Excerpt
The 5 Types of Wealth Life Planner
Letter to the Reader“You’re going to see your parents fifteen more times before they die.”
Those simple words changed my entire life—but only because I acted on them.
They were spoken by an old friend who had asked me how I was doing. At the time, I was marching down an all-too-familiar path, chasing money, status, and material things, thinking that they would create a good life. While things were going well on the surface, the deeper realities were showing cracks.
I replied to my friend that it had started to get difficult living so far away from my aging parents, who were on the East Coast, three thousand miles away. I had noticed them slowing down and had grown aware of their mortality for the first time in my life.
He asked how old they were. I said mid-sixties. He asked how often I saw them. I admitted it was down to about once per year. He paused and then spoke those words:
“Okay, so you’re going to see your parents fifteen more times before they die.”
It was a gut punch. The realization that you have limited time left with the people you care about most can stir emotion in even the most stoic individual.
And in that moment, I was struck by a stark awareness of one fact: My entire definition of success—of what it meant to build a wealthy life—had been incomplete. I was prioritizing one thing—financial success—at the expense of everything else. I was going to win the battle but lose the war.
But awareness is nothing without action.
The next day, my wife and I had a candid conversation about the values we wanted to build our life around. That conversation led to a bold action. Within forty-five days, I had left my job, we had sold our house in California, and we had moved three thousand miles across the country to live closer to both of our sets of parents.
In that dramatic action was a powerful truth: We were in control. Of everything. Nobody was coming to save us. We had reassumed agency over our lives.
And if there’s one thing I can promise, it’s this: You are entirely capable of doing the same. You are entirely capable of squeezing everything you want out of this life. Of doing hard things. Of figuring it out. Of meeting your responsibilities with energy and enthusiasm.
It does not take talent or intelligence, just courage.
Throughout your life, you will encounter certain “truths” that are only truths in the sense that they’ve been repeated so many times that people accept them to be true. It takes courage to question these defaults in a world that profits from your acceptance of them.
The truth is that talent and intelligence are abundant. Courage is not. There’s someone out there living the life you want simply because they had the courage to ask the hard questions.
The life you want is on the other side of the questions you dare to ask.
This Life Planner will help you ask those questions and set your life’s course. It is designed to be dynamic, iterative, and all-encompassing in its capacity to transform every area of your life. You can and should come back to it regularly for reflection, adjustment, and course correction. The pages that follow will guide you on a journey—a new way to design your life, make better decisions, and take the right actions. The journey is just getting started.
Let’s start walking . . .
—Sahil Bloom, New York, May 2025
IntroductionYour wealthy life may be enabled by money, but in the end, it will be defined by everything else.
The 5 Types of Wealth
Pyrrhic victory is a phrase that refers to the victory won at such a steep cost to the victor that it feels like a defeat. The victory damages the victor beyond repair. The battle won, but the war lost.
This is important: A Pyrrhic victory is what you need to avoid in your own life. And unfortunately, a Pyrrhic victory could be where you’re headed if you don’t change direction.
You’re walking this perilous path because of one simple mistake: You’re measuring the wrong thing.
Money.
Austrian-born management guru Peter Drucker is often quoted as having said, “What gets measured gets managed.” He was right: When a measure of performance becomes an explicit, stated goal, humans will prioritize it, regardless of any associated and unintended consequences. You blind yourself to everything else, focusing on the single measure, no matter the costs elsewhere. Every new promotion, pay raise, and bonus feels like a win as you ignore the painful losses of a war slowly slipping through your fingers.
The war you wage is for happiness, fulfillment, loving relationships, purpose, growth, and health.
If all the battles you’re fighting are exclusively about money, you may win these battles, but you will lose the war.
Money is the default life scoreboard, but unfortunately, it’s a broken one.
The 5 Types of Wealth is your new life scoreboard:
1. Time Wealth
2. Social Wealth
3. Mental Wealth
4. Physical Wealth
5. Financial Wealth
Each of the five types of wealth is individually important, but it’s the relationships across them—the interplay and prioritization—that are critical in building a comprehensively fulfilling existence.
Time Wealth is the freedom to choose how to spend your time, with whom to spend it, where to spend it, and when to trade it for something else. It is characterized by an appreciation and deep understanding of the precious nature of time as an asset—its value and importance. It is the ability to direct deep attention and focus to the highest-leverage activities. It is the control over your time, the ability to establish your own priorities—to set the terms on which you say yes or no to opportunities. If you have a life devoid of Time Wealth, you are trapped in a perpetual loop of busyness, running faster and faster but never making progress, with little control over how time is spent and with whom it is spent.
Social Wealth is the connection to others in your personal and professional worlds—the depth and breadth of your connection to those around you. It is the network you can rely on for love and friendship but also for help in times of need. It provides the texture that allows you to appreciate the other types of wealth. What good is the freedom to control your time if you don’t have anyone special to spend it with? What joys can physical vitality bring if you can’t enjoy physical pursuits with people you love? What satisfaction can money provide if there is no one to dote on? Social Wealth is defined by a few deep, meaningful, healthy relationships and a fulfilling breadth of surface ties throughout your community or culture. If you have a life devoid of Social Wealth, you focus on acquired social status and lack the consequential, weighty relationships that provide lasting satisfaction and joy.
Mental Wealth is the connection to a higher-order purpose and meaning that provides motivation and guides your short- and long-term decision-making. It is grounded in a pursuit of growth that embraces the dynamic potential of your intelligence, ability, and character and an engagement in lifelong learning and development. It is the health of the relationship with the mind, the ability to create space to wrestle with the big, unanswerable questions of life, and the maintenance of rituals that support stillness, balance, clarity, and regeneration. If you have a life devoid of Mental Wealth, you live a life of stasis, self-limiting beliefs, stagnation, low-purpose activities, and perpetual stress.
Physical Wealth is your health, fitness, and vitality. Given its grounding in the natural world, it is the most entropic type of wealth, meaning it is more susceptible to natural decay, uncontrollable factors, and blind luck (positive or negative) than other types. Physical Wealth is defined by a focus on the controllable actions around movement, nutrition, and recovery and the creation of consistent habits to promote vigor. If you have a life devoid of Physical Wealth, you lack the discipline to maintain these habits and you are at the mercy of the natural physical deterioration that robs you of enjoyment, particularly in the latter half of life.
Financial Wealth is typically defined as financial assets minus financial liabilities, a figure often referred to as net worth. On your new scoreboard, there is an added nuance: Your liabilities include your expectations of what you need, your definition of enough. If your expectations rise faster than your assets, you will never have a life of true Financial Wealth, because you’ll always need more. Financial Wealth is built upon growing income, managing expenses, and investing the difference in long-term assets that compound meaningfully over time. If you have a life devoid of Financial Wealth, you exist on a treadmill of matching inflows and outflows, a never-ending chase for more.
With these five types of wealth, you have a new scoreboard—a new way to measure your life, because when you measure the right thing, you take the right actions and create the best outcomes.
You can win the battle and the war.
Never let the quest for more distract you from the beauty of enough.
