Practicing Healthy Habits, Pursuing Wealthy Outcomes

I am also struck by the way Attia describes his role as a physician, which feels similar to the way good financial advisors approach their work. He sees himself as a “translator” who wants to help people understand what medical advances mean to them as individuals. That process is rooted in science, but there is an art to applying it differently for each individual patient. There is an art to implementing financial science, as well.

For decades, Dimensional has worked closely with financial professionals to help translate financial science. Investors benefit from understanding their investment decisions and what they should expect over their L.I.F.E. (Lifetime Integrated Financial Experience).

We should want to make the best-informed decisions about our health while recognizing that outcomes are uncertain. It is the same with investing. Attia sees the goal of medicine as prolonging not only our life span but also our “health span” so that we are in the best shape to enjoy doing what matters most to us. At Dimensional, we want investors to have a good investment experience so they can use their savings to lead the lives they want to live while feeling safe along the way. Having a healthy “wealth span” is about more than accumulating money. It is about maximizing L.I.F.E.

Attia calls his approach “Medicine 3.0.” Medicine 3.0 emphasizes prevention over treatment, treats each patient as a unique individual and focuses not just on surviving but thriving. Medicine 3.0 represents an evolution over Medicine 1.0, which centers on crisis management, and Medicine 2.0, which incorporates scientific advances but not enough emphasis on holistic, personalized care.

Borrowing that framework, you can think of Dimensional as Investing 3.0. Investing 1.0 is active management. Investing 2.0 is indexing. And Investing 3.0 draws on both and improves on each: using flexible implementation to lower costs, tilting portfolios to emphasize historical drivers of higher expected returns and offering clients tailored solutions to help them pursue their financial goals. At Dimensional, we have been applying rigorously tested financial science, grounded in academic research and proven in the real world, for over 40 years.

Helping people change how they approach their health is important work, but to me the work we do at Dimensional is just as important. In a sense, we are pursuing a common goal: empowering individuals to make informed choices so that they can lead healthier, wealthier lives. By recognizing the importance of prevention and individually tailored strategies, we can help lay the foundation for a future where individuals not only survive but thrive, in all aspects of life.