What If the Point Was Never the Money? Rethinking What You're Actually Building Toward

Think Like an Owner-Entrepreneur

What If the Point Was Never the Money? Rethinking What You're Actually Building Toward

I want to tell you about the moment I stopped working Fridays in the clinic.

It didn't happen because I reached some financial threshold or checked a box on a retirement planning spreadsheet. It happened because I read a book that asked a question I hadn't let myself sit with: what are you actually saving all of this for?

The book was Die With Zero by Bill Perkins. The premise is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of optimizing your entire professional life around accumulating as much wealth as possible and leaving the bulk of it behind when you die, Perkins argues that the goal should be to convert your resources into experiences while you still have the health and energy to enjoy them. He is not telling you to be reckless with money. He is telling you to be intentional with time.

For me, that reframe changed something. I had been working at a pace driven largely by a background fear — that if I didn't save enough, something bad would happen. And that fear was useful in some ways. It kept me responsible. But it had also quietly become the engine running my schedule, and when I looked at what I was trading away to run at that pace, I didn't love the answer.

So I took Fridays back. I turned them into what my family now calls adventure days — unstructured time with my wife and kids, built around whatever we felt like doing that week. No agenda, no RVU targets, no inbox. Just time.

That single change cost me income on paper. What it gave back was not measurable on a spreadsheet.

The Ownership Connection Most Physicians Miss

Here is where this connects directly to what I write about every week, because I do not think the Die With Zero philosophy is separable from the ownership model.

If you are a traditional W-2 employee, you cannot take Fridays off on a whim. You cannot batch your work schedule around a family trip in July, decide to do locums in a warmer state for three months, or step back from clinical volume without going through a formal approval process that someone else controls. The system owns your time. You are renting it back from them in the form of PTO and scheduling accommodations, and the terms of that rental can change.

When you own your professional structure — when you operate as a micro-corporation and have control over your contract, your schedule, and the volume of work you take on — you have something that employed physicians mostly don't: the ability to actually act on the things you say matter to you.

Dr. Olga Deengar, the hospitalist from Toronto I wrote about earlier this week, built her entire schedule around her family's summer. She batches her Florida locum shifts so her children can spend the warm months near the water. That is not a fantasy. That is a physician who owns her professional structure using it to live the life she designed rather than the one assigned to her.

The micro-corporation is not just a tax tool. It is a time tool. And for most physicians, reclaiming time is the deeper goal that the business structure makes possible.

Building Your Own Adventure List

My wife and I keep what we call an adventure list. It has been one of the most useful things we have done for our marriage and our sense of forward motion as a couple. On it: visiting all of the US National Parks, reaching all seven continents, and a personal collection of places and experiences that matter to us specifically. My wife documents everything in scrapbooks through her project Scrapping In My Sleep, which turns each trip into something permanent we can revisit for decades.

I bring this up not to describe our travel preferences but because I think the exercise of making this kind of list forces a clarifying question: what do you actually want your life to look like? Not your retirement. Your life, including the years you are working in.

Most physicians have a vague sense that someday things will slow down and then they will do the things they want to do. Die With Zero challenges the timeline on that assumption. Perkins makes the case that your ability to enjoy experiences is age-dependent in ways that your net worth is not. A trip to Patagonia at 45 is a different trip than the same itinerary at 70, even if the finances are identical. The memories you build while your children are young cannot be backfilled later when the balance sheet is healthier.

The adventure list is a way of taking that abstract concern seriously. It puts your intentions in writing, which makes them real enough to plan around.

Time, Health, and the Window You Have Right Now

My wife and I are both in our late 50s. We are healthy. We have the resources to do the things on our list. And we are aware, in a way that is both sobering and clarifying, that this window — good health, reasonable energy, financial stability, an empty enough nest to have some freedom — is not permanent. It will narrow. Not necessarily soon, but eventually.

That awareness is not morbid. It is motivating. It pushes us toward action instead of deferral. The next decade is the one we intend to move through with intention, not inertia.

Perkins talks about this in terms of the "Die Before Your Health Declines" framing — the recognition that the ability to convert money into meaningful experiences has a physical expiration date that most financial plans do not account for. You can have every dollar you need at 80 and lack the ability to use it the way you would have at 55.

I think about this when I talk to physicians who are working at maximum volume in their late 50s with a vague plan to "slow down eventually." Slow down to what? With whom? When your kids are grown and your parents are gone and the relationships you deferred are now more distant than they used to be?

The time to start designing your life around experiences is not after you hit a number. It is now, while the window is open.

Spending With Intention, Giving With Purpose

One more piece of this philosophy that I have come to believe deeply: spending on experiences does not mean spending only on yourself.

My wife and I maintain a donor-advised fund. A percentage of our income goes in regularly, and from there we distribute it to causes and people that matter to us — locally, nationally, internationally. Generosity is part of our adventure list, not separate from it. Some of the most meaningful "experiences" we have had have been watching resources reach people at the moment they needed them most.

My mother taught me this directly. After my father's death, we reorganized her finances, and she realized her lifestyle was fully supported by her pension and government income. Her assets were surplus. Rather than hold them for inheritance, she began distributing them to her eleven grandchildren, who are mostly in their twenties — people who could genuinely use a windfall now, while building their lives. She gets to watch it land. She gets to see the impact. That is an experience too, and it is one that traditional estate planning rarely accounts for.

We intend to follow that same playbook when the time comes. The goal is not to maximize what we leave behind. The goal is to live generously and fully while we are here.

Case Study: Dr. Vásquez's Scheduled Sabbatical

Dr. Vásquez (name protected) is a family physician in her early 50s who had been working full-time employed for nineteen years when she first came to me. She had a strong retirement account, no debt, and a growing sense that she had been putting her life on hold. Her children were teenagers. Her husband had been asking about travel for years. Her answer had always been "soon."

She formed her micro-corporation, converted her primary employment to a 1099 arrangement, and used the scheduling flexibility that came with it to negotiate a four-month sabbatical for the following year. She and her husband took the trip to Southeast Asia they had been planning since their engagement. She worked locum shifts on her own terms for the other eight months at a gross income that came within 10 percent of her previous W-2 salary — while retaining significantly more of it after taxes.

When I asked her what the sabbatical was worth, she said she couldn't put a number on it. "We almost didn't do it," she told me. "We kept saying we'd go when the timing was better. There is no better timing. There's just now, and later, and later keeps moving."

The Practical Starting Point

If this resonates with you but feels abstract, here is a concrete place to start. My wife and I use a Dare to Dream guide to set goals that span both financial and life-experience dimensions together rather than separately. It is a planning tool that treats your time and your money as connected resources, which they are.

And if you are at the stage where you want to talk through the structural changes that would give you more control over your schedule — converting employment, building the micro-corp, restructuring how you take income — that conversation starts with a strategy session.

You can also read the original version of this post here: Reclaim Your Time: Prioritizing Experiences Over Wealth.

Ready to design your life on purpose?

The ownership model gives you the structural freedom to act on your priorities — not someday, but in the schedule you build starting now. If you want to think through what that looks like for your specific situation, I'd love to talk.

Book a $500 Business Strategy Session and we will map out what the path from employee to owner actually looks like for you, including the time benefits that rarely show up on the financial projections.

If you are earlier in the process and want to explore the ownership philosophy before committing to a session, start with the PEA Explorer membership at $99/year. The community, the resources, and the clarity it provides are worth it at any stage.

The window is open. The question is whether you are going to use it.

This blog was updated from the original post Reclaim Your Time: Prioritizing Experiences Over Wealth