Dropout Archives | Page 4 of 7

Wanna come out and play?

When you were a kid, you (usually) needed a grownup’s permission for your friend to come out and play.

Now…you don’t.

You are connected to over 3 billion people, and you have the ability to ask any of them if they wanna come out and play.

Wanna come out and play?

Wanna make a movie about a raindrop trapped on a window ledge?

Wanna do an interview with me on my podcast?

Wanna help me build 25 schools in Eastern Liberia?

Wanna start a T-shirt business on Etsy?

The Internet is one big street where you get to knock on any door/tap on any window and ask whoever’s inside if they want to come out and play.

Many people will say no, because they don’t know you/trust you (yet) or don’t want to play whatever game you’re inviting them to.

But many more people will say “Let me grab my coat” and come join you outside to play…especially if you show up as a real person who cares about connecting with them.

It all starts with asking:

Wanna come out and play?

This is a taster from Escape Velocity: a personalised email course that guides medics step-by-step in how to successfully make the transition from being stuck in medical school…to living a life of happiness, freedom and fulfilment. Admission is by invitation-only. Click here to apply for your FREE invite.

Flying too close to the sun

How To Drop Out Of Medicine

Here’s the story of Icharus in less than 10 seconds.

Icharus and his Dad are escaping an island using wings made from wax. Icharus is warned not to fly too close to the sun (so the wings don’t melt). Icharus disobeys. His wings melt. He falls into the ocean and drowns. The end.

Lesson: curiosity killed the cat, obey your parents, colour within the lines, don’t try to reach beyond your boundaries…

But as Seth points out in The Icharus Deception, that’s only half of the story.

Icharus was also told by his Dad not to fly too low, so that his wings wouldn’t be damaged by the salt spray from the ocean.

Lesson: making a prison break on waxen wings isn’t an exact science, playing it safe can be the most risky thing you can do, aiming too low is dangerous…

Most of us have been conditioned by Med School et al. to keep our heads down and avoid flying too close to the sun…so you’re easier to control.

Clearly, the one thing you must do, then, is fly as close to the sun as you possibly can.

What’s the worst that can happen if you do?

Or more importantly: what’s the worst that can happen if you don’t?

Don’t die before you fly

How To Drop Out Of Medicine

If you’re thinking about ending it all anyway, why not go out with a bang?

Not the “bang” of a well-written note and a dramatically executed suicide.

That’s been done.

But the BANG of doing something outrageous, scandalous and outlandish in your skin…making everyone you know gasp in amazement.

Start a band and go homeless.

Launch a business and go bankrupt.

Write that novel and flunk all your exams.

Build a controversial following on Snapchat and be disowned and kicked out by your parents.

What will that feel like, how will you survive, what will you do next?

Those are questions you get to answer by deciding to stick around and go out with a bang.

Refuse to die before you fly.

Refuse to take yourself out of the game, just because of how awkward you think you’re making other people feel.

Insist on the right to live your life to the full, even if you screw-up along the way.

Demand that the world sees who you are — warts, smells and all — and make them try to take you out because of how blindingly brilliant your light is to their eyes.

(The way they took out JFK, MLK, Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, and many others).

There are tactics and strategies you can use to do this (as you’ll see in a moment).

But if you’re thinking of ending it all anyway…forget about the strategies and tactics…and skip straight to where you live such a bold, outrageously generous and daring life, that you get folk plotting on how to take you out.

Don’t die before you fly.

Refuse to die with your wings stuck inside you.

Unfold them and see where they take you.

6 months to live

How To Drop Out Of Medicine

If you were suddenly given 6 months to live…what would you do?

Write the answer down right now.

Next question: why aren’t you doing that now?

Again: write the answer down now in the comments/email/Facebook/somewhere public.

The 2 minutes it takes you to do this will save your life.

120,000 hours

How To Drop Out Of Medicine

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?

Are you willing to head upstream?

How To Drop Out Of Medicine

A few months before getting kicked out of medical school in 2003, I attended a dull lecture that transformed my life and ended any aspirations for a career in medicine.

It was a sociology lecture. And right in the middle of lulling a lecture hall of about 200 medical students to sleep, my Sociology Prof suddenly grabbed me out of my seat with an analogy about a river.

“What it comes down to is a choice. You can choose to be the noble doctor who spends the next sixty years fishing the same drowning patients out of the same old river, day in, day out. Or, you can choose to be the one who leaves the river bank and heads upstream to stop whoever is pushing your patients into the river in the first place.”

Wow!

Here was the answer to the growing discontent I’d been feeling over the first few years of medical study. I’d signed up with the desire to change the world but was being trained in the ‘best practices of managing illness and disease’. But now, with my Sociology Professor’s brilliant analogy, I knew what my next move had to be: I was going to head upstream, whatever that looked like.

So when I was thrown out of medical school a few months later, with no qualifications, the weight of having let my family and friends down, and a tonne of student debt, I got a job at a local doctor’s practice.

Officially I was there to read through 7,350 patient records and summarise them onto a computer so that the Practice could claim money from the Government. And for a while I simply did my job, innovating every chance I got, including finding a loophole in the Government contract within my first few weeks that let the Practice claim a few thousand pounds of money overnight.

And as long as I was pushing the boundaries within doing my job, things went well.

But the moments I attempted to head “upstream”, the responses ranged from apathy, to slight concern to angry emails from doctors and a phone-call from a ruffled local member of government.

I found the same in the worlds of freelancing, church, hustling products for a Hollywood makeup artist, talking to people down at the unemployment office during the years of taking care of a wife and three kids on benefits…

Do your job/stay in line = fine.

Try to change the world/Head upstream = frustration of trying to empty an ocean with a tea cup.

In other words, they — critics, neighbours, family, friends, nemeses — were right.

You can’t change the world, because the world doesn’t want to be changed.

Which is when I had an epiphany.

Even though most of my efforts to ‘change the world’ had been shot down in flames,there was one thing that actually consistently was a resounding success.

The Conversations and Salvador Dali

Every time I’d found myself having a Conversation with someone about what they really cared about, what they were working on, what they felt their God-given reason for being alive was…I’d been able to encourage them, goad them, and in a small way push them to keep doing what they already knew they needed to do…despite what they said.

The Conversations. Intimate one on one interactions. Encouraging those who were already “heading upstream” to build something important…without a marked out path or readily available resources for doing it.

The Conversations. Exchanging ideas and perspectives. Celebrating the tiny milestones that they simply branded as “pointless wastes of time”.

The Conversations. Earning the right to be invited into Conversations with those who were already fumbling to figure out how to make bricks without straw for the dreams they were building into reality.

That’s what I was supposed to do. That’s where I could do my Work of encouraging those who were building the future.

So I entered the world of marketing as a way of being invited into the Conversations going on in the world of business and entrepreneurship.

So I became a Bass player to help find the groove of the Conversations going on in various jam sessions.

So I became a husband and father to be able to have an influence on the Conversations of my kids and grandkids (inspiring others to do the same).

So I launched a project called Paperback Junkie (#FAIL) as a way of having Conversations around the books that had shaped my thinking and given me the raw material for building my dreams.

So I started a blog called Save Dali (#FAIL) that has no comments, no Salvador Dali, and a simple desire to spark a Conversation with someone who’s already doing the Work of making bricks without straw.

And so I decided to start a medical school called Bizarro to help find the others who are also trying to figure out how to head upstream.

You’re still reading, so I guess that means I’ve found you.

Email me. Let’s talk. And above all, keep doing what you’re doing…we need you to.