The Unfulfilled Doctor

It’s not surprising that I suffered from burnout and eventually left the practice of medicine. Only in retrospect can I see clearly that I had built a life around the wrong-sized purpose. The signs were there along the way, but I chose to ignore them. The reasons are many, but the outcome was always the same. I spent much time thinking about the destination and very little about the path I was taking to get there. That path was much less gratifying than I hoped it would be. I simply didn’t enjoy being a doctor.

I had failed to recognize that the destination is in fact the way, and the path is more important than its end point. I was doomed to fail from the beginning.

These shortcomings started from a very young age. Somehow, as young children often do, I decided that my father’s unexpected death was my fault. As silly as it sounds, this belief drove me to coopt his purpose in life. His dream was to delve deeply into medicine and help people, and I felt that I could undo the existential tragedy of his death by taking his place. It was only decades later, while skimming through some of his medical notes left over in my mom’s attic, that I realized how different we truly were.

My dad had an innate love of the delicacy and intricacy of the human form and how it goes wrong. I didn’t. He thought in extremely three-dimensional terms and was an excellent photographer. I had a learning disability and would often draw words upside-down and backwards. Conversely, I loved deep conversations, and baseball cards, and writing poetry. My father had no interest in those things.

Becoming a doctor totally fulfilled my father’s sense of purpose and he loved the moment-to-moment work required to accomplish the goal of helping his fellow man. Unsurprisingly, even when things got tough, his deep interest and love carried him through. Trying to fix the cosmic tragedy of his death, I saw the end goal of helping my fellow man as laudable; but I was actually ill-suited to the day-to-day activities required to meet that goal.

Don’t get me wrong: I was able to overcome my discomfort and eventually do exactly as I had planned — walk in my father’s shoes. But the blisters that formed on my heels in doing so never callused over. They festered and bled until the pain eventually became unbearable.

I was not made for such work. So why did I keep on pursuing it?

Have you ever found yourself in the same position? Floundering to live someone else’s dream and finding that it really doesn’t suit your goals and abilities? You realize that instead of enjoying the journey, you are loathing the path and praying to make it to the destination. If this is your current situation, then you — like I was — are lumbering toward burnout. And even becoming that which you strive for is unlikely to make you happy. It certainly didn’t for me!

It was not just in the beginning, but even as I continued on my path toward medicine that I realized something was wrong. While I shared some of my colleagues’ dreams of having “MD” after my name, I found myself shying away from talking about it with other people. I felt almost embarrassed to tell them what I planned to do for a living. I felt an inexplicable sense of shame.

That shame multiplied even after I began to practice as an attending physician. While my friends and schoolmates were so proud of their profession, I secretly daydreamed about becoming an esteemed writer instead. And the most joyful part of my day was almost always the few minutes I squirreled away to escape my job and work on my blog or some other creative project.

The problem was that I never saw writing as an important enough or viable way to earn a living. Helping people and becoming a doctor … now that was the type of purpose that sounded meaningful to me! I made the mistake back then that many of you are likely making today: I thought that the bigger the purpose, the more gratifying it would be to pursue it.

It took many years and quite a bit of emotional heartache to reach the conclusion that I hope to convince you of now: when it comes to purpose, bigger is not better.

Excerpted from The Purpose Code: How to Unlock Meaning, Maximize Happiness, and Leave a Lasting Legacy by Jordan Grumet, MD.