Five Types of True Wealth

< Full Episode

Transcript: Five Types of True Wealth

Season 12, Episode 26  | April 14, 2026

Brian Mazza

Let’s get into it. New York Times bestseller. Congratulations, my man.

 

Sahil Bloom

Thank you.

 

Brian Mazza

Very cool. So your book, Five Types of Wealth, reframes wealth beyond just finances, right? So people probably think it’s just about finances in the beginning. What was the single moment or insight that triggered you to write this book?

 

Sahil Bloom

Yeah, you know, for me, I think it’s important for me to just give a little bit of background on sort of my family story and the arc that led up to all of this. Like, I am very much a product of this kind of strange collision of two worlds. My mom was born and raised in Bangalore, India. She was like third daughter, kind of a rebellious spirit, and had her whole life mapped out for her by her parents. She was gonna get an arranged marriage, settle down for this kind of nice, stable, secure life.

 

My dad was born and raised in the Bronx, New York, right here. Jewish family. Similarly, had his entire life mapped out for him by an overbearing father. He was gonna marry a Jewish girl, settle down for this stable life. My parents crossed paths in this kind of turn of fate. Over the course of a two week window, they crossed paths at Princeton. My mom had applied in secret to come to school here. My dad was studying for his final dissertation at the time. My mom was like working in the library, saw this guy, walked up to and asked him out on a date. And on this first date, my dad walked up to my mom and says to her, 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, my dad was actually right. His father was not accepting of this idea of his son, you know, his golden child in many ways, like spurning his wishes, choosing his own way, kind of rejecting this default path

 

that was handed to him and he told my dad he had to choose between my mom and his family. And my dad walked out the door and never saw his family again.

 

And so to this day, I never met my dad’s parents. He has three siblings I’ve never met. I have first cousins out there in the world that I’ve never met. All on the basis of this one decision to choose to carve their own path, to reject that default way and to create their own. And when I look back on that and sort of reflect on the ripple effects, if you will, of that one choice. I often think that like that legacy of rejecting the default path, choosing to find your own way, is something that has kind of almost been ingrained in the DNA in our our family and in our household.

 

I spent the first 30 years of my life doing the exact opposite of that. I marched down the most traditional path to what any of us would think of as a successful life. I you know did the things that you’re supposed to want to do. I got I took the job that was gonna sound good for the LinkedIn post rather than the job that maybe I wanted. Like I wanted to be able to say I was humbled and honored to take X job, which by the way, no one is ever humbled and honored when they say that, especially on LinkedIn. And I basically convinced myself at every step of the way for the first seven years of my career that my contentment and happiness and fulfillment was on the other side of some achievement, some thing.

 

I was gonna wake up one day and I was gonna feel fundamentally different about who I was as a person I had gone and gotten that thing. There’s a name for that. It’s called the arrival fallacy this idea that we build up these things as being the Destination we’re gonna wake up. We’re gonna get that thing and you’re gonna say right I feel better I feel different about who I am and we know it is a fallacy we get that thing we feel that kind of momentary blip of dopamine induced euphoria and then you come back down you reset you feel the dread of never doing enough needing to do more and that was kind of the story of those early years of my career.

 

And unfortunately, while I was getting the things and I was doing the things that you’re supposed to want to do, everything else in my life started to fall apart. By 2020, I was making money. I had all the trappings of that success. But my relationships were in a lot of turmoil. I was living 3,000 miles away from my parents. My wife and I were in the middle of this two-year struggle with infertility, which was creating strain in our life, our relationship.

 

for the first time. I was drinking six, seven nights a week. I was 40 pounds heavier than I am today. Mental and physical health were in disarray. And it was all at this time where if you had seen me from the outside looking in, you would have said I was winning the game.

 

I was doing the things you’re supposed to want to do. And it struck me at the end of that year that if that was what winning felt like, I had to be playing the wrong game. And it all came to a head with a single conversation, May of 2021, it’s the opening of the book for a reason, that I went out for this old friend, we sat down and he asked how I was doing. And I told him that it had started to get difficult living so far away from my parents, two of my best friends in the world.

 

I had noticed for the first time that your parents aren’t immortal in the way that you think they are when you’re a kid. And he asked how old they were. I said mid-60s. He asked how often I saw them. I said about once a year. And he just looked at me and said, okay, so you’re going to see your parents 15 more times before they die.

 

That was the moment that changed everything. Because in that moment I realized that my entire definition of success, what it meant to build a wealthy life, had been incomplete. I was focusing on the one thing at the expense of everything else rather than in conjunction with everything else. And we took a pretty dramatic action in the aftermath of that. You know, we had a conversation, my wife and I, about what our center really was, what our priorities really were, what our true north really was and within 45 days I had left my job, we had sold our house in California, and we had moved 3,000 miles across the country to be closer to both of our sets of parents. And the last thing I’ll say on this is, in that one decision was a very important realization, which is that you are in much more control of your time than you think. We had taken an action and fundamentally created time.

 

That number 15, it’s now in the hundreds. I see my parents multiple times a week. They’re a huge part of my son, their grandson’s life. We had taken an action and reassumed agency over our own lives, recognized that we were capable of taking action to build our life around the priorities that we truly had. And the truth is that there are two types of priorities in life. There are the priorities we say we have, and there are the priorities our actions show we have.

 

And oftentimes there’s a big gap between those two things. I was living that big gap. The way your life improves is by closing that gap, but the only way you can is if you hold your feet to the fire enough to acknowledge that it exists in the first place.

 

So the whole journey that I’ve been on in writing this book and sharing these ideas, whether through the book or on social media and the newsletter, any of the things I do, has been about trying to get that across to people. That like you are entirely capable of creating a life and building a life around the things that you care about. But a huge part of that is defining what those things are and then creating a plan of action so that you can show up every single day to go and build your life around that.

 

Brian Mazza

Amazing. So if anyone in this room took a chapter out of the book and applied it rigorously for 90 days, which chapter do you think you would recommend?

 

Sahil Bloom

I really think that the order of the book people often ask about, The Five Types of Wealth, there’s the five sections and the ordering of those. I really do think that the time wealth section came first for a reason, which is because unlocking a feeling of being in control of your time is how you are able to then allocate that time towards the things that you truly care about. I think the starting point to that is really one, developing an awareness of just how precious that time is in the first place. I ask a question all the time especially to young people like all of us in this room, would you trade lives with Warren Buffett?

 

It’s a simple question. Initial sort of reaction to that is like, well, there’s a lot of things that are pretty good about his life, right? He’s worth $130 billion. He has access to absolutely anyone in the world. He like flies around on a Boeing business jet. He reads and learns for a living. It all sounds pretty good, but you wouldn’t trade lives with him for one very simple reason. He is 95 years old. None of you in this room would be willing to trade the amount of time that you have left for all of that money.

 

And on the flip side he would give anything to be in your shoes He would give up every single dollar he has to have the amount of time that you have So with a simple question you’re sort of shining a light on the fact that your time has incalculable value like your hourly rate of your time is enormous. And yet on a daily basis, how often are you truly treating it that way? How much time are we spending scrolling on our phones, comparing our lives to other people, worrying about the past, stressed about the future, all of these things that fundamentally disregard that one most precious asset that we have.

 

And so the antidote to that is to start developing that awareness and then being very deliberate about how you think about allocating that time on a daily basis you have like if someone came to you on the street outside here and was like hey give me ten thousand dollars, a random person, absolutely not, but every single day there are people and things that draw on your time that exact same way that you don’t think twice about giving your time to.

 

So we’re thinking all of this, we’re putting so much energy around how we have the perfect allocation of our money, but not spending two seconds to think about how we allocate our time. When in fact, again, it is the one thing that is really going to drive your life in a meaningful way when you start allocating it, deploying it into the things you truly care about. The things that really can drive those 5, 10, 100X outcomes in your life.

 

Brian Mazza

We talk about this often about our daily habits and how great it is when you do them right and they compound over time. So I know we talked when you’re speaking about time right now, but what are some other habits that you’re most protective of and how do you defend them against these distractions that you were just talking about?

 

Sahil Bloom

I mean, I’ve talked about this ad nauseum on social media probably at this point, but waking up early to me is like the ultimate life hack. Really waking up early. five in the morning? That’s why I text you at five in the morning. I wake up and I just send texts. No, look, I am . . . I think that if you are feeling stuck in any way, the feeling of feeling stuck to me is about losing your agency, losing the feeling that you are capable of taking action to create desired outcomes. And the fastest way I know to regain that agency in life is to work out. Wake up early and go work out. If you do that for 30 days, you will feel fundamentally different about who you are as a person because you have done something hard for 30 straight days.

 

You will recognize that you are capable of doing just about anything and that has ripple effects into every other area of life That’s not about working out. It’s not like after 30 days You’re all of a sudden gonna be a bodybuilder or be a you know amazing marathon runner It’s about the fact that you are gonna recognize you are the type of person that is capable of doing that thing and the type of person that’s capable of doing that thing shows up in their Relationships in that way you show up at work that way you show up for your friends that way it has ripple effects into everything else that you do just do that one tiny action. Doesn’t need to be some dramatic workout or fancy routine. Wake up and do some push-ups every single morning. It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s about just reminding yourself that you are capable of taking action to create desired outcomes.

 

Brian Mazza

So if someone is stuck, besides working out, right, because not everyone is going to get up early and work out. Maybe they have other commitments they have to do. They have kids, have to commute, they have to do all these other things in their life. What else could someone do that maybe a two-minute hack or a two-minute habit that they can just start?

 

Sahil Bloom

Yeah, I I think that I come back to questions a lot. What questions can you ask yourself to kind of see the problem differently? There’s this story that I love from the business world. Andy Grove, he was the CEO of Intel. And in the 1980s, Intel was having a lot of problems with their business. They were getting outcompeted by a bunch of these Japanese manufacturers that had come into their core memory processing business. And Andy Grove was sitting there with the then CEO of Intel.

 

And he said, you know if we got fired and we got kicked out of here and some new CEO came in here what would they do right now like what would be their first decision and the answer was they would get out of the memory business which is like our core business they would get out of it it’s a race to the bottom there’s nothing there they’d really prioritize this other area and they looked at each other and they said like why aren’t we doing that then if someone else would come in and do that thing why are we not doing that and they did and it ended up being this enormous step function change and Intel’s whole trajectory they got into this whole new line of business.

 

That same thought process can apply to any of our lives. Ask yourself the question of, if I were to hire a CEO of my life, what changes would they make in the next 100 days? What one thing would they go and do that would move my life in the right direction? If I showed up and did this habit every single day for 100 days, my life would be materially better and then realize that you are that person in your life and you can go and just do that yourself. You’re not waiting for permission from someone else.

 

Because I do think that a lot of time in life, I’ve felt this in my own journey, we’re kind of, whether we know it or not, waiting for someone else to come and tap us in to a situation. You’re like, I’m doing all these things, I feel like I’m stuck, I’m not making movement, because I’m waiting for someone to come and give me permission to take the leap of faith or to make this change or to get out of this relationship. To start looking at a new career track, all of those things, you can just be that person and tap yourself in. I had no basis for thinking that I could be a writer four years ago. I hadn’t ever written a single thing. And so we talk all the time about like, planning. I want to make my five-year plan and my 10-year plan. My fundamental belief is that you cannot plan for the best things in your life because they are inherently invisible to you where you stand today.

 

Five years ago, if you would asked me to write out 100 scenarios of where I was going to be in five years. I would have written out 100 scenarios. Not a single one of them would have been sitting here having this conversation.

 

Brian Mazza

You took my question.

 

Sahil Bloom

I hadn’t written a single thing before, right? Like there wasn’t any basis for me to say that this was going to be a path. But I started walking towards things that created energy for me. And now here we are. We get to do these things. I get to feel like I’m working on something where I can be an N of one. And it’s truly unique to me. There’s this quote that I share in the book that I absolutely love. Rumi, the ancient poet, said, as you start to walk on the way, the way appears. As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.

 

That is that idea. You don’t get clarity from sitting where you are and planning the future. You get clarity from taking action and specifically taking action toward things that really do create energy in your life.

 

Brian Mazza

Touching on that, walking that way, you weren’t into running. And you started one day just running, and then your first marathon you run.

 

Sahil Bloom

You’re making me sound like Forrest Gump. You just started running, I don’t know.

 

Brian Mazza

You started to get into running, you, but that’s really special that you were able to dive into something like that. It’s very difficult, very uncomfortable, sticking with the program and then your first marathon running a sub-three. What did you learn from that whole process?

 

Sahil Bloom

Yeah, I mean, I’m kind of a . . . yeah, I have like a psycho side to me. It’s probably like an undiagnosed OCD to some extent where when I take something on, I get laser locked in focused on this one thing. And I like to set ambitious goals and ambitious targets. And so when I saw that he was running and he was faster than me when we were running, I was like, that’s stupid. Why is he faster than me? And I like that little competitiveness. It’s hard for a gorilla to run really fast, so was much skinnier. But I very quickly found that the running wasn’t a physical pursuit for me, it was a mental one. And in particular, the solitude that it created, just being out there, being able to create space to be in your own head. And I think that fundamentally, most of us really lack that space in our lives.

 

We kind of live in this world where we wake up in the morning, the first thing we do is we grab our phone, thousands of people come rushing into your bedroom, Like metaphorically, get text messages, emails, notifications, all of these things. You’d never allow a thousand people to come into your bedroom, literally, but technologically, it seems okay. And from the time you wake up in the morning till the time you go to bed at night, you are just in this fixed loop of stimulus and response. There’s no space. Everything is urgent.

 

And when that happens, you no longer have an ability to see the bigger picture. Like you’re living first person mode, you’re on the ground, and you cannot see, scan the field to identify those things that really matter, to lean into the people or to the things that are really moving you forward. And so what I found when I picked up running was all of a sudden it was like this breath in my life where lifting doesn’t have that same feature. You’re in a gym, there’s a lot of stimulus, there’s things around.

 

There was something about just the like, almost the like, the pounding of like your feet and like the rhythmic nature of it that just like puts you into this sort zen state in a similar way to I think walking does for a lot of people and so I got addicted to it to some extent. The training and the process and it was fun getting better at something physically in my 30s. Like I was kind of at the point where I’m probably not gonna get a whole lot stronger like unless I go take stuff and it’s probably just not gonna happen meaningfully but running was a thing where you can get better into your 40s and like some of the most elite marathoners in the world are in their late 30s early 40s and so I really enjoyed it. And it was just, you it’s been a fun pursuit and a fun community building thing that you just like find these new communities around the sport.

 

Brian Mazza

Any races coming up?

 

Sahil Bloom

I don’t have anything on the calendar. You know what I am gonna do is, I’m turning 35 on January 5th and I think I’m just gonna go out and run 35 miles as like a fun pursuit for it. Kind of like a Masogi, an annual challenging ritual. I might do it around a track if I wanna really drive myself nuts during it. I don’t remember when you did that. Yeah, I did 20 miles around a track once which was pretty miserable. 35 would be really miserable. But yeah, I think I’m gonna do that.

 

Brian Mazza

Alright, so I love this question. What part of your life right now do you feel like you have the least amount of mastery? And whatever that is, what are you doing to try to fix that?

 

Sahil Bloom

I mean the biggest struggle for me, particularly since the book came out, has just been in finding the right balance around my own time. There’s this tendency or this belief that like, you I talk about these things so it must be like perfect balance across all of them. It couldn’t be further from the truth. Like I think about these things a lot and I’ve spent a lot of time asking the right questions and I think I know the different levers to pull. But you are never gonna feel imperfect balance, right?

 

Like your life has seasons. What you focus on or prioritize during any one season will change. You are going to have seasons where you have to lean into a certain thing or area and it’s necessarily going to mean you have to pull back on others. When my book came out and in the lead up to it, I was really in a season of unbalance. I needed to and I really wanted to, because it was important to me, lean into this one thing heavily so that I could go and create the ripple effect and the chain reaction in the world that I thought the ideas could have. That has been a challenge as it relates to making sure that I then create the space and have the balance with, in particular with my son. Not traveling too much and that I find that right balance point of doing the thing that I feel so much energy around while also maintaining and continuing to build that relationship with him during these really special years. My son’s three. It’s a really special time.

 

And you know, like I’ll share a story right before the book came out, maybe two weeks before, I was in my office and I was like working on this thing for the launch. I was really in focus mode on something. My son was two and a half at the time, came barging into my office. And he’s like knocking things all over the place, jumping up and down on the couch, just doing two and a half year old terrorist things. And I started having this super annoyed train of thought doing this. This is so annoying. Doesn’t he know I’m trying to focus? He should really get out of here. And I looked on my desk and I have this picture of me holding him when he was born. And it snapped me back to four years earlier when my wife and I were in the middle of this two-year struggle with infertility.

 

I had prayed every single night for two years that we were one day going to have a healthy child. And here I was in this moment complaining about the exact thing that I had prayed for. And it was a reminder to me of a really important fact, which is that sometimes in life, the things we pray for become the things that we complain about if we let them, right? If we don’t stop and catch ourselves and pause and recognize that we are quite literally living out our prayer.

 

And so that was like this aha moment for me of clarity to just recognize that as all of these things are happening I need to make sure that I don’t lose sight of what I’m doing it for like what what these things were that my younger self would have just dreamed of getting to go out and do and Don’t sort of lose that in the continuous motion and the continuous chase that you find yourself on.

 

Brian Mazza

Love that. You know, picture at Stanford, awesome career there, get into the traditional path of career like we spoke about. So some advice for people in here who might want to get out of the corporate world and chase their dream or create their own path. Everyone always says, and I don’t like this, the what if. What if I fail? What if I’m not successful? What if it doesn’t work? What advice do you have for anybody in here that might have that mindset of what if?

 

Sahil Bloom

Most things are reversible. Before I made this quote unquote leap of faith and this big change, I was so terrified of going and doing something different because there’s this feeling, especially when you’re young and you get bombarded by this idea that every decision you make is permanent. If I leave my safe stable consulting job or my finance job and I go try this other thing, I’ll never be able to get that job again. I will never be able to go back.

 

I’m gonna be screwed if I go and make this change and it doesn’t work out and the truth is that the vast majority of these decisions are You know, they’re two-way doors as Jeff Bezos talks about them You can walk through and if you don’t like what’s on the other side you can turn around and walk on back.

 

There are like a few decisions in life that are maybe one-way doors the vast majority are two-way doors and I think treating things more like that allows you to have more of a sort of explorers mentality when it comes to those early years in particular to just say that like you have no idea what’s out there in your 20s. I spent the first seven years of my career in one track convincing myself that this is the only way you can make money. I have to just be on this stable track in finance, know, like continue to rise my way through the ranks.

 

I really didn’t know what else was out there because I hadn’t given myself permission to go and explore. Like, you know, there’s these video games that I would play when I was a kid where you’re like you get dropped on the map and the whole map is black and you’re like in the white one spot that has light on it. Like that is what your career is. You take your first job and you’re in that one spot and you’re just supposed to start digging in that one spot and hope there’s gold there. Like that makes no sense. What you do is you go and wander around and you shine a light on a bunch of different areas and then you have the whole map lit up and then you know like there’s actually gold over there I’m gonna go dig and that’s where I’m gonna go double down.

 

That’s where I’m gonna go spend my time and invest in this opportunity because otherwise you’re really like you know you’re taking a huge chance and a huge risk and so interestingly the thing that you’re told is the safest path is actually probably the riskiest one you’re hoping that’s the thing that’s going to be the massive energy creator for you the place where you’re going to find the gold when in reality you need to explore enough to be able to find those things.

 

Brian Mazza

We often hear people talk about in this high performance world that we all kind of dabble in and work hard, train hard. I was listening to a podcast the other day where a CEO was saying there’s really no work-life balance when you’re at your level, right? It’s kind of a juggling act. How can you figure it all out? How do you do that and how do you avoid burnout when you have all of these great things going on and maybe you want to get back into more running or you want to get stronger and then you have another book or this or an event.

 

How do you juggle all of it?

 

Sahil Bloom

Look, I mean, I think burnout is much more of a function of working on things and with people that don’t create energy for you than it is a sheer hours thing. I think if you are working on things that really feel like your quest or your mission, our capacity to lean into those things is infinite. I mean, it’s unbelievable what you can go and do when you really feel energized by the thing you’re doing and the people you’re doing it with.

 

I always believe that like this whole idea of work-life balance is kind of just incorrect framing, you will. Like it fundamentally places the two things in tension that they need to be balanced. What I would say is that what we’re striving for is work-life harmony, right? Like work is a huge part of your life and it will be. And what you want to do is you want to find things that feel like they are a part of your life and that the people in your life, the most important people, are a part of that mission.

 

When I talk about and I go and do work that I’m doing, I want my son and my wife to feel like and to know that they are a huge part of this mission that we are on as a family to go and build this life that we are trying to build. And they are a part of that, right? I talk about, I write about a whole lot about my experience as a family and as a husband and as a father. And so for them to understand that, then it doesn’t feel like the two things are in this balancing act. It feels more like I’m going to work on something that my son really understands.

 

Like when I was a kid, when my dad would be gone, I always knew what he was working on and why it really mattered. Why he felt and cared deeply about the things. And that unlocked me to feel that same way and create that same sort of bond and relationship with my son as he gets older. That he’ll know why the things matter that I’m spending time on. Why I’m leaning into these things to try to build more of that harmony around work and life.

 

Brian Mazza

Among the five types of wealth that are in your book, was there one that surprised you the most to write about or to build or maintain on after the book came out?

 

Sahil Bloom

You know, I just think when it comes to the financial wealth piece, ⁓ this whole idea of enough, what it means to you to have enough, is so central to the whole way that you think about building your life. enough as a concept in Western culture has sort of come to mean like this, it needs to be sort of Spartan or bare. Like if I ask you, what does enough look like?

 

Like, okay, well, if I had a condo and I, you know, put food on the table, like, right, that’s technically enough. But that’s not really what it means. It’s really about defining what you really want your life to look like. Like, where are you living? What are you doing? What are you thinking about? Who are you spending time with? What does that, like, thriving life really look like to you? And then back into what do you need to do to create that life?

 

Because what I found in the three years of research, talking to thousands of people about this is that you go and ask people what that means to them. Enough. They come up with a number, first off, and they have no idea what the number means in terms of the life it creates for them. Like, if you would come and ask me in 2020, I probably would have come up with some number. would have said, I don’t know, $10 million, make up a number. And I had no clue what that meant. I didn’t know what could I afford with that, what could I do, what was the life, could I have a bunch of kids, like, where would we live? I literally couldn’t have told you what the life looked like.

 

So it’s useless. The number also just does this disappearing act, right? Like you get close to it and it just goes up. Michael Norton, this Harvard Business School professor did a study on this. He asked a bunch of high net worth people, how happy are you on a scale of one to 10? Then he asked them how much more money they would need to be at a 10.

 

Across the board, whether they were worth a million or a hundred million plus, they all said they needed two to three times as much money to be at a ten. It makes no sense. There should just be some happiness number, but that’s not the way the human brain works. When we have a number, it’s prone to we get close to it and it’s a mirage, it disappears. The antidote to that is to have a clear vision of what the life actually looks like. The actual life doesn’t do that same subconscious, irrational disappearing act. It has to be a more rational, thoughtful process. And so getting clear on that, I think is the real unlock for a lot of people.

 

Like, what is the money actually rather than going and just blindly chasing it, make sure that you understand the life that it is creating for you and the life, the vision that you have for what you are trying to do and how you’re trying to live. Because your expectations are your single greatest financial liability. If your expectations of what that life should look like continue to rise faster than your assets, you will never feel wealthy. You will never feel like you are capable of having abundance in that way.

 

Brian Mazza

In your journey in health, performance, professionally as well, was there one habit that you kind of developed that had zero payoff? And how quickly did you realize that and drop it? And was there one that you found unexpectedly transformative?

 

Sahil Bloom

Zero payoff habit. That’s a good question.

 

Brian Mazza

You get into a routine, you get into something going on that just continues to happen. Is there something that you’re like, this is kind of slowing me down?

 

Sahil Bloom

Yeah, adjusted, like I’ve changed things that I’ve done because I’ve felt that way at different times. I wouldn’t say that the habit itself, know, like cold plunging had a real like season of life for me. First thing in the morning, I’d get up every day at like 4 a.m., get in the cold plunge. we know. And then, you know, and then have my morning routine after that. And as I got closer to the book launch, one of the things I found was that it was basically taking me like an hour to get my morning started when I did that, because I would do the cold plunge, I’d be so cold, like it would take me a while to warm up enough so that I could focus and read, or like do the thing that I was gonna do. And so I was like, what if I just wake up and I just like have my coffee and I start reading instead? And so I did that and I was like, wow, that was really nice.

 

I guess I don’t need to do a cold plunge to get work done. I don’t need the Brian Johnson 12-step morning routine to get work done. I can do that. And it was really liberating to realize that, you actually can just wake up and start working on a thing that you care about. You don’t need to do the 18-step thing. So I would say that was an unlock for me. I have continued cold plunging just in a different construct and probably with a healthier sort of overall relationship with it.

 

On the habit that has probably surprised me, I would just say anything having to do with leaning into relationships, I have found that the quote unquote returns have been 10x what I ever would have expected. I have never found anything bad has come from spending time with positive, uplifting, inspiring people. Now when I think about young people and I mentor for young people, one of the things I constantly notice is like the unbelievable amount of pressure that they face around things that I think of as totally inconsequential to the outcome they’re trying to create. The amount of pressure that is placed on 18 year olds around where they are going to school, getting into the right school. I mean the suicide rates around kids and college applications, it’s completely insane. It doesn’t matter.

 

It just like does not matter where you end up. What matters is if you are curious and if you spend time with great people. If you are like an 18-year-old and you are extremely curious and you spend time and focus on spending time around positive, uplifting people, things will probably work out for you in life. Because if you’re curious, you’ll find ways to create value for people around you. You know, if you create value, you’ll receive value. And if you spend time around great people, the opportunities just seem to manifest themselves.

 

You end up being in rooms with people that are inspiring you to think bigger about your life that believe you are capable of doing more and Scientifically, we know that surrounding ourself with people who believe we are capable of more who have high expectations for us makes us rise to the level of those expectations. It’s called the Pygmalion effect It’s an actual scientific phenomenon. So in surrounding yourself with inspiring people giving with no expectation of return I have always found that the greatest returns paradoxically come when you were just giving with no expectation.

 

You have been an example for that in my life and I think that it’s a testament to what you built that I think it shows, right? Like the communities you’ve created are really through that.

 

Brian Mazza

We’ll end on that nice, note.