#118 Purpose, Identity, & Connections… The Grit Of A Good Life, ft. Jordan Grumet, MD

Welcome to the Passive Income MD Podcast, where we talk about creating your ideal life through multiple streams of income. I'm your host, Peter Kim. If you enjoy hearing about this stuff, make sure to hit subscribe so I can bring it to you every week. Now, let's get on with the show. All right. Hi, everyone. I'm really excited to talk to my friend, Dr. Jordan Grummet. We've actually known each other for a while, but we're going to get into the story about his life, about how we met, about all these type of things. But in case you don't know who he is, he's trained in general internal medicine. He's now a hospice doctor. He is a wealth of information when it comes to finances and just life in general. And he's the host of a wildly popular podcast called Earn and Invest that started 2018. He had another podcast before that and different blue blogs and these kind of things. We're going to talk all about this. And he is the author of a book that's coming out right by the time we talk about this, but it's called Taking Stock. A Hospice Doctor's Advice on Financial Independence, Building wealth, and Living a regret free Life. And we're going to talk all about these things. Jordan, how you doing?

It is great to be here.

Yeah.

Peter, you and I do know each other from way back when. You were one of the first blogs that I read, passive income, MD, when I started writing my own blog quite a few years ago.

Yeah. It's so cool that we are in the space and it's funny because it is a small space and there's only a few of us out there. I'd say that at least have stuck around for a while and you're one of those people that's still going. But you know, it's funny, like, even in all those years that we've known each other, I don't know if I've really known your full story. You know, I haven't really asked you about how all this got started, so if it's okay with you, let's find out right now on this podcast. I find out on this Facebook Live, whatever you're watching this, let's talk a little bit more about it. But you were trained in general internal medicine and I know that now you're in hospice. Let's talk a little bit about how that all came to be.

So, you know, it all goes back, believe it or not, to I was 7 years old and my father was a doctor and I wanted to be just like him. And he died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. And so this made in me this idea that I will be a doctor just like him. I will fill in his shoes. And that really became a sense of purpose and identity for me throughout my younger years. I went to college. I went to medical school. My first week in medical school, I volunteered in hospice. We had an inpatient hospice at Northwestern University. The first patients I ever saw were hospice patients. But I didn't connect at that moment with this idea that, oh, my father died. I've lived through this. I'm now volunteering as a hospice volunteer. Maybe that's something I should do for a living, as I think lots of us do. We don't listen to what our heart's telling us. Instead, I decided to practice general internal medicine. And, you know, I went through residency.

And started to practice, and I got burned out.

Like, I found that the paperwork was excessive. We were rushing and rushing to see.

More patients in less and less time. What I had thought becoming a doctor was going to be or was going to be like wasn't at all my preconceived notion as a kid. And I started looking for ways out. And so I said, well, how am I going to get away from this job that is burning me out? I'm stressed. I'm no longer the happy guy I was before I went to medical school and I started doing side hustles. I started buying real estate. I. I started doing medical side hustles, one of which was hospice. I had been seeing a patient of mine who was elderly geriatrics, and I was seeing patients in the hospital at the time, and they were getting towards end of life, and I was starting the morphine drip and giving them Ativan and talking to the family. And just as I was doing all this, the hospice nurse walked in. She looked at me and she said, you need to work for us. And so I said, why not? I could make a little bit of a stipend, and I could work for them, and I didn't have to do all the administrative work someone else did that I could just help run teams and help take care of hospice patients. And right about then, in 2014, as I was trying to build up enough wealth to extract myself from medicine, I got a phone call from a guy named Jim Dally, who I never met before. He called my office and he said, I've got this book called the White Coat Investor. You have a medical blog. Could you read this book and then write a review on your medical blog? And I said, sure, you're sending me a free book. Awesome.

And so I read his book.

And it's funny, it gave me the vocabulary for everything that I kind of learned from my parents already, but didn't know how to put into words or into an action plan.

So I had been modeled great financial habits from my parents. They saved 50% of their income. They owned real estate. They had side hustles and side businesses, and then they ran their own major entrepreneurial ventures. So I was investing and saving and side hustling and had real estate, but I had no idea how to figure out what looked like enough when it came to wealth. And so reading Jim's book really put that in perspective. I realized I could walk away from medicine right away. I could stop working because I indeed was financially independent, which I thought would make me happy, and I'd start celebrating. But instead, I kind of had a panic attack because for the first time in my life, I had to decide, who am I as a person outside of medicine, outside of this wisp of this connection I still had with my father, who died when I was seven. And actually, it was quite disruptive. I realized I had no idea who I was outside of being a doctor, and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. And that set me off on a journey to not only understand personal finance, but to also understand what parts of medicine still spoke to me. And as I whittled down everything about medicine I didn't like, I was left with hospice. And I realized I would do this even if I wasn't being paid for it. And that's how I knew that that was the part of medicine I should stick. But then for the rest of my time, I could go pursue other things that seemed to fit me better. I eventually identified myself as a communicator. I like writing. I like public speaking. I like podcasting. So that's what I started pursuing. And I didn't have the pressures of whether I made money or not there to have an effect on what I decided to do on a daily basis. And that's kind of how I ended up here today.

I mean, such a cool story. I mean, is that really the case? I mean, where you, you know, have been saving, you've been doing things financially responsible, following the model of your parents, and then you read a book, you learned about these things, and then all of a sudden, you just figured out, hey, I'm already where I wanted to be. Is that kind of how it went?

Well, it's funny, as I Got tired of medicine. I had a financial advisor at the time, and I went to my financial advisor, I said, when can I retire? Can I retire early? Because I don't want to do this anymore. And he did something really interesting, and I don't think it was on purpose. He said, well, how much do you want to spend a year? And I had no idea. I saved half of everything. But we didn't pay attention to exactly how much we spent. So I said, 300,000, 350,000 a year. That's what I think I should be spending. So he did all these Monte Carlo simulations. And I had owned real estate, but he didn't feel like real estate should play a role in these, even though that I owned six, seven figures of real estate. And so he came up with a number. He's like, yeah, 10, 15 years, you should be okay. And so then I worked harder. And then I went to my accountant, who happened to be my mother, and I said to my accountant, my mom.

I said, well, how much is enough money?

And she kind of said, $10 million. I didn't really even ask her why. I'm like, oh, $10 million. I don't have $10 million. So I guess I can't retire.

I had all these reasons why I thought I couldn't do it. What I didn't have is the knowledge of how to actually start calculating these things out. And that's what Jim Dally gave me, that's what the white coat investor showed me, is that there is a vocabulary, a set of equations. They're not perfect, but they can act as rules of thumb or guidelines to start helping you decide at least what is financially enough when it comes to having enough money to at least pull back, if not quit work.

I mean, I know that in the book you've talked about wealth in general. You talk about it kind of globally in different ways of wealth. And I love that conversation because, like, at that point when you felt like you were able to retire, at that point, did you feel wealthy? Because that's what I think a lot of people are searching for, that feeling of I am wealthy, I'm set, and this kind of stuff.

It's funny, two problems with getting to.

A number and deciding I'm wealthy. The first problem is if you're like me, you're a high achiever and you're used to making lots of money. So we connect with this identity of the high income earner, and letting go of that can feel very difficult. The other thing is loss aversion. And most of us become victims of loss aversion. We set up a goal, we say we want a net worth of, let's say, a million dollars. And so we fight, we fight, we fight. We get to a million dollars, it's invested, we're feeling good about it, and then we panic at this idea that we could lose it at any time, that the market could go down, we could have a health expense we didn't expect. Whatever it is. I realized that enough is kind of a treadmill. Like, you get there and you think you're there, but then you see a higher peak, maybe more money, maybe you're afraid of losing it, and you start running faster and faster on that treadmill. In the book, I call it overdrive. It doesn't fulfill your needs the way you think it will. And part of the reason is we think that happiness or safety or meaning or purpose or identity, we think they're money problems. And the problem is they're not money problems. So you accumulate more and more wealth and more and more money, and you think you're going to solve those problems. And all you do is become a person who has a lot of money but still has the same life problems, except the problem of not having enough money. So, yeah, you don't have to worry about putting food on the table. Yeah, you can afford that nice vacation once a year. But it doesn't get down to the root of who am I, what's important to me, and what do I want to use all this money, this fuel, this potential energy to actually do for me, for my legacy? How do I want it to manipulate how I use my time?

Because we all know our time on this earth is set. We talk about commoditizing it, like buying and selling and trading, but you can't do any of that. All you have is a set amount of time. You have these time slots in your life. The only thing you can do is kind of decide what to place in those time slots. What type of activities am I going to be spending my time doing? And that's kind of the real power of money, is it gives us a little more control of how we use those time slots. But then we have to decide what's of importance in our life to put there. Like, what type of activities do I want to spend my time doing?

I mean, I think a lot of people are going to hear that and actually resonate with. I mean, again, a lot of things you said resonate with where I was, what I'm still working through right now. And a lot of Things that I do, where's a good place for people to start? Like how do they even get started thinking about, like how to separate themselves from that type of mindset and start working towards that other new type of mindset.

So I think the first mistake we make, and it was certainly the mistake I made that writing this book hopefully will help inform people about, is we make the mistake of thinking of building a financial framework first. Whereas I think we really have to start thinking about three concepts in life and then move to the financial framework. The three concepts are purpose, identity and connections. I think this is the grit, this is the material of what living a good life actually is made up of. And our mistake is we kind of put those things aside because it's easier and focus on things like money because it's low hanging fruit. Like becoming financially independent isn't easy, but.

The steps certainly are right?

I can make more money, I can side hustle, I can invest more aggressively. We can come up with the answers and build a plan to get there. It's a lot easier than saying, I want to live a life of more purpose. I want to be more in touch with my identity. I want to allow those connections in life that are important to thrive. Like that's hard stuff. So I think the first big mistake we make, the way we start is that we say, I'm going to work on my financial framework. I want to build a path towards financial independence. But I'm going to put that aside for a moment momentarily and start really thinking about what feels purposeful, who am I, or what is my identity and how realizing my purpose and identity are going to build better connections in my life. And then once we get a better feeling for those, we can then move over to the financial framework and say, okay, now I'm going to build the financial framework that supports these things and the reason why we need to do that now, as opposed to what I did, which is build the financial framework and then start thinking about those things is you could end up like my dad. You could die at the age of 40 well before you ever actually finish making that financial framework. How sad it would be if you never really had put any time into figuring out what you really wanted in life and what you want your legacy to be. And so that's what I think is the important role. Now there's another question which is usually the next question people ask when I give this answer is, well, how do we discover our purpose, identity and connections? And I'm more than happy to talk about that if you'd like, but that's usually kind of the next question people come to.

Yeah, I mean, let's start touching on that again. I want to go and figure out again how you even got to writing this book. But I think that if people hear this, they're going to want to know at least the first couple of steps. You kind of put the nugget out there right now. I think people want to know, how do you. How do you even start thinking about purpose, identity, and connection?

So let's talk about purpose and identity, because I think once you figure those out, it naturally leads to connections. And let me give you two very simple exercises.

And this is part of why I.

Wrote this book, because it's how being.

A hospice doctor has helped inform me about financial independence and my finances. In hospice, we do something called a life review. So when we get patients and they're admitted to hospice, what we're saying is you have six months or less to live. You have a terminal illness. And one of the first things we do is we help people with their symptoms. Are they short of breath? Are they anxious? We start the right medications, we take them off the wrong medications. But part and parcel of making sure a person is okay or ready to die is not just physical symptoms, but it's helping them come to terms with their lives. So doctors, nurses, social workers, chaplains, all of the people, as part of a hospice, one thing we do do is sit with patients and do what's called a life review. And it's an extensive process, but the idea is that we talk to people about the landmarks in their life. What was important, what did they accomplish? What didn't they accomplish? What do they regret? What are those relationships that were important in their life? Where are they today? What would they need to do to feel like they've lived a good life? Before they die, we ask all these deeper questions. So let's go back to purpose.

All that wisdom and all that amazing stuff we do with these hospice patients. Why don't we do it regularly in younger people who are nowhere near death? So I always say, if you want to think about purpose, imagine that you are lying in your deathbed and you're bemoaning life. And you say, I really regret that I didn't have the energy, courage, or time to like, whatever comes next. It's a pretty good insight into, hmm, those things have meaning and purpose for me. Maybe it's time to start thinking about them now. Another, more simple way that's maybe not as scary as thinking about your own Death is something I call the reverse lottery test. Look at this idea of all of a sudden, you looked at your lottery card today and you just won a hundred million dollars more money than you could ever spend. How would you spend your days? What types of things would you no longer spend your time doing? But more importantly, after you divorce, out, subtract out all those things that you don't want to spend on. You're going to hire a lawn service. You're going to hire a maid because you don't want to clean the house. You're going to hire a driver because you don't like driving around.

Whatever.

You have more money than you know what to do with. What would you spend your time doing? Like, what would be meaningful for you? People say they would rest or relaxation or play video games or travel, and those things are all great. But at some point, after doing those, in the short time, it's very appealing. But in the long term, you kind of have to dig into the grid of existence. Why am I here? And what do I want to do with my time? Those are the kind of things I want to start thinking about. What would you do if money was no longer an option? So those are good purpose exercises when it comes to identity. My favorite identity exercise is to say the sentence I am and then fill in the blank. And you have to do this over and over and over again. So for someone like me, the first time I did this, I said, I am. First thing I said is, I am a doctor. Right? That was the first thing that popped into my mind. And it's true, it had become a big part of my identity, but it was really just what I did for a living. Then I thought further and I said, I am a father, a son, a spouse. So again, these are family relationships. It's part of who I am. But it doesn't really get down to what I feel is meaningful or purposeful in life. The next thing that may happen is you might say, I am. And you might mention an award like, I'm a Plutus Award winner for my Earn and Invest podcast.

So again, awards, achievements, those things help define us, too. But when I did this over and over again, eventually deeper stuff came out. I am a writer, a podcaster, a public speaker. What I settled on is I am a communicator. And that changed my life because for all these years, I had been wearing as a cloak this identity of being a physician. And I didn't have a lot of doctor friends. I hated hanging out in the doctor's lounge when I went to a party and everyone was talking about what they did for a living. I would kind of shy away and not try not to talk about my profession. After years, I said, why am I so ashamed of being a physician? I realized I'm not ashamed of being a physician. It is a wonderful thing to do. I just felt this disconnect from the identity I wore on my outsides and my feelings on the insides, which were much more about being a communicator. When I realized this, when I realized my purpose in life had more to do with communicating and having these big conversations, and I identified with that communicator personality, all of a sudden, I found the connections came naturally. I would go to conferences like you and I met at a fincon, and I would meet people. I'd meet bloggers and writers and podcasters and YouTubers, and I would feel this new sense of connection that I had never felt in 10, 20 years dealing with physicians. It was like all of a sudden, I'm like, okay, I found my people. The reason I had never found my people before is because I didn't know who I was. And once you figure out who you are, you feel like you connect with people who have shared experiences, interests, and joys. And so, yeah, I think if you start with some of those exercises, purpose can change. And it can be everything from wanting to change the world and save the whales to wanting to learn a martial art. It can be selfish or can it can be the for the good of the world. And purpose can change as well as parts of your identity can, too. I'm not saying we have to figure it all out up front, but we have to start being intentional in thinking about these things and then use that as an impetus to start our financial framework so that we can incorporate it.

I mean, all that is just so powerful. I mean, it's funny because I know you as a communicator. If you ask me, I know what you are. It's funny because that's how I met you. I met you when you were writing a blog. We connected over all these things. I mean, tell us a little bit about, like, how the blog got started. Why even talk about financial stuff, right? You actually had a very successful medical blog as well. And so you went from that to financial type information to this podcast that's called Earn and Invest. Just really quickly, how did that all kind of come about?

So I had been writing about medicine since 2005. I had been blogging about medicine. And in a sense, when you really dial it back I was writing about medicine to process. I mean, medicine for most all of us can be wounding. I mean, all of us have a certain amount of Post Traumatic stress disorder. We've gone through some difficult things. And so I always used writing to.

Process, to tell those stories about our.

Lives that helped me make sense of it. Like, I've always felt that a part of happiness is learning how to tell.

Yourself the stories about your life that make it magical. And so I had all these painful, hurtful stories. So for me, starting to write and blog was my attempt to take those difficult stories and turn them into magic, to reimagine and reevaluate what they had been in my life so that I could feel good about moving forward. When I discovered, financially, that I was financially independent, it actually did cause a panic. I did become depressed and disoriented. Who am I now? What am I to do with my life? I started writing about finance because it became a personal online diary of my aspirations. Like, I knew that I needed to change my life. I knew I had the financial wherewithal to do it, but I didn't know how to actually go from knowing to doing. So. I started writing very regularly about everything I could finance because I was processing what it meant to me, and it allowed me to embrace my sense of purpose and identity because I was a communicator and writer. So it was a very comfortable way to do it. But it also held me accountable.

Like I said, I'm financially independent. I said, I'm burned out. I'm going to write about burnout. I'm going to write about financial independence. I'm going to write about side hustling. I'm going to write about semi retiring or retiring. Now that I've written about it, I've made it public, I've put it out in the world. Now I have to act on it. And so that accountability, too, just became an important part of the process. Now, the blog. I wrote almost daily for a good year or two. Eventually I transitioned from the blog to the podcast because I actually liked the medium better. I love public speaking, and I like the medium of talking and interviewing people. But I'd also got to that point where I felt like I understood the Personal Finance 101. I understood how to invest. I understood what a Roth IRA is. I understood about entrepreneurship, all the stuff that's vitally important, but it's also somewhat learnable. Like, you can go out and learn those things. What I was intrigued by were those next level 201 conversations. Now that I'VE figured this stuff out now what? And that's why I kind of continued in personal finance and started the podcast. And asking the now what, not only on the podcast but in life, really turned me back towards medicine and hospice and all of these amazing things I was learning from these people who are going through the process of dying and how they were dealing with that and looking back at their life and deciding what was important. That was exactly what I wanted in my financial life. I'm like, I have some fuel, I've got some money. How do I use that to serve my purposes and make a better life?

How about the idea for the book? When did that come about? I know that you have this podcast, you probably are pretty short on time, and somehow you found the. The time and energy to put it all together in a book. So how did that all come about?

So I had written years ago, I'd written a blog post for my personal finance blog called Investing Tips from a Hospice Doctor. And that post marinated in my brain for quite a while and was read by someone who I am very close.

To, a dear friend, Grant Sabatier, who.

Had written a pretty well known book called Financial Freedom. Grant and I chatted a lot, and at one point he said, look, you write really well. You have this amazing perspective as a.

Hospice doctor, and yet you understand personal finance.

He's like, are you going to write a book? And it's funny, because I'd written medical.

Books before and self published, but I had a mental block on this idea of traditionally publishing. And somewhere deep down inside, I truly wanted to write a book.

I wanted to traditionally publish.

I wanted to take everything I learned.

In finance and medicine and put it all together.

But I don't know if I had the courage. Like, I was afraid. I was afraid of failing. I was making the mistake that I'm.

Telling all my readers not to make.

Which is let fear stop you from doing something that's important and then regret it when you don't have time. And Grant comes in and says, I think you should write this book.

And he helped.

And it's.

The great thing about this is it.

Helps kind of proves my point by.

Discovering my true purpose and identity.

I created a community around me, and one of those community members actually pushed me to do something that was deeply important to me that I was putting off because I didn't have the courage. So his believing in me, his goading me and saying, hey, you should do this and I'll help you. I'll introduce you to my agent. I'LL help you write this manuscript and organize it. And that gave me all I need. And part of my brain clicked and I said, this is going to be the best chance you ever get with the most support. This is life telling you it's time. And so I dug in and it was not an easy process. I mean, there were multiple, multiple rewrites. Grant is a great friend, and so when I sent him my first draft, he looked at it, he said, this is not it.

He literally, he said, there's some good.

Ideas here, but this is not a book. This is not it.

And then I had to have the.

Courage to go back and rewrite and change. And then eventually I had to get an agent. And of course, you know, getting an agent. I got rejected by some people, accepted by some people. And then the agent looked at the manuscript and she said, well, that's not going to work. And then I got a publisher, and then the publisher, well, that's not going to work. So you have to go through that process. But I will tell you, if you can accept that these people are professionals and they do this for a living and they have a good idea of how to get this done. The product I ended up with was years ahead of what I started with. And so it was this great growth process for me to do something difficult that was deeply important to me, that I had finally developed the courage to do.

Well, we're all glad that you went through with that. I mean, I know that people are going to listen to this. They want to check out the book. They want to find out more about you. Earn Invest. I mentioned these things already, but do you mind just sharing where people can kind of connect with you and find these things?

Sure.

First and foremost, taking stock. A hospice doctor's advice on financial independence, building wealth, and living a regret. Free life will be available August 2nd through Ulysses Press. You can pretty much get it anywhere where you get books, especially online. We're talking about Amazon, Barnes and Noble books, A Million Target, all those kind of places. If you want to know more information, there's really two good places to go to learn about me, this book and pretty much everything I do, both medically and personally finance. The easiest is to go to my personal website. It is Jordan Grummet Jo R D A N G R U M E T dot com. You can find links to buying the book there, but you can also find links to my medical blog, which I haven't written for, for years, my personal finance blog, as well as the Earn and Invest podcast. If you Want a shortcut just to get to the podcast? That's earn and invest dot com. Either of those ways are great ways to learn about both. On both places, you'll find links to the book as well as other things.

I mean, it's awesome.

What's next for you?

Now, as someone who's gone through this process, a process that is outlined somewhere in this book, I've thought a lot about what is personal contentment and happiness for me and what I've decided that happiness generally is something that in the book I call the climb. It means finding something that is meaningful and purposeful to you and making incremental.

Headway in it, even if you don't.

Ultimately get to that big goals. So enjoying the process enough that the product of that process, however you define it, it isn't essential that you get there.

You just want to feel like you're continuously making headway.

I love podcasting.

Podcasting is the place where I feel most myself.

Of course, I'd love to get a.

Million downloads a month on the podcast. But above and beyond that, I like doing it so much that, you know.

That product, that endpoint, that goal really.

Doesn'T change whether I enjoy it or not. I feel like I'm constantly making headway by having more and more interesting guests, by having better and better conversations, by creating more content around these important ideas.

And so I think I'm going to do that.

We'll see how this book goes. I did love writing this book. I love how it came out. Maybe I'll write another book and then of course, support my family and my kids and my spouse and all those kind of things. So that's what I see. My future is continuously diving into those things that are purposeful and give me a sense of identity and meaning and spending my time doing that, hopefully for the rest of my life.

Well, this has been so great. I'm sure that people are going to listen to this. You know, hopefully they're able to at least grab one or two things that I think ultimately can change your lives. So this has been really powerful. I want to thank you for your time. Check out the book, everyone. You know, you're doing amazing work and hopefully you just keep it up, you know, don't stop. So thanks so much. Really appreciate it. And let's talk again soon.

Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Enjoy the show. Let me know by dropping a review in the podcast app you're listening to us in. And if you haven't already, make sure to hit subscribe. Are you part of our community, yet join thousands of physicians who are also on this journey to creating their ideal lives through multiple streams of income. You can join us on our Facebook group Passive Income Docs, and you can always learn more at our website passiveincomemd.com thanks again for allowing me to be a part of your journey. See you next time.