If You Can Only Read 5 Books This Year, Read These

Dr. Mike Mackney, DDS  ·  Invest with a DDS

I don't read as much as I should. Between patients, the newsletter, real estate deals, and everything else that comes with trying to build a life outside the clinic — time is the one thing I can't manufacture more of.

But when I do sit down with a book, I want it to mean something. I want to close it feeling like my perspective shifted. Like I see something I didn't see before.

These five books did exactly that. Some hit me in the finances. Some hit me in the identity. One hit me so hard I didn't want it to end — and I'm still waiting for the next installment like a kid waiting for Christmas.

Each one is here for a reason. And each one, I think, was written for someone exactly like you — a high-achieving healthcare worker who's quietly wondering if there's more to life than the next appointment on the schedule.

Why I Chose It

This book broke something open in my brain that I didn't even know was stuck. I had been doing what most healthcare workers do — grinding, saving, building, accumulating — with this vague idea that someday I'd enjoy it all. Someday. This book asked me a question I couldn't answer: what if someday never comes the way you imagined it?

I think about patients I've seen over the years. Successful people. Dentists, surgeons, physicians. Retirement accounts they never touched. Trips they never took. Things they were always going to do — once they finished building whatever they were building. This book is about that trap.

What It's About (No Spoilers)

Bill Perkins — a hedge fund manager and energy trader — argues that most people are optimizing for the wrong thing. We've been conditioned to save and accumulate, but the goal was never the number in your account. The goal was the life that money was supposed to fund. The book isn't about making your money grow — it's about making your life grow.

Perkins introduces concepts like "time buckets" — the idea that certain experiences are only available to you at certain ages. The hike you want to do at 40 isn't the same hike at 70. The energy you have now, the health you have now, is a form of wealth that depreciates every single year whether you spend it or not.

The core idea is that you should spend your money while you're healthy and able — creating meaningful memories and personal fulfillment instead of delaying gratification and over-saving for the future. Not recklessly. Not without a plan. But intentionally — with the understanding that your money only has value when it's converting into experiences, relationships, and a life you actually lived.

Why Healthcare Workers Need This Book

Why I Chose It

I built my brand around investing — and for a long time, investing meant one thing to me: money. Stocks, real estate, options. Numbers on a screen. Then I read this book and realized I'd been using a completely broken definition of the word.

This is the book that made me realize why I was pivoting. Why just talking about financial investing felt incomplete. Why the dentists and nurses and physicians in my audience weren't just asking how to build wealth — they were asking how to build a life.

What It's About (No Spoilers)

Sahil Bloom — a Stanford-educated entrepreneur and investor — spent years chasing the traditional metrics of success. Status, money, title. And then he had his own version of the "is this it?" moment that so many of us in healthcare know intimately.

The book introduces a holistic way to measure and build wealth across five dimensions: Time Wealth, Social Wealth, Mental Wealth, Physical Wealth, and Financial Wealth. The argument is simple and devastating at the same time: most of us have been optimizing one dimension while quietly letting the others collapse.

The arrival fallacy — the false assumption that reaching some achievement or goal will create durable feelings of satisfaction — sits at the heart of the book. If you've ever hit a goal, felt nothing, and immediately started chasing the next one, you already know what he's talking about.

Why I Chose It

I debated including a fiction book on this list. Most of what I read is nonfiction. Personal development. Finance. Business. Things I can extract and apply. But I couldn't leave this one off — because I've never been so absorbed by a book in my life. Not even close.

I'm not a big fantasy person. Swords and dragons and magic schools were never my thing. But someone put this book in my hands and I didn't come up for air for days. I finished it and immediately felt withdrawal. Like when a great TV series ends and there's nothing left to watch. That level of "I need more."

I'm still waiting on the third book. The author has been working on it for over a decade. It's the only book I've read where the wait for a sequel has felt genuinely painful.

What It's About (No Spoilers)

The story follows Kvothe — a legendary wizard, musician, and fighter — who is now living in disguise as a quiet innkeeper. When a chronicler recognizes him and convinces him to tell his life story, Kvothe begins recounting his extraordinary journey from childhood through his years at a legendary school of magic.

What makes this different from every other fantasy book you've tried and put down is the writing. Patrick Rothfuss doesn't just tell a story — he crafts one. The prose is deep, intricate, and wondrous. The world feels completely real. The magic system is unlike anything you've read. And Kvothe himself is one of the most compelling characters in modern fiction — gifted, driven, flawed, and completely human despite everything extraordinary about him.

It's a story about ambition, loss, the pursuit of knowledge, and what it costs to become the person the world decides you are. Over 700 pages and there is not one moment of drag. Not one.

Why I Chose It

I've read this book once a year since my 4th year of dental school. Every time I read it, I hear it in Tony's voice — that unmistakable energy that's somewhere between a coach screaming at you and a mentor putting a hand on your shoulder. And every time, it gets me back on track.

This is my self-help bible. Not because Tony tells you what to do with your life, but because he hands you the controls back and makes you realize you've been sitting in the passenger seat when you should've been driving the whole time.

What It's About (No Spoilers)

Tony Robbins provides insights and strategies to help you take control of every aspect of your life — from your emotions to your focus. The book is built around a foundational idea: your life isn't shaped by your circumstances. It's shaped by your decisions. And decision-making is a muscle — one most people have let atrophy.

He breaks down how our brains wire associations between pain and pleasure — and how those associations silently run almost everything we do. Why we avoid hard conversations. Why we stay in careers that exhaust us. Why we know what we should do and still don't do it. Then he gives you the tools to rewire those patterns — deliberately, not by accident.

This is a 500+ page book that earns every page. Don't skim it. Don't rush it. Work through it. Take the exercises seriously. If you do, you'll finish it a different person than the one who started it.

Why I Chose It

Healthcare workers have a particular relationship with regret. We see it in our patients constantly — people who waited too long, chose the safe path, said the thing they didn't mean and never walked it back. We counsel others on it. And then we go home and do the exact same thing in our own lives.

We compare. We second-guess. We carry around a mental highlight reel of the alternate versions of ourselves — the one who chose a different specialty, moved to a different city, took that trip, said yes to that opportunity. This book is about that. And it will shake something loose in you.

What It's About (No Spoilers)

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality — another life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life.

The story follows Nora Seed — a woman in her 30s who has reached a breaking point, overwhelmed by regret and the feeling that every path she chose was the wrong one. She finds herself in the Midnight Library: a place between life and death where each book represents a version of her life had she made a different decision. A relationship she didn't end. A career she didn't pursue. A dream she didn't abandon.

What follows is a philosophical journey that reads like a novel — which is the highest compliment I can pay it. It's asking you something the whole time: what if the life you have is actually the one worth living? What if your regrets are less about what you didn't do and more about how you're looking at what you did?

I won't say more. Just read it.

The Summary: Why These Five Together

I didn't plan this list to have a theme. But looking at all five of them lined up, there's an obvious thread running through every one: the life you're building needs to be one you actually live.

Die With Zero tells you to stop hoarding experiences for a retirement that may look nothing like you imagined. The 5 Types of Wealth tells you money is only one of five dimensions you should be building. The Name of the Wind reminds you that life is richer when you let yourself get lost in something purely for the joy of it. Awaken the Giant Within hands you back control of your decisions when the grind has made you passive. And The Midnight Library asks whether the path not taken was really better — or whether you've been too busy looking at the other shelves to appreciate the book already in your hands.

As healthcare workers, we spend our careers telling people to take care of themselves. To not wait. To make the changes now before it's too late. And then we go back to our own lives and keep waiting.

These books won't let you do that.

Start with whichever one speaks to where you are right now. But read all five by the end of the year. Your future self will thank you.

Dr. Mike Mackney, DDS  ·  Invest with a DDS  ·  investwithadds.com