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This Book Changed How I Think about Time

2025-02-04 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 24:35 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Goals, purpose and life design (also: Productivity and time, Relationships and personal life, Health, sleep and habits, Money and investing) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Lesson from a book, Sponsor segment present

In a Book Club episode on Sahil Bloom's The 5 Types of Wealth, Ali takes one or two practical tools for each type of wealth: the four types of professional time, the relationship map, the think day and 1-1-1 journaling, the dimmer switch, and defining your enough life.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — The 5 Types of Wealth: what older people say matters, and the five types

  • ★★ Ali calls Sahil Bloom's The 5 Types of Wealth an excellent, transformative guide to designing your dream life, and is applying much of it to his own life. — 00:00:00
  • ★★★ Sahil Bloom (quoted): The core message of The 5 Types of Wealth: we are led to believe money is the only type of wealth, but a wealthy life is defined by everything else. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Sahil Bloom (quoted): Sahil Bloom asked hundreds of people in their 80s and 90s what they would tell their younger selves; all said time, purpose, people and health, and very few mentioned money. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ The five types of wealth in Sahil Bloom's book are time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth and financial wealth. — 00:00:56

00:01:24 — Time wealth: the memento mori calendar, three pillars, the quiz and the four types of professional time

  • ★ Roughly 5% of the people who watch Ali's channel are in their 50s or above, he says. — 00:01:24
  • ★★ Ali says a memento mori calendar is a visual reminder that life is short and time always moves forward, so we should be a little more intentional about how we spend our time. — 00:01:54
  • ★★ Sahil Bloom (quoted): Sahil Bloom's paradox of time: you are subconsciously aware of the immense value of your time, yet regularly and consciously take actions that disregard that value. — 00:02:20
  • ★ Seneca (quoted): In On the Shortness of Life, Seneca wrote that we are not given a short life but make it short, and are not ill-supplied with time but wasteful of it. — 00:02:20
  • ★★ Sahil Bloom (quoted): Sahil Bloom's three pillars of time wealth are awareness (that time is short, and of how you spend it), attention to the things that really matter, and control over how you spend your time. — 00:02:49
  • ★★★ Ali agrees with Sahil Bloom that control of your time comes third: everyone can have more awareness of how they spend their finite time and improve their attention to what matters. — 00:03:23
  • ★★ Ali suspects that, judging by the screen time on their phones, most people are not giving their attention to what genuinely matters to them. (hedged) — 00:03:23
  • ★★ Ali says the point of scoring yourself on the book's wealth questions is to see where you stand, then set a goal to raise that score over the next 12 months. — 00:04:50 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Sahil Bloom (quoted): Sahil Bloom recommends also defining an anti-goal: what you want to avoid doing on the way to raising your time wealth score. — 00:05:19
  • ★★★ Sahil Bloom (quoted): Sahil Bloom names four types of professional time: management (meetings, calls, emails), where most of it goes; creation (writing, coding, building); consumption (reading, studying); and ideation (brainstorming, journaling, walking). — 00:05:19
  • ★★ Sahil Bloom (quoted): Sahil Bloom writes that most people have no time for stillness and thought at work, so they make linear progress and miss asymmetric opportunities that need creative, non-linear thinking. — 00:06:18
  • ★★★ Ali advises colour-coding your calendar by the four types of professional time, then batching management time, blocking more creation time, often first thing in the morning, and making space for consumption and ideation, which he is working on. — 00:06:47

00:07:16 — Sponsor read for Reclaim.ai

00:08:54 — Social wealth: American Time Use Survey graphs, six lessons and the relationship map

  • ★★ Sahil Bloom (quoted): From American Time Use Survey graphs: time with family peaks in childhood and falls sharply after 20, with friends peaks at 18, with a partner rises until death, and time alone steadily increases. — 00:09:23
  • ★★ Sahil Bloom (quoted): Sahil Bloom's six lessons on time with others: family time is finite, cherish it; children's time is precious, be present; prioritise real friends; never settle with a partner; find energy in coworkers; love yourself alone. — 00:10:28
  • ★★★ Ali recommends Sahil Bloom's relationship map, which he is doing himself: list your 10 to 15, up to 25, core relationships and rate each as supportive, ambivalent or demeaning, and frequent or infrequent. — 00:10:50
  • ★★ On the relationship map, Ali says to cultivate the green zone of supportive, frequent relationships, and in the red zone of demeaning, frequent ones, make them less demeaning or see those people less often. — 00:11:48
  • ★★ Ali says research suggests that ambivalent daily relationships, sometimes supportive and sometimes demeaning, damage mental health more than fully demeaning ones. (hedged) — 00:11:48
  • ★★ Ali is focused on the opportunity zone of his relationship map: he has many supportive relationships but sees those people less often than he would like. — 00:12:17
  • ★ Ali points to the wealth score quiz on wealthscorequiz.com, made by Sahil Bloom and his team, which gives personalised responses to your answers. — 00:12:47

00:13:10 — Mental wealth: space to think, think weeks and the think day, thinking prompts and the 1-1-1 method

  • ★★★ Ali has historically neglected creating space in his drive to be productive and efficient, but his best ideas come when he has free time to journal or think, or is on a plane without wifi. — 00:13:33
  • ★★ Ali is actively incorporating a think day into his life. — 00:13:33
  • ★★ Bill Gates took think weeks off the grid in a cabin in the woods with a private chef and no internet to read and reflect, and credits many of Microsoft's good ideas to them, Ali says. — 00:14:02 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ Since most people cannot take a whole week off in a cabin, Ali likes Sahil Bloom's idea of a think day in place of a think week. — 00:14:32
  • ★★★ Sahil Bloom (quoted): Sahil Bloom's think day: pick one day each month to step back from work demands, seclude yourself, set an out-of-office reply, shut off all devices and spend the day reading, learning, journaling and thinking. — 00:14:32
  • ★★ Sahil Bloom (quoted): Sahil Bloom's think-day prompts include: if I repeated my typical day for 100 days, would life be better or worse; am I hunting antelopes or field mice; how can I do less but better? — 00:14:32
  • ★★ Ali points people who have not yet tried journaling to Sahil Bloom's 1-1-1 method. — 00:15:47
  • ★★★ Sahil Bloom (quoted): Sahil Bloom's 1-1-1 method: at the end of every day, write one win, one point of tension or anxiety, and one point of gratitude. — 00:16:17

00:16:46 — Physical wealth: his lowest score, the dimmer switch and "anything above zero compounds positively"

  • ★★ Physical wealth was Ali's lowest score on the wealth score quiz, which he took a couple of months earlier when Sahil Bloom came to Hong Kong to record a podcast interview with him. — 00:16:46 · Hong Kong
  • ★★★ Prompted by that low physical-wealth score, Ali has gone back to the gym, started running every day, had a Muay Thai lesson and has his first squash lesson, and his score has substantially increased. — 00:16:46
  • ★★★ Ali finds the idea of the dimmer switch useful: each of the five types of wealth sits on a dimmer switch, and believing you must switch off family, relationships or health to pursue financial wealth is fundamentally incorrect. — 00:17:25
  • ★★★ The dimmer switch made Ali realise that 15 minutes at the gym beats not going and one home-cooked meal beats three takeaways; with his physical wealth he has let perfect be the enemy of good. — 00:17:25

  • ★★★ Since his conversation with Sahil Bloom, Ali's mantra is "anything above zero compounds positively", while zero compounds negatively: on busy days he still does something for his health. — 00:18:23

    “Anything above zero compounds positively.”

00:18:59 — Financial wealth: what is enough, the Mexican fisherman, lagom and the arrival fallacy, his own enough life

  • ★★ Joseph Heller (quoted): Asked by Kurt Vonnegut how it felt that their billionaire host may have made more in a day than Catch-22 ever had, Joseph Heller said he had the knowledge that he had enough. — 00:19:35
  • ★★★ Since reaching his goal of financial freedom, which let him quit the day job and do what he loves, Ali has been grappling with what enough is. — 00:19:35 · work optional
  • ★★ Sahil Bloom (quoted): Sahil Bloom reads the parable of the Mexican fisherman as a lesson in identifying what success and purpose look like to you, defining your enough life and building a life that meets it. — 00:21:28
  • ★★ Ali says defining your enough life, your lagom life (a Swedish word for just the right amount), helps you overcome the arrival fallacy. (hedged) — 00:21:57
  • ★★ The arrival fallacy, Ali explains, is thinking you will feel you have arrived when you reach a goal; when you get there, your sights immediately reset to the next thing. — 00:21:57
  • ★★ Ali calls Andrew Wilkinson's Never Enough: From Barista to Billionaire a wonderful book on how hard it is, when building financial wealth, to resist seeking more and more. — 00:22:27
  • ★★★ Ali is still working out how much to grow his business against the rest of his life: he could make more millions but already has enough, and flip-flops between feeling he has enough and wanting more. — 00:22:48
  • ★★★ Ali calls writing the journaling prompt "What does my enough life look like?" at the top of a page, then creating a clear picture of that life, the single most powerful exercise here. — 00:22:48
  • ★★★ Doing this exercise, Ali finds he is already living his enough life, and says it is fine to keep growing the business for the fun of playing the game. — 00:23:34

  • ★★★ Ali keeps working mostly because he finds it fun and fulfilling, and reminds himself that, given a choice between making more money and doing what he loves, he should pick what he loves. — 00:24:04

    “if it's a choice between making more money and doing what I love, I should pick doing what I love”

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: dimmer switch · four types of professional time · relationship map · Sahil Bloom · The 5 Types of Wealth · think day

Also: People: Andrew Wilkinson · Bill Gates · Joseph Heller · Kurt Vonnegut · Seneca

Projects: Book Club

Works: American Time Use Survey · Catch-22 · Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Never Enough · On the Shortness of Life

Organizations: Microsoft

Concepts: 1-1-1 method · anti-goal · arrival fallacy · compounding · lagom · memento mori calendar · parable of the Mexican fisherman · think week · work optional

Places: Hong Kong

Products: wealth score quiz

Also centred on Sahil Bloom: What to do if you hate your job

Also centred on think day: How to Change Your Life

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