BLOG POST #2  

CATCHY TITLE: Money in Our Dreams

http://dreamatico.com/

BLOG POST BODY PARAGRAPHS:  (Broken into easy to read paragraphs, formatting font to make it easier to follow main ideas, etc.)

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/business/27richer.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Article: Gilded Paychecks Lure of Great Wealth Affects Career Choices

In this article, the New York Times reveals how certain doctors truly determine what they do based on the opportunity to gain immense wealth.

“Hoping to achieve breakthroughs in curing cancer, his specialty, he plunged into research, even dreaming of a Nobel Prize, until Wall Street reordered his life.”

“There were doctors at the reunion — very, very smart people,” Dr. Glassman recalled in a recent interview. “They went to the top programs, they remained true to their ethics and really had very pure goals. And then they went to the 20th-year reunion and saw that somebody else who was 10 times less smart was making much more money.”

“The opportunity to become abundantly rich is a recent phenomenon not only in medicine, but in a growing number of other professions and occupations. In each case, the great majority still earn fairly uniform six-figure incomes, usually less than $400,000 a year, government data show. But starting in the 1990s, a significant number began to earn much more, creating a two-tier income stratum within such occupations.”

“Others have moved to different, higher-paying fields — from academia to Wall Street, for example — and a growing number of entrepreneurs have seen windfalls tied largely to expanding financial markets, which draw on capital from around the world. The latter phenomenon has allowed, say, the owner of a small mail-order business to sell his enterprise for tens of millions instead of the hundreds of thousands that such a sale might have brought 15 years ago.”

I once thought that it was passion and the love of what one does in their work that drives their ambitions to do what they do, but this article by the New York Times proves differently. It seems that these doctors specifically choose that they would rather go to specialties that pay the most. For example, Dr. Glassman once dreamed of winning the Nobel Prize for cancer research but after a reunion, he learned that his colleagues who were not as smart as he was earned a much larger salary than him. For me, I would rather choose an occupation that I am happy with and can live with doing for the rest of my life than choose a job where I don't enjoy it but get a fat paycheck in.

For my next blog post I will look into how a child's upbringing by their parents affect the child's future career choice. For example, both my parents were doctors in China and right now, my brother is in medical school, studying to become a doctor.