Thinking of transitioning? Your input is less than what you should be doing.

What do I mean by your input is less than what you should be doing?

I realized while talking to my friend who had successfully transitioned to a drug safety associate role in Pharma 2 wks ago, that the work I was putting in so far for research into transitioning was significantly less than what she was putting in. I "researched" 2 podcasts a week with a full time job, while she went through all 192 podcast episodes of Doctor's Crossing AND rebuilt her resume AND recreated her LinkedIn AND reached out via LinkedIn to multiple medical directors in her interested role to confirm whether she wanted to work in this field AND reached out to multiple recruiters AND went on interviews.

And guess what? She landed the job with plans to start in May 2024. She did this all in the last 6 months, but mostly since November 2023.

It reminded me of a podcast episode where Alex Hormozi, one of the co-CEO's of Acquisition.com, resets the bar for content creation input for another entrepreneurial friend. The story goes, the entrepreneur wanted more traction and more customers and asked how much content Alex put out in a week, to which Alex replied that he put out 300 in a week, but more importantly, it was done consistently and daily in large volume. The effort was not just 2 fold but 10 fold, 100 fold.

At this point, I have been contemplating, openly talking about transitioning to a non-clinical role for around 3 years. Though I did do a stint as a puppy dog trainer for around 7-9 months, I hadn't actively done research into a non-clinical clinician role. The decision to create a goal and devote a plan to researching while working full time as a doctor came while listening to a podcast and youtube by Ali Abdaal, and at the end of January, I made a plan.

My plan simply was to take all the podcasts on Doctor's crossing and listen to 2 podcasts a week and to blog about them in spark-notes style on here, so I have something to go back to as a reference when I was finally making my decision on WHAT I wanted to transition to. I chose a low goal because I didn't want to discourage myself by putting too high of a goal and giving up. Small attainable wins are better than large unattainable wins, I said to myself.

Now here I am, sitting here, only a couple podcasts in, envious of my friend because my lack of going all in.

So heres a reminder for all those other physicians out there thinking of transitioning like me: if we're serious, we need to increase our input. Actually do work in a truncated time with urgency for the transition, or we'll be sitting here, reading another blog by another physician about how they successfully transitioned while we envy them while ruminating about our unhappy life and option paralysis.

Finish that LinkedIn profile.

Finish updating that resume.

Send out those LinkedIn messages.

Join that committee at work to bulk up your resume.

I will give myself 2 wks, until April 5th, to listen to all the Doctor's Crossings podcasts and to blog them all. I will also give myself the same allotted time to fix my LinkedIn profile to reflect what I want, based on listening to all the podcasts, during my spare time.

Maybe we need to use of our spare time wisely – and with a sense of urgency – to build a life we want, instead of escape from our current one.

Word, Ai.