My First Million
00:32:22 · Bill Perkins
[00:32:22] S0: Yeah. And just trying to balance it. I mean, I have 11 old now. My kids are 22 and 19, and they definitely wanna come. Like, I I had a big party. My daughter's like, can I come? Can I come? I'm like, yeah. You can come, but you you can't you can't stay. I was like, look. You guys have 6th Street and all the partying. Was like, why can't us adults hang out and get our swerve off? Like, why you gotta come? But she wants to hang out. She's like, dad, you're cool. I wanna hang out now. Whereas before, I was like, dad, you're so strange. Like, why are you so weird? Like, why do you do this? Like, why do people know you? And now we hang out and we have a good time. And, you know, traveling, I take my kids traveling. We try and arrange a life. I like, listen. There's something very seductive about a bucolic life that I want later. You know, I ultimately want to be a farmer. And, you know, I've thought about how do I get everybody into life that I want to live and, you know, balance for me is like the pendulum, like how do you manage the pendulum swings because your life is not perfectly balanced for each time period. Right? It swings into I'm grinding really hard to I'm vacationing really hard. I'm partying really hard. I'm relaxing really hard. I'm I'm, you know, I'm doing spiritual work very hard. Right? It's a swing. Right? It's never the pie is cut evenly each day or even each month or even each decade. Right? Like, this might be the decade of, you know, learning all this shit, and then I'm a doctor, and then it's a decade of practicing. It's a matter of like getting buy in and enrolling other people in the vision and making sure it works. You know, there's people who are, you know, military parents, and their kids travel all around with them, and that's their life, and they make the best part of that life. There's some people that that's just who they are, they don't have an obligation to the United States government, they travel around with their kids and they want to live somewhere. My wife and I were like, hey, we want to live in Japan for a little bit, so we're going to pack up our little boy and and go to Japan. It's really about just making it the best ride. There's infinite rides. I don't think one's necessarily better than the other. It's really just a preference, and then designing the life that you want and and and and trying it out.
00:34:24 · Bill Perkins, Shaan Puri
You know? I I don't... You know, there's nothing wrong with people that just like, hey. I just want a nine to five. This is a job. I'm gonna join the rotary club, you know, get a nicer car, go on vacation two weeks a year, and then die. Like, there's nothing wrong with that. It's just not for me. [00:34:40] S1: Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you, and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content. You create content that converts. Check out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Can you explain this idea of time buckets, not bucket lists?
00:35:12 · Bill Perkins
[00:35:12] S0: Yeah. The idea of, like, a lot of people think life is like, oh, I have a bucket list and, you know, like the movie, you know, a month before I'm gonna die, I'm gonna run around, do all these things, and I'm gonna be happy. Right? My life is complete. And the the main thing is is that each period of your life, like, don't have one death, you have many deaths. Right? There was the college you that died. There was a single you that died. There was you with young kids that died, you know, first job, first startup, etcetera. Right? And and and they're largely in age brackets, right, like for most people. And so each period in your life, certain experiences are optimal, depending on who you are, the arc of your life, in that time period and don't transfer well to the next time period, or they don't transfer at all. And so it's like, hey, if your life... Satisfaction... If a satisfactory life for you was like, I wanna go skiing in my life 500 times, well, the distribution of those ski trips are probably gonna come earlier. Right? And if it's skiing with friends, it's probably earlier. Right? Because they get married, they have life or whatever. And if you just kind of like, oh, have a bucket list ski 500 times, and those activities get shifted later into your life, well, you've kind of fucked it up, right? Like, because you're really not gonna get those 500 ski trips, right? And so life is like Tetris. You kind of have to get the order right in order to get the high score and fulfillment. And so... But what that requires you having kind of a a understanding of what you want out of life and thinking about like, okay, what I want out life with respect to my kids and my family and my job and my career, my own leisure, my own hedonistic activities, my own altruist activities, etcetera. You're not gonna know it all because life is discovery. Right? You don't know what you want, you discover what you want. But having kinda like a time bucket of each period of your life, maybe three to five year brackets and say, okay, what experiences, what choices do I wanna make in this period or in this period, and this period? And when you do that, you'll go, oh my gosh, I have this here, and it should be here, and this here, and it should be there. Right?
00:37:15 · Bill Perkins, Sam Parr, Shaan Puri
And then you'll have a much more fulfilling life because you'll actually get to do both of them as opposed to up the order and not getting it at all. [00:37:23] S2: Do you do any type of annual planning? [00:37:25] S0: Yeah. Wait. We we do we do like kind of a period, time bucketing period. Like, this is what we wanna do. Like, we know while Kai is, you know, under five, we definitely wanna go live in a different country, particularly Japan, and we're like, okay, how long is that gonna be? Is it just gonna be a summer? Is it gonna be a year? Is it gonna be two years? You know, we're actively discussing, like, how that fits, you know, what's going on, and and then all the other things, you know, people have multifaceted, multivariate experiment running their lives. Right? Like, how do all these pieces fit in? And it's kind of fun doing that. [00:37:59] S2: Do you sit down with your wife, and you're like, okay. Yeah. Like, because we talked with Jesse Itzler, and I think Shaan does this now, Do you do this, Shaan? Were you like Jesse, where he plans his quarterly I [00:38:11] S1: carve out three days now a year, because it just seemed crazy to me that I wasn't spending 1% of my year just trying to think through how to spend the other 99%. And so now I spend three days and I try to get creative and think about what I want this year to look like, and what would be the most exciting version of the year. And then I put dates on stuff and I try to make it happen then.
00:38:11 · Shaan Puri, Bill Perkins
[00:38:11] S1: carve out three days now a year, because it just seemed crazy to me that I wasn't spending 1% of my year just trying to think through how to spend the other 99%. And so now I spend three days and I try to get creative and think about what I want this year to look like, and what would be the most exciting version of the year. And then I put dates on stuff and I try to make it happen then. [00:38:30] S0: Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, we sit down frequently, but our our our life and our travel schedule is so packed, and there's so many... We're reacting to a lot of events. Right? Like, we're in the... Playing a game like catching events, like, and and trying to move them around. Can we go? But then the larger arc conversation, like, where do we wanna be and set up camp? What culture do we wanna discover? You know what mean? What activities? Those are ongoing. [00:38:53] S1: But what what part of your life are you most dissatisfied with right now? And I ask this because I think when people listen, it's cool to hear somebody who's got their shit together and inspires you, but also it's good to remember, like everybody's still a work in progress, right? Everybody's got some level of wet cement they're still trying to shift around, whether it's their health or their relationships or whatever.
00:38:53 · Shaan Puri, Bill Perkins
[00:38:53] S1: But what what part of your life are you most dissatisfied with right now? And I ask this because I think when people listen, it's cool to hear somebody who's got their shit together and inspires you, but also it's good to remember, like everybody's still a work in progress, right? Everybody's got some level of wet cement they're still trying to shift around, whether it's their health or their relationships or whatever. [00:39:12] S0: I'd have to say health adherence right now. Like, I got married four years ago. Four... Was it four... Yeah. Twenty... Four years ago, and, you know, I was 8% body fat, v o two at the top 1%, yada yada yada, and now I'm probably like 16, 18% body fat, and v o two is like barely at the mid for my age, which is not the way to be. And so I would say that's probably the most dissatisfaction. I got a lot of victim stories of like, you know, I get up twice a night because we have a small baby. I'm too tired to do the things. You know, just went through a pregnancy and just kinda ate like, you know, I was a prisoner on death row. You know what I mean? Like... But that's just all bullshit. So, like, I'm just being lazy and not doing the thing. So I've broken all [00:40:04] S1: the all the all [00:40:04] S0: the stay in top 1% health, and I'm I'm, you know, down in the mids or below in certain areas.