The 6 Bucket Theory: How to Build a Wealthy Life Without Regret

Hey, what's up guys? Today I'm going to share something a little different than hardcore marketing content. It's what I call the 6 Bucket Theory of Happiness, and honestly, it is really, really, really powerful and something I've done personally for over 10 years, a framework I've used, and I think it's something that can change your life. And the reason I brought this up is because I was doing a questionnaire for a podcast that I'm going on Tomorrow, and one of the questions was about what sacrifices have you made building your businesses. Be honest, you know, things of your family, your health, whatever else. And that's a common theme, so I understood why they asked the question. Uh, it's often expected that entrepreneurs sacrifice time from their family and miss kids' birthdays and baseball games and they're stressed with their relationships with their wife or their husband or whatever it may be because of their entrepreneurial journey. And I categorically, categorically reject that and have for quite some time. And part of the reason why is because I know that you don't have to make those sacrifices necessarily. And the Six Bucket Theory of Happiness proves that. It also is something you can use to really assess your current life state. And I think it can make a huge difference. I mean, if you look at what will happen as we go through this exercise, and I'll kind of give you the, the how and my own answers, and then from there, uh, you'll be able to do it yourself, right? So if you do this, you'll have a chance to get wealthy and succeed wildly without living a life of regret. You'll have a greater sense of control and purpose each day, and you won't keep sacrificing the things that matter for no real reason. Because ultimately, for some people who do feel like they have to sacrifice everything, there isn't actually a good reason for why they're doing it. They just don't really understand this framework or have a mental model similar to this one. So here's how it works, okay? We're going to start by imagining that we've got 6 empty buckets sitting in front of us, or in front of you, okay? Health, health, wealth, friendship, deep relationships, spirituality, and personal interests. I'll kind of go through each one of those buckets means in a second. So health would be diet, exercise, you know, physical, is it going to a doctor, therapy, coaching, if you're a biohacker, all that kind of stuff. Wealth I look at as both your work and investments. It could be active or passive. So this is where the businesses you are building, you are building can come into play if you have an investment portfolio or are an investor, if you have a job, right? This audience here is more for entrepreneurs, but I think this will be valuable to anybody. That's that category. Okay, friendships would be meaningful friendships and an active social life. So hanging out with your buddies or your girlfriends, or, you know, going out to brunches or whatever it is that you do with friends. As you'll see, this is one of my weakest buckets by far. Deep relationships. This I look at as different from friendships because it's really people you have a very deep intimate relationship with. I don't necessarily mean intimate in a romantic sense, but I mean like your spouse, uh, your boyfriend or girlfriend or significant other, your children, your closest family members, maybe a friend, but this friend is like a brother or a sister to you. You've known them for 20 years, right? Those, you know, comprise the— or encompass what I mean by deep relationships. Spirituality. So religion, meditation, prayer, personal practice, going to church, that kind of stuff. And then personal interests would be hobbies, passion projects, recreation. You know, you write novels, you play music, you build model ships in a bottle. Whatever it might be. Okay. Now here's the thing with this model. Here's what makes it effective is you have 6 buckets in front of you, but you only have enough water to fill 3 of those buckets completely. And the question becomes, how do you distribute the water? And this decision will in many cases dictate your level of fulfillment and whether you die with deep regrets or a smile on your face. And yeah, there's an M dash here. Uh, I wrote this article this morning, put it on X. Now I'm turning it into a YouTube video. I wrote it. I asked Claude to make the slides. Claude decided to add in an em dash because as we all know, AI loves em dashes, but don't go roll your eyes and dismiss this because there is an em dash. This is all coming from me, not from AI, but AI helped me make this PowerPoint so I can make this video for you, right? Okay, so staying focused. This is the most important decision. How do you distribute the water? Into these 3 buckets? Because you could fill 3 up entirely, but then 3 would be, would be completely empty. This is the important decision-making. And to kind of make it easier to think about this, we can quantify it. You've got 6 buckets, right? You've got 8 gallons, let's say, per bucket, which means you've got 24— or sorry, 48 total gallons of capacity in those buckets, but you only have 24 gallons of water. And so essentially you can only fill it with half the water compared to the capacity, right? And so right away, like this slide might seem out of place, but we go back to, hey, you must sacrifice your health or your family to succeed in business. I brought that up at the beginning of this video. And like I kind of said before, for 99.999% of entrepreneurs, that's false and the math doesn't math. And this framework, as you're going to see, destroys that excuse and every other bullshit narrative that people tell themselves about why they can't have it all. So to show you why, let me kind of explain how I personally distribute my water. Okay, health for me is about a 6 out of 8. Wealth is about a 7 out of 8. Friendships, maybe a 2 out of 8. Deep relationships, so my family, is an 8 out of 8. The bucket is overflowing practically, um, although not really because that doesn't work with this model, but it's completely full. Spirituality is pretty low, really. It's like a 1 out of 8. Personal interests are like a 1 out of 8 as well. I actually think friendships are 1 out of 8, and the graphic's just a little bit off because AI is good but not perfect at all of these things. I'll give you the exact breakdown. Okay, so health I put as a 6 out of 8. I work out nearly every day, uh, but only for 30 or 45 minutes. I kind of skip some things. I don't go super hard and heavy on all the weights. I do what I can. I eat pretty healthy. I'm not a biohacker. I'm not reckless. I don't eat processed foods. I do order food for delivery a little bit too often. And even though I try to make healthy choices, it's probably cleaner to, to cook all of your meals, but I don't cook any of my meals. My wife cooks lots of meals, which is great. But you know, also I get ice cream with my, my daughter and my family. Sometimes I, you know, have my little vices, right? I go, you know, get an annual physical. I get lab work done. I just did it. They referred me. I'm gonna do a full body scan, and, uh, they referred me to like a dermatologist for a skin check. I've been putting off the skin check just because I don't want to give up the time, um, and I haven't booked the full body scan like I should at some point. Um, point is, 6 out of 8, right? These little light bulb things are kind of dumb. Again, they're AI-driven. I wouldn't focus too much on them. What about wealth? I mean, I give myself a 7 out of 8. I originally thought I would give myself an 8 out of 8, But when you, when I'm really honest about it, it's probably more like a 7, right? I built 10+ multimillion dollar businesses over the last 15 years, telemedicine company that's doing $50 million plus. I've sold 2 businesses, businesses in the last 3 years. I'm doing the agentic marketing stuff and I've got CA Pro. I work at least 40 hours per week as well, but I also stop at 4 to 5 PM most days, but really it's virtually every day. Sometimes earlier, and I really rarely work on weekends even when I'm tempted. And the reason why comes back to those deep relationships and family, which we'll talk about for a second. Now, friendships. This is one of my weakest kind of slides. I give myself a 1 out of 8. I've got like, you know, 1 out of 8 gallons, you know. I have some longstanding friends that I sort of stay in touch with. Really just one friend who I really, really, really stay in touch with, and he's got stage 4 cancer. So I try really hard. I had a best friend who passed away from cancer, and, you know, that degraded the bucket. And after that happened as well, I kind of like— there's some fallout, some other friends. It's a whole long separate story. But even regardless of that, the truth is I just don't prioritize a social life right now. You know, I've got two young kids, I've got work. It's a conscious trade-off, and I'm comfortable with that at this phase of my life. Now, it might change later, and we'll talk about that soon. Deep relationships, 8 out of 8, right? I'm home pretty much every day. I coach my daughter's softball team. This is my third season doing it, my oldest daughter. I spend 2 hours plus per day quality time with my 11-month-old. I try and do a weekly date night with my wife. I say no to most kind of overnight speaking events. People ask me to travel to, you know, Dubai or Europe or other places to speak, and I pretty much always say no. Even in Miami, I don't want to deal with the traffic most of the time, even though I only live an hour from Miami. Right? This is my number one priority. Uh, 8 out of 8 water goes to this bucket. Spirituality, I put, uh, 1 out of 8. But before you think I'm a spiritually devoid heathen, I'll share my philosophy on this, right? I think that for spirituality, it's about a personal relationship with God more than anything. You know, I think like praying or meditating for 15-20 minutes at night doesn't really take a whole lot of time, you know, out of your day or detract require a lot to go into the bucket. If you go to church, I think that's sort of family time anyway. You're doing it on a Sunday, so it doesn't really detract from a work bucket. So my belief is that unless you are a missionary or in seminary school or something like that, then you can be deeply spiritually fulfilled without this huge investment, and you could be at a 1 out of 8. Maybe you disagree, but that's my belief. Okay, personal interest. That's one that I also kind of quote unquote neglect. Like, I read kind of books every night. I've read tons of history and other stuff. Right now I'm reading fantasy and a sci-fi series and things like for fun and really enjoy it. But, you know, I don't write books or write novels, even though part of me would love to. I don't make music. I don't go camping a lot, although I could do it under family time. But the point is, you know, I have other personal interests. I mostly neglect them. I'm okay with that because work is such a passion project of mine, and family is a passion project of mine, and health to a slightly lesser extent is a passion project of mine. So, you know, my life is full of passion, it's just not full of hobbies, right? That's how I look at it. And, um, yeah, so those are all of our buckets, right? So if you look back to here, this is kind of what my distribution looks like at a glance, right? Uh, 24 out of 48 gallons used. This is kind of how the distribution is, okay? And one note is the, the one of the most important takeaways of this video is that you want to be intentional and aware of this distribution, right? That's the entire name of the game. A lot of people go through life passively. They take actions, they start a business, they have a family, they hang out with friends, but they're not really thinking about the why or how they distribute their time. And this is really, really, really important. And, you know, also it's worth noting that your distribution probably will look different. That's also okay, and that distribution will probably change. So just to kind of harp on this for one moment, this is what this looks like for me today at age 40. But, you know, if you're 21 years old, your deep relationship bucket may be way down here, right? Your wealth bucket as far as your focus on it, right, may be full or overflowing. Your friends bucket may be much fuller. When I was 21, my friends bucket was way higher. My health bucket was down here. My spiritual bucket was also down here. My personal interest bucket was up here. You know, that's okay. And even like as far as like that sort of grinding 24/7 thing, which we're gonna talk about again in a minute, if you're 22 and you don't have, and you're single and you don't have a family, and you're pretty healthy anyway, then like there's nothing necessarily wrong with doing this. The point will be that you're doing it to acquire the skills needed so that you can keep this bucket high while still filling other buckets as life changes. And we'll talk about that more in a second here, right? Because ultimately, here's, here's the deal. Working 7 days a week and grinding and killing yourself is kind of a skill problem and not anything else. It really just means you haven't mastered the skill of producing consistent, reliable income or building world-class teams that provide exponential leverage, or setting up systems and automating your marketing, or even maybe developing a mindset that lets you step away from everything without falling apart, right? You have the understanding that you've built this business and now you don't have to work 24/7 and kill yourself. The business will go on and thrive without you because you have set it up. Nothing's going to fall apart. You're not a bad person. You're not undeserving of success if you are to remove yourself from the business on some degree. It's something I've gotten really good at doing, including with that telemedicine company and the companies I've sold. And it can be hard though if you've got some programming in your head around how, you know, if I don't, I don't deserve success, so I must work really hard. If I don't work really hard, I don't deserve it. But also I get burned out and then I don't know why I'm working so hard in this kind of crazy cycle, you know? And like I said before, your distribution is going to change, and that's okay. This got kind of cut off a little bit here, um, but you know, I look at mine right now, what mine might look like in 20 years from now, uh, it might go down, right? It might go from 8 to 4, even though the, the water level is a little screwed up on this, you know. But basically it's supposed to be 4 gallons, not, not 6 here. But the idea wouldn't be that I don't love my family more, like, you know, as much in 20 years. But if my kids are both grown and out of the house and have lives and families of their own, then they're gonna need less from me, right? And I'm still gonna give, you know, everything to my wife and our relationship there. But then a day, the time investment may be lower, whereas personal interests that I've neglected now may be higher. Same thing with work. I, you know, sell a company for 9 or 10 figures. I'm always gonna keep having companies and being an entrepreneur, but at that point, more of my wealth becomes passive. And maybe it's a 4 out of 8, and, you know, that's how it looks, you know. So the distribution changing is good. What's not good is if you lose your intentionality, you know, become a lost vessel at sea being pulled by currents and tossed by the wind with no vision, because you still only get these 24 gallons. So you're always going to need to make decisions about how to allocate them. And that's one of the great freedoms we have as a human, is this agency and autonomy to make decisions of how we allocate the gallons of water that we have, especially if we are entrepreneurs. Okay. So what I would recommend is that you try the exercise for yourself right now and grab your phone or a piece of paper, open up a note app or whatever it is, write down the 6 buckets, score yourself out of 8 and be honest. And it must total 24. And then look at the results and then, you know, assess, is that the life you want? It's like the hardcore quad summary of this slide, but Really, you know, it's true. Are you happy with that allocation of the water, the distribution? Or do you feel like, you know, I could probably change this distribution a little bit and what would happen? That's a lot of the secret, right, to happiness, fulfillment, contentment. And again, you suddenly have more agency and control over your life when you do this. But it's also a limiting factor, the 24 gallons. Means you just can't fudge it. You can't cheat. You can't lie to yourself that you're gonna put, you know, 8 out of 8 into every single bucket, because I don't think you can, at least if you subscribe to my framework and the 6-bucket theory of happiness that I'm sharing with you. Um, and I put it here as a kind of closing slide, but really, agency over your action and your life equals freedom. Passivity equals regret, right? So it's sort of the deathbed thing. You're on your deathbed and you maybe you worked so hard but you weren't intentional with your family, or you didn't pursue these passion projects, or whatever it is, you know. I think you have to make those conscious trade-offs. Everything is, is trade-offs, but that's not a bad thing. That's literally, um, part of the human experience. And so being intentional and having agency of your actions gives you freedom, and not being intentional and being passive will probably leave you with a life of regret. And so you can choose the allocation or distribution, uh, and you will be a much better off person for it. So hope Hopefully this is helpful. I will share some kind of thing in the description of, you know, the buckets and the exercise so you can do it. And if it is, please like, subscribe, share, and help me feel like encouraged to keep putting things up on YouTube as I've become a bit active here on YouTube again. All right, thank you all.