You Don’t Need Piles of Cash to Be a Time Billionaire
Sahil Bloom, an inspirational writer and entrepreneur, has spent the last two years writing The Curiosity Chronicle newsletter and running SRB Ventures. But the birth of his son prompted him to take a step back and examine how he’s allocating his time.
“We were in bed one morning. The sun was coming in through the windows, and my son was sleeping. He had this baby smirk on his face. I didn’t want anything more in that moment,” Bloom recounted to Hone Health CEO Saad Alam in a recent episode of the Hone In podcast.
What he realized at that moment: “I’m very ambitious. There’s always some more that you’re looking for, whether it’s a promotion or a house. And the challenge is, when you’re constantly chasing something more, you lose sight of the beauty of that feeling of enough.”
That’s when he decided to hone in on a concept coined by East Rock Capital co-founder Graham Duncan: becoming a time billionaire. The philosophy describes someone who has over a billion seconds left to live.
“At 50 years old, you’re still a time billionaire. You have a billion seconds left in your life,” Bloom told Alam. “But we don’t relate to ourselves that way. We don’t think about the fact that our time is ticking down. It’s so finite and so precious.”
It’s not about doing more; it’s about doing what’s important. Learn how on the Hone In podcast.
How to Become a Time Billionaire, Per Sahil Bloom
“A huge part of being a time billionaire is just appreciating and understanding the precious nature of our time: How little of it we have, how quickly it goes away, and how precious the time is with the people who have less,” Bloom says. “It’s such a powerful realization that makes you want to grind through whatever this moment is. Appreciate the texture, the stress, in the moment rather than rejecting it and wanting to fast forward through it.”
But there’s more to it than watching the seconds tick by. Being a time billionaire has nothing to do with money, but you do have to invest your seconds the right way. Bloom swears by these three methods.
1. Create an energy calendar
Sure, grinding through back-to-back networking calls and meetings might lead to business success. But if you’re left feeling completely drained after, all those calls and meetings might be doing more harm than good. Bloom suggests creating an energy calendar to spot the things that dampen your fire and prioritize the events that ignite it.
“Every single day for a week you look at your calendar and you color code things according to whether it created energy, was neutral, or drained energy,” Bloom says. “At the end of a week, looking at this calendar gives you a really good sense of what type of activities create energy for you and what type of things are just draining.”
What you do with your newly multicolored calendar is up to you. Sahil tells Alam that he realized virtual networking calls were sapping his energy, so he pivoted to more intentional, in-person meet-ups.
At the end of the week, I ask:
— Sahil Bloom (@SahilBloom) July 1, 2022
(1) What are the common energy creating activities? These should be prioritized.
(2) What are the common neutral activities? These should be delegated.
(3) What are the common energy draining activities? These should be delegated or deleted.
2. Write down your daily to-do list the night before
Having a plan in place the night before is the best way to hit the ground running in the morning, according to Bloom.
“The easiest thing that anyone can do to level up their life is write down the three things that they’re going to do the next morning the night before. Your days will immediately get five times better,” says Bloom. “That single thing has allowed me to really break through quite a bit because it lets me hit the ground running with no friction. It also is hugely liberating when you get those couple of things done.”
“Appreciate the texture, the stress, in the moment rather than rejecting it and wanting to fast forward through it.”
3. Focus on your eulogy virtues
No one is going to pull up your LinkedIn at your funeral. So start to focus on improving the social virtues you want to be remembered for.
“Resume virtues are the things that show up on your resume. They’re the things that you want to stand out,” Bloom explains. “Eulogy virtues are the things that people say about you at your funeral—whether you were caring, loving, if you had the capacity to have courage, loyalty, the things that really matter in the end.”
