Back in training, my fellow residents and I gulped ladles full of Kool-Aid from tenured professors who ruled an impressively pedigreed land of job security and underlings to perform scut. For readers outside of medicine, scut refers to the small and annoying tasks involved in routine patient care. Examples might include drawing blood at specific time to test levels of …
I’ll keep this short and sweet. One of my medical heroes, Dr. Rick Hodes, was interviewed on the White Coat Investor podcast. Rick is a Jewish medical director working with Catholic nuns at the Mother Theresa Mission in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, caring for sick destitute patients including Ethiopian Orthodox Christians and Muslims. Together they model the world as it should …
Yesterday, I awakened early and cycled my usual route: 8.9 miles of early uphills followed by exhilarating downhill coasts taking in the broad sweep of the Pacific. I returned home in time to enjoy breakfast with my wife, then took up a spot on the couch that is perfectly aligned with the sun’s autumn path to enable me to soak …
Dr. F is a high-achieving female physician whose impressive academic pedigree launched her on a prestigious academic trajectory at the outset of her career. She took the unusual step of pivoting away from academia, relocating geographically to an area that was more in tune with her lifestyle goals, and creating a business that evolved into an entrepreneurial exit strategy from …
The New York Times recently ran a piece of schadenfreude entitled, “The Digital Nomads Did Not Prepare For This.” The author takes a swipe at the professionals who departed the U.S. for international destinations to transform the pandemic into an opportunity to #livetheirbestlife. Gloating over others’ plans gone awry turns out to be the subtext of the article. Great pleasure …
I have read that a raccoon will wash a perfectly clean food item in filthy water before consuming it as a matter of genetically-based behavior. The inclination to rinse food prior to eating it must have historically served as an evolutionary advantage, even if in some circumstances it may harm the raccoon. In a similar vein, I hail from a …
One of the awkward parts of being a kid is navigating what type of humor is or is not appropriate when you incompletely grasp the context. One second your adult audience is rolling in the aisles and you are killing like a comic on the Sunset Strip; the next moment, the muscles in your parents’ necks are pulled into taut …
When our investments reached certain milestones ahead of schedule, we discussed over several months whether we ought to take some risk off the table. In the end, we revised to a more conservative target asset allocation of 60/40 equity to fixed income. Then we mulled it over some more, and modified it to 45/40/15 equity/fixed income/real estate. This was in …
The title of this post comes from an excerpt of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s excellent book, The Black Swan, which explores the role of highly improbable events in shaping our lives more definitively than recurring, predictable events tend to do. Taleb uses it to refer to a phenomenon he witnessed firsthand during the outbreak of Civil War along religious lines in …
I came home from an early morning shift to find my daughter feeling down. It seemed she was in a COVID funk. This would be the first year of Halloween where she could not go trick or treating in our Norman Rockwell community, where we would routinely meet up with a couple of families we love and run into another …