Austin Scholar #156: How your kid can design their dream life
& Sahil Bloom's "The 5 Types of Wealth"
Hey, y'all!
This week from Austin Scholar...
How your kid can design their dream life
Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…
I’ve been feeling great recently. With spring break coming up and my overall prepared-ness for my finals, I feel both excited for the upcoming weeks and content with where I am now. This is a far cry from the first half of this quarter, where I was constantly stressing about my exams and how far behind I felt.
What changed?
I’ve been getting eight hours of sleep each night, exercising multiple times per week (including pilates in my dorm room, walking a few miles around campus, and yoga routines), and studying for my Math 51 exam a little bit each day instead of all at once two days before. Small, basic changes really do the most.
I’ve also been locked in on a few TV shows, which I’ve found to have become a fundamentally social activity for me – I don’t really watch shows without other people. Instead, I’m watching Severance every Thursday with one of my best friends, Mythic Quest with my family, and White Lotus every Sunday with a group chat recap with some close family friends. It’s a great way to connect with people even when you don’t have a lot of energy (a constant state of mine at the end of each day). I couldn’t recommend having a “family show” more – it will make everyone excited to spend time together and ensures that a least a little time each week is spent together.
How your kid can design their dream life
Two years ago, I wrote an article about my favorite ideas from Sahil Bloom and translated them to be more applicable to kids. He then responded to my thread about that article with this, which basically cemented my love for his ideas and my hope that I was on the right track with my content:
So when Sahil published his book, The 5 Types of Wealth, earlier this year, I knew my time had come to yet again become Sahil’s teenage translation engine :)
His book is about designing your dream life, something that could not be more applicable to kids, and to teenagers in particular. I mean, that’s literally the entire point of being a teenager – trying to figure out who you are and what you want out of life.
It would be super hard to talk about every incredible concept in his book (you should buy it yourself to get the maximum amount of value!!), so I’ll cut it down to what I think were the most valuable thought experiments and exercises for your kid.
In the book, Sahil argues that there are five pillars of wealth: time, social, mental, physical, and financial. In this issue, I’ll broadly explain each one and then include one or two exercises your kid can do to transform the way they think about each pillar. In the next, I’ll share some more parenting-focused exercises and concepts from The 5 Types of Wealth.
Time wealth: “The freedom to choose how to spend your time, whom to spend it with, where to spend it, and when to trade it for something else” (25).
The energy calendar
The premise of this exercise is simple: you want to find the activities in your life that give you energy and do more of them, and find the activities that drain your energy and do less of them.
Your task: spend one week rating every activity you do on a green, yellow, and red scale. Green activities give you energy, yellow activities are neutral, and red activities drain energy. Don’t think too deeply about your responses – go with your gut feeling. Here is mine from a few weeks ago:
(I used orange instead of yellow to differentiate from my class schedule.)
Some trends I noticed (ignore my midterm crash out – that was a bit of an anomaly): the one-on-one tutoring and individual studying were significantly better for me than the group review sessions, so for the final, I should think about not going to those and instead going to office hours or learning on my own.
On Tuesday, scrolling on TikTok after working on my short story was a neutral activity, while watching TV with my friends after our midterm was energizing for me. So I should definitely consider making my decompression time after a long day more social. And, of course, everything related to my newsletter was energizing :)
The goal is to figure out the parts of your life that drain your energy and figure out ways to improve them. Of course, it’s often impossible for students to “improve” energy draining activities like awful homework worksheets or essays about things you don’t care about, but there are things you can do to give yourself energy. Try having an energizing activity right after a long homework session – like dinner with your friends or watching a show with your family. Or maybe reward yourself for completing the homework with a nice dessert or an extra episode of TV that night.
The anti-procrastination system
Procrastination plagues millions of teens every year. But there is a way to work around it.
Step 1: Deconstruct the task – break it down to its smallest parts (ex. I have to write the introduction, research, write an article, find sources, and write the sources every week for my newsletter)
Step 2: Plan and create stakes – plan exactly what you’re going to do and use social pressure and rewards to motivate yourself (ex. I’m meeting up with my friend today at 2pm to write my newsletter introduction for fifteen minutes and find my sources for fifteen minutes. Once I do that, we can catch up for a half hour.)
Step 3: Action – follow through on your plan
That is, of course, the hardest part. But by using social pressure and making plans with other people who can hold you accountable, you are definitely helping yourself get started.
This is why I always love studying with other friends who also have stuff they need to get done. We can support each other and reward ourselves by talking to each other (something that is very motivating, especially when I have lots of life updates).
Social wealth: “The depth and breadth of your connection to those around you. It is the network you can rely on for love and friendship but also for help in times of need” (26).
Every single exercise in this section is an absolute banger and particularly applicable to kids navigating relationships for the first time, but this was my favorite thought exercise in this section: