Interview with Dr. Jordan Grumet – 386
In this podcast episode, John interviews the author of The Purpose Code, Dr. Jordan Grumet.
As the host of the Earn and Invest Podcast and a physician-turned-author, Dr. Grumet combines insights from his hospice patients with his own experiences to offer fresh perspectives on finding authentic purpose and creating lasting impact. His new book, “The Purpose Code: How to Unlock Meaning, Maximize Happiness, and Leave a Lasting Legacy,” challenges traditional views about purpose while providing practical guidance for those seeking greater fulfillment.
Our Episode Sponsor
We're proud to have a NEW EPISODE SPONSOR: Dr. Armin Feldman's Prelitigation Pre-trial Medical Legal Consulting Coaching Program.
The Medical Legal Consulting Coaching Program will teach you to build your own nonclinical consulting business. Open to physicians in ANY specialty, completing Dr. Armin Feldman’s Program will teach you how to become a valued consultant to attorneys without doing med mal cases or expert witness work.
His program will enable you to use your medical education and experience to generate a great income and a balanced lifestyle. Dr. Feldman will teach you everything, from the business concepts to the medicine involved, to launch your new consulting business during one year of unlimited coaching.
For more information, go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/mlconsulting or arminfeldman.com.
Our Sponsor
We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.
The UT PEMBA is the longest-running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete.
By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career you love. To learn more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.
For Podcast Listeners
- John hosts a short Weekly Q&A Session on any topic related to physician careers and leadership. Each discussion is posted for you to review and apply. Sometimes all it takes is one insight to take you to the next level of your career. Check out the Weekly Q&A and join us for only $5.00 a month.
- If you want access to dozens of lessons dedicated to nonclinical and unconventional clinical careers, you should join the Nonclinical Career Academy MemberClub. For a small monthly fee, you can access the Weekly Q&A Sessions AND as many lessons and courses as you wish. Click the link to check it out, and use the Coupon Code “FIRSTMONTHFIVE” to get your first month for only $5.00.
- The 2024 Nonclinical Summit is over. But you can access all the fantastic lectures from our nationally recognized speakers, including Dr. Dike Drummond, Dr. Nneka Unachukwu, Dr. Gretchen Green, and Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Go to Nonclinical Summit and enter Coupon Code “30-OFF” for a $30 discount.
Redefining Purpose for Modern Life
Dr. Grumet introduces a fresh perspective on purpose by distinguishing between two distinct types: “Big P” and “Little P”. This approach challenges conventional wisdom about how we view and pursue purpose in our lives.
Through his research and personal experience, he explains why pursuing Big P purpose often leads to anxiety and frustration, while Little P purpose offers a more accessible and fulfilling alternative that anyone can implement.
The Path to Lasting Impact
Drawing from compelling real-life stories and evidence-based research, Dr. Grumet demonstrates how small, meaningful actions can create profound and lasting impacts. His insights reveal why some of our most significant contributions may come not from grand ambitions, but from authentic engagement in activities that naturally resonate with us. And that often leads to unexpected but meaningful legacies.
Summary
For those seeking guidance on finding meaning and happiness while building a lasting legacy, “The Purpose Code” is available at Dr. Grumet's Website and major booksellers.
Dr. Grumet's approach offers practical tools for creating a more fulfilling life by reimagining how we think about and pursue purpose. This is particularly relevant for professionals experiencing burnout.
Links for today's episode:
- Dr. Grumet's Website
- Official Trailer for The Purpose Code
- The Purpose Code: How to Unlock Meaning, Maximize Happiness, and Leave a Lasting Legacy (this is an Amazon Affiliate Link*)
- How to Be Purposeful with Your Life and Career – 317
- Why You Must Dare to Discover Your Purpose When You Retire – 258
- How to Develop a Passionate Side Hustle – 098
- Purchase Your All Action Pass Videos and Bonuses from the 2024 Summit (Use Coupon Code 30-OFF)
- The Nonclinical Career Academy
Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton
If you liked today’s episode, please tell your friends about it and SHARE it on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Right click here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.
Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 386
Now Find Happiness and Meaning and The Purpose Code
- Interview with Dr. Jordan Grumet
John: I'm pleased to welcome a fellow physician podcaster to the show today. He's an internist, hospice medical director, and an author. Actually, that's why he's here today for the most part, because he has a book coming out called "The Purpose Code: How to Unlock Meaning, Maximize Happiness, and Leave a Lasting Legacy." So that's coming out right as this is being released, actually. So with that, I'll say hello and welcome, Dr. Jordan Grumet.
Dr. Jordan Grumet: John, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited for this conversation.
John: Yeah. And my listeners may know you if they listen to earn and invest podcast or have seen that, you know, that term out there, then they're already familiar with you. But I think probably there's many people that haven't either met you, seen you, or even read your previous book. So we're going to get into it right now. But let's start by you telling me and the audience a little bit about your medical training and experience and kind of what you're doing right now, everything a little smattering of what you do.
Dr. Jordan Grumet: So basically, at the age of seven, my father was 40 and he was an oncologist, and he died suddenly from a brain aneurysm, was actually rounding at the hospital. And right then and there, I decided I want to be a doctor. I think part of it was that I think I could cosmically fix this wrong that happened, this trauma that I went through, by walking in his shoes and fulfilling his role. And that's exactly what I did. I went to college and medical school with the certainty that was my sense of purpose, that was my identity, that was what I was going to do. Did my training in internal medicine, and basically after a few years of practicing, really started to burn out. I realized that maybe this was my father's sense of purpose and not mine. There were things I loved about medicine, but the paperwork and the feeling like sometimes you weren't making a difference and the long hours started to grate on me. And I started looking for a way out. And strangely enough, at the time I was writing a medical blog, and this guy named Jim Dally wrote me, and he said, "I just came out with this book called 'The White Co-Investor.' Would you review it for your medical blog?" I reviewed it. I learned about financial independence. I realized that my parents had given me great modeling when it came to money and probably was already financially independent. I was very emphatically joyful for about a moment because I could leave medicine, the thing that was burning me out, until I realized that I had no idea who I was or what I wanted to do.
And that basically started a long road where I got rid of everything in medicine I didn't like except hospice care. I was doing it almost as a side hustle, and I loved it. So I kept that and started doing it 10 to 15 hours a week. But because I was only doing that 10 to 15 hours a week, I had all sorts of time and I started blogging about personal finance because that's what got me there. Eventually it turned into a podcast. And what was really interesting is I'd have on my podcast all these authors, entrepreneurs, people who are making lots of money. But when I asked them about what enough look like, or why they were doing what they were doing, a lot of them couldn't answer. And I was finding the answers from my dying hospice patients who could talk about regret and what was really important to them. So I wrote my first book called "Taking Stock," about what the dying could teach us about money and life. And one of the big questions, or one of the big premises of that book was that we should put purpose before we build the financial framework. I went out to market this book and I got all sorts of angry people saying, "You keep on saying find your purpose and I can't find it. I've been looking forever. It's pissing me off. Please stop saying this." So I did a deep dive into purpose and I eventually wrote the book, "The Purpose Code," to answer all those naysayers who are having what I call purpose anxiety, this idea that they can't figure out their purpose and they don't know what to do. I found a lot of us people are in that exact place and I wanted to answer that question: How do you "find your purpose?"
John: Well, yeah, I mean, that is a very common conundrum for some of us. I mean, you talk about mission or the meaning of life, purpose, sometimes what's... yeah, I don't know. There's all kinds of terms people use and they're like, "I just, it seems like it's something that should just flow from my heart, it should just be obvious. Why should I have to look for it? It doesn't come to me naturally." So I think this is going to be really good, a good book. So we're going to dig into that a bit, and the fact that you have this history in hospice is awesome too. I mean, like you said, where else to really learn about, but at the end of life, you know, the purpose and meaning of life, which you address everything in the book, 'cause I've had access to it for a little while. So I appreciate that. So was it just obvious after the first book? When did this decision to actually write a second book and to focus on this area, how did that come about?
Dr. Jordan Grumet: Well, after having people come up to me angry at the end of conferences and public speeches about this idea that they were angry that I was telling them to find their purpose, I did a deep dive and I found two things that seem to contradict each other. The first was there are tons of studies about purpose in life and it's been shown to increase health, longevity, and happiness, like really clear studies, tons of them. But then I found other studies that show that up to 91% of people at some point in their life have what's called purpose anxiety. This idea of purpose makes them frustrated, angry, depressed. And so the question is, how can purpose be the most important thing, but also cause us so much unhappiness? And the answer is that we get purpose wrong. We usually think of it as one thing. It's probably two things. And one of those things is probably much more associated with that anxiety, and the other is probably more associated with the health, happiness, and longevity. But the problem is most people go after that more toxic version of purpose because society has told us that that's what we should do. I call it big P purpose. It's big, audacious, goal-oriented purpose. And from the day we're born, we are sold this idea that that's what we're supposed to base our life on. And so it leaves a lot of people feeling frustrated when they can't find that one thing that's supposed to make everything better.
John: So distinguish the Big P and the little P, since you mentioned that. I mean, so how should we go about searching for our purpose and distinguish those two things?
Dr. Jordan Grumet: So big P purpose is that toxic purpose and it's big and audacious. And if we think about America, it's this idea of you can think it, you can build it. And so often this kind of purpose is really huge. Like "I'm gonna become a billionaire, I'm gonna cure cancer, or I'm gonna have an eight-figure business." The problem with that kind of purpose is you got to be the right person at the right time saying the right things with the right genetics and a whole lot of luck. So big audacious purpose or big P purpose is easy to fail. It's all or nothing. You either succeed or you fail. And it's usually winner takes all. Let's think about "I want to be president." Well, only one person can be president. So there's going to be a bunch of losers and one winner. Because of that, Big P-purpose is often easy to fail and it's very scarcity mindset oriented. Only a few people are going to get there. Let's contrast that to little P-purpose. Little P-purpose is not as much worried about goals as it is the process. So it's this idea of find things we love doing and spend our time doing those things. So instead of being scarce, those are really abundant. Think about all the millions of things you could enjoy doing. Instead of being all or nothing, it's all or all and it's almost impossible to fail. And so that's the difference. Big P purpose, I think really brings out a lot of anxiety. Little P purpose, the kind that actually most people don't strive for, is a lot more reassuring and nurturing and is much more tangible as opposed to big P purpose, which is very ephemeral and pie in the sky. And I wanna do these crazy things, but I'm not sure how to get there.
John: But you know, you give several examples in the book and I wonder if you could talk about the one that I really remember. It was going way back, baseball cards, maybe just a little review of that story because it was pretty touching in a way.
Dr. Jordan Grumet: So there was a gentleman who changed my world and he did it without even trying. And he did it with little P purpose. And this is the importance of this story is, A, it helps us define what little P purpose is, but it also shows the impact. And so I get this argument all the time. The reason I go after big audacious goals is I want more impact and legacy. And that's fine if you happen to succeed in your big audacious purpose, which most people don't. But I think little p-purpose actually can be more impactful. And the guy who taught me this was Roman. He owned an antique store. He was a baseball player, actually had dreams of becoming a baseball player. His version of big p-purpose was becoming a baseball player, but he blew out his knee. And so after high school, he called it quits. Instead of going to college, he decided to run his father's antique shop. And he liked refinishing furniture. And so he would get various pieces of furniture, he'd refinish them and sell them. And one day a gentleman brings in an armoire and he says, "Okay, I can fix this and sell it." So he buys it and he's in the middle of refinishing it, opens one of the drawers, and there's a stack of baseball cards there. So he says, "Okay," he calls the guy back. He says, "You know what? I have these baseball cards. You forgot them. Do you want them back?" The guy says, "No, keep them, do with them what you want." Roman had no idea what to do with these things. So he just put them on the counter and left them there. A few days later, a woman had come in with her teenage son and you know how snarky teenagers are. They pretend they don't care, but when he came up to the counter and saw these baseball cards, he all of a sudden got interested. He flipped through them and he looked up at Roman and said, "How much for these cards?" Roman had no idea. For him, it was just on the top. It didn't matter. So Roman says "10 bucks" and the kid says, "Fine," takes out 10 bucks, gives it to him. Then he spreads the cards out on the table and points out three or four of them. And he said, "These three are worth a hundred dollars on their own." Now, Roman was enthralled. He could have been pissed, but he wasn't. He was actually excited. There was something about this that lit him up and he knew all of a sudden that this was something he wanted to be engaged in.
Maybe it was the fact that he played baseball himself. Maybe it was memories of having the cards himself and putting them in the spokes of his bike, or maybe it was going to Wrigley Field with his dad and sitting in the bleachers. He can't remember exactly what it was, but this lit him up. But here's the thing: he could have just given up there, or he could have just waited for something to happen to him, but Roman realized that you don't find purpose - you kind of build and create it. So he had to take action. So he hired the snarky teenager right there to help him. He started researching baseball cards, and he started buying them, selling them in his antique store. And believe it or not, within a few years he was selling more baseball cards than he was antiques.
Here's the interesting thing: Roman did this because it just lit him up. It wasn't that he wanted a better business plan. He never thought it was going to make that much money. But what he also didn't foresee was there was a group of kids, a community, who found themselves surrounding his antique store and these baseball cards. I was one of these kids. And I had a learning disability, and my dad just died, and I had no friends. I was kind of one of those nerdy kids. And he built a community of these nerdy, geeky kids who had nowhere else to go but loved baseball cards. And this meant everything to me.
And I think back... As I got older, as many of the kids who went to that baseball card shop, as they got older, we carried with us a sense of community and belonging and even a new sense of self-confidence. Roman himself actually got cancer and died a few years later. His antique shop closed. But 30 years later, I'm still talking about him, which is interesting because he never set out to change my life. He never set out to fix all these kids. He just... performed his sense of little P purpose. He just got involved in something he loved.
Let's compare that to Mickey Mantle. Mickey Mantle was notably one of the best baseball players to ever play. He was one of the baseball cards that I sought after when I was a little kid. I always wanted his baseball card. If I instead had decided that I wanted, or if Roman instead had decided that either of us wanted to be Mickey Mantle as opposed to enjoy the little P purpose of baseball cards, there are many reasons it would have never happened. Me? I didn't have the genetics, the skill, the talent. I didn't have any mentors to teach it to me. Him? His knee had blown out. He physically just couldn't do it anymore. But if that had been our version of purpose, this big audacious purpose, we probably both would have failed and been unhappy and we wouldn't have accomplished anything. We would have had what I call a purpose anxiety. But instead, Roman's Little P purpose built a community, and we're all better for it. It still affects my life today, all these years after he's gone. And so Little P Purpose not only lights us up, but it changes the world. And I think if impact and legacy is what you're looking for, you're a lot more likely to get there with Little P Purpose than Big P Purpose.
John: Let me ask you more about the purpose, this whole thing. Should we try to imagine where if we are working, and you know, we have to put money on the table and we can make a lot in job A, maybe a little less than job B, but job B is maybe a little closer to my purpose. What are your thoughts about going for the... the P instead of the money?
Dr. Jordan Grumet: And I actually get this criticism all the time. People are like, "Well, you are a doctor. You made all sorts of money, realize you're financially independent. Of course you can talk about purpose." That's kind of, they use the other P word, privilege. And here's what I say to that. And it's a complicated answer, but I think it's a really important one. If we look at our lives, we all know this, we're doctors, right? You're born one day and you die hopefully many years later, and you get a set amount of time. You don't know how much time that's gonna be. And yeah, maybe you're exercising, you wear your seatbelt, you do some things to help it along and maybe get a little more time, but mostly it's set. And here's the problem: Time passes and we can't control it. We can't buy it, we can't sell it, we can't exchange it. The only thing you can really do is control what activities you're involved in as time passes. That's it.
Winning the game is if you look at life as a series of time slots. You want to fill as many of those time slots with things you love or little p-purpose and get rid of as many things that you loathe as possible. So that's what we want to do from the time we're a young adult till we die - we want to continuously look at our schedule and improve those numbers. So this is where the conversation about work comes in. We look at money as a very important tool in living a life of purpose. And we think, well, if we have lots of money, that's privilege, and then we can do whatever we want. But if we don't have a lot of money, we're kind of lost.
Well, I'd like to tell you, we have a lot more tools than just money. We have our youth, our energy, our communities, our relationships, our joys. So we have a bunch of tools, and then we also have some levers. We can use the joy of addition, which means we add in purposeful activities to our life. We can use the art of subtraction, which means we just get rid of things we loathe. And then we can use substitution, which means we can change one thing for the other.
So here's the thing: If you really want to win the game and make your calendar better every year for the rest of your life, where you're doing more things you love, unless you loathe, you got to use those tools and those levers to make a better life. And for each person, that's going to be a little bit different. And so if you're young at the beginning of your career and you have a job and you don't love it, but it makes lots of money, you've got a different tool, maybe not a huge amount of money yet, but you've got the tool of your energy and your free time. Maybe you're not married. Maybe you don't have a mortgage. So for you, you can work 60 hours a week and probably still spend three or four hours on a Sunday doing something purposeful.
So you've used the joy of addition to add in purpose to your life. So already you're winning the game because you're adding more purpose to your life. You might monetize that, turn it into a side hustle, and then not only are you doing three or four more hours of purposeful activity a day, but maybe you have a little more economic margin to cut back on that job you don't love. And so what we really want to do is use these tools and these levers, and that's going to look different at different times in our lives and different times of our careers. And depending on how much family we have and what our economic needs are.
So there's not a simple answer of, do I go with passion and purpose and not get the high paying job or vice versa? The answer is we want to continuously use our levers and tools to bring in more purpose and get rid of more things we loathe. But we have to do that in such a way that we can financially manage. And I don't think it's a difficult equation, but we've got to be really thoughtful about how we do it. And so maybe I have a job I don't love and I can't add in more purpose and I can't subtract out things I don't like, but maybe I can work for a different boss at the same company. Maybe it's the boss that's making me loathe this. Maybe I can do the same job but for a new company. This is all substitution. So I'm just trying to bring out ways we can use these tools and levers to make the calculus better. But there's not a simple answer. It really depends on you and what your situation is.
John: Well, you know, some of the guests I've had before, and when I hear from my listeners, you know, they're physicians, sometimes they're burned out and they feel like it's all or none. And what a lot of us talk about on this end is, well, you don't necessarily hate healthcare. You hate whatever you happen to be doing right now. So why not volunteer for something on a board or become a part-time physician advisor? Only takes a couple hours a day if that. You might like it, you know, and look at these other opportunities instead of saying, "Well, I'm just going to drop it all and just go become a, I don't know, a mutual fund investor or something."
Dr. Jordan Grumet: The mistake that most people make is they don't do enough thinking about little p-purpose. So they realize they're burning out and they realize that work's overwhelming and they realize it's the only way they think they can make money. But because they haven't invested at all in little p-purpose, they don't even know what to strive for. And so for instance, look at me: I was a practicing internal medicine physician and I was exhausted, but I didn't go into hospice immediately. When I eventually realized I liked hospice and I would do it even if someone wasn't paying me for it, I was lucky enough to have this tool of money such that I could get rid of everything else and keep it. But what if I understood purpose a little better at the beginning of my career? Even though I didn't have much money, I could have gone into hospice in the first place. And that could have been a version of Little P-Purpose for me. And yes, I would have made less money, but I don't think I would have burned out my career so fast. And so I would have had much longer career longevity and I probably would have spent more of my time doing things that I love.
So this calculus would have been much better for me if I just went into hospice in the first place. And so most of us haven't done enough deep thinking about what purpose looks like in their life. And so we can't improve. Who knows? I love writing. A lot of medical practices actually have a blog or create content and will pay doctors to do some of those things. I could have brought that into my work life even if I didn't love my job itself. There's a lot of tools and levers. We just got to be real thoughtful about them and we've got to have a better understanding of what purpose looks like in our life.
John: Well, I want to talk more directly about the book because we're touching on the big P, the little P and some other things. So maybe give us a little... a glimpse of what else is in the book. What kind of things do you talk about in the book? What kind of problems do you solve in the book? And then just tell us where we can get the book at that point.
Dr. Jordan Grumet: So really what the book is, is hopefully the book is a journey to happiness. And so we start with purpose because I think people get purpose wrong. And I think when we redefine it as little P purpose and big P purpose, it goes from something very ephemeral and difficult to reach to something very tangible and easy. And so that solves the purpose problem. But happiness is not only purpose, I actually say it's meaning and purpose. So in the book we talk about the difference between meaning and purpose and how to build both of them in your life so you ultimately get to happiness. And a lot of the book is spent talking about how little p-purpose, again, leads to legacy and impact. A lot of people like big audacious purpose because they think it's going to change the world and they're going to make their mark. And I spend a lot of time, especially at the end of the book, talking about how little p-purpose actually makes more of a mark. And so that's kind of what the book talks about. And if you're interested in getting it, you can of course get it anywhere books are sold, places like Amazon, or you can go to my website, JordanGrumet.com, J-O-R-D-A-N-G-R-U-M-M-E-T.com where you can get the book, my other book, Taking Stock, as well as see all the places I create content like the Earn and Invest podcast and the Purpose Code Substack.
John: All right. And the publisher is a traditional publisher, is that right?
Dr. Jordan Grumet: Correct. So, Hairman House actually is an imprint of Pan Macmillan. So, it is a traditionally published book, which a lot of people like to self-publish, but I really enjoy the process of working with the editors and the creators and the designers and coming out with a beautiful product and that is always my goal whenever I write something.
John: Excellent. Yeah, because we've had authors out here and we go from everything from self-publishing to hybrid to... traditional and it's just interesting to see what people choose just based on, you know, their preferences and their priorities. So that's awesome. You know, I usually ask like what advice you would have for someone who's in the hospital setting or just in the clinic, you know, a lot of family physicians no longer enter the hospital like myself. And I mean, maybe this is part of the solution to burnout is, is to focus on the P. So tell us more about how they could think about that.
Dr. Jordan Grumet: Yeah. I really believe burnout is pretty much people who are searching for big audacious purpose and either getting there and finding it doesn't fulfill them, or not getting there and feeling frustrated like they're failing. And the problem with big audacious purpose is it's so goal-oriented that a lot of times we spend time doing things we really don't like in service of this goal that we may or may not reach, but doesn't really gratify us for that long. And so I do very much believe little P purpose is part of the antidote to burnout. I think when we start doing things we love the process of doing, regardless of the outcome, it adds to our life. So if you're a busy physician, and again, you're doing it on nights or weekends, you're adding in some gratifying time to your life. But I think as you do that and you connect with other people and you build communities, you can also find ways to build that into your career. Sometimes that looks like changing your career as a physician where you go to a different specialty or focus on one thing that you were doing before, but it becomes your specialty. Other times it means leaving medicine and pursuing completely other types of work. There's no right or wrong. The question is, what could you love the process of doing and how to build more of that into your life? And if we start that process, everyone's going to end up somewhere different. Some people are going to continue that job they don't love, but build purpose in other ways. Some people are going to find that they can move out of that job they don't love, or some people will turn the job they don't love into a job they do love. All of that's possible, but none of it happens until you A, understand better what lights you up - what's your little P purpose. And then B, you got to take action.
John: Sounds like awesome advice to me. I'm going to just record that last two minutes and replay it every time and my podcast. But no, I appreciate you taking the time to tell us about this. Is there anything we missed that we need to know before I let you go? We've got the place to be at the book, website.
Dr. Jordan Grumet: My simple message is just to remind everyone that purpose is easy and it's straightforward. It's not nearly complicated as the world has made it out to be. It's abundant. You can, I don't want to say find, because you don't find your purpose. You build and create it. But you can start creating purpose in your life. It's just some basic simple actions.
John: All right. Well, with that, Jordan, I will say goodbye and hopefully we can catch up with you maybe when you write your next book.
Dr. Jordan Grumet: Thank you so much for having me.
John: My pleasure, bye-bye.
Sign up to receive email reminders, news, and free stuff every week!
Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you reminders each podcast episode, notices about nonclinical jobs, information about free and paid courses, and other curated information just for you.
Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 386
Now Find Happiness and Meaning and The Purpose Code
- Interview with Dr. Jordan Grumet
John: I'm pleased to welcome a fellow physician podcaster to the show today. He's an internist, hospice medical director, and an author. Actually, that's why he's here today for the most part, because he has a book coming out called "The Purpose Code: How to Unlock Meaning, Maximize Happiness, and Leave a Lasting Legacy." So that's coming out right as this is being released, actually. So with that, I'll say hello and welcome, Dr. Jordan Grumet.
Dr. Jordan Grumet: John, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited for this conversation.
John: Yeah. And my listeners may know you if they listen to earn and invest podcast or have seen that, you know, that term out there, then they're already familiar with you. But I think probably there's many people that haven't either met you, seen you, or even read your previous book. So we're going to get into it right now. But let's start by you telling me and the audience a little bit about your medical training and experience and kind of what you're doing right now, everything a little smattering of what you do.
Dr. Jordan Grumet: So basically, at the age of seven, my father was 40 and he was an oncologist, and he died suddenly from a brain aneurysm, was actually rounding at the hospital. And right then and there, I decided I want to be a doctor. I think part of it was that I think I could cosmically fix this wrong that happened, this trauma that I went through, by walking in his shoes and fulfilling his role. And that's exactly what I did. I went to college and medical school with the certainty that was my sense of purpose, that was my identity, that was what I was going to do. Did my training in internal medicine, and basically after a few years of practicing, really started to burn out. I realized that maybe this was my father's sense of purpose and not mine. There were things I loved about medicine, but the paperwork and the feeling like sometimes you weren't making a difference and the long hours started to grate on me. And I started looking for a way out. And strangely enough, at the time I was writing a medical blog, and this guy named Jim Dally wrote me, and he said, "I just came out with this book called 'The White Co-Investor.' Would you review it for your medical blog?" I reviewed it. I learned about financial independence. I realized that my parents had given me great modeling when it came to money and probably was already financially independent. I was very emphatically joyful for about a moment because I could leave medicine, the thing that was burning me out, until I realized that I had no idea who I was or what I wanted to do.
And that basically started a long road where I got rid of everything in medicine I didn't like except hospice care. I was doing it almost as a side hustle, and I loved it. So I kept that and started doing it 10 to 15 hours a week. But because I was only doing that 10 to 15 hours a week, I had all sorts of time and I started blogging about personal finance because that's what got me there. Eventually it turned into a podcast. And what was really interesting is I'd have on my podcast all these authors, entrepreneurs, people who are making lots of money. But when I asked them about what enough look like, or why they were doing what they were doing, a lot of them couldn't answer. And I was finding the answers from my dying hospice patients who could talk about regret and what was really important to them. So I wrote my first book called "Taking Stock," about what the dying could teach us about money and life. And one of the big questions, or one of the big premises of that book was that we should put purpose before we build the financial framework. I went out to market this book and I got all sorts of angry people saying, "You keep on saying find your purpose and I can't find it. I've been looking forever. It's pissing me off. Please stop saying this." So I did a deep dive into purpose and I eventually wrote the book, "The Purpose Code," to answer all those naysayers who are having what I call purpose anxiety, this idea that they can't figure out their purpose and they don't know what to do. I found a lot of us people are in that exact place and I wanted to answer that question: How do you "find your purpose?"
John: Well, yeah, I mean, that is a very common conundrum for some of us. I mean, you talk about mission or the meaning of life, purpose, sometimes what's... yeah, I don't know. There's all kinds of terms people use and they're like, "I just, it seems like it's something that should just flow from my heart, it should just be obvious. Why should I have to look for it? It doesn't come to me naturally." So I think this is going to be really good, a good book. So we're going to dig into that a bit, and the fact that you have this history in hospice is awesome too. I mean, like you said, where else to really learn about, but at the end of life, you know, the purpose and meaning of life, which you address everything in the book, 'cause I've had access to it for a little while. So I appreciate that. So was it just obvious after the first book? When did this decision to actually write a second book and to focus on this area, how did that come about?
Dr. Jordan Grumet: Well, after having people come up to me angry at the end of conferences and public speeches about this idea that they were angry that I was telling them to find their purpose, I did a deep dive and I found two things that seem to contradict each other. The first was there are tons of studies about purpose in life and it's been shown to increase health, longevity, and happiness, like really clear studies, tons of them. But then I found other studies that show that up to 91% of people at some point in their life have what's called purpose anxiety. This idea of purpose makes them frustrated, angry, depressed. And so the question is, how can purpose be the most important thing, but also cause us so much unhappiness? And the answer is that we get purpose wrong. We usually think of it as one thing. It's probably two things. And one of those things is probably much more associated with that anxiety, and the other is probably more associated with the health, happiness, and longevity. But the problem is most people go after that more toxic version of purpose because society has told us that that's what we should do. I call it big P purpose. It's big, audacious, goal-oriented purpose. And from the day we're born, we are sold this idea that that's what we're supposed to base our life on. And so it leaves a lot of people feeling frustrated when they can't find that one thing that's supposed to make everything better.
John: So distinguish the Big P and the little P, since you mentioned that. I mean, so how should we go about searching for our purpose and distinguish those two things?
Dr. Jordan Grumet: So big P purpose is that toxic purpose and it's big and audacious. And if we think about America, it's this idea of you can think it, you can build it. And so often this kind of purpose is really huge. Like "I'm gonna become a billionaire, I'm gonna cure cancer, or I'm gonna have an eight-figure business." The problem with that kind of purpose is you got to be the right person at the right time saying the right things with the right genetics and a whole lot of luck. So big audacious purpose or big P purpose is easy to fail. It's all or nothing. You either succeed or you fail. And it's usually winner takes all. Let's think about "I want to be president." Well, only one person can be president. So there's going to be a bunch of losers and one winner. Because of that, Big P-purpose is often easy to fail and it's very scarcity mindset oriented. Only a few people are going to get there. Let's contrast that to little P-purpose. Little P-purpose is not as much worried about goals as it is the process. So it's this idea of find things we love doing and spend our time doing those things. So instead of being scarce, those are really abundant. Think about all the millions of things you could enjoy doing. Instead of being all or nothing, it's all or all and it's almost impossible to fail. And so that's the difference. Big P purpose, I think really brings out a lot of anxiety. Little P purpose, the kind that actually most people don't strive for, is a lot more reassuring and nurturing and is much more tangible as opposed to big P purpose, which is very ephemeral and pie in the sky. And I wanna do these crazy things, but I'm not sure how to get there.
John: But you know, you give several examples in the book and I wonder if you could talk about the one that I really remember. It was going way back, baseball cards, maybe just a little review of that story because it was pretty touching in a way.
Dr. Jordan Grumet: So there was a gentleman who changed my world and he did it without even trying. And he did it with little P purpose. And this is the importance of this story is, A, it helps us define what little P purpose is, but it also shows the impact. And so I get this argument all the time. The reason I go after big audacious goals is I want more impact and legacy. And that's fine if you happen to succeed in your big audacious purpose, which most people don't. But I think little p-purpose actually can be more impactful. And the guy who taught me this was Roman. He owned an antique store. He was a baseball player, actually had dreams of becoming a baseball player. His version of big p-purpose was becoming a baseball player, but he blew out his knee. And so after high school, he called it quits. Instead of going to college, he decided to run his father's antique shop. And he liked refinishing furniture. And so he would get various pieces of furniture, he'd refinish them and sell them. And one day a gentleman brings in an armoire and he says, "Okay, I can fix this and sell it." So he buys it and he's in the middle of refinishing it, opens one of the drawers, and there's a stack of baseball cards there. So he says, "Okay," he calls the guy back. He says, "You know what? I have these baseball cards. You forgot them. Do you want them back?" The guy says, "No, keep them, do with them what you want." Roman had no idea what to do with these things. So he just put them on the counter and left them there. A few days later, a woman had come in with her teenage son and you know how snarky teenagers are. They pretend they don't care, but when he came up to the counter and saw these baseball cards, he all of a sudden got interested. He flipped through them and he looked up at Roman and said, "How much for these cards?" Roman had no idea. For him, it was just on the top. It didn't matter. So Roman says "10 bucks" and the kid says, "Fine," takes out 10 bucks, gives it to him. Then he spreads the cards out on the table and points out three or four of them. And he said, "These three are worth a hundred dollars on their own." Now, Roman was enthralled. He could have been pissed, but he wasn't. He was actually excited. There was something about this that lit him up and he knew all of a sudden that this was something he wanted to be engaged in.
Maybe it was the fact that he played baseball himself. Maybe it was memories of having the cards himself and putting them in the spokes of his bike, or maybe it was going to Wrigley Field with his dad and sitting in the bleachers. He can't remember exactly what it was, but this lit him up. But here's the thing: he could have just given up there, or he could have just waited for something to happen to him, but Roman realized that you don't find purpose - you kind of build and create it. So he had to take action. So he hired the snarky teenager right there to help him. He started researching baseball cards, and he started buying them, selling them in his antique store. And believe it or not, within a few years he was selling more baseball cards than he was antiques.
Here's the interesting thing: Roman did this because it just lit him up. It wasn't that he wanted a better business plan. He never thought it was going to make that much money. But what he also didn't foresee was there was a group of kids, a community, who found themselves surrounding his antique store and these baseball cards. I was one of these kids. And I had a learning disability, and my dad just died, and I had no friends. I was kind of one of those nerdy kids. And he built a community of these nerdy, geeky kids who had nowhere else to go but loved baseball cards. And this meant everything to me.
And I think back... As I got older, as many of the kids who went to that baseball card shop, as they got older, we carried with us a sense of community and belonging and even a new sense of self-confidence. Roman himself actually got cancer and died a few years later. His antique shop closed. But 30 years later, I'm still talking about him, which is interesting because he never set out to change my life. He never set out to fix all these kids. He just... performed his sense of little P purpose. He just got involved in something he loved.
Let's compare that to Mickey Mantle. Mickey Mantle was notably one of the best baseball players to ever play. He was one of the baseball cards that I sought after when I was a little kid. I always wanted his baseball card. If I instead had decided that I wanted, or if Roman instead had decided that either of us wanted to be Mickey Mantle as opposed to enjoy the little P purpose of baseball cards, there are many reasons it would have never happened. Me? I didn't have the genetics, the skill, the talent. I didn't have any mentors to teach it to me. Him? His knee had blown out. He physically just couldn't do it anymore. But if that had been our version of purpose, this big audacious purpose, we probably both would have failed and been unhappy and we wouldn't have accomplished anything. We would have had what I call a purpose anxiety. But instead, Roman's Little P purpose built a community, and we're all better for it. It still affects my life today, all these years after he's gone. And so Little P Purpose not only lights us up, but it changes the world. And I think if impact and legacy is what you're looking for, you're a lot more likely to get there with Little P Purpose than Big P Purpose.
John: Let me ask you more about the purpose, this whole thing. Should we try to imagine where if we are working, and you know, we have to put money on the table and we can make a lot in job A, maybe a little less than job B, but job B is maybe a little closer to my purpose. What are your thoughts about going for the... the P instead of the money?
Dr. Jordan Grumet: And I actually get this criticism all the time. People are like, "Well, you are a doctor. You made all sorts of money, realize you're financially independent. Of course you can talk about purpose." That's kind of, they use the other P word, privilege. And here's what I say to that. And it's a complicated answer, but I think it's a really important one. If we look at our lives, we all know this, we're doctors, right? You're born one day and you die hopefully many years later, and you get a set amount of time. You don't know how much time that's gonna be. And yeah, maybe you're exercising, you wear your seatbelt, you do some things to help it along and maybe get a little more time, but mostly it's set. And here's the problem: Time passes and we can't control it. We can't buy it, we can't sell it, we can't exchange it. The only thing you can really do is control what activities you're involved in as time passes. That's it.
Winning the game is if you look at life as a series of time slots. You want to fill as many of those time slots with things you love or little p-purpose and get rid of as many things that you loathe as possible. So that's what we want to do from the time we're a young adult till we die - we want to continuously look at our schedule and improve those numbers. So this is where the conversation about work comes in. We look at money as a very important tool in living a life of purpose. And we think, well, if we have lots of money, that's privilege, and then we can do whatever we want. But if we don't have a lot of money, we're kind of lost.
Well, I'd like to tell you, we have a lot more tools than just money. We have our youth, our energy, our communities, our relationships, our joys. So we have a bunch of tools, and then we also have some levers. We can use the joy of addition, which means we add in purposeful activities to our life. We can use the art of subtraction, which means we just get rid of things we loathe. And then we can use substitution, which means we can change one thing for the other.
So here's the thing: If you really want to win the game and make your calendar better every year for the rest of your life, where you're doing more things you love, unless you loathe, you got to use those tools and those levers to make a better life. And for each person, that's going to be a little bit different. And so if you're young at the beginning of your career and you have a job and you don't love it, but it makes lots of money, you've got a different tool, maybe not a huge amount of money yet, but you've got the tool of your energy and your free time. Maybe you're not married. Maybe you don't have a mortgage. So for you, you can work 60 hours a week and probably still spend three or four hours on a Sunday doing something purposeful.
So you've used the joy of addition to add in purpose to your life. So already you're winning the game because you're adding more purpose to your life. You might monetize that, turn it into a side hustle, and then not only are you doing three or four more hours of purposeful activity a day, but maybe you have a little more economic margin to cut back on that job you don't love. And so what we really want to do is use these tools and these levers, and that's going to look different at different times in our lives and different times of our careers. And depending on how much family we have and what our economic needs are.
So there's not a simple answer of, do I go with passion and purpose and not get the high paying job or vice versa? The answer is we want to continuously use our levers and tools to bring in more purpose and get rid of more things we loathe. But we have to do that in such a way that we can financially manage. And I don't think it's a difficult equation, but we've got to be really thoughtful about how we do it. And so maybe I have a job I don't love and I can't add in more purpose and I can't subtract out things I don't like, but maybe I can work for a different boss at the same company. Maybe it's the boss that's making me loathe this. Maybe I can do the same job but for a new company. This is all substitution. So I'm just trying to bring out ways we can use these tools and levers to make the calculus better. But there's not a simple answer. It really depends on you and what your situation is.
John: Well, you know, some of the guests I've had before, and when I hear from my listeners, you know, they're physicians, sometimes they're burned out and they feel like it's all or none. And what a lot of us talk about on this end is, well, you don't necessarily hate healthcare. You hate whatever you happen to be doing right now. So why not volunteer for something on a board or become a part-time physician advisor? Only takes a couple hours a day if that. You might like it, you know, and look at these other opportunities instead of saying, "Well, I'm just going to drop it all and just go become a, I don't know, a mutual fund investor or something."
Dr. Jordan Grumet: The mistake that most people make is they don't do enough thinking about little p-purpose. So they realize they're burning out and they realize that work's overwhelming and they realize it's the only way they think they can make money. But because they haven't invested at all in little p-purpose, they don't even know what to strive for. And so for instance, look at me: I was a practicing internal medicine physician and I was exhausted, but I didn't go into hospice immediately. When I eventually realized I liked hospice and I would do it even if someone wasn't paying me for it, I was lucky enough to have this tool of money such that I could get rid of everything else and keep it. But what if I understood purpose a little better at the beginning of my career? Even though I didn't have much money, I could have gone into hospice in the first place. And that could have been a version of Little P-Purpose for me. And yes, I would have made less money, but I don't think I would have burned out my career so fast. And so I would have had much longer career longevity and I probably would have spent more of my time doing things that I love.
So this calculus would have been much better for me if I just went into hospice in the first place. And so most of us haven't done enough deep thinking about what purpose looks like in their life. And so we can't improve. Who knows? I love writing. A lot of medical practices actually have a blog or create content and will pay doctors to do some of those things. I could have brought that into my work life even if I didn't love my job itself. There's a lot of tools and levers. We just got to be real thoughtful about them and we've got to have a better understanding of what purpose looks like in our life.
John: Well, I want to talk more directly about the book because we're touching on the big P, the little P and some other things. So maybe give us a little... a glimpse of what else is in the book. What kind of things do you talk about in the book? What kind of problems do you solve in the book? And then just tell us where we can get the book at that point.
Dr. Jordan Grumet: So really what the book is, is hopefully the book is a journey to happiness. And so we start with purpose because I think people get purpose wrong. And I think when we redefine it as little P purpose and big P purpose, it goes from something very ephemeral and difficult to reach to something very tangible and easy. And so that solves the purpose problem. But happiness is not only purpose, I actually say it's meaning and purpose. So in the book we talk about the difference between meaning and purpose and how to build both of them in your life so you ultimately get to happiness. And a lot of the book is spent talking about how little p-purpose, again, leads to legacy and impact. A lot of people like big audacious purpose because they think it's going to change the world and they're going to make their mark. And I spend a lot of time, especially at the end of the book, talking about how little p-purpose actually makes more of a mark. And so that's kind of what the book talks about. And if you're interested in getting it, you can of course get it anywhere books are sold, places like Amazon, or you can go to my website, JordanGrumet.com, J-O-R-D-A-N-G-R-U-M-M-E-T.com where you can get the book, my other book, Taking Stock, as well as see all the places I create content like the Earn and Invest podcast and the Purpose Code Substack.
John: All right. And the publisher is a traditional publisher, is that right?
Dr. Jordan Grumet: Correct. So, Hairman House actually is an imprint of Pan Macmillan. So, it is a traditionally published book, which a lot of people like to self-publish, but I really enjoy the process of working with the editors and the creators and the designers and coming out with a beautiful product and that is always my goal whenever I write something.
John: Excellent. Yeah, because we've had authors out here and we go from everything from self-publishing to hybrid to... traditional and it's just interesting to see what people choose just based on, you know, their preferences and their priorities. So that's awesome. You know, I usually ask like what advice you would have for someone who's in the hospital setting or just in the clinic, you know, a lot of family physicians no longer enter the hospital like myself. And I mean, maybe this is part of the solution to burnout is, is to focus on the P. So tell us more about how they could think about that.
Dr. Jordan Grumet: Yeah. I really believe burnout is pretty much people who are searching for big audacious purpose and either getting there and finding it doesn't fulfill them, or not getting there and feeling frustrated like they're failing. And the problem with big audacious purpose is it's so goal-oriented that a lot of times we spend time doing things we really don't like in service of this goal that we may or may not reach, but doesn't really gratify us for that long. And so I do very much believe little P purpose is part of the antidote to burnout. I think when we start doing things we love the process of doing, regardless of the outcome, it adds to our life. So if you're a busy physician, and again, you're doing it on nights or weekends, you're adding in some gratifying time to your life. But I think as you do that and you connect with other people and you build communities, you can also find ways to build that into your career. Sometimes that looks like changing your career as a physician where you go to a different specialty or focus on one thing that you were doing before, but it becomes your specialty. Other times it means leaving medicine and pursuing completely other types of work. There's no right or wrong. The question is, what could you love the process of doing and how to build more of that into your life? And if we start that process, everyone's going to end up somewhere different. Some people are going to continue that job they don't love, but build purpose in other ways. Some people are going to find that they can move out of that job they don't love, or some people will turn the job they don't love into a job they do love. All of that's possible, but none of it happens until you A, understand better what lights you up - what's your little P purpose. And then B, you got to take action.
John: Sounds like awesome advice to me. I'm going to just record that last two minutes and replay it every time and my podcast. But no, I appreciate you taking the time to tell us about this. Is there anything we missed that we need to know before I let you go? We've got the place to be at the book, website.
Dr. Jordan Grumet: My simple message is just to remind everyone that purpose is easy and it's straightforward. It's not nearly complicated as the world has made it out to be. It's abundant. You can, I don't want to say find, because you don't find your purpose. You build and create it. But you can start creating purpose in your life. It's just some basic simple actions.
John: All right. Well, with that, Jordan, I will say goodbye and hopefully we can catch up with you maybe when you write your next book.
Dr. Jordan Grumet: Thank you so much for having me.
John: My pleasure, bye-bye.
Sign up to receive email reminders, news, and free stuff every week!
Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you reminders each podcast episode, notices about nonclinical jobs, information about free and paid courses, and other curated information just for you.
Disclaimers:
*Many of the links that I refer you to and in the show notes are affiliate links. That means that I receive a payment from the seller if you purchase the affiliate item using my link. Doing so has no effect on the price you are charged. I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you, and that I have personally used or am very familiar with.
The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.
The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. I do not provide medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counselor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career.
[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
Leave A Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.