Executive Radio. Really creative name. Today’s gold fact of the day is that the longest record

for someone staying awake is 264.4 hours. That would be 11 days and 24 minutes. Kind

of a long amount of time, even if you’re on Bulletproof Coffee, Provigil, Adderall,

and all the other crazy stuff that you could do to stay awake and that you probably shouldn’t

if you’re that tired. Today’s podcast is going to be particularly

cool because we’ve got a guy on who’s a really well-known expert in something that

I don’t talk about that much on the Bulletproof Executive.

We talk about human performance, but we don’t often talk about financial performance and

one of the things that I’ve learned over the years of spending $300,000 on upgrading

my performance and getting my brain to work the way I wanted it to work is that it takes

money, and it’s easier to do things like that when you have a solid financial base,

so I’ve invited Tom Corley, the author of Rich Habits: The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy

Individuals onto the show to talk about not necessarily biohacking or being healthier,

but to talk about the financial side of success and what we can do as human beings to ensure

or at least encourage our own success. Tom, you’ve studied for five years daily

activities of 233 wealthy people and 128 people in poverty to find 200 daily activities. That’s

what you’re here to talk about today. Thank you for joining the show.

Tom: Hi, Dave. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Dave: You’re doing something else new that’s really interesting as well. In fact, you just

turned in your manuscript for Rich Kids: How to Raise Our Children to Be Happy and Successful

in Life. I’ve written a book about epigenetics. I think that success starts really in your

grandmother about when she’s conceived because of the epigenetic impacts that roll down through

multiple generations. What your mother ate when you were in the womb really affects what

your physical [meat 00:02:18] is capable of today, so even if you follow the rich habits,

if your parents got it wrong, you’re at a disadvantage.

All men are not created equal, not in the world that I see through the lens of epigenetics.

Some have more skills than others, and through hard work, we can all achieve all sorts of

amazing things, but it’s harder if your parents didn’t do it right. I’m stoked

to see talking about building habits in kids so that we can avoid some of the pitfalls

that many people go through, especially in their 20s. What are the habits that people

should care about the most if they want to be successful? What’s your number one thing

out of this list of 200? Tom: Boy, that’s a loaded question. There’s

so many of them, but I’ll tell you. The one thing that I found that is responsible

for most of the success that the wealthy people have is daily self-improvement, and predominantly

reading that relates to what you do for a living. Thirty minutes a day was the average

time that wealthy people spend every day reading something that had to do with their career

or something that had to do with gaining knowledge that they could leverage at some point to

help their customers, clients, or anybody and the other thing I found was building relationships.

To the wealthy, relationships are like gold. It’s the currency of the wealthy, Dave,

and they go to great lengths to build strong relationships with specific people. They just

don’t build relationships with anybody. If they decided that Dave Asprey was going

to be a relationship they wanted to develop, one of the individuals in my study, he would

call you a relationship tree, and he would say he was going to plant you in the ground

and his goal by the time he ended his career or his life was to turn you into a redwood.

He wanted to know everything there was to know about Dave because that information’s

powerful and it could help him in some way, shape, or form to help you.

Dave: My background is computer science. I was raised by geeks in the wild and there’s

a sort of mindset that comes in. A lot of the readers here were like, “That’s manipulative”

or “That’s slimy,” or “That’s using people,” or “You only went to school to

get relationships and that’s some form of privilege that’s not based on ability or

merit.” How do you respond to that when you find out this is what wealthy people do?

Tom: A lot of the wealthy people, while they’re building these relationships, are on board

of directors of nonprofit groups, civic groups. They’re helping to build hospitals. They’re

helping, for example, I’m on a … ever since I found out about this research, I joined

a bunch of nonprofits and I’m on the board of directors of an organization that helps

kids with cancer, so you could look at it any way you want, but at the end of the day,

they’re helping a lot of people by building these relationships. These relationships are

a two-way street. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. Along the way, a lot of people benefit

from that backscratching. Dave: I find it to be … I wasn’t raised

to do that, to even recognize the value of those relationships, but as I matured, that

seems like amazing advice and all of the most successful people that I’ve been fortunate

to spend time with in Silicon Valley and elsewhere do the same thing. They will pick up the phone.

They’ll call someone they want to get to know. They’ll arrange activities that they

want to do to connect to the people that they value, and fortunately, there’s some times

that I’m in that list, and it’s a dance. It seems like one that successful people do

do, and they don’t do it because they’re trying to use other people, but you have an

hour. Who are you going to spend it with? You might as well structure that consciously

instead of going to a bar and figuring out whatever happens.

Tom: I call it the relationship seesaw and what wealthy people try and do is surround

themselves with other wealthy, successful people because when wealth comes together,

you can do a lot of good with that wealth. You can do a lot of good with your Rolodex,

your contact database, and what wealthy people try and do is tip that relationship seesaw

so that most of their relationships are success relationships and one of the things that they

try and do is limit the time that they spend with what I call poverty relationships. Those

are the relationships with negative people, people that are cynical. They don’t add

any value. They’re more like vacuum cleaners. By building these successful valuable relationships,

they do a lot of things besides what we’ve talked about. I had one individual in my study

who was a bigwig at a bank in New York. He ran their commodities group and during January

of 2009, everybody remembers what was going on back then, he lost his job and he lost

$600,000 a year in pay. For two weeks, he made a couple phone calls. I remember one

of them was to me and he said, “Boy, I just lost my job.” I said, “That’s too bad,”

and he goes, “Yeah, I’m not worried about it. I’m going to make a few phone calls.

I’ll find something.” Within two weeks, he had another job and then

he called me up. He said, “Yeah, I got a job. I think it’s going to be a better job.

More potential for earning money anyway.” I said, “How did you do it?” and he said

over all the years, along with a lot of the wealthy people, they did certain things: A

hello call, a happy birthday call, life event call. They stayed in touch. They did everything

in their power to help build the relationships they wanted to build, and so when he fell

into that abyss, all he had to do was throw out a life line, a phone call, a couple phone

calls, and within two weeks, he had another job, and that’s what those powerful, successful

relationships do. They bail you out in a time of need, not just help you make money, but

they bail you out when you really need them the most.

Dave: It’s a form of resilience, just like you can recover from an accident or something

or from a heavy workout or you can drink more vodka than the next guy because you built

resilience, and building it into your career, it matters. This happened to me actually.

I was at a security company in Silicon Valley. We planned to lay off. I fought like hell

to protect my team, the guys working for me, and I did. None of them got laid off. I was

assured that I was also protected, knowing full well that I was probably at risk because

my team was all really good, so you don’t need the boss when you’ve got people who

can execute. Sure enough, the morning of the layoff, I’m

not invited to the right meetings. I’m like, “Oh, great. I’m on the list” even though

two days ago they promised I wasn’t on the list and I didn’t mind being on the list,

but they didn’t give me the benefit of a runway, so I came home from what was already

going to be a rough day because any time there’s a layoff, it’s painful, and I found I don’t

have a job. Honestly, my wife, Lana, freaked out a little bit, but I’m like, “I’m

going to make a few phone calls,” just like the story you said. That’s what made this

come up in my mind. “I’m going to make a few phone calls.”

I had a job as an entrepreneur in residence at Trinity Ventures within a few days, and

that was a remarkable time in my career because I got to see what start-ups experience when

they’re pitching on the VC side, but I got to see it from the VC’s perspective, which

was really valuable for me. It’s a weird thing to look at any time you’re laid off

as an opportunity to expand if you’ve built resilience and safety buffers in. Like I said,

it’s about the people and more specifically, the people you’ve helped. I think that piece

of advice for everyone listening to this is don’t look at everyone as who’s going

to hire me later, but how can you help them because they might help you back or they’ll

help someone else and it works out, so it’s beautiful advice. I love it.

You pay a lot of attention to this because when you were nine, your family went from

basically millionaires to nothing. What happened? Can you tell me a bit about that?

Tom: Yeah. My dad … there’s four types of luck, Dave. There’s random good luck,

there’s random bad luck, and those two types of luck are fairly democratic. They affect

rich people and poor people equally. Then there’s the types of luck that wealthy people

and poor people create. Wealthy people create opportunity good luck and poor people create

detrimental bad luck. My dad was the victim of random bad luck. The warehouse burnt down

and back in those days, they didn’t … he had, I don’t know, four or five million

dollars’ worth of tools in inventory and lost most of them. They didn’t have insurance

like they do today, so he had to stroke a check to his vendors for about four million,

which was all the money he had. He could have filed for bankruptcy because

at the time, I didn’t know anything about it but as I got older, my dad said, “Yeah,

I was probably half a million dollars insolvent at that point,” and he said, “Bankruptcy’s

not the solution.” He said, “The solution’s getting back up on your feet and starting

all over again.” He was fortunate enough to have some rich habits, not many, but he

had a few rich habits that helped to drag him back up, and it took years, but when he

retired, he had a million dollars in the bank, so he went from being insolvent with eight

kids, most of them young, to retiring with a million dollars in the bank and that was

because of some of the rich habits that he had.

Dave: At the time, were his rich habits conscious or were they things he’d picked up? I imagine

most people’s habits because they’re habits, are not particularly conscious, cultivated

habits. Did he pass these down to you or is this all a result of your study because you

didn’t want to relive that experience? Tom: No, the answer is he didn’t pass these

down to us really because he was never around. He was always working. He was one of these

people that he tightened his belt and he decided, “I’m going to work my way out of this,”

and he was great at building relationships. There was no question my dad was probably

one of the most powerful people on Staten Island before he fell off the mountain. He

was a big, powerful, behind-the-scenes political guy and all those relationships came … that

was the one rich habit that he had. He had the rich habit of building these rich relationships,

and each one of them bent over backwards to try and help my dad.

They were loaning him money. They were trying to get him jobs. They couldn’t do enough

for him and that’s why we didn’t lose our house. We came close. Until the time I

was 23, we probably had about six or seven instances where we almost lost our house.

You lose your house and we had 11 people living in that house. That would have been a disaster.

My dad was incredible that way in keeping the family alive. It was that rich habit of

building those relationships. Most of these rich habits that I’ve encountered opened

up my eyes because I didn’t have my dad that sat down and had the conversation with

me. I can tell you when I uncovered these rich

habits, I sat down with each and every one of my kids and explained the habits to them

as I was uncovering them and all of the strategies that I uncovered, and of course, when I wrote

the book, I made each one of them read the book, and so they’re the beneficiaries of

it. I’ve got a guinea pig in my son who’s 24 years old and he’s working in the city,

and he’s knocking it out of the park. He’s one of the fair-haired kids in his company

because he is the beneficiary of these rich habits and this is why the parenting is so

important and why I wrote the Rich Kids book. Parents are often the only success mentors

any of us ever have a shot at having in life. There’s five ways you can find a mentor.

Parents are predominantly the way, so if parents aren’t doing their job because they don’t

know what to do, then the kids are going to grow up and they’re going to pick up whatever

habits their parents passed along to them and this is why the rich get richer and the

poor get poorer, Dave. It’s not because of Wall Street. It’s not because of the

government. It’s not because of 15 other reasons. It’s because of parenting.

If parents know the rich habits, they can pass … and not just parents, grandparents

… they can pass along the rich habits to the kids or the grandkids and it can change

their lives. It can break the generational cycle of poverty at a very early age by indoctrinating

kids. Dave: You are going to achieve a lot of good

with this book. I’ve been involved with Junior Achievement where you go in as a businessperson

and you teach economics usually to poorer schools and I’ve done this in East Palo

Alto, I’ve done it in Mountain View. One was a rich school, one was a very poor school

and man, the difference in the awareness and understanding of the people in the classroom.

In the poor school, it’s like, “What are you going to do to get a job?” “I’m

going to buy insert-name-of-large-SUV-with-spinners-on-it” and you go across the tracks and it’s so

different, just the perception of economic reality is wildly diverse.

If you, with your work, can teach parents to do this for their kids, a lot of people

won’t do things for themselves that they’ll do for their kids or even their pets, so since

you’re not going to have rich pets, rich kids was definitely the right target for you.

When are people going to be able to get this book? Because honestly, I want to read it