Many physicians in their 40s don’t regret being doctors. They regret not having built more breadth, optionality, and intentionality around medicine earlier.
The 2 p.m. clock check stopped me. I felt that in my 40s, and I can report from the far side, at 59 and still practicing internal medicine, that you named the cause correctly. The regret was never about doctoring. It was about letting the job narrow me. What broke the pattern was deciding to stay a student. When a topic catches me I go broad first, then deep, and for the past few years that topic has been AI in clinical care. It started as exactly the kind of small bounded experiment you recommend and has become the most alive part of my professional life. I have not watched the clock in years. Curiosity turned out to be the antidote.
Hi Doug, thank you for this thoughtful comment. I’m glad this piece resonated with you, but moreso, that you took agency and started to experiment and explore, and have found the activities that give your professional career more interest and more range. We do ourselves a great favor by not letting our job narrow us - we have so many options that can broaden our experience, while keeping great medical care at the foundation. Please keep up the great work, and look forward to the continued conversation!
This resonates far beyond medicine. I'm not a physician, but I recognize the structure exactly. Around 40 is when the initial ascent levels off enough that you can finally see the full landscape of your field. And what you see is both its actual scope (enormous) and its blind spots (structural, not accidental). Including the ones you know won't change in your lifetime, even if you throw everything you have at them.
What struck me most is the reframe of regret as data rather than failure. That's precise, and it applies everywhere professionals hit this particular threshold.
Thank you Gabi, I appreciate that this Essay resonated with you. I agree that this can apply to many different professional domains, especially ones in which you actually have a wide dispersion of true outcomes - you could follow a default path and end up at point A, or make different choices and end up in a totally different professional position.
Thinking about regret as data to surface those things and values that we still need to act on is the right way to tackle it. Thanks again for your thoughts!
The 2 p.m. clock check stopped me. I felt that in my 40s, and I can report from the far side, at 59 and still practicing internal medicine, that you named the cause correctly. The regret was never about doctoring. It was about letting the job narrow me. What broke the pattern was deciding to stay a student. When a topic catches me I go broad first, then deep, and for the past few years that topic has been AI in clinical care. It started as exactly the kind of small bounded experiment you recommend and has become the most alive part of my professional life. I have not watched the clock in years. Curiosity turned out to be the antidote.
Hi Doug, thank you for this thoughtful comment. I’m glad this piece resonated with you, but moreso, that you took agency and started to experiment and explore, and have found the activities that give your professional career more interest and more range. We do ourselves a great favor by not letting our job narrow us - we have so many options that can broaden our experience, while keeping great medical care at the foundation. Please keep up the great work, and look forward to the continued conversation!
This resonates far beyond medicine. I'm not a physician, but I recognize the structure exactly. Around 40 is when the initial ascent levels off enough that you can finally see the full landscape of your field. And what you see is both its actual scope (enormous) and its blind spots (structural, not accidental). Including the ones you know won't change in your lifetime, even if you throw everything you have at them.
What struck me most is the reframe of regret as data rather than failure. That's precise, and it applies everywhere professionals hit this particular threshold.
Thank you Gabi, I appreciate that this Essay resonated with you. I agree that this can apply to many different professional domains, especially ones in which you actually have a wide dispersion of true outcomes - you could follow a default path and end up at point A, or make different choices and end up in a totally different professional position.
Thinking about regret as data to surface those things and values that we still need to act on is the right way to tackle it. Thanks again for your thoughts!