People often ask me how I built wealth.
The truth is, there isn’t one answer. It wasn’t a single investment, a brilliant stock pick, or a perfectly timed real estate deal. It was a collection of decisions—some intentional, some accidental—that compounded over decades.
Recently I had a conversation with financial historian Joseph Moore that got me thinking about this more deeply. Before I go any further, I want to acknowledge something important: I had advantages. I was born in the United States. My parents were professionals. I had access to education and opportunity.
Those things matter.
But they aren’t the whole story.
So in this week’s “10 Things” episode of the Earn & Invest podcast, I decided to share the ten reasons I think I ultimately built wealth. Some of them are conventional. Others might feel a bit controversial.
Here they are.
1. I just kept buying.
I didn’t perfectly time the market. In fact, I made plenty of early mistakes—buying individual stocks and expensive mutual funds with loads.
But I kept buying.
Over time I shifted toward simple index funds, but the real magic wasn’t the specific investment. It was consistency. Markets went up. Markets went down. I kept investing anyway.
That habit alone did most of the heavy lifting.
2. I didn’t budget—I automated.
I have never kept a formal budget.
Instead, my wife and I built a simple system. We lived off one income and automatically routed the second income straight into savings and investments.
By paying ourselves first, we never had to obsess over categories or spreadsheets. Whatever was left in the checking account was fair game.
Automation built our wealth. Not discipline.
3. I didn’t sweat the small stuff.
I’ve never spent much time chasing credit card points or hunting for the absolute highest-yield savings account.
Those things can be helpful, but they rarely move the needle.
Wealth tends to come from big decisions—saving large portions of your income, investing consistently, building businesses, buying real estate—not squeezing pennies out of financial minutiae.
4. I ignored the “you can’ts.”
Early in my medical career, my colleagues told me it was impossible to earn a performance bonus at our hospital-owned practice.
So I tried anyway.
I worked extra shifts, saw more patients, and within a few years I had doubled my salary.
Often when people say something can’t be done, what they really mean is they haven’t figured out how to do it.
5. I innovated.
Eventually I realized the traditional medical model wasn’t serving me.
So I changed it.
I created a concierge-style practice where patients paid an upfront fee and I visited them in their homes or nursing facilities. That allowed me to eliminate office space and reduce my staff from fifteen employees down to one.
My overhead plummeted. My income rose.
Sometimes the biggest financial wins come from reimagining the system entirely.
6. I thought in decades, not months.
Many of the things that eventually worked in my life looked like failures at first.
Take writing.
I spent years struggling to write and market a self-published book. It often felt like nothing was happening. But by sticking with it for more than a decade, opportunities eventually opened that I never could have predicted.
Big things take time.
7. I grew tired of material things.
Something interesting happened along the way.
I stopped wanting stuff.
I used to love collecting baseball cards, buying art, and filling rooms with expensive furniture. But over time those things lost their appeal. The joy faded quickly.
Ideas, writing, podcasting, and connecting with people felt much more meaningful—and they cost almost nothing.
When your passions are inexpensive, wealth builds faster.
8. I thought abundantly.
Instead of focusing on scarcity—cutting every expense and squeezing every dollar—I spent more energy thinking about expansion.
How could I make more money? Build more interesting projects? Fund bigger experiences?
This mindset pushed me toward opportunity rather than fear.
9. I sought failure.
One of my favorite strategies is what I call the spaghetti method.
You throw a bunch of spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks.
Most things won’t.
For example, I once spent a year building a medical consulting business called Crisis MD. After all that work, I had exactly one customer.
But failure isn’t wasted effort. It’s data.
Eventually those experiments led me to ideas—like my concierge practice—that worked far better than anything I could have planned.
10. I forgave myself.
Finally, and maybe most importantly, I made plenty of mistakes.
I bought a whole life insurance policy. I tried to time the market. I watched individual stocks go to zero.
For a while, those decisions felt embarrassing.
But dwelling on them doesn’t help. The only productive response is forgiveness—followed by learning.
Every mistake becomes information for the next decision.
And that’s how progress actually happens.
If you want to hear the full discussion, you can check out this week’s “10 Things” episode of the Earn & Invest podcast.
Also, a quick community update: I’m consolidating most of my writing and podcast summaries here on Substack. Every Monday and Thursday I’ll be posting episode summaries, and on Wednesdays you’ll still find my regular essays on purpose and money.
If you’d like to comment, interact, or support the work, you can subscribe here. The paid subscription is $8 a month and helps cover the basic costs of running the show—travel, microphones, and hosting.
Either way, I’m glad you’re here.