Sahil Bloom | The 5 Types of Wealth | Talks at Google

A very warm welcome to my fellow Googlers here in New York City today. Wow, what a crowd. And it's a gorgeous day in New York. What better an opportunity to have a rather eye opening and dare I say it, potentially life altering conversation today. I know that's how I felt after I finished reading the book that we're going to be talking about today. My name's Zara. Like you all, I work here in Google nyc. I'm a researcher and a behavioral scientist. So I don't know about you, but I'm often looking at how we act as people. And one really interesting thing I've started to notice lately online is I'll see a video with someone maybe like toasting some marshmallows with their family or taking some space away from work, like going on a trip, maybe taking time to have a grounding morning routine. And I'll see comments that say something like, well, I would give to be this rich or oh you rich. And they're not talking about money. These aren't videos about stock balances and investments and spreadsheets. They're about other aspects of life. And it signals to me that we're starting to think differently as a society about what it means to be wealthy. And if that's a question that you've also been asking yourself, and if you've started to see Those comments on TikToks and Instagram Reels, then you are going to be in for an absolute treat here today. We're going to be joined by someone renowned and beloved for their clarity and their insight when it comes to conversations around finance, personal decision making and personal growth. You might already be one of the hundreds of thousands of people subscribed to his newsletter, where he shares amazing frameworks and actionable tips for how to take your life in a better direction. Sahil Bloom is the New York Times bestselling author that I am thrilled to be chatting today here with about his latest writing endeavor. Now, Sahil, for those of you who don't know, spent many years working in finance, so he has had a front row seats to these traditional ideas we have about wealth and what what those ways of life can look like if that's what you're pursuing in your definition of success. But it was also where he started to realize that we need to think more deeply and more broadly about what it truly means to be wealthy. And I think there's no more resonant a place to be having the conversation than here in New York. New York City. We are a city driven by Ambition, a central finance hub. So that's one form of wealth. But we're also a community where there is incredible rich relationships and social structures that really ground and uplift our lives here. There's also access to institutions with some of the world's foremost information and learning. There is also, you know, to be fair, very, very scarce time a lot of the time, right? We're running for our subways. It's the city that never sleeps. And you know, so there is an absolute wealth of wealths here in New York. And we're going to be talking today about the five types of wealth that Sahil has identified in his explorations of what it means to have a truly rich life. So without further ado, please join me in giving a very warm Google NYC welcome to Sahil Bloom. In classic time scarcity. New York City madness. You've had a rather chaotic journey here this morning.

Very chaotic journey getting here this morning. I'm sorry for keeping everyone waiting. We got stuck behind a classic, what was it, Eastside accident that backed up traffic for 30 minutes. So.

Well, it's actually a great illustration though of one of the points that you make in your book, which is how there are more forms of resource and wealth than simply money in life. Right? Time is a big one. Look, before we get too into the weeds of these five types of wealth, I want to ask you, why did you write this book? What inspired you to think about wealth in a more broad way and dig into what the various types might look like?

I had a single conversation with an old friend in May of 2021 that really was the catalyst and the spark behind all of this. And to understand that conversation, I need to set a little bit of context, which is my life path up until that point. I think like many of us sitting in this room, I had pursued all of the things that I thought were going to be the sort of pillars of building that successful, wealthy life that we all want, that good life that we all want. I climbed all of those mountains, I chased all of those things. A lot of that for me personally was driven by this insecurity from a young age. I grew up in a very academically oriented household. My mother is Indian, so for any Indians out there, we know very academically oriented culture. My father is a professor at Harvard, so I sort of got it from both sides. And I had an older sister who was extremely high achieving academically. And from a young age I started telling myself this story that I wasn't very smart, that my sister was the smart one. And that I had to be something else. And one thing that I know is that humans are very good storytelling creatures. And if you tell yourself that you are not capable or you are not smart, you will look around and find every single piece of evidence to confirm that belief, and you'll ignore every single piece of evidence that would refute it. So from a young age, I did that. I looked around and I found a lot of evidence to confirm that belief. And it built in me this sort of insecurity that no matter how much my parents told me it was false, no matter how much evidence might have been out there that it was false, it was what I believed. And that created this sort of internal void, if you will. And when you're young, what you do when you have an internal problem is you seek external solutions to that internal problem, which as you get older, you learn you cannot do. You cannot fix an internal problem problem with an external solution. But at a young age, and as I was coming into young adulthood, that was what I tried to do. What's the best way to go and get a whole bunch of external solutions, external affirmations in our modern society? To go make money, to accumulate status, to get things that the world seems to value. And so I did that. I went and got a job working in finance in the Bay Area. And if I'm being honest with myself, it was the job that I wanted other people to see me having, not the job that I actually wanted to have. It's one of the best pieces of career advice that I've gotten since, that I wish I had gotten when I was younger, is to ask yourself, when you take a job, do I actually want this job, or do I want other people to see me having this job? Do I want it for myself, like actually what the work is, or do I want the LinkedIn post about the thing? And I marched up that path, and at every single rung on the ladder, I convinced myself that my contentment, my fulfillment, my happiness, my solution to that internal void was on the other side of whatever bonus promotion, title, status thing I had propped up as the destination. And it's called the arrival fallacy. We've all felt it and experienced it at different times in our lives. We build up something as the destination, we march towards it, we get that thing, we feel the momentary blip of kind of dopamine, you do euphoria. And then we reset to whatever the next horizon is, whatever the next destination is. And I did that over and over and over again. And that contentment that Fulfillment, that good life that I thought was going to be on the other side never was. And unfortunately, along that path, a lot of other areas of my life had started to suffer. So while I was winning the one battle of making money, these other areas of life had started to fall apart. I was losing the much bigger picture war. My relationships with my parents. I was living 3,000 miles away, never really seeing them. My relationship with my sister had ground to a halt. I had created, created this competitive tension with her over that dynamic from childhood that had really harmed our relationship. And most importantly, my relationship with my wife was strained by the fact that we were struggling to conceive at the time. In the middle of this two year infertility struggle, I was drinking six, seven nights a week. My mental and physical health were in a bit of disarray. And it was a time in my life where on the surface, it seemed like I was winning the game. I was doing the things that you're told you should want to do. But I started to have this sensation at the end of 2020, early 2021, that if that was what winning the game felt like, I had to be playing the wrong game. And it all came to a head in this one conversation in May of 2021. Sat down with this old friend. He asked how I was doing, and I told him that it had started to get difficult living so far away from my parents, who were on the east coast, 3,000 miles away. I had noticed for the first time in my life that they were slowing down, that they weren't going to be around forever. And he asked how old they were, and I said mid-60s. And he asked how often I saw them. And I admitted that it was down to about once a year at that point. And he just looked at me and said, okay, so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die. And I just remember feeling like I'd been punched in the gut. The idea that the amount of time you have left with the people that you care about most in the world is that finite and countable that you can place it onto a few hands just shook me to the core. And in that moment, I realized that my entire definition of success, of what it meant to build a wealthy life, had been incomplete, that I was focusing on the one thing at the expense of everything else. And in the aftermath of it, the next day, my wife and I had a very candid conversation about what we wanted to build our life around, what our center really was. And within 45 days, I had Left my job. We had sold our house in California and moved 3,000 miles across the country to live closer to both of our sets of parents. And in that one decision was a very important realization, which is that you are in much more control of your time than you think. 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 took an action and created time for the things that we really care about. We reassumed agency over our own journey. We reminded ourselves that we were actually in control of these things, that we could take an action and create an outcome. And that was the spark that started this entire journey that has led to this book and that has led to my desire to spread this idea with the world, to redefine how you think about what success, what wealth looks like in your own life.

Wow. I mean, part of me is thinking, what if that conversation of your friends had never happened? You know, what if he hadn't made that startling assertion of 15 more times? It's so fortunate sometimes that we have these. They may not seem like interventions at the time, but they really can stop us in our tracks and force us to take stock and think about where we're at. Who did you write this book for, Sahil? Like, if you could be that friend to anyone that picks up your book, who are you hoping you're going to be able to grab with this new framework, this new perspective on life?

To be completely transparent, when I was pitching the book originally to publishers, they asked me the classic publisher question, which is, who is this book for? Who's the reader? And my answer is the same now as it was then, which is, I honestly think this book is for anyone, anyone, anywhere on the journey. I don't care if you're 12 years old and you haven't even started high school yet, or if you're 100 and you're starting to figure out how to spend your remaining years. The idea to question some of the default assumptions that you've been told about your own life, about what it means for you to be successful, to just start scraping away at some of those things is universal. And when I talk about that with this book, the really important thing that I want to get across is that the book does not have the answers for your life, have the answers for anyone's life. I'm not a guru. I don't claim to be able to tell you all of the solutions to fix your life in all of these different ways. Because the reality is, no one else in this room has the answers for your life. You already know the answers for yourself. You just haven't sat with the questions long enough to actually uncover and act upon them. The answers you seek in life are found in the questions that you avoid. These questions that we are choosing to ignore, that we are choosing not to act upon in our own lives. That is where you uncover these answers. But it only comes from asking some of these universal questions. How much more time do we really have remaining with our loved ones? What is the value of that time? These questions that are very easy for us to just ignore as we get busy, as we pursue our personal responsibilities, as we start to say things like, that's what just what I have to do, or that's just the way it is. Asking these questions is universal. Your answers, your experiences, the lens through which you view them is unique to you, and it's unique to the present season of life. The answers that you come to are going to be different now than they're going to be in 15 years or 20 years. They're going to be different when you're 24 and just starting your career than they are when you're 34 and you have young kids. Every single season of life is going to bring a different set of considerations, a different set of focus points, but those questions are going to be universal.

Okay, I don't know about you guys, but I'm ready for it. I want to know what the five types are, I think, right. This is such a compelling introduction to the philosophy and the framework of your book. Sahil, introduce us to the five. Right. And maybe tell me a little bit about how you uncovered each of them.

So the process and sort of discovery around it was really immersed in the human experience When I first left and made this big change. Following that conversation, the first thing I did was what any sort of academically oriented person would do, or at least someone that at that point in my life considered myself to be a student. I started reading and what I thought was, like, I could read enough books about building a good life that I would figure it out. And realized very quickly that to understand something human, you actually have to immerse yourself in the human experience. And so I pivoted and started just spending time with hundreds, eventually thousands of different people from all walks of life. And ask them, you know, what advice would you give to your younger self? What are your hopes for the future? All these types of questions that sort of hone in on this idea of what does it mean to you to build a good life. And the four common themes that kept coming up over and over again across everyone were time, people, purpose, and health. Money was kind of an enabler to some of those, but it was very rarely an end in and of itself. When you ask people what their ideal day looks like at age 80, no one says they want to be on a private jet by themselves. Right. It's just not something that comes up. Everyone's version of their ideal day at 80 is some combination of feeling free, being surrounded by people they love, feeling healthy of mind and body, and feeling some sort of purpose, some sort of thing that they wake up for in the morning. And the reality is that money helps up to a point to achieve those things, but it can no longer be an end. It cannot be the. It cannot be the. It has to be a tool to go and accumulate those things. If you think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs in the early years of your life, money directly buys happiness. Anyone that tells you otherwise is lying to you. The science on that is very, very clear. Money buys happiness in your early years. But what happens is we create a pattern in our minds that an incremental unit of money equals an incremental unit of happiness. Because that's true when you're younger. But above a certain point, it no longer holds. What the specific number is, people will debate. If you live in New York City, it's certainly going to be higher than if you live in Omaha, Nebraska. So it's a little bit hard to say what averages are across broad populations. But above a certain point, that incremental unit of money, incremental unit of happiness equation no longer holds. But if you've patterned yourself to believe it does, you may fall into the trap of continuing to pursue money as the sole end in your life. And that is the path to what I talk about as the Pyrrhic victory. This idea of the victory that comes at such a steep cost to the victor that it might as well have been a defeat, the battle won, but the much bigger picture, war lost. And before I dive into the five types, what I want to say about the Pyrrhic victory. We live in New York City. You do not have to look far to find examples of the Pyrrhic victory. You can find someone who has made hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars maybe, who we pat on the back, we celebrate, we admire, we think they're great, and we ignore the fact that they have three ex wives and four kids that don't talk to them. And we write books about those people, we celebrate them and admire them in society, and we say they won the game. And we all have to ask ourselves in our own lives, is that actually a game that I care to win? Is that a win to me? Because for me, the answer was no. And so I wanted to live differently. I wanted to step off the path, take into account the much bigger picture war, rather than just focusing on this one battle. So what is the much bigger picture war? And how do you build? How do you measure across all of it? That is what the five types of wealth is about. It is about redefining your scoreboard so that you are not just focused on the one thing at the expense of everything else. Peter Drucker, the management theorist, said, what gets measured gets managed. This is the idea that the thing that you measure ends up being the thing that you optimize around. It's the thing that you hone in on narrowly and lose sight of everything else. And that's great if what you're measuring is actually going to lead to the outcome that you want. Money's measurability has been a feature for society in a lot of ways, but in your own life, it can actually be a bug, because if you only focus on that one measurement, you can win that battle, but then lose this bigger picture war. What we need to do is measure across these five types of wealth. 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. It's about an awareness of time as your most precious asset. What I learned when that friend said that math to me, that simple math, the way that I love instilling this in people is to ask whether you would trade lives with Warren Buffett. He's worth $130 billion. He has access to absolutely anyone in the world. He flies around on a Boeing business jet. He's got homes all over the place. It all sounds pretty good. But none of you in this room would 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 up every single dollar that he has in order to be in your shoes today. So you acknowledge with a simple question that your time has quite literally incalculable value. And yet, how much of it are we really wasting? How much time are we spending on our phones, scrolling, comparing our lives to other people, allowing ourselves to feel bad about our lives because we're staring at other people's. It's a real question that we need to ask. Social wealth is the second type of. This is about relationships, the few close, deep bonds, and then your broader connection to circles that extend beyond yourself. Mental wealth is about purpose, it's about growth, and it's about creating the space necessary in your life to actually wrestle with some of these bigger picture questions, Some of the unanswerable questions, whether through spirituality, religion, meditation, solitude, what have you. The fourth type is physical wealth, about your health and vitality, Taking the controllable actions on a daily basis to fight against the natural decay that your body's going to go through as you get older. And then the fifth type is financial wealth, the one we all know about money, but with the specific nuance of really honing in on what it means to you to have enough to build your life of enough, with the recognition that expectations are your single greatest financial liability. That if you allow your expectations to grow faster than your assets, you will never feel wealthy.

Well, the Roman poet Virgil once said, the greatest wealth is health. Just between us, do you have a favorite, do you have a type of wealth that you think is the greatest? And I'm going to bear in mind something you said at the start, which is that your answer to these questions changes as you go through chapters of life, maybe for the chapter of life you're in right now, which for you is a book tour, right? This is a. This is a really busy, rich time of life in many ways. What for you, would you say is the greatest type of wealth for you in your life right now?

I think this is probably somewhat universal, actually, which is social wealth. And the reason I say that is because it is very hard to enjoy any of the other types of wealth if you don't have the texture that relationships provide. I said it earlier, no one dreams of being on a yacht or a private jet by themselves. Social wealth is what provides the meaning to a lot of the other types of wealth, that depth and connection of relationships. And it doesn't have to be hundreds if you're introverted, if you're wired differently, it may be one or two close connections. But we know scientifically that social connection relationships are the single greatest predictor of happy, healthy lives. The Harvard Study of Adult Development was this amazing study done over the course of 85 plus years. They followed the lives of 1300 original participants and 700 of their descendants. They found that the single greatest predictor of physical health at age 80 was relationship satisfaction at age 50. It wasn't your blood pressure, your cholesterol levels, it wasn't your smoking or drinking habits. It was how you felt about your relationships that determined how well you aged, your happiness and health. And age is based on your relationships. And yet it is the first thing that we stop doing that falls by the wayside when we get busy. The first thing that we drop the ball on is texting. The friend, is calling our mom, is getting together with the old group of friends, is finding the time for the coffee, date or the walk. Those are the things that we cut off the investments in when we get busy on the other areas, when in fact it's the one thing that we should make sure we are truly designing into our life. And, and in my opinion, that's because we don't think of relationships that way. We don't think of investments in relationships being the single best investment that you can make on a daily basis that they compound in the exact same way that any financial investment does. And ambitious people in particular have one really big fault, myself included. We allow optimal to get in the way of beneficial over and over and over again. You find this in your own life. You say, I don't have an hour to work out today, so I'm just not going to work out. I don't have two hours for deep work, so I'm just gonna do emails instead. I don't have 30 minutes to call my mom, so I'm not even gonna text her over and over and over again. We allow optimal to get in the way of beneficial when the truth is that anything above zero compounds sending a text to a friend is better than doing Nothing. Doing the 10 minute walk when you don't have an hour is better than doing nothing. Those tiny actions on a daily basis stack and compound into your future in your relationships or in any of these areas of life.

I love this because I feel like a lot of the time when we think about social wealth, we think about the roles that these relationships play in the hard times and we just kind of think of it like that. It's like, oh, our people are our safety net. We often talk about it that way, right? And we forget the point that you just made so well, which is that it's not just about having people to lift you up when the times are bad. Social wealth is really essential for enjoying the highs. It's people to celebrate them with you. Like you say, like it's hard to enjoy all the other types of wealth how physically, financially, mentally fit you might be without having people to share it with. So, favorites aside, you make a compelling case for social wealth. But favorites aside, I'm also reminded of another saying, and it's very clear from your book that you believe in this holistic view. But there's this saying jack of all trades, master of none. Do we risk falling into a similar paradigm if we think about pursuing the five types of wealth? Is it the case that by pursuing all five, we will somehow be mediocre in all of them?

I think the reality here is that the mindset you need to.