⁠Podcast with @Sahil_Bloom on Content Creation, Side Hustles & Fitness | GSTH 04

nobody knew this guy 3 years back all of a sudden he comes in India does three different events in three different cities with packed houses what happened a year can really change your life and 3 years you can become an entirely different person being impressive to others is overrated and it's much more important to be impressive to Yourself Journey over the last few years has really been about just that finding who I am sharing authentically for me working out consistently has been probably the thing that has had the biggest impact on my life when you work out first thing in the morning you start eating healthier you feel more awake you feel more focused when you actually get to work so you perform better you found your internal piece as a result you were able to double down on it what is your advice there how you tell me how do I get started you need to lower the barrier for what you consider to be working out any tiny amount anything above zero compounds when you see me post something on any platform it was literally me either on my phone or on my computer right then writing the thing I found that when I tried to schedule things out be like a content business and I lost the soul in it for's top 10 richest people in the world have 13 divorces I don't want to be that person and I never want money to stand in the way of the things that matter much more in the end what is your take on this disruption of AI that is happening right if anyone can create like a baseline level of content or video or whatever the thing is and where you stand out is by your taste level are you able to elevate your taste to create interesting unique things the things that are meaning meaningful in the real world cannot be replaced by a this human connection being in a room being with people it might enable you to talk to a virtual Mentor but I can't give you a hug with an AI human connection at the end of the day is still what we are grounded in and still what we will always come back to and Find meaning

in what's up guys how's it going this is an amazing turnout I'm so blown away thank you for all for being here this is incredible wow I would like to stand up and see this is quite a setup thank you guys thanks for coming around on a Saturday um my name is web I'm the founder of growth school and welcome to the first uh growth School Town Hall which is not happening inside of growth school so I'll just give you context of what we do at a growth school down hall right so every time I have great friends like sahil coming in right I host them uh in my office that is the growth School HQ that happens in Bangalore as well where you know the whole team gets access to these folks and these are very open conversations what I usually have with them closed door but I do it in front of everyone last year right last year so we did the first town hall ever with sahil when he had come a year back that happened in the office that was so early that the name Town Hall didn't exist then right now we have a name what do you think of that it looks incredible and this setup at we work is amazing so thank you thank you we look forward for doing this I'm really Blown Away by the number of people here I was um on the way in I was just reflecting with my parents and with my business partner who's here about how incredible it is that you can travel around the world and be here and have so many people come out that are so positive and optimistic and motivated and just have a chance to interact with all of you so I feel really grateful so thank you all for being here brilliant brilliant uh so this is going to be a very informal conversation between two friends Brothers however you want to put it so I'm going to go brutal on him uh and uh I will set the stage for you guys to go brutal as well later on because we will do a Q& A and we will keep sahil for as long as it takes but with that being said sahil like uh I mean I'm sure is there anyone who doesn't know this guy okay great hopefully everyone that showed up on Saturday knows superb dude few people do show up for me as yeah maybe do you want to do a handful I don't want to embarrass you all right so s like uh you know I was just talking uh to s's business partner and we were talking about how nobody knew this guy 3 years back right uh he was working for a job like most of us are right now uh and all of a sudden 3 years later he comes in India comes to India does three different events in three different cities with pack houses what happened what the hell happened in this you know the answer you let me know um how do I even describe what has happened I um I tend to think that a year can really change your life and 3 years you can become an entirely different person than you ever thought possible I like many of you out there today I was following a very traditional path uh in my own life I had graduated from school and took a job in finance I was basically following the path that I feel like other people wanted for me and the path that externally felt impressive and I was so focused on that in my life I so wanted other people to think I was impressive and I recently had a conversation with a dear friend who reinforced this idea that being impressive to others is overrated and it's much more important to be impressive to yourself and that idea has just stuck with me and the journey over the last few years has really been about just that it has been finding who I am sharing authentically and raw how I'm living my life on a daily basis not so much about being a performer and you know the thing that I kind of bemoan about influencers or the modern Creator economy is there's this tendency for people to kind of act you put on this character and you show up in a certain way online to try to impress others and to try to sell people on things I don't think i' sold a single thing to anyone in this room I don't have courses I don't have a paid online community mastermind that I'm charging for I have really just gone out and given free value hopefully value over the last three years of my life every single freaking day for three straight years and this is the manifestation of that I think uh hopefully that has come across hopefully has come across that this is really who I am as a person this isn't some ACT this isn't something I read about in a book and I'm just thrilled that I have the opportunity to continue to do this over hopefully decades and decades to come brilliant man how like there's so many

people who would like to go into a similar Journey like you did right uh I wanted to know how it got started break it down light your Twitter trade for us right in front of us so this is a flashback to like May of 2020 so I guess almost four years ago I was working in this traditional track in finance and covid hit and like many of you I was stuck at home and I had no social life and not that I had that great in thriving of a social life before but I had way less of a social life and I started thinking about what am I going to do with all this free time I had always loved wrri writing that was just something that had always been close to me something I had always enjoyed as sort of a like therapeutic outlet and my mother's an incredible writer and so I had always learned and by the way I point because my parents are sitting here in the front row and my yeah and my mother is a local bangalorian uh born and raised here so it's good to be uh good to be back and you know what I realized was that at the time there was not a lot of good information going out about really like personal finance or Finance we were at this time in the world where everyone was stuck at home but at least in the US the stock market was for some reason just going up and up and I couldn't understand why everyone was unemployed and all these companies were shut down but for some reason the markets were soaring and I had all of these friends from my prior Life playing baseball and who weren't in finance asking me those questions and so what I realized was that there was an opportunity there was like a gap in the market to provide information on a topic that clearly wasn't getting across to people you kind of had this world where people were either talking over your head giving you finance information with which was really them trying to sound smart so they were using all this complexity and jargon talking over your head to make you feel dumb and make them sound smart or you had these people telling you to YOLO into call options you know on Tik Tok or wherever it was giving you really bad information and what I realized was that the opportunity in the middle to provide the like basic very simple information was enormous so I started by doing that it was a niche that I understood very well because I was working in finance it was very core to what I was doing on a daily basis and I had credibility around it and from there I've just slowly kind of expanded what I was writing about what I was sharing about and the realization was basically if I want to do something it for decades and I knew that I couldn't write about Finance for decades because I don't care enough about it and what do I care about well I care about life I care about building a balanced healthy wealthy existence and I can do that and be on a journey and share that Journey with people in a way where hopefully they can pick up little insights along the way that allow them to live slightly better and the point that was really clear to me and really important to me was nothing that I do is trying to tell other people the answers because I don't have them I'm 33 years old I'm constantly in a process of screwing things up figuring things out but I'm asking questions along the way and I'm wrestling with those questions constantly and if I can share those questions and I can share with you how I'm wrestling with them and how I'm coming to terms with them you might be able to wrestle with them a little bit better 1% better than you currently are and that will make you better off in your life so it's much more about questions and my own experiences than it is about trying to provide answers so for people uh who are

thinking about approaching their life in the way you did want to start something in the side while having a full-time job what would be your advice for them how approach so it's really scary um I was on a traditional track that was paying me well I was making more money each year other people thought I was impressive uh we had a mortgage we had responsibilities we didn't have children yet but there was a lot of reasons why staying on that track would have been the easier and probably statistically at the time the better choice and it was a leap of faith like I don't know how many people out there have seen the movie Inception um there's this scene in Inception that I absolutely love where Saito the character is talking to Leonardo DiCaprio's character and he says do you want to take a leap of faith or become an old man filled with regret waiting to die alone and I remember feeling that and like feeling it in my bones like injecting that idea into my veins and the problem with the leap of faith is that there's so much that you don't know so if you're on a current track and things are pretty good and you want to make a change the other side just feels like it's hundreds of meters away you can't see it you don't know what it looks like and so that you fill that unknown with fear that's what it feels like it just feels terrifying and so my whole thought process that I went through was how can I make that 100 foot leap feel like it's 5et and the reason it feels so far is because of two things one is an information asymmetry you know everything about the current side that you're on but you don't know what the other side looks like you don't have the information and the second thing is an Evidence asymmetry you have tons of evidence about how to live your life and how you can build a life on the current side but no evidence that you can build a life on the other side so everything in my Pursuit before I quit my job was trying to close those two asymmetries it was trying to gather information learn from people who had made changes learn what the other side of the Gap looked like and then create evidence how could I go out and get one customer build one little business one little side hustle that would start to prove to me that it was possible that there was actual evidence in my mind that I could point to and say I'll be able to make it pay our bills we're not going to go hungry things are going to be okay that was really the pursuit and what I tried to do and so if you are out there and you're thinking about a leap of faith consider how you can do those two things gather information today while you're still in your current job consider how you can create tiny pieces of evidence because those tiny little bits of evidence start to build up in your mind and you can point to them it's like a cookie jar you like look to it and say okay maybe I can make it on the other side of whatever this leap is all right man like uh you know I

think you have to job and then you started writing I'm assuming that was the starting of everything right uh when did you decide to L where your job when like if there is someone out there who needs a framework for this saying I started when do I take the leap of fi or do I just say like just stop everything I'm doing and put that was approach or what do you is a yeah so I never recommend and quitting your current job before starting the next thing a lot of people will tell you to do that you'll find a lot of online gurus who will say oh you should just drop your current thing and go do it I think that's terrible advice because it's SC I mean you might have kids you might have other responsibility it's very scary and by the way when you do that you operate from a place of fear immediately in the new thing that you're going and doing you'll start the new thing and your first thought in your mind is going to be how do I make money because I need to pay the bills and when you operate from a place of needing to make money you usually make shorter term decisions the best decisions in life are made when you're thinking about how can you create value not how you can make money and so by starting the new thing while you're still well you still have the stable paycheck from the current thing you actually make much better long-term decisions that was what I did I for about a year was writing on Twitter was building the very start of my newsletter had started building a couple of little businesses and side hustles so I had information I had evidence before I ended up quitting full disclosure I did not quit until I was really forced into it um I wanted to move back to the east coast to be closer to family I told my firm I was going to leave we lived in California at the time and then I went and interviewed at a bunch of investment firms on the East Coast my initial operating mindset was that I was just going to go do the exact same thing I was currently doing stay on the safe track but go and do it in New York so I was still in the mindset of like the stable track and I got rejected from every single firm that I applied to and for anyone out there that is because you were too local on Twitter it didn't help there um you look there was one firm in particular where the founder was not comfortable with the idea that I would have had a bigger presence than him a lot of um if you've ever interacted with the world of Finance there's a lot of like chest puffing alpha male Behavior and the idea that the boss would have someone that was an underling that maybe had a bigger presence than him did not make the guy feel very good um but I got reject I mean like by 10 different firms over the course of a three-month interview period and it got down to where there was one firm left that I was really excited I thought about going and joining and they called me and rejected me and I had gone through like six weeks of interviewing with this firm I really thought I was going to get this offer and they rejected me and I woke up the next morning and I've never felt so lost in my life because I woke up and just said wow like this was the first time I've really made a terrible decision I already told my firm that I'm leaving so I'm kind of on the way out I'm a lame duck if you will like they know I'm leaving and I don't have anything else lined up there's lit I literally might not have a job and that same day I was talking to my wife and I was telling her how I was feeling lost and just being open like I think I made a terrible mistake and she said to me why don't you just do this thing that you're currently doing on the side as like your full-time thing like you aren't you making some money off of it like can't you just do this as your job and I had just never thought about the fact that I could pursue a different path I don't know how many of you are feeling like this but I come from a very traditional background my father's an academic we don't have a lot of like risk-taking behavior in the family that was never something I really thought about and so I just didn't have it in my mind even I needed someone else to provide the lens that I could look through and see the world differently than I was currently seeing it and so finding that by the way the lesson there is like you need people in your life that will see the world differently than you and that happened to me my wife which I was extremely blessed for but that could be a friend that could be anyone someone that's just going to force you to think totally differently than you would otherwise think about a problem that you're facing because that can be you never know where that's going to come from that one aha moment that is going to spark you to create the big change in your life I think that makes a lot of sense uh in a way you got into a position where you were forced to consider this option and that turned out to be an awesome option right uh just wanted to add a couple of scents here right so I've always been doing side huses all my life right that's that has been the source of learning for me right and that essentially led me to crack jobs and uh you know second time when there was a layoff that happened for the company that I used to work for which was called cluke it was in travel Tech and Co happened there was a layoff right uh then the side hustle that I was doing which was called a LinkedIn Workshop anyone here from LinkedIn Workshop there you go oh wow not bad big Crow yeah uh so I started something called as a LinkedIn Workshop which was just me doing something in the side and when this transition happened which I didn't fores would happen I was like screw it like you know let's try giving it a shot and the LinkedIn Workshop turned out to be growth school from 20,000 people we are 2 million Learners today in like 3 years so I think when you do side hustles congratulations something inside uh and you keep learning you know when is the right time to make that switch uh and the point is that it only comes from action you cannot I'm like a big planner I tend to want to like sit where I am today and just like look out at the future and plan out everything perfectly like okay I'm going to create the perfect business plan strategy I'm GNA like really nail this and I didn't have a single strategy or a single idea about where any of this was going I mean I was literally writing Twitter threads it was taking me eight hours on the weekend to like research some topic and write something I could never have imagined that three years from then I would be sitting here getting to talk to people it's it would have been ridiculous for that to have been the plan because that didn't exist there was no road map for what I was trying to do and so the point was that it only came through action it was like um roomie has this quote that as you start to walk the way appears you cannot sit where you currently are and see what the way looks like for your life you have to start walking you actually have to start moving in order to find what that path is absolutely I think uh you know like what I have realized it could be just personal and it could be for a lot of you people as well how many of you year are those during college you would just study one day before the exam and still manage to pass I think that's in a blade I'm sure a professor would not like to see that right hopefully you raised your hand mom cuz I know I got that from you but you know what like I don't know how many people in the world do it but we Indians are extremely good at it right most of us are uh so uh there is this thin line that comes in where there are people who fail the people who pass in the examinations people who fail in the exams are the ones who are sitting one day before the exam I like screw it not worth my time they are the ones who go into drain the guys who end up you know studying just for the one final day and giving it their best shot they're actually making doing fine in life as well and also with the exams and that kind of trans slits into everything that we trying to do right when we over plan when we think about so many things that over preparation lot of times unless you're extremely organized doesn't lead anywhere right so even at growth school and everything that we do uh every time my team hates me for this uh as well when there's an idea I was like guys when are we getting this done and I'll be like tomorrow we're taking it live tomorrow I was like 8 hours to go yeah tomorrow let's do it right and that leads to a lot of experiments so it's a great way of uh I mean information is not the problem we live in a world of literally abundant information at the touch of our fingers today anyone in this room can pull out their phone and have access to courses from the best universities in the world from the best professors people who have actually done it sharing their insights and experience on YouTube or wherever it is or with growth school thanks for that yeah I got to do the plug I was waiting for it so information is not the problem action is the problem what we're all lacking is action we like to talk about it we all like to talk I can start yelling about it but very few people actually want to be about it and it goes for all of us by the way I have to fight it and face it on a regular basis where I have to remind myself that it's one thing to be online and for me to tweet out about discipline or talk about the importance of any of these things that I'm trying to talk about but it's much more impactful when you actually see someone living it acting on the things that they talk about I was talking with my business partner earlier today about how at every event I've gone to in India there have been people who have come to me and asked me about discipline and I went and looked on my Twitter before coming here how often I've said the word discipline on Twitter I have literally tweeted the word twice since August of 2023 so in the last nine months I've only said the word discipline twice on Twitter I'm not sitting here being like hey discipline's important discipline this discipline that I'm just living it you see me on Instagram getting into a cold plunge every day you see me doing the dumb things that I do that maybe you think they're dumb every single day and acting in a certain way and that is so much more powerful for establishing in people's minds the type of person you are than me talking about it because there's so many people in the world who are going to talk about it and there's not many people in the world who are actually willing to be about it it's like Gandhi's quote be the change you want to see in the world it's not about say talk about the change you want to see it's be the change awesome yeah I think uh by the

way y means friend you did you pick any Hindi at all not enough my mom spoke Delo see I speak so anyways we we'll keep that conversation aside uh but uh you should pick some Hindi by the way uh so what I've been noticing with uh a few people that I admire quite a bit waru is one you are one more is that I end up seeing a very good structure with how you do things right uh I feel that the reason why you as a successful is because of the structure I would not use the there is some level of day planning that goes in there's some level of calendar or timetable that goes in I also know that you have a fancy word for this if I'm not wrong annual oh my annual planning guide right why don't you touch base on that yeah I mean the general idea that I have is that planning is overrated and action is underrated we've just talked about that it's very easy to plan it's very hard to actually go out and do and what I've realized over my own life is that the big goals that I set for myself actually don't help me all that much they're kind of nice in like setting the abstract Direction of what I'm trying to do but they're not very motivating on a daily basis like if you have some big goal for the year when you wake up in the morning and you're tired that big goal is not really getting you out of bed and James Clear talks about this in atomic Habits Like goals are fine but systems are where you need to fall and I really do believe that I think that the important Point actually is working back from those big goals into things that are much more micro things that are like the checkpoints along the way that are going to show you that you're on the right Journey reflection that you're doing on an ongoing basis of looking at your direction how are you heading are you do you need to adjust course change the things you're doing on a daily basis do you need to understand how you can actually pivot how you can change your daily actions to be pushing you in the right direction and the one other thing I will say there sorry to interrupt you is there's this concept of um neuroplasticity which is the idea that experiences can actually change the structure and function of your brain and the whole point there is that it's experiences it's not sitting down and doing thinking about something it's not planning something it's actually acting it's actually going and doing something so that whole idea of having a growth mindset it's actually grounded in science that you can go and change the structure and function of your brain through action through things that you are doing on a daily basis and when I talk about discipline the reason I find it so core to my life the reason I think it's so important is grounded in the idea of Love Languages so I don't know how many people have read about or understand like the five love languages and this whole idea one of them is acts of service discipline is the ultimate Act of service to your future self no one cares more about your actions today than your future self your 80-year-old self cares the most about the things that you are doing today because the long-term compounding of what you're doing today is going to be felt by them 10 100 a thousandfold and so every single second when you do the right thing when you do that hard thing today you were doing an act of service for that future self and that could be your 80-year-old self 50-year old tomorrow self whatever it is but the key is reminding yourself of that in the present because all of these things feel really bad right now and they feel great after you do them we all know this feeling like when you have your alarm go off in the morning it really hurts you're like I don't want to get up this is terrible you start having the mental gymnastics of like I don't really need to get up now I set my alarm earlier than I needed to I don't need to go get in the cold shower I don't need to do this workout whatever the thing is you convince yourself and that mental cycle starts going but after you do it you feel amazing if you actually get up on time if you actually go and do the workout if you do the thing you know 10 minutes into it you feel incredible and so the key is reminding yourself bringing that after into the before reminding yourself how good you're going to feel in 5 minutes if you just get started your feet on the floor and get out of bed if you just do that cold shower the hard thing that you said you were going to do how incredible that feels I'm going to start sweating up here I'm getting fired

up guys uh the way we want I want to take this conversation up is I don't like to keep the Q& A to it the end what I do is every now and then uh I would love to open it up for the crowd to ask up questions so right after this maybe uh keep your questions ready I'll open a couple of opportunities right now as well right uh man like you just touch based on the fact that you know how this journey has led you to create some businesses right and I I'm not aware of what have you been working so I'm very curious right now because what are you up to this is one of the funniest things because my parents who have been on this tour of India with me said that they didn't understand how I made money until they've come to these events um because it's totally unclear to them how I have any sort of income um which is by design by the way my whole intention was I didn't want to sell things to people the natural way that creators make money is by selling to Their audience you generate this audience and then you go and sell things to them courses products ads what whatever the thing is and I didn't want to do that I wanted to create an enormous amount of value for people and eventually I'm going to ask you all to buy my book when it comes out so that'll be the first thing that I'll ask everyone to buy um and so what I did want to do though was build businesses that sat alongside like adjacent to the things I was doing so I could leverage the platform that I had to drive business to these businesses that were set up the way that I actually thought about that fundamentally was grounded in what Amazon did with Amazon web services so anyone that's familiar with this story Jeff Bezos starts Amazon it's an online bookstore they're building it out over the years and they build this enormous e-commerce engine well to run that e-commerce engine they needed a tremendous amount of server capacity on the back end compute power and server capacity this massive enormous cost center for their business very complicated very expensive to do Capital intensive what they realized was that startups needed the same exact thing startups needed server capacity startups needed compute power so they could rent out what they had already spent money on and built out two startups and turn the cost center into a profit center now Amazon web services that thing is a hundred billion doll business it would be in the Fortune 100 if it sat as a standalone business but instead it sits within Amazon it's this incredible story of turning a cost center into a profit Center I wanted to do the same thing and so the idea was what are things I'm spending money on a monthly basis and how can I turn those cost centers into profit centers an example of that I was spending maybe $10,000 a month on things like web design web services branding for startups I was involved in ETC well instead of spending money on that I could go partner with someone and start a web design and development business that would now actually generate profits so I partnered with someone we started that I own a big chunk of that business because I can drive tons of business to it via my platform and turn something that I was spending $10,000 a month on to something that's generating me $50,000 of profit per month so you turned a cost center into a profit center now today there's 11 businesses in that portfolio they all have CEOs and operators running them so I'm not involved in the day-to-day operations of any of them I don't have to build a team which I'd be terrible at I don't have to manage people which I'd also be terrible at um and all I have to do is focus on my creative work and driving leads to those platforms phenomenal so uh you know like I'm a huge believer of distribution of a product right what I believe is uh right now with AI and everything coming into the picture building a product is no more it was not so hard before with no code and all kicking in and with AI coming in it makes it even easier so a lot of people will be able to build good products I would not say great products but they'll be able to build good products but because there'll be influx of number of products and makers coming up distribution is that one factor that will decide if a business is Su successful or not successful right and I think what you're anchoring on is that you're becoming that distribution layer for a lot of business in the bottom right which is I think is a very smart way of doing it I think Ali abdal is also doing something similar if I'm not wrong yeah we built actually Ali is a dear friend of mine I'm sure there are some fans of Ali's content out there he's amazing um he we launched so I co-own uh his uh YouTube Production Studio we built that for him I think we can get some discounts now yeah um yeah I mean the way the mental model that I have for this more broadly is that trust uh so Commerce follows Trust and so if you kind of go back in time like 50 years trust was held in the hands of a few large companies and they had the trust because they owned the airwaves they owned all the television advertising space they owned all of the advertising space in magazines in newspapers on the radio all of those places so they were the companies that people trusted and as a result commerce was built as the layer on top of that trust they were able to generate enormous consumer Brands and businesses but trust over time has been decentralized trust now is not in the hands of those enormous companies in the way it was before trust is in the hands of millions and millions of creators around the world of people with audiences that trust them whether it's narrowly for one tiny thing or whether it's broadly like a macro creator that you trust for a number of different things so as trust has been decentralized now Commerce will follow that decentralization it's slowly starting to happen but you're going to see that Commerce is going to follow that decentralization where be built on top of individuals that have that trust the problem with trust is that it's slow to build you can't just go out and like hack your way to building trust I can't go online on LinkedIn and go post about uh 10 TED Talks that'll change your life and 10 Chrome extensions here's a cheat sheet on leadership and expect you to trust me all of a sudden because that's fickle right there's nothing to that you don't know who I am why would you trust me I'm just doing some hack trust is built through long-term slow boring actions that are actually building a relationship one to one I haven't met many of you in this room I'm going to meet you all today I hope what comes across is that the person that you know from the online world is the exact same as the person that you're going to meet when we all say hello afterwards and that is what real trust is and so when I then go ask someone to use a service that I'm in involved in or to hopefully buy my book someday we've built a trust over years and years that now Commerce is being connected to that so as all of you anyone that's interested in becoming a Creator that's interested in building a life around this I would encourage you to think about it that way how can you actually build that trust even if it's with a thousand people 10,000 people and not worry about reaching Millions reaching tens of millions that was never my intention was to create value and build that trust and that opportunities and luck would come on the back of that

makes a lot of sense uh you know like again I'm I'm still very curious about uh the business operation that you're running right uh so in that aspect right like when you're working with 10 11 different brands at once you need to have an operating system with which you work with them because your distribution is limited to X and you have 10 brands that you're talk talking about how do you work with them what is the SOP there so as I said they all have CEOs and operators whose entire job and who own a big chunk of the business so they are really invested in all of them uh and the reason that I believe in that by the way is I don't want to get a phone call at midnight about some random business problem um I would much rather the person owns enough of the business that it's their problem and that they are empowered both financially and actually operationally to go and solve that issue um partially by the way because I am not equipped to solve that issue I've never gone and built a web designer development business I don't know how to run a service business on the operations I don't know how to build out a team remotely how to build a culture these operators have done all those things they're much better at those things than I am and I have enough self-awareness to know that I'm really bad at certain things I think I'm incredible at some things but I'm also terrible at other things and being able to build a team that is complimentary in that way is really the essence of this so the actual operating procedure I mean I probably spend one or two hours a week on these businesses um and everything is run to my organization at like the sahill bloom level is just me and then my chief of staff who is kind of the interface point with everything that exists and manages and operates all of this stuff runs all of the different you know content operations and things that were thinking about doing the basically the anything that's not related to creating content that's all I think I'm really qualified and good at and everything else organizationally is run under him and then I've partnered with all these people so strategy calls things about the long-term direction of these businesses struggles that we're facing whatever that is what I would interface with them around right so essentially two hours a startup a week and that's how you interface with your team that sounds very and then I mean I run a I have a venture fund where I invest in companies so I have A10 million Venture fund where I invest in early stage startups around the world um and that is me there's no one else there that's a it's a solo uh general partnership superb guys if anybody is Raising for the next startup you have like a VC here uh sahil bloom. com is my email address he making it very clear no pictures today okay I will'll open a question in the crowd as a Creator myself I was wondering if you were to start a 12th business right today what would it be because I really

love the model about building authenticity as a Creator by sort of cross financing or cross subsidizing your work as a Creator using other businesses so question like part one would be 12th business what would it be and part two would be what are the prerequisites for starting um such Services right because I understand that the space is very saturated there's a lot of competition do you need to be very de pocketed so yeah so 12th business um I think there's an enormous opportunity in recruiting and placement Services um for someone like me in particular I have access to on both sides of that market because that's really a Marketplace there's tons of companies that need to hire incredible people and I have access to a lot of incredible people uh that are looking for cool new opportunities and so I'm currently in the process of evaluating um opportunities to do that around very specific niches so not kind of a blanket idea of a placement agency which lots of them exist but around specific roles that I think are going to become more and more important in the future I've tweeted about this but I think the Chief of Staff opportunity is one that is going to continue to rise in prominence in the tech world and more broadly you know someone that like can really go down rabbit holes for an executive and can go and pursue interesting opportunities and be trusted to go and do that uh that's a role that I think is really interesting and not enough people are kind of thinking about it yet so I think there's a cool opportunity around that um in terms of what's required these Services businesses in particular are a really beautiful business model for cash flow um because most of them you're collecting cash on the first day of the month from a customer and then you're providing a service over the course of the month after so just from a cash flow perspective you generally don't have to invest in them upfront I mean across all the 11 businesses I think we've only had to invest capital in two of them out of the 11 upfront and very minimal because most of them were bringing in customers from day one and so they were generating cash from day one so the only reason you would have to invest would be to hire a CEO that you're going to pay like a professional person that's going to run that business my biggest focus in starting any new business is on the person that I'm partnering with because ultimately that is the person that I'm trusting uh to go build the business and also someone that's going to be trading on my face and name and that is the really important part because my biggest fear in the world is that I partner with someone that doesn't have the same values as me and that they go and make decisions that put my credibility and put my character in Jeopardy that is a long process of figuring out if you are aligned with someone value one of my business partners is here in the crowd we spent a year together before we started actually thinking about building a business together we spent a year getting to know each other tinkering with things hosting people together and it was there was nothing there until there was all of a sudden something and we went and started building it takes that long it's like the whole idea that you know Warren Buffett talked about it when the bank that he had invested in collapsed he was like if you lose me some money I'll be okay about that but if you lose me my Integrity or the Integrity of the firm I will be ruthless and that's really how I feel I cannot because my face is on anything that I'm involved in rightly or wrongly I might not be involved with a decision that's made but I'm the face of it and my face is tied to the thing and so I need to be really judicious about who I partner with because ultimately that is what's going to trickle down through an organization

will take one more from somewhere from the hi s my name is [ __ ] and um there a lot of people on LinkedIn so there's a guy who has 6,000 followers he also is a top voice badge there a guy who has six lakh followers he also is a top voice badge VAB has almost four lakh he doesn't have a top voice batch thanks for mentioning that was the context the question is how to get the top voice batch and what's the procedure of that uh followers is not the answer for you got to go into the back alley and like hand them the cash under the table um honestly I have no idea I um the top boys badge used to be like a very closely guarded secret um and I literally woke up one morning with it um and had no idea what happened in my notifications it popped up and just said that I had it um partially I think because there had been some spam accounts that I had notified them about who were like trying to sell people crypto or do whatever scam they were trying to do um and unfortunately some people fell for it like I went to my barber shop one day and my barber was like what do I do about that investment I was like what are you talking about and he's like the thing you messaged me about you know the $50 I sent I was like oh no did you really so people were fall for those things um but I don't know and now it seems like it's more broadly distributed you're probably like a competitor of some of the LinkedIn uh education businesses so maybe that's why yeah that is majorly one because I don't have one because Li did doesn't like to promote me much because I teach people how to crack LinkedIn and uh and when I say crack ledin I'm not talking about hey create content do this do that uh I talk about a little uh how do I put it can't really put it out here but you know things that LinkedIn doesn't want you to do uh yeah like basically I teach people how to hack LinkedIn not someone else's profile but hack l so it works for them you're the guy that's the crypto scam right uh so that is one uh but again right like it's been interesting what's happening right now I think I mean the reason why I've been seeing a lot of top voices uh and this disparity of no relation to followers which is a good thing by the way not a bad thing uh the reason why that is happening is LinkedIn is more and more becoming a Content platform from just a networking platform I mean networking in the sense for LinkedIn was connecting with people but right now LinkedIn wants people to create more content and how do you encourage more people to create content on the platform the moment someone is getting traction give them a pat on the back that is a top voice right now right and that's why they've created top voice marketing top voice AI top voice for a job role that you might have never heard of right uh and that's why they're doing uh and I think uh how do I put it see I think a bluetick was beautiful till yeah anybody and everybody could get it I mean until Twitter made the change yeah and now Instagram made it as well I mean that is when the value of the Blu TI stay by way never I have never on any of these platforms seeing any change in my engagement or in my follower growth from having it so I would also uh push back against the notion that it is impactful at all like the only thing that I've ever found works on any of these platforms is creating good content when I create something that's actually interesting it does well and I grow when I create things that I'm like n that was okay I just had to put something out nothing happens it doesn't work and so I think for anyone that wants to be a content creator create content that you would want to consume you yourself not that you think is going to go viral or interesting create content that you would actually want to consume on the other end and every single person in this room like the push back against creating content or the fear that people have is like well I'm 25 I haven't had any experiences why am I credible to create content why would anyone listen to me your experiences may not be unique But the lens through which you are viewing those experiences is an N of one that is unique to you and if you can actually just share that how you are struggling with whatever problems you're facing if you're a student how you're thinking about studying for exam the failure you've had and bouncing back from it those experiences are Universal everyone is having them but your perspective on how to wrestle with them is unique to you and so all of a sudden now you're creating content that no one else in the world can create anyone in this room can go and create 10 TED Talks that will change your life 10 free University whatever the trendy thing is that everyone's doing to try to go viral anyone can do that which means there's no barrier to doing it which means everyone will do it but no one can create the content that is unique to you and your lens so go and do that and get away from worrying about the cycle of how any one thing does and trust that if you do that over long periods of time that trust that I talked about is going to be built so the conclusion is

stop worrying about top Voice start creating cont now sahil I have this question for you uh where like I believe that there's always that one thing that has massive impact on everyone's lives right what is that for you I think for me um working out consistantly has been probably the thing that has had the biggest impact on my life um and I don't say that because of the impact on my fitness and on how I look I say it because I think that working out has more Ripple effects into other areas of your life than basically anything else in the world partially because the greatest successes in life come when you feel like a winner we've all had times in our life when we feel like we're losing when we have a lot of self-doubt when we're questioning ourselves at every turn when we're overthinking things and the solution to that is to create a winning sensation to create some tiny thing that convinces us that we're worth something that we're worthy that we are enough and I have personally found at every point in my life where I felt like I was in that dark place that working out has been the first positive movement the thing that kind of got me initially out of that rut because if you can wake up early and go work out before work you just done a very hard thing that you need to Pat yourself on the back for and by the way like actual Ripple effects when you work out first thing in the morning you start eating healthier the entire day because you just did a hard thing why are you going to ruin it by going and eating a cake you feel more awake you feel more focused when you actually get to work so you perform better you sleep better at night which allows you to create the self-fulfilling prophecy of being healthier and feeling better on a daily basis all of these things start to fall into alignment from one simple action and I'm just a big believer in life of like when you find that one thing that can create a chain reaction of positive events you should just double down on that one thing and were you always this guy or no no um what the working out guy yeah no I I'm not naturally a morning person so that's the first thing people assume that I like wake up every morning and that I'm like chipper and excited to get into my cold plunge um basically 10% of days I'm really excited to get up like 10% days I wake up and I'm fired up like I want to get up I Can Take On The World everything's great motivated excited I slept great energy 80% of days it's like somewhere in between like the bottom 10% we all know that feeling you just feel awful you're sick there's bad things happening you need to like just do the bare minimum on those days but the middle 80% is really where life is made like that is where the high Achievers the people that we ad admire the people you look up to entrepreneurs athletes whatever on that middle 80% of days they make the most of it they convince themselves to go do the hard thing they push themselves a little bit more than they otherwise would and I would say five years ago sahill was very prone to taking that 80% of days for granted and just going through the motions skipping things you know not worrying about it the details being distant not being there not being present in the moment um and as more broadly my life externally came into Harmony and as or sorry internally came into harmony all of these external actions and my interaction with the world started to come into harmony I am just a big believer that you can't have Harmony externally until you have Harmony internally So when you say internal Harmony you mean uh when you got out of your job and started doing something that you really like is that what you're trying to say every area purpose yes I mean working on something that I found energy through moving closer to family where I would get to see my parents see my sister um all of those things that created internal Harmony started to be reflected in the external world you know my wife and I had been trying to have children in California and we've been unable to conceive and I attribute that to all of the bad things that I had internally stress not feeling good feeling Discord with my family not being close to my sister being far away from my parents all of these things were creating an environment internally that was manifesting as these challenges externally we moved back to the east coast I quit my job I started on this new world and within a month my wife was pregnant with our son and so the internal Harmony manifested as external Harmony out in the world and I see that now that I know that and that is a mental model I have in my mind I see it with people that I meet mean you can see it on someone's face when you meet them whether they have that energy feeling that they are internally present that things are well internally and so if you're on that Journey trusting and trusting the process of reflecting and finding that internal Harmony everything in your external world will start to fall into line well you know what like how many of

you guys here uh and be uh Frank okay wanted to get started of wanted to start working out but haven't got there so here's the problem right and that's me as well by the way right here's the problem we all know that this is important we all know it that's exactly why we started when we feel terrible about ourselves a lot of us do including me and then we give up on our way of it right you found your uh internal piece as a result you were able to Double Down on it I don't expect everyone to find it and wait for it for them to find uh balance in life when it comes to working out and staying healthy what is your advice there how you tell me how do I get started you need to lower the barrier to what you consider working out and this goes for everything right it's we're talking about working out but it goes for everything everyone in this room is ambitious you wouldn't have shown up on a Saturday morning to talk about the things we're talking about if you weren't an ambitious person ambitious people have a serious flaw which is that we think that something has to be optimal for it to be beneficial we think that working out means going to the gym for an hour or 45 minutes or doing weights and cardio on the same day doing the perfect thing that's in your mind you're like oh okay that's what working out looks like well that's a lot that's scary that's intimidating and if you haven't built the Habit that's way too much you shouldn't be thinking of that as working out you should be thinking about how do I go for a walk for 15 minutes how do I go walk around the park during my lunch break how do I go walk around after I eat lunch how do I go walk around when I first wake up in the morning maybe you like dancing You Can Dance for 10 minutes in your room and that's working out find something that you actually enjoy doing as your form of working out for me walking was the thing that actually started building the engine for me because I found that I could never find a way to meditate but that walking without technology was meditative for me that was when I had the best ideas was able to reflect it also so happened that was great exercise when my son was born I wasn't able to work out for an hour a day like I normally like to but he would sleep on walks so I would walk for three hours a day just walking around with him in my own head and what better way to exercise and find that internal Harmony and the Solitude that comes so every single person you need to lower the barrier for what you consider to be working out beneficial from a focus standpoint with your Rel relationships any tiny amount anything above zero compounds it's why I mean some people have probably read my piece on like ABC goals it's okay to have an a goal associated with working out your best case scenario that's like I'm going to go to the gym for an hour but most days that may not be reasonable you may not feel good you might feel sick you might feel under the weather you may have stayed up late there's a million reasons why life will happen and you won't be able to hit that but doing nothing on that day is the best way to stop your compounding how can you go for a walk for 15 minutes on that day a seagull that is a baseline that you can do on any given day no matter how you feel if you're traveling that day you can walk around the airport I'm here in India this week I slept probably like three hours a night I was here for six days traveling to three cities we did seven events but I managed to go to the gym and run a little bit every single day I didn't get my perfect workouts in lifts in that I like to do but I didn't worry about it cuz I knew I could just hit the Baseline level and continue to make progress not stop my compounding engine so everyone I would highly encourage you if you struggle with this just create that in your mind create your a b and c goal where you give yourself a little bit of a break you celebrate good enough just as much as the optimal that's great advice I mean uh we do walk uh that is inside the office walking from one floor to another and that's where get treadmill desk that's a good idea I actually have one but I don't use it because I start sweating action not information absolutely uh so I mean okay let's take some question there's too many hands coming up there you go yeah my name is I work at and on top Bo yeah I know someone that wants a top boys how much you pay for it no I'll I will talk about it later uh on weekends I'm a professor I'm a marketing professor at Christ University just want to let you know that I took a day off so that I could be here today and my students are really happy but they're more happy when I said that I would get a chance to meet you and in my next class I'd be able to share some wealth of knowledge about you coming back to top voice I'm not going to talk about that but just

want to have a huge call out being the top startup in India for cons consecutively 2 years I think there's a huge shout out that we need to give to B and his team so cool I didn't know that great it's not a small feed at all right to my question what are the things that you do for upskilling where does all of this come from and how much time do you invest in getting all of this you have to say growth school yeah um so upskilling is the question and how do I learn and come up with these ideas I suppose I um I read a lot I listen a lot but the biggest thing for me is that my insights or anything that I'm sharing come from people I have always prioritized people I would say it is the best investment I've ever made in my life has just been to focus on you know that whole idea of like who not how and I've always prioritized surrounding myself with people who Lift Me Up and who inspire me and I listen to people I love nothing more than understanding The Human Condition and The Human Experience and the varied Human Experience I've learned way more from like an Uber driver on the way to a meeting with some fancy CEO I learned way more from that Uber driver than I did from the meeting with the fancy guy I was going to meet but opening your mind to those things and listening to people from different experiences different backgrounds is how you understand and how you process I try to have conversations with new people every single day and what I find is that when you're writing about fundamentally like the journey I mean most broadly like I basically just share I say this like I'm exploring my curiosity and sharing what I learn along the way exploring my curiosity doesn't mean I read books all day it means I'm talking to people like when I come to this and you see me post that I'm going to meet instead and talk to every single person that comes I mean that and it also is beneficial to me because I'm going to learn a million new things that I wouldn't have Otherwise Known the number of ideas and content ideas that you have from talking to people seeing what questions they ask you what are the common threads what are the things they're struggling with how can you make their life slightly better what is something that is universal that only comes from actually listening and opening your mind to the world and again my big thing has always been I don't want to talk about things that I read in a book I want to talk about things that I've experienced or wrestled with and so even when I'm talking about mental models or Frameworks it's things that I have actually used I've actually struggled with I've found value in my life from them and then I'm sharing how I use them in the hopes that maybe you can pick something up from that so that is really the basis for me I do read I I'd say I read less books than I used to um I used to be big on like read every non-fiction Business book in the world I find myself reading more history more Fiction more sci-fi like things that I feel like are sort of Mind expanding versus like data most non-fiction books and this is uh shooting myself in the foot because I'm going to publish a non-fiction book most of them can be summarized in like a 10 page newsletter or essay it was specifically why I held off on writing a book was that I wanted to make sure I had a book that you would read the entire thing and really find Value in every page because most of them again like the abstract gives you the idea and they might be amazing books there might be great stories after but your time is better served going out and living the thing after reading the first 10 pages that is why I've focused much more on conversations on people and on actually experiencing things because I think that also me sharing how I'm actually going out in living and like the interesting experiences I'm having is much more interesting content in the long run than like hey I read grit by Angela Duckworth here are the three things I learned because again anyone can do that not anyone can go out and have the conversations I'm having spend time with some of the people I have access to and share those things that I feel like I'm getting to learn taking one more from here how do sah Bloom keep the most important relationship that he shares with himself authentic and how does he stay true to himself great questions for anyone that couldn't hear um the first one is just around how you can find the different lens within yourself so if you don't have someone like the story I told about my wife giving me the different lens through which to look at the problem when you're in a dark place how can you find that internally um I think it was Tim Ferris that had this question that he asked him that he asked himself of what if you did the opposite for 48 hours was the question that he thought about so when you're facing a problem and you're struggling with it what if you did the exact opposite of what you're doing the kind of essence of that question is forcing yourself to look from a completely different perspective at a problem like what would this look like if it were easy was one of the things he often said I think that is the best way to force yourself to see a different angle on a problem just actually sit down and like if you're not good at doing it in your own head write it down write down at the top of the page like what is the completely different way that I could look at this problem what if I'm totally wrong about how I'm viewing the World Mark Twain said it ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble it's what you know for sure that just ain't so there are things in your life that you know for sure right now that just ain't so I've been there I've had many things in my life that I knew for sure in my first job that I was on the road to the rich life that I wanted like I knew for sure that success lay on the other side of whatever bonus was next whatever promotion was next I literally knew that in my mind it's so deep down engrained in me but I was wrong and I couldn't have been more wrong I was leading myself off a cliff forcing yourself to think about the other side of it what do I know for sure that just ain't so is a really good way to think about that and your second question remind me I'm G to I'm going to forget it now I oh how do I have my relationship with myself yes um finding Solitude on a daily basis building Solitude into your schedule is one of the highest Roi things you can do for your life I found that through walking as I said a lot of people have found that through meditation I can't get myself to meditate I'm go stir crazy I like sit and my mind starts racing and I've never been able to do it but I find that like walking is meditative for me at the end of every day I do a very short journaling thing um that I've written about I call it one one I could write down one win from the day one point of gratitude something I felt grateful for and then one point of tension or anxiety from the day doing those tiny things every day like if you can be alone for 10 minutes or 15 minutes with no stimuli by the way I don't mean like go on a walk and listen to a podcast on 2x speed that's not Solitude being truly alone in your thoughts for a few minutes every day will bear fruit across your life in finding Who You Are I've posted this before but there's a chart of the amount of time that you spend alone over the course of your life it goes steadily up from the start of your life till the day you die you spend more and more time alone so you have to find a way to love yourself you need to be comfortable with that Solitude because if you're uncomfortable with it and we're all really bad at Solitude we have our phones constantly and they're beeping and buzzing and the notifications on all of them everything constantly you go to the bathroom and instead of just sitting there for a minute you have your phone and you're scrolling on it we're so bad at being bored so finding a way to find a little bit of boredom in your life will really bear fruit it's why you have the best ideas in the shower or right before you go to bed by the way so what is your relationship with money

and how has that evolved while doing a job to right now because we like it or not it's a very integral part of everybody's label yeah money used to be a end for me um is the simplest way I would describe it was the thing that I was actually striving for was a certain dollar figure a certain amount of money um and that has now changed to where I view money as a tool to achieve more meaningful ends um I don't not like money it's not like I don't care about money anymore but what I know is that there are way too many Rich yet miserable people in the world and I have zero desire to have a billion dollars but be on a yacht by myself I would much rather have way less money and be surrounded by people that I care about and be healthy and be well I mean what good like when I see a very rich person that is in terrible Health later in life because they didn't focus on their health physical or mental they're miserable they're alone Forbes top 10 richest people in the world have 13 divorces among them 13 divorces in 10 people do the math I'm not I don't do public math but that's a lot I don't want to be that person and I never want money to stand in the way of the things that matter much more in the end the science is clear there are plenty of studies that now show that social connection relationships are the key to Lasting fulfillment and happiness and yet our scoreboard says that money is the thing that matters money is a very powerful and useful tool for having other things in your life for having freedom to spend time with the people you care about for having the freedom to experience incredible things with those people for being able to travel with my parents and have these experiences money is an enabler it is a means to some other end not an end in and of itself awesome did you have like a I'm going to get tactical right now okay uh did you have like a dollar value back of your mind saying that you know what I HD this number I'm good now I don't have to think about money anymore everybody has that number right anyone who doesn't have that number you should have one or maybe not he'll tell you so there's science on this so everyone has that number um and then you get to it and uh that number disappears and it's 2 to 3x whatever you have so Michael Norton is this Harvard Business School Professor that did a study on this with high net worth individuals so he went to thousands of people that had made anywhere from $10 million to $100 million and asked them where they sat on a scale of 1 to 10 from a happiness perspective they answered then he asked how much money would you need for it to be a 10 and across the board from $10 million through hundreds of millions of dollars every single person said they needed 2 to 3x as much money as they currently had in order to ATT 10 they did across the board everyone and I've gone and tested this with wealthy people that I know and the same thing comes up I have a friend who sold his company for a billion dollars he made personally 250 million I asked him what he would need in order to be happy because he's sort of miserable and he said he needs 5x as much as he currently has it's unbelievable like that's a ludicrous statement on paper no matter what and he would have said before he had sold his company that he needed 2 to 3x or five 5x as much as he had then and the number just shifts the goal posts just change but you have to actually understand that and then act on it on a daily basis it's one thing to just say oh yeah you know the goal poost is going to change but it happens and it happens to everybody you just reset it's the hedonic treadmill and by the way it's biology it's for a reason we reset because in the wild if you didn't reset to a baseline you got eaten you need to have the happy thing happen the selling your company the big promotion the bonus and then come back down to a baseline so that you're still going out to hunt so that you still have an incentive to go and do the next thing but you need to know that and the reason it's important to know that the goal post is going to shift is the same reason it's important to know that achieving whatever goal whether it's money or a career goal or a health goal achieving that goal is not going to make you happy you need to actually fall in love with the journey to achieving it because there's this thing called the arrival fallacy that says that we think we are going to suddenly feel like we've arrived when we've achieved that thing we think that happiness is on the other end of whatever goal we've set for ourselves but what actually happens is you achieve it and then you immediately start thinking is that it is that am I supposed to feel good now you start resetting to the next thing and you've probably all experienced that at some point you got the promotion that you had wanted for years you got the promotion you feel good for a second and then you just want the next promotion or then you see one of your colleagues who got a better promotion and you're pissed find happiness with yourself okay uh I want I wanted to like

double click on the Creator side of you a little more get a little tactical there as well uh one thing according to me that has worked uh really well for you is that you've been extremely freaking consistent right and uh it's extremely difficult to do that I'm a living example of that again right uh so like what is that framework that you follow starting from thinking about content ideas to actually getting the content out what is the kind of library that you operate uh so that you know that hey you know what you're out for 5 days what do you post you don't have time you're sleeping for three hours how do you work like talk about your creator life your creator sure um I'm probably a bit atypical in that I um I guess I run a Creator business in some ways um but I don't have like a Content schedule uh when you see me post something on any platform it was literally me either on my phone or on my computer right then writing the thing I don't have anything written like I don't know what I'm going to post today I don't think I've posted it I don't know what I'm going to post today yet it's probably going to be something about this but I don't know what I'm going to post tomorrow I don't have my newsletters written for next week I literally write everything in real time the reason is because what I have found is that I want inspiration to drive the things I put out into the world I want it to be driven by something that I'm actually feeling and experiencing versus something that I've scheduled out I found that when I tried to schedule things out be like a Content business and become a operator and be all regimented that I lost the soul in it that it just became like oh this is a job now and I don't operate Well when things start to feel like a job or like there's a whole apparatus around it and I never wanted to get caught in the Trap of the algorithm where you're a slave to just producing one type of content I have many friends who are enormous creators that you know that are miserable because they don't want to create the content that they have to create they're stuck in this Loop of like the only thing they can create is videos on passive income and they don't care about passive income but they know that that's the thing that gets views and so for their content business they that's all they can create they just have to create another 30 videos on passive income or on dividend stocks or whatever the thing is I didn't want to do that and I knew that I couldn't do that for decades because I would just lose myself along the way so I have gone the complete opposite approach of being entirely inspiration driven that doesn't mean that I don't sometimes grab things that I've written before and repurpose them if I don't have some bright idea that day but everything that I do and put out is done right then I do have a repository that my chief of staff manages in notion which is driven by this little notebook that I carry around with me everywhere where when I experience something I'm writing it down I send pictures to him and they're all uploaded into like an idea repository which is where we manage the entire flow so if I am looking for what I'm going to write about on a day I go into notion and there's a whole Board of ideas that we've looked at we have a researcher on the team who can go deeper if there's studies or things we want to look at um to actually just go deeper on the idea but the whole thing is sort of managed in real time versus being built out well in advance I think that is where the authent authenticity kind of comes out all right so great work man uh what has

been your relationship with formal education like what do I mean by that is what has been the correlation of your formal education to your success um so I went to Stanford uh undergrad I did my masters there as well I honestly didn't really have any business getting into Stanford but I could throw a baseball pretty hard at the time and so they apparently value that to some extent so I was able to go um I wouldn't say I made the most of my entire experience there I was kind of screwing around playing baseball for the first few years at the end at the tail end I started to sort of find myself academically more than anything else when I think of Education institions like Stanford or like the elite schools that you see out there what I think they do is they expand your luck service area I didn't learn a single thing in a class at Stanford that is useful just being completely honest I don't remember one thing from my economics class that I used to invest or to build businesses I don't remember a single sociology principle a public policy there was just nothing to that but what it did do was it put something on my resume that people think is impressive so they may become to me it put me in rooms with interesting people that I could interact with it got me access to people into Minds that I otherwise wouldn't have had access to so it expanded my surface area for Lucky things to happen in my life you don't need to go to a fancy school in order to do that in your life but it does take action there's this idea aidea from a neurologist named Dr James Austin he wrote this book in like 1978 that there are four types of luck the first is blind luck that's where you're born the chance occurrences of your life acts of God Etc the second is the most important one which is luck from motion this is like the idea that you can actually create lucky events by acting by moving around by meeting people by putting yourself in rooms like this because you never know when that one moment when that one connection when that one idea is going to spark the lucky thing you might meet your future business partner here you might have a conversation that Sparks some insight that changes your life but you don't know when that's going to happen unless you create motion the third type is luck from awareness which is the idea that your knowledge base that you're building over time makes you really good at spotting luck and the four fourth type is luck from uniqueness which is like when your weird hobbies eccentricities and expertise actually attract luck to you but the way that I think about it is that early in your life everything is about the motion so going to a school like Stanford going to an elite educational institution I think is a way to like hack your luck you get access to a lot of Lucky things but you don't have to do that in order to expand your luck surface area you do have to move put yourself in rooms where you have a chance to get lucky that's a great answer so uh you know like just double clicking on what you just said right uh how do you see uh your like I mean it's I always think that one thing leads to another all right just double clicking on that narrative what is the likelihood of you doing what you're doing right now if you are not doing the job that you are doing before this what was the likelihood nness of you know you not being in that job if you didn't do uh if you didn't study in the school that you studed in right how do you look at that like because I believe that you know there always is a ripple effect across how do you look at that narrative yeah I mean it's the reason I don't really believe in regret uh in the value of regret in your life like looking back on things and saying oh I regret this or that is really tough because I don't know how different my life would be if I hadn't done those things I can easily tell you that I wish I hadn't gone down the rabbit hole I had gone down with some of really like the last three years I spent in finance the first four years I learned quite a bit it was great I was learning a lot but the last three years I was pretty miserable a lot of other areas of my life were suffering but it's hard for me to regret that because the insights the things the people there's some way which it created where I am today I get to talk about those things that's an experience that I have that is valuable because there are a lot of people out there that feel that way so it's hard to ever go back and try to change something in hindsight and with the value of hindsight the other point that comes out of that is it's very easy to look back and say here was the strategy I followed every single Business book you read is from some entrepreneur who's saying like well I did this and so you should do this because this is what worked but all of those things are just expost it's narrative that's applied expost to something that worked and it may not work again if they had gone back and done it there was clearly luck involved there were things that happened circumstances whatever the thing was the reality is that you just have to live it you're living it going forward and then you're reflecting Looking Backward but life has to be lived going this way and so the only way to wrestle with that is to not concern yourself over the things that have happened in the past to not worry about the too far distant future and to focus on the actions that you're actually taking today and how are they making you better maybe not tomorrow but a 100 days from now like if you repeated your actions today for 100 straight days would you be better off or would you be worse off it's a useful question to ask yourself if you literally repeated today for a 100 days where would you be in 100 days is it better because then good you should probably continue having the day you're having today but be honest with yourself about it uh at some point I need to use the restroom I drank like this entire bottle of water you want to do it now no well whenever we end up wrapping up before we meet every sure uh before we start taking questions

uh again right like what is your take on this disruption of AI that is happening right now uh there are people there are two sides to this Co people are terrified of this that people are like ah not going to happen uh where do you stand what's your take on this and also how do you see this evolving for Founders and creators and of course the employees and everyone around yeah um I'm terrified of humanoid robots uh taking over the world I'm an investor in this company figure that recently had this whole video come out of like an open AI collaboration and their humanoid robot doing all these it's pretty amazing but it's actually terrifying I've seen too many movies where that goes badly to not think about it um no look I think that AI like every other technology that has come before it has raised the floor of what anyone can do I think you said that earlier where I think you stand out in the long run with the rise of AI is taste and I think this applies to content but it applies to business too if anyone can create like a baseline level of content or video or whatever the thing is then where you stand out is by your taste level are you able to elevate your taste to create interesting unique things because again everyone will be able to create the Baseline but how can you rise above that and I think that will apply to building businesses content I think that will apply to every area but AI at some point like the things that are meaningful in the real world cannot be replaced by AI I can't build a relationship with you face to face with AI this human connection being in a room being with people it might enable you to talk to a virtual Mentor with an AI it might enable you to do those things but I can't give you a hug with an AI human connection at the end of the day is still what we are grounded in and still what we will always come back to and Find meaning in the long RM I think this is the funny thing about it right when I put my evil hat on I feel everything is questionable can you not feel the human touch without the human touch can you not give the hug do you think that is not possible 5 years 10 years 15 years from now uh I mean it's all questionable according to me but there of course there's a layer of human to human connection uh that will always exist but uh what really shakes people up is how easy a lot of jobs have become for them and it's a good thing that the job has become easy the scary part is now less people are needed for that job right and every time when a fertility comes out challenging uh the world saying that this space is not going to get disrupted the next space that gets disrupted is that space if you know what I mean I don't want to pick anything right with all of this madness happening now nobody has a clear side of what's going to happen but the velocity with how things are moving before we know it we wake up tomorrow with ABC uh building an alternative to a marketer building an altern Al native to a content creator building an alternative to uh a developer or anything around it and again uh going deep into my evil hat I have this what I'm scared of right of course robots and all is there uh we have all seen iroot and all of that right but it all of a sudden feels like content I mean if just looking at the content space right content is created using AI it's engaged with AI it's a bot that is commenting on your content the whole Loop that content is created for is being you know influenced heavily with this Tech what will be left because to your point again I'm challenging your point here right to your point authenticity can also be learned because where are you learning ideas from you're taking inspiration from places right when you read something when you look up something a idea kind of clicks and you put it out here and today probably we can't do that using Tech but I will not be surprised if that can be done two years from here right if AI has access to everything that you have written think thinking about with the neural link yeah I mean I think that's also why I'm here like right that's why I'm doing something in person it's why I believe in building inperson human connection is why I think this is so important to do things like this because in a world where more and more of our daily interactions are technology interactions and through a screen I think that the pendulum swings back to people being starved for in-person interaction for actual human touch and human connection and I also tend to think that I things will actually disseminate slower outside of the few places where we live in your in Bangalore it's a technology Hub New York San Francisco Miami if you live in those places right now you think AI has taken over the world yeah and if you go to any other part of the United States I don't know about India and you ask someone who Sam Alman is you're going to get a really confused look on your face no that is true uh early days right awesome I think uh we had like a ton of conversations here uh ton of questions now I would like to spend more time with the audience as much as we can and of course every time I get something in my mind I'm going to pull the mic because I already have it so I want to know what

are the pro and more about the cons because that is more important as a entrepreneur what are the problems that you going to face I guess there's a handful of things uh I used to be a big fan of bodybuilding when I was a kid um Ronnie Coleman was this legendary bodybuilder this enormous guy and there's this video clip of him uh lifting some enormous amount of weight and in the video he says everybody wants to be a bodybuilder but nobody wants to lift this heavy ass weight and I think about that in everything in life everyone wants to be a Creator but nobody wants to lift the weight associated with doing it and the weight comes in the consistency of showing up every single day but more importantly the weight comes in the fact that you are putting your neck out on the line publicly every single day and you are extending yourself to have a bunch of people you don't know comment on you your life who you are as a human being whether or not they have the right to is a separate thing but there are a lot of people that will and that is a very uncomfortable thing so as a con you have to really develop thick skin like I consider myself to be a very positive person there are a lot of people in this room I would doubt you've ever seen me post like something trolling somebody making fun of somebody attacking anyone I've never done it I'm super positive everything I post is like flowery positive and yet there are still people in the world who will tell you that I am a scumbag that I'm terrible that I'm an awful person that I'm a bad father there are people out there that will say that and that is a crazy thing but if it happens to me imagine if you're like slightly more controversial how much it will happen and so the ability to develop a thick skin and get comfortable with that is hard earned and Tak takes a long time and it still bothers me I still feel like if I put something out and someone says something negative I still feel it and for like an hour I'll be thinking about it and that is it's just a tough thing of being like in public and building everything with the entire world to see failures are much more

public I just have a quick question for you how and why the hell are you doing this for free uh I mean see what does it cost you build something like this one is distribution and luckily how many of you are growth school learners here there you go there bunch of growth school learners and then we have sahil right so distribution is Sol that's what costs a lot of money two is how do we Host this we work was very gracious to partner and make this happen uh right and three is that we always want to find Opportunities to come and meet people I love doing it every time there's an opportunity you try to enable it uh we thought if this was much bigger if you have to do it in a five star hotel maybe we could have we would we should have or we had to charge but we figured out ways to do it for free can I add a number four sure did you guys have to put your phone number or email address into the registration but we already have because I guarantee you will get some growth School marketing materials in the days to come so free is not free see I'll tell you what I have a counter to this it's a very uh you know cpms are not so expensive in India I'm just giving you a hard time but awesome uh perfect what we do is we

take a quick picture