Building a Career out of Social Leverage | Sahil Bloom at GrowthSchool HQ | Beyond Degrees #01

spent so many years unhappy because I didn't get Forbes 30 under 30. like that really bothered I am still not just gotten I know I saw it great good for him I'm not bitter I'm not bitter that guy

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my mother grew up in Bangalore yeah my parents are here and my grandmother's here so yeah are you enjoying your time after so long yeah very good the traffic's bad it's great I'm excited to be here hey dude hey how are you to see you man good to see you where do you want me to put it plug it in flip it around so that you're not promoting Road for no reason this is no I need to hear a little bit more about girls school and what you're building you know I was with um tanmay last night that made a very good friend so he was excited that I was coming to see so what you're doing with growth school is get folks from Facebook

Google Microsoft Amazon whatever it is folks who are doing the job that you want to do tomorrow yeah learn from them we give you Tech they give you a Playbook and more importantly we solve distribution for you okay let's go meet the team cool this is usually where we hang out with guests ideally we should be doing it here yeah but just because it gets so noisy and this is more like a little cafeteria place which is also a standing desk this is our wall of love oh nice and then we keep clicking pictures and probably your picture would go here as well this is the like I said started from LinkedIn right this was my first LinkedIn workshop and we didn't know it would be growth school one day yeah this is cool what a cool story hey guys

hello meet sahil probably must have seen him on Twitter meet our team nice to meet everyone this is something we're doing it for the first time I've been planning to do this forever I pitched this to ankur First and ankur was like yes dude will do it for sure and then it never happened when I get a lot of very cool people like Sahel to address all of you and the idea here is Kyle has had a very interesting past consider this to be a podcast but with live audience how cool is that so dude like sahil first of all thanks for being here man thank you for having me the

first question I think of is you know like look at this audience right super young and all of them in some form of fashion want to become creators of some sort while having the full-time job please don't leave the jobs yet you also started in the same way right yeah you had a full-time job pandemic you started how did that go yeah I think the most interesting thing about the Creator economy if you will is you can do it alongside other things that you're working on it doesn't have to be this full-time switch where you leave everything that you're focused on and take this massive risk to like quit your job and go and be a Creator the way of the future is that you can start to do it along side build and you can take all the things you're learning from your full-time job and share that experience uniquely with new people that are out there because there's so many people who would kill to be in your shoes like you have this cool job you're working at a cool startup there's so many people millions and millions of people in India young people who are super excited about what you're doing on a daily basis and so being able to just share that is an easy way to just get started like how did you how

just get started like how did you kind of transition right you had a full-time job yeah I was working a full-time job at an investment Fund in California I went to Stanford and then took a job right near the campus there and I was working like 80 to 100 hours a week like the crazy Finance job you know I was just working basically yeah I started because covet happened and then I was stuck at home I wasn't commuting into the office I wasn't traveling all the time so I had all this time on my hands basically I had always loved writing my mom was a big writer and always kind of taught me to find this joy and love of writing and so I started writing and started sharing more what I found was that basically six nine months after I started I had bill built what was a pretty large audience and I was starting to make money from it from my newsletter from the course that I had done from a couple businesses that I had started and so it was all of a sudden like I was making more money on this random little weekend project than I was at my supposedly high paying Finance job and yet I was still working 80 to 100 hour weeks and like miserable on the thing in finance but I was really enjoying being a Creator and the biggest challenge for me frankly was like the idea of me quitting my finance job to like be writing on the internet my mom was like what the hell are you talking about what do you mean you're gonna do that and I still laugh about it now because like you know the Indian mother and her is like she wanted me to go to business school or go to medical school or you know go join McKinsey or whatever like that was the path that she envisioned we live in a very different world than our parents lived in you can go and build your own Universe your own ecosystem and build a life that you really want rather than the one that other people think you should have so that was kind of my own Journey with I mean when I quit I probably had 150 000 Twitter followers maybe my newsletter was 25 000 maybe at the time on don't get excited anshika has like some 200 000 YouTube subscribers oh man she's an engineer man like I've been a small

Creator myself and as we started growth School my Creator side of things helps us to grow and do things better at growth school so every time the revenue is slightly down for the month they would come to me saying do this so they can hit the months Revenue one's biggest reasons why we managed to get some really interesting investors onto board was my distribution also I would be a nobody how has this changed your life from being a financial boring guy making a lot of money I'm sure to becoming a full-time Creator how was your lifetime did you get tapped at the airport yeah there's enormous leverage to having distribution into having a brand the greatest companies now aren't hiring from resumes they're hiring from your Twitter profile because you can see how someone thinks and they think about the world how they share their ideas how they distill their thoughts into you know a piece of writing or into a video and that's so powerful and when you have now The credibility established by having built an audience people assume certain things about you whether it's right or wrong right like I see your LinkedIn profile I see you have a lot of followers there I assume you're smart I assume you're successful I assume 100 things about you that may or may not be true and so when you go and reach out to me or if you reach out to someone famous they see that and it immediately Clicks in their mind you have access to all of these new people I mean I think about like my Twitter account now I'm like one dm away from basically anyone because if they see my profile they assume that I have done something at least to achieve that whether it's right or wrong like they're probably wrong I'm probably an idiot but it works there's this tendency to have

all these timelines in life when you're young and it really pisses me off now thinking about it because I spent so many years unhappy because I didn't get Forbes 30 under 30. like that really bothers I am still like I was like man I can't believe you know I was like 28 I was like man I haven't gotten that yet what like what the hell yeah I just gotten I know I saw it I texted him one when I saw that it's great good for him I'm not bitter I'm not bitter that guy I'm not envious but you've managed to

get to almost a million on Twitter so I mean for all of us here and everybody would be listening it's the three things that you think that hey these are need to do to get started on Twitter what would they be develop a daily posting habit would be number one I think that's for any platform just getting into a habit of sharing regularly is really helpful find your community I was really fortunate when I was just starting to create on Twitter that I met this cool group of people who were all at the same time doing that with and then the third one is what I talked about earlier which is just write about things you actually know and that you actually care about so you have to find what works for you and figure out you know what your own kind of version of that is going to be awesome dude like one final question

before we kind of jump out I heard you met the CEO of Apple Tim Cook how the hell does that happen and I also read up that he mentored you what's about all this so it's kind of a funny story I when I first started working at my first job I knew I was going to be working long weeks and long hours and I really cared about health and fitness the only way I was going to be able to do that was if I went to the gym before work I was like okay I'm gonna do this I'm gonna wake up at 4 I'm gonna get to the gym by five and then I'll get to work by 6 30. and because it was so early there's only like five people that were there and about six months in I've been talking to all of them every single morning I was talking to this one gentleman and he we left and someone came up to me and said do you know who that is and I was like one of the Five Guys that hanged out I have no idea I don't even know his name we just talk every morning and he was like that's Tim Cook the CEO of Apple and I just said oh like I've been talking to this guy for the last six months I had no idea who he was and he didn't wear glasses in the gym in the morning so you didn't really look he didn't like he didn't look the way that he looks when he's on stage but I wasn't in Tech so I had no idea I was just talking to this guy and so then like a couple mornings later I had read some article about Tim and I was talking to him about it and I said oh like it was a great quote and I got to the office that morning and I was like I'm gonna try to email it to him and I didn't have his email address so I guessed his email and sent the article to him and said here's what I was mentioning this morning and he replied right away said oh you know thanks for sending it like super interesting and then I thought like why not just like be super bold and send another one and so then I just replied and asked if he'd be willing to get breakfast or get coffee and sort of answer some questions about career stuff he was willing to this is 2014. so it was before he was as famous as he is now he was kind of the new CEO but I think the fact that I hadn't known who he was and that I had just kind of talked to him genuinely it was really helpful because then we end up building like a very genuine relationship on the back of that starting point and he's been an amazing Mentor in my life I mean he's been super supportive of all the things I'm doing now was really an integral part of me deciding to make this life change that I made towards what I'm working on now so I'm very grateful for it and uh unfortunate awesome funny like weird showing up at the gym super early leads to something really lucky happening so you never know so guys wake up yeah people have hard time including me hard time to be at office by 11. I don't recommend waking up at 3 45. it was bad for my health overall anyway it led to some good things I should yeah what a great story to say right I met Tim Cook but I didn't know who he was yeah I told him that later I was like you know I didn't know who you were for the first while and he got a good laugh out of that awesome man this is this was great

thank you so much so do you guys want to click a picture see if we can get everyone in here I grow School love it awesome I opened the notion dock like five minutes before you came in I had no idea