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The pursuit of financial independence linked to the desire to spend some of my adult years pursuing activities other than medicine can seem like a deeply lazy indulgence to many colleagues. Choosing to leave medicine in these prime adult years by these folks is seen as twofold betrayal. First, there is the obvious implicit lost income during one’s peak earning …

Dr. Y is a rare and exotic species among Docs Who Cut Back: a surgical subspecialist who completed a decade-long course of training in a highly competitive field. More unusual still, she opted to cut back 4 years after working full-time as a subspecialist attending (to be fair, she worked one additional year as a general surgeon prior to entering …

Some phone calls are long overdue by the time you make them. Distance learning has echoed evolution in our household by rewarding specialization. As a dual-nerd couple, my wife has adopted the more time-consuming math supplementation while I have offered to help teach science and social studies. Discussing the classification of species with my 13 year old recently, I caught …

I enjoyed many guilty pleasures in my TV gorging teen years, but none were so satisfying as tuning into a “Where are they now?” program. Whether it was one hit wonders on VH1 or my favorite child actors from Punky Brewster, Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life, I could not get enough of this silliness. There was the male …

Developing financial literacy, and the pursuit of financial independence, tends to generate extreme enthusiasm among participants. People go big. Folks who stumble across the Mr. Money Mustache blog don’t just take note of MMM’s frugal lifestyle, they tend to judge whether they are following the precepts of Mustachianism, a tongue in cheek term for a cult that is more serious …

We tend to recall our winners disproportionately, a wiring flaw in our human composition. I first became acquainted with this fact when someone dear to me began touting her remarkable track record with matchmaking friends. She liked to entertain friends at social gatherings with the two marriages that had come into being due to her intervention. Much was made by …

Years ago, I read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. One of the most striking concepts in the book was what one of the top engineers at Apple called the reality distortion field, a Trekkie term co-opted to describe how Jobs made the impossible seem plausible to those in his immediate vicinity and overcame their objections to reach unlikely outcomes. …

COVID seems like such a weird way to spend a childhood…except for all the other ways. Solitary, sure. Antisocial, of course. But weird is a relative term. I was thinking back to the music videos that defined my childhood in the 1980s, and I couldn’t help but be struck by how weird it all seems in retrospect. Take an artist …

Iteration, iteration, iteration. You repeat a process with minor tweaks, incorporating what you’ve learned from your successes and failures, until you ultimately arrive at a workable solution. This is a weirdly personal case study, but I thought it adequately described a valuable process. It also demonstrates that the difference between success and failure is persistence. I have a dust problem …

It was the early 1980s, and we were eleven years old. She and her identical twin sister had been classmates for several years, teasing presences with ponytails and impish grins. In the novel marinade of hormones that flavored my outlook on absolutely everything, I began to notice her. She was my first crush. Years later I would discover a forgotten …