Building A Wealthy Life Means Family, Presence & Taking Back Your Time

From the outside looking in, Sahil Bloom had it all. At 30 years old, he had the fancy job title, the paycheck, and all the markers of what we're told success looks like. But beneath the surface, everything was falling apart.

On a recent episode of the mindbodygreen podcast, Bloom, author of the bestselling book The Five Types of Wealth, shares the exact moment that changed the trajectory of his life—and why most of us are chasing the wrong definition of success entirely.

Bloom was living 3,000 miles away from his parents, seeing them about once a year. His friend did the math: mid-sixties in age, once-a-year visits. Fifteen more times. That's it.

"That hit me like a punch to the gut," Bloom says. "The amount of time you have left with the people you care about most in the world is that finite. You can literally count it on your hands."

Within 45 days of that conversation, Bloom had quit his job, sold his house in California, and moved across the country to live closer to both sets of parents. That number—15—became hundreds. He now sees his parents multiple times a week.

If the parent statistic hits hard, the data on children is even more sobering. Based on the American Time Use Survey, Bloom shares a hard truth that reveals a truth most parents don't want to face: 95% of the time you have with your kids happens before they turn 18. And 75% of that time is over by age 12.

After 12, kids have activities, friends, boyfriends, girlfriends. They're off living their own lives. That magical window when they actually want to hang out with you? It's shockingly brief.

This creates what Bloom calls the most challenging tension parents face in the modern era— presence versus ambition. How do you be present during those magical years with your kids while also building the career and financial foundation your family needs?

His answer: "You can't teach your kids anything. You just have to embody the things that you want them to learn."

The most critical lesson kids can learn is delayed gratification—that working hard today on things that matter creates value in the future. When children see their parents pursue meaningful work with discipline and focus, they internalize that principle in ways no amount of lecturing can achieve. I know from personal experience that my daughters seem to learn more from what they see me do than from what I say.

"Finding that balance for yourself, being present in the moments where you're present, making sure they understand the why of why you are working hard—that is where people find what I think of as work-life harmony rather than work-life balance."

So how does Bloom define success today?

"I define wealth as being able to take my son in the pool at 1:00 PM on a Tuesday."

Most of us live under what psychologists call the arrival fallacy, the belief that when we reach a certain goal, achieve a certain title, or accumulate a certain amount of wealth, we'll finally feel like we've "made it."

It's a trap.

"We build up these destinations as being the point at which we will feel that we have arrived," Bloom explains. "And it is a fallacy because we get that thing, we feel that momentary blip of dopamine-induced euphoria, and then we reset. We come back down. We feel that familiar dread of never doing enough."

He quotes the movie Cool Runnings: "A gold medal is a wonderful thing, but if you're not enough without it, you're never going to be enough with it."

One of Bloom's most practical frameworks is the idea of treating different areas of life like dimmer switches rather than light switches.

The conventional wisdom says you need to "turn off" certain areas of your life to focus on others. Focus on your career in your twenties and thirties, so health and relationships get switched off. The problem? If you leave something turned off for too long, you can never turn it back on—or it becomes incredibly difficult.

His solution: treat these areas like dimmer switches. Just because one is turned all the way up doesn't mean the others are off. They can just be turned down low.

Goals tell us what we want to achieve. Anti-goals tell us what we don't want to happen along the way.

If your goal is to become CEO of a company, your anti-goal might be spending 300 nights a year away from your family or allowing your health to completely deteriorate.

"Every single time you set a big goal, you should make sure you have your anti-goals very clearly articulated," Bloom advises. This allows for regular check-ins: Am I progressing toward my goal while running afoul of my anti-goals?

Time is the only asset we can never get more of. And yet, most of us spend our youth operating under the assumption of our own immortality, only thinking deeply about time when it's too late to do anything about it.

Bloom's work offers a different path, one where we define success on our own terms, where we treat time as our most precious resource, where we live like every moment could be the last one.