For those of you who have known me personally over the years or attended our live events, you will be familiar with my constant praise of outsourcing.

And as a two-doctor family with four children, we’ve done a lot of it over the years to keep the household and our practices running.

Yet what the pandemic taught me is that our needs evolved.

Now that our kids are older, they can (and more importantly, should) do more.

Janette and I want our children to be independent and resilient hustlers like their parents. But we realized that it won’t happen if daily life is always handled for them.

We need to prepare them not only to live with less money but to be happy in the way we were – broke and driving a $400 car.

So, in addition to talking to the kids about independence and living on a budget, we teach it.

I’m proud that our teens readily scrub bathrooms, cook, change oil on the vehicles, work in the family businesses, and take flights independently.

These skills take time and need to be taught. But in busy households, we often feel harried and want to take the burden off our families by outsourcing.

A key teaching at Physician Empowerment is that life should be lived with intention, so I’ll leave you with this:

What can you do to prepare your children to take on the world?