Transcript
A (0:00)
Welcome to the MyBodyGreen podcast. I'm Jason Wakab, founder and co CEO of MyBodyGreen and your host.
B (0:08)
Time is valuable. That's why Lowe's blueprint takeoffs turn blueprints into quotes faster. Bring us your plans and we'll generate itemized material lists to make quoting easier so you can get back to Building Plus. At the Lowe's Pro desk, you get access to thousands of building materials not sold in store. And when your order's ready, we'll deliver everything to the job site. Improving is easy at Lowe's.
A (0:40)
You're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die. That single sentence changed everything for today's guests and it might change everything for you too. Saheel Bloom is the New York Times best selling author of the Five Types of Wealth and one of the most compelling voices on redefining success and time. At age 30, he had the prestigious job, the money, the markers of success. But his relationships were deteriorating and he was living 3,000 miles away from the people who mattered most. When a friend calculated he'd only see his aging parents 15 more times, Bloom quit his job, sold his house and rebuilt his life around what actually mattered. In today's show, we explore the shocking reality that 75% of our time with our children is over by age 12. We also talk about the arrival fallacy and why external achievements leave us unfulfilled and practical frameworks like anti goals and treating life priorities as dimmer switches rather than light switches. We also discussed the last time principle, a reminder that we don't know when we'll experience anything for the last time and how to define enough for yourself. Instead of chasing what society tells you what to want. This is a wake up call about how we spend our time and whether we're building the life we actually want. Let's dive in. So you start the book by packing a punch and I'll start with this opening quote. You're going to see your parents 15 more times before they die. End quote. Let's start there.
B (2:16)
We're going to go right into it. I love it. Those words hit me at a moment in my life that was pretty interesting because it was a time in my life life when from the outside looking in, I was winning the game. I was doing the things that you're supposed to want to do. I was, you know, 30 years old. I had the fancy sounding job, the title, the, you know, the money. You know, I had the markers of quote unquote success. As we, as we typically Think about it. And yet everything in my life was slowly falling apart. You know, my. My relationships were deteriorating. My wife and I were in the middle of this two year struggle with infertility that was causing strain in our life. For the first time, I was living 3,000 miles away from the people that I cared about most. I was drinking six, seven nights a week, you know, deeply unhealthy, mentally and physically. And on the surface like that surface interpretation sort of was just belied the reality that was underneath. And I went out for a drink with this old friend and we sat down and he asked how I was doing. And I sort of opened up that it was getting difficult living so far away from my parents, that these two people that were really two of my best friends in the whole world, that I just wasn't seeing them often, that I had noticed that they were slowing down and getting older. And he asked how old they were, and I said mid-60s. And he asked how often I saw them and I said about once a year. And he just looked at me and said that quote, those exact words, okay, so you're going to see your parents 15 more times before they're gone. That hit me in the same way that it hit you right there. Reading it right like that punch to the gut of recognizing that the amount of time you have left with the people you care about most in the world is that finite, that countable, that you can literally place it onto a few hands. That just shook me to the core. And that was the moment, that was the math that changed everything in my life. Because in that moment I realized this entire definition of success, of what it meant to build a wealthy life, had been incomplete. My entire mental model for what mattered in life was fundamentally broken. And that if I didn't change course, I was going to end up somewhere where I didn't want to be. And so my wife and I took a dramatic action. I mean, within 45 days of that conversation, I had quit my job, we had sold our house in California, and we had moved 3,000 miles across the country to live closer to both of our sets of parents. The last thing I'll say here is the most powerful realization in that was that you are in much more control of your time than you think. We had taken an action and fundamentally created time that number 15 more times before they're gone. It's now in the hundreds. I see my parents multiple times a week. They're coming over in a couple hours. Like I'm going to get to go in the sauna. With my dad, get to spend time with him on a random what's today Wednesday? We had taken an action and, and reassumed agency over our own lives, realized that we were capable of building our life around the priorities that we truly had. And so that was the spark that I think changed everything. That recognition, that reassumption of agency over our own journey. And it's why I felt so strongly about opening with that, because I wanted that spark to kind of take hold in other people and start letting that fire, to take action and to recognize that you are capable of, of building the life that you actually want.
