If you were to win the lottery today, how would you change the way you practice tomorrow?
This is an off-shoot to the post I made a few weeks ago asking if people are practicing because they want to or because they need to. That was a great discussion that seemed to reveal some things for some of you or at least got people thinking. These are the kinds of questions we need to ask ourselves and mental challenges we need to put upon ourselves as clinician entrepreneurs to keep ourselves in check in a healthy way.
By creating an imaginary scenario where all financial barriers are removed what would your practice look like? The three most common answers that come up are:
You would take your clinic to the next level by expanding, employing more people, go bigger.
You would scale back the amount that you would work or go part-time.
You would quit practicing and retire from medicine.
Does answering anything other than #1 bring up feelings of guilt, shame, or failure? If you answered “yes”, keep reading.
We practice medicine because it was a calling. But just because it’s a calling doesn’t mean you must abandon or de-prioritize all other passions in your life. Medicine may still be a calling, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it must be your main bread and butter. There are lots of voices out there who will disagree, including the ones in your own head. They say that if something is really your calling then practicing should be your only livelihood. That it’s not appropriate for a doctor to have a “side-gig”. And if you do, then you’re not serious and your practice is just a hobby. Or you’re putting the pressure on yourself because you made this big financial investment in your education, board exams, and licensure that you have an obligation to be all-in.
I call bullshit.
The only thing you are obligated to do is to take care of yourself. Because if you don’t you cannot be the best doctor you can be, and in turn you can’t provide the best possible care to your patients. And for some people that can mean scaling back. Or scaling back and introducing non-clinical income streams in the form of a side-gig that lights you up (Not a side-job. There’s a difference.). Or taking the steps toward retirement. I think the more we get out of the mentalities of what “should” be it would be a great overall step toward happier doctors and fewer cases of clinician burnout.
I’m eager to see what people’s responses are to this question.