It was a Tuesday, and I was working from a deck in the Pocono Mountains.
It had rained all weekend. That morning it finally cleared, and the air had that smell you only get in the mountains after rain, wet pine and cold and something clean underneath it. The fire pit from the night before was still there. So were the marshmallow sticks. I had my laptop open on a table outside and a full day of work ahead of me.
Then a call started, and someone on my team asked me a question I've been thinking about ever since.
She works remotely too. Two monitors, a real setup, the whole thing. And she said, more or less, I need to learn from you. How are you always working from somewhere else?
The easy answer was right there. I built this by design. It's a skill. It took years. Post-COVID everyone went remote, AI makes more of it possible every month, and at some point you just stop wanting to wake up and do the same commute until you're old enough to ask what it was all for.
All of that is true. I almost said it.
But it's not the real answer, and I knew it while I was saying it.
Here's the real one.
I don't work from anywhere because I'm disciplined. I work from anywhere because I don't trust my own head to hold anything. So I built a system that holds it for me.
The cabin isn't the point. The system is. Once the work lives outside my memory, in writing, in process, in something a stranger could pick up and run, the location stops mattering. Presence was never the job.
You can watch me do this. It's most of what I did this week.
We had polished training videos and someone experienced left detailed notes to make them better. I said don't touch them. Not because the notes were wrong. Because we hadn't seen five patients yet, and every word in those videos is a guess until a real one proves it. Get it out of your head. Wait for reality to test it.
The same week, I kept pushing one question about our documentation: if you removed my name from this, would the team still know what to do? Because if the answer is no, then the document doesn't work. It just has me standing next to it, explaining. And I can't stand next to everything. That's the whole point of leaving the room.
Same instinct both times. Anything I build has to survive me not being there.
That's what nobody tells you about the laptop life everyone says they want. The freedom isn't the reward for being disciplined. It's the reward for refusing to be the thing holding it all together. You don't get to leave the desk because you're free. You get to leave it because you made sure nothing important depends on you sitting at it.
I left traditional medicine partly to get here. In a hospital, presence is the job. You are in the building or you are not working. It took me a while to understand that I didn't want a version of that with a nicer view. I wanted work that kept running when I stepped away from it.
So when she asked how I'm always somewhere else, the honest answer isn't that I designed a lifestyle.
It's that I don't trust myself to be the thing holding it together. So I made sure I'm not.
Which leaves me with a question for you, the one I actually want you to sit with.
If you disappeared for a month, would the thing you're building keep breathing?
Because if it can't survive your absence, you didn't build a business. You built a desk you're not allowed to leave.
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