there's a pervasive stereotype that doctors are terrible with money but I think it has less amount of to do with ability and more with how they allocate their time see most doctors put their focus on becoming a great doctor and they simply don't put in the same time into educating themselves about finance and Entrepreneurship that being said doctors possess many traits that would serve them well even outside of Health Care here is why doctors make for great entrepreneurs first is the ability to delay gratification to become a doctor in the U.S you got to do
four years of college four years of med school three to seven years of residency plus one or more years of Fellowship depending on your specialty and throughout this time most students are living in incredibly Frugal lifestyle many are living solely off their student loans and they're accruing hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt all with the hope that one day they'll earn enough to pay back all that debt and with enough left over to make the whole ordeal worthwhile the average medical student graduates with approximately 242 thousand dollars worth of debt but they end up
paying back between 365 and 440 000 after student loan interest but the ability to grind hard year after year after year for a long period of time it's a really valuable skill in becoming an entrepreneur a lot of people can't delay gratification for even a few weeks let alone gears I mean a lot of people want to be in shape but they can't sacrifice that short-term pleasure or endure the short-term discomfort of eating less and exercising more to achieve that outcome and with business it takes patience you really need to grind hard year after year
to really enjoy the fruits of your labor when I've left residency in 2018 to build both med school insiders and mem I wasn't making enough money to even pay rent I had to move back in with my mom despite working 80 to 100 hours per week because the businesses it takes time for it to build and grow revenue and such but yeah imagine that you're in your late 20s you finally got your md you worked your ass off for all your 20s and then boom you live at home with your mom but every student that
gets through their medical training and becomes a doctor they have the skill set to delay gratification and that's not gonna hold them back this brings me to my next point which is that medical students have the ability to live off a very small income because most Med students are heavily reliant on loans they get used to living off of very little and making the most of what little money they do have and similarly most business owners especially early on invest as much as they can back into their businesses they have to be really Scrappy Alex
ramosie explains that when he was growing his gym business he was asset rich but cash poor so on the outside he looked really successful he had six gyms but he had very little cash on hand because everything was reinvested heavily back into the business at the time when I had a million dollars my bank account Layla and I were living together on 1200 a month of rent in about 400 ish a month in food and that's what we were living on and we were taking home at the time three or four hundred thousand dollars a
month Mr Beast the biggest Creator on YouTube also describes how nearly everything he makes goes back into the business of creating better videos often spending millions of dollars on a single video actual cash I'm probably the poorest person in this room like if I make three four million dollars a month I just spend it on videos the next month well you literally like have razor thin margins and just reinvest it that's wild this is sometimes what's required to build a successful business if you're focused on growth there may not be much left after expenses are
paid now because most Med students are used to living a very frugal Lifestyle the role equipped to endure that early stage in entrepreneurship where you have to be really Scrappy and just survive off of very little this next point is similar to delayed gratification but medical students have also honed their ability to focus nowadays we have an inattention epidemic you've probably noticed your own ability to focus decline in the last decade or so and I mean just look at social media look at how much shorter and shorter pieces of content are getting on Twitter you
have these short bits of text on Instagram you have photos on Tick Tock and Instagram reels and YouTube shorts you know chopping up these videos into even shorter and shorter and shorter segments thanks to social media our ability to focus is getting more and more fragmented but Med students need to be very intentional to fight against us they need to hone their focus ability because getting through med school successfully is less about your intelligence it has much more to do with your work ethic putting in the Reps and that requires focus and that's just in
the classroom or at home when you're studying but even in your clinical years your third and fourth years you're in the hospital you're in the clinic et cetera et cetera you need to focus for several hours the whole day because you don't really have a break and this ability to focus translates very well to business because business generally requires a higher intensity you're not just clocking in and clocking out and doing mindless work you're being very creative you're problem solving and it requires a higher level of intensity and focus that Med students have honed as
they say in the military you have to learn to embrace the suck which is something that medical students are pretty good at embrace the suck adapt to the suck medical training does also require you to do things that you probably don't want to do there's going to be more than a few days where you have to study eight or ten plus hours sometimes you have to spend 17 19 20 hours in the hospital go home sleep for two hours and then come back the next day you'll miss social events family gatherings even holidays to achieve
your goal so you learn to make sacrifices in the short term in order to achieve your long-term goal which again is another valuable trait when it comes to entrepreneurship and succeeding in business Med students also often have a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset individuals with a fixed mindset often believe that things like intelligence or abilities or talents are inherent and they're stable they're unchangeable in contrast those with the growth mindset believe that these traits can be developed and honed over time having a growth mindset is essential in both business and Medicine in both
Fields you will be challenged physically emotionally and intellectually and if you feel like you don't have a growth mindset entering medical school by the time you graduate you probably will because it's almost impossible not to self-direction is another key trait that doctors have that's key to success as an entrepreneur med school does require a lot more independent study than most people realize no one's breathing down your neck telling you to drop your phone and put down the Rice Krispies and start studying you have to have the self-discipline to do it yourself in residency you're even
less directed than you were in medical school and as an attending you're completely on your own you really need to be self-directed and self-motivated with your learning becoming an entrepreneur is similar you won't have someone there telling you what to do next instead you're going to have to think critically for yourself and decide what's the next best move and sometimes you're going to get that wrong and you'll have to live with the consequences of that decision but just like in medicine you'll learn and adapt to the problems that you face and you'll grow as an
individual in the process lastly is that communication skills are critical to being an effective doctor you need to be able to talk with your patient determine their needs and effectively communicate with them and the rest of the healthcare team the diagnosis and the treatment plan doctors spend years only the ability to communicate effectively and this is a skill that will obviously serve you very well in business alright so Med students and doctors they have a lot of the traits that make for successful business people so why don't we see more Med students and doctors becoming
entrepreneurs the first reason is opportunity cost on average it takes between 11 and 14 years to become a physician in the US so by the time you've completed your four years of college for his med school three to seven years of residency one plus years of Fellowship you've already committed a lot of your life to medical training and most people don't want to take on another challenging Endeavor like starting a business once they've already grinded so hard through all their 20s and even into some of their 30s just to become a doctor many will want
to dial back and focus on other aspects of their life things that were neglected because medical training was front and center things like family and relationships second is finances because the majority of medical students are taking out loans to pay for medical school when you have so much debt you can just work as a doctor and pay that off guaranteed rather than taking on business which may or may not pay off which brings me to the third and final Point risk aversion as Dr Goldman puts it in his why I did plastic surgery video medicine
is a a mecca for the intelligent but risk averse medicine really is a mecca for the intelligent but risk-averse becoming a doctor is a relatively guaranteed path to High income when compared to becoming an entrepreneur you go to college you get to med school you work hard get into residency work hard become a full-fledged attending doctor if you just walk down this very clear-cut pathway laid out in front of you you're going to become an attending physician and you're going to have a high salary and all the programs that come with becoming a doctor but
entrepreneurship and business they're nothing like that there's no there's no straightforward path there's no guarantee that your business is going to succeed in fact you could put in countless hours and so much money into your business idea and it could all ultimately fail a lot of people are going to tell you that 80 or 90 plus percent of small businesses fail and I get it those figures are pretty scary but I don't think they tell you the full story if you're constantly educating yourself about business and you're learning from your mistakes then I believe that
most Med students and most doctors can in fact become successful entrepreneurs thank you all so much for watching if you enjoyed this video you'll definitely like this one or that one much love and I'll see you guys there [Music] foreign [Music]
