- What if there were more to wealth than just money? Don't believe me? Then ask yourself. - Would you trade lives with Warren Buffett? He is worth $130 billion. He is 95 years old. There's no way you would trade the amount of time he has left for the amount of time you have, even for $130 billion.

- Today with my friend, Sahil Bloom, we're gonna explore the five types of wealth, time, social, mental, physical, and financial, and how balancing all of them can lead to a life of true fulfillment. We'll share practical strategies for building your wealth by regaining control of your time, strengthening your relationships, enhancing your mental clarity, and investing in your health, all while building your financial freedom.

Whether you're starting fresh or looking to level up, I really think you'll like this one. I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or leave a comment or review. And if you wanna keep upgrading your life, money, and travel, click follow or subscribe.

So I think so many people have an idea of what time wealth is. And I know the last time you were on the show, we looked at some charts about how much time you spend and how it changes for different people. What are the key factors of time wealth?

- The general consensus, standard, societal, cultural definition of wealth has always just been money. And in my view, it's really because money is so measurable. Like Peter Drucker, the management theorist says, "What gets measured gets managed." And the reality is a feature of money is that it is so measurable.

You can place a single number next to your name and determine your entire life worth. Unfortunately, while money is useful as a tool for a whole lot of things in our life, it is not the singular thing that contributes to a life of meaning and a life of fulfillment and happiness.

There are many other things. That is really what this book is about. The five types of wealth, financial wealth being one of them. So I am very much not saying that money doesn't matter and that you should go live off in the Himalayas, meditating 12 hours a day and drinking warm broth.

If you want to, by all means, go do that. I just won't be joining you. But it is a life built around these other four things in addition to money. And those other four are time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, and physical wealth. We can talk through each of the five if it's useful as a framing and can go from there.

- And do any of these types of wealth have more or less impact than others? Or is there a reason that time wealth is first? - Time wealth is fundamentally, I think, of about two things. It is about one, your awareness of the impermanent, finite nature of your time, of the fact that time is your most precious asset, a true awareness of that fact.

And then it is about your control of that time, your ability to actually control your calendar and priorities on a actual functional basis, your ability to take that time and invest it into things that you want. So if you choose to invest it in working 100 hours a week on things that are really meaningful to you, that is great and that is your choice.

Or if you choose to sit around on a beach in Bali and relax, that is also your choice. But the ability to actually control your time is the kind of second piece that is really important with time wealth. - And what are some of the ways that someone can actually become more aware of that finite nature of time?

- I think the first thing that people need to do is simply ask themselves a set of questions around time as an asset, questions that sort of frame up the fact that time is a valuable asset in their life and one that is terrifyingly finite and impermanent. So each section of the book is framed around one big question.

The big question in time wealth is, how many moments do you have remaining with the people you love? And we talked about this last time in the context of those charts. These short windows of time during which these people occupy your life, they are very finite. And we don't think about that enough in the moment.

We think about it at the end once it's too late. Time has this funny nature where for most people, you think about it not at all until the very end when it's the only thing you think about, but then it's too late. You can't do anything about it. So asking yourself those questions in the present along the way is the path to actually developing more awareness about that time, about the fact that it is finite.

The other question I love to ask people, young people in particular, that frames this up is, would you trade lives with Warren Buffett? He is worth $130 billion. He has access to anyone in the world. He reads and learns for a living. He flies around on private jets and has a bunch of fancy houses, but you wouldn't trade lives with him simply because he is 95 years old.

There's no way you would trade the amount of time he has left for the amount of time you have, even for $130 billion. And on the flip side, he would give anything to be your age. He would trade all 130 billion to be in your shoes and to have the amount of time that you have left.

So we know by asking ourselves something like that, that our time has incalculable value. Now we need to act in the present to recognize that, actually take actions to center and to focus our time and energy on the things that we truly care about, on the things that matter, that drive us forward towards our goals.

So I went through this exercise. We'll talk about how people can kind of calibrate themselves on all these, which there's a tool you guys have built to be able to say, where am I on this? And time wealth was one that was interesting. I think where I struggle is on the control side.

It's like, it's very easy to know that time is finite, but I don't feel in control of that time. And I imagine a lot of people who spend their day doing a job maybe they don't love or just have taken on too much, which I think is often my case is, it's not that I don't love what I'm doing, but I might take on 25 projects and then realize I didn't leave enough moments for family or friends in the week.

How do you think about that side of it and how people can kind of take control? - Yeah, you have different domains of your life and your degrees of control across different domains will vary, right? If I'm working a nine to five job and I have bosses and people that I need to be responsive to, I may have less control, especially early in my career.

As I rise through the ranks within that, I'll probably develop more control. In your personal life, you have more control. You may have responsibilities and things that you have to do, but you typically have more control over what you say yes and what you say no to in your personal life than you do your professional life.

The point is that you need to actually understand that control, that that freedom is the goal. You can't lose sight of that because along the way, you can then be taking actions to say no to the things that probably aren't actually moving the needle in your life. What most of us do is we do this thing of saying yes to things in the future because we don't think they're ever really gonna come.

It's called the yes damn effect. Something comes your way, you say yes to it under the premise that you are going to have more time for it in the future. So someone invites you to something two months from now and you say yes, then the thing comes and you're like, damn, I can't believe I have to go do this thing.

And so we fill our time, we make ourselves endlessly busy, but we don't have enough time to focus on the real things that are going to vault us forward, that are going to progressively change the level that we're on, the 10x, 100x outcomes. Learning to say no more effectively is a great way to start taking more control over your time.

Learning to recognize energy creators versus energy drainers in your life, meaning the things that are truly creating energy on a daily basis, those are typically the things that are actually driving the greatest output. Those are the things that you're leaning into, the things that are actually creating real value versus energy drainers, the things that are just pulling down your energy, that are hurting you, as it were.

Learning to identify between the two and in the book, there's an exercise called the energy calendar for actually sketching that out in your life. You can start to make slow methodical shifts over periods of time to start taking more control over your time so that you can push yourself forward.

- Are there any other activities or kind of things you can do that are kind of the most important ways to impact your time? - Developing an actual awareness of the two to three things that are truly your priorities within your personal and then within your professional spheres, I would say is the first exercise we all need to do.

Like most of us, if you ask us to list out our priorities, we'll list 20 things. And the reality is if you have 20 priorities, you have zero priorities. Because you cannot be prioritizing 20 different things. That's just not the way that life works. If you had to choose two to three things that you were gonna work on that you thought were gonna truly move you forward, what would those two to three things be?

And limit yourself, create a true forced constraint that you can only focus on these two to three things. It was like Tim Ferriss back in the day with the four hour work week, had the idea of like, if you could only work for two hours for the entire week, what would you work on?

And it's a silly, crazy question to ask for most people. But the crazy question forces you to figure out what is the thing that would actually allow me to get all of this done, that would actually allow me to move forward? Asking those kinds of questions really does help in figuring out what are the things that are really moving the needle?

And what are the things that are just movement? Like the rocking horse phenomenon. A whole lot of movement, not a lot of actually going anywhere. This episode is brought to you by Kick. If you're anything like me, bookkeeping is one of those things that you know you need to stay on top of, but it always ends up last on the list until tax season hits and it is a scramble.

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And I'm curious if one of them is more important than the other, or if there are ultimate things, whether it's happiness or something else that they each impact, that some have outsized impact on. So they all contribute to a life of fulfillment and happiness. They are not ever going to be equal for anyone, right?

Like all of our priorities are different. The things that we truly care about are different. Time wealth is at the heart of all of them. And it is the first section for a reason in the book, because time is what unlocks you to invest in any of these areas.

When you create time wealth, when you create an ability to choose how you spend your time, that is what allows you to then allocate that time into the things you really care about. So if you have that freedom and you have the control over your priorities, you could invest it into building relationships, social wealth.

You could invest it into working on your purpose, to working on growth, mental wealth. You could invest it into physical pursuits, physical wealth. You could invest it into financial wealth, into investing, into building things. And so the point is that time wealth unlocks several of the others, and so it sort of runs alongside all of them.

But then the ones that you choose for your life, it doesn't matter what I choose. It doesn't matter what Chris chooses. What matters is what you care about. And what you focus on or prioritize during any one season of your life will change. So when you're in your 20s and 30s, it is a great time to focus on and prioritize building a base of financial wealth that you can compound for the rest of your life.

But in your 30s and 40s, when your kids are young, you may want to set some of those things on autopilot and step back and really be present with your kids. Focus on social wealth during that window of your life. Then when they're grown up and they're back, you may wanna lean back in heavily into your purpose, into working on building financial wealth, building a business, doing those kinds of things.

The point is that the seasons of your life come and go, and how you think about balancing these different things and prioritizing and focusing on them will change. But along the whole journey, you cannot turn off any one area. The traditional school of thought on all of these things has been this like on-off switch methodology.

I fundamentally think that is broken. All of these areas of your life exist on dimmer switches. And when you turn one way up, that's great, you're gonna focus on one. You cannot turn the others off. You can have them turn down, which means they're more in maintenance mode, but you still need to invest a little bit in them to compound it to the future.

You still need to send the text to the friend to let them know you're thinking about them. You still need to go for the 30-minute walk to make sure your health is moving forward. You still need to find the five minutes of space and stillness to make sure your brain and your mind is sound and sharp.

Those tiny little investments compound as well as any financial investment, but you need to think of it that way along that journey. Okay, so that's time wealth. That's why it was first, why it's important. It's the one I'm focused on right now, but let's talk about social wealth. Social wealth is all about your depth and breadth of connection to the people around you, both your kind of inner circle of like true deep, what I call darkest hour friends, and then the broader circles of sort of looser connections, your broader connection to communities that extend beyond yourself, spiritual communities, local, regional communities, et cetera.

And then social wealth is also about how you interact with others around wealth, the idea of status and how it plays into your life. Building social wealth is fundamentally what allows you to enjoy any of the other types of wealth. No one dreams of having a private jet and being alone.

No one wants to have a whole ton of money and no one to dote upon, no one to create experiences with. Building social wealth is fundamentally at the core of living a happy, healthy, wealthy existence. There is scientific evidence that the strength of your relationships is the single greatest predictor of your health as you age over time.

The Harvard study of adult development followed the lives of 2000 plus people over 85 plus years. They found that the single greatest predictor of physical health at age 80 was relationship satisfaction at age 50. It was more impactful than whether they smoked or drank, their blood pressure, cholesterol, how you felt about your relationships was the single greatest predictor of your healthy aging.

So we know these things are important, and yet most of us will not invest in relationships in the same way we will invest in making more and more money. We need to change that. We need to flip the script. It needs to be just as important. It needs to be that same daily investment that you think about compounding into the future.

- And do you think a lot of this change over time comes from what really happens in our lives when we have kids? We both have young kids. I feel like our entire social life has completely switched where now I'm like, where is the time to go out with friends?

Where's the time to go on trips to go see people at events and that kind of stuff? Because you've got kids, there's lots of demands. You value sleeping more. You have to spend more time on your physical wealth than you probably did in your 20s. How do you think outside of your immediate family, your social wealth should be prioritized, and how do you do that in a world post-kids?

- Yeah, I tend to think that life follows these natural sort of like ballooning phases where you kind of come in and then you balloon back out, you come back in and then balloon back out, depending on the different phases. When you're young, you're very much expanding that balloon of your social networks, the people you're meeting.

In your 20s, your early career years, you're building these networks, you're building these relationships that are going to kind of continue to grow over the course of your life. But then as you have kids, you sort of narrow that a bit as you focus in on those really, really important core relationships.

And then as they get older, I think it starts to expand again. I see my parents now expanding and spreading their wings again. Look, I think that fundamentally, the separation between depth and breadth that I articulate in the book is the important point here. You have your few core relationships, they're truly deep relationships.

People that will truly be there for you across different seasons. From each kind of season of life, I tend to think you get a few people that you end up carrying with you for the entirety of this journey that you're on. You pick up a few people along the way.

You have the earliest ones, which are your parents and your siblings maybe, and then you maybe pick up a partner who's gonna be there and maybe a few friends at each phase of life. That is your depth. Those are the people that you can call at three in the morning when you have a problem and they'll show up for you.

The people that are there for you during your darkest hour. Then you have breadth, which that is what sort of creates this fluctuating nature. If you have time to invest in these broader social networks or professional networks or spiritual networks, you will. And that creates this incredible texture and kind of reach to something that extends beyond yourself.

This feeling of connection to something that is bigger than you, that is bigger than your local network. But that is not a necessity for happiness or fulfillment in the moment. Having those few deep, meaningful relationships that you can call upon during times of need, that is really what fights off the feeling of loneliness.

But when you are sort of during one of those growth phases, when you have the flexibility to invest in it, building upon that broader network of connections is a really meaningful pursuit. - And have you thought about processes or ways that you could kind of map this out to see where you're at?

- Yeah, I mean, the quiz that we talked about has a good approach for kind of thinking about where you are today. In the book, I also lay out something I call a relationship map, which is sort of a two by two matrix for all my nerds out there.

Mapping your existing kind of relationship ecosystem and thinking about where people exist on this map of the frequency of your contact with them from infrequent to frequent and the health of that relationship from sort of toxic to very supportive. And it gives you a visual perspective on what are the relationships that I really wanna be leaning into and what are the relationships that I should be leaning away from in order to live a happier life?

- Yeah, one thing I've been playing with, and I'll probably do an entire episode after I finish the playing phase, is there's a couple of apps that attempt to map out all of your relationships. Clay is one, Dex is one. I'm open to others if you have them. And I've been going through them trying to understand how I could use them to better tackle this aspect of wealth.

And one of the things I did, which is separate from those, is I have like a contact list on my iPhone that's basically called like walking calls. And anytime I'm just, I don't have anything to do, I'm going on a walk, I just go into this. And there's like 30 people there that I like mentally wanna make sure that I stay in touch with.

I just scroll through it. I'm like, "When's the last time I talked to this person?" I think technology will get even better at like, "Hey, it's been six months since you talked to this person. "Maybe you should reach out." But any other tactics you have for kind of staying in touch or kind of prioritizing people?

I have a silly one. So I love all these tools, the personal CRMs. I haven't seen Dex before, but I've seen Clay. I always run the balance and the tension that I feel is between making this feel natural and real and sort of like systematizing it and optimizing it to the point where it no longer feels like a genuine relationship.

Like I am not big on the word networking because it feels transactional to me, it feels fake. When what I really wanna do is build genuine connection, I want to give with no expectation of return. So I wanna find something in a way to operationalize these things in my life that feels natural.

One of the funny ways that I've done that is by using Apple's sort of like memories or like for you feature with pictures. So every single week, I'll pop into my like iPhone photo feature where it pops up memories from your phone over the last several years. And I have a practice where when there's a picture with someone, I text it to them.

I just send it to them and say like, "Oh, good times," or something like that. It 100% of the time ends up sparking a quick catch-up interaction with someone that I likely haven't spoken to or connected with in a while. And it's just like a simple trigger that reminds me to do that, to reach out to the person because it's so easy and it's so accessible and it's sitting right there.

And I have found that to be just like an awesome practice, very simple way of building social wealth and keeping in touch with these people that you've clearly created cool memories with in your life. Yeah, I mean, mine is probably less millennial or Gen Z. I literally just call people and half the times you're like, "Why is someone calling me?" Random phone call, but I don't know.

I just find I'm like, "Hey, I just haven't talked to you in a while." Yeah, it's like taking some of the idle minutes that you have. Sometimes I find myself just driving and I just call someone, do the same thing or like send a voice note, something little where you let someone know that you were thinking about them.

And again, to the point of like investing in these areas the same way as financial wealth, that compounds into the future. Like that person, you were building a relationship. You were like putting a penny in the jar that's going to compound and stack up over a longer period of time.

Is there something you think most people are getting wrong or making mistakes when it comes to building social wealth beyond what you said about focusing on transactional networking? The thing people get wrong is thinking that more is better with social wealth. The tendency is to say like, "Well, it's because money like more is better is the mindset people have had." And everyone's wired differently around this.

One person might feel lonely if they have only a hundred friends. Another person might feel lonely as long if they only have one friend. Like what social wealth means to different people will be different because you have a natural level of introversion or extroversion and you need to figure out what level of connection fills your cup.

It doesn't matter if it's the same. I am more extroverted than my wife. My wife really just needs her like very close network of a few friends and family to feel extraordinarily socially wealthy. I need a bigger group of people. Like I need to feel like I can reach out to different people who have expertise on different things and problems that I'm facing.

And that's what makes me feel good, but it's different for all of us. So figuring out your sort of natural set point or baseline, if you will, that you're kind of working towards is important. And then last, it wouldn't be all the hacks if I didn't ask you. You've got 31 social wealth hacks.

Any favorites that you wanna drop here? And then obviously people can go read all of them in the book. Let's see. I have this anti-networking guide in the book, which is this idea of like how to build genuine relationships. And in there, I share this whole idea of finding value aligned rooms.

What I mean by that is people often complain that it's hard to make friends as adults. You're like, "Well, when I was in school, "it was easy to make friends. "And now as an adult, I don't know how to do that." The idea that I have here is you know your kind of core set of values.

Map them out. Things you care about, things you're interested in, things that are exciting to you. Find rooms that self-select for other people that have that similar set of interests or values. So if I'm really into health, a room that has a lot of people interested in health is like a farmer's market.

That's a great place where I could go and have cool conversations with people that are interested in similar things to me. The gym, another example of that. If I'm really into dogs, I'm really into animals, going to a dog park is a great example of getting into a place like that.

If I love the arts, going to art gallery openings or going to book clubs in your local community, going to museum openings, those kind of things are going to place you into situations where you are highly likely to meet other people that are excited about similar things to you.

That is how you make friends as an adult. But you need to think about it that way. You need to like play the game on easy mode a little bit when it comes to finding those people. - This episode is brought to you by Superhuman. Now I've used Superhuman for years and I think it's hands down the best way to do email, assuming you value your time, which I absolutely assume you do.

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That's 15% off at chrishutchins.com/masterclass. One of my favorites was just this obvious thing. Say exactly what you mean. No one, not even your family, can read your mind. And it's something that I feel like I need to repeat because there are so many times in life where you're with people, and you're just assuming they know what you're thinking.

And it's just so easy to just tell them. And if anyone has friends from cultures where people are way more direct, I have a couple of friends from Israel where it's like every single time, they just tell you exactly what they're thinking. I'm like, "Oh, isn't this nice?" And then sometimes we play these guessing games in the States where it's like, "Let's see if someone can figure out what I really want." - Yeah, I mean, the other one is just never avoid hard conversations with people you care about.

When you avoid a hard conversation, you're just taking on a debt that has to be repaid with interest at a date in the future. Time doesn't heal anything when it comes to relationships. It just makes things worse. So if you have to have a hard conversation, have it now.

Don't delay having that for the future. - I love that. Okay, and delaying it can cause a lot of mental stress. So let's talk about mental wealth. - Yeah, so mental wealth is about a few things. Mental wealth is about your purpose. It's about engaging in growth, growth as a human being, growth of the mind.

And then it's about creating space, creating stillness, creating an ability to wrestle with the bigger questions in life, these unanswerable questions that we face. Mental wealth is such an interesting one because it's a story and a kind of arc that we can all relate to, which is the hero's journey, which we've seen throughout history.

And it's something that we all connect to. It's the reason it's such a popular movie arc or television show arc is because we all see ourselves in that story arc. It's like the pursuit of some core purpose, some sacred duty that you go off into pursue and you face trials and tribulations and experience growth from that journey only to see yourself change as part of the process.

That is the journey we all find ourselves on. But oftentimes we lose sight of that. We get kind of stuck with the shiny object of trying to make money and we lose sight of this thing of curiosity, of purpose, of growth, of creating that stillness in our life. And so finding ways to cultivate mental wealth on a daily basis, tiny investments that you can be making to allow yourself that space, to search for that purpose, to pursue your curiosity, to engage in growth-oriented activities, to have a growth mindset, that really cultivates a life of abundant mental wealth.

- I think one of the biggest criticisms or follow-ups to conversations like the one we just had or what you've just said is talking to people who are like, "I just don't know what the thing is. Even if I had the time to spend on it, I haven't found that purpose, that thing that I love doing." What advice do you have for those people?

- The idea that your work has to be your purpose is one of the worst lies you've been told. Purpose has been hijacked by hustle culture. And basically, you've been told that if you don't find your purpose in your work, you are lost and you're hopeless. And that's not really true.

If you do find purpose in your work, that's great and I'm really happy for you. But the reality is that most people won't. Most people, the best case and what you should work towards is a world where you have a higher order purpose for this season of your life, and you are able to connect to that while you are at work.

It doesn't need to be the same thing, but you can connect to it. I'll give you an example. During the research process for the book, I had a conversation with a man who works at a factory and he basically assembles widgets for eight to 10 hours a day, like on an assembly line.

He doesn't like his work at all, right? Like he's doing a manual task, very monotonous over and over again. But every single day when he goes to work, he connects to a higher order purpose, which is to be the father that he didn't feel like he had, to be a provider for his family.

So every day when he goes to work, even while he's doing something that he doesn't intrinsically enjoy, that's not his purpose, he's connecting it to the higher order purpose of what he's trying to do as a human being. So he has energy for it. He shows up with a good attitude for it because he knows it's in service of something much bigger.

We can all do that. We can all identify what is that thing during this season of our life that is our higher order purpose. Maybe it's providing for our family. Maybe it's engaging with our love of the arts. And we know that working in a job that pays the bills allows us to experience and appreciate the arts or to go travel to see history and historical artworks around the world.

So it doesn't have to be, oh, I don't love the thing that I'm doing in my work. And so I'm lost. I need to keep going on this endless search. It might just be that your job is your job and it works in service of some higher order purpose in your life.

- I would also go one step further and say, there are times where the job that feels like it's more aligned with your purpose might end up consuming your life to the point that it actually negates that purpose. So I have, I'll say friend or family member to kind of leave it vague, but they've taken a path of like not pursuing a job that they necessarily love or is aligned with what they care about most in the world because they're able to have a lot of free time after work where they're not consumed by thinking about work.

Whereas as you and I probably know, when you're doing that thing that you love for work, sometimes work consumes you. Like you think about it nonstop all day. And as much as I love what I do, I also wanna spend time with my kids. And sometimes it's, they're at odds because the thing I'm doing for work, I love so much that it makes it hard to step away.

And I'm sometimes jealous of people who are just so easily able to step away from work, not think about it on the weekends, not think about it at night. And I'm not saying I would trade it, but there's definitely some benefit to that style of work. - I have this conversation all the time with people.

So I love that you raised it, which is this idea that ambition is a double-edged sword. Extreme ambition can actually manifest as a curse at times because you are constantly in the pursuit of some thing and you are unable to disconnect. And so while it ends up creating some incredible outcomes, it also has a real cost.

Extreme ambition has a tax to be paid in your life from having that. I often kind of muse on the fact of whether like there is an optimal, a Goldilocks amount of ambition where you like have enough that it's kind of pushing you to grow and do things, but not so much that it's making you not appreciate the present moment and the present quality that you have in your life.

- We talked a lot about mental wealth. Where do things like stress, anxiety, and burnout fall in the mental wealth framework? - All within this idea of creating space in your life. So space is derived from this idea from Viktor Frankl, who said that basically your power exists in the space that you can create between stimulus and response.

Most of us live in this immediate sort of loop where stimulus is constantly coming in and response is constantly going out. Everything's urgent, you're constantly responding to things. You have no space to slow down, to zoom out, to contemplate, to wrestle with questions internally, externally, with a higher power, whatever it might be.

And that gets you into this endless loop of anxiety, of stress, of poor mental health, deteriorating mental health, because you're not able to stop and pause and create that space to breathe. Finding rituals to create that space is the way that we get out of that loop. I also should mention, the goal is not to eliminate stress from your life.

This is like a common misconception, right? The goal is to have meaningful stress, to have stress over things that actually matter, that you actually care about in life. If you have stress because the thing that you're working on is extremely meaningful to you, that is not bad stress. That is not stress to be eliminated.

Stress to be eliminated is the stress over silly things that can be fixed very easily or that you don't need to worry about as much. That is, I think, a common misconception that we need to sort of rid ourselves of. - Or I would say, if you're focused on something, you deeply care about it, but you let it get to a point that that stress is debilitating, that would probably also fall in the unhealthy camp.

- I would agree with that, yes. - Yeah, I love that each one of these sections of wealth has a bunch of hacks in here, because one that I thought I hadn't heard anyone really say, which was about rereading books. And so one of my favorites was just this concept of, if there's a book that meaningfully affected your life, go reread it later, because it might completely be a different book.

I've experienced that as a podcast episode. So I've gone back and listened to two-year-old episodes and been like, "Wow, I learned so much even though I'd already done this episode." But for some reason, I'd never really thought about doing it with books. Any other kind of quick hits in that set of hacks that you share on mental wealth that you wanna drop here?

- I think that's a good one. One of my absolute favorites, and this is a collaboration with Susan Cain, who's one of my favorite authors. She wrote the book "Quiet." It's about introverts and their power in an extroverted world, is the secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting.

For some, it's a Broadway spotlight, for others, a lamplit desk. Use your natural powers of persistence, concentration, and insight to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems, make art, think deeply. - I like that. Great, great, great ending. And let's talk about physical wealth. - My personal favorite.

No, physical wealth is all about your health and vitality. It is about your physical health. And we've heard the phrase, right? Health is wealth. And it's very true. The investments that you make in your physical health are going to compound in your life. And physical wealth, because it is the most natural type, i.e.

it is part of your biology, also is the most naturally entropic, meaning whether or not you invest in it is going to deteriorate. What your best hope is is that you slow the rate of that deterioration through daily actions that you take. But through daily actions and daily disciplined investment, you can slow the rate of that decay so that you can enjoy more of your years so that you can have a great health span, as Peter Attia talks about.

And the question that I ask in the book to frame this up, the big question is, will you be dancing at your 80th birthday party? If you imagine your 80th birthday and your family and friends all show up to celebrate you and the dance floor opens and your favorite song comes on, based on your current actions and the trajectory that it has you on, will you be able to get up and be on the dance floor dancing with your loved ones at your 80th birthday party?

And if not-- - And not the middle school sway dance, right? Like a really big-- - Not the sway, like some serious dance. Yeah, serious dance. And if not, what actions do you need to start taking in the present to make sure that you are building towards a future where you are able to do that?

And physical wealth really comes down to just these three pillars of movement, nutrition, and recovery. Taking on the boring basic like level one within each of those gets you 80 to 90% of the benefit. We're bombarded by the most complex, crazy regimens around physical wealth. And it's because it's what gets clicks on social media.

The craziest stuff is what generates clicks, when in reality, the most basic stuff is what works. With movement, level one, just move your body for 30 minutes a day. I don't care if you're walking, jogging, skiing, lifting, dancing, whatever you like, swimming, just move. For nutrition, just eat whole unprocessed foods, 80% of your meals.

If that's all you do, that is a great start in the nutrition bucket. That's about 17 out of 21 meals in a week. And then recovery, just sleep seven hours a night, nothing else. You don't need fancy blue light blockers. You don't need sunlight in the morning. You don't need any of those things.

If you do those three things, you're ahead of 90% of the population and you're going to be moving things forward. You don't see those, that type of like boring basic wisdom espoused on the internet simply because it doesn't get clicks. You can't sell that, right? Like I cannot sell you an ebook on building your health that just says, you know, move your body for 30 days, eat whole unprocessed foods and sleep, right?

It would be a very short ebook, not particularly interesting one, but it just works. Like the boring basics, just plain work. - And for people who have that dialed in and still maybe feel like physical wealth is an area they want to focus on, how do you think about the next step?

- So I lay it out in the book as sort of like a video game. So you kind of have levels to physical wealth that you are going to graduate up. So if you are already doing the boring basics, you graduate to level two and level three. And you know, if you want to try to become Brian Johnson, I'm sure there are way more, you know, detailed crazy levels above that.

I would think of level three as having a movement regimen that includes both cardiovascular training and resistance training, meaning weight training. So you're kind of hitting all of the major buckets on that. With your nutrition, I would think of it as the vast, vast majority of your calories are coming from single ingredient, whole unprocessed foods.

You're limiting alcohol, you're hydrating enough, you're making sure you're getting your micronutrients as well. That's largely from supplementation because they don't occur naturally in your body. And then with recovery, you're making sure you're getting eight hours of sleep a night. And you're probably taking on a few other recovery methods, whether it's sauna or cold plunge, you know, red light therapy, some of these breathing protocols, other things that are helping you with your recovery.

That is sort of level three, where like beyond that, everything else is the last 1% of benefit. If you're doing that, you are at the top of the chain already, and you're doing great. - I didn't really ask this for each one. So maybe we could do a quick recap.

Within each bucket, are there diagnostics that you look at? You know, when I think of health, I'm like, okay, you could look at your sleep score. How many hours of sleep you get is pretty straightforward. You know, you could go all the way to VO2 max. How do you think about level setting where you are within each area beyond kind of the questions you have?

- I think the best diagnostic tool really is the wealth score quiz that we've laid out. Because some of these in relation to like physical wealth, there's very objective number metrics that you can put to it. I think, you know, both financial wealth and physical wealth sort of have that.

With time wealth, with social wealth, and with mental wealth, a big goal of the book was to put forward a way for you to sort of quantify these things that are previously unquantifiable. And so you can put it in the show notes, but wealthscorequiz.com. You can take the online assessment.

It's also in the book. And it'll give you this visual that you can kind of use as your baseline to go and build against. - This episode is brought to you by Delete.me. And if you prefer not to have your identity stolen or have your phone number, home address, or email showing up all over the internet, you really need to check out Delete.me this year.

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Again, that's chrishutchins.com/deleteme, or click the link in the description. This episode is brought to you by Facet. Finding good and actionable financial advice is not easy, especially if you want it to come from someone who's acting in your best interest. So let me save you some time, because when I shut down my financial planning firm a few years ago, we did a ton of research on who to recommend to our clients, and we landed on Facet.

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So head on over to chrishutchins.com/facet, F-A-C-E-T, to learn more about which membership option is best for you. That's chrishutchins.com/facet. All right, the one that we all know, financial wealth. How do you approach this, given that it's the thing we by all default think of as wealth? So the articulation that is really important in the book, and in my own perspective on financial wealth, is that it is all about defining what enough means to you.

Defining clearly what your enough life looks like. And the reason that's so important is because expectations are your single greatest financial liability. If your expectations rise faster than your assets, you will never feel rich, you will never feel wealthy, you'll just keep chasing whatever more you've propped up as the place where your happiness lies.

And that fundamentally comes down to having a clear definition of what it means to have enough financially. What that life actually looks like to you. Not a number, but more where you are. What you're doing, where you live, how you feel. You know, the amount of money you have in the bank account maybe factors into it, but it's much more about what the entire life picture looks like when you feel you have enough.

And the whole goal there is to make it a clear image in your mind. So that when it naturally starts to increase and move up, which will happen because you're human, it's human biology, the hedonic treadmill. When that happens, it needs to be a conscious and rational upward movement, rather than a subconscious irrational one, which is the standard for all humans.

So we need to frame that, we need to understand what that enough means financially, so that we can start to actually make that upward movement a clear conscious one. And what are the key factors that promote financial wealth? You know this, I'm a big fan of deconstructing complex things to like the most simple, boring version that exists.

And when you think about the path to building financial wealth, there is really only one model that works, no matter what you see out there in the world. Every single person that has accumulated and built financial wealth has done some version of these three things, which is, they've grown their income, and that is cash inflows.

That could come from primary employment, secondary employment, side hustles, or like windfall events from selling things. They've managed expenses, meaning their cash outflows. They've managed those over time to be below their cash inflows, which creates a gap, a gap between the inflows and the outflows. That gap is the single most important tool for building financial wealth, because you can take that gap and invest it, which is the third piece of this, into long-term compounders, into things that are going to compound value over long periods of time, whether that's boring basic things like stock market index funds, or whether that's fancier things like real estate investments, or crypto, or whatever it is that you're getting excited about.

But that model of growing income alongside your skills, managing expenses so that you are living below your means and expanding and growing that gap, and then investing that gap into things that compound, fundamentally, that is all that building financial wealth comes down to. - And do you think there's a place that's often overlooked or underlooked?

- I think that most people focus a bit too much on the managing of expenses and a bit too little on the growing of the cash inflows. The reason that's important is because you can only cut your expenses to zero, but you can grow your income infinitely, effectively. And so if you focus on the idea that income is a byproduct of value that you create for the world, value you create for others, you capture a portion of that value, that's how you make money.

If you can grow the amount of value you create by stacking and compounding your skills that you can offer, and then leveraging those skills, you can make more and more money over periods of time, both from primary employment and from secondary employment. If you do that, and you manage your expenses to a rational level, you don't allow your expectations to run wild as you're growing, you will build a life of financial wealth, because you'll be able to just take those things, invest them into boring, basic stuff that compounds, and you'll create financial independence for yourself and your family.

- A different way to say something similar, which is that on the expense management side, where you started with defining enough is way more important than thinking about it from a cutting standpoint, because naturally over time, your income goes up, whether that's from raises, or finding a partner and combining incomes, or just all the things that end up happening, most people end up making more money as they age, then they end up spending more money.

So it's a little bit of the management of expenses, but a lot more of level setting, here's what we want and not letting that creep happen. And I think just going through how you spend money and having a conversation with yourself, or a partner if you have one, on do we spend more or less than we want to in this category of expenses?

Like that conversation has led us to realize, oh, if we had more money to spend on travel, like I have no aspiration to fly private. And we play the game well enough that like we don't need more money for that category. So it's less about trying to find ways to save and trying to be comfortable with where we are, which makes it easy to not spend more when you generate more income.

- Yeah, I completely agree with that. - And then on the investing side, I think personally my investing strategy is pretty boring. I'm in a bunch of, like you said, boring index funds. And I think we talk so much about that for the same reason that all the crazy supplements and diets work on social media, because it's really boring to say, hey, you could just buy some index funds and be done.

Like it's way cooler to talk about the crazy things people do than it is to talk about the other categories, which are like managing your own impulses financially, which is actually the thing that really clickbaits on social media. - Yeah, I completely agree with that. It's like the complexity trap, especially with smart people.

Smart people are attracted to the complex, sexy solutions. And so what ends up happening is that we naturally want to do the complex thing because we know it'll be more interesting to other people when we go and talk about it. - Funny enough, I think the financial wealth section, which is what most people might think of as wealth, is the one we spent the least amount of time on.

And I wanna go back to how we talked about diagnostics and measuring your wealth. So wealthscorequiz.com and the book both have the tool you've built. Talk a little bit about what it is. And then I want you to share the tip you gave me about a way to do it if you're in a relationship.

- So the quiz itself is broken into the five types of wealth. So for each of the five types of wealth, there are five statements. And you respond to the statement from strongly disagree to strongly agree on the basis of how you feel that statement aligns with you. And it totals your score across all of these.

So for every strongly disagree is a zero, every strongly agree is a four. So each of the areas ends up being 20 total points, which adds up to 100 across the five areas. And it gives you a picture when you spit out your final visual here across these different areas of wealth in this circle.

And it kind of fills in the chart in the different areas on the basis of how you're doing. It's a great baseline assessment, especially starting your year out to get a sense for where you stand today so that you can build against it. When I first created it in 2021 was when I was making my big life change personally.

I was at a 53 and now I've worked my way up to an 87, I believe the last time I did it. It's totally personal. The way that you answer it is sort of up to you and how harsh or critical you are on yourself is going to impact it.

So it's a personal scoring system that you wanna measure yourself against over long periods of time. What you mentioned about an interesting way to do it is if you're in a relationship, do one for yourself and then do the same assessment for your partner. And each, you do one for each other.

And then look at it and see how you stack up. Basically like how did you rank yourself and then how did your partner rank you and have a discussion about why they ranked you differently than you ranked yourself. Because it often reveals interesting things about yourself, sort of like doing a 360 review on your life, but with your partner.

My wife is more critical and probably more honest about some of these areas. So I found her score was like 10 points lower for both of us than mine was for each of us. And then we talked about it and I was like, I'm probably playing this optimist role where I'm like, yeah, I do have control over my time.

And she's like, yeah, but you're not using it the way you want to. We had this dialogue and it was super helpful. So I would encourage everyone to not only take it, but have someone else take it for them. Ideally, someone that knows you really well. And if you don't have a partner, maybe it's a best friend and then talk about it.

And it spun off so many interesting conversations. For the nerds, we put it in a little two by two matrix so we could kind of compare it all on one sheet just to go full circle there. I love that for you. And how do you think about what to do with that?

So for us, there were two or three areas to focus on. Earlier, you said you can't focus on all of them and you can't focus on any of them, zero. How many of them do you need to focus on? And how many of them do you even have to be kind of near capacity?

Can you live a fulfilling life with a 60? - It's totally up to you. And if you're feeling deeply fulfilled and you're at a 60, I think that's great. My guess is you are not feeling deeply fulfilled if you answer at a 60 and you feel like there's improvement.

If you're listening to this podcast, you are a growth-oriented individual. Having a score and seeing what this looks like, you are going to want to improve on the areas that are weak. The book, each section has a guide at the end that is filled with tips, tricks, hacks, science-backed strategies for building that type of wealth in your life.

So you can go and read it and actually take action on something today to start building that type of wealth. They are the exact strategies that I've used in my own life to dramatically improve my sort of comprehensive wealth score across these areas. They are what people have used across all walks of life to do that.

So they are proven, they're timeless, and they work. But just getting your baseline, having that awareness, and then starting to slowly take action to build against that, that is the path to creating change in any area of life. You measure what matters, and then you build and take action against that to build the future that you actually want for yourself.

- And if someone does this and is like, "Gosh, I'm lower than I want to be in four areas," do you suggest tackling one at a time, two at a time, all of them? - I think you should take a tiny action in all of them, and then ask yourself which is the one that you're really focusing on.

Wait, like if you are in a place where you're like, "Oh man, I really want to focus on my physical wealth," then you can prioritize that and lean into that one more heavily, but still take one tiny action on the others. I mean, the tiny action on social wealth could be as simple as sending one text a day to someone that you care about.

The tiny action on physical wealth could be going for a 15-minute walk every single day. The tiny action on mental wealth could be taking five-minute breaks to just breathe in between meetings. There are simple tiny actions you can do that will improve that type of wealth today. Like it doesn't need to be, it's a month-long activity, it's a year-long thing, it's literally today, but you have to do the tiny action.

So creating the awareness, know where you're deficient, and then invest a little bit to start building that area. - I love it. And what do you think the difference for someone who has identified this, gone through this process, and really cared about it, someone who has five types of wealth instead of thinking about it from just one, what do you think the difference in the life that that person will live is?

- It's dramatic. I mean, you will see the world in an entirely different light. You'll be able to measure the things that actually matter. You will make decisions with the bigger picture of your life in the clear view. So when you make a decision, rather than it being just about financial wealth and just about money, you'll be able to see all of these different areas because you understand how they play a role in your life.

And then you'll be able to design your life proactively along these pillars so that when you're making those future-oriented decisions, so that when you're designing where you wanna be in five, 10, 15, 20 years, you're taking into account this broader picture of your entire life rather than just the singular one.

- We've talked about this book since, you know, before you, I think, started even writing about it. I'm so excited that you put it together. I only got the digital copy, so I'm still waiting for my physical copy. But by the time this comes out, I think it'll be here in the mail.

I think we actually talked about you maybe coming on for the members and doing a little something. So for anyone who's an All The Hacks member, stay tuned. - I can't wait. I can't wait to do it. Thank you so much. And looking forward to seeing what actions people take on the back of this.

- Yeah, and you didn't say it, but you can find the book wherever books are sold. Did you do an audio book and did you read it? - I read the audio book myself, which was an absolute grind, by the way. The audio book process is crazy and can't wait for people to listen to that one as well.

- Awesome. All the links in the show notes. Thanks so much for being here.