Sahil Bloom: Author of The 5 Types of Wealth

Episode 645

In this episode of The Kara Goldin Show, I sit down with Sahil Bloom, author of the newly released book The Five Types of Wealth. Sahil is not just an author but also an entrepreneur, investor, and one of the most insightful voices on redefining success. Through his viral social media content and popular biweekly newsletter The Curiosity Chronicle, Sahil has captivated millions with his fresh perspective on living a truly fulfilling life.
During our conversation, Sahil dives into his journey of breaking free from the traditional idea of wealth. We explore the five types of wealth he writes about—Time, Social, Mental, Physical, and Financial—and how understanding these can help you design a life filled with meaning and purpose. Sahil also shares lessons from his research, including wisdom from 80- and 90-year-olds, practical tips for building meaningful relationships, and the importance of curiosity as a “fountain of youth.”
If you’ve ever questioned what it means to live a rich life or felt stuck chasing the wrong scoreboard, this episode is packed with insights and actionable takeaways. Tune in to learn how to balance your priorities, redefine success, and start building wealth in all areas of your life. Don’t miss it! Now on The Kara Goldin Show!

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show. Super, super excited to be sitting down with Sahil Bloom, who is an entrepreneur investor, and the guy who’s changing how we think about wealth. You probably know him from his viral insights on social media, or his bi weekly newsletter, The Curiosity Chronicle. But today we’re diving into his brand new book, which is absolutely awesome. I got an early copy of it as well, yay. And it’s the five types of wealth. So Sahil isn’t just talking about building a big bank account, although that would probably be nice as well, but he’s flipping the script on what it means to live a very rich life, and his framework of time, social, mental, physical and financial wealth is a game changer for anyone to pay close attention to. This is about designing a life that’s not just successful, but truly fulfilling. And I’m just really, really a big fan of I was a big fan of him before I got the book. But even better, and I hope that you will all pick up a copy of this too, or download it as well. So let’s get into it. It’s all so great to finally meet you and have you on the show. Welcome. Thank you.

Sahil Bloom 2:10
Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the warm words in the intro Absolutely.

Kara Goldin 2:14
Well. You did such an amazing job as you and I were talking about. This is your first book, which is, congratulations. Very, very cool. So you talk all about in the five types of wealth, about redefining success, and what inspired you to challenge the traditional idea of wealth. And you know, I think so often when we have tragedy, traumas, as we’re aging, you know, we start to think about this stuff, but I love how you actually put pen to paper on this and and really started to think through it and share your ideas. So I’d love to hear a little bit more.

Sahil Bloom 2:54
Yeah, my, my kind of like opening hypothesis around all of this is that you will never feel successful unless you create your own definition of success. And so many of us, if you really zoom out, have blindly accepted the default definitions of success and meaning that are handed to us by culture, by society or by our parents or by our peers or whoever it is that are around us, and that definition has been about money. It has been the sole form of measurement in our lives. It’s how we stack ourselves up, how we think about our own worth, how we think about who we are as humans and as individuals. And unfortunately, while it is a part of building a life of happiness and contentment and fulfillment, it is only one piece of that. And there are a whole lot of other things that we sort of know in the back of our minds are just as important, if not more important than having a whole lot of money. But those tend to fall by the wayside because they are not things that we measure. They are not things that we focus on. They are not things that we think about investing in, in the same way that we do our financial wealth. My own journey to kind of coming to this idea and starting to share and think about it and internalize it and write about it, was that I spent the first, you know, seven years of my career marching down a path that was very focused on money being the key to me living the good life. I really had absorbed and embraced this idea that my success and happiness was on the other side of X amount of money. And what I found was that every single time I would go and achieve that amount of money, it would sort of be a mirage, like it would disappear and reappear on the horizon, and it was just some bigger number. And every year, every promotion, every bonus, everything I convinced myself that, okay, no, it was really just the next tier that I needed to get to, and then I would wake up one day and be in this world of happiness and stress free fulfill. Moment. And unfortunately, on that journey, I became more and more narrowly focused on money and on avoiding distractions around it, and on doing everything that I could to sort of build this one version of what my life worth was. And along that journey, because I was so narrowly focused on it, I started to see a lot of other areas of my life suffering. My relationships, most importantly, with my parents, with my sister, had started to suffer. I wasn’t seeing them ever. My relationship with my wife had experienced some strain, as we were struggling to conceive at the time and I wasn’t present enough for her, mentally or physically, to be there with her during that time. Physically, I was drinking almost seven nights a week. You know? I wasn’t sleeping particularly well. I was stressed. There were all of these other areas of my life that were suffering while on the outside looking in, you would have said I was winning the game. I was achieving the things that you would traditionally say, we’re building a successful life, but I felt anything other than successful. And all of this for me came to a head in May of 2021, you know, we were in the throes of the pandemic, stuck at home, still a lot of loneliness associated with that, a lot of struggle. And I went out for a drink with an old friend, and we sat down, and he asked how I was doing, and I said that it had started to get difficult being so far away from my parents, who lived on the East Coast. We were living in California at the time, 3000 miles away, and that I wasn’t getting to see them a lot, and that I finally had noticed that they were getting older. They were slowing down. They were showing chinks in the armor, as it were with their health. And my friend asked me how old they were, and I said, mid 60s. And he said, How often do you see them? And I said, maybe once a year. And he looked at me and just said, okay, so you’re going to see your parents 15 more times before they die. And I remember feeling like I had been punched in the gut. I mean, 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, is just terrifying. It shook me to the core. And in that moment, I realized that something had to change, and my wife and I had a very candid conversation the next day about what truly mattered to us in life, and that we needed to make a change to prioritize those things. And within 45 days, I had left my job, we had sold our house in California, and we had moved across the country to live closer to our parents on the East Coast.

Kara Goldin 7:41
Wow, that’s, that’s a, you know, very it hits home for sure, because I think it’s, you know, whether you’re dealing with aging parents or you’re dealing with siblings that are sick or friends that are sick, you know, it definitely is you have those moments where I think the most thoughtful people that don’t want to live with the regrets will that statement, in and of itself, really will hit home with them, and certainly me, for sure. So the framework what in the book, which, by the way, is amazing. The five types of wealth. What are the five types that you cover? And if you had to, is there one that’s more important than the other? Or how do you, how do you think about the five types?

Sahil Bloom 8:36
So the five types of wealth that I walk through in the book are time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth, and then financial wealth, time. Wealth is all about your ability to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it, whether you trade it for other things. Social wealth is all about your depth and breadth of connection to the people around you. It’s your relationships, it’s the people. Mental wealth is about your purpose. It’s about your growth. It’s about your ability to create space, to engage with these bigger, unanswerable questions in life. Physical wealth is about your health and vitality, your actual physical being in the in the world. And then financial wealth is what we know. It’s money, but importantly, it’s also all about viewing expectations as one of your most significant liabilities, about realizing that your definition of enough being clear is the key to you truly being financially wealthy, because if you don’t have a clear definition of enough, you’re constantly chasing some more that just disappears into the horizon. In terms of your question on whether one is more important than the others, there’s this idea that I bring up in the book of the fact that your life has seasons, and that’s a really important concept. If you zoom. Out and think about it, because what it implies is that what you prioritize or focus on during any one season of life can and should change. You are going to have seasons of your life when building a stable financial foundation is your core focus, and it is a great use of that time, because it’s it allows you in your 20s and 30s, if you build that foundation, it allows you to feel a level of security and independence that you can compound into the future. You are going to have seasons of life when you want to prioritize other things, when you want to prioritize your relationships or your health or your purpose. And the point is feeling the freedom to change across those seasons is very empowering, because that is what allows you to then say, I’m going to choose, I’m going to zoom out, I’m going to think about, what do I want to be focusing on right now? And maybe that will change in the future, but I can, I can focus on it today with the clear eyed awareness that it’s okay if it shifts at a later date. My kids are only going to be five years old for this short season of time, and I want to really be present here and when they’re older and they’re in school, I can start leaning back into my work and my purpose and other things with the awareness that I was there during those years. So that concept of seasons means that it’s hard to say one is any more important than the other. The whole point is what I said at the beginning, which is you have to define what success means to you, what a wealthy life means to you, and then go take actions to build around it. That all being said, Time wealth is the first major section of the book, for a reason, because having time wealth is what enables you to allocate that time across the things that you care about. When you unlock more time in your life, when you get off the busy treadmill that so many of us are on, you suddenly have new time that you can then put towards the things that you really care about. You can put them towards more dates with your partner or with your friends. You can put them towards more workouts to build your physical health. You can put it towards financial pursuits and things that you want to continue to double down on building your business. And so the point is that time wealth is a really, is really a tool that you can then use to unlock these others as well.

Kara Goldin 12:19
I remember reading that chapter. And my kids are a little bit older than than yours. I have my four kids, and my last one is in college, and you know, I was just having this conversation with him while he was home for break, that it’s that it’s just so nice to be able to spend time with them. And when I was running a startup, and, you know, as we were growing over the years. I mean, those are the seasons, too, where you’ve got to spend some time on that. But I would say not that anything’s broken, thankfully with my kids, but I talked to so many people who the time factor. It actually takes you more time if you don’t spend the right time, for example, with your kids, right maybe it’s your own regrets or whatever, or fixing things takes more time. So I think a lot of people don’t think about that. You’re getting

Sahil Bloom 13:15
at something very important too, which is that time and energy are not the same thing. And what I mean by that is we often think that, you know, okay, I need to spend an hour with this person. And you know, if you spend an hour with a person, but you’re sitting there on your phone or thinking about email or texting or whatever it might be, you’re not giving them any of your energy, and the other person really picks up on energy, not time, you know, like, 10 minutes of truly present energy with your kids is worth a whole lot more than an hour of you being distracted doing 10 other things. And that’s a pretty liberating concept, because what it means is like, yes, you might be in a season of building your startup, and you’re really leaning into it. You’re pushing it forward, because it means something to you, and it’s important. And you might not have hours of time to be, you know, present with your kids all the time, but you can take that 10 minutes that you do have and truly be in that moment with them, and that can last a lifetime, and that compounds for years and years to come. The other piece in that chapter that you referred to is it’s very important for your kids to see you working hard on things you care about, and that is sort of the tension that we all need to navigate as parents, between presence and ambition, right? Like being present with your kid doesn’t mean that you sacrifice all of your personal professional ambitions. It doesn’t mean that you suddenly give up all the things that you really care about in service of your children. If you choose to do that, that’s fine. But if you want to do both, you can, but it’s important that your kids know the why, why are you working on the things that you are doing? Why are you away? Why are you traveling? And they need to know that it’s because it really matters to you that you’re working on something that you have. Much energy for that you believe is important, and so you’re pushing yourself, because that’s a lesson that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. That is a lesson in working towards things, realizing that hard work is the key to building the life they want that they will never forget. And so I really do think that there’s a tension and a balance that we can all find our own version of that’s important there, yeah,

Kara Goldin 15:23
and I think knowing your why, why on that topic too? Because sometimes you know whether the kids are too young to understand it or or people’s priorities are different, right? And I think that that being able to explain to people who want to know why it’s important to you, I think is really super, super important. One of the things that you or topics that you talk about in the book, is front row people, I loved this, and the biggest struggles people have, I think, are with relationships, whether or not they want to own that or not. You talked about that in as it related to your your parents and and picking up and moving and doing, doing that. But how can you identify these front row people? And I mean, is there a certain number out there? Is it always your family, things like that that I think people might be thinking about. Yeah,

Sahil Bloom 16:25
so this idea of front row people, the visualization exercise that I walk you through in the book, is to close your eyes and imagine you’re dead, sorry, and you’re at your funeral. People are walking in, they’re hugging each other, they’re crying, and then they all sit down. Look at the front row at your funeral, and visualize the faces of the people that you see sitting in that front row. Those are your front row people. Those are the people that occupy this very special space in your life, and the call to action is to think about whether you are cherishing those front row people in your life, whether you are truly being a front row person to them as well. And that idea is really all about depth. It’s really about thinking about those few core deep relationships, those people that are truly there for you during life’s highs and life’s lows, and do they have to be your family? No, I think that there is a traditional view that you know you have to your closest relationships have to be your family. That’s not necessarily the case for everyone. Some people do are not lucky to have family members who are truly supportive and loving, without fail, and if you find that supportive loving relationship in a friend, a best friend, a partner or someone else outside of your family, that’s totally fine, too. But the point is that you do need a few close, deep relationships. You need people that you can call at 3am when you need help, when you’re feeling lost, and they will pick up the phone, and those are your front row people. And one of the most surefire ways to find your front row people is to be one to someone else.

Kara Goldin 18:13
I totally, totally, totally agree. So the idea of the enough life is so powerful. Why is it so hard for people to define what enough looks like? You talked about, you know, wealth in terms of of money, but I think that sometimes it’s hard for people to actually step off the train right and and go and make these changes. But like, how did you do that?

Speaker 1 18:44
Yeah, the concept of enough. My favorite story with this is Kurt Vonnegut, the famous author, was with Joseph Heller, another famous author, the author of catch 22 and they were at the house of this billionaire in the Hamptons, at this party. And Vonnegut says to Heller, Joe, how does it feel that just yesterday, the owner of this home made more money than your book catch 22 made in its entire lifetime? And Heller replies, Yes, but I’ve got something that he’ll never have. And Vonnegut asks, What’s that? And Heller says, the knowledge that I’ve got enough, and that is such a powerful concept, the knowledge that I’ve got enough, that feeling of enough is a feeling of happiness, of contentment, of not needing to strive for some next rung on the ladder in order to experience your joy, you’re able to be content in the place where you are. I found that that feeling for the first time in my life, after my son was born, I was out for a walk with him early one morning, and this old man came up to me on the street and said, I remember standing here with my newborn daughter. She’s 45 years old now in. Goes by fast. Cherish it. And I took my son home, and I brought him into bed, and the son was kind of cracking through the windows, and my wife was still asleep, and he had this little smile on his face, and I had this sensation that for the first time in my life I had arrived, but there was nothing more that I wanted, that moment was enough. And so I wrote this line in the book, and I’ll say it again. Never let the quest for more distract you from the beauty of enough. That’s

Kara Goldin 20:31
really super beautiful. So no, I love it. It’s really great. So you emphasize simplicity in the book, and have you share a little bit about the system? I don’t want to give too much away from the book, but I really, really like this, and just the practice that’s had a pretty big impact on on your life, if you could share that

Sahil Bloom 20:56
which practice around simplicity, because there are a few. Yeah,

Kara Goldin 21:00
well, I mean, what’s the most important for you? What would you say is, is kind of the the most important? I mean, you talk about the think day as an example, but, but what are some of the other things that are pretty simple? Yeah?

Sahil Bloom 21:16
My, yeah, my operating thesis on life is that complexity sells, but simple is what actually works. You know, Occam’s Razor is this idea that the simplest possible explanation is often the best one. Simple is beautiful. And in the world of social media, complexity is what gets clicks and what gets likes. So anytime you are trying to improve in any area, you’re bombarded by the most complex, sexy solutions. Like, if you’re trying to improve your fitness or your health, it’s, you know, it’s January, February. Like, there’s a whole lot of fitness and health content out there. Everyone is going to hit you with the fanciest new solutions, the new diet that is like the only diet that works, or the new workout plan that’s the craziest workout plan. And the reality is that the boring basics in all of these areas really do work. Simple is really beautiful. And so I find that creating practices to slow yourself down, to zoom out and to just think about bigger picture, simple processes in your life is a really useful way to avoid the complexity trap, to to hone in on the things that you know are really going to work. The think Day, which you mentioned, is probably one of my favorite ongoing, regular rituals that I that I have in my life. So it’s an adaptation of Bill Gates’s think week, he, starting in the 1980s I believe, created this practice where one week out of the year, he would go off the grid, bring a whole bunch of reading material, and he would just read and think and learn for an entire week. And he credits a lot of the kind of transformative processes and improvements that Microsoft made with ideas that came to him during these think weeks, most of us get caught in this trap where we’re constantly, constantly moving, and we never take that ton of time to zoom out and think so the think day is the idea that one day A month or one day a quarter, get yourself out of your normal systems, out of your normal environment, and just slow down and think about some of the bigger picture questions in your life, some of the things that will allow you to cut through the noise and simplify how you think about the world. A couple of my favorite questions. I walk through eight question prompts in the book for engaging in your own think day. One of my absolute favorite ones is, if someone were to observe you for a week, what would they say your priorities are? And the idea there is there are two types of priorities. There are the priorities you say you have, and then there are the priorities your actions show you have. And for a lot of us, there is a big gap between the two. We would say our priorities are one set of things, but our actions would show them to be something else, zooming out and giving yourself the self awareness to actually confront that gap and then start taking action to close it is a really useful approach.

Kara Goldin 24:23
Yeah, super, super, super useful so and are you? How are you, I guess, through the book launch. I mean, it maybe is slightly different. But how do you spend your best days today? How often are you doing these? Think days, about once a month, once a month. And then, how do you typically spend your day? Are you like? What is a typical practice? Is it meditation? Is it cold plunges? I mean, on

Sahil Bloom 24:53
a think day? No, a think day I would normally like either rent a house. To sort of get off the grid and get into a different space, or if I was going to do a shorter one, which you know, like you can take two hours and do this, you don’t need to take eight hours or 10 hour day. But I would go to a coffee shop, I would go to something that is a space that I’m not normally in. So that’s important, because when you’re in a in a familiar space, what happens in your brain is that you default to familiar thought patterns. You know you’re thinking about things that you normally think about. If you put yourself into a new space, your brain doesn’t have that patterning already going and you’re able to create new thoughts and sort of think on different wavelengths. So I would put myself into a creative sort of open space, whether it’s outside or whether it’s in a new space, and I would sit with a journal, usually with these question prompts, and I would sort of just write and journal on them, free form, open ended. The idea there with the writing is that you cannot write clearly unless you’re thinking clearly. And that’s why writing is such a powerful tool, because as you write and as you start to kind of contemplate, while you’re writing, you’re you’re forming thoughts, and you’re really forming critical thinking. And doing that is probably the easiest way to get started. And I would just recommend, for most people, try to carve out one hour in the coming month when you can zoom out and do this, bring a blank notebook or a journal, take the question prompts that are in the book and sit with three or four of them, you know. And the idea across this entire book, it’s filled with questions, right? It’s built across these big questions in each section. It’s filled with these different questions and prompts. And the idea there is that you already have the answers within you, you just haven’t asked the right questions to help reveal them. Those those answers that you need for your life are actually already within you. It’s not You’re not all of a sudden having some new answer. It’s just that you’re sitting with the right question for long enough you’re feeling the discomfort and the uncertainty of sitting with the question, and so the answer is going to reveal itself.

Kara Goldin 27:01
I love the book too, because it’s, it’s one of these books that I keep going back to, right? That I Yeah, no, no, I keep going back to it and thinking on it. And it’s not one that I’m like, Oh, this is easy peasy. I can, I can, because it’s, it’s very it’s, it, it definitely is very personal, right? And, and you have to go back and really work at it, right? And, yeah, I like it.

Sahil Bloom 27:29
My hope was that it was a book that would be something people would come back to across different seasons of their life. You know, like, one of the things I say is that you could read this book when you are 18 or 22 years old, and you will experience it very differently than when you are a young parent in your early 30s, or when you are an empty nester in your 50s, or when you are retiring in your 60s or 70s, and the questions that it forces you to ask are really universal. They apply to anybody. The answers you come to will be very different, and they’ll be unique to you and unique to the phase of life that you’re in and the season of life that you’re in. But the questions are timeless,

Kara Goldin 28:10
definitely. So you’ve interviewed incredible people, done lots of research about advice for life. What’s one piece of wisdom that’s really stayed with you.

Sahil Bloom 28:24
This is from my grandmother, who unfortunately passed away a little over a year ago. She was a remarkable, remarkable woman 95 when she passed, and she when I asked her for advice that she would give to her younger self, she said, Never fear sadness, as it tends to sit right next to love. And I love that so much. The more and more I reflect on it, the more I love it, because what it brings to the surface is the fact that the most beautiful things in life dance on this razor’s edge with the most challenging and unless you are willing to expose yourself to the pain, you are not going to experience the joys. And that is the most challenging thing in life. It’s the fact that you have to embrace and expose yourself to the sorrow of loss in order to experience the joys of love. So many things in life follow that same pattern. We have to be willing to embrace both sides of these things in order to experience the most meaningful, valuable things in this world. Yeah,

Kara Goldin 29:33
no, it’s that’s a so, so true. So last question, if, if someone could only take one lesson from the five types of wealth. It’s hard because it’s it’s not, I mean, it’s not a short book, but having said that, it’s like I said, it’s not a I think it’s a quick read, but you’re going to want to go back and keep reading, which is a is a great thing to have. Have in a book, that’s a huge compliment. But if someone could only take one lesson from the five types of wealth, what do you hope it would be

Sahil Bloom 30:08
to reject the default settings of meaning and success and to live by your own design? I really want people to simply pause for one moment and think about what you want in life, what do you really care about? What are your priorities? And then take one action to go and build your life around that. If that’s all you get out of this, if you just start to question a little bit more what matters to you and whether you’re acting in line with those things, I will have done my job, and I will be very proud of the impact that it can create.

Kara Goldin 30:44
Sahil, this has been incredible. Your book the five types of wealth isn’t just a roadmap, but also it’s a it’s a great reminder to really live truly great life. So appreciate you taking the time and effort to go and write this and also come on and talk to us. I think everyone’s going to really enjoy listening. Definitely grab a copy of it. It comes out. What is the launch date? February

Sahil Bloom 31:16
4. I think it’ll be out anywhere books are sold at this moment when you when you’re listening to this amazing

Kara Goldin 31:22
and sign up also for the curiosity Chronicle. It’s it’s so great. I’ve forwarded to many people as well. I think you definitely have game changing insights. And if you love this episode, share it with someone who needs to hear it as well. And thanks for tuning in. Thanks again, sail and until next time, thank you so much. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book, undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building hint we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening, and goodbye for now. You.

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