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039: Sahil Bloom | You’re Consuming Information But That’s Why You’re Not Changing | The Matt King Show
00:49:14
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- [00:00]
Sahil Bloom
There are two types of priorities in life. There are the priorities we say we have, and there are the priorities our actions show we have. And oftentimes there's a big gap between those two. Your life improves alongside your ability to close that gap.
- [00:11]
Host / Interviewer
The first time Sahil came on this show, he challenged everyone to rethink their lives. But in this conversation, he goes even deeper into why the gap exists and what actually closes it.
- [00:21]
Sahil Bloom
Life is all about information and then action. For most of us, there's this big gap, right? You consume the information, you're like, oh, that's neat, that's interesting. And you do nothing with it. You don't actually go and act upon it in your life. So you end up in coast mode. Because how. How are you going to improve if you're not actually going and taking action in the world? You're not going to have any new clarity.
- [00:39]
Host / Interviewer
And if you're honest with yourself, you might recognize that pattern. We consume, we plan, we think, but very few of us actually take action and change.
- [00:48]
Sahil Bloom
You need to figure out what the tiniest daily action is that you can take that you can just go and do over a consistent, let's say 30 days. The big barrier that people have to that is that they think the tiny action is inconsequential and that it's not really going to drive them forward. You need to make pain of not doing something more significant than the pain of doing it. And when you give yourself this ultra high bar for what doing it means, the pain of doing it is just too severe, it's too steep. And so, as a result, you do nothing.
- [01:18]
Host / Interviewer
Sahil closed the gap between who he was and who he wanted to be. If you're willing to do the same, this conversation might just change your life too. This is Sahil Bloom. Came to the ranch first time, and I told you I was thinking about writing a book. I think one of the things I've struggled with in my life is this thing called the permission myth. So we're all waiting for somebody to give us permission to write the book, to leave the job, to move closer to family. And I was looking for permission to write the book. Finally, I'd given myself that permission. I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna write the book. I'm gonna publish it. And I will never forget, you sat there and you said, if you're gonna write the book, why wouldn't you just write it to be the best and be a New York Times bestseller? I was like, fuck. Now I actually have to, like, really work at this. Cause if I'm gonna push this out, it's gonna have to be something I'm super, super proud of. So many people self published and maybe gets a little traction, but you don't. It's like a business card, it's a door opener, but it's not like to the level you did it. If you could go back in time, what would you do differently through the process of writing the book?
- [02:17]
Sahil Bloom
Well, first off, I second and would reiterate exactly what I said to you, which is just if you're going to do it, you might as well go all in on the thing. I have had a personal reflection in my own life and with anyone that I interact with or give advice to that a lot of the times the reason we don't give 100% towards something is because we're worried about what will happen if we do give 100% and it doesn't work out. Like you hold yourself back, right? It's like a, it's a self protection mechanism because you're worried about giving your all to this thing, trying to make it a New York Times bestseller, and then it doesn't work out. You miss the list for whatever reason. And that fear holds us back so much from going and doing the thing that we really want to do. I was, you know, frankly, for like probably leading up to about three months before my book came out, I was doing that. I was holding myself back from truly leaning into the whole marketing and push of it. Because you want that little excuse in the back of your mind to say like, oh, I didn't really go all in on the marketing of this, so of course it didn't really work out. You just want to like protect yourself in that way. It's like this guard mechanism that we have up. And the truth is that you actually will never accomplish anything in life if you aren't willing to go completely all in, naked, exposed towards the thing, as scary as that sounds. And so I am a big believer that you get a few things where you're going to do that, pick what those are and truly go all in. I mean like, truly let yourself go towards that thing. And sometimes it won't work out. But nothing bad ever came from leaning into things that you really care about to that extent. So again, I'll say it to you, I really want you to go all in on it in that way. And to me, the New York Times thing is much more about the sort of scale of the ripples and impact that you can create. At least in the initial launch. When you think about a book, it's the exact same as a company, right? Like you are putting something out into the world. You know, they'll launch the announcement and then what actually governs how well it does over a long period of time, the 5, 10, 15, 20 years, is the quality of that product. And people are either going to use it and then recommend it to their friends, or they're not. And you can't really control that after. You can write a great book or you can launch a cool product, but you can't really control it after the launch. You can control the launch and you do and you give it the best chance of that success. If you really go all into that thing at the outset. I would just say for me personally, I have learned a handful of things about what makes a book sort of have a higher K factor, if you will. K factor is this metric within businesses, companies. A lot of times people talk about it when it comes to technology apps, which is the number of people that a new user recommends to join the thing apps you always talk about. If the K factor is over one, the app is going to really take off because for every user they're recommending more people to join and that allows it to take off. The fastest growing, most viral things have a K factor over two, right? It's like exponential growth. It's shooting off to the ceiling. Books are no different. It's like every new reader of Atomic Habits probably recommends two people to go and buy and read Atomic Habits. As a result, it will just keep selling into perpetuity until you've tapped the entire addressable market of people that want to learn about habits, which is enormous. I think that there are a handful of things that can improve that K factor in the actual process of writing the book and that if you lean into those things in the process of writing it, you can expand your chances of having that K factor be higher to actually kind of more readily control the post launch success of the book. Things like images really help, you know, people share books. Not as much by like texting a friend anymore. It's much more on social media. And images are the things that end up capturing attention on social media. So like pictures of pages, pictures of photos from books, pictures of graphics. That chart that I have in my book of the time that you have with your children has probably done 50 million impressions over the course of the six months since launch. It's probably sold 20,000 books more. Things like that I would really lean into because I think that it really does expand your likelihood of success.
- [06:45]
Host / Interviewer
What's your K factor? What do you think the book's K factor is? If you had to guess?
- [06:49]
Sahil Bloom
I think it's probably just north of 1.
- [06:50]
Host / Interviewer
Just north of 1.
- [06:52]
Sahil Bloom
You know, the thing that you have to take into account is like it's not of the people who buy a book, because the statistics on books are like 90% of people who buy a book don't read past like page five of the book. What you really need to figure out is like people that read a decent chunk of the book, how many of them are recommending to it to someone else, and again to the point of expanding your K factor. That means make the first 20 pages of your book the hardest hitting part of the book. Like if you have an incredible idea on page 250 of the book that is so dumb, that needs to get pulled forward somehow and you need to tease it or have it included in that first 20 pages. Because 95% of readers are only going to read the first 20 pages of the book. Most people will say they read a book after reading 20 pages of it.
- [07:40]
Host / Interviewer
Right.
- [07:40]
Sahil Bloom
It's like this social status signaling thing that we all say, like, oh, I'm a reader, I read this book and you listen to it on audiobook for an hour or you read 20 pages. You have to have all of your best ideas right up front because that's when people decide whether or not they're going to share it. I think it's just over 1. I mean, the fact that it's continued to sell means that it has to be over one, otherwise it would have already gone to sort of zero. And I think if it was two, it would be like, you know, I would have sold 10 million copies by now. And so it's probably just north of 1, if I had to guess. And I, I think it'll actually continue to grow and reach people as a result. Which is really what my whole goal was from the outset.
- [08:21]
Host / Interviewer
Yeah, to impact people, to create change. So you said something really interesting where most people will buy a book, read the first five pages. I feel like most people live their life like that. They kind of like sign up for a job and they live like the first five days and then they hit the coast button or they want to buy a business, they look at businesses for two weeks and they kind of hit the coast button. How does somebody transition from, you know, living a life of just reading the first five pages to being somebody committed to reading the whole book and impacting the life that they live? But also the lives that they come in contact with.
- [08:51]
Sahil Bloom
I think all of this comes down to this tendency that everyone has developed in this modern age to get our dopamine from information gathering. Dopamine from information gathering is a dangerous drug. That is the dopamine that you get from reading the first five pages of a book. You're like, oh, I'm smart now, I know this thing, right? Oh, I read the first pages, five pages of Atomic Habits. I'm good at habits now. But you haven't done anything yet. You haven't actually gone and taken action on the thing. So if you think about that as like a broader meta principle for life. Life is all about information and then action. Like there's this idea that I often talk about of like the gap between information and action in your life. My observation, spending time with some of the highest performing people in the world is that they have a razor thin gap between information and action. If they consume information on something, they're immediately finding a way to act upon it, to teach it, to implement it in their life. That is what allows them to consistently improve over long periods of time. Because for most of us, there's this big gap, right? You consume the information, you're like, oh, that's neat, that's interesting. And you do nothing with it. You don't actually go and act upon it in your life. So you end up in coast mode. Because how are you going to improve if you're not actually going and taking action in the world? You're not going to have any new clarity. Clarity comes from action, not from information gathering. And so what I would say to anyone that's kind of feeling stuck is you need to figure out what the tiniest daily action is that you can take that you can just go and do over a consistent, let's say 30 days. The big barrier that people have to that is that they think the tiny action is inconsequential and that it's not really going to drive them forward. So you say, you know, why would I do the 15 minute walk every day? I'm 100 pounds overweight. The 15 minute walk is not going to do anything. I need to go to the gym for an hour a day to make progress. But the hour a day, you're just never going to do it. You might do it for one or two or three days and then you're going to fall off the wagon because it's going to be hard, you know, like the. You need to make the pain of not doing something more significant than the pain of doing it. And when you give yourself this ultra high bar for what doing it means, the pain of doing it is just too severe, it's too steep. And so as a result, you do nothing. It's like, I used to do this with journaling all the time. I thought that journaling meant sitting down and writing for 30 minutes. And what would happen is January 1st would come around. It'd be like, I'm going to journal this year. Two, three days go by, I would do it and then something would happen and I would fall off the wagon. Because my version of what it meant to journal was this grand, extraordinary thing. When in reality it could have been as simple as like a blank sheet of paper for 30 seconds, jot down a few things. And if I had lowered the bar, I could have built the muscle and built the habit over a period of time to eventually maybe get to 30 minutes or not, or maybe 30 seconds is my journaling habit. And that's fine too. But what you really need to do is just think about how can you shrink that gap between information and action? How can you bring the two together? So when there's something new, you're going and acting on it in your life and you're kind of continuing that over a long period of time.
- [11:58]
Host / Interviewer
Well, and when you say that, it makes. Makes me think about the story you had about going to the gym early. Like, you started with that small, tiny micro action of, I'm just going to go to the gym really early. I'm going to be the first person in the gym and I'm going to get my workout in. You didn't know you would meet people that would change your life, impact you in deep and meaningful ways. All you did was said, I'm going to go to the gym early. And you made a commitment to yourself that led to you meeting what, Tim Cook?
- [12:21]
Sahil Bloom
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's no such thing as a loser who wakes up at 5am and works out. Every time I say that, people lose their minds. But it's true. Like, it's just, it's not saying that you have to wake up early and go to the gym in order to be a winner and that you're a loser if you don't do that. But it is saying that. I don't know anyone that wakes up early on a consistent basis and goes to the gym that isn't finding ways to win in other areas of life because it's very hard. You're doing a hard thing every single day that requires discipline and Focus and the type of people that can do that and convince themselves to do that are, are showing up in that same way in their relationships, in their business, in all of the other areas of their life. That to me is why the gym in the early morning hours is this like natural sort of filtering mechanism for high achieving people that are aligned with you values wise too. When you think about the people in your own life that have had the greatest impact, generally speaking, it's people who are aligned on some of the bigger picture values of how to live. For me, the biggest one is a belief in delayed gratification. You know, a belief that doing something hard now to create a benefit later is the key to life. And people who show up at the gym early in the morning believe that. Otherwise they would not be there because it sucks. No one wants to wake up at. I don't like waking up at 4 in the morning. I don't like getting into a cold plunge. You don't, you're doing something that you don't like. You're overriding that pain mechanism because you know it's creating a benefit for you later. You're sort of saying, you know, you're pulling the after into the before. You feel great at 6am when you leave the gym and you've done the thing, you feel like crap when you're getting out of bed at four to go and do it and you're able to override that mechanism to go and live. Well, it's, you know, it's like a modern day, it's like an adult version of that marshmallow test. Like at Stanford in the 1970s, I think they did this experiment where they put a bunch of kids in a room and they gave them a marshmallow on their plate. And the experimenter left and said, I'm going to come back in a few minutes and if you don't eat that marshmallow, I'm going to give you two marshmallows. But if you eat it, that's all you get. And they left. And then they watched what the kids did. Some kids ate the marshmallow, they couldn't resist it. Some kids distracted themselves that they could wait and then get the two. And then they followed those kids and what they found was that the kids who were able to delay the gratification, wait for the bigger prize later, ended up having better outcomes across basically everything in their lives. They had higher scores on things, higher educational outcomes, made more money later in life. It was proof sort of of this fact that delayed gratification is the key to success in all of these areas of life. And I just think that those tiny actions that you do, whether it's the gym early in the morning, whether it's waking up early and reading, waking up early and praying, if you're, you know, if you're spiritual, all of those things I find just have ripple effects into the other areas of life.
- [15:18]
Host / Interviewer
Yeah. The fascinating thing too is now that you're a parent, you get to watch how hard it is to teach your kids that delayed gratification. I mean, it is like the ultimate test. And what I have learned is the world we live in today is trying to remove delayed gratification from us. I mean, Amazon, you can get your stuff tomorrow. So how do you teach this to Roman? How do you impact Roman so that he understands it? You put a marshmallow on his plate and see what he does.
- [15:41]
Sahil Bloom
It's very hard. I mean, I would say zoomed out view, 10,000 foot view. Technology as a thing is about friction reduction. Every technology, every new technology that has been developed over the last 200 years has been about reducing some level of friction in our lives. If you think about back to the industrial revolution, like machines, all of a sudden they reduce the friction of needing to actually do the work. Fast forward to today. All the technology that exists reduces the friction in your life. Oh, you didn't like going to the grocery store and having to spend time going and buying groceries. Okay, Instacart exists. Oh, you didn't want to go to the restaurant to pick up your food or go out and eat. You can get Uber Eats. You know, you don't want to cook. You can get a personal chef. Like all of these things that have been developed have been about reducing friction. Home workouts, you don't have to go to the gym anymore. You can do it here. Here I have the technology for you. And somewhere along that trend line, what you find is that the friction actually created meaning. And if you reduce too much friction from your life, you can optimize the life out of your life. You've sucked so much friction out that you live like that movie wall Eat. We're all massively obese and we're scooting around in scooters and neuralink projects just only happy thoughts into your brains. And you only have foods that are perfect. And AI is telling you how to communicate with everyone so that you're perfectly in line with them at all times. That's not a world that I want to live in. Personally, I'm a big believer that the reason you experience true joy in things is because you have experienced true sadness or pain. Right. Like struggle creates the benefit on the other side. And if you obsessively reduce friction, you're going to live in a world where you no longer have the sort of the spring or the summer. Like ask anyone that lives in a exclusively warm weather, beautiful place. They no longer appreciate the 70 degrees sunny day quite as much as someone who lives in Boston or who lives in a cold climate. I lived in Palo Alto, California. It's 70 degrees and sunny every day. I can tell you for a fact, I did not enjoy the 70 degree and sunny spring day the same way I enjoy it now living in Boston or New York. It's just you don't. Because you don't have the other version of it. There's no season to your life in that way. So I think that teaching this is just about finding ways to reinsert friction strategically to our lives. To choose friction in a certain way where you otherwise would have a choice to just walk down the easy path. That can be as simple as choosing to take the stairs when you could take the elevator or the escalator. Right. Like, I actually have a rule. It's a silly thing, but someone on my team pointed it out to me that when I'm in airports I never take the moving walkway. I always, I always walk. And this guy on my team was like, I noticed that you never take the moving walkway. And I was like, I never really thought about it, but it's just like this tiny little stand that I like to take that like I am blessed to be able bodied right now in my life. And I can walk, I'm gonna walk in this situation I don't like, it's not getting me there any faster. Frankly. I'm usually faster walking than the people standing on this thing anyway. Those little sort of strategic choices I view as like this active rebellion in some ways. In a world that is trying to get you to sort of just meld and blend into your surroundings, to sort of be in equilibrium with this lazy surrounding that is around you. It requires this active fight in order to resist that.
- [19:21]
Host / Interviewer
Yeah. And I think that's all of life. I mean, I do something similar at the airport. I always take the stairs. The amount of people that take the elevator or the escalator blows my mind. It's like, dude, it's 15 stairs. Is the escalator really going to get you there faster? Now there are people who are elderly or who have walkers. Like, absolutely. Those things were Built for you guys, but they weren't built for the able bodied humans that we are today. Someday we might have to take them. And I'll choose to take it when that comes. That time comes. But for you. As we approach a new year, there are so many people that are listening to this, going like, January 1st, I'm going to change my life. January 1st is when I'm gonna do it. Now I have a thing, I start my year every year on December 1st because I find so many people sleepwalk through the holidays that I then get 13 months. Everybody else is 12. And like that's the.
- [20:04]
Sahil Bloom
You're manipulating time. This is like the Ed Violette, the meme that went viral.
- [20:09]
Host / Interviewer
Yeah, but what everybody tells me is like, you still have the same 12 months. And I said, yeah, you're right. But December 1 asked me that and I'm telling you, I've got 13 months. So somebody's sitting there going, oh, this is what I needed. I'm gonna change my life. I'm gonna get healthy, I'm gonna run that marathon, I'm gonna do that thing outside of the microhabit, that small thing that they can do. How do they truly transform from where they are to where they want to go? What would you do if you were them?
- [20:30]
Sahil Bloom
Well, first I would have a clear vision of what it is that I want to do. And to me, that vision has to be the person that you want to be. Like, if you were to wake up, ask yourself this question. If you were to wake up one year from now and you are in flow, your life has just in flow. Things are clicking professionally, personally, health wise, all these areas. What does your life look like? What are you doing on a daily basis? How do you feel? What do you look like? Really create a clear vision in your mind. You can write it down if you want or if you're a visual person. Like, you know, I've seen people do the vision boards, not for me, but some people really get a lot of value out of that. Create a clear vision of what it looks like first. The next piece is one that I think people lose sight of, which is do it with someone. I cannot tell you how many times I have failed at implementing or creating a new sort of habit or practice simply because I wasn't accountable to anyone around it. There's all sorts of science now that says that you shouldn't publicly talk about your goals or the things that you're doing. Generally the science is, what it shows, is that people get a dopamine hit from Saying they're going to do a thing and that disincentivizes you from doing it. So you go and tweet, I'm going to lose £50 this year. And a bunch of people are like, that's awesome, Matt. That's great. Go and do that thing. Now all of a sudden you got a dopamine hit from saying you were going to do it, when what you really want is a dopamine hit from doing it. I am a big believer that saying it to a person, like an individual in private that you're going to go on this journey with in some way is a huge accelerant to achievement. So maybe publicly gets you that dopamine hit, but having that accountability partner, someone that you are going to feel a little bit ashamed if you skip out on a thing, is hugely motivating. I, I am someone who benefits from a little bit of negative reinforcement. I need that little voice in my ear being like, you're being soft. Like you said you were going to wake up. You're being soft and having someone that can be that where you are naturally just going to feel a degree of like, I'm letting someone down. If I don't go to the gym today, they were planning to meet me there. That's part of the value of having a personal trainer. People don't pay a personal trainer to actually show them how to work out. People pay a personal trainer to have personal accountability to show up at the gym. And you don't need to pay a personal trainer to do that. You can just have a friend that you're maybe going to text done to. When you went and did the thing you said you were going to do, they don't have to live near you even, right? Like, you could have one person if it's me and you, and I'm like, hey, my goal is, you know, I want to go run a marathon by the end of 2026. I haven't run a mile in my whole life. And that's my big ambitious goal for this year. You could say, hey, I want to go build a new million dollar revenue stream. And every day we're just going to have a text message thread where when we do the 30 minutes of the thing that we said we were going to do, I'm going to text you and I'm just going to say done. The text thread isn't for anything else other than just saying done or sending a little check mark. And every day I'm accountable to you and you're accountable to me to Go and do the thing you said you were going to do. That is an enormous, enormous cheat code for going and making progress on the things that you said. It's totally free. You don't need any fancy apps. You don't need some like notion tracker, database board. A text message thread where you just say done to someone that you're accountable to can have a huge impact.
- [23:49]
Host / Interviewer
Yeah. It's funny because those two things were the two things that changed my life. The first one was having a vision. So many people are sleepwalking through life having some rough idea of where they want to go, but not a specific clear plan of where they want to go and what success looks like. So oftentimes you ask people, on a scale of 1 to 10, how healthy do you feel? They'll be like, oh, I feel like a 7. You're like, well, what would a 10 look like? And they explain the exact health that they're currently experiencing. So you have to first get clear with where you want to go. And then that accountability piece, I mean, it's ironic because we're here at the GoBundance event and that's what this whole tribe was built on, was extreme accountability. Because it's so easy to quit on yourself, but it's so hard to quit on people that are depending on you that you feel an obligation to. And one of the things that I've realized in my personal life is I don't like to share the thing I'm going to do publicly. I like to share the punishment of what I'm going to do publicly if I don't do the thing. So I signed up for 100 mile race in February. My thing is I am not going to train for the race. I will not run more than 10 miles at any one stint. And everybody thinks I'm crazy. Like, you don't run 100 miles because you know it's going to be fun. You run 100 miles because you know that the knowledge, the wisdom, the experience of in the pain you get is where the gold is. So I'm like, well, shit, I might as well get there as fast as I possibly can. How do I do that? I'm just not going to train. And so I was, I was watching Instagram one day, my dad sends me this picture, this, this, this reel of a woman riding, you know, those horses that our kids have where it's like a broomstick with a horse head? There is a world national horse broomstick jumping competition. I don't know what that. I mean, it's crazy. So I'm like, I'm going to run 100 miles in February and if I don't run it, I have to sign up for this World National Broomstick horse racing. So for me, I have found, like, what you said, when you share the thing, you get that hit of dopamine. But when you share the punishment now, all of a sudden you get the accountability of people texting you, going, I can't wait to watch you gallop on a broomstick for four hours jumping over these cute little jumps for you. Do you put punishments in place if you don't achieve things? Or have you just found the accountability is all you need? Need?
- [25:44]
Sahil Bloom
I always have those punishments. But candidly, for me, the punishment of failing to do something that I said in my own mind that I would do is worse than any horse broomstick riding that I could possibly take on. I'm sure it looks pretty bad. I just, I have always been someone that was like, if there's anyone that's hard on me, it's myself. I'm very hard on myself. I had parents who had really, really high standards. My mom, you know, I have an Indian mother. Like, Indian mothers notoriously, very tough and hard driving in a lot of ways. But I was always my own harshest critic to this day, you know, when things go well, I'm like, oh, yeah, like one. Okay, like, could have done, could have done this, could have done that. And that's not to say that I'm not proud of myself when I go and execute something. I do feel that way, but I, I tend to be pretty hard on myself. I would say I always connect the things I'm doing to my relationship with my son. And so if I, you know, a silly example is like, I'm not really training for a race right now for any specific marathon, but every single Saturday morning I wake up and go for a run between 16 and 22 miles. There's zero reason for me to do that, right? Like, I don't need to do that. I'm fit whether or not I do that. But it's something that I've just said that I, that I do. I go out on this long run on Saturday mornings and there have been a bunch of times where I got home late Friday night and I just didn't want to get up and do the thing. And I'm always able to talk myself into doing it because I say to myself, like, what am I going to say to my son if I'm not the type of person that does what he says? He's going to do, right? Like, my son actually absorbs these things. I get home at like 8 from this early morning run. He's like, where were you? He was like, were you on a run? Were you going for a run? I want to go for a run with you. Right? Like they're learning and absorbing the things that they see us do. My dad is turning 70 this week and I was sort of reflecting on it, writing about lessons that I've learned from. And one of the things that I realized is I wrote down all these lessons and he didn't sit me down and explain a single one of these to me. My dad's not like a huge talker. He's not the type of person who's going to sit down and like wax poetic on these deep lessons in life. Maybe in the way that I might. He just lived by these things. I saw it. When I think about hard work and why I value hard work so much, it's because I got to travel with my dad on a couple of his work trips and I would see him on a 12 hour flight, stay up throughout the entire night working on some talk or presentation. And I would ask like, why are, you know, why are you doing that? He's like, well, this is what's required to, you know, execute up to the standards that I have for myself and that you can't teach. These are unteachable lessons. You can only learn them by seeing someone live by them. And so to me, that is the worst punishment I can imagine is saying I'm not living by the things that I want my son to understand, hell no, I'm not going to allow that to happen. If all it takes is for me to wake up early and go and do this run, or all it takes is for me to show up and write in the way that I said I was going to write every day or do the thing that's like in the grand scheme of things, not hard, right? Like I'm an able bodied human being. I'm so blessed in that way that I can go out and go and run in the morning and I'm going to complain about that. There's people on the other side of the world that have to go and walk 10 miles to go get water for their family. And I'm going to complain about having to go for a 16 mile run that I'm able to do in this beautiful area that I live in. Like it's ludicrous for me to sit around and complain about that. And so I just I feel an enormous amount of gratitude and I feel an enormous responsibility to take advantage of these blessings, live through them and hopefully go and share these ideas with more people so that more people can go and live by them.
- [29:28]
Host / Interviewer
So somebody has a vision, somebody has an accountability partner. 27 days into the year, they fall off the rails. I always tell people the only difference between a rut and a grave is how long you choose to stay there. How does somebody get out of that rut?
- [29:41]
Sahil Bloom
Don't try to make up for a miss. I think, you know, if I were to make a playbook for consistency, like, okay, consistency is the key to all of these things. You want to do these things consistently. If you were to make a playbook for consistency, I would say that the number one way that ambitious, self proclaimed, high performing people fall off consistency is by trying to make up for a miss. Misses happen, but what we tend to do is say like, oh, I was going to run every single day. I was going to run two miles every single day. I missed on Tuesday, so I'm going to run four miles on Wednesday to make up for it. I'm going to run six miles because I missed two days in a row. Then they get hurt or they're exhausted from it, so then they miss Thursday. That attempt to make up for a miss comes from a good place in your heart, but it's counterproductive to what you're actually trying to do. All you need to do is just get back on the wagon. You just need to go back and do the two miles again. You missed a day, okay, it's done, it's gone. There's nothing you can do about it. You don't need to make up for the miss. Just go back to the system that you were executing on before. That desire to make up for it has led to more people falling off on the long term because it is, I mean, it's what leads to the burnout because you get exhausted from the action, then instead of just feeling good from it, it leads to injuries, it leads to all sorts of problems down the road.
- [31:00]
Host / Interviewer
Do you think somebody can be critical on themselves without having judgment and resentment towards themselves?
- [31:08]
Sahil Bloom
I think that this is a, this is a difficult one for me to answer. I think that being a extraordinary high performer requires certain traits that I think you could view as negative that kind of come in the kit. Like I often think about delusion as being one of these that like.
- [31:39]
Host / Interviewer
You.
- [31:40]
Sahil Bloom
Kind of need a little bit of delusion, delusional self belief in order to execute at the top 0.01% level. And you go look at like the careers of some of the highest performers in history. There's this tendency to not know when to quit. You'll look at Muhammad Ali, right, like one of the greatest boxers of all time getting beat to a pulp at the end of his career because he didn't know when to hang it up. Even like recent examples, like why does Tom Brady continue to play after winning a Super bowl with the Buccaneers? Michael Jordan with the Wizards, probably actually an even better example, like, what are you doing? Why are you doing this thing? And what you realize when you go and sort of analyze it as well. The unwillingness to quit was what made them successful. Like the delusion was actually necessary for them getting to the extraordinary goat status level that they got to. So you can't just all of a sudden shut that off and know exactly when to fold them, if you will. You know when to hold them, know when to fold them. It just doesn't work that way. You know, it sort of comes in the kit and it's a double edged sword. You're going to get it on both sides. I often think that a little bit of that negativity, that judgment, that resentment that you have towards yourself sometimes the anxiety that comes with these things are sort of part of the either like attacks on the achievement that you are going to have or the success that you're going for and you can't have one without the other. It's just part of it. Like I think that stress and anxiety are attacks on extreme ambition. If you have extraordinary ambition, you are going to feel a lot of stress and anxiety on the journey because there are going to be times when you don't feel like you're making progress towards this, this great ambition that you have and that's not going to feel good. That is just part of the kit. If you are going and trying to achieve these things now, if you're not, if you're just trying to build a, you know, a good simple life, which I think is amazing as well, there's nothing wrong with that. You probably can get into this good flow around those things. But for me, like, paranoia is just part of who I am as a person. I am always, no matter what level I get to, I'm always going to be paranoid. Like I feel to this day, like, oh, what if no one ever wants to book me to speak again? All of a sudden people just don't want to book me to speak or I'm not able to write and like it's Objectively, it makes no sense. And you could sit here and give me a very rational case for why that makes no sense and that won't happen. But it's just part of who I am and it drives me to continue to show up in the best light, continue to continue to push. And so I think it actually is a negative to think about trying to solve those issues in yourself. It's actually the reason why, you know, there's this meme in Silicon Valley that a lot of great founders will go, do you know, ayahuasca? Or go on a psychedelic experience and never be the same as founders. Because all of a sudden the like insecurity or the struggle or the challenge that was inside that allowed them to go and push so hard, to go and create something is gone. They've sort of internally healed. And by internally healing they have hurt the thing that was actually making them as successful as they were. Now, are they better off or worse off? That's a totally different question and it's up to them to decide that. But it is just true that a lot of the highest performers throughout history were deeply damaged in some other way that sort of allowed them to thrive in this one arena.
- [35:04]
Host / Interviewer
GoBundance is a community of over 800 high performers, entrepreneurs and investors with a combined net worth of over $5.7 billion. But look, it's not just about the money. We're about building lives of abundance. If you're ready for a tribe that challenges you to achieve a higher standard for yourself, visit gobundance.com tribe that's G O B U N D A N C E.com T R I B E to apply today. So have you done any of the psychedelic stuff? Have you gotten into any of that stuff?
- [35:38]
Sahil Bloom
I have not. I. I am, yeah. I've tried mushrooms before. Like, I shouldn't say I've never tried it, but I, I am. I'm not like actively trying to work through something. I haven't to date, at least suffered from like some, any clinical mental health issues. I don't have ptsd. There are a lot of use cases that I think are incredible now and the research is starting to support them and they're helping a lot of people. Whether it's ketamine or ayahuasca or some of these other psychedelic therapies, I think there's going to be more and more. I don't have something that I'm trying to work through. I feel very much in flow right now and so I haven't really found a reason That I would never say never, but I'm sort of terrified in her sense of, like, trying something and, like, breaking something by accident and if it ain't broke, don't fix it. To some extent is sort of my mentality on life. It's sort of how I feel about, like. Like, I'm not going to dramatically change the way I work out all of a sudden because I feel. I feel good and I. And I feel pretty healthy until, like, I'm not all of a sudden going to do CrossFit and, like, go and do some crazy things because I don't want to all of a sudden, like, break something that wasn't having an issue in the first place.
- [36:53]
Host / Interviewer
Yeah. For me, it's almost like. And you were an athlete, there's like, that superstition. Like, you get those pair of cleats and they're working. You don't want to get a new pair. You get that glove, it's working. You're like, I don't want to get a new one. And I kind of look at those, like, medicines, let's call them as, like, man, it's. I'm not broke. I don't really want to mess with it because, like, once you open up that box, what I've seen is it's really hard to close the box. And I just. I have, like, you felt. The negative part of me that most people perceive as negative is actually the thing that fuels me to get up as early as I get up and work as hard as I'm willing to work up and show up for my kids the way I'm willing to show up. And I'm like, man, I just don't want to mess with that. It's working.
- [37:27]
Sahil Bloom
Yeah. It also. It depends whether it manifests internally versus externally. Like, I. The things that I would view as negatives about me are mostly things that are internal in that I can wrestle with them and they don't impact the way that I show up for the people that matter most in my life. Like, I show up and try to serve. I think that I'm a very kind person. You know, I love other people. I love listening. I love spending time with people. And so those deficiencies that I do acknowledge and know that I have are things that, like, I get to wrestle with, and I can throw them on my back, and I know I can carry that burden. The second they started manifesting in the world around me and sort of leading to struggles in relationships with people I care about, I would see a case to say, like, oh, I should probably go talk to someone. I should spend time thinking about these things, but I haven't seen that to date. And so I don't want to. I mean, like, your brain is so unbelievably complex. You get one like, I'm so scared. Like one little misfiring, wiring something issue gets broken and I'm like, this whole thing that my whole life is built around that is right now feels in flow. I just don't see why it would.
- [38:40]
Host / Interviewer
Yeah. And I'm a very paranoid person too. So I'm like, okay, go try the ayahuasca. And the shaman gives me the wrong dose. Then what happens? Or like, I get the bad batch of the thing, then what happens? I'm like, I'm just. I'm very paranoid as well.
- [38:51]
Sahil Bloom
Yeah. I don't want to get one shotted by a multi headed Mesoamerican demon. You know, there's like that meme of you, like normal people going in. There was a thing on Twitter that was like ayahuasca being done by like turbo normies. And they get one shotted by this like, Mesoamerican demon, and all of a sudden they're never the same. And I'm terrified of that kind of stuff. Yeah.
- [39:14]
Host / Interviewer
So what has come from the book, New York Times bestseller, more than seven weeks, that you weren't expecting?
- [39:22]
Sahil Bloom
I would say the number one thing that I am most amazed by and grateful for is just the access to people that it has created. I am someone who very much measures my sort of joy and life around the interactions that I get to have with people who inspire me to think bigger about my own life. Not to like go and chase more things, but just people who inspire me that could be family members. My wife inspires me every day with the energy that she shows up for our son with, but also just people who are going out and living life differently and building their lives. And it has afforded me such an extraordinary opportunity to meet and spend time with people across all walks of life who have interacted and engaged with the book. It's very different from any other thing I'd done leading up to it. Because so much of what I had done before the book was ephemeral. Like all things on the Internet are ephemeral. Whether or not people believe that is a different story. But tweets, newsletters, social media posts, they're sort of there and then like 48 hours later, they're gone. You don't gift a newsletter to your kid for their graduation. Right. You don't gift a newsletter to someone for their, for Christmas, you gift a book, it's permanent, it's there, it sits on someone's shelf, they see it, it reminds, it sparks a thought in their mind that doesn't happen with things on the Internet. And so what I have found is that the ripple effect of that is 1000x what anything I had done before looked like. And in line with that, the topic of the book, it's not a you either agree or you don't agree, which some books just sort of have like, okay, here's the idea. It is like a lens or a framework for you to think about the world. And depending on where you're coming from, you'll use that lens and you'll see a completely different thing. And so what I have found as a result is that no matter who you are, you sort of can interact with it. You know, like an 18 year old can read it and find a lot of value in it. An 80 year old who is at the end of their life can read it and interact with it. And because of that diversity, I have been afforded this extraordinary diversity of conversations to kind of hear how people have wrestled with it in their own lives. Like, I, I got to co host a retreat with, with Richard Branson at his, at his island back in July. And he was saying how my book had gotten him really thinking about his own life. And to me, I'm like, this is someone I grew up watching on television, admiring in so many different ways. He has lived by a lot of the principles. He's married to the same woman. His kids are incredible. We got to spend time with them. He's so healthy at 70, ferociously competitive. Beat the hell out of me in this long distance bike ride while we were there.
- [42:12]
Host / Interviewer
Yeah, dude, I saw that. He was riding, you were walking.
- [42:14]
Sahil Bloom
Yeah, I mean, he is, he's on another level physically. Like, you know, for his being in his 70s, it's pretty incredible. I just, I think that that's just amazing that you can, you know, I started all this four years ago. Like, you can, you can sit down and, you know, you can reinvent your life as many times as you need. You know, new habits, new mindsets, new relationships. There's nothing that says that where you are is where you have to be and that who you are is who you have to be. And to me, that is just extraordinary.
- [42:48]
Host / Interviewer
Yeah. And to have a guy like Richard Branson, who's dyslexic, extremely dyslexic, say that your book has him wrestling with things that, like you said, he's lived his life by. I mean, what an incredible compliment.
- [43:00]
Sahil Bloom
That is pretty cool.
- [43:02]
Host / Interviewer
Pretty humbling.
- [43:03]
Sahil Bloom
Pretty humbling, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, look, I. I think it's really easy to attach to sort of extreme examples, like someone like him. But I'm. I've been more touched by the hundreds of messages, probably thousands at this point, from people who are just choosing to live slightly differently because of something that I happen to write. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be that it was something that they had never thought about or heard before, but just something that sparked action in their life. It was like it was the catalyst that sparked the action. What an extraordinary thing to be able to actually catalyze some action or change in someone's life that they are finding value in. Yeah.
- [43:43]
Host / Interviewer
And I think the coolest thing, having gotten to know you over the last six, seven, eight months, the coolest thing about it is you didn't just write a book and put it on a shelf and say, hey, this is a lens you should choose to look through. Like you could choose to look through. You live your life the way you wrote the book. You show up the way you wrote the book. You respond to people the way you wrote the book. How do you maintain that as you and your brand and your likeness continues to scale?
- [44:08]
Sahil Bloom
I don't feel any different as a person. I mean, is the biggest thing I. I'm a huge believer that you need. You need people in your life that are willing to keep you grounded no matter what. My wife is that for me, to an extreme degree. If I ever started to get too high on my own stuff, she would definitely be there to knock me out. And she has done that in the past. Whenever I, like, thought I was getting too cool for school, in whatever context. Back in my college baseball days, for sure, I needed it probably less so now because I. I just don't. I don't. I don't. I just don't think that highly of myself, to be honest. Like, because. Probably because of a little bit of that paranoia or that negativity that I have, I just feel really grateful. I mean, if there. If there's one feeling that I have around all of this is gratitude, I just. I think it's amazing that, like, four years ago I was miserable. I mean, I was living a completely different life. I was 40 pounds overweight. Like, I. There were so many things about my life that were struggling, and I started taking action, started working on things that I really cared about, found a path that was actually mine, that I think I could be one of the best in the world at. And four years later, I get to sit here and have this opportunity to impact people and be around people that inspire me and do things for work that I never. I mean, we're sitting here and Lake Louise like it's the most beautiful place in the world. I get to come here and call it work, spend time with people like you, with the folks that are here. I just, I mean, I'm like, I still, I feel like I'm on cloud nine. And I don't think I will ever take that for granted because I know how different it could have been if not for a few things that I was able to go and do.
- [45:47]
Host / Interviewer
So let's say you go back four years, you talk to that 40 pound overweight self who's miserable. What advice would you give yourself? Oh.
- [45:59]
Sahil Bloom
I would probably just really want that younger version of myself to have a clear vision for what that life looks like that he wants. I think I knew all of this stuff and I would have said the right things. If you had come to me and you had said, like, what are your priorities? I would have laid out a perfect list of priorities. I would have been like, oh, my family, my relationship with my wife, my health, all these things. But you would have watched me for a week and I wasn't living by any one of those. There are two types of priorities in life. There are the priorities we say we have, and there are the priorities our actions show we have. And oftentimes there's a big gap between those two. Your life improves alongside your ability to close that gap. But you can't close that gap until you look yourself in the mirror, hold yourself to the fire, and acknowledge that it exists in the first place. I needed to do that. I needed to ask myself those hard questions. And I think that creating the vision, starting to wrestle with that, I would have been able to start catalyzing action more quickly. It all worked out. So it's always hard to. It's really hard to look back at the past and say, oh, I regret anything. Because if you like where you're sitting today, why would you regret the path that brought you to here? I wouldn't change anything about the way that my life went because I don't think I would have had the experiences that led to a lot of these insights if I did. But I wish that I hadn't allowed it to impact people around me. I wish I could have just shouldered that burden along the way.
- [47:30]
Host / Interviewer
How did it impact them.
- [47:31]
Sahil Bloom
Just the way that I showed up in relationships, I was just not present. I was really withdrawn. I wasn't seeing my family. I wasn't present for my wife during a period of our life that was tough with some of the struggles with infertility. And that was unnecessary if I had just sort of healed a little bit more internally.
- [47:54]
Host / Interviewer
That's beautiful, man. So somebody's listening to this. They're hearing about you for the first time. Newsletter book. Where do they find all these things?
- [48:00]
Sahil Bloom
Yeah, I mean, you can find the book. It's called the five types of wealth. You can find it on Amazon or anywhere books are sold. Newsletter. You can find it my website, sahilbloom.com, and on all the social media platforms. I guess benefit of having a weird name is that you can find me just under my name anywhere.
- [48:18]
Host / Interviewer
Yeah. Or you can see the book in the airport, man. I saw it in the airport flying out here to Lake Louise. It's pretty cool.
- [48:22]
Sahil Bloom
Yeah, it is pretty cool.
- [48:23]
Host / Interviewer
You ever pick any up and sign them?
- [48:25]
Sahil Bloom
No, I pick them up and put them into a more prominent spot. I'm shameless about it. I pretend like I'm looking at it and then I put it right there. So if there are any bookstore merchandisers out there that have noticed that these books are mysteriously appearing in good spots because I'm traveling so much, so you just see me moving books.
- [48:45]
Host / Interviewer
That's awesome, man. Well, I've really enjoyed getting to know you. I appreciate you being here with the gobundance community. I appreciate your time, and I'm sure we'll be having this conversation again sometime soon.
- [48:54]
Sahil Bloom
Yeah. The gratitude is mutual. Thanks for having me.
- [48:56]
Host / Interviewer
Thanks.