Go from burnt out to FIREd up.
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 …
The first and second installments in this 3 part series described the ideal attributes of my Second Act, and how (with one rare exception) every possibility I’ve pursued has been a total dud. I remain an incorrigible dreamer, so in Part 3 I’ll spell out my latest hare-brained idea for an encore career that might meet my needs once I’m …
We all have some crazy in us, and finding a constructive means of channeling it is often what separates the person ordering the meds from the person receiving them. I’ve referred in the past to pathology with utility, the concept that an obsessive trait placed in the appropriate context can function as a superpower that yields superior performance. I’ll be …
In the first installment, I described some guidelines for the type of work I hoped to pursue as part of my Act Two, and explained why I did not end up pursuing an opportunity practicing outpatient palliative care medicine or attempt to join a med tech startup. In this second installment, I’ll describe several other pursuits that did not pan …
Sometimes you set yourself up for failure, and you can only clearly see it in retrospect. A few weeks ago we decided to day trip by car to make a socially-distanced visit to family who live a few hours’ drive from us. We planned to hit the road early, and piggybacked a shopping trip for shoes for one of my …
One of my goals has been to figure out what to do with that new balance of time I’ve carved out. I want to find something that will keep me busy after the kids leave home; a fiefdom of my own that lets me settle into an empty nest rhythm; something to sustain me going forward. It’s hard to figure …
Life-affirming experiences come in a wide variety of contexts, often in the least likely places. Those I savor most tend to be when eccentrics stay true in their chosen form of expression. I was looking back through old photos (a past time I’ve come to appreciate during COVID) when it triggered a delightful memory. It pertained to a bit of …
Three and a half years ago, we decided to incentivize aggressive saving and demonstrate the power of compound interest to our kids by offering them exclusive access to the Bank of Mom and Dad. That experiment, we are pleased to say, has thus far been a success. We gave them a sweetheart deal for maximal impact: 5% interest compounded monthly. …
There are certain quirky discoveries that delight you to the core, the mere thought of which continue to bring a giddy smile to your face because of how endearing they feel. This morning, listening to a podcast on the short drive home from a dawn patrol session at my local break, I sank my teeth into a delicious new morsel …