The following is contributed by Cousin Throckmorton.
When will it end?
Between the boredom
And bourbon
I haven’t much left
Empty
Hours
And hours
Of dry books and disappointed looks
Of diabetic feet and discharge sheets
Wading through patients
And patience
Knock kneed and faceless
From hackneyed cases
A doctor
Of guile
Hiding behind false smiles
Sweating away my soul
Into a day old shirt
I’m sinking
Gradually
Then suddenly
I haven’t much left
Way off topic, but this is one of the best goodbye letters I’ve ever read.
I’m done. I’m finished. I can’t take the stupidity anymore, so I’m leaving and I’m taking my website with me. As of Tuesday, Feb 10, 2009, T-Shirt Hell will be no more.
That’s the opening line from the letter from T-Shirt Hell creator Sunshine Megatron.
You’ve seen the shirts before here on MedSchoolHell. Definitely racey stuff, but the guy made a mint and had a good time doing it. Class act for not selling out and instead letting the site die. He’s opening up the Worse Than Hell collection for a limited time while he clears some inventory.
Let’s assume that you’re a partner in a practice or an emergency medicine doc or a hospitalist somewhere. Let’s also assume that I own a pencil manufacturing plant. We’re also assuming that this is a scenario to illustrate a point. Thanks for playing along…
I get an order for 100,000 pencils. I fulfill the order and profit. I leverage my employees to create pencils for me and fill the order. If I need extra help for the order, I hire it.
You get an order for 100,000 patients.
You can only feasibly see 50 patients per day, so you tell approximately 99,550 patients to go elsewhere. You can’t hire extra help to see the patients because the extra help eats all of your bottom-line profit.
The Service Business
My point is that medicine is a service business. You can only do so much yourself when you’re serving others. If you want to progress beyond a certain income level, you’ll need to figure out a way to duplicate yourself. We can’t duplicate ourselves, so game over. Service businesses lend themselves to income caps. Income caps don’t play nicely with large (very large) incomes.
In other words, if you want to get rich, you need to get out of the service business. Which means, getting out of medicine. Sure, medicine will give you an incredibly “comfortable” life. I got tired of watching my parents be “comfortable” and decided to change. Will you?
There’s nothing wrong with banking a couple hundred thousand per year in medicine and living comfortably. But, you’ll never be rich so get used to that now. People all around you are making 5 times your income and working less than half of the time of your favorite attending. It may not seem like that or that cut and dry, but just trust me when I say that it’s true.
It’s all about passive income, and medicine alone doesn’t afford a passive income. You’ll always need to see patients or sign out a case to get paid.
And, that’s not the way to live. In my opinion, anyway.
Discuss.
Awhile back I had requests to set up a forum. I never got around to it, but here they are now. Nothing fancy, hell it doesn’t even match the main site. But, I’m about to retire the old MSH theme and get a brand spanking new one, anyway.
So, here it is. I’ll try and answer questions as much as I can, but I’m pretty much leaving it up to you guys to get shit started. If it dies I’ll pull it, but hopefully it can be a decent resource once some solid discussions get going.
What the fuck is with all of the hate recently? I’ve seen a huge increase in the amount of comments directed towards me and questioning why I still update this site since I’m out of medicine.
Don’t worry about what I’m doing and go save some lives. Seriously, get a fucking life and don’t worry about me updating this blog. I’m actually starting to think some of you guys have stalking issues.
Let’s take a look at some of the recent comments. ‘MD’ is my favorite commenter lately:
If sleeping in every day and playing WoW makes you feel fulfilled, by all means do it. And if you are going to look back on life with a sense of pride and feel that you had a meaningful existence in doing so, then by all means make yourself happy. I can promise you I’ll never devote a blog to why your ways are wrong or what I don’t like about it.
What the fuck? Do you actually think I sleep in every single day and play WoW all day long? I run a company doing 7-figure revenues every year and you think I play WoW all day? I don’t give a fuck about ‘being fulfilled’ and ‘contributing to society.’ What I care about is my bottom line and financial security for the future. Nothing more, nothing less. Like I’ve said time and time again, it’s all about the Benjamins.
MD will never devote a blog to me because he simply doesn’t have the time. If you think you have the time while practicing medicine, I challenge to you start one that becomes more popular than MedSchoolHell.
Don’t lie to yourself and think it’s about anything else, either. You want money just like the next guy, and you want to obtain it with the least amount of work possible. Fuck all of this “contributing to society” crap that’s been rehashed over and over. That shit is tired, get over it.
I’m not going to lie and say I don’t sleep in regularly and play games a lot. I do. But, I still run a successful company. I have a lot of “free time.”
I love what I do not only because it’s very interesting to me, but also because it gives me an insane amount of freedom to do what I want, when I want.
The Hatorade drinkers like ‘MD’ are really just pissed that they have to wake up each morning at the ass-crack of dawn and go into work while I snooze it up for a few more hours. I can do what I want, when I want while they have to ask for time off and put up with patient care issues while pretending to “feel good” about what they do for a living. Whatever, I see through that shit like saran wrap.
That’s honestly the nuts and bolts of all of the negative comments I’ve received lately, and if you feel differently, please let me know in the comments.