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White Coat Investor Podcast
WCI #460: Why Finding Your Zone of Genius Reduces Physician Burnout
00:46:42
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- [00:00]
A
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. This is White Coat Investor podcast number 460. 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, but that's where SoFi can help. They have exclusive low rates designed to help medical residents refinance student loans 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, NA member FDIC. Additional terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891 all right, welcome back to the podcast. Hope you enjoy the podcast. I'm grateful for you out there. I have had a surgery recently. I'm recovering from surgery again. I had a little revision done on my wrist and I'm grateful not only to my surgeon but to numerous white coat investors. I got a whole bunch of second and third and fourth opinions sending my CT around and ended up having a removal of my distal pull of my scaphoid and my hardware and hopefully that gives me a little better outcome on my wrist long term. But had a great experience and I was pretty amazed. By post op day one I was on Tylenol. By post op day three I was on nothing. So wonderful experience for healthcare interaction and got to use my hsa. So that's always wonderful. But thanks for what you're doing out there. Nobody said thanks for it. Let me be the first today. Okay, our quote of the day today is about leadership, a topic we'll be addressing during the podcast. This one comes from Jack Welch who said before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others. Love it. Okay, WC Icon is coming up. Okay, many of you, it's getting to be later I suppose and a lot of you that are going to be coming in person have already committed to come in person. I'm sure you still can come in person if you can arrange your schedule or if you happen to already be in the Las Vegas area or we'd love to have you in person, but a lot of you who are signing up at this point are being coming virtually. And we're having a sale on our virtual version of the conference for WCICON 26 between 23rd February and 25th March. If you use code WCICON100, we'll give you $100 off the virtual version of the conference. It's not too late to come in person though. I mean, our hotel's sold out, but we've got another one. It's right down the street. No problem attending that. I mean, you've all been to medical conferences where you couldn't be in the conference hotel. It's still well worth coming to the event just because you're not sleeping in the same building. You're going to the presentations. That's okay. It's still going to be a wonderful experience and we encourage you to come. So check that out. Whiteconeinvestor.com WCICON or you can go to wcievents.com and sign up. We'd love to have you. All right, great interview today. This interview is actually going to be with one of our speakers from the conference, a fellow by the name of Rutherford Pascal. And I'm just getting to know him, but I think you're going to like what you hear in this interview. My guest today on the White Coat Investor Podcast is Rutherford Pascal. He's a certified John Maxwell leadership trainer, coach and speaker. And he's going to be a speaker at the Physician Wellness and Financial Literacy Conference in a few weeks from now. So we're excited to have him on. Get to know him a little bit better. He's also the founder of Glasswalls Leadership, where he trains people to be leaders and delivers not only dynamic keynote presentations like we're going to be hearing at the conference, but does transformative leadership training and impactful coaching to unlock unprecedented growth and elevate leadership skills to new heights. Rutherford, welcome to the podcast.
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B
Hey, thanks for having me on. Excited to talk to you.
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A
Yeah. So I don't know that you're a well known name in the physician financial space and I'm curious what caused you to apply to be a speaker at the conference.
- [04:29]
B
I'm not a well known name. In my house, one of the things I talk to people about is leadership. And the hardest person, the hardest thing to lead is yourself. And once you, if you think about how do you grow to be a great leader from a financial perspective, from a growth perspective, you have to lead yourself first. It's there's things I call bright lines. You know, bright lines just means boundaries, right. And there's, there's things that, that are exciting, that really fit who you are and who you want to be. And really what I talk about is understanding and finding your genius and thinking about your genius and really architecting your life around that genius, around those things to make yourself financially successful and just successful in every shape, matter and form, this financial success. But, but it's also the success of doing the right thing for people, patients and society. And that's part of what we talk about too.
- [05:47]
A
Yeah. Accomplishing that mission, that purpose, the reason you're on the planet.
- [05:51]
B
That is exactly correct.
- [05:53]
A
Exactly. All right. Well, the talk you submitted is called Transformative Unleashing Potential for Wellness and Financial Mastery. Talk to us a little bit. I mean, the purposes of the conference, obviously people are wanting to be a little more financially savvy. They're excited to come and talk to other people because there's nobody they can talk to in their lives about finances. But at the conference they can talk to everybody there about their finances. But also a lot of people at the conference are kind of getting to mid career and facing some wellness challenges. They're feeling the stress of their workplace, of their profession. They're feeling burned out. The burnout rates in medicine hover around 50% these days. What are they going to learn from your talk that's going to help them deal with those challenges?
- [06:43]
B
I'm going to break things down into three areas. It's really about this thing I call the PID system. Preparation, intentionality, differentiation. And if you think about burnout, if you think about financial mastery, you think about, if you put those, if you prepare well, if actually plan for your day. Let's think about burnout, right? If you plan your day, month, week, quarter, year, whatever you do in a way that you give yourself time, deep work time, right? If you read the book by Cal Newport called Deep Work Spectacular for that, right? You do, or time blocking was something you can, you can use for that. But then you put time in where you're not working, where you are actually resting, your mind, your body system. So it's really about preparation, but that's also intentionality, right? So you have to be intentional about what you do, how you do it, when you do it. So sometimes you do more by doing less. You do more by greater focus of time, greater focus on a task, skill or something or whatever you're doing, but you spend less time doing it, if that makes any sense, right? So you give yourself this deep work, this time to focus, right? But then you also give your times plenty of rest to recharge and reload, and typically by not thinking about it. So it's that whole thing of being prepared, but being intentional. And that intentionality will help curb, if not completely eliminate burnout. Right? Preparation and intentionality will do that. Because you won't be doing things on a consistent basis. On a hamster wheel where you feel like, oh, I'm doing the same thing over and over, you're going to figure out, exactly where do I operate best? Where is my greatest and best use? Either give this task tool to somebody else, or it's now down at 90th on the prioritization list, instead of everything being a priority. And that's when you go crazy. So that's really what I talk to you about. I talk to people about how to think, how to think about what they're doing. And if you put those rules in place, those bright lines, which I talked about through preparation, through intentionality, you're not going to burn out. You're going to master yourself from a financial basis because you would have architected your life and what you're going through, not for today, but for weeks, quarters, years now.
- [10:02]
A
One of the challenges that I think leads to burnout, particularly for employee physicians, is they find themselves in an environment where they don't have as much autonomy as they would like. Right. I mean, this idea you put forth, which is excellent, right, that you operate only at your highest and best use, you find somebody else to take care of those little tasks. Well, when you're not in charge of hiring that person, when you're not in control of having that person's. Sometimes those tasks all load up on you. Any thoughts on how to manage that? Conversation with an employer, with the supervisor, et cetera, to receive that level of support, to make sure you're operating, practicing at the highest level of your license, for lack of a better term.
- [10:50]
B
That is a spectacular question. So I don't know if I said this. I spent 35 years in pharmaceuticals, right? 35 years in front of physicians, talking to them. So I know that there's different organizations that demand. I was going to say require, I'll say demand, a certain type of time commitment. But what I've seen is how different people work within that time commitment because they're asking you to get specific tasks done. Right. But again, it's the mental or mindset framework of how you do this. So in some of those situations, you can talk to your organization about timing, how much time do I have to do this? And they will oblige as long as they're getting what they want. Right. And if that's not the case, they're mandated on where you're seeing a patient every seven minutes or, you know, you're, you're, you're working from this. You're, you're, you know, they, they mandate the number of patients you're going to see a day, right? Then it's just about, how can I do this to be more efficient with my work? What tools am I not using that I should use? There's always a way to become more efficient within those constructs. There's always somebody with, within the organization that is managing their time well and is not getting burned out and is still following the rules of that organization. And I think it's talking to those people or it's figuring out for yourself, how can I do this in a way that satisfies everybody? My company, the patients, I see the staff in a way, I will tell you, I've led teams for my entire career. And I always tell people, there's five. There's always five ways to do things. There's five answers. Some of them are answers you don't want. Right. But there's always five answers. And people have to challenge themselves to think about, huh, I could do that, I should do it that way. And I'm not giving you a direct answer, because every situation's different. You have to look at your situation and say, you know, instead of having the, the my assistant or nurse come in after, why not have them come in with me? And they can take, you know, so it's things like that, like you can, you can adjust and change that might help the situation, might curb burnout, might curb some of the things that are restricting the physician or from being happy and productive in their course of the day.
- [13:42]
A
I wonder if it helps to be able to speak the same language as your boss. Right. I mean, the boss might be focused on throughput numbers or whatever. Right. And sometimes they just don't realize that having doctors doing, you know, relatively menial tasks is a terrible use of that time. I mean, I find myself in the emergency department doing things that, you know, are certainly you don't need an MD to do, you know, bringing patients blankets, bringing patients something to drink, you know, those sorts of things. Just because I come out of the patient's room and I can't see anybody, there's nobody else around to do it, so I go and do it. And sometimes, especially in my particular situation, the hospital is not my employer, but if it was my employer, I ought to be thinking about the cost to them of me and my time and my expertise to be taking patients blankets. Maybe they're not getting the bang for their buck that they'd like to be getting out of that and just being able to talk to them in terms of what they understand. And really, every sort of discussion looking for more support is a negotiation. I mean, you're really moving into negotiation with your manager or your supervisor. And I'm not sure a lot of physicians realize how often they're entering into negotiations in their lives and in their daily career work.
- [15:08]
B
You bring up a great point. So we talked about, I told you, I read this. My book is the PID System Preparation, intentionality, differentiation. So even if the employer has these mandates and had these things and you're seeing an inefficient way of working, you talked about speaking those same language. Typically, the language is money. That's a typical language. So in hospital, they could want infection rates decreased, they could want success in certain types of surgeries, whatever they're known for, increase. They want a heda scores. I mean, whatever, whatever it is, right. And if you, you're right, you're, you are spot on. If you're speaking in their language, they will listen. And they could change because you said, hey, what if we had one person that was in charge of water, blankets, blah, blah, etc. That come in and they, their job was every single time a physician walked out, they did it. That would give me more time to be more efficient. I could see two more patients a day. But I'm going to tell you, if you say, you know, I'm going to say two patients today, and if you, if you multiply by the number of physicians, even if it's one patient or a half a patient, I'm going to see a half a patient a day more, they're going to say done, because that's what they're looking for, right? So if you're bringing solutions in that way and speaking their language, that is absolutely what you can do and should do.
- [16:46]
A
Let's circle back to something you said earlier. You talked about inserting rest time into your schedule. Let's talk about that. What does that look like? I mean, is it literally a blank on your Google calendar or do you put I'm going to doom scroll on my phone for 15 minutes here at the end of my lunch hour? I mean, does it have to be a planned activity or Is there literally a blank in the schedule? What does that look like to insert deliberate rest into your schedule?
- [17:14]
B
Great question. And it differs for everybody, right? Let me tell you some options. So it basically is how you recharge yourself. And some people could recharge by listening to opera, listening to music, listening to hard rock, whatever. It could be music, okay, make it a gentle term. It could be walking around the building, walking up and down the stairs. It's whatever recharges you. Right. It could be spending. Okay, I'm going to spend 10 times in quiet reflection. I could be meditating. It doesn't matter. It's you. Nothing. There's nothing that's universal. You have to figure out. I'll just tell you me what I do when I'm in this room, in my office and I'm working for an hour, two hours straight on something, whatever. I will get up and I'll go into the other room and I will put on a show that I've seen 400 times. The episodes which is typically Law and Order. Like I've seen every episode like at least four or five times. And for 10, 15 minutes I'll watch it. It's mindless. I don't think about the last two hours, but it gets me prepared. My mind blanks and I'm ready re energized for the next two hour block or hour block, whatever that is. So it's really about who you are. And by the way, I do that. I don't do that all the time. Lots of times I just, I walk. Because that also resets my time. So it just depends on weather, on situations, on where I am, on, you know, what I'm working. But I will tell you, if you think about people who are successful, they reset their mind. And by the way, it could be going and taking three deep breaths. What I'm talking about is simple. I'm giving you 10, 15 minutes. But it could be just like going to me. Just reset your mind, take three deep breaths and come back. It's all different and it's not, it's not universal.
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A
One of the ideas you talked about and you mentioned it earlier, is this idea of genius, right? Somebody's zone of genius. Yes. What is a zone of genius? And how can somebody figure out what their zone of genius is?
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B
So what kind of physician are you?
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A
I'm an emergency doc.
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B
So is there your emergency? So let me ask you, when a patient comes in, there's certain things that happen to the patients where you're, I mean, you diagnose probably all of them, I'm going to say equally. I'm just going to say that. But there's certain things that happens, and maybe it's a gunshot, whatever it is that you not only love doing, love, meaning that you, you. You see it and you know exactly what to do. You. You're excited about doing it, and you're better than the next emergency physician. Right? Because it doesn't matter. We do the same thing. We're better. You know, you don't have to be modest. You know, there's certain things that you do better than another emergency physician. Am I correct?
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A
I think most people feel that way. Yeah. They've got a few, you know, the things that they love. I mean, everybody loves reducing nursemaid elbows. You know, that's the greatest thing in the world because you have these parents come in that they're totally worried, and there's almost nothing wrong with their kid. And what is wrong with their kid you can fix in about a second and a half. And they just think you're the genius. And it's literally super easy and super rewarding and takes no time and no time to document. If I could have a whole clinic of nursemaid elbows lined up for the rest of my life, I would die happy. You know, it's wonderful. But, you know, at the end of the day, unfortunately, most of the work you. You get to do as an emergency physician is not necessarily what you're particularly good at, nor what you enjoy.
- [21:16]
B
What do you enjoy? Tell me. Tell me the surgery that walks in that you enjoy. When I say enjoy, let me define it. When it's enjoy, it's. It might be slightly difficult. It might be unique. You might get one case every month. And then when you say, oh, you say, hey, I'm glad this came in on my shift versus somebody else's shift. Does that make sense?
- [21:42]
A
Yeah. I mean, everybody loves a good foreign body, right? No matter what orifice it's been inserted into. You know, it's just a lot of fun and, and rewarding to get out. And you usually can. Yeah, get it out. And so you're able to help that patient. When you look about, look for charts that people maybe fight over a little bit often. It's a foreign body chart.
- [22:03]
B
So that's what I'm talking about. So everybody has a zone of genius within a profession, within a. It's just something that they're great at. A zone of genius. I'll explain it this way. There's a lot of people that are not analytical and that they don't want to work on a spreadsheet at all. They see a spreadsheet, they break out in hives. Okay? There's other people that they. They see a spreadsheet or they see code, and they'll. They'll. They'll get lost in it for a long period of time. And it's all sudden. It's. I've been working on this for four hours. Oh, my God. That becomes your zone of genius, where time goes away, you're thrilled to be in it. There's nothing else that's happening in the world because you're so deep and you're so good at it, and it interests you so much that you can spend time and you could do it over and over again. It never gets boring, and it never gets old, and your results are fantastic at it. You know, there's certain people that. That you would trust doing your taxes and you would trust doing construction in your house. And there's other people who have come to your house that have done construction that you would never let back in your house again.
- [23:30]
A
Absolutely. I think everybody's got a list of those. Yeah.
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B
You talk to those people. That's their genius. They see a problem, they solve it. They love it. They're involved. And there's other people that know they do it, but they're. They're mediocre at it. Right. They haven't found their zone of genius because that person should be doing something else that they're great at. Right. Or doing another part of that skill, career that they're great at. That's not. That's their zone. So when I talk about people's zone of genius, it's when they found the things that are great at. So let me go back to the emergency physician situation. So do you know when emergency physicians started to rise in popularity?
- [24:17]
A
You mean when. When the ER TV show came out? That's exactly what happened back in the 90s. Yeah.
- [24:23]
B
Yeah. So it became. Because they saw the energy. Right. Because every. Some people, like, every case is different. Every case is unique, and there's. Your mind's, like, constant. So that as a class of physicians, those types of physicians, they like that. Right. They want that challenge of something new, and that comes in the adrenaline. Right. That's happening on a regular basis. Right. So that adrenaline, that is a zone of genius. Right. That other physicians don't want. So that's what I'm talking about.
- [25:03]
A
You know, it's interesting because, you know, sometimes when we're younger, we think we want to do something or we Dream about doing something, you know, like I saw somewhere in some interview you did that, you know, your dream was to play center fielder for the Mets. And, you know, but what happens sometimes is, you know, people get their dream, right? In high school, they wanted to be a doctor, and so they go to college and they go to medical school, and they do a residency, and they come out of the training pipeline. They do it for a year or two, and now they're 35 years old, and they're like, oh, I don't like this as much as I thought I was going to like it. I'm now the center fielder for the Mets, and I hate fly balls. What advice do you have for that person that's realized relatively early in their career and maybe still with hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans hanging over their head, that they don't like this?
- [25:57]
B
I got to tell you a real story. I was working for this big company. One of the customers I was calling was pediatricians. I was talking to this pediatrician about a medication I was talking to him about, and he invites me to his room. He's doing it just like simple thing. And he walks out and he goes, oh, I hate kids. And I went, did you not know this? Did you understand this when you chose to be a pediatrician? It was the crying, because I didn't understand. I didn't know they would cry that much. I said to him, I said, you should probably think about doing something that doesn't involve kids. Maybe it's adolescents or what. I mean, you know, doing something else. So, by the way, I swear to God that that happened. What happens is life changes and interest changes.
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A
Yeah, you. You change. You're a different person at 35 than you were at 20, much less 15.
- [26:57]
B
You know, that's exactly right. So the truth is, there's very few people who know exactly what they want to be at 8, 12, and 15. Doctors are some of those types of people, right? Who typically want. But they. But even a lot of doctors don't know exactly what specialty they want. Now. Some people do. I want to be a brain surgeon. I want to be. You know, there's some people, because of. Typically, it's because of some history, their family, something happened that they. They want to do that, and they haven't investigated 100% of what it is and what it entails. So the good, the bad, the dirty, it's like anything else. You got to figure out what's the worst part of the position and make
- [27:40]
A
sure you're okay with that. Exactly yeah. The homeless drug seeker of your specialty. Yeah, exactly.
- [27:47]
B
Yes, exactly. Find out what the worst part is. What everybody and I, by the way, I talk to people about that. What do you hate when you go interview people or do an internship? Talk to people. What is, what is the worst part about your job? Ask. Don't ask one person because some people ask like five different people. And if the same answer comes 56% time, that's probably the worst. And then if you can live with that, then you know, you, you can stay. If kids crying is going to be a big deal, you should never, you should switch, you should go do something else. Right. You can always change. You can always adjust. By the way, you can do this upward. Instead of going lateral, you can do, go up. Right. So you can go in a specialty, so you can get another thing to grow higher so be even more specialized. If in fact that zone of genius and what you like, you could go across. I know doctors who started as internists and gone to another specialty three, five years later because it's not what they expected and they don't like. So you have that opportunity to do that. If you don't, then every day you're unhappy. You theoretically can work for 30 to 50 years. If you find out in the first 10 that you do not like this position, the next 20 years are going to be hell.
- [29:13]
A
And they're your best 20 years of what remains of your life. That's the worst part about it.
- [29:18]
B
It's your best 20 years. It's better for not only you, but it's better for your patients, your nurse, the staff, if you are happy. And it's way better for not only your constitution, but the patients, because the joy you'll have doing what you want will filter into the people that you work on and work with. And it's going to be much better. It's going to be much better for everybody concerned. Everything's individualized. But generally, if you hate your position, if you think you're not at your best use and you don't love what you're doing, some adjustments is probably the best way to go. And I'm going to go back to zone of genius, because I believe in that. Now, typically, people change careers seven times. Seven times from 24 to 57 times. So this is not unusual. This is, this is fairly normal. It's not that you failed. It's that you didn't find out exactly what you were great at early or you did find it out and then you, okay, this is. I'm going to change again. I'm closer, but so there's always a change.
- [30:33]
A
It's just more painful in medicine, right? I don't think it's seven times for most people in medicine because the training pathway is so long. You've committed some huge chunk of your life to learning how to do this, and now you found out you liked blogging better than being an emergency dog. I mean, who knew that was coming, right? Nobody knew to that point.
- [30:56]
B
Think about your emergency doctor and you want to be a blogger or writer or professor. You could probably transition during the work, right? You can probably. Instead of being an ER doctor for 100% of the time, maybe you can do it for 50% or 30% and then you can do what you love and grow that into that. And plenty of doctors have done that. I mean, my message would be go towards joy. Okay? There might be a short financial cost mental. There could be short workload cost because you might be preparing for the next career while still doing that one. Because you want the transition to be short, but the long term gain, if it's exactly what you want, you'll be so happy if in fact, you've figured out what your zone of genius is. And by the way, it might be less money, but if you're happier, I know a lot of people who are so happy and they decrease their salary by 30 or 40% and they would do it over again because you got to live with yourself and other people have to live with you. So you want to make sure you're doing things that are great for you and great for the people around you.
- [32:13]
A
Now you spend a lot of time talking about and teaching leadership skills. Now, there's a few people out there that want to be a leader, but in my experience, it's not that many people, right? And yet we need more good leaders than we actually have. Why is it important for someone who doesn't necessarily want to be a leader to develop leadership skills?
- [32:39]
B
It's how you define leadership. If you define leadership by having three to 30 people under you, that's one way of defining leadership. If you have 10 ER physicians, no different rank, or they're all the same, but that person's a leader because of not only what they say, how they say it, how they do things, that's also a leader. You don't need people under you to be a leader. It's how you present yourself, how you are. By the way, you always lead. As a physician, you have nurses, you lead them, you have technicians, you lead them. As a doctor, you're always leading. Tell me if I'm wrong. There's very few situations where there's not somebody around you in the environment where your voice doesn't play oversized role in that situation. Doctors are leaders 100% of the time. Now there's going to be people who are quiet, who don't speak up and say, I think we should do it this way. There's other people going to be like, I think we should do this way. Those are, those are people, more leaders. These are the people who are quiet leaders who. They don't say anything, but their actions speak louder than their words. They're leaders, too, because that's part of leadership. Right? Because you don't have to be the loudest voice in the room. And I'll be frank with you, the loudest voices in the room are typically not the best leaders.
- [34:09]
A
Yeah, there's some truth to that. So can it be taught? I mean, is leadership just innate? Is it just charisma or can you teach it?
- [34:17]
B
Charisma is part of it, but it's not. There's a lot of charismatic people who are not great leaders because they use their. Their charisma for ill. Right. Or they use their charisma for certain situations, but they don't care about the entire situation. So there's a lot of successful leaders who you wouldn't call charismatic, by the way, I don't know if you're a football fan, but the person who won the super bowl this year, Mike McDonald, he's the. He's the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks. No one would ever call him charismatic. And as a matter of fact, he himself said he, at the beginning of the year apologized to his team for not speaking the way he should about the team to reporters and other people. He was. I have to be a better speaker. But what kind of a leader is he? He's a spectacular leader. Right. But he's not charismatic. Leadership's about influence. How can I influence or how do I influence somebody to do something the way that I think it should be the way that's best for my patients, the way it's best for my team, the way it's best for whatever. What do I do? And that's why I'm saying you don't have to have the loudest voice. If your actions influence others, you're a leader. It's about influence. It's nothing else, nothing more. I mean, and people put way too much emphasis on somebody who is charismatic. I understand it. It's what we're used to. It's what we see. But the really, really effective leaders, people follow them because they make that person feel special. They have some type of foresight as far as what people should, you know, direction people should go. And because that person's been correct, they've helped other people. People follow them wherever, wherever they go. That's when you, that's when you understand real leadership is when somebody says something and people start walking in that direction.
- [36:37]
A
It's interesting. You know, this phrase influencer has this negative connotation right now. When my children are asked what I do for a living, they're like, oh, he's an influencer, you are. And my kids tell him all the time. And I kind of cringe a little bit when I hear that. But the truth is, that is what I'm trying to do here at the White Coat Investor. I'm trying to influence people to, you know, manage their money a little bit better and, and be a little bit less burned out and, you know, be a better parent and a better physician and a better partner. And that's really what we're doing. We're trying to influence people. And maybe it would be less offensive if we called it leader instead of influencer.
- [37:20]
B
It would be much less offensive because these people who, who have a platform and they, they use it for good. And these people who have a platform and they use it for ill, and we hear about the people who use it for ill, and the influencer negativity came from those people. They got famous or wealthy for doing, for having no skill or talent. So when your daughter or son say, my dad's an influencer, that's a really positive statement. You might say, oh, influence. I don't want to be an influence. But the context around how that's being placed on you is very positive.
- [38:03]
A
You know, you, this company you founded, you called it Glass Walls Leadership. Tell us what you mean by glass wall. I mean, everyone's heard of the glass ceiling, right? Tell us what a glass wall is.
- [38:14]
B
You're correct. Everyone has heard of glass ceilings. And glass ceilings are what people put on you to mute your growth, right? There's a glass ceiling. I can only go this high. I can be a second line leader, but I can't be a third because somebody says, I can't. Glass walls are what we put on ourselves. We construct these walls like, I can't do this. I'm not good enough. So what I'll say to you is, nothing great has ever been accomplished without a rational belief. Nothing. Nothing great. So if you think about when you were 13 and you said to somebody, your friend, hey, I'm going to be a ER physician. And your friend said, no way, you're not that smart. To them, to people, that was an irrational, he's irrational, he's never going to be a doctor, he's never going to be this, he can't do this. This belief you have to have in yourself is single minded. It has to be that way. When every single thing that's ever been accomplished greatly, like this phone that was irrational 10 years ago, this phone was irrational in the 70s. This is more powerful than Apollo 11, right? This thing in my hand, when that was first told, people thought a personal computer in my pocket, crazy irrational. So that's the glass walls that people put around themselves. They want to be hyper rational, they want to conform to what everybody else has done. This is how you do it, this is how you proceed, this is how you grow. And as I said, there's many different ways. And if we as a society thought like that, there would never be open heart surgery, There would never be all these different things that happen in the medical space because there was somebody that was so irrational about how they were thinking, right? There's things that you do now. How long have you been an ER physician?
- [40:26]
A
20 years, couple of decades since I got out of training.
- [40:29]
B
So tell me, give me one or two things that you do now to a patient that walks in that you couldn't do 10 years ago.
- [40:38]
A
Well, one of the things that's definitely changed the practice of emergency medicine is the availability of MRIs. You can just get MRIs almost willy nilly now. Whereas when I was a resident, it took an act of God to get an mri. I mean, sometimes you admitted people to the hospital just so they could get an MRI at some point while they were in the hospital. And now I, I order it like I'm ordering a trivial lab test and you know, a couple hours later I've, I've got the results. So that's, that's certainly been practice changing for, for a lot of emergency physicians, I think.
- [41:14]
B
And so that's, that's a great, great thing you said because that is, that's, that is life changing, right? Not only for the patient, because now, now with that MRI you can diagnose correctly, right? And it's probably going to be able to be treated and get out faster. You're saving. The MRI costs a lot of money. It's not inexpensive, but it saves more than it costs, right? Not only to the patient, but to the hospital. Right. Because that patient, instead of staying there for five, seven, eight days, you can figure out with the MRI exactly what to do. They can get treated and leave hopefully within a day or two for sure.
- [41:54]
A
Well, our time is getting short, but you've got the year of 25 or 30,000 high income professionals, most of them doctors. What have we not talked about today that you think they need to know today?
- [42:06]
B
I think maybe just to double down on what we talked about with intentionality, right. What you're talking about with the financial mastery and you're talking about burnout. People don't think they're control. Even though you work for an employer, you still have some control. And you can always control how you think. You can always control how you respond and act. And within that control, you can make your life better and the lives of the people around you better. And especially in what you do, the patients better. And what you're doing is showing people how much control they have to, you know, to make you know themselves. So that makes themselves not burn out and to create a better financial life for themselves. They have control. They need to get rid of the glass walls they have around themselves, understand they can do for themselves, to make themselves and their family, their staff, the patients better. They are in control.
- [43:14]
A
Awesome. Well, we've been chatting with Rutherford Pascal. He is going to be one of dozens of awesome speakers at wcicon, the Physician Wellness and Financial Literacy Conference. You can still sign up for that. You can still come in person even. You can sign up@wcievents.com the virtual version of it. Of course you can sign up, you know, halfway through the conference if you want and start, start watching the, the conference at that point virtually you sign up for all of that@wcievents.com thank you so much, Rutherford, for coming on the podcast.
- [43:46]
B
Hey, thanks. You were spectacular. Appreciate your questions.
- [43:50]
A
Okay. I hope you enjoyed that not necessarily hardcore finance information today, but you know what, we can't do that all the time. You guys just don't want to hear about 101 Ways to Screw up a backdoor Roth every episode of this podcast now do you? No, there's a lot more important stuff to talk about out there besides just the hardcore finances. And at the end of the day, the greatest thing you can do for your financial career is to stay in your career, right? Longevity. You got to optimize for longevity. And decreasing your burnout, increasing your ability to influence events around you can make you much happier. And the longer you can stay in that career, the more works out for you financially. Not only do you have more time for your investments to compound, you have more income that you can save as you go through. You delay Social Security longer and your Social Security benefit is larger. All kinds of wonderful things happen when you're able to work longer. Not only to the people you're helping with your work, but to your finances. 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 that they've got waiting for you one more time. That's sofi.com whitecoatinvestor Sofi student loans are originated by SOFI Bank NA Member FDIC. Additional terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891 don't forget about the discount off the virtual version of WCICON. Use code WCICON100 when you go to whitecoatinvestor.com WCICON and you can get $100 off the virtual version of the conference. And while you might not experience all the fun, we get rubbing shoulder to shoulder in person at the conference. You do get all the content and there's a lot of value in the awesome content that gets put together for this conference every year. Thanks for leaving 5 star reviews. A recent one came in from FIMD who said fantastic, Great, reliable resource for the fundamentals of personal finance. Five stars. We appreciate that review that helps get the word out for everybody out there in White Coat investor land. I hope you're having a great day. I hope you're having a great week. I hope you're making progress toward your financial goals. You can do this. There's a whole community standing here trying to help you do it. Keep your head up and your shoulders back. Don't give up. You're going to get there. We'll see you next time on the podcast. The White Coat Investor Podcast is for your entertainment and information only and should not be considered financial, legal, tax or investment advice. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. You should consult the appropriate professional for specific advice relating to your situation.