Sahil Bloom Quotes

You'll achieve much more by being consistently reliable than by being occasionally extraordinary.

Treat your body like a house you have to live in for another seventy years.” He added, “If something has a minor issue, repair it. Minor issues become major issues over time. This applies equally to love, friendships, health, and home.

Never let the quest for more distract you from the beauty of enough.

The arrival fallacy is the false assumption that reaching some achievement or goal will create durable feelings of satisfaction and contentment in our lives.

the ideal future end looks remarkably aligned: Time, people, purpose, health.

In a famous articulation often attributed to Peter Drucker, the Austrian-born management guru, “What gets measured gets managed.

The greatest discoveries in life come not from finding the right answers but from asking the right questions.

Ironically, that busyness, and the scattered attention it creates, is the very reason you lack control over your time—it is the maker of the modern struggle.

Close your eyes and imagine your ideal day at eighty years old (or one hundred, in the case of the ninety-year-old!). Vividly imagine it. What are you doing? Who are you with? Where are you? How do you feel? The exercise forces you to begin with the ideal future end in mind—it establishes a personal definition of a successful life that can be used to reverse-engineer the actions in the present to achieve that desired end.

20 years from now, the only people who will remember you worked late are your kids.” — Sahil Bloom

In a 2018 paper published by Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton, researchers asked a group of millionaires (1) how happy they were on a scale of 1 to 10 and (2) how much more money they would need to get to a 10 on the happiness scale. Commenting on the results, Norton said, “All the way up the income-wealth spectrum basically everyone says [they’d need] two to three times as much.”[2]

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. Alone time is abundant—love yourself.

If you identify your Earth in the window—your Life Razor—and keep it top of mind, I’m willing to bet he’ll change yours too.

Their deeper message: Life is about direction, not speed.

In his bestselling book Atomic Habits, author James Clear famously wrote, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

With the five types of wealth, you are no longer waiting to arrive, because happiness and fulfillment—previously a hoped-for destination—are embedded in the journey itself. You don’t have to wait to arrive; you can feel like you’ve arrived every single day.

If all the battles you’re fighting are exclusively about money, you may win these battles, but you will lose the war.

Curiosity keeps us happier, healthier, and more fulfilled. If curiosity were a pill, all the world’s pharmaceutical companies would call it a super-drug and clamor to sell it.

The disciplined pursuit of a life of Physical Wealth is a catalyst for growth: It initiates a mindset shift—it reminds you that you are in control, that you have the power.

Life hack: Always invest in yourself—you’ll never regret it.

Your purpose need not be impressive or grand to anyone else—it is personal; it is yours.

The goal is to have the clarity to choose—to define your balance and live by design rather than by default.

You are subconsciously aware of the immense value of your time, but you regularly and consciously take actions that disregard that value.

A life without curiosity is a life devoid of the desire to search, explore, and learn and lacks the texture created by this desire. A life without curiosity is an empty life, a life of stasis, a life without wonder.

The only thing that matters at all is the quality of the relationships with the people we love.

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.

If you have the luxury of choice, make sure you choose work—and coworkers—that you find meaningful and important. Aim to have coworkers who create energy in your life.

Denis Diderot had fallen victim to the perils of bought status—the slow, creeping thirst for more, for the next thing that would confer upon him a level of external affirmation.

One fact is clear: Fortune favors the curious.

As Mahatma Gandhi famously said, “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Focus on the people. When you surround yourself with inspiring people, the journeys become more beautiful, and the destinations become more brilliant. It’s impossible to sit where you are and plan the perfect journey. Focus on the company—the people you want to travel with—and the journey will reveal itself in due time. Nothing bad has ever come from surrounding oneself with inspiring, genuine, kind, positive-sum individuals.

On the Shortness of Life, Seneca 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.

In the context of your life, concentrated attention is the dedicated, deep focus on the high-leverage projects, opportunities, people, and moments that truly matter. Attention is what allows you to get ahead, to stop running faster (more units of input) and start running smarter (higher output per unit of input). It requires appropriate project selection and rejection—saying yes to a few high-leverage things and no to everything else.

Treat your body like a house you have to live in for another seventy years.

Once you’ve achieved a baseline level of financial well-being, more money is unlikely to meaningfully affect your overall happiness.

When a measure of performance becomes an explicit, stated goal, humans will prioritize it, regardless of any associated and unintended consequences.

If you have a life devoid of Time Wealth, you are trapped in a perpetual loop of busyness, running faster and faster but never making progress, with little control over how time is spent and whom it is spent with.

You have more time than your ancestors but less control over how you spend it.

Life is about direction, not speed.

You’re going to see your parents fifteen more times before they die.

If you had an entire day to yourself with zero responsibilities, how would you spend it?

The consequences of the modern struggle—of perpetual busyness, digital alerts, and scattered attention—are dire.

People who are time poor are less happy, less productive, and more stressed out. They exercise less, eat fattier food, and have a higher incidence of cardiovascular disease.

You have more time than your ancestors but less control over how you spend it. You have more time, but somehow you have less time for the things that truly matter to you.

You don’t have to feel behind. You can get ahead. It’s time to stop running faster and start running smarter.

The goal is to bring to the surface the awareness of the precious nature of the time you do have. Without this awareness, you will never value time enough until suddenly, at the very end, it will become all that you value.

Focused, concentrated attention is significantly more powerful than scattered, unconcentrated attention.

The freedom to allocate time according to your preferences—to choose how you spend it, where you spend it, and whom you spend it with—is the ultimate goal. This is the desired end state of true control over your time.

Who will you choose to join you on this wild, crazy journey? Who will you choose to gift your energy, love, and respect to? Who will you choose to spend your terrifyingly finite time with?

The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age fifty were the healthiest at age eighty.

To reiterate that critical point: The single greatest predictor of physical health at age eighty was relationship satisfaction at age fifty.

I had prioritized one thing at the expense of everything.

Close your eyes and imagine your ideal day at eighty years old (or one hundred, in the case of the ninety-year-old!). Vividly imagine it. What are you doing? Who are you with? Where are you? How do you feel?

Time, people, purpose, health.

Almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

It is the people you can call at 3:00 A.M. when everything is going wrong. It is your Front-Row People.

I always felt connected to his work because he took the time to explain the why—why he was working hard on things and what he hoped to achieve with them. Involving your loved ones in your journey this way is a beautiful thing. They will understand why you’re working hard, the value it creates for them and you, and feel connected to your growth and achievement. An absence due to work becomes better understood and more appreciated with the benefit of context.

The magic years will fade away and disappear if you let them. Reject the defaults, ask the questions, embrace the tension, and design the balance that fits your world. Always remember: The days are long, but the years are short.

We spoke about the light of life found in the darkness of death, the beauty of a life devoid of the false pretenses that perceived permanence instills in you.

lose. You are already naked.”[11]

Life is so very fragile, but no matter how fragile it is, each day we have a choice of how to live it. Each day is a fresh start, a fresh choice to make.

For ten years, you are your child’s favorite person in the entire world. After that, children have other favorite people—best friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, partners, and, eventually, their own children. But during those ten years, you are everything to them. You occupy a unique place in their world. It is during this period that the foundation for the parent-child relationship—so central to many people’s Social Wealth—is built.

Seneca famously wrote, “We suffer more in imagination than in reality.

Always remember,” she said, “everyone we love, they are on loan to us for a short period of time. They are gone in the blink of an eye.

The consequences of the modern struggle—of perpetual busyness, digital alerts, and scattered attention—are dire. In Time Smart, Ashley Whillans, a researcher and professor at Harvard Business School, notes the steep costs of time poverty on the individual: “The data I and others have amassed show a correlation between time poverty and misery. People who are time poor are less happy, less productive, and more stressed out. They exercise less, eat fattier food, and have a higher incidence of cardiovascular disease.

When I asked the same of him, instead of replying with typical busyness one-upmanship, he replied that he was “making time for the important things,” since his father had gotten sick the prior year.

Mark Twain is often quoted as having said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

The arrival fallacy is the false assumption that reaching some achievement or goal will create durable feelings of satisfaction and contentment in our lives. We incorrectly assume that we will finally experience the sensation of having arrived when we reach whatever we have propped up as our destination.

How many folks, in country and in town, Neglect their principal affair; And let, for want of due repair, A real house fall down, To build a castle in the air?[

From the outside looking in, I was winning, but if this was what winning felt like, I began to wonder if I was playing the wrong game.

The greatest discoveries in life come not from finding the right answers but from asking the right questions. If I had been playing the wrong game, what was the right one?

Without fail, every single person I guided through the exercise had some combination of these pillars at the center of the ideal future day. Spending time surrounded by loved ones, engaged in activities that create purpose and growth, healthy in mind, body, and spirit.

Money was an enabler to these ends, but not an end in and of itself.

Broken scoreboard, broken actions. If we measure only money, all of our actions will revolve around it. We’ll play the game wrong.

This will be a journey—but it’s one that you can start today and one that can change your world faster than you ever thought possible.

I looked down at my son, whose eyes were closed, a small, perfectly content smile on his lips. In that moment, I had a profound sensation: I had arrived, but for the first time in my life, there was nothing more that I wanted.

Never fear sadness, as it tends to sit right next to love.

Never raise your voice, except at a ball game.

Find dear friends and celebrate them, for the richness of being human is in feeling loved and loving back.

Treat your body like a house you have to live in for another seventy years.” He added, “If something has a minor issue, repair it.

When in doubt, love. The world can always use more love.

In all the advice, insight, and wisdom shared, there was a notable omission. No one mentioned money.

Money isn’t nothing—it simply can’t be the only thing.

Three core insights summarize the body of research on the topic of money and happiness: Money improves overall happiness at lower levels of income by reducing fundamental burdens and stress. At these lower levels, money can buy happiness. If you have an income above these levels and are unhappy, more money is unlikely to change that. If you have an income above this baseline and are happy, more money is unlikely to drive increasing happiness.

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading. —LAO TZU

The war you wage is about happiness, fulfillment, loving relationships, purpose, growth, and health. If all the battles you’re fighting are exclusively about money, you may win these battles, but you will lose the war.

Thriving is not an end state—it is a continuous journey.

It struck me how they all had this hidden assumption that if they could just make a billion dollars, then they’d be happy. I used to have that assumption too. But then I had the realization that if you went to Warren Buffett and asked him whether he’d trade a billion dollars for a billion seconds, he’d take the time over the money.” Would you trade lives with Warren Buffett? He has a net worth of approximately $130 billion, access to anyone in the world, and spends his days reading and learning. That all sounds great, and yet I’m willing to bet that very few of you would agree to trade lives with him.

The Paradox of Effort: You have to put in more effort to make something look effortless. When you realize this, you start to do things differently

The Paradox of Effort: You have to put in more effort to make something look effortless. When you realize this, you start to do things differently.

Your wealthy life may be enabled by money, but in the end, it will be defined by everything else.

The most dangerous person in the world is the one who shows up every single day even when the rewards are uncertain. The one who can tolerate the most uncertainty is the one who will eventually win.

The fight against normalcy is the most important fight of your life. To maintain your uniqueness, to live on your terms in a world that pulls you to blend in, is the only way to realize your full potential and live a fulfilled, texture-rich existence.

How many folks, in country and in town, Neglect their principal affair; And let, for want of due repair, A real house fall down, To build a castle in the air?[1]

I feel strong, healthy, and vital for my age. I move my body regularly through a structured routine and have an active lifestyle. I eat primarily whole, unprocessed foods. I sleep seven or more hours per night on a regular basis and feel rested and recovered. I have a clear plan in place to allow me to physically thrive into my later years.

Time Wealth Social Wealth Mental Wealth Physical Wealth Financial Wealth

I have a clear definition of what it means to have enough financially. I have income that is steadily growing alongside my skills and expertise. I manage my monthly expenses so that they are reliably below my income. I have a clear process for investing excess monthly income for long-term compounding. I use my financial wealth as a tool to build other types of wealth.

I regularly embrace a childlike curiosity. I have a clear purpose that provides daily meaning and aligns short- and long-term decision making. I pursue growth and consistently chase my full potential. I have a fundamental belief that I am able to continuously change, develop, and adapt. I have regular rituals that allow me to create space to think, reset, wrestle with questions, and recharge.

I have a core set of deep, loving, supportive relationships. I am consistently able to be the partner, parent, family member, and friend that I would want to have. I have a network of loose relationships I can learn from and build on. I have a deep feeling of connection to a community (local, regional, national, spiritual, and so on) or to something bigger than myself. I do not attempt to achieve status, respect, or admiration through material purchases.

Do you want to take a leap of faith? Or become an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone?