30 Dinners Left: Why Money Isn't Wealth

Most dentists are hitting their financial goals and still feel like something is missing. In this episode, Wes Read (CPA, CFP, and founder of Practice CFO) steps back from the balance sheet to ask a bigger question: what does wealth actually mean? Kicking off a new multi-episode series, Wes introduces the book The 5 Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom, a framework that redefines wealth across five dimensions and challenges high-earning, time-poor practice owners to intentionally design the lives they keep deferring.

What You’ll Learn

• Why financial success and true wealth are not the same thing
• The five types of wealth: time, social, mental, physical, and financial
• The “arrival fallacy” is why reaching your goals won’t create the satisfaction you’re expecting
• How to break the cycle of marginal thinking and start building your designed life
• The math exercise that changed Sahil Bloom’s life and Wes’s
• Why dentists in particular are vulnerable to being rich on one dimension and bankrupt on the others
• Three questions to take inventory of your own wealth right now
• Three action items to start this week

Key Takeaways

Financial wealth is one of the five.

Time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth, and financial wealth. Most successful dentists score very high on one and are quietly bankrupt in at least one other, often wealthy.

The arrival fallacy will keep moving the finish line.

Reaching a financial milestone does not produce lasting contentment. The assumption that it will be the arrival fallacy. Recognizing it is the first step to escaping it.

A designed life beats a default life every time.

If you don’t intentionally author your life, thousands of others are waiting to do it for you. The opposite of a successful life isn’t a failed life. It’s a default life.

What gets measured gets managed.

The reason most practices run well financially is that everything gets tracked. How much are you tracking the other dimensions of your wealth? The book gives you a scorecard to do exactly that.

Marginal thinking is the enemy of blueprinted life.

Skipping the gym once is harmless. Skipping it 9 out of 10 times compounds. The aggregation of small neglected decisions is what separates the life you designed from the life you actually lived.

The 1% framework works.

The coach of Team Sky didn’t demand a breakthrough; he asked for 1% improvements across every variable. Small, consistent, intentional gains compound into transformation.

Transcript:

Wes Read:  Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of "The Dental Boardroom" podcast. I am pivoting a little bit in this next series. Normally, in my episodes, I'm talking about, generally speaking, issues inside of the dental practice, a lot around cash flow and understanding your financial statements, and tax planning, and strategies, and protecting your practice.

I have the executive session where I have a marketing specialist and a practice management specialist come onto the show, and we talk about it from our different angles or lenses when we talk about a given subject, like how to make marketing effective, or what's happening with AI, or creating a system that allows scalability.

So much is about what I call the beating heart of your cash flow. If a practice-owning dentist… And by the way, a practice-owning dentist is the higher form of income, personally, than a non-practice-owning dentist. It's what Practice CFO was established for, was that private practice owner. Therefore, so much of the systems, the advice, the processes that we here at Practice CFO develop are to drive a healthy beating heart, that heart that feeds the rest of your financial ecosystem and ideally gives you the life well-lived.

Well, in this next series, I'm gonna take off my CPA hat, and I'm gonna put on my CFP hat. And as you know, I'm a CPA and a CFP. A CFP stands for certified financial planner. I've been a certified financial planner since about 2008. We are now 2026, so going on about 20 years almost as a CPA and certified financial planner.

And I wanna remind everybody that when I started Practice CFO, which now works with about 350 dentists throughout the country, we have about, uh, 60 employees, and we do full CPA and wealth management services. But I wanna emphasize that at the tip of my spear, the engine behind everything we do here is all about personal financial health.

The practice is just a gateway or a mechanism to achieve personal financial health. Now, what I wanna do in these next few episodes is really talk about what that means. What does financial health mean? And I'm gonna rephrase it and use the more broad term of wealth. Wealth. In what ways does happiness get derived from wealth?

Well, we need to define what wealth is, and we commonly correlate wealth with finances, almost like they're synonymous. But I'm gonna argue over the next few ser- uh, next few episodes in this series that wealth And finances are not the same thing. A strong financial situation does not mean a wealthy situation.

And I want you to follow me along. I think this could be a game changer in the way that you view your relationship to money. All right. And as a dentist and as a practice owner, I just want you to know as, as, as a high earner, relative to most Americans, our clients are high earners, and they tend to be at times very time poor.

And part of this is because we're optimizing the wrong variables. And as I talk about what wealth means these, in these next few episodes, we're gonna try to optimize much more the variables that drive true wealth, a true life well-lived, rewarded, and full of all that fulfillment that we're all looking for.

So let's go ahead and kick this off. And I want you to imagine yourself for a minute. Imagine yourself sitting across the table from your parents, and your parents are, you know, in the last chapter of life. And if your parents are already passed, then I want you to put somebody else in that seat. Maybe you're nearing that last chapter of life, in which case put your kids on the other side of the table.

If you don't have kids, put a sibling or put somebody you're really close to. These front row funeral seats I call them, the people that just matter the most, where you derive the most relational award, reward, uh, uh, sort of s- s- sense of reward in those relationships. Think of that person, plop 'em in the other side of the table, that you're with them, and now imagine that you see them twice a year.

Twice a year. Now I want you to run a little math for me. This is somebody you care about a lot. Your time is limited. Spending time with them is limited, particularly if they are not in close geographic proximity to where you are. And if you run that math, the average person is living into their late seventies, right around 80.

How many times a year are you seeing this person? And then simply multiply that number by how many years they have left or you have left and quantify that. And ask yourself, does that feel like enough? Does it feel finite and limited? Does it change the way you wanna prioritize your time to increase the amount of time you are with that person?

Well, in the next series Of episodes, I'm gonna talk about a book that starts off with this exact context, and the book is called The 5 Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom. I read this book last year when it came out, and it really moved me, like few other books have moved me, particularly in the financial area.

And I have read a lot of books about finances and personal financial planning and business financial planning. This one was just different, and it wasn't written by an academic. It was written by somebody who had experienced a remarkably busy life and who suddenly sat down and took inventory of the life and how that life compared to a more intentionally designed life.

So the book, The 5 Types of Wealth, defines wealth differently, and I'm just gonna share something about what that meant to this author, Sahil Bloom. So when he did the math that one night, it changed the entire trajectory of his life. It also was the reason he ended up writing the book that I'm starting today with you, The 5 Types of Wealth.

And if you're a dental practice owner who has spent the last decade chasing financial numbers while everything else in your life quietly erodes, well, guess what? This book and this series is gonna be a challenge to everything you thought you knew about being wealthy. And for those of you following along on YouTube, I have a slide deck, and I will narrate for those of you who don't.

And here's what happened with the author. When he's meeting this old friend, he sat down, he met this old friend, and the old friend was asking about his life, and, you know, you ask the questions, "How you doing?" And his response was, "Well, I'm just really busy. You know, I'm in my twenties." Th- this was the author saying in this story.

He was in his twenties, and he was trying to become a very successful hedge fund manager. And as you know, hedge fund managers make insane amounts of money. He had gone to Stanford, and he was following all of the pattern that was laid out for him to have a successful life. And in that moment, the friend, his old friend said, "Well, how often do you see your parents?"

And he said, "I see them twice a year." They're in New York, and the author, Sahil Bloom, is in California. "Twice a year," he said. "I see them about twice a year. I fly out, and we spend time together." They were in their mid-sixties, so if you run that math, fifteen times. Fifteen more times is how often the author realized he was going to be able to spend time with his parents, who he deeply, deeply loved.

And this is what he says in the first section of his book: "This was the math that broke me. It was the math that changed my life." It has also changed my life since reading that, and let me tell you how. I actually made a decision after I read that chapter. I thought about my dad, who is now 79 years old. I think he's 80 years old now.

I am 47. My dad lives in Arizona. I live in Southern California, in San Diego. I see my dad every Thanksgiving, that's for sure, and then I'll see him generally one or two other times during the year. So I started doing that math. My dad is at that age of expectancy. I immediately took action. I reached out to my dad and I said, "Dad, it's time to do a road trip."

This was about four months ago, three or four months ago. And sure enough, we got online and we decided to do a road trip back east. And this Sunday, today is April 30th, 2026, this Sunday, in four days, three days, I am flying to DC to be with my dad for two weeks. This is going to be amazing. I haven't done this ever.

When I was 15, my dad and I did a five-day backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevadas, which was phenomenal, and just one of those sort of anchoring memories to my relationship with my dad that forever changed me after that. A little bit of a rite of passage. We hiked about 80 miles. I mean, it was rigorous.

Absolutely rigorous. But that shaped a lot of that relationship and how I sort of viewed myself going into my teenage years at that time. I was, I think, in eighth or ninth grade. Well, it's been a long time since I've had that amount of time with somebody who I care about so deeply. So my dad and I are gonna go to Washington, DC.

We're gonna take a rental car, we're gonna head up to Gettysburg, and then we're gonna head up to Pennsylvania and just see a number of historical sites. I love history. My dad loves history. And we're just gonna have all this time, hours and hours and hours together, talking about our lives and the things that make us happy, and I am so looking forward to this.

With that in mind, just know this book was deeply impactful for me, and I hope it's deeply impactful for you. So let me welcome you into this book. As a CFO advisor, that's, that's me and my team here, we have eight CFO advisors be- besides me, who are meeting with doctors every day to talk with them about that beating heart of their cash flow, i.e.,

their practice, and how to make that blood flowing out of it to their personal lives to give them meaning and joy and value in their life, as opposed to the money coming out and doing harm to the life instead of supporting that life. So as a CFO advisor working with dental practice owners every day, I see the same pattern over and over.

I see clients hitting their financial goals, but they're still sometimes, not sometimes, often feeling like something is missing. And so when I read this book, I thought, "Wow, this really captures what I'm experiencing anecdotally in a lot of my clients." In fact, my very first client, somebody who was extremely near and dear to my heart.

This was 2009. He was a doctor I was going to for allergies And that doctor was a lifelong allergist. He was nearing retirement and was really thinking about the next stage of his life. And so I let him know I'm a CPM financial planner. Next thing you know, I'm in his house with his wonderful wife, and we're designing what the, the next chapter looked like.

Well, over the next couple years, he sold his practice, and he moved into retirement. And I just absolutely loved this doctor. He really struggled to define himself after being a practice owner for so many years, which gave him such intense purpose every day of getting up and fighting that battle and finding joys and affecting patients' lives like mine.

He helped significantly reduce my allergies, which was a major upgrade to my health, and he found so much joy in that. Now that that was gone, well, he started to look into some visits to different parts of the world, third world countries, where he was helping people with allergies and supporting various groups.

But it was very challenging to reorient his sense of identity into something new. And I learned out of that. I learned out of that something about myself as well, that I get almost tunnel vision, narrowly focused deeply in this thing I call my business, which I absolutely love, which is challenging, which is full of joy.

I have amazing relationships here. I love the culture. It gives me a huge sense of purpose. But at the same time, am I n- am I nurturing everything else about who I am? How my life will unfold in the future outside of work and this thing called Practice CFO here that I try to operate effectively every day?

What will I pivot into when that lone no longer is my identity way down the road? And this book made me ask the right questions about that future. Okay, so here's my promise about this book. By the end of this series, you're gonna have, I believe, a complete framework for evaluating your life, not just your balance sheet in your business, uh, and even your personal balance sheet, but a set of tools that you can actually use.

So in this episode today, there's just three things I really wanna talk about before we even launch into chapter one of this book. What I'm gonna try to do is have each episode be a chapter in the book. If you're a consistent follower of the Dental Boardroom podcast or a client of Practice CFO, I would love for you to read along with me over the next few weeks about the five types of wealth.

I think you will find it a very interactive, dynamic experience and really challenge a lot of the way you view your relationship to money and also your relationship to your own future. So this first episode, we're gonna talk about, number one, why this book is different as a financial book. Two, why it matters for you specifically as a dentist.

And three, we'll do a, a deep walkthrough of the prologue. All right, so let's launch into this. The mo- most financial books, I've read a lot of good financial books. You know, there's some classic, um, classic great financial books out there about, um, the way you think. In fact, I've got a few here, number here.

There are actually a lot of them here in my office. I have a textbook on personal finance. Let me grab my mic. I'm looking, literally looking at my books over here. I've got Good to Great. I've got a book called Enough by Jack Bogle. Fantastic book. One called The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel, also a fantastic book.

One called Strategic Wealth. And then there's, um, there's The Richest Man in Babylon. That's a classic right there. Also, As a Man Thinketh or Think and Grow Rich. These are some classics. But there was something extremely unique about this book, that it wasn't just about principles, it was about actionable takeaways.

Almost a scorecard, which I'm gonna talk about here in a moment. A scorecard for your life. And that's why I found this book so impactful for me, was things that I can do right now today to change the way that money is influencing my motivation and my happiness in life. So three things why I believe dentists should read this book.

The first one is it does redefine wealth. Most financial books treat wealth as a single dimension. Cha-ching, the dollar sign. Also, the author, Sahil Bloom, argues that there are actually five dimensions of wealth, not just the one, and that most of us are bankrupt in at least one of these five dimensions, and here they are: time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth, and financial wealth.

Again, time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth, and financial wealth. Now, we're gonna spend a full episode on each of these, but here's the punchline. Most successful dentists that I've worked with are really strong on the financial wealth scale, especially those dentists who are really producing well and they're highly coachable and live on a disciplined spending plan in their personal life.

Those three things, high collections, they are very coachable, and they moderate their personal spending. Those doctors tend to be a ten out of ten in their financial wealth. And however, they often tem- tend to be a lot lower on the scale when it comes to time wealth. And you know what? I'm guilty of this myself, no doubt.

And where people fall on the social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth also tends to be all over the place. So I want us, if you're a, a client of Practice CFO- Or you're a regular listener of the Dental Boardroom podcast, I'd like you to go through this journey with me of reading this book and evaluating how it relates to your own life.

So here's the second reason why I think this book is different as a financial book. It's built on stories, not just theory. And like I said, the author is not an academic, he's not a researcher, but he quit his job and he went deep into what happiness is and how money relates to it. What is true wealth?

And so he was a former hedge fund manager, and as a hedge fund manager, he was working extremely hard. I mean, I don't know if you know Wall Street, but Wall Street, man, you come outta, you come outta college, it is night and day grind. You really don't have much time off. You're building your, your relationships, you're building your reputation, and you're moving up that ladder, and he was doing all of that.

And then he got to a place where he had that experience with his friend and realized, "Wait, is this the, is this the direction that I wanna go with my life?" And so when he went through all of that, he went deep into studying what would lead to a fulfilling life. He was still in his 20s, and he really saw his life ahead of him and said, "I wanna do that."

And so he, he went to town researching, and this is from the book. He goes, "This question was where my journey to discover began." And when it talks about a question, he was really questioning what are the things that truly drive wealth in life. And he states here that the greatest discoveries in life don't come from finding the right answer.

They come from asking the right questions. And it's almost like the Mark Twain quote that it's not what you know that gets you into trouble, it's… Uh, actually let me, let me find that quote so I, so I don't get it wrong. He says, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble, it's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

Gosh, I think a lot about that. What do I think I know for sure that maybe isn't so? And I've gone through a significant interrogation of the assumptions, belief, beliefs that I've had over the past number of years to reopen a whiteboard to allow me to have more of a free discovery process around my beliefs.

I think it's incredibly important to interrogate one's belief. There's nothing harmful that can come out of that. Either you change your beliefs based on an independent study, or you reaffirm your beliefs by gaining new data that supports those beliefs. Well, what Sail Bloom, the author, is talking about here in the book is that the world has sort of set a- Set of beliefs or staged a set of beliefs that we sort of grow into as we grow up that defines the story of success.

They define the scoreboard. And what Sahil Bloom did is he said, "You know what? I'm gonna scrap all that, and I'm just gonna go back to that whiteboard, I'm gonna erase it, and I'm gonna just start asking questions. And I'm gonna set aside all my assumptions of what I think I know and, and instead of, uh, trying to think about what, um, you know, what I do know and confirming that, I'm simply gonna start from scratch here and say that I don't know what brings-- what makes for a wealthy life."

And he just started from there, and then he went out on his journey to search, and here's what he said: "The question was where my journey to discover began. I had to define the right game, the one that would actually lead to the life I wanted. I read everything I could get my hands on, hundreds of books and tens of thousands of pages, that might help me make sense of the maze I found myself in.

Ancient self-help classics and modern self-help hits, biographies of great men and women throughout history, religious texts, epics from a diverse array of cultures, and legendary tales of the hero's journey. But reading, I found, I can take-- can only take you so far. To understand something deeply human, you need to immerse yourself in the human experience."

He carries on, "I had conversations with people from all walks of life. I sought them out. I flew to them. I sat with them. I listened to them. From recent college graduates to CEOs of Fortune 100 companies, from stay-at-home parents to those working multiple jobs to make ends meet, from professional athletes living out of suitcases to ski bums and digital nomads, from life coaches and spiritual guides to factory workers and auto mechanics.

I became a student of the human experience." When I read that, I thought, "Okay, he's done his due diligence." And as I was reading the book, I realized so much of the information he was able to absorb from all that reading and all those interviews came together so nicely in a really impactful book known as The Five Types of Wealth.

So lastly, why this book is different is that it is very actionable. It is aspirational, even though my PowerPoint slide here says it's not. It is aspirational to me, but more importantly, it is actionable. So each section has essentially a takeaway set of homework items, a score, a scorecard and-- or exercises or a way of sort of auditing y- the wealth that you have in your life.

And most personal financial books leave you motivated, but not necessarily giving you or equipping you with that, that set of action steps. So this one leaves you with that homework. Now, let me share with you why I think that dentists, uh, should read this book specifically. I think owning a dental practice is one of the m- m-…

Owning a business in general in a very competitive environment, known as capitalism here in the US, is hard Competition is fierce, and there's fairly low barriers to owning a dental practice once you get out of dental school. I would say dental school is a barrier to owning a dental practice, of course, unless you're in one of those states that doesn't require a dental license to own a practice.

But even then, to be a successful practice-owning dentist is very difficult and is very demanding. And what it tends to do is absorb from you so much of your energy, your emotions, your psychology into this thing called your dental practice and getting it to a stage of success that is then spinning off cash flow, which then allows you to use that cash flow to define your life, at least all those things that have a dollar sign associated with it.

But here's the problem. It's actually very rare that a dentist, and really any business owner, and even human, will sit down and intentionally and methodically design their life. And within that design, that blueprint, what has a price tag on it? Sitting out back reading a book virtually has no price tag on it.

You wanna go travel the world and stay in the Four Seasons? That's gonna have a major price tag on it. Funding your kid's college education? That's gonna have a major price tag on it. Having a second home? Major price tag on it. Going out to dinner with your mom? Virtually no price tag on it. But defining those things matters because then once you know what the pile of cash you need to accomplish all these things, including retirement, you can then back into your practice and say, "Based on my cash flow, overhead, debt, and taxes, how much is left?

And is that enough to feed me today, and is that enough to feed me in the future?" And my, my most recent episode I just did in the executive session, we talked about what is enough. What is enough? And that's something that dentists absolutely need to define in their life. If you're a client of Practice Sale and W- CFO, when you first come in, we're gonna have you do a budget, and we're gonna force this conversation of what is enough.

What do you need to live on? How much needs to land in your personal account from your practice checking account every pay period? So you tend to be a highly paid or highly earning person, and therefore, and because most of that earnings come out of-- comes out of physical labor, you're not laying bricks, but you are standing up, sitting down, walking around, leaning over, head is leaning over, hands lifted, in the mouth.

And there's-- I mean, disability across dentists is extremely high, which means you cannot allow physical wealth to atrophy. That's one of the five categories of wealth. You can't let this atrophy because these five categories of wealth do have a relationship across them, and that physical wealth is an asset that you need.

The next thing is as a dental practice owner, you tend to be a bottleneck for most things growth, clinically, operationally, financially. Which means there's a lot of pressure on you to release those bottlenecks, to fix your systems To create protocols, processes, SOPs, and marketing patterns. That is, that is on you as a business owner because nobody's gonna care about the business as much as you do, and nobody ultimately is gonna move the needle.

Now, you may have consultants and people like me or marketing consultants, practice management consultants, but at the end of the day, you gotta show up and you gotta implement and do your homework. And that takes a strain on, strain on the mind. And so mental wealth, this concept of how wealthy are you psychologically and emotionally in your life, is absolutely fundamental to having a good, rewarding life and translating that practice cash flow into good personal cash flow as well.

The dental industry is full of high earners who hit their numbers at a, you know, a modest age, and yet sometimes they get there, and they hit financial independence, and they don't know who they are without the practice. Well, this book and this series on what wealth means is the antidote that I'm trying to provide for you.

Okay, let's jump into now the prologue of the book. On the journey of a lifetime, as he titles this section of the book, and this is the heart of this episode. So part A here, the scene. Book opens up right off the bat with that scene with his friend. He realizes when he asks his friends, "How are you doing?"

And his friend says, "Well…" Now, what the author was thinking the friend would say is what typically happens is, "Yep, I'm busy too," which would basically a one-up, sort of a one-up r-response to the author's saying that I'm busy and then asking how he's doing. He says, "You know, I'm really busy too." And that's how a lot of these conversations go.

But instead, his friend said something completely different, and he said he was redirecting, rewiring his energy to focus on the things that really mattered to him that weren't about busyness in his job or in his business, and it was about things that are not measured as much, that he is attempting to measure those.

And, uh, and so the author thought, "Well, on paper, I'm winning." He was making really good money early on in his mid-20s. He was, uh, m- had gotten married already to a, a beautiful woman. They were on their way to having children. On paper, everything was winning. But in that conversation, he realized that if he changed the way he was measuring that, he wasn't necessarily winning, and that's what instigated this whole process for him.

And he thought that that moment was a major emotional hit for him. Traditional success had cost him the most non-ren-renewable resource he had, and that was time with the people that he loved. So what did he do? Sahil and his wife packed up and moved across the country to be closer with family. He left the hedge fund world.

He started building a life around the people, not the money. Now, this was, was not, the way he viewed it, anti-a-ambition. It was simply redirecting his ambition. And so here's the punchline from that decision. The opposite of a successful life is not a failed life. The opposite of a successful life is a default life.

And I have emphasized this in a lot of my speaking engagements, that if you don't author your life, there are thousands of people who will author it for you. In fact, they are clawing at your doorstep to get into your brain and dictate how you define success, how you define happiness, how you define joy.

And if you do that, and you allow others to come in your head and tell you how to author your definition of success and happiness, then you are living a default life rather than living a designed life. So let me say that again. The opposite of a successful life is not a failed life. The opposite of a successful life is a default life.

So now we get into him designing his life and authoring his life, and that realization sparked this multi-year inquiry, what does it actually mean to be wealthy? And so he interviewed all those people, like I said, and he came up with a different scoreboard because what he realized is the reason why at work and in our business we tend to be successful when we, you know, we're committed to it, is because we measure all sorts of things in the business.

I can't tell you how many things I measure here at Practice CFO across the company, across our P&L, ac- across our, our client satisfaction. I measure so many things. How much do I measure in my personal life? How much of those ingredients that produce or bake this happiness in your life, how much do I measure those things?

All right. Well, I have an Apple Watch, and I measure my, I measure my, my activity, my physical activity. For a while, I had a WHOOP, and I was managing my sleep and some other things. And so there are some aspects that I measure, but not on a systematic basis and not more comprehensively, and especially not around all five of these areas of wealth accumulation as the author defines what true wealth is.

What gets measured gets managed. So a lot of what the book is doing is giving us a framework to measure these other areas of wealth in our life that so often get crowded out because we're just focusing on that one key area of success, financial wealth. Okay. Let's now go on to the next segment here, but there's one concept that I want to mention here, too, and this is something that's tripped me up a lot And it's called the arrival fallacy.

And if you, if you ha- if you have the book or when you get the book, the arrival fallacy talks about it on page seven. It says, "The arrival fallacy is the false assumption that reaching some achievement or goal will create durable feelings of satisfaction and contentment in our lives." And he goes, "Worse yet, the incessant quest for more had blinded me to the great beauty of what I had right in front of me."

I think about this ar- this arrival fallacy often. I tend to be fairly aggressive in deferral gratification. I can weather a lot. If we go on a hike together, you're gonna see I may have blisters on my feet, but I'm still, I'm s- I'm still trekking it. It's just the way I am. My-- In high s- in high school, in my, my football team, I was the lightest guy on the team.

I weighed 135 pounds my senior year, and Coach always called me Mr. Marine Boy 'cause I gave it everything I had. Sometimes I wonder if I have cognitive issues from lowering my head just to try to get those scratches on my helmet. How silly was that? But I really lean in. I get really committed to things, and I have in my head this destination.

That's where I wanna be, and I will work incredibly hard to get there. But I have realized in some areas that when I get there, I lift my head and I say, "This actually isn't what I thought it was. I've been working really hard only to be up the wrong tree." And that's not where you wanna be. That's why defining your life intentionally gives so much more meaning and efficiency in how you achieve that happiness or that wealth, so to speak.

And so be careful in how you define what arriving means, because there's are a lot of fallacies in that. Instead, I use the term reverse engineer your life. Look ahead. This is a Stephen Covey Habits of s- of Highly Successful People, Seven Habits. Define the end first. Start with the end in mind, and then reverse engineer back into today to say what do you do today in order to have that life?

Now, one thing that happens is sometimes people will do that. They'll define that. They'll say, "Here are the major variables that I know if, if I accomplish these, should give me an incredibly rewarding life." The problem is, when you get started, it's like, it's like the architect has now blueprinted this.

You know, my dad's an architect, and I have all these visuals of him leaning over his drafting board with the electric eraser and this sort of, this bl- big black ruler that goes up and down the board, and he's there just, you know, hunched over, designing a house. Well, that's great, and his designs were beautiful, and he'd walk around with these scrolled-up blueprints as he'd go on site to talk with the, uh, the construction people.

What happens though, if there's no construction people? What happens if there's no destination for those, those blueprints to actually come to life? Well, what ha-- what I believe prevents a blueprinted life from not gaining traction, this sort of non-starter, this disjointedness between thinking and doing, is this concept of marginal thinking.

And I think every human alive is guilty at some level of marginal thinking. And overcoming this is the definition, in some ways, of achieving success. And it really relates closely to atomic habits. And atomic habits help you overcome marginal thinking. And marginal thinking is the belief that it's okay to neglect a small but important decision because the effect of that neglect feels harmless.

I don't need to go to the gym today. It's okay if I have this, this donut. It's okay if I miss this date night. It's okay if I don't read tonight with my, you know, with my eight-year-old son. It's okay to miss the dance recital of my daughter. It's okay. It's just one time. It's just one time. No biggie. And happens again.

And maybe it happens three out of five times. Maybe it happens nine out of 10 times. I don't know. But in the aggregate, as the years go on, there's an aggregation of these marginal thoughts that prevent action. And therefore, the blueprinted plan doesn't get lift or it gets lift very slowly and therefore doesn't make the impact it was intended to do.

As you go through your life and as you think about these big decisions and as you think about this blueprint of what you want to accomplish with your life as you pursue happiness and wealth, more broadly speaking, I want you to ask yourself when you're about to say no, to not go to the gym, not put on those gym clothes, not go do that thing, say, I want you to try to magnify the effect of not going.

Think of some of the worst case scenarios of you not going. You know, like my mom right now is in the hospital. She had a hip replacement on Monday. Today is Thursday. And I've been calling her every day. And sometimes when I call my mom, I end up on the phone for an hour. And I love my mom. She's got a big, big heart, this one.

But I know when I call my mom, it's a commitment. It's a commitment on my time. But over the past week or so, as I've known this surgery was coming up and I haven't seen her in a few months, I thought, you know what? I'm so busy. I'm going to call her. And at times it's a bit inconvenient. But I called her.

And every time I did, I got off the phone. I'm like, I'm so glad I had that call with my mom. But the marginal thought of not calling her was constantly there. And I needed to overcome that. Well, that's just a very small example of the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of decisions throughout your life, these small decisions that ultimately in the aggregate make the difference.

It's called the aggregation of marginal gains. A great author, James Clear, I think is his name, who wrote Atomic Habits, talks about this aggregation of marginal gains. And, and I'm a little bit off, off subject here, but I think this is valuable. He, he talks about the coach of Team Sky, which was the cycling team in Great Britain.

And a new coach came in, they had never won the Tour de France, and he came in with a philosophy. I can't remember his name, but he came in with a philosophy which was, "I'm gonna try to increase improvements just by 1% in various areas." So they started to look at the nature of the seats, the tires, how well they're sleeping, all the way down to which pillows they're using when they travel, down to what sort of they, uh, they, they take in their body specifically.

There's all these different areas that he looked at. And in every one of them, he was just trying to improve it a little bit. And over the next few years, it started to show results. Little changes. If you just changed 1% systematically over a period of time, that 1% change can dramatically change the direction or course of that thing that you're pursuing.

And they ended up winning a number of Tour de Frances after that. And I think the story is true, that James Clear is driving home, that making intentional efforts to avoid or not, not be a victim of marginal thinking and making these small changes aggregate up to the world of difference in one's life.

So define your life, reverse engineer it. What are you to today? Avoid, avoid marginal thinking that prevents a true liftoff of that plan and get going. All right. Let me now move to the three questions I want you to ask yourself. All right? The… This is intended to make this personal. So go ahead and listen to this, and I'm gonna give you a moment, and I want you to think about it.

The first question is, when was the last time you actually defined what wealth means to you? In your words, not somebody else's. When was the last time you actually defined what wealth means to you? Number two, if you took inventory of all five types of wealth today, time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth, which one would score the lowest?

And how long has it been low? Question three, what's your version of Sahil, Sahil Bloom's cross-country move? So I don't know if I mentioned that, but he decided after that conversation with his friend, he literally quit his job. He uprooted from California, and he moved back, I think it was to New York, where his parents were, and got a smaller house closer to his family, didn't have that income now, and made a life-changing decision with he and his wife.

So the third question here is, what's your version of Sahil's cross-country move? What's the deliberate decision you've been putting off because the default is just easier? All right, here's the three things for you to do, the closing takeaway. Number one, order the book. Order the book on Amazon. It's called The Five Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom.

That's number one. Don't just listen, read along. It will be infinitely more rich and valuable as an experience to read the book and then come back and listen to these episodes. Number two, spend 10 minutes writing what does wealth mean to you, in your words. In your words. Try to sift out what everyone else, authority figures, parents, childhood, mentor, coach.

Just sift it all out for a sec. It doesn't mean you're not gonna include it, but I think you need to just start with your own self. In your own mind, nobody knows your life like you. Nobody knows what makes you happy like you. Nobody knows your struggles. Nobody knows your health condition like you do.

Nobody knows your relationship conditions like you do. Nobody knows your bank account like you do. Nobody knows these things. Only you do. Inventory it, categorize it, put it on paper, brainstorm it, then go from there in defining as you reverse engineer what you want your life to look like. And lastly, share this episode with one person, a partner, as- an associate, a friend.

If you could do it with somebody else and have them read the book with you, and then you have conversations, that will give so much more context and accountability to reading and implementing the incredible recommendations in this book. Here's one thing I do. I have, I have-- I actually subscribe to Marco Polo.

It's an app on my phone. There's a free version. I subscribe because there's all these cool little features to use it, and you basically record yourself, and you send it to a friend, and then they get it, and they can listen to it on their own time, and then they can send it back. Now, you may say, "Well, why don't I just use my phone and record myself?"

Because it's very limited. It's, um, it has… It, it's not a smooth process. Marco Polo makes a conversation, even though that conversation is sort of disjointed because it's not real time, extremely valuable, and I have found this unbelievably helpful to a lot of my family who don't live nearby, who I don't see very often, and who do have busy lives, and it allows us to stay really, really connected.

Well, I have a friend, and we will pick a book, and we will read it together, and then we'll send these Marcos to each other, maybe get together on a Friday night and talk about it. But that experience of recruiting somebody into that learning process has been just so valuable. So that's the third takeaway or third action item is to try to invite somebody, especially a spouse.

If you're married, that would be my preference. I don't think it'll be m- more valuable with anybody else more so than your spouse or your partner if you're not married. Okay, here's a teaser in the next episode. Next time, in chapter one, we're going to talk about the framework of these five types of wealth itself.

Why most people are bankrupt in at least one and the wealth scorecard you can run yourself in under 10 minutes. Thanks everybody for listening to another episode of the Dental Boardroom podcast. I have to genuinely say I'm excited to read the various chapters in this book and to have this series on what true wealth actually means.

Until next time.