A few months before getting kicked out of medical school in 2003, I attended a dull lecture that transformed my life and ended any aspirations for a career in medicine.
It was a sociology lecture. And right in the middle of lulling a lecture hall of about 200 medical students to sleep, my Sociology Prof suddenly grabbed me out of my seat with an analogy about a river.
“What it comes down to is a choice. You can choose to be the noble doctor who spends the next sixty years fishing the same drowning patients out of the same old river, day in, day out. Or, you can choose to be the one who leaves the river bank and heads upstream to stop whoever is pushing your patients into the river in the first place.”
Wow!
Here was the answer to the growing discontent I’d been feeling over the first few years of medical study. I’d signed up with the desire to change the world but was being trained in the ‘best practices of managing illness and disease’. But now, with my Sociology Professor’s brilliant analogy, I knew what my next move had to be: I was going to head upstream, whatever that looked like.
So when I was thrown out of medical school a few months later, with no qualifications, the weight of having let my family and friends down, and a tonne of student debt, I got a job at a local doctor’s practice.
Officially I was there to read through 7,350 patient records and summarise them onto a computer so that the Practice could claim money from the Government. And for a while I simply did my job, innovating every chance I got, including finding a loophole in the Government contract within my first few weeks that let the Practice claim a few thousand pounds of money overnight.
And as long as I was pushing the boundaries within doing my job, things went well.
But the moments I attempted to head “upstream”, the responses ranged from apathy, to slight concern to angry emails from doctors and a phone-call from a ruffled local member of government.
I found the same in the worlds of freelancing, church, hustling products for a Hollywood makeup artist, talking to people down at the unemployment office during the years of taking care of a wife and three kids on benefits…
Do your job/stay in line = fine.
Try to change the world/Head upstream = frustration of trying to empty an ocean with a tea cup.
In other words, they — critics, neighbours, family, friends, nemeses — were right.
You can’t change the world, because the world doesn’t want to be changed.
Which is when I had an epiphany.
Even though most of my efforts to ‘change the world’ had been shot down in flames,there was one thing that actually consistently was a resounding success.
The Conversations and Salvador Dali
Every time I’d found myself having a Conversation with someone about what they really cared about, what they were working on, what they felt their God-given reason for being alive was…I’d been able to encourage them, goad them, and in a small way push them to keep doing what they already knew they needed to do…despite what they said.
The Conversations. Intimate one on one interactions. Encouraging those who were already “heading upstream” to build something important…without a marked out path or readily available resources for doing it.
The Conversations. Exchanging ideas and perspectives. Celebrating the tiny milestones that they simply branded as “pointless wastes of time”.
The Conversations. Earning the right to be invited into Conversations with those who were already fumbling to figure out how to make bricks without straw for the dreams they were building into reality.
That’s what I was supposed to do. That’s where I could do my Work of encouraging those who were building the future.
So I entered the world of marketing as a way of being invited into the Conversations going on in the world of business and entrepreneurship.
So I became a Bass player to help find the groove of the Conversations going on in various jam sessions.
So I became a husband and father to be able to have an influence on the Conversations of my kids and grandkids (inspiring others to do the same).
So I launched a project called Paperback Junkie (#FAIL) as a way of having Conversations around the books that had shaped my thinking and given me the raw material for building my dreams.
So I started a blog called Save Dali (#FAIL) that has no comments, no Salvador Dali, and a simple desire to spark a Conversation with someone who’s already doing the Work of making bricks without straw.
And so I decided to start a medical school called Bizarro to help find the others who are also trying to figure out how to head upstream.
You’re still reading, so I guess that means I’ve found you.
Email me. Let’s talk. And above all, keep doing what you’re doing…we need you to.
This is a taster from Escape Velocity: a personalised email course that guides medics step-by-step in how to successfully make the transition from being stuck in medical school…to living a life of happiness, freedom and fulfilment. Admission is by invitation-only. Click here to apply for your FREE invite.