I haven’t sent one of these in months. Here’s why.
When I last wrote, I was running this whole thing on the assumption that the newsletter was the front door. Then I launched the podcast. Rebuilt the blog. Stepped further into the division director role I’d been quietly growing into. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I started asking myself a question I should have asked sooner: is this newsletter useful to anyone?
I didn’t have a good answer. So I stopped.
Here’s what I didn’t expect. The list kept growing. People kept subscribing. Not because of anything I was doing — because of what we’ve built together over the last few years. The blog. The conversations. The frameworks. The fact that we are, all of us, trying to practice medicine in 2026 with the same set of unsolved problems.
That is what got me back to the keyboard.
The Developing Doctor was never just coaching and courses. It’s a community of physicians naming the gift and the grift of this work — the days that remind us why we did this, and the structural absurdities that are quietly costing us our careers. Both are real. Pretending only the first one exists is what got us into this mess.
So here is what I’m committing to for the next few weeks. Real letters. One idea per email. A few will feature recent podcast guests whose work has changed how I think about something. One of them, in about a month, will share a piece of news I’ve been working toward for a while.
If you’ve been here the whole time — thank you. If you forgot you subscribed, that’s fair, the unsubscribe link is at the bottom and I won’t take it personally. If you want to stay, I have one ask before I go:
Hit reply. Tell me one thing you are wrestling with right now in your practice. One sentence is enough. I read every one, and what you send shapes what I write next.
More soon.
— Ben
P.S. The two most recent pieces on the blog — on the physical signs of burnout most physicians miss, and the three energy accounts you’ve been quietly overdrafting — are where I’d start if you want to see what I’ve been working on. Links at thedevelopingdoctor.com.
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