

I Quit My Job - arn
http://normalkid.com/2008/07/01/i-quit-my-job/
thought people would be interested in hearing of a "success" story so to speak.  If I had had a traditional 9-5 job, I probably would have quit in 2003-2004. but for various reasons it dragged out to 2008. I never really considered myself a "blogger", though it seems that's what I've become.  My other projects will not necessarily be blogs in the traditional sense.
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arn
thought people would be interested in hearing of a "success" story so to
speak. If I had had a traditional 9-5 job, I probably would have quit in
2003-2004. but for various reasons it dragged out to 2008. I never really
considered myself a "blogger", though it seems that's what I've become. My
other projects will not necessarily be blogs in the traditional sense.

~~~
wallflower
I love MacRumors because even though they are huge they are still are in some
arenas an underdog (e.g. full-time staff of Gizmodo)... Like other blogs I am
addicted to, I manually type in the site address at least once, if not twice a
day.

> My other projects will not necessarily be blogs in the traditional sense.

Maybe we can look forward to some custom iPhone/iPod Touch apps that are a
different way to read/change the way we read our news?

~~~
petercooper
That's interesting. MacRumors.com is the only blog I manually visit every few
days too. Almost everything else is in my RSS reader but for some reason I
still visit MacRumors "by hand."

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tptacek
He's licensed to practice medicine. He doesn't need much luck. If everything
fails, he has an enviable fallback.

~~~
ojbyrne
How long can you not practice medicine before your skills deteriorate and your
knowledge become obsolete? Probably just as fast as it happens to programmers.

~~~
Deadsunrise
Yes, because humans change as fast a computer technologies , right? I think
that next week they will be putting out Lungs 2.0

Come on, if you are a doctor you can always be a doctor, in a couple weeks you
can get up-to-date with the discoveries made in your field in the last 10
years.

~~~
arn
actually, the body doesn't change much, but medical practice changes a lot
over a few years. Treatments and standards of care change pretty frequently,
so you do need to keep up (if you are practicing)

There are required continuing medical education credits to maintain your
licensure. And board certification expires in 10 years, so you need to re-take
the licesnsing tests every 10 years besides doing regular education every 2
years.

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dcurtis
So after all that work and school, you're giving it up for MacRumors? What led
to your decision? Did you have a passion for medicine?

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arn
I probably don't have a "passion" for medicine, but few people do. I
personally don't know any doctors that truly have a passion for it. (I doubt,
for example, that many would continue to do it if they won the lotto.)

I felt like I was good at medicine and enjoyed it day to day, but given the
choice of doing it vs being able to just do something I was doing for fun
anyway and spending more time with my family, I think the choice became easy.

The flip side to that, is I do have a passion for what I'm doing now. If I won
the lotto, I think I would continue to run MacRumors, and still try to launch
some other web projects I've had in my mind.

~~~
dcurtis
Really? You think passion for medicine is that rare? I sit in biology classes
with my mouth wide open, in absolute awe at the principles that guide the
human body. Then, when I think about applications of that knowledge in
clinical settings (especially relating to the brain, in the same way that V.S.
Ramachandran practices and researches), it excites me.

When I think about practicing medicine and helping people by embarking on a
journey of diagnosis every day, I get the same burning sensation of excitement
in my chest that I get when I think about starting a company.

I don't know how someone can endure the torture of medical school, residency,
and then a practice without being passionate and absolutely in love with what
they do.

Most of the "I quit my job!" posts I read here are about people who code in a
dead-end corporate job who are escaping for entrepreneurship (still coding).
You had a completely different, successful career that you gave up. I find
that interesting.

(Also, I read MacRumors every day. Thanks for that.)

~~~
iamelgringo
I've made a habit out of asking the doctors that I work with "Would you do it
over again, if you had to?" I have about a 60% "Hell no" response rate. And,
only about a 5-10%, "Yeah, I love what I do" response rate.

Especially nephrology. That's a brutal specialty. You watch most of your
patients slowly die over 5 or 10 years while they are linked to a dialysis
machine 3 times a week. The happy stories in nephrology are the people who get
kidney transplants, but then you're only trading one disease for another:
kidney failure for chronic immuno-suppression.

Congrats, on making it out! And, here's wishing the best for ya.

~~~
dcurtis
That's an extremely scary statistic. 60% an enthusiastic "no"?

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noor420
Yeah man, as long as you have fun doing this Mac blogging, its worth it.

I hate Mac personally, but am happy to see you are willing to give the
community the fullest. Love what you do!

