How To Change Your Habits, Achieve Your Goals & Live A Contented Life with Sahil Bloom #517

Every single thing that you do today is something that your 90 year old self will wish they could go back and do. The good old days are literally happening right now. You are living them. Hey guys, how are you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better. live more in a world seemingly obsessed with financial success what does it truly mean to be wealthy and what are the path to a more meaningful life

has less to do with what we earn and more to do with how we live. Today's guest is Sahil Bloom, successful entrepreneur. online creator who shares insights on living a more intentional life with millions all over the world through his newsletter, The Curiosity Chronicle, and author of a brand new book, The Five Types of Wealth. A transformative guide to design your dream life. In our conversation, you'll discover the five types of wealth framework. The power of something called the life raiser.

how to build meaningful relationships, including the concept of darkest hour friends. The truth about external validation and Sahil's journey from chasing financial success. to finding genuine fulfillment, the importance of daily appreciation, and the real meaning of work-life harmony. Sahil's core message is that we can all create lives of genuine wealth.

through intentional choices and meaningful connections. And this conversation is full of practical wisdom to help you design your own life around what truly matters. I want to start off with something I heard you say in an interview recently. Most of your life has been defined around your insecurities. What does that mean? It's a painful reality to come to terms with. I spent the first 30 years of my life trying to find an external solution to an internal problem.

meaning seeking out enough external affirmation, enough external success that I would feel good internally. I don't quite know what the source, the sort of origin of that story that I told myself, the origin of that idea that I wasn't enough or that I didn't feel like enough was. My best guess...

is I come from a very academically oriented family. My mother is from India, very academically oriented culture. My father is a professor at Harvard, obviously very academically oriented. Academic achievement was our currency. in our household as a child. And I have an older sister, three and a half years older, who was very rich in that currency, extraordinarily academically gifted and extraordinarily academically hardworking.

And from a very young age, I remember creating this story in my mind that she was smart and that I wasn't. And as much as my parents would tell me that wasn't true, as much as they would show me evidence that it wasn't true, that was a story that I built up. And you know this. Those original stories we tell ourselves are very, very tough to break because what we do is we just seek out evidence to confirm them along the way. And we reject evidence or we avoid evidence that might...

Break those stories. And so from a young age, I remember having that feeling that I wasn't enough, that I wasn't good enough. And as a result, seeking out things that would... try to fill my cup because it didn't feel full internally. Yeah. I think it's a story that many people can relate to. There's quite a few elements there in what you said that are of real interest. The first thing I want to pause on is three words you said. Create the story. For me, that's really powerful.

you created that story, that narrative about your sister, about your life, right? Maybe there was a good reason for you to create it, but nonetheless, it was something that you created. And I believe because we created it.

We also have the power to uncreate it if we can pay attention and get to that point like you have. Would you agree with that? I think that's correct. That fundamental belief... in your ability to take an action and create an outcome, to actually make a change in your own life is really at the heart of...

all human and personal progress. You have to believe that you're able to do that. The feeling of feeling lost or feeling powerless is the lack of that understanding. You don't experience and you don't believe that you are able to do something and see a positive. change in your life and whenever you experience someone either yourself or someone else who is feeling lost it's that they don't believe that they can do that and I think for most of my life I actually

didn't believe that I was capable of changing this narrative in my mind. I thought I could mask it or I thought I could build up myself in other ways, athletically or with money, but I didn't. think that any of those things were actually going to change the fundamental reality of that story. Those original stories we tell ourselves are so, so powerful. What's interesting to me hearing you talk about that, Sahil, is

This new book, The Five Tites of Wealth, which I really, really like, has so many core life truths within it. It's very clear from that book that you are now... Not a victim to that story. You're now living a much more intentional, purposeful life. But you weren't always. Now you said when you were describing your...

your experience about designing your life around your insecurities, which is something I think many stroke most of us do. You said that I'm not sure of the origin of that story. That's really interesting to me. Do you think we need to know the origin of that story to move forward? Or is it enough to go, well, something happened that made me feel like this, but I don't want to be a victim to it anymore. I do think it's important to...

be able to deconstruct where that, the source of that insecurity, the origin of that story. Because only then can you actually confront it. It's like the demon, right? You sort of need to understand. what that demon looks like. And that's why therapy is a powerful tool for a lot of people. It's because it helps them identify that source and that origin. For me, that process took... Many, many years because I spent so much time.

hiding from just running away from it i wasn't actually there was no confrontation with that origin and that story because i i didn't know it existed in in my own mind i lived truly blindly i was just following uh this default path and all of these assumptions that I could run away from those things. The unfortunate reality is you can only run from these things for so long. It's the same exact thing as avoiding hard conversation.

I say this a lot. When you avoid a hard conversation with someone or with yourself, you are taking on a debt. And that debt has to be repaid with interest at some point in the future. There's no avoiding it. Time does not heal anything when it comes to hard conversations, when it comes to relationships with other people or with yourself.

confronting that hard conversation with yourself is often even more challenging than the one that you have to have with someone else yeah no i love that i mean you're speaking there to one of these types of world social wealth and having difficult conversations and why that's so important. Let's get into this idea or this redefining of wealth that you talk about. So...

What I like about this book so much is that it speaks to the quote that I think about all the time, which is from the Tao Te Ching. True wealth is knowing what is enough. It's the question I ask myself all the time. What is enough? What does enough look like? And why I think that's such an important question is because I believe the biggest disease in society these days is the disease of more, more money, more followers, more downloads, more holidays, more...

Anything is going to bring you that happiness or that validation that you think you can get from the outside, but you actually can't, right? So understanding what is enough, I think, is...

so important for each and every single one of us. And I think you've got quite a unique take on it through these five types of wealth. So how do you see wealth and what are these five types? Yeah, I... I tell this story in the prologue at the very outset of the book that in May of 2022, just after my son was born, he was newborn, like a few weeks old.

And I was out for him on a walk because he wouldn't sleep other than when I was walking him around in his stroller. And I was on the sidewalk early one morning and this old man approached me. And he looked at me and he said, I remember standing here with my newborn daughter. Well, she's 45 years old now. It goes by fast, cherish it. And it hit me so hard.

And I walked back home. My wife was still asleep and I brought my son into bed with us. I put him down and the sun was kind of coming through the blinds and he had this like perfect content smile on his face. And for the first time in my entire life, I had this sensation that I had arrived, but there was nothing more that I wanted.

It was no longer that arrival fallacy of you get to whatever summit you've propped up and you just immediately reset to some new height. I had the feeling for the first time in my life that that moment was enough, that if I never got anything else in the world. beyond the joy of that moment, that that would have been enough. And I write in the book, this one line, never let the quest for more distract you from the beauty of enough. And the heart of the entire book is that line.

It's that idea, that idea of embracing the beauty of enough is so central to how we think about living a good life. Because that chase, that endless quest for more, that treadmill that so many people find themselves on is going to end in your own misery. Yeah. Why do you think so many of us are on that treadmill? Where we keep thinking that we need to do more and be more and achieve more and earn more. Where does that come from, do you think? Our scoreboard is broken.

The default scoreboard, the way that you measure your life is fundamentally broken and... dislocated from what actually creates a meaningful, happy, fulfilling life. I went, I did this and you can go do it. You go ask hundreds of people, all ages of life. What does your ideal day look like at age 80 or age 90? They'll list off a bunch of things. Being around people they love. Being of healthy mind and body.

working on things or thinking about things that they really care about, living in, standing in their purpose. Those are the things that you talk about that matter. Those are the things that create a meaningful life. It's not about money. And then you ask them, what are you doing on a day-to-day basis today to actually affect that end? And the answer is nothing. They're not working out. They're not building and investing in their relationships. They're not...

following their curiosity to engage their mind. They're chasing money in the present moment. And so we have this weird... dislocation where we know what creates a really meaningful and happy and fulfilling life, and yet we don't take actions in the present to actually affect that. The fundamental reason is because our scoreboard, how we measure our lives, is money. And in my opinion and what I propose, it's because money is so easily measured.

You can literally take a single number, place it next to your name and define your entire life. And money's measurability is a feature, right? That is why it has been so useful throughout society is so easily measured. It's a way for us to train. Act, to barter, to measure ourselves on status hierarchies. But that feature has harmed us in so many ways as we have failed to measure these other areas of our life.

that are much more important in actually winning the war that we're trying to win. Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, I've been saying, I think on this show for the last year or so, that what I've realized in life over the last few years is that... the most important things are the things that can't be measured right so the unmeasurables you know i can't give you a

number that tells you the quality of my relationship with my wife i i don't have a metric i can tell you that a few weeks ago we passed 17 years of marriage okay but that doesn't tell you what the quality of that relationship is like. Even that number 17, it just means, yes, we've lived with each other for 17 years as husband and wife. It doesn't tell you what is our relationship like.

Is it better than it was? Is it deeper now? Have you learned new things about each other? Whatever it might be. And yes, the answer is yes. We've never been closer or understood each other more than we do now. A lot of that is to do with the things that you write about, having the difficult conversations, not avoiding conflict, all those kind of things. But I can't give you a scorecard on that. I can't tell you, you know, I can't give you that score.

of what my relationship is like with my son and my daughter. But having got a similar story to you, you know... chase external validation for much of my life because of an inner insecurity. Having got all the external validation I could possibly have wanted, I realized it doesn't make you happy. And so these days, it's all about how can I validate myself?

That subtle difference, but that's where the peace and the contentment comes from. So I call them the unmeasurables, but I think actually you do a pretty good job at actually... making them measurable in this book, right? So can you just outline these five types of wealth and then explain... why your new scoreboard is so important for them. So the five that I cover in the book, time wealth, that's the idea of the freedom to choose.

how you spend your time, who you spend it with, when to trade it for other things, and an awareness of time as your most precious asset. Just how important it is, how finite, how impermanent. Social wealth is your depth and breadth. of connection to the people around you, to your communities, and how you engage that in what I call earned status.

Mental wealth is the idea of purpose, of meaning, of growth, and of the ability to create space in your life, which we'll talk about in greater depth later, I'm sure. Physical wealth is your health and vitality, your ability. to engage in controllable actions that promote vigor in your life as you age. And then financial wealth, which is a very important type of wealth. But in the context of this idea of enough.

And this idea of understanding very clearly and rationally what your version of an enough life looks like. And one of the important things that I heard you say just then is... This idea of not being able to measure these other things and all of those types of wealth that I just mentioned. Financial wealth is the most easily measured. Trying to create a way of measuring these other things for your own life.

is what I'm seeking to do in this book. Money is very easy for us to measure across people. I can look at you and sort of figure out from all these external metrics, how you're doing and how I stack up against you. And so we use that. And the weird, almost dystopian thing about that is the single darkest moment of my life was also the moment where you would have looked at me and thought that I was...

Absolutely winning the game. Everything about my life looked great on the surface. I had a great job, a fancy title, a nice car, a house. I was married. Everything on the surface, I looked nice. you would have thought oh he's winning the game and in my own life my experience was i had the realization that if that was what winning the game felt like i had to be playing the wrong game

And my own journey to figuring that out and then learning that I needed to redefine the game that I was playing. I needed to play that game differently, create my own scoreboard. That is... what this book is about that is the manifestation of it it's really interesting i think those five types of wealth are they're really broad they're applicable to everyone and i actually appreciate that you do put financial

wealth in there because you know money and happiness there's a complex relationship and it You know, there's all kinds of views on the relationship between money and happiness. And I think how people hear that depends on their current state. So sometimes when people hear that money doesn't make you happy, some people can... often understandably say all right for you you know if you already have enough yeah i get it but if you had my life then you would know that money would make you happy so

It's really interesting that you put that one in there because, of course, it is important. And I think that scoreboard applies to everyone because if, let's say, you are in financial hardship, well, increasing that probably will help you.

quite significantly, right? So then you can put that on the scorecard and have to pay attention to that. Whereas that question of enough is important, isn't it? Because many people... So why I'm so... passionate about this is a it's helped me personally but during my career as a medical doctor right i have seen people get this wrong badly I have seen people keep chasing more, even though the warning signs were there. They kept pushing, pushing, pushing until they get sick.

They get the autoimmune disease. And then they wish they'd paid attention five years before. So yes, I feel your book, yes, it is about purpose and meaning and joy. But actually, there's a very serious health consequence if you're not paying attention to these things as well. I felt that in my own life too. I mean, the first seven years of my career were spent...

steadily rising through the ranks of the old scoreboard. I was making more and more money. I was getting promoted. I was getting bonuses. What was your job? I was working as an investor at a private equity fund.

I had great colleagues. It was a great firm. I was making more and more money. On the old scoreboard, things were going great. But while I saw that happening, my own focus and priorities were so narrowly, myopically... honed in on money being the path to my good life, to this idyllic land of success and happiness and joy to the point where I didn't think I wanted kids.

I thought, I'm not, I don't want kids because that's going to get in the way of the thing that really matters, which is me making a lot of money so that other people think that I'm great. So I can puff myself up and that other people think, Sahil, he's so impressive. And that journey slowly cracked and crumbled all of the other areas of my life. I was drinking seven nights a week. My physical health was deteriorating. Mentally.

I was lost. And COVID did not help that during the early part of the lockdown. But I was fundamentally... walking someone else's path and completely lost on my own my relationship with my parents had become almost non-existent I wasn't seeing them at all I'd grown up very very close to them

They were getting older. We lived 3,000 miles apart across the country. My relationship with my sister had effectively ground to a halt. The competitiveness of our early years that I had created led to a resentment that had torn us apart. And most importantly, my relationship with my wife, who I had been together with since high school, was struggling. And...

mostly driven by the fact that we were struggling to conceive at the time. We had been trying to have our first child and for about a year and a half had been unable to. And that's something that... Most people don't talk about publicly, especially men. It's sort of stigmatized. And it was a burden that my wife was carrying. And I was not there present enough to help shoulder that burden.

And so I saw, I experienced this viscerally, this chase and this focus on just the one narrow thing and how it was robbing me of everything else in my world. And fortunately, I found my way to the other side and found a better way. And I don't want anyone else to experience that. Thank you for sharing about... The infertility that you and your wife experienced. It's interesting as you were describing that, it's clearly very emotional for you even now.

reflecting back on that. Do you think that most of us in order to realize these truths We have to go through something like that. The patients I talk about who get the autoimmune illness or you thinking everything's going great and you're driving a nice car and you're earning good money, yet you can't have... a child with your partner right do you think people can

experience and understand these truths that you can't just chase one form of wealth you have to chase all five or not necessarily chase you have to intentionally create a life that allows you to accrue wealth in these five areas Do you think it's possible without going through pain? Vivo Barefoot are one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, I am a huge fan of Vivo Barefoot shoes and have been wearing them for over a decade now, well before they started supporting this podcast.

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These packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office or car. If you want to give them a try, just go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. I do. I think what we need to do a better job of is shine a light on the real cost of that endless chase for more. It's what we're talking about now that you've seen it with your patients. You knew from seeing it through your patients, the cost of that endless chase.

I know it from experiencing it. But we can read about things and then take action on them. When you're a kid, you read or are told that putting your finger into an electrical socket is a bad idea. So you don't do it. You don't have to do that to learn that it really hurts. You know that that's probably a bad idea. It's no different for this, but unfortunately...

We as a society glamorize and celebrate financial success so much and very rarely shine a light on the negatives or the cost of some of that success. You read books about all of these billionaires, famous historical success stories.

You don't read about the broken relationships. You don't necessarily read about the children who don't want to spend time with them. You don't read about the divorces. You don't read about the massive health trauma or mental health issues that these people had. You read about, or at least what you... focus on is the celebration. It's the billion dollar company sale. It's the IPO. Those are the things that we learn to celebrate. And so as a result,

The visible evidence of these other costs is not highlighted in our minds in the way it needs to be for us to take action against it. Yeah, this is something I, very much having learned it the hard way myself, try and teach my children. And literally last week I was in London. Chris Williamson, host of Modern Wisdom, was there. And I was appearing on Chris's show to talk about my book, right? The new one. And it's interesting, Chris is...

You know, young guy, crushing it, doing really, really well. He's releasing three podcast episodes a week, okay? And he does a great job. But one thing I said to Chris is I shared with him a conversation that I had with my son a couple of years ago. I think he was 12 at the time from recollection, around there basically. And he had overheard me talking.

I don't know what was going on. Maybe Gareth, the videographer, maybe he was in the kitchen chatting. I can't remember what happened or what prompted this conversation. But, you know, in the podcasting world... Back then, it was well known, or it was a piece of advice that if you release two episodes a week, you can 4x the show. You can increase the growth, right? And my son heard us talking.

And then later on, he said, Daddy, if releasing two conversations a week would increase the reach of the show, why don't you do it? And had he asked me that question five years prior to that, I don't think I would have had a decent answer. But I was in a really good place a couple of years ago because I've been thinking about these kind of concepts, having experienced stuff myself, having seen my dad get lupus.

and have to retire from ill health, hugely driven by overwork, basically. And I said, hey son, you know, if I go to two conversations a week, the way I like to do them, which is with a lot of prep. Really have these intentional conversations. You know, there's weekends where we go for bike rides, or we do park run, or we all go out and have nice warts and play in the garden. If I'm doing two a week, those won't be happening.

I'll be in the studio recording intros. I'll be researching for the next guest or whatever it might be. Because, again, let's see what happens as my kids get older, but trying to... Teach them from a young age of things that we weren't taught, that everything has a cost in life. Everything. We like to look at the upside, and we don't think about the downside. And again...

It doesn't mean that what I'm saying is that Chris Williamson's wrong. I'm not at all. Chris is doing what he wants to do at this stage in his life for him. For me, at my stage, married, two children. I've got to realize every extra thing I do for work potentially has a cost to arguably the most important things in my life. Yeah. And it's, you know, there's the...

The list cost, which is the cost you see. And then there's the real cost, which is all of these sacrifices. And oftentimes I find that...

Some things look like a good deal based on the list cost, what you just see, but a ripoff when you take into account the real cost of all of these other tradeoffs and sacrifices you're going to have to make. It also reminds me of... the story of the fisherman and the banker, which I write about in the book, that idea that this banker goes down to Mexico and he's walking along the dock and he sees this fisherman in his boat and he goes up to him and says, how long did it take?

take you to catch those fish? And the fisherman says, just a little while. And the banker says, why didn't you fish for longer? He says, well... I fish for a little while and then I have a siesta and I have dinner with my wife and then I drink some wine and play music and laugh with my friends.

The banker says, oh, you're doing this all wrong. What you have to do is you have to fish all day and then you use the profits from that to buy another boat. And then you fish all day on that one. You hire a team, you buy more boats and you have a fleet of boats. Now you move to the big city, take your company public and you'll make millions. And the fisherman says, and then what?

And the banker replies, well, then you can fish for a little while and you can take a siesta in the afternoon and have dinner with your wife and drink wine and laugh and play music with your friends. And the fisherman just smiles and walks off into the sunset. And the idea is exactly what you said, which is it's not about the banker being right or the fisherman being right. It's that they each have a very different definition of what matters to them, of what success looks like. And that's okay.

But the important point and what I'm trying to get across in the book is that you need to clearly define what matters to you. and build your life around it. You cannot accept the default settings of meaning that the world is going to hand you and just walk with them. Yeah, I love that. I think that's probably the central message in your book for me.

is this idea that you can build an intentional life but to build an intentional life you have to put a bit of thought in you have to do certain exercises you need space to reflect If you just wake up every day and live on autopilot and react to your email inbox and your social media platforms and the news and what everyone around you wants you to do.

Well, that's a default life, right? That's not an intentional life. So I think you've done a great job actually sort of trying to make these unmeasurables measurable. In fact, right at the start, actually, you do have this quiz, don't you? which I did yesterday, which is quite fun, actually. I thought, oh, this will be interesting. The wealth score. So it's in the book for people, right? And you go into these five areas, time, wealth, social wealth, mental wealth.

physical wealth and financial wealth. And there's five questions in each one. I did it yesterday. How'd you do? Well, I'm a bit nervous about saying my result, actually. No, I'm not nervous. It's just... I think I scored 92. It's fantastic. Yeah, it's out of 100, right? Yes, out of 100. Yeah. And... I'm not saying that to boast or anything. I like genuinely. It's just... I feel that... I feel that I'm in a really good place.

I feel I've been into similar places where you have been and it's taught me so much. Even, you know, I think both your parents are still alive, right? Yeah, my dad's not. And... you know a couple years ago mum got really sick after a fall which you know really made me for the first time confront the fact that it may not be that long whilst I still have a parent, a living parent, and I would think about what does that actually look like?

What is it like to live in the world? So I do and mum's doing fine. And, you know, I saw her just before you arrived and went around. I live five minutes away from the house in which I grew up, right? So I get... a lot of this stuff. And I feel that I've done a lot of the work to get to this place. I kind of, I was trying to do it as honestly as I could. And I thought, 92 out of 100, I'll sort of take that, you know, at the moment.

What would you say, I know you have this, I think, in your email newsletter, lots of people are doing this quiz, aren't they? Can you give us a sense of what scores people tend to get? Yeah. It's... So you can take the quiz online if you'd like at wealthscorequiz.com.

And it'll give you a visualization, which is also in the book, that sort of breaks down what your score looks like on this nice circle that kind of shows what the deficient areas are. The most interesting thing is to use it to establish a baseline that you can build against. My score when I first did this, when I first created it, was 53. And that was in May of 2021 when I started to create these changes in my own life and stepped off the default path.

I would say that most people, I think the average score so far of the 10,000 plus people who have taken it is a 67. Okay, that's not bad. Not bad, but it's pretty rare that people will be harsh enough on themselves to get significantly lower than that because, you know, it's subjective in a certain sense, right? You're answering based on your own natural disposition of optimism.

kinds of stories about my life and actually kidding myself that I'm a 92 and at the same time I do believe if I was doing this 10 years ago... I don't think I'd get past 50 personally. But a very interesting exercise that I'm going to ask you to do. Have your wife do the score for you. And you do the score for her and see how close it is to what each one of you got. I'm chuckling now because I'm now thinking back to my answers. I'm thinking...

Would they agree? Okay, so I'm going to do that. It's an interesting one. It's an interesting way to just sort of test your own, like the quality of your responses to things. If another person would agree, especially around the relationship. I think actually I'm looking forward to scoring hers. more than I'm looking forward to. It's mine, basically. No, but what you... I'm sorry about your father. The story you shared, I appreciate you sharing that. That really was the...

turning point, if you will, in my own life was the recognition of my parents' mortality. And When you are young, you believe that time is infinite. You believe that you are immortal and your awareness of time and the amount you think about time, if you look at a chart. is completely flat. Maybe it slightly increases for the early 70, 80 years of your life until it shoots up when time becomes the only thing that you care about. And for me, what happened was...

I got to a point where I was confronted with this reality that I was living 3,000 miles away from my parents. I was seeing them once a year. The two people that I was closest to in the world that knew me so well, that had created so much for me, that had supported me. so wholeheartedly in anything that I was doing. And if I didn't make a change, I was going to see my parents 15 more times before they died. They're 65. I saw them once a year. They might live until 80.

It was math. It was brutal, terrifyingly simple math. And that recognition was the turning point. The next more after... Hearing that from a friend, the next morning I woke up and told my wife, I thought we needed to make a change. And we did. Within 45 days. I had left my job, we had sold our house in California, and we had moved back to the East Coast to live closer to both of our parents, our sets of parents. And the most beautiful part about all of it was...

Two weeks after getting back, making that big change, we found out that my wife was pregnant. After this year and a half of... struggling, not being able to conceive. And I'm not a particularly religious person, but that was a moment in my life where I felt like... God was winking at me. Just this idea that when your energy and when the things come into alignment, everything falls into place as it should.

in the way that it did in our life. And I'll never forget bringing him home from the hospital. He was born pulling into our driveway and both of our sets of parents were there cheering. That feeling of being welcomed home, of being exactly where you're supposed to be, that is the moment when I felt like I'm the wealthiest person alive. This is what matters. This is what's real. And that experience changed me forever. Do you think you and your wife's decision to move back

to be nearer to your parents contributed in any way to her getting pregnant? 100%. I think that scientifically, the... Impact on my stress, on my mindset, on my own chemical levels and physiology is proven to have an impact on your fertility. 100%. And infertility is one of those things that very easily gets placed onto the woman. And I don't know the statistics around this, but I'm certain that in a... Significant number of cases, it is actually the man, an issue physiologically. And...

To me, in hindsight, I was not in a position to welcome a new life into the world. And then I was. We were home. We had made this shift. I was standing in my purpose. I was going on a new journey and an adventure. We were ready. We were home. And that, I mean, my son and being blessed with a healthy child, knock on wood, that has been...

the centering and grounding force in this entire journey. I say that in the dedication, like as long as I have my wife and my son by my side, I feel like the wealthiest man alive. Infertility is on the rise for a variety of different reasons. There's many things in the modern environment that are...

frankly, quite toxic for the human body in terms of its ability to conceive and bring new life into the world. One of the things that I think we don't think about enough really speaks to what you just said. which is if you think about it on a broader evolutionary level, the woman is not going to become pregnant or it's unlikely.

If it feels as though there is threat around, if things are not safe, if there's not, you know, safety and resources and food and kind of what you might need to bring and nurture a life, a new life into the world, right? You know, we talk about stress. It's become, you know, common parlance. Oh, how are you doing? I'm okay. I'm a little bit stressed. It's that common, you know.

10 years ago, the World Health Organization is saying that stress is the health epidemic of the 21st century and stress impacts every single organ system in the body, including our fertility. It kind of makes sense. Maybe it's hard to get proof from a blood test in terms of the things that we're saying, but it absolutely holds true. I've seen it time and time again with patients when there is that feeling of...

safety and calm, people get pregnant. Now, I want to acknowledge there are other reasons. I'm not saying that's it for everything, right? But it doesn't surprise me to hear that. Yeah, it is. It is a beautiful thing. And the. The thing that I always say to people now is if you are out there and you are struggling in silence on that journey, you are so not alone. And there is a tendency, especially for men, to struggle in silence.

on that journey and to not talk about it, to not share that with their friends. I have many close friends in my life. I'm very, very fortunate, but I hid from the world for many years.

And hid who I truly was. I hid my true values. I created this version of myself that was not real. And a part of that was avoiding vulnerability. And this... hard set belief I had that vulnerability was weakness and by sharing vulnerability I was going to be losing man points and I needed to be tough and be strong and what I've learned

over the last several years is that it's quite literally the opposite. That if you are able to open up, you are creating a ripple effect of strength in both the other person and in yourself. And so investing in that, investing in those relationships that you have, being that person to someone else, because then they will be that to you, is so powerful. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that.

Going back to this scorecard that you mentioned before, and the scoreboard, one of the things I really loved towards the start of the book was where you said the new scoreboard outperforms the old scoreboards. in three particular ways. Measurement, decision, and design. That was really, really interesting. Like measurement, for example, you say measure the right thing and you'll take the right action.

it kind of makes sense, doesn't it? If you're measuring it, you're likely to take action on it, which is why I think your wealth score, that wealth quiz is so important. But can you speak... to those three things measurement decision and design and why those three things are so important yeah as long as you can measure something

you will focus on it. So the reason people focus so much on money is because it is so measurable. You can see it, right? You have these like online net worth tools and so you check it and you refresh every day to see the number going up. With this new scoreboard, you can measure your progress on all of these areas of life. You know you can go back and take this quiz as many times as you want. I did that.

Every month, I would go back and check how am I feeling about these different areas and get a much better measurement and as a result, a much better set of actions that you will take to build your comprehensive wealth, your truly wealthy existence. The decision and design, I would argue, is just as, if not more important. This is when you are making a big decision in life. Because the default scoreboard has so long just been money.

That is the only metric you have in your mind when you're making that decision. So if you get given a new job offer, let's use you as an example. You have a wonderful life that you really love, but money is your only scoreboard. And someone comes and offers you $10 million to move to Omaha, Nebraska. And you're going to have to travel there 300 days out of the year and completely uproot your life, your children, everything.

If money was your only way of measuring your life, and someone just offered you $10 million, That sounds pretty damn good. And people do this all the time. They take a job to go live in some faraway land, away from their family, away from their friends. They move to another country, be an expat. They switch tax jurisdictions so that they can reduce their-

taxes even though they're going to be 3,000 miles away from their family. When you're only measuring money, the decision process is only around that one thing versus you think about all of these things. Now, that same decision.

I'm offering you $10 million. So I say, okay, financial wealth is a plus. I'm going to make a whole bunch of money. But what about these other types of wealth? Let me think about that in this decision. Well, my social wealth is for sure going to go down because I don't know anyone in Omaha, Nebraska.

So that's a big hit. My mental wealth. I'm going to be working on something that I don't really like. This job that they're offering me. I don't think it's going to be enjoyable. It's not going to push my intellectual curiosity. It's not going to engage me in my purpose. So that's a hit. My physical wealth.

Well, I have a really nice outdoor life here where I'm living, and it's really cold in Omaha, and I'm not going to be able to be outside and do my daily walk, so that's going to take a hit. Time wealth, I'm going to have to travel 300 days out of the year for this job.

And I'm going to be working 80 hours a week because it's really stressful. They're paying me so much money. So all four of these other areas are taking a big hit. Now, when I'm making that decision, I can make it with a very clear-eyed view. on the impact it's going to have on my entire life rather than just on the sole focus of money. And that is a really powerful thing because it allows you to make a much better decision. Yeah, I love that. It's those unmeasurables.

you know, bringing them out of the darkness into the light so that we can at least factor them in. One thing I've often thought about is with parents like mine, immigrants to the UK, you know, they... They came for a better life, but the cost of coming was leaving your parents, leaving your siblings, leaving your family, leaving your culture, right? Leaving the whole weather and coming.

to the northwest of England, right? And I sometimes wonder. It's not my decision to make, whether it was worth it or not. That's, you know, it was their choice. But I do wonder, looking back, if they, you know, if Dad was alive, I'd... One of the questions I may ask him is, hey, dad, was it worth it? Or would you have preferred to stay in India, hanging out with your friends, seeing your parents, your siblings? Do you know what I mean? But again, it's like you said before.

when you were crushing it at work, your metric was money, right? So every decision gets made around money. And that makes me think of one of my favorite things in this book, right? The life razor. I love it. And I think it kind of applies here, but in the reverse way. So could you just explain what the life razor is? Because this got me to stop and pause. I had to think about my own. So explain it and then let's just go through it because I love everyone.

on the back of this conversation to start thinking about their own life razor. Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits that are holding you back.

and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated. But it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life.

And I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour. And I can't wait to see you there. Ever have one of those days when everything seems to go wrong, and before you know it, you've slipped back into those habits you're trying so hard to avoid, like sugar, doom scrolling, and wine.

When it comes to making changes in our lives that actually last, most people think the solution is to try harder. But this is simply not the case. In my new book, Make Change That Lasts, I reveal how exactly you can break free from the habits that hold you back. What many of us don't realize is that our behaviors follow our beliefs.

So when you change your beliefs, and my book will show you how to do that, you'll spend less time having to think about your habits because they'll happen automatically. Make Change At Last, the number one Sunday Times bestseller is available to buy now all over the world as a paperback, ebook, and as an audiobook, which I am narrating. And if you've not got your copy yet... What's he waiting for? So the idea of a razor, just to define the term, is a rule of thumb.

that allows you to simplify decision-making. The most famous one is Occam's razor. You've probably heard of it. It says that the simplest answer is often the best one. Simple is beautiful. My concept of the life razor... is to take this idea of a rule of thumb to simplify decision-making for your entire life.

I derive it from a man named Mark Randolph. He's the founder and first CEO of Netflix. He posted this thing that talked about the fact that throughout his entire life, he never missed a Tuesday dinner with his wife. A Tuesday 5 p.m. dinner. He always had a date. While starting all of these incredible companies, he never missed that date night. It was a sacred ritual. And I had this realization that...

It wasn't really about the dinner. It wasn't really about the date nights with his wife. It was about the ripples that that created, what that meant, the identity that that defined about him and how that impacted the circles in the world around him. That got me thinking about this concept of the life raiser. How can you come up with a single defining rule, a single statement in your life, like I never miss a Tuesday dinner with my wife, that instills this identity?

that you can use to answer the various questions that come into your world. I'll use an example from my own life to walk through this. My life razor is I will coach my son's sports teams. What does that mean? It means certain things about the type of person that I am, that I'm going to coach my son's sports teams. It means that I am the type of father that he wants to have around.

It means that I'm the type of husband and community member that people are proud of. It means that I will never sacrifice my morals or integrity because I wouldn't want to harm those relationships and that important bond that I have with him. So one statement now implies a whole series of things about my life, about my identity, who I am, how I define myself. So when an opportunity comes along...

someone's offering me a lot of money, but it might come with 300 days away from my family, like that one I gave earlier. I can say, what does the type of person who coaches his son's sports teams do in this situation? And I can think about that very clearly to say, well...

I need to prioritize time with the people I care about most with my son. So I would probably not take that opportunity in that situation. It becomes a way to look at these problems through a very clear lens of who your ideal self is, how you show up in.

the world that is very powerful in your ability to navigate the chaos that inevitably enters your life. Yeah, I really like it. I love what you said in the book and what you just mentioned there about Mark Randolph and that actually it's not about... the actual thing necessarily. It is, but it's more about what it symbolizes to him and to the people around him. Yeah, and as I was...

Going through your book yesterday, I was kind of thinking through this because, you know, I mentioned I scored very well on this wealth score. So I think things are really good. Having said that... I would say at the moment, things are slightly out of balance, but I'm aware of that because, you know, we're recording this in December. We are three weeks out of my sixth book coming out.

And so I've been doing lots of interviews and promotion, which I don't normally do, right? So I've been traveling a lot. I've been in America. I'm going to London a lot.

These are things I don't usually do, but I'm aware that I'm doing it for a particular reason, which is I spent three years writing something. I'm very passionate about the ideas. This is the way to get those ideas in the world. But it has meant... temporarily that my balance has shifted slightly I think I'd welcome your view on this I think it's okay for balances to shift

As long as you're aware and as long as it doesn't go on for too long. So I'm already imagining, oh, next year when I'm through this and I'm through my national tour, you know what? I'm going to be resetting in a big way. The life razor that I came up with yesterday was something like, I'm the kind of person who spends every single weekend with his wife and kids.

And is full of energy when I do so. And that last bit I added in because the truth is last weekend I was at home. I was exhausted because I'd been traveling and I haven't got over. the travel fatigue. So for me, it was really nice to go, oh, it's okay to be at home, but if you're knackered whilst you're at home. And I think that was going to be really useful because it will help me just tweak a few things as I go into the new year.

Absolutely. I mean, the three tests to ask yourself about your life razor, which I talk about in the book are, is it controllable? I.e., can you actually take action to control this thing, which you can in this case. You can control that you are home, that you are present with your family, that you have energy in those moments with them. Is it ripple creating, meaning does it extend beyond?

just the direct action. So you being the type of person that does that has ripples into how you engage with your teams. It gives them the freedom to also... place boundaries and embrace their family, embrace these other areas of wealth in their life? And then the third is, is it identity creating? Does it signify something about who you are as a human and how you show up in the world? And that is very identity creating for you.

get the sense just from spending a bit of time with you, that family is so central to how you think about what your life is. It's everything for me. Even the fact that I live in the town where I grew up, five minutes away from my mom, it's kind of... I think it's a reflection of who I am, certainly how I was raised and how I view the world and how I choose to define success.

Although this isn't a life razor, what's been really interesting to me over the last few weeks, I've been going around talking to people. The amount of people who I've met who've said to me, Ronan, I really love what you do every summer. where you go off social media and you stop your podcast for six weeks.

So it's really interesting if I look at that through these three characteristics, controllable, ripple creating, identity defining, although that isn't an intentional life eraser, I guess it is in some ways, right?

I know I'm probably one of the only major global podcasts who stops for a period of time during the year. And I do it... intentionally I do it for me I do it because I recognize like that question about you you had to wrestle with how many times you're going to see your parents a couple of years you thought If it's once a year, I'm only going to see them 15 more times in my entire life. I mean, that is a powerful question. I've been more and more aware that my kids are getting older.

how much longer they're going to be around for these summer holidays. I acknowledge I'm in a position to be able to do this because not everyone can. So it is controllable for me at this moment in my life. It is ripple creating because it means so many other decisions in the year get made around the ability to take that time away from the show. And I think it is identity defining. It's identity defining for me.

And I didn't realise how identically defining it is for other people and their views of me. But... I want to come back to what I think is an important point when we're talking about these different types of wealth. And maybe the life razor is a good lens through which to look at this. I think sometimes there's a risk that these kinds of conversations seem to only be relevant for people who are already successful. So we hear this story, your story, my story.

You know, all kinds of stories about people who reached the societal versions of success, but then weren't happy. And they realize, oh, money and external validation doesn't make you happy. I need to do other things, right? But I think it's easy and I think a lot of people or many people will say, yes, but it's okay for you because you had that. You got the validation, you got the financial success, which now allows you.

to recalibrate. So let's make this really specific. I got a DM on Instagram two days ago from an NHS, National Health Service nurse. And in essence, her message was just saying, I love your show. I love what you put out each week. It's really, really helping me. But I've got to say, I'm really, really struggling in life at the moment. I'm working 14-hour shifts. I don't think the NHS value what I do. I love...

caring for patients but it really is getting harder and harder. I come back home, I don't have energy for my children and to do the passions that I want. So if we just use that as an example, because I think your five types of wealth still do apply. What would you say to that lady and how your book can help her? Yeah. Well, first off... I say this at the outset of the book, and it's an important point. Money isn't nothing. It simply can't be the only thing.

Every single discussion where people say money can't buy you happiness and you should focus on these other things. I agree. I actually completely agree with the pushback that at the lower levels. Money directly buys you happiness. And I want everyone, that's why financial wealth is one of the five types of wealth, because it is a part of this journey. Earning money, especially in the early on, is a direct...

action that will create real happiness. It will reduce unhappiness, reduce fundamental burdens and stresses, and improve your life in meaningful ways. Beyond a certain point, It will not. And you need to focus on other things. You need to focus on these other types.

But when you're still on that upward curve, the book has plenty of tools for you to do just that, for you to earn more money, for you to find scalable uses of your time, for you to focus your energy on the things that are actually going to create significant output in your life. For that person in particular, for a person that feels that way, the thing I would say is to connect in your work.

to the higher order purpose that you have. You mentioned that she really cares about the patients. And it's very easy when you're doing a job that maybe you don't actually... love the hours of it or the the work uh the job to lose sight of what the bigger purpose is that you're trying to engage with i i spoke to as part of the book a factory worker he spends

10-hour shifts, putting together widgets on an assembly line, right? He doesn't love his job. There's nothing about that. You don't have to find your purpose from your job. His purpose is that he... is a provider for his family and he takes that very seriously he says he's the type of father that he never had that he provides for his family and that he shows up and he does what he has to do to take care of his children and he's going to be there for them

Every single day when he goes to work, he is engaging with that purpose. It does not mean that he likes what he's doing, but it gives him energy for that thing that he is doing because he's connected to something higher. Is that intentionality? It's the intentionality. It's not about the money that he's earning. It's about the fact that it is creating this purpose. It is affecting the purpose that he has for himself.

And so what I want people to do, even if you are on that journey, you haven't made enough yet, you're not near your version of the enough life, and you're coming up that curve. Continue to focus on financial wealth, but do it in a way that is connected to something deeper than just the money. And you will find so much more energy for every single day and of the actions. Yeah, I love that. Really, really great piece of advice.

Okay, let's go through these five types of wealth then, okay? So you've sort of given us that top line summary right at the start. Social wealth. If you could just remind us what is social wealth and then perhaps give us a few points as to how we can start. increasing our own social wealth. Yeah. And by the way, I love that idea of pointers to start increasing because one of the central ideas here is that

You need to invest in all of these areas. What happens is financial wealth is an area where we say, oh, yes, we're going to invest in our financial wealth. We're going to put money away into the stock market or whatever it is. We're going to invest in our future. But you don't think about investing in these other areas in the same way. When in fact, they compound just as well, if not better, than any financial investment. And in the absence of that investment, they atrophy.

So that is a very, very important point. You cannot keep saying later about these other areas. There's a tendency to always use that word later. You say, I'll spend time with my kids later, or I will spend more time with my friends later. or I'll invest in my physical health later. And the reality is that later just becomes another word for never.

Because those things are not going to exist in the same way later. Your kids are not going to be 12 and 14 years old later. Your health is not going to be the same later. Your friends are not going to be there for you later. And so if you don't start investing Now, they will not exist. You will not be able to. And the important thing with that is you cannot build up what invest means in your mind to the point where it feels intimidating.

An investment in your social wealth, which we'll talk about, can be as simple as sending a text to a friend. It can be making that phone call. It can be going for a five-minute walk with your wife. It doesn't need to feel dramatic. It doesn't need to be optimal. It just needs to be beneficial because anything above zero compounds. Yeah. That point about later, it's just so good and it's so applicable to frankly anything.

You know, a lot of people listen to the show for physical health tips and knowledge, right? And yeah, I'll do that workout. I'll be the person who moves one hour a day when I have time, you know, but at the moment I can't, but... that later never comes. It never comes for so many people that, you know, the workers who I've seen with autoimmune illness, and there's many different contributing factors, of course, I'm not trying to put it all on stress.

But they wish that that later had come earlier all the time. Man, I wish. I wish I stopped earlier. I had enough 10 years ago. Why did I keep pushing for an extra promotion? I sometimes wonder if some people intuitively get this. I didn't intuitively get this. Well, I've had to work at this stuff, but I've got a friend who... I was at primary school with and he's a teacher and he basically got offered a few years ago to be, I think, head of the department.

And he turned it down. I remember I was playing squash with him back then. He's just like, yeah, it's like, you know what? If I take head of the department, I'll get paid a bit more money. But I've got to be in at weekends, evening meetings. There's going to be more reports to write. It's just not worth it. I'll stick to where I am. And here's the thing, right? Society would often look at someone like that.

Oh, man, they're a failure. They don't know what's going on. Do you know what I mean? It's not what we actually celebrate in society. The person who goes, Yeah, actually, I don't need the promotion. I'd rather just chill with my wife and kids at the weekend and be home in the evenings and not be there. But actually, it's people like that who I think are actually winning.

These guys are winning at life. You know, I've had to learn this stuff. I think many people are going to have to read your book to learn about these types of wealth. But I think some people, maybe because of their upbringing, I don't know, do you think some people just get it automatically? I do think that some people, I actually would argue that most people know these things. We, the way that I phrase it in the book is that.

I am not here to give you the answers for how to live your life. You already have the answers within you. You just haven't asked the right questions yet to reveal them. You just haven't sat with the questions long enough to actually reveal those answers. Because we know, I mean, we... So many times in your life, you experience some light from the other side, some...

a death in the family, a near-death experience. You read regrets from the dying. You hear these incredible stories of wisdom from older people, and they shine a light from the other side back onto your path. That light is the wisdom.

It's the insight. It's the thing that you learned. And 99% of people will hear it, they'll nod their heads, and then they'll go back living the same damn way they were before. And the only thing that I really want people to do... if you read the book or if you don't, is to hear the things we're talking about right now and just take one tiny action.

I don't care what it is. It doesn't have to be dramatic. It doesn't have to change your entire world. But the tiny little action to just change something, to live a little bit differently than you were before, the momentum from that and the ripple from that. will dramatically alter your life. Yeah. On the subjects of questions and ask yourself the right questions, there are just so many wonderful questions in this book that will get us to just stop.

and start thinking. I wrote a few down. I really like this one. What do I currently take for granted that I would miss deeply if it were gone tomorrow? This one is something that I recently had an experience with. I was in my office working on something really focused. I, like you, am in a season of unbalance.

And I was focusing on something and my toddler son, he's two and a half years old now, he came in and he's very rambunctious. And he came in and started creating chaos in my office, throwing things and sort of like making noise. He wanted to play. And I had this whole... thought spiral, very negative, complaining in my head. Why is he doing this? I'm really trying to focus. There's a bad time. All of these things. And I snapped myself back into the present with this question.

recognizing the fact that three years ago, three and a half years ago, when my wife and I were struggling to conceive, I prayed every single night. that we would one day have a healthy child. And here I was in the present complaining about that exact prayer. And it's the recognition that sometimes the things that you prayed for become the things that you complain about.

If you're not willing to stop and call yourself out when that happens, it's a very vicious spiral. Sometimes you really are living out your prayers, but you have to recognize it. and embrace that gratitude in the moment. Yeah, I love, love, love that example. How many parents rush through bedtime? You know, I have done in the past, right?

But I try not to anyway. I try and remind myself, sometimes if I'm knackered or the kid's not going to bed at the time that you want them to, whatever it might be, it's just that reminder, oh... You know this experience that you're trying to fast forward and get to the end of? You won't have many more of these soon. And then you'll be thinking back to...

Do you remember when they used to want me to read them a bedtime story? Do you know what I mean? Those days are already starting to go. And I'm like... Oh, wow. I mean, there's something really powerful in your book about the first 10 years, right? So maybe tell us about that. I mean, every single thing that you do today... is something that your 90-year-old self will wish they could go back and do. The good old days are literally happening right now. You are living them. And with children...

There is a 10-year window when you are your child's favorite person in the entire world. And after that... You're no longer their favorite person. They have friends, best friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, spouses of their own, children of their own. You no longer ever occupy that same place but for this 10-year window you are literally everything but we live in a world

Where that 10-year window is also the time when you are told that you're supposed to be hustling until you drop. You're supposed to be as busy as possible. You're supposed to be chasing every single more that the world hands you. And my call to action to everyone that's listening to this is to question that. To say, how can I find my own definition of balance during this part of my life? How can I find harmony between my work and my life rather than...

this dichotomy that's created? How can I embrace those magic years that I have with my children, recognize their impermanence, and be present in those moments? Find energy in those moments, even when you're tired. And I experienced that with my own father. This was informed in me through my own experience with him. He unfortunately did not have that relationship with his father when...

When my father wanted to marry my mom, my dad is white Jewish from the Bronx, New York. My mother's from India, from Bangalore, born and raised. She came over for college. They crossed paths for a two-week window while they were both studying at Princeton. And... My mom asked my dad on a date and they went out for ice cream together. And at the date, my dad said, you know, my father will never accept us.

And my mom was so blinded by his use of the word us that she completely missed the message. And unfortunately, he was right. And my dad's father was not. supportive of this courtship and told my dad that he had to choose between my mom and his family and my dad chose love he walked out the door and never saw them again And to this day, I never met either of my dad's parents. My dad has three siblings I've never met. And that choice that he was forced to make...

And the ripple effect of that, of the fact that he chose love, played out so strongly in the way that he raised my sister and I. And in how loving and supportive and in how... energetic he was in showing up for us after a long day of work, all of the travel that he did, the research that he was working on to be able to then go outside and play catch with me when I wanted to, when I wanted to practice, even though I know now.

That meant that he was going to be working until 10 or 11 at night. That meant that he was going to have to do something early in the morning. It changed who he was as a person and as a father, the way that he showed up with us. And I'm very lucky in that. My parents are an incredible model of a loving, healthy relationship. 42 years strong today.

I think about that constantly with my own son now that the thing that my father did particularly well, and it's the lesson that I take from all of this. He didn't sacrifice his ambition professionally. He didn't scale it back massively and just decide to live an average professional existence. What he did was that he always included me in the journey. I always knew why he was working hard on things. I always knew

that what he was working on was important to him, that it lit him up, that he was helping people. And that made me feel included. Because what children do is if you are not there, if you are gone, They will fill that with the worst reason unless you fill it with the right one. When you're gone, they'll just say, oh, dad's never here. But if you tell them I'm gone because I am helping.

create this impact in the world. I'm sharing these ideas with people that are going to improve all of their lives. And that's really important because it's important to help people to act in the service of others. Now, your son, when he's thinking about why you're not here at a point in time, has

that understanding of the why in their head. And it becomes a very different thing. They are proud. They are a part of your professional journey now. They're no longer feeling like, oh, you're making a sacrifice and a trade-off. They are actually with you on the journey. They're on the mission.

together. And to me, that is the thing that makes this whole idea of work-life balance into more of a work-life harmony, where the two exist together. The people are on the same journey. The mission is one. Yeah, I love that. How do you think about friendship? I think that the loneliness epidemic is the scariest trend in society today. And that... We are really in a friendship recession. And the data that you're seeing coming out of everywhere in the world is terrifying.

I recently saw a statistic that teenagers in the United States are spending 70% less time with their friends in person than they were 20 years ago. The lack of in-person real... Textured human interaction is devastating to who we are and how we derive meaning. The science is very clear that human connection...

and relationship satisfaction impacts our health and happiness more than any other factor in our lives. The Harvard study of adult development found that over the course of 80 years, 1,300 plus people that... The single greatest predictor of their physical health at age 80 was relationship satisfaction at age 50. How you felt about your relationships was more impactful than your cholesterol, your blood pressure, any of those things, smoking, drinking, any of those things.

We need to invest in our relationships the same way we invest in anything else. We need to send the text. We need to tell the person how we feel about them. We need to open up to people more. Those tiny daily deposits, we need to... Tell people we appreciate them. Those little daily deposits have lasting positive benefits. And people always ask, well, I can't.

find someone to be there for me. No one's ever there for me. If you don't have someone who is there for you, be that to someone else. Because what you put out into the world as a friend, you will receive in return.

I truly believe that. If you are there for someone during their hard time, they will be there for you during yours. People never forget the person that was just there with them in their dark moment. If you send a text to the person who's currently being dragged whatever reason personally professionally and you tell them that you are there with them they will be there for you during your dark moment but if you don't if you don't show up for people you can't expect people to show up for you yeah

This loneliness epidemic, it's a massive, massive issue. I know we talk about it a lot, people hear about these studies more and more, but I'm still not convinced that enough of us are taking action. on it. It's really interesting. I mean, we're recording this in December. Tomorrow night in the UK. A documentary goes live on Channel 4 that I've been involved with filming over the last few months about smartphones and children.

And there are some year rates, which basically means in this country, 12 to 13 year olds at a school are basically giving up all of their technology for 21 days, right? not just smartphones smartphones gaming devices laptops tablets And with the University of York, we have tracked what happens. Now there's many things. It's frankly incredible what...

we are showing. And the documentary doesn't even show everything that has been found because it can't, because it's a TV show. It can't absolutely show everything, right? But relevant to what you just said is before... the kids gave up the use of their technology. It was voluntary. I think some of their parents just, you know, suggested that they take part, right? But it was voluntary. One of the things that kids were most concerned about...

was that, oh, we're going to be less connected, right? What we're going to do, everyone else is communicating on these smartphones and, you know, on social media. After 21 days. pretty much all of them said that they felt more socially connected.

This is the big con about technology. This is the big con about this whole idea of our children need smartphones. No, they don't. Yes, parents are under pressure. Yes, it's difficult. And we don't want our kids to be... left out but this idea that we need them to be socially connected is fundamentally not true in my experience and what we saw in that school and i did these little clinics with the children uh throughout those

21 days, first two or three days, it was like a drug withdrawal, right? Which is quite telling in and of itself. I mean, I've seen people withdraw from sugar, from alcohol. I know the signs. I'm not saying it's the same thing, but there were some traits that weren't dissimilar to what happens when we withdraw from things that we've been dependent on. Once it got through that...

Anxiety was better. Depression was better. They're sleeping one hour extra per night. One hour extra, right? So we could go down a deep rabbit hole on that, but...

The point that's relevant to what you were just talking about is that they felt more socially connected. I would ask them why. I said, how come? He says, well, actually, you know what? I've realized when I hang out with my friends, we don't actually do anything apart from just look at our phones and look at TikTok. Whereas because I don't have it now. I'm talking more to my friends. We're going out and doing stuff. We're going to the park. We're actually doing these real world things.

So people feel connected. And I think this applies to adults as well. How much time do we spend on these devices? It's like junk food or whole food. Is it junk connection? or whole, real, three-dimensional human connection. That's a beautiful, I can't wait to watch the documentary. It sounds like an incredible, incredible effort and hopefully one that will actually spark people to take action around these things.

I often think that no one teaches a course on how to make friends. And so when you're a kid in school, you sort of like make your friends and it's because you're like forced into a...

into a box with them right like you're in school and so you kind of are forced to make friends and then you're in university and you kind of you're with all these people in the dorm and so you make your friends but as an adult no one teaches a course on how to make adult friends and so it's one of the things that I talk about in the book you know at the end of every

So there's a section for each of time, social, mental, physical, financial. There's a guide. And that guide is filled with these short, actionable ideas for building that type of wealth. And in the social wealth. One of them is around how to actually build genuine relationships. And one of the things that I think is most powerful is you need to figure out like the version of being placed into a box with these people.

like how you did when you were in school. I call that being placed into value-aligned rooms as an adult. And what I mean by that is you have certain values and interests. You need to find places where there is a high density of... other people naturally in that place that have those similar values. So if I'm really into working out fitness, that might be the gym. If I'm into health and my overall vitality.

A farmer's market is a great place to go and frequent. There will be a whole lot of other people there who care about those same things to you. You place yourself into these situations where there are going to be other people with whom you have natural conversation starters, natural interest alignment. value alignment. Doing that more often is how you make this whole process feel easier.

It reduces the friction to having those initial conversations that feel uncomfortable as an adult, but that spark these friendships. My adult friendships? are almost entirely built through this like weird set of physical hobbies that I have, whether it's like marathon running or the lifting or cold plunges, saunas, these weird things that I'm into because...

Other people that are into those things I know exhibit a core value that I hold very dearly, which is delayed gratification. And I've placed myself into enough value-aligned rooms that I've built these relationships as an adult as a result. I think this is one of the hangovers of COVID and the lockdowns. I think it's insidiously crept into society and we haven't really... taken stock and reverted back. So much went online during COVID. Yoga classes.

your hobbies, education at school, whatever it might be, and it hasn't gone back, right? So I agree with you that one of the things I've said to patients for many years is like, if you're struggling, you... Many people have moved away for work, right? They didn't have your scoreboard, but often I've seen people who move away for better opportunities.

feel quite isolated. They're away from their family, away from their friends, away from the people, their tribe who knew them. So what are your hobbies, right? Go to a local... Whatever your hobby is, yoga, gym, book clubs, whatever, go in person because then you're going to meet those like-minded people. I think it's a great way for people to start building up those connections. What about those...

deeper friendships. You said before that you're blessed to have some really, really good friends as am I. How do you define a really good friend? I think it's the people that you have sat in the mud with. I don't think that depth is something that can be engineered or manufactured depth is built through.

shared struggle and scientifically that's shared struggle releases oxytocin which creates these feelings of love and connection that is forged over long periods of time And that is something that you may have one, two, three, maybe five, if you're lucky, people in your life that you have truly sat in the mud with, that you have experienced this.

thing that I like to call growing in love. I've talked about this before romantically, but it applies to friendships just as much, which is falling in love is very easy. Growing in love is very hard. Falling in love is the like... Thing you see on social media. It's the Instagram picture the fancy vacation the nice date the beautiful filtered image But that's not what real life is And growing in love is the things

that don't look as pretty. It's the hard conversations. It's the calling the person on their shit. It's the sitting in the mud with them during their tough time, sitting in silence, not necessarily offering advice or support or help, just being there. And that is what real life looks like. It's not those fancy, beautiful, glamorous moments. It's the struggle. It's the doing nothing. It's the just being there with the person.

And more of us need to embrace that growing and stop focusing so much on the falling. And that applies, as I said, just as much to your friendships as it does to your romantic partners. Because... Your fake friends will just pat you on the back and tell you that everything's great. Your real friends are the ones that will call you out on things. They're willing to hold you to the fire more because they've... built that

base with you. They've built up on, they've been there through the ups and through the downs. And so they have earned that position in your life to tell you when things don't stack up to have that hard conversation. And there's so much power in that. And again, To attract those things into your life, put those things out into the world with someone else. Sit in the mud with someone else and they will sit in the mud with you. What's the darkest hour, friend? This is one of my favorite ideas.

that I share. And it's derived from a very harsh truth, which is most of your friends aren't really your friends. They're just along for the ride when it's fun, convenient, or valuable, and they'll be gone when it's none of those things. Your real friends are the ones who are there for you.

when you have nothing to offer in return, when you're down and out, when you're in the mud, when the world has collapsed down on you, when you're bankrupt, when you get arrested, when the business fails, when your partner breaks up with you. Those are your darkest hour, friends. Find one, cherish them, and be one to someone else. That's quite powerful, isn't it? Is it a sad state of human existence today that most of our friends are not real friends?

Because we can look at that in quite a depressing way. Can't we go, wow, that's pretty sad. I actually don't view it as sad. I think that... You only have room in your life for so many of those truly deep bonds. And I don't think... We need to bemoan the sort of seasonal friends. There's this idea that I think it's from Tyler Perry that you have three types of friends. You have leaves, branches, and roots.

And the leaves are those seasonal friends. They're there when times are nice and sunny and they're fun and they're nice and they look pretty. But as soon as the storms come, they fall. The branches are somewhere in between. They're sort of there, but you can't lean on them too heavily, put too much weight on them because they might break off. But the roots...

are those darkest hour friends. The roots are the people that are there for you through summers and winters and falls and across all of these different seasons of your life. They are grounded. They are deep. They are entrenched. And the idea is not that the leaves are bad or that you shouldn't have leaves on your tree. It's just to recognize that they are leaves, to not expect them to be their...

As the roots will be and to not lean too much on the branches because the roots are the ones that will really be there. And I think that that's the important point. It's you will have friends that come and go. And you will also have deep relationships that blossom in different seasons of your life for reasons completely unbeknownst to you and out of your control.

Relationship with my sister has been one of the most beautiful things that's happened to me in the last three years of my life. I mentioned this earlier. For the longest time, I had created this environment of competition with my sister. that she was the golden child and I was the ne'er-do-well son that couldn't do anything right. And that competitive dynamic that I had created through my own insecurity, not through any fault of hers.

manifest as resentment. I created this resentment towards her that she was accomplishing all these things that I wasn't capable of. And as a result, our relationship during the first 30 years of my life was effectively non-existent. We would see each other at holidays, but it was terse at best. Not outwardly toxic, but ambivalent, say. And the most beautiful thing happened after we had our son, which was my sister had had a child 11 months before her first, a little boy as well.

And after my son was born, we were all at my house and my whole family came down to visit us. And my sister and I took a picture. And I so vividly recall this moment. I'm holding my son. She's holding her sons, the two of us with our two boys, these two new entrants to the family. And I looked over at her and I had this sensation that...

I was meeting her for the first time. It was literally like I could see her as she truly was for the first time in my entire life in that moment. See her for who... See her... for her spirit, who she actually was, not this propped up definition that I had fakely created in my mind. And our relationship since has blossomed into this beautiful, deep relationship. And it's a reminder to me that...

you will have a deep, loving, beautiful relationship with someone that you haven't even met yet. Someone out there. Yeah. I love that. I love...

hearing how things with your sister have changed and the idea of seeing her in a new way. There's an exercise I've mentioned a couple of times on the show before, but I think really speaks to that. I have this exercise or this... this kind of thing that you can experiment with called starting with zero um and it's this thing that i often do with my wife and it's this idea that the past for many of us, hugely influences our present day relationships. And you might say, well, yeah, that's obvious.

Okay, sure, that's what the human brain is there for. Like, we look at past experiences, we try and then predict what to do based upon our past experiences, but I've... believe that for many of us, we don't realize how skewed our relationships are because of the things we've experienced in the past. So starting with zero...

And I will try and do this every now and again for seven days at a time with my wife, where basically I go for the next seven days, I'm going to try and interact with Vid as if every time is the first time I've met her. And it's tricky because our whole brain and evolution is conspiring against us when we do this. But if you've never done it, I would challenge...

I would challenge you. I would challenge anyone to give it a go because it's one of those beautiful things you can do because you learn about yourself. You learn... Oh, I'm making this assumption when I interact with her. And frankly, you can do it with kids. You can do it with anyone, basically. Work colleagues, you know, just try it and see. So I kind of, I really...

Yeah, I just like that as an idea. And it kind of speaks to what you just said with your sister, where you kind of almost saw her differently, which is really nice. I have a question for you about friendships. I guess it's a question I've been thinking a lot about in my own life. And so I'd very much welcome your perspective based on the way you view, you know, a happy life, a wealthy life basically.

I would say friendship is something I think a lot about. I don't know how important you think this is. I've got some of the best friends that anyone could ever wish to have. But they don't live anywhere near me. So they're my friends. from childhood and university days when I had a lot of time to invest in friendships and go through and sit in the mud, as you mentioned, right?

So I could call on these guys for anything at any time and they would in a heartbeat drop what they're doing and be there for me. I know that. But I don't have that... locally in my near environment. And I've been asking myself a question recently, how much does that matter? My life feels pretty full. I enjoy my work. I spend time with my wife, with my children.

I see my mum regularly and help look after her when that's needed. Like, do I also need to spend time finding friends locally who I can sit with and go and hang out with? I don't feel that I necessarily do, but I put that to you. You've written this wonderful book on the five types of wealth. What would you say if someone was to ask you that question? I would say no. Why? Because loneliness is...

relative, not absolute. And what I mean by that is if you feel your bucket is full, your life bucket, if you feel that you are living well, That is what matters, not the absolute of how many friends do I have locally. Because for certain people, they would have your same experience and they would feel very lonely.

that they don't have people to hang out with. I was recently having a conversation with one of my dearest friends from my entire life who lives in the Bay Area and who expressed to me that he feels very lonely. that he has great friends, but none of them live anywhere near him, so he doesn't see them a lot. For him, his expression of friendship is in-person interaction regularly. He's extroverted. He needs to be around people to feel that he...

has that cup filled, that he has that bucket filled. For other people, like you and I, it sounds like, we don't necessarily need that. We feel our bucket is filled by the depth that we have with people, even if they're far away, the knowledge that we can call on them. creates this feeling of connection and friendship with us. And we have a lot going on in these other areas of life to the point where we are not feeling that sensation of loneliness. The point is that...

loneliness does not manifest in the same way for every single person. You can feel lonely in a room surrounded by people. In a room with 100 people all around you in a crowded pub, you can feel very lonely if you don't feel that there is someone that understands you in the world, that connects with you. And so it's not one size fits all is the point. And if you...

experience the sensation of loneliness, that you don't feel like you have that level of connection that you need, then you should make friends with people that are around. You should take these actions that we've shared, that we've talked about, to go out and find those people. Be that to someone else.

But if you are not experiencing that, if you feel you have that bucket filled, if you feel that there are people in the world who will drop everything to be there for you, that you're on missions with people that really matter, that you care about. then continue marching on your path. Continue investing in it, by the way, because with all of these areas, the natural state is entropy. It's atrophy.

Everything is going to naturally decay and want to fall apart. So you have to daily invest in these areas. It's no different than your physical health. You have to continue to maintain it if you want it to stay there. It's the balance, isn't it? And you say something really beautiful towards the start of the book. Each of the five areas of wealth are important, but it's the relationship across them that is crucial. I think that's a really key point.

If certain buckets are overflowing because they're really, really nourished, can we get away? with maybe one of the other buckets being not quite as nourished. And then let's even go a bit further. Let's say there's someone listening who is struggling financially.

So they look at your model and go time, wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth, financial wealth. And I'm not trivializing how important money is for well-being and... you know, your sense of what you're able to do in the world and autonomy and all those kind of really important things. But could we argue that for some people, let's say they're not as financially wealthy as they might want to be, but if they are, you know...

Five-starring it in some of the other areas like their physical wealth, their health, basically a strong body, a strong mind, their mental wealth, their social circles, their time wealth. That can sort of rebalance it, right? Yeah, I... What's your take? The way that I articulate this is that your life has seasons. And what you... prioritize, and focus on during any one season can change and will change. For example, your 20s and early 30s are an incredible...

season for you to focus on your financial wealth, on building a foundation for the rest of your life. It is perfectly reasonable and probably advisable To do that, to really prioritize and focus on building a career, building a stable foundation of income and of financial wealth that you can compound against in the later years of your life. That will change.

In different seasons of your life, when your kids are five years old and you want to prioritize your time with them, the social wealth, that connection, that meaning, you may want to step off the gas pedal a little bit in those other areas. And so when I say...

it's important to think about the dynamic across these. It's because there is a natural fluctuating nature to what you are focusing on. But you never lose sight of the fact that in all of these areas, they need to exist on a dimmer switch, not an on-off.

There's a tendency for all of us to think that all of these areas in life exist with an on-off. That, okay, if I'm going to focus on money, then no more friends, no more physical health, no more purpose. You know, all of these other areas get flipped off.

And what I said earlier is true. If you don't invest in these areas, they will atrophy and not be there later in life. So you still need to take the couple of small, tiny daily actions for the dimmer switch to be on. The recognition that anything above zero... compounds in your life. To your second point, for the person that is not achieving at the level financially that they want to but they're very wealthy in these other areas, they're doing great, there is a sort of empowering idea here.

which is that maybe by society's traditional definition, you are not wealthy. I would argue that definition is wrong, and you are much wealthier than you have been led to believe. And then you appreciate. And you should feel empowered by that, that you are doing a whole lot right and that you are building things of incredible meaning. So even if you are on this...

path that feels like a treadmill. It feels like a hamster wheel. You can't get ahead. You don't see an upward mobility in your career path. You don't see an ability to... have a bunch of side income that's going to change it you don't see the ability to invest in things that's going to suddenly make you financially wealthy but

your health is good. You're able to invest in it. Your relationships with your children, with your partner, with your friends are really strong. You're constantly connected. You feel a higher order purpose, whether it's connected to your work or otherwise. You have the free time to spend on things.

that you care about and you recognize how important your time is, you are wealthy. I don't care what society says about you, you are wealthy. I guess that's one of the most empowering things about the scorecard that you propose in your book, right? it shines a light on those areas. So if you think you're struggling because of what you've been conditioned to look at, let's again, your life eraser concept that I love, that one sentence, right? That defining statement.

If your defining statement about success in your life is based on money, then you will start unwittingly perhaps to neglect all the good things, your friendships, your mental well-being, your physical, whatever it might be. Whereas what your scorecard does is give people tools to go, oh, actually, I'm not doing so bad. I'm winning in all of these areas, right? It doesn't negate that, yes, some people may not be earning enough and may need to try and earn more.

to improve the quality of life absolutely i think we both recognize that but i agree with you i think a lot of people are wealthier than they think they possibly just don't realize it You mentioned before that your parents had and have a very loving relationship, which has always been a wonderful role model for you. What do you do in your relationship to model those kind of things for your son? I think that vocalizing appreciation daily is ultimately...

the key to strong relationships. Lack of appreciation is where relationships go to die. I'm a big believer in inverting big problems in life, meaning if I know... What leads to divorce? I can tell you actually exactly what will lead to a terrible marriage. Not vocalizing appreciation, avoiding hard conversations, complaining to the other person, showing contempt toward the other person. All of these things will destroy your relationship.

going to do the opposite. I'm going to avoid all of those things. It's the same with your health. I know what will make you obese, so I'm going to do the opposite of those things. Lack of appreciation, I would say, is the number one thing.

that harms relationships, when you stop vocalizing the things that you appreciate, that you love about the other person, when you allow them to simply exist in your mind and you don't say them out loud to the person, when they don't experience and feel that from you.

a whole lot of bad things start happening. And I think it's particularly important in the time after a child is born. There's a statistic that 80% of married couples said that their relationship got worse in the year after their child was born. And that's scary because it should be the most beautiful thing in the world. Bringing a new life into the world should be the most beautiful thing. And yet it harms so many relationships. And it's because suddenly there is a new...

thing, literally a thing that is both of your exclusive focus. And you forget to focus on each other. You forget to give each other the love that you need during that transformative and very dynamic and changing time in your life. So after my son was born, I committed to that idea.

that every single day I was going to tell my wife one thing that I appreciated about her. It could be as small as something little that she did in the kitchen. It could be as big as something that I just think is incredible about the way that she's loving. My son. But that appreciation, that vocalizing it every single day has had such a profound impact on our relationship during these changing and tumultuous times. Yeah. Yeah. I love hearing that. And in terms of specifically.

around your son because you could express that appreciation to your wife when your son's asleep or when your son's not around. And of course that will have... amazing benefits for your relationship. But specifically, given how fondly you talk about the way your parents were with each other as you were growing up. Is there something that you think about when your son's around? How can I be a really good role model to him? Yeah. I mean, I say it like this. If I want my son...

to treat my wife like a queen, then I better damn well treat my wife like a queen. Because your children, you cannot teach them anything. They simply embody the things that they see you do. They embody the way you live. And so when I think about that every single day in the way that I act, in the way that I work, in the way that I put effort towards things and in the way that I am with my wife.

Because if my son observes me talking down to my wife, or he observes me being short with her, or he observes me yelling, what do you think that he is picking up and learning in those situations? It's a very, very negative cue. And we know that child trauma and the things that children see have a massive ripple effect in their lives.

I need to make sure that every single day I am treating my wife like the queen that she is because I know that my son is going to model that behavior. The other thing that I think about constantly is... Every single day, I see my wife do tiny, almost invisible things for my son that he will never know about. his entire life. From adjusting the pillow so slightly so that he's a little bit more comfortable while he sleeps, to holding his head

while he's sitting in his car seat so that his face isn't slumped forward, to wiping something off of the floor so that he doesn't slip on it. These tiny acts of love. I mean, there is nothing in the entire world like a mother's love.

It is the most remarkable biological thing that I have ever seen. And my wife is an unbelievable example of it. But my son will never know that. And my duty... as a father and as a husband, is to make sure that he knows every single day as he gets older just how much his mother loves him and all of those things that she does for him that he is going to have missed, ignored, that have been invisible his whole life.

Because my father did that for me. And while I don't always vocalize it to my mom, and while I complain when she harasses me about certain things, as Indian mothers sometimes do, I have so much respect and admiration for the amount of love that she has shown me my entire life. And I understand that every single ounce of that harassment that I perceive comes from a place of love. Yeah.

because she wants what's best for me and that she's been there for me. And the amount of appreciation I have for that has 10xed now in seeing my wife with my son. Yeah, for sure. And understanding. that level of connection, that level of emotion that my mom has for everything with me. Yeah, that was beautiful. Really lovely to hear.

I think for me, when I hear that, it's beautiful to hear it makes me want to be a better person. Even hearing that, I think that's the power when we hear people sharing their experiences or their aspirations. I think also one of the things I've learned in my parenting journey, which is a little bit longer than yours, given the respective ages of our children. How old's your son now? Two and a half. Two and a half, right. So mine are 14 and 12.

One of the things that I've learned to do, and again I think I'd probably give my wife a lot of credit for this, is to not try and be perfect in front of my children. If I make a mistake, to acknowledge it and say sorry, say daddy shouldn't have done that. you know, whatever it might be. I think that's really, really powerful because I don't think that happened to me when I was growing up. That is not me putting blame on anyone at all, right? I think my parents did a fantastic job of raising me.

But I believe that it's good. You know, our children put us on a pedestal for good reason, right? That we're their everything as they're growing up. But I think it's good for them to know that actually we are also human and that we do make mistakes. Sometimes we get things wrong. I think if you think that your parents are perfect and they can do no wrong, I think you... you go you get it for a rude awakening i think when you're a bit older maybe in your 20s and you kind of see

oh, they're just like me or they're just like everyone else. They've got things they're struggling with and the things that they're trying to cope with. So yeah, I love what you said. And for me, on top of that, it's also about if I don't... live as I would aspire to ideally you know in terms of my behavior or my words or whatever it might be I think I'm pretty good most of the time but if something does slip because you're tired or you're stressed or whatever it might be because

That's what happens. I think it's also important that we don't beat ourselves up because... I think that might be too high a bar for some people to live up to. And I think it's important to acknowledge that, yeah, sometimes, you know, you're not going to, but don't kid anyone. Don't kid your wife. Don't kid your children. own up and acknowledge it and try and make amends. I think one of the greatest gifts we can give our children is to grow up in a household where...

They see hard conversations happen, but also the healing and the apology that comes after it. And I felt that. My parents... My parents still to this day fight all the time. And it's hilarious to me now. And most of the time it was funny to me then because they would have these fights and then they would apologize to each other and I would see them make up. And every night before bed, they would go to bed having kissed and made up.

And it was real. That was how they vocalized their struggles and the things that they were feeling weren't going well, whatever it was about. But I always saw the healing that came after it. I think about that now that there's a lot of power in learning at a young age that hard conversations are important and that...

It is through those hard conversations that growth is created because it teaches you the same lesson that you learn in sports or in your physical wealth, which is that hard things create good things. And enduring the hard is how you get to the positive outcome that you want on the other side. And that every single thing you want in life is on the other side of something that sucks.

And it could be 100 hard conversations or it could be 100 workouts. But everything, all the meaningful things that we want to build, that we want to achieve, are on the other side of 100 hard things. And being willing to endure those hard things is how it's the cost of entry for getting to the other side, for getting to that bright future. Yeah, I love it. I could talk to you for hours. I love these concepts. We've not even...

I don't think we've even scratched the surface of what is in this book. It's full of so much wisdom. And so many practical exercises in every single chapter. I think it's going to help so many people. The Five Types of Wealth, A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life. It's your first book. My first book. But you also write a newsletter.

don't you? Yes. Just tell us a little bit about the newsletter because I think people are going to love that as well. Yeah, the newsletter is called The Curiosity Chronicle and it is twice a week and I've been writing it for about three and a half years now. There's...

almost a million subscribers around the world, all walks of life. And it has been a true joy to build that in this journey. Yeah, amazing. So guys, check out everything Sahil's doing. It's fantastic. To finish off this conversation. It's very clear to me that you have had some major realizations over the past few years and made some dramatic changes in your life on the back of them, right? Which is, it's wonderful to...

hear you talk about them, share them, and then put all of your learnings in your newsletter and this book. What I thought I'd ask you right at the end of our conversation is this. What is the single biggest realization you have had in your journey from feeling lost in the pursuit of success to reclaiming a life of meaning and joy? The answers are already within you. You just haven't asked the right questions yet. In the book, I share this

letter that I had written to myself in 2014, right when I was graduating college. I wrote a letter to my 10 year future self. This is a practice I've been doing for many, many years. But usually I would do it for a one or two year future. So I would open it every the following year, the following new year. But I wrote this one and it was addressed to myself in 2024.

I opened the letter literally two weeks before I was supposed to turn in the first draft of this book, the final draft rather of this book. And it knocked me off my feet. It was a list of hopes for the future. things that I hoped were real in my life 10 years from then. And it exhibited a level of clarity about all of these topics that I did not feel on the surface.

I talked about my relationship with my sister. I talked about the things I was hiding from the world, my insecurities. I talked about my relationship with my wife, who was then my girlfriend.

I talked about children, how I didn't want them at the time, but I hoped that I one day would. And I talked about all of these things. And when I opened it and I read it, I had that profound sensation that the answers were already within that young person, that young arrogant, stupid kid that wrote that letter. I had the answers. I just hadn't sat with the questions. I hadn't asked the right questions to reveal and live and act upon those answers in my own life. And so the journey for everyone.

that engages with this, anyone who reads the book, it's not to give you the answers. It's to help you ask the questions so that you can reveal the answers that are already within you. So I love that. It's a great answer. I've thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with you. Thanks for making the journey to the studio. Thank you so much for having me.

Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information.

Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday Five. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not... share anywhere else including health advice how to manage your time better interesting articles or videos that i'd be consuming

and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something...

You can sign up for free at If you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world, covering all kinds of different topics, happiness, food, stress, sleep, behavior change, and movement. weight loss, and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out. They are all available as paperbacks, eBooks, and as audio books, which I am narrating.

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