I had one of the stranger CMEpalooza-related conversations of my life over the weekend. I was in one of those interminable zig zag lines where you go back and forth…back and forth…back and forth…only to get to what looks like the end of the line but then find that you are merely getting dumped into another zig zag maze. It’s a psychological horror show, and yet we often voluntarily subject ourselves to it over and over again. The amusement park, passport control in the airport, ordering food at the ballpark — I can’t imagine how much time I have wasted in line just this past month!

Anyway, as I was zigging and zagging in one direction on Sunday, a man with his wife, adult daughter, and grandkids was zigging and zagging the other way. After we had passed each other maybe, I dunno, 10 or 11 times, the man stopped me to ask “I keep looking at your shirt and wondering, what is the CMEpalooza STEPtacular Challenge? It looks pretty awesome.”

Now before you think I am some sort of celebrity that gets recognized in public everywhere I go (that would be Derek – he is the Taylor Swift of Chestnut Hill) I should back up for a second and acknowledge that I was wearing my Spring 2025 CMEpalooza STEPtacular Challenge (sponsored by Talem Health) t-shirt. I know I have mentioned this before, but these t-shirts are super comfortable and quite breathable on a hot summer day. If you don’t have one, you should totally enter this Fall’s STEPtacular Challenge and get one. Did I mention that they are free to everyone who enters?

Anyway, I knew I had about 30 seconds to respond to this kind gentleman’s question before we zigged and zagged out of earshot. So I started with Part 1.

CMEpalooza is a biannual online conference that I co-produce. It is geared to people who plan and create continuing education programs for doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals.

“So CMEpalooza is for doctors?” he asked, seemingly familiar with the healthcare world (I’m guessing he was a physician, though I don’t know for sure). “It’s a way for them to get CME credits?”

No, not exactly. CMEpalooza is for the people who develop the programs through which doctors and other providers can get credits. People in academic centers, who work for associations, medical education companies, pharma folks – people like that.

I zigged. He zagged. Five minutes later, the conversation continued.

“So what about this STEPtacular Challenge?” he inquired. “What’s that all about?”

It’s this event we hold a week or so before each of our live broadcast days. You just have to send us a screenshot of whatever app you use to count your steps. Any day you reach 10,000 steps or more, you can enter. We give away a few hundred dollars worth of prizes. It’s open to anyone who wants to enter. Win or lose, you get one of these amazingly comfortable t-shirts just for entering.

I zigged. He zagged. Five minutes later, the conversation continued.

“So what I hear you saying is that I could have turned on my step counter the moment I stepped into this $@%#-ing zig zag line and I would have gotten enough steps in to enter? How do you afford all of these prizes?”

(Turns around to show back of the t-shirt)

You see how it says ‘Sponsored by Talem Health?’ They sponsor the STEPtacular Challenge every year and provide the financial support to allow it to happen. We have lots of great sponsors of CMEpalooza — they are one of them.

(Whispering to his daughter, who it seemed was also a healthcare provider) “Maybe we should check out this CMEpalooza thing. Assuming we ever get to the end of this $@%#-ing zig zag line.”

Becoming a sponsor of CMEpalooza doesn’t require jumping through hoops, filling out endless forms, or yes, zig zagging through another interminable line. I mean, there are currently 28 sponsors of CMEpalooza Fall, and they certainly are all too busy to waste time with any of that. No pressure or anything, but if you want to have any chance of being as popular as Derek is in Chestnut Hill, you might want to consider joining them as a CMEpalooza sponsor.

If you want to see what we currently have available for this Fall, you can check out our current Sponsorship prospectus (also available on our Sponsor tab). Our Fall sponsor event is coming up once the leaves start turning, and I am sure that Derek is already working on his haikus for our higher-level sponsors. I promise we’ll treat you right.

When people ask me what I enjoy most about my job, I usually tell that them it’s the daily and varied intellectual challenges I have to overcome. I like to problem solve and come up with creative ways to collect and disseminate information, whether that is through the education I help develop as part of my full-time role (ie, not CMEpalooza) or through what we do with our CMEpalooza blog and twice-annual extravaganzas. I get to work with smart people (yes, even you Derek) who push me to be the best version of myself and not take shortcuts just to “get things done.” Whether I want to or not, I am constantly learning and being forced to engage my brain on a daily basis.

But here is the problem: All of this can be mentally draining. Inevitably, I find myself running out of gas at about the halfway point of every year. I find every excuse to step away from my desk (“It’s nice outside. I should go for a walk to recharge my batteries. I promise to think about work while I’m traipsing around the neighborhood. Yeah, yeah, that’s it.”) and even when I am in my home office, I am not super productive or creative. The quality of my work suffers, which makes me grumpier than usual around the house. I’m just burnt.

Of course, we all know the solution to these issues: Summer vacation!

Every year, I hear stories about people’s international colleagues who are “sooo sooo lucky” that they set their OOO message to “I’ll be gone for the next 4 weeks. I don’t know and I don’t care who you contact in my absence, as long as it’s not me. Byeeeee!”

We all know that isn’t the way things work in the United States. First of all, many of us don’t get a month’s work of vacation days annually, and even if we do, they often have to be spread out throughout the year for our mental well-being. I was watching a rerun of The Office last week, and there was this great quote from Pam that summed things up well: “I get 10 vacation days a year, and I try to hold off taking them for as long as possible. And this year I got to… the third week in January.”

I hear you, Pam. I hear you.

That said, I am one of the multitude of Americans that takes my lengthiest vacation of the year with my family in the summertime. We did 2 weeks in Italy last year, which was frankly too much for me. I was getting extremely antsy to get home on the last few days, so I convinced my wife and son that 10 days would be our family sweet spot moving forward.

There is a ton of research focused on the restorative value of vacations. I won’t bore you with the details, but essentially, study after study has shown that taking a break from the daily grind — be it 3 days or 3 weeks — and going somewhere that isn’t your house can have substantial short-term benefits on work productivity and attentiveness. Some people will opt to sit on the beach for a week. Others will hike and camp in the wilderness. Others will drive a few hours to visit family and just sit around eating and drinking. Personally, I like seeing new cities, learning about their history and culture, and eating well. I learned in my 20s not to try to jam too much into a summer vacation, so our current vacation schedule usually involves one activity per day (ie, historic walking tour, hiking/kayaking/something else active, or something unique to the region) with plenty of downtime surrounding everything. Eventually, everyone figures out what works for them during vacation time — this is what works for us.

As you may have read in Derek’s most recent blog post, we spent our summer vacation in Sweden this year in late July-early August. From a vacation destination, it was a good trip. Not a great trip, but a good trip. The cities were clean, the downtown areas were very walkable, but the weather was extremely variable (cloudless and sunny at 9 am, ominous and rainy at 11 am was a normal day) and we had one tour guide who cancelled on us 15 minutes before we were supposed to meet because he “wasn’t feeling well” (the tour started at 2 pm and you just now are not feeling well? I’m not buying it, Ulf) (note from Derek: uh oh, bad news for Ulf. He’s definitely going to get a sternly worded Yelp review now.).

Regardless of our summer destination, I have a fairly predictable vacation routine from a work perspective. Since I am always the first person awake in our family, I’ll usually log onto my email while the others are sleeping and spend up to an hour addressing anything urgent. Basically, I’m just dealing with small details that don’t require a lot of mental acuity (so yes, no blog posts – sorry). I know that a lot of “experts,” as well as our European colleagues, suggest a total unplug from work, but my approach is what works best for me — I don’t have to worry that anything urgent is being unknowingly overlooked but I’m also not having to fully mentally engage. Plus, my inbox is fairly clean so I don’t have to worry about coming home to a lot of nonsense.

And you know what? By about day 5 of our recent trip, I started to feel intellectually unstuck. I actually jotted down a few ideas for future CMEpalooza blog posts so I’m not dreading the “Uh oh, what should I write about this week?” feeling that hit me earlier in the summer. I actually found myself looking forward to getting back into the rhythms of work.

Studies show that the mental and emotional restorative impact of vacations lasts about 3 weeks. I’ve been home now for 5 days. My wife will be glad to know I won’t be my usual grumpy self for a little bit longer.

For most of the last 25 summers, I have volunteered as a tour guide in the historic district of Philadelphia as part of the Independence Historical Trust’s Twilight Tour program. I started doing it in my much younger days as a way to get out and do something different upon my move back East following the fizzling out of my newspaper career. While I’m not as introverted as Derek (or at least, I wasn’t back then), being in the spotlight isn’t necessarily something that comes naturally to me, so leading these historical tours has been a good way to do something that makes me uncomfortable. Yes, there are still times when I’m walking to the start of the tour and quietly wishing, “Please don’t let anyone show up tonight so I can just go home without having to talk to anyone,” but yet, once I get going, I’m usually OK.

Over the years, I have developed a number of ways to connect with a fairly diverse audience. Many weeks, the audience will include foreigners who know nothing about the founding of our country (sadly, many Americans fall into this boat too), kids who are being dragged along by mom and dad, visitors who are only there because they have an hour to kill and the buildings are all closed for the day, and everything in between. I’ve managed to strike up conversations with all kinds of interesting people from interesting places, and can confidently say my life would be very, very different if I hadn’t taken up the challenge of being a tour guide in the first place (it’s where I met my wife – not the “Meet Cute”  story you hear every day).

We’re a little more than halfway through the current touring season. The tours run every night from mid-May through the middle of September – I will typically do one tour a week. By now, I have my script down pretty cold. Year after year, I walk the same route through the park, tell a lot of the same stories, and rely on a lot of the same jokes (“I would tell you about all that the state of New Jersey contributed to the history of our great nation… but I wouldn’t want to waste 30 seconds of your time” works week after week, year after year) (note from Derek: I laughed.) I’ll throw in a few new tidbits that I’ve learned each year just to keep myself engaged, but I would bet 75% of the material I share today is the same material I started with 25 years ago. History is history after all – people, places, and dates don’t change.

After doing these tours for so long, you’d think that every week would be more or less the same, but that is absolutely not true. Every group that comes along with me has a different vibe. Sometimes, things come easily – I get into a good rhythm with my storytelling, I know the answers to the questions people ask, and I can see on the faces of my audience that they are paying attention and seem interested in what I am saying (this is the best feeling of all). But then there are the weeks when I lose people, either because it’s too hot, they are too tired, or I am just boring them to death (this is the worst feeling of all).

Let me briefly illustrate.

THE BAD: I had one tour in early June that was perhaps my worst in a decade. There was only one woman who showed up – she was a librarian from Puerto Rico who didn’t speak or understand much English (and she was wearing a mask, so I could barely hear what she was trying to say). Since my Spanish petered out in high school, I was stuck trying my best to share information with her in English that she may or may not have understood, about a topic she may or may not have cared anything about. I could tell about 10 minutes in that she wanted to leave, but she probably felt bad because no one else had shown up for the evening. So, we both persevered as we walked through the park for an hour. I did my best to keep up appearances, but I skipped certain anecdotes and probably got some names and dates wrong because I just wanted to be done with it. I have actually given some really good tours to group of 1 or 2 people over the years — this happens maybe once or twice each summer – but this one was just awful. I was admittedly a bit dejected afterward.

THE GOOD: Let’s contrast this with last week’s tour, where amongst about a dozen or so people on the tour was a family from Los Angeles. They were on their way home from a 6-week whirlwind trip throughout Asia and Europe and had taken an Uber into Philadelphia during a 5-hour layover because they wanted to “do something besides just sit in the airport.”  Well, mom and dad wanted to do something. Their 10-year-old daughter looked exhausted and was totally disinterested at the start of the tour. I usually don’t engage much with family members who seem like they are being dragged along, but since it wasn’t a large tour group, I made an effort early on to connect with this girl. I don’t even remember how it started – I asked her some question about someone’s name and she guessed with clear disinterest, “John.” Well, the answer wasn’t John. But wouldn’t you know, there was someone named John at my next stop that I talked about (hatmaker John Thompson), and then another John right around the corner (Commodore John Barry), and then another (Colonel John Nixon), and then another (John Todd), and another (John Adams). Every time I came to a story about one of these men, I paused to let this girl tell everyone what their first name absolutely, positively had to be. She seemed mildly amused the first time this happened, but then she started to get excited. By the second or third “John” story, I had managed to hook this girl who only wanted to go home 20 minutes ago in a completely unplanned and unrehearsed manner. I eventually ran out of Johns to talk about, but the whole group had a good laugh when I cued up my comedy partner near the end of the tour and gave her the Family Feud buzzer when, alas, my story was about Bishop William White. When the tour was over, she came up and shook my hand before hopping into an Uber to head back to the airport. “That was fun,” she said. It’s one of my favorite compliments I’ve ever had.

In the CME world, we are all educators. If you’ve been in this field for any length of time, you’ve seen faculty who are able to make connections with their audience and those who simply fall flat. The materials undoubtedly matter, but you can give two faculty an identical slide deck with the same data and see very different results. Heck, I have seen the very same faculty with the very same educational materials give presentations on consecutive evenings and witness wildly different levels of interest. Sometimes, you just get an audience of “librarians from Puerto Rico” who are only there for the free food or because they need the credits. They are impossible to engage. Sometimes, you get people who really, truly want to learn and who come with lots of really good questions. They are easy to engage. But then sometimes you get those people who are there after a long day at work and need that hook to bring them into the education. If you can find faculty who are able to reel those sorts of people in, those are the ones who you want to invite back again.

A CMEpalooza side note: On my historic tours, my unique schtick is that I ask trivia questions and give away money for the correct answers. Because Derek and I also like trivia and giving away money, we debuted CMEpalooza Trivia night last September during the Alliance Industry Summit (AIS). Since the first year was so much fun, we were invited by the AIS powers-that-be to bring it back in 2025. We’re happy to announce that Year 2 of CMEpalooza Trivia Night will be happening from 6-7:30 pm on Tuesday, Sept. 9, at the Hilton at Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia. There will be trivia (some CME related, some not), some prizes ($500 up for grabs), and perhaps a few jokes as well. More details coming later, but if you are going to be at AIS (or if you live nearby and want to sneak in – shh, we won’t tell), please come join us. Lastly, a huge thank you to our friends at AcademicCME for sponsoring this year’s CMEpalooza Trivia night!