreneur. All it means is that you are going to solve problems for people. You are going to create value for people via solving their problems. And you will get paid, you will receive value in return. And overcomplicating that, turning it into like, you know, thinking about all of these things around structure and business plans and all of these big questions that you can get bombarded by on social media is actually losing sight of the most important thing. And the most important thing is just figure out how to create value for other people. And if you do that, you'll receive value in return. All it comes down to.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Down to is that it is identify a problem, create a solution and then scale that solution. The more scalable the solution, the more money you will make. And if you distill it down to that and deconstruct it down to that, it actually feels quite simple. Because then it's one of those three things that you need to be thinking about. Start when you're starting and you're trying to find your journey and what you might be interested in. All you need to focus on is identifying problems. Literally take out a notepad, walk around for a week and just write down every problem you perceive of the people around you that you're interacting with. That's literally the first place I would start if I wanted to go create a new business and I didn't know what to do. Just identify problems. Then, once you've done that, start to think about solutions. How might you be able to solve that problem for that person? Whether it's with a service or a product or something you can put out.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  And then think about how you would scale that solution. How would you reach more people? How would you make the solution more scalable through the internet, through social, through whatever it is, whatever means? But that's what it all comes down to. And that is what like stalls a lot of people is they over complicate it so then they do nothing.

• 29:01Hala Taha?

  Yeah, once you have your business idea, it's all about focus and consistency. Putting in the reps, getting the work done. When you work a nine to five, you've got a boss telling you these are the priorities, spend your time this way. You kind of know what to do. You might even be taking over a job from somebody else who tells you exactly what you need to do. As an entrepreneur, you need to create your day job. How do you recommend that people go about that when they're used to so much structure?

• 29:27Speaker 01

  You have to create your own structure. That is, I think what you've hit on there is actually the biggest challenge for most people when they, when they actually do start. When they do take the leap and they're diving into it is you've known historically exactly what you had to do at all times of the day. You knew what meetings, what work you had to do, what emails you had to send. And now no one is telling you what to do. I think the first activity I would go through is to actually create a clear routine and structure to your day. And I do that straight into the calendar because I think that your energy will really flow with what you put onto your calendar. Your priorities are really just an outflow from your calendar. I think Keith Raboy, the famous investor, said, don't tell me your priorities, show me your calendar. And I love that quote.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Because it's true. It's like you can't say your priorities are building a business and then your calendar is a whole bunch of like busy work meetings. You need to have time on there structured to actually work on the things that matter. So, structure your day. Make like become a disciplined routine person for a period of time. Where you really break down your day according to the type of activity that you're going to be doing during that window. It's called time blocking. It works really well. It doesn't need to be down to the minute, but like have windows of time. So if you know, for example, that you are very creative early in the morning. Wake up and have a block of time for creative work. So if part of your business is going to be creating content to drive the top of funnel like it is for us. And you're most creative in the morning, you should probably have a window of time in the morning when you are focused on creating content.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Creating things that are going to drive that top of funnel. Have a window of time when you're going to be processing emails and doing, you know, basic management tasks like invoices or meetings, whatever those might be. But have real structure on a daily basis. And then you won't feel that sort of anxiety and aimlessness. That naturally happens. I have, I've written this before that stress and anxiety feed on idleness. When you take action, when you have movement, you literally starve them of the oxygen they need to breathe. So when in doubt, you just have to act. You have to have that clear structure so that you know you are doing something throughout the day.

• 31:35Hala Taha?

  I feel like time blocking on your calendar is just such a life hack. I've now scaled this to my team. So you're probably familiar with Leila Hermosy. She's got this thing called Monday hour and chill. Monday hour, one hour and chill or something like this. And they have like an SOP online if you guys want to find it. And basically it's like for one hour a week, you sit down with your team and everybody time blocks their calendar, color codes it based on the activity. And then, you know, shares it with their manager and it helps me see like, okay, why are you working on this for three hours? You shouldn't do this or you need to take a break. You know, like you have no breaks in your day or you've got too many calls. And it kind of just helps you see what everybody is working on because to your point, you can have to do lists and project.

• 32:20Hala Taha?

  Management tools, what's not on your calendar, it doesn't reflect that you're not getting what you need to do done. So I feel like it's like such a great hack.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that works well.

• 32:29Hala Taha?

  So it's the start of the year and I learned that you have this annual tradition of asking people for advice. And it's around, I think your birthday just, just came up. So talk to us about this tradition. How did you get started with it and how has it evolved over time?

• 32:43Speaker 01

  I have always been someone that is rather reflective. I try to accumulate insights and wisdom from people who I feel have a lot of it. And I've been very fortunate to have a number of mentors and people in my life, many of whom are significantly older, some of whom are just a little bit older, but who have unique experiences and have, you know, taken the plunge in different ways in their life. And I like to, on an annual basis, create a reflection exercise where I go and ask them, what advice would they give to their younger self at whatever age I'm at? So like, you know, I kind of started when I was around 30 and I asked a whole bunch of people, what advice they would give to their 30 year old self, like what do they wish they knew then that they know now?

• 33:28Speaker 01

  And it ends up creating this incredible map of how to live a life, in a beautiful life. And so I share some of it in the book, in this, in this upfront section, especially from this one year on my 30th birthday, when I did it with all people that were 80 and 90 years old, actually one 100 year old. And it created this incredible, clear vision in my mind of, of what matters and what doesn't. Like the things that I was stressing over and how I need to just be able to look through those and see the bigger picture, see the real true north of what we are all trying to drive towards.

• 34:06Hala Taha?

  Yeah. And how did it end up influencing you to write this book?

• 34:10Speaker 01

  It was a huge part of creating this idea of the five types of wealth, of thinking about the fact that money was an enabler to a lot of the ends, but it was not an end in and of itself. In other words, money is a tool, but not the goal. And it brought to light the fact that there were really four things that kept coming up for everyone. It was time, people. Purpose and health.

• 34:32Hala Taha?

  Okay.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Those were the four things that everyone really focused on. And again, money was an enabler to some of those, but it wasn't really an end in and of itself. And that sort of ended up creating and being the early structure and skeleton of this idea of the five types of wealth. Financial wealth is one of the five types of wealth. It is very important. But these other four of time wealth, of social wealth, and of mental wealth and physical wealth are how that all got rounded out into this new scoreboard for your life.

• 35:00Hala Taha?

  Hmm. So I want to stick on one of the types of wealth, time wealth, because I feel like that's one that I haven't really heard of. And so I'd love for you to like, break that down and how do we build it?

• 35:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Time wealth is the freedom to choose. It is all about having the freedom to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it, when you trade it for other things. And it all starts with what we were talking about earlier, which is an awareness of time as your most precious asset.

• 35:29Hala Taha?

  Hmm.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  I often ask young people, would you trade lives with Warren Buffett? Think about it. Would you trade lives with Warren Buffett? He's worth $130 billion. He has access to anyone in the world. He flies around on Boeing business jets. He has houses all over the place. He reads and learns for a living. But you wouldn't trade lives with him because he's 95 years old.

• 35:50Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  You would never trade the time you have left for $130 billion. So you know, your time has incalculable value. And yet, on a daily basis, how much time are you really wasting? Spending, you know, scrolling on TikTok, flipping around on your phone, comparing yourself to other people, you know, worrying about little busy work tasks, urgent, urgent things that don't really matter, that aren't driving you forward. We all do that.

• 36:14Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  And so creating an awareness of just how important your time is, just how precious it is, is what allows you to then say, okay, I'm going to take this really seriously. I'm going to deploy my precious attention and energy into the few things and into the few relationships that really matter, that are really creating those, those outcomes in my life that I want. That is what time wealth is all about. It's about deploying your attention and energy into the few things that really move you forward, that really matter.

• 36:41Hala Taha?

  I love that. Is there any sort of activity that you recommend to figure out like what our priorities are?

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a few, and a few are shared in the book. The energy calendar is a great start for figuring out where am I getting my energy from so that I can focus in. There's another one that actually comes from Warren Buffett, where he asks you to create a list of your 25 priorities in life. Go write down all of your priorities. And then he says, okay, now you have to circle only five of them. And you have to go and try to figure out on this long list of things you've just written down, what are the five things that actually matter? So now you have a list of five things circled and 20 things that you didn't circle. And what he says is, the five things you circled are your true priorities. Those are the things that you need to put energy towards. The other 20 things are your avoid at all costs list.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Because every single ounce or energy that you put towards those is just a distraction. All of those things are just a distraction, pulling you away from the things that are really going to drive the outcomes, the things that really matter. And so it's a critical exercise for thinking about that exact thing of what does really matter? And where do I need to avoid the distraction in life? Because that's where we really get, that's where we really get lost on these journeys. As we get pulled by the little shiny object that's floating over here, when the thing right in front of us is the thing we need to hammer in on.

• 38:00Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and I love that because it just goes to show that there's things that you might want to do, that seem really exciting, that you would love to do if you had the time. But you've got to be able to say no, even if it's something that you kind of want to do.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  And as entrepreneurs, and as ambitious people in particular, we have a bad, bad tendency to take on too much. And when you take on too much, you aren't actually getting more done, you are getting less done. Because you're pulling yourself away from the thing that's really going to create the incredible outcomes. And so there's, you know, a moment in every entrepreneur's life, anyone who has achieved extraordinary success. When they realized that actually they figured out what the one thing was that really mattered, and they were going to put all their energy into that one thing. And just keep chipping away at it over a long period of time. The whole idea of like, I'm going to have 15 income streams is a little bit of a farce. Because every single- Single one of those is like you're gonna have a little bit of attention on each one of those.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Rather than, okay, I'm gonna have a lot of attention on two or three things.

• 38:58Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  That could be the really big one.

• 39:00Hala Taha?

  So, social wealth is another one of your elements when it comes to the new scoreboard that you're putting out in your book. And as entrepreneurs, we can really suffer with our relationships. I remember when I first started my company, Yap Media, I worked for four years straight. I lost a lot of close friendships. We're friends again, but like I wasn't talking to my best friends. I was with somebody for 10 years and we broke up and like just a lot of, you know, relationship shambles that I had to take a lot of time to like proactively rebuild in the last like two years, right? And I had to basically start from scratch. So, talk to us about relationships and in the context of entrepreneurship, what we need to keep in mind.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  There are going to be long periods of loneliness on your entrepreneurial journey. And that's okay. That is a necessary cost of entry to the personal transformation that you are trying to create in your life. Because literally what happens is you start changing and growing as you were with the things you were building, the things you were focusing on. And your environment that you previously existed in has not changed. And so there comes to a moment when it feels like you are actually speaking a different language than the people that you used to be close to. And they will not understand the way you were living and the things you are doing. And they may belittle you, they may tell you to be realistic, they may laugh at your ambitions.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Taylor Swift once said, "The worst people in the world are the ones who make you feel bad for being excited about something." I think about that all the time. There are people that have done that on your journey. We know who they are. So that period of loneliness before you have attracted new people, because you haven't quite gotten to the place where you're going, you haven't attracted your new environment yet, is long and sometimes really painful. But understanding that it is the cost of entry for building the life you want allows you to sort of feel empowered on that journey. Understand this is normal. This loneliness is actually a normal part of my entrepreneurial journey. That's an important mindset shift that I have had to have and that I've shared with people along this path.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  All of that being said, the understanding that your life has seasons is critical here. You actually articulated it really well in describing your own journey, which is you went through this really focused part, this focused season as you were building the foundation for the rest of your life, building the foundation with your business, which you've now done. And you are now in a season where you can rekindle these new relationships and build this incredible social wealth. That is exactly how life works. Your twenties, early thirties, maybe into your forties are really spent building this foundation. And that's okay for social wealth to sort of exist on the back burner during those times. It doesn't mean you want it to completely shut off. It would still be great for you to be able to cultivate, you know, family relationships

• 41:49Speaker 01

  or one or two close friends during those periods, still send the text, still do the one annual trip, do the little thing, the tiny little investment that compounds. But you don't need it to be the primary focus of your life at all times. The important realization there is that the exact same way we know that investing a little bit in financial wealth compounds into the future, the exact same principle holds for social wealth. You can invest a little bit in social wealth and still have it compound into the future. The little text that you send, the one coffee that you get with the old friend, the, you know, birthday with the parents, all of those things are tiny little time investments that really do keep those relationships flowing in a healthy way into the future. You don't need to be the social butterfly life of the party during those years when you're head down.

• 42:34Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  It's just true. And that's okay. You can feel liberated by that idea of these seasons coming and going.

• 42:41Hala Taha?

  Yeah. One of the things that really impresses me about you is your huge network, right? We were talking offline before this interview, you just had dinner with Codie Sanchez yesterday, and you always meet all these awesome people. What is your idea around like mentorship and community with other entrepreneurs?

• 43:00Speaker 01

  I think networking is dead. The concept of networking implies a transaction that is not conducive to building genuine relationships.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  What you are really seeking to do is build genuine connection with people. You, if you go into a new interaction with someone, trying to get something out of it, you will never build a real relationship with that person. Especially if that person is ahead of you, if it's someone that has achieved the things that you're looking to achieve, because everyone can pick up on that. It is very blindingly obvious when you interact with someone that just has their handout. They just want something from you. Now you experience that on the other end of it. We've, you know, been that way in our own lives. It is such an important idea to say, as you go into an interaction with someone for the first time, how would I interact with this person if I assumed that I was going to know them for the next 50 years? Think about that in your mind. How would I interact with them?

• 43:55Speaker 01

  I would not be transactional with that person because I'm gonna have to spend time with them for the next 50 years. I will probably really start to listen. I will really lean into understanding who they are as a person, creating a map in my mind of the type of things they're excited about, the values that they hold. Those would be the things I would focus on. I would try to create value for them so that they felt connected to me in some way. Approaching relationships in that way, where you were really genuinely seeking to give with no expectation of return. That is when you end up getting the best returns, which is the funny paradox of relationships. When you give with no expectation of return, you get the best returns in life.

• 44:32Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  And I have found that time and time again. I mean, I, some of my mentors that have provided extraordinary value in my life are people that I didn't even know they were impressive when we first met. I didn't know, I just wanted to be friends with different people. I was trying to learn from the people that were around me. And it ended up sparking these incredible relationships because there was no networking in mind. It had nothing to do with a transaction. It was just, I genuinely want to get to know people.

• 45:00Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and like you said, people can feel that, right?

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Immediately, especially people who are very successful. Because again, it's very lonely at the top. They are used to just having people come with a handout. And so if you want to stand out to those people, and if you want to build those connections, you have to be the opposite. You have to be the person that comes with the thing. You're providing the value. It's the same as like, you know, when people are trying to do cold outreach for, to get a job or to connect with someone, come with some value.

• 45:28Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  And it's not that hard to figure out how to create value. I mean, like, I could probably spend, if I was trying to meet you. I could probably spend an hour doing some research about you and identifying a couple of areas that I know from you talking about it on podcasts are trying to focus on and build in your business. I could do a little bit of research, figure that out, and then I could try to work on some sort of proposal or solution to that problem that you were facing. Maybe you're saying like you're trying to build your podcast network and you're trying to reach new potential podcasters. I could reach out to some of them, create some sort of connection there, recognize that I could make an intro, and now I would come to you with some level of value. You would take me so much more seriously than if I just came being like, hey, I'd love to meet you, pick your brain, right?

• 46:13Hala Taha?

  Totally. This reminds me of, so Jordan, do you know who Jordan Harbinger is? So Jordan Harbinger was my early podcast mentor. And when I first started podcasting, he was like top of the food chain. He knew everything about growing pot. He knew so much more than me. And I really wanted him to be my mentor. And so I remember I would just like every once in a while message him on Instagram. He came on my podcast, we kind of stayed in touch. And I would just give him growth strategies, like, hey, like, I just tested this new platform and I got, I paid this much per subscriber and it retained this much. And I would just like give him all this like little information. And then finally, he was just like, you really know what you're talking about and you keep giving me really good advice, like, let's hop on a call.

• 46:55Hala Taha?

  And then one day, he was like, Hala, my script writer bailed on me. I think you're really good at this stuff. Can you write me my ad? And I was like, sure, I'll write you your ad. I didn't say, oh, it's going to cost this much, I'm going to, I need this or that. I just did it, you know? Sent it to him. Before I knew it, we were taking calls, he was my mentor and that was that, you know? We're like the closest industry friends. So you really do, like you said, like have to try to provide some value and, you know, try to actually connect with people.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that is something that in hindsight, people will call you lucky. Like, oh, you're so lucky for having Jordan Harbinger be your mentor and be a connection that you have. There's no luck involved in that. You were hustling for years. And I say this, I'm like, you are one year of focus away from people calling you lucky. You putting in focused daily effort for a year led to the luck that other people see on the surface. It's just the truth. So you continue to put forward the effort. You continue to put forward the hustle, the energy, the motion, and now the lucky thing happens.

• 47:56Hala Taha?

  Yeah, but then when you do secure the mentor, it can help you speed along so far. Because then, once you trusted me and was like, okay, you helped me, I'm gonna start giving you some insights of how to rank your podcast, how to do this, how to do that, really helped me. So you talk about something called a brain trust. What's that?

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Similar idea. Basically, the idea is that mentorship is a fading or dying concept. And it's funny, we just talked about mentorship. I would argue what we're really talking about is more the brain trust. So mentor, in the traditional sense of the word, is the idea that you would identify a single person who was going to be your mentor. And they were going to help you navigate all of the challenges in your professional career that you were going to face, and maybe your personal life as well. That is a crazy concept, because it implies that there is a single person out there who has all of the answers that can help you navigate the terrain that you are facing, that their map will match your terrain.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  And it implies a really high level of commitment on that person's part to be willing to do that. It sounds like a big burden. If you go ask someone, will you be my mentor? Oh, that sounds like a lot of work, especially if it's someone high up that has a demanding job or demanding path. I think of the concept of the brain trust as sort of the 21st century alternative to the 20th century idea of mentorship. A brain trust is a group of people from different backgrounds and experiences that you can call upon for advice or guidance about different areas of your life. They are people that have ideally domain expertise in these different areas that you can turn to at different inflection points in your own life and journey. The origin of the concept is from Pixar.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  They do a brain trust for every movie that they are creating. It's a bunch of people that aren't involved in the creation of the movie that pressure test and help sort of make the movie better along the way. They make sure that the storyline is good and that they're tugging on heartstrings. Right way, all of those things. You can develop a brain trust for your own life. It doesn't need to be formal. No one needs to know they're even a part of your brain trust. But they're people that you go and call upon whenever you're facing whatever challenge. Who have that unique set of insights, who have that perspective and who are willing to tell you the truth. Give you the hard feedback along the way.

• 50:14Hala Taha?

  And you know what's funny, like psychologically, people love to give advice. And so if you don't overstep this, if you're not asking somebody a question every day, but it's somebody that you respect, that you want to have in your life and you're asking them some advice. You connect with them and that actually probably strengthens your bond over time and make sure that your network is warm. And all the people that you want to keep warm, stay warm.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. It also is just, um, it's an easy way to naturally stay in touch with people that you want to stay in touch with. Like someone that you have connected with once or twice. And you want to continue to kind of foster the connection, the relationship, the same way you did with Jordan. It's an easy way to say like, hey, this thing came up. Do you, have you ever faced anything like this? And you kind of create a natural touch point and it could end up being like once a quarter or once every six months. It doesn't need to be so often because they're not your only person. So you can turn to other people along the way, but it is, um, it's been a great practice for me. And, and, um, you know, the, the people that I would consider to be on my brain trust. I've just gotten so much value from them over the years.

• 51:18Hala Taha?

  Let's move on to financial wealth. So we talked about your business ecosystem a little bit. You've got a media business, you've got a holding company, uh, you've got a fund, right? So talk to us about the different elements of your business and, um, how you prioritize them.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the media business I think of as existing sort of over the top of everything. It's a little bit of a halo in that it provides value to all the other businesses. It is a self sustaining business that is profitable. And, uh, as we all know, media businesses can be very profitable, um, and very high margin. The media business functionally today is newsletter and book. There are a few other things that exist in there and there will be more things that get added there post the book. But it's really just been those, uh, to date. The holding company is. Is a number of partially owned businesses that have CEOs that are running them. And these are businesses that I am sort of involved in at a board or strategic level, but not on an operational level on a day to day basis.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  The entire idea there was to create businesses around things that I could naturally drive value to via my media platform. So things that I have sort of a unique set of experiences in that I can naturally drive leads towards. So it would be like newsletter businesses or design development businesses, other things within those spaces. Those all have profitable sort of financial profiles. So none of them have been like, you know, money losing venture like investments. They're all profitable from day one, largely bootstrapped. A couple of them have been things that we've seeded, but generally speaking, bootstrapped. And they shoot off distributions every single month and their cash flow is straight up back

• 53:00Speaker 01

  to the holding company, which is great because then you can reinvest across different things. And then the venture fund, I raised that in 2022. I had worked in the world of investing for the first seven years of my career, mostly later stage private equity stuff. This is all early stage technology companies. So I raised a $10 million venture fund from a whole bunch of LPs and investors and have been investing out of that, have made 50 or so investments and will likely raise a second fund here in the next year or so.

• 53:28Hala Taha?

  So cool. I really want to dig deep on the holding company. It's really interesting to me. Something that I learned that you do is you tend to use like vendors that you actually use that you might like actually pay. You try to turn those cost centers into profit centers. And I just thought that was so smart. So walk us through like how you actually invest in these companies. Do they exist already? Are you creating these companies? What is it typically struck? Like what's the structure typically look like?

• 53:54Speaker 01

  I remember coming across the case study of Amazon Web Services in maybe like 2018, 2019. And for those who aren't familiar with that story, basically Bezos, as they were building Amazon, the bookstore and the e-commerce platform, had to build an extraordinary

• 54:13Speaker 01

  narrowly large platform of like compute power, basically on the backend to power the entire e-commerce business that they were doing. And so they built this whole backend thing that was a huge cost center for the business. And what they realized was that there were a lot of people, as the kind of technology ecosystem grew, that needed that type of enormous compute power. And so they started renting it out, effectively charging people to use this extraordinary compute power that they had created. That became an enormous profit center for Amazon, now in the hundreds of billions of dollars, that is a separate company called Amazon Web Services. That idea sparked in me, whether there was a micro, micro, micro version of that same thing

• 54:57Speaker 01

  that I could adopt in my own world, where things I was spending money on, on an ongoing monthly basis, as a creator and as a business person, could be things that I could turn into profit centers for my business. So turn my cost centers into profit centers. And that has been an overarching mental model of how we've approached our different businesses that we've launched. The first example of that was a newsletter business, where I was paying a team to manage the backend of my newsletter. So I decided, all I want to do is write the newsletter. I don't want to deal with lead magnets, I don't want to deal with paid ads, I don't want to deal with segmentation funnels, any of those things. I'm just not good at that, and I don't really care. So I'm gonna pay someone to do it. That team turned out to be really good at doing that. And so I went and partnered

• 55:39Speaker 01

  with them and a friend of mine, who is a founder of a business called Kit, which is a newsletter sending platform. Yeah, ConvertKit. And we partnered to launch this as a business. I continue to pay them every single month to do the backend of my newsletter. And now it is also a massively profitable business. I shouldn't say massively. It is a very profitable business, where we serve the backend of newsletters for some of the largest newsletter writers out there in the world. Turning a cost center for me into a profit center for me. Similar versions of that across different areas of my business have materialized over the last two or three years. You know, content agency business, design development business, video businesses,

• 56:23Speaker 01

  embedded talent business that does sort of like if you need to hire offshore talent into your business will do that. And it has become a really cool way of like coming up with the ideas for the things because I can see them on my own P and L. Looking at my P and L, I can see what I'm spending money on and thinking, okay, is there a way when I can, where I can actually own the business rather than just having this be a cash outflow every month?

• 56:45Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I feel like entrepreneurs that come from the private equity space like you and Codie Sanchez, you've got such an advantage over everyone because you really know how to like buy companies. So just walk us through like the process of like how you're actually doing this, like how are you, are you just investing in these companies or just buying these companies? Are you creating some of these companies?

• 57:07Speaker 01

  It could be any of those. So it depends where you catch them in the lifecycle. In the case of the newsletter one, that was a brand new business. That was a, that was a guy I was friends with who was just doing this on the backend for me as a consultant. And he was just an independent freelance consultant doing it. And I said, we should productize this and make it into a service and a real business. And so we founded that from the ground up. There are examples now, businesses like the design development business where you can make an investment both in cash and then also in the form of your platform. So when I say that, what I mean is like, I can drive a lot of leads to these businesses via my platform. That is a form of investment in this person's business that they've already started.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  And so you can do a combination kind of structure of, of, of cash plus, you know, my energy, my platform, audience, distribution, if you will, that you can kind of invest in it. The third way that you could do it is just go buy a business. And you know, Cody obviously does that. I will do more of that in the years to come at the holding company level that will sort of use holding company cash flows to go buy bigger businesses. And we can raise quite easily, probably anything up to like $50 million to go and buy a bigger business. If we, if we saw something that was really exciting where we felt like we could really bring unique value add to the table.

• 58:25Hala Taha?

  If somebody wants to learn more about how to buy companies, what do you suggest?

• 58:30Speaker 01

  There's a lot of resources out there now for learning about buying businesses. I would definitely go and read a bunch of the books that kind of exist about private equity. On like the more traditional versions of private equity. There's a great book called King of Capital about Steve Schwarzman, who was kind of the first person within private equity world that really built Blackstone, which is a huge private equity fund. Cody obviously has a new book out about buying smaller businesses and sort of Main Street businesses, which is a great resource. But there's plenty of free online resources that you can go and look at and find about investing in buying businesses. And again, the thing to think about is are there creative ways that you can do it?

• 59:13Speaker 01

  And if you have a platform or if you have built some unique distribution or some unique strategic perspective, or if you have a unique SEO capability or unique paid marketing capability, there's a way where you can actually invest via your energy rather than cash. So the art of the deal, if you will, is really about identifying what is that sort of unique edge that you might have to make this business bigger than it is today, where you can sort of invest that into the business in addition to or instead of any upfront capital.

• 59:44Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and I love that you take the approach of like being a customer first. So you really can see like how well the company performs, if they're really good, and then you invest. So I just think that's so smart. It kind of opened my eyes of like, oh, maybe I can invest in XYZ vendor.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you probably have, I bet there are 10 businesses that you'll think of over the next like month now that you have this in mind that you'll see and say, oh, I could probably actually like invest in this or be a part of it and drive business into it. That, as just an idea, comes from Peter Lynch. It's this like very famous Wall Street legend who wrote this book. I think it's called One Up on Wall Street. One of the best investing books of all time. It's sort of a legendary one. And one of his best investments of his career was he invested in Hanes, the underwear company. And he invested in it because his wife came home from like CBS or something and she had picked up a pair of like Hanes pantyhose. And he, she was raving about it.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  To him. And so he was like, oh, I'm gonna go pick up some shares of that company. She was raving about this like tiny little company. And he ended up making like an 100x return on this public market investment. And so the idea there was like invest in things you love. If you uniquely love an experience or a product, it's probably going to be something that ends up being profitable.

• 1:00:57Hala Taha?

  Yeah. So speaking of investments, you've got this barbell strategy when it comes to your investments. Can you tell us about that?

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, the barbell strategy as a model says that on a risk spectrum, if you think about the most risky things on one end and the least risky things on the other end, that you want to be weighted on both of those ends. So I basically want to have a handful of things that are highly risky. And for me, the highly risky things are investments in myself and in my own businesses. And then on the other end, it's going to be super boring, basic stuff. For me, stock market index funds. I don't want things in between that I don't really understand. My, my whole goal is like, I really only want to invest in things that I can really touch and feel and understand. And so the riskiest stuff is always going to be creating your own businesses.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  And the fun thing about that as risky is that you actually control it to an extent. So like versus me investing in, let's take another really risky thing like crypto. I don't control the price of Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever. I don't control. And so, yes, it might be a great investment, but I have no ability to influence the outcomes.

• 1:02:08Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  I have a high degree of ability to influence the outcomes of my own businesses, things that I am actually driving. And so I would prefer to invest my time and energy into things that I have some degree of control over. And if I don't have a degree of control over them, I want them to be super safe and basic and boring. And so that's why I would like, for me, the best plan is that it's the personal things that I do that I have control over on the riskier end. And then like, I'm putting money into Vanguard, you know, S and P 500 index fund on the other side.

• 1:02:36Hala Taha?

  Yeah. So let's go back to your five types of wealth. There's a lot of balancing that needs to go on. And I learned that you used to drink a lot, right? You decided to kind of cut back on your drinking, but you're not totally cutting drinking off. Like you still actually drink in some social situations. So you are basically balancing your physical wealth with your social wealth and doing trade offs sometimes. So maybe talk to us about some examples of kind of trade offs between the different types and how we can think about balance.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  All of life is about deciding the price you are willing to pay for the things that you want. And what I would argue is that to perfectly optimize any one area of this, you would need to completely shut off every other area. And some people do that, and most people that do that do it to perfectly optimize financial wealth at the expense of every other area of their life. They lose all their relationships, their health goes to hell, they have no clarity of mind, they're stressed all the time, they have no time, freedom, and they make a lot of money, but at an extraordinarily high cost to these other areas. What I try to find is what is the place where I'm able to build across all of these things?

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Where I am able to build great, big businesses, but not at the expense of not being able to spend time with my wife and son? Not at the expense of not having time to work on my body, or take care of myself, or have the freedom to, you know, take my son in the pool at 1pm on a Wednesday. I've written that before, that the wealthiest I ever feel is when I'm able to take my son swimming at 1pm on a Wednesday. Because it implies that I have the freedom to do that, that I have a business that's big enough, that's working, where I'm able to have free time. I don't have calls all of a sudden in the middle of the day. I can go do that. You are always going to face these trade offs, and what you need to decide is what trade offs are you willing to make? Not the ones that people tell you you should make, not the ones that the normal path says are the ones that matter,

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  but what you truly care about. If all you care about is building an enormous business, that's great. I'm happy for you, and you should build your life around that. But the point in the book, and the point that I'm trying to get across with everything that I do, is you get to decide. You get to define what matters to you in your own life, and you have to ask these questions, and then take action to build your life around those things. It's no one else's job to tell you what matters. You get to decide. And that I think is the really important, critical message in all of this. It's just, I want people to identify and really think about what matters to them. And then go build their life around those things.

• 1:05:18Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I love this conversation. The last thing I want to touch on on your book is mental wealth. I know that a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with their mental health. Actually, on average, we're more likely to suffer from depression, loneliness, ADHD.

• 1:05:33Hala Taha?

  You know, there's a lot of mental health issues in entrepreneurship. It's just an uncertain, risky thing to do, and it's very stressful. So what advice do you have for entrepreneurs in terms of building their mental wealth?

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  Create more space in your life. Create deliberate practices around space. The idea of space comes from Viktor Frankl, who is the famous Holocaust survivor, the author of Man's Search for Meaning. And he has a quote where he says that our power exists in the space that we can create between stimulus and response. Entrepreneurs in particular live in this constant loop where stimulus is coming in and they're immediately responding to it at all hours of the day, at all times. That is a very dangerous place to be because it makes you reactive. Everything in your life becomes a reaction. There's just things coming in and you're immediately shooting things out. You find incredible power and presence if you can just create a little bit of space between the two.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  That can be found through a five-minute walk in between meetings or a 15-minute walk after lunch, or taking one day per month to just zoom out and go journal for a few hours at a coffee shop. Or just making sure you give yourself one evening a week where you're not going to work. Creating a little bit of space in your life has dramatic, dramatic effects. But you have to be deliberate in how you structure it into your life. It can't be something that's floating in the back of your mind. To the point earlier on time blocking and structuring, put it on your calendar. Actually have a window where you're going to create space. You cannot be on your phone scrolling during that time. It needs to be truly shut off and just give yourself that freedom to just turn off for a short window of time,

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  and you'll experience incredible benefits.

• 1:07:13Hala Taha?

  What, how do you do that? Like, what's your schedule like?

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Five-minute walks in between meetings. So if you have a bunch of 30-minute meetings on your calendar, make them all 25 minutes. This is actually scientifically proven. So Microsoft did a study where they put EEGs on people's heads and had them go through a set of back-to-back meetings or a set of meetings where they had a five-minute break in between each. The people that went through back-to-back meetings saw stress build up steadily across the meetings and performance deteriorated across the meetings. The people that had a five-minute break, zero stress buildup and consistent performance. It makes an enormous difference with a tiny intervention. So 25-minute meetings instead of 30. Honestly, all that happens is you remove the like banter about the weather that meetings start with. You just can get rid of that. You'll be more efficient, you'll get it done.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  And then the second practice, which I walk through in the book, is once a month or once a quarter at a minimum, do what I call a think day, where you give yourself like a four to eight-hour window to step out of your normal ecosystem, go into a new environment, whether it's at a coffee shop or rent an Airbnb or go to a hotel or go to a spa, do something. Bring a journal, bring a pen and walk through, I have eight question prompts in the book, walk through some of those question prompts that force you to zoom out and just look at the bigger picture of the things you're doing professionally and personally. That will naturally create this incredible ritual for space in your life. So if you do the micro level of the five-minute breaks and if you do the macro level of a think day once a month or once a quarter, you'll get a ton of benefit.

• 1:08:45Hala Taha?

  And I find when I step back and do like a strategy day, you call it a think day, I call it a strategy day, my stress and anxiety as an entrepreneur just like melts away. Cause like suddenly it's like all these open loops, all these things, should I do this, should I do that? You make decisions, you have your roadmap and you could just like action on it instead of worrying about things so much.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've always thought that you have stress when there's a gap between your present reality and your expectations, but in particular, when you don't have a plan to bridge that gap. And that strategy day or that think day allows you to create that plan for bridging the gap and then it just becomes about execution. And you're an entrepreneur, you know you can execute, you know you can show up and be disciplined and do the thing every day, do the hard thing. So it just allows you to create enough space to create that plan and the stress, as you said, melts away.

• 1:09:36Hala Taha?

  This is a perfect way to close out. We can bring it up right from the beginning. You were talking, we were talking about waking up and doing hard things. Talk to us about your morning routine and how it structures your day.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm an early riser. I have like a 90-year-old man's schedule. So I go to bed at about 8:15, 8:30, and I wake up at 4:00. I love the early morning hours because I'm partially because it's the only time of day I get when there's no stimulus. There's nothing coming in. My kid's not awake yet. I have a two-and-a-half-year-old. He's not up. You're not getting emails. No one's texting you at 4:00 in the morning. And so I get this two- or three-hour block just to myself. I, first thing out of bed, get into the cold plunge. I have no idea if it has any health benefits, but it definitely has cognitive benefits for me. I get an incredible energy boost from it and definitely a mood improvement from it. The dopamine, I think, really does impact me. I get out of the cold plunge and I'm usually at my desk by about 4:45 or so.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  I always do a writing block to start the day. That's when I feel most creative. So this book got written from about 5:00 AM to 8:00 AM over the course of two or three years. And after that, my son is awake. I would do breakfast with the whole family. And then I sort of go into my workouts from somewhere between 9:30 and 11:30.

• 1:10:48Hala Taha?

  Amazing. It's working really well for you.

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  We'll see.

• 1:10:51Hala Taha?

  Okay, so I end my show with two questions I ask all my guests. It doesn't have to be related to what we talked about today. What is one actionable thing our young improfitters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  I would create an evening three-to-five-minute journaling ritual. This reflection, I think, really helps you make more money, allowing yourself to just pause and reflect a bit. And the thing I do is I call it my 1-1-1 method. So you write down one win from the day. That's something that you feel good about that went well. One point of stress, tension, or anxiety, something that was bugging you that you need to get off your brain and onto the paper. And then one point of gratitude, something you felt grateful for during the day. It takes three to five minutes max, and it forces you to recognize a win and just feel better before going to bed at the end of the day.

• 1:11:41Hala Taha?

  I love that. And what would you say your secret to profiting in life is? And it doesn't have to be financial.

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  My relationship with my wife and son, for sure. I, I get more joy out of seeing him grow and the relationship that he and my wife have than just about anything else in the world.

• 1:11:57Hala Taha?

  That's so sweet. And where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  Well, you can find the book anywhere books are sold and more information at the fivetypesofwealth.com. And then I'm at Sahil Bloom on every major platform.

• 1:12:10Hala Taha?

  Awesome. Sahil, it was such a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  Thank you.