I didn't grow up wanting to be a doctor. In fact, I hadn't even considered it until late in my undergraduate education. Once I decided, I worked hard with a single-minded focus to make it happen.

But just as medical school admission was practically in the bag, I felt torn between pursuing my interests in business and medicine. I chose medicine, but promised myself I would never take a path that didn't allow for self-employment and building non-clinical businesses. A decade later, I was pain management doctor founding my own practice.

Founding a practice was another all-consuming pursuit. Like anything, I couldn't really go back and convey to my past self what I was in for. Some aspects were better than expected, others worse.

About a year into running the practice, I joined a group of generous physicians who gave advice on running a pain practice. This look into my future changed my life. These doctors are successful by most measures, but even the endgame didn't look like a life I want to live.

And that's without mentioning the build-up phase of a practice, which takes years. My build-up phase was going well, but it didn't leave time for me to pursue the kinds of business interests I'd been voraciously learning about for years. With what appeared to be a window of opportunity given advances in AI, I just couldn't bring myself to put off my entrepreneurial desires for that long.

So I decided to close my practice. It was a complicated decision that required life experience to build up to, but it wasn't a hard one.

Years prior, sometimes I'd ponder out loud, "Why don't I just give up on this whole pain management practice thing and start the business I really want to start while doing part-time anesthesiology?" What I thought was an unlikely plan B has become my life.

I started out working on an online directory of stem cell clinics, which I'm not sure was worth the effort. After that, I developed and deployed a virtual oral board examiner for anesthesiology oral boards. Now I'm working on iOS apps.