1: It was a warm California evening in May 2021. Sahil Bloom and an old friend sat down for a drink.
“As we settled in at our table, he asked how I was doing,” Sahil writes in The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life.
“I gave him the standard response that we’ve all grown so accustomed to: ‘I’m good. Busy!'” he recalls, “with all the unintended irony of the modern era, where busy is a badge of honor, as if being more stressed is something to be proud of.”
Sahil asked his friend the same question. “Instead of replying with typical busyness one-upmanship, he replied that he was ‘making time for the important things,’ since his father had gotten sick the prior year.”
His friend’s response took the conversation in a different and deeper direction. “Rather than resist, I walked down it,” Sahil remembers, “adding that living in California had begun to wear on me, it being so far from my aging parents on the East Coast.”
Friend: “How often do you see your parents?”
Me: “Maybe once a year right now.”
Friend: “And how old are they?”
Me: “Mid-sixties.
Friend: “Okay, so you’re going to see your parents fifteen more times before they die.”
Bang.
“I had to take a deep breath to avoid an instinctively angry response,” Sahil writes. “This was an old friend, one who knew my parents well. It wasn’t meant to be insensitive—it was just…math. The average life expectancy is approximately eighty years; my parents were in their mid-sixties, and I saw them once per year. The math said I would see them fifteen more times before they were gone.”
The math changed his life. “This rare emotional honesty,” he writes, “altered the course of my life.”
2: As human beings, we are wired to want things. We assume that getting what we want will create durable feelings of contentment.
This assumption is what scientists call “the arrival fallacy.”
“We incorrectly assume that we will finally experience the sensation of having arrived when we reach whatever we have propped up as our destination,” he writes.
Sahil was thirty years old at the time of the conversation above. He had been uber-successful in his career. “I had arrived,” he writes. “But the feelings of happiness and fulfillment I expected were nowhere to be found. Instead, I just felt that familiar dread of needing to do more, of never having enough.”
Achieving what we want does not always satisfy us.
“How many times has the thing our younger selves dreamed of become the thing we complain about once we’ve gotten it?” Sahil observes.
“The house we longed for becomes the house we grumble is too small, the house in need of repairs,” he writes. “The car we obsessed over becomes the car we can’t wait to trade in, the car that’s constantly in the shop. The engagement ring that made our eyes sparkle becomes the ring we need to upgrade because of its imperfections.”
Sahil was running hard and fast on the treadmill of life. “My exclusive pursuit of money was slowly, methodically robbing me of a fulfilling life,” he writes. “My health had deteriorated from my lack of sleep and activity, my relationships suffered from my absent energy, and, as my friend’s piercing math had made clear, my time with those I loved most was depressingly finite and quickly slipping away. . .
“From the outside looking in, I was winning, but if this was what winning felt like, I began to wonder if I was playing the wrong game,” he recalls.
3: “Our entire lives can change in one year,” Sahil writes. “Not ten, not five, not three. One.
“One year of asking the right questions.
“One year of measuring and prioritizing the right things.
“One year of focused, daily effort on the right actions.
“Trust me, I’ve lived it,” he notes. “In May 2021, I was silently miserable, my broken scoreboard and priorities slowly marching me toward the point of no return.
“In one week, I had jump-started my actions,” he shares. “My wife and I had deep, painful conversations about how we wanted to measure our lives, and we aligned on the priorities and values that would guide us going forward.
“In one month, I could see and feel the impact. I had made the difficult yet important decision to embark on a new professional journey built around my higher-order purpose of creating a positive impact. I reprioritized my health, focusing on the boring basics of movement, nutrition, and sleep.
“Most important, my wife and I sold our house in California and started our move to the East Coast to be closer to our parents, a decision that turned ‘You’re going to see your parents fifteen more times before they die’ from a harsh reality into a memory of a former life.
“In one year,” Sahil observes, “everything was different—my entire life had changed. My new energy-creating entrepreneurial endeavors were thriving, and I had the freedom to go for multiple daily walks, find time for a robust health routine, and focus on the projects and people that brought me joy.
“And while we had struggled to conceive in California, soon after arriving in our new home in New York, we were blessed with the news that my wife was pregnant. She gave birth to our son, Roman, on May 16, 2022.
“As we returned from the hospital and pulled onto our street,” he writes, “I saw both sets of Roman’s grandparents cheering in the driveway, our family all there to welcome him home—to welcome us home.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: How many moments with those I love am I letting slip away while I chase after things that matter less?
Action: Sahil recommends: “Write down the name of a friend or family member you love deeply but don’t see enough. Approximate the number of times per year that you see that person. Write that number down. Next, write down your age and the other person’s age. Subtract the older person’s age from eighty. This is the approximate number of years you have remaining with this person.
Now, do some basic math: Multiply the number of times you see that person per year by the number of years you have remaining with that person. With some terrifyingly simple math, you’ve determined the number of times you will see your loved one before the end.”
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