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Lessons - The Currency You Can't Earn Back: Mastering Time Management | Sahil Bloom - Newsletter Creator & Investor · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, explore why time is our most undervalued form of wealth and how ignoring
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  its fleeting nature leads to lasting regret. Learn how recognizing yourself as a time billionaire
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  shifts your priorities. Learn why consuming and ideating without action traps you in illusion
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  and learn how restructuring your professional time can lead to greater purpose and clarity.
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  What do you think? I'll ask you personally. I guess I could ask what people have the
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  most trouble with but it's more fun to ask what you have the most trouble with. So what is the
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  one kind of wealth that you think is the most difficult for yourself? I think time wealth is
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  the one that most people struggle with. And it's for a few reasons. First off, time wealth is
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  first and foremost about an awareness that time is your most precious asset, about an awareness
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  that it is finite and impermanent, that if you don't think about it until the very end,
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  it's going to be the only thing you think about but when it's too late. That is a very tough
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  switch to flip in a lot of young people's minds in particular. Time has this characteristic for
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  young people where you think about it none and then at the very end of your life it's the only
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  thing you think about but it's too late or you think about it none until your parents are dead
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  and then you're like oh shoot I should have thought about it more. And it's hard to get that across
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  to young people. The question I love to ask is would you trade lives with Warren Buffett?
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  He's worth $130 billion. He has access to anyone in the world he flies around on private jets,
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  he's got plenty of houses, he reads and learns for a living but you wouldn't trade lives with him.
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  Because he's 95 years old. There's no way you would take $130 billion to be a 95 year old today.
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  Of course not. You wouldn't do that. And so you're recognizing and by the way on the other end,
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  he would trade lives with you. He would give up $130 billion in your age in a heartbeat.
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  And so you're recognizing that time has incalculable value and yet on a daily basis you take a bunch
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  of actions that disregard your time. You sit around scrolling on social media, you work on nonsense,
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  you say yes to things that you don't actually want to do, you know, you catch yourself in these
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  like time for money trades that don't make any sense in your life anymore. So you sort of know it
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  in the back of your mind, but then you don't take actions to. That's not legal attention. It's not
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  painful and you don't people have a tough time internalizing a like future reality in the present.
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  So yeah, it's exactly that. It's like it is you don't recognize the fact that the time is just
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  slipping away, right? Like you are a time billionaire. There's this concept in the book that I bring
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  out from this investor Graham Duncan. You are a time billionaire when you were young. You literally
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  have billions of seconds left in your life, but the seconds are just ticking away. And importantly,
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  there are certain seconds. There are certain moments in your life that are more important than
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  others. There are windows of time that actually have more importance. Ancient Greeks had two words
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  for time. Chronos was the linear sort of normal version of time and then Kyros was this idea that
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  there were certain windows that were more important than others that had more texture, more meaning.
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  That is true in your own life. And energy and attention deployed into those moments is more
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  impactful. As an example, when your kids are young, that is a window of time that is going to be
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  very short that you are never going to get back. Not recognizing that being present during those
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  moments is something that you will regret for your entire life. But if you don't think about that,
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  if you don't sit with that question, if you don't think about the tension that you're going
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  to have to navigate, if you don't ask yourself, ask your spouse, ask your partner how you want
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  to navigate that tension, you just allow it to slip by. It just becomes part of the thing,
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  part of the layers that we end up living. It's interesting because I think that a lot of
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  the focus on traditional wealth, on money wealth, and I just thought of this as we're chatting
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  now is because you feel the pain when you can't afford rent, you feel the pain when you can't
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  afford the school that all your friends are sending their kids to. And also, content in general
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  and media that we're exposed to is just sort of tripling down on the fact that we don't make
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  enough money. There's no social media saying, hey, I have better relationships with my parents
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  than you. There is that social media saying, hey, you don't drive a limbo or you don't fly
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  private or you don't get to go to same parts on vacation, that's social media. So we're just
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  inundated with all this negativity, only focus on one kind of wealth. And it's becoming
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  probably even harder and harder for young people to focus on the other four kinds.
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  Yeah, and it's very flimsy, right? You ask people like, the question I like to ask when it comes to
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  like sort of shows of wealth is, would you buy this thing if you couldn't tell anyone or show
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  anyone that you have it? So like, you're going to buy some fancy watch. Would you buy that watch
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  if you couldn't show it to anyone or tell anyone that you had it? Like, usually not, right? Usually
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  you're buying it because you want to exhibit the fact that you have achieved some level of wealth.
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  And then it becomes this sad question of how much of your life are you simply living for the
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  pleasure of others? I really ask yourself that how much of your time and life are you living
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  to please other people, to impress other people? And in order to try to make yourself feel
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  impressive, right? Like we focus so much time, energy and attention on trying to be impressive
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  to others. When in reality, what you should do is try to be impressive to yourself. That's what
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  really matters at the end of the day. Being impressive to others is overrated. Being impressive
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  to yourself underrated feels much better. And I mean, people don't really care about you that much
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  either. No one's thinking about you. No one's thinking about you. I'm dead up before.
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  There are two big mistakes in life. One is worrying about what other people think about you.
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  And the other is believing that other people think about you in the first place.
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  The spotlight effect, right? It says that we overestimate the degree to which other people
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  are noticing or observing our actions or behaviors. No one is thinking about you. Everyone's
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  just worried about themselves. So focus on in terms of these really important moments of time
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  with kids. You sort of alluded to parents as well before. Does stoicism, the thought of your
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  own death, those kinds of concepts, do they sort of influence how you think through time?
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  Absolutely. There's a chapter in the book called A Brief History of Time. I sort of play on
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  Stephen Hawking's famous book. And at the start of that, I have this quote from one of my favorite
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  movies, Troy. I don't know if you've seen a Brad Pitt, which is hilarious because my wife jokes
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  and me that like, she can't escape that movie because I've watched it literally hundreds of times.
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  And she was like, what's the center of the screenshot of it in my book? She was like, what's
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  this made an interior book? But it's this line. Good movie. It's a great movie. And it's 20 years
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  old now, which is crazy to me. But yeah, it's 2004. I had no idea until I had to cite the book.
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  That's time. Yeah. Yeah. But Brad Pitt has this line in it, you know, speaking as a Achilles where
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  he just says that the gods envy us because we are mortal. And he says, everything is more beautiful
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  because we are doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. And that is such a powerful
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  line to me of that exact idea that like the fact that you will never experience these moments
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  again, make them so much more beautiful, so much more important because you don't know when it's
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  going to be the end, you don't know when there's going to be a last time to use Sam Harris's idea.
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  All of these things are inherently fleeting. And that's what makes them so special and so important.
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  When you interviewed all these people, what would be one thing that you noticed was incredibly
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  different from interviews with young people versus old people? It's perhaps cliche to say, but
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  the young people almost unanimously across the board assume that the linear relationship between
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  money and happiness is going to continue into perpetuity. And the old people know that it doesn't.
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  Arthur Brooks is this famous happiness researcher. He's a friend of mine, one of the early
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  readers of this book, which I was very grateful for. And he talks about the fact that early in your
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  life, money does directly buy happiness. It reduces fundamental burdens and stress. It affords you
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  kind of early pleasures, which really directly drive happiness. And so what happens is we create this
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  pattern that when the money bell rings, we get the cheese, right? Like we're like the little mouse.
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  And that creates a very strong mental pattern that convinces us that that relationship,
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  money bell ring, get cheese is going to continue into perpetuity. And it's very hard to crack
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  that patterning that we have from our early years. So even once you get to the point where there
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  are diminishing returns where it no longer drives that incremental happiness where you should be
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  focusing on these other types of wealth that you can use money as a tool to hopefully unlock.
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  You don't realize that. And so you keep marching down the path thinking that money is going to
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  continue to drive happiness until it's too late. And that's where you end up in this rich yet
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  miserable existence that we see all too often. You mentioned four types of professional time.
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  So can you explain that? What those mean? Because I think that a lot of people understand,
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  okay, fine. I have to spend time on things outside of work. But within the context of work,
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  how do I allocate my energy in time? Yeah. So this idea of four types of professional time is
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  the idea that in a regular professional schedule, there are four ways that you can spend your time.
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  One is management, which is basic tasks, emails, meetings, processing things, like very simple
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  management tasks. That probably ends up being like 80 plus percent of most professional people's
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  time. The second type is creation. That is when you're actually creating or building something.
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  That could be making a deck. It could be doing analysis. It could be coding, but it's creating
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  something. That ends up being the rest of the time for most people. These other two types of time
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  basically get forgotten, but they are so important for changing your outcomes. The third type of time
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  is consumption, meaning this is when you're actually consuming things at the top of the funnel.
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  This is reading. This is learning. This is listening to things. This is where you're actually
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  incepting new ideas into your brain. Most of us spend zero time on that structurally,
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  and then the fourth type of time is ideation. That's when you're actually thinking. That's when
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  you're creating the space, as we talked about earlier, to zoom out and actually ask yourself
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  the bigger questions about the things you're working on. Consumption and ideation get lost
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  in a typical professional calendar. You spend the vast majority of your time on management,
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  a little bit of time on creation, and consumption and ideation are nowhere to be found.
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  The problem is that when you are in that management-focused loop, that's when you end up being
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  like the rocking horse. Where all you're doing is emailing and sitting in meetings, and you're not
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  actually making forward progress. Consumption and ideation are what enable you to have the 10 or
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  100X outcomes on things, because that's where you're incepting new ideas, where you're actually
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  thinking about what really matters, the bigger picture questions, where you can focus in on the
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  things that matter, and work smart, not hard. Management time is like very much the time for money
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  trade. It's the endless loop that we get stuck in, and so thinking about this in your own calendar,
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  the exercise I walk through in the book when I talk about this is to color code your calendar
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  across those four types of time. Color code things, according to whether it was management, creation,
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  consumption, or ideation, and then look at what your mix of time is across the week.
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  And once you have a sense for what your current mix is, then you can try to more strategically
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  put together a calendar that actually does carve out windows for consumption ideation,
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  and hopefully reclaims a little bit of the management time to put it towards creation.
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  So I would say that what you described is the majority of people, but the people that have bought
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  into the concept of consumption and ideation, which I think is a lot of your audience and a lot of
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  people listen to podcasts as well. I have discovered another problem, which is over consumption
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  and over ideation and no action. So to people that do nothing but consume podcasts, read newsletters,
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  read books, non-stop, and they think through a million different ideas and they have shiny objects
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  syndrome, what's your wisdom for them? How do once you actually graduate the level where you do
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  the act? Yeah, that's going to be the whole podcast.
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  I mean, it's useful to the ice, but you know, I'm sure you see this as well.
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  Yeah, I mean, the reality is that the answer you seek is found in the action you avoid.
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  Information gathering is a dangerous drug. A lot of people in this day and age are getting
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  all their dopamine from information gathering. They read atomic habits and they think they're good
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  at habits. You know, they go and read the book and they think they get the thing. When in reality,
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  you need to get your dopamine from action. So you need to consume some, but then act a whole lot
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  on the back of it. The rule that I have, which is just kind of a funny rule is I carry around this
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  little pocket notebook, sitting in my backpack over there. And I use it because I like to write things
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  down during the course of the day. I'm going to have an interesting conversation with someone
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  write something down, spark some idea, read something or write something down. My rule with the
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  notebook is that I have to act on anything I write down within 24 hours. Meaning I have to
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  year go deeper on it. I have to log it somewhere. I have to learn more about it. I have to,
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  or I have to mark it as like not interesting and cross off, but I have to do something with it.
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  So it can't just become this mindless loop of like, oh, I'd write down everything that I come
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  across. There has to be an action attached to the thing that I log is interesting. And I have found
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  that simple sort of triggers like that really help with reminding me that I have to go do the thing.
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  It's not talking about the thing. It's not brainstorming the thing. It's not asking questions about
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  the thing. You literally have to do the thing. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable,
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  don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive
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  deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode.
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  See you in the next one.