Jul 27, 2022
Welcome back to another episode
of Ordinary Sherpa, I am your host Heidi Dusek. This summer
has been a fascinating journey in continuing to live out and test
our adventurous lifestyle with kids. We spent over 30 days
living in an RV in The Canadian Rockies near Banff, Jasper and then
made our way down into Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming before some time
in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Our purpose for this
experiment was to consider this a test in slowing down. Treat
it less like a vacation and more like a lifestyle filled with
simple adventures.
You’ll hear more about our trip
in coming episodes and through my email list
(you can read all with a dose of adventure in your inbox each
week). If you are intrigued about RV life I invite you to
join me at the RV Entrepreneur summit in September in
Colorado. I am including the link in the show notes.
The theme for the summit
is Connection Through Community. If you are remotely
interested in RV life, starting a side hustle, or how to manage a
remote lifestyle you might want to consider attending. I am
particularly excited about the limited tickets in an effort to
create a smaller event where we can connect deeper.
Registration Link: https://therventrepreneur.com/rv-entrepreneur-summit/
I am excited about this episode.
When I was launching my book,
Doc G was extremely open and supportive, I would say demonstrating
the sherpa philosophy. I also am excited because while he and
I seem to approach life slightly different, I think our purpose
behind the why of our work is similar. In fact part way
through reading his book I messaged him to say I think we are both
working on cultivating a meaningful life!
Jordan spent the later part of his
career with patients during their end of their life. His
interest in becoming a doctor was ignited when his father died
unexpectedly in the prime of his life. After years of
rotations and various practices, burnout and financial independence
he settled into the speciality of hospice care. Doc G, whom
you may have heard in Episode 20 Opting Out is back
as Jordan Grumet with his new book, Taking Stock
a Hospice Doctor’s Advice on Financial Independence, Building
Wealth, and Living a Regret-Free Life.
Worth noting, I have found that
I really enjoy podcasting and having conversation without all the
ads and interruptions many podcasters use. If you enjoy the
ideas, find joy or inspiration from my work, you can
buy me a coffee to say thanks and support the show. If
you want to go deeper with the content and/or get more engaged you
can find additional ways to support the show through the links
below.
Website for this
episode:
https://ordinarysherpa.com/084
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Key Takeaways
- Jordan is a study in delayed
gratification. Being a doctor meant putting in the time and
work, which made planning for the future easy. Hospice allowed him
to see 1. how fragile life is and how that rocket may never launch
2. Sometimes it’s just more fun to enjoy life now and recognize
maybe I don’t need 2 marshmallows later! “What I forgot is
that the real joy is to live life.”
- His hospice patient reflections
often sounded like “I wish I would’ve taken that trip 10 years ago
when I felt better.” Jordan didn’t like the idea of YOLO
until he realized you do only live once. He learned from his
patients who were dying that there is a spectrum: YOLO on one
end and delayed gratification on the other. Realizing this
softened his perspective on YOLO.
- While the doctor role was my
purpose, I didn’t feel like I belonged in that culture.
Instead of having the courage to cling onto hospice care which
spoke to me, I pursued all the other elements of being a
doctor. It took me decades to come back to do what I loved
doing.
- We’re dying from the day we are
born, but we don’t really like to talk about that. Death
means we have a finite amount of time to live out our
purpose. Big scary thoughts remind us of our mortality.
We focus on less important things - for Jordan that was
money. Money and death are both topics that we don’t like to
talk about, both topics are intertwined, and both are critical to
figuring out who we want to be today.
- A terminal diagnosis forces us
to face important questions such as: What am I going to regret that
I didn’t do? What am I going to want to achieve in the last 3-6
months of my life? We don’t need a death sentence to have
those conversations.
- The idea of writing your own
eulogy is a great clarifier. He often gets the question “How
do I know what my purpose is?” These activities force us to clarify
what is important and meaningful to us. Having children has
profoundly affected me in how I think about my goals and legacy.
When you have to explain to your children why do you do what you
do? Why do you have to work at night? Why can’t you be
at my game? These are great clarifiers and help you focus on
life through a different lens.
- We make the mistake of thinking
we can commoditize time (exchanging things for time). Time is
static, it’s unchangeable and uncontrollable - meaning time passes
no matter what we do. We need to change the conversation from
gaining or losing time, rather what do we choose to fill our time
with.
- How do we experience time -
it’s different at different times of our life. 6 YO version
of time is very different at 48 YO version of time when you
celebrate your child’s teenage birthday wondering where the time
went. Another example set a time and watch tv for 2
minutes and then reset the timer for 2 minutes and hold a plank
position….the same amount of time can feel very different based on
what we are doing to fill the time. Ideally we want to find
things that bring us joy, meaning and value to fill the majority of
our time.
- How can we view money as
potential energy to erase the things we don’t want to do? I
would rather do something I like but don’t love to erase something
that I hate doing for an hour. Studies show we have a decent
amount of free time.
- Money and time capital are
probably the least important of the overall equation. You can
parse it out into all different sorts of capital, but when you get
the money part of the framework you can erase the things that don’t
bring you joy. Time becomes less of an issue when you learn
to perceive it as abundance.
The Book Taking
Stock Connects purpose, identity, to who and what we want to be
in life and secondly gives us the money framework to make a
meaningful life. Once you figure out your pathway to
financial independence and how fast to get
there.