Pod Insights The Nick Bare Podcast 106: The Five Types of Wealth: A Conversation with Sahil Bloom About this episode In this episode, I sit down with Sahil Bloom to get into the key concepts from his new book about the five types of wealth—time, social, mental, physical, and financial. Sahil shares personal stories, valuable insights, and actionable advice on how to achieve a balanced and fulfilling life. We also explore the importance of setting anti-goals, creating space for deep thinking, and the profound impact of focusing on direction over speed in your life's journey.
CHAPTERS
00:51 Podcast Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:59 Weather and Life in Texas
03:18 Launching a New Book
03:41 The Halftime Moment
05:41 Chasing Societal Success
08:06 The Wake-Up Call
09:19 The Move and Life Changes
10:44 The Quest for Identity
15:04 The Importance of Skill Acquisition
19:44 The Role of Money and Happiness
22:54 Struggles with Conceiving
28:57 Gradual Changes and Sudden Realizations
37:33 Balancing Presence and Ambition
40:23 Understanding the Importance of Explaining Your Absence to Kids
41:38 A Life-Changing Moment: The Birth of Sahil's Son
44:37 The Power of Slowing Down and Creating Space
53:05 The Benefits of Alone Time and Deep Work
01:03:37 Investing in Relationships for Social Wealth
01:11:17 The Concept of Anti-Goals and Life Razor
01:21:07 Balancing the Five Types of Wealth
01:22:31 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
ORDER SAHIL'S BOOK:
The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life
https://www.amazon.com/Types-Wealth-Transformative-Guide-Design/dp/059372318X
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IG: https://www.instagram.com/sahilbloom/?hl=en
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Transcript 15,569 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 It's better to climb slowly up the right mountain than to climb fast up the wrong one. And that's a message that we so often need to hear. Like, I want to get it tattooed on my body. Because most of the biggest mistakes you make in life end up being because you're climbing up the wrong mountain. You're climbing up someone else's mountain, usually. You haven't taken the time to slow down and think about what is the mountain I actually should be climbing right now? What is my true north in life that I'm headed towards? And the true north, again, it doesn't have to be like your purpose or the perfect passion. But you need to think about what you truly care about. Like, you needed a reset moment to remember the things that you truly care about. The things that actually are going to light you up, the things that you're going to remember 50 years from now.
0:50 Nick Bare? All right, today on the podcast, we have Sahil Bloom. Brother, welcome.
0:55 Speaker 00 Thank you. Thank you for having me.
0:57 Nick Bare? How, uh, how's Texas treating you so far?
0:59 Speaker 00 Texas is cold this week, you know, like I live on the East Coast, so I'm kind of used to it. But, uh, I see people freaking out. It's like 35 degrees out and everyone here is, uh, uh, wearing like down jackets.
1:10 Nick Bare? Oh, wait, once you acclimate to a certain like temperature, I'm from up north. I'm from Pennsylvania originally.
1:14 Speaker 00 I didn't know that.
1:15 Nick Bare? Grew up in Pennsylvania. So, like, cold weather is nothing new to me. But being in Texas for a few years, like, I'm so soft with the cold now. It's horrible.
1:26 Speaker 00 Dude, I lived in the Bay Area for 12 years because I went to, I played baseball at Stanford and then I was out there. I took a job out there and I got so soft by the weather. Like, just, yeah, it's like 70 and sunny every day in the Bay Area. It's crazy. You just, and you forget, it's, it's actually a lesson for life. Like, you don't appreciate a good weather day because it's just nice every single day. Right? Like, on the East Coast now, when it's 70 and sunny, you're like, you take advantage of it. You go to the park with your family. It's like, it's the best day ever. So sometimes, like, things being impermanent is actually a really nice way that you appreciate them more.
2:00 Nick Bare? Do you find that the weather dictates your, your mood and energy?
2:05 Speaker 00 Yeah, I probably have some degree of like seasonal depression when it comes to like sunlight. I think sunlight definitely impacts my uh my energy level or just like my general demeanor and happiness. But that doesn't that doesn't impact my ability to actually go out and do things, but I know a lot of people who it does.
2:23 Nick Bare? It used to affect me a whole lot more and I don't I don't know why. Like I I think I would have some sort of level of seasonal
2:29 Speaker 00 Yeah.
2:30 Nick Bare? depression. But now for some reason, I don't know why, like the weather just doesn't shift my mindset, my mood, but it used to really heavily influence it.
2:42 Speaker 00 It bothers me now with a young kid because it's so much more fun being able to be outside with him all day. And like my my son is a typical two and a half year old boy. So like he just wants to go nuts and run around and do things. And it's much harder in the Northeast to do that when there's like a whole bunch of snow and ice on the ground. Can't take him and like run around a playground because he'll fall and break his face. And that like, that's a little annoying.
3:05 Nick Bare? Yeah. When was your son born?
3:08 Speaker 00 May, May of twenty twenty two.
3:10 Nick Bare? Okay, my my daughter is July of twenty two.
3:14 Speaker 00 Okay.
3:15 Nick Bare? So right around the same timeframe.
3:16 Speaker 00 Yeah.
3:18 Nick Bare? So you're launching your new book.
3:19 Speaker 00 Yeah.
3:20 Nick Bare? Uh, the five types of wealth. Week of February, first week of February.
3:26 Nick Bare? I'm super excited to talk about it and the foundation of this book.
3:31 Nick Bare? The last couple years and specifically the last couple of months, I've been going through like this life transition. And I think that happens to a lot of people once they have kids. And priorities shift, focus shifts. As I was telling you before we started recording, I'm reading this book right now called Halftime. And it's about how this this shift in life happens where the first half of your life, you're focused on success. And then if you have this halftime moment, the second part or second chapter of your life can be focused on significance as opposed to success. So I'm in this transition right now, which is super exciting. It's a huge opportunity. I pulled this quote
4:17 Nick Bare? and I thought this quote was really meaningful. The real test of a man is not when he plays the role that he wants for himself, but when he plays the role destiny has for him.
4:31 Nick Bare? What I love to hear is your experience with this shift in, in life focuses priorities, when, where, if it happened, and then your experience with maybe that first chapter focused on purely success and then now significance.
4:52 Speaker 00 Yeah, there's a lot of similarities in that halftime concept to David Brooks' Second Mountain concept. If you've ever read that book, it's another amazing book that you'd love. That whole idea of like your first mountain is the thing that you climb early in your life and then you have a second mountain. And a lot of people struggle with that because so much of that is like finding a new identity and a new version of you for that second half of your life. So you'd really like that as well. And I'm excited to talk about the concepts of the book with you in particular, because there aren't many people out there in the world that I have grown to become friends with and also admired from afar for a long time, who I feel embody the principles of what I'm talking about as well as you do in the way that you live your life and in the way that you authentically engage with
5:37 Speaker 00 the world around you. So really excited to have a chance to chat about it. I, um, my entire journey with this concept and this idea started in May of 2021. For the first seven years of my career, leading up to that point, I had chased the societal definition of success, which is to make a bunch of money. I had taken a job working in finance. I'd graduated from Stanford where I played baseball. I wanted to take the job that just like made me sound successful from the outside looking in. And honestly, like partially from my parents, partially just trying to fill the void that I felt in my own life. Like I was pretty insecure. And one of the ways that you fix that internal problem that you feel
6:22 Speaker 00 is that you chase like the external pats on the back, right? And you get a bunch of pats on the back for taking the fancy sounding job that's going to pay you six figures straight out of school. And so I did that. And there was a lot of good that came out of early in life, first season, if you will, of your career, building a financial foundation. I made money. I learned a whole lot. I had a lot of experiences that were incredible. But what happened to me on that journey was that as I continued to make money and as I'm more and more narrowly focused on money being the key to me living this like stress-free, happy, fulfilled, good life, a lot of other areas in my life started to suffer. I was so
7:03 Speaker 00 narrowly focused on finding my happiness on the other side of whatever bonus, promotion, title, you know, fancy thing that I could get. I thought that one day I was gonna wake up and feel like I had arrived. And every time I would get that thing and inevitably be like, is this it? You know, what's the next thing? And along that journey, my relationships had really started to suffer. I wasn't seeing my parents ever. I lived 3,000 miles away from them. They were in the Boston area. We were in California. My relationship with my sister had ground to a halt. My relationship with my wife unfortunately was strained by
7:43 Speaker 00 a struggle to conceive at the time that we were battling with. I was drinking seven nights a week. Physical health, mental health had started to take a hit from that. And so on the outside looking in, I was very much winning the game. Like you would have seen me and been like, oh, that guy's killing it. But internally, these things were falling apart. And that all came to a head for me in May of 2021, when I went out for a drink with an old friend. And we sat down and he asked me how I was doing. And I said that it had started to get hard, being so far away from my family, my parents who are on the East Coast, that they were getting older. It had finally become clear to me that they were mortal, that they had these chinks in their armor, that the people that I was closest
8:25 Speaker 00 to weren't gonna be around forever. And he said, how old are they? And I said, 65. And he said, how often do you see them? And I replied, about once a year. And he looked me square in the face 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.
8:49 Nick Bare? How old were you at this point?
8:50 Speaker 00 I was thirty.
8:52 Nick Bare? Okay.
8:53 Speaker 00 The idea that the amount of time you have left with the people you love most in the world is so finite, so countable, that you can put it onto a few hands, shook me to my core. And I realized in that moment that we had to make a change. Otherwise, we were going to end up in a place where we didn't want to be. And I told my wife the next morning that I thought we needed to make a move. And within forty-five days, I had left my job. We had sold our house in California and moved three thousand miles to live closer to our families. And so that was like the spark, the rip the Band-Aid off moment of this enormous set of changes that frankly, on the surface, made no sense.
9:36 Speaker 00 But to your quote, it was like that moment of going and actually living your life rather than the one that had been handed to you.
9:44 Nick Bare? Right. So your background, talking about that a little bit, I love to explore your twenties that led to where you got to your thirties.
9:54 Nick Bare? Cause I know there's, there's probably people listening to this right now that say, or are thinking, dude, shut up. Like you got the money, like what else? What else could you be upset about? Cause it's really hard to relate sometimes when, if there's someone who is just struggling to financially set themselves up for success, that is like their, their main concern is just surviving. But then when you pass this point of sur- of survival to thriving, other parts of your life become empty. So I'd love to kind of explore that, how you approach that. But going back, played baseball at Stanford. Did you have any experiences of unhappiness then, or was it all?
10:40 Speaker 00 Roses. No, plenty of, uh, plenty of painful experiences then. I mean, uh, a lot of life is a quest for identity. Like, we think we want money, fame, wealth, success. What we're really all looking for is identity. We want to know how we fit into the world around us and that there's a clear way that we fit in. And my entire childhood, I had identified as a baseball player. That was like, what I knew, what I loved. I thought I was gonna go play professionally, create this whole world around it. And I got to Stanford and I'd gotten a scholarship and had this amazing thing. I was in this small school in Massachusetts. It was like a big deal. And I got there and immediately got humbled because I realized that like, I really wasn't shit, right? It was like,
11:24 Speaker 00 everyone is much better than me. I was probably the worst player on the team my freshman year. And I figured out very quickly that if I was gonna carve out my own identity within this team, that it was gonna have to be based around actually being tough to kill. Like, just showing up every single day. My grandfather used to tell me, uh, you'll achieve much more by being consistently reliable than by being occasionally extraordinary. And I remember that so clearly as a message that has just sort of reverberated through my life to just keep showing up. Like, it's very hard to bet against the person who just keeps showing up. And I wasn't very talented, and it was hard because I had defined my entire life around being like the best player on the
12:08 Speaker 00 team, the smartest, all these things. And you get into an environment where you're none of those, and you have to redefine who you are. Um, then I got hurt and baseball was completely taken away from me and I had to try to find an entirely new identity, um, my junior, senior year after that happened. So, it was, um, it was very much this like, you know, I think typical college quest for like figuring out who you are and how you fit into the world. What was that, that next identity after athlete? I mean, I thought it was gonna be like, you know, rich, successful guy that makes a bunch of money working in finance. I basically went on this quest, like going around and asking the like wealthiest people I could find, what they did for work. And I was like, I should just go do
12:50 Speaker 00 that thing. And basically, all of them said like they work in finance in some way. And so I figured, based on this like assumption that money equals, you know, happiness and like the things that I was looking for in life were on the other side of making money. Let me just go do that, make as much as I can doing that. And look, to your, to your question earlier, I think it's a great pursuit in your twenties and early thirties to build a financial foundation for the rest of your life. Like, I actually very explicitly say in the book that your life has seasons and what you prioritize or focus on during any one season will change. Your twenties and early thirties are an incredible season for you to focus on building a financial foundation for the rest of your life. Purely math,
13:34 Speaker 00 like, your, your life and your like foundation that you can build is all going to be based off compounding. So money that you can put away earlier is going to be better than money put away later because it's returns to the power of time and time is the exponent. So you want to put away money early. I'm definitely not saying that money is nothing. I'm just saying that it can't be the only thing. And so when you think about your own journey and when you think about your path, and if you are in your twenties or early thirties, building and focusing on that financial wealth, which is one of the five types of wealth, it's a whole section on it in the book, is a great pursuit and a great use of time. You just can't get so blinded by it as the end all be all of your
14:17 Speaker 00 life. It can't be the only thing that you are pursuing in life. You need to invest in these other areas if you're going to achieve the happiness and fulfillment that we're all really after.
14:27 Nick Bare? Yeah, if I think of my twenties, I wouldn't have changed anything, looking back. Yeah, maybe small things. I made some mistakes. There were some failures, setbacks, but overall, like my twenties, I spent
14:41 Nick Bare? Working really, really hard and laying the foundation for what I can enjoy now. And if I wanted to have spent my twenties doing that, there's no way for the wife and two young kids right now, that I would have been able to go as hard as I did in my twenties as my thirties, forties, fifties and so on. I actually just shared this with the team yesterday. I was reading this article a few weeks ago and the article grabbed my attention because it said, "Stop pursuing your passions." I was like, "Oh, this is interesting." So I read this article and it explained how everyone is so concerned with like finding their purpose and their passion, and then turning their work into their purpose and their passion, or their purpose and passion into their work.
15:27 Nick Bare? And the article argued that you should spend your time acquiring skills and building this toolkit of skills over time. And by building out this toolkit of skills, skill acquisition and getting really good at a few certain things, or many things, your purpose, your passion will become a byproduct of skill acquisition.
15:52 Nick Bare? I look at my twenties that same way, where I was just trying to acquire as many skills as possible. And the byproduct of acquiring those skills became my purpose, my passion and my work. And I wouldn't change my twenties with any possibility or option.
16:08 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, you, uh, you basically have this world where people think that they can sit and like plan out the perfect course for their life, right? They're like, "Oh, okay, I need to think about, I'm gonna sit here and think about what my passion and purpose is, and then I'm gonna go like take action," right? That's not how it works. How it actually works is you take action and then you find those things. Rumi, uh, one of my favorite ancient poets, has this line, "As you start to walk on the way, the way appears. As you start to walk on the way, the way appears. The answer is found in the action." So like what you said about your life is exactly right. You took action to go and build skills, then you found your passion, then you found your purpose, then you found your calling.
16:52 Speaker 00 You can't do it in reverse. And so people make that mistake and they sit, and then what happens is you do nothing. You overthink. You say like, "Well, I don't really like doing that, so I'm not gonna do it." All these young people come to me and like look for, you know, life or career advice. And like, oh, well, I don't like my job. It doesn't matter if you like your job in your early years. It really doesn't matter because you're gathering information. You're building skills, you're creating a foundation. Every single thing you want in life is on the other side of something you don't like doing. It's just the truth. It's on the other side of a hundred hours of focused work. It's on the other side of a hundred workouts or bland meals. It's on the other side of a hundred hard conversations. But the truth is that the answer is found in the action.
17:36 Speaker 00 The answers you want are hidden behind the actions you avoid.
17:40 Nick Bare? Yeah, kind of the caveat off that. And what happens is so many people
17:46 Nick Bare? explore or try to find their life's purpose and then plan it out. And then as soon as it goes off course or something happens where they're forced to adapt and pivot, that change breaks them. One of my favorite quotes is change breaks the brittle. And as soon as change happens, people become paralyzed, whoa, like this was not part of the plan. Part of the plan is you learning how to adapt and pivot and change and grow. Like when you were in your mid twenties, where did you expect to be in your mid thirties? Where did you think you were going to be right now?
18:23 Speaker 00 Definitely not here having this conversation. I say this all the time. I totally agree because I, um, people ask me now, like, where do you, what's your plan? What's your five year plan? What's your 10 year plan? The honest answer is I have absolutely no idea. And the reason is because five years ago, if you had asked me where I was going to be in five years, I could have written out a hundred scenarios and not a single one of them would have been right. Cause the most interesting opportunities in life are inherently invisible to you where you stand right now. They get revealed through your action, through the things that you're doing. I was working in finance. I wasn't writing, like I hadn't even started writing on social. Like I hadn't started a newsletter, I hadn't done any of the things that have contributed to where I am today. Cause I didn't know they existed, they were invisible. It's also why I always say,
19:09 Speaker 00 Preparation beats planning. Planning is based on the expectation of order, that things are going to go perfectly, that the seas are going to be smooth. Preparation is based on the expectation of chaos. You prepare where you stand today. You harden yourself so that when the chaos comes, you're able to pivot on the fly.
19:28 Nick Bare? Yeah, like that.
19:28 Speaker 00 It's like Mike Tyson's, uh, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Like one of my favorite quotes. It's so true, right? Like you come in with a plan, your life punches you in the mouth and your entire life is going to be defined by how you respond to getting punched in the mouth.
19:42 Nick Bare? Yep, I agree with that.
19:43 Speaker 00 Yeah.
19:44 Nick Bare? So that conversation you had in the bar about realizing how many times you're going to see your parents before they passed. Up until that point, was financial security and money the priority of your life? Like, did that run your life?
20:04 Speaker 00 It ran my life and all of my focus. Yeah. Was on making money and then also signaling to the world that I was making money. Uh, those were really the two primary focuses. And again, there's nothing wrong with making money. Uh, the challenge happens when you have gotten past the point of the security, past the point of the like clear linear relationship that exists between money and happiness, which it does, by the way, the science is very clear on this. In the early years of your life and in the early days, there is a very clear linear relationship between making more money and achieving more happiness. Because we know it reduces a whole bunch of stress. Uh, you can get food and shelter and you can take care of your family, take care of your people around you. You can get vacations, experiences.
20:49 Speaker 00 There's a very good relationship there. The problem is that relationship does not continue in perpetuity. So what people do is they create this pattern in their mind that, uh, when the money bell rings, they get the cheese, right? We're like mice. And that money bell, we keep trying to ring it because we think that we're going to get just as much cheese over the course of our entire life, when in reality it has started to level off. And so if you continue to think that it is going to be the thing that continues to drive all of your happiness gains, you lose sight of these other areas. You don't invest in your relationships. You don't invest in your health. You don't invest in your mind and the clarity that you have. And what you find is that if you don't invest in these things, just like any other area of life, they atrophy and they will not be around later.
21:34 Nick Bare? Yeah. At this point, how how long were you married for?
21:38 Speaker 00 I had been married since 2016. So I'd been married for five years when that conversation happened. But we'd been dating since we were high school sweethearts. So I met her when she was 14. I was 15 years old.
21:48 Nick Bare? Oh, wow.
21:49 Speaker 00 Yeah.
21:50 Nick Bare? And your job, you're in, were you in the private equity sector at that point?
21:54 Speaker 00 Yep.
21:55 Nick Bare? So working a lot.
21:56 Speaker 00 Working a lot.
21:57 Nick Bare? Probably traveling a lot, too.
21:58 Speaker 00 Traveling a lot.
21:59 Nick Bare? What was the relationship like with your wife? Was it, I mean, did you still have like that honeymoon phase of love and feel? Or was it like, we're just roommates passing the night?
22:10 Speaker 00 No, my wife and I have always had an amazing relationship. Part of that is we grew up together. Like, there is a, it's hard to describe the level of connection you have with someone when you manage to grow together despite all of the insane changes that happened from the time you're 15 until the time you're 30. I mean, it's crazy, right? Like, I was a kid. She was a kid. And so normally, you break up and you never experience that. But when it works, there's like a incredible strengthening of that bond. I mean, she knew me and knows me to this day better than anyone else in the world. And at times, it feels like she knows me better than myself. Like, there are things that I am ignoring about myself, where I'm not willing to admit those things that she sees in me. And that has been a huge part of this journey we've been on.
22:54 Speaker 00 The challenge was, you know, we were struggling to conceive at the time. And that's a topic that people suffer with in silence, and men especially don't talk about it.
23:13 Speaker 00 And in hindsight, you know, it's a thing that women carry the burden around. They put it on themselves, and she was doing that very much. And in hindsight, being able to look back on it, thinking about where I was mentally and physically in my own life, the stress that I was placing on myself, the fact that I was drinking seven nights a week, all these things about my own life. It was probably my fault that we weren't able to conceive. And the clearest representation of that was, we made this big change. We moved across the country. Within two weeks of getting back, we found out that my wife was pregnant.
23:46 Nick Bare? Oh, wow.
23:47 Speaker 00 Within two weeks of making that change. And it was one of those things, I don't know if people out there, if you're particularly religious, but it was one of those moments in life when you feel like God winked at you. Like it was a message of when your life comes into alignment, everything falls into place as it should. And so that was just, I mean, it makes me emotional thinking about it, like that feeling that you made the right decision, like things have fallen into alignment in your life as they should.
24:17 Nick Bare? Yeah, we struggled to conceive for a year. And I understand the, I don't know how long you guys were, went through it, but it was a year of like, you know, you, you wait to do the pregnancy test and you're like, please, please, please. And then it's negative. So like, there's this huge, just like
24:38 Nick Bare? horrible energy for the next 30 days. And that repeats every 30 days, month after month. And it's like wear and tear on a relationship.
24:48 Nick Bare? But it was early on when we were trying to conceive. And we're believers, both me and my wife. And my wife heard this whisper like in the air that said October, as she was praying about getting pregnant. And at this point, it was like six months away from October. And she's like, no way, there's no way. Ended up being six months later in October, dude, that she got pregnant.
25:13 Speaker 00 I just got chills.
25:14 Nick Bare? Like wild. And there are two moments that she has heard like a voice speak to her.
25:21 Nick Bare? Another, this is a side note, but I just gotta share it. It's right when we got to Nashville. She heard this whisper saying, this is going to be inconvenient. So we got to Nashville and we moved there. And like, our hot water didn't work the first day. So my wife is thinking, oh, this is the inconvenience. And then some other small things happened with the house that weren't working out well. And she's like, oh, this is the inconvenience. What I think ended up being the inconvenience is that after we got to Nashville. A few months later, I moved back in the CEO role. We moved back to Texas, our entire family and small creative team. The inconvenience was getting to Nashville in the first place.
26:05 Nick Bare? But just hearing that whisper, in that foreshadowing, it's pretty powerful.
26:10 Speaker 00 That's amazing. Thank you for sharing that too. I do think that like, men, especially men who are considered traditionally masculine by the outside world, talking about some of these struggles that are typically not talked about is really powerful. Because I know there are going to be people that are listening to this that are going through that. And so to hear that like, they're not alone in that is a powerful thing. I also think that, and I've experienced this recently, this is like a few weeks ago. I was in my office, I was working on something, I was trying to stay focused. And my son, who's two and a half, so he's like a crazy toddler, burst into my office and started just like wrecking stuff. He was throwing things on the ground. Yeah, the classic two and a half year old, right? He was just wrecking things. And I started having this like very negative thought pattern. I was like, why is he doing this? So annoying.
26:55 Speaker 00 Trying to work, doesn't he know I'm trying to focus? All of these things. And in that moment, I snapped myself back to three years ago, four years ago, when we were in the midst of that monthly struggle. And I prayed every single night that we would one day have a healthy child. And then there I was in that moment, complaining about the exact same thing that I had prayed for. And it was a reminder to me that sometimes the things we pray for become the things that we complain about if we let them. If we don't force ourselves to zoom out and recognize that sometimes you are literally living out your younger, your younger version of used prayers in your life.
27:39 Speaker 00 And we have to recognize that, you have to pause and actually appreciate that and allow yourself to embrace that present moment.
27:47 Nick Bare? I mean, that level of self-awareness is so essential for a successful second part of life. I think it just comes with experience and wisdom, but actually just slowing down and having the perspective of, okay, what do I have? What can I be grateful for? How do I appreciate this? How do I show recognition? And really leaning in. But some of the questions I was earlier asking, like, you know, how long were you married when you were going through this life transition of having this conversation in this bar? How old were you? I'm curious like what that that realization of, well, I'm not going to see my parents.
28:30 Nick Bare? And I focused on the wrong things like this focus and love for money and financial success. It's not everything I hoped it would be.
28:40 Nick Bare? I kind of want to hear what that transition looked like because it feels like you went through that process prior to becoming a dad, which I think was timely, like very important. Like, what did that look like over those weeks, months, years?
28:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, I don't know if you're familiar with the phrase from Ernest Hemingway. Once was asked how he went bankrupt and he said gradually, then suddenly. And I feel like that's sort of the story of a lot of these big changes in life is like there's the, it's like the boiling frog metaphor of the, you throw a frog into boiling water, it'll immediately jump out because it's so hot. But if you put a frog into a lukewarm pot of water and bring it to a boil, it'll stay in until it dies because it won't recognize the changes that are happening so slowly. I think some of these things in our life happen really, really slowly. And then you have the one shock event, the one thing. Those changes in my own life had been happening very slowly.
29:35 Speaker 00 And I had had moments where I sort of questioned it, where I was like, am I on, am I climbing the wrong mountain? Am I like focusing on the wrong things? Am I on the wrong train? There's this Japanese proverb that says, if you get on the wrong train, get off it at the next stop because otherwise it'll take a long time to get back.
29:58 Speaker 00 And I think about that in my own life, like we made this change. We dramatic shift, moved across the country or back. I had no idea what I was going to do next. Like I had left this lucrative job where I had great colleagues. It was, you know, interesting work. There were all these things that were good about it. And I was like writing on Twitter at the time. I just started a newsletter. I was like doing a little bit of like, you know, started doing a little bit of consulting, different things. And I went on a journey to try to understand what were the. Real underlying components of a life well-lived, of a truly wealthy life, a life of wealth across all of these different areas of life.
30:42 Speaker 00 And one of the main ways that I did that was by going and talking to a lot of people who are much older and much wiser, who had experienced more of life and who had kind of experienced the ups and downs and the pitfalls and the different things. That ended up being essential because it reminded me that money is a part of the entire journey, but there are so many other pieces to living a truly fulfilling life. And the common themes that kept coming up were really four things: time, people, purpose, and health. When you go and ask people, like I would go, I spoke to thousands of people and I would go and ask them to do this visualization, to imagine their ideal day at age 80.
31:27 Speaker 00 Close your eyes and imagine your ideal day at age 80. You wake up, what are you doing? Who are you with? How do you feel? What are you thinking about? What are you spending your time on? And when you ask people that question, basically everyone says the same thing. They all sort of surround this idea of having freedom, being surrounded by people they love, whether it's kids, friends, you know, spouse, whatever, people you love, feeling healthy of body and mind, and sort of knowing what your meaning is, like knowing what you're supposed to be doing on a daily basis. And that has a little bit to do with money. Money is an enabler to some of that.
32:10 Speaker 00 It maybe unlocks some of the freedom and it is, it helps with some of those, but it's very much a tool, not the goal in and of itself. No one was saying like, "I want to be sitting on a private jet or a yacht." Most of them were like, "I just want to be surrounded by people I care about." And so it was a reminder to me that we all basically want the same thing and it has very little to do with money as the core and goal of it.
32:35 Nick Bare? Is these the interviews you had with, you mentioned in the book, in 2022 you interviewed a group of 80 and 90-year-olds and asked them what advice you'd give your younger self? I pulled some of the quotes from that that I thought were very powerful. And like you said, no one mentioned money. Someone said, never fear sadness as it tends to sit right next to love. Grandmother. Find dear friends and celebrate them for the richness of being human is in the feeling of being loved and loving back. Treat your body like a house that you have to live in for the next 70 years. Tell your partner you love them every night before falling asleep. Someday you'll find the other side of the bed empty.
33:20 Nick Bare? And you wish you could tell them that.
33:24 Nick Bare? All very powerful comments and, and mentions. Without even bringing up money at all. I love. The whole gradual and then sudden approach that you brought up. Cause I'm, as I'm thinking about my last month of life, I got hit by a car, you know, when I was running three weeks ago. And for months leading up to that point. Like being very honest, I was having trouble being happy. I could not figure it out. It was driving me nuts. I would sit in my office in the morning thinking, why am I unhappy? Like what changed? And I knew I had to change something.
34:08 Nick Bare? But I wasn't willing to in that moment. And it was building and it was building and it was building. And me and my wife would have conversations about it. And I was just digging myself into the ground. Like when I am struggling with something. I will. Dive into work. I will dive into training. I will put more and more and more on my plate. I don't pull back. I lean in and I just submerged myself in as much as possible.
34:39 Nick Bare? And for the last couple of months, I mean, I was doing a lot. Training, business, two young kids, three moves in the last 15 months. And then when I got hit by that car, it felt like a sign directly from God saying, slow down. And you better prioritize the right things or you are going to miss them.
35:00 Nick Bare? So it was very gradual. It was building, it was building, it was building. And all of a sudden, when I got hit by that car, literally hours afterwards, I was like, okay. And my wife was afraid after I got in that accident. She's like, oh, he's gonna lose his mind not being able to train for a few weeks. And I completely just like let go of the reins. Gonna let my body heal, not gonna worry about it, not gonna stress about it. And she was completely mind blown by the fact that I wasn't stressing out over not being able to run or lift.
35:36 Nick Bare? But I am a completely different person today than I was three weeks ago. And it's really hard to get someone else to understand that when I tell them that.
35:49 Nick Bare? But it was that gradual, gradual, gradual sudden, okay, God, I got you. I hear you. Change is here.
35:58 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's, um, there's this passage in the book. Um, my parents gave me this compass at a pretty dark time in my life and a time when I was struggling with all of these things. They gifted me this compass and it was a little silver compass. And on the inside it had this engraving that just said, "So you may always know where your true north lies." The message in that was to focus on direction, not speed. It's better to climb slowly up the right mountain than to climb fast up the wrong one. And that's a message that we so often need to hear. Like, I want to get it tattooed on my body because most of the biggest mistakes you
36:40 Speaker 00 make in life end up being because you're climbing up the wrong mountain. You're climbing up someone else's mountain usually. You haven't taken the time to slow down and think about what is the mountain I actually should be climbing right now? What is my true north in life that I'm headed towards? And the true north, again, it doesn't have to be like your purpose or the perfect passion, but you need to think about what you truly care about. Like, you needed a reset moment to remember the things that you truly care about, the things that actually are going to light you up, the things that you're going to remember 50 years from now. There's this,
37:14 Speaker 00 A chapter in the book where I talk about children, I talk about sort of the relationship with as a parent and children and trying to navigate this tension that exists between your desire to be present and between your ambition, your drive to go and create things, to build things, to build a big business, to impact the world, to do all of these things. And there's this, in that, there's this Reddit post that I talk about that said, "In 20 years, the only people who will remember you working late were your, are your kids. In 20 years, the only people that will remember you working late are your kids." And the common understanding of that is to say, "Okay, I'm gonna put all of my professional
37:59 Speaker 00 ambitions aside and just be present entirely with my kids." But it's not really as simple as that because you really want your kids to understand the importance of hard work, of pursuing their ambitions, and you can't teach them that. They have to see you doing that. They have to see you living that out in your pursuits, in the way that you're engaging with the world. And so navigating that tension between presence and ambition ends up being one of the most challenging tensions that we have to navigate as children.
38:30 Nick Bare? I've been talking about that for the last like two years. I'm telling you, man, that's been the hardest transition for me is balancing that, that presence and ambition. That's, that's the hardest chapter of life for me.
38:42 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think it's really difficult and it doesn't come naturally. And the way, the way I wrestle with it, which I talk about in the book, is you have to include your children in the why, the why of your ambition. I think of my own father and my dad's my best friend and I feel so grateful for having had a dad like him. And a lot of who he was as a father was informed by the fact that he didn't have that same dad in his life. You know, when my dad wanted to marry my mom, my dad's white from the Bronx, New York. My mom is Indian, born and raised in India. And when my dad wanted to marry my mom, his dad didn't accept it and told him he had to choose between his family and my mom. And my dad walked
39:25 Speaker 00 out the door and never saw his family again. To this day, I never met my dad's parents. My dad has three siblings I never met.
39:33 Nick Bare? Oh, wow.
39:34 Speaker 00 I have first cousins somewhere out there that I've never met.
39:38 Nick Bare? Still in New York?
39:39 Speaker 00 No clue.
39:40 Nick Bare? Wow.
39:44 Speaker 00 That episode, I think, instilled in my dad this desire to be the most supportive father that he could be. I think we often either sort of reject or amplify the things that we received from our parents. Like, we either reject the things that we thought were bad and we go the other way, or we amplify if we thought they were good and we kind of double down on it. And my dad is, he's a professor and worked extremely, extremely hard his whole life. He's an incredible researcher, professor, has been at Harvard for the last 25 or 30 years. And I always saw him working extremely hard on the things that he cared about. And when he left, when he wasn't there, or when he was traveling, or when he had
40:27 Speaker 00 to work on things, I always knew why. Like, he would always take the time to explain to me what he was working on, why he thought it was important, why he felt there was an impact to it, why it mattered to the, like, mission of providing for the family and for being there. And so, as a result, when he wasn't there, I had a reason. I filled it with the story that he had told me. And what kids do is if you don't give them that why, they fill it with the worst, which is, oh, dad's just never around, dad doesn't care about me. And you can fill it with the true story, which is that you are trying to build something meaningful to you, that you are creating things, that you want them to understand the value of hard work. And that makes a huge difference in the way that you kind
41:09 Speaker 00 of navigate that, and in just the pride that they feel in being a part of that mission with you. And so, like, as my son gets older, and even with this book, I'm taking painstaking efforts. He's only two and a half, so he doesn't really understand things yet. But I am taking the time, every single time he sees me working, to try to show him, like, here's this book that I'm working on, here's the reason that I'm traveling, that I'm doing this book tour, the different things that I'm doing. I want him to know why it matters and why I care about it.
41:38 Nick Bare? Did you have this perspective before your son was born? Or was it a shift afterwards?
41:44 Speaker 00 Definitely a shift afterwards. I mean, my entire life, I could argue, is like a before and after of him being born. I spent, I spent the first 30 years of my life thinking I didn't want kids. Even when my wife and I were first starting to try, I was like, almost assuaging her. Because I was still convinced, in my own like narrow focus on money, that kids were like a distraction from the thing that really mattered, which was like making money and being famous or successful. And I remember having this like transformative moment, the second he came out and I was holding him in my hands and he looked up at me and I was like, I spent the first 30
42:27 Speaker 00 years of my life wondering what the purpose and meaning of all this was, and then I was holding it, staring back at me in the face. And my entire life has been different on the other side of that. I mean, I just, I view the world different. It's like putting on a, you take off a pair of like glasses or something and your whole life feels different. And it's almost hard to explain to someone who hasn't experienced that, but then you go talk to dads, you talk to people, and everyone has some version of that same feeling, some same feeling of connection.
42:57 Nick Bare? Yeah, I experienced the same thing. Before we continue with this episode, I want to take a quick break to talk about BPN's new free membership program we just launched. And by signing up for our membership program, you unlock a massive amount of benefits. And all you have to do to sign up is opt into our SMS program. That's it. And when you opt into our SMS program, you unlock 20% off subscriptions for life. There are subscriber only free shipping windows and flash sales. You get access to exclusive apparel and hat drops. And all you have to do to get started is go to bpnsubs.com, follow the neon green banners,
43:41 Nick Bare? opt into SMS, and you are officially a BPN member. I think the best part about this membership program is the 20% off subscriptions for life. Because for a lot of people, myself included, these products work, our training works, our diet works, when we are consistently good, as opposed to occasionally great.
44:07 Nick Bare? And by offering 20% off subscriptions for life for these great products to you guys, you can be more consistent, you can reach your goals and truly achieve your full potential by maximizing consistency in your supplement routine, your training and your diet. So head over to bpnsubs.com to get started today and take advantage of this opportunity to become a BPN member. I love what you mentioned about climbing the wrong mountains and focus on direction
44:46 Nick Bare? rather than speed. Cause if I look at my life before my daughter was born and then life changing, but prior to that, I also said when I was in my twenties, I don't know if I want to have kids because I just want to be a business owner. I just want to build this thing into the biggest possible thing it can be. And I want to eliminate distractions that hold me back from that, which is just such an ignorant, immature, narrow point of focus. And if I look back at my life then, I had a very clear direction, but I was on
45:28 Nick Bare? that path at high speed. Anything that got in the way would disrupt my direction and my speed. And then when I became a dad, direction and speed both got blown up. And I was sitting there thinking, okay, what does this next chapter look like? And over these last honestly, two and a half years, it's been a journey and exploration, both each additional day and moment where like I'm noticing my kids are getting older and developing like that direction and that speed becomes clearer and clearer and clearer. And it's not to
46:07 Nick Bare? go faster any longer. It is to slow down as much as possible. You know, you seem to have so much perspective and you articulate your thoughts very, very well.
46:22 Nick Bare? Is that because you create these moments to slow down and actually think? And what does that look like? Like, what are your systems around actually thinking inward? So then you can show up externally?
46:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, I um, I use this example in the book of Lionel Messi, the soccer player.
46:40 Nick Bare? I love that analogy in the book that he used.
46:43 Speaker 00 Yeah, so he um, he is known for walking around the field. Uh, if you go and search Lionel Messi walking on Google, you'll get like half a million hits. It's probably the most talked about walking habit in the world. Uh, and it's this really interesting thing because most people assume that the walking is laziness. And in reality, it's strategy. As he walks around the field, he is able to create an incredible mental map of what is going on, of space. He's able to slow down, he's able to identify what's happening. And at the exact right moment, he's able to shoot forward at the perfect angle in order to perceive the ball and score.
47:27 Speaker 00 That is sort of a metaphor for our own lives. We need to slow down enough, we need to create enough space that we can see the whole field so that we can deploy our energy into the right moment and the right opportunity and the right set of priorities that really matter. Early in your life, in your twenties, you probably benefited actually from some of the speed, from some of the urgency, from some of those things. That's like the work hard phase of your life. But as you start gaining some of the benefit of experience and wisdom and networks and money, you need to start working more like Lionel Messi. You need to start working smarter and deploying those things into the right opportunities because that is where you end up generating the 10, 100, 1,000x outcomes in your own life.
48:10 Speaker 00 It's when you deploy energy, concentrated attention and energy into the few things that really matter. The systems for actually building that into your life, I think there are a few in the book that are actually quite simple and powerful. So at the end of each section, there's one section for each type of wealth. There's a guide and that has the systems for actually building that type of wealth. The mental wealth section has this idea of space and creating space in your life. That comes from Viktor Frankl, the famous Holocaust survivor, Man's Search for Meaning, famous book, where he says that our power in life exists in the space that we can create between stimulus and response. So we have all of these things coming in at us, emails, texts, notifications, all the
48:55 Speaker 00 stuff that's coming in. And in a normal world, you are forced to be on this like immediate treadmill where you're just immediately responding to everything.
49:03 Nick Bare? Block, tackle, block, tackle.
49:05 Speaker 00 Over and over again, reactive, reactive, reactive, reactive. And you are severely limited in your ability to create asymmetric opportunities when that is your life, because you're just forced in this urgent loop. Your power is in the space you can create. So we need to find ways to create space. There's sort of ways that I think of it on a daily basis and then on a more macro monthly basis. On a daily basis, I think the first thing most people can do is create a five-minute window between meetings and calls. So rather than scheduling 30-minute phone calls or meetings, make them 25 minutes. The first five minutes of any call or meeting is usually bullshit. You banter about the weather and talk about whatever sports game happened. If you make a meeting 25 minutes, people get more efficient.
49:50 Speaker 00 You still get the exact same meeting done and now you have a five-minute window, which it turns out is extremely powerful. Microsoft did this research study where they put EEGs on people's heads and had them go through a set of meetings that were either back-to-back or meetings that had a five-minute window in between them. The people that went through the back-to-back meetings had these linear spikes in their stress levels throughout and their performance went like this throughout the entire thing. It just declined steadily. The people that inserted the five-minute break had no buildup of stress and their performance was consistently at a higher level the entire time through. So this five-minute window and break that you create, this little bit of space allows
50:31 Speaker 00 you to slow down enough to reset and be more present in every activity you do. So your output goes up. On a more macro monthly basis, I use something that I call a think day. Bill Gates became famous for doing a think week. In the 1980s, he started taking an entire week where he would go off the grid with just a bunch of like reading. And he would go and spend a week in a cabin, just thinking, reading and learning about the bigger picture things that were facing Microsoft. And he credits it as being a hugely transformative process for the journey that Microsoft has been on over these several decades. We can create something similar on a slightly lower level in our own lives.
51:13 Speaker 00 Take four hours once a month, or once a quarter if you can't get once a month. Go off the grid, like go somewhere that's not normal for you, whether it's to a new coffee shop, or like rent an Airbnb, or go somewhere that you really like that sort of opens your mind. And just go and spend time thinking about some of the bigger picture questions in your life. I have a set of eight question prompts that I like to use in the book. I can share a couple of those. One is, if someone were to observe my actions for a week, what would they say my priorities are? So the idea there is, there's sort of two types of priorities. There's the priorities you say you have, and then there's the priorities your actions show you have.
51:58 Speaker 00 Yeah. And unfortunately, there's a big gap for a lot of people. We'll say we prioritize our family and our health and all these things, and then really we just prioritize work and making money. And so forcing this self-awareness by viewing it from a third party's perspective is a good way to push yourself sort of back into alignment across those two things. Another one that I really like to ask myself is, if I were the main character in a movie of my life, what would the audience be screaming at me to do right now? So think about like you watch a TV show or a movie and you're watching and you're like, you want to just jump through the screen and grab the main character like, don't, you know, go into that basement or like, go chase the girl to the airport, whatever the thing is. You are that main character in the movie of your life
52:43 Speaker 00 and the audience would be screaming at you to do something right now. And it's probably something very obvious that you are ignoring, that you're not forcing the self-awareness to identify. So take the day, take a few hours to zoom out and think about some of those bigger picture things. You'll find that you create this space in your life and that space will change your life.
53:04 Nick Bare? One of my favorite authors is Cal Newport. And, you know, he's a huge proponent of creating time and space for deep work. And not necessarily anti-technology, but like, anti-busy technology and
53:26 Nick Bare? how it makes us just reactive. From the time we wake up to the time we go to sleep.
53:34 Nick Bare? One of my favorite things to do to just separate once in a while, I'd love to do it more often, but it becomes a stretch sometimes. So House, downtown Austin. I'll go work there some days. And I won't have my phone on me. I have my laptop. I won't get on the internet. I'll work on a podcast. I'll just brain dump. I'll just think. I'll sit outside in the fall or the spring or the summer if it's not too hot. Drinking Americano and just like dial in. And it's some of my most productive couple hours. As opposed to being in the office or being on email, being on my phone, being reactive. And that's what I look forward to with this ranch that we just started building out.
54:19 Nick Bare? Like Bear Ranch is a new project that we took on. Where it's 240 acres. It's 20 minutes from my house. We're remodeling a house there. We're building a barn gym there. We'll put some animals there. We'll host races there. But that for me is a place where it's quiet. There is solitude. And the amount of work that I'll be able to get done in a more restricted period of time, I believe will be beneficial for my business, my family, me so much.
54:51 Speaker 00 I have this chart in the book. I don't know if we're gonna be able to pick that up on the camera, but this is the time spent alone over the course of your life. And it's a really powerful chart because what it shows is that the amount of time you spend by yourself over the course of your life steadily increases. So if you don't get comfortable spending time alone, if you don't get comfortable having that solitude, you are going to have a very, very tough life as you have more of that. When you are young, if you can build that solitude muscle, it becomes like your superpower. There's, I think there's a, I think it's Blaise Pascal that says all of man's problems can be attributed to his inability to sit in a room alone.
55:36 Speaker 00 And you think about in your own life, how terrified you are of boredom. Like, we go to the bathroom, we bring our phone.
55:43 Nick Bare? Yeah.
55:44 Speaker 00 You go to take a dump and you sit there with your phone. And you think about how sad it is. You cannot be bored for like two seconds, even now. Like, I drive my, you know, family from Boston, New York, to see family. And like three hours in the car, you know, listening to kids' songs and I'm going nuts. Like, I need some sort of stimulus. How challenging it is, but it's a muscle and it's one that you can build on a regular basis. Like, you know, go for a 15-minute walk with no phone or technology today. Go do that. I guarantee you will have some of your best ideas that you've had in months.
56:18 Nick Bare? So do you consider if you're by yourself, but you have your phone, is that time alone?
56:26 Speaker 00 No.
56:26 Nick Bare? It's not?
56:27 Speaker 00 I mean, it is technically according to this because this is like, you're just not with other people.
56:30 Nick Bare? Yeah.
56:31 Speaker 00 But no, you're not alone. Because you are, when you have your phone on you and you open your phone, you open social media, quite literally, there are millions of people that have access to your inner world during those moments, right? Especially you, right? Like, you have millions of followers. We both have big platforms. We are never alone if we are, if we have social media open. There are people that can message us. There's people that are commenting. We're not like... You know, it's like one of those weird things like you. I think I saw Jay Shetty say this, like you would never wake up in the morning and allow a million people to walk into your bedroom. But you grab your phone as soon as you wake up in the morning and you effectively allow a million people to come into your world. And so I think about that a lot and I like this is coming from
57:14 Speaker 00 someone who is definitely overly connected because it's a big part of my job. But we need to create rituals for making sure we actually have space. And look, I think deep work is incredible if you have the ability to create it. The idea of, you know, having a day where you're at your ranch or at your cabin, you have like eight uninterrupted hours to focus on big picture things is like this amazingly romantic, beautiful idea. I would love to get to a world where I can do that. It's not reality for most people, right? Like if I can get two, three hours of deep work in a day, like truly deep work, that's a great day for me. The way that I do that is I wake up at 4:00 a.m.
57:56 Speaker 00 That's how I do it. People ask why I wake up so early. It's because my kid doesn't wake up until about eight, 7:30 or eight. So I know if I can sit down at my desk at 4:30, I have three hours basically completely uninterrupted before the chaos of the day starts. Part of the reason why I think waking up early is a cheat code for your life. A, it's really hard and it has ripple effects into every other thing because you convince yourself that you're a winner when you can do the hard thing. But B, structurally, you're not getting emails. No one's texting you at five in the morning. No one's texting you at 4:30. You're not getting the like social media pings. Your kids aren't awake yet. Your wife probably isn't awake yet. So it's a great time to just sit down, focus and get shit done.
58:37 Nick Bare? I mean, that's why I wake up at 4:30 every morning if I'm working out or not. My morning runs are like my, my time where like I need that six days a week. There's one day a week I don't run. I still wake up at 4:30 on Sunday morning. And the, the work I get done in those hours before my family wakes up.
59:03 Nick Bare? It's like not even an option anymore. Like I need that time and it is so powerful for everything else that I do.
59:10 Speaker 00 There's no such thing as a loser who wakes up at 5:00 AM and works out.
59:13 Nick Bare? It's true.
59:14 Speaker 00 A lot of problems in life are solved by just waking up early and working out.
59:18 Nick Bare? How long you been doing that now?
59:19 Speaker 00 Uh, I started waking up early when I was in college because we had early morning practices and I like, I'm someone that needs to be awake for a little while before I uh can like turn on for something physical. And so I would get up early before it. It really started when I started my first job, which is a funny story. I uh, you know, I knew I was gonna have long days at the office because it's, you know, early years of finance and analyst role. You're like, you're gonna work 80 to 100 hours a week. I was gonna get to the office at like 6:30. So I knew I needed to get to the gym at 4:45 and uh, to get to the gym at 4:45, I had to like wake up at 3:45. And so for the first five or six years of my career, I woke up at 3:45 every single day. And I credit that as being
1:00:00 Speaker 00 some of the most, some of the more transformative action that I took was just doing that on a daily basis. I ended up uh, as a result of that, I would go to the gym at 4:45 every morning at this um, Equinox in Palo Alto. And um, there was like five or six people that would show up there every single day at 4:45 in the morning. Crazy people, right? Uh, it turned out that one of those people was Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, who we became friends. He's been a mentor. Uh, you know, now he's on the back of the book. He was one of the reviewers that read it.
1:00:33 Nick Bare? I was very curious how you got that.
1:00:34 Speaker 00 We met literally because he is crazy enough. He was the CEO of Apple at the time, right? And he was waking up at 3:45 every single morning and going and working out. Imagine that, right? It's so easy. Like, oh, he's made it. He doesn't need to do that anymore. But it's who he is as a person, is he creates that space in his life by getting up early and working out? And he still does it to this day. He's 60 plus years old. And I just think about that fact over and over again that you see in your life, that people that do these hard things to start their day, find ways to win in other areas of life. It just has ripple effects into everything you do.
1:01:09 Nick Bare? My mind or my life is kind of been shook here for a second because when he pulled that chart open in the book and showed how as we get older, we have more time alone. The first thing I wanted to respond with to that was, I love alone time. I, I, I find it so powerful. But then the realization that alone time is not alone time if your phone's with you. It made me really think, how much alone time do I actually have outside of my run? There's not much. And like, for me, a call to action, the next action step is
1:01:51 Nick Bare? finding and creating more alone time without being connected. Cause I, I hate being connected all the time. I don't prefer it. But I do feel this need to, based off of business and work and all the things that are going on in life. But a very clear action step for me is create space, create time without the connection. That's like, I, I, it kind of rocked my world right there.
1:02:18 Speaker 00 Good. It, um, yeah, and it's crazy, the impact that our phones have on us and the pull they have. Even in your social connections with people, and I learned this recently. There is scientific evidence that if I have my phone out on the table while we're having a conversation, up or down, our feelings of connection after this conversation will be reduced. So just having your phone out when you have a conversation with your partner, with a friend, or someone you're trying to catch up with, is going to negatively impact the feeling of connection that you have with them. You think about the ripple effect on that, long-term in those relationships, it can be dramatic. So the other action step too, is just like, put your damn phone away.
1:03:00 Speaker 00 You're having a conversation, don't have your phone sitting here, because then you know, it lights up when you get a notification. And you naturally, you're talking to me, you might be saying something really interesting, but I'm gonna go like this. Cause these things are designed to be addictive. They're designed to grab you the attention. That's why also, by the way, I always try to have my phone on grayscale mode. So it makes it just like, that screen looks so boring.
1:03:21 Nick Bare? Oh, wow.
1:03:22 Speaker 00 So you can like, set color filters on your iPhone. So 90% of the day, as long as I'm not like, posting something that needs to color, set your phone on grayscale mode, and I guarantee you'll spend less time on it during the day.
1:03:34 Nick Bare? That's interesting. I'll try that.
1:03:35 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:03:37 Nick Bare? So in the book, there's these five types of wealth. Time, social, mental, physical, financial.
1:03:45 Nick Bare? I'd like to focus on one for a second and just hear your, your perspective, your thoughts on it, the social aspect of, of wealth and the way that you think about it.
1:03:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, so it's a perfect segue to from what we were just talking about.
1:04:02 Speaker 00 Social wealth is all about your depth and breadth of connection to the people around you. You know, it's the depth of connection with the few people that you're truly close to. And then it's the breadth to a broader circle of friends, community, spiritual connections, et cetera.
1:04:19 Speaker 00 There is clear scientific evidence that the strength of your relationships impacts your health and happiness more than anything else. The Harvard Study of Adult Development was this amazing study done over the course of 85 years. They followed the lives of 2,000 plus participants. They found that the single greatest predictor of physical health at age 80 was relationship satisfaction at age 50. So it wasn't how your cholesterol was, your blood pressure, your smoking or drinking habits. It was how you felt about your relationships that impacted your physical health and aging outcomes. We know this in our own life anecdotally, that the people we surround ourselves with determine our life, our happiness in life.
1:05:02 Speaker 00 And scientifically, it's also shown the people you surround yourself with determine your outcomes. The Pygmalion Effect is this scientific phenomenon that we rise to the level of expectations others have for us. So if I surround myself with people who are big thinkers, who are encouraging me to push myself, who, who believe in me, who think I can grow, I will rise to the level of those expectations. Similarly, if I surround myself with people who laugh at me, who make fun of me for being excited about things, who put me down, I will fall to the level of those expectations. So what more reason do you need for surrounding yourself with people who are truly there for you?
1:05:41 Nick Bare? What have you done to create that ecosystem of? Maximizing social wealth of the people in your circle.
1:05:48 Speaker 00 I think this fundamentally comes down to investing in your relationships the same way you know to invest in your financial health. So we naturally know that investing in something in the financial world is going to compound into the future. Like, you know, you learn that very early on. I'm going to put $10 away, $100 away into the S and P 500. It's going to compound into the future. I'm going to have more money in the future. Your relationships are perhaps the best investment you can make. They pay dividends in the exact same way for the entirety of your life. And if you invest in them with very small, tiny investments now, they will be there for you later. And if you don't, they won't. So, you know, life ends up being filled with laters, right? We say, I'll spend
1:06:33 Speaker 00 more time with my kids later. I'll spend more time with my wife and friends later. I'll focus on my health later. The sad thing is that later just becomes another word for never. Because those things won't exist in the same way later. Your kids are not going to be two and a half years old later. Your wife won't be there for you later if you're not there for her now. So either you design those things, design those investments into your life now, or you're just going to regret it later.
1:06:59 Nick Bare? Yeah, one of the analogies that I love is the plants you don't, plants or seeds you don't continue to water will die. They will erode, they will break off. And I believe, and I'm victim to this as well, that we believe that something we have now is just going to be there when we come back to it, even if we don't maintain it, or water it, or take care of it. And the reality is, we let something die, and we try to come back to it, and we realize, this thing's not here. It's dead. It's not the same. It's different. It's eroded.
1:07:40 Nick Bare? And that is really hard to accept sometimes. But it's also just sometimes the byproduct of becoming busy and life. And that for me is why I've moved into this chapter and season of life of like, what does matter to me? Work wise, family wise?
1:08:06 Nick Bare? My faith, relationships, friendships, I need to keep watering these things because if I don't, when I try to come back to them later, they will have been dead or moved on.
1:08:16 Speaker 00 And the truth is that it doesn't take much to keep them going. It's one of the points that I try to get across in the book is you don't need to be maximizing an area in order to keep it moving forward. Anything above zero compounds in your life, quite literally. Like, it's much better to do a 15-minute walk than to do nothing physically during the course of a day. People think, especially ambitious people, that it needs to be optimal for it to be beneficial. I need to do the full Huberman protocol on X, Y, or Z. I need to do the two-hour workout or the like 10-mile run. And the reality is that the two-mile run is better than the zero-mile run. And so similarly with your relationships, sending the little text to a friend to let
1:09:01 Speaker 00 them know you were thinking about them is way better than sending nothing. Getting your guys together for your one annual trip that you do is way better than just allowing that to continue to slip. It could be once a year that you get together with them, but it has a dramatic impact on where those relationships are headed. And so it's the tiny, the willingness to engage in the tiny deposits along the way that really creates that lasting effect. And you're absolutely right that like, you have to fight for these things. You actually have to pay a price in the short term to have these things in the long term. It's the ultimate delayed gratification. Jeff Bezos, in his last shareholder letter when he left Amazon, quoted this piece from The Blind Watchmaker.
1:09:43 Speaker 00 And he talks about the fact in it that you have to pay a price for your distinctiveness in the world. And the idea from The Blind Watchmaker is that being alive is a fight against your whole body just like melting into its surroundings. That's literally what being alive is. All of your cells right now, as you're sitting here listening to this, are fighting to avoid just like melting. They have to fight to maintain their integrity. And you are the exact same in your life in all of these areas. You have to fight every single day to avoid the natural entropy and decay of all these things. We know that physically, actually. Like, you know, if you do nothing, your body's eventually gonna go to shit.
1:10:24 Nick Bare? The atrophy.
1:10:25 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:10:25 Nick Bare? Falls apart.
1:10:26 Speaker 00 Yeah. And the same thing applies to relationships, to any of these areas.
1:10:31 Nick Bare? You quoted Charlie Munger in the book. He said, or he said, "All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there." I love that quote.
1:10:45 Nick Bare? And it comes off of the, the chapter of your life razor, which talks about having goals, but also anti-goals. Yeah, a lot of us know what goals are, these big, audacious, long-term ambitions, or your medium-term checkpoint objectives along the way.
1:11:06 Nick Bare? But anti-goals is actually something I've started incorporating these last couple of months that I believe are extremely powerful. Boundaries, creating boundaries around the goals and conditions in which you want to achieve.
1:11:22 Nick Bare? How would you describe your life razor and how you implement anti-goals to support your goals?
1:11:28 Speaker 00 Yeah, so I'll start with the anti-goals piece. Anti-goals, for those who aren't familiar with the concept, are all about what you want to avoid on your journey to achieve your goals. So if you think of your goals as like the summit of the mountain, anti-goals are the things that you aren't willing to sacrifice in getting there. Uh, you know, like you don't want to die, uh, while getting to the top of Mount Everest. You don't want to lose your toes. You don't want to like lose your ear, whatever. Uh, so if you think of like, oh, uh, you know, my goal is to become CEO of this company. Well, my anti-goal might be being away from my family 300 nights out of the year, uh, or allowing my health to fall off a cliff from all the travel and dinners out and all those things.
1:12:12 Speaker 00 I want to achieve the goal of becoming CEO, but not at the expense of these other things. It's really important to have both because an awareness of the things you want to avoid on the journey goes to Charlie Munger's thing. I want to know where I'm going to die, so I never go there. Those are the places where I'm going to die. It's being away too much. It's allowing my health to suffer. And so I'm going to stay on track for my goals and I'm going to avoid these bad areas along the way. As you set your goals for the coming year, you know, you're listening to this early in the year, think about what the anti-goals are, what those things are that you want to avoid, because it creates a self-awareness around them so that on the way, as you continue to sort of naturally, uh, measure yourself and see whether you're headed toward the goals, you avoid those bad things that could befall you.
1:12:57 Speaker 00 The life razor that I lay out in the book is the idea of having a single point of focus, a single statement, a single idea that allows you to cut through the noise and the chaos in life. I sort of had the first genesis of this idea watching Apollo 13. I don't know if you've seen that movie, but like in the final scene, they're trying to enter the atmosphere and it's Tom Hanks is flying the spaceship. And they get told that basically if they come in too steep, they're going to blow up. They come in too shallow, they're going to shoot off into space. And they don't really have a way to like perfectly hit the right angle because the computers aren't working on the ship. It's all busted ship. And Tom Hanks says that he figured out a way.
1:13:41 Speaker 00 And basically what it is, is there's this little triangular window to his right. And he pans the ship over and the earth comes into the center of this little window. And what he says is that if he keeps the earth in the window while they're burning the engines, that will allow them to enter at the right angle so that they'll survive. That is a perfect example of what I'm getting at, which is in the midst of this crazy, chaotic, like 100 variable scenario, he has figured out a single point of focus that is going to allow him to just think about that one thing, cut through the noise and get to the place he wants to go. The life razor is that for your life. It is your way of keeping the earth in the window.
1:14:21 Speaker 00 My life razor is that I will coach my son's sports teams. Why is that my life razor? Well, it's about coaching his teams, but more so it's about the ripples. It's about the identity that that implies about who I am as a person and how I interact with the world around me. The type of person who coaches his son's sports teams is the type of person who is a great father, a great husband to my wife, a family member, a community member. It is someone who prioritizes family above financial opportunities, above whatever the next more is that people are trying to chase. It's someone who believes that the strength of his relationships are the most important asset that he has.
1:15:06 Speaker 00 And it's someone that believes that the freedom, his time is the most valuable asset that exists. That means that when different scenarios or opportunities or chaos come into my life, I can ask myself, what does the type of person who coaches his son's sports teams do in this situation? And the answer becomes very clear.
1:15:27 Nick Bare? What are your thoughts on establishing your anti-goals first and then your goals? Because as you're describing that, like if I set up my anti-goals first,
1:15:40 Nick Bare? I now know when I go to set up my goals, what I'm not willing to sacrifice. And that might shift the goals themselves. I think back to, I had Jordan Syatt on the podcast a few months ago, and he was explaining, you know, we were talking about where he sees his business going and what his goals are in life. He's a newer dad as well, two young kids.
1:16:06 Nick Bare? And he came in and he was saying on the podcast, you know, I come into VPN, I see what you guys have built and I love it, but I would never want it. Because he worked as Gary Vee's trainer for years and he saw how hard Gary Vee had to work and what he had to sacrifice to get what he has. And Jordan realized, I respect that, but I don't want it because I don't want to sacrifice certain parts of my life to achieve X, Y, and Z. So what are your thoughts on establishing anti-goals before goals?
1:16:35 Speaker 00 I think it's brilliant. It's funny, Jordan, I met Jordan when he was, um, so he went to the high school next door to mine and he was an intern at Eric Cressy. I don't know if you've ever come across Cressy stuff. He's the performance coach for the Yankees now. He was an intern at Cressy Performance, which was my first gym when I started training for baseball when I was 16 or 17. So I've, I've known Jordan for a long time. It's amazing to see his rise and success. I, um, I think it's a great idea. And this comes to like a fundamental realization I've had in life, that the people that I read books about are rarely people I would ever trade lives with. Like I read all these business biographies of the like most incredible people in history, from Elon Musk to John D Rockefeller, you know, Andrew Carnegie, all these people. I would never
1:17:19 Speaker 00 trade lives with any of those people. You couldn't pay me any amount of money to go trade lives with them. Because the things that I want are not the same as the things that they wanted. And the realization there is that
1:17:33 Speaker 00 There is a list price, if you will, for the things that you want to achieve in life. It's the price that you know you're going to have to pay for those things. So like, you know, to build a big business, you're going to have to, you know, have a great idea and put in all this work and do all of these things along the way and go build an incredible business. But then there's the real price of those things, which is the other sacrifices that get made. It's the relationships lost, it's the health, it's the stress, it's all of these other areas that we often don't think about or see. And a lot of people delude themselves into thinking they want to play a game on the basis of the list price being attractive. When in reality, if you take into account the real price, it's a ripoff.
1:18:16 Speaker 00 And one of the calls to action in this entire book is to really think about what games you want to play. Because life and culture and society will try to hand you the default game, which is to just make more and more money. And social media will hand you that game and tell you that like, okay, just play this game. Here's the game that you're going to play for the rest of your life. But if you play someone else's game for your entire life, you will never feel successful. You will never feel successful unless you create your own definition of success. Unless you play your game. So Jordan saying that, this is amazing that you're doing this, but I would never want to play this game. I respect and admire that about people more than anything else. Someone who has made no money, but they're playing just the game that they want.
1:19:01 Speaker 00 I think that's incredible. And like even you and I having a conversation before we got on here. I asked you that question of like, what do you really want to do long term? What is the game that you really want to play for the next 20, 30 years? And that being clear in your mind, that's your North Star, right? Like, that's the true north of this whole thing. I want to build an incredible relationship with my kids, with my wife. I want to build a house full of love, this like incredible lineage, grandkids and all of these things that I see. And I want to create an impact in the world. I want to impact people positively with the ideas that I share. And that doesn't have a whole lot to do with making a billion dollars. Maybe I would make money as a byproduct of those things.
1:19:40 Speaker 00 But building an enormous business that makes billions of dollars, like that's not actually the game that I want to play.
1:19:47 Nick Bare? Yeah, kind of like bringing this full circle to how we started this conversation.
1:19:52 Nick Bare? When you're younger and like that first chapter of life, the list price, like you just mentioned, it's very attractive. It's sexy. And because you're ignorant and inexperienced, you don't realize or recognize the sacrifices that have to be made to achieve that list price. So you get started and you're chasing success. You don't really care about the sacrifices you have to make because the collateral damage, even if it's affecting other people in your life, you're so focused on that success. And the shift happens where you go in.
1:20:26 Nick Bare? The newer star is now significance as opposed to just success. These sacrifices are much more meaningful and you can weigh them much differently. And that list price isn't as sexy as it once was because it's a mirage.
1:20:41 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, the, um, the Forbes top 10 richest people in the world have 13 divorces among them.
1:20:49 Nick Bare? Gosh dang.
1:20:50 Speaker 00 Right? Like, that's not my definition of wealth. That is the societal definition of wealth, but I would not be willing to trade my relationships or, you know, have a broken marriage or have children that don't want to hang out with me because I've been distant and they haven't been a part of my life. Like, you could not pay me any amount of money. And so, part of the reason I think the idea of the five types of wealth is so powerful is because when you make a decision in life, you need to make a decision factoring in the bigger picture. Like, if you came and offered me $100 million to go work in Omaha, Nebraska, or take a job in Omaha, Nebraska, working on something that I hate for 80 to 100 hours a week and I'm gonna have to travel a whole ton. And then you said like, hey, come take this job.
1:21:33 Speaker 00 In the old world, in my old definition, my old scoreboard, if you will, that was just money. That's like a hell yes opportunity, right? You're gonna pay me $100 million? Yeah, I'm on a plane right now. But if you think about it from the bigger picture of the five types of wealth, well, now, okay, yes, financial wealth is a big plus. But my time, I'm not gonna have any freedom. I'm working 80 to 100 hours a week. My social wealth, I don't know a single person in Omaha, Nebraska. I'm gonna be far away from my family. My mental wealth, you're telling me I'm gonna work on things that I hate. That's taking a big hit. And my physical wealth, if I'm having to travel all the time and Omaha's pretty cold, I'm not gonna be outside much, is gonna take a big hit. So a decision that seemed like an obvious one on the basis of the old scoreboard becomes an obvious one in the other direction on the basis of the new one. You couldn't pay me to go take that job.
1:22:17 Speaker 00 There's no amount of money that I would take. And that is really empowering because then you're making decisions on the basis of your broader life score, broader idea of what actually you're trying to build towards.
1:22:29 Nick Bare? Yeah, it's truly balanced.
1:22:30 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:22:31 Nick Bare? Well, Sahil, I appreciate it, man. Love what you're doing and love the perspective and mindset around this book. It speaks to me very strongly in the chapter of life that I'm in, moving from just one focus to now a broader focus. Where do you want to point people to, to learn more about the book, yourself, purchase, all things?
1:22:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, you can get the book anywhere books are sold. You know, Amazon hardcover is most easy for people, delivers probably by the end of the day today. But go support your local bookstore if you have one nearby you that you love. We always love hearing that. And I'm just excited to hear how people take these ideas and run with them, whatever tiny ripples they create in the world.
1:23:16 Nick Bare? Well, I appreciate it, man.
1:23:17 Speaker 00 Appreciate you. Thank you.
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