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White Coat Investor Podcast
WCI #421: Finding Joy in Your Work with Dr. Cory Fawcett
00:58:40
Today we are talking with our friend, Dr. Cory Fawcett. Dr. Fawcett is an author many times over and has another great book newly published called A Doctor's Guide to Finding Joy in Your Work. We know how prevalent burnout can be and Dr. Fawcett has...
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- [00:00]
Jim Dahle
This is the White Coat Investor Podcast where we help those who wear the white coat get a fair shake on Wall Street. We've been helping doctors and other high income professionals stop doing dumb things with their money since 2011.
- [00:16]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
This is white Coat Investor Podcast. Finding joy in your work with Dr. Corey Fawcett. Today's episode is brought to us by SoFi, the folks who help you get your money right. Paying off student debt quickly and getting your finances back on track isn't easy. That's where SoFi can help. They have exclusive low rates designed to help medical residents refinance student loans. And that could end up saving you thousands of dollars, helping you get out of student debt sooner. SoFi also offers the ability to lower your payments to just $100 a month while you're still in residency. If you're already out of residency, SoFi's got you covered there too. For more information, go to sofi.com whitecoatinvestor SoFi student loans are originated by SOFI bank and a member FDIC. Additional terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891. You know, it's interesting. We really appreciate SoFi as a sponsor. We've been working with SOFI here at the White Coat investor for like 13 years. I mean, I can remember a time many years ago when I flew out to San Francisco and literally sat down with their entire C suite. They're a much bigger company now, but it is the only, the only MLS number NMLS number I've ever memorized, but one I've got. So it's a little annoying to have to read it off each time we do this podcast. But we are grateful for the partnership with SoFi and they've certainly helped out a lot of White Coat investors over the years. All right, our quote of the day today comes from Morgan Housel and I love Morgan. Wish we could afford to bring him back to the conference. He's too expensive now. He became way too popular after his last book. But he said financial success is not a hard science. It's a soft skill. For how you behave is more important than what you know. And that is the truth. You know, personal finance, 90% personal, 10% finance, 90% behavior, 10% math. All right, thanks to all of you out there for what you're doing. I had a rough shift this week. Okay. I don't like having young people come in and die in the er. It's not a good day when that happens, especially when everything else is going crazy in the er and it's a Super busy day anyway and maybe some other patient interactions have not been awesome. And I know every now and then you also have a bad day. We actually had a bad day today at the White Coat Investor. While we're recording this, we had to replace a camera. We went back to our old camera because our new camera went on the brain, which is never very fun. Especially since tonight we're recording a big resident webinar. We've got 4,000 residents signed up for. So even here at WCI, we have bad days. Thankfully, nobody dies when we have a bad day here. That's not the case for your work. So thank you for being willing to engage in that. Okay, we have a great guest here. He's been on the podcast before. He's been to Wzicon multiple times is Dr. Corey Fossen. I love Corey. He does a lot of great work and we had a great discussion about his latest book. So let's get Corey on the line and get this started. Our guest on the White Coat Investor podcast today is Dr. Corey Fawcett, the author of the book, among other books, Finding Joy in youn Work. Welcome back to the podcast, Dr. Fossett.
- [03:24]
Corey Fawcett
Hey, thanks for bringing me back. I love being here.
- [03:27]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
Corey, you've written a bunch of books. How many have you written now?
- [03:30]
Corey Fawcett
Seven.
- [03:31]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
Seven books. And you didn't write any before you retired? This has all been post retirement work for you?
- [03:37]
Corey Fawcett
Yes. When I retired, I worried that I might need a purpose. You know, I've been type a go, go, go all the time. And to shut that off, I was worried how would I handle that in life. And. And I needed a purpose. And so I set up a business and started writing books to teach doctors about finance, very similar to what you were doing. And it gave me purpose and it kept me going. So, yeah, if you'd asked me before I retired if I would ever write a book, I would have laughed.
- [04:12]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
Now you got a series. You got a whole series of books.
- [04:15]
Corey Fawcett
Pretty awesome. A whole series of books. You never know what's going to happen when you change something in your life and you move a new direction. You might think you know what's going to happen, but you know, until you get there, you don't know what's really on that other side.
- [04:30]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
Corey, I love your story. In fact, so much so that last week, I spent last week canyoneering in southern Utah, exploring slot canyons with friends, one of whom is a surgeon.
- [04:39]
Corey Fawcett
That's a surprise about.
- [04:40]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
Yeah, exactly. A surgeon about my age, a little older than me. And I used your example in a long discussion we had on a three and a half hour approach to a canyon. And we talked quite a bit about what you'd done in your life. And I think it's really, your story's really instructive for a lot of docs out there. And so I think before we get into talking about your latest book or any of your books, I want to talk about you. Okay, let's go back to when you were, I don't know, 48, 50, 51 or so, and talk about what you were doing in your life. And I want you to kind of tell us the story from then until now because I think a lot of people dream about retirement. They dream about early retirement. And I think it's. It's very instructive to hear from somebody who has done it, who is doing it right. I'm not retired. You know, I'm clearly working, maybe not quite full time, but between the two jobs, I'm working something close to that. And I think it's an example that I can't use personally for my life. So I want them to hear from you. So start us back at, I don't know, age 48 or something. Tell us, tell us your story.
- [05:46]
Corey Fawcett
Well, I mean, to tell the story right, we have to go clear back to medical school, because it started there.
- [05:52]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
All right, well, let's make the first 20 years a little faster, though.
- [05:55]
Corey Fawcett
It'll be real fast. But in medical school, I was laying out my life. What would the rest of my life look like? And it was at that time that I had set age 50 as the date of retirement. And so from that day forward, I had been planning that at age 50, I would be in a position that I could retire. I would have saved enough. And so I began that plan way back then. So you can't start at age 50 and say, I think I want to retire next year and then start planning for your retirement because you don't have enough Runway to get your plane off the ground in savings unless you've been serendipitously saving a lot. Now, fast forward to it's nearing retirement. And I saw that point coming. Okay, I'm 50 years old. I said I was going to retire when I'm 50. But you know what? Back then and now, you're not the same person. So here I am in 50. My plan says retire, but I didn't really want to retire. I kind of liked what I was doing. It was kind of fun. But what I really want to do is, could I Cut back. Could I work a little less hard now? Because I was noticing call nights were getting tough to recover from. The older I got, the more days it took me to recover from an all nighter. When I was in residency, I could do an all nighter and sleep good the next day and I was good to go. But by the time I was 50, it would take two, three days to recover from being up all night. And so I could see the writing on the wall. As you get older, you can't keep up the pace that you could do when you were young. And so I wanted to cut back, but my partners, they said no, we only want full time surgeons in the practice. And so I said, well, I don't want to be full time anymore, I need a different pace. I told them I was going to retire at the end of the year and if they're not going to let me be part time. And then I searched for what do I want to do with myself? And I didn't really know outside of medicine what I wanted to do. But I had just done some locum's work to help out a resident who was in trouble. He had two partners and the three of them were in a small town and two of them quit in the same month. And he was suddenly the only doctor in town and he was just swamped. And he called and said, can any of you guys come help me? And I thought, well, that'll be fun. So I went and did a week working with him and it was so eye opening. People were saying, thank you. Wow, I can't believe you're here helping him so that he can stay here with us longer. And it was really joyful to be there. It was like gave me a new spark. And so I thought maybe that's what I could do in my retirement years, was just go around and help these doctors in small towns where there's just one doctor and he has to get some relief here and there. How does he get that? And I could be that guy. And so I actually went on a seven week vacation a few months before I was going to retire. And I sent a letter out to every small critical access hospital in the three states surrounding me and thought when I get back, if I get a response, that's what I'll do. If I don't get a response, I'm going to be retired in a couple months anyway. And I got more response than I could even handle. There was so much demand for help in those places and I took that on and I did that for A while. And then I had this interest of, but what am I going to do when I quit this? Because this isn't going to last forever either. And that's when I started my financial success, MD idea to help doctors and teach them what I learned in this path through my life. How to save money, how to stay out of debt. That's what the books are about. And then I began that. And two things happened at the same time that really shifted my gears again to do this and give up medicine completely. I had just come back from a awards ceremony where my first book was given nonfiction book of the year award. And on the way back, I was talking to my wife. Is this like a sign that says maybe I should just go with that now? And I get back and I'm doing a simple appendectomy. And for the first time in my life, I said to myself, what's the next step? And light bulbs went off. I wasn't doing enough medicine in these little bitty hospitals one to two weeks a month to keep my skills at the level they needed to be at. If you do enough appendectomies, you never asking yourself the next question because you're on autopilot. But if you slow the number down too far, it'll get to where you start asking, what was I supposed to do next? And I realized that I was on a slippery slope. I had to do one of two things. I had to either stop practicing before I got too far down that slope, or I had to up my practice so that I was doing more numbers, because those little hospitals, they don't do very much work. And so I decided I wasn't willing to go back to being a higher level surgeon. And I decided to let go. And I was very happy to have had that three year ramp as a locums doctor where I was able to go from full power, type A, working full time, 60 hour a week doc, down to not working anything. And I believe that that ramp really saved me. If I hadn't ramped it down like that, I think I would have missed medicine if I just stopped it completely one day. And so that ramp gave me a really nice exit from medicine where I slowly eased out. I started at about two and a half weeks a month and then went down to two weeks a month and then one week a month. And it became pretty clear after three years that I was ready to move forward and I was financially ready. So whenever I said yes, it was the time perfect.
- [12:30]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
That's exactly what I wanted you to talk about. That concept of a ramp. And this ramp is very easy to form for a hospital based, shift based specialty. Right. When you're an emergency doc, when you're an intensivist, when you're a hospitalist, when you're a radiologist, when you're an anesthesiologist, creating that ramp is pretty easy. Now, some partnerships are harder than others, but it's pretty easy. Surgeons have a much harder time with it. And I think you've shown the model. The model is, first you go to your group and you say you still want me even if I'm part time. And a lot of them will say, oh well, that's a whole lot better than having to hire somebody else. And let's see if we can make that work. And some will do what your partnership did and say, no, we only want full time docs. And you can go looking on the locum circuit. And there's lots of locums work out. There's an unbelievable amount of locums work out there.
- [13:21]
Corey Fawcett
It was more than I can handle just in these three states right around me. And that was just looking at the little bitty hospital. Yeah.
- [13:28]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
And I mean, you can basically write your own ticket. You can create your own ramp that way. And so I think for pretty much, I mean, if a general surgeon can do it, any specialty can do it. You can build a ramp to retirement.
- [13:41]
Corey Fawcett
Let me tell you a funny thing that happened though. My partners who said we don't want any part time doctors, the moment it was real and I'm leaving, and then they found out I was going to do locums, they said, well, if you're going to do locums, could you do locums for us? And suddenly they hired me back as a locums doctor, working one weekend a month so that I would still take the amount of call I had been taking. So it's like when the rubber met the road, they changed their mind. And if they would've just changed their mind a little sooner, I'd have just been part time with them.
- [14:15]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
Yeah. I'm curious if they paid you more as a locums.
- [14:20]
Corey Fawcett
No, no, it's about the same. I set my locums price lower than market price so that I could have plenty of options and pick whatever I wanted to do. I didn't actually need to get paid. I'd already passed that point where I was financially independent and now I was just working for purpose and I love to do it. So I set a low price so I could pretty much write my Ticket wherever I went because they knew they'd have to pay way more than what they were paying me to get somebody. So they would do just about anything I asked them to do. They wanted me to use my phone for texting so they would. That's how they got their doctors. I said, no, I want a pager because when I leave, I want to be able to turn off my pager. I don't want you paging me tomorrow when I'm in Florida sleeping in and somebody, some nurse thought I was still available. And so they were happy to get me a pager because I was way cheaper than them hiring the locums. So it made a nice to be in that position. You have the way more power to negotiate when your finances are under control. You don't worry about losing your job.
- [15:38]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
So give us a sense. What did your clinical income look like over those three years?
- [15:43]
Corey Fawcett
The interesting thing is as a locums working two and a half weeks a month, I was making more money than I had been making full time working in my practice and I was undercutting the price that I could have got. So yeah, you can work half time as the locums and make more money than full time in your practice. At least in my practice. Now, my practice wasn't a lucrative practice. I lived in a small town that was depressed. Is it in the timber industry area? And the timber industry all got shut down by the environmentalists and, and so there was a lot of unemployment and I took 12 weeks a year off vacation. All of that combines, my income wasn't high for a surgeon. All of the surgeons that I coach, I've yet to have somebody come and ask me for financial help that actually made less than I made when I was working.
- [16:49]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
There are some benefits to that though. You did enjoy a pretty good cost of living in your town as well, right?
- [16:55]
Corey Fawcett
Yes, the cost of living is better here, but it's still kind of high. A few years back we made the list of one of the top 10 cities in the country to live in. That ruined the cost of living here because everybody started moving here. House prices skyrocketed. We went through a period of double digit house price increases per month. When that happened, you never want your town to be on that list of the 10 best places to live in America because you just get flooded and afterwards, two, three years later, you are not one of the 10 best places to live anymore because everybody came here. It's like telling people where your fishing hole is. Now all the fish are gone.
- [17:39]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
Now you did something else that's kind of interesting. Compared to lots of docks in that small town, you decided to not only invest in mutual funds, but you were a direct real estate investor. I think over the course of 20 plus years in your career, you ended up buying six or so small apartment buildings and manage them yourselves. Give us a brief overview of kind of that journey and how it contributed to you becoming financially independent.
- [18:05]
Corey Fawcett
By Tifty so my grandmother was a real estate investor. She had had an 8th grade education. Her and grandpa started. I say my grandmother because my grandfather died when I was a teenager. And so he had got started. They would buy some real estate. And when grandpa died, I noticed grandma never needed to get another job. She was making enough money from the real estate that it was okay. And so I always had in my mind I wanted to do that. And I was her oldest grandson, so I helped around the place. So I learned a lot about how to take care of places. And so when I finally became debt free, we had a discussion, well, what are we going to do with all this money that we used to be paying towards debts? And we said, well, I wanted to get into real estate. Now's the time, let's do it. And so we bought our first apartment complex. It was a 31 unit complex. And what we set out to do was for one year, we would do everything that you have to do to take care of something. I mean, we took care of everything. We mowed the lawn, we pulled the weeds, we did the painting, we did everything so that I understood fully what went into that. And then at the end of the year, we hired out other people to do those things. And I backed off and just became the manager of the places. And as the manager, if you do it right, you know, it's supposed to be a passive investment. You can do as much or as little as you want. When you own a property, you can hire it all out, let everybody else do all the work, which is what I do today, or you could do all the work yourself. We did that for 12 months just to get a feel for what everything was. So if somebody came along and says, well, it's going to take this to do that, I know it isn't. I know because I did that three months ago in another apartment. I know what it takes so you don't really have to do that step. But it was the step I wanted to do because my goal was someday when I retired, I would do all those things at the apartments. I would be the maintenance man, I would do that Stuff. The problem is, when I retired, I wanted to travel around the world and I couldn't be the maintenance man. If I'm in Paris, that doesn't work.
- [20:23]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
I'm sure everybody's very surprised to see that goal changed.
- [20:28]
Corey Fawcett
Yeah, it's funny, if you make goals way out there, by the time you get there, you're not the same person who made those goals. And so you need to be flexible enough to realize that your goals may change as you age. And suddenly I didn't want to be that guy. So today I do nothing with the apartments. I just farmed it out completely to a property management company and basically they just send me a check every month. And they don't even send me the check. They deposit it directly into my account. I can be on a six month world cruise and the money just keeps going into the account. It was really nice. So we did that. And initially when we made that change, I still liked doing some of the stuff that was there. Because you need something outside of medicine to do with yourself. You need some kind of a hobby. You need something that allows you to take the stress down while you putter with it. Some people garden, some people play a musical instrument, some people are photographers or woodworkers. But you need something. And there were some parts of running the property that I enjoyed and I kept a few. So I worked about 10 hours a month on that so that I did a few of the things and the rest were all farmed out until I gave the whole thing to the property management people when I retired and let them do it.
- [21:52]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
You know, one of the things I see real estate investors struggle with and some of them don't have any insight into it at all. But you didn't have any trouble with this. And that is the concept of enough. Right. With real estate. The, the urge and the books, you know, filled with hype. Urge you to, you know, when you start getting more equity in the property, well, take it out and buy another one, you know, and.
- [22:15]
Corey Fawcett
Right, keep going, keep going. One more.
- [22:18]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
200 and 300 and 1,000 doors under management. At some point you decided, we're just going to pay off the debt and have the cash flow and not buy more properties. Tell us about your thought process and enough.
- [22:32]
Corey Fawcett
It wasn't my thought process, it was my wife's thought process. Because I was the guy out there looking for one more. I just want one more, one more. It was fun for me. It was like hunting, you know, I'm looking for that piece of property. There it is. I got It. It's mine, you know, And. And I was out looking. We had had five at this time, five properties, 64 rental units, I think it was. And I was looking at this other one. I came to my wife. Oh, I found another good one. And my wife said, why are you looking at more property? I said, well, it's a good one. She says, you know, our goal when we started buying property was that my retirement plan was to have enough cash flow coming through the property to completely pay for my expenses and have a backup of seven figures in my retirement plan invested in the stock market. Okay, that was my goal. So my wife says our goal was just to have enough cash flow to take care of us in retirement. We have that already. It's not there today, but we can see rents are going up. We're paying down the debt. She said, why don't we just pay off the ones we have and stop playing this game of hunting down? Because every time I hunt down one, it takes up some of my time I could have spent with the family. And so she put the brakes on it, and we decided that when we look at the numbers, we really do have enough to take care of us for the rest of our life and probably to take care of the next couple of generations as we pass this down. And so I stopped. I never bought another piece of property after that. We had enough. If you run in a race, nobody crosses the finish line and puts their hands in the air and then keeps running. They say, okay, we did it. We're done. Let's go have a beer and take a break. And it was her that put the brakes on me. I would have probably gone down that path of just keep getting more and more. It just cringes me when I see somebody saying, oh, I've got 1500 houses under. Under contract. I'm thinking, what a waste of your time. You could have stopped a long time ago. What are you doing? And I had more things I wanted to do with. In my life. I wanted to have fun. I wanted to go out and do some things and travel. And if I keep this going, it just. One more key just comes with a little bit of headache. And no matter how you do it, you know, if you spread Your investments over 30 different companies in 30 different brokerage firms, that's a lot of paperwork you're going through all the time. If you consolidate it and realize when enough's enough, your life will be way better.
- [25:37]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
Yeah, well said. All right, let's talk a little bit about your book. You've Got seven books now. You've got the Doctor's guide to real estate investing for busy professionals. You've got a guide to loving your timeshare, how to get the most for your money and family, fun and experiences. The doctor's guide to smart career alternatives in retirement, the doctor's guide to eliminating debt, the doctor's guide to starting your practice right. The Doctor's guide to navigating a financial crisis. And the latest one, the doctor's guide to finding joy in your work, A path to personal and professional fulfillment and creating a life you love. Why this book? Why? Why is this the seventh book? Why is it not the first one? What motivated you? I mean, writing a book is not a small amount of work either. What motivated you to do this book?
- [26:25]
Corey Fawcett
There was a couple of things that happened. One was a guy I meet in a men's group on Monday mornings. And one of the guys there had gone to the hospital with his wife, and he had said, I don't understand why doctors are just. It's not the same as it used to be. When you go see your doctor, that's not the same experience. What's going on? And he got to thinking about that. And the other one was a relative who called and he was in the hospital and said, I don't know what's going on. Could I have my doctor call you and fill you in so we could talk about it? And the doctor said, yes. But the doctor never called me. The doctor was just too busy and was gone for a few days. And those things made me think, you know, what's wrong? And it came to me that we just lost the joy of being a doctor. It's become drudgery. There's two words for work in Latin, opus and labor. And an opus is something that you do for fulfillment, like being a doctor, a teacher, a musician. And a labor is something that's just work for work's sake, like digging a ditch, working on an assembly line. And the problem is, I saw that doctors are converting their life and their dream from an opus type work to a labor. And they lost the joy that we have in having an opus, something where you do special things for people, something where you change people's lives. That got lost in the assembly line. That began to happen. And when we combined that with. I did a lecture at your conference on this topic, finding joy in your work. And I decided when I came back from that, from the response I got from people, that I wanted to change gears. This was not the next book I was supposed to write. And my publisher was already pushing for, okay, it's time to start the next book. And this is what it was. We had kind of a list of what we were doing. And I said, you know what? No, I want to write this. It, like, spoke to me, this topic that why don't doctors have joy? And we decided we would do it. And she said, you know, I've never seen you this excited to write a book. I was not a book writing kind of guy. That wasn't something that excited me, but this book did. And then I was kind of contemplating, how are we going to put it together? And I went to a conference that had nothing to do with medicine. And I sat serendipitously next to a doctor. Maybe we were the only two doctors in the whole conference. It wasn't a doctor conference, and I didn't know he was a doctor. I sat there and he put two telephones next to his dinner plate at this beautiful resort. We're there for a whole weekend, all expenses paid at this thing. And I said, so what's the deal with the two phones? And I learned he was a pediatrician. He takes care of his patients 24 7, 365. He is never off. He lives 200 miles away. So he's 200 miles away from his practice, sitting in a beautiful resort, and yet he's got two telephones at the ready. He is not off. He is not at the resort. He is really still back home working and everything. I said, oh, man, I should help this guy out. And we started talking about stuff. But everything I said, he had some reason why that won't work for me. No, can't do that. No, no. And his whole life was set down to, I got two more years to put up with this, and then I'm going to retire. He was just willing to put up with everything. And as we walk back to our room, it dawned on me what the problem was. And the problem is inertia. An object in motion keeps going that way until an energy is put into it to change its direction. Or an object at rest stays that way until energy goes into it to get it to move. It's a powerful force. And you know what it looks like in medicine? That's the way we've always done it. When you say that, you're stuck.
- [30:48]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
But you know what? It makes you wonder. You know, these people have observed, maybe you've observed that maybe doctors used to find more joy in their work than they do now. Are doctors different? Have they changed? Do different People go to medical school or is this more the forces in medicine and healthcare interacting on those doctors in a different way? Is it that fewer of us are self employed and now we have an employer telling us what to do and making us run faster on the treadmill? What's changed? What's different from 20 or 30 years ago that you think doctors have more trouble finding joy in their work now?
- [31:23]
Corey Fawcett
I put a list in the book as my answer to the guy who said, why are doctors different? And there are so many things that have changed about the life of being a doctor that I think it's all of the things you mentioned, those are all good points that take the joy out of your, your life. And the thing that's happening is that we just put up with it as if that's the way it's going to be. And that concept of that's the way we've always done it or my boss won't let me do it differently. That concept didn't used to exist in medicine because we were the boss. We decided what we were going to do. Now we decide what our boss says. And our boss may not even live in the same town that we do, maybe even a different state. Somebody else is running this place that you work for. And so what I thought about, and probably the main new concept in this book is what I call the aha moment. And that's when you say to yourself, I love X, I hate Y, or I wish Z. And what we do is something at work happens and we say that, oh, I hate this, and then we just go do it anyway. We just ignore the fact that we just told ourselves the secret to our happiness. You do less of what you hate and more of what you love, you'll be way happier, right? If you just told yourself that you hate this. Stop, write that down and figure out a way to do less of it or get it removed from your life. It's just silly what we do. We tell ourselves the secret to our happiness and then we ignore it and we just. And a great example from my life as a general surgeon. I worked from Friday morning to Monday morning for my weekend. By Monday, I had 10 new patients in the hospital. Two of them need surgery and I have a full day booked in clinic. That day was so miserable. I would wake up Monday morning, every Monday morning after call, I would wake up and say, I hate the Mondays after call. And then I would just go do that Monday and I would cancel a whole bunch of patients. And my office staff had to do that. And the patients didn't like it, and I didn't like it. Nobody liked that day because it was just chaos. I got to get these two people in the operating room, in the operating room's schedule, which doesn't correspond with my office schedule. And I'm canceling patients, and there's no place to put them because we're booked solid. And one day I woke up on that Monday and I said, I hate the Mondays after calling. And then I said, I wonder if I could fix it. Three or four or five years. I don't remember how many years it was. I had been going on and on hating the Mondays after call and doing nothing. And I thought about it, and I came up with an idea that the real problem with Mondays isn't that I was on call. It wasn't the call. It was that I electively filled Monday full of patients, knowing that this is going to be a problem, and yet I still filled my clinic. So I walked into the office manager that morning and I said, look, these Mondays after call, these are a disaster. You guys are having to cancel half the patients. We don't know where to put them in. It's a bunch of work for you guys. The patients hate it. Some of the people have already arrived to the office and they can't see me, and they got to go back home, and they've made arrangements. This is terrible. From now on, we know a year in advance when I'm on call on the weekend, every Monday after my call, I want that book to be a day out of the office. You don't book any patients that day. You know what she said? Okay, that was it. That's all it took for me to solve this horrible problem that I've been dealing with and just going right on ignoring the fact that I hate this and doing it anyway. And all I had to do was fight inertia a little bit instead of, that's the way we've always done it and do something to make the change. And once we canceled all those patients, that became a great day. Because the only thing I needed to do on that Monday was round on 10 patients and do the two surgeries. So I didn't even have to set an alarm that morning. I could sleep in because there was no. I wasn't going to be the first case doing the cases today. They're going to be worked into the day somewhere, and I could go in at my leisure, make rounds, set up the time we're doing the case. It became a great day that day after call. And it took me years of saying, I hate this before I finally took action. And I think doctors don't think they can take action because they work for somebody who's telling them what to do, and they believe they just have to do that and they can't fix it. I think that's not true.
- [36:28]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
I'm curious. That particular change even impacted you financially? Did you make less money because you weren't having those crazy Mondays?
- [36:34]
Corey Fawcett
No, I still saw all those patients. It's just that they didn't have to get rebooked and I didn't see them on that day when they were booking them in the first place. They called to see me. You know, it wasn't that I wasn't going to work that Monday. I'm still making rounds in the hospital. I'm still going to do two operations. It's just that day turned into an operative day for me instead of a clinic day. I didn't notice any change in my income. In fact, people say, when I tell that story, they often say, yeah, well, that works for you because you were in private practice. But I can't get my boss to do this. And I tell you what, I guarantee you that if you go to your boss thinking these three things, so what? Who cares? And what's in it for me? Because that's what your boss is thinking. You think it from your boss's point of view, and you make this request for a change based on what's hurting your boss the way it's going to, you have a great chance of successfully making this change. But we tend to go to people, tell them what I want, I need this, this is bad for me. And they don't really care if it's bad for you or, you know, because you've been doing it for years, so it can't be that bad. You seem to be doing it. But when you go to the boss and say, do you realize that the office staff has to rebook half of my patients on these Mondays? The patients are mad. The office staff is already busy. They're upset about this. People have gotten elder care set up or childcare set up or taken the day off work, and now they're pissed and they're writing bad reviews because they're getting rescheduled and they might have needed medicines renewed, but now they're rescheduled for six weeks out and can't get that. And then the office staff is dealing with that. It's a disaster on multiple levels. We gotta not have me in clinic that day because I Got so much work to do in the hospital. I can't be trying to prioritize my hospital patients versus my clinic patients. Everyone's losing in this deal. And you're not going to lose any money in this because we're rebooking those patients anyway. I'm still going to see them. And if you approach it like that, like what's in it for them, they are way more receptive of making this happen than if you just tell them you need something different. So there are ways to approach it, even when you're an employee, that you can get things done.
- [38:59]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
Now, burnout is essentially endemic, a pandemic, even in medicine right now. When they survey doctors, over 50% of them in many specialties will say they're feeling symptoms of burnout. Did you ever experience what you would describe as burnout during your career? And if so, what changes did you make to get to the point where you were 50 plus and still enjoying what you were doing?
- [39:26]
Corey Fawcett
I never experienced what you would call burnout. I've experienced some other bad things that made me not like medicine and make some changes. But I kind of, from the beginning, worked to try and avoid burning out. That's why I took 12 weeks of vacation a year. And so burnout itself wasn't a problem. But there was a time when I was so mad at medicine and so upset that I almost quit. I was only maybe eight years into my practice and eight, 10 somewhere. I was already debt free. I had already become debt free. And every time I saw my office, I was upset. Every time I saw the hospital, I was upset. All this was a problem and I couldn't figure out why. It's akin to burnout when you don't really know what's going on, but you just can't take it anymore. And I ended up taking a little sabbatical. I need a month off. In the month off, I wanted to do two things. I wanted to figure out why I was so upset about being a doctor, and I wanted to read the New Testament. During that month and my first day reading, people talk about this notion. They were reading the Bible and something jumps off the page like a neon sign to them. And that's what happened to me. Like a neon sign on the first day. There was what the problem was. The problem was bitterness. Something had happened to me recently that involved the higher ups in the hospital, and I was really mad at them for what had happened. And so I didn't realize I was so bitter about this. But every time I saw a patient, it Reminded me of this problem, and I was mad. So I did a quick study on what do you do about bitterness? And forgiveness was the answer. And I needed to forgive that person that did this. I did that and then made a big cash donation to a project that person was working on just to prove to myself, I forgive you for this. I'm letting this go. I'm forgetting. It was like I was drinking poison, wishing he would die. Bitterness doesn't work in your life. It ruins your life, doesn't hurt them. He didn't even know that I was upset, I don't think. And once I did that, I was kind of good to go. I did experience burnout as a resident. My very first month out of medical school. I was on neurosurgery, and my first weekend on call, I had five gunshot wounds to the head. All five of them died. I ran the code that was unsuccessful, and they all died. I had to talk to the patient's family. My staff wasn't super supportive. They kind of made me do all the work, and if I couldn't handle it, then they'd step in. We consisted of me, a first year intern and a fellow, and the staff member. That's all the neurosurgery team was. And they made me do all the work. And so by Sunday of that weekend, I had not slept. I had multiple deaths. It felt like I was a failure because I'm supposed to save all these people. And they all died. And this was on top of all the other patients that were on the service. And I literally broke down and cried and told my fellow. We had lunch together. And I says, I can't do this anymore. Maybe I wasn't cut out to be a doctor. I don't know what to do. And he talked to me about it, and he realized that. That I was taking it personal, like I was responsible for all these people's deaths. And as we talked about who's responsible, it wasn't me. It was the attending who's responsible for these patients and what's happening? Not me. I'm just the new guy. And this was eating me up. And I hadn't had any sleep. And so what he did, he says, let's just give you a break. He took my pager and says, you go to the break room and I want you to sleep. I'll come get you in six hours and we'll go from there. And I got some sleep and realized it's not all on my shoulders and I should ask for help. I should have been Asking for help during all this time. But I thought I had to do everything. And when I came back from that, I was a new person and I never had that problem again. But I would say that was very akin to a burnout episode that a lot of people and I could see why somebody would commit suicide when they look at that situation where I thought, I just killed all these people and you don't have any sleep and you think the world's on your shoulders and you can't handle it. That's a terrible place to be. And I think there are a lot of doctors who've been through that and didn't have somebody reach out and say, hey, listen, that's not the way it is. The world's not on your shoulders. And it was that talk with that fellow that day that probably saved me from quitting medicine that weekend, thinking that this is not what I signed up for.
- [45:06]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
Yeah, I can certainly relate to that. I had a rough shift in the ED yesterday, including a young person came in dead and stayed dead despite her resuscitative efforts. But it certainly does start adding up when you get it. Shift after shift, day after day, call after call, and burnout certainly is affecting.
- [45:28]
Corey Fawcett
A lot of people. And you don't get a respite, the guy dies. And you can't process that at all because the nurse walks in and says, hey, the person in room six needs you.
- [45:38]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
Yep, absolutely.
- [45:40]
Corey Fawcett
And you just have to go on to the next thing. And you never got a chance to decompress what just happened. You just get forced into the next one. And that's not how they do it in other professions. If you had a death, they give you a moment to. To get over that. And you can even see a counselor if you want. But not us.
- [46:03]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
Yeah. You know, it's interesting. It's interesting because my next patient yesterday was the deceased's partner who came in, was upset, began having chest pain. That was my next patient. So it's not only, you know, moving on, it's doubling down sometimes. And it does add up for docs after a while. You know, it's interesting, some people, medicine's a long pathway, right. You enter this thing as a Pre Med at 19 or 20 or whatever. And by the time you come out of the pipeline a lot of times, especially if you're particularly specialized or you had some gap years, you're in your mid-30s, even as a traditional student, you're a different person at 35 than you were at 20. And a lot of people find themselves, you know, Just barely out of training going, I don't love what I'm doing. What advice do you have for that person in the book to help them find joy in their work?
- [46:57]
Corey Fawcett
There are a lot of people that say, I hate my job.
- [47:02]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
Okay, yeah, there's a club for that. It meets at Fridays down at the bar. Right.
- [47:07]
Corey Fawcett
I hate my job. But here's the thing I want you to think about. It isn't the job you hate. This is a big mistake. People will say, I hate my job. Like I had that day. I was ready to quit medicine. I hate my job. If you quit and just got a different job, you're probably going to hate that one too, because the same thing that was making you hate this one is probably going to go forward because it's more about you and how you're handling things. So what I would recommend that you do is ask a series of why questions. There's a whole chapter in the book about asking why. Because what you want to know is, what is it about my job that I hate? Because if you can identify the piece that's the problem, you can fix that piece. It's not the job. Because I can give you a great example of this. I was about to do colonoscopy, and I'm next. And I was in the middle of the day, and so there was other people doing colonoscopies ahead of me. So I wanted to walk over to the colonoscopy room and ask them, where are we at? When will you be ready for me? As I'm walking through here, I walk by one of the colonoscopists in one of the rooms, walked by me complaining, oh, I hate this job. And. And he was pretty down and upset. You know, they booked too many of them for me today. And I, you know, and something went wrong with the last one. It took him too long. He was just griping and grumbling about how he hates this job. And I kind of went on by him. And then right after that, as I'm still walking to the room, the other room guy, that doctor came out and says, oh, man, I love this. This is so great. I love doing colonoscopies. It's so fun, you know? And I realized at that moment, these two doctors do exactly the same job in exactly the same facility with exactly the same staff, exactly the same rules. Everything is the same. And one doctor walks by me and says, I hate my job. And the other doctor walks by me, says, I love this. It's not the job. It's the same job for both of these guys. And if you quit your job, someone else is going to take that job thinking it's going to be a great job, right? It's not the job. There's something about the job that's bothering you. And if you ask the series of why. Why do I hate my job? Well, I hate being on call. Why do you hate being on call? Because they don't get enough sleep. Why do you not get up? If you keep asking these whys until you don't have another answer, you're going to get to the root thing that bugs you. Because there's usually something bugging you. Like me. I hated my job when I was having the bitterness problem, but I didn't realize I was having a bitterness problem. It was only after I really analyzed the job. What's going on here? Why do I hate my job? What's happening here that I realized I was mad at somebody and I was transferring that to my job. It wasn't the job I was mad at. It was the thing that was happening in my job. It was. And those you can usually fix.
- [50:22]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
You know, it's interesting. I've heard people don't quit jobs. They quit bosses. What advice does your book given in dealing with a challenging boss?
- [50:33]
Corey Fawcett
Well, there's not a specific section on a boss, but it's more of asking yourself or listening to your aha moments. So if your aha moment was, you know, I hate my boss, oh, I hate something. Okay, write that down. Because we want to do less of that, right? So I hate my boss. Now, I have a chapter called the list of 10. When you see a problem like I hate my boss, you first do the whys. Go through there and figure out what it is you don't like about this thing. What's the real problem? And then you make a list of 10 ways that you can fix this problem. Okay? Because it's probably not your boss. It's something your boss is doing. There's a particular thing they're doing that's getting under your skin, and you're letting it get under your skin. So if you make the list of 10, here's the cool thing about forcing yourself to write 10 ways I could fix this. So maybe it's your boss is making you work on your day off. Maybe that's what it comes down to. Okay, 10 ways I could not have to work on my day off. And what happens is most of us think of one or two things and we stop right there, because that's the quick, easy, common Answer, and you say, well, that one won't work, and that one won't work. And then you quit and move on. But when you force yourself to write 10 ways you can do it, by the time you get to the middle of that list, you're really thinking outside the box. What could I really do to solve this? How could this be better? By the time you get down to number 10, you're just putting some stupid thing on the list, so you're done. Okay, so the first ones aren't any good.
- [52:12]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
It's all about number five and six. Huh?
- [52:14]
Corey Fawcett
Five and six. Right in the middle in there, there's an answer that could solve the problem. And if you can ask yourself a series of why do I hate my boss? And if you can figure out that answer, then you can potentially solve the problem. Because it's usually. I mean, most people get to be a boss because they're good at what they're doing, but they do have personalities, and they do have ways they do things, and they may not be the same as the ways you do things. And if you can figure out which of the things that are happening in your job that your boss is part of that are pissing you off, you're mad at this guy or girl. But if you can figure that out by asking a series of why questions and then go through your list of 10, you can usually solve this and make that better. If it's something they're doing that you don't like, you can find a way that you can get around that or not have to do that, or get that assigned to somebody else, or get yourself assigned even to a different boss, or there's so many, many ways that you can make changes in that relationship. But if you don't overcome inertia and you don't get rid of the. That's the way we've always done it. If you will act, you can find what's usually bothering you about that. I've done that with other friends that aren't my boss. I'm really mad at somebody. Well, what is it that I'm really mad at? And if I go address that, usually you can solve the whole thing and it goes away. If you just ignore, ignore it. You just keep being mad forever. So you just really got to act. But you got to act on the right thing. You don't want to climb a ladder and then find out you put it on the wrong wall.
- [54:10]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
Yeah, for sure. Well, our time is now short. Corey, you have done a fantastic job assisting doctors these last eight plus years. And I'm sure your latest book will continue down that important work pathway. Those of you who are interested in it, you can find this on Amazon. We'll have a link in the show notes. It's called the Doctor's guide to finding joy in your work. A path to personal and professional fulfillment and creating a life you love. And it's available now. You can buy it this instant. It's not even very expensive. The Kindle price is less than five bucks and the paperback's less than 20 on Amazon as I'm looking at it right now. So, Corey, thank you for writing this book. Thank you for being an advocate for doctors and their careers and their finances, and congratulations on the success you've had and using it to assist others to find that same success.
- [55:04]
Corey Fawcett
Well, thanks. It's nice to get a pat on the back once in a while. You know, we need that.
- [55:13]
Dr. Corey Fawcett
All right. I hope you enjoyed listening to Corey as much as I did. Corey's got a lot of wisdom. He's done a lot of things right in his life. And I think there's a lot of lessons there that White Coat investors can take away. And I hope we not only talked about his book, but also talked about his example and what that can be, how that can be applied in your life. As I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, SoFi could help medical residents like you save thousands of dollars with exclusive rates and flexible terms for refinancing your student loans. Visit sofi.comwhitecoatinvestor to see all the promotions and offers they've got waiting for you. One more time. That's SoFi.com WhiteCode Investor SoFi student loans are originated by SoFi Bank NA member FDIC. Additional terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891 all right, we have a product line here at the White Coat Investor for personal loans. And I've had a lot of qualms over the years about having this product line at all. We would love for no White Coat investor to ever have to borrow money ever again. However, that's just not realistic. So like with any other financial service, we want to make sure that when you do have to borrow money, you borrow as little as possible for as short a time period as possible from the best companies in the industry. Personal loans are generally used to solve cash flow problems. Some of those are very reasonable uses for these loans. You know, things like residency, job interviews, use. Right. Relocation expenses. Okay. These sorts of things. I don't want you buying a car and keeping this loan for 20 years to pay for your car. That's probably not a reasonable loan for a reasonable use for a personal loan. But if you're going to buy a car for three months and pay the thing off, that's probably fine. If you're consolidating 30% credit card loans, it's probably a good use for a personal loan, right? There are some reasonable uses. Please don't get in the habit of just borrowing money to borrow money. But if you want to check out some of these companies that we have partnered with to give you the best products available out there for docs, you can go to whitecoatinvestor.com personalloans all right, thanks. For those of you leaving us a five star review and telling your friends about the podcast, we had an email recently. This wasn't a review, but this is what they said in an email said WCI has made a tremendous impact on my financial life and overall well being. Jim and the whole WCI team always provides honest and sound financial advice. After listening to several WCI episodes a couple years ago, I ultimately had the confidence to fire my financial advisor. He puts advisor in quotes. Sounds like maybe it was a product salesman and became a do it yourself investor. Since then I've listened to every WCI podcast that is available and taken control of my finances. I can't thank you and your team enough. All right. We love getting those. We love them especially when they come in as five star reviews because then they help other people also find the COD podcast more than just sending us an email, but we appreciate your kind words. We do work hard to try to help you and achieve the goals that you have for your financial life. Okay, that's it for today. Keep your head up and shoulders back. We'll see you next week on the White Coat Investor Podcast.
- [58:19]
Jim Dahle
The hosts of the White Coat Investor are not licensed accountants, attorneys or financial advisors. This podcast is for your entertainment and information only. It should not be considered professional or personalized financial advice. You should consult the appropriate professional for specific advice relating to your situation.