That's all for now.
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Keep breathing and have a great rest of your day,
Dike
Dike Drummond MD
www.TheHappyMD.com
[Transcript]
Physicians Unchained: Retirement Mastery for Doctors – Weekly Tip
Physician Retirement and Time
Hey, Dike Drummond, here again with another tip from my new book, physicians, unchained retirement mastery for doctors, the book comes out in q1 of 2026 and until then, I'm putting out these weekly tips for people that are on my early bird mailing list.
The tip today is all about retirement and time, retirement and time and before we begin, remember the structure of the model we're using. The last two stages of a doctor's life are practice. That's a 50 year span for some people. And then after that, the last stage of a doctor's Life is life after medicine, and retirement is the transition between the two, transition between the two.
So after retirement is complete and you're in your life after medicine, let's talk about time in this last stage of a physician's life, because here, time will appear to accelerate. Things will appear to be going faster as you get older. That's because your clock is ticking, and time in life after medicine is a finite resource.
I don't know how much you have. I don't know how much I have, but each of us has an hourglass with only so much sand in it, and there's only one thing I can tell you about tomorrow, and that's that each of us are one day closer to when our time runs out. Now, you may or may not have an intimate connection with your mortality right now, knowing that you aren't going to make it out of here alive.
I can tell you there's two things that have shown me my mortality in perfect clarity. Number one, I'm a gardener, and for years now, whenever I've plant a tree and I like to plant big things, perennials and stuff. I'm always thinking about the mature form of the tree, and for years now, I've realized that when I plant a sapling, I'll never be able to see that mature form of the tree, because I won't live long enough forget to get that big.
And then two years ago, to the two years anniversary, in a week, I had a stroke, woke up in the middle of the night on the floor of my bedroom. Thank God my wife, Sherry recognized I was having a stroke, threw me in an ambulance, sucked a clot out of my middle cerebral artery. You can't tell I've had a stroke, but I sure can, and I can tell you that was a shot across my bow fired by the Grim Reaper.
And maybe if you haven't had any episodes like that, you aren't as intimately aware of your mortality. But it's true, nobody makes it out of here alive.
Lessons? There have been a number of surveys showing the Regrets of the Dying. It's the deathbed regrets of people who are about to die, and the old joke is that nobody ever regretted not doing more work. But the real interesting one is, if you actually survey people who are dying, who retired with means like you, retired with a reasonable amount of wealth, and what these people say is, one, I wish I had retired sooner. And two, I wish we had spent more money early in our retirement doing the things we want to do before we got too old to be able to be Go, go, if you know what I mean.
So time and retirement, it's a diminishing resource. Every day is closer to your end. Nobody gets out of here alive.
The best time to retire if you're financially capable of doing it, is right now. You may not feel that way now, but you will on your deathbed.
and the best thing to do early in retirement is anything that you can
And that's why it's important to realize life after medicine is not simply the absence of seeing patients, it's whatever you want to build, and the clock is ticking.
Now, if you're watching this from a link that you got in an email, you're already on my early bird list. However, I bet you've got a friend or two that's struggling with this whole retirement issue too, so please, there's a link here that you can share with your friends so that they can join the early bird list too, and get these tips along the way.
I'll see you in a week. Get excited, because this book is going to be amazing in the first quarter of next year. Until then, keep being the light worker that you are. Keep breathing and have a great rest of your day.