Dentists Who Invest Podcast
Official Podcast of the Dentists Who Invest platform. Talking all things investing, money and finance with a dental spin. Have you ever wondered how you can grow your wealth and protect your hard earned money as a Dentist? We've got you covered. Featuring famous guests such as Andrew Craig, Edward Zuckerberg and Benyamin Ahmed we delve deep into EVERY aspect of finance to educate and empower ALL Dentists.
Dentists Who Invest Podcast
I Read 50 Books On Money: Here's What Will Make You Rich with Dr James Martin
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The quest for wealth often seems shrouded in mystery, reserved for a privileged few with secret knowledge. Having immersed myself in over 50 finance and wealth books over a decade, I've uncovered something surprising – the path to financial freedom isn't as complex as we've been led to believe, but it is counterintuitive to conventional wisdom.
My journey through classics like "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" and "The Psychology of Money," alongside lesser-known gems, revealed consistent patterns used by every wealthy person throughout history. At the core of financial success lies Naval Ravikant's concept of leverage – maximizing output per unit of input. The four types of leverage (human, cash, automation, and media) form the foundation upon which all wealth is built, whether the wealthy person consciously applied these principles or not.
MJ DeMarco's framework of the sidewalk, slow lane, and fast lane illuminates why so many struggle financially despite working hard. Most people unknowingly walk the sidewalk (no financial plan) or crawl in the slow lane (traditional investing over decades), while the fast lane (entrepreneurship) offers accelerated wealth-building potential with calculated risks. Robert Kiyosaki's Cashflow Quadrant reinforces this by showing how wealth creation requires moving from being employed to owning businesses and investments. Complementary insights from books like "Who Not How" and "Traction" provide practical systems for implementing these principles through teamwork and accountability.
Ready to transform your financial future? Apply these battle-tested principles to your life and watch what happens. For more practical wealth-building strategies, subscribe to my channel and join me on this journey toward financial freedom.
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Disclaimer: All content on this channel is for education purposes only and does not constitute an investment recommendation or individual financial advice. For that, you should speak to a regulated, independent professional. The value of investments and the income from them can go down as well as up, so you may get back less than you invest. The views expressed on this channel may no longer be current. The information provided is not a personal recommendation for any particular investment. Tax treatment depends on individual circumstances and all tax rules may change in the future. If you are unsure about the suitability of an investment, you should speak to a regulated, independent professional. Investment figures quoted refer to simulated past performance and that past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results/performance.
Everybody wants the fast track formula to getting rich, and that included me as well, and that's why I spent a huge chunk of my life reading 50 books on finance and wealth. Turns out that when you read enough books, the answer is out there, but it's a little counterintuitive to what you might expect it to be. I've spent the last 10 years of my life reading books on finance and wealth and applied the lessons to my own life to achieve success. That includes the all-time classics like Rich Dad, poor Dad and the Psychology of Money, but as well as that, a lot of books that people don't know about that contain lessons that are equally, if not more so, valuable. It was Einstein who once said that everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler, and that's why, in this video, I'm going to give you the best takeaways from those 50 books, so that you can benefit from the knowledge contained within them the highlights without having to put the hours in that I did. I'll also be sharing the main reasons why so many people fail at becoming wealthy and what you can do to avoid that. So let's get into it.
Dr James:The very first book that we're going to talk about today is this all-time classic, the Almanac by Naval Ravikant. What this book is is basically a collection of tweets from a chap called Naval Ravikant, who is a multi-millionaire, and these tweets don't just talk about finance and wealth, they just talk about life in general. Therefore, you might be saying to me now, james, but what the heck is this all got to do with finance and money specifically, and I can understand why you might think that, and I suppose the reason why this book was so pivotal to me and encouraged me to go on a big journey of discovery about money and wealth is because of how Naval Ravikant describes the concept of leverage. What is the concept of leverage? It is the fundamental principle of maximizing your units of output per unit of input. So in this specific example, we're talking about returns, or hourly rate, or pay or returns and investing per unit time. Naval breaks it down super simply. He says that, fundamentally, on the face of this earth, there's only four types of leverage, and every rich person who's ever been successful or obtained wealth has used these lessons, whether they've realized it or not. They'll either have used one method or a combination of those methods. So what are the four types of leverage that Naval describes in this book.
Dr James:The first concept is human leverage. What Naval means by that is using staff or team members in order to grow a business and increase your productivity per unit time. The second form of leverage is cash leverage. Obviously, what he means is investing. When you understand how you can invest and grow your money, you can get a greater return on your money per unit times, just about knowing what to do. The third type of leverage is automation, as in software or machines. Obviously, if you can create a software, a piece of software, or build a machine, or even purchase a machine that replaces you in an activity that you do day on day, then what it will mean is your productivity is increased. And the fourth type of leverage, and the one that everybody's scared to do, is media, is to get in front of the camera, talk, tell your story, your story, share lessons, share knowledge, share wisdom and eventually, if you do that enough times, well, that manifests into money in your bank account, which is the whole premise of how YouTube works, if you think about it. So really, the key take home is that if you want to get wealthy, you must use at least one or some combination of those forms of leverage.
Dr James:Categorically, the next thing I thought to myself on my journey was all right, this cash leverage we talked about just a second ago sounds intriguing and it sounds like I need to know how that works. Then I picked up this book, which is how to Own the World, which talks about how someone can grow their money in the stock market and how you can manage your own investment accounts. According to Copley Fund Research, the average UK active fund returns 8.21% per annum. But if we know that the American stock market returns 10% every single year, then what's happening to the extra 2%? Not financial advice. Do your own research. Of course, these are just stats that I'm recounting Now. That might not sound like much, but if we're investing for long periods of time, say towards a retirement fund, that can add up to quite something. That is significant. I'm going to put a graph on the screen right now which shows you the return on £10,000 over 40 years at various interest rates. The interest rates also double up as rates of return on investment. This graph is going to appear on the screen right now. At a rate of return of 8% a year, we'll give you about $200,000 at the end of that period, whereas that extra 2% on top, that 10% will give you over $450,000. So that 2%, depending on how you look at it, you either doubled your money or halved your money, so it's really important to be able to understand this.
Dr James:The next book that really helped me on my journey was this book, the Millionaire Fastlane, by MJ DeMarco. I reasoned to myself all right, brilliant, I already know how to invest and I understand about cash leverage. I'm good. Now, the truth is, that does work, but it's only one method that you can use to become wealthy. I really like this book, the Millionaire Fastlane, because it talks about your journey to wealth from a top-down fashion, and the author just makes it so simple.
Dr James:He says right, if here is where you are and here's where you want to get to, here being where you currently are financially and here being financial freedom, you've only got three paths to get there and even if you don't select a path actively, you'll still be on one of them by default, without even realizing it. Mj DeMarco breaks those three paths down as the sidewalk, the slow lane and the fast lane. And what does he mean by that? The sidewalk if you're taking the sidewalk on the slow lane and the fast lane and what does he mean by that? The sidewalk? If you're taking the sidewalk on a journey while you're walking, you're going very slow and you might get tired out before you even get there, particularly if the journey is long, as is the journey to financial freedom. And what he means by that is, if you don't have a plan, you're basically moving at a snail's pace and you're unlikely to ever achieve financial freedom, unless it's by blind fluke or luck. So if you don't care about money, you're not thinking about your wealth, you're probably on the sidewalk.
Dr James:Next method he describes is the slow lane. What that corresponds to is growing your wealth steadily in the stock market over maybe 20, 30, 40 years. Now, it will get you to where you want to go. It's a very reliable method. Again, not financial advice. Do your own research or consult a financial advisor if you're uncertain about that. However, the big thing to remember is it's not quick. It does take a lot of time. Therefore, if you want something a little bit faster, you need to think about other methods. The third method that MJ DeMarco describes is the fast lane. The fast lane will get you there extremely quick, but it is dangerous. You may crash and burn, you may fail, you may fall, run into obstacles, you may run your car off the road that's the risk of the fast lane but it also has the potential to achieve the Holy Grail, which is financial freedom and relative youth. Mj DeMarco relates this to starting a business and running a business Obviously easier said than done, but really, if you want to accelerate your journey towards wealth, you have to think about incorporating a business into your plans, because it is such a formidable beast that has allowed so many people across the face of the earth Jeff Bezos, bill Gates, elon Musk to attain great wealth very fast.
Dr James:The next book on my list that was pivotal for me is an all-time classic Rich Dad, poor Dad and really there's a lot of lessons in this book, but the biggest lesson that stuck with me was the cashflow quadrant. What is the cashflow quadrant? Well, it's a really useful framework that will help you understand what you need to do in order to achieve passive income, invest in assets and or grow a business. It works like this You've got a quadrant on the left-hand side, as you look at it. On the left-hand side of the quadrant, you've got employed and self-employed. On the right-hand side of the quadrant, you've got asset owner and business owner, robert Kiyosaki, makes the point that if you stay on the left-hand side of the quadrant, you're always going to be exchanging time for money, even if you're self-employed, because when you're self-employed, you're still employed. You just own your own job, so you get a greater slice of the pie. It's not until you take some of the wealth you generate over here don't spend it all and transfer it across to the right-hand side of the quadrant that you can start to invest in assets and grow real wealth, and those can be the stock market, those can be property, those can be a business. You get to decide. Just pick the asset that you like in terms of characteristics and just keep going until you get there. The key thing to realize is you've got to transfer some of that wealth across to the right-hand side of the quadrant.
Dr James:Now remember that I said at the start that some of these books are a little bit off the beaten track and definitely not the sort of books you see normally recommended in these videos. In that spirit, my next book is who, not how. I reasoned to myself right. I'd really like to grow a business. Easier said than done. How can I go about that?
Dr James:And this book describes how you can properly leverage teamwork in order to achieve that. What does the book talk about? Well, the book talks about replacing the word how in your life with the word who, and I guess the biggest takeaway for me, which he points out in the book, was to try to train yourself to think in those terms. There's a part in the book that always sticks in my mind and he says, instead of saying to yourself, how can I achieve this? If you change that sentence into who can help me achieve this, you'll achieve the same goal, or probably do even better with way less effort and hit your objectives way faster. I retrain my brain to think like that. If I have a problem, I always think to myself who do I know in my rolodex that can really help, because their likelihood is that they will know more about the subject than me, be able to get better results with less effort, and I'll probably also learn from them along the way. It's such a simple little tweak in your thinking that just makes a huge difference in terms of output in your life.
Dr James:It was really at this stage that I realized that I wanted to have some skin in the game in the slow lane and the fast lane, the slowly, and stuff investing. You can pick it up with time and knowledge. It's just about repetition and patience, whereas the fast lane has potential to accelerate things, and how that looked for me was growing a business. The next book on my list is the book Traction by Gina Wickman. This book is one of my favorite books of all time. It talks about something called the entrepreneurial operating system, which is effectively a way to communicate KPIs effectively to your team members and your business and give them accountability. You meet with them every single week, you measure your progress and you ensure you're hitting your goals. And for me, around about that time I'd heard about KPIs, but I was just flying blind a little bit and hitting it open. My companies now are way more structured, we have effective goals that we all agree on and I'm able to delegate accountability to other people. Because of that, it's one of the best books I've ever read. Whenever it comes to business is having really great protocols, and that's why I'm going to throw in a little bonus book, which is the e-myth revisited, which shows you how to make really killer protocols in a business a little bit of a bonus one for everybody. Both of those books complement each other really, really, really well. I recommend reading traction first.
Dr James:I guess something that really hit home for me was this next book, psychology of money by Morgan Housel. What Morgan Housel does in this book is explore the psyche of different generations and how they view money traditionally and how they could be subtly influenced in ways that you don't even realize, for example, your parents. The narrative of how most people got wealthy over the last 40, 50 years was that they used the slow lane method we talked about earlier, as in they invested in the stock market or they invested in property and then gradually compounded their wealth with time over many decades. It's important to remember that that, therefore, will be the wisdom that our elders, in the era that we're currently in, espouse, because that's what worked for them and that's what they know. But you have to remember they lived through one of the greatest boom periods of all time through the stock market and also property market. One of the greatest boom periods of all time for the stock market and also property market.
Dr James:Does that necessarily mean that those methods will apply going forwards? In likelihood they will, but you have to understand the world has changed since their day and there's so many other ways out there that you can make money and grow your own wealth, and that's the point that Morgan Housel makes in this book. Just be aware of how they think, so then you can choose whether or not to listen to them and understand that they didn't make their wealth in 2025. Therefore, they're not likely to be able to encourage you to use those methods which work extremely well. I'm referring to the fast lane, of course, and all those other methods we talked about in those books just a minute ago which help somebody grow a business.
Dr James:What's clear at this point is that if you want to become wealthy, fundamentally you need to employ leverage, as Neville described it earlier, and then the second thing to understand the second huge takeaway for me is that you need to move some of your wealth from the left hand side of the cash flow quadrant over to the right. It really is just about applying these methods. Anybody on the history of planet earth who has obtained wealth has used these methods, whether you're conscious of them or not. At least if you know what they are, you can be intentional about it. Part of becoming wealthy is passive income, and that's why I've made a video on the coolest ways that I've ever found to obtain passive income, which you'll find just here.
