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How many stamps in your ‘life passport?’
Look to John Corboy for inspiration on how to pack the experiences into your life.
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“The finest eloquence is that which gets things done.” – David Lloyd George
“When you’re in trouble, all you need is your bank card and passport, and you’re fine.” – Sam Worthington
My partner Corinne Wohl and I are just back from spending a few days with an old pal, ophthalmology icon John Corboy. Which got me to thinking: I know very few people who have packed so much living into one life.
We talked about it some. If he had entered this world with a “life passport,” John would have run out of blank pages to stamp. Consider just a few highlights:
- He was the sixth surgeon in America to open a private ASC.
- He embraced and wrote about advanced practice management and marketing at a time when his colleagues struggled with decisions like, “Should we have two phone lines or three?”
- Not satisfied with just founding the Hawaiian Eye Foundation to provide charity care around the world, he parlayed that into the annual Hawaiian Eye meeting (now run by the Wyanoke Group, parent company of SLACK Incorporated) and hopscotched to Southeast Asia to launch parallel conferences.
- At a time when many retired surgeons are using a cane to get around, John still flies his Robinson helicopter with abandon, taking off from a helipad on his Molokai estate, a mere hundred yards from the three-story stone dollhouse/castle he built by hand for his granddaughter.
- His annual holiday card is a photo collage of motorcycle romps, family cowboy roundup reunions and nudist colony sprees.
You get the picture. John has packed it in, using a combination of good fortune, a profoundly strong work ethic and what could be best called an enduring itchiness to see and do more. His passport has stamps on top of stamps, covered with — more stamps.
How about you?
Most of John’s colleagues, while miles ahead of the average person in the street, have experienced only a sliver of what John has mastered and squeezed the juice from. Out of all the possible pages in their life passport, the typical ophthalmologist has only collected a few of the most common and predictable stamps. School. Spouse. House. Kids. Wealth. And a perfectly safe and dull retirement.
Read through the rest of this month’s column for reminders of stamps you may still want to collect.
1. To round out my formal education with a fellowship or, beyond medicine, a second or third degree.
2. To take my grandchildren on a European holiday.
3. To be an effective managing partner for my practice.
4. To be financially independent by the time I am 55 and work my last 10 years to fund an eye hospital in Africa.
5. To get in the best shape of my life and harness that fitness to backpack the length of California.
6. To explore my religious roots or put down new roots in a different teaching.
7. To design an office building that perfectly suits my needs.
8. To cultivate a wider and deeper circle of friends.
9. To learn Italian and spend a 6-month sabbatical in Siena.
10. To invent a new instrument and a surgical maneuver to go along with it.
11. To sail my own boat from France to Florida.
12. To attend an ophthalmology conference on every continent of the planet.
13. To teach my daughter how to race Porsches.
14. To develop a new breed of dog.
15. To celebrate the visual in my office by bringing in fine art for patients and staff to enjoy.
16. To build a vacation house with my own two hands.
17. To learn how to scuba dive in the Red Sea.
18. To invent a new way to objectively measure cataract outcomes.
19. To run for Congress.
20. To pick up where I left off at 12 on the piano and play Bach.
21. To video the wisdom of my parents and make it into a documentary film.
22. To revisit my first joy in biology, using a microscope to explore the natural world.
23. To establish a foundation to help kids with the same disorder my son has.
24. To attend Harvard Business School and run a major health system.
25. To open a restaurant using my mother’s recipes.
26. To adopt a child.
27. To design, build and fly experimental aircraft.
28. To develop an app that can monitor macular degeneration.
29. To become a master cabinetmaker.
30. To found a new ophthalmology society in our city, where none exists.
31. To become our hospital’s chief of staff and bring new services to the community.
32. To set up a scholarship fund for promising but poor high school kids who want to become doctors.
33. To collect antique medical equipment, then donate the collection to a museum.
34. To have our family all climb Mount Kilimanjaro.
35. To write my memoir.
36. To open up a for-profit tech training school and hire the best graduates.
37. To become a professional photographer when I retire.
38. To plant a vineyard and make my own wine.
39. To build a real estate empire, launched with practice profits.
40. To lecture on organic chemistry at our local state college.
41. To own a radio station.
42. To give away 200 free cataract surgeries each year.
43. To develop an entirely new approach to ophthalmic staff attire, then sell the line at the American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting.
44. To emigrate and spend the second half of my life providing care in a third-world country.
45. To qualify for the U.S. Olympic archery team.
46. To collaborate with an industrial efficiency expert on how to see more patients per day.
47. To turn the grounds of my office building into a free public botanical garden.
48. To fly a hot air balloon in the shape of an eyeball.
49. To buy up 15 local optometry practices and become the No. 1 eye clinic in our city.
50. To invent a healthy fast-food restaurant concept and take it national.
51. To connect with the Hawaiian Eye Foundation (http://hawaiianeyefoundation.org) and volunteer for an overseas humanitarian mission and experience the joy of restoring sight to the blind poor of underserved countries.
P.S.: As this column goes to press, Dr. Corboy is on a flight to Cambodia for a fact-finding mission to bring his surgeon training program to Phnom Penh. And so it goes.
- For more information:
- John B. Pinto is president of J. Pinto & Associates Inc., an ophthalmic practice management consulting firm established in 1979. John is the country’s most-published author on ophthalmology management topics. He is the author of John Pinto’s Little Green Book of Ophthalmology, Turnaround: 21 Weeks to Ophthalmic Practice Survival and Permanent Improvement, Cashflow: The Practical Art of Earning More From Your Ophthalmology Practice, The Efficient Ophthalmologist, The Women of Ophthalmology, Legal Issues in Ophthalmology, Ophthalmic Leadership: A Practical Guide for Physicians, Administrators and Teams and a new book, Simple: The Inner Game of Ophthalmic Practice Success. He can be reached at 619-223-2233; email: pintoinc@aol.com; website: www.pintoinc.com.