Sahil Bloom
The Five Types of Wealth
Video Transcript
The Five Types of Wealth
Sahil Bloom — Main Stage Talk, Main Street Summit
Thank you so much. We’re going to change gears a little bit here. This is going to feel a little bit different than the two conversations you just heard. I’m going to ask you all to zoom way, way out with me in this discussion.
I’m going to begin with a question. If you were the main character in a movie of your life, what would the audience be screaming at you to do right now? We’ve all been there, right? Watching a movie or television show and we just want to jump through the screen and grab the main character. Just start shaking them. Chase the girl to the airport. Don’t go down in that basement. Look out behind you. Whatever that thing is—you are that main character in the movie of your life. And there is something the audience would be screaming at you right now.
So, what is it? What is that thing that is so blindingly obvious from the outside looking in that you are either choosing to ignore or have yet to create enough perspective to see? I want you to think about that question in the few minutes that I have with you this morning—and then in the days and weeks ahead—and then I want you to take one tiny action against your response to it, because that one tiny action could be the thing that fundamentally changes the entire trajectory of your life. It certainly did for me.
Now, this discussion has one simple goal: to make you think deeply about what you want your life to look like. Not what the world has told you it should look like, not what your family has told you, not what your friends have told you, and certainly not what X has told you it should look like—but what you really want. So, with that in mind, let’s dive into it.
An Unlikely Collision
Now, the things that I talk about—and this talk in general—it shouldn’t be about me. But when I speak and when I write these ideas, they are very much a manifestation of my own journey. So I think it makes sense to begin here with a little bit on my story.
I was born of an unlikely collision of two very different worlds. My mother was born and raised in Bangalore, India. She was a third daughter, something of a rebellious spirit. She had her whole life mapped out for her by her parents. She was going to get an arranged marriage and settle down for a nice, stable, secure life. My father was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. Similarly, had his entire life mapped out for him by an overbearing, rather domineering father figure. He was going to marry a Jewish girl and settle down for a nice, stable, secure life.
Now, fortunately for me, fate—if you believe in that—had pretty different plans. My parents crossed paths over the course of two weeks, a two-week window in a Princeton University library. My mother had applied in secret to come to school in the US, and she was working in the library to pay her way through her degree. My dad was there—the nerd that he was—studying feverishly for his final dissertation defense. My mom walked up to my dad the first time she saw him and asked him out on a date.
On this first date, my dad turned to my mom—he had very little game, so this is going to make a little bit more sense—and said, “My father will never accept us.” My mom was so blinded by his use of the word “us” that she completely missed the message.
Now, unfortunately, my dad was right. His father was not accepting of this budding courtship, this idea of his son—his golden child—spurning his wishes, choosing to carve his own path, go off on his own. And he forced my dad into an impossible choice: choose between my mom and his family. And my dad walked out the door and never saw his family again. To this day, I never met my dad’s parents. He has three siblings I’ve never met. I have first cousins out there in the world that I’ve never met. All on the basis of this one decision, this one choice to choose love, to choose to carve their own path, to reject the default that was handed to them and to live by their own design.
Now, when I reflect back on that and I speak to my parents about it, the ripple effects of that one decision are profound. I often joke with my dad that it took him 28 years to make that decision—to reject that default path—and he beat me by about two.
The Arrival Fallacy
You see, I spent the first 30 years of my life marching down the most traditional path to what we think of as a “successful” life. I was a pretty insecure kid. When I was young, I started telling myself this story that I wasn’t very smart. You can imagine—I have an Indian mother and a Harvard professor father. Academic pressure was the standard in our household. I have an older sister who’s extremely high-achieving academically. From a young age, I convinced myself that she was the smart one and I had to be something else. I started telling myself that story.
Well, what do we know about humans and stories? When we start to tell ourselves a story, we look around us and find every single piece of evidence that will confirm that story we already believe. And we’ll ignore every single piece of evidence that would refute it. It’s why we have to be so careful as parents about the stories that we allow our children to tell themselves, because those stories have the potential to shape and create our entire reality.
So from a young age, with that story in mind, I started developing this internal void, this feeling of never-enoughness. And in our modern society, the best way to go out and fix that internal problem is to seek external solutions—those pats on the back, the affirmations that you get from others that tell you that you’re great. And the fastest way to do that is to achieve: to go and make money, to accumulate status, to get things.
So I took the job out of school that was the job that sounded the best for the LinkedIn post, right? I got to say that I was “humbled and honored” to receive a position—which, by the way, no one is ever humbled and honored when they say that. And I convinced myself for the first seven years of my career that my entire happiness, fulfillment, contentment—it was all on the other side of some achievement, some bonus, some promotion, some title. Something that I was going to wake up one day, I was going to have gotten that thing, and all of a sudden I was going to feel fundamentally different about who I was. All of those insecurities were going to melt away in the face of this achievement.
I’m willing to bet many of you have felt that at some point in your life. We have a name for that. It’s called the arrival fallacy. We build up these things as being the destination, the point at which we are going to feel that feeling of arrival, the idyllic land of success.
And unfortunately for me, on that journey, while I was achieving those things and winning in this one domain, I started to see everything else in my life fall apart. A few years ago, I was 40 pounds heavier than I am today. I was drinking six, seven nights a week. My mental and physical health were in disarray. Most importantly, my relationships were starting to show cracks. I was living 3,000 miles away from my parents, two of my best friends in the world. I had noticed for the first time that that youthful naïveté we have about our parents being immortal was starting to show cracks, that they were slowing down. And most importantly, my wife and my relationship was having strain for the first time. We were in the middle of a two-year struggle with infertility that was causing turmoil in our life for the first moment in our journey.
And it all came at a moment in time in my life where, if any of you had seen me from the outside looking in, you would have said I was winning the game. I was doing the things that you’re supposed to want to do. I was achieving the things that you’re supposed to want to achieve. And at the end of 2020, I had a realization: if that was what winning felt like, I had to be playing the wrong game.
The Math That Changed My Life
And it all came to a head for me with a single conversation in May of 2021. I went out for a drink with an old friend. We sat down and he asked how I was doing. And I told him that it had started to get difficult living so far away from my parents. I wasn’t seeing them very often, that they were slowing down. And he asked how old they were. I said mid-60s. And he asked how often I saw them, and I said about 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.”
Gut punch. I actually had to take a deep breath to avoid an instinctively angry response. But he wasn’t trying to be rude or mean or insensitive. It was just math. The math, no matter how much I didn’t like it, said I was going to see them 15 more times before they were gone. They’re in their mid-60s, life expectancy around 80. I’m seeing them once a year. It’s just math.
That was the math that changed my entire life. Because in that moment, I realized that my definition of success—of what it meant to build a wealthy life—had been incomplete. That I was focusing on the one thing at the expense of everything else rather than in conjunction with everything else.
And in the aftermath of that conversation that night, I went home and my wife and I had a very candid conversation about what we wanted to build our life around, what our center truly was, what our true north really was. And we took a dramatic action. Within 45 days, I had quit my job. We had sold our house in California. And we had moved 3,000 miles across the country to live closer to both of our sets of parents.
And in that one decision was a very important realization: that you are in much more control of your time than you think. We had taken an action and fundamentally created time. That number 15—it’s now in the hundreds. I see my parents multiple times a week. They’re a huge part of my son, their grandson’s life. We had taken an action and reassumed agency over our own lives. Recognized that we were capable of taking action to build our life around the priorities that we truly had.
Because you see, there are two types of priorities in life. There are the priorities we say we have, and there are the priorities our actions show we have. And oftentimes in life, there’s a big gap between those two. I know because I was living in that gap. Your life improves alongside your ability to close it. But you can’t close it until you hold your feet to the fire and acknowledge that it exists in the first place.
What You Measure Matters
So I went on a journey after making that decision to try to understand why I had fallen victim to this trap in the first place, because I knew that if I had, there were millions of other people out there doing the exact same thing. And what I came to realize is that it’s actually quite simple: what you measure in life really matters. The things that you measure end up dictating all of your actions. Peter Drucker, famous management theorist, said, “What gets measured gets managed.” All of your actions myopically, narrowly hone in on those things.
You don’t need to look far to find examples of this. How many of you out here have ever put on one of those sleep tracking rings or wristbands? Maybe you know someone that has. All of a sudden, you become the most annoying sleeper in the world. “Oh no, I can’t go out. I can’t have a drink with you. My sleep score.” You’ve got a perfect sleep score, but you’ve got no friends. Great. All of your actions suddenly surround the one thing that you can measure.
Well, as a society, what is the one way that we have typically measured our entire self-worth? Who we are as people? We walk into a room and we stack ourselves up in the hierarchy. It is around money. And while money is part of living a good life, it is far from the only part. So, when you’re measuring for only one thing, you may find that you are marching down a path—like I was—towards winning in the one domain but losing across all of the others.
The Pyrrhic Victory
That is what I call the Pyrrhic victory. This is a story from ancient times. King Pyrrhus of Epirus charges into battle with the Roman Republic. He fights this bloody, multi-day battle on an open plane and he is victorious against this Roman invader. But in the process, he loses all of his lead generals and most of his army. In the aftermath of that battle, he is said to have exclaimed, “Another such victory and we will be undone.”
That is the idea of the battle won but the war lost. A victory that comes at such a steep cost to the victor that it might as well have been a defeat. That’s not just a random history lesson. That is what we need to avoid in life. That is the person who has made hundreds of millions—maybe billions—of dollars that we pat on the back, that we celebrate, that we admire, that we might write books about, and we ignore the fact that they’re deeply lonely, that they’re unhealthy, that they have four kids that don’t talk to them.
My entire life changed when I realized that my definition of success looked very different from the one I was being fed by the world. That I would never want to trade lives with the people that I was reading books about.
A New Scoreboard
So that continued this journey to try to understand: if money is part of living a good life, what is the bigger picture? What is the right scoreboard that we should be measuring against?
I went and talked to thousands of people over the course of three years researching for this book. Young and old. 18-year-olds: “What do you hope for your life? What does your ideal day look like at 50?” 80, 90, and 100-year-olds: “What advice would you give to your younger self? What regrets do you have about your past?”
Four themes came up over and over again: time, people, purpose, and health. Time, people, purpose, and health. Money is an enabler to those, but it is very rarely an end in and of itself. We need to measure for the much bigger picture so that we can win the battle and the war.
That is what forms the idea of this new scoreboard. A new way to measure your life around these five types of wealth: time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth, and financial wealth.
Lagom: Just the Right Amount
All of this centers around one word that I love to share with people. One word to conclude this discussion this morning. And that word is lagom. The word lagom is Swedish. It means “just the right amount.” What is your definition of lagom? What does lagom look like to you?
There’s a story of these two famous American authors, Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, walking around this palatial garden estate of a billionaire in the Hamptons. Vonnegut turns to Heller and says, “Joe, how does it feel that just yesterday the owner of this home made more money than your most famous book, Catch-22, made in its entire lifetime?” And Heller says, “Yes, but I’ve got something that he’ll never have.” Vonnegut says, “Oh yeah, what’s that?” And Heller replies, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
What did that mean? Why did he have the audacity to say that that was worth more than the billions of dollars that this individual had accumulated? It was about the fact that he recognized your expectations are your single greatest financial liability. If your expectations grow and rise faster than your assets, you will never feel wealthy. You will never feel rich. You’ll just be chasing whatever more the world has told you that you should want.
So the antidote to that is to get very clear on what your lagom looks like, what that enough life looks like. And importantly, it cannot be a number. You go and talk to a hundred people and ask them what “enough” means to them—ninety-nine will give you some number. Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton did an interesting study. He went and asked a bunch of high-net-worth individuals—$100 million plus. They all said they needed two to three times as much money to be at a 10 out of 10. It makes no sense, right? It boggles the mind. But that is how the human brain works. The numbers are a mirage. You need to understand what the life actually looks like. What is the money for? What is the life you are trying to build? Where are you living? What are you doing? What are you thinking about? Who are you spending time with?
The Banker and the Fisherman
The best visual that brings this to life is a story that some of you may have heard—of an investment banker and a fisherman. I have a very contrarian take on the meaning of this story though, so I want to share it.
A banker goes down to a Mexican fishing village. He’s walking along. He comes across a boat with a few fish in it. He asks the fisherman, “How long did it take you to catch those fish?” The fisherman says, “Only a little while.” The banker says, “Why didn’t you fish for longer?” The fisherman says, “Well, I have everything I need. In the morning, I fish for a little while. Then I go home. I have lunch with my wife and kids. Then I take a nap. Then in the evening, I go into town, drink wine, play music, and laugh with my friends.”
The banker says, “Ah, you’ve got this all wrong. Here’s what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to fish for longer so you can catch more fish. You use the money to buy a second boat. Then that boat goes out and fishes. You buy a third boat, a fourth boat, a fifth boat, a sixth boat. Pretty soon you have this whole fishing enterprise. You move to the big city. You take your fishing enterprise public, and you’re going to make millions.”
The fisherman says, “And then what?”
The banker says, “And then what? Then you can retire and move to a small fishing town. You can fish for a little while in the morning. Then you can go home, have lunch with your wife and kids. Then you can take a nap. Then you go into town, drink wine, play music, and laugh with your friends.”
It’s a funny story, but the common interpretation of that story is completely wrong. The common interpretation is to say that the banker is wrong and the fisherman is right. But it’s more nuanced than that. It is about the fact that the two have a fundamentally different definition of what it means to have enough. It is perfectly okay and reasonable for the banker’s definition to be about building something big, going and chasing this grand ambition, creating jobs, going after this vision for the future. But for him to apply that map of reality to the fisherman’s terrain makes no sense. The fisherman’s already living his version of enough.
And yet that is what we do when we take out our phones and we compare our lives to other people. We allow other people’s maps of reality to impact how we feel about our terrain. So again, I say the antidote to that is to get very clear on what your lagom looks like, what your enough life looks like—not the one influenced by the factors outside of you. I want you all to think about that in the week ahead.
Living Out Your Prayers
So I’ll end where I began, with this question and my own response to it.
A few weeks before the book came out, I was in my office working on something, really focused on something for the launch, when my two-and-a-half-year-old son came barging in. He started jumping all over my office, throwing things all over the place, generally doing two-and-a-half-year-old terrorist-like stuff. I started having this very annoyed train of thought: Why is he doing this? This is so annoying. Doesn’t he know I’m trying to work? He should really get out of here.
And in that moment, I looked on my desk. I have a photo of me holding my son the day he was born, and it snapped me back to four years earlier when my wife and I were in the middle of this two-year struggle with infertility. I had prayed every single night for two years that we would one day have a healthy child. Every single night for two years, I prayed that we would one day have a healthy child. And here I was, in this moment, complaining about the exact thing that I had prayed for.
And it was a reminder to me of a very important fact: sometimes in life, the things we pray for become the things we complain about if we let them. If we don’t stop and pause and catch ourselves and recognize that sometimes you are quite literally living out your prayers. That every single thing you do today is something your younger self dreamed of and something your older self will wish they could go back and do.
So I want to leave you with that one message to just remember—as you’re here this week and with your family in the days and weeks ahead—that the good old days are happening right now.
Thank you so much. God bless.
