The other evening I was asking a friend why she stopped practicing medicine. She was a family doctor working in a community clinic. She explained that the health insurance requirements became ridiculously overwhelming. She only had 15 minutes to see a patient and spent at least that much time filling in paperwork to collect insurance for every patient, which resulted in a lot of after-hour paper pushing. In addition, when she would send a referral to a specialist who had up to an hour to see a patient, it was still H. who was filling in more paper work. Even though she was never in it for the money, her work load as the time-starved humanitarian was more than the highly paid specialist who had more time to pitch in.
Our society considers the work of humanitarians “noble” but we don’t reward it. We pay less to the folks who are shaping society, be it in community service, education (our teachers!), nurses (mostly women!) and we pay more to corporate dwellers who are creating jobs (although I wonder how true it is when we are recruiting talent from overseas most of the time in high-tech).
I was conducting a workshop last night at a local private college, and we were discussing their capstone projects in finance. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that many of them wanted to do more than make money in wealth management or finance. They wanted to “help people”. And as they saw it, the only way to do that was to make money, first.
I’ve often thought about that for myself too. How many times have I dreamt of buying homes for families in need, or buying a block of homes to create a neighborhood of caring families. But then I have to wake up from that 10-second dream.
Personally, I am still driven to create jobs for people who want to do both. Make money so they can afford to pay their bills, and focus on what matters: shaping society for the sake of humanity.
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