Change Your Life in One Year with Sahil Bloom

What if you treated your life like a puzzle?

Allow me to explain: when you approach a puzzle, you typically start by identifying the corners or edges.

Once you have your corners in place, you begin filling in the pieces, one by one. Each piece represents a small step or task that contributes to the larger picture.

Well, in life, progress is made by breaking down big goals into manageable tasks and tackling them one at a time. By focusing on completing one piece at a time (and not the whole picture), you gradually build momentum and move closer to your goal.

This was one of the many (MANY!) takeaways from recording this episode with my new friend Sahil Bloom, and of course, my temporary co-host Jen Gottlieb.

In this episode, you’ll learn how to make small changes that lead to BIG transformations, and what to do if you want to change your whole life… in just one year.

Click play to hear all of this and…

(00:00:01) Why you must take risks and start before you feel completely prepared.

(00:04:14) How Sahil creates small, daily positive impacts.

(00:05:59) The concept of changing your life in ONE year.

(00:06:52) The concept of making small pivots to reach your goals

(00:10:04) What to do when you’re being consistent but still not seeing results.

(00:15:19) How to get better at doing hard things (and why it’s important).

(00:17:06) How to train yourself to handle stress.

(00:18:42) The realization Sahil had that changed his whole life.

(00:21:19) How Sahil got started in entrepreneurship.

(00:30:12) Why you need to focus on complementarity partnerships instead of compatible ones.

(00:32:36) The importance of putting yourself out into the world to create opportunities and find the right business partners.

(00:32:55) What it means to expand your “Luck Surface Area” (and how to do it!).

(00:33:58) The importance of learning outside of your industry.

(00:37:30) How to find out what you’re fully capable of doing.

(00:40:38) How to rewire your brain to think differently (in the BEST way!).

(00:42:54) The impact of taking immediate action on ideas to solidify learning and understanding.

(00:45:14) Strategies for overcoming fear of large tasks.

(00:48:15) The power of creating momentum with small wins.

(00:48:50) The BEST way to create “winner momentum”.

For full show notes, visit:

https://jasminestar.com/podcast/episode409

You know that feeling when you find a platform that just works—and you never have to worry about switching? That’s been me and Showit for the past 10+ years.

I built my website with Showit because it gives me total design freedom.

If you’re ready to build a website that works FOR you—and not against you—head to JasmineStar.com/showit for a 14-day free trial + first month free when you subscribe!

Transcript

Jasmine Star (00:00:01) - It's a. Welcome to the Jasmine Star show. I couldn't be more excited to bring together two brilliant minds. As you all know, I bring in guest co-host to help curate a powerhouse group of people, and one of those powerhouse groups of people is none other than Sawhill Bloom. But before we get there, I want to say welcome back to Jen Gottlieb, my amazing co-host here in Miami. The conversations have been very powerful. And as a reminder, if you're just tuning in to this particular episode, the through line, aka the theme of every single guest is focusing on Jen instead of me talking. I'm gonna turn that over to you. Let's do it. When I thought about all the guests that were coming today, the overarching theme when Jasmine asked me to think of like, what's the theme? What's the what's the connecting factor? It was everybody starts a little bit before they're ready. Every single person that we brought in had to take a risk, had to do something that maybe they weren't completely and totally crystal clear about.

Jasmine Star (00:01:12) - And they started with some fear, with some uneasiness, with some uncertainty, and made some magic happen that maybe they didn't even realize was going to come out of it. So that's the theme starting before you're ready, started before you're ready. And on that note, Sawhill, I'm in an elevator going downstairs from this Miami sky rise, and we go down and we have about eight floors together. What's your elevator pitch? Who are you and what do you do?

Sahil Bloom (00:01:34) - Oh, gosh, that's a hard question.

Jasmine Star (00:01:36) - I know it is.

Sahil Bloom (00:01:36) - Bad at this, by the way.

Jasmine Star (00:01:38) - Hold on before we get there. Before we get there. You're so bad at it. Because when I read your bio, I was like, are you freaking kidding me? His bio includes Condoleezza Rice. I know, you know, it's like all these awards and I went to Stanford and I'm just brilliant. And I was like, P.S. at the end, yeah, I was like, oh, oh. And and Condi were a first name basis.

Jasmine Star (00:01:57) - Uh, Sawhill, please welcome and thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. How do we set the context and the framework for taking action before you're ready?

Sahil Bloom (00:02:04) - Yeah. I, um, the reason I'm bad at this, by the way, is when you work in, like, a very traditional path, you have the, like, little one sentence intro of what you do. So I started my career in finance and I always had that, like it was very comfortable. You'd say like, oh, well, I'm a vice president at this firm, like I work in private equity. I'm doing this. And you had like one line. And so going to any cocktail party or any event, people are like, what do you do? You have your little one line and then you move on from it and it's super comfortable and you're confident in it. Leaving that to go do the thing that you're uncomfortable, like you're not ready for it. Your theme. One of the things that holds people back from that is you.

Sahil Bloom (00:02:39) - Like, you don't know how to explain what you do. And that's so scary to like, all of a sudden feel like I don't have my little one liner that I can just give people where like they're like, what do you do? I'm like, I don't, I don't know, I do like ten different things. And I'm like really excited about this, which I actually don't do. But I'm hoping to do someday. It's like a really weird vibe. My whole bias when I was making the switch into my like, current world, which we can talk about from.

Jasmine Star (00:03:04) - Finance to your current world. Yeah.

Sahil Bloom (00:03:05) - To like this new thing was, I would much rather sink as the captain of my ship then continue to thrive as a deckhand on someone else's. And that for me, was just like my calling and my mantra of I just want to go and I'll figure it out. Like there's this ancient Persian poet Rumi, who said, as you begin to walk on the way, the way appears.

Sahil Bloom (00:03:33) - And I've had that up on my wall for as long as I can remember, because it's so true, in my experience, that, like, you have no idea what the path looks like. We all sit back and you like, want to create. Okay, I'm going to do this, this, this and this. I'm going to create this perfect plan. And this is exactly the path that I'm going to go walk down. But you can't see the path until you begin walking it. And in everything that I've ever experienced in my life, and I would bet with both of you and on your entrepreneurial journeys, it's been the same. You didn't know what the way was until you started walking on the way. You had to just start moving and then you found it. So it was a super long winded, not eight floor elevator way. And I didn't even answer your question, but that's how I'll open.

Jasmine Star (00:04:12) - So what is what do you say?

Sahil Bloom (00:04:14) - So if.

Jasmine Star (00:04:15) - You had to say something.

Sahil Bloom (00:04:15) - If I had to say something, what I would say is that my main focus is on creating positive ripples in the world. And I do that in a few different ways. One is through a venture fund where I invest in early stage technology companies. One is through a holding company of a bunch of businesses that, broadly speaking, help people augment, amplify their voice as an individual so that they can create ripples in the world. And then the third way is through my content, which is across basically any platform that you can have access to. And an upcoming book that I'm excited about, which really is focused on helping people live slightly healthier, slightly wealthier lives.

Jasmine Star (00:04:53) - I love that you said slightly. Yeah, I love that. It's it's more actionable. It's more tangible.

Sahil Bloom (00:04:58) - Yeah. My whole goal is like anything I put out into the world, I want it to be actionable, and I want it to help you in some tiny way. Like I think the focus on, like trying to get someone to create some dramatic change in their life is noble and great, but it's unrealistic because when you read something that.

Sahil Bloom (00:05:14) - Asks you to create some dramatic change, whatever the dramatic change is. 99% of people engage with that. They're like, oh, that sounds nice. And then they go back to living their normal life. But if you give someone something that's like the 1% change that actually might be acted upon, they might go if you tell them like, hey, go for a 15 minute walk today, don't worry about like working out for three hours. Go for a 15 minute walk. They might actually go do that, and that might turn into a 20 minute walk the next day, or a 30 minute walk the next day. And then all of a sudden their entire life has changed. And you were the tiny little drop that created that ripple effect. And so, like when I say ripples, that's what I mean by it. It's like, how can you be that tiny thing that creates this ripple out in the world?

Jasmine Star (00:05:54) - Beloved, can we go back to the quote that you live by? I'd rather be a captain.

Jasmine Star (00:05:59) - I'd rather go down being the captain of my own ship than the deckhand on somebody else's. Can I read something that you had said on an Instagram reel? Okay. You said your entire life can change in one year, not five, not ten. And so as we start this, there are a lot of people I would venture to say 99.9% of the people who are watching and listening right now, they desperately want to be the captain of their own ship, but they have a hard time looking at a timeline and not being beholden or believing that if it doesn't, if it's not executed in their timeline, that they will have not succeeded, they will be perceived a failure. So let's just go back when you said that tiny little ripple one year, when you talk about changing your life in one year, do you have like how can we talk about specific strategies? We are all podcast like this podcast listeners, listen, I'll I'll live and die. But these folks, they take action. So somebody wants to look at one year to say, I want to be a captain.

Jasmine Star (00:06:52) - What do I do.

Sahil Bloom (00:06:53) - 30 minutes today on something that you're interested in? I, I'm a huge, huge believer that like, one of the biggest drivers of inaction and of procrastination and of paralysis is intimidation. You look at it and you say like, oh my God, I'm sitting in my dead end job. I'm sitting in this dead end relationship, or my health is suffering and I'm overweight, and I cannot possibly envision the path to getting from here to being that fit person that I admire on Instagram, to being that wealthy entrepreneur that I admire on Instagram, to being in that loving relationship that I admire wherever I've seen it in the world. And the reality is, like, you don't go from point A to point B overnight. It's the tiny little steps that happen along the way. It's those tiny little actions that you take. And so that bias has to come from doing the one little thing today. And I always say this, that like, you are always just one positive decision away from being in a slightly better place than you are today.

Sahil Bloom (00:07:53) - And again, it's one small decision like, you don't need to worry about the 100,000 decisions that are going to happen over the next year. You just need to worry about this one. There's this scene. Um, have you seen the movie The Martian? Uh, it's like Matt Damon's stuck on Mars, and, you know, it's all about space. It's like this crazy sci fi movie. But at the very end of it, there's this amazing scene that I'm obsessed with where he's talking to, like he's giving a lecture about how he got home from Mars. Sorry. Spoiler alert. And, um, he basically says, here's how it works. You solve one problem and then you solve another one, and then you solve another one. And when you've solved and solved enough problems, you may get to come home. And he's talking about it in the context of surviving some traumatic event. But that thing like that distilled idea of like just solve the one problem, which is the action today. Don't worry about the thousand actions that it's going to take.

Sahil Bloom (00:08:45) - After that, solve the one thing, then solve another one, then solve another one. Matthew McConaughey talks about it as like do one in a row. He talked about it in his book greenlights. Just do one in a row. Like it's a great thing for like, people coming back from addiction. You're like, just one day in a row, just one day of sobriety, then another day, then another day stacking days. Like, if you can just do that, the one tiny thing that pushes you in the right direction, after 100 days of that, you'll be transformed. It's not even like it's going to take five years. That's why I said that on Instagram of you can change your life in one year because it's so tangible. I can see a year from now, ten years from now is hard for me to say. Five years from now is hard for me to say a year from now. If I do this one thing every single day, is my life going to be in a much better spot after doing that for a year? Hell yes it is.

Sahil Bloom (00:09:28) - So I'm going to start doing that. Like just take on the day, take on the next day, take on the next day, and let it let it compound.

Jasmine Star (00:09:35) - A question that I get asked a lot, and I would love to hear your take on this is about consistency and how to stay consistent when you feel like you're doing the thing. Like, let's say you start to pick up a habit and you're like, I'm going to do this for 30 minutes a day, every single day. I'm going to do it every day. And they're doing it every day. And a year goes by. Nothing has really changed for them as far as getting to that goal that they desire. What would you say about like patience, consistency, and when do you throw in the towel and shift gears and pivot? Or when do you keep going and doing the thing that you're hoping is going to get you to that big goal?

Sahil Bloom (00:10:04) - Yeah. So there is like a narrative fallacy, I would say, around people that have pounded their.

Sahil Bloom (00:10:13) - Into a wall for years and years and then eventually succeeded. We, like, hold those stories up as examples of why we should all pound our heads into a wall on whatever the thing is, right? You're like, oh, well, that actor or actress didn't get a role for ten years. They were still struggling and then they got their big break. And so like that is then celebrated as the thing of like, you should do that. So if you're struggling and you're not making it, whatever it is you're doing, just like keep that in your head wall because actually make it. That's just survivorship bias, right? Like we're ignoring all the people that pounded their head into a wall for ten years and then never made it. And so the lesson there is it's not about pounding your head into a wall. It's about getting slightly better at how you pound your head into the wall each time you do it right. Like if I walk over to that brick wall over there and I start hitting it with my head, and I do it like ten days in a row, and I'm planning to do it for as long as it takes.

Sahil Bloom (00:11:00) - If after like ten days, I haven't seen a single budge or chip in the wall, I might want to start thinking about whether there's a different spot on the wall that I should try, because maybe that spot is like not the right place. And so I use that analogy because that's what you need to do, right? Like it's not about just the consistency. It's also about getting slightly smarter at where you're applying your leverage, like where you're applying that energy and effort. And so if you're not after 30, 60 days seeing any tiny little glimmer of progress on what your main thing is, maybe you need to, like, make the tweak, reevaluate. Like, what's the slightly different version of this that I can approach it around. And that, I think, is where a lot of people will see, like the sudden surge is from just like, think about how you can get slightly smarter at the thing you're doing each day that you go after.

Jasmine Star (00:11:50) - It slightly smarter and on. On that note, when Jen is talking about consistency and you're talking about the brick wall and finding a different spot to hit your head if that is your objective.

Jasmine Star (00:12:01) - I thought that was beautiful. It was like very visual. Yeah. And I'm like, how many times have I actually constantly paused and said, you're gonna keep on hitting your head against the wall. Can you do it slightly different? Um, you also had mentioned a description of deferred happiness. Um, when I think about consistency, when I think about pounding my head against the brace, when I think about my voluntary decision, I'm going to do this. Can you explain what is happening from the deferred happiness? Like, I'm not that happy banging my head against the wall.

Sahil Bloom (00:12:29) - Yeah, well, it helps when you enjoy the thing, when you enjoy the pounding of your head into the wall, you've, like, really found it. Because then if I'm willing to pound my head into that wall for a decade, I'm just probably not gonna lose. Like, if I get slightly smarter at it each and every time. Like, you're gonna have a really tough time beating me if I'm enjoying pounding my head into that wall.

Sahil Bloom (00:12:45) - So, like, when you find the thing that you're happy pounding your head into the wall on you, like, really. And probably most people don't ever find that in their life. So when you found that just like, savor it and really embrace that. But the biggest thing is, like all great things in life come from delayed gratification from like the ability to say, I know that the thing I want is on the other side of something that sucks. Bottom line, every single thing you want in life is on the other side of something that sucks. Every thing, like the body you want is on the other side of a hundred workouts that are really hard. The relationship you want is on the other side of 100 really hard conversations with the person that you care about, the job you want, the business you want to build. It's on the other side of a hundreds of hours of really challenging work. You have to be willing to endure that in order to get the thing you want, knowing that going in is the most powerful thing because you're not expecting it to be easy.

Sahil Bloom (00:13:40) - You're not expecting it to be like, oh, here, I've been handed this incredible life. I've been handed this incredible relationship, this incredible purpose. Nothing in life that you actually should value should come easy. There's no seven easy payments of 1999 for like, an amazing relationship with a partner, for an amazing relationship with your kids, for an amazing business where you feel a ton of purpose around it that doesn't exist. And if someone tells you it does, you should run in the other direction because it's B.S.. And so I just like this fires me up a lot because it's something that I think about constantly is like, how can I just endure this a little bit longer? How can I just embrace this hard quote unquote, of whatever it is that I'm going through? And the beautiful thing about life is that you get to choose your hard. And I've said this countless times. Everything in life is hard, but you get to choose what your heart is. It's really hard to build an incredible body and physique.

Sahil Bloom (00:14:34) - It's also really hard to see your body completely fail you because you haven't used it. But you get to choose which hard like it's really hard to build meaningful relationships. It's also really hard to live on the surface with a bunch of people. Again, you get to choose your heart. It's really hard to live a life of purpose working on something you care about. It's also really hard to live without purpose, so you get to choose which hard you're pursuing. You get to choose the thorns that you're going to have on the path of your journey.

Jasmine Star (00:14:59) - Would you say that we get better at doing hard things? The more that we practice doing hard things? Like I see you in your cold plunge, I see you, I do the same thing. So I used to hate it. And now I do ice baths every Saturday to practice being uncomfortable so that I know that the. Next time something hard comes around, I'm like, I got this. Do you see that proof of concept? The more that you do it, because people don't like doing hard things.

Jasmine Star (00:15:19) - How do we get better at doing hard things?

Sahil Bloom (00:15:21) - Yeah, I mean, we live in a world that if you look at like the last 20 years, technology has progressively sucked the friction out of our lives. Like everything, if you think about any technology that exists, its main purpose, if it has succeeded, has been in reducing friction in your daily existence like Uber has made it much easier to get around. Instacart has made it easier to get your groceries. You don't have to go talk to anybody. Amazon has made it easier for me to get whatever I want at any point in time, without having to interact with a single human being all like, you know, dating apps. I'm not in the dating scene, but like, you don't have to go talk to a girl at a bar. Like all my friends that are in the dating me. Like, I don't have to go through the discomfort of like, putting myself out there to go up to a stranger at the bar and strike up a conversation.

Sahil Bloom (00:16:03) - I can just like swipe left or right, whatever. So we've reduced all this friction in our lives, and somewhere along the way, we have to have realized that, like, the friction was actually what created texture and meaning. And something has to give there. There's a pendulum that has swung too far towards this frictionless existence where you're like, oh, actually, maybe the friction was what created value and created meaning in our lives. And so my calling has been on helping people realize that you can strategically reinsert friction via these hard things into your life. And the cold plunge is like one of the trendy examples, right, that people have gone after. But it's no different than like choosing to walk the stairs instead of take the elevator. It's no different than like doing the hard work out, um, then having the hard conversation rather than just avoiding it and putting it off for forever because it's difficult. Those things, like when you are willing to embrace the voluntary hard things, you become better when the involuntary hard things inevitably come into your life.

Sahil Bloom (00:17:06) - And we all know this. Like we are going to face hardships of some sort that are totally involuntary. At some point you lose a family member, you know, your kid gets sick, you're sick, you're injured. Uh, you know, you get fired from your job like your company goes under. These things are really, really painful and hard. But when you've trained yourself to handle that stress, to handle that chaos, when you've become antifragile and you can benefit from that, incredible things happen. But it's only through the training you can't just expect. I mean, it's like I can't expect to be able to go run a marathon if I've never run.

Jasmine Star (00:17:43) - Exactly.

Sahil Bloom (00:17:43) - No different.

Jasmine Star (00:17:44) - Okay. So I feel like there's two sides of my mind, and I feel like I can sit with you all day and talk about who you are, like you on the inside out, and you emanate that, and you're so lit up by these things. And then there is another part of me that, if I'm being completely candid, is I love how you're living life because of what you're putting out.

Jasmine Star (00:18:07) - And I see your lifestyle choices. What an ardent fan you are of your high school sweetheart and wife, and what a big supporter believer, lover of your son. What an advocate you are for your parents and the decisions that they made and how they showed up for you. And so I see this really palpable, beautiful bite size firecracker lightning bolt content. And then I'm like, what's your business? How could I look at this, this constant desire to be in my purpose, to inspire other people to create small ripples and then say like, okay, but what is the back end of what Sawhill is doing in order to straddle these two lines?

Sahil Bloom (00:18:42) - Yeah, it's an interesting question. So the business side of all of this was pretty organic. So I worked in finance for the first seven years of my career. I was at a private equity fund. I was making lots of money. Things were great on the outside looking in. You like get patted on the back. You're like getting your big.

Jasmine Star (00:18:58) - Bonuses around this time.

Sahil Bloom (00:18:59) - Um, that was from 2014 to 20. I was like 23 until I was 30. Okay. Um, I'm 33 today. I just turned 33. Um, and things were great, right? Like I was making millions of dollars. At an age when people are just getting started in their career, in life and so on, the outside looking in, everything was great. On the inside. I was pretty miserable and I didn't show that to the world. I hid a lot from the world. I was very insecure, I was overweight, I was stressed, my relationship with my wife had really suffered. Um, you know, I was like, not present with my parents, with friends. Um, there were just a lot of areas in my life that really were strained by the fact that I was chasing this, like, singular scoreboard of trying to make more and more money. And I thought that was right. I thought that that was like what success looked like.

Sahil Bloom (00:19:48) - I was like, oh, things are great. Well, why don't I feel good on the inside? Like, why are things actually not working? Um, and I realized I had to make a change. And so, you know, I had one conversation with a friend that really changed my life. I sat down with this old friend, not really a super close friend either, and he asked how I was doing, and I said, it's getting hard being so far away from from my parents. We were living in California at the time. My parents were in the Boston area and he said, how old are they? Um, I said mid 60s. He said, how often do you see them? I said, once a year. And he said, okay, so you're going to see them 15 more times before they die. And it was just math. It wasn't like an insensitive comment. He wasn't trying to be rude. It was just math. And I've never felt a gut punch like that in my entire life.

Sahil Bloom (00:20:41) - And the next morning I woke up and I told my wife that I wanted to make a change. And within 45 days, I left my job. We sold our house in California, and we bought a house on the East Coast to move back. And that was really the start of this journey of my life, um, into building something different into like finding a whole different path, the business side of that.

Jasmine Star (00:21:08) - To actually go back. Yeah. You leave finance within 45 days. Your wife is thumbs up. A move across the United States. Yeah. Do you know what you're going to do?

Sahil Bloom (00:21:19) - So I had started writing, just like casually on Twitter about a year before that. I had 500 followers on Twitter, but I was stuck at home during Covid like I had no social life at the time because California was locked down. And so I'd started writing on Twitter. I'd probably grown my Twitter audience to like maybe 75,000 or so followers, but there was no business around it, you know, like I had a few little, like, side hustle type things that I was doing around it, like helping other people with their content strategy.

Sahil Bloom (00:21:48) - But there was no real business. I didn't have a newsletter. There wasn't like any businesses that had started. And this goes to the point of like the power of having someone in your life that believes in you more than you believe in yourself is unparalleled. And when I went and said this to my wife, she had no reason to believe that this made sense. I was making a whole lot of money. We had a great house, like we had a great life, great setup. And I went and said this crazy thing. And she was like, all right, great. Like. And I was like, what am I going to do? Like, I don't, I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't have another job lined up. I don't have a thing. And she looked at me and she said, like, why don't you do this thing that you're doing now that you're like currently doing on the weekends, like as a little what if you did that full time, like, couldn't it be bigger than it is today? And I'd never thought about it.

Sahil Bloom (00:22:37) - Like I just assumed I would go take another job in finance on the East Coast to just be closer to family. But suddenly you're like, oh, you think about something in a completely different way just because someone else believed in you around it. And that was what sparked me to actually and this is 2020. This is 2021. Wow. Yeah. This is, uh, like two and a half years ago, um, May 2021 specifically.

Jasmine Star (00:22:59) - So this was built out of Twitter.

Sahil Bloom (00:23:01) - Yeah. Originally Twitter. Yeah. Yeah yeah. Tweeting. Yeah. For fun. Yeah. Tweet threads. Um, yeah. But after that conversation I actually took a step back and I was like, okay, I'm not like the creator mindset in general is like, how do I get every dollar right now? It's like, all right, I'm gonna get this brand deal, I'm gonna do this sponsored post, I'm going to do this ad, I'm going to sell this course, I'm going to do all these things.

Sahil Bloom (00:23:23) - And my whole perspective from the get go was, I think in decades, it's just how I've always thought, like I think in at a minimum ten year time horizons. And I can't do that for ten plus years, like I can't possibly. There's just no precedent for like getting ad brand deals. Like it's all hand to mouth, right? Like you're getting paid. Yeah, you might make a lot of money right now, but that can't feed my family for 20 years. 30 years, whatever. That's not like there's nothing real there. And so from the get go, my mindset was, what is the actual business you can build that is decades long that like lasts beyond you needing to create a new piece of content on a daily basis. And my whole idea around that was like, let me look at my own pal. Like, let me look at the things that I'm spending money on as I'm building this. And how can I actually turn those into profit centers rather than cost centers? So Amazon Jeff Bezos is the most famous example of this.

Sahil Bloom (00:24:11) - They had to build out all of this, like internal compute and server power at Amazon in order to function as an e-commerce business. They built that out and then realized it was extraordinarily valuable to other companies that would rent it from them. So that was Amazon Web Services that they started selling the server capacity to other companies. And now that is like an $100 billion business. That would be a fortune 100 company just on its own, completely separate from the Amazon that everyone knows. The entire idea there was like turn a cost center, this server thing into a profit center for them. I want to do the same thing on a much smaller level.

Jasmine Star (00:24:46) - Can we pause? Yes. What Sawhill just did is ask himself, what am I spending money on? And that I could actually make money with?

Sahil Bloom (00:24:57) - I need to bring you around with me more often to do that. Slow down. I get excited about it, you know, like, all right, everyone understands this.

Jasmine Star (00:25:04) - Because here's the thing. I am tracking with you 1,000%, and I am 100% like AWS.

Jasmine Star (00:25:09) - Let's go. And then all of a sudden, I know that there is a disconnect between the person. Oh, it's a $100 million business that would be on it. And someone's like, wait, I'm trying to get my first million. Yeah. So what I want to do is just like, okay, look at your profit and loss statement and ask yourself, is there anything on this list? Anything I'm paying for that? I'd say, wait a minute, could I actually make money? Could you give us your temples? Yes you are, yes you are.

Sahil Bloom (00:25:32) - The first one was. I had built really like, blueprints for myself of how to grow my platform on Twitter. It turned out there were a lot of other people that were trying to do the same thing. Now you can monetize that via selling a course. I could create a course around how to build a Twitter audience, and I could sell $100 course to a lot of people and try to make it would be a lot of courses, but try to make $1 million off selling $100 course.

Sahil Bloom (00:26:00) - Or I could get high paying clients to pay 5 to $10,000 a month to have like a true service delivered to them. Done for you to, like, implement these blueprints around how to build your audience. It doesn't take that many clients. Then at 5 to $10,000 a month to make $1 million, and I hired someone to help run that, to actually, like, build that out and operationalize it for clients and build a business around it. So something that I had actually kind of like created myself now turns into a business that very quickly, I'm able to drive leads to because my whole platform like whenever people ask me, oh, how do you grow on Twitter? You're like, oh, well, actually, this company that I own can actually help you if you're looking to do that.

Jasmine Star (00:26:40) - Is that how you initially grew this just by people asking you, how did you do it? Did you go to market?

Sahil Bloom (00:26:45) - Yeah, exactly. Just by people asking, I mean, it was totally organic leads.

Sahil Bloom (00:26:48) - The beauty of a 5 to $10,000 a month client to is like, you don't need many leads, and frankly, you can't service that many leads when you're first starting out. But if you have eight clients, you're in $1 million business. But it's like it's just not many clients at that price point. And so you're serving like startup founders, you're serving, you know, small business like people who can pay that. They're happy to run that through their business because it's 50% off after you think about the tax deduction. And it creates enormous value for them, like having a platform on Twitter, on LinkedIn, which, by the way, like I'm going to convince both of you by the end of this to start building your LinkedIn presence because it's an unbelievable platform. Yeah. Um, but like for a small business owner, having a big platform on LinkedIn can drive millions of dollars of value into their business. And so they're perfectly happy to pay $5,000 a month to go do that. I mean, it's an incredible ROI.

Sahil Bloom (00:27:38) - So that was just one example. I mean, the next one was like video. I was starting to post videos on Instagram. We were doing video edits. I was paying 5 to $10,000 a month to like random agencies and editors, to make me clips from podcasts. I went on, and I was sending them referrals for clients because people were asking me constantly like, who did this video for you? And they were paying me $500 for every referral, just a one time fee. And I looked at it and I was like, I must have contributed 50% of this guy's business, and he's making $2 million a year, and I made $2,500. Like, it makes absolutely no sense. Let me just go watch this business. And so we went and did that. We went and created a video business and partner with someone incredible to run it. And we drive tons of leads to it. And like basically overnight it's a $2 million business. Okay.

Jasmine Star (00:28:22) - I'm going to pause here again. Yes. As you're looking at your profit and loss statement, what Zala did is notice I'm spending about $8,000 a month hiring an editor to create video content.

Jasmine Star (00:28:33) - He's like, I also know I'm sending out leads to other people, and I can look at the LTV lifetime value if he says, I've been working with this editor for a year, and I've spent somewhere in the ballpark of $10,000 worth of editing, $20,000 worth of editing, what would it look like if I sent people who are in my similar state to somebody else, and he could do back in the napkin math, just based on the leads that he got on his own, multiplied by the lifetime value, he could look at a business. But he didn't just say, you want to know what I'm going to do, I'm going to go in and I'm going to build this business from the ground up. He decided to say, I'm spending money. I know I can get the leads, I know I can make money. What I need here is an operator, I need a partner. I need somebody who's gonna come in and do the things that maybe I'm not that strong or I just don't want to do so.

Jasmine Star (00:29:16) - So he was saying, what is an expense that I can turn into a profit center? What is my skill set? And how do I get somebody else with a different skill set to handle all the leads that I've been getting a $250, $500 referral on? All I'm saying is look at this framework. There is something on your profit and loss. And here's the thing. You might look at him and be like, I'm not the person who's getting the leads, but could you be a partner for somebody who is cool?

Sahil Bloom (00:29:41) - What you just said there too, is a perfect example of a broader relationship. Framework of complementarity is more important than compatibility, and it applies to romantic relationships just as much as business ones. But everyone is constantly thinking about compatibility in a relationship like, oh my, compatible with this person. For a long lasting relationship, it's much more important to be complementary and to have your skill sets and your passions and your interests be complementary to the other person's so that when you are drained, the.

Sahil Bloom (00:30:12) - They're able to step up and be in that role. Like it can't always be 5050. In these things. Right? Sometimes you're at ten and you need the other person to be at 90. Sometimes you're going to be at 90 and they're going to be at ten. And having that complementarity and having that mindset of what I'm looking for is complementarity. It's not necessarily compatibility. That is like a big mental shift I've had around business and my own relationship and my like, reflections on what has made my relationship with my wife so strong is exactly that.

Jasmine Star (00:30:39) - So would you. And I know that we're very new in our, um, like peer to peer relationship friendship. We are more complementary because we possess similar ish skill sets. Like we know we can talk, get people's attention, guide people with leads. Somebody who would complement that skill set would be you talk, you get people to attention, you get leads. And I can operationalize the back end. Yeah.

Sahil Bloom (00:31:05) - My perfect example of that is my business partner in a lot of these businesses is um, his name is Hunter.

Sahil Bloom (00:31:10) - And Hunter has a track record of ten plus years of building service based businesses like dealing with high ticket services, client based businesses. He's done that over and over again, and he's ruthlessly efficient with it. He knows how to run them. He knows the pitfalls. I don't know any of that. And I don't want to know any of that. And I would suck at that. Like, I'm not good at managing people, and I'm perfectly self-aware enough to say that, like, I, I don't need to be the best people manager in the world. I actually, if I ever have like an organization within my like, holding company, that's like 100 people, something went really wrong. Like I screwed something up badly. I don't want that. And so when I found that though, like Hunter is great at that, but Hunter doesn't have the platform I have or the relationships that I have with these creators, with the people we can partner with. And so when you bring that together, that's like the one plus one equals three moment that everyone is looking for in business and in your personal life and your relationships.

Jasmine Star (00:32:06) - How do you go about making those connections with those people? Because I find that usually the compatibility thing is the thing that attracts initially you to somebody like a friend, like it's like, oh yeah, we have all these things in common. We've got this similar energy, the similar vibe. So if somebody is listening to this right now and they're like, okay, I really need someone that has the thing that I'm missing to be my partner in this business that I want to start. Where did they go to find that person? So they have to be really super intentional about finding that type of person. How did you find your partner, Hunter? I guess maybe you can even use that as an example.

Sahil Bloom (00:32:36) - I think, you know, first off, putting yourself out there into the world is extraordinarily important in everything that you do. I call it luck surface area. Like basically the idea is you get lucky and people say it's luck. The reality is it's engineered. It's like engineered serendipity. You're putting yourself out into the world.

Sahil Bloom (00:32:55) - And by expanding your luck surface area, more lucky things can happen. That's by like going to events that you're nervous to go to. That's by engaging in online communities and discussions. It's by like publishing that thing that you're terrified to publish, rather than just like holding it internally. All of those things expand your luck surface area. You're more likely to meet that person. The second piece of that is being willing and actually embracing situations where you feel like the other person is very different from you, where like they have an entirely different background or a set of assumptions about the world, different perspectives. They come from like a whole different ecosystem and world and actually opening up to learn about that and like being interested in other people and in other different world views and other different perspectives, um, on business, on relationships, on, on whatever it is that you're going about. Most people hide behind like sameness, right? You like you seek out sameness because it's comfortable. It's the most comfortable thing in the world is to just have conversations only with people that completely mirror your perspectives and worldviews.

Sahil Bloom (00:33:58) - It's the safest way to live. I can guarantee that actually, you'll never have your worldview questioned. You'll never have your assumptions questioned. Everything will be totally fine until all of a sudden something bad happens and you're like, you're dead because you haven't had that, like battle testing and the hardening that comes from seeing different sides of things. But putting yourself out into the world with a broad array of people and actually embracing the differences that come. That's how you find the complementarity rather than just compatibility.

Jasmine Star (00:34:25) - So good. So would you mind if I ask a little bit of a personal question, and if you don't want to answer it, we can cut it out. So you and I were texting yesterday and you had said you talked about the weather in Miami. I said, thank you so much for coming. And you're like, um, I'm going to dinner tonight. And you went to the dinner that Jen had hosted, and I've gone to her dinners before and everybody stands up, and then they say who they are, what they do and what they need based on how you're thinking about being complimentary and compatible.

Jasmine Star (00:34:56) - Who was complimentary yesterday and how are you thinking? I want to get into like, what did you see? Who did you talk to? How did you get there?

Sahil Bloom (00:35:06) - Um, I would say most people there were probably compliment I, I think I'm probably. Different than most of the people that were at that dinner. There was a lot of like domain expertise in different unique areas that I know nothing about. And I'm fascinated by learning most broadly, like what I enjoy and what I get energy from is just learning. And that's learning about people. It's learning about ideas like that's what gives me energy. And so whether or not I like agree with an idea or whether or not I think it's like, uh, you know, an exciting thing to go about and pursue. I love learning about the thing. And so, like, there was someone there that, um, actually, I was seated next to a gentleman who has gone super deep in like, direct response marketing for his whole life and has like, is thinking about how I interact with it and how it's going to change.

Sahil Bloom (00:35:51) - And I'm seated next to him. I don't I know nothing about direct response marketing. I've never been in that world. I don't know anything about it. But I'm launching a book next year and I'm interested in like, oh yeah, like, is there a direct response angle on how you like? So I'm asking him, like, how would you think about that if you were to launch a book, like, what would you do? Like what would be like the little hacks you would go about knowing what you know about direct response marketing. And so then I'm sitting there and it's like, I just got a free college lecture from like an expert on something that I never if I didn't go to that dinner, I never would have known, you know, the 1 or 2 things that I picked up that that I'm sending, you know, writing down in my notebook and I'm sending to my chief of staff like, hey, we should look at this and this when we're thinking about the book launch.

Sahil Bloom (00:36:30) - So that's just like one tiny microcosm example of when you open yourself up to things like that, you never know what that like. One thing is that is going to be the power law outcome in your life. And that applies again, like it applies to business, where you might find that like one person that you partner with. I didn't know when I was going to meet Hunter at some random event, but then we did, and I think we're going to build a $100 million business together. Incredible power law outcome. But I had to meet thousands of people over the course of ten plus years in order to meet the one person. And same thing happens to relationships. You don't just, like, stumble upon like the first time you meet someone. Maybe. Maybe somebody will do.

Jasmine Star (00:37:06) - I met my high school sweetheart.

Sahil Bloom (00:37:07) - I know exactly, so maybe I'm. Maybe I'm a rare example of this, but, like, it's pretty rare that that would happen. And you have to go out like, you have to go meet.

Sahil Bloom (00:37:15) - You have to step in the room, put yourself out there. You have to, like, get uncomfortable. You have to, you know, manifested in whatever way, like you have to have those conversations. You have to do that work in order to have the power law outcome. Like asymmetric things only happen when you took enough bets for the one asymmetric thing to hit.

Jasmine Star (00:37:30) - Yes. Yeah. You didn't know you were sitting next to. He is the considered number one direct response copywriter in the entire world.

Sahil Bloom (00:37:39) - I mean, I literally got like a free lunch. People probably pay $10,000 to have. Totally.

Jasmine Star (00:37:42) - And you just got that. And so you never know. You got to get in the room. And a lot of people, they, they actually stopped their own luck. Right. Would you say that you've you've seen that a lot where people just they, they have an opportunity and they don't show up for it because it's too hard or because they, they feel too uncomfortable.

Sahil Bloom (00:37:59) - Yeah. I think there's a lot of, um, look, it's easier for extroverts.

Sahil Bloom (00:38:04) - Like we're all probably like, at least to some extent comfortable, extroverted enough to, like, you can be in that room and you can be the light in that room that's like, you're there and you're standing up and you're connecting people and introducing them. And it's like, I am in awe of it and find it so inspiring because I'm not nearly on that level. But not everyone's like that. There are people that are like, super introverted. It's really uncomfortable for them to stand up and say what they do, and people hide behind that. They say like, well, that's just how I am. So I'm not going to go to these things. And what I would encourage anyone that's listening to do is to like in 2024, just like push yourself to be uncomfortable a couple more times. It doesn't have to be every single day, by the way. Like, you know, it's going to be draining for you. So it doesn't have to be every day. But just like a couple more times, deal with that discomfort and like, go do that thing that scares the shit out of you.

Sahil Bloom (00:38:52) - Go to that dinner, stand up. Like, do the improv class. Like whatever the thing is that's scaring you. Just go and do it because you really have no idea what you're capable of. The only way you find out is by putting yourself out there. It's by like taking that risk. It's by doing that thing that terrifies you, that you ultimately figure out the actual boundaries of your competency and capability. And I just love like, nothing makes me happier than seeing someone that was, like, previously afraid to do something, do it, and then experience the benefit they came from it. It's just like, that gives me so much life and energy when I see that there was actually there was a woman at the event last night who stood up and said during her intro that she was really introverted and she was nervous about doing it, but she was like lit up by standing up. And you can tell that, like she was saying, she was nervous, but she actually didn't really feel that nervous.

Sahil Bloom (00:39:42) - Like she was getting energy from the room and from talking about it. And she could see the people smiling and people nodding at her. And that was so cool to me to see someone that, like, clearly would have self-identified as introverted and that being a terrifying situation actually have this, like, new light to her and embrace the fact that she had like a real growth mindset around being able to go do that. I don't know if you've heard, um, there's this concept of neuroplasticity, which is like the idea that your brain can actually change in structure and function on. The basis of experiences. So taking on new experiences, doing new things actually changes the wiring of your brain. Your actual brain can change in form and function. It's the basis of this whole idea of a growth mindset. You can actually develop and change, but it only comes through action. It cannot come from sitting around, planning in a room, reading whatever. You have to actually take action on something in order to change how you operate.

Sahil Bloom (00:40:38) - And so it's so fun to see situations where people are enabled to actually take those actions and to create those rooms, like you're creating a room like that where someone can take that one action that positively changes their trajectory. I just think that like that gives me so much energy to get to experience that.

Jasmine Star (00:40:55) - Okay, so a couple of things. If we go back a couple of minutes, you had mentioned that after last night's event and then you met with somebody this morning. It's like you're putting these ideas around and you say, I carry this notebook around. And I have to say that I did a lot. There it is. There it is, it's pro. It's I did a lot of creeping on who you were because I'm under. When I look at something, it's a curse. I walk into any place at any time and I look at the structure of the business. It's just. It's like something I can't turn off. So the first one I come across, your content, I immediately was like, okay, well, this guy is amazing, very strong, understands his point of view where he is in the world, what he's doing and how he's doing it.

Jasmine Star (00:41:33) - And then I immediately went to like the business component. So I started reading your blogs, started downloading resources, started listening to on podcast interviews. And my number one question was, is this him in real life? Like, this is a this is a very unique skill set. So then the first time we've ever met was today, you walk in the door and you have like these really cool gold rimmed glasses that my Miami vibes are drinking, like, you know, black. Yeah. Put them on the whole thing. No experience. If you're not watching this on YouTube, you have the link. So we walk in and I'm like, oh, Stanford educated baseball player, academic award winning athlete that he is. And, um, I'm seeing him being introduced to people myself. And then he takes time for himself, sits at a desk and starts writing furiously in this book. And me being me, I have no swag. I was like, what are you doing? He's like, well, I'm just writing down a few things.

Jasmine Star (00:42:23) - My thoughts, what I've heard. And I'm like, well, what did you hear? Like, I want to know who he is and what he's doing. And he had breakfast with somebody this morning, but that wasn't enough. He said, I write them down and I'm like, okay, so do you just write them down? So it's like hand-eye brain coordination. And he's like, well, yeah. But then I take action within 48 hours and I'm like, so when he's talking about neuroplasticity, it doesn't exist without action. Can you get us into your brain and then expand hours? Yeah.

Sahil Bloom (00:42:54) - So what you just referenced is this like little rule of thumb that I have around this notebook. So I carry around it's a moleskin little like pocket leather notebook. And the reason I have a pocket size is two fold. One is so that it actually fits in my pocket. I can carry it. The other one is it forces you to actually distill thoughts like you can't write long winded notes because the paper is only so big, so you have to write like little short, quick writing tweets.

Sahil Bloom (00:43:18) - Yeah, exactly. Like everything has to be like distilled, cut down to the essence. And, um, my rule on action developed because I found that in school you were encouraged to, like, literally write down everything, like you'd sit in a lecture and you'd, like, take note on every single thing the person said, and then you're not listening anymore, like you're just writing and you're regurgitating. Right? It's just like in one ear, okay, onto the paper, whatever. And I'm not actually there's nothing there. And so what I started doing was saying, okay, anything I write down in my book, I need to take action on and by take action, what I mean is I need to either think about it more, explain it to someone else, or like log it somewhere else as something that I'm going to go deeper on later. And what that does for me is, like anything I write in there now becomes cemented in my mind. Because if I, if I like, learn about neuroplasticity, great, now it's gone.

Sahil Bloom (00:44:08) - If I don't do anything. But if I go talk about it with you and I explain it to you and I see, okay, how did Jasmine react to that? Like what were the pieces that she had questions on? What were the things that I didn't explain clearly enough? What was the way that I said it that like, lit her eyes up? Now I know a little bit more information about the thing. I know where I need to learn more and know where I need to, like, say it a little bit more clearly. I know where I need to slow down. That is like the incredible insight that allows a simple idea that you wrote down to become this like incredible, thriving concept in your mind that is now like connecting. It's actually like linking with other things that you have that are already on your pattern on your map. Um, so yeah. Do you have.

Jasmine Star (00:44:47) - Anything in that book that you ever write down that's an action step that you know that you need to take, that maybe you've been too afraid to take? And are there strategies that you use when you're really afraid to do something like, let's say there's like a big action in there.

Jasmine Star (00:44:58) - You're like, man, I'm scared of this. And here's the strategy that I'm going to use to take action, even though I'm afraid, because I know a lot of people listening are probably thinking, okay, well, I need an actual tangible strategy to just start and take that first action step because it scares me so much. That. I just keep putting it off to the next day and the next day and the next day.

Sahil Bloom (00:45:14) - Usually fears of action, or because of the size of the thing that you're acting on, at least in my experience, it's usually like, that thing is so big, like my goal is so big that I mean, paralyzing. It's like, um, it's a silly example, but there's this concept called, um, burdens ass. It's about this donkey. Um, that's like between two pails of water. It's like right in between. And because it's the same distance from each bale of water, it can't decide which bale to go to. So it dies of thirst.

Sahil Bloom (00:45:44) - So it's like the rational thing would just be to drink one of the bales of water, but you get completely paralyzed by, like, trying to make the perfect decision that you just get stuck and you die. And the biggest thing that always helps me, I'm going through this right now with my book project, is you have to deconstruct it down to the tiniest, simplest first step. And it sounds cliche, but it just plain works. Undertaking this book I wrote the whole draft. I got it done. It was with my editor, came back to me, you know, I hadn't written the draft. And at that point, like there were parts of the book that I had written six months before, and I'm going through and reading it again as I'm making the next round of edits, and I'm looking at it and I'm like, this isn't, uh, you know, nip and tuck edit like, this is war. Like, I need to cut mass. Like there is stuff that I can't believe I wrote that.

Sahil Bloom (00:46:35) - Like I'm a different writer now that I was. That is terrible. Like, I looked at it, I was like, this isn't going to be a simple process. This is going to be absolute war. Going through and editing this. And it paralyzed me for two days. I was just like, I can't even open the document because I didn't know. The first step was so intimidating of even acknowledging how much work there was going to be. To get this to a point where I felt good about it, and I sat down and I was like, okay, well, what is the single first thing I need to do? It's like, okay, well, there's that one part. Let me just go in like write down bullets, a couple of ideas that would like bring that actual narrative line together. And so I went and did that. And then when I went back into the document, I was like, oh, I've already done the bullets. Like, let me see if I can just, like, flesh that out into sentences.

Sahil Bloom (00:47:16) - And now all of a sudden you're like, okay, now I'm making forward progress. There's like, the big thing now feels more like a little puzzle where I'm like sticking little pieces into it. Then the like massive expanse of, I don't know what it looks like. Did you ever do puzzles when you were a kid or like, Legos or anything like that? I always loved, like, puzzles where it was like this enormous puzzle you're looking at and you're like, how am I ever going to start doing this? It's like insane puzzle. And then you go create the outline or you create the one corner, you're like, oh, well, now I can kind of see it. Like now I have a little bit of a dopamine hit because I've gotten a few of these things in place. Now I'm starting to feel like a winner. Now I'm starting to make positive movement in the right direction on it. And so it's like it's creating that. It's like, how do I create the corner of it? Yeah.

Sahil Bloom (00:48:00) - To use the puzzle analogy in whatever it is that I'm afraid of doing, but it requires stock. Like you have to sit down and think about, like, what is the tiny action that is going to start moving this in the right direction? But if you can do that, if you deconstruct it a little bit, it makes a huge difference.

Jasmine Star (00:48:15) - Get that little, win the tiny. That's what creates the momentum.

Sahil Bloom (00:48:18) - I mean, the winning sensation is undefeated. Like that little feeling of a win. It's why I had a, um, this is recent. I had a 24 year old young man reached out to me who was upset with where he was in life and asking me for advice about how to improve his standing in life, and I replied and said, for the next two weeks, wake up at 5 a.m. and work out. And he replied and I was like, that's not really business. I'm looking for how to make more money. I need to like, improve my life. I was like, trust me, just do that.

Sahil Bloom (00:48:50) - And the point I was making was one of the biggest reasons you're unhappy with where you are in life is because you don't feel like a winner, and if you can change that, you can start to change a whole lot. And this is not like energy. Woo woo. It's it's very real. Like if you can get up early and go work out for two straight weeks, you convince yourself in some small way that you were a winner, that you did the hard thing that you said you were going to do. And when you do that, that has ripple effects into every area of your life, because then you're going and you're sitting down at your desk, you're like, oh, man. Like, no, I'm actually a winner. I'm so like, I got up and I did this, I focused, now I can do this. You're going and eating and you're like, I'm going to eat healthier because I just worked out. Why would I, why would I not? I'm gonna go to sleep at the right time.

Sahil Bloom (00:49:33) - I'm gonna wake up at the right time. Like all the things in your life start to fall into place when you create the one positive thing that makes you self-identify as a winner. So doing that, like, whatever that thing is that's going to start, that little winning momentum will completely change your life.

Jasmine Star (00:49:48) - Can I talk to you about that winners mindset and how you said getting that win like there's nothing better than it. And so I know you have a son who's adorable. And by following your stories, you need to find him the perfect plush animal to take home every new city. You take him a plush animal. And so I know you. In the past, you talked about playing baseball at Stanford, and then you get to the end of your career. Due to an injury. And your dad played a very integral role to watching you play succeed. And then as you transitioned into other athletic endeavors. Your dad being there with you. When you look at your son and you try to build a winner's mindset, what did you learn from your dad that you would want to share with your son?

Sahil Bloom (00:50:33) - Oh, there's so much.

Sahil Bloom (00:50:34) - Um, I have a really amazing relationship with my dad. Um, it really goes back to his relationship with his dad. Um, I in general think that we either amplify or reject what we feel like we had with our parents and how we interact with our kids. It's one way or the other. You either like, amplify the incredible things that you feel like you had, or you reject how you feel like you trauma was created in you. And, um, unfortunately, my dad was on the bad side of this where his father did not accept that he wanted to marry my mom. Um, my mom's from India, uh, and my dad is white, and his dad was not accepting of that fact and told him he had to choose between him or her, and he walked out the door and never saw him again his whole life. Uh, to this day, I've. I never met my dad's father. He passed away. I've never met his mother. He has siblings. I've never met.

Sahil Bloom (00:51:27) - Um, full separation from the family. Um. What an incredible faith of his love. And my mother. Um, which is been a, you know, role model of, like, a loving marital relationship for as many years as they've been together. They just had their 40th wedding anniversary. Um, but my dad's relationship with me, I think, was so informed by what he felt he was lacking with his father. And as a result, he was so unwaveringly supportive of anything that I wanted to pursue. He was always the first person to be taking me to my lessons, taking me to my game, supporting whatever it is that I was excited about. And you mentioned it when I had to retire from baseball. The hardest call in the world was calling my dad. I knew that I couldn't play anymore, like I was fine with it. I'd come to terms with it. It sucked. But I was like, you know it, right? Like it's just not going to happen. But calling him and telling him that so much of our relationship was grounded in this sport and what we had built, and all he said on the phone was like, I don't care.

Sahil Bloom (00:52:31) - Whatever you do next, I'm going to be there to support you. Sorry.

Jen Gottlieb (00:52:40) - Um.

Sahil Bloom (00:52:41) - And this past year, I went and ran a marathon. It's like a silly example of this. I went and ran a marathon, and, uh, he surprised me, flew out. And it was just such an amazing example to me of, like, he truly lived by that. It was not. It wasn't words. It wasn't just words. It wasn't just something that he had said. It wasn't on paper. It was how he actually was going to live. You know, the whole idea of like, what you say is a human being is fine, but ultimately you're going to be defined by your actions. And so as I think about the lesson for myself with my own son, it's that like, I want to just be there to support him in whatever it is that he's getting excited about. Like, I don't care if he loves baseball. I don't care if he loves drama, if he loves ballet, like whatever.

Sahil Bloom (00:53:36) - The thing is that he's getting excited about, I want to be his cheerleader. I want to be there in the front row and be there to support him and what that is. And at the end of the day, like, what more can you ask for in apparent than that? It's like someone to be there to support you in whatever your endeavors are. Win or lose. Um, so yeah.

Jasmine Star (00:53:56) - I guess part of what led me to that question is, um, being able to see as a parent myself to could I love myself the way I love my daughter? And when I see a model of your father, the way that he showed up for you, and then I see a model of how you show up for your son in the way I want to show up for my daughter. I ask myself, as entrepreneurs, parents are not. Could we not extend the same amount of love and support and grace as we pursue our own endeavors? So maybe you don't have a supportive parent. And then the big thing that I've pulled away is we create positive ripples by standing in our purpose and having encouraging people to take a 1% to make a 1% change.

Jasmine Star (00:54:40) - And we've seen that modeled through Sawhill. We've seen it narrate it through Sawhill. We've seen Jen s really great, amazing follow up questions. But at the end of the day, the biggest takeaway for me is to extend the same amount of grace that I've seen other powerful parents do it. And then the way that I would like to show up for my child in the big push for me in 2024 is can I love myself and encourage myself to pursue those things that I want to? Um. Sawhill, uh, you are a powerful human being. You've opened yourself to your business the way that you think. You encourage us. And I think that many of us listening are going to make more than a 1% change for people who would like to join that journey. Where do people go to connect with you?

Sahil Bloom (00:55:18) - Best place is probably my newsletter, Sawhill bloom.com. You can find everything there. Fortunately, having a weird name, it's pretty easy to find me.

Jasmine Star (00:55:26) - Sagal, bloom. And on that note, I wasn't going to say anything, but he mentioned the newsletter.

Jasmine Star (00:55:32) - When did you start building your newsletter?

Sahil Bloom (00:55:34) - May of 2021, May 2021.

Jasmine Star (00:55:36) - And it now has over 600,000 subscribers. I mean, I.

Sahil Bloom (00:55:39) - Mean like pushing 700,000 put.

Jasmine Star (00:55:41) - Okay, so by the time this thing drops, it's going to be well over 700. And I think that is a testament of showing what it means to fall in love with something and pursue that journey and make one person changes at getting better every time he sends a newsletter, if you want to be on that journey. So bloom.com, and be sure to follow him on Twitter. Where it All began. Instagram where it's Still going on. It is an honor and it is a privilege. If you found this episode inspiring, be sure to tag Sawhill Gen underscore Gottlieb and your girl Jasmine Star. Like always, it's an honor and privilege. Thank you for listening to The Jasmine Star Show.