In early 2022, A message from a 28-year-old subscriber to my newsletter caught my attention.
Rohan Venkatesh was, in a sense, a slightly younger version of me. The eldest son of two Indian immigrants, he had grown up in a small town outside Boston, Massachusetts, where he excelled academically at the public high school. He went to Northeastern University in Boston, graduated magna cum laude, and began his career in finance, accepting a prestigious, demanding role as an analyst at an investment bank. A few years of strong performance later, he joined an investment fund and saw his responsibilities grow. Just as I had, he put his head down and did the work with the deep-rooted belief that the best was yet to come.
Things certainly seemed that way until one August morning in 2021 when everything changed.
On that morning, Rohan woke up ready to take on the world. He had just accepted a new job that would catapult him to an offi ce in the heart of New York City. The morning began like any other: a little bit of work followed by a run with his mother, something that had become a bit of a ritual. While on the run, Rohan felt an odd sensation in one of his legs. Assuming he was fatigued from workouts or lack of sleep, he simply walked home and jumped on his next work call. In the middle of the call, he noticed that he couldn’t move his left arm. He called for help. A few minutes later, his condition had worsened to the point that he required a wheelchair to enter the hospital. Within 24 hours, a team of doctors walked into his room and delivered the stunning news: Rohan Venkatesh had an inoperable brain tumour.
In the span of one day, his future went “from wonderfully infinite to terrifyingly finite.”
The week he had excitedly marked on his calendar as the start of his new job became the week he started his radiation treatment. The months that followed were a blur of hospital rooms, tests, and treatments. He endured six weeks of radiation that threatened to drain the life out of him. He endured the period that followed as he awaited news on whether the treatment had halted the tumour’s growth. He endured months of rehabilitation as he worked to regain his mental and physical strength, a process that continues today.
When Rohan reached out to me and shared his story, he had just entered what might best be described as a “holding pattern” with the tumour – it hadn’t disappeared, but it had stopped growing. I was taken with his infectious, almost inexplicable optimism for a fresh lease on life. Over the year that followed, I had a chance to spend time with him, and we developed a friendship. We spoke about the light of life found in the darkness of death, the beauty of a life devoid of the false pretences that perceived permanence instils in you. Apple founder Steve Jobs put it well: “Almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.”
Rohan Venkatesh was already naked – and in the face of the darkness, he found his light:
“I had the power to choose.”
An old Buddhist parable echoes this sentiment. The Buddha asks a student, “If a person is struck by an arrow, is it painful?” The student nods yes. The Buddha asks, “If a person is struck by a second arrow, is that even more painful?” The student again nods yes. The Buddha then explains, “In life, we cannot always control the first arrow – the bad thing that happens. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the bad thing, and that second arrow is optional.” The first arrow is the negative event that hits you – the chaos, pain, challenges, and complexity that threaten to derail you, to take you out of the game. It hits and it hurts. But the second arrow is your response to the first, and as the parable teaches us, you can avoid being struck by the second arrow; it is entirely within your control.
Rohan Venkatesh was determined to avoid being hit by that second arrow, even in the face of dire circumstances. “I had lost a lot. I had this (literal and figurative) Sword of Damocles hanging over my head. But every morning, I got to choose what to focus on. I could choose to focus on things outside my control. I could choose to sit alone in my misery. I could choose to scroll on social media and see people doing the things I could no longer do. Or I could choose to focus on things within my control. I could choose to spend time with people who lift me up, who inspire me to grow. I could choose to be the type of person who they would want to be around.”
Life is so very fragile, but no matter how fragile it is, each day we have a choice of how to live it. Each day is a fresh start, a fresh choice to make. Rohan’s words on choosing his people are particularly poignant. You have many choices over the course of your life, but one stands out as the most important choice you will ever make: Who will you choose to join you on this wild, crazy journey? Who will you choose to gift your energy, love, and respect to? Who will you choose to spend your terrifyingly finite time with?
You need connection to survive and thrive, for your health, happiness, and fulfillment. You need to build a life of Social Wealth.
Your Social Wealth is built across three core pillars:
Depth: Connection to a small circle of people with deep, meaningful bonds
Breadth: Connection to a larger circle of people for support and belonging beyond the self, either through individual relationships or through community, religious, spiritual, or cultural infrastructure
Earned status: The lasting respect, admiration, and trust of your peers that you receive on the basis of earned, not acquired, status symbols.
This does not require any special starting place, family situation, or financial means. It does, however, require a sense of urgency: The time horizon of our investment in Social Wealth matters. In The Good Life, the New York Times bestselling book by Marc Schulz and Harvard Study of Adult Development director Robert Waldinger, the authors point out, “Like muscles, neglected relationships atrophy.” If we incorrectly assume an infinite time horizon for our relationships – meaning that an investment in the future is effectively the same as an investment now – we may find that many of these relationships have atrophied to the point of no return by that later date.
If you skip those family trips in your twenties and thirties, you might not have the chance in your forties and fifties. If you fail to check in on your friends in your thirties and forties, they might not be around when you’re in your fifties and sixties. If you don’t join that local community group in your forties and fifties, you won’t have those connections in your sixties and seventies. If you don’t show up for your loved ones during their times of need, they won’t show up for you during yours.
Investing in your Social Wealth now through daily, deliberate actions to improve your social fitness is the clearest path to developing a life rich in connections, from depth to breadth and beyond.
As you measure Social Wealth as part of your new scoreboard, the three pillars – depth, breadth, and earned status – provide a blueprint for the right action to build it. By developing an understanding of these pillars and the high-leverage systems that affect them, you can begin to create the right outcomes.
Excerpted with permission from The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life, Sahil Bloom, Harper Business India.
