Sahil Bloom on the 5 Types of Wealth

Sahil Bloom writes The Curiosity Chronicle newsletter and is the managing partner of SRB Ventures, a venture investment firm. His first book is The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life. In this podcast, Motley Fool personal finance expert Robert Brokamp caught up with Bloom for a conversation about:

• Why money does buy happiness (to an extent).
• Managing your time wealth.
• What social media gets wrong about health advice.
• The case for creating an energy calendar.

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This video was recorded on April 05, 2025

Sahil Bloom: The question that I love to ask people to raise awareness around this concept is, would you trade lives with Warren Buffett? He's worth $130 billion. He has access to absolutely anyone in the world. He reads and learns for a living. He flies around on a Boeing business jet. It sounds pretty good, but you would not trade lives with him simply because he is 95 Years Old. There's no way you would agree to trade the amount of time that he has left for all of that money.

Ricky Mulvey: I'm Ricky Mulvey, and that's Sahil Bloom. He writes the Curiosity Chronicle newsletter, and he's got a new book titled The Five Types of Wealth, a transformative guide to design your dream life. My colleague Robert Brokamp caught up with Bloom for a conversation about creating mental wealth, how to simplify building financial wealth, and what Bloom learned from having Apple CEO Tim Cook as a mentor. Before we get started, just a quick note, we've got our annual company onsite meeting this Monday and Tuesday. That means no shows then, but we will be back with a new episode on Wednesday, April 9.

Robert Brokamp: One of the key messages of your book is, frankly, life is fragile, time is fleeting, and we should use those truths to make the most of the time that we have while we still have it. There was an event in your life when it really hit home for you. Tell us about that lunch you had with a friend back in May of 2021.

Sahil Bloom: I think it's important to set the context for that one conversation, that one event, and the context is that I spent the first seven years of my career chasing the definition of success that we are all told to chase. I was running the race that we're told is the race that we should want to run. I was working in finance. I was trying to get promoted. I was doing the things that you're supposed to do to live the successful happy life. Along that path as I got more and more focused on money being the sole means to achieving that success, achieving that happiness, I started to see other areas of my life deteriorating, namely my relationships. I was living far away from my family, from my parents, from my sister. I had started to see my health suffer. I was drinking six, seven nights a week.

All of these other areas of my life had started to show cracks, while on the surface, it very much appeared like I was winning the game. The game that we're all told to play. I was getting promoted. I was making money. I had the things. But on the outside looking in, what seemed like I was winning the game, to me, I started to have this sensation that if that was what winning felt like, I had to be playing the wrong game. That all came to a head for me in May of 2021. This one conversation, as you said, I sat down with an old friend for a drink, and he asked me how I was. I told him that it had started to get difficult living so far away from my parents who were on the East Coast. We were living in California, 3,000 miles away, and I had noticed for the first time that they were getting older, that they were slowing down, that they weren't going to be around forever. He asked how old they were, and I said, mid 60s. He asked how often I saw them, and I admitted that it had gotten to the point where I was seeing them about once a year. He just looked at me and said, Okay, so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die. I just remember feeling like I had been punched in the gut.

The idea that the amount of time you have left with the people that you care about most in the world is that finite, that countable, that you can literally place it onto a few hands just shook me to the core. In that moment, I realized my entire definition of success of what it meant to build a wealthy life was incomplete, that I had been chasing this one thing of making money at the expense of all of these other things in our lives. It was that moment that sparked a whole bunch of changes in my life and my life. The next day, we had a conversation about what we wanted to build as our center, what our True North really was, if you will. Within 45 days, we had made a dramatic change. I left 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. In that one decision, there was a really powerful realization, which is you are in much more control of your time than you think. We had taken an action and fundamentally created time with the people that we love. That number 15 more times before they die is now in the hundreds. I see my parents multiple times a month. They're a huge part of my son, their grandson's life. We had taken an action and created time for the things that we really care about. That was the spark that changed everything.

Robert Brokamp: You had the financial wealth. You were doing very well. You were working in private equity, and you decided at this point, I guess, to put it in economic terms, to diversify into other types of wealth, and that's what your book is about. The five types of wealth. It's time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth, and financial wealth. You save financial for the last in the book, but let's talk about that first because after all we're a financial podcast. But also, I think some people have to get to a certain level of comfortability with their finances to say, it's OK for me to devote a little bit more of my energy to some of these other things. You obviously had to do that. You left a lucrative job, had to take a bit of a risk. How do you suggest people reach that level of comfortability or maybe even reframe how they think about their personal finances and how much they actually need before they can devote energies to other parts of their lives?

Sahil Bloom: This is a very important point because the most common response when you hear someone talking about different types of wealth or what it means to build a good life is like, Oh, OK, you made money, and now you're saying money doesn't buy happiness. Very much the book rejects that idea. Money does directly buy happiness. Especially in the early days of your life. Look, this is Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In the early years of your life, money is what enables you to take care of your basic needs, food, shelter. You're able to take care of the people around you, create basic pleasures and experiences, a couple of vacations a year. Money very directly buys happiness in the early part of that curve in your life.

The challenge is that once you get beyond that early part of the curve, you have patterned yourself into thinking that an incremental unit of money equals an incremental unit of happiness. Because it did in those early years. But that equation no longer holds beyond a certain point. But when you've created that pattern in your mind, we're like a mouse. The money bell rings and you get the cheese, and you keep following that over and over again when it no longer actually holds true. The way that I frame it in the book and the way that I frame it when I actually work with people is money isn't nothing. It simply can't be the only thing. Your wealthy life may be enabled by money, but it will be defined by all of these other things.

To answer your question more specifically, in the early years, as you are getting on the early part of that curve, the focus needs to be on creating value. My fundamental belief is that money earned is a byproduct of value created. I think that the vast majority of financial content out there overcomplicates what is actually pretty simple. Which is, you are going to receive value in response to value that you create. You can do that in a variety of different ways. It doesn't matter if you are working in a 9:00-5:00 job, working for someone else or an entrepreneur. The reality is that your job is to identify problems, solve those problems, and then scale those solutions. That is how you create value. It is working on one of those three things, and when you create value and when you scale the value you're creating, you will capture a portion of that value in the form of money.

Robert Brokamp: I was happy to see you mention the Millionaire Next Door in your book. It was a big book back in the '90s, faded a little bit. Probably a lot of people that haven't heard about it, co written by Thomas Stanley and William Danko. What were your lessons from that book?

Sahil Bloom: Really, the most important lesson that I draw from that book is that we overcomplicate what it means to build a life of financial wealth, and that the path to building financial wealth does not have to come through these extreme risks or these extreme elegant shots, if you will. I think that in the age of social media in particular, one of the greatest risks to you building the life you want is that you get caught up in these complexity traps, if you will, meaning the complex, sexy solutions are the things that get clicks and shares on social media. If you and I were to go to a cocktail party and we're standing in a circle and people ask, Oh, what are you guys doing for investing right now? If I say, I'm dollar-cost averaging into index funds. People are going to very quickly move on to the person who is talking about their crypto covered call arbitrage strategy. It sounds more interesting. Everyone's going to be attracted to that thing.

That's what happens on social media. That thing gets shared. Unfortunately, the path to actually building a life of financial abundance, to financial wealth, to financial security, to financial independence is actually through executing the daily boring basics over long periods of time. Morgan Housel has talked about this before. When you look at the equation around compounding, time is the exponent. Time is the thing that matters. Doing the simple boring basics on a daily basis over long periods of time is how you generate financial wealth. I think that Millionaire Next Door is one of the greatest examples of just bringing that idea to life in a very clear and visceral way.

Robert Brokamp: You talked about conceptualizing the gap between your expenses and your income as something to be tracked, and I think that's an interesting concept. A lot of people know they should track their expenses. They should track their income. But that gap. You want that gap to be growing because it's almost like a superpower.

Sahil Bloom: That gap is your number one weapon in your journey to building financial independence. The reason I focus on the gap is because the gap is what you can invest into those compounders. The gap is what you are actually able to stack over long periods of time. The thing that people miss here is it's great to be growing your income. It is great if your income is growing 5% 10% a year. As your skills build, you're leveraging those skills, you're generating more income. But if your expenses are growing at the exact same rate or if your expenses are growing faster than your income is growing, that does you no good.

You are not actually increasing the size of that gap over periods of time in order to stack more and more into your compounders. What we need to think about as we grow our income is how can I manage my expenses, not to just be flat because, yes, we're going to increase our costs as we improve our standard of life or quality of life. But to make sure that that rate of growth of your expenses is lower than the rate of growth of your income, so that that gap is scaling over time.

Robert Brokamp: Yeah, good rule of thumb for that. Every time you have an increase in income, whether it's a raise or anything else, enjoy half, but use the other half to increase your savings rate so that gradually over life you are saving more and investing more. One final thought on your discussion of financial wealth. You talked about the single greatest investment in the world, and that is to invest in yourself. Tell us a little bit about.

Sahil Bloom: Yeah, when I graduated college, I was asking my dad for what advice he had for me as I entered the "real world", and the piece of advice he gave me was to never think twice about investments in yourself, and that qualified as books, quality food, fitness, mental health, personal development. The idea is that those are all things that can be easily viewed as expenses, but in reality, they are investments into you. Those investments pay dividends for a long time. To make a rule to never think twice about those investments because they are the things that are going to contribute to your long term growth, whether that's in income or life growth.

Robert Brokamp: That's a good segue into the other types of wealth because a lot of them will involve maybe some extra expenses, but they're probably good investments. Let's move on to those other types. Tell us about time wealth.

Sahil Bloom: Time wealth is fundamentally about freedom, freedom to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it, when you trade it for other things. It's about understanding that time is your most precious asset, the one thing that you cannot get back. The question that I love to ask people to raise awareness around this concept is, would you trade lives with Warren Buffett. He's worth $130 billion. He has access to absolutely anyone in the world. He reads and learns for a living. He flies around on a Boeing business jet. It sounds pretty good. But you would not trade lives with him, simply because he is 95-years-old. There's no way you would agree to trade the amount of time that he has left for all of that money. On the flip side, he would give anything to be in your shoes, to have the amount of time that you have left. With that one simple question, you've recognized, you've created awareness around the fact that your time has quite literally incalculable value, and yet, on a daily basis, how much are we really treating our time that way? How much of our time are we wasting scrolling around on these things, comparing ourselves to other people, leaning into things that drain our energy, spending time with people who drain our energy, truly disregarding that one most precious asset that we really have.

Robert Brokamp: You provide some tools in the book on helping determine where you should spend your time because there's lots of stuff on the list. One of those is the energy calendar, which I found very helpful. Tell us about that.

Sahil Bloom: This is my favorite tool, and it's one that anyone can go do right now, which makes it really useful. The idea, fundamentally, is that your outcomes in life follow your energy. When you are spending time on things that create energy, meaning they lift you up, you feel interested, you feel pulled toward them, your outcomes follow. When you're working on things that create energy in your life, that is when you generate the 5, 10, 100,000X outcomes that create those step-function improvements or changes in your life. But the first step is identifying what actually creates energy in your life. The energy calendar is the strategy I've developed and that other people have used to actually do that to create that awareness. It's very simple. At the end of the day, let's say it's a Monday. Look at your calendar from the day. Color code the activities according to whether they created energy, market green, meaning it lifted you up, you felt interested, you felt pulled into it. You mark those green. If it was neutral, mark it yellow, and if it was energy draining, if you felt physically drained from the activity, mark it red.

If you do that for a week, you zoom out at the end of the week, you will have a very clear visual perspective on the types of activities that create energy versus drain energy in your life. That perspective, that awareness, then allows you to make slow, steady incremental changes over a period of time, to try to lean more into those energy creators and lean away from the energy drainers. That applies, by the way, to professional pursuits just as much as to people. We all know those people in our lives who lift us up, who we feel energized from spending time around, versus the people in our life that we feel drained from being around. The people who make us feel like we need to take a shower after spending time with them. Your life will improve if you spend more time with those energy creators and less time with the energy drainers.

Robert Brokamp: Turning back to another Buffett-related story. Tell us about the two list exercise, which I had heard about in the past, but I was very happy to be reminded of it.

Sahil Bloom: This is one of my favorites, and this is a story of Buffett going on a flight with his private pilot, and he's having a conversation with his pilot, and his pilot is basically bemoaning the fact that he has so many different things that he's trying to focus on. He's not making progress on these things in his life. Buffett asks him to make a list of all of his professional priorities, all the things that he's focused on. Mike Flint is the guy's name. He makes this list, and it's 25 things. Buffett says, now take that list and circle the top 5. Circle the things that are your true top 5 priorities on this whole list. Flint takes the list, and it takes him a little longer. That's a challenging exercise, but he circles the top 5, then he brings it back to Buffett. Buffett says, these are your top 5 priorities. Now, what are you going to do with the other 20?

Flint says, well, I'll turn to those once I'm done working on these five. Buffett says, no, you're wrong. Those other 20 things are your avoid-at-all-costs list. You have your priorities, which are the five, and then the other 20, which are simply a distraction. That framing completely changed my life because it's the recognition that when you have too many priorities, you have none. You are simply chasing all of these little distractions in your life that are just pulling your energy and attention away from the few things that really matter. That rule and that system for actually framing up your priorities is a really good way to narrow in in your professional life and in your personal life on what are those three to five things that are really going to drive the ball forward in those areas in your life and then enable you to actually avoid all the shiny objects and distractions that are drawing upon your attention.

Robert Brokamp: Let's move on to another type of wealth, social wealth. I think most people know that it's good to be around people, but tell us a little bit more about your take on why it's so important.

Sahil Bloom: Social wealth is all about relationships. It's about the few close, deep relationships and then your connection to something bigger than yourself, your communities, local, regional, spiritual, what have you. The reason social wealth is so important is grounded in a scientific one. The Harvard study of adult development, I would argue, is the most important study of the last 100 years, followed the lives of 1,300 original participants and then 700 of their descendants. Over the course of 85 years. They found that the single greatest predictor of physical health at age 80 was relationship satisfaction at age 50. Not what you had for your blood pressure, your cholesterol levels, not your smoking or drinking habits. How you felt about your relationships was what determined how well you aged. In that learning, we find the key. This is what we need to be investing in on a daily basis. Unfortunately, Relationships are the first thing to fall by the wayside when we get busy. We get busy in our careers, and the first thing that we drop the ball on is the annual trip with our friends. It's calling our mom. It's not texting the friends anymore.

It's not finding time to get present energy with your wife, with your kids. Those are the things that we drop the ball on when, in fact, those are the things that are going to contribute to the life that we are actually trying to build. The mindset shift that we all need to have here is to recognize that investments in your relationships compound just as well as any financial investment. Everyone listening to this podcast knows compounding is the eighth wonder of the world. Albert Einstein reportedly said that. It's true. Financially, put away $50 today or $100 today, that's better than zero because it's going to compound. Same exact rule applies to your relationships. Sending the text to the person when you're thinking about them is going to compound in your life. Calling your mom for two minutes during your commute is going to compound in your life. Doing the one annual trip with your old friends is going to compound in your life. Anything above zero compounds in all of these areas of your life.

Robert Brokamp: Now, so to double down on that. That was the Harvard study, often known as the Harvard Happiness study as well, found that it is good for your health to have strong relationships, and we are hearing more and more about the opposite. Loneliness is bad for your health, as bad as smoking or not having any exercise. When you talked about social wealth, you break it down into depth, breadth, and earned status. Tell us a little bit about those.

Sahil Bloom: Depth is about the few close, deep relationships. This is who you can call at 3:00 in the morning when you're down and out. When everything has hit the fan, when nothing is working, when you're really feeling lost, who can you pick up the phone and call that is going to pick up? You might have a couple of people, and that's great. I call them front row people, the people that are going to be in the front row at your funeral. That is true depth. That depth is built through vulnerability. It's built through shared struggle. It's built through crawling through the mud with people over long periods of time. Breadth is about your connection to broader circles, the acquaintances, the looser friends, the communities, local, regional, spiritual, etc. That is what extends you beyond yourself, that is acting in the service of others. Then earned status.

This is a really important piece because when we talk about social wealth, when we talk about social connection, we need to understand that representing ourself in the context of these social hierarchies that form is an important social mechanism. Status is a very useful social mechanism. It's how we actually organize as societies. But unfortunately, in modern society, the way that most people seek to acquire status is through buying it. It's through the purchase of the fancy thing or the car, the watch, or the house, or the club membership. People are trying to buy the respect and admiration of their peers. Unfortunately, what you find over and over again and what CS Lewis wrote about in an essay that he entitled The Inner Ring is that those things are fleeting. You buy them, and they're like a mirage. You think that they are going to garner the lasting respect and admiration of your peers, but they are just going to be like peeling an onion, as CS Lewis writes. You're just going to keep peeling it away until there's nothing left. There's always going to be a bigger boat, as I like to say.

Robert Brokamp: A good way you put it is basically, earned status is something that the richest person in the world could not buy and have by tomorrow.

Sahil Bloom: It's a very important way to think about it. It's like, what are you actually chasing? What are you working on? It applies to your career and your career decisions, as well. When you take a job, ask yourself before you take it, do I actually want this job, or do I want other people to see me having this job? That is a pretty simple and very powerful separation between those two things, because sometimes you are doing things purely for the benefit of other people. You want the status that you think is going to be conferred upon you from doing this thing, not actually the utility that you are going to be getting from doing it.

Robert Brokamp: If you decide to get married, who you get married to is going to be one of the biggest components of your social wealth. You talked about it in your book, how you ask people who are married for 40, 50, sometimes 60 years for their advice. What were some of the tips that they passed along?

Sahil Bloom: This was an amazing exercise. I'm a big believer in wisdom from the end, if you will, turning to people who have experienced much more time and experienced much more ups and downs as a source for these ideas and for this timeless wisdom that exists. I got to spend time with all of these people that have been married 50, 60, 70 years in certain cases, and ask them for what advice they wish they knew. I think one of the most interesting pieces was marriage cannot always be 50/50. Sometimes it's going to be 90/10, sometimes it's going to be 10/90. But the important point is that it always adds up to 100. I thought that was a brilliant articulation of something that I have experienced in my own life, that complementarity is much more important than anything else. You need to come together to be a complementary unit that adds up to 100 in your life. I think that is just a really important way to think about your partnership and your collaboration with the person that you were going to go through life's ups and downs with.

Robert Brokamp: I think my favorite tip from that part was the person who said never stop dating. The quote was ''Marriages don't get boring, you stop trying.'' I'll keep that on my mind for a while. Let's move on to mental wealth. Tell us about that.

Sahil Bloom: Mental wealth is about purpose. It's about growth, and it's about creating the space necessary to wrestle with some of these bigger unanswerable questions in your life, whether through spirituality, meditation, solitude, what have you. Mental wealth is easily overlooked in our path as humans. We very rarely zoom out and actually think about the things that we truly want to do. We very rarely think about the races that we want to run. What is our race? We walk down these paths that we've been handed that we've been indoctrinated into, and we do not create the zoom out. We do not create the perspective to actually think about whether we want to be running these races.

Robert Brokamp: You talk about it in some ways in terms of somewhat religious terms. You mentioned Dharma, which comes from the ancient Hindu traditions. You mentioned Ikigai, which is a Japanese term most associated with the people in the island of Okinawa, one of the blue zones in the world, where people tend to live longer. I, as someone who was once studying to be a priest, might think of it in terms of my vocation, but it is more than just my purpose is to make a paycheck. You describe it as the intersection of what you love to do, what you're good at, and what the world needs.

Sahil Bloom: This is really important because the most important piece of that articulation is how you define world. A lot of the debate over purpose fundamentally comes down to people that define world differently. If you define world as being the actual world, you are going to go off and want to do something enormously grand and ambitious. Elon Musk probably defines world as all of humanity. He wants to create an interplanetary species, and that is how he defines his purpose on this earth. That is one definition that you could have, but my world, and frankly, how I really think about it at my most core atomic level is my world is my wife and son. What they need from me is to provide to create the world where we are able to have our needs met, take care of my wife and son in that way. Under that definition, it is very clear to me that that is my purpose. At the most atomic level, I need to make sure that I am providing for these people that I love and care about in my life. That does not have to be that my purpose is my work.

That is an important clarification that I think a lot of people need to hear. We've been convinced and you've been told over and over again that you have to find purpose in your work. I disagree. Your purpose can be something that exists on a higher order than your work. Your work can be in service of that purpose without it actually being the same thing. I spent all this time during the book research process with this man who works in a factory. He works on an assembly line. He puts together widgets basically for eight, 10 hours a day.

He hates his job. He doesn't like showing up and doing this assembly line monotonous work day in day out. But he defines his purpose as being the type of father that he never had, as providing for his boys in a way that he didn't feel his father showed up for him. That allows him to draw energy every single day when he goes to his job because he connects his work to the service of this higher order purpose as a father and as a provider. That is a really beautiful thing because he gets energy every single day, doing something that he doesn't necessarily intrinsically like because it connects to his higher order purpose.

Robert Brokamp: You provide a tool or a system for helping people, maybe zero in on where their purpose might be. You talked about Gay Hendricks' zone of genius, high competency, high interest. Tell us a little bit about that.

Sahil Bloom: I created when I first started working and I was starting to progress in my career, this idea of a pursuit map. A pursuit map, if you just think about it visually, and there's a breakdown of this in the book, is this 2*2 matrix where you have competency on one axis, from low competency to high competency, and energy on the other axis, from low energy to high energy. Fundamentally, you are going to find the best outcomes when you are spending time on things that you have high energy for, meaning you feel this intrinsic interest and energy and high competency, things that you are good at, things that feel easy to you that are maybe hard to others. That circle, that quadrant is really your zone of genius, Gay Hendricks concept of this zone of genius. When you spend time in your zone of genius, you are going to find that the results follow.

The interesting thing when you think about this on an organizational level with your teams, with people you work with is that everyone's is different. The ideal scenario is that you are actually working with people who have complimentary zones of genius. Like my chief of staff on my team has a very complimentary zone of genius to me, which is an incredible thing as a team because the things that I am not good at or that I get low energy from, are things that he has high energy and competency for. Our zones of genius actually match in a very complimentary way to allow us to continue to progress as an organization.

Robert Brokamp: You also highlighted in that part of your book, the zone of danger. This is where you have high competence, but it does not give you energy. It drains you because you have high competence, so you might get acknowledgment for it. You might get paid for it. But in the end, you do it after 5, 10, 20 years, and you may regret spending your life doing that.

Sahil Bloom: This is the trap, and this is the trap in a lot of corporate tracks in particular because humans love getting recognition. We love getting patted on the back. That's normal. You start having that when you're a little kid. I have a three-year-old son. He loves when we clap for him when he does things. That persists throughout your entire life. When you get the claps from the crowd, you like that. That feels good. There's a dopamine hit. The problem is when you're getting those claps and you're getting the cheers from the crowd for something that you fundamentally don't get energy from that feels like chewing glass. You can be good at it, but you don't want to spend your whole life doing. If you allow yourself to exist in that world, you're going to keep getting progressed, you're going to get promoted. You're going to get those pats on the back.

But if it's not something that is creating energy for you, you are living someone else's life. You are walking down someone else's path. What I often say in this regard is that the worst thing in the world is not being on a bad path. The worst thing in the world is being on a good path that isn't yours. A bad path screams at you every single day to get off of it. You know, it's abundantly clear to you that you need to make a change, that you need to step off, you need to do something different. But the good path that isn't yours, that is the zone of danger. That is something where you are getting paid, you're getting promoted, there's all sorts of reasons to stay on that path. But you know that it's not your hero's journey. It's not your path in life, so stepping off of it is very difficult. Every year that you stay, there's more gravity, there's more momentum. We all need to think about what are the slight adjustments that we can make if we are on that good path that doesn't feel like ours? What are the ways that we can start testing into those higher energy areas? What are the ways that we can make adjustments to the things that we're currently doing so that we do feel more energy around them?

Robert Brokamp: Let's move on to the final type of wealth, and that is physical wealth. I'm going to kick this one off with a quote from an 80-year-old father of one of your friends, "Treat your body like a house you have to live in for another 70 years."

Sahil Bloom: My absolute favorite. Look, physical wealth is about your health and vitality. This is about taking the controllable actions on a daily basis to fight the natural decay that your body is going to go through as you age. That quote is a powerful articulation because it is the recognition that your body is quite literally your house and making the daily investments in a solid foundation, making the minor repairs along the way, recognizing that if you ignore them, minor repairs become major repairs over time. That is a really important way to think about your physical wealth. It is to understand that we need to invest in some tiny way on a daily basis in this area if we want to avoid real big challenges later in life.

Robert Brokamp: You included a quote from Peter Attia, the author of the great book Outlive, and I'll just read it here. "The data are unambiguous. Exercise not only delays actual death, but also prevents both cognitive and physical decline better than any other intervention." I think for a lot of people, they may not be too afraid of death, or they know that eventually it has to come at some point. But I think most of us are afraid of what happens between now and death. We don't want to be in a situation where we saved our entire lives for retirement, but then we get to retirement and we're too immobile or too in pain to enjoy all the things we wanted to do or even worse, our mind starts to go down and we can't enjoy those final years. Exercise is one of the best things you can do to prevent that.

Sahil Bloom: Over and over again, you see in studies that this is true. This has been proven out unambiguously, as Peter Attia said. I would argue, though, that it is difficult for most people to think that far in the future. One of the reasons people do not invest in their physical wealth in the way they should is because if you're a 40-year-old, if you're a 50-year-old, you don't really think about your 80-year-old self and how you're going to feel, how you're going to be able to take care of your family, how you're going to be experiencing life. The thing that I think is important for people to think about is how it makes you feel today. The reality is that exercise is one of those things where you are doing a hard thing right now that actually contributes to every other area of your life almost immediately. People that exercise that take care of themselves show up in the world better in every other area of their life. It is a catalyst for the other areas of your life because it is doing a hard thing that proves to you that you are capable of taking an action and creating a desired outcome. When you're feeling lost when you're feeling stuck in your life, it is because you have lost that sense of agency. You have lost the sensation that you are capable of taking an action and creating an outcome.

Engaging in activities related to your physical wealth is the fastest way to reassume that agency, to recognize that you are capable of doing that, that if you for 30 straight days go out for a 30 minute walk and eat mostly whole unprocessed foods, you're going to look and feel much better. That is recognizing that you are in control, you are at the steering wheel of your own life, and when you do that, you start having ripple effects into every other area of your life. You start engaging with the world differently. There is actually a present right now benefit to how you make money, to how your relationships are, to your mental health, to all of these other areas of your life. You don't even need to think 30 years in the future to recognize the benefits of this. I understand exercise can be hard, but you can feel the benefits right now.

Robert Brokamp: You make the point in the book that there's a lot of information out there about exercise and nutrition and gadgets and toys, and that a lot of that you don't really need. In fact, you suggest the Pareto Principle, the 80/20 rule when it comes to your physical wealth. It's just basically moving, eating right, and sufficient recovery, and it's pretty simple stuff.

Sahil Bloom: It's unfortunate because it's probably even more stuck than the Pareto. It's probably more like 95/5 at some point within this domain. Social media has allowed for the propagation of the longest tale of information in this domain, of all of the crazy, sexy, fancy, complex solutions, generally speaking, because someone is then selling you that solution on the other end. They're telling you, you have to do this, this, this, this and this in order to be a healthy person, and by the way, here's my product or my course on how to do that exact thing. The reality is you can get 90, 95% of the benefit, totally free. Move your body for 30 minutes a day, eat whole unprocessed foods, 80% of your meals, sleep seven hours a night on average. Do that, you're ahead of the vast majority of people within this domain.

Robert Brokamp: You talk about the power of waking up early, at least for yourself. You rarely find an early riser who isn't winning. Tell us about that and tell us about how if you get up early and go to the gym, you might just end up with a mentor who happens to be the CEO of one of the most valuable companies in the world. You got to tell us that story.

Sahil Bloom: I started working my first job in 2014, and I was going to be working in finance, and I knew that the hours were going to be long. There was going to be a lot of late nights. I had played baseball in college. I was a pitcher at Stanford, and I wanted to keep up my health habits. I knew that if I was going to get to the gym, it was going to have to be early before going to work because the day was going to be too chaotic. I started by getting to the gym at 4:45 every morning because I had to get done. I had to get into the office by 6:30 to be there when I wanted to be there. It turns out not that many people do that.

There was a group of 5-7 people that you would see every single day that were crazy enough to show up at the gym. It was the Equinox and Palo Alto at 4:45 in the morning every day. One of those people happened to be Tim Cook, the then new CEO of Apple. For the first six months, I had no idea who he was. I would chat with him every single morning because there was only five people there. We'd spend time. Then, six months in, someone came up to me after I was talking to him and said, "Do you know who that is?" I was like, "I don't know. That's the guy that I talk to in the mornings." They were like, "That's Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple." I just thought, crap. I have probably been saying the dumbest things to this guy, and he's the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world. I must sound like an idiot. Following up on that, I ended up asking him if he'd be willing to get breakfast, provide some guidance, insight as I was starting my career. I wasn't looking for a job. I wasn't asking for anything in particular. He took me up on it and ended up building an incredible bond and relationship, friendship, mentorship over the years. He was one of the big driving forces behind my decision to go down this path, creating, writing. He was the first endorsement for this book. He's just been an incredible mentor and guide on this whole journey.

Robert Brokamp: That's such a great story. Let's close here with my final two questions. So the truth is someone who reads your book, they're going to leave with tons of really good actionable ideas, many ideas. How do you suggest that someone decides which to prioritize?

Sahil Bloom: I'd say that the first step that I would tell anyone is to establish a baseline of where you are currently in your life. There's this idea in the book of this wealth score, which is a way of looking at the broader pillars in your life. With that, you get a very clear sense of the areas where you want to focus. Once you have that, all it comes down to is just do one tiny thing. My fundamental perspective here on life is that dopamine from information gathering is a dangerous drug. Too many people are getting all of their dopamine from information gathering. We're reading the book and then thinking that we did something when in reality, you need to go and take action on something in order to actually make progress. What I want people to do is go and do one tiny thing. It doesn't really matter what it is. There's 50 plus different systems, ideas, actions that you can go take. Go start on one of them. If you listen to this conversation, go do the energy calendar. It'll take you five minutes today. But it sparks the action, and that action creates momentum. The momentum is what fundamentally could change your life for the better.

Robert Brokamp: The final lines of your book are, "You have the tools, you have the information. Only one thing remains. Do you want to take a leap of faith?" So what would you say to someone who is almost ready to make a significant change in their life, but they just need a little nudge, just a little bit more confidence?

Sahil Bloom: Go do it. At the end of the day, the truth is that fear comes from inexperience not incapability. You're afraid because you haven't done it yet, not because you can't do it. Inexperience then is the problem to be solved. It is only solved through having the courage to act. Go and take the action, go do the tiny thing, whatever that might be, and that tiny thing may just change your life.

Robert Brokamp: Well, Sahil, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining us.

Sahil Bloom: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Ricky Mulvey: As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talked about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and are not approved by advertisers. Motley Fool only picks products that it would personally recommend to friends like you. I'm Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. Again, no show Monday or Tuesday, and we will be back on Wednesday, April 9th.

Ricky Mulvey has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Robert Brokamp has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Apple. The Motley Fool recommends Palo Alto Networks. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.