June 23, 2025 • 33 mins
Sahil Bloom spent years working in the financial industry, putting in long hours and cashing big paychecks. But even though he’d found career success, he started to question whether the life he was building was actually what he wanted. On today’s show: hitting pause on the rat race and defining success on your own terms.
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I was basically like steadily marching down the path to
what I thought was the good, successful life. Take the
high status sounding job and just put your head down,
and if you do that for long enough, you'll wake
up and you'll have made a bunch of money.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
You'll be happy, fulfilled, etc.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Sawhill Bloom spent years working as a financial advisor, putting
in long hours and cashing huge paychecks. But even though
he'd found career success, he wasn't happy. He started to
question whether the life he was building was actually what
he wanted.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
My entire definition of success, of what it meant to
build a wealthy life had been incomplete. I was prioritizing
one thing at the expense of everything else.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
On today's show, hitting pause on the rat race, and
defining success on your own terms. I'm Maya Schunker, a
scientist who studies human behavior, and this is a slight
change of plans, a show about who we are and
who we become in the face of a big change.
(01:47):
When was the last time you checked in with yourself
and asked if you were really living out your values?
Today's conversation is about questioning your beliefs and being more
intentional about what you prioritize. These are the kinds of
ideas that Sahil explores in his book The Five Types
of Wealth, A Transformative Guide to Design your Dream Life.
(02:09):
Growing up saw Hill saw firsthand the value of defying
social norms and challenging other people's expectations.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
My parents came from very different backgrounds in worlds. My
mom was born and raised in India. Her father was
a professor, my father was raised in the Bronx, New York,
and the collision of their lives was a very unlikely one.
My mom had applied in secret to come to university
in the US, my dad was finishing his dissertation, and
(02:39):
my mom was working in the library at the school
to kind of pay her way through program that she
had applied to, and the two of them connecting and
building a kind of thriving love and relationship was just
extraordinarily unlikely, and it was an example of them choosing
to create their own path rather than accept one by default.
(03:01):
My dad's father was not accepting of the idea of
his son marrying an Indian woman and told him that
he had to choose between his family and her, and
my dad walked out the door and never saw his
family again. To this day, I never met my dad's parents.
He has three siblings I never met all through this
decision to choose love over the conventional path that was
(03:22):
handed to them.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
And so I would say, if there.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Was one value that was more important than any other
in our family, it was the idea of independent thinking,
of cultivating an environment to question things and not feel
apprehensive or any degree of shame associated with that questioning.
But that's a difficult thing to understand or internalize as
(03:47):
a kid.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
It is a really difficult thing to internalize. And in
your case, you know, despite these values at home, you
still grew up very eager to achieve right. You were
still influenced by other social pressures. And this was in
part because your older sister was very academically gifted and
received lots of praise from teachers.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yeah, unfortunately, I would say, from a young age, I
started telling myself a story that I was not capable
of the same level of achievement academically as my sister.
There were a couple of instances, first second grade whatever
it would be, where I would get to a class
they would say, oh, your Sonali's brother, Like all this
hope and excitement that I was going to be the
(04:31):
next star student. And then I was kind of into like,
you know, dicking around for lack of a better word,
it said. I was like, you know, I was a kid.
I was really active, I was really rambunctious, and I
would inevitably sort of disappoint this teacher. And I could
see it in them and in the way that they
treated me and acted, and the things they would say
to my parents and whatnot. And it started cementing in
(04:52):
me this story that I would tell myself that I
wasn't that smart, that I had to be good at
something else because my sister was the.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Smart one and I wasn't.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
And those stories that you tell yourself are really hard
to break.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Absolutely, it sounds like you grew up in a home
where it was very clear giving your parents values that
their love for you is not contingent upon your success,
and they valued free thinking and they valued independent thinking.
And so how interesting is it that even in an
environment like that, we can grow up feeling the need
(05:28):
to prove our value in specific ways, to anchor it
to a form of success or wealth or what have you.
It's not like you grew up in a family where
your parents were like, this is what you need to
be valuable to us, they weren't saying that, And I
just think it shows how pervasive this need for self
validation is.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Yeah, especially when you're young, because so much of your
identity is being established in those young years around how
other people react to things that you are doing. And
I think that when you see those first pieces of
evidence of what the scoreboard is, then you're kind of like, Okay,
here's the thing that's going to build the evidence bank
(06:12):
of what my identity is and who I am. So
there's a little bit of like an addicting thing of
what you measure, you know, really mattering, because that's where
you can make progress. That's the video game, if you will,
that we're going to play life around in this family.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Yeah, so you eventually figured out what your lane was,
right you were like, Okay, maybe I'm never going to
be as good as Sonali academically, but I'm good at sports.
And you ended up getting a baseball scholarship you intended Stanford,
huge achievement. Take me back to that time. What role
did baseball play when it came to shaping your identity?
Speaker 3 (06:43):
Hard to overstate how much.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
My own self worth was defined around these baseball achievements.
I basically grew to define my own worth around the
sort of external affirmations that I could accumulate in any
one thing, and baseball I found to be a very
good conduit for accumulating external affirmations, a sport that's very popular.
Getting a Division one scholarship was like a big deal.
(07:07):
A bunch of people would think you were really impressed.
You would get attention from different people, and every single
time you got one external affirmation, it made you hungrier
to get the next one and the bigger one and
whatever it was.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
So it's self fulfilling as well.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Totally.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
The problem with those things is that they further cement
this narrowness of identity as you do that, where every
single one of the pats on the back that you
are getting makes you more and more convinced that that
is who you are and that that is what you
need to continue doing.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
That is the only path. And that really did happen
to me.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Your baseball career ended earlier than expected, and I'm curious
about how you personally handled that transition.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
It was challenging for me.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
I mean, I you know, I thought for many years
that I would play professionally. I hurt my shoulder summer
after my sophomore year. I had one game when I
was pitching and just felt something in the back of
my shoulder and didn't really think anything of it.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
And basically, over the course of two years, it just.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Got worse and worse, and it got to the point
where I just couldn't throw effectively anymore.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
At that level.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
And the hardest part of that entire transition was calling
my dad. So much of my and our relationship over
the twenty years leading up to that was built around baseball.
I thought of him as like the dad who came
home from work after a long day and he would
always have the energy to go outside with me and
play cash in the backyard. He was the one that
(08:41):
took me to all my lessons. He was the one
that coached my little league teams. He was the one
that showed up to all of my high school games.
He flew out to all of my college games. I mean,
he was my number one supporter in everything that I
was doing. And before I called him to let him
know that I was going to not be able to play,
I had this fear that he was going to be disappointed.
And I called him and I was in tears, and
(09:02):
I told him, you know, I can't play anymore.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
I can't throw.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
And he was like, I'll be there to you with
whatever's next, Like whatever your next thing is, I'll be
in the front row. And there was so much power
in so few words that he had said there, because
it was just a reminder that he did not think
of me as a baseball player. It was like that
(09:27):
identity maybe was something that I had convinced myself that
that's who I was, but he didn't. I was his son,
and he would support me in whatever it was that
I was off and doing. He was going to be
in the front row of whatever that was. It was
a baseball field, now it's going to be something else,
and I'm going to be there for that.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Yeah. It is interesting how often we can impose beliefs
on other people that they don't actually carry right, that
aren't rooted in facts. You know, in your book, you
write about how you attended college with a bunch of
high achievers who measured success by who got the highest
offer from Goldman Sachs or from McKinsey, and you know,
(10:05):
those norms affected you, right, You really internalize belief that
money leads to happiness, and as a result of that,
when you graduated, you reached out to the richest people
you knew and found out what they did and then thought, Okay,
I'm going to do the same thing. And that is
ultimately what led you to become a financial advisor.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
I spent those first seven years of my career after
I got done in school basically like steadily marching down
the path to what I thought was the like good
successful life. You know, take the high status sounding job
and just put your head down, and if you do
that for long enough, you'll wake up and everything will
be good. You'll have made a bunch of money, you'll
(10:49):
be happy, fulfilled, et cetera.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
And all on the way.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
I felt like there was this tendency to make my
happiness conditional on some end, Like every year, I'd convince
myself that, like, oh, I'm going to feel totally different
December thirtieth when my bonus comes in. I'm going to
get this much money and this I'm going to be
so happy, and over and over again, those mountains, those
like you know, summits that I had built up as
(11:16):
being my arrival. Were anything, but I would get them,
I would feel that momentary blip of kind of dopamine
induced euphoria, and then I would reset to whatever right.
It was like I'd never done enough. It was just
more and more and more, And unfortunately, as the years
went by, I became more rather than less focused on
(11:39):
money being the path to living a good life. Like
as I got around it more and as I got
more indoctrinated into this financial culture, I grew sort of
these blinders of like, Okay, let me just keep getting
more and more, folks, this is what really matters. I
grew so convinced that like this one scoreboard was the
one that mattered, that every other area of my life
(12:00):
started to show cracks, and my relationships. I was living
three thousand miles away from my parents. I was noticing
for the first time in my life that they were
slowing down, getting older, but we were three thousand miles away.
My wife and I were struggling to conceive at the time.
Now was creating strain in our relationship. I was drinking
six seven nights a week, and it all coincided with
(12:20):
a point in time in my life where from the
outside looking in, you would have said I was winning
the game, and I started to have this sensation that
if that was what winning, felt like I had to
be playing the wrong game.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
You described this pivotal moment in your book, when you're
roughly thirty years old and you have I think it's
coffee with a friend. Is that right?
Speaker 3 (12:43):
Oh? Yeah, Toraink.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Unfortunately you had a drink seven nights a week of drinking.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
You had a drink with a friend and they say
something to you that just stops you in your tracks.
Walk me through that story.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
I went out for a drink with this old friend
who I hadn't seen in a while, and we sat
down and he asked how I was doing, and I
told him that it started to get difficult living so
far away from parents that I had started to notice
they were slowing down. And he asked how old they were,
and I said mid sixties. And he asked how often
(13:18):
I saw them, and I said once a year at
this point, and he just looked at me and said, okay,
so you're going to see your parents fifteen more times
before they die. And I just remember feeling like I
had been punched in the gut. Even now, it sort
of gives me chills remembering it. But the idea that
(13:40):
the amount of time you have left with the people
you care about most in the world is that finite
and countable that you can place it onto a few hands,
that just shook me to the core. And in that moment,
I realized that my entire definition of success, of what
(14:01):
it meant to build a wealthy life, of this path
that I was on, had been incomplete, that I was
prioritizing one thing at the expense of everything else. And
in that moment, I realized that if we didn't make
a change, if something didn't change fundamentally, that we were
(14:23):
going to end up somewhere where we didn't want to be.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
And so we did.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
My wife and I had a candid conversation the next
day about what we really viewed as our center in life,
what we wanted to build our life around, what our
true north really was, and we made a change. Within
forty five days, I had left my job, we had
sold our house in California, and we had moved three
thousand miles across the country to live closer to both
(14:51):
of our sets of parents. And in that one decision,
was a very important realization, which is just that you
are in much more control of your time than you think.
I see my parents multiple times a month. They're a
huge part of my son, their grandson's life. We had
taken an action and actually created and that was the
spark that really changed everything.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
I'm so curious about this conversation with your wife right
So for people who are listening right now thinking Ooh,
I need to do one of these reflection sessions with
myself and with my partner to really question assumptions. What
kinds of questions were you asking each other?
Speaker 2 (15:30):
The first thing I would just say was thinking about
what we wanted the end to look like, like what
is the end goal? What is the end that I'm
trying to create? And for both my wife and I,
it had very little to do with money, you know.
It was being on like a porch with each other,
with kids that want to spend time with us, with
(15:52):
grandkids in the yard, with friends coming over for dinner.
It was like, Okay, both of us have just laid
out an entire scenario that has people at the center
of it. It has relationships, especially our core closest relationships,
and yet.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
On a daily basis, what are your prioritiyizing right now?
Speaker 2 (16:10):
We live in California where we don't really have any connection,
Like we don't have close friends that live here, and
we're living three thousand miles away from the people that
we're closest to, And that was just extremely illuminating. You're like,
I just shined a light on the fact that my values,
the things that I really am saying really matter to me, Yeah,
are very different from what my actions are showing those
(16:33):
values to be. And that gap is sort of the
fundamental gap that we should all be trying to close
in life.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
It's like the difference.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Between what you say your priorities are and what your
actions show your priorities are. When you close that gap,
your life improves, But you need to highlight the gap
before you can close it.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
We'll be back in a moment with a slight change
of plans. Once saw Hil realized he needed to make
major changes to live out his values, he and his
(17:16):
wife packed up their bags and moved across the country
to be closer to family. He also quit his demanding
job and started to write more, and he got curious
about what it means to live a good life. He
started asking people what advice they give their younger selves,
and from these conversations he came up with the idea
that there are five buckets of wealth.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
The five types of wealth are time wealth, social wealth,
mental wealth, physical wealth, and then financial wealth. Time wealth
is fundamentally about freedom to choose how you spend your time,
who you spend it with, where you spend it, when
you trade it for other things. It is about an
awareness of time as your most precious asset.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
What are some strategies that you've found helpful when it
comes to protecting your time, but then also feeling just
more agency over your time.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Your outcomes in life tend to follow your energy. Very
few people are actually aware of their energy in a
meaningful way, meaning understand the types of activities and the
types of people in their life that create energy versus
drain energy. When you spend time and lean into things
that are creating energy for you, your outcomes will improve.
(18:31):
And when you lean away from and remove things that
are draining energy, Similarly, your life and your outcomes in
the way that you feel on a weekly basis improves.
The fastest way to develop an awareness of that is
to just use your calendar. I mean, if you look
at your calendar at the end of a weekday and
color code the activities according to whether they created energy,
(18:52):
meaning you felt sort of a natural pull or interest
or excitement around the thing that's green, if it was neutral,
market yellow, and if it left you feeling physically drained
market red. If you do that for a week, you'll
have a very clear visual perspective on the types of
active vites that create versus energy from your life. That
(19:13):
information allows you to make slow, incremental changes to your
weeks that will improve the overall outlook and outcomes in
your life, like removing certain things that you previously said
yes to that we're actually draining your energy that you
can remove, removing people from your life that consistently drain
(19:33):
your energy and are not adding a.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
Whole lot of value.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
A piece of that is this idea of just saying
no more effectively.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yeah, terrible at this.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
We all sort of know that it's important to know
when to say no, but very few people have good
framings for how to actually do that. I offer two
in the book that I have found personally very useful.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
One is this idea of the right now test.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Oh yes, I love this one.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
If someone asks you to do something, whether personal or professional,
two months from now, ask yourself whether you would want
to do it if it was tonight or if it
was right now. If the answer is yes, you say
yes to it, because then in two months you'll still
want to do it. But if the answer is no,
and you're just saying yes to it because two months
seems like so far in the future, Like sure, I'll
(20:22):
have more time than two months in the future future,
maya will have way more time, you should.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
Just say no to it.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Yeah, it's a failure of empathy with your future self. Yeah, absolutely, Okay,
can we talk now, sihil about social wealth? So how
do you define it? And what are ways that we
can try to boost the amount of social wealth that
we derive in our lives.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Social wealth is all about your relationships. It's the you know,
it's the few close, deep bonds, and then it's the
larger circles of connection to things that sort of extend
beyond the self, whether through communities, local, regional, spiritual, et cetera.
I love this visualization that I propose in the book
of Imagining your Own Funeral and thinking about the people
(21:06):
that are going to be sitting in the front row,
And the most important part of that visualization is actually
not identifying those people. It's about recognizing the traits and
the experience that those people create for you, and then
reminding yourself that the most important thing is to be
(21:27):
a front row person to someone else. Everyone always asks like,
how do I build deep, loving bonds? How do I
find those people that you know I can call at
three in the morning when things are bad. The most
clear obvious answer is be one of those people to
someone else.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
We attract in life what we put out into the world.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
Yeah, and I mean there's also the now famous Harvard study,
Robert Weldinger study about how our social relationships are the
greatest predictor of long term well being and physical health.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
The most interesting finding of that study was that the
single greatest predictor of physical health at age eighty was
relationship satisfaction at age fifty. I think it's the most
impactful study of the last one hundred years.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Yeah, well, you mentioned already one of the best ways
to boost our physical health, which is to invest in
our social relationships. Tell me how you think about physical
wealth and just a few strategies you might share.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
That's basically three pillars. Move your body for thirty minutes
a day any type of movement walk, run, jog, bike, row, dance,
whatever you like doing. Move your body for thirty minutes
a day, eat whole unprocessed foods eighty percent of meals,
and then try to sleep seven hours a night.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
What about mental wealth?
Speaker 2 (22:41):
Mental wealth is about purpose, It's about growth, and more
than anything else, it is about creating the space necessary
to wrestle with some of these bigger picture, sort of
unanswerable questions of life. I really think about mental wealth
as being about carving your own path and pursuing your
(23:04):
curiosity enough such that you can unlock whatever that is.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
A lot of these techniques do become more accessible when
our financial needs are met, and there is a profound
amount of financial anxiety in this moment, for session, fears, layoffs, inflation.
What advice would you say to someone who is really
eager to think bigger than money, just see things more expansively,
but they feel like they are stuck in survival mode.
(23:29):
Can they still take some of the advice from your book?
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (23:34):
I would say a lot of this does reflect Maslow's
hierarchy of needs to say that until you achieve these
basic needs of food, shelter, you know, basic pleasures, money
directly buys happiness. Beyond that, you start wanting to think
about money as a tool to build and accumulate these
other things. What I would say is that some tiny
(23:55):
daily investment in these other areas of life will pay
dividends for you. Doing the like tiny daily action is
better than doing nothing, and it prevents atrophy in all
of these areas. So even if you do not have
the luxury or the privilege of investment thing meaningfully into
your physical wealth or into finding a purpose, you can
still do the tiny daily action. Anyone can find five
(24:18):
minutes to just go for a walk around the block
before going to bed to clear their head, or doing
the like two minute journaling thing before going to bed
to get some stressful thing off your brain to help
you sleep a little bit more clearly at night. Anything
above zero compounds in all of these areas of life.
But we don't think that way. We think that something
needs to be optimal in order for it to be beneficial,
(24:40):
when the reality is that the tiny thing done well
on a daily basis will stack and compound positively in
your life.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Yeah, how do you personally think about navigating the trade
offs between these types of wealth. So obviously there are costs,
right if you are prioritizing your mental wealth, it might
come at the expense of other buckets. And if you're
moving to be closer a family, it might also strain
your career options or your finances.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
I really think about life coming in seasons, and these
trade offs are fundamentally about what sort of dimmer switch
you want to turn up versus down during different seasons
of life. The traditional wisdom has always been that these
things exist on on off switches, and that is what
I fundamentally push back on. And so the idea to
me is that you have these dimmer switches in front
(25:28):
of you, and what you are going to have way
turned up at any point in time is going to change.
In your early years twenties, thirties, forties, you might be
really focusing on building that financial stability and financial foundation.
So that area is turned up. That doesn't mean the
other areas are turned off. It might just mean they're
turned down low. Maybe low means the five minute walk
every day. Maybe low means the two minutes of journaling
(25:50):
for the headspace that you get. Maybe low means the
one phone call to your family each week.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
Whatever it is down low, but it's not off.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
At a different season of life, what you are choosing
to have turned up or you know or to the
middle is going to change, and you are not tethered
to what your prior season was, and you don't have
to stress about what your future season might look like.
You can just embrace whatever does exist in the present season.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Yeah. One of my favorite parts of your book is
that you talk about the fact that balance is not
achieved on a daily level. It's achieved at a macro level.
When you zoom out and you say, look at a
year or many years in the aggregate, that's when you
see the balance reflected back to you.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
I love that idea of like being able to just
lean into the unbalanced when it comes. As long as
you have a broader macro awareness of the desire to
create the balance in the future can be really powerful.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
What's the most difficult change that you've had to make
since shifting how you define wealth.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
I think the biggest and most challenging change is that
your definition no longer aligns with the world around you's definition,
and when you live differently, and when you embrace different things,
and when your scoreboard is different the way that you
kind of value and think about the world, all of
a sudden, it's very clear to you that it's in
(27:14):
conflict with how other people do. You're no longer playing
like similar games to other people, and so your ability
to have and carry on conversations with a lot of
people sort of just goes away. You know, I've had
like a lot of friends who I thought of as
real friends that it no longer feels like I speak
the same language as them in a lot of ways.
And that's challenging just in the context of relationships.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Sure, sure, But has it also brought you closer to
other people that share those values.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
It's brought me closer to the people that I hold dear.
I would say that it has like narrowed and focused
my people around the real people that I want to
be on these few missions with in life.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
So do you find, for example, that you're in an
impast with friends who continue to focus a lot on
financial wealth? Like where are you finding that disconnect?
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Yeah? I wouldn't say an impasse.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
I would just say almost like a you know, an indifference,
Like you know that we no longer have in common
the things that previously maybe bonded us around, like thinking
about and talking about money and fancy things and status
and like the club memberships. All the things that we
previously used to have a shared language and communication around
it no longer exists. And so you realize, you know
(28:25):
at times that like some of the things that bonded
you together, it wasn't like maybe real deep connections. It
was these surface level things that once you change those,
it no longer is there. The point, the meta point
of the whole book is that you get to choose
what races you wrut. You get to choose, and you
don't need to live by default into someone else's.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Yeah, And I mean, I think this aligns so closely
with how we can buttress ourselves against the dynamic force
of change in our lives and what can stabilize us.
And I think the premise of your book, which is
to question our value systems and to essentially put more
weight into these other buckets of wealth over the course
of our lives, to diversify those investments, does actually build
(29:09):
our resilience in the face of change, because life will
throw these curveballs our way, and we may stop having
to play baseball at one moment, or we may face
a financial crisis at another moment. There's a safety net
when you do have these investments in many places and
you allow it to be a dynamic space that is
shifting in real time. Like I think, another thing that's
(29:30):
really important for listeners to understand is you're not proposing
you figure out your pyramid and then it's fixed and
locked for life. It's like an ongoing dialogue with yourself
and your loved ones to figure out where you want
to make those investments at any given moment.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
Exactly right.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
It is entirely dynamic, and you have the freedom to
choose during any season of life to take actions to
change where you are and what your priority is and
what your life is being built around. And certainly there
are going to be situations where you just have to
lean into certain things because of responsibilities or because of
(30:06):
life circumstances. But when you do find yourself with the
luxury to choose, if you do, it is a responsibility
to take advantage of that as well to do right
by it.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Yeah, I think a lot of people listening are probably thinking, Okay, well,
sy Hill's got it all figured out, because not only
is he successful, but then he's also got this like
deeper philosophical wealth pyramid thing figured out. What is an
area of your life where you're currently struggling and maybe
where you're finding it hard to apply some of these
(30:37):
principles and tell me about how you're working through that challenge.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
I would just say I have nothing figured out. I mean,
I think I understand some of these things, but all
of them are sort of notes to self that I
am presently wrestling with and struggling through. I tend to
think that in life, your best bet or your best
hope is that you just kind of stumble a little
bit better each day. You never like FULLI er on
your feet and feeling great and that you have it
(31:00):
figured out. I have found personally, whenever I think I
had it figured out, I'm about to get punched in
the face. And so I really like to think about
just like stumbling a little bit better, you know, for
me personally, Like in the aftermath of the book release
and the impact that it's had, I have really wrestled
with like finding this balance around especially time and social
wealth of this wealth of new opportunities that feels like
(31:21):
it should be a good thing. But that has really
meaningfully negatively impacted my life in a lot of ways
because I've gone and like taken on too much chase
too many things that have spread me thin. The quality
of everything deteriorates. When you do that, it pulls me
away from my family. My wife had to have you know,
we had to have a sit down and talk about,
like this spring and summer, you need to like reset
(31:43):
more time. My son is three years old. It's gonna
be an amazing summer. And that is that was really
a struggle. It sort of this like natural push and
pull that happens with these inflection points in life.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Hey, thanks so much for listening. I've written a newsletter
post inspired by my conversation with Saalhill. It's all about
how we can better invest in our friendships. You can
subscribe to this free newsletter at Changewithmaya dot com and
next week join me when I talk to psychiatrist Judith Joseph,
(32:37):
who learns to feel joy again.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
We were built with the DNA for joy.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
We're supposed to derive pleasure from the basic things in life.
If you're not deriving pleasure from those things that is
a problem That's next week on A Slight Change of Plans.
See you then. A Slight Change of Plans is created,
written and executive produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight
(33:02):
Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor
Kate Parkinson Morgan, our producer Britney Cronin and Megan Leeuvin
and our sound engineer Erica Huang. Louis Scara wrote our
delightful theme song and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals.
A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries,
(33:22):
so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a
very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A
Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker.
See you next week.
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I was basically like steadily marching down the path to
what I thought was the good, successful life. Take the
high status sounding job and just put your head down,
and if you do that for long enough, you'll wake
up and you'll have made a bunch of money.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
You'll be happy, fulfilled, etc.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Sawhill Bloom spent years working as a financial advisor, putting
in long hours and cashing huge paychecks. But even though
he'd found career success, he wasn't happy. He started to
question whether the life he was building was actually what
he wanted.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
My entire definition of success, of what it meant to
build a wealthy life had been incomplete. I was prioritizing
one thing at the expense of everything else.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
On today's show, hitting pause on the rat race, and
defining success on your own terms. I'm Maya Schunker, a
scientist who studies human behavior, and this is a slight
change of plans, a show about who we are and
who we become in the face of a big change.
(01:47):
When was the last time you checked in with yourself
and asked if you were really living out your values?
Today's conversation is about questioning your beliefs and being more
intentional about what you prioritize. These are the kinds of
ideas that Sahil explores in his book The Five Types
of Wealth, A Transformative Guide to Design your Dream Life.
(02:09):
Growing up saw Hill saw firsthand the value of defying
social norms and challenging other people's expectations.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
My parents came from very different backgrounds in worlds. My
mom was born and raised in India. Her father was
a professor, my father was raised in the Bronx, New York,
and the collision of their lives was a very unlikely one.
My mom had applied in secret to come to university
in the US, my dad was finishing his dissertation, and
(02:39):
my mom was working in the library at the school
to kind of pay her way through program that she
had applied to, and the two of them connecting and
building a kind of thriving love and relationship was just
extraordinarily unlikely, and it was an example of them choosing
to create their own path rather than accept one by default.
(03:01):
My dad's father was not accepting of the idea of
his son marrying an Indian woman and told him that
he had to choose between his family and her, and
my dad walked out the door and never saw his
family again. To this day, I never met my dad's parents.
He has three siblings I never met all through this
decision to choose love over the conventional path that was
(03:22):
handed to them.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
And so I would say, if there.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Was one value that was more important than any other
in our family, it was the idea of independent thinking,
of cultivating an environment to question things and not feel
apprehensive or any degree of shame associated with that questioning.
But that's a difficult thing to understand or internalize as
(03:47):
a kid.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
It is a really difficult thing to internalize. And in
your case, you know, despite these values at home, you
still grew up very eager to achieve right. You were
still influenced by other social pressures. And this was in
part because your older sister was very academically gifted and
received lots of praise from teachers.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yeah, unfortunately, I would say, from a young age, I
started telling myself a story that I was not capable
of the same level of achievement academically as my sister.
There were a couple of instances, first second grade whatever
it would be, where I would get to a class
they would say, oh, your Sonali's brother, Like all this
hope and excitement that I was going to be the
(04:31):
next star student. And then I was kind of into like,
you know, dicking around for lack of a better word,
it said. I was like, you know, I was a kid.
I was really active, I was really rambunctious, and I
would inevitably sort of disappoint this teacher. And I could
see it in them and in the way that they
treated me and acted, and the things they would say
to my parents and whatnot. And it started cementing in
(04:52):
me this story that I would tell myself that I
wasn't that smart, that I had to be good at
something else because my sister was the.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Smart one and I wasn't.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
And those stories that you tell yourself are really hard
to break.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Absolutely, it sounds like you grew up in a home
where it was very clear giving your parents values that
their love for you is not contingent upon your success,
and they valued free thinking and they valued independent thinking.
And so how interesting is it that even in an
environment like that, we can grow up feeling the need
(05:28):
to prove our value in specific ways, to anchor it
to a form of success or wealth or what have you.
It's not like you grew up in a family where
your parents were like, this is what you need to
be valuable to us, they weren't saying that, And I
just think it shows how pervasive this need for self
validation is.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Yeah, especially when you're young, because so much of your
identity is being established in those young years around how
other people react to things that you are doing. And
I think that when you see those first pieces of
evidence of what the scoreboard is, then you're kind of like, Okay,
here's the thing that's going to build the evidence bank
(06:12):
of what my identity is and who I am. So
there's a little bit of like an addicting thing of
what you measure, you know, really mattering, because that's where
you can make progress. That's the video game, if you will,
that we're going to play life around in this family.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Yeah, so you eventually figured out what your lane was,
right you were like, Okay, maybe I'm never going to
be as good as Sonali academically, but I'm good at sports.
And you ended up getting a baseball scholarship you intended Stanford,
huge achievement. Take me back to that time. What role
did baseball play when it came to shaping your identity?
Speaker 3 (06:43):
Hard to overstate how much.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
My own self worth was defined around these baseball achievements.
I basically grew to define my own worth around the
sort of external affirmations that I could accumulate in any
one thing, and baseball I found to be a very
good conduit for accumulating external affirmations, a sport that's very popular.
Getting a Division one scholarship was like a big deal.
(07:07):
A bunch of people would think you were really impressed.
You would get attention from different people, and every single
time you got one external affirmation, it made you hungrier
to get the next one and the bigger one and
whatever it was.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
So it's self fulfilling as well.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Totally.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
The problem with those things is that they further cement
this narrowness of identity as you do that, where every
single one of the pats on the back that you
are getting makes you more and more convinced that that
is who you are and that that is what you
need to continue doing.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
That is the only path. And that really did happen
to me.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Your baseball career ended earlier than expected, and I'm curious
about how you personally handled that transition.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
It was challenging for me.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
I mean, I you know, I thought for many years
that I would play professionally. I hurt my shoulder summer
after my sophomore year. I had one game when I
was pitching and just felt something in the back of
my shoulder and didn't really think anything of it.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
And basically, over the course of two years, it just.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Got worse and worse, and it got to the point
where I just couldn't throw effectively anymore.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
At that level.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
And the hardest part of that entire transition was calling
my dad. So much of my and our relationship over
the twenty years leading up to that was built around baseball.
I thought of him as like the dad who came
home from work after a long day and he would
always have the energy to go outside with me and
play cash in the backyard. He was the one that
(08:41):
took me to all my lessons. He was the one
that coached my little league teams. He was the one
that showed up to all of my high school games.
He flew out to all of my college games. I mean,
he was my number one supporter in everything that I
was doing. And before I called him to let him
know that I was going to not be able to play,
I had this fear that he was going to be disappointed.
And I called him and I was in tears, and
(09:02):
I told him, you know, I can't play anymore.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
I can't throw.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
And he was like, I'll be there to you with
whatever's next, Like whatever your next thing is, I'll be
in the front row. And there was so much power
in so few words that he had said there, because
it was just a reminder that he did not think
of me as a baseball player. It was like that
(09:27):
identity maybe was something that I had convinced myself that
that's who I was, but he didn't. I was his son,
and he would support me in whatever it was that
I was off and doing. He was going to be
in the front row of whatever that was. It was
a baseball field, now it's going to be something else,
and I'm going to be there for that.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Yeah. It is interesting how often we can impose beliefs
on other people that they don't actually carry right, that
aren't rooted in facts. You know, in your book, you
write about how you attended college with a bunch of
high achievers who measured success by who got the highest
offer from Goldman Sachs or from McKinsey, and you know,
(10:05):
those norms affected you, right, You really internalize belief that
money leads to happiness, and as a result of that,
when you graduated, you reached out to the richest people
you knew and found out what they did and then thought, Okay,
I'm going to do the same thing. And that is
ultimately what led you to become a financial advisor.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
I spent those first seven years of my career after
I got done in school basically like steadily marching down
the path to what I thought was the like good
successful life. You know, take the high status sounding job
and just put your head down, and if you do
that for long enough, you'll wake up and everything will
be good. You'll have made a bunch of money, you'll
(10:49):
be happy, fulfilled, et cetera.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
And all on the way.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
I felt like there was this tendency to make my
happiness conditional on some end, Like every year, I'd convince
myself that, like, oh, I'm going to feel totally different
December thirtieth when my bonus comes in. I'm going to
get this much money and this I'm going to be
so happy, and over and over again, those mountains, those
like you know, summits that I had built up as
(11:16):
being my arrival. Were anything, but I would get them,
I would feel that momentary blip of kind of dopamine
induced euphoria, and then I would reset to whatever right.
It was like I'd never done enough. It was just
more and more and more, And unfortunately, as the years
went by, I became more rather than less focused on
(11:39):
money being the path to living a good life. Like
as I got around it more and as I got
more indoctrinated into this financial culture, I grew sort of
these blinders of like, Okay, let me just keep getting
more and more, folks, this is what really matters. I
grew so convinced that like this one scoreboard was the
one that mattered, that every other area of my life
(12:00):
started to show cracks, and my relationships. I was living
three thousand miles away from my parents. I was noticing
for the first time in my life that they were
slowing down, getting older, but we were three thousand miles away.
My wife and I were struggling to conceive at the time.
Now was creating strain in our relationship. I was drinking
six seven nights a week, and it all coincided with
(12:20):
a point in time in my life where from the
outside looking in, you would have said I was winning
the game, and I started to have this sensation that
if that was what winning, felt like I had to
be playing the wrong game.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
You described this pivotal moment in your book, when you're
roughly thirty years old and you have I think it's
coffee with a friend. Is that right?
Speaker 3 (12:43):
Oh? Yeah, Toraink.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Unfortunately you had a drink seven nights a week of drinking.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
You had a drink with a friend and they say
something to you that just stops you in your tracks.
Walk me through that story.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
I went out for a drink with this old friend
who I hadn't seen in a while, and we sat
down and he asked how I was doing, and I
told him that it started to get difficult living so
far away from parents that I had started to notice
they were slowing down. And he asked how old they were,
and I said mid sixties. And he asked how often
(13:18):
I saw them, and I said once a year at
this point, and he just looked at me and said, okay,
so you're going to see your parents fifteen more times
before they die. And I just remember feeling like I
had been punched in the gut. Even now, it sort
of gives me chills remembering it. But the idea that
(13:40):
the amount of time you have left with the people
you care about most in the world is that finite
and countable that you can place it onto a few hands,
that just shook me to the core. And in that moment,
I realized that my entire definition of success, of what
(14:01):
it meant to build a wealthy life, of this path
that I was on, had been incomplete, that I was
prioritizing one thing at the expense of everything else. And
in that moment, I realized that if we didn't make
a change, if something didn't change fundamentally, that we were
(14:23):
going to end up somewhere where we didn't want to be.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
And so we did.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
My wife and I had a candid conversation the next
day about what we really viewed as our center in life,
what we wanted to build our life around, what our
true north really was, and we made a change. Within
forty five days, I had left my job, we had
sold our house in California, and we had moved three
thousand miles across the country to live closer to both
(14:51):
of our sets of parents. And in that one decision,
was a very important realization, which is just that you
are in much more control of your time than you think.
I see my parents multiple times a month. They're a
huge part of my son, their grandson's life. We had
taken an action and actually created and that was the
spark that really changed everything.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
I'm so curious about this conversation with your wife right
So for people who are listening right now thinking Ooh,
I need to do one of these reflection sessions with
myself and with my partner to really question assumptions. What
kinds of questions were you asking each other?
Speaker 2 (15:30):
The first thing I would just say was thinking about
what we wanted the end to look like, like what
is the end goal? What is the end that I'm
trying to create? And for both my wife and I,
it had very little to do with money, you know.
It was being on like a porch with each other,
with kids that want to spend time with us, with
(15:52):
grandkids in the yard, with friends coming over for dinner.
It was like, Okay, both of us have just laid
out an entire scenario that has people at the center
of it. It has relationships, especially our core closest relationships,
and yet.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
On a daily basis, what are your prioritiyizing right now?
Speaker 2 (16:10):
We live in California where we don't really have any connection,
Like we don't have close friends that live here, and
we're living three thousand miles away from the people that
we're closest to, And that was just extremely illuminating. You're like,
I just shined a light on the fact that my values,
the things that I really am saying really matter to me, Yeah,
are very different from what my actions are showing those
(16:33):
values to be. And that gap is sort of the
fundamental gap that we should all be trying to close
in life.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
It's like the difference.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Between what you say your priorities are and what your
actions show your priorities are. When you close that gap,
your life improves, But you need to highlight the gap
before you can close it.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
We'll be back in a moment with a slight change
of plans. Once saw Hil realized he needed to make
major changes to live out his values, he and his
(17:16):
wife packed up their bags and moved across the country
to be closer to family. He also quit his demanding
job and started to write more, and he got curious
about what it means to live a good life. He
started asking people what advice they give their younger selves,
and from these conversations he came up with the idea
that there are five buckets of wealth.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
The five types of wealth are time wealth, social wealth,
mental wealth, physical wealth, and then financial wealth. Time wealth
is fundamentally about freedom to choose how you spend your time,
who you spend it with, where you spend it, when
you trade it for other things. It is about an
awareness of time as your most precious asset.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
What are some strategies that you've found helpful when it
comes to protecting your time, but then also feeling just
more agency over your time.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Your outcomes in life tend to follow your energy. Very
few people are actually aware of their energy in a
meaningful way, meaning understand the types of activities and the
types of people in their life that create energy versus
drain energy. When you spend time and lean into things
that are creating energy for you, your outcomes will improve.
(18:31):
And when you lean away from and remove things that
are draining energy, Similarly, your life and your outcomes in
the way that you feel on a weekly basis improves.
The fastest way to develop an awareness of that is
to just use your calendar. I mean, if you look
at your calendar at the end of a weekday and
color code the activities according to whether they created energy,
(18:52):
meaning you felt sort of a natural pull or interest
or excitement around the thing that's green, if it was neutral,
market yellow, and if it left you feeling physically drained
market red. If you do that for a week, you'll
have a very clear visual perspective on the types of
active vites that create versus energy from your life. That
(19:13):
information allows you to make slow, incremental changes to your
weeks that will improve the overall outlook and outcomes in
your life, like removing certain things that you previously said
yes to that we're actually draining your energy that you
can remove, removing people from your life that consistently drain
(19:33):
your energy and are not adding a.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
Whole lot of value.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
A piece of that is this idea of just saying
no more effectively.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yeah, terrible at this.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
We all sort of know that it's important to know
when to say no, but very few people have good
framings for how to actually do that. I offer two
in the book that I have found personally very useful.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
One is this idea of the right now test.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Oh yes, I love this one.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
If someone asks you to do something, whether personal or professional,
two months from now, ask yourself whether you would want
to do it if it was tonight or if it
was right now. If the answer is yes, you say
yes to it, because then in two months you'll still
want to do it. But if the answer is no,
and you're just saying yes to it because two months
seems like so far in the future, Like sure, I'll
(20:22):
have more time than two months in the future future,
maya will have way more time, you should.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
Just say no to it.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Yeah, it's a failure of empathy with your future self. Yeah, absolutely, Okay,
can we talk now, sihil about social wealth? So how
do you define it? And what are ways that we
can try to boost the amount of social wealth that
we derive in our lives.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Social wealth is all about your relationships. It's the you know,
it's the few close, deep bonds, and then it's the
larger circles of connection to things that sort of extend
beyond the self, whether through communities, local, regional, spiritual, et cetera.
I love this visualization that I propose in the book
of Imagining your Own Funeral and thinking about the people
(21:06):
that are going to be sitting in the front row,
And the most important part of that visualization is actually
not identifying those people. It's about recognizing the traits and
the experience that those people create for you, and then
reminding yourself that the most important thing is to be
(21:27):
a front row person to someone else. Everyone always asks like,
how do I build deep, loving bonds? How do I
find those people that you know I can call at
three in the morning when things are bad. The most
clear obvious answer is be one of those people to
someone else.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
We attract in life what we put out into the world.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
Yeah, and I mean there's also the now famous Harvard study,
Robert Weldinger study about how our social relationships are the
greatest predictor of long term well being and physical health.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
The most interesting finding of that study was that the
single greatest predictor of physical health at age eighty was
relationship satisfaction at age fifty. I think it's the most
impactful study of the last one hundred years.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Yeah, well, you mentioned already one of the best ways
to boost our physical health, which is to invest in
our social relationships. Tell me how you think about physical
wealth and just a few strategies you might share.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
That's basically three pillars. Move your body for thirty minutes
a day any type of movement walk, run, jog, bike, row, dance,
whatever you like doing. Move your body for thirty minutes
a day, eat whole unprocessed foods eighty percent of meals,
and then try to sleep seven hours a night.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
What about mental wealth?
Speaker 2 (22:41):
Mental wealth is about purpose, It's about growth, and more
than anything else, it is about creating the space necessary
to wrestle with some of these bigger picture, sort of
unanswerable questions of life. I really think about mental wealth
as being about carving your own path and pursuing your
(23:04):
curiosity enough such that you can unlock whatever that is.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
A lot of these techniques do become more accessible when
our financial needs are met, and there is a profound
amount of financial anxiety in this moment, for session, fears, layoffs, inflation.
What advice would you say to someone who is really
eager to think bigger than money, just see things more expansively,
but they feel like they are stuck in survival mode.
(23:29):
Can they still take some of the advice from your book?
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (23:34):
I would say a lot of this does reflect Maslow's
hierarchy of needs to say that until you achieve these
basic needs of food, shelter, you know, basic pleasures, money
directly buys happiness. Beyond that, you start wanting to think
about money as a tool to build and accumulate these
other things. What I would say is that some tiny
(23:55):
daily investment in these other areas of life will pay
dividends for you. Doing the like tiny daily action is
better than doing nothing, and it prevents atrophy in all
of these areas. So even if you do not have
the luxury or the privilege of investment thing meaningfully into
your physical wealth or into finding a purpose, you can
still do the tiny daily action. Anyone can find five
(24:18):
minutes to just go for a walk around the block
before going to bed to clear their head, or doing
the like two minute journaling thing before going to bed
to get some stressful thing off your brain to help
you sleep a little bit more clearly at night. Anything
above zero compounds in all of these areas of life.
But we don't think that way. We think that something
needs to be optimal in order for it to be beneficial,
(24:40):
when the reality is that the tiny thing done well
on a daily basis will stack and compound positively in
your life.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Yeah, how do you personally think about navigating the trade
offs between these types of wealth. So obviously there are costs,
right if you are prioritizing your mental wealth, it might
come at the expense of other buckets. And if you're
moving to be closer a family, it might also strain
your career options or your finances.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
I really think about life coming in seasons, and these
trade offs are fundamentally about what sort of dimmer switch
you want to turn up versus down during different seasons
of life. The traditional wisdom has always been that these
things exist on on off switches, and that is what
I fundamentally push back on. And so the idea to
me is that you have these dimmer switches in front
(25:28):
of you, and what you are going to have way
turned up at any point in time is going to change.
In your early years twenties, thirties, forties, you might be
really focusing on building that financial stability and financial foundation.
So that area is turned up. That doesn't mean the
other areas are turned off. It might just mean they're
turned down low. Maybe low means the five minute walk
every day. Maybe low means the two minutes of journaling
(25:50):
for the headspace that you get. Maybe low means the
one phone call to your family each week.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
Whatever it is down low, but it's not off.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
At a different season of life, what you are choosing
to have turned up or you know or to the
middle is going to change, and you are not tethered
to what your prior season was, and you don't have
to stress about what your future season might look like.
You can just embrace whatever does exist in the present season.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Yeah. One of my favorite parts of your book is
that you talk about the fact that balance is not
achieved on a daily level. It's achieved at a macro level.
When you zoom out and you say, look at a
year or many years in the aggregate, that's when you
see the balance reflected back to you.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
I love that idea of like being able to just
lean into the unbalanced when it comes. As long as
you have a broader macro awareness of the desire to
create the balance in the future can be really powerful.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
What's the most difficult change that you've had to make
since shifting how you define wealth.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
I think the biggest and most challenging change is that
your definition no longer aligns with the world around you's definition,
and when you live differently, and when you embrace different things,
and when your scoreboard is different the way that you
kind of value and think about the world, all of
a sudden, it's very clear to you that it's in
(27:14):
conflict with how other people do. You're no longer playing
like similar games to other people, and so your ability
to have and carry on conversations with a lot of
people sort of just goes away. You know, I've had
like a lot of friends who I thought of as
real friends that it no longer feels like I speak
the same language as them in a lot of ways.
And that's challenging just in the context of relationships.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Sure, sure, But has it also brought you closer to
other people that share those values.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
It's brought me closer to the people that I hold dear.
I would say that it has like narrowed and focused
my people around the real people that I want to
be on these few missions with in life.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
So do you find, for example, that you're in an
impast with friends who continue to focus a lot on
financial wealth? Like where are you finding that disconnect?
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Yeah? I wouldn't say an impasse.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
I would just say almost like a you know, an indifference,
Like you know that we no longer have in common
the things that previously maybe bonded us around, like thinking
about and talking about money and fancy things and status
and like the club memberships. All the things that we
previously used to have a shared language and communication around
it no longer exists. And so you realize, you know
(28:25):
at times that like some of the things that bonded
you together, it wasn't like maybe real deep connections. It
was these surface level things that once you change those,
it no longer is there. The point, the meta point
of the whole book is that you get to choose
what races you wrut. You get to choose, and you
don't need to live by default into someone else's.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Yeah, And I mean, I think this aligns so closely
with how we can buttress ourselves against the dynamic force
of change in our lives and what can stabilize us.
And I think the premise of your book, which is
to question our value systems and to essentially put more
weight into these other buckets of wealth over the course
of our lives, to diversify those investments, does actually build
(29:09):
our resilience in the face of change, because life will
throw these curveballs our way, and we may stop having
to play baseball at one moment, or we may face
a financial crisis at another moment. There's a safety net
when you do have these investments in many places and
you allow it to be a dynamic space that is
shifting in real time. Like I think, another thing that's
(29:30):
really important for listeners to understand is you're not proposing
you figure out your pyramid and then it's fixed and
locked for life. It's like an ongoing dialogue with yourself
and your loved ones to figure out where you want
to make those investments at any given moment.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
Exactly right.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
It is entirely dynamic, and you have the freedom to
choose during any season of life to take actions to
change where you are and what your priority is and
what your life is being built around. And certainly there
are going to be situations where you just have to
lean into certain things because of responsibilities or because of
(30:06):
life circumstances. But when you do find yourself with the
luxury to choose, if you do, it is a responsibility
to take advantage of that as well to do right
by it.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Yeah, I think a lot of people listening are probably thinking, Okay, well,
sy Hill's got it all figured out, because not only
is he successful, but then he's also got this like
deeper philosophical wealth pyramid thing figured out. What is an
area of your life where you're currently struggling and maybe
where you're finding it hard to apply some of these
(30:37):
principles and tell me about how you're working through that challenge.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
I would just say I have nothing figured out. I mean,
I think I understand some of these things, but all
of them are sort of notes to self that I
am presently wrestling with and struggling through. I tend to
think that in life, your best bet or your best
hope is that you just kind of stumble a little
bit better each day. You never like FULLI er on
your feet and feeling great and that you have it
(31:00):
figured out. I have found personally, whenever I think I
had it figured out, I'm about to get punched in
the face. And so I really like to think about
just like stumbling a little bit better, you know, for
me personally, Like in the aftermath of the book release
and the impact that it's had, I have really wrestled
with like finding this balance around especially time and social
wealth of this wealth of new opportunities that feels like
(31:21):
it should be a good thing. But that has really
meaningfully negatively impacted my life in a lot of ways
because I've gone and like taken on too much chase
too many things that have spread me thin. The quality
of everything deteriorates. When you do that, it pulls me
away from my family. My wife had to have you know,
we had to have a sit down and talk about,
like this spring and summer, you need to like reset
(31:43):
more time. My son is three years old. It's gonna
be an amazing summer. And that is that was really
a struggle. It sort of this like natural push and
pull that happens with these inflection points in life.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Hey, thanks so much for listening. I've written a newsletter
post inspired by my conversation with Saalhill. It's all about
how we can better invest in our friendships. You can
subscribe to this free newsletter at Changewithmaya dot com and
next week join me when I talk to psychiatrist Judith Joseph,
(32:37):
who learns to feel joy again.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
We were built with the DNA for joy.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
We're supposed to derive pleasure from the basic things in life.
If you're not deriving pleasure from those things that is
a problem That's next week on A Slight Change of Plans.
See you then. A Slight Change of Plans is created,
written and executive produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight
(33:02):
Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor
Kate Parkinson Morgan, our producer Britney Cronin and Megan Leeuvin
and our sound engineer Erica Huang. Louis Scara wrote our
delightful theme song and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals.
A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries,
(33:22):
so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a
very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A
Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker.
See you next week.
Host
Dr. Maya Shankar
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