Key insights from the conversation

Rejecting Default Paths

• Sahil's core message: "Reject the default, live by design", questioning the predetermined paths society expects us to follow

• The "tiger in the market" story illustrates how we believe things simply because they're repeated, not because they're true

• Most people never question their default assumptions about success, career paths, and life choices

• The worst situation isn't being on a bad path (which screams at you to leave) but being on a "good" path that isn't truly yours

• Sahil once believed the only path to success was through traditional high-status careers (banking, consulting, etc.) until he questioned this assumption

Career Transitions & Taking Leaps

• Sahil's career change began with rejections from traditional jobs, forcing him to consider his weekend writing as a potential career

• What makes leaps of faith scary is the information asymmetry: we have complete information about our current path but almost none about potential new ones

• The solution: gradually gather information and evidence about alternative paths to reduce fear and increase courage

• Sahil emphasizes the value of "path blindness": you can't see better possibilities until you step off your current path

• About 99% of people on good paths that aren't right for them will never make the leap to something better

Reality vs. Illusion of Freedom

• The "guru vision" of entrepreneurship (four-hour workweek, location freedom) often masks challenging realities

• True freedom means: no structure unless you create it, total accountability, no excuses, and eating what you kill

• Decision fatigue becomes a major challenge when building a personal brand business

• The "key man risk" problem: difficulty separating your personal brand from your business when your face is the product

Time & Priority Management

• The "Right Now Test": When invited to future events, ask "Would I attend if this were happening tonight?" to avoid overcommitting

• As success grows, requests for your time become effectively infinite

• Balancing presence and ambition creates tension, especially in your 30s-40s when career compounds while having young children

• The Warren Buffett thought experiment: Nobody would trade their youth for his $130B fortune, proving we value time over money when forced to choose

• Family should be included in your mission, not competing with it: help them understand why you're doing what you're doing

Authenticity & Personal Growth

• Sahil maintains all his content creation personally rather than outsourcing to staff or AI

• "Unscalable things become the most scalable over long periods of time": authenticity creates lasting connections

• Journaling practice simplified to the "One-One-One Method": one win, one stress point, one gratitude point daily (2-3 minutes)

• Success without self-worth in other areas creates deeply insecure successful people who constantly status signal

• Create your own success metrics rather than competing on someone else's scoreboard

Future Planning

• The most interesting opportunities in life are inherently invisible until you start taking action

• Five years ago, Sahil couldn't have predicted any aspect of his current life

• Financial security matters first (addressing Maslow's hierarchy) before pursuing deeper definitions of success

• Running your own race from wherever you start is more important than comparing yourself to others

Full transcript

Here is the full conversation transcript, edited for clarity and conciseness. Here’s also the link to the conversation on LinkedIn live.

Roberto: Hello.

Sahil: Hey, how are you?

Roberto: excited to be here

Sahil: Is my first LinkedIn live.

Roberto: Thank you for connecting. I'm super excited. To do this, and I want to thank you, Sahil, for investing this hour of your time that as you perfectly know, we cannot buy more time. It's gone. And also to the people who is connected.

We had the so many interesting exchanges in anticipation for this conversation I also want to invite you in the chat. Besides saying hi, we are here to interact and to have a conversation.

These will not be a scripted interview. Question one, question two. It's so much more fun if we engage with you, if you ask questions. And as you also say, Sahil, to be interesting, be interested.

Sahil: Yes.

Roberto: I want to make a very quick introduction because one of my friends who I contacted to invite her to this live, this was Sandra she told me, oh, I love to because Sahil looks like such a good person I'm fascinated by good persons. Yeah. And I love this definition and I definitely think that. is what you share and what you express. And my first question for you, Sahil, will be one of the questions that actually I, I know you, suggest,to the people for me would be if you had a billboard to see all the world, what would put on that billboard?

Sahil: I like you're using my own question against me. This is very good. It's a good starting point. I think, it's a funny question for me to answer because I actually did this. I did have a billboard in Times Square when my book came out, and we did quite literally put on the billboard, reject the default live by design and that message, the reason we chose it, and the reason it was such a core mantra of the book is because, that is at the core of everything that, I believe people should be doing more of. It is to reject the default and to live by your own design. That has become increasingly rare. It feels like one of those obvious things like, oh yeah, I'm gonna reject the default.

Very difficult to do, in a world that, pats you on the back for accepting the defaults and for, marching down the path that you've been told is the right one for playing the games that you've been told are the right ones. We celebrate the people that do that in a lot of cases. And the whole book, the whole call to action around it is to take the time to question those things.

There's this, story that I love a minister goes to the king and says: if I were to tell you that there was a tiger in the market, what would you say? The king says, I would say you were crazy. Then the man says: what if I told you two people were saying there was a tiger in the market?

The king says: then I would start to question it; the minister says, what if I told you there were three people who told you there was a tiger in the market? The king says, then I would believe you that there's a tiger in the market. The minister replies: there's no tiger in the market.

But if enough people tell you something crazy, you'll start to believe it. That story is very representative of how a lot of us have been forced to live. We have been told certain truths, over and over again by the world, by culture, by society, by school, by social media, and by ourselves.

Over and over again enough times that it's called the illusory truth effect. If something is repeated enough times, we start to believe it as truth, whether or not it is actually grounded. My entire call to action is to say: you just need to pause and ask the question of whether those things actually are true.

Sometimes when three people tell you that there's a tiger in the market, it is because there is a tiger in the market, but sometimes it's a complete lie. It's made up, and unless you take the second to pause and ask the question, you'll never know which of the two it is.

Something that has been repeated over and over, and it's not true. The emperor has no clothes. That's what I want people to do. I want them to start questioning some of those defaults and at least taking the time to do that. And it doesn't take that much time. It's not like I'm saying, oh, you need to remap your entire life.

If you give yourself an hour a month to sit down and think about the bigger picture questions of your life, you'll be amazed by the impact that can have on your trajectory and the things you're doing.

Roberto: I love what you say and I see a connection because on your website, they say, I'm sorry, I don't have the answers. That's very connected to this because you don't have the answer of how do I reject the default? What I hear from you is you have to ask your own question.

Doesn't have to be the bravest question or I have to leave everything. No. Maybe you are suggesting just start little by little. Take your time some time with you. This connects me to one practice that, I read from you, which is journaling. Can you bit more about how this?

Sahil: Yeah, I don't have a massive, ambitious journaling practice. One of the things that I found in general, on the internet over The last, four or five years is that it's very easy to get sucked into these routines. Again. It's like question the defaults, right?

if you're on Twitter or LinkedIn, you get these elaborate routines that get a whole lot of likes I love routines in certain cases. I do a cold plunge in the morning, I do like routines, but one thing that I've found is that, there is a paradox of routines in that sometimes the routine that, is meant to serve you, starts to own you.

And, journaling was one of those areas for me where built up what journaling was to this elaborate level in my mind where, if I wasn't doing it on this extreme level, then I was failing as a journal or I wasn't gonna get the extraordinary benefits from it, et cetera. And yet again, questioning that and asking like what am I actually seeking to do what is the value of journaling in my life? For me it's getting a few things off my brain, articulating a few things, forcing me to think a little bit more deeply about something. My actual journaling practice now on a daily basis is this, I call it the one one one method I like at the end of the day, right before going to bed I'll write down one win from the day. That's something that went well. One point of stress, tension or anxiety. Something that's nagging at me, that I wanna get off my brain onto the paper. And then one point of gratitude, something that I was grateful for during the course of the day.

I do that it takes, on an average day, probably two to three minutes, and I get an enormous amount of value from it. It is one of those asymmetric things, like a tiny investment of time that has enormous positive impact on my life, on my wellbeing, on my ability to fall asleep at night.

I'm one of those people that used to stare at the ceiling, mind racing, stressed about things, Really had a tough time going to sleep. and this has helped a lot.

Roberto: Yeah, and what I hear from you is that even these tiny things, two or three minutes has a tremendous impact on. you, and also reminds me of what you say there about that, anything about zero compounds.

Sahil: Yeah.I'm seeing some questions, in the chat about how do you actually reject default things: I would just say, one of the things that you need to do is pause to ask yourself the question of, what are some of these default things that you believe about your life or about the path that you're on?

And ask what if they were not true? What would the world look like if that were not true? So what one of mine was, I really fundamentally believe that the only way, to live a happy, successful life was to get on a track that ideally was gonna be one that made me a lot of money and just stay on that track and keep my head down and do it as long as possible.

And so for me, I basically believed that the only ways to make money were investment banking, hedge fund, private equity, consulting, like one of these high prestige, high status tracks. I basically thought that was the way that you make money.

You get on that, go to a good school, get on that track, take the job, stay in the job for 30 years, make money, leave happy. Only once I questioned whether or not that was actually true, whether there were different paths, did I see those paths?

And so that's an interesting thing, which is, you cannot plan the perfect journey. You can't sit where you are and say I'm on here on this path A look at this perfect path B over here. Let me just go take path B. What actually happens is you question whether path A is the right one you realize, oh, maybe it's not. You take a sort of leap of faith, which is I'm gonna step off this clean path in front of me and go into the underbrush over here, which is like a little yucky looking. You go over there and then suddenly it opens up and you're like, oh my God I can't believe I had never realized that this existed over here. But you didn't know that it existed because you had path blindness. You were so focused on your one path, you hadn't even thought to ask whether there were alternative ones. When I was leaving my old job, my first assumption was that I was gonna go take basically the same type of job, but closer to family.

And I went and applied to a bunch of those and I got rejected. I had a good track record. I had, a great degree from a great school. I had great network. All these things were going for me, and I was getting rejected from these jobs on this normal path. It was only then that my wife said, can't you just do this thing that you've been doing on the weekends, which was this writing?

Can't you just do that? Isn't that a thing that people can do? That was when I started walking down this new path. It gave me the courage to do it. And now we look back on it and laugh because I think to myself, what if one of those places had accepted me and I had taken that job?

It would've been miserable. I would've been, again, like chewing glass, marching down a path that isn't yours. All of these things that have happened were a result of this lucky, encounter of not getting the job. It forced me to realize that there were other paths and that you could walk down something different.

Roberto: Yeah. Let's check the chat because I see also a lot of questions, Paul is asking where did you find the courage? What's the defining moment for you? How to take this leap of faith when it's the moment.

Sahil: Yeah. Leaps of faith. I've written about this before. I deconstruct every problem I come into. You'll probably notice this as a common thread about me. I'm like a I guess highly analytical person, and so my tendency is to take a problem and say what is this?

What is the problem in reality? What is it about a leap of faith that makes it feel so leapy? When we talk about a leap of faith, we are saying it's very scary. What is so scary about it? There's basically two things. It's an information asymmetry and then there's an evidence asymmetry, meaning I have tons of information and evidence about my current life, I know exactly what it looks like, evidence means I know that I can live my life here, I can take care of my people, pay my bills, responsibilities, et cetera. I have none of that for whatever the future life is, the other side. When you say the fear equals that asymmetry, the problem to be solved is that asymmetry, we need to gather information and create evidence that makes that fear come down so we can have the courage, to reduce that fear.

That increases our ability to show courage by stepping over it. That was really what I did without realizing it. I was writing every single day sharing things. I was starting to see other people who were doing these other things because I was exposing myself to that world. I was meeting with authors, spending time with writers.

Creators that were doing courses, doing other businesses, I was spending time immersed in that world. So I was seeing it. the information was going up, and simultaneously I was building this platform. I was getting evidence. People were coming to me wanting to pay me money for things there was all this evidence being generated, of my ability to make money and meet my responsibility.

That fear was coming down. So then when my wife made that comment, can't you just do this other thing? Rather than it being like, oh my God, no, I can't. That's this enormous leap It felt like. That might be a risk, but yeah, what's the worst that could happen?

It's a two year MBA and I end up going back, I do a two year, live real life MBA, and then I go back and get another job. And, that really just as a framework for thinking about those big changes helps a lot. It's like just deconstruct the problem to something that you can actually solve through time, actions, gathering information, through creating evidence, and as a framework for general problem solving, when you encounter big life changes a really good way to approach it is to say, what is the actual problem that I'm dealing with? The reality with these paths that you're on in life, everyone will tell you that the worst thing in the world is to be on a bad path.

I completely disagree. I think the worst thing in the world is to be on a good path that isn't yours. The reason I say that is because the bad path screams at you every single day to get off of it. Everything within your body, within your world is telling you that you have to get off this path because it's bad for you, because it's destroying you in some way.

The good path that isn't yours is much more deceptive because there's so many forces telling you to stay on it, telling you that it's good, that you can pay your bills, that it's oh, it's fine. This is what life is. You start doing the mental gymnastics that like, oh, you're not supposed to, like the things you do, it's fine.

You need to, owe your responsibilities. So what happens is it makes that leap feel way more intimidating, and most people will never do it. I would guess 99% of people who are on a path that doesn't feel like theirs, will never, gather information, create evidence to actually go and make that step off of it; a lot of what I talk about and write about is, how to go about doing that, how to go about taking all these actions, creating that evidence so that you can then make the decision. And it doesn't necessarily mean that you were going to make the decision to step off and go down the new path, but it at least means that you'll be armed with, enough information and enough evidence to make a good decision.

Roberto: Yeah, I love what you say and that has one thing that comes to my mind when you say this, when I hear people saying, oh, thank goodness, it's Friday. Maybe that's some alert that something is not 100% aligned.

Sahil: Yeah, I think that's true. I go back and forth on a lot of these things because, I think that in general work is work and you can love it, but it's still nice to get a little break every now and then. I really, have been in a season of unbalance over the last few months, really like six, nine months.

I haven't gotten much of a break, and I love what I do. I get a ton of energy out of it, but I am gassed. I could really use a true break. I think there's a lot of realities of doing your own thing, going down your own path that get masked and brushed under the rug by the whole culture of glamorizing it.

I need to write a piece on this. I've been writing them down and brainstorming this for a while and I need to just write a piece on it 'cause I do think that linkedIn, all of these different platforms, we celebrate as an alternative path to the traditional one the idea of go do your own thing, bet on yourself, all of this.

And, it is not for everyone. There are great, amazing, benefits and incredibly challenging drawbacks to it. And going in eyes wide open about both sides allows you to make a more, thoughtful and elegant, decision when comes time to actually go and do that.

But the whole guru thing of go, just bet on yourself. Do your own thing. Quit your nine to five maybe, right? For some people, yes, go do that, but in general, I think most people, like the illusion of what freedom is. And not necessarily the reality of what freedom is.

The illusion of freedom is that you just oh, it's the four hour work week. I can work from wherever I want. I do all these things. I make all this money, all this stuff. The reality of freedom is often very different. What it means is that no one's telling you what to do at any point in time, which means you have zero structure.

It means that you have to create that yourself. It means that you are the one, at the end of the day that the finger points at. You eat what you kill on every single thing. So you are accountable on an extreme level to everything. There's no excuses at the end of the day and, that is actually quite challenging.

There's drawbacks to that in a lot of cases. It would be nice to rely on someone else for something at some point in time. But, that is part of this gap between the reality versus the illusion. I think it would be better if there were people that, were a little bit more honest about that.

Roberto: Yeah. absolutely. Because especially here on social media, you hear only one side, and then sometimes that everyone struggles with something, but we don't see

Sahil: Yeah.

Roberto: So we're sharing one thing, but then in the back there's always something that we struggle. I struggle with something.

You're struggling with someting.

Sahil: Yeah. Full transparency, I think one of the biggest challenges that I face is, decision fatigue around needing to make constantly high intensity, bigger decisions where I am the ultimate stakeholder

When you build a business around yourself the reality I can't outsource a lot of these decisions because it's me. It's my face, my time, my word I've had a lot of conversations with Ali Abdaala close friend of mine, and he and I have had a lot of conversations about this over the years.

'cause for a while he was going down this rabbit hole of trying to, avoid it becoming like key man risk. Like basically try to separate his brand from the businesses he was building's, brands. And it's very challenging to do because at the end of the day people are coming to these things because of his face and you try to separate the two it gets confusing and doesn't do as well. it is a real challenge of this, new world ecosystem and economy that we live in.

Roberto: Actually, I remember one thing that you shared, one in one of these, book session, which was we, I bought the book in pre-sale because I trusted you and the people who are here, they're here because of you, because they trust you, they follow you and if you want ideas, of course there are a lot of ideas all over the place, but it's your specific take on the idea, your angle, your experience, all the things that people value.

Sahil: Yeah. And I think in a world of, AI and the rise of people using AI for content and comments it's the realness and authenticity that survives and allows you to win over the long term. I don't really have any interest in having AI start creating all my stuff for me partially because I enjoy writing. Writing is how I think, it's how I articulate ideas. But also I wanna be a real human and spend time with people and be real about, struggles, challenges, things I'm wrestling with.

I think that's more valuable because the people that are reading it are real humans. you could create a bunch of AI content that ais would really like, maybe, but at the end of the day, I do think that authenticity and trust are what allow you to achieve power lie outcomes in any of these areas.

I see we have a lot of questions. I have one question that pop into my mind and let, then I prefer we go back to the chat. when you said that talking to people reminded me of the thousands of hours that you said and you did with all the conversation you had with a lot of people in these years, and I'm super curious, what made you think of having all these conversation?

Roberto: What was the value?

Sahil: I think that to understand something human, you have to. Immerse yourself in human experience. If there's one thing, I think that allows me to stand out, it's that, I really love people and spending time with people and different types of people, and. I would say if there's one that, that has allowed me to create a very unique, network of people who have supported me and who I consider friends and mentors over the years, that have lifted me up on their shoulders in many cases.

That is a very unique asset or attribute, for someone that's my age. I think leaning into that and the things that I do and the things that I create, is really useful. I can share and bring the insights of some of these people to everybody in a connected, and thoughtful way.

I need to think about more ways to do that. But the book was a good starting point.

Roberto: Yeah, and absolutely. And then you have the word behind you, which is curiosity, which connects beautifully because you never know what you're going to find in another person. There's always something to discover, always something beautiful.

Sahil: Yeah, agreed.

Roberto: Yeah. we have a question from Fabian. He's asking about anti-goals and he ask, what are your top anti-goals? As a content creator.

Sahil: I would say the number one thing is just, ever creating a whole bunch of content that, like any, 22-year-old with access to chat GPT in a computer could create. I really want to. Share things that are unique to my lens or perspective on the world that I've spent time on and thought about and wrestled with in my own ways.

When I'm writing things that are deeper and in longer form, you can't always do that with Twitter. It's just so short and punchy. my LinkedIn, there's never been any scalable automation to the things that I'm doing.

And the reason is because I really like being the one with the pen, creating these things and sharing it. And I think that's the slower path, but I think it's the more durable, long-term path, and I'm willing to make that trade off. In the way that I think about the future and the way that I think about the world.

I've never done the oh, I have, a chief of staff writing my things for me, posting it with AI and content and ghost writers. I don't want to do that. Could I grow faster doing that? Probably. But it's not the game that I wanna play. I wanna be in touch with it.

I actually wanna sit down and do it. So when you see me post something, I sat there and wrote it. That morning. I actually don't even have a schedule. I have no idea what's getting posted tomorrow. I sit down and I do it in the morning. I think that, there are things like this that are the unscalable things, and my general belief is that these unscalable things become the most scalable over long periods of time.

Roberto: I love what you say about unscalable things because there is a friend of mine, PJ Milani, that perhaps you also know.

I do, He talk about the things that don't scale, and you did a few of those and there's one, which was a amazing, which was what you worried. all these messages to all the people who send you an email. Can you talk a little bit about the value of that? Because it doesn't scale, of course.

Sahil: Yeah, those unscalable things become the most scalable. the people that sent me receipts, that I sent videos to, I made probably over a thousand videos by the end of everything. Unbelievable amount of time to go and do that. But those people are, I think a high proportion of them are real evangelists for the ideas I'm talking about.

When you think about the ripple effect of that, they're going out and living by these things, they're taking them more seriously. They're more likely to share it. So you would, you did one action that became significantly more impactful than it otherwise would've been.

Roberto: Another question here from Lorenzo, was there a moment in your life when you were reaching one type of world but bankrupt in another?

Sahil: Yeah, it's the very beginning of my book. it's the prologue of my book is that story. I lay it out in quite a bit of depth there, so I don't want to, spoiler alert, the whole thing. I would read that. I was making money. and that was good in terms of creating some level of financial independence, but very bad in the impact it was having on other areas of my life.

And to be clear, that was my own fault. it wasn't like someone was forcing me down that path or doing anything. It was my own narrow priorities that, were growing increasingly narrow year by year and blinding me to everything else.

Roberto: And there's one thing that reminds me when you said this was my own, which is the agency that we have, and you talk sometimes about the victim mentality or the opportunity mindset. What's the connection with that?

Sahil: Yeah, I think that agency, is at the core of all self-improvement, growth related ideas that anyone can share. Agency is the belief that you are at the steering wheel, that you are in control. You can take an action and create an outcome. anything that you talk about within the world of growth has to rely on that feeling of agency and ultimately feeling stuck.

Feeling lost in life is when you no longer feel you have that agency when you feel like you are incapable of taking action and creating an outcome, I turn to physical health as an important part of your life. Because that is the fastest place where you can re assume agency, where you can take actions, see the direct outcome of those actions, and see the ripple effect that agency has into other areas of your life.

Roberto: what's one belief or habit you have to unlearn in order to stop living on autopilot?

Sahil: I would say probably the biggest one was just, measuring. My own self worth on the basis of how much money I was making. I was just living in a world and, surrounded, like spending time with the circles. I was in the people, where everything was about how much money you make, your bonus, where you vacation, the fancy bottle of wine, the bourbon, all of those things.

It was all, status and signaling and insecurity. Playing out around, these feelings of self-worth attached to financial success that's a hard thing to crack. You need an alternative, something else you can start measuring and thinking about in order to, opt out of that system, which is really what this book is.

It's a manifestation of that idea that you can opt out and create your own scoreboard. I have been blown away by how insecure, highly successful people are. I've spent time with a lot of incredible people over the years and it's shocking to me just how insecure, some hyper successful people are.

The need to flex on things, status signal, knock other people down. It's just always pretty shocking to me. And, it all stems from attaching so much of your self-worth to a single thing, as I write in the book, there's always gonna be a bigger boat.

you're chasing the more that you've been told to chase, rather than the one that you've designed yourself.

Roberto: There's one thing I love from this part of the book that you said that we all want the same thing and it doesn't have to do with money.

Sahil: Yeah, I just think people lose sight of that at the end of the day. I fundamentally believe that is true. You focus on the short term and the near term thing that gets you the pats on the back and you lose sight of what that bigger picture thing is, and it's very hard to, refined it along that journey.

Roberto: Yeah, absolutely. I feel I'm very privileged and maybe some people also connect. They will be, they say, okay. It's easy to say to you, but, or sorry, you are, we are living a very, lucky position on but at the same time, is something that you say also in the book that everyone on all position, everywhere in the spectrum, they all said they need three to five times more money to be okay. It's, again it's ourself that will tell us that we have to always have more.

Sahil: Yeah, the thing around privilege, I completely agree. There is blind luck involved in all of this. Where you are born, who you're born to, the circumstances, all of those baseline situations. The whole point of this idea is that you no longer need to feel like a comparison game to anyone else.

You can define what your own success looks like and take actions from wherever you are, whatever your starting point is to build towards this. If you are at a low rung, if you have not come up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, in terms of your financial wealth. The single best action you can take to improve your life is going to bebuild financial wealth to come up that curve. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is real and lasting and has the Lindy effect for a reason. the ability to provide food, shelter, basic needs, even basic pleasures, a vacation a year.

Some of these early on in life money directly buys happiness. Having a focus on that is really important, you get to run your own race wherever your baseline is, you start from there and you can build. None of this is to say that money doesn't matter; money can't be the only thing you are focusing on that journey.

Roberto: Yeah. And there is a beautiful question from Matthew that is connected to this. What's your definition of enough?

Sahil: I am already, living that in many ways. I have said this before, that my definition of wealth is being able to take my son in the pool at 1:00 PM on a Tuesday. What I want out of my own life is the ability to do those things and I can do that.

That doesn't mean that I always have full clarity around that being what matters. And that doesn't mean that I stop pursuing more. It just means that the more is grounded in something more meaningful than just money. I'm not going and just chasing a whole bunch of financial gains. If I am chasing money, it's because I'm trying to create more stability, long term durability, or it's because I'm chasing purpose and something that's really meaningful to me. Creating a lot of energy for me in the long run. Sharing ideas with people in a meaningful way.

Roberto: Yeah, absolutely. It's a different plane now. They talk about your child, and I love how you share stories With your son, Roman, I have a question for you, which is, which way being a father changed you?

Sahil: Oh, basically in every way imaginable. I would just say, at a high level, the level of clarity and focus that I have around the things that matter has dramatically increased. I don't think you can say no to things effectively until you know what you're saying yes to.

my son and my wife have provided the most clear yes, that I could imagine having. it's much easier for me now to say no to doing things because I know that it's pulling me away from time with him or from, creating memories or from having those lasting experiences that I'm never gonna get back.

That has probably been the number one thing. it's an incredible, focus and clarity enhancer.

Yeah, so it looks like you want to make the most of what you have. You cannot your time or your attention to things that don't matter in the end. Yeah.

Roberto: Absolutely. brings me to one question also a person shared with me, which is that of course I'm not going to do a lot of spoiler, but there is a beautiful thing here in the book, which is the, right now test and the opportunity test. Can you tell a little bit more about this framework and how it works?

Sahil: The right now test is just asking yourself, would I do this right now? If someone asks you to do something in the future, just asking yourself, would I do this thing right now? So if you invite me to a dinner two months from now, asking myself would I go to this dinner? If it were tonight or tomorrow night.

And if the answer's no, you're not gonna want to do it in the future. So say no. And if the answer is yes, then you say yes to it. 'cause you will wanna do it. It's a really useful tool 'cause it, it stops you from having this like weird, time bias thing where we always assume we're gonna have more time in the future than we have right now.

And we never do. And so making sure that you take that into account as you're making decisions is really useful. I am pretty good about this, I would say like 80% of the time. But I often say yes to doing things that then the date comes and I have that yes damn effect of saying, damn, when the event actually comes.

I need to continue getting better about this. The challenge is that if you define as a nice person in some way, it's very difficult, to say no, and, just leave people hanging. But as you achieve more success in whatever domain you're in, the demands and the requests on your time and energy are effectively infinite.

The number of messages that I get now on a daily basis, emails, messages, requests, that are all effectively requests for my time. It's probably 50, messages a day. I would have to ask my team, but it's basically nonstop. if there wasn't a clear way to just be saying no to things, it would be impossible.

I would not have any time to do anything that actually mattered. I would just be on coffee chats with people getting my brain picked or whatever that means.

Roberto: Yeah, absolutely. this reminds me again, about the tension between being with your family, enjoying that moment and developing your full potential, having the most possible impact. I see also connection here to what you're sharing.

Sahil: You're trying to create a dynamic tension between presence and ambition. The desire to be present with your family during these, very precious years, the knowledge that time is your most precious asset, that you're not gonna get these years back with those years also being the ones where you're supposed to be chasing your grand ambitions where you're seeing the compound. I mean like your thirties are really the first time in your life when you're starting to see the compounding of the things that you did in your twenties. Your twenties, you're stumbling around a whole lot, haven't figured anything out.

In your thirties, you start to see little green shoots of compounding of some of those actions and then in your forties it's really ramping, and so those are typically the times when you have young kids. You don't want to step off the compounding engine. You want to allow it to keep going, but at the same time you also wanna be there.

And so that dynamic tension, and figuring out how to navigate that is a real struggle. I wrestle with this idea of missions: my family is part of the, broader mission we are on, to create a life together. For me to be able to include my wife and son on this mission, for them to understand why I'm doing the things I'm doing for my son to understand why I'm traveling that is really important.

Roberto: Yeah. And again, it reminds me, one other thing that you always say there is this viral, thing, which I, also did an illustration on which is the people who remember working late in 20 years will be your kids.

Sahil: Yeah.

Roberto: Then you give always two sides of this. It's not only the classic one, which is don't do that. is another view which is sharing the why are you doing that?

Sahil: Yeah, it's exactly that, making sure that they're included in that why. I think for your kids to see you work hard on things that you care about, for them to understand that it is important to work hard on things that create energy in your life is a very important lesson that they will remember forever.

We don't teach our kids anything. They embrace and embody things that they see us living by. for my son or whoever to see me living by these things is, fundamentally the way that he's going to learn any of them.

Roberto: Yeah, absolutely. And I also say that when you are with your kid, you are with your kid. So even if you work late, if you have to do something, when you are With your family, you're 100% present. You don't have the mobile, you don't have any distractions. So maybe it's not about only how much time you spend, but if you are really present when you're with them, because don't matter if you are all the weekend, but then you are looking at the mobile phone all the time. They're learning. You have distracted father, and it's much better.

And I 100% agree to say, okay, this weekend I'm going to do this because I really care about that. And then we'll be spent the whole afternoon together. 100% with you.

Sahil: Yeah.

Roberto: Let's see if you have more question. Hey. Hello Kate. Great to see you here. Kate, ask how do we get people value time more than money? Today is not the case yet.

Sahil: I think there's a mindset shift that, people need to understand and embrace. the question I ask in the book is, whether you would trade lives with Warren Buffet. he's worth $130 billion. I'm actually right after this. I'm flying to Omaha.

Or, he has his annual weekend, event this weekend in Omaha that I go to every year with a few friends. He has access to anyone in the world. flies on a private jet. All these great things. But no one would trade lives with him because he's 95 years old.

You wouldn't agree to trade. All of that time for $130 billion. so you know right there that your time has incalculable value, but on a daily basis, we're spitting on that time. We're like disregarding it. We're, scrolling on our phone doing all these silly things, comparing our lives to other people, stressing about the past, anxiety about the future, disregarding this one most precious asset.

And so what the call to action is to say. Okay. I know this, I just heard this question. It sparked this intrigue. I need to pull that awareness on an ongoing basis, because what happens with awareness is perishable. You have oh, awareness comes in. It's interesting.

it's sitting there. It's great. I'm acting on it right now. Then three days go by. And the same action happens and I'm like, oh, that awareness is gone. so I do something stupid. We need to pull that awareness on a more regular basis because when we can pull from it again, it may be perishable, but if I can pull it regularly, I can act accordingly.

Roberto: Yeah, there's a beautiful quote in the book that you pull out, which is how you spend your days and how you spend your life.

Sahil: Yeah. Yeah.

Roberto: We have to see what did we do today? How do we spend an hour five minutes here and there? Yeah. And there's one more question. This is, also very, comes connected question.

Why do you want to be in 10 years, your professional path from Fabian?

Sahil: I have no idea. If I was good at planning 10 years in advance, I wouldn't have had all the struggle that I had, five years ago. I think it's impossible to plan the future that far in advance. The reality is that the most interesting opportunities in life are inherently invisible to you, they're non-linear, they're asymmetric. if you attempt to plan them, you're fighting an uphill battle. It's impossible because they're invisible. The path that is the best one for you will reveal itself as you take action along the way, and you have to be ready to march down it whenever it may come.

Trying to create that plan is a fool's errand. Five years ago, if you had asked me to write down a hundred scenarios for my life where I'd be in five years, I would've written down a hundred scenarios. Not a single one of them would've been where I am now. I hadn't ever written anything.

I hadn't written on the internet. I didn't have a Twitter account, and that was five years ago. planning 10 years, I'm like, I really have no idea, I can list out a bunch of hopes of things that I'm doing on a bigger picture scale, the impact that I'm creating of the things that I'm sharing.

We always live in pretty uncertain times, and I think now more than ever.

Roberto: My last question for you would be, Sahil, what do you want to see more less in the world?

Sahil: I would love to see people focusing much less on, others worrying about what everyone else is doing and much more on. Taking action in their own life. The amount of time that people spend, energy people spend comparing themselves to other people, would be much better spent investing in your own life, and creating for those around you.

More. I would just, I would love to see people question some of these assumptions that they've had about what they're capable of doing, about what the path is. And I think a lot of good comes from that. It's not always gonna be that you decide to step off and go do something crazy. But I've never seen anything bad come from questioning some of the defaults.

Roberto: Yeah. Absolutely. thank you Sahil for this time. Thank you to all these amazing friends and people here, Thank you for your question and thank you for the invitation we'll keep following you. It was amazing and I hope it was a good investment of this precious time we have.

Sahil: Thank you.

Roberto: Thank you so much. Bye everyone.

Where to find Sahil and his work

• LinkedIn

• The Five Types of Wealth