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.  

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Key Takeaways

1. 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.”
2. 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.  
3. 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. 
4. 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.
5. 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.  
6. 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.  
7. 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.  
8. 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. 
9. 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.  
10. 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.