It’s time to leave Medicine
Category: It’s Time To Leave Medicine
Jeff Bezos’ Guide To Quitting Medicine
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. — Bronnie Ware, Top 5 Regrets Of The Dying
When it comes to the decision to quit Medicine…it is going to hurt a lot.
This isn’t going to be a “sharp scratch”.
The moment you tell your parents or guardians or society that you don’t want to follow the plan you’d previously agreed to…the one they’ve helped you pursue your whole life…there’s going to be conflict.
Painful conflict.
And a brutal emotional and psychological battle between their expectations and your exasperations.
This is going to hurt a lot, particularly since it involves people you love.
But as painful as this confrontation might be, it’s a fun day-on-the-beach when compared to what you’re left with if you don’t have this confrontation:
Regret.
If only, what if, woulda, coulda, shoulda.
The sort of regret that will haunt you every step of the way into your 80s and taunt you on your death bed.
And when asked about the things they regret most, virtually every “senior citizen” mentions regret over things they didn’t do rather than things they did do.
Jeff Bezos used this insight as part of his “regret minimization framework”…and was inspired/compelled to quit his job as a successful stock analyst to start a company called Amazon.com
Here it is in Jeff’s own words:
The framework I found, which made the decision incredibly easy, was what I called — which only a nerd would call — a “regret minimization framework.” So I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.”
I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision. — Jeff Bezos
The excruciating pain of disappointment and failure hurts way less than the agony of regret.
Either way, there’s pain. But you get to choose:
To disappoint them for a moment (and maybe delight them for a lifetime)…or just keep going through the motions to keep them happy, and live with terrible regret for the rest of your life.
The choice is yours.
Choose to live life with as few regrets as possible.
And a bonus video from Bronnie Ware, author of Top 5 Regrets Of Dying People:
Thanks for reading this article! If you’re ready to find your personal Escape Velocity…where you make the transition from being stuck, to living a life of happiness, freedom and fulfilment…click here for more info.
10 Famous Exit Strategies From Medical School
Start with the end in mind – Stephen Covey, 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People
Whether you’re robbing a bank, starting a business, or going to medical school, you need to be able to answer one question:
What’s your exit strategy?
As in, your “pre-planned means of extricating yourself from a situation that is likely to become difficult, dangerous or unpleasant”?
When it comes to the world of Medicine, the 2 default exit strategies are:
Retirement
Death
You will be a Doctor and practice Medicine until the day you die or retire, whichever comes first.
Now while these exit strategies may be the favourites of hospital managers, politicians and our parents’ generation…what about those of us who feel stuck, trapped and are looking for a way out of their medical career?
What about all the “happy” doctors who die by suicide?
I’m not a dropout…I’m an Exit Strategy
Thankfully, you don’t have to die or wait for retirement in order to get out of a miserable situation. Many of your predecessors have found their way out and modeled different Exit Strategies from the world of medicine.
Here are 10 famous exit strategies to inspire you.
Exit #1: Become A Teacher And Start A Family
Cindy dropped out of her 3rd year in medical school to become a teacher and start a family.You can read more about that here on her blog.
Exit #2: Pursue Your Lifelong Passion For Astronomy
Roshaan quit in his 4th year, to pursue a lifelong passion for astronomy, despite the lack of support or esteem from his community in Pakistan.
Exit #3: Finish Writing Your Sci-Fi novel (And Have Steven Spielberg Direct It As A Movie)
Michael graduated from Harvard Medical School, did a postgraduate fellowship study at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies…and then quit to become a full time science fiction writer…creating novels, movies and franchises such as Jurassic Park, ER, The Andromeda Strain, Twister, and many others.
Exit #4: Start A Rocket Ship Company
Peter wanted to fly into space…but went to medical school to make his parents proud. He launched a space company in his 4th year, graduated after promising the Dean he would never practise medicine…and launched the $10million X Prize, Planetary Resources (an asteroid mining company), just to mention a few projects.
Exit #5: Lead A Marxist Revolution In Argentina
Ernesto was inspired to tackle the diseases of poverty and inequality whilst travelling across South America. So he completed his medical studies and transformed the world of Argentinian politics as the force of nature we know as Che Guevara.
Exit #6: Join The NBA And Win 2 Championships
His mother was a doctor, and his father a senior nurse in Barcelona, Spain. And with two medical parents, Pau Gasol was set to follow in the family tradition. But along the way, Pau’s passion for basketball developed into a career that led him away from medicine and into 2 NBA championships as a professional basketball player.
Exit #7: Act In A World Famous TV Sitcom called Friends
After completing a psychobiology degree at Vassar College in New York, Lisa found her path to medicine hijacked by her love for show business and improv. This lead her to pursue a career as an actress, resulting in her being cast as Phoebe in one of the world’s most famous sitcoms.
Exit #8: Start A Comedy Troupe Called Monty Python
Graham went to the University of Cambridge to get a medical degree. Instead, he ended up deferring his studies to start a little comedy troupe called Monty Python.
Exit #9: Build A Private Medical Practice Designed By Your Patients
Pamela qualified as a Doctor, but quit the traditional pathway to build a medical practice designed by her patients.
Exit #10: Just Walk Away
Sometimes the simplest exit strategy…is just to simply walk away. Maria walked away from medicine 4 years after qualifying. She told TEDxJohannesburg it was the best thing she ever did.
You Are Not A Failure…You Are An Exit Strategy
Things are not as hopeless as they feel, and it’s never too late to change your mind and make new decisions based on new information. And when you’re ready to make a change, but feel guilty or condemned by those who choose to stay miserable, remember this:
You are not a dropout or a failure: you are an exit strategy.
QUESTION: What’s one thing that’s holding you back from making your exit?
Einstein’s Insanely Simple Guide To Fixing The NHS
The NHS is in trouble.
How much trouble?
Well…how long is a piece of string?
At a micro level, you’ve got the frustration of Medics who are overworked, inadequately supported, and silently struggling with depression and suicide.
And at a macro level, you’ve got the usual suspects of: hospital closures, huge waiting times, poor allocation of resources…not to mention the role of Brexit in exacerbating these issues.
So the question is: what can we do to fix things? How can we make things better?
Answer: ask a genius outside the NHS to help us fix it.
A genius like…Albert Einstein.
Even though he’s been dead for over 60 years, his brilliance has lived on, through online memes featuring statements like:
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
However, if you had to pick just ONE of Einstein’s many brilliant insights and apply it to fixing the NHS, I believe it would be this one:
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Think crazy
If you were to sum up the history of human innovation in just 5 words, it would look like this:
Today’s brilliance was yesterday’s bonkers.
Switching from horses to cars…crazy.
Flying through the air in a metallic aircraft…crazy.
Running a mile in under 4 minutes…crazy.
Convincing Doctors to wash their hands with soap…crazy.
Women voting, a black President of the USA, the telephone, the Internet, driverless cars, space travel to Mars…
Today’s brilliance was yesterday’s bonkers.
This means that the cure for cancer, or AIDS or cystic fibrosis could be hiding in plain sight…disguised as a ludicrously impractical “mad hatter”.
This means that the solution to that extremely complex situation that you’re dealing with is probably much simpler than you dare to imagine.
This means that the key to solving the global healthcare challenges facing humanity…is simply empowering and encouraging each of us to think and look like one of “the crazy ones”.
Get some sleep, do some aerobic exercise, and think differently for 10 minutes each morning.
That’s how practical this idea is.
Given humanity’s excellent track record in seeing a brilliant innovation and quickly dismissing it as crazy, ridiculous or impossible…it stands to reason that we should be more intentional about exploring today’s crazy in order to discover tomorrow’s normal.
In other words, make time each day to think differently…to think crazy.
How do we do that, particularly in a highly regulated, litigation-rife industry such as healthcare?
Or even more importantly, how do you become more intentional about exploring the ideas and interests that you’ve earmarked as impractical, impossible or “for when I have time”?
Yes, you.
That’s the real question.
Because when we talk about “the NHS”, we’re really talking about the people who make up the NHS…people like you and me.
And if we will dare to think differently, dare to look like a fool, dare to ask a silly question today in order to discover a brilliant answer tomorrow…then we will not only transform the NHS, but also the lives of generations to come.
Image: @hughmacleod