6 Big Lessons to Build Your Dream Life with Sahil Bloom

Define for me, Sahil, your definition of a successful life.

My definition of a successful life is quite simply being able to go and create the life that you have decided you want. I cannot tell you what success looks like for you, nor can you tell me what success looks like for me. My definition of success is being able to take my son in the pool at 1 PM on a Tuesday. We sold our house in California. I left my job and we moved 3,000 miles across the country to live closer, you know, driving distance from, from both sets of parents.

Yeah. So living on purpose is really important.

You are the sum product of your actions. Being able to show up and convince yourself to just act in line with how your ideal self shows up in the world on a daily basis in the simplest way, a lot of good will come from that.

Hey friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks, your host. So happy to have you back with us. This is a show, as you know, about the science of happiness and how you can get more of it in your life, the real techniques and practical habits that you can adopt, but just as importantly, the underlying science behind these habits and giving you tips and ways that you can share these ideas with others. Remember, if you want to become a happier person, you need to know the science, change your life, and share with others. And that's what this show is really all about. As you know, my mission personally, if you watch this show, is to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love. Using science and ideas. I'd love for you to feedback. If you're a regular viewer of the show, or even if this is your first time, please let me know your thoughts by writing to me at officehours@arthurbrooks.com. That's the email that appears here right now. Don't forget to leave a review on Spotify or Apple and subscribe on your platform of choice. Subscribing is really helpful on YouTube and Spotify because that helps us with the algorithm, and also you'll get the episodes delivered to you. You don't have to think about it. It'll come right to you. In this episode, I get to interview somebody that I like and admire very much. That's Sahil Bloom. Maybe many of you follow him. He has a big audience base across his newsletter and social media platforms. He's one of the most talented people I've ever met at, at, at taking the best ideas that he finds about self-improvement, about empowerment, about human flourishing, about human potential, and, and bringing them in, in consumable ways to large groups of people, which is why he has such a large and dedicated audience. I met him when he, out of the blue, sent me an email and said, I really like your stuff. Can I come and watch your class at Harvard? Which was wonderful. It was lovely. And he did. And we got to know each other. We've been friends ever since. Since we first met during that time, he's had a big bestselling book. He wrote the book, The Five Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life. In addition to that, he creates original content across all of his platforms. So do, remember if you're inspired by the conversation that you're about to hear, and I think you are, I certainly was, that you'll subscribe to his newsletter and follow him across his platforms. You'll be rewarded by doing that. What you're going to find in this episode is that we're going to have a wide-ranging conversation that we're going to be able to boil down to 6 big lessons that you can use for your life. These are very practical things that you're going to find as well. I'll make sure that this all goes into the show notes, all the information that you need. and I'm going to review, uh, the, the 6 big lessons that we have in our conversation at the very end of the podcast. So watch all the way to the end. You're going to love it. Enjoy my conversation today with Sahil Bloom. Hey, Sahil, how are you?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. It's nice to see you.

And I see you're in some new digs. This is not your typical studio. Tell me where you are.

I am, uh, now in the cold Boston suburbs. Uh, you find me in a, uh, in an amazing flow from a life perspective, because we just made the move to live like in a 15-minute little circle with all of our family here.

So you're in a process of getting colder and colder because you started in California, then you moved to New York, now you're in Boston. Next time I'm going to talk to you, you're going to be in Buffalo or something.

Yeah, we're going to be in Saskatchewan or something with some polar bears.

But give me the reasons why you've made these last two moves.

In 2021, I had a big reckoning or realization sparked by a conversation with a friend. Who asked me how I was doing, and I opened up that, you know, it had started to get difficult living so far away from my parents. My parents are two of my best friends in the world. And I think when you're young, you have this sort of youthful naivete about their immortality. You know, if you're lucky enough to have healthy parents, it's, it's not something you ever question. And COVID came around and I saw them and I just remember thinking for the first time in my life, they're slowing down. Like they're not the vision I have in my mind of them in the same way. And when I went out for this drink with this friend and he asked about that, I said, you know, I'm not seeing my parents often. And he asked, how old are they? And I said, mid-60s. He asked how often I saw them. 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. And look, we were living in California. We had built a whole life there. I bought a house. I had this great job. All of my priorities were so focused on money and financial success and status being the pathway to me feeling like I had lived a good life, success, wealth, etc. And in that moment, it sort of jammed a wrench in that, you know, in the wheel of that bike to just recognize that my entire definition of success or of wealth had been incomplete. I was really focusing on the one thing at the expense of everything else rather than in conjunction with everything else.

And so you moved to the colder part of the country because you wanted the warmer part in your heart.

That's a good way of putting it.

Yeah.

We moved, you know, like within 45 days we, we sold our house in California. I left my job and we moved 3,000 miles across the country to live closer, you know, driving distance from, from both sets of parents. Yeah. And, you know, the one thing I would just say about that is what it created and instilled in us was this recognition of our own agency in our lives, to recognize that we were capable of building our life around the things that we really cared about, the priorities that we really had, because there are really 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 there's a big gap between those two things, and your life improves alongside your ability to close that gap. but you cannot close it until you hold your feet to the fire enough, look yourself in the mirror to acknowledge that it exists in the first place.

Yeah. I have to say though, Sahil, you missed the obvious solution to this problem. For listeners, uh, Sahil's dad is my colleague at Harvard University, a professor. And, um, the obvious solution is for them to move to California.

You know, the obvious solution, uh, definitely, uh, would've been everybody to shift to the much, much nicer climate. You know, look, I mean, You know this, like the gravity of where you live and the communities you build there is very real. And so for my parents in particular, they've lived in Boston since 1995. All the communities, all the circles of their friends, his, you know, his career, he's been at Harvard for 25 years. It becomes difficult to uproot for that reason. We had much less gravity built up where we were. And so while it was hard to move to the cold, and I certainly regret it this time of year, It was the best decision we ever made.

Yeah. No, no kidding. And you know, we've done that too. We actually had a big family meeting. I've told you this before, but I don't think listeners have heard this. We had a big family meeting with my 3 adult kids and we asked them, where, where do you think you're most likely to raise your children? And it was where they had been raised, which is the Washington, DC area. So we all made plans. We got a great big moving van. One son married, moved with his wife and their brand new son to Washington. We did too. Our other son and his wife and son came from California and our daughter graduated from college, now is in the Marine Corps, but we'll wind up there. And you know, we have a 3-generation house. It's like talking about moving in together with one of the families and the other's just up the street. But we made a very, very conscious decision for exactly the reasons that you suggest. And you know, my kids grew up not knowing their grandparents all that well. They saw 'em a couple of times a year max. My parents were on the West Coast and my in-laws were in Barcelona. and it's not ideal. I want to be happier. I didn't have a close relationship with my family. I'm not going to screw up what I did with my parents with my own kids. So living on purpose is really important. And then the second point that you're making, which is really well taken, I want people to notice this big point that you just made, which is don't live like your time is unlimited because it isn't. And if you do that, you're going to discount into infinity and make incorrect decisions that you will almost certainly regret and you will miss a lot of beautiful parts of life. And that really leads me to the main part of what I want to talk about today. I mean, you've got this big bestselling book and it's not new anymore. I mean, when did it come out? When did The Five Types of Wealth come out?

February.

February, February of 2025. And it did really well and it continues to sell really well. So just quickly tell me, what are the five types of wealth? And then I want to talk about how to get it.

So the five types of wealth, you know, think of as a new scoreboard. A new way to measure your life, with the idea being that when you measure the right things, you can actually take the right actions to create your desired outcomes. The 5 types of wealth as I lay them out are time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth, and financial wealth. And we can dig into what each of those are. But just on a very surface level, time wealth is about freedom to choose how you spend your time, where you spend it, who you spend it with, when you trade it for other things. It's about that awareness of time as your most precious asset. Social wealth is about your relationships, those few deep, close bonds, but also your connection to circles that extend beyond the self, you know, whether through local, regional communities, spiritual networks and communities, et cetera. Mental wealth is about purpose and growth and also about rituals to create space, the space necessary to wrestle with some of the bigger picture, maybe more unanswerable questions of life, whether through spirituality, religion, meditation, solitude, etc. Physical wealth is all about your health and vitality. And then financial wealth is about money, but with the specific nuance of really thinking about your definition of enough, what it means to you to have enough financially, the recognition being that your expectations are your single greatest financial liability.

Yeah. This has come to you through experience, but you actually got a lot of this through the experiences of your parents and a lot of older people. I mean, you, I know you hang out with a lot of older people because, you know, I got an email from you over the transom some months ago saying, hey, I like your work. Can I come sit in on your class? Let's be friends. I mean, and, and this is, this is the mark of a young guy trying to get wisdom before his time.

Is that fair to say? I think that is fair to say. I have always been a big believer that closed mouths don't get fed, if you will. And so, I've always believed that if you've done the work and you really admire someone, you look up to someone, just reach out. The worst that happened when I sent you that email was that you didn't see it, you didn't respond, or you said, "No, hey, you can't. No, it's not something I do." And I would've been in the same place where I was. And what actually happened was you said, "Yeah, sure. Come sit in on the class and we'll have coffee after." And look, here we are probably just, I don't know, 2, 2.5, 3 years later, you know, and I get to count you as a mentor and friend. And so I think for most people out there, it's just, it's a reminder that, you know, if you don't ask, you'll never get.

Do you believe that you can speed up your wisdom this way by actually talking to people who are further along in life than you are? Is that, is that a technique that you'd recommend a lot? I mean, you're in your early 30s, you're 30 years younger than I am. Is this something that you'd recommend to people your own age?

Speeding up wisdom is an interesting question. I don't think that wisdom is about answers as much as it is about the willingness to ask difficult questions. And so when people seek out elders, I think what they're typically looking for is the answer, like, okay, you know, Dr. Brooks, what is the answer to how I do this or that? And you give me, you know, based on your map of reality, you know what the answer might be. And the challenge with that is that the person who you're seeking out for the wisdom, their map may not match your terrain. And so if you try to apply these things directly, it might not actually work. What you should seek out when you're speaking to people who have more sort of earned experience than you is what are the questions? What are those universal questions that we are avoiding as individuals? For me, that one question of how much time do I really have left? With the people that I care about most? That was a difficult question that would've been much easier to avoid. That sparked this insight or this wisdom in my life, but it wasn't the answer necessarily. It was the fact that I was willing to uncover and then wrestle with the question that really led to it.

That's interesting because this gets back to this point you made just a minute ago, which is that a lot of people live in kind of this cognitive dissonance of their stated values not matching their actions. When somebody says one thing and does another, what do they really want? Which one is reality?

I think your actions create your reality.

Actions speak louder than words, I suppose, is the thing, right?

Yeah. You know, it's like the Benjamin Franklin school of thought that, you know, you are what you do. And, you know, look, there is a lot of talk on social media that as long as you have good intentions, you know, it's okay if you, you know, slip up here or there, whether it's, as a parent or in your relationships or in your health or whatever it might be, and that you should give yourself grace because you had good intentions. And I think there is a space for grace in our lives and in forgiving ourselves that, that leeway. But I also think we need to be able to hold ourselves to the fire and to recognize that at the end of the day, you are the sum product of the actions that you take, not your intentions or not what you thought you should take or how you think you are as a human being. You are the sum product of your actions. And so being able to show up and convince yourself to just act in line with how your ideal self shows up in the world on a daily basis in the simplest way, a lot of good will come from that.

Well, it's true. And it's interesting because this actually brings up two really important points from behavioral science. One, it actually is from Carl Jung and Carl Jung's understanding of happiness is that people are happy when they know what their values are and they live in a way that's consistent with those values. So unhappiness comes either because you don't know what you believe or you do know what you believe, but you're not acting according to it. And that's just to be really dissonant and that's unhappiness. And so if you say, you know, I believe in God and I believe that there's a manifestation of God on earth and you act as if you didn't, or you act out of accord with what you believe to be God's law, then you will by sort of Jungian axiom, you'll be an unhappy person is how he talks about that. And that's a really important thing. The other idea that's in line with this is this Buddhist concept of right desire. People, they want certain things, but they want to want other things. They want a happy marriage. No, they want to want a happy marriage, but what they want is a particular lifestyle. And so right desire is having a desire that's in line with your ideal desire. And it sounds like a sort of complex here, but it really isn't. And so the first step that I recommend to a lot of people who are listening to us right now is don't ask, what do I want? Because that's what the world is telling you to do. Ask what you want. No, no, no. Ask what you wish you wanted. Your ideal self. Sahil's talking about here, folks. Is not the person who's giving into her or his animal impulse, but rather to her or his moral ambition, which is not what you want. It's what you want to want. And that's information that you need. Is this fair?

That's a fascinating thought exercise and thought experiment. And it actually draws upon something that I've thought about recently, which is to just consider and audit how much of your quote unquote desires are being influenced and heavily formed by your environment, by the people around you. I've often written or spoken about the fact that it is very difficult to play this game of creating your own scoreboard, of living differently when you are surrounded by people who are trying to live one way. The most classic example of this to me is like if you were trying to live a simple life grounded in core you know, really what I would view as moral values, you know, family and, you know, spirituality and religion, principled values, and you're living in New York City, a place that really glamorizes wealth and status and, you know, where you send your kids to private school and where you vacation in the Hamptons. And like, that's how we measure self-worth. It is going to be very difficult because the two are in tension and humans are mimetic, right? Scientifically, we assume a lot of the desires and wants of the people around us. And so that in particular is, is sort of two things. It's one, it's make sure that you are finding a community of people who are aligned with you around these bigger picture values of the things that you are really wanting to want, because it will make it much easier for you to then go and align with that. And then two, make sure you are constantly auditing your ability to create that daily sort of forcing function on the awareness of who your ideal self is. The reason I say that that's so important is because I have this impression or, you know, experience in my own life that awareness is perishable. You know, there are a lot of things that I say, and I'm sure that you say, that people's first reaction to it would be, well, I know, I know that. I know my relationships are, you know, the most important thing. I know my time is precious. It doesn't matter if you know something in an abstract sense, if you are not acting on it at the testing point. You know, as C.S. Lewis talks about when it comes to courage, that, you know, courage is every value at its testing point. That is what matters. And the only way you can act on these things at the testing point is if you are forcing that awareness to the front of your mind constantly, like recognizing who your ideal self is constantly, not just in the ease moments when the seas are calm, but also when it's the stormy seas so that you can go and do something about it.

So give me an example. So let's make it tangible here because it's pretty theoretical at this point.

Yeah. I mean, for me in my own life, I have a little note card that sits on my desk in my writing area that just says, I will coach my son's sports teams. That's all it says. Just one little sentence on it. What that statement means to me is sort of the version of who my ideal self is during this season of life, if you will. I have a young son and I want to be the type of husband, the type of father, the type of community member who shows up to coach my son's sports teams. Now, knowing that, I can now flip a switch when I see that card to turn on that ideal self at any given moment. So if someone sends me an opportunity and it sounds really interesting financially, but it's going to require me to be away 300 nights out of the year. I could ask myself the question when I see that card, well, okay, turn this on. What would the type of person who coaches his son's sports teams do in this situation? I'd probably have to adjust that opportunity or say no to it because it's not who my ideal self is. It's a shiny object that I'm going to be naturally drawn to because of those mimetic desires. It sounds so sexy and attractive, but it's not aligned with what I want to want to be.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, and by the way, a lot of people listening to us are going to make a mistake along these lines. And again, giving yourself a little grace is important. When I was writing a book a few years ago, a book called From Strength to Strength, I was interviewing a lot of very successful people, which I've been privileged to be able to do in my life. And I interviewed a woman who at the time was about my age in her 50s, who was a billionaire. I mean, unbelievably successful in financial industries at the top, very famous. And she was telling me her story and I was congratulating her and she says, I'm so unhappy. And I said, talk to me, sister, you know? And she said, well, I got everything I always wanted. And it turns out, I mean, my dreams came true and it turned out, I guess I had the wrong dreams. I'm roommates with my husband and I'm cordial with my adult children and everybody does what I say, but I think they're afraid of me. I don't really have any friends. Fallen away from my childhood faith and that was important to me, but I never had time. I don't go to the gym. I go to the doctor who says I drink too much. What do I do, professor? And I said, you don't need a Harvard professor to tell you what to do. You just wrote your own prescription. I mean, go away with your husband, take a souvenir in your firm, step back. You're financially independent. Spend time with your kids, get into AA, go to the gym, go back to church. I mean, You want me to make a list? She says, no, because I know, I know. And I said, why didn't you do it? And she was silent for a long time, Sahil. And she said, I guess I always chose to be special rather than happy. And once again, this is this Jungian idea that your happiness comes from living up to your own standards, understanding your standards and living up to them without exception. And that was like a knife to my heart, man. I mean, I have spent many, many nights especially when I was a CEO at the 14th hour in the office and spent instead of the first hour with my kids. And when my kids were your kids' age, I missed a lot of it because I was trying to be so special this entire time. And now I'm telling you, I mean, I have a different set of standards. I don't travel on weekends. And the reason I don't travel on weekends is I want to spend the weekend with my wife. We're not getting any younger. And I live with my kids and grandkids and I want to spend time with them. And so I miss a lot of opportunities on weekends. And I'm really, really grateful that I'm making those decisions at this point. I wish I had started when I was your age, quite frankly. I wish I had had a little card on my computer screen that said Little League coach or whatever. Right. I wish I'd done that.

It's good advice. The important point in all of that is you get to decide for yourself where you want to go. And when you have clarity on the direction, and on the life that you're actually trying to build, the actions and the days become clear as well. You know, it's exactly as you laid it out for, you know, for that hyper-successful woman. And it's exactly as you even articulated about your own journey recently with the family meeting that you said you had. When I heard you tell that story, the thing that immediately jumped out to me for most people listening to this as the most important part of that story is that you had a family meeting. To talk about the life that you were trying to create. That sounds so simple, but it is something that 99% of families will never do. Sit down as a family and talk about what is the life we are trying to build. We're all off chasing these things. We're trying to make money. We're trying to be successful. We're trying to be special in our own ways. And that is great. But make sure you know what it's for. What is the life you are actually trying to build? You know, I think it was Naval that said something to the effect of the only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. And while I agree with it to a certain extent, I do think there's a layer deeper, which is to know what you actually want out of life in the first place, not just get it. The getting it is actually easier than the knowing. The knowing requires that energy and that effort and some of those uncomfortable conversations upfront.

Yeah. And okay, since we're now talking about getting what you want, we have now transitioned to the part of our conversation. We're going to talk about success. Because, you know, everybody wants to succeed, but your point is they don't necessarily know what actual success means. So let's talk about that. Now, it would be easy to say success means getting the 5 types of wealth, right? But, but, but let's be more specific about what success looks like in people's lives, why people find success so unsatisfactory, why so many people get depressed when they hit their goals. Let's talk about some of that stuff because I think that that's a really important way for us to understand how to point our lives in the right direction. So define for me, Sahil, your definition of a successful life.

My definition of successful life is quite simply being able to go and create the life that you have decided you want. And that is a sidestep for sure, but it is an important sidestep because what it implies is that I cannot tell you what success looks like for you, nor can you tell me what success looks like for me. And by the way, that version of success will change across seasons of your life. Like this season of my life that I am currently in, my definition of success is being able to take my son in the pool at 1:00 PM on a Tuesday. That means a whole lot of things across all of these types of wealth. It means I have the time freedom at 1:00 PM on a Tuesday to be able to go outside and go take my son in the pool. It means I have the type of relationship, social wealth where he wants me to do that. It means that I have a sensation of purpose and meaning around my relationships, around my work that I can. It means I'm healthy enough to do it. And yes, it means I have enough money to have a pool in my backyard. All of those things circle around what that level of success looks like for me right now. But when my son's 18, he's not going to want to go in the pool with me at 1:00 PM on a Tuesday. So that definition necessarily is going to change across those different seasons.

So what's your mission statement, Sahil?

My mission statement broadly is to create as many positive ripples in the world as I can. And what that means to me is, you know, a ripple, you know, you throw a rock in a pond, right? A ripple can be local, meaning with my family, with my closest people right around me. Through my interactions with them that I encourage them to go off and live slightly better and they go off and create their own changes out in the world. Or it can be global with the work and the things that I'm putting out into the world that hopefully are encouraging other people to go live more positive, fulfilling lives. But my impression is that when I go out and I have that at the front of my mind and I take actions in alignment with that mission statement, I end up achieving the greatest things and I feel most energetic about it along the way. And when you talk about why people feel unfulfilled or miserable even when they achieve their goals, this sort of trap of success, so much of that surrounds the fact that all of our definitions of success are tied to some outcome, right? Like, I know you've written about this on several occasions. I have certainly in the book as well, the arrival fallacy, right? Like you build up these things as being the destination. You were going to wake up and feel like, oh, I got to the top of the mountain. And, ah, everything's better. My whole life is great now. And we know scientifically and anecdotally that it is not the case. When we build up these destinations as being the thing, the turning point, we feel a massive letdown after achieving them.

And we know why. I mean, we know why because evolution didn't create a limbic system in our brain to feel constant unremitting joy. I mean, the ventral tegmental area of the limbic system gives you this sense of joy immediately after you get a reward and then homeostatically resets. So you're ready for the next set of circumstances. You're not able physiologically to get this bliss that comes from hitting a particular worldly goal. So it's not that you're an ungrateful wretch, although we are, it's that we can't muster the emotional energy, positive emotional energy to go on and on and on and on. And if we could, we'd be in danger. So that's worth pointing out too. Okay. So that leads really to, I think, an underlying point that you're making, which is if it's not arrival at particular goals, it's the process of living according to these goals and making progress. Correct?

I think that from the, for the vast majority of people, your happiest life is found when you are engaged in struggle that you find meaningful for yourself and more importantly for others. That idea of uncovering your meaningful struggle is so central to how I think about living my own life. I often talk about the value of doing hard things and doing hard things is not about just any hard thing that you can go out and do. It would be hard for me to shoot a nail gun through my hand. Yeah, it would hurt. It would be hard. There's no point in doing that. There's no meaning. It's not a meaningful hard thing. It's not a meaningful struggle. Parenting is a very meaningful struggle, right? Like it is the most meaningful struggle, I would argue. Love, relationships, meaningful struggle, hard conversations, being present along that journey. Finding work that you find to be a meaningful struggle, something that you need to endure challenges and struggle now in order to create benefit later and to get better at that game over periods of time. That to me is where a lot of our happiness is unlocked. And so what I try to find and seek out in my own life is what are those few missions, if you will, that I can identify that I can play for a long, long time and be alongside people I really love on those missions. And so I think of my life along three missions. I think I have a professional mission, creating ripples in the world with this content that I'm putting out, with the books that I write, with the speaking that I do. I have a personal mission around my health and the pursuits that I have physically that I'm going after and doing, and also mentally with some of the challenges I'll take on. And then I have a family and sort of relationship mission, which is the people that I love and helping them live their most fulfilled, best lives. I sort of think of my life around those missions and think about the meaningful struggle associated with each. And if things don't fall into one of those three missions, I basically say no to those things.

Hmm. Do you tell me more about this topic that you briefly touched on a minute ago, which is the struggle? I mean, satisfaction is defined, and satisfaction, by the way, is one of the three macronutrients of happiness: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Everybody who listens to the show knows this is how happiness is properly defined. Enjoyment plus satisfaction plus meaning. And satisfaction is the joy that you get from an accomplishment or an achievement or an activity after struggle. And so the struggle is proportional. I should say that your satisfaction depends on struggle, which is really important to keep in mind because, you know, no struggle, no sweetness. You know, that's why good things come to those who wait, which means that waiting is not just a cost of doing business. Waiting is actually part of the good thing that comes at the end of it. Right? So tell me more about this. Sacred suffering business, Sahil?

Yeah, I had this realization a few years ago. I took up running as sort of a new pursuit. I had always— I played baseball in college. I got a scholarship to play out at Stanford, and that had always been sort of my physical pursuit. And then after it ended, I didn't really have a new one. And so I started to sort of get antsy, and I took up running in 2023, and I decided I was going to try to run a marathon in under 3 hours. That was going to be my big goal, my big ambitious thing, right?

I was a goal setter. Yeah.

And along the way in the race itself, the most interesting realization that I had was that there was this almost euphoric moment for me, not when I actually crossed the finish line and when I had achieved it, which I did, I ran 2:57. The euphoric moment was maybe 10 minutes before the end of the race when I realized that it was going to happen. I was actually going to do it, that the work that I had put in and these things that I was doing, I was in the most pain I had ever been in my life, really like in the depths and darkness. My peripheral vision had closed in, all of these things, but I knew that it was going to happen. And I was like, I just need to continue enduring this and it's going to happen. I'm going to go and do this. I recently was reading this new book by Nicholas Thompson, your Atlantic colleague, who speaks about this beautifully, almost poetically. It's a beautiful book, The Running Ground, it's called. And he sort of references this idea across all of it. He actually had this beautiful line that was something to the effect of, In order to do it, I had to first forget that I couldn't do it. It was this idea of how often our brains hold us back from enduring the struggle long enough to get that benefit. And I've just found a lot of wisdom and life learning in the pain that we can kind of create in our own lives through these physical pursuits.

Yeah. Another thing that's worth pointing out is that one of the great barriers that we have to being able to find meaning in our struggle to be able to build and learn and grow from struggle is the ideology that pain is something that should be eliminated. And there's an eliminationist philosophy, particularly among people your age, that's quite foreign to people my age. One, I mean, every, every generation struggles to understand the next generation, but my kids are a little younger than you. And one of the things I noticed with a lot of their friends was that, you know, when they were sad or anxious, the first thing their parents did was put them in therapy. And, and I got nothing against therapy, But I have also have nothing against sadness and anxiety, quite frankly, because I'm a behavioral scientist and I know that these are manifestations of, you know, properly working activity of a healthy limbic system saying that you're sensing something that you need to be paying attention to. And that's good. I mean, if you got rid of sadness and anxiety, of fear and disgust and anger, you'd be dead in a week, man. I mean, that's a really bad thing. Plus you wouldn't learn and grow. So are you countercultural in your generation when it comes to pain?

100%. I think I'm countercultural in a lot of things. I've been sort of an 80-year-old man since I was in college.

Nice.

In a lot of ways, I've always gone to bed at 8:30 and woken up at 4:00, very much always lived differently. And look, I think a lot of that comes from my background, especially my Indian side. My grandmother was extraordinarily wise when it came to this. Type of stuff. Before she passed away, I asked her for advice she would give to her 30-year-old self, and she said, "Never fear sadness as it tends to sit right next to love." And that is directly tied to what you just said about the labeling of these certain emotions, whether it's sadness or struggle or anxiety as being bad and the other ones being good. Now you're saying like, okay, well, these are bad, so I should try to get rid of them. I need to fear these things and try to eliminate them, reduce them, reduce the friction that comes from them. But when you do that, you don't expose yourself to the good. If you're not willing to endure the risk of sadness, you will never feel the true depths of love. You will never open yourself up in the fully vulnerable way that is required to experience the true depths of love. And so many things in life are that way. If you don't expose yourself to that struggle and that real pain, you will not feel the joy of that hard-earned win that you get on the other side of it. And so I do think that that message getting across to more people, that so many of these things in life dance on this razor's edge, and without experiencing the bad, you cannot possibly hope to experience the good.

I want to dig a little deeper into that because still you're talking about the bad as a cost necessary to get the good. I want you to go deeper because I know I've read you for a long time. That's not the entirety of what you think. You think that the bad is good.

I think that the bad is good in what it creates in you and understanding all of those depths of who you are and what you are capable of. And recognizing that you can become friends with that bad, if you will. You know, I think that that draws upon a lot of ancient practices, whether it's Buddhist or Stoic practices. It is embracing it as just part of who you are as a whole being. I do often phrase these things, and I think that there was a Stoic philosopher who said that some of these things should be viewed as taxes on all of the benefit that you can get. You know, they are costs of entry.

That's Marcus Aurelius. To a T, but I think you're saying something much more Indian than that.

How would you articulate it?

Well, I mean, the point is that there's incredible beauty in being fully alive, and being fully alive requires that you recognize that there are positive and negative experiences. As such, you should give thanks for your suffering. You should find the sacredness in your suffering per se. That doesn't mean you need to become a fakir lying on a bed of nails necessarily. It doesn't mean that you actually have to go around self-flagellating. But in point of fact, people do this all the time, man. I mean, I start every day with an hour in the gym at 4:45 in the morning every day. For decades, I've been doing this and there's not a single day when my clock goes off at 4:30 in the morning, I'm like, "It's a great day." No, I'm like, "Embrace the suck." And at 4:45, I'm down there and I'm picking up heavy things and I'm doing things that are really uncomfortable. But the whole, in point of fact, after 30 years of doing this, I'm like, this frankly is awesome because I'm fully alive in these moments. That's what I'm, that's what I'm saying. I mean, there's something beautiful per se about the suffering beyond just the cost of doing business, right?

And it is the recognition that there is a version of you that would dream of doing that. The 95-year-old version of you that is bedridden and not able to will dream and wish they could go back and do a 4:45 in the morning workout. I was on a hard run on Monday of this week doing this hard workout and it was freezing cold out and I was in the middle of a really tough, like, rep of this run and I was running up a hill and I was miserable. I was like, this is stupid. I don't need to do this. I'm not really training for a race. Why am I putting myself through this? And it just so happened that this hill came over this crest and was sort of right alongside this cemetery. And I had this sensation while I was running by it of how lucky am I to get to suffer through this right now? Like, there are all of these people who lived their own lives, who have their own stories, all of these things, and they would give anything to have the opportunity to endure this suffering that I'm enduring right now. Yeah. And someday I would give anything to be in this moment.

Yeah.

And so I do agree. I mean, embracing the fullness of who we are. There's this concept in ancient Indian culture of Kalachakra, like the wheel of time, that time naturally goes through on a cosmic level and on an individual level, these cycles of creation, destruction, and then rebirth. And that you cannot bemoan any one of those elements because they are all a natural part of cosmic time, of who you are, of your own being, and of your own cycle.

Yeah, it's important. And lest anybody listening to this think that that's an exclusively Eastern concept, If you ever walk into the Notre Dame Cathedral or any cathedral for that matter, there's a rose window, you know, Sahil, those round windows on the back of the cathedral. That's, and that's to represent the ancient idea of the wheel of fortune. And if you look closely, typically you'll see a king on the top and you'll see a beggar on the bottom. And the whole point is there's only one way to be stable in this world, and that is to be in the center of the wheel. The whole point is you can go round and round and round, man. You're gonna get some vertigo doing that. Get to the center of the wheel such that no matter how fast it's going and which direction it's pointing, you know who you are. And one of the best ways to know who you are is to have a rum line, a destination, and understanding what success means to enjoy the journey, to articulate your wealth in these ways and all the things that you're talking about. I've got a couple other things to ask you, but first, before I do that, I mean, you've got, sort of a preternatural level of wisdom for a guy your age. Tell me about some mistakes that you've made.

I typically find that I make mistakes when I jump at new and seemingly exciting things without considering the full kind of scope of the opportunity cost.

Give me an example.

What they're going to require.

Like cold plunging?

No, I don't ever regret cold plunging. I maybe regret it first when I get in, but certainly not when I get out.

Well, watch, you got to watch the research. We got to see what long-term exposure to cortisol spiking does. When you're my age, we'll see. But anyway, yeah.

I know. I think that one's still TBD. Sauna is pretty— Sauna is—

Yeah, that's studied. That's well, well, well studied for sure. Heat. Yeah. Anyway, I didn't mean to get drawn off. Tell me more about your peccadilloes and faults.

I would say that the worst, mistake I ever made was one that sort of led me to that point that I made at the beginning of this, which was allowing my sort of creeping normality, if you will, to over the course of 7 years, get my life to a place where I was living wildly out of alignment with what my true priorities were in life. We think of mistakes, like when you ask for someone, oh, what are your biggest mistakes or what are your biggest failures? We think of there being like, oh, a single moment, right? Like I did this one thing and it was a huge mistake. And the reality in life and, you know, for people who are truly down and out, who have like found themselves under a bridge in some way, is no one wakes up one morning and says like, I'm going to screw up my life today. I'm going to ruin my life today. Right? It is the tiny little decisions and slip-ups that have that feeling of creeping normality. It's okay in the days. And then when you stack the negative compounding over time, it's not okay in the years. And I just think that my worst mistake in life was allowing that to happen over a period of 6 or 7 years to where I didn't pull out enough to see the bigger picture that my course had gotten way off base.

So you started one degree off and then one degree off and it does this, right? That, that's—

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a, there's a rule around that in aviation. It's like the 1 in 60 rule for every 1 degree error in heading. You'll miss your target by a mile for every 60 miles flown. So like the small variation leads to a huge miss when you amplify it across time. Look, that to me was really a byproduct of just assuming the default version of what it meant to live a good life and assuming that my insecurity could be solved by some external thing that like a gold medal, if you will, was going to make me feel better about who I was. There's this quote from the movie Cool Runnings, like a kind of funny, silly Disney movie. Jamaican bobsled team goes to the Olympics and John Candy is the coach and he's speaking to one of the athletes and he says, a gold medal is a wonderful thing, but if you're not enough without it, you're never going to be enough with it.

Right. Right. And so what point— what part of your life did this occur? This 6-year period, from when to when?

2014 through 2021. I was— it was my first job out of school. So from there through when I had to make the big change.

And you were already married by this point, right?

I got married a few years into that in 2016.

How did you get back on track? Was it your wife who saved you?

My wife was a huge part of it because my wife is, I would say, my number one truth teller in my life. You know, the one person who I think She's known me, we started dating when she was 15, I was 16 years old. And so, she knows me better than I know myself in many moments and really was able to identify and see that my energy, something was out of alignment and we needed to make a change.

Okay. So, in other words, you're the guy who does all this really important profound stuff, gives people all this advice, you harvest the best ideas you can possibly find and retail them to audiences of millions of people, but you still screw up.

The bottom line, always. I mean, this is all a constant process, right? It is a continuous process of adjustment, course correction, and struggle. Yeah.

Can I sum up our conversation?

I would love that.

And then you're going to tell me whether or not you agree with each point. And I've taken notes on our conversation and I want to turn this into 6 Lessons with Sahil Bloom. On office hours. Okay. 6 lessons to live by, 6 lessons to getting happier and having a better life. All right. Lesson number 1, watch the clock. It doesn't have unlimited time. Act according to the time constraints that you actually have. Make decisions that make sense with respect to the fact that time is limited. That's lesson number 1. Fair?

Fair.

And that's across all sorts of things in life. That's not just how many Thanksgivings you have left with your parents. It's how long your kids are going to be little kids. It's how long you have until retirement. It's how long until you have until the end of this workday. It's how long you have between now and when you have to get up in the morning. Remember, time is limited. Watch the clock. Lesson number 2, don't be one-dimensional. Now, what you told me was that the 6 years of your life that were, I mean, they were fine, but they weren't optimized. Is because you were working on one particular or two dimensions. And then you wrote a book called The Five Types of Wealth, which is a five-dimensional way to see your life. And you just told me that the worst part of your life is because you weren't living five-dimensionally. So the second lesson is don't live one-dimensionally because if you do, you will not be getting to the best possible point and you'll be neglecting some of the most important things in your life, right? Yeah.

You can walk yourself into a Pyrrhic victory. A victory that comes at such a steep cost to the victor that it might as well have been a defeat. Battle won, but war lost.

Lesson 3: Get in sync with yourself. Work to match what you do with what you say you believe and make sure that what you want is actually what you want to want. You need synchronization with yourself more than you need it with anything else on the outside if you're going to have any prayer at this kind of success. Is that fair?

Create the space to go and do that in your life, whether through prayer or through solitude, journaling, what have you.

Number 4 is we know the types of wealth and we have a concept of success, but write your mission. Be able to state your mission. Why? Because that's your true north. It might change from time to time, but you need to know it is the whole point. So write your mission. Is that a good number 4?

That's a great one.

Number 5, remember that you have a destination, but you're living the journey. You better enjoy it.

That's probably the most important lesson of them all at some point. Thriving is a continuous journey, not an end state.

Yeah. I mean, even in business, I mean, I teach at a fancy business school. One of the things that we tell them, you're going to be a great CEO, know the outcomes, but pay attention to the processes. And the same thing is true with your own life. You know, what does it mean to have a successful marriage? Well, to death do us part. Well, that doesn't mean that you're thinking the whole time about death. You should be thinking every day about being happier such that death do you part at some particular time. So, journey, not the destination. And last but not least, and this is maybe the hardest one of all, is to embrace the suck, man, because if you can't do that, you're not going to get the bliss. And it turns out that the suck is actually bliss. Fair?

I love it.

I like the 6 lessons from Sahil Bloom. They're good reminders for me and probably good reminders for the rest of us. Thank you for joining us and sharing these ideas on Office Hours.

Thank you for having me. This was the single most interesting Office Hours I've ever attended.

It's a low standard, I realize, but I'll take the compliment nonetheless. See you later, Sahil. Well, my friends, I hope you love that conversation as much as I did. Let me know your thoughts. Once again, the way to feedback with us is on any of the platforms. We read the comments here on the team, even if they're critical, especially if they're critical. That's helpful to me too. Or write to me at officehours@arthurbrooks.com. Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple. Follow me on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on all the other social media platforms where I'm always putting out different kinds of content and little clips of this and that and some original stuff as well. And order The Meaning of Your Life. I hope you have a wonderful week. Thank you for tuning in, for staying with this show, for listening or watching every week if you can, and for for recommending this show to, to the 2 million of your closest friends. That's how we actually can change the world together.

See you next week.