E08 - How to Get Unstuck

[00:00] Hi, and welcome to the from MD to entrepreneur podcast. The podcast that teaches you how to find financial security outside of medicine. I'm Dr. Pranay. And I started out as a fresh attending with zero business knowledge, despite loving my job and medicine. I didn't feel like I had the financial security or control over my life today.I am a serial entrepreneur and practice medicine on my own terms. Listen on to learn how I've helped hundreds do the. I was post call the other day after a grueling shift, you know, the one, a ton of admissions and pages every few minutes, the type of shift where you feel like you don't even have time to think, let alone a minute to yourself.

[00:47] A few hours. After my shift ended, I was finally ready to go home. At that point, I'm already thinking about how great a warm shower will feel and a bite to eat real food, something more substantial than the granola bar I grabbed from the cafeteria earlier. Fortunately, I only live 15 minutes away and I've finally got into my car to leave.

[01:07] I feel myself relax a bit shortly. My exit should be coming up soon or is it? No, it would've been my exit if I was working at the other hospital, but not this one, another 15 minutes is added to my commute. Just what I needed after a tough shift. I decided that I'm done thinking for a while and just turn on the GPS to guide me home.

[01:29] Five minutes later, I'm already. I thought my exhausted brain was playing tricks on me. I've missed my exit before and thought there's no other way. Going back home. I'll have to spend another 15 minutes turning around and finding the exit I missed. The GPS had taken me down that I didn't even know existed despite doing the same commute countless times.

[01:50] This had me thinking, how often are we looking at things that we have to do and thinking that there's only one way to do. I remember how game changing it was when I started using dictation software at the hospital, I'd always done my notes by typing them and was proud of how fast I could type. It was a while before I gave in and finally started dictating my notes.

[02:10] I learned how much faster I could do notes by just dictating them and using dot phrases. I was being stubborn because I didn't wanna take the little extra time to learn a new way of doing things. This can be especially true in entrepreneurs. Where we often learn one way to do things and rarely take a look around to see if there's any better way.

[02:28] In my case earlier, my GPS showed me new routes home that I had never thought of. Of course I had used GPS on my first time at a hospital, actually the first couple times until I had my route memorized. After that, I hadn't even considered changing up the route. It was familiar and comfortable. There was a study that looked at commuting in London.

[02:48] A strike was happening in the London underground network. And all the commuters who used a tunnel were forced to change their commutes. This gave scientists a great chance to see how it affected people's commute preferences. What happened to the commute after the tunnel was fixed? Surprisingly many of the commuters ended up sticking to their new route, even after the strike was over.

[03:07] This was because they had found a new, more efficient route. A good fraction of the commuters were probably like. Hadn't even considered adjusting their commute for years. How often do we stick to the familiar into other parts of our lives? We find a way that works and sticks to it. Each problem has one solution.

[03:24] Inher gets in our way of changing. As soon as I started using the GPS, it had me take the local streets to get home. I always thought the local streets would take longer, but, well, I was wrong. I wonder if the same could be asked about entrepreneurship. What do we continue to do? Just because. Always been done that way as we are new entrepreneurs, we oftentimes teach ourselves how to do something one way and stick to it.

[03:49] Rarely do we go back and consider if there's a better way to do it. For example, when we first started Ascent equity group, people would email us to tell us they were interested in investing with us. However, there were times we'd forget to check that email box and by the time we replied, they had lost. I'm sure like me, you probably have way too many email addresses to check.

[04:08] You can imagine that we would want to reach out to these interested investors as soon as possible, but the old way would depend on when one of us thought to check our email, we thought of notifications or reminders for us to check, but the process still revolved around us checking the email inbox.

[04:23] Instead, we were able to take ourselves out of the picture and make the whole process automatic. The interested investors would be able to schedule some time to talk to us all without us needing to I. In the end, it didn't matter to the investor. What part of the process was automated? The investor is able to spend more quality time with one of us without having to go through multiple emails, back and forth.

[04:44] It also saved us time and made sure that no one got lost to follow up. Now take a few minutes to think about what you have to do on a regular basis. Have you considered if there's anything out there that could make it better? A lot of times we have to look outside ourselves for the answer, like the new route that was shown to me by GP.

[05:02] In our businesses, we try to take an overarching look at all our processes, at least once a year. We also look at each of our projects on a one by one basis on regular intervals to see if there's anything that could have gone better. For example, on the real estate side, could there be anything that we could have done better communication wise, anything we missed and led to us wasting time we do this right after a successful deal so that everything is fresh in our mind.

[05:26] Lastly. Reach out to some fellow entrepreneurs and see how they go about it. There's always room for improvement. Find colleagues that are willing to share and do the same for them to recap. We often get stuck in our ways and miss out on opportunities to improve the many things that we do on a regular basis.

[05:42] It's important to take a look, to see if there's anything you can do to improve your business. And even your life feel free to reach out to friends and colleagues to see how they go about doing these things. Because often we are blind to what we don't. See you guys in the next episode. Thanks. I appreciate you taking the time to listen as this episode.

[05:59] If you have any questions on entrepreneurship, please feel free to email me at info@frommd.com. I answer all my messages. So please don't hesitate to reach out.