Stuart Clive, MD, was ready to retire. He had done the math and made the practical moves: he worked extra shifts, saved aggressively, and structured his career so that he could step away from emergency medicine in his 50s. When he got there, however, he made an entirely different calculation. He decided to work one more year and donate his entire year’s salary to the Cure Blindness Project.

“I asked myself, ‘how long would I work to cure a complete stranger of blindness? A few hours? A few shifts? A month?’ The average ER doctor can earn enough to cure a blind person or two in an hour,” Dr. Clive said. Thinking about it in those terms, walking away felt harder than staying, so he decided to stay for a full year.

Dr. Clive hadn’t always had that much clarity in his career in medicine. As a college freshman, he nearly abandoned the profession altogether when he took a pre-med course outlining the sacrifices and frustrations of life as a physician. Then a church mission in Ecuador helped him see firsthand what life looked like without access to health care.

“I fully appreciated the difference that a doctor and health care could make, and I decided that I wanted to make that kind of difference, so I resumed my path to being an ER doctor,” he said.

Emergency medicine was a natural fit for his desire to make a difference and to use all his skills and training. “I didn’t want to throw away 90 percent of the knowledge that I had worked so hard to learn,” he explained. He was attracted to what he called the “big highs and big lows.”

But he recognized that the highs and lows could cause burnout, which he saw often among his colleagues. He adopted a pragmatic approach to prevent himself from burning out: He planned to build financial independence so he could retire young. He also worked proactively to deal with impostor syndrome and a search for meaning by asking himself what difference he could uniquely make.

Late in his career, while watching a documentary about surgical teams providing cataract operations in North Korea, mathematics and morals collided for Dr. Clive. “I was shocked at how little money it took to heal a blind person,” he said. “To me, the thought that in a world with so much wealth there are tens of millions of people that could be cured with just a 10-minute, $100 operation is one of the biggest tragedies.”

The simple math added up to him connecting with the Cure Blindness Project, a global nonprofit organization committed to helping people in underserved communities retain or regain their sight. Dr. Clive’s donation of his final year’s salary will help fund completion of the Eye Care Center of Excellence at the Cape Coast Teaching Hospital in Ghana.

“My commitment was large enough that they could resume the completion of the facility and get a third residency up and running in Ghana. They have 200,000 curably blind people in Ghana and they only had two residencies, so my donation will give them 50 percent more capacity to heal people,” he said.

During his last year of clinical practice, Dr. Clive has made his motivation visible every day. “I know how much it costs to cure a blind person in Ghana, so to make each individual shift that I work more meaningful, I put Post-it notes on my mirror for each person that I’ve given money to cure. It is emotional after a shift to go in and put up sticker after sticker and think about the lives changed.”