Tag: Entrepreneurship
120,000 hours
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?
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.
WHY are you here?
Why you do something is more important than what you do or where you do it.
That’s the crux of the eye-opening TED Talk by Simon Sinek: Start with WHY (watch this right now):
Put simply, understanding what your WHY is will help you determine the what, where, when, who&hows of your life.
Right now, asking yourself WHY you’re in Medical school may reveal a whole cluster of WHYs that belong to your parents, society…everyone except you.
But getting clear on your WHY will give you a devastating degree of clarity about everything in your life.
And once you’ve got the clarity, you’ll not only know exactly what you need to do…you’ll also discover an inner power that drives you to pursue your WHY.
Watch the Simon Sinek talk…and start with WHY.
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.
4 hours a week?
4 hours a week
80 to 90 hours per week.
That’s the typical workload of a Doctor…and a huge factor in the on-going 21+ day-strike of all government Doctors in Kenya since 5th December 2016.
Overworked, underpaid, and unappreciated work, as the Doctor nobly fights to save each patient he or she comes across.
But what if instead of 90 hours a week…The Doctor worked only 4hours?
4 hours a week?
What would happen if that were the case?
What would the world look like where every Doctor only worked 4 hours per week in practising the craft of Medicine?
What would the implications be? Economically, socially, culturally, politically…personally?
How can a Doctor work fewer hours and achieve a much greater impact?
Just some of the questions I’ll be exploring in my new Medium.com publication: The 4-Hour Medic
I’m importing the Tim Ferriss 4-Hour Work Week meme into the world of medicine to see what breakthroughs it can help unlock.
Maybe nothing. After all, this might not work.
Or maybe it will spark just a single conversation…a single idea…that leads to a breakthrough that changes the face of Medicine and health care for the next 2,000 years.
That’s the goal. Let’s see what happens.
10 Minutes A Day
If you struggle to find time to do the things you want to do, try embracing the idea of 10 minutes a day.
10 minutes a day.
70 minutes a week, 300 minutes a month, 3650 minutes a year (60 hours and 50 minutes a year).
What could you do with a 60 hour block of time over the next year?
What is the MOST valuable asset you could build with a solid chunk of 60 hours?
Could you spend 60 hours building something in 2017 that freed up 600 or 6,000 hours in 2018?
Of course you can.
The challenge is to pick ONE thing that you can build over the next year…in sessions of just 10 minutes a day.