What got you here won’t get you out

No one’s coming to save you—except you

Noah Wyle never wanted to do another medical show.

The star of ER, the show that launched the entire medical drama genre, refused to take a single medical role for fifteen years after the series ended in 2009. 

“I wouldn’t take a script if it was to play a doctor, even if it was a veterinarian,” he says. “The idea of putting a stethoscope around my neck just seemed like a really bad idea.”

And then Covid happened. In his 2025 interview with Variety he says,

As the world was just starting to retreat into lockdown in 2020, Wyle began getting DMs on Instagram from first responders overwhelmed by the first lethal waves of COVID-19. Some simply thanked Wyle for inspiring them to pursue a medical career with his performance on “ER.” But most of the messages were laced with an unmistakable desperation about the precarious state of the country’s health care workers — and how no one was telling their story.

“They were saying things like, ‘Carter, where are you?’” he says. “‘It’s really hard out here.’”

Wyle, meanwhile, was confronting his own pandemic-fed crisis…. “I just thought the world was coming apart. I didn’t know how to contribute anything of meaning or value anymore.”

And so The Pitt was born.

Noah Wyle, credit Chantal Anderson

Healthcare folks, has The Pitt been as hard to watch for you as it has for me? Not because it’s a bad show. God no.

It’s incredible.

But because Covid broke a promise. 

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You know what I’m talking about. For years before the pandemic, you did everything right. You showed up early. Stayed late. You worked weekends. You sacrificed sleep, meals, family dinners. You told yourself, this is what good doctors do, what good nurses do.

And then the pandemic hit, and you did it even harder.

But. Patients still died, colleagues still burned out, administrators still squeezed more and more from fewer and fewer resources. And through it all, the message from leadership was clear: work harder. Give more.

And now you. You’re burnt out. You’re tired. 

And you’re not alone. Nearly half of the nation’s workforce is over it. They want to leave medicine, they want to leave nursing. But so many of them don’t know how, so they stay stuck.

Is that you? Well, if so, I’ve got good news—there’s a diagnosis, and it’s beatable.

What got you here won’t get you there

Certain habits made you a successful healthcare professional. You’re most likely driven, motivated, caring. 

You made it through med school, nursing school, vet school, dental school by doubling down. When things got hard, you worked harder. If there was a problem, you sacrificed more. And medicine rewarded that—heck, it basically made it a requirement. Everything you learned, everything your training taught you, implied that your value as a health professional lay in your willingness to say yes when everything in your body screamed no.

And that? It brought you success. Of a kind.

It also got you stuck. 

Your burnout was fueled by three powerful lies:

First, you believed that working harder guarantees success. And it did once, back when “success” was defined by exam scores and your senior resident’s opinion of you. But medicine—real-life, this-is-not-a-test medicine—isn’t med school. Success now depends on so many factors beyond your control: hospital staffing, reimbursement rates, patient outcomes, and the whims of sixteen administrators peeking over your shoulder.

Second, you believed your sacrifices were inherently noble, that giving everything to the job was worth it. It felt meaningful and necessary. And it was meaningful—but meaningful work doesn’t mean erasing your identity. Necessary doesn’t require martyrdom.

Finally, you believed your patients needed you to be present, at all times, no matter what. That meant that at least a small part of you felt like stepping away, even slightly, meant abandoning them. You became your white coat. You forgot that your white coat is what you do. It’s not who you are.

We all know the pandemic didn’t create the burnout; it just revealed what had been broken for decades. It stripped away the facade we’d all been hiding behind: the system runs on your willingness to keep giving, long past the point of depletion.

And it counts on you never figuring that out.

False consensus

When I started my deconstruction (to borrow the theological term) from the traditional path of medicine, I naturally assumed that everyone else would feel the same way. I mean, we all see the system, right? We all see the suicide rates and the divorce rates and the alcoholism rates. 

Boy was I wrong.

The first time I took a year off to spend working in West Africa, every one of my attendings—to a man (and they were all men)—asked me if I knew the gravity of this decision.

“You’ll never be taken seriously,” they said.

“This is how you ruin your career.”

“Are you sure you want to be a surgeon?”

And with every career change I’ve made, I’ve been met by the same surprise—things that I knew were deeply obvious, things that everyone should agree with, were…not.

Which is how I learned—the hard way—about something called the False Consensus Effect. The False Consensus effect is a bias we all have, a presupposition of agreement. We assume others are more likely than not to agree with us, and we’re often surprised when they don’t.

For me—and for many of my clients—the False Consensus Effect actually deepens the stuckness. It leads us to question: if no one else is as burnt out as I am, maybe I’m the problem. Maybe I should just tough it out, keep my head down, show up for my patients.

We assume that because we’ve started questioning the sacrifices and the endless grind, everyone else must be doing the same. But then we find out, the hard way, that many of our peers are still fully bought into the narrative. They genuinely believe the sacrifices are noble, necessary, and justified. Those colleagues aren’t quietly doubting; they’ve accepted the system as-is. 

If that’s you, let me assure you: you may be far more alone in your skepticism of the system than you think—and the problem isn’t you. 

Read that again. 

Yes you may be more alone than you think. But no, that does not mean you’re the problem.

It means you’ve already recognized what so many of your colleagues either haven’t, or have just decided to accept: that your value isn’t measured by exhaustion, that self-sacrifice isn’t necessary, and that the system benefits from your silent compliance.

This realization is your strength, not your weakness. Let it give you permission to act without waiting for consensus or approval from peers who haven’t caught up yet.

Let it confirm something important: you deserve better.

You deserve better than grinding yourself down to the bone. Better than being exploited by administrators who think your compassion is an unlimited resource. Better than missing your life outside of medicine because you’re too exhausted to participate in it.

Stop expecting the system that broke you to fix you. It benefits from your silence. 

Stop waiting for others to affirm your decisions. No one is coming to fix you.

Except you.

Getting into burnout wasn’t your fault. Getting out of it is your responsibility. Your escape depends on you deciding—without waiting for anyone else’s agreement—that you deserve better. And it depends on you deciding to do it. 

You get to choose what parts of medicine you keep

You get to choose the medicine you practice. You get to keep what you love and drop the parts crushing you. It’s allowed. It’s possible.

Maybe you still love patient care but hate endless documentation. Maybe surgery still sparks joy, but not when you’re juggling seven cases in an afternoon. Maybe you’re done with clinical medicine entirely, ready to bring your expertise to policy, consulting, entrepreneurship, or, like one of my clients, cabinetmaking.

You get to choose what parts of medicine you keep—but to do that, you’ve got to let go of the old beliefs keeping you trapped. 

Stop believing that your harder work will fix a broken system that fuels itself on your sweat. Stop believing that self-sacrifice is inherently noble. And stop believing that your identity depends on it. 

You don’t have to stay trapped by assumptions that never served you. You don’t have to stay quiet. You deserve better right now. You’ve always deserved better.

It’s possible. It’s achievable.

Claim it.

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→ Doctors, nurses, healthcare folks: Are you ready to claim it? Check out my free webinar on creating your Burnout Escape Plan, one science-backed decision at a time, here.

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