Why I Quit My Job as a Doctor: My Honest Story

It's now been six years since I quit my job as a medical doctor after feeling unfulfilled in a lot of ways in that line of work. And I wanted to spend some time in this video to just share my story of those decisions that I made and how I changed my career and what I think about it now. And I think there are a lot of professionals if you're watching that feel similarly about being unsatisfied or unfulfilled in your career. Uh, I'm not intending for this to be a career coaching video, but I think maybe sharing a little bit more about my story and my decisions could help you, too. So, first, why did I quit medicine in the first place? Well, really the question is, why did I choose medicine in the first place? Now, I know you will be watching this video having some thoughts thinking, he's Asian. His parents must have made him be a doctor. But that's not the case. Uh actually uh my parents actually didn't want me to be a doctor. Um and it's a decision that I made by myself I guess when I was 14 or 15. Honestly, I don't remember the reason why. Uh and 14 15year-old me also wasn't really great at making decisions either. So there probably wasn't a great reason why. But what I do know is that when I said I wanted to be a doctor and people always ask you when you're young, right? What do you want to be when you grow up? What are you going to do in uni or whatever? And you say, "Hey, yeah, I want to be a doctor. " They say, "Wow, oh, that's so impressive. " Oh, yeah. Good for you. You get a pat on the back. So, you positively reinforce about this career decision that you're making. And I hear the story all the time. And so, I felt like it was the right decision that I had made because everyone else was telling me that it was a good decision. And it felt good to have something to be aligned on that I was focusing wholeheartedly on and I could say, "Hey, this is my goal. Here's what I'm pursuing. " And then I took that to the extreme in my first year of university, which is the premed year entering into medical school. I was like, "All right, this is make it or break it. " Like, "This is my life's purpose. " I kid you not, when I was in my first year of uni trying to enter into medical school, I held myself to the standard that I wanted every electron to spin for the purposes of me entering into medical school. I visualize like every molecule in my body mobilizing purely for that reason. And if you're watching this and you're like, "Yeah, that's how I think. " See your therapist. I should have seen a therapist at that time. That's not a healthy way of thinking about things. You know that yes, being ambitious or you have to be a little bit obsessed to do something, but that's not healthy. And I was like that. I was really unhealthy towards chasing my goal. And yes, I got into medical school. And you know, so began my kind of strange journey of going through medical school, learning about learning science, coaching people, and eventually becoming a doctor. But one of the things

that stuck through the entire way was that I didn't truly understand what it meant to be a doctor. Not really. Not to a daily level. And I also didn't understand enough about myself. I didn't really know what I find fulfillment in. I didn't know what was aligned to my values. I don't I didn't really know what my values were even to begin with. And I didn't know a lot of things about my personality. And actually to a certain extent, I think I see a lot of advice out there like figure out your values, figure out what's going to create fulfillment for you. Figure out your passions. Create a career that's aligned. do as much career research as you can before you make a career decision. And although I sort of partly agree with a lot of that stuff, again, I'm not a career coach, but people ask me this all of the time, I'm of the belief that there's a certain amount of information that you just cannot gain before having certain experiences firsthand. There are certain things that I learned about myself because I was exploited as a junior doctor and I had to reflect on what that feels like and what that meant to me. Many of you will know this, but my first few years of coaching was in the nonprofit space, right? So, I've been tutoring students throughout medical school, teaching them what I'd learn, teaching them some of the subject content, but also teaching them how to learn effectively. Uh, and then I created a nonprofit to try to tackle some of the educational inequity cuz I saw a lot of students coming from less rich backgrounds. They just didn't have the sort of academic exposure that sort of richer kids had. And that actually made the biggest difference like they'd get double the amount of tutoring in university and they'd do half as well because they just didn't have that background. So my thought was, well, maybe we can teach these skills to them when they were in high school. So I set up this mentoring program, did all this coaching. That's where a lot of my experience came from. And I got to scratch that itch of like being an educator and going and being a coach and then running a business and running a nonprofit and feeling how that all made me feel and understanding where I get fulfillment from versus what I just think I get fulfillment from. And I don't think it would have been possible for me to know that about myself until doing it. Likewise, I don't think I would have known exactly what it's like to be a doctor until you do it for a few months and you really see what it's like when the novelty of it is all gone. Um, and so I I think it's a more important thing to realize that there probably isn't a right answer that you can arrive at. Like the best decision is just the one that you feel you're going to be the most comfortable with. And more important than making the best decision is always remembering that after you make the decision, you can always change your mind and being open to changing your mind. And the reason I think that is the area that I should probably focus on a little bit more is because all throughout medical school and then as working as a doctor, a third of the class, like a lot of people around me also had the same sentiments around not really feeling fulfilled in certain things, being kind of burnt out, feeling like they probably didn't really re-examine the decision that they made when they were six years old. Uh, and if you just put that in contrast, it's kind of like saying, hey, when you're 6 years old, you really like licorice flavored ice cream, and therefore your life purpose is going to be eating only licorice flavored ice cream for the rest of your life. You know, that's kind of that's the same brain at that age that made that decision. Uh, to carry on thinking in that way. That's what it means to follow through on a career decision that you made when you, you know, were a child. A lot of the people around me, they had the same thoughts and sentiments around being dissatisfied, but they didn't challenge that. They didn't really lean into that and they sort of actually positively reinforce it into themselves by saying, "Hey, it's something I've always wanted to do. " But for me, having spent, you know, a lot of time helping students go through medical school as well, I kind of saw that as a red flag. I realized that when you have people that said, "I've always wanted to do this. This has been my life's goal. " It probably means I haven't really explored it properly. As opposed to people that were like, "Yeah, I worked as a software engineer for 7 years and then I realized this is not a career that I'm finding fulfillment in. " So, I started asking around and like looking into all these other careers and then, you know, arrived at medicine. So, I'm going to give it a go cuz I feel like it's going to be more suited for my personality. That answer, those people, even though it feels less impassioned, they're actually probably more mature in the way that they've thought about that decision than someone who's just like flying the flag of, you know, one career since birth. And because they never challenged that throughout university and they didn't challenge it throughout their junior doctor years, one of the

surprising nots surprising things that happened when I quit was that all these people around me, everyone in my class, the years below me, the years, you know, above me, the my colleagues that I'd worked with, they all messaged me. And normally you might think the message is going to be like, "Why did you quit, Justin? " Well, what are you going to do now? Like, what was the issue? No one asked me that. Not a single doctor asked me why I quit medicine. Everyone knows why you would quit. And if you're want to be a doctor and you're like, "Well, I don't know. I don't know why you should quit. " Okay, maybe actually deliberately look for that reason. Deliberately try to find a reason not to do something and see what would it be like living a life with that. So, no one asked me why I quit. Everyone just asked me how. They said, "How did you quit? " Because they've been dissatisfied and they feel like they're locked in. They've already sunk too much cost into it. They've been on this railroad and they can't see themselves diverging out of it at all. And so I remember there was this one pharmacist who messaged me and they said, "Wow, it's so lucky that you were able to switch from medicine because you had something else to fall back on. " And I remember thinking like it's not really luck if I spent five years of medical school creating a business and then nurturing it and learning the skills to create an entire career pathway for me to fall back on, you know. And it's ironic because probably for those 5 years, she also spent that same time complaining to me about how she doesn't like pharmacy. And to this day, she is a pharmacist complaining to me about how much she doesn't like being a pharmacist and to this day not really doing anything about it. And the reason I'm telling you all of this is because there are for me at least a few key learnings I feel that I had that really changed the way that I thought about things that has put me in a position now where I feel that decision really paid off. I was able to fulfill myself in a lot more meaningful ways. Just as an FYI, one of the biggest reasons I left medicine is like the hospital workplace and kind of the I guess culture in medicine is pretty exploitative and toxic. Um to be a health professional is a tough gig. Not because of the hours. You do long hours in other places. Not even because of the stress and the pressures which are pretty unique, uh, but just because of how it feels when your managers like the way that your managers treat you essentially. Like I I really hated it and I felt like there's so much more I could do and I felt really disempowered to really make an impact. And so now I feel really empowered to do that because the impact that I can make it's like up to me. If I if I'm not doing that well, it's my fault. I can't blame a system or manager for it. Like I'm it's all on me. And so that is really aligns with my personality. That's just as an FYI in ter like one of the biggest reasons why I left medicine. I still really enjoy the topic of medicine.

But there are a couple of these key learnings that allowed me to do that shift and maybe these learnings will apply to you as well. The first one is since early on in medical school, I really tried to think about this idea of a career decision as one that I'm never really going to arrive at. Like I'm never going to arrive at the answer to and I try to frame it in terms of just a constant process of seeking alignment. I think the most important thing that you can do in terms of deciding a career from my perspective is creating alignment between the type of work you want to do but more importantly the type of person you want to be through that work and I I personally don't believe in this concept of a work life balance. I think the idea balance is like a bad framing. I think there is only the time you spend whether you spend that intentionally or not intentionally. time doing the things that you want to do versus things that you don't want to do. It's just about alignment. Are you spending your time in a way that's aligned to how you want to spend that time or not? And that's a big question because like when I say is it the what you want to do, I'm not talking about like joy or even emotion in that short-term sense, you know? I'm talking about that sort of deep sense of fulfillment. And experience that got me to realize this full force was when I was asked to cover a shift and spend an additional 6 hours after my shift had normally ended to cover someone who wasn't able to to work in a different department. And when you cover a shift short notice, you get paid like one and a half times your normal hourly rate. So, I'd be working an extra 6 hours but making another one like more than an entire day's worth of pay from being able to do that. But the issue is that then you're going home at like 11:00 p. m. You have to be in at work again 6:30 the next day. Like, you're going to be sleepd deprived for the rest of the week. Your weekends are already barely enough to recover. And you've already got another 10, 11:00 p. m. shift scheduled that week anyway. So you're really, you know, you're ruining kind of that whole week or even two weeks by picking up that extra shift. And you know what do you get out of it? Like an extra hundred bucks, couple hundred bucks in hand. And so I what I realized is that I'm never picking up these extra shifts because I'm never saying that money is worth it for my quality of life. But I'm getting paid one and a half to double what I would normally be paid. So actually why am I even coming into work on a normal day when I feel like the money double is not worth it? And so I started thinking like when I go to work is that what I want to be spending my time doing. And I realized no like I would rather be sick than go into work. I would legitimate like not even calling a fake sick leave sort of thing. Like I would legitimately want to get sick to have a legitimate reason to not go into work. Um, and so this feeling of just dreading work made me realize that I was holding on to this idea of career progression or salary as a way to compensate for that. I had to make a certain amount of money and progress my career in a certain way to compensate for the fact that I'm not spending that time of my life doing the thing that I really wanted to do. Um, and and feeling very frustrated and feeling more soul destroyed every single day that I was working in it. And so I flipped that question. I asked myself, how much money would I need to make to just deliberately make the decision to live the rest of my life spending most of that time working in a career that doesn't fulfill me? I'm basically saying, how much money do I need to pay you for you to have a life that you don't like? That amount for most people is a lot more than they're making from their jobs. And having that perspective kind of made me realize it's actually it's really not about the money. As long as the money reaches a certain minimum amount that allows me to kind of support my family and you know the people who depend on me and helps me fulfill certain, you know, like reasonable financial goals, a minimum amount of money that I'm able to make is enough. What's more important is creating that really clear sense of alignment and constantly holding myself to a standard where I'm not really satisfied with living not in alignment. constantly looking for that better alignment and realizing that sometimes that requires a pivot or a shift and of course there are responsibilities like that's the reason why I didn't just quit immediately you know like my family did depend on me so I wasn't able to just immediately quit I spent years building up a business that I could quit to pay myself and I took like a 60% pay cut when I left I was living on like less than 40,000 a year but I had some kind of safety net So, so that I was able to protect that biggest risk and the biggest downside strictly financially. But I think that I would really have regretted not leaving when I consider that the most important thing that I would probably end up thinking back on and regretting is how

aligned did I live? And personally I feel like there are two things that is almost a scam. Like we are led to believe is just the truth but thinking that it's the truth is really harmful. And the two things are to believe that you can know what your career your ideal career is when you are young. And the second is that you can know what your values are when you're young. You have no idea what the ideal career is actually going to be for you. And probably the ideal career for you, hypothetically, like the most optimal career of all might not even exist yet. It might only exist 10 years from now. And if you're in the right place at the right time, maybe you get to work in that career. And so I think a lot of the emphasis is on figuring out what is the career path for me rather than how am I going to create a path in my career and navigating through that understanding that there isn't this right answer and this certainty and what we owe to ourselves is to constantly reflect and think about what is creating alignment. learning about ourselves through our work and learning about what fulfills us to just continually make slight iterations to eventually get to a path that we do truly find fulfillment in. And the same thing goes for figuring out your values. You know, most people will say like you're going to find fulfillment doing the things that you feel give you value in your life. But if you don't know what your values are, like your value, you don't you're not born with values, right? You don't pop into the world and the universe like grants you a boon like these shall be your values for the rest of your life. It doesn't work that way. If you can't sit there and say hey these are my values. It's not that you haven't discovered them like some buried jewel hidden deep within your psyche. Those values don't exist yet. Like values are created by the person. You can think you know what your values are and then when you test those values you may realize that they're not really your value. They're not as important as you thought they were. And so sometimes people are in this paralysis by analysis of not knowing what the right step to take is because they don't know what is the most valuedriven. But the answer is you don't know what the right step is because you don't know what your values are because you haven't created those values yet. You haven't had enough experiences. You haven't tested living through a certain set of values to realize if those values are for you or not. You may think that the most important thing for you is to be responsible to your family. So, okay, live your life through that lens and see how it makes you feel. If it's truly aligned with your values, that's that will create you deep fulfillment. But actually, if you realize that you're being stifled in some other ways, then maybe that's not the value. It's not a bad thing. Maybe it just means that it's balanced with something else. I think this constant iteration between trying to live through a certain set of values through just having diverse experiences and really challenging yourself and seeing those experiences as a way to learn about yourself is how you come to understand which values really matter for you. And so as you are constantly looking to seek alignment with what you feel is really fulfilling, you're also at the same time constantly learning and creating values for yourself. And the two just cycle endlessly. You're constantly creating values and then trying to live through those values, realizing if those values are true or not, and then just reiterating on that. And I think that process in and of itself, even if it doesn't get you to a point where you feel I really know my values and I'm in full alignment with it, just the very fact that is how you are going about life already feels fulfilling and aligned because you know that you as a person like a vehicle traveling through the cosmos you are living in alignment with this kind of philosophy. you are holding yourself saying I want to create alignment and I'm doing everything that I can to do that and engaging in that process is fulfilling even without an end goal and I'm taking the time to make this video because I make a lot of videos about learning obviously it's my job productivity as well you need to be productive to achieve your goals you know it's there's no good learning if you procrastinate all the time you can't manage your time you don't know how to prioritize but actually one of the topics I don't talk about very often is kind of the biggest level of prioritization and productivity, which is that if you spend 10 to 20 years of your life doing something that isn't really meaningful for you because you've tricked yourself into thinking it's meaningful because opening yourself up to the uncertainty it brings to challenge that and say maybe I was wrong which is totally normal. But if opening yourself up to that uncertainty is a thing that means you spend the next 10, 20, 30 years of your life doing something, everything you've done during that time could be considered unproductive. So I often say that the biggest waste of time is doing something really well when you shouldn't have been doing it in the first place. And so if you are feeling some of these sentiments and some of the story resonates with you, again, it's not a career advice video, but what I would

have said to myself when I was having those feelings is that just try. You don't have to know the right answer. what experience is going to lead you to know or value to figure out your ideal career. You don't need to know how it's going to pivot. You don't need to have a perfect plan, but just learn about yourself. Why do you have the feeling of unfulfillment? What about it is it? What could you do to maybe explore where your values are? What really creates fulfillment? And it could be small. Could be a tiny little thing that you do one or two hours a week, a little voluntary thing. Just being slightly involved, but give yourself some kind of experience that you haven't had before, something that's new that allows you to learn something new about yourself to get slightly more clarity. And then when you just continue to repeat that, it becomes clearer and clearer. And so for most of my uni years, I had no idea what I was going to end up doing. I honestly for six and a half, seven years learning doing learning coaching, spending dozens of hours a week going through learning science research articles, understanding the learning science, practicing it, applying it, teaching it to people for thousands of students. I never thought I would do that full-time. Up until that point, I still thought this is going to be just a chapter of my life me exploring something I'm interested in and then I'm just going to be a doctor. It's only, you know, like in the eighth and ninth year that I started realizing, hey, actually there might be something to this. So, you don't have to have an answer. a goal, but just seek and explore. See how it makes you feel. learn about yourself and then eventually one day you will have more clarity and so that you will know what the right decision to make actually is. So I don't know if this helped you but I hope it was useful to you. If you like me talking a little bit more about this side of things. I know it's not the normal kind of learning strategy stuff that I typically talk about. But if this was useful for you, you want me to make more content like this, then just let me know. Um your feedback is always what helps me to understand what content to make in the future. But thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one.