The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life

by Sahil Bloom

To establish anti-goals, look at your goals, but rather than think about this great outcome, invert the problem—flip it on its head: What are the worst possible outcomes that could result from your pursuit of these goals? What could lead to those worst possible outcomes occurring? What would you view as a Pyrrhic victory—winning the battle but losing the war?

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

Systems are the daily actions that create forward progress. Leverage amplifies the output of a single unit of input. Combining the two ideas, high-leverage systems are the daily actions that create amplified, asymmetric forward progress.

“The trick in investing is just to sit there and watch pitch after pitch go by and wait for the one right in your sweet spot.”

Both focus their energy on a few key moments and ignore the rest. When they’re on, they deploy their energy in a concentrated, glorious burst. When they’re off, they wait, conserve, and position themselves slowly and strategically into locations that will be advantageous in future moments. They work smart—not hard.

To establish your high-leverage systems, consider the guides and select the actions that will create meaningful progress toward your envisioned future.

If you have the appropriate goals, anti-goals, and high-leverage systems, your focus on each type of wealth can exist on a dimmer switch rather than an on/off switch. This shift is important. It allows you to prioritize your values and goals for the present season without turning off any one area, something that leads to atrophy that proves painful (and difficult) to reverse.

Consider the mentality of surfers riding a wave. They fully enjoy this wave, with the wisdom and awareness that there are always more waves coming. They know they don’t have to ride every single wave that comes their way.

There will be seasons of growth and seasons of maintenance for each type of wealth. Enjoy each season for its individual beauty, position yourself for future seasons according to your values and goals, and always place yourself in the water.

At the end of each month, ask yourself three tactical questions: What really matters right now in my life, and are my goals still aligned with this? Assess the quality of your goals and ensure that they still serve as true north. Are my current high-leverage systems aligned with my goals? Assess the quality of your high-leverage systems and whether they create the appropriate momentum. Am I in danger of running afoul of my anti-goals? Assess the quality of your environment and decisions to evaluate any changes that need to be made.

At the end of each quarter, add these four questions to your regular ritual: What is creating energy right now? Review your calendars from the prior quarter. What activities, people, or projects consistently created energy in your life? Did you spend ample time on these energy creators, or did they get neglected? Recalibrate to spend more time on these in the quarter ahead. What is draining energy right now? Review your calendars from the prior quarter. What activities, people, or projects consistently drained energy from your life? Did you allow energy drainers to persist, or did you cut them off in real time? Recalibrate to spend less time on these in the quarter ahead. Who are the boat anchors in my life? Boat anchors are people who hold you back from your potential. They literally create a drag on your life. Boat anchors are people who belittle, put down, or diminish your accomplishments, laugh at your ambition and tell you to be more realistic, harm the quality of your environment through negativity and pessimism, and make you feel bad by consistently showing off what they have. Recalibrate to minimize or eliminate the energy you give them in the quarter ahead. What am I avoiding because of fear? The thing you fear the most is often the thing you most need to do. Fears, when avoided, become limiters on our progress. Recalibrate to get closer to your fears in the quarter ahead.

Before you continue, sit down and write a letter to your future self—ten years from now, five years from now, three years from now, whatever. Reflect on where you are and where you hope to be when you open the letter. Vividly imagine that desired future. The letter is your true north. This imagined future is yours to create. You have the answers; it’s time to start asking the right questions to turn this imagined future into reality.

How Many Moments Do You Have Remaining with Your Loved Ones? The years go by, as quickly as a wink Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think —Guy Lombardo, “Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think)”

“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.”

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.

“Despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life.”

Writer and philosopher Sam Harris once said, “No matter how many times you do something, there will come a day when you do it for the last time.”[3]

“I once saw a challenge that said, ‘It’s your time to shine! You’ve got the stage, ten thousand people are waiting for you to walk out, you get one sentence. What do you say?’ My answer was and still is ‘It’s later than you think.’ ”

Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.

I’ll tell you a secret. Something they don’t teach you in your temple. The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again. —Achilles, Troy (2004 film)

The Red Queen Effect says that we must run just to stay in place and that we must run even faster if we ever hope to get ahead.

Society assures you that it’s okay to feel time-poor as long as it’s a by-product of a chase for more money. Busy has become standard fare, equal parts reality and pseudo-dystopian status symbol. The invisible hand is silently increasing the speed on your treadmill.

In other words, there is a cognitive switching cost to shifting your attention from one task to another. When your attention is shifted, there is a residue of it that remains with the prior task and impairs your cognitive performance on the new task.

You have back-to-back meetings and find yourself still thinking about the prior meeting in the current one. You rush from one kid’s activity to another’s but can’t remember exactly how you got there. An email notification pops up and completely derails your focus on the current task. You check your phone under your desk during a lecture and find yourself unable to refocus on the professor’s words. You’re having a conversation with a friend or partner, but your mind is on the work email you just received, not on what the other person is saying.

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. It takes all the running we can do to keep in the same place. You’re running faster and for longer, but you’re not getting anywhere—at least not anywhere worth going.

The ancient Greeks had two different words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos refers to sequential, quantitative time—the natural sequence and flow of equal parts of time. Kairos refers to a more fluctuating, qualitative time—the idea that certain moments are weightier than others, that not all time is the same.

Awareness: An understanding of the finite, impermanent nature of time Attention: The ability to direct your attention and focus on the things that matter (and ignore the rest) Control: The freedom to own your time and choose exactly how to spend it

The three pillars of Time Wealth—awareness, attention, and control—are individually important, but are best thought of as a progression: awareness first, attention next, control last.

Awareness is characterized by the understanding and appreciation of the impermanent, precious nature of time—of its tangible value and importance as an asset.

That all sounds great, and yet I’m willing to bet that very few of you would agree to trade lives with him. Why not? Warren Buffett is, at the time of this writing, ninety-four years old. It doesn’t matter how much money, fame, or access he has—you probably wouldn’t agree to trade your remaining time for his. On the flip side, as Graham Duncan pointed out, there is a decent chance that Buffett would trade all of his billions of dollars to have your time.

his 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.

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.

Attention is defined as the state or act of applying the mind to something. This application of mental energy is how we create progress. Your choice of how and when to deploy your limited attention determines the quality of your outcomes.

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

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.

It requires appropriate project selection and rejection—saying yes to a few high-leverage things and no to everything else.

Attention needs to be directed, managed, and harnessed.

With this fundamental shift, time morphs from a fixed asset that you must take to a dynamic asset that you can make. Time enters the realm of your control.

Here are twelve proven systems for building Time Wealth. 1. The Time Wealth Hard Reset | Awareness 2. The Energy Calendar | Awareness and Attention 3. The Two-List Exercise | Awareness and Attention 4. The Eisenhower Matrix | Awareness and Attention 5. The Index Card To-Do System | Attention 6. Parkinson’s Law | Attention 7. The Anti-Procrastination System | Attention 8. The Flow State Boot-Up Sequence | Attention 9. Effective Delegation | Attention and Control 10. The Art of No | Control 11. The Four Types of Professional Time | Control 12. The Energy Creators | Control

Start by writing down the name of a friend or family member you love deeply but don’t see enough. Approximate the number of times per year that you see that person. Write that number down. Next, write down your age and the other person’s age. Subtract the older person’s age from eighty.[*] This is the approximate number of years you have remaining with this person. Now, do some basic math: Multiply the number of times you see that person per year by the number of years you have remaining with that person. With some terrifyingly simple math, you’ve determined the number of times you will see your loved one before the end.

For one week, at the end of every weekday, go through your calendar and color-code each event from the day that just finished: Green: Energy-creating—these activities left you feeling energized. Yellow: Neutral—these activities left you feeling neutral. Red: Energy-draining—these activities left you feeling drained.

At the end of the week, zoom out, look at your calendar, and ask yourself a few questions: What are your common energy-creating (green) activities? What are your common neutral (yellow) activities? What are your common energy-draining (red) activities?

Based on the answers, you can formulate an action plan for your time: Energy-creating activities should be prioritized and amplified. How can you spend more time on these activities in future? Neutral activities should be maintained or delegated. How can you slowly work to outsource or delegate some of these neutral activities to free up your time for more energy-creating activities? Energy-draining activities should be delegated, deleted, or adjusted. How can you slowly work to outsource, delegate, or delete some of these energy-draining activities? Are there ways to make subtle adjustments to these energy-draining activities that would move them up to neutral (for example, shifting from an energy-draining video call to a neutral walking call)?

The point: The most important items had been highlighted; everything else was simply a distraction threatening to derail Flint’s progress.

Make a list: Create a comprehensive list of your top professional priorities. Repeat this for your top personal priorities. Narrow the list: Go through the professional priority list and circle the top three to five items. These should be the absolute top priorities in your professional life, the items that will have the greatest impact on your trajectory—the long-term value drivers. These are the items that truly matter. Repeat this process for your personal priority list. Split the lists: On a fresh sheet of paper, write down the circled three to five priorities on the left side and all the remaining priorities on the right side. Label the left side of the sheet Priorities and the right side of the sheet Avoid at All Costs. Repeat this process for your personal list.