The Difference Between The Doctor and The Drop Out

In my earlier teenage years, I use to get nervous meeting highly educated professionals like doctors, lawyers, or even teachers. I had a high level of respect for people in certain types of professions.

I’m not sure why but I assume it has something to do with the glorification of their status in society in my culture. Being a high school drop out myself and having worried parents didn’t make things better also.

I can’t recall the exact moment when I came to this realization, but it changed the way I view everyone in life. It helped remove all personal social bias and stereotypes of certain class of people. It eventually led me to view everyone as simply human beings not much different than myself.

 

 

The Difference Between the Doctor and The Drop Out

The difference is time. Time is what differentiates the two. It’s that simple. Let me explain.

A doctor chose to invest 25 years of his time learning about medicine. While the drop out perhaps invested his time into something else. Perhaps, the drop out invested his time in business.

Difference Between the Doctor and the Drop Out

Doctor:

• Time invested: 25 years (Medicine)
• Time invested: 0 Year (Business)

High School Drop Out:

• Time invested: 1 month (Medicine)
• Time invested: 20 years (Business)

The social class and titles do not matter. The point of focus is how and where someone chose to invest their time throughout their life.

Difference Between Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos

Bill gates:

• Time invested: 33 years (CEO Microsoft)
• Time invested: 19 years (Philanthropy)

Jeff Bezos

• Time invested: 25 years (CEO Amazon)
• Time invested: 1 years (Philanthropy)

The reason why invested time is such a good measure of differentiation between people is because we are all amazingly similar in the grand scale of things. We all bleed the same. We all have nearly identical genetic DNA similar by 99.9%. We all need food and water to survive, etc.

 

 

Focus and Invest Your Time

The focus on how someone invests time helped fundamentally change the way I view people. You may find this emphasis on time as the differentiator between people help foster self confidence over the long term.

It also helped me realize something so obvious more crystal clearly. Want to get good at something? Invest your time into it.

Anyone can improve on anything if one invests time. Choose wisely on how you wish to invest your time because time is a limited resource.

Keep in mind that spreading out your time into many different areas may dilute your chances to become exceptionally good at any single skill.

A professional today is a product of time invested in their past. How are you investing your time and why?

(Sorry about using the word “time” a billion times on this post.😅)