How to Become Wealthy with Your Time and Relationships

Hi there,

What’s the Story?

Hope January is going great for you. This week, I’m diving into one of my favorite books from 2025. Sahil Bloom’s The Five Types of Wealth is one of the most useful books about success out there.

We’re covering the first two types this week: time wealth and social wealth. Next week, I’ll walk you through the other three. Really excited to share this with you.

For more detail, check out this week’s Changing Minds Podcast episode – you can watch it here.

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How to Become Wealthy with Your Time and Relationships

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes 41 seconds

What does it really mean to be wealthy?

Most people answer this question the same way. They point to their bank account. They talk about financial freedom. They dream about the day when money stops being a worry.

And sure, financial wealth matters. Having enough money to live comfortably makes life easier. Nobody disputes that.

Here’s the problem, though. We’ve become so fixated on this one type of wealth that we’ve forgotten about everything else. We sacrifice our time. We neglect our relationships. We burn ourselves out chasing dollar signs while our lives fall apart around us.

Sahil Bloom saw this pattern everywhere. He’s a creator and investor who started “The Curiosity Chronicle” newsletter back in 2021. Millions of people read his work every week. In his book “The Five Types of Wealth,” he makes a compelling argument: financial wealth alone will never make you truly wealthy.

I spent the last few weeks going deep into this book. What I found was a framework that actually works. Today, I want to walk you through the first two types of wealth: time wealth and social wealth.

By the end of this article, you’ll understand how to organize your time better and build stronger relationships. These are the foundations that everything else depends on.

The Arrival Fallacy

Before we get into the specific types of wealth, we need to understand why chasing just money never works.

Sahil refers to this arrival fallacy. You’ve probably experienced this yourself. You set a goal and tell yourself, “Once I achieve this, then I’ll be happy. Then I’ll have made it.”

Maybe it was landing your first speaking gig. Or hitting a certain income level. Or getting that promotion you’ve been working toward.

But what happens when you actually achieve it? You feel good for a while. Maybe a few days. Maybe a few weeks. Then you’re right back where you started.

This happens because of what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill. Your baseline happiness doesn’t really change much over time. Good things happen, you feel happy temporarily, then you adapt back to your normal level. Bad things happen, you feel sad temporarily, then you bounce back.

In 2023, Sahil collected many years of lived experience by interviewing elderly people. He asked them what advice they would give to their younger selves.

Nobody said they wished they’d worked more hours. Nobody regretted not making more money. Instead, they talked about relationships. Time spent with loved ones. Moments they missed because they were too focused on material success.

That’s the wisdom we need to pay attention to. Just because something feels important now doesn’t mean it will matter in the long run.

Time Wealth: Your Most Finite Resource

The first type of wealth Sahil explores is time wealth. This one comes first for a reason. You can always make more money. You can improve your health. You can learn new skills.

But you can’t create more time.

He starts this section with a question that hits hard:

How many moments do you have remaining with your loved ones?

If you see someone once a year and they are 65, if they live to 80, you might have 15 more visits with them. Fifteen times. That’s it.

When Sahil did this calculation, he and his wife decided to move across the country to be near his family. That’s how powerful this realization was.

The same applies to your kids. Research shows that the amount of time you spend with children rockets up until they’re teenagers. Then it drops off a cliff. By the time they’re in their twenties, you’re spending a fraction of the time with them that you used to.

These insights force you to reconsider everything.

The Three Pillars of Time Wealth

Sahil breaks time wealth down into three pillars: awareness, attention, and control.

Awareness means recognizing that your time is limited. This sounds obvious, but most of us live like we have infinite time. We don’t. Oliver Burkeman wrote a great book called Four Thousand Weeks that drives this point home. That’s roughly how long you have if you live to 80.

Once you become aware of this, everything changes. You start asking different questions. You make different choices.

Attention is about focusing on what matters without getting distracted. This is harder than ever in today’s world. Every app, website, and device is competing for your attention. Your job is to take it back.

When you control your attention, you control what you create. You control what you accomplish. You stop reacting to the world and start acting with intention.

Control is the ultimate goal. This means having the freedom to choose how you spend your time. You become a time maker instead of a time taker.

The Red Queen Effect

In Alice in Wonderland, there’s a scene where Alice and the Red Queen are running faster and faster. But they’re staying in the same place. The world around them is moving at the same speed.

That’s the Red Queen Effect. We get time-saving technology like email. Instead of giving us more free time, it just means we can do more things faster. We respond to messages in seconds, not days. But that doesn’t mean we’re getting ahead. We’re just running faster.

The solution is to work smarter. Focus on high-leverage activities. These are actions that yield the greatest return for your time invested.

Learning how to use AI effectively? That’s high leverage. Building strong relationships with key people? High leverage. Spending three hours in meetings that could’ve been emails? Low leverage.

Practical Strategies for Time Wealth

Let me walk you through some of the best strategies shared for managing your time better.

Warren Buffett’s Two List Exercise: Write down 25 career or life goals. Circle your top five. Most people think you work on the top five and fit in the other 20 when you can.

Wrong.

Buffett says the 20 items you didn’t circle become your “avoid at all costs” list. Why? Because they’re tempting enough that you actually want to do them. That makes them dangerous. They’ll distract you from what really matters.

The Energy Calendar: Stop thinking about time management. Start thinking about energy management.

Take your calendar and color-code everything. Green means the activity gives you energy. Red means it drains you. Yellow is neutral.

Look at your week. How much green do you have? How much red? If you’ve got a lot of red activities, make sure you’ve got green ones on either side of them.

For me, anything creative is green. I could write and create content all day. Doing my taxes? Pure red. So I reward myself after finishing those draining tasks.

The Four Types of Professional Time

Management Time: Meetings, emails, calls. Necessary but can easily become busywork.
Creation Time: Writing, building, coding. This is what moves you forward.
Consumption Time: Learning, reading, taking in new ideas.
Ideation Time: Thinking, reflecting, and coming up with new ideas.

Most people spend too much time on management and not enough on the other three. Batch your management time. Block out windows for creation. Never neglect consumption and ideation.

When I go for runs, I’m mostly either consuming information through podcasts or I’m in ideation mode with just music playing. Both matter.

Social Wealth: The Relationships That Define You

The second type of wealth is social wealth. This is about your connections and relationships.

Sahil opens this section with another powerful question:

Who will be sitting in the front row at your funeral?

Uncomfortable to think about? Absolutely. But that discomfort is the point. It forces you to identify the most important people in your life.

The Three Pillars of Social Wealth

Depth refers to your deep connections. These are the three to seven people who form your inner circle. The ones you can call at 2 AM when everything’s falling apart. The ones who’ll be in that front row.

These relationships require investment. You need to show up consistently. Make sacrifices when necessary. Build trust over time through vulnerability and action.

Breadth is your wider network. Friends, acquaintances, professional contacts. Sociologists call these “weak ties,” and they’re surprisingly valuable.

Research shows that opportunities often come from your broader network rather than your closest friends. That person you met once at a conference might connect you to your next big opportunity. Your best friend probably knows the same people and information you do.

Both depth and breadth matter. You can’t just focus on one.

Earned Status is the respect and reputation you build through accomplishment. When you’re excellent in your field, when you win awards, when you achieve something significant, doors open.

This earned status gets you into rooms you wouldn’t otherwise access. It creates opportunities to connect with people at higher levels.

The Four Zones of Relationships

Sahil created a framework for mapping your relationships based on two factors: how supportive they are and how frequently you interact with them.

Green Zone: Supportive people you see frequently. These are your priorities. Invest heavily here.

Opportunity Zone: Supportive people you rarely see. Reach out more. These relationships have potential but need more attention.

Danger Zone: Ambivalent people you see frequently. These relationships aren’t helping you. Either transform them or reduce contact.

Red Zone: People who demean you, even if you rarely see them. Cut ties when possible. If you can’t (like a toxic boss or family member), minimize exposure and transform the dynamic.

You can’t always eliminate toxic relationships. Sometimes you’re stuck with them. In those cases, you need strategies to protect yourself and change how you engage.

Three Simple Questions

When someone comes to you with a problem, they usually need one of three things:

Help: Practical advice and solutions
Hug: Emotional support and presence
Heard: A safe space to vent

Figure out which one they need before you respond. Most people default to giving advice when the person just wants to be heard.

The Brain Trust

Build yourself a personal advisory board. Pick five to ten people who genuinely want you to succeed and can offer unbiased perspectives.

They don’t need to know about each other. This isn’t an official group. These are just people you can turn to for guidance and support.

Think of them as your personal board of mentors.

Understanding Love Languages

Gary Chapman identified five love languages. People feel loved in different ways:

Words of affirmation
Quality time
Gifts
Acts of service
Physical touch

Learn how the people in your life prefer to receive love. Tell them how you prefer to receive it. This single insight can transform your relationships.

Also, pay attention to what John Gottman calls the “Four Horsemen” of relationship problems:

Criticism (attacking the person instead of the behavior)
Defensiveness (never being wrong)
Contempt (showing disrespect)
Stonewalling (refusing to engage)

When you see these patterns, address them immediately. They don’t doom a relationship, but they need to be fixed.

What This Means for You

Time wealth, and social wealth form the foundation for everything else. You need both to build a truly wealthy life.

Get clear on how you’re spending your time. Identify the most important people in your life and invest in those relationships. Use the strategies I’ve shared to start making changes today.

Next week, I’ll walk you through the other three types of wealth: mental, physical, and financial. Together, these five types create a complete framework for building the life you actually want.

If you want to go deeper on this topic, check out this week’s episode of the Changing Minds podcast, where I explore Sahil’s work in even more detail. You can watch it here.

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