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- The 5 Types of Wealth (A Guide to Designing Your Dream Life)
The 5 Types of Wealth (A Guide to Designing Your Dream Life)
Matt Karamazov
December 05, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 19 minutes
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The 5 Types of Wealth, by Sahil Bloom is easily one of the best books I’ve read so far this year (out of exactly 82 books), and tonight I’m sharing my full summary, review, and the eleven pages of notes I came away with.
I’m not about to sit here and rob you of your precious Time Wealth, so let’s just get into it!
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“I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness.
I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.”
“Your business plan must be both emotional and logical. That’s why I want you to see which side you favor, and where you need to improve.
If you’re only logical, you have probably struggled to inspire people. With my approach, you will know what you need to change to accomplish that.
If you’re only emotional, you have struggled to develop systems and stay organized. This is why you’ll benefit from the structure of a methodical plan.”
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After achieving my (somewhat meaningless) goal of reading 1,000 books before I turned 30, I set a new (also meaningless but cool) goal of reading 10,000 books. As of today, I’ve read exactly 1,434 books, including 82 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“I had prioritized one thing at the expense of everything. From the outside looking in, I was winning, but if this was what winning felt like, I began to wonder if I was playing the wrong game.”
You can have virtually anything you want in this life, but you can’t have everything, and certainly not all at once. In my experience, and as a result of reading this book, I believe that life is best lived in seasons, and that the best decisions are made while keeping the entire scope of your life in mind at all times.
The 5 Types of Wealth (one of the absolute best books I read in 2025, and by a wide margin) will help you optimize, if not maximize, your Time Wealth, Social Wealth, Mental Wealth, Physical Wealth, and Financial Wealth across your lifespan. And if you’ll notice, Financial Wealth comes last, because while it’s still undeniably important, it’s not the only thing that’s important. Many people today forget that, and to their extreme detriment.
The thing is that maxing out any single one of these stats is inevitably going to mean lagging behind in some other area. You can dedicate your entire life to the accumulation of wealth (and many people do), but in that scenario you can just as easily come to the end of your life realizing that you unthinkingly sacrificed the best years of your life to do it.
You can find yourself alone at the mountaintop, the mental stress of having “made it” causing you to spend all your money buying back your health, the clock of your life winding down to zero, leaving you with no time left to turn it all around.
You can avoid that tragic end by reading this book! Seriously, it’s sooo good! As you can see, I have about eleven pages of notes, and I’ll be returning to them again and again over the years as I strategically map out my life, adjusting my approach based on where I currently am in life, what’s truly important to me, and which types of wealth I want to focus on during the current season.
Similarly, Tony Robbins refers to the “Four Burners,” and that’s a great way of thinking about your priorities as well. Let’s say Five Burners, since we’re talking about The 5 Types of Wealth. But when you’re trying to “heat up” one specific area of your life, you start cranking up that specific burner.
For example, if you want to prioritize your physical health and mental peace, that’s fine, but you should realize that this means you won’t have as much time available to go out with your friends every weekend or advance your career as fast as you might be able to otherwise. You can have anything, but not everything.
It’s a perfectly legitimate choice to prioritize your Physical and Mental Wealth, but odds are, you’re not going to be able to get promoted to the corner office, take first place in a physique competition, see your parents every weekend, build a strong, lasting marriage, attend every one of your kids’ soccer games, read 100 books a year, and still find time to meditate for two hours every morning. And if you try to run all five burners at 100 percent at the same time, you’re likely just going to burn your whole house down.
Whichever type of Wealth you choose to pursue in this season of your life is completely and totally up to you. I’m 35 years old as I write this, and right now I’m focusing on growing my Financial Wealth, building my Physical Wealth, and aggressively protecting my Time Wealth. It’s stressful going this hard in business, dominating in the gym, and locking in.
I’m working harder now than I’ve ever worked in my entire life, but I know that it’s not forever. I know that I can choose a different path at any time. And I know that as many good lives exist as there are people to live them. The key is that I’m making these choices consciously, with a full and complete awareness of what I’m (temporarily) giving up.
One of the many things I like about The 5 Types of Wealth is that Sahil Bloom is not “anti” ambition - far from it. In this book, he’s just showing you that our societal scoreboard is broken, and that you can in fact reject the default path, thereby setting out on your own, toward a life that’s strategically designed to fit your priorities. Again, you can have virtually anything you want in this life, but you have to be willing to pay the price.
The last few things I’ll say here is that taking the time to consciously design your life will not kill your spontaneity or infringe upon your freedom. In fact, living blind will imprison you as you make impulsive, shortsighted choices that give you fewer options later on.
Sure, eating a healthy diet means you lose the freedom to eat sixteen chocolate chip cookies every day, but you gain the greater freedom of being able to dance to your favorite song at your eightieth birthday party. The freedom to even make it to your eightieth birthday!
Living on a sensible budget restricts your “freedom” to put your entire future on a credit card, but it gives you the freedom to spend extravagantly on the things that genuinely make your life better. And what you’ll also find is that the compound effect of these individual, smart, conscious choices multiplies your efforts across your lifespan, leading inexorably to a life that’s simpler, freer, happier, and wealthier than you ever could have imagined.
“With this realization, it hit me: I wasn’t playing the wrong game, I was playing the game wrong. The scoreboard was the problem. Our scoreboard is broken. It forces us into a narrow measurement of wealth, success, happiness, and fulfillment entirely defined by money. And what you measure matters.”
“In one week, you can jump-start your actions. In one month, you can see and feel the impact. In one year, everything will be different. Your entire life can change in one year. Not ten, not five, not three. One. One year of asking the right questions. One year of measuring and prioritizing the right things. One year of focused, daily effort on the right actions.”
“Never let the quest for more distract you from the beauty of enough.”
“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”
“Each of the five types of wealth are individually important, but it’s the relationships across them - the interplay and prioritization - that are critical in building a comprehensively fulfilling existence.”
“Life is about direction, not speed.”
“There are specific windows - much shorter than you care to imagine or admit - during which certain people and relationships will occupy your life.
You may have only one more summer with all of your siblings, two more trips with that old group of friends, a few more years with your wise old aunt, a handful of encounters with that coworker you love, or one more long walk with your parents.
If you fail to appreciate or recognize these windows, they will quickly disappear.”
Six Key Lessons for Life:
*Family time is finite - cherish it.
*Children time is precious - be present.
*Friend time is limited - prioritize the real friends.
*Partner time is meaningful - never settle.
*Coworker time is significant - find energy.
*Alone time is abundant - love yourself.
The Three Core Pillars of Time Wealth:
Awareness — An understanding of the finite, impermanent nature of time.
Attention — The ability to direct your attention and focus on the things that matter (and ignore the rest).
Control — The freedom to own your time and choose exactly how to spend it.
“There is a decent chance that Buffett would trade all of his billions of dollars to have your time.”
The Bought-Status Test: “Would I buy this thing if I could not show it to anyone or tell anyone about it?”
The Earned-Status Test: “Could the richest person in the world acquire the thing I want by tomorrow?”
“You may read thousands of books in your life, but there will be only a few that deeply change you. Reread them every single year. Your experience with the book will change as you do - you’ll get new perspectives. And doing this will remind you of how you can fall in love with the same thing (or person) over and over again.”
“If I repeated my current typical day for one hundred days, would my life be better or worse? If people observed my actions for a week, what would they say my priorities are? If I were the main character in a movie of my life, what would the audience be screaming at me to do right now?”
“In all likelihood, your definition of enough will increase over time as your reality comes closer to your definition. That is to be expected. The goal is simply for it to be a conscious upward movement that can be measured and monitored, rather than a subconscious one that can accelerate out of control.”
“The most important decisions are best made with the full spectrum of your life in mind.”
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OK, that’s it for now…
I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!
There’s also my YouTube channel, where I publish book reviews, reading updates, and more each week.
And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 180,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!
With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are two more ways I can help you:
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