Medical School Archives | Page 2 of 8

Seek first to understand…

…then to be understood.

One of the most crucial lessons from Steven Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, especially when it comes to recruiting your parents as allies in your transition from a career in Medicine into the Work you were created to pursue.

Dare to feel where they’re coming from and looking at the world from their perspective (don’t worry about losing your sense of self or desire for freedom…that’s built into you)

Or as Stephen put it:

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

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Not your Father’s world

How To Drop Out Of Medicine

This is not your father’s world. And things are not the same as they were when he was the same age as you.

Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

But maybe he’s trying to prepare you for a world that doesn’t exist anymore.

Listen to your Dad’s advice…but remember to consider the world you’re actually living in, and not the one he wishes was still around.

Happily ever after

How To Drop Out Of Medicine

That’s all your parents want for you, and they’re driving you towards the best path (that they know) to achieving that outcome.

Your dreams, ambitions and interests are seen as saboteurs of your success and hooligans who want to divert you towards a life of aimless drifting in mediocrity.

And that’s because you present them with no plan, no conviction and a poor track record of following things through.

(They remember all the other plans you convinced them you were interested in, and yet didn’t follow through on).

All they want is for you to live happily ever after. That’s all.

Understanding this is the first step to letting go of the bitterness, frustration and negative emotions that are inhibiting your ability to transform your dreams into reality.

You all want the same thing…you just have different ways of pursuing the same goal.

Money, respect and impact

How To Drop Out Of Medicine

Those are the 3 “biggies” used to drive us into a career in Medicine.

Doctors make a lot of money. Doctors receive a lot of respect. Doctors make a huge impact on the world.

But under the microscope lenses of “personal experience” and “reality”, these 3 USPs aren’t as brilliant as they seem at first glance.

Doctors don’t get as much money as you think they do…when you divide what they earn by the crazy number of hours that they work.

Doctors are respected by some of the patients they treat. But they do not get respect from the Health care Factory that treats them as the dispensible, replaceable cogs that it trained them to be.

And whilst Doctors work really hard to make a difference in the lives of their patients, the impact their work has on the global canvas of health care is about zero percent.

That is, unless they develop an innovation like the Polio vaccine or a breakthrough in Human genomic that can scale independent of their continual efforts…something that most Doctors will neverdo because they aren’t given enough time, energy or encouragement to make meaningful breakthroughs in their fields of interest.

Also under the microscope, we see that the Money, Respect and Impact offered by a career in Medicine, come attached with a huge price tag:

Your personal happiness and well-being.

You have as much right to these as the patients you’re being trained to serve…don’t you think?

Rites of passage (this is where you grow up)

How To Drop Out Of Medicine

In some cultures, you have to kill a lion in order to graduate into adulthood.

In others you go on a Walkabout, or run with the bulls, or trek across the Amazon with nothing but the clothes on your back.

Today, the rite of passage is making the conscious decision to pursue your potential, despite how much this upsets your parents, elders and guardians.

It means doing the work of figuring out what’s important to you, making a plan to get it, and then going after it with everything you have.

It means standing up to your parents’ challenges, figuring out how to deal with debt/loan/cash flow issues, and refusing to settle for less than what you were created to do.

It means being willing to suffer for a moment or a decade or more…in order to reap the rewards of being true to your True Identity.

And when you do this, your parents et Al. will resist you, shout at you, guilt trip you …and then celebrate you for standing up to them.

Because all they want to know is that you’re really seriously about what you say you want this time.

So this is where you grow up, and decide to go after what’s important to you.

Welcome to your Rite of passage.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled

How To Drop Out Of Medicine

…was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

And when it comes to Medical School, one of the biggest tricks is convincing you that how you feel and what you’re going through is ‘just a normal part of Med school’.

No pain, no gain; right?

We also used to put up with blood letting and treating headaches by drilling into patients skulls…until someone had the courage to do something about it.

No, you’re not the only one going through what you’re going through.

Yes, you have the right to do something about it…even if nobody else is.