Transforming into a Doctor was Almost an of Body Experience

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm here and I'm talking. I'm having fun right now, talking with Dr. Roger Schwelt. And Roger, the thing is that I heard you say, you know, in terms of finding, being proactive and finding things to motivate you to do things, you did that kind of with your approach to learning, in terms of where you got to where you learned the material and then anticipated what the questions would be. That's never occurred to me in my life to go ahead and anticipate what would the question be on this now, to write it down, to memorize, to outline and, you know, all of that stuff. But for me to internalize that and take it to another point. But that's just something you put in your mind that can cause you to be more focused, really. And that's what finding the extra motivation will allow you to do. And so you had all these things working. You thought, well, if I get the good grades, you know, I'm going to make a impression with Betty the beautiful blonde. And so how did it end up?

Well, I mean, it worked out great. What was astounding to me is when I finally talked to Betty and we got married and we have three kids now, when I asked her, she looks back at those times, and the one thing that she said that attracted herself to me was the fact that I was getting really good grades. And so it's kind of funny.

It worked. It worked.

I deluded myself into thinking something that I thought was wrong but actually turned out to be true. And that was quite something. It worked out well.

Yeah. And the lesson in that is do what is in front of you. Maximize. You know, that's one thing you could do. You know, you couldn't make yourself better, looking funnier, you know, dramatically change your. Your charisma overnight. But you could try and make your mark with the grades, you know, and, you know, standing out there. So if you want to be outstanding folks, grab whatever opportunity you have, hit it hard. And when you stand out, you attract attention, you know, like one out of what, what'd you say, 400, 300 or something?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it wasn't all the time, but if you do it enough times, you get up the top.

Yeah. And people, you know, if you want to make your mark, you want to get noticed in the marketplace or at your job or whatever, hit it hard and make yourself outstanding where people have to take notice of you. Really great, really great story, really great insights. And I think we'll find as we move forward that's going to set the stage for your method of attack in a lot of areas. So did you feel an evolution of yourself as you were studying into going from least likely to succeed in school? All of a sudden you get in gear, you start getting better grades in high school, excellent top marks in college. As you went through this journey of climbing the ladder, did you feel yourself turning into a doctor? A doctor?

I didn't feel like a doctor until I was in residency after four years of medical school. But no, I did. It's almost as though it was this out of body experience I was having. Like I was going to wake up and it was going to be a dream because for the first time in my life I was doing something and I was good at it. And I was wondering, when was the other shoe going to drop? When was this going to stop? It was almost as though it was almost like a divine appointment. And when I think about it and I look back at those days, I distinctly remember, you know, in my upbringing we were, you know, and even now just very Christian, we would read the Bible. And I'm reminded of a story in the Bible that I, that fascinated me. And I thought about it often and it's a story, it's a very famous story. If anyone who knows of the stories in the Bible, it's when Solomon, who's this young boy and he inherits the throne of Israel at a very young age. His father David is one of the greatest kings of Israel and he's supposed to inherit this. And he goes to God and he asks, and God asks him, you know, what is it that you want? What is it? And I'll give it to you, whatever it is. And you know, what would we do if we were in that position? You know, we've all been faced with the, you know, the genie coming out of the bottle and you get in the three wishes. You know what he says? What Solomon says is he looks at a situation, he says, I'm going to be the king of a country. And instead of asking for riches, instead of asking for wealth, he asks for wisdom. And not just so he can show off and be smart. He tells you the reason why he wants wisdom. He wants wisdom. So that he can effectively administer justice to his people. That's first and foremost in his mind. And of course, if you know the story, God is so impressed with what he asks for that not only does he promise Solomon wisdom and judgment, but he also says, I'm also going to give you riches as well. And even though you didn't ask for it. And so as a small kid, I'm listening to this story, and I'm like, man, I got this down. If God ever asks me what is it that he wants to give me, make sure I don't ask for riches. But if I ask for what he wants me to ask, he'll give me riches. And so that's kind of not. That's kind of an overstatement. But the point of the story that really got me was this, is that, you know, maybe I did ask for wisdom, and maybe he gave it to me, and maybe that's why things were improving. Not only that, it wasn't like I wasn't studying hard. I was doing hard work, but it was this. It was this cooperation. It wasn't given to me as a gift only, although the gift was there. It also required hard work. And both of those together. That's point number one. Point number two is, and you'll see this theme happening over and over again throughout the story, is making sure that your calling or your charter or whatever it is that you think you've been called to do is to help other people. You see this time and time again, Larry, think about this. Think about how easy it is to get things done when you're doing it for other people rather than when you're doing it for yourself. Imagine you're in a store, or let's say you're at a university, or you're some job or whatever. And somebody comes in and they ask, hey, could I get a special parking spot? And you're like, why? Well, because it's closer. I don't want to walk as far. Okay. So then the next guy comes in and he says, hey, you know that person down the aisle there? He. He works really hard. Wouldn't it be cool if we got him his own parking spot? Now, who are you more likely to help get that goal? Is it somebody that you're helping to get something for somebody else or something that you're helping to get something for that person? Obviously, you're going to be more willing to do something for somebody who's doing it for somebody else. That's something that we can all get involved with. We all feel good about that is when we're doing something for somebody else. And I think if we all think about that, that's kind of what the service professions are all in. A lot of us are in service professions and that's what we do, whether we're in good professions making goods or doing services. If we're doing it for somebody else, if that's what your goal is, I think the motivation to do something for that and to apply for that is much greater. Imagine a medical student studying in school. Think about this motivation. This hit me many, many times when I was in medical school, which is a more powerful drive. Wow, I better learn this topic here in medicine because I got to do well on the test. If I don't do well on the test, I'm not going to have a job. If I don't get a job, I'm not going to get paid. Ok, that's one way of thinking about it. Another way of thinking about it is, wow, I better learn this disease really well. Because one day there's going to be somebody with this disease that comes to my clinic. And if I know it and I understand it and I know how to recognize it, I could change someone's life. And so this is the type of things that I was facing on a daily basis when I was in medical school. Is this motivation to know your trade so that you can execute your duty on mankind? It's a very high noble calling. But it's not just in medicine. It happens every day in all walks of life. And I think if we started to think about that more and more, we would probably do a better job. I don't know what you think, Larry.

Talk about how you began your migration to becoming an actual teacher and trainer. You said that actually started while you were in school.

Yeah. So when I was at ucr, I don't know why I did this, but I decided to get into teaching. And there was a tutoring center there at UCR and I would go down there and I would teach physics chemistry to students that had a hard time. So over and over again I started to hone those skills of teaching. I also took the mcat, which is a medical training amplitude test for medical school entry. And I did fairly well on that. And so I was picked up by Kaplan Test Prep to teach. So I would do that for a few years.

And this was like a part time job.

Putting yourself a part time job?

Well, I was putting yourself through school, making a little money and whatever kind of job you can, you know, for those youngsters we have listening. Whatever kind of job you can find that's related to, possibly related to your future after college, look for it, do it, because that's going to make your help dramatically improve your learning, because you're going to, it's going to change the context that you go about your business, you know, that real world experience. And so very valuable. And so as you got in that, it was a natural progression up the ladder from just, you know, following the hunch and doing well, enjoying it. And then you went into the MCAT thing.

Yeah, and then. And then I got accepted to medical school. So this is a little bit of an interesting thing here in terms of, of maybe nothing, maybe things not going according to plan. And that would be when I was at UCR and my wife was going to this medical school, she was accepted to UCLA and for medicine. And so I wanted to go to ucla. And so I have applied to ucla. I applied to a number of different medical schools. She was in a slightly different program than I was in. And where she got advanced a year, they cut out some of the years of college. And part of that very highly competitive program was, is that she went from UCR to UCLA and graduated in 1999 from UCLA School of Medicine. I was on a different track. I had to apply to these medical schools, more of a traditional track, and I applied to a number of these. I did not get into ucla and I was disappointed with that. The only medical school that I actually got into was Loma Linda. So here's a situation where.

Let's talk about that for a minute. How disappointed were you, Roger?

I was. I remember that. I remember specifically the place I was, what I was doing, and even the music that was playing on the radio when I found out and opened up that envelope from UCLA saying, you know, you know how it always starts, right? There were many applicants this year. Many of them were qualified. You already know how it's going, right? And so, yeah, so I was not. And it was almost a miracle that I didn't get into ucla. And I'm not here to say how great of a, of a, of a person that I was in terms of academics, but I had a 3.99 GPA out of four. I was scored in the top 97th percentile in the MCAT. I had research. I was a double major. For all intents and purposes, I should have been accepted to ucla, for by some miracle I wasn't, because if I had been, I would have definitely have gone there, right? And looking at my life, how it has Unfolded, I think that would have been a mistake. Nothing against ucla. My wife went there. She got a great education. I think the place for me was Loma Linda.

Yeah.

And that was because of the people that I met and the things that I've done. And I could tell you for a fact that medcram would not be around today. A lot of the things that I'm doing today would not be around if any of those things had changed in terms of what they were.

And that's like. To realize that when things happen to you, it's not necessarily an accident or someone being arbitrary and holding you back, because from a worldly standpoint, you had overqualified to get into any of these schools. You know, really, let's. Let's be honest. But you didn't. And so obviously that was like a brand on, you know. You know, that was never going to change. You're going to carry that the rest of your life. But that did send you in another direction. And when did you realize this might be. Be a better place for me and this might actually work out to my advantage? How long did it take for that to come?

Yeah, I took. It took. I mean, I'm not somebody that begrudges or carries things with them. So it wasn't too long, you know, about a week or two. I started to realize that, you know, Loma Linda was the place I was going to go. It was a lot more expensive, I'll tell you that. At the time. At the time, medical school at UCLA, this is back in the late 90s, so it was probably maybe five or six thousand dollars a year at a state school at Loma Linda. It was about $25,000 a year to go there. So it was a significant amount. I mean, today, in 2020, 2021, you could just probably triple those numbers and you probably be about where it is. So, yeah, it took me some time. It was kind of fun in some sense, because my. My time, my girlfriend, we had not yet got engaged, but my girlfriend was a medical student at ucla. I was a medical student at Loma Linda. And we would kind of, you know, have you. Hey, have you learned about this yet? Have you learned about that yet? And we would just kind of compare and contrast what we were doing. But it was. It was an interesting time. So we would see each other on the weekends, and during the week we would study hard and immerse ourselves in our studies. So because Betty was a year ahead of me, she was graduating a year ahead of me. She graduated in 1999. From UCLA School of Medicine. And then for those of those in the listening audience who don't understand what happens after you graduate from medical school and you get your md, you're not done. You can't really go out and practice. You don't have a medical license. You've got to do something called residency. And residency is for us, we both went into something called internal medicines about three years. And so she was looking for a place to match. And so here I am at Loma Linda. And of course, we have residency programs at Loma Linda just as well as anywhere else. And so bottom line is I convinced my girlfriend at that time we had proposed to, so she was my fiance now at this point to come to Loma Linda. And she matched. It's kind of an interesting process. What happens, you write down the programs that you want to go to, and then the programs write down the people they want to have match. It all goes into big one big supercomputer, and it matches you. And so on match day, you get this envelope that literally tells you where you're going to spend the next three years of your life. You open this envelope, you whip it open, and it's like, oh, I'm going to St. Louis, or, oh, I'm going to, you know, Tampa. It depends. You've got to rank it. If you rank a bunch of places and none of them watch you, then you basically unmatched. And then you got to scramble for. For a match. So Betty, Betty went around.

That'd be a heck of a heck of a note after putting yourself through all of that education. But I guess, I guess it happens, huh? Hey, listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business, has accrued over $5 billion in assets under management, and has done well even during trying times. Now, if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to Whiteellawinning.com webinar Now, I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others.

Move up, it does up to, you know, 10, 15% of people who go through the match don't get matched, that they've got to scramble at the last minute to some place, maybe in some area or field of practice that they don't necessarily want at some place that they didn't think about. But, you know, this is what happens. I'M sure there's a learning point there. I mean, just sometimes these things happen.

Yeah, well, so how did that end up?

So she matched to Loma Linda for internal medicine. And because she ranked it very high and we wanted to be together, I was going to be. So she spent a year of that residency at Loma Linda while I was a senior medical student. And I finished up and graduated in 2000. I matched. I also went through a match process and I matched to the very same program. And so Betty and I were in the same program finally. And we were together. We got married when I graduated from medical school in 2000. And so we literally, in about two weeks time, I moved out of my house. I went from paying for school to actually having a job as a physician and. Yeah, moved out of my parents house.

You're both at Loma Loma Linda.

Yeah, exactly. And.

That was a huge thing. I mean, that was a huge.

Yeah, big change.

You won the lottery basically there.

Yeah, I got where I wanted. Well, I also was.

And she was there too.

Yeah, so she was a great student. I was a great student. We both were highly sought after. So when we put Loma Linda as our top choice, it was. It was pretty easy to get. Internal medicine is not particularly competitive. It's not like orthopedic surgery or radiology or anesthesia. So it wasn't like a miracle, but it was good. It was good that it happened.

Okay. And so your teaching career is going along while all of this is happening on. It's kind of like two different tracks.

Yeah. So the teaching aspect of this is sort of contained in medicine. I mean, if you think about it, the word doctor, which is what they call us, physicians, is Latin for teacher. So we're doing a lot of teaching, whether it's teaching students, teaching residents. Whenever you go to an academic center where physicians are being trained, there's teaching happening all the time, everywhere throughout the entire institution. So the teaching aspect is almost inseparable from the practice of medicine. After doing three or four years of internal medicine, I became something called the chief resident, which means I was in charge of teaching the residents. So I had finished my residency program. I was now the chief resident. And that was at a place called Riverside County Regional Medical center is in Riverside county in Southern California. And that was probably one of the most fun years of my life. I said that college would be the place I would go back to. Probably the second place would be chief residency. We got to do all the fun stuff. When these interesting cases came into the hospital, we would be on those cases when we had to do procedures, we'd be the ones doing it. It was all the fun stuff that is in medicine that you get to do. I did that for about a year, and then I went back to school this time to learn pulmonary and critical care. And that was another three years. So we're talking after medical school, which is four years, three years of internal medicine, a year of chief residency, and another three years of pulmonary and critical care. So about seven years.

What gives you that desire to punish yourself like that? Well, okay, that's something I can't relate to. Like a friend, you know, let's see. A friend of mine who's from out in Aspen, had his daughter grow up. You know, she's a brainiac. She went to Brown University or something. And she had this statement she made. She told him, like, her freshman or sophomore year is like, I can't wait. Something about loving, studying, and couldn't wait to. You know, that's the most fun thing. I was like, that's a statement I could never imagine coming out of mine or my boy's mouth ever, you know? But, you know.

Well, it's not like it's a vow. Yeah, it's not like it's a vow of poverty or anything. You are getting paid a pittance there while you're in school called residency. And it was about 40 or $50,000 a year. So it was. It was enough to get by and pay the interest on the loans. But the point is, is that when I was in residency, okay, so when I was an internal medicine resident, you realize that you can just stop your training there and become an internist or become a primary care physician or become a hospitalist, or you can subspecialize and become a kidney doctor or become a heart doctor or become a lung doctor. Like, I became one of the rotations that I was doing during that internal medicine year. Those three years after medical school involved critical care, ICU work, and my attending by the name of Diane Lim. She was probably the most enthusiastic. And there was a host of others. Don't get me wrong, there's a host of other people that were very influential. Phil Gold and a number of other people in the department. But she, in particular, she was a young, recent graduate of pulmonary and critical care. And she brought to the table an enthusiasm and a thirst for knowledge, and that was rarely seen. We would often say that she could change lives with the flick of her wrist. She was that type of personality, and you meet these type of people in life. Yeah. You know, people ask me, why did you go into pulmonary critical care? It's not because I like studying about the lungs, although they are interesting. It's like everything else in life, it's who you happen to be with.

Right.

Who's your friends and what's the influence that they have on you?

Right. And so let's talk about, you know, to kind of summarize what this ladder, what you've done such a great job of explaining is the ladder you've got to go through. You know, when you go through the ladder of experience building, paying a price as you move up in business through a corporate ladder or an entrepreneurial type thing. But so much of the ladder climbing that doctors have to do is educational to kind of position themselves for where they want to go. And at some point you got to stop climbing the ladder and launch. But that's not a guaranteed success as just because, you know, there's not like these high paying, wonderful jobs just sitting out there waiting all over the country for. You have to kind of make your way, talk about you have to make your way to get out of that situation and make that the transition, you know?

Yes. So when you're done your education, now what do you do? Right. Life is not just all education. So at the end of my training, I had options, I had job options that were there. There was a job option at a Kaiser. Kaiser is a big hospital system. I look at it as a big machine with a lot of gears and cogs. If you wanted to be one of those cogs on the gear wheel where you basically show up at 9, come back at 5, it's a huge system. You're going to be one of these people that are basically one of the moving parts of a very large system. Or you could become a part of a entrepreneurial type of deal where, you know, if you want to put in a little bit more time, you want to put in a little bit more resources, a little bit more elbow grit, entrepreneurial spirit, then you could join a medical group that's owned by the physicians as well and do that. And so I had that debate, you know, with my wife and I for a long time, for a good month or two, where we just decided to say what is best for us because on one side we maybe you're not, maybe the upside financially is not there, but you're going to have more free time on the weekends. You're not going to be asked to do things because it's a bigger system. Or do I go in and say, I'M going to work a little bit harder, maybe a little bit less time, maybe a little bit more call. But the financial upside is greater and maybe a little bit more autonomy because you don't have to.

Well, that's the thing about it seemed like you would have develop after all this studying and all of this restricting and putting yourself in a straight jacket of discipline, of attending class, learning thing, you know, you know, pouring this information in your head, pouring it out on the test, you know, just continuing to stack information into that poor little brain you have, you know, reaching saturation point of terms and connections and everything. At some point, it seems like you want to break out and have some freedom in your life. You know, does that build or I guess with certain people it either dulls, you know, that process either dulls their entrepreneurial, independent streak or it makes it grow to where I got to get out of this thing and I'll pay any price to be my own boss.

Yeah, it's true. And I ultimately chose to go the more independent entrepreneurial route. And I'm glad that I did because I think in that environment, something like medcram, which we'll talk about, was able to flourish. But I'll tell you, Larry, you may have seen this as well, and we're certainly seeing it in the medical field that it's not to pigeonhole individuals, but it's becoming a generational type of thing. So people, the baby boomer, the Gen Xer, perhaps to some degree were more, maybe tending towards the entrepreneurial, more independent type of thing. And now what we're seeing with more millennials is instead of that they value the possibility of owning equity in a company or monetary upside. What actually interests them more is, you know, freedom, lifestyle, those types of things. And of course, freedom and lifestyle is, was almost non existent in the old days when you had the medical teams. I mean, I mean, those doctors would work incessantly hours and hours. That was their job, that was their life. And that type of a physician experience is now sort of kind of going away. It's becoming more of a 9 to 5 type of job now for physicians because that's the type of roles that the people who are coming into those roles want to actually have.

Now explain that where you say it's disappearing, but the millennials want it.

You know, it's the millennials want lifestyle.

Okay, I want to be, I don't.

Want to be too, I don't want to be too dogmatic.

We're just talking about conceptually.

Yeah, yeah, there are certainly exceptions And I don't want to label everyone, but. But as somebody who is involved with medical recruitment and trying to get people to our medical group, I've been involved with that. What we are seeing when we, when hey, here's the pluses of coming to our group. It used to be that owning equity in the company, becoming a partner, having an upside with owning the business and things of that nature. That used to appeal. That doesn't appeal as much as it used to. What now appeals is, hey, I don't want to have to take call. Hey, I don't want to have to. I want to be able to make sure that I've got my free time, even if it means that I'm getting paid less. That is much more of a plus now than it used to be.

So for those of upcoming doctors who have that entrepreneurial thing, more opportunities for you.

Yeah, exactly.

More opportunities for you to go against the grain. Very, very interesting insights. If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world. I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch. Go to whiteellawinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast as possible. I'm Larry Wydell and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, go, go.