Why You're Probably Wasting More Time Than You Think (& What To DO About It!) With Sahil Bloom.

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast.

My life fundamentally changed when I realized that I would never trade lives with the people I was reading books about. We read all these books about these successful people, and we celebrate these people, and we admire them, and we very rarely think about the sacrifices and the trade-offs that those people made in the form of relationships, in the form of time, in the form of stress, in the form of health. In all of these other areas. And we're convinced and told by society that those are the things that we should want. And what I found over and over again was that often those people had pursued a path that I would view through my lens as the Pyrrhic victory. They won the battle but lost the much bigger picture war. We all know people who have made hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions of dollars, and we pat them on the back, we celebrate them, we admire them, we might even write books about them. And we ignore the fact that they have 3 ex-wives and 4 kids that don't talk to them. And we tell that person that they won the game. And my life changed when I started asking myself, is that actually a game that I care to win?

Welcome to The Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

Ben Greenfield: I don't even remember how I came across this book, "The Five Types of Wealth." I think it was because there's a pretty good Twitter follow out there, or X follow I should say, Sahil Bloom. He's a New York Times bestselling author. And, it might have been in one of his, as I believe Naval Ravikant would call it, incompressible tweets. That I came across the fact that he had released a book called "The Five Types of Wealth." And, I'm not a huge fan of some of these self-improvement books. There's a few authors who I really admire in the space. So, I don't read a lot of these type of books, but this one caught my attention. I slammed it on my Kindle, I read it, and it was just fantastic. Goes into all sorts of different types of wealth here. Time wealth, your— well, I should ask my guest on today's podcast. What are the 5 types of wealth?

Remind me. Thanks for the warm introduction. I appreciate it. Time wealth, you nailed. That is the first one. Time wealth is about freedom to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it, when you trade it for other things. Social wealth is the second one. It's about relationships. Mental wealth is the third type. This is about purpose and growth. Physical wealth is the fourth type. You're very familiar with this one, all about health and vitality. And then, financial wealth, the fifth type, what we all know about money but with the specific nuance that we can get into when we dig into it of really understanding your definition of enough.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. It was a good book. I often will hold up a book if I have the physical copy because I prefer the feel of real paper. I don't have a book to hold up, you guys, for this one because I read it digitally like I mentioned, but I highlighted a ton. It's sometimes frustrating for me. It's a good problem to have when I read a book and I'm like, "I don't even know how I'm going to interview the author and get through all of this." But, my guest on today's show, if you hadn't guessed already, is the guy who wrote the book, Sahil Bloom. That's how he knows so much about it. And, in reading it, I thought, well, what would be really valuable to you guys listening in as far as the things that I think might really serve you well. And, because I think a lot of people struggle with this and because it's been a little while since I've talked about the whole concept of productivity and time management, today I decided to focus a little bit on time wealth. And so, I've got some questions to ask Sahil here. And just so you know, Sahil is also a little bit into health and wellness himself considering that's a portion of the book. Am I correct, Sahil?

Yeah, a little bit is probably an understatement at this point. I mean, I played Division I baseball back in the day and I played at Stanford. I was not particularly talented and the only way that I got that scholarship was that I became something of a fitness maniac during my later high school years. I trained under this guy named Eric Cressey. I was his first client actually. Oh, no way. Yeah, before he was nearly as well-known as he is now, he had just opened his facility and I was his first client there. So, I was sort of a disciple of a lot of those training methodologies and have been a bit of a nerd around all this stuff ever since.

Yeah, Eric Cressey is an OG in the whole strength conditioning industry, particularly even though I don't follow him anymore, when I used to follow him and read some of his stuff, he was kind of known as the shoulder guru.

Yeah, he was really well known in the baseball world. He sort of is one of the founding fathers of baseball-specific strength and conditioning training. And now, he's the head of performance for the New York Yankees and has been for several years.

Yeah. So, obviously, in a podcast focused on time, I'd be remiss not to ask you a little bit about what your training routine looks like. When it comes to health specifically, do you have a specific morning routine or style of training that you follow?

Yeah, very specific. I've always been something of a routine junkie. We'll get into it when we get into time, but I'm a big believer that this phrase, "Don't tell me your priorities, show me your calendar." If I'm trying to make progress in absolutely anything, the first thing I do is I need it structured. I need it on my calendar. I need it laid out and sketched out. So, I'm very disciplined with my morning routine in particular. I get up right around 4 o'clock every morning. I've always been a big morning person. That's not because I'm a hard-o about not getting sleep, I just go to bed at 8:00 or 8:30. But, I'm up at 4:00, I do my cold plunge every morning out in the backyard.

Wait, I'm going to slow you down because I know folks are already wondering a couple of things. Bedtime at 8:00, up at 4:00, do you have kids, wife, family?

I have a wife and a 3-year-old son.

Okay.

So, I basically go to bed at the same time as my son. He's kind of down around 7:00, 7:30 on a good night. And, my wife and I will watch a show and go to bed right around that same time.

So, your wife goes to bed the same time as you. You guys aren't sleep divorce people?

No, we're on the same page on that. And, that has actually helped our relationship a lot. I have friends who are on a massively different schedule from their partner and it's tough.

Yeah, yeah, it is. And, the concept of sleeping in separate beds, I get it. There's actual research on this and it turns out that individuals or couples who are more emotionally and spiritually intertwined tend to do a better job sleeping in bed together. And, those who might be a little bit more distanced from each other, no surprises here, often get better sleep in separate beds. I'm a total snuggler. I love to sleep in the same bed as my wife. Sounds like you too. And then, the morning piece when you're up at 4:00 a.m. and you say you do a cold plunge, are you just rolling out and going straight into the plunge?

Pretty much. I mean, I am. I literally, my alarm goes off at 4:00, I go to the bathroom and then go get in the plunge. So, I'm probably in the plunge by, I don't know, 4:15 maybe at the latest most mornings, the time it takes me to kind of get out into the backyard. Every now and then I'll stare at it for, you know, a few minutes and then I realize like the cold water doesn't get any warmer if I look at it.

No, no, it almost gets colder. It almost gets colder the longer you—

Yeah, and it's the worst. I mean, in the winter it's awful. Now like we're starting to get to the time of year where that morning cold plunge gets a little easier. Like you can hear some birds chirping, it's a little warmer out, but in the winter, man, it is, that is rough.

Well, where do you live?

I live in the New York area, just outside New York City.

Yeah, that's legit. Sometimes somebody from California will say that and I'm like, "Oh, cry me a river." So—

Different beast. Yeah. No, so I do the cold plunge for anywhere from 3 to 7 minutes depending on the morning. I don't have a specific breathing thing that I do. To be honest, normally I'll film a little video just something that comes into my mind when I woke up in the morning, something to talk about. It also is a way for me to build up stress tolerance, like the ability to speak and articulate thoughts while you're really cold. I have just found to be a productive sort of a productive activity in terms of my own resilience and stress response mechanisms.

Ben Greenfield: Huh, that's actually a really good point. It kind of makes me wonder if anybody's ever actually researched— I'd be surprised if they haven't— learning under stress or producing content under stress or engaging in intellectual stress at the same time as biological stress and seeing if that actually increases cellular resilience or your HRV or something like that?

Yeah, I think it's partially— I've always had this idea of in the same vein as baseball, practice the way you're going to play. And, what I mean by that is in practice, you want to simulate as close to as possible the game environment both from an actual performance standpoint but also from a stress response standpoint. And so, for a public speaking engagement, I used to be a really nervous public speaker. I used to be the type of person who I'd get up there, my heart would start racing, I'd get really nervous, I'd start sputtering over words, et cetera. And, one of the things that I did to conquer that was I started doing practice sessions of the talk while doing Zone 2 cardio because it prepared me for that elevated heart rate state. Where I was actually practicing reps of the talk while in an elevated heart rate state so I could actually do it. So then when I got out there and I felt the elevated heart rate, it wasn't foreign to me trying to speak through it or give a talk. It just felt like this natural thing that I had prepared for.

I love that. I have a little bit of a similar preparation methods with my talks is I travel a lot, so I will practice while weaving through human traffic at airports.

Oh, it's so good.

It's interesting because you got a bunch of humans around you. There's distractions. You're in a different environment. And, you're still moving also a little bit of cardiovascular stress. So, I practice so many talks just while walking from gate to gate.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, that's a really good one. Yeah, I do think it builds that up. I mean, I've definitely gotten better through the cold plunge speaking through those reps of zone— I call it zone 2 practice sessions. It definitely works. Yeah.

And, I'm sure for the olfactory recall component, if someone comes out with some type of Cinnabon essential oil that I can smear on my upper lip when I'm actually up there giving a talk, it'd probably go even better.

Locked in.

Yeah, exactly. Okay. So, you have your cold plunge. What about your training? What's that look like?

Well, the last few years I've kind of picked up on this. I don't know. I hesitate to call it this hybrid training thing because I think it's cliché and too trendy now, but effectively, I'm trying to run relatively fast marathons without ever looking like a marathon runner. Is how I would define it. So, I've always really been into my lifting and training, like from the Cressey days, deadlifting and all of the kind of power lifts were a big part of it. I always want to look aesthetically good and muscular and my wife would never allow it otherwise. But, the new running pursuit of the last 2 years has been a cool sort of challenge and balance point against that, having to dial in nutrition to make sure that you're getting enough calories to to offset all of the caloric intensity of the cardio training that we're doing. And, I've run some pretty fast marathons. I ran 2:57 in my first marathon and then I ran 2:53 in my second one. I'll try to run a sub-2:50 this year. Body weight's been around 185 for all of those.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, that's pretty solid especially considering that you're lifting. Do you follow Cameron Haynes, the Bowhunter? His son, I think he just set something like the pull-up in 24-hour world record. And, he also runs marathons in jeans and he's jacked. He probably fits in that category as well.

Ben Greenfield: Super jacked. I mean, actually yesterday, I think he ran the Boston Marathon sub-2:40 wearing jeans. Yeah, I mean, he's on another level. That guy's a beast. Him and Nick Bare is the other one who sort of pioneered this space, also super jacked guy. Who has managed to run really well. I think it's a fun pursuit. It's challenging. It's definitely different.

Yeah, yeah. I kind of got clued into the concept that you could be a pretty good endurance animal and also have decent amounts of strength and muscle when I did obstacle course racing. And, one of my friends was Hunter McIntyre, also a pretty good follow. And, I think he's the HIROX World Champion right now, but clicking off sub-5-minute miles at nearly 200 pounds and probably 6% body fat. It's incredible. It's a little bit more cardiovascular strain, but you make a good point. It's kind of cool to be able to knock off those personal Mount Everest and still maintain good aesthetics and body composition.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. And, I mean, the science around the longevity benefits of the cardio training side are nothing to laugh at either. There's a clear benefit in terms of my longevity to doing those things.

Yeah. And, you're a prolific author. I mean, you're a New York Times bestselling author. I know you don't just sit on your hands all day after you train. And, you have this term, I think you call it time billionaire. Am I remembering that correctly?

Yeah. Yeah. The first time I came across that was from an investor named Graham Duncan who's a very successful investor, had built this incredible investment fund. And, he talks about the fact that interviews hundreds of young people that want to join this firm. And one thing that he recognized as a common trait among all these young people was that they all wanted to become billionaires. They all want to make, you know, make a billion dollars. And his recognition was that they are all billionaires in one very specific way, which is that they are time billionaires. They quite literally have billions of seconds left in their lives. The articulation there is really important because what you are recognizing when you say that you are a time billionaire is that time, not money, is really your most precious asset. Time is the one thing that you cannot get back, and it is the most precious resource. When you are young, you are quite literally a time billionaire. You are rich with time. You know, I go and ask young people, like, 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. Flies around on a Boeing business jet, all these things that you would want, but you would never trade lives with him because he's 95 years old. There's no way you would agree to trade the amount of time that he has left for all of the money that he has. And on the flip side, he would give anything to be in your shoes. He would give up every single dollar that he has to be back where you are today, to have the amount of time that you have. So you recognize in a simple question like that that your time has quite literally incalculable value. And yet, on a daily basis, how much of it are we really wasting? How much time are we spending scrolling on our phones, comparing ourselves to other people, stressing about the past, anxiety about the future, spitting on, disregarding this one most precious asset that we really have?

So, when it comes to this idea of not being able to buy time, I think a lot of people get it when they hear that and they're like, "Hey, yeah, time is money. I won't get it back." And yet, there still seems to be a constant struggle for many, many people when it comes to actually figuring out how to alter their habits and their daily routine to get or have the time that they need. How do you begin to tackle that?

I really think that from an unlock standpoint, the two things you need to think about here would be awareness and then attention. Awareness is about recognizing this fact that time is your most precious asset. And it's not just recognizing it in the abstract sense. It's not just, you know, listening to this and saying, yes, I understand time is my most precious asset. Really recognizing it on an ongoing basis is a much more challenging thing to recognize. You know, when you find yourself drifting, when you find yourself, you know, wasting time on dumb things, to be able to pull yourself back using that awareness into the present to recognize the importance of the moment. That's awareness. The second piece is the more challenging one, which is attention. Attention is the most important resource that you have when it comes to unlocking time, because harnessing your attention into the specific opportunities and moments that really matter is how you unlock time wealth. That's how you lead and drive the 10, 100, 1000x outcomes that actually create step function changes in your life. The analogy that I like to use when it comes to this to really visualize it is thinking about like Lionel Messi playing soccer. He's known for walking around the field the entire game. He, you know, literally like if you go search Google, Lionel Messi walking, you'll get 500,000 hits. He has the most talked about walking habit in the world and everyone bemoans the fact that he walks around the field and thinks he's lazy. When in reality it's part of the strategy. He is conserving energy. He's creating a map of the field. He's creating space on the field. And right in the perfect moment when it really matters, he is in a full 100% sprint at the perfect angle to get the ball and score. That is what harnessing attention is about. It is about identifying those perfect moments and making sure that you are prepared to harness all of your energy, energy to concentrate your attention into the one thing that really matters. That requires that you identify those things that matter, the things that are going to create energy. And it requires you to say no to all of the other stupid moments and dumb things that are currently pulling at your attention because your attention is a finite resource. You can't just all of a sudden create it. If you're spreading it across 50 things, you're never going to have the concentrated blast into the one thing, right?

And sometimes it's stupid moments or dumb things, and sometimes it's things that are kind of important but not important enough to prioritize your time with. Sometimes I feel like an asshole personally, and I'd love to hear your take on this because I tell people when they ask me if I want to go have a coffee or have a lunch that I don't do coffee and I don't do lunch. I just don't do it. I don't find that sipping a cup of coffee in terms of the time it takes to drive to the coffee shop and do the meeting and arrange the appointment, is worth the time. And, I work through lunch. I use lunch as a time to read articles, research journals, catch up on videos, catch up on podcasts while I'm hunkered over a salad and I just don't do lunch. And, not in an antisocial way, I still get out with people, but I don't find that coffees and lunches are worth the time trade-off. Do you do coffees or lunches or have a typical reply if people ask you about that?

I think that having rules like this is one of the most powerful things, by the way. Like, this is a real unlock for people, is you just need to set a rule of the things that you do and don't do, because then it's easy to say, no, I just don't do that. That's a much easier out than like a specific thing of like, this one I'm not going to do, that one I'm going to do. It's harder to make those decisions. For me, my version of that is that I don't do phone calls or Zooms. You know, like if people want to do like a get-to-know-you phone call, pick-your-brain type chat. I just won't do it. I actually like meeting people in person. The way that I've identified these differences, by the way, is actually a good tool that people can use. It's what I call my energy calendar exercise. So at the start of a week, look at your calendar, say on a Monday, and color code the activities from the day after you get done with them. According to whether they created energy, meaning you felt lifted up, you kind of had a pull of interest towards those things, mark them green. If it was neutral, mark it yellow. And, if it was energy-draining, if it actually made you feel physically drained, mark it red. If you do that for a week, you will have a very clear visual picture of the types of activities that create energy versus drain energy in your life. Outcomes follow energy. So, if you lean into the things that are creating energy, you are going to feel better and you're going to drive better outcomes in your life.. And if you lean away from the things that are draining energy, you will be able to strip those out of your world so that you can focus on the things that are creating energy. For me, when I first did that, I identified that phone calls, Zoom meetings were massively energy-draining for me. Now, at the time, I was working in finance, like 80 to 100-hour weeks, traditional finance. And so my reaction was, well, I just have to do those. I can't really do much about it. These phone calls and Zooms are just on my calendar.. And so I looked at it and asked myself, well, okay, even if I have to do these, is there a different way I could do them that would make them more energy creating? And the answer for me was that I could do walking calls. About half of the calls I could have done on a walk. And walking calls for me are energy creating. I get energy from being outside. I feel more open. I can't multitask if I'm walking around and doing it, so I'm more present, focused on the call. So I took half my phone calls and turn them into walking calls. And that made a dramatic difference for me at the time. It meant that at the end of the week, I felt totally different. The outcomes from those calls were better. It was a tiny intervention that really improved the overall flow of my week. Now I'm in a position where I can dictate my schedule a bit more as an entrepreneur and doing the things I'm doing. And so one of my rules, as it were, is that I don't do phone calls or Zooms. If people want to get together in person, you know, they want to meet me, I always offer for them to come join me on a run. I run at this time at this place basically every single day. If you want to come join me for an easy run, more than welcome to. You can pick my brain on a run, but I'm not going to do the thing where I sit in my office on phone calls and Zooms all day doing get-to-know-you chats.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, yeah. I completely resonate with the idea that you can take something like a phone call or a Zoom and turn it into an enjoyable activity. I enjoy podcasting. I'm walking during our podcast and I do find myself more focused when I'm walking. I'm often getting the cardiovascular benefit and the movement, but there's also the brain-derived neurotrophic factor. And, I honestly do better podcasts when I'm moving a little bit. But, with Zoom calls, it's tough, especially in this day and age because people want to see your face and they want it to be video. And, I don't want to tell you how many times I will get on a Zoom I will say hello to the person on the video and then I will tell them, "I'm going to go on a walk while we talk. The phone will be in my pocket. My video is going off." And, a lot of people, especially these days that they— 20 years ago, nobody would have cared. They would have thought it was just magical and incredible that you could have video, but if you didn't, no big deal. And now, people seem to just have this total pattern interrupt and almost have a a little bit of a problem with not being able to see your face.

Yeah, it's, um, I mean, it's an odd response of the last, just the last few years, right? I have found that it's actually helpful to let people know that it's a positive for the call. Like, this isn't me not wanting to be there with you. It's actually the opposite. When I'm sitting on Zoom, if I'm at my desk, I— we all know this, right? Like, on Zoom, scientifically, first off, everyone's looking at themselves. Like 90% of the time everyone's just looking at themselves, uh, and you are so likely just reacting to whatever notifications are popping up on your computer. So you're sitting there and you're like, okay, I'm trying to have a conversation with person B, but the reality is that both, both of us are responding to emails, we're checking text messages, we're looking at Twitter, like we're doing 8 other things versus if I'm out for a walk and my phone is in my pocket, I'm just with you. We're on a call, we are really locked in one-on-one. It makes actually a big difference.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, I agree. Even right now walking on this treadmill, I can't reply to text messages, I can't hit WhatsApp, I can't look at Instagram. I am 100% zoomed in and dialed into Sahil with this camera right in front of my face. And yeah, I think it definitely speaks volumes to how we focus our attention when we're in meetings like this and how many of them we actually take. The other one that kind of annoys me you probably get these too, Sahil, is collaboration. "Hey, I want to talk with you about a collaboration or a potential idea that we have together." My instant reply to that is email me the details of the exact collaboration that you're thinking of and I'll see if it's something that makes sense.

Yeah, just don't do phone calls. I mean, I think that it's one of those funny things where it's just like What's going to happen is we're going to get on a phone call, we're going to spend 30 minutes, and then it's going to end up as an email where you have to send me the details because we're going to— we're just going to get on and chit-chat. It's like, oh, let's do a phone call to chat about potentially doing a speaking engagement. You're like, well, why don't we just have you send the details of it and we can talk about whether or not it's relevant? The phone call is not going to make or change any of these things in the first place. It's the same with, you know, like, I run an investment fund. I have a small venture fund that I raised in 2022.. And, um, the first instinct, just because it's a pattern and it's the way that everyone does things, is let's hop on a call and I'll walk you through the deck. And my response now is I would much rather you send me the deck or send me the memo in advance so that I can digest it, actually understand if I'm interested, and come up with any thoughtful questions that I really want to hone in on and ask. Because otherwise, We're going to get on, you're going to do your rehearsed pitch, which may or may not be the things that I really want to focus in on, and we're both just wasting 30 minutes or wasting an hour of our time when we could have been much more targeted with how we were using it.

And you actually have these charts in your book because again, I realize that you and I could come across right now as like antisocial assholes not wanting to have phone calls or spend time with people in certain environments. But you actually have this chart, a series of charts that breaks down the amount of time that we spend with different people over the course of our lives. Talk to me about those charts and why they're in there.

Yeah, it's actually the opposite of antisocial for the exact reason of these charts, really. When you are saying no to things more effectively, that means that you get to say yes to the things that really matter to you. And that is the essence of all of this. It is to say that the only way that you unlock time wealth is when you learn to say no to the things that don't matter so that you can say yes to the things and to the people that do. And that could be business opportunities, or it could be time with your wife and son. For me, the ultimate thing I am saying yes to in this moment, in this season of my life, is this time with my son. He's 3 years old. My wife and I are unbelievably in love with him, spending time with him as much as we can. And so every time I take on something new, I'm effectively saying no to time with my son. There's no created— that time doesn't just get poof magically created. It's me saying no to things with him. And so having real clarity around the things you're saying yes to allows you to say no more effectively as well. Those charts that you're referencing are charts that come from data from the American Time Use Survey, which is this amazing data set, you know, 30, 40 years of data looking at how Americans spend their time and who they spend it with. Over the course of their lives. So these charts map the averages across these datasets of who you are spending your time with as you age. And it looks at, uh, you know, time with your partner. It looks at time with your family, that's your parents and your siblings. It looks at time, uh, with your children. It looks at time with friends, with coworkers, and by yourself. And it is really striking to see this data and to see it visually because what you recognize is that there are specific windows of time much shorter than you care to believe or imagine during which certain people occupy your world. You have quite literally 10 years with your kids. I mean, the data on this is shocking. 95% of the time you have with your children is over by the time they turn 18.

When you say 10 years, you must mean like cumulative, because obviously people's kids aren't moving out when they're 10 years old.

What I mean is that you have 10 years of like really concentrated, high-density time with them. That is when you're spending a whole lot of time with them, is the first 10 years of your life. Then they're off doing other things, is kind of the point. Like, so what I'm saying is 75% of the actual time you have with your kids is over by the time they turn 12, um, the cumulative time. I mean, once they turn 18, 95% of the time is gone because then they move out and they go on and have their own lives. But the bulk of that 95% is in that first 10 years because they're at home, they don't have friends yet, they're not in school all hours, they don't have all sorts of activities. This is like really the window. And so, the point of all of this stuff, I mean the recognition around it is that there are these magical windows of time when the people that matter most to you in the world are going to be in your life. Either you recognize that and you prioritize those people during those windows or you miss it and you come to regret it later. And for me personally, I want to be in the former camp. I never want to regret the way that I approach time during these special years that I have with my son as an example or with my parents who are getting much older now and recognizing they're not going to be around forever.

Ben Greenfield: When it comes to your son specifically, how do you balance that with the idea that you have to provide for the family? I think in most cases fathers, in some cases mothers, they're off working and away from the children justifying to themselves that they're doing that so that their kids can have a good life or so that they can put bread on the table, so to speak.

This is the most fundamental tension of being a parent. It is the tension as I identify it between presence, that is the desire to be present with your child during these special years, and ambition. Uh, which is the desire to go and create, to go and build, to go and provide, to do all of these things. The way that I personally wrestle with it is to recognize that this whole idea of work-life balance is fundamentally broken. When you say balance, work-life balance, what you're saying is that the two, work and life, are fundamentally opposed. They're in tension. They're pulling against each other. The reality is that you can have work-life harmony. You can really have these things come together because your family is a huge part of the mission that you are all on together to go and create this life that you're trying to build. So as an example of that, when I'm traveling, when I'm going and working on things, when I was on the book tour, when I was like pushing really hard on all of this, I want my wife and son to understand why I'm doing those things so that they are a part of that mission. Because if you don't articulate that, that they're a part of it, that they understand the why, they're going to fill it with the worst version, right? Like, your kids are going to fill your absence with the worst version of it if you don't explain the real version of it. And so that is how I have personally wrestled with it, is to just say that this is not about giving up your ambitions. This is not about, you know, just being present. We obviously have to provide, we have to go do these things, but it is about explaining and bringing your kids along for that journey for them to understand why you are working hard on the things you're working on. Also recognizing that one of the most important lessons you can teach your kids is that working hard on things that matter, things that you care about is a powerful lesson for life.

Isn't there a story in the book about like your dad on a plane and you were watching movies or something like that?

Yeah, I got to go along with my dad on a work trip that he had when I was a kid to Asia. My dad's a professor. He was giving a talk at some conference and I got to go as his plus one. And we were flying on this long overnight— I don't know if it was overnight— long 12-hour flight to Asia. And I'm watching movies, I'm getting all the food. It was like a kid in a candy store, unbelievable experience. And my dad was sitting next to me and the entire The entire 12-hour flight, he just worked. He was working on his talk, working on his presentation. We landed and I turned to my dad and I was almost incredulous. I was like, "Dad, you didn't watch a single movie on that whole flight." Not even a glass of that champagne. Yeah, you didn't have a single thing. And, he just looked at me and said, "This is what's required for me to perform at the level I'm capable of, the level that I expect for myself and to bring you along on this trip." And that stuck with me more than anything else my whole life. And it was not like that he sat me down and told me, "Hey, here's the importance of hard work. Here's what matters. Here's how you have to work and do these things." It was that I saw him. He was embodying those principles and I learned from seeing that done. And there's an important insight there because we often think that we can teach people things. We can tell people the things we care about. We can, pass learnings along by sitting down and writing down a list and explaining the values and the mission and all these things to them. But the reality is that you just need to embody the things that you want those people to learn. If I want my son to treat my wife like a queen, I better damn well treat my wife like a queen. If I want my son to understand the power of delayed gratification, he better damn well see me work hard on things for a benefit later. There is no teaching your kids anything. You can only hope to embody the things that you want them to learn.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. They barely listen to a word coming out of your mouth relative to what they see you doing, whether it's Pomodoro breaks during work or how many times you glance at your phone at the table or anything else. Kids pick up on that. And, in talking about all this related to children, I do think that you can hack the averages that you show in those charts just a little bit. I'll tell you what I mean by that. My objective with my home is to make it such a fun Disneyland-esque playground that not only do my kids and their friends want to stick around as much as possible and hang out here as much as possible, but also so that my grandchildren and maybe even my great-grandchildren will really want to come hang out at grandpa's house because it's such a cool place to be. I mean, frisbee golf course and bocce ball and cornhole and hot tubs. Every year, I add something new to the property with the objective of building almost like a family compound. Sounds a little bit too cult-like, but such a fun place that this is the family gathering hole for generations to come.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. First off, yes, you can hack the averages. I mean, frankly, we are all in the business of hacking the Averages, like you're doing things right now, you're walking on a treadmill while we have this conversation because you believe you can hack life expectancy averages. You believe that you can hack health averages. All these things we know an average is spread across the entirety of society. None of us that are listening to this, you and I having this conversation, have any aspirations to be average in anything we do in life. I have zero— I've never wanted to be average at anything that I do. So the averages should be a call to arms. To go and break the hell out of those curves and make the most of the time we have. And look, this entire book is an outflow of me recognizing the pain of that average. The very first line of the book is me having this conversation with an old friend who pointed out that I was going to see my parents 15 more times before they died. He was pointing out that I was on the tail end of that curve with my family, that I had very little time left with them. Well, we took an action and bent that curve. I quit my job, we sold our house in California, and we moved 3,000 miles across the country to live closer to both of our sets of parents. That number 15 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 literally took the curve from being all the way down to just spiking it. And now we have tons of time. You know, it's not infinite, but we bent the curve in a meaningful way. And So, that's all to say the goal is to take actions to bend those curves. Use it to drive awareness just as I said earlier. Take the awareness that those curves provide and then take action to harness your attention into the things that matter so that you can actually create better outcomes.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, yeah. I noticed that was one of the other charts in the book, how much time that we actually have left with our parents. And, that's incredible that you actually pulled the trigger on that. Created a scenario where you could be closer to them. So many people don't even think of that. And, I think it's also a way of honoring your parents in a way. Related to this, you got your time with your kids, you got your time with your parents, but then you just have your time in general. And, you talked about attention and awareness. There's this whole concept of memento mori, the idea of dwelling upon your own finiteness and as morbid as it might seem, your death. In our Greenfield family constitution, me and my wife and my sons have all mapped out our funeral, our memorial service, our end-of-life wishes. And, it is a powerful exercise and it does remind you of your own mortality. But, do you mess around with or have you heard of any of these apps that will tell you, whatever you open the app, tells you how many days you have left in your life or apps that give you this constant momento mori or some type of self-reflection at night about this. Do you systematically or intentionally weave the concept of memento mori into your life?

Ben Greenfield: I have one of the calendars, which is one of the wall calendars that has the weeks of your life mapped out and you shade in weeks as you live them so that you can very clearly see the weeks lived in black and the weeks remaining in white. I personally find that life gives you enough reminders of the fact that you are mortal if you open your eyes to it. We are at the age now where unfortunately, once a month, you get some reminder. There's some friend that gets sick. There's something that happens in the family. There's someone that's not doing well. And, if you open your eyes to those things and if you allow yourself to sit with them and actually be impacted by them, they have that same effect. When you are younger, you don't yet have that. You still feel immortal. You still feel like, "Okay. Well, time is something that happens to old people, but I'm good." As you start to get into your 30s, 40s, 50s, you start to feel that on a more regular basis. And so, I have found less need to have the visceral calendar-esque reminders.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, yeah. We touched a little bit on starting into your routine, how you prioritize time with your sons, how you move to be closer to your parents. But, I think it's a lot of the little nitty-gritty daily ins and outs that derail people when it comes to time management. Gosh, I have friends who will drive 30 to 45 minutes to go to Costco to get the deals at Costco and then back home. And, it's like, "Dude, that was 60 to 90 minutes and you saved $2 on eggs. And, I've always admired the— I think this comes from UPS, the idea of avoiding left turns as much as possible when you're running errands because it takes a lot more time to cross lanes than to focus on right turns and to map your travel out accordingly, which nowadays Google Maps helps a little bit with finding the fastest route. But, I want to hear some of the practical things that you do and maybe if it helps for you to keep walking through your daily routine after you get out of that cold plunge and some of the things that you do to manage time as as you go through your day?

Yeah. I would say most significant intervention in my own life that has helped a lot has been just time blocking things on my calendar around the general activity that I'm going to be doing during that window. Knowing the blocks when I'm going to be really focusing on a specific thing and knowing what that thing is, reducing the friction to starting on that thing, has been really meaningful in terms of getting the most important work done. The most salient example of that is that in the evening, I spend 5 minutes or so sketching out the 2 to 3 priority tasks for my morning focus work block. That morning block from about 4:30 to about 7:30 is my most important work block of the day because it's the work block before my son and wife are awake and it's quiet in the house. I can truly focus. There's no emails, there's no social media, there's no calls of, of my attention other than whatever it is that I'm focusing on. So, spending the 5 minutes the night before to identify the things that I'm going to focus on that really matter, having them pulled up so that it's easy so that I can just get started right away, that has been a very significant improvement to my overall flow.

Ben Greenfield: And, are you using a calendar management system for that or a time management system like iCal or BusyCal or one of these apps that let you track your priorities?

I'm not super fancy. I use a note card. Okay.

Yeah, no, like a physical note card and a pen.

Yeah, physical note card. I write down— I've tried every single fancy productivity system in the world. And what I found is that the note card is better than all of them. Because what happens with these fancy productivity systems is that people spend more time on the productivity system than on getting the things done that the productivity system was supposed to help you with. This is like the paradox of routines in general. That the best routine in the world is the one that actually that you can break and still get things done. The routine is supposed to serve you, not supposed to own you. And, for a lot of people, I think these productivity routines, these morning protocols, these fancy elaborate things, they end up becoming a slave to that routine rather than having the routine serve them in the thing that actually matters.

Some of the productivity apps with all the bells and whistles, they can create a scenario in which you're taking one step back to take two steps forward. A perfect example would be I switched last year from Gmail to Superhuman for email management. I had pretty slow email workflow for about 3 weeks while I was learning the shortcuts and the new interface and how to create split inbox folders and all the things that Superhuman allows you to do. But now, it's like triple the speed going through email triaging. So, I think Sometimes it just depends on how fast a certain system takes to learn. But, like you, as far as planning out the next day's event, I'm pretty simple. I use Notes, like just the Notes app that comes in native OS, and I'm just scribbling down on there apart from an actual calendaring system what the next day is going to look like.

Yeah. I guess my question that I try to ask myself with all of these things before taking on some new system that's going to improve it before doing any of that is do I actually want to be good at this thing? So like with email, it's a good example. I've never done— I still use the Apple Mail app on my computer. Everyone, all of my like tech friends, when they see that, lose their minds. They're like, why aren't you using Superhuman? Why aren't you using whatever?

Insert one of 500. Almost as bad as AOL.

My whole thing is like, I'm not trying to be good at emailing. I actually want to be bad at emailing. I want people to email me less. Because I respond in like a week. I mean, literally my response time to emails is probably about on average like a week at this point. And what I found is that people email me less and I don't like, you know, I'm not trying— in my old job that wasn't possible. I had to respond to emails in, you know, within an hour on the things that I do now. You know, look, like I make money through creating content, you know, sharing ideas, writing books. Uh, speaking, um, you know, some businesses that I own where I'm not the operator. So I'm not having to respond to emails right away. Um, my money is made by, by spending time thinking on bigger picture things, um, and really creating. And none of that really involves being great at email. So, uh, for me to spend time trying to improve my email system or improve my productivity system is probably just pulling me away from the actual thing that matters. And this all goes to that most important time management, time wealth principle, which is you really need to identify what are the 2 to 3 things that move the needle, the 2 to 3 things that are the most important priorities in your personal and in your professional life. Once you identify those 2 to 3 things, you can get really focused and regimented about how to optimize, how to improve, and how to perfect those things. And how to say no to everything that falls outside of those buckets. It's a work in progress. I still say yes to too many things, but I am definitely getting better about it over time.

Yeah. And, I agree with the 2 to 3 number. I mean, not only for how many high-priority tasks you're going to be able to cognitively focus on, give deep work to, and attend to on an average day, but even when I travel, my rule is a maximum of 3 highlights. It's not going to be see this restaurant, go to this museum, go visit this park, come back, visit this place for lunch, go check out this gym, have this meeting, go to dinner. Usually, it's more something like, "Hey, I want to check out this amazing gelato shop and I want to go for a walk in this park," and that's it. Those are the two main things scheduled when traveling. And, it allows you to be so much more free-flowing and not be rushed and hastily progressing from task to task or event to event. So, yeah, I think even with travel, minimizing the number of, not work appointments, but just highlights in general, I call them, when you're on the road.

Ben Greenfield: There's just so much rocking horse stuff out there, if you will. I find this with work the most, but there's so many very obvious pieces of work or tasks or things that you can do that are in front of you that stare at you. They're shiny, they feel abundantly obvious to go and do, and all they are is a fancy distraction. And, uh, you become a rocking horse, meaning you are constantly moving but never actually making progress, never going anywhere. And I find that with so much of the work that I end up doing, I end up defaulting into It's like I'm just doing something because I think this is the way that it's supposed to be done because I think I'm supposed to do this thing. And it's generally speaking easier than the thing I actually should be working on and doing. And fighting back against that tendency to opt into that rocking horse work is a really productive endeavor.

Yeah. Yeah. What's it look like at 7:30 when your kids and your wife are up and around and you're kind of done with those 2 to 3 hours of high-priority work?

Come down and make breakfast. We all hang out for about an hour or so, go for a walk once the weather's nicer. Usually, sun's coming up and we can go out on a walk in the neighborhood, get some outdoor time. And then, about 8:30 is when I head out for my training for the day, whatever run that I have, whatever lift I'm going to do that day.

And then, going into the rest of the day, do you have more work or is it all just reactive at that point? Relying to emails on your crappy OS or making phone calls.

Yeah, I'm adding you to the list of people that are going to give me crap about this. No, so from about, let's say, 8:30 to 11:00 at peak when my training is really at a peak, that's kind of my training window just with driving time and all of that stuff. From about 11:00 to noon, I'll do family time again. We'll all have lunch together, we'll go for a walk. And then from 12 to 5, I have two sort of focus work blocks. Generally speaking, the two of those will be focused on business-related activities, less creative. So I'm most creative in the morning. So I always try to stack my creative work first thing in the morning. Later in the day, I'm very much not creative. And so I try to do more business-related things that could be investing, which would be spending time thinking about different investment opportunities, speaking to the founders if I need to on anything in particular, or it's doing things strategically at any of the companies that we're working on, putting together different projects or different things that we're looking at.

Yeah. What some people might call reactive work, although it's really not necessarily reactive what you described such as analyzing an investment, it simply doesn't fall into the creative bucket.

Yeah, the way that I think about time is there's 4 types of professional time.

That's actually what I wanted you to— I wanted to ask you about that. You read my mind.

Oh yeah. So this is a framework that's in the book that I really think is helpful for thinking about your professional life, which is you have 4 types of professional time. There is management time, which is analogous to the reactive time you're talking about. That's meetings, that's calls, that's email, that's processing things, et cetera. That's usually about 80% of most people's professional time is management time. There's creation time, which is the second type. That's what I try to spend that morning block on. It's creating things. That's writing, that's, uh, coding, that's creating in whatever way around your work. Um, then you have these two kind of forgotten types of professional time that most people have none of in their calendar. Those would be consumption, which is all about reading, listening, and learning, and ideation, which is actually about thinking, spending time thinking about the different ideas so that you can let ideas and concepts sort of intermingle in your brain. I try to make sure that I have all 4 of those types during the course of the week. That doesn't mean that every single day is gonna have them, but generally speaking, um, my morning block is my creation time. Then I have that first afternoon block is much more focused on management activities. That is email, that's the processing of stuff. And then that second work block will be more about consumption and ideation. So that's when I'm reading something that I really wanted to go deeper on. That's when I'm maybe going out for a walk and brainstorming a new newsletter topic or something for my book or, um, something that I want to talk about on some sort of podcast. Um, that's what I'm doing, some of that thinking. And then, in the evening after my son's bath time, I always do a sauna before going to bed. And, that's when I do a final bout of sort of reading and thinking. I'll bring something that I want to review, something that I want to read into the sauna with me. I print it out on paper because you can't bring technology in there. And, that's when I do some of my best clear the head thinking, get ideas off the brain and onto the paper. That has been I would say the sauna has been the single highest ROI investment that I've made over the last few years.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, you can do a lot except the books will fall apart, but sometimes I'll save the crappy magazines for the sauna. But yeah, I agree, the saunas are incredible because again, very similar to walking while podcasting, you can get all the benefits of heat stress and longevity while you're in there consuming or ideating. It's kind of interesting because I've I suppose accidentally prior to reading your book woven those two more neglected aspects of professional time into my life. Namely, like I mentioned, I don't do lunches. Lunches are consumption time, right? Research articles, videos, sometimes thumbing through a book, et cetera. And then, I always have typically between about 2:00 and 3:00 PM completely unblocked calendar. And, that is the time that I'm allowed to go into my lounge and relax, meditate, catnap. And usually, towards the latter 10 to 20 minutes of that session, that's when I'm ideating. I'm digesting and thinking about things that occurred earlier in the day, making plans for a new idea or something I'm going to be tackling later on in the day or the next day. And then, Sundays are kind of like our rest day. And Sundays are also a big day for just walking and ideating and just thinking about things.

Yeah. I think that in general, high performers have knowingly or unknowingly adopted some of these principles because it unlocks high performance. It's not a chicken or the egg thing. Adopting these 4 types of time, having these woven into your day does lead to higher performance over long periods of time. What you find is that those forgotten types are essential for having new ideas and being able to execute on new ideas over long periods of time. You can hack it for a short period of time, but in the long run, people who have had longevity in whatever it is that they're doing professionally have had to engage that consumption and that ideation time on a regular basis.

Yeah. And, and when it comes to the time with your son and prioritizing time with him, let's say until he's 18, Is there anything that you are delaying until then? And, the reason that I ask is I started writing fiction, I got one book into a 4-part series and then realized my sons are the protagonists in the book. I realized I'm spending more time writing about my sons than being with them during their formative years. I'm going to delay fiction until they're out of the house. There's also this 10-day hunting trip I really want to go on in Alaska. And again, solo by yourself and I'm delaying that until that formative time with my son still living at my home is done. Are you delaying anything that is a big thing bucket list item until your son's grown up and gone?

That's an interesting question that I've never really thought about. I would say that the things that I'm delaying would be, and it might just be foregoing because I don't know if some of these will still exist, but There are certainly professional opportunities that I'm regularly foregoing or saying no to because the trade-off that exists is a whole bunch of time away that I'm not willing to make. And you have to do that. Life is a big Cornelian dilemma at some point. Like, you have to make trade-offs and sacrifices of certain things. You're making a decision that is— Right, right.

Choose your regrets.

Yeah, exactly. You're making a decision that's inherently imperfect. And you need to know what your yes is at the end of the day in order to say no. Uh, and I know that looking back on it, when I'm 80, I would much more regret, uh, not having spent the time with him than I would not having made an extra X amount of money or taken whatever new opportunity that thing is. And so, uh, you know, if you came and offered me, uh, $10 million a year to, uh, you know, travel 300 nights out of the year, I wouldn't take it. And that sounds crazy to some people, but it's just true because I already have enough. Like, I'm not extraordinarily rich or anything, but I have enough and, um, we have a great life and I get to spend a lot of time with my son. And my definition of wealth is being able to take my son in the pool at 1:00 PM on a Tuesday. I know that, I know that that is my wealthy life. It is not taking him on a private jet, which would require me to make $10 million more a year and probably be traveling 300 nights out of the year. That's not my definition of what I want. And so, I have no reason to go and chase those things.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. And, I think that acceptance of the potential regret is also important. Before we start recording, I told you I'm going into town to play pickleball tonight. That means that I will likely not be engaging in another hobby that I'm really trying to grow and build, guitar practice. But, I just know in advance, hey, The regret might be there a little bit that I didn't practice my guitar today, but I chose to play pickleball. I'm okay with that. Just having the awareness of the choice.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, yeah. I totally agree with that. A lot of power just comes from being more self-aware about the things that you really want in life. When you know what you actually want in life, you're able to take actions to build towards those things. Uh, my life fundamentally changed when I realized that I would never trade lives with the people I was reading books about. We read all these books about these successful people, whoever it is from history or the present, and we celebrate these people and we admire them. And we very rarely think about the sacrifices and the trade-offs that those people made in the form of relationships, in the form of time, in the form of stress. In the form of health, in all of these other areas. And we're convinced and told by society that those are the things that we should want. And what I found over and over again was that often those people had pursued a path that I would view through my lens as the Pyrrhic victory. They, they won the battle but lost the much bigger picture war. Um, and we don't have to look far to find examples of people like that. We all know people who have made hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions of dollars,, and we pat them on the back, we celebrate them, we admire them, we might even write books about them, and we ignore the fact that they have 3 ex-wives and 4 kids that don't talk to them. And we tell that person that they won the game. And my life changed when I started asking myself, is that actually a game that I care to win? And the answer is no. And knowing that has meant that I am able to pursue things in a very different way. And I feel zero insecurity about that. I no longer walk into rooms feeling like I need to stack myself up on the basis of money earned or how rich I am, which is the way that I felt back when I worked in finance. I'm just able to be myself because I'm really comfortable in the things that I actually want.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, I have that reminder conveniently pinned to my life because I coach about 8 to 10 people every month for their health, their fitness, their nutrition. Many of them are wealthy and I would not want to be in the shoes of several of them simply because they have all the money in the world and they're not able to swing a golf club because their back is hurt and they're going through their fourth divorce. And sure, they've got the money but none of the happiness or the blessings that come from prioritizing a lot of the other forms of wealth that you talk about in your book. Sahil, in a podcast about time wealth, I want to respect your time. This book, for those of you watching or listening, is just incredible. I mean, we barely even delved into the depth of the time wealth category alone, much less the other 4 types of wealth. So, in the shownotes, which you can find at bengreenfieldlife.com/bloom-podcast, Sahil's last name, Bloom, B-L-O-O-M. I'll link to the book. I'll link in the shownotes to everything else that we discussed except maybe Apple Mail. I don't know that many people are going to go download or start using that, but we might leave that one out. But besides that, I'll put it all in there. Sahil, you're an incredible wealth of knowledge. You're a great follow. I encourage people to follow him on X also. Thank you so much for giving away your valuable time and maybe a little bit of time with your son to talk today.

This was a thrill. I've been a great admirer of yours for a long time, so thank you so much for making the time for me.

Alright, folks. I'm Ben Greenfield along with Sahil Bloom signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com.

To discover even more tips, tricks, hacks, and content to become the most complete boundless version of you, visit bengreenfieldlife.com. In compliance with the FTC guidelines, please assume the following about links and posts on this site. Most of the links going to products are often affiliate links of which I receive a small commission from sales of certain items, but the price is the same for you. And sometimes I even get to share a unique and somewhat significant discount with with you. In some cases, I might also be an investor in a company I mention. I'm the founder, for example, of Kion LLC, the makers of Kion-branded supplements and products, which I talk about quite a bit. Regardless of the relationship, if I post or talk about an affiliate link to a product, it is indeed something I personally use, support, and with full authenticity and transparency recommend in good conscience. I personally vet each and every product that I talk about. My first priority is providing valuable information and resources to you that help you positively optimize your mind, body, and spirit. And I'll only ever link to products or resources, affiliate or otherwise, that fit within this purpose. So, there's your fancy legal disclaimer.