Finding Your Question with Sahil Bloom

You. Welcome to Claim youm Confidence, a podcast that will introduce you to the most powerful people in the world. No matter what obstacles you face, claim your confidence will inspire and motivate you to go after the life you want. Are you ready to claim your confidence? Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Claim youm Confidence. I am Lydia Fannette, coming to you from Rockefeller center in Newsstand Studios. It is summer in New York City, but it is so cozy in the studio. So today I have an absolutely fantastic guest. And I can say this because I had the opportunity to spend a couple of days with him at a summit a couple of weeks ago. Sahil Bloom has joined me today in the studio. Sahil, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. And this is an incredibly cozy and beautiful studio. So I'm happy to be here.

Well, I'm definitely happy we're here, not outside right now. Yes, that is one huge part of it. So we were both asked to do a roundtable and I want to tell our audience a little bit about you because you have so many incredible side businesses and things going on. But what you're really known for right now, this is all going to change in the coming year, is an incredible newsletter that goes out every week called the Curiosity Chronicle. There are almost a million people who subscribe to this bi weekly newsletter to get your advice, to understand a little bit more about how they can enhance their life and live a more healthy, wealthy life. So let's start at the beginning. How did you even come to a place where this would be part of your journey to have so much wisdom that you can impart? Where are you from originally?

I grew up in the Boston area. I was born actually in New York. My dad was a professor at Columbia, so I was born in faculty housing on the. On the Upper west side. But when I was a kid, about 4 or 5 years old, he took a job at Harvard. And so we moved up to the suburbs just outside Cambridge.

And it's interesting because you talk a lot about your parents. Tell me a little bit about their story and in particular how they met, because this has been fascinating me since I learned where they were both from.

Yeah, my parents have an incredible story. And, you know, I say a lot that so much of my life and the foundation of who I am as a human is a result of their love. And I'll explain exactly why. So my, my mother is Indian, hence the name Sahil. And my dad is white Jewish from the Bronx, the Bloom side of me. Back in the early 1980s, late 1990s, 1970s, that was a different world that they were living in. And the idea that my Indian mother, who was born and raised in Bangalore, and my white father, born and raised in the Bronx, would meet somehow fall in love and build this beautiful life together was extraordinarily unlikely. You know, my mom came over for college when she was 18 years old. Against her parents wishes, she applied to school in secret, got a scholarship to go to Mount Holyoke Women's College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Went to school there, was through a, like, very funny clerical error. She only ended up having to do two years of school to get a degree because they thought she had done so, like back then. This is before digital records. So she in India. The last two years of her high school education were at a thing called Mount Carmel College in Bangalore. And so when she came to school, they thought she had done two years of college. And so she got put into junior year classes as a freshman. She thought it was weird that the classes were so hard. She was like, oh, this is odd. But she just figured like, oh, I need to study harder and get up to speed.

I love everything that you just said about mother.

She sounds, like, incredible. She is unbelievable. She is unbelievable. And she ended up graduating in two years and then applied and got into a master's program at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. She was there and she knew she needed to pay her way through school, and so she started working at the library there. The summer before she was going to start this program. Well, my father happened to be there finishing his PhD, and so he was studying feverishly for his final dissertation. She was working in the library, and so she saw this cute guy, he saw this cute girl. Both of them, funny enough, had friends who told them it would never work. So my dad had an Indian friend who was like, oh, she's Indian, she'll never go for you. And my mom had a Jewish friend who was like, he's a Jewish guy, he's never going to go for you. My mom got up the courage to ask my dad on a date and asked to see if he wanted to go for ice cream. And he said yes. And they went out for an ice cream together. And my mom still relays this story in such a beautiful way where my dad said to her, you know, my father will never accept us. And my mom was so blinded by his use of the word us that made her her feel like these butterflies that she kind of missed the underlying message of what he had said. And unfortunately, he was right. His Family was not accepting. And his father mostly, who was sort of a domineering figure, was not accepting of their budding courtship and made him choose between her and their love and his family. And my dad walked out and never saw his family again. And so to this day, I never met my dad's parents. He has siblings that I've never met, I have first cousins that I've never met. All because of that one decision where he chose love over his parents wishes.

Wow, that's an incredible story. It says so much about your parents as people too. I mean, first of all, your mom, I love that she asked your father out. Obviously that was not what was taking place at that time.

It claimed your confidence.

It claimed your confidence, indeed. I also love that she completely glossed over everything except the word us. That sounds very familiar. I understand that feeling as well in life where you hear only what you want to hear, but truly a testament to love. And so they've been together ever since.

Yeah, 42 years later, they are still a role model to my wife and I and to my sister and her husband for what a beautiful relationship looks like. So I just feel so fortunate to have had that model in my mind of what a healthy, happy, loving relationship looks like and what it means to build this life of wealth surrounded by people you love and to pursue love at the expense of other things in life.

Yeah, that's such an interesting point because wealth is typically something we talk about with money and, and wealth really doesn't mean that at all. And I know you have written a book about that and we'll go into that a little bit more. But I truly think that wealth is so much more than money, and people don't always equate that with anything else. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah. I mean, the journey I've had personally, and you mentioned the book, to kind of experiencing this in my own life has been a pretty long and winding one. But I really think the foundation of it was set by this decision that, you know, that my parents made and how they pursued and made decisions all along the way in building their life. I mean, my dad, I consider, you know, to have been my best friend in life, has always prioritized his relationship with myself and my sister and my mom over any financial opportunities that came his way. And I think he has sacrificed a lot of things in the way of traditional definitions of success or money in order to build the type of relationship that we all have today. And in order to build the relationship with my mom that he has today or with my sister and I. And I could not be more grateful for it. And I couldn't be more appreciative of the fact that he did that. I mean, I know countless instances now, looking back on it, where he would come home from a long day of work, I would be like, play catch with me. He would come outside, play catch, make us dinner, and then I would go to bed. And I know he was up late working on things because he had to get the work done that he had put off while he was with us and while he was present. So I look back on it now and I'm so appreciative as a father myself now to a young kid, the lessons that that taught me about what you have to say no to if you want to say yes to those things you view as most important in life.

Truly. And I think that in parenting that is one of those things that we have to be reminded of time and time again because there are so many moments when you really feel like you're being pulled in so many directions. So to have that voice in the back of your head must be such an incredible thing. And I'm sure he's a wonderful grandfather as well to your son.

Yeah, you've probably seen this in your own life. But that transition of seeing your parents become grandparents is one of the most beautiful things I have experienced as a man and as a father. The amount of joy that that brings into their life. My dad calls it the third season of love. So the first season was falling in with my mother. Second season was falling in love with myself and my sister. And now this third season of rejuvenated love, of falling in love with your grandchildren. And there's science actually that shows that the health impact that grandparents feel from having that new life and new joy brought into their world from grandchildren. And I just feel grateful for the fact that we live close enough that they get to experience that so regularly and get to actually have that life giving capacity of my son and my sister's son in their world.

Yeah. Sahil, it's so funny that you say that. My biggest supporters on this podcast or my mom and dad and actually my mother in law as well. But my mother sends me all of the Instagram algorithms that feed you the studies about grandparents being close to their children. I mean, it's a weekly thing and my mom, if she's listening, is definitely nodding. So anytime my oldest daughter gets really upset about anything, I'll look at her and I'll say, let's call Mimi on FaceTime, so you can talk to my mom. Because then they can just go and have a conversation. I don't even know what's said, but she always comes back so calm. And I think there's something about taking the parent out and bridging those gaps that I've seen both with my in laws and my parents, which is truly such a gift. Let's start with your childhood then. Obviously you've given us some amazing lessons about things that your dad taught you that you've been able to take on. But who were you as a child? Because first of all, I think you speak in the most incredible sound bites of anyone I've ever met in my entire life. Have you always been like this sort of laser focused, or were you a child who was just eternally curious?

I was certainly curious, I would say. I come from a storytelling family, so my mom probably got this from my grandmother on my Indian side, who unfortunately passed away last October, but who was one of the most exceptionally gifted storytellers I've ever had the pleasure to spend time around. And I think in another life, born in a different time or place, she would have been a famous something or the other. She just had one of those magnetic personalities where she would start talking and it was in this slow, sort of old methodology, methodical way. But you really just felt this magnetic connection that you wanted to listen. You were kind of waiting on bated breath. And I think my mom got that from her. And I think I'm a much worse version actually than both my mother and my grandmother. I disagree, but I think I have that same sort of genetic capacity and love of telling stories. And so all my childhood, which was mostly time spent in locker rooms, I was a baseball player. I was like the person who was always telling the story, embellishing things. Not a class clown by any means, because I don't consider myself super funny, but I always enjoyed being in front of people and having that kind of one on one interaction and being able to talk and share stories. And I've always found that humans are storytelling creatures. And so you can teach something in an academic context and it'll go in one ear and out the other. But if you teach it to someone with a story attached to it, suddenly that idea sticks. And I work in the business of sticky ideas. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to create an impact with the ideas I share. And so I know that I can share the idea or I can share a story that relays the idea and that is so much more powerful. My childhood, I would say, was mostly marked by insecurity, really, up until I was 30 years old, to be perfectly honest. I'm 33 now. So I feel like only in the last few years have I become truly comfortable and confident in who I am. I was the younger sibling. So I have an older sister who's about three and a half, four years older than me, who was the golden child my entire childhood. She was getting the best grades. She was doing all of the things that an academically oriented family wanted someone to do. She was a physics major at Yale. She got into all the colleges, Harvard Business School, all of these great, incredible things. And she's amazing. And as a kid, I did not have the confidence that I could do those same things, academically or intellectually, that she was doing. And so what I did was I convinced myself that I wasn't smart. And I focused on an entirely different domain, which was baseball. And fortunately, if you're good enough at a sport, you can get into a good school. And so I managed to do that. But the unfortunate side was that my own insecurity and lack of confidence manifested as a bit of competitiveness and resentment for my sister. And that's a really sad thing from a sibling relationship standpoint, because it easily could have manifested as joy, happiness, were two different people. But I wasn't able to see it that way as a kid. I just. I became resentful of her. And I think in a lot of ways, when we were younger, and I say this now because we've had this incredible blossoming of our relationship in these older years, now that we're sort of, for the first time, in the same stage of life. Like, I have a young son, she has a young son, and we've been able to have these conversations. There's no more of that competitiveness. There's no more of that tension. There's just this beautiful relationship that has blossomed. And I said to her recently, it's like this feeling that after 30 years of knowing someone, you've met them for the first time, and there's been something so beautiful about that, something of feeling that a relationship can bloom in a totally new season of life in a new way.

Yeah, the sibling thing is such an interesting part of life. You know, they're the only people who are with you your whole life. And those relationships do have ups and downs. I feel like there are years that are great and amazing, and then one thing can derail it for a while. But ultimately, I think the beauty of a sibling is that they are always around and they know your whole life story. And maybe they've been through the life story in a different way, but at least there is that commonality in a way that almost nobody else will know you. I think that can be a good or bad thing, which you've seen both of. But I'm so glad to hear that you guys have come out on the other side of that. That's an amazing thing to hear, because I know not everybody gets that chance over the course of their life. You've alluded to this earlier, but you talked about being a baseball player. So talk a little bit about what it was like for you to play on a team and what you learned from those years that you've carried forward.

Yeah. So my entire childhood, I played baseball, and I was. I was always pretty good. And I really took a step to the next level when I was about 16 years old. My high school baseball coach, a man named John Beverly, who was my first real mentor. And at the end of my freshman year of high school, I had had a good season on varsity, which I went to a small public high school, but it was pretty, pretty rare that someone was a starting pitcher for the varsity team as a freshman. And I went into his office at the end of the year for our kind of end of year discussions, and he asked, do you have aspirations to play baseball in college? And I said, yeah, maybe like D3 or maybe Ivy League. If I do really well, I can go play. And he looked me square in the face, I'll never forget it, and just said, how about Stanford? And Stanford is one of the best baseball programs in the country.

Oh, really?

And I thought he was nuts. I was like, the kids that go to Stanford are from Texas, Oklahoma, the South, California. I'm from a small public high school in Massachusetts. I'm not going to Stanford to play baseball. I thought he was nuts, but he believed in me in that way. And what he said was, it's not going to be easy, but you are capable of that if you're willing to work for it. And so that was the first time I felt like I had a real big ambition and goal around this thing and that I was in control of actually being able to go and act on it and execute on it. It was no longer this amorphous, oh, yeah, maybe I' get good enough. Maybe my talent will expand, maybe I'll grow. It was like, no, you go out and do the work every day and see what you're capable of. And I started doing that. And so I went from my sophomore season, I was probably throwing about 80 miles an hour. And my junior season, I showed up and I was throwing 90 miles an hour. And when you do that, a lot more people start taking notice.

I'm asking because my son's a baseball player, so tell me what it takes.

Yeah. Between sophomore and junior year, I gained about 30, 35 pounds. I went from being 160 pounds soaking wet to closer to 200 pounds. 195 pounds, put on a ton of muscle. I mean, it was puberty coinciding with the first time you're ever lifting weights, eating right for the first time in your life, really taking it seriously. All of a sudden, laser focused on this goal. I was going to go and get a baseball scholarship. And again, in hindsight, a lot of that desire was driven by an insecurity. I need the external affirmation of someone else telling me I'm great in order to feel great about myself. But sometimes that's actually healthy. In some ways, you actually need something to drive towards. And it really drove me and I really was laser focused on it. And my junior year, before the season started, Stanford offered me a scholarship. And so this thing of two years of working towards this suddenly became real. I got to Stanford and I had basically coasted from a baseball standpoint, up to that point, things had always been pretty easy because I went to, like a tiny school in Massachusetts. No one's, you know, really competitive at that level, very rarely. And then I went out to one of the best schools in the country and I got the hell kicked out. I mean, I like, really over and over again, right? I was awful. I was terrible compared to them. And I remember calling my dad and saying, maybe I'm just not good. Maybe I'm just not cut out for this. And he just said, it's time to go back to work. And I remember just thinking, like, oh, that makes me feel a lot better, because now I'm back to where I was as a freshman or sophomore in high school. It's just I just have to go out and do the work every single day and see what happens. I can't say definitively that I'm going to all of a sudden be the best player on the team. Probably not. But can I make a great career out of this? Can I, you know, help the team win games? Maybe if I keep putting in the work. And so I did that off of a talent base that was probably in the bottom 5% of the team. I ended up actually performing really well and having a great college baseball career and really helping win games, which again, was just a lesson to me in you can achieve absolutely anything you set your mind to if you are willing to do the work necessary. And your whole idea of claiming your confidence I love because to me, confidence is a byproduct of evidence that you can create. And sometimes you just need to manufacture a little bit of evidence to get that flywheel going. It's the tiny little thing. It's the waking up when you said you were going to, it's the doing the workout that you said you were going to do. Those tiny little things compound. And then suddenly I have confidence in myself. Suddenly I'm able to go out and do the thing, stick my chest out, feel confident in that moment and perform at that level. And then the evidence just starts snowballing.

It's so true. I call it the discipline of being disciplined. And it's interesting, when we were at that summit a couple of weeks ago in the Hamptons, the COO of the company that we were both there to speak with was a friend of mine from many years ago. And I woke up early, I think the second morning of the summit. I was a little jet lagged. And as you know, I was writing my third book proposal. And I always try to get up early, a huge cup of coffee and just sort of sit and write. And as soon as I do that, I usually go running. At some point I'll get a little stuck. And a run is kind of what gets me back to the place where I feel like I can write. And as I was coming around the first corner, it was probably about 6:45 in the morning, I saw my friend, probably one of the smartest, most hardworking women I know, she was coming back from a run. I honestly didn't realize that she was a runner. But I texted her after we waved and she passed and I said, it's so funny, I didn't even know that you were a runner. But it doesn't surprise me because the one marker of every successful person I know is discipline and the discipline of being disciplined. And you're right, that's where confidence comes from. It's that you put in the work. It's never gonna be something that explodes overnight. I don't know who created this myth that things happen overnight. They don't. It's the small that compounds over time, that makes the big, that ultimately sets you up for success. But you have to do the work. And I'm so glad you said that because so many people are looking for the carve around and, you know, one out of every billion people gets that. But I also don't think think you're as rewarded if you haven't done the work to get there.

Yeah. Confidence is not born, it's built.

Yes.

And no one just wakes up feeling confident in some new domain. In fact, I would argue that the most successful people in the world are very good at embracing the embarrassment of being a beginner.

Yes.

And they're not afraid of that feeling. They actually view that as a positive signal because it means that they're going to have to go learn. That means they're going to have to be curious. It means they're going to have to grow. And they generate the confidence in that new domain by stacking little bits of evidence that build up over time. I had a dinner with this billionaire entrepreneur, actually, who was at that event, and we were having this conversation about some of the lessons that he had learned from this incredible career he's had. And one of them was the hard work. And the effort has been constant throughout his career. He's not easing up off of it. Now that he's made tons of money and had all this success, he's actually doubling down on it. And I asked why. It seems crazy, like, oh, you should chill now. You did your thing. And he's like, no, now is the time for me to push even harder. Because now that hard work is compounding against this incredible base of wisdom, knowledge, and insights that I have. When I was just starting out, the hard work was all I had. So if I was going to make it, it was my only chance. Now I can't lose. Like, it's stacking against this incredible base that I have already built. And so why would I ease up right at the point when it is going to be the most effective that it has ever been in my life? And I just thought that that was such an amazing reframe of. Of what we're all about and what we're doing and why we're pursu.

Absolutely. I love that. It's so amazing when you speak with people who are at the top of their game, how they will always go back to the beginning and they will always talk about those things that they learned along the way. As you've been growing your career, you told this amazing story at the summit about this inflection point in your career where you were going into what you thought was leave a job, and then I'll let you tell the rest of the story, because you are a storyteller. But I did love it. I've thought about it so many times since.

Yeah, well, I started my career in finance and I was marching down what I think a lot of people can probably appreciate as like the very traditional path for the son of an Indian mother who they really value. Name brand careers and the McKinsey's and the Goldmans, you know, those kind of things. That's like a great career path. And then a tenured professor father. So it's like, you know, very risk averse career track. Taking that safe, stable job that was just going to make me more and more money each year seemed like the obvious path to go. I didn't have the entrepreneurial bone in my body. Like I wasn't one of these kids that was doing lemonade stands and trading trading card businesses and landscaping companies. Like I was just playing baseball. And so I took this safe job and I was kind of marching down that path. And probably about three or four years in I realized it wasn't for me. And the reason I realized that is because I knew I didn't have the energy pulling me towards it. I've always felt like passion is sort of a big loaded term. I don't really know what it means. Interests, I don't know. Sometimes I'm not interested in things when I'm bad at them and then I get interested. But energy doesn't really lie. When your energy is pulling you towards something, you commit more time to it, you dive deep into it, you ask questions, you learn, you grow. And so I've always thought that following energy was a great way to find your pursuits in life. And I knew that my energy was not pulling me into this career. In finance. I had friends who were obsessed with the work we were doing, truly loved it, and I was never going to be that way. So if I'm the type of person that wants to be at the top of whatever I'm doing because I, I enjoy getting better. I enjoy the aha moments. I enjoy the feeling of growth and progress. This wasn't the path for me. The challenge is taking that leap of faith and stepping off that path is terrifying. Especially when you are quote, unquote successful and when you have a mortgage and you have responsibilities, you're married and all these things. Yeah. And you have the paycheck coming in every other week, you have the benefits, all of those things. And you know, I kind of created this framework for myself that the reason the leap of faith in life is so scary is because of two things. An information asymmetry and an evidence asymmetry. What I mean by that is you have a ton of information and evidence about where you currently stand. You know exactly what it looks like. You know you can build a life there. You have no idea. You have no information about what the other side looks like, and you have no evidence to prove you can build a life there. So suddenly, that manifests as this fear. It manifests as this, like, enormous gap with nothingness down below, and you can't imagine jumping off and trying to get to the other side. So what you need to do is close that asymmetry. You need to actually go and gather information and create evidence that proves to you that it's not as scary as you thought. When Covid started, I started writing, I started sharing on the Internet. I started trying to distill these stories and see if there were little businesses that could be built or see if these ideas were resonating with people. And by the time early 2021 rolled around, I realized that that leap of faith wasn't quite so leapy. It was actually more of a step. And so I was able to then do that and not feel that same level of fear that I otherwise would have.

It's incredible, because I think that is exactly what stops everybody from taking that leap of faith. It's just that sort of like, what if I can't do it? What if I get on the other side and I look back and I want to be back over there? And there's never the belief in yourself that you can just walk backwards. Right. It's never that you could step back over. It's like, once it's done, it's done.

Yeah. Which is totally incorrect. Everyone assumes that once you do it, you can't go back to that safe job you had. And that's almost always incorrect.

Yes.

Even furthermore, the regret from inaction is much worse than the regret from action.

Yeah.

I think Ben Franklin said most people die at 25 and aren't buried until they're 75. And I love that as a saying. I mean, it's. I mean, I know tons of people, and I would have been one of those people that you kind of fall asleep at the wheel. And I was going to wake up when I was 70 and wonder what the hell just happened.

Yeah.

And what I just did with my life. And if not for this sort of chaos that got infused from COVID and all of these crazy situations that hit all at once in my life, I don't know that I Ever would have taken the time to think about it and made this leap, made this change.

In the day and age that we live in. It is not what it was even 10 years ago where people would go to a company and stay there for the rest of your life. You will either get fired or you will leave a company at some point. People don't, don't work for companies for 40 years, or if they do, they're a dime a dozen at this point. So the so and so comma, company ism, you know what I'm talking about, goes away very quickly. And every skill you learn when you work for a company comes with you. So in my opinion, the best thing you can possibly do if you're working at a job is learn everything you can, because all of that comes with you. If you're smart enough to invest in yourself the way that the company will allow you invest while you're there, they'll get rid of you the minute they want to. But the most important thing is you always look at it as your career and your vision. Because whatever you're taking from wherever you are walks out the door the minute you do, too. I always say, too, it never hurts to line up a lifeboat next to you. And it's better if the boat's bigger so you can walk up on the boat as you leave. It's a better place to be.

That's brilliant advice.

I do think so many people are myopic in jobs. They're like, well, I can only stay here and I can only do it here. It's like, no, actually, once you leave that job, that all comes with you wherever you go.

Yeah. Everyone thinks they need to be loyal to the company, but the companies aren't really loyal to you in those cases. Right. They'll fire you as soon as they need to for whatever profit target they need to hit or whatever the thing is. And so I always, always thought that was funny. Like, there's definitely an asymmetry there in, in loyalty in the company world.

Yeah.

I mean, my dad always used to say that to me, if you're going to do it, do it well and take the small things seriously. Because if you take the small things seriously, you're going to be trusted with the big things. And if I could give one piece of advice to a young person starting their career, that's what it would be. Because people notice when a young person takes a small, stupid task seriously.

Yes, absolutely.

If you're given something and it's like, clean a bathroom and you take it really Seriously. And you do that for a few days, people are going to take notice of it. You can think it's dumb and you can try to half ass whatever the job is, but whatever that small task is, it's only small now. And you're going to be given the big thing if you're the type of person that people can count on. You know, the idea that people generally overestimate the importance of excellence and underestimate the importance of reliability and just being someone who can show up and do the work is enough to get you ahead of 99% of people somehow.

It's so true. I had two incredible summer interns and one intern who's sort of with me year round who came on so fired up. You know, Joe and I were actually talking about this before you came in here. How amazing they were at everything they did. They just gave it their all. And so huge shout out to Gardner and Susan if they're listening, which I'm sure they are, because they were integral in forming all these things that have been created this summer as a result of the time and effort they put in. Because they showed up and did the work. And as someone who's worked for a long time, I noticed. So just shout out to them for sure. Let's talk about the Curiosity Chronicles. You talk about this in 2020. You started this sort of as a side project, right? But this has developed into a full time plus plus role for you. Talk to me about how this started, the idea behind it, and how it's grown.

I originally started writing on Twitter, which was in May of 2020, had like 500 followers at the time. Started writing these sort of longer form posts, which now are called threads. At the time, they didn't really have a name because it wasn't a format people were using, but I was breaking down and trying to deconstruct more complicated topics around business, finance, et cetera, into simple terms that anyone could understand. It started taking off slowly during the course of 2020, to the point where like by the end of that year, I had maybe a hundred thousand followers on Twitter. And the most common thing I kept getting asked was like, I want to receive these in my inbox. Twitter's not a great place to read them. I want it in a better format. Oh, okay, let me gather emails and I'll just start sending out the posts. I'm sending to an email newsletter In 2021, May, which was when I was deciding to make the leap and leave. I had a friend who had started Morning Brew, which is a now huge, huge business that's built around the kind of daily newsletter space. And only through conversations with him, I realized that newsletters can be a great business. So then I started to think, oh, maybe there's actually something to this if I start actually sharing unique content in the newsletter rather than just the stuff that I'm already sharing on Twitter. So in mid May of 2021, I sent out the first, what I would call curiosity chronicle and named it that. And it was on a new topic, not something that I had written about. And the main difference was rather than being focused on a specific thing in business or finance, it was going to be about anything in life. It was going to be anything that my curiosity was pulling me towards. What I found over the course of, really the year, year and a half that followed was that there was almost infinite ideas out there that I could think or write about, because every single week I was meeting new people, I was having conversations, I was reading things, I was consuming stuff, stuff that was sparking me to think and write. And what I say to this day and what I'll say in my book and what I say in the newsletter is I don't have the answers for anybody. I'm 33 years old. I'm not your guru. I'm not like the wise old man that has figured everything out in life. I'm on the journey with you trying to figure these things out. And I can tell you the questions I'm asking. I can tell you how I'm wrestling with them. I can tell you, you and try to distill wisdom from others that have talked about or written about these things. And that's what you get from my writing. And I personally, I think that that connects with people. And that's part of the reason it's been successful, is because so many especially male, like, influencers, quote, unquote, out there are shoving some answer in your face. Here's the only way you can live your life, whether it's a health guru telling you, you have to eat this way, otherwise you're going to die, or whether it's a business guru telling you this is the only way to make money, crypto, whatever. The thing is, I'm not doing any of that. I'm like, I'm really trying to say I can give you a lot of different thoughts, questions, ideas, and then you are going to apply your own lens and come to the answers yourself. You're going to be empowered to now come to your own answers about the world. And that I think is what really connects with people because it feels different. In a world of answers being shoved in your face.

Do you think the answer is a polar plunge at 4:30 in the morning? Because I read that you do that too.

I have had extraordinary life benefits from the morning cold plunge. Done that.

But wait, how do you. Sorry, I just have to step back for a second. I did my first polar plunge this year. I love them. I think they're amazing. But how do you wake up and get yourself into a cold pool immediately at 4:30 in the morning? I need a couple hours to psych myself in.

I'm a big proponent of doing hard things to start the day. And you're taking on a voluntary struggle that prepares you for whatever involuntary struggle comes into your life. And I have no idea if any you of, of the, you know, physical health benefits of this are real, but I sort of just view those as upside to the mental health benefits that I've experienced around focus, clarity, energy in the morning, that rush feeling of feeling like a winner that you just started your day and now I've a b tested it. Like I've done days where I don't do it and I know how I feel when I don't do it. So now I can override the desire to not do it by knowing that, okay, five minutes from now I'm going to feel like a badass. So I should just get in this thing and go do it because it's going to start my day on the right foot. There is nothing easy about it. And it sucks every. It's not like it gets easier.

I was gonna ask. My sister has been doing them for years, so every time she would do it, I'd be like, why are you doing this? And finally did it. I joined her. I went in and I was like, oh, I actually get it. When I did my first retreat this year, on the first day, I had done my first polar plunge on January 1st, and it was 12 degrees outside. And out of everyone on the retreat, one woman said, you know, I've always really wanted to polar plunge. And I found myself saying, I think sometimes I'm a better leader than an actual doer myself. I was like, like, I'll come with you. And then because the two of us did it every day, we would bring more people. And the third day we were there, a woman told us, which I will never forget, and I will share this with you for your next polar plunge, that on the day that the super bowl took place, it was the coldest day of all time. Their coach told them that they needed to scream before they went on the field. I want it colder. And so the last day, everyone on the retreat went in screaming, I want it colder. That moment for me was such a mental wow, look at what you can accomplish if you really dig in and you believe in yourself. I think is all to say, this is what I see you do. You have brought this mental energy and this focus to so many people through this newsletter. And I know whatever is in your book, which is coming out later this year, it will be in there too. So I want to talk to you about the five types of wealth. But tell me about writing the book. What was that like for you?

You writing of the book was the hardest creative task I've taken on. And the biggest reason is because there was no dopamine loop or feedback loop with it. You're writing in the dark. I mean, it's the last three years I've been working on it since I left my job in May of 2021. And that is so different from the newsletter, from any of the social media stuff I do on Twitter, Instagram, anywhere else where I create content. And you immediately get a feedback, feedback from someone, someone's responding, someone gets the email and they reply. And there's so much of that that gives you energy because you feel like, oh, someone's seeing it, someone's reacting to it, it's impacting them in some way. With the book, you're just working in the dark and no one's going to see it until February of 2025, which to me, when I started in 21, that might as well have been. It's like so far in the distant future. It's like the Star wars thing of somewhere in the future, millions of miles away. It's like I can't even imagine that. So that was the most challenging part, was just still committing to putting in the daily effort when you don't have any of the reward attached to it. And interestingly, I started to fall in love with that aspect of it to the point where I actually didn't enjoy the immediate dopamine hits of social media quite as much as I had before. It sort of rewired my brain almost in a sense that it was much more around this kind of like long term earned dopamine rather than that kind of quick hit artificial. And it's been an amazing process. I mean, the thing that I'm most proud of in the book is that I was able to tell the stories of some real people that I spoke to during it that I think are really going to emotionally and psychologically be a gut punch for a lot of people and the decisions that they're making in life and the fact that these people granted me and kind of gifted me with their stories to tell to the world is a really powerful thing to me and one that I don't take lightly. And again, to the point of being able to get an idea across to people through storytelling about real humans, I think it's just going to be really powerful thing.

Well, I have no doubts. Sahil, thank you so much for your time. I always like to leave our listeners with one thing and I think the biggest theme of today would be do the work. So whatever you're working on, just remember you're doing the work. It's not going to be an instant hit. It's something that takes time. But doing the work is the most important part of it. So where can we find you? How can we get your newsletter? Give us all the things.

Yeah, so everything is@sahilbloom.com, which is my website. And then you can find information on my book@the5typesofwealth.com.

All right. Well, we will be tuning in. We will be reading. We will be anxiously awaiting February 2025. Sahil, thank you again for joining me today. And of course, I would not be here without the amazing Joe who makes all of this happen. A thank you to Newsstand Studios, a huge thank you to Rockefeller center, and most of all, a huge thank you to you for listening. Once again, I'm Lydia Fanette. This is Claim youm Confidence. I'll see you again next week.

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