Jay Papasan:
When Gary and I were writing The ONE Thing, we realized that we had to define success. How do you define success? Is it about how much money you make? Is it about how big your business is? How many friends you have? What is your scorecard? In the end, we decided to define it as getting what you want. And here’s the trick. Lots and lots of successful people are chasing things that they’re not exactly clear that it is the thing they want.
This week’s guest is Sahil Bloom. He’s the author of a fantastic book called The Five Pillars of Wealth. He also writes a fantastic newsletter called The Sahil Chronicles that I’ve been reading for many, many years. He is very thoughtful in his approach to both life and work. He’s figured out some tricks on how to figure out on getting clear about what it is he really wants.
As an example, he understood that he has a high value around family time. And even though he was pursuing a very lucrative career in finance in California, he realized one day that if he didn’t make changes in his life, he would have very few days of his life left that he would actually get to spend with his parents in New York City. So, he moved all the way across the coast, left his career and started anew, building the career that we know of today as Sahil Bloom, the content creator. And he has no regrets about it because he was very clear about what ultimately mattered for him. And he did it in a way that, yes, he may have left something, but he built something bigger and better and more aligned with his values.
I think you’re going to love this conversation. He shares his framework for conducting experiments to figure these things out. We talk a lot about time, which is one of the Five Pillars of Wealth, right? Are you a time millionaire? Are you a time billionaire? Do you really understand how to invest your time to be wealthy in it and to get the most out of it? We’ll explore all of that in this amazing episode with one of my heroes, Sahil Bloom.
I’m Jay Papasan and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
All right, Sahil. Welcome to The ONE Thing Podcast. I’m so happy to have you.
Sahil Bloom:
I’m thrilled to be here.
Jay Papasan:
I’m a longtime fan. I was telling you, I’ve been, gosh, a subscriber of your newsletter, the Curiosity Chronicle, for at least three years. And I like how you think about models. That’s something that Gary and I hold near and dear to our heart. If you’re gonna do something that’s important to you, how can you take the best possible approach? And you seem to write about that a lot, where you’re a razor for thinking whatever.
One of the things that’s a through line, and we were talking about it, is that you’re trying to find sometimes the highest point of leverage. Where does that come from, that instinct? Where did you learn that?
Sahil Bloom:
I don’t know that it’s instinct. I feel like my natural tendency is to get grabbed by shiny objects. I think for most of my life, I was someone that would get pulled by the distractions. And one of the things that I’ve come to learn over the last few years as I’ve started to see a bit more success, and I think no accident as a result, has just been this idea that, sometimes, the worst distractions masquerade as good opportunities.
And what I mean by that is they look on the surface like they’re good opportunities. They’re interesting, they’re shiny, they’re exciting, they’re new, they’re novel. And really, all they are is a distraction from the one thing that really matters. And I have had to wrestle with that natural tendency that I have and kind of refine that instinct to get to the point where I understand that no, I need to identify the one point of high leverage, the highest leverage that exists in this system that I’ve created in this business ecosystem. And then, spend the rest of my time ruthlessly prioritizing that one thing.
And I think that that as a model for anyone to think about is a really powerful one. Like, within whatever system it is that you’re operating, think about what is the one thing that you can be doing that makes everything else feel much easier.
Jay Papasan:
Which is almost a perfect paraphrase of the focusing question, what’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything would be easier or unnecessary? So, perfect segue. But asking the questions at the beginning, hopefully you can find the answer. And I’ll point out, like I’ve seen it, I’ve experienced it, you did this thing so well, right? You had a newsletter that blew up and brought you, I guess, some ubiquity in terms of certain circles. You got a book deal. Your book is New York Times bestseller as well.
Sahil Bloom:
Yeah, yeah.
Jay Papasan:
So, you’ve become a New York Times bestseller. And I think I had a conversation with Ryan Holiday about it. The thing that you did to get all that success is probably the first thing that most people will put on the shelf because the success is there. Now, they can go do all the speaking gigs. Now, they can do, as you’re here, for a speaking gig. Not that that’s not an alignment but you know what I’m saying? That a lot of times, people work for the rewards of doing it, and then they neglect the thing that got them there.
Sahil Bloom:
Yeah, I think that that’s probably one of the most common traps that people fall into is they lose sight of the work that got them there in the first place. And sometimes, the work needs to change, right? And the way that you approach the work needs to change as you sort of refine that filter to focus on the one main thing, but you can’t lose sight of what that thing was, that really true distilled principle or action that you were taking on a regular basis.
For me, that was the writing, that was the creative work. It was like the true focused creative writing time that feeds everything else. Because for me, as my ability to spread interesting ideas goes, everything else goes. All the businesses work on the back of that. My ability to help companies I invest in goes on the back of my platform, which goes on the back of these ideas.
And so, that has taken me a long time to understand that that’s actually the thing that I need to be spending my time and energy on. And me spending my wheels on the hundreds of other things that I could spend my time on – brand deals, or interviewing employees, or hiring people, or managing businesses, or board stuff, all those other things are exciting and might make me feel really good about my LinkedIn page, but they don’t actually drive the real outcome that I’m trying to drive on a bigger picture level.
Jay Papasan:
You’ve figured it out. I think that’s awesome. There’s the challenge of now defending that decision. What advice would you give to someone who they think they have it, but like a lot of people, so like I know that you went to Stanford, you played baseball, you’ve probably had academic success, you’ve probably had a lot of things you were competent in, I call it the competency trap, like they look up and their business, there’s still all these things that they do better than anybody else around them. How do they know of those things, like this is the one to go in? Did you only see that in retrospect or were you able to have a way of looking at it that helped you decide?
Sahil Bloom:
I think that constant experimentation helps as you’re on that learning curve. I have just found that taking the approach of cheap, low cost experiments that you learn from very quickly is the way that you get to the right answer eventually. I don’t think you can hope to come into a new system and have this aha moment of here’s the one thing that really matters and I need to just focus on this one thing. The way it actually goes, if anyone’s going to be intellectually honest about it, is you come into a new system, whatever it is, whether it’s the new business you’re launching, or the new content ecosystem you’re building, and you experiment over the course of it could be several years.
In my case, it took me three, four, almost five years to figure this out of experimenting. I did. I spent time on a few different businesses. I spent time on the hiring things, but I did it in a low cost way. Meaning, I could experiment on that thing. And if I quickly found it wasn’t working or if I found that it burned my energy was the big one for me, it’s like, “Oh man, this feels really draining,” and I don’t feel I have the energy now to do the thing I enjoy, I need to be able to walk back that experiment quickly or shut it down.
And the challenge for a lot of people is being willing to engage in those experiments, and then doing them in a way where you’re willing to cut them loose if they aren’t working. A lot of people have this, as humans, plan continuation bias, where you create a plan, you launch some new experiment, and you’re like, “Well, I’ve been doing this for six months, so now I have to keep doing it,” right? Sunk cost fallacy. You stick to the thing because you set out to start doing it.
And especially, ambitious people really struggle with this because ambitious people self-define as having grit, right? We started to celebrate as a society, grit. You don’t quit. You just keep going. And quitting, saying no to things, quitting, walking away from things when your gut is telling you it’s not right is really the path to identifying that one thing to be able to go and do it. But you have to be willing to kill those darlings along the way.
Jay Papasan:
Yes. And so, you look up, I’m just trying to track, you’re doing an experiment, I’m looking at all the things that I do well in my business, I’m not sure which is my one thing. Some of them are gonna bring you energy and some are gonna drain. And so, that’s a quick measure. I know you have your energy calendar, which is in the five types of wealth. And I love that because if something inherently drains your energy, you’re not gonna do it for a long time. So, all that bias towards grit is also valid in the sense that most extraordinary things are a longer journey of commitment, but you’ve gotta have energy along the way. So, if you’re propping yourself up, you’re dead before you start.
Sahil Bloom:
Yeah, you can’t. I think of things on 10-year time horizons. Like if I’m gonna do something at an extraordinary world-class level, I have to be willing to do it for 10 plus years. And I cannot chew glass for 10 plus years. Meaning, like I cannot do the energy draining thing for 10 plus years. I just can’t. So, if I might think that creating long form educational videos is the main thing, that’s like an experiment that I wanna run, but if I quickly learn that it’s just killing me in the way that we’re doing it, I either need to change the way I’m doing it or I need to not be doing it because I can’t do it for 10 years. So, it can’t be the thing. It might be someone else’s main thing in the same context, but for me, if it’s not bringing me that energy, it just doesn’t quite work.
The mental model that I think really is helpful around this stuff is from this old tennis book, 1999, I think this tennis book came out. The author’s name is Simon Ramo. And he talks about the fact that amateur tennis is what he calls a loser’s game. Meaning 80% of points are won when someone makes an unforced error. Someone hits a ball into the net or hits it out.
Jay Papasan:
Is this The Inner Game of Tennis?
Sahil Bloom:
Yes, yes, yes.
Jay Papasan:
It was my last coach’s favorite book and he quoted from it all the time. And I eventually made the journey and read it and it’s brilliant.
Sahil Bloom:
Yeah, it’s a metaphor for life.
Jay Papasan:
It’s the best book not about tennis that’s about tennis.
Sahil Bloom:
Yeah. And I don’t even play tennis. But this idea of you win by avoiding unforced errors. And the concept as it applies to life is basically that most games of life are losers games. You’re not getting paid for hitting extraordinary, elegant shots. We think that when we’re young. We assume that in order to be a business success, you have to have the one world-changing idea or the one dramatic success. When in reality, a lot of the people that are extraordinarily successful that you admire, that you celebrate are people who just showed up over and over and over again, doing the boring basics, and they avoided unforced errors.
So, now, for me, I have a card on my desk that just says no unforced errors. And that’s like my rule, where when I’m starting to get grabbed by things-
Jay Papasan:
Is that Billy Ball too? Is that from the Moneyball book, where Billy Bain is like, he just wanted people who didn’t get outs.
Sahil Bloom:
Yeah, you just get on base. Yeah, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have to be sexy. I mean, that was what Moneyball changed about baseball was, it used to be all about batting averages, about getting hits. And what he realized was like a walk was just as good as a single. It didn’t matter. And so, it completely changed how they think about scouting, how they think about paying players.
Jay Papasan:
So, avoid things that can knock you out of the game or would count as outs. And one is energy drain. How do you distinguish a lot of – like I’ve got Anne-Laure Le Cunff in my head. I don’t know if you know her. We had her on. And yeah, tiny experiments, there’s gonna be … it sounded like maybe I can change the way I approach it. Like I feel like for my business, I really need to start a YouTube presence. And I don’t like it, I don’t feel good at it, whatever.
So, maybe we can change our approach. We can look at it from multiple angles before we just say no to it. Because I do think there’s a lot of people who start and we just suck at most things when we start. And that doesn’t fill us with energy usually. So, how do we help people distinguish between, “No, this is just the awkward teenage years of your starting this. It’s not that bad”?
Sahil Bloom:
Yeah, I think we need to separate energy for the action from energy for the outcome that it’s generating. I do think there is almost nothing when you first start that is energy creating in the outcome. There’s very few things that you’ve ever just picked up and you were immediately good at that you’d get that feeling of extrinsic success, affirmations, “Oh, this is creating energy for me because people are patting me on the back about it.” It’s sort of the question to ask of, would I be excited to do this thing if I could tell no one I was doing it, no one saw the output of it? Like, would I be excited to sit down and write if no one was going to read this piece?
And to be honest, writing a book is that. For three years, you were working on something that no one is going to see. And you have to be excited to be able to get up and do that work on a daily basis when there’s no visible output that’s actually coming from this action that you’re taking. And to me, that’s the ultimate test of an energy-creating endeavor. You should not write a book. You should not take that on as a task unless you are truly going to get an intrinsic joy and energy from doing it.
The way that I would think about this for a lot of people is to say that an experiment I view is like you have a wall in front of you and your goal is to get to the other side of the wall. That’s like let’s say success is on the other side of this wall. You’re gonna start by hitting your head into a wall in one spot. And you should probably do that 10 times or so. And after 10 or so times, if the wall didn’t budge an inch, you should probably try a different place on the same wall. It doesn’t mean you abandon the wall altogether. You might still be able to break through it, but the way that you’re hitting it, maybe that spot is not a good spot to pound your head over the wall.
And so, I think that that gets lost in this whole narrative of sticking with something. We talk about Mr. Beast. You’re like, “Oh, he made 10,000 videos before he got a million subscribers.” But he didn’t just make the same video 10,000 times over and over again. He wasn’t pounding his head into the same spot on the wall. What he was doing was ruthlessly, maniacally evaluating the data and things that were coming back from every single one of those 10,000 videos, getting slightly better at the way that he was approaching that experiment, until eventually, you break through the wall.
And so, the point of that is to say grit is not about just pounding your head into the same place on the wall over and over again. It’s about actually having the self-awareness to identify when you should be making those tiny micro shifts in the way that you approach it.
Jay Papasan:
It’s like grit with wisdom.
Sahil Bloom:
Yeah, exactly. It’s adaptive grit, if you will, would be a way that I might say it. It’s like we need to be adaptable. Adaptability is the key to life at the end of the day. You don’t set out on a voyage thinking that it’s just gonna be perfect seas and that you’re gonna get from point A to point B exactly on plan. You set out on a voyage trusting in your ability to adapt to whatever storms might come and the chaos that comes, which is also why the whole idea of planning is fundamentally flawed.
Planning is sort of based on this expectation of order, that everything’s going to be fine, and so my plan is perfect, I’m going to get over to the other side. Preparation is about the expectation of chaos. That chaos is going to come, but I’m prepared for it, because I’ve set myself up in a way where I can adapt to whatever it is that may hit me along the way.
Jay Papasan:
I love that. The way you described that, it reminded me of like deliberate practice when we were studying mastery for the book. So, you’re going about it in a way that’s somewhat purposeful. And I remember reading one book and they said, going to the golf range and hitting a thousand balls doesn’t really make you a better golfer. But if you show up every day, and you try to hit 100 balls within six inches of a cup with a seven iron, that’s a different kind of practice. And it’s a little bit more boring, but then you get to shake it up and try different things.
So, that hits your head in different places on the wall, which is a strange metaphor that we’ve really stretched out, right? But you are banging your head, but you’re testing out different ways, different angles. You’re gonna do it kind of deliberately. And then, there’s a point at which you need to know, “Okay, I’ve tried this 10 different ways. It’s probably not the thing for me.” And that is where winners quit. And I think a lot of people just need to hear that again and again. Winners do quit, they actually quit more than a lot of people believe.
Sahil Bloom:
Yeah. And there’s different timelines for different people to find what this thing is. I think there is a tendency to just create these arbitrary timelines and you say like, “Well, I haven’t found my thing. I’m 45. I’m 50. So, I’m just not going to ever find my thing,” when actually it’s easy to say in this sort of hypothetical way, “Well, it’s never too late,” right? And we can point examples – Ray Kroc, Martha Stewart, Morris Chang, all these amazing people that started their thing in their 50s, 60s, very late in life.
There’s also scientific evidence to support this idea that there are different types of innovators in the world. David Galenson, I think was the name of this researcher at University of Chicago, that basically identified that there were two types of innovators. There were conceptual innovators, who tended to have their big breakthrough in their early years of life. And then, there were experimental innovators who were the people that sort of through this process of these tiny, little changes or adaptations over long, long periods of time found their big breakthrough in their 50s, 60, and beyond.
So, if Picasso was on the conceptual land where he had his highest price, greatest artworks as a youth, then you have Jackson Pollock on the other end who if he had died at 40, you wouldn’t have known the name. It wouldn’t have existed because he hadn’t actually come to that big transformative innovation yet.
Jay Papasan:
And he was really prolific at the very end too.
Sahil Bloom:
Very, very prolific at the end.
Jay Papasan:
Wow. Which would you prefer, early or late?
Sahil Bloom:
I think the pathway to happiness is certainly late. I’ve often joked that I think if you were to map a perfect course for happiness in life, it would be tiny incremental growth over long periods of time. The worst path to happiness is the spike thing early in life that, then, you can never live back up to. It’s why athletes, military, like people who have spikes in relevance or mattering to the world early in life really struggle to kind of refine that.
Jay Papasan:
It’s not sustainable.
Sahil Bloom:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
Like it’s so weird.
Sahil Bloom:
Yeah. And humans get a lot of joy from growth and continued value expansion. And so, this idea of experimental innovation where you’re kind of slowly figuring things out over a long period of time, I think that would be a much cleaner path to happiness. It’s why you find a lot of these artists that have these early in life successes to be really miserable in a lot of ways as human beings.
Jay Papasan:
And that’s why I actually admire the ones that have a great success, and then immediately change the game. You know, I was an R&B artist. Now, I’m going to go to jazz. And now, I’m going to try some other thing. And I feel like they’re just kind of playing with it a little bit to say, “Yes, that was cool, but I’m actually on a different journey.” I think the ones that I’ve seen that have played with multiple mediums and different things, I feel like they’re using a different scorecard at the very least.
Sahil Bloom:
Yeah, I think you have to in some ways. Just avoid continuing to compare yourself to that early in life success.
Jay Papasan:
So, we kind of have been talking about figuring out your one thing, like your highest, greatest use or, for you, the highest point of leverage. We need to take a quick break. On the other side, I’d like to talk a little bit about defending that choice. Because I kind of feel like once you’ve figured it out, it doesn’t mean that every day just suddenly gets easy. You still can fall back on old habits all the time. All right, we’ll be right back after the break, folks.
All right. So, in the first half, Sahil, we were talking about kind of identifying that thing that you probably should be doing and giving more of your time to – experimenting, kind of playing with it and letting it evolve over time. It’s not really not going to be a road of Damascus, a lightning bolt that hits you and, like, “Oh, I know.” It’s gonna happen over time.
You’ve lived this. So, you get there, the thing that got you there, how do you start to protect that focus now that you’ve identified it over time? Because it’s really easy. I mean, we see people all the time. Like I had this moment where for a year, I was doing it, and then I fell off the wagon. And they’re trying to refine that magic. How do we defend it and stay on track?
Sahil Bloom:
I think one of the first steps is to really check your comparisons, the people that you compare yourself to.
Jay Papasan:
Oh, let’s define what on track means.
Sahil Bloom:
Yeah. I mean, I think that one of the reasons people fall off track is because you start looking around you and you see these other people doing all these other things, and you say like, “Well, I had an idea of what my main thing was but that looks pretty good over there, and this looks good, and this person is doing more than me, and that person is doing more than me.” And all of a sudden, things that I didn’t know existed or that I didn’t really care about become the way that I’m defining my own worth around what I’m pursuing. And so, you start getting pulled by that little pang of FOMO or whatever you want to call it, which is a huge risk to your ability to focus.
I have just found that having a system for that, managing the way that you really think about measuring yourself, what you are really trying to strive towards, what is the life that I’m actually trying to create, is hugely helpful for avoiding that natural insecurity that I think humans have.
The second piece is having a team or systems in place for outsourcing and delegating the things that aren’t your main thing because it’s great to know it, but if I know that my main thing is X, and too bad, I have to spend 90% of my time on Y and Z simply to run the business, that’s not a particularly useful insight. I need to do something about that.
And so, the big process for me as a team over the last year or so has been, now that we feel like we know what that best use of energy and time is on my end, how do we build a team where the best use of theirs, their main thing are the things that I hate doing and that aren’t that for me, creating sort of a complimentary set of zones of genius or whatever you want to call it, where the whole team functions as greater than the sum of the parts.
Jay Papasan:
If I’m following right, the first step, you’ve developed your own scorecard so that you’re paying attention to the right things. You want to give us a snapshot of what that looks like?
Sahil Bloom:
Yeah. I mean, for me, it is just that I am very clear on what it is that I want to build out of my life. I think that very few people ever sit and think about what they want their life to look like. Naval had this quote that went viral a while back where he basically said that the only true test of intelligence is whether you get what you want out of life. And I actually think there’s a layer deeper to that, which is whether you actually know what you want out of life, because when you go and ask people, and I’ve done this-
Jay Papasan:
Liking what you get is different than knowing what you want and getting it.
Sahil Bloom:
Yeah, knowing what you want in the first place. I mean, I’ve gone and asked some of the most successful people in the world this question, what do you actually want your life to look like? And sometimes, you get this weird blank stare from people. They’re like, “What do you mean? Of course…” It seems like it’s this obvious question that you ask. And then, they’re not able to articulate what they’re trying to build. Like, what the money is actually for? They’re going and creating and building these things, but they don’t really know the life that they’re trying to create, what they want it to look like.
And my view is that in the absence of having a clear picture or vision for what you’re trying to create, what you do is you look around and you grab things from other people, or you accept whatever the world has handed you. So, you end up living this life by default rather than creating your own life by design. The way that you fight against that is to get very clear on that vision, where you want to live, what you want to be thinking about, what you want to be working on, what you want to be focusing on on a daily basis. Once you have that in mind, you no longer seek to look for other answers to the question because you know yours.
Jay Papasan:
When people know what they’ve actually said yes to, the no’s are a lot easier.
Sahil Bloom:
Yes.
Jay Papasan:
Right? And I do think when we were just beginning to write the book, we realized ultimately, I think success was in the subtitle originally. And, it was the big part of it. We’re like, “Well, we have to define that. Well, what is success?” And there’s all of these different measures of what success is. And ultimately, we just kind of wrote, it’s like success is getting what you want. And that’s the rub, is I really don’t think I agree with you. A lot of people show up, and they’ve been chasing things that are not authentically coming from within them. Maybe their parents wanted it for them. Maybe people just rewarded them for doing something. And so, it’s social acceptance that they’re chasing but it’s not coming from the inside.
So, I know that you devote a lot of time to thinking time. We advocate for it. We usually try to get people just to do even 30 minutes a week. How can we find the space to actually ask that bigger question?
Sahil Bloom:
You don’t find space. You structure it-
Jay Papasan:
How do we make sure it’s in your calendar?
Sahil Bloom:
I think the way that most people create the space in their life to have thinking time or to have consumption where you can actually read and learn is by getting tighter about the way that you manage your management time, which I think of management time as like emails, processing things, meetings, all the stuff that sort of naturally bleeds out over your entire calendar.
The way that you more effectively batch that is by leveraging what’s called Parkinson’s law. This idea that-
Jay Papasan:
Yes, the work will fill the space, the time that you give it.
Sahil Bloom:
Yes, exactly. Work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. So, the example that I love is like if you give yourself four hours to do your emails, you’ll take four hours to do your emails. If you give yourself 30 minutes to do your emails, you will crank through your whole email inbox in 30 minutes. We have an amazing capacity to just hammer things if we need to. And if there’s that time constraint, you felt that at some point in your life, you can use that sort of constraint-driven urgency to more tightly squeeze these things that have a tendency to bleed out over your calendar.
And what that does is it creates time that you can use for other things, that you can allocate towards whatever it is you might want. It might be that you allocate it towards a date night with your wife, it might be that you allocate it towards time with your kid, or it can be that you carve out 30 minutes a week to think about some of these bigger picture questions.
I love asking myself these bigger questions that sort of reset my focus. The one that I love right now is this idea of if a third party were to watch you for a week, how serious would they say you are about your goals? I love this idea of the third party because what it does is it forces you to zoom out and see a bigger picture on your own life. And it’s very easy to delude ourselves, living in the first person, into thinking that we are doing the things necessary to go and build the life that we want. But if someone else were to come and watch you for a week, how serious would they say you are about your goals?
And be honest with yourself. Be able to sort of be that ruthless third party saying, “Yeah, you like to talk about these things, but you’re not showing up and doing the things you said you were going to do on a daily basis.” And your life will improve alongside your ability to deliver that tough message.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah. And so, I’ve had one tough coach when I made an assertion about something that I thought was important, he just asked, “Could you prove that? Could you show me your calendar and prove that?” And a lot of times, our calendar, how we spend our time reveals what’s actually important to us at that moment in time. And it was very convicting. And then, you can start allocating to be in more alignment with what you say you want to be but there’s usually a gap for most people because we’re not aware.
So, that’s a good trick. If someone followed me around for a week, how serious would they say I am about being an author or whatever it is I say that’s important to me?
Sahil Bloom:
Don’t tell me your priorities, show me your calendar.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah. It’s very revealing. I feel like there’s going to be an AI integration at this point, which will be completely removed. If we have to tell it it’s okay to hurt our feelings, because we know ChatGPT is pretty soft but like, “Tell me, you’re a world class coach, what does my calendar reveal about my values?”
Sahil Bloom:
That’d be a great AI use case, actually, to just look at your calendar on a weekly basis and tell me, like, how aligned was the time that I spent this week with what I say that I’m focused on.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah. And ask follow-up questions.
Sahil Bloom:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
So, you block time for this. Did you actually use it? Because what’s on our calendar and how we live it aren’t always parallel as well.
Sahil Bloom:
Very true.
Jay Papasan:
Now, I believe that we’re in the business with The ONE Thing of helping people invest their time better, so they have fewer regrets. And a lot of what you preach and what you wrote about, some of the great constructs in The Five Types of Wealth are doing the same thing, right? You realized through a question that you might only see your parents 15 more times, and it created a whole life change. So, it’s a credit to you.
A lot of people, they do those exercises but they don’t make the change. Like you saw it, you realized in the future you might feel regret, and you took action and moved your whole life around for that. So, I want to hit the last piece because we already opened it up. There’s two parts. We have to have our scorecard and build time to think about that. The other one is you have to then maybe surround yourself with people that can do the things you’re supposed to be saying no. Do you have a simple strategy for when you’re looking for people that you want in your world? Do you have a rubric for how you select?
Sahil Bloom:
My only major hiring criteria is that it has to be the type of person who can just figure it out.
Jay Papasan:
Resourcefulness.
Sahil Bloom:
Yeah, I don’t know what I would even call it. I think that there is basically like a haves and have-nots that separate around this one trait and it is the ability to just figure it out because in your life and in your career, you’re gonna be handed hundreds of things that you have no idea how to do. There is nothing more valuable than someone who can just figure it out. The person that can ask a few key questions, do some work, and then go get the thing done.
I think that in the world we live in now, there has never been a better time in history to be able to figure it out with all of the tools that are available. And so, there’s no excuse for not doing that. It tends to just come down to whether the person is high agency or not. And a high agency person will just go and figure the thing out. If I have a few people that are high-figure-it-out quotient or whatever you want to call that on my team, I think I can go to war on anything that we’re going out and doing.
The other piece to that, which I-
Jay Papasan:
It’s agency as you define it. I mean, I know what it means in a bigger way. Like, it’s basically people who believe that they have the ability to make changes, right?
Sahil Bloom:
Yeah. I think of it as the belief that you are capable of taking an action and creating a desired outcome, most broadly. And people that are high agency tend to also be people that believe that they can do that in any domain in life. And so, they take care of themselves because they believe they’re able to do that, their families, all of these other areas.
The piece that is sort of harder to define and suss out is, is this a person that just cares about the things that they do? I love people, and I tend to think of myself this way, that take the small things seriously. And like I often will early in my like kind of test run with a person just give them something that seems like a stupid menial task and see how they run with it, see how seriously they take this thing that seems small because what I have found over and over again in my own life and anyone I’ve worked with and what I certainly learned from my father and my grandfather, is that people that take the small things seriously take the big things seriously. And when you find someone that will take the small seriously, that just is going to play out and have ripple effects over long periods of time. And so, I really try to find people like that.
Jay Papasan:
I sometimes combat that. So, I’ll just be – and not in being contrarian, I wanna make sure – do you mean, can it be small and important or small and unimportant? Does it make a difference? Just how I treat the small things?
Sahil Bloom:
I really do believe that people that, in their early … like, they’re starting out and they have to arrange travel for something, just making up an example. And yeah, it’s important, right? This can’t get screwed up. So, it’s not like, you know-
Jay Papasan:
Because people can obsess over the details of things. And I think that’s another discretionary thing. Like, is this worth putting a lot of effort in or is good good enough here?
Sahil Bloom:
Yeah. But look, I think when you’re a junior, and you’re starting out, everything should be important to you.
Jay Papasan:
You should treat everything-
Sahil Bloom:
It’s different now for you or for me, you feel like you’re later along, yes, I don’t wanna spend a whole bunch of my time thinking about my hotel booking or something or my travel or I don’t know, whatever the little thing is. But when you’re starting out, I mean, when I started my first job, I took every tiny little thing seriously because I trusted that if someone could trust me to take on the small, then they would eventually trust me with the big.
And I have found that with the people that I’ve hired on my team and on the teams that are different companies, the people who have that ability to take on the small and really treat it, not feel like they’re above it, and really take it seriously are the people that end up winning and get more and more opportunities along the way. They sort of increase their luck surface area.
Jay Papasan:
I love that. And I love that saying as well. Like I could probably talk to you for like two hours just kind of mining your experience because you’ve walked down a lot of paths that we’ve explored as well. For the people who’ve been listening to this, we’ve talked about several different domains around figuring out our one thing, kind of coming up with our scorecard, figuring out how to say no or get other people to help us out. What would be like a tiny challenge we could give them this week, between now this week’s episode and next, where they can maybe take a little progress in what we’ve talked about?
Sahil Bloom:
I guess I’ll give you another question. A question that you sit down, give yourself 15 minutes and just with a blank sheet of paper, think about this and journal on it, which would be if a third party were to observe me for a week, what would they say my priorities are? Sort of a derivative of what we talked about earlier.
But there’s two types of priorities in life. There’s the priorities we say we have and there are the priorities our actions show we have. It’s that exact concept of don’t tell me your priorities, show me your calendar.
Ask yourself that question because your life improves alongside your ability to close that gap between those two. But you can only close that gap if you identify that it exists in the first place. So, hold yourself to the fire a little bit, ask yourself that question this week, and then take one tiny action to close that gap.
Jay Papasan:
Thank you. Thanks for joining us today.
Sahil Bloom:
Thank you. Well,
Jay Papasan:
Well, I hope you enjoyed our conversation with Sahil Bloom. I’ve got more great stuff for you next week. It’ll be a solo episode. I’m gonna cover my framework for putting ideas into action. We invest lots and lots of money in becoming a better person. We go to courses, we go to classes, we go to conferences, we read books, but how often do we just have a really smart notebook and know ideas that actually turn into action and therefore results in change in our life? I’ve got a five-step framework I call “tips” for how we can get more out of these educational investments. How do we get an ROI on our personal development time? That’s next week. We’ll cover ideas into action. See you then.
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