Transcript & Summary: This Book Changed How I Think about Time

[00:00] throughout your life you've been led to believe that money is the only type of wealth in reality your wealthy life may involve money but it will be defined by everything else that is the core message behind this excellent book the five types of wealth by SEL Bloom which is a transformative guide to designing your dream life it is a mammoth of a book I have made lots and lots of highlights taken lots of notes I've taken a lot of stuff from this book that I'm applying to my own life and that's why we are [00:22] discussing this book in this episode of book club the ongoing Series where for the last 5 years I've been distilling And discussing summaries and highlights from some of my favorite books but I spoke to hundreds of much much older people like 80 90y old people and asked them about the things that they would tell to their younger self what did they really think about what were the things that were meaningful and impactful to them and all of them across the board say the same things they say time they [00:46] say purpose they say people and they say health very few of them talk about money and yet when you go back and you see how people are actually living during their 20s 30s 40s and 50s it's all focused on that one thing so the five types of wealth are time wealth social wealth weth mental wealth physical wealth and finally Financial wealth and so in this video for each of these different types of wealth we're going to be talking about what it means to have that kind of wealth and secondly I'm going to share [01:10] one or two key actionable principles from the book you can see it's an enormous book I've taken loads and loads and loads of stuff away from it but I'm just going to share one or two actionable points if you want to get the rest of it you should totally read the book it's very good but let's just dive into it the first type of wealth time wealth all right so this is the mimo Mori calendar MTO Mori is Latin for remember you will die and each of the boxes on this calendar represents one week of your life now there are 80 rows [01:33] of 52 weeks here so this is the average 80-year-old life and I am currently 30 and A2 years old and so this is what my momentum Mori calendar looks like if you're in your 20s this is roughly what your calendar might look like if you're in your 30s it looks something like this if you're in your 40s it looks something like this and if you're in the roughly 5% of people who watch this channel who are in their 50s or above then this is what your calendar might look like and this sort of calendar is supposed to be [01:56] a visual reminder of the fact that firstly life is short secondly time always moves forward and thirdly that therefore we should probably be a little bit more intentional about how we spend our time time wealth is fundamentally the idea that your time is your most precious asset this is something that people fail to recognize until it's too late and the funny thing about time is you never think about it until the very end when it is the only thing that you think about this brings a paradox to the [02:26] surface one I call the Paradox of time you are subconsciously aware of the immense value of your time but you regularly and consciously take actions that disregard that value in his on the shortness of Life senica wrote we are not given a short life but we make it short and we are not ill supplied but wasteful of it you know how important your time is yet you ignore its passage and engage in low value activities that pull you away from the things that really matter now in the book SLE talks about three pillars of developing time [02:56] wealth the first pillar is awareness where you have awareness of first ly the idea that time is very short and is always running out and secondly where you have awareness over how you're actually spending your time once you have that awareness the next step is attention which is your ability to direct your attention and focus to things that really matter and ignore everything else that doesn't and then the third and final pillar is control where you genuinely have control over how you spend your time now when it [03:20] comes to time wealth a lot of us fixate on this idea of control and we start saying things like well I can't control how I spend my time because I have a job or because I have a family or because this that and the other but the point that sahil makes in the book which I very much agree with is that control is the third pillar we can all have more awareness of how we're spending our time and the finite nature of it and we can all definitely improve our ability to pay attention to the things that matter [03:41] like I suspect for most of us if we look at our screen time on our phones we're not really giving attention to the stuff that genuinely matters to us if we genuinely had awareness that we were going to die and that time is our most valuable non-renewable resource we probably wouldn't be spending our attention on the things that we're currently up and once you've got this awareness and you can direct your focus and attention in a sensible way at that point you can work towards genuinely getting control of your own time now for [04:03] each of these five different types of wealth there are five questions each that help you figure out what is your own level of time wealth social wealth physical wealth mental wealth and financial wealth so I'm going to read out the five questions for Time wealth and the idea is that for each of these questions you're giving yourself a score from zero to four so zero is if you strongly disagree four is if you strongly agree so these are the five time wealth questions and it might be worth pausing the video in a second and [04:27] answering these questions for yourself if you would like question number one I have a deep awareness of the finite impermanent nature of my time and its importance as my most precious asset I have a clear understanding of the two to three most important priorities in my personal and professional lives three I am able to consistently direct attention and focus to the important priorities I have identified four I rarely feel too busy or scattered to spend time on the most important priorities and five I am [04:56] in control of my calendar and priorities so feel free to pause the video at this point and answer these five questions for yourself and if you feel like doing a little bit of mental maths you can even add up your score out of 20 now the point of doing a quiz like this is not to make you feel bad or anything like that it's literally to identify where you are and then you can set a goal for okay in the next 12 months I would like to increase my time wealth score or whatever score it might be to whatever [05:18] points something SLE recommends is that you also Define an anti-g goal which is on my way to increasing my time wealth score I want to avoid doing the following and then you figure out High leverage systems that you can Implement into your life and he's got like dozens in the book but the idea is that you pick one two or three of them you apply them to your life and those will help you increase your time wealth score but there's one that I've started applying to my own calendar right now which is [05:40] the appreciation of the four types of professional time so when it comes to our professional lives s Oru that there are four types of time type one is management and management time is what most of us spend the majority of our professional time in that's things like meetings and calls and presentations and processing emails and like team and people management then you've got type two which is creation time and creation time is the second most most common type of professional time it's what most of [06:01] us scramble to get done in the gaps between management time blocks and typical activities of creation time include writing coding building and preparing creation is where new progress is found thriving organizations have a focus on creation time and thriving individuals as well and ensure that management time doesn't infringe on it then we have type three which is consumption time consumption time is one of the two forgotten types of professional time it's where new ideas for creation and growth are planted [06:24] typical activities include reading listening and studying and then we have type four time which is ideation time this is is when new ideas for creation and growth are cultivated and grown and typical activities include brainstorming journaling walking or self-reflecting S writes that most of us have zero time for Stillness and thought in our day-to-day professional lives so we make linear progress and miss out on the asymmetric opportunities that require creative nonlinear thinking I completely agree the idea is that you go through [06:49] your calendar and you color code the blocks of time in each of these four different types of time and then from that Baseline you can work towards a more optimized balance so for example tip number one here is to batch management time like ideally you want management time to be all in one go rather than scattered throughout the place as it is for most of our professional lives secondly you want to increase creation time like try and actively make up blocks for creation time first thing in the morning is often [07:09] a good time to do that and thirdly and the thing that I'm personally working on is to create space for consumption and ideation now speaking of time wealth one of my favorite new tools that I'm experimenting a lot with for scheduling my time intentionally is [07:28] reclaim.the automatically help build out your ideal week without spending more time in Google Calendar it also automatically reschedules stuff if you have any calendar conflicts which means you can stay flexible while hopefully making sure you never actually drop the ball now there are three features in particular that I've been playing a lot with recently firstly is the habits feature so these are daily non-negotiables that I want reclaimed to put in my calendar each day they've also got a really interesting tasks feature [07:50] so essentially it's like a to-do list but you can Define tasks in different priorities and then based on the priority and the deadline and how much time the task will take it will automatically time block the task for you and then if you manage to do the task it goes off the list but if you don't manage to do the task in that time it will block it to another time based on like the AI algorith me thing and then the other nice thing is that reclaim can also add automatic flexible buffer times into your schedule in [08:13] between stuff so if for example I have a personal trainer session after a meeting then it will automatically know that and it will figure out how much buffer time to put in my calendar reclaim also has a Time tracking feature that shows you how you're spending your time and personally me and my team are big advocates for time tracking so that you can really have that awareness of oh crap you know this is where I'm spending my time and this is where I want to be spending my time so if you're looking for a way to [08:33] level up your time management game without spending more time fiddling around Google Calendar then I would recommend checking out reclaim and very excitingly you can get an extended 30-day trial of all the premium features when you sign up to the free plan with my link reclaimd that'll be linked down below as well it's a cool tool I'd recommend trying it out and seeing if it fits within your workflow so thank you so much reclaim for sponsoring this video and let's get back to it the second type of wealth social wealth all right so [08:56] here are some really interesting looking graphs from the American time use survey which is something that the US Bureau of Labor and statistics has apparently been putting together since 2003 and so these graphs show on average how people spend their time as they age this is the graph of time spent with family time spent with your parents and siblings peaks in childhood and declines sharply after you reach age 20 as you leave home and get caught up in your own life you often fail to recognize the time you have [09:21] remaining with your family is so very limited cherish these relationships while you can this is the graph of time spent with your children time spent with your children children peaks in the early years of their lives and declines sharply thereafter there's a devastatingly short window during which you are your child's entire world don't blink and miss it time spent with your friends Peaks when you're 18 and then declines sharply to a low Baseline in your youth you spend a lot of time with a lot of friends as you enter adulthood [09:48] you spend a little bit of time with a few close friends embrace the breadth of friendships that comes with youth and prioritize the depth of friendships that should come with age time spent with your partner Trends up until death the person you choose to confront life's ups and downs with will have the largest impact on your happiness and fulfillment Choose Wisely time spent with co-workers is steady during the traditional Prime working years from age 20 to age 60 and declines sharply thereafter work will [10:14] pull you away from your family and loved ones throughout your life if you have the luxury of choice make sure you choose work and co-workers that you find meaningful and important aim to have co-workers who create energy in your life and then finally time spent alone steadily increases throughout your life when you're young you tend to view time alone as a sign of not fitting in you come to fear time alone to fear boredom but you need to learn to cherish it find happiness and joy in the time you have [10:40] to yourself there will be more of it as you get older so here are six key lessons for Life family time is finite cherish it children time is precious be present friend time is limited prioritize the real friends partner time is Meaningful never settle coworker time is significant find energy and alone time is abundant love yourself now there is a cool exercise that he recommends in the book which I'm actually in the process of doing and that's called the relationship map so the idea is that step one you list your core [11:08] relationships in your life and this will be in the range of 10 to 15 but maybe up to 25 core relationships the core people you interact with then step two is you want to assess these core relationships so for each of these core relationships we are asking ourselves two questions firstly is the relationship supportive ambivalent or demeaning and secondly is the relationship interaction frequent or infrequent so a supportive relationship is one where there is mutual understanding of care love respect and [11:30] comfort a demeaning relationship is characterized by the absence of those qualities and typically involves specific behavior that undermines one's self-worth and then an ambivalent relationship has elements of both supportive and demeaning relationships at different times it is inconsistent and then step three is we want to map the core relationships on the relationship map in terms of how demeaning or supportive the relationship is and then how rare or frequent that interaction is now once you've mapped [11:53] these out you will find that there is a relationship green zone these are relationships that are supportive and that happen quite frequently so you want to focus Fus on cultivating those relationships there is obviously a Red Zone where the relationship is very demeaning but also you have to encounter it quite frequently and then the goal would be to either try and make it less demeaning or to try and reduce the frequency of those encounters there is actually a danger zone and that danger zone is actually the ambivalent [12:14] relationships the ones that are inconsistent that's you know sometimes they're good sometimes they're bad sometimes they're supportive sometimes they're demeaning and the danger zone is when we have those sorts of daily relationships and actually those relationships apparently according to the research cause more damage to our mental health than the fully demeaning relationships like if we're not sure how someone is going to respond to us that can actually be more painful more damaging than if we know that they're [12:35] demeaning all the time and then you have the opportunity Zone this is the area that I'm personally focused on because I have a lot of supportive relationships but where my contact with those people is rare or not as frequent as I would like and so then it's about finding actionable ways to get more contact with those sorts of people again in the book there are a bunch of other systems and tools that you can use to cultivate social wealth and these are the five questions that you can use to assess [12:56] your social wealth score and again if you would like to do this feel free to pause the video and have a thing for yourself or you can go on wealth quiz.com I'll link it down below that's a website that sill and his team have created where you can do the quiz and it will give you personalized responses based on your answers the third type of wealth mental wealth all right so again on screen these are the five questions for your mental wealth score so feel free to pause the video now if you would like to do these and again if you decide [13:20] to do these you can add up your score and that should give you a score out of 20 but the one I want to specifically discuss in this video because otherwise this video would be like 8 hours long is question number five which is I have regular rituals that allow me to create space to think reset wrestle with questions and recharge and this idea of creating space this is one of the things that I've historically neglected with my whole like desire to be more productive and to be efficient but I found that for [13:43] me the times where I have space where I've got some free time to just journal or to just think or like I'm on a plane with no Wi-Fi those are the times where I come up with my best ideas and those are the ideas that make asymmetrical gains in my business and my life rather than just sort of continuing and plugging along as usual and I want to talk about two strategies here the first one is one that I'm actively incorporating into my life as we speak which is the think day now the story here and I actually wrote about this in [14:04] my own book feel good productivity the most famous example of this is Bill Gates who used to take these think weeks where he would spend a week who basically going off the grid going to a cabin in the woods he would have a private Chef prepare all his meals and he would be disconnected from the internet and from devices and stuff for that week and he would he would just use that time to read and learn and reflect and he cites a lot of the gains and like good ideas that Microsoft did he attributes them to taking those like one [14:29] week off the grid kind of periods those think weeks now that's a cool concept but most of us don't have the time or the space to be able to take a whole week off with a private Chef in a cabin in the woods but one thing that Syle mentions in the book that I really like is the idea of a think day rather than a think week if you're like me you don't have an entire week to dedicate to thinking but you can adapt something with a similar core Vision the think day was my adaptation pick one day each month to step back from all of your [14:52] day-to-day professional demands seclude yourself mentally or physically put up an out of office response and shut off all your devices the goal spend the entire day reading learning journaling and thinking by doing this you create free time to zoom out open your mind and think creatively about the bigger picture and here are eight thinking prompts that Syle has found particularly useful one if I repeated my current typical day for 100 days would my life be better or worse two if people observed my actions for a week what [15:18] would they say my priorities are three if I were the main character in a movie of my life what would the audience be screaming at me to do right now four am I hunting antelopes big important problems or field my small urgent problems five how can I do less but better six what are my strongest beliefs what would it take for me to change my mind on them seven what are a few things I know now that I wish I'd known 5 years ago and eight what actions did I engage in 5 years ago that I cringe at today what actions am I engaged in today that [15:49] I might cringe at in 5 years now as you guys might know I absolutely love collecting journaling prompts it is one of my favorite things to do and so linked down below is my life-changing journaling prompts list it's completely free we keep it updated it's got these prompts in it and also loads of others so if you are taking a think day if you are taking some time to journal then hopefully you can get some value out of these powerful questions that can help change the way that you think about stuff it's completely free link down [16:12] below and speaking of journaling if you haven't yet tried journaling SLE has this one1 method that is a good starting point to get started with journaling I was creating this very high bar for what journaling was and I was allowing optimal to get in the way of beneficial so what I've done in response is I created something that I call the one one one one method which is at the end of every day you sit down and you write one win from the day something you felt good about one point of tension or anxiety something that is on your head [16:39] that feels like a burden that you can put down onto the paper and one point of gratitude something that you felt grateful for small or big during the course of the day it takes 3 to 5 minutes max and you immediately get this feeling and sensation of calm and positivity to end your day the fourth type of wealth physical wealth now these are the questions for physical wealth again feel free to pause the video right now and to do this for yourself when I took the wealth score quiz myself this was my lowest score I actually did this [17:07] a couple of months ago when sill came to Hong Kong to record this podcast interview that we did and since then my score has actually substantially increased because doing the quiz made me realize oh crap my physical wealth score is by far the lowest score let me actually do stuff about it and so since then gone back to the gym I've started running every day I've got my first squash lesson today I had a my highe lesson yesterday basically of just like you know making my my physical health a priority now again in the book there's a [17:30] bunch of different strategies that you can use to increase your physical wealth score but there's one concept that I found really useful which is the idea of the dimmer switch your entire life exists on dimmer switches all of these different areas the five types of wealth they all exist on a dimmer switch and there's this tendency or this flawed belief that all of this stuff exists on and on off so you can pursue Financial wealth but you have to turn off your family you have to turn off relationships your health all these [17:51] other areas and that's fundamentally incorrect so this dimmer switch mentality kind of made me realize that actually you know what going to the gym for 15 minutes is better than not going at all and like cooking one meal at home is better than ordering takeaway for all three meals like I think when it comes to my physical wealth in particular I have been letting perfect to be the enemy of good you can identify those things the high leverage actions that you can take that don't take a lot of time but allow you to continue [18:15] compounding on those things that aren't your primary focus you can do the five minute thing that continues to build your relationships or continues to push your health in the right direction because with all of these areas anything above zero compounds positively this is actually a menra that I've been telling myself quite a lot since this conversation with sill anything above zero compounds positively that means on a day where I'm in meetings all day or I'm doing a lot of work stuff and I haven't done anything for my physical [18:38] health I keep in mind that anything above zero compounds positively but zero compounds negatively like health physical wealth is one of those things that if you leave to its own devices and if nothing happens it will actually deteriorate over time so I keep that in mind and think okay cool what is one small action I can take can I just go for a 10-minute run can I do a 15-minute gym session can I just do anything in this department anything above zero that would help compound and like fight the entropy that happens especially when you [19:03] get to your 30s and above as it relates to physical health and that brings us on to the fifth type of wealth Financial wealth and these are the five questions as part of the wealth score quiz for financial wealth again feel free to pause the video and try these out for yourself but I want to focus on the first question here and you know the big question here is what is your definition of enough now SLE opens this with in a short poem about his late friend Joseph heler a famous American Author best [19:26] known for his work of satirical genius c22 Kur vut shared an anecdote that offers a powerful piece of hel's wisdom as the two enjoyed a party at the home of a billionaire vut asked heler Joe how does it make you feel to know that our host Only Yesterday may have made more money than your novel catch22 has earned in its entire history hel replied I've got something he can never have the knowledge that I've got enough I've personally been grappling with this question like a lot of us do of what is enough uh ever since I achieved my goal [19:54] of Financial Freedom Financial Independence I was able to quit the day job etc etc be able to do what love now it's a case of like genuinely what does enough actually look like and there is a fun story that siil writes about in the book uh you might be familiar with the story it is the parable of the Mexican fisherman I very familiar with the story but I'm going to reread it out anyway because I think this is an important lesson worth revisiting a wealthy investment banker goes on vacation to a tropical fishing Village as he walks [20:19] along the docks one afternoon he comes upon a small rundown fishing boat with several large fish on its deck how long did it take you to catch those fish he asks the fisherman looks up from his work and smiles smes at his new visitor only a little while the investment banker is taken aback by the response he likes the fisherman and wants to help why don't you fish for longer so you can catch more fish the fisherman shrugs and explains to his new friend that he has all he needs each day I sleep late fish [20:42] a little and spend some time with my children and beautiful wife in the evening I go into town drink wine play the guitar and sing and laugh with my friends the investment banker is puzzled he wants to help his new friend who in his opinion is clearly confused so he lays out a plan for the fisherman first you spend more time fishing so you can catch and sell more fish you use the proceeds to buy a bigger boat which allows you to catch and sell even more fish then you buy a fleet of boats you hire a team vertically integrate as the [21:06] CEO of a large growing Enterprise you could move to the big city you would take your company public and make millions the fisherman looks confused but smiles and then what he asks the investment banker laughs at the silly question well then you could retire to a quiet town you could sleep late fish a little and spend some time with your children and beautiful wife and in the evenings you could go into town drink wine play the guitar and sing and laugh with your friends I love the story absolutely love the story it's great [21:31] this is s's interpretation the popular interpretation of this Parable is that the investment banker is wrong and the fisherman is right my own interpretation is that this story isn't about the fisherman being right and the banker being wrong it's about identifying what success and purpose look like to you and building a life that meets that definition it's about defining your enough life and then working to embrace it maybe both the fisherman and the banker are happy with their choices and priorities I'll let them decide and the [21:56] same goes for you now there is apparently word in Swedish called lagum which means just the right amount and this thing around defining what our enough life is defining what our Lum life actually looks like helps us overcome something called the arrival fallacy the arrival fallacy is the name for that exact phenomenon that we think that we are going to feel like we've arrived when we get to whatever that thing is and ultimately what actually happens is you get there and your sight's immediately reset to whatever [22:23] the next thing is you get this kind of momentary feeling of this like dopamine induced euphoria and then you just reset to this feeling of is that it is this all it is what's the next thing it's never enough there's also a wonderful book by chap called Andrew Wilkinson who used to be a barista and is now a billionaire and the title of that book is Never Enough from Barista to billionaire which also talks about this concept that like for people who are trying to build Financial wealth it's like it's so hard to overcome the [22:50] temptation to just keep on seeking more and more and more this is something that I'm still trying to Grapple with trying to figure out how much do I want to grow the business how much do I want to prioritize my life how much do I you know how do I balance all the things knowing that you know I could make more Millions by focusing on the business but I already have enough but like you know there's this this always this trade-off between I I seem to sort of flip-flop between these these two sides of the [23:12] pendulum where at certain moments in time I'm like yep I've got enough Life's good and other moments of time I'm like no but I want more I want to you know whatever probably the single most powerful exercise anyone can do here is to write the journaling prompt uh at the top of your page what does my enough life look like and then sit down and actually create a clear visual in your mind of what you have where you are who you're with what you're doing how you feel what you're working on what you're [23:41] spending time on like really create a visual of that life if you were to close your eyes and truly just imagine that you're waking up in the morning and you feel that you have enough for me the thing that I get to after doing this exercise is that I'm already living my enough life and yes it's fine to try and grow the business for the sake of the fun the enjoyment of playing the video game sometimes I try and connect that to the impact that you know we can have by I don't know making more videos writing [24:03] more books making more software but if I'm being honest like for the most part the reason I continue to work is because I find it quite fun and fulfilling and I just have to try and remind myself that like if it's a choice between making more money and doing what I love I should pick doing what I love rather than trying to make more money anyway if you enjoyed this video and you got to this point you would definitely love reading the book you should definitely check it out and if you're interested in [24:22] more on the whole financial wealth front I have a video here which is my honest advice to someone who wants Financial Freedom where I talk a friend through his struggles with like how to become financially free so thank you so much for watching have a lovely day and I'll see you in the next video bye-bye