Medical School Archives | Page 5 of 8

6 months to live

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.

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.

The Pursuit of Happyness

How To Drop Out Of Medicine

Borders bookstore on Tottenham Court Road was my sanctuary.

I felt lost, confused and uncertain about who I was and where I was going after being kicked out of medical school.

So I headed for the bookstore to find answers and spend time with hundreds of advisors and alternate universes on the shelves of Borders.

One of the worlds I collided with was the world of Chris Gardner, author of The Pursuit of Happyness.

I didn’t read the book from cover to cover, but I skimmed it for a couple of hours like a pebble skipping the entire length of a pond.

And one of the parts that stuck with me was the idea of enrolling in God’s university. I took a photo of that passage that is still one of my screens avers. ..a photo that outlasted the now extinct Borders bookstore.

Here’s the photo:

Photo.

And here’s the excerpt:

Others may question your credentials, your papers, your degrees. Others may look for all kinds of ways to diminish your worth. But what is inside you no one can take from you or tarnish. This is your worth, who you really are, your degree that can go with you wherever you go, that you bring with you the moment you come into a room, that can’t be manipulated or shaken. Without that sense of self, no amount of paper, no pedigree, and no credentials can make you legit. No matter what, you have to feel legit inside first.

With all the pressure that medical school/family/the world puts you under to earn their approval and validation…just imagine what would happen if you spent even half that energy on approving yourself first.

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.

Become a Hedgehog

How To Drop Out Of Medicine

The Hedgehog is a small and delicate creature…with one very powerful strategy for dealing with attacks and threats:

Curl up into a ball of prickly spikes.

No matter what happens, no matter who or what threatens the Hedgehog, it has just one simple strategy that works every single time.

Jim Collins — (Author of “Built to last”, “Good to great”, “How the mighty fall” and “Great by choice”) — calls this The Hedgehog Concept.

He found that every successful company that has achieved and maintained success…found their ONE thing that answered 3 critical questions:

What are you passionate about?
What are you good at?
What could you be paid for?

In other words:

PASSION + SKILL + ECONOMIC ENGINE

Make a list of your passions, skills and possible economic engines (ways that others are already getting paid for engaging in your passions&skills).

Look for patterns, ask your friends and dig deep into finding the ONE thing that addresses these 3 questions.

(It’s a bit of work, but far less than your current workload in Medical school).

When it comes to following your dreams, you need to become a Hedgehog.

Don’t listen to Gary Vee

How To Drop Out Of Medicine

Don’t listen to Gary Vaynerchuk.

Don’t watch his YouTube show: #ASKGaryVee.

Don’t type “Gary Vaynerchuk” into Google and click “I feel lucky”.

Don’t ignore his “highly offensive language” and “wanton use of the F bomb”.

Don’t be impressed by his insane work ethic, fascinating immigrant origin story, and 100% no b*s approach to engagement.

Don’t take action on his calls to: hustle, crush it, jabjabjabrighthook (JJJRH), be grateful, be self-aware, build legacy, say thank you or know who you are (instead of who you want to be).

And definitely don’t download the unabridged audio book of “Crush It!”.

Don’t listen to Gary Vee.

You have been warned.