Sometimes the routine stuff of everyday life can pack an unexpected punch.
So it was for former US college baseball star-turned-investor Sahil Bloom when, in May 2021, he met up with a new friend for a drink. Bloom, a chiselled-looking Indian American who’d spent most of his career up to that point as vice president of a private equity firm, was talking about living in California, far from his Boston home, and missing his parents and sister.
His friend, a Californian native, asked how often Bloom saw his parents, then in their mid-60s. When Bloom told him it was about once a year, the friend did the maths: If Bloom continued his annual visits, he’d see his parents around about 15 more times before they died.
“It was like a complete gut punch,” says Bloom, on a Zoom call from his New York home. “I actually had to take a deep breath in the moment to avoid an angry response but, you know, the realisation after the fact was it was really just math – the kind of math that we avoid.
“We don’t think about the fact that the amount of time we have with these people in our lives is so finite and countable – and that amount of time with the people that we care about most in the world is much more finite than we ever care to admit. It’s sort of a question that we avoid.”
Bloom went home to wife Elizabeth and the two had a heart-to-heart about what they really wanted from life. Then they made some profound and life-changing decisions.
What you truly care about
Four years on and now parents of a toddler, they live closer to their families on the United States’ eastern seaboard. Bloom has grown his online newsletter The Curiosity Chronicle from 100 followers to more than 800,000 around the world and written his first book on wealth.
But The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life is slightly different to your standard financial-planning text because Bloom’s focus isn’t solely on money. Instead, he says other types of wealth – time, social, mental and physical – are just as important as financial when it comes to what a truly successful life looks like.
“Traditionally, the definition of success has been exclusively about money,” says the 34-year-old. “That has been the way that we have defined our success. What I’m encouraging people to do is to think more comprehensively about the things that they truly care about.
“I’m not saying give up your worldly possessions and walk away from money and think that your family will magically feed itself, but to recognise that it is not going to be the only thing in your journey to building your wealthy life.”
In 5 Types of Wealth, he writes: “The chase for more is socially celebrated, while the contentment with enough is easily misunderstood as a lack of ambition.”
He talks of spending time with “high net worth individuals” who have made hundreds of millions of dollars, who are patted on the back and told they’ve won the game of life, when they have been through three divorces and now have four kids who no longer speak to them.
“You have to ask yourself, is that actually a game that I care to win? But unfortunately, that is the societal definition of success – and we write books about those people and read books about them. My entire life changed when I realised that I would never want to trade lives with the people that I was reading books about.”
Changing measures of success
In short, Bloom is a high-profile advocate for a more nuanced understanding of success. He’s not saying money isn’t important – “the reality is that it is” – but the point Bloom stresses is that we all get to live by our own design rather than accepting the defaults we’ve been handed.
It’s a definition that recognises the world is changing so identity and achievement can’t necessarily be built around work to the extent they have been and that individuals should define success on their own terms.
“You know, it’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs so the early years of your journey should be about building a foundation of financial wealth,” he says. “You need to create that base because it allows your basic needs to be met and for you to take care of the people around you.
“It allows you to escape that pay-cheque-to-pay-cheque cycle and hopefully create the level of financial rigour and discipline, in your budgeting and money management, so you can step out of that and start to think of the other areas in your life.
“The fundamental premise of the entire book is that you will never feel successful unless you create your own definition of success. My definition is going to be different to yours because the things that we care about and want to prioritise will be different, but the important point is that you get to decide.”
Of course, it’s tempting to look at Bloom’s life and conclude that now he’s “wealthy and sorted” he would say money isn’t the be all and end all, wouldn’t he? But Bloom’s own background offers clues to the sincerity of his stance.
His father, David, is a professor of economics and demography at the Harvard School of Public Health while his entrepreneur mother, Lakshmi, arrived in the United States in 1980. Bloom shared on his LinkedIn page that his “mom is an absolute legend. Born and raised in Bangalore, India. Secretly applied to college in the US and got a scholarship. Arrived in 1980 with no money to her name. Got her undergrad in two years and her masters in another two. Met an American guy and fell in love. They’re happily married 42 years later…”
The family lived in Weston, just outside Boston, which is regarded as a wealthy town. But Bloom says, while they were comfortable, they certainly were not rich.
“This was a town that had a lot of rich people – like very rich people – so I was kind of like the poor friend or relative,” he explains. “My best friend growing up was from an extraordinarily rich family, and I was always very envious of all these things that he had, you know, like all these fancy toys, all the best sports equipment. I never had that stuff.
“I didn’t want for anything, but it was never the fanciest things in the world like my friend had. I never really questioned the fact that he might have given up all those things in order to have the family that I had because while he would get chef-prepared meals every night, he’d be eating them by himself in front of the TV while I went home where my mom had cooked and we sat down at the table to eat.”
He went to Stanford University on a baseball scholarship, graduating with a degree in economics and sociology. Not knowing what he wanted to do next, Bloom got a master’s degree in public policy before Altamont Capital Partners.
His early life had also included a good deal of travel. As a child, he regularly visited his mother’s home in Bangalore and also accompanied his father, a health demographer, on some of his work-related field trips. Bloom says from a very young age, he saw what abject poverty looks like – and was surprised to meet in slums happy people who were genuinely enjoying their lives.
“There is research on this, that someone who is like at an average level in a very poor community is actually generally happier than someone who is poor in a very rich area because a lot of our happiness, when it comes to money, is based on a relative perspective of where we stand in comparison to others.”
Education is clearly a motivator in the Bloom family, so his parents used travel as “teachable moments” to emphasise his good luck in being born where he was. It is, says Bloom quoting billionaire Warren Buffett, winning the “ovarian lottery”.
“I think there is a sense of responsibility that comes with that, and my parents were always really thoughtful about instilling in my sister and I to appreciate these gifts and then to try to do something to help others along the way.”
Sahil Bloom’s six marketable meta skills to build for a high-income future
An extract from The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life
The basic model to establish a robust income engine:
1. Build marketable skills
2. Leverage marketable skills to convert them into income
This model is broadly applicable: Whether you’re a recent graduate just starting out or a seasoned professional late in your career, to establish and build an income engine, follow this basic model.
Meta-skills are the foundational marketable skills upon which other skills can be developed. The most useful meta-skills are those that can be leveraged across the risk spectrum from lower-risk, time-for-money primary employment to volatile, higher-risk, self employment – in a variety of potential income-generating endeavours.
Here are a few of the most valuable meta-skills to consider building:
• SALES: The ability to sell a product, service, vision, or oneself is a meta-skill for life. Selling is at the core of most success stories.
• STORYTELLING: The ability to aggregate data and formulate a clear, concise narrative. This applies across functional areas and is essential to a variety of career tracks, including traditional, stable career paths like medicine, law, and finance.
• DESIGN: In a world where artificial intelligence will direct much of the doing, design taste and preferences will rise in importance. The ability to direct AI (and humans) to produce a coherent, beautiful design vision will be essential across many industries.
• WRITING: You cannot write clearly if you aren’t thinking clearly. Writing forces a clarity of thought that is useful across any major endeavor. The ability to convey ideas in simple, concise language is a meta-skill that will provide value in every arena.
• SOFTWARE ENGINEERING: Our world is increasingly governed by bits and bytes. Those who understand that world will be better positioned to thrive. The ability to leverage AI to accelerate efforts is a skill that all software engineers will need to develop.
• DATA SCIENCE: Data is becoming modern gold, a currency like no other. The ability to analyse, tag, manipulate and leverage data is going to be an increasingly valuable skill in an AI-driven world.
This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, but each of these marketable skills is attractive in that can be leveraged to create stable, growing primary-employment income and higher-upside secondary-income streams. There are other marketable skills, such as those around medicine, law, finance, and certain professional services, that have strong income potential but are generally confined to single, stable, primary employment tracks, so they may be more limited in terms of long-term upside.
If you build a solid foundation of meta-skills, you will create the conditions for a high-income future.
