80,000 hours.
That’s the total number of hours that a person will spend working a 9 to 5 job, 50 weeks a year (2 weeks of annual vacation) over the course of a 40-year career.
40 hrs/wk × 50 wk/yrs × 40 yrs = 80,000hrs
And if you’re a Doctor working an average of 60 hours/week, this number goes up to 120,000hrs.
120,000hrs.
That’s the number you’ve got to work with.
And when you’ve used up your 120,000 hours as a Doctor, what will you have to show for it?
Show me the money
From a money perspective, the average Doctor earns about $90 for every hour they work:
$90/hour × 120,000 hours = $10,800,000
(Total amount earned over the course of 40 years trading time for money).
Broken down, this $10,800,000 is the equivalent of:
- $90/hour
- $5,400/week
- $21,600/month
- $259,200/year
And at the upper end of the pay scale, with Neurosurgeons earning about $398/hour:
$398/hour × 120,000 hours = $47,760,000
Broken down, this $47,760,000 is the equivalent of:
- $398/hour
- $23,880/week
- $95,520/month
- $1,146,240/year
Touching lives
From a patient perspective…the number of lives you can personally touch ovet a 40 year career as a Doctor…what does that look like?
Of course, this varies depending on your area of specialty.
But assuming 15-minutes per patient, then each hour you spend working will touch 4 lives.
120,000 hours × 4 = 480,000 patients
So in a best case scenario, you have the potential to touch almost half a million lives as a Doctor.
But that’s not the full picture.
In reality, you will only spend about half your time (52.9%) actually seeing patients. The rest of your time will be spent doing paperwork and administrative tasks.
So your 120,000 hours of patient time is more like 60,000 hours.
And the number of lives you can personally impact is:
60,000 hr × 4 patients/hr = 240,000 patients
So after 40 years of toiling away as a Doctor, you will potentially have impacted almost a quarter of a million people.
But sadly, that’s still not the full picture.
For one thing, we’re assuming that each patient you treat will only see you once in their life time. In reality though, each patient will visit you about 3 times per year.
So when you factor this in, the total number of lives you can impact is:
240,000 patients ÷ 3 = 80,000 patients
(About 2,000 patients a year)
And when you factor in the global death rate of about 7 per 1,000 people…you will lose about 560 of those patients over the course of 40 years.
But excluding the death rate, the total number of lives you will potentially touch over the course of 40 years is about 80,000 people.
40 years to touch 80,000 people.
40 years of battling beauraucracy, filling out paperwork, reacting to whatever your patients bring through the door, fighting fires, fishing the same 80,000 patients out of the river…
Meanwhile.
Mark writes some code in his dorm room and launches Facebook…touching over 1.86 billion people every month in less than 13 years after starting.
Blake starts TOMS shoes and gives away 10 million pairs of shoes to needy children around the world in just 7 years.
Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin decide to figure out a vaccine for the Polio virus and effectively eradicated the disease from the entire planet, and are continually touching the lives of billions of people every year.
Peter Pronovost decides to spend a few minutes writing out a simple 5-step checklist and instantly saved 1,500 lives.
The point is that if you’re goal is to make money while changing lives…there are more ways to do that beyond just going to medical school and becoming a Doctor.
And those ways don’t need you to spend 40 years doing something you mostly hate or are frustrated by.
How do you want to spend your next 120,000 hours?
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