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The Richest Dentist You Know Isn't the Wealthiest

The Richest Dentist You Know Isn't the Wealthiest

5/9/2026 12:47:43 AM   |   Comments: 0   |   Views: 26


In this episode, Wes Read continues his deep-dive review of The Five Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom, a book that profoundly influenced his thinking as a financial planner who has spent his career helping dentists build meaningful lives through their practices.

Wes covers the book’s preface and Chapter 2, unpacking the research on money and happiness, the philosophy behind redefining wealth, and Sahil Bloom’s powerful framework: the five types of wealth that truly define a fulfilled life.


What You’ll Learn in This Episode

Why money matters but only up to a point. Wes walks through three core findings from the research on money and happiness, including the concept of declining marginal utility.
The Pyrrhic Victory. The story of King Pyrrhus in 280 BC and what it means to win the battle but lose the war, and how this applies directly to the pursuit of financial success at the expense of everything else.
Wealth inequality by the numbers. A candid look at Federal Reserve data on how wealth is distributed in America and what it means for dentists trying to cross from labor income to capital ownership.
The comparison trap. Why “there’s always a bigger boat” and how excessive comparison is one of the greatest enemies of happiness.
The 90% rule. A striking stat: 90% of all the time you will ever spend with your children happens before they leave home.

The Five Types of Wealth are defined:

Time Wealth: The freedom to choose how, where, with whom, and when you spend your time.
Social Wealth: The depth and breadth of your meaningful relationships; the #1 predictor of happiness.
Mental Wealth: Connection to higher-order purpose, lifelong growth, and a healthy relationship with your mind.
Physical Wealth: Your health, fitness, and vitality; the most entropic form of wealth requiring consistent daily habits.
Financial Wealth: Assets minus liabilities, but with a twist: your expectations are also a liability.

The seasons of life. How your priorities across these five categories will naturally shift over time, and why balance, not perfection, is the goal.

Transcript:

Welcome back again, everyone, to another episode of The Dental Boardroom podcast. As you know, I've launched into a review of the book, The Five Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom, a book that profoundly moved me when I read it, and I'm a financial planner, quite literally. I'm a certified financial planner, a CFP, and a CPA, and really founded Practice CFO to help doctors, largely dentists, to know how to have a healthy relationship with their money, and to use their practice as the feeder of that money to support the life that they design to create happiness, fulfillment, and joy.

Well, this book really hit home on that subject. For those of you who are dedicated to the podcast, and perhaps you're a client of Practice CFO and wanna know what's in my mind as a new read that really influenced me, this is it. And if you can buy this book and read along with me, I think you'll g- get a great set of thoughts and plans around your life to design it in a way that is deeply meaningful by Sahil Bloom, S-A-H-I-L B-L-O-O-M, Sahil Bloom.

Today, I'm on, if you do have it, page 17, and before we launch into the five types of wealth and go into each of them individually, this, uh, section, which is only a few pages, is a little bit of a preface. And he launches into this chapter by saying every year he tries to do something that makes him reflective about life.

Well, in this particular year, this was 2022, it was a bit different because, uh, he had his first child was born. And as he saw his child sort of come into life and see him slowly start to grow and move and develop, it made him think about his relationship to time. And as he was going through this big change in his life, this inflection point where he really wanted to understand how money affected people's happiness, and really what is a better definition of wealth beyond money, he decided to go and interview some people he knew who were in their 80s and 90s.

He asked the question, what did they know at 90 that they wished they had known at age 30? And one thing about us humans, we do not have a good understanding of the time-space continuum. We look forward, and we feel like the future will never end, that the end of our life will never come, that we essentially have forever to live.

As you get closer to your 70s, 80s, and 90s, you realize that that becomes less and less of a reality, but when you're in your 30s, 40s, and even 50s, and even 60s sometimes, you just feel like that hourglass is never gonna run out. And yet when you look backward, you ask yourself, "Where did the time go so fast?"

And that trouble understanding the time-space continuum in our existence in life is a challenge for us and causes us oftentimes to have a lot of regrets. Well, one of the things he quotes in the book, uh, that he learned from these interviews was the following: "Regret from inaction is always more painful than regret from action."

I thought that was a great little insight that I've taken with me. I would rather try and fail than not try at all, in other words. But in all of these interviews, you know, they gave him various tropes in life, like, "Never fear sadness as it tends to sit right next to love." Or another one, "Never raise your voice except at a ball game."

Or another one, "Treat your body like a house. You have to live in it for another 70 years." And one of them, or one of the things he noticed in all of the responses were that none of them once mentioned money. Not a single one. Now, that said, he launches into this section where he says, "This isn't to say that money doesn't matter.

That's not what I'm saying, and that's not even what the research s- is saying. What the research is saying is the following: It is something, but it simply can't be the only thing when it comes to happiness." And here are three core summaries of the research on the body of evidence around the relationship between money and happiness.

Number one, money improves overall happiness at lower levels of income by reducing fundamental burdens and stress. At these lower levels, money can, and in fact does, buy happiness. It is true that if you're sleeping on a soft bed with a roof above your head on a cloudy, rainy night, you're going to be likely happier than the one sleeping on the streets soaked.

That's a basic, simple understanding that should make sense to everybody. However, if you have income above these levels to cover all of your life's basic necessities, and if you are still unhappy, more money is likely to change that unhappiness. And lastly, if you have income above this baseline and are happy, the more money you have is unlikely to drive increasing happiness.

Now, you know, I've talked about this in a, an economic term called the declining marginal utility of something, or the declining marginal happiness over time. In economics, if you've taken an economics class, they have this thing called the declining marginal, the utility of a dollar, which simply means that the next dollar you earn is less important and less impactful for you than the dollar just before it.

So your first $30,000 you make In a year are gonna probably be the most important if you think about those going to your most important needs first, your food, your house, you know, your kids, a car, that kind of thing. That is the most important. Then the next thirty thousand, which starts to go toward start getting into hobbies or eating out or luxury items or the nicer car.

The next thirty thousand, the next thirty thousand, the next thirty thousand, et cetera, does buy you more. More stuff, higher quality stuff, more experiences, possibly. However, the value of that new tier of money becomes less impactful than the tier before it. That's the main takeaway from most bodies of research on the subject of money and happiness.

So in other words, the default scoreboard, so focused on money. Whenever we think of wealth, the default scoreboard is money. And it may be a useful asset in the earliest days of your journey, but it is a liability when you're attached to it in later days. And I've got the book here. I'm literally reading right out of it.

And I can say as I've worked with people all up and down the age continuum, from dental students to even teenagers like my kids, or I have some nieces and nephews who come to me and ask advice around money, all the way up to the, to the client who literally was about to pass away and did pass away, and helping them and their family after they passed away.

And everything in between. Early-stage dentists, new practice owners, mature practice owners, selling practice owners, and retired practice owners. We've helped all of them in countless hours of conversation and analysis around their money, ultimately trying to attach value and meaning of that money in their life.

And I will say that those who created their entire scoreboard, or the majority of their scoreboard of happiness around the dollar sign, the one of the five categories of wealth per the book, which is the financial side. Those who have derived their scoreboard on that number only tend to be the ones who struggle the most to pivot outside of their practice.

It is what makes up their self-identity. And it's difficult. When you sell the practice on paper, you are giving up what is that source of your identity. And for some doctors, that will be very, very hard. And there are others who have had a really good balance in these other areas of wealth, such that when they release that source of financial income, they have plenty of other sources of wealth to lean on and to pivot to that ge- that derive incredible joy in their life He ends off this section by talking about one of the people he interviewed.

He owned a manufacturing business, and he sold it for $100 million. That's a lot of money. Most people would struggle to spend the amount of money that can spin off $100 million. Just to put some math on that, let's say a h- the $100 million makes 7% per year. 7% per year. That is $7 million. 7 mill... Let's go ahead and say 6%.

$6 million. That is $500,000 per month. That can get difficult to spend. I mean, don't get me wrong, if you are a luxury car connoisseur, or you like to-- you wanna buy a Gulfstream jet, yeah, sup- I suspect you could spend that money really quickly. But for your average person, that actually becomes work to have to spend that level of money.

Imagine being a billionaire. Imagine being worth 300 or 400 billion. It's utterly insane to think what capitalism is able to dish out for those select few who get up into those categories. In fact, here's a little stat for you. This is completely off the cuff. But the Federal Reserve Board recently released, uh, as of 2020, I think it was '25, the breakup of wealth in this country.

The-- And it, it goes like this. The top 1% of wealth owners, so this is capital. In your economics class or in this, you know, as you look back at the ec- at the famous economists who wrote on the subject of capitalism and the different economic structures that countries will use, that there's always this tension between labor and capital.

Labor is people working. They're working, and they live off the paycheck from their hands, from their computer, from their body. They are working. They're physically working, and that work is generating income. Whether that's physical labor or whether that's intellectual labor doesn't matter. That is labor.

Now, certain labor demands a higher premium. So professionals, like a dentist, like an attorney, demand a higher premium than, say, somebody who will come and clean your yard. That's a different set of skills that took a lot longer to develop and therefore demands a higher revenue. And the higher the revenue that one can demand from that expertise, the more that they are able to use excess cash income to develop assets, i.e.

buy capital, and over time, bridge from labor into capital. And that has been one beautiful thing about capitalism and our system in this country, which is largely meritocratic-based, is it rewards meritocracy. It rewards those who have leveraged the concept of meritocracy to work hard, be gritty, learn, go to school, take on risks- Earn money that exceeds what they need to live day to day, apply the surplus toward their personal balance sheet and other assets, and then over time they are able to live off those assets rather than their income from physical or from, you know, a day job.

And that-- One of the big questions out there these days is, is that bridge from labor to capital that every American born in this country has typically had the opportunity to do. Now, I won't get into the subject of how much chance of life circumstance and who your parents were connected to and how much money you were born into and all that stuff.

I won't get into that right now. But setting that aside, there's different... I, I would say there is different proportionate levels of access that people have to cross that bridge based on what they were born into. But I will say this country has been remarkably successful in giving a platform for virtually anybody through that hard work, through that grit, through that in, uh, intellect, through that IQ, what I call the IQ premium, to get ahead and to become on the other side of labor and to own things.

To own things, and then live off the income, whether that's a dividend, interest, capital gains, rental income, but to be able to live off of the things that they own. That's always been a beautiful thing. Nobody's stuck in an economic tier. Nobody is stuck. The question is, is what is AI doing to that? Is AI lifting up that bridge such that I don't need to go pay $10,000 for an attorney to give me legal advice about my business?

I'll pay 20 bucks a month to a, to an LLM that is specific to legal knowledge. You know, like a ChatGPT that's just for understanding legal. Now, I'm not saying that's the case, because we don't ultimately know where AI is gonna end up. Where it is now is it is a phenomenal retriever of data. But I still believe strongly that you need a human judgment who can think nuanced and the application of that knowledge to a particular context of a given client.

But the creation of the data underneath it, I think will become more and more automated over time. And what I think is gonna happen is that the A-- that AI is going to accelerate the consolidation of wealth into a very narrow group of people who are on the side of capital. Now, I'm not gonna get into a whole economics lesson here.

That's not even my area of expertise. This is something that I've thought about substantially over the past year since I am in a knowledge work area as a CPA and a financial advisor for our clients. What does this mean? How can I use AI to create a better experience for my clients? That is the end game in the way that I think about AI.

How can I use AI to create a better experience for my dentist in helping them understand their practice, understand their money, and accelerate even faster their rate toward financial independence? Now, going back to this Federal Reserve study that was done, in the top 1% of wealth Currently owns about 33% of all assets in the US.

33% of wealth is owned by the top 1% of Americans. The next 9% own about 36 to 37% of the wealth. So if you add up the top 1% and the top 9%, that is the top 10%, equals approximately 70% of wealth in the country. Then there's the, then the other 40% to get down to 50%, so the top 10 plus, plus the top 40. The, the, the next 40 owns roughly 27% of the wealth, and the bottom 2.5% of, or, yeah, the bottom 2.5%, uh...

How does that work? The top 1% owns 37, the next 9% owns about, uh, uh, 35. You're getting to somewhere around 70% there. And the bottom 50%, this is it, and I'm going off the top of my head, I apologize, but the bottom 50% of Americans own just 2.5% of the wealth. So 2.5% of wealth in this country is shared across 50% of Americans, and the other 97.5% of wealth is owned by the other 50%, with 1% owning 32%.

Now, that consolidation, i.e., the erosion of the middle class, seems to be accelerating right now. This wealth inequality is what they call it. And this is not a political commen- you know, commentary. This is not a political show. This is a financial planning and financial psychology show, this, this, this podcast I do.

However, inevitably, we're gonna get into some of these social issues, like tax policy, for example, and this, I think, matters to understand where do, where do you line up? How are you trying to bridge into the side of capital where you own things? Were you born into wealth, or are you having to work to create wealth?

Are you creating wealth to live through your life comfortably, or are you trying to create multi-generational wealth to provide advantages to your children? What are your goals? Well, let me come back now with that in mind. Here's a, somebody that the author Sahil Bloom interviewed, sold his manufacturing business for 100 million.

And to celebrate, he h- he, uh, rented a yacht, and he invited his best friends to come celebrate. And as they're getting on the boat, one of his friends looks, and on the other side of the dock was a bigger yacht. And he looked over at that yacht, and he said, "Whoa, I wonder who's in that one." And at that moment, the happiness and satisfaction That the author's friend had felt around that moment quickly deflated at the comparison.

There's always going to be a bigger boat. You have to live with that. If you are Jeff Bezos with Amazon, guess what? He looks over at Elon Musk's yacht and he says, "Dang, that's a bigger boat." And that comparison causes people to, how would I say it? Causes people to lose sight of what money and wealth, financial wealth, is intended to do, which is to make you happy.

And excessive comparisons is, are the enemy of happiness. This is why social media is such a problem, particularly with youth. Because as they're looking, whether it's, uh, uh, my son looking at bodybuilders or a woman looking on Instagram models or whatever, you're looking at people who are the top one to 3% of whatever that thing is that they specialized day in and day out doing, and you're comparing yourself to that one thing.

So you're comparing yourself to the top 1% in this category and this category and this category and that category, and you're saying, "Dang, I suck in all of these things compared to them." And then how does that make you feel? When in reality you might be way happier than all of them. It's all, um, it's all about con- putting into context what matters and knowing how to measure yourself properly, and therefore, this book is j- about just that.

It's about setting up a scorecard, a way to measure yourself in the same way that you can easily measure your finances. 'Cause you can see your bank account, bank account, see your credit card account, you can see the balances. You know what the value of your home is. Just go on Zillow, and you can quantify all that.

You know what your income is. Just look at your tax return or your W-2, all quantifiable, all over the place. All over the place. How do you quantify your relationships that matter? How do you quantify your health? How do you quantify how productively you're using your time to produce happiness? How do you quantify your mental state?

All of these things matter even more than money in what is happiness, and don't let this comparative view of you relative to others, particularly around the financial side, bring you down. So this section, he ends off by saying, "Your wealthy life may be enabled by m- by money, but in the end it will be defined by everything else."

Okay. Let's move on to chapter two, the five types of wealth, and he starts the chapter by saying, here's a quote from Lao Tzu, "If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading." Okay. He starts off the chapter, and I thought this was a great concept and has made me think a little bit about the way I allocate my time and energies in my life.

And he talks about how in, uh, the year 280 BC there was a king named King Pyrrhus, and he received a request for support from Southern Italy, the Southern Italy state, um, called Tarentum. And this state, Tarentum, was at war with the Roman Republic, and Tarentum was not an explicit ally of this king, and this king is named King Pyrrhus, and he was a king over the, uh, o- over Greece.

And he was a very powerful king. He had had incredible successes in his life, a lot of notoriety, and was a very large, the largest power at the time in that area. And so he basically said, "Well, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and so I'm gonna go, and I'm gonna help this southern It- uh, Italian state, Tarentum, and I'm gonna help them fend off the Roman Republic, who is trying to take over their land and seize it."

And so he gets in, and he starts fighting the Romans, and he wins. But he, he did it at a very significant cost. He defended them off, and s- then he said, "You know what? I wanna go for more. I wanna now go on the offense." And he did, and he went on the offense and started going north, uh, in Italy and started conquering and taking over more territory.

And eventually, he was able to extend that victory and take over that land. However, it left him so decimated, his military so minimized, his weaponry pretty much eliminated, that he had to retreat back down to Greece, and he essentially died in almost vague notoriety. Nobody really-- He's not really going down in the history books because he had to give up so much in order to have that victory.

And a term came out of that, and the term is called the Pyrrhic victory, and it now refers to the victory won at such a steep cost to the victor that it feels like a defeat. The victory damages the victor beyond repair. He wins the battle, but he loses the war. And many of you have heard me talk about my favorite TED Talk, A Softer, Kinder, Gentler Definition of Success by a British philosopher named Alain de Botton, and the first one I ever listened to.

And his main theme there was that we have to be very careful about our definis- definition of success and that as we pursue success in our life, it is critical that we define, in some ways, our definition of success by the elements of loss, the elements of loss that will completely overshadow and really eliminate the reward that comes with achieving that more narrowly defined definition of success.

What is it in your health? What is it in your life? What is it with your relationships? What is it in your mental state? What is it in your spiritual state? What is it in all those things that have to be given up in order to achieve that goal? Defining your success by those elements of loss. Well, what this book is trying to do is look more comprehensively at all the areas of wealth and take a balanced approach as we pursue wealth in our lives.

So let's go over all five of these areas of wealth. But before we do, I wanna share a few bullet points from the book, which are common examples, common situations that I bet we can all relate to, uh, that are illustrative of us putting our focus on the one dimension of wealth, which is the financial side of wealth, our business, our career.

And here they are. Uh, these warning signs, um, on the path towards success, uh, that, uh, don't involve loss of life and limb like King Pyrrha, but they aren't pretty. And here's what, here's what they are, a few examples. You hit another quarterly profit target, but miss another anniversary dinner. You earn a record bonus, but fail to make it to a single one of your child's sport games.

You say yes to every single work call, but can't find time to reconnect with an old friend. You stay in a job for the security, but allow your high order purpose to wither and die. You host five client dinners per week, but can't walk up the stairs without feeling winded. You never leave money on the table, but won't think twice about leaving your peace of mind there.

You know, another stat, this is not from the book, but another stat I read, maybe it's in here somewhere, is with your kids, those of you that have kids, did you know that it's about 90% of all the time you will ever have with your kids occurs before the time that they leave the house? So let's just say that's 18 to 20, kind of right around that timeframe.

90% of the time that you will have with your kids in your whole journey through life will be up to that point. Then for the rest of your life, you'll only see them about 10% of the total time you've been with them throughout your life, meaning that after your kids leave the house, the amount of experience, interaction, time you have with them falls off an absolute cliff.

And we take this for granted when they're with us. You know, I still have a couple kids at home, and when I get home, there's all these things I like to do. I like to go back in my office and keep working sometimes 'cause that's in my nature, and that's why this book is good for me. I like to go exercise or go on a run.

I love to sit down and watch something for a little bit to diffuse. I love to, you know, do all sorts of things. Sit down and read a book, sit in my massage chair. And my son is there- And I know I've got this small block of time before he has to go to bed where I can sit down, have dinner, and do something with him.

So lately what I've been doing is, this is so dad of me, but I bought a book called Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens, which is written by the son of Stephen Covey, who wrote the famous book, Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. And just that roughly 10 to 15 minutes that I sit down and we sort of alternate reading pages is just so good because then we close the book, we lift our head, and we say, "How we doing?"

His name is McKay. "How we doing in these areas, McKay? Go ahead and, and tell me what you think. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna judge you. I just want you to th- tell me how you feel you're doing." And I always have to remember, you know, with kids, that their maturity occurs in its own timeframe. I can't jump in their brain and wire it so that they mature earlier.

And there's things like dirty rooms or not committed enough to their sport or grades that aren't where I'd like them to be or them not, you know, taking out the trash when I ask or, you know, whatever. Leaving the toothpaste lid off it all the time. These things we experience all the time with our kids. I just have to, like, accept that I have to take a lot of that in stride and know that in time, as the child's brain matures, they will start to care about these things naturally without me telling them.

Now, there's a certain amount of routine that we have to establish with our kids and habits, and, and don't get me wrong, there is certain changes that we can enforce with our kids. But in the long run, there's just some things that only time and brain development is going to, to occur with our kids. And so I'm trying to use this time to nurture what is just a really healthy relationship, so my son thinks of me, and immediately it's a positive connotation and not a negative connotation.

Now, that's difficult 'cause you can't just play the friend. If you just play the friend, you're probably not gonna be teaching them the skills that life demands to survive in the wild, as I always tell him. I'm like, "Son, I'm not gonna fail you. I know you don't like what I'm saying. I know you do- don't like doing these chores.

I know you don't like it when we look at your grades. I know you don't like this stuff, but I got a job to do. And to love you is number one. But number two is to teach you to know how to survive in the wild, and it gets really wild out there. Costs are going up. It's super difficult to accumulate the money as a down payment on a house.

You got AI coming in. What is that gonna mean in the workforce? Education matters incredibly, but now you got AI doing a lot of automation. I n- I need you to learn the process of commitment, learn the process of sharpening your own saw. And so we're gonna w- you know, we're gonna do some hard things. You know, we're gonna, we're gonna go on a hike together, a long hike.

And yeah, I know you don't wanna throw on a 30-pound backpack and go walk 50 miles. Nope, but we're gonna do it. We're gonna read this book. I know you wanna go out with your friends this weekend, but this weekend we're gonna do A, B, and C together as a family, or we're gonna do this service project," or whatever that is.

It's so important that we do that. Now, I'm a little bit on the subject of parenting. I don't mean to be. My main theme here is that you have a very short time, I will say. With key relationships in your life, let's not take them for granted like these examples I just read off from the book. Now let's launch in to the scoreboard, as this section is called on page 24.

The new scoreboard of the five types of wealth, here they are: time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth, and financial wealth. And all of these should be embedded in our journey through life, and the interplay across them is also incredibly important. And what he's trying to do in the book is give three things in each of these categories of wealth.

The first one is a way to measure how well you're incorporating that pillar of wealth into your happiness, into your existence as a human. And these tools to measure are in the same way that a net worth statement or a tax return or even a P&L, these things measure financial progress. How do we create a P&L or a tax return or financial statement when it comes to our mental state?

When it comes to our physical state? That one's a little bit easier, 'cause you got things like Fitbits and, you know, iWatches and WHOOP straps. Uh, but social wealth, that one's incredibly hard to come up with a scorecard. And do you even want to have something that's such a deliberate sc- scorecard?

Probably not. But should you set up something where you're assessing the health of your relationship and how you're nurturing those? Yes, because the book was gonna emphasize over and over that it's actually social wealth is the number one indicator of happiness. The quality of your relationships drives the quality of your life, as you've heard me say before.

So one of the three things he tries to give in each of these domains of wealth is a way to measure them. The second thing he tries to do is give you ways to make decisions based on what those measurements are telling you. So he writes, uh, "The book is intended to provide a dynamic lens through which to evaluate minor and major life decisions.

Rather than being narrowly focused on financial wealth, you can evaluate its, a decision based on its impact on all five types of wealth. A daunting decision on the old scoreboard, one that will have a negative impact on financial wealth, may prove exciting on the new scoop, scoreboard, because it will have a positive impact on several other types of wealth."

So again, seeing these things all in relationship to each other. And the third thing he tries to provide here, number one measurement, number two is sort of a decision-making framework, and number three is a way to design your life authentically and intentionally. "Design provides a model for proactive life design that considers your changing priorities across the years and enables you to focus on specific individual battles without sacrificing your victory in the longer-term war."

It creates clarity as you evaluate the trade-offs you are willing and unwilling to make to prioritize specific areas. And lastly, each of these five types of wealth are individually important, but his main theme here is that the relationships across them, this interplay and prioritization, that is the most critical, uh, uh, area here in building a comprehensively fulfilling existence.

So let's talk about each of these individually. Let's talk about time wealth. What is time wealth? Time wealth, you may think, is simply how much time are you doing the things you love. That's not how actually he defines time wealth. Now, I know we'd all love to have, you know, be at that place where we're living off our capital and we're not having to g- to, to go and, and earn income for our existence every day.

You know, we're all aspiring to get there. It's what are we giving up along the way? And when we get there, do we even recognize it, or do we just extend that journey longer to create more and more and more? One thing I didn't read, I passed up on it, but he interviewed multiple, uh, uber wealthy people, a number of who had sold tech companies, and one was worth 100 billion, one was worth 40.

Sorry, 100 million, one was, uh, worth 40 million. And in every case, every single one of them except for one, except for one, said, "I'd prefer to have two to five times more. If I had two to five times more, I could do A, B, C, and D." There's only one person who said, "You know what? I'm actually pretty good. I'm actually content with where I am.

Could I use the extra amount? Well, if I had twice as much I have now, I'd probably fly private instead of public. But beyond that, I'm pretty happy." That is someone who became intentional about defining what their happiness was derived from. Okay. So let me come back to... Let me come back to these different types of wealth right here.

So let's talk about what is time wealth. Time wealth is the freedom to choose how to spend your time, with whom you spend it, where to spend it, and when to trade it for something else. It is characterized by an appreciation and deep understanding of the previous nature of time as an asset, its value and importance.

It is the ability to direct deep attention and focus to the highest leveraged activities. It is the control over your time, the ability to establish your own priorities, to set the terms on which you say yes or no to opportunities. If you have a life devoid of time wealth, you are trapped in a perpetual loop of busyness, running faster and faster but never making progress, with little control over how time is spent and with whom it is spent.

And before you realize that, it can be a bit too late. Now, one of the things as the book goes on, he talks about time wealth. One of the definitions of time wealth, and this is what I was saying earlier, that sometimes we don't fully understand what he means by this- Is that a younger person is more time wealthy than an older person simply by math.

How many days left do they have to live in their life? How many hours? How many months? How many years? And the younger you are, the more time wealth you have. So from that standpoint, my twenty-year-old son is more wealthy than me. I am forty-seven. All right, let's go on to social wealth. Social wealth is the connection to others in your personal and professional worlds, the depth and breadth of your connections to those around you.

It is the network you can rely on for love and friendship, but also for help in times of need. It provides the texture that allows you to appreciate the other types of wealth. What good is the freedom to control your time if you don't have anyone special to spend it with? What joys can physical vitality bring if you can't enjoy physical pursuits with people you love?

Social wealth is defined by, one, a few deep, meaningful, healthy relationships, and two, a fulfilling breadth of surface ties throughout your community or culture. So I'm sort of saying that first order relationships, those are the people on the front row at your fu-funeral, and a second order of relationships that are more in other rows, in communities, in clubs, social groups, athletic groups, or in a church group, and at work as well.

If you have a life devoid of social wealth, you focus on acquired social status and lack the consequential weighty relationships that provide lasting satisfaction and joy. That is social wealth. So again, back to the beginning, time wealth and social wealth. Let's go on to mental wealth. Mental wealth is the connection to a higher order purpose and meaning that provides motivation and guides your short and long-term decision-making.

It is grounded in a pursuit of growth that embraces the dynamic potential of your intelligence, ability, and character in an engagement in lifelong learning and development. And also, it is the health of the relationship with the mind, the ability to create space to wrestle with the big unanswerable questions of life, and the maintenance of rituals that support stillness, balance, clarity, and regeneration.

If you have a life devoid of mental wealth, you live a life of stasis, self-limiting beliefs, stagnation, low-purpose activities, and most likely perpetual stress. That is mental wealth. Let's now go into physical wealth. And for those following along, I just moved my PowerPoint ahead, uh, to a summary of each of these.

So physical wealth. Physical wealth is your health, fitness, and vitality. Given its grounding in the natural world, it is the most entropic type of wealth, meaning it is more susceptible to natural decay, i.e. entropy- Second law of thermodynamics, right? Uncontrollable factors and blind luck, positive or negative than other types of wealth.

Physical wealth is defined by a focus on the controllable actions around movement, nutrition and recovery, and the cre- the creation of consistent habits to pro- to promote vigor. If you have a life devoid of physical wealth, you lack the discipline to maintain these habits, and you are at the mercy of the natural physical deterioration that robs you of enjoyment, particularly in the latter days of life, or the latter half of life, is what he writes here in the book.

That is mental wealth. So time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth, and lastly, the one we are also accustomed to thinking about, financial wealth. Financial wealth is typically defined as a financial asset minus-- as your financial assets minus financial liabilities. This is a very mathematically calculated number.

It is a figure often referred to as net worth. If you're a client of mine, you know I say that your net worth is the number one indicator of financial independence. Again, I didn't say happiness. I said financial independence, which is related, but absolutely not the same thing. However, your net worth is not your self-worth.

Your self-worth is really driven by all of these more comprehensive views of what wealth truly is. Um, carrying on. On your new scoreboard, there's an added nuance. Your liabilities... So normally, when we think of liabilities, we think of debt, our practice purchase debt, equipment debt, our home loan debt, our student loans, our car debt.

That's normally what we think about when it comes to the term liabilities. What are you liable for? However, he expands that definition here in the book, and he says your liabilities include your expectations of what you would need, your definition of enough. If your expectations rise faster than your assets, you will never have a life of true financial wealth because you'll always need more.

Financial wealth is built upon growing income, managing expenses, and investing the difference in long-term assets that compound meaningfully over time. This, that's very much my world right there. If you have a life devoid of financial wealth, you exist on a treadmill of matching inflows and outflows, a never-ending chase for more.

Wow, this one hits right home to what I do with clients, is how do we create surplus, and then how do we, in a disciplined, prudent way, use that surplus to build long-term assets that are gonna appreciate and gain the benefits of compounded growth? That's why starting early is so important, because time will make it grow exponentially.

Get started early, even if it's not a lot. Just start early. All right. Lastly, he ends off this chapter by talking about the seasons of life, saying that thriving is not an end state. It is a continuous journey that as you go through life, where you allocate your emphasis in these five categories may be different than where you allocate your emphasis in your 50s and 60s.

It will ebb and flow and change over time. That's very natural. The question is, in every era of your life, are we devoting some attention to all five of these categories? And if we do that balance and we do it effectively, we are increasing the likeliness that we feel truly wealthy in life, truly fulfilled in life.

And that is the purpose of this book, to explore how you can find that balance to produce more fulfillment and joy in your life. In the next chapter, he goes into the wealth score.

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