How Bad Do You Want It?

This was a post I wrote over about 5-6 months ago but never posted. I added a couple of thoughts to the end of the piece.

I was watching this video of a motivational speaker, Eric Thomas, and he tells the story of this young man that wanted to make a lot of money, or be successful, and went to a guru for help. The guru agrees and asks the young man to meet him at the beach at 4am. The guru walks the young man out in the water waist deep and then continues to walk farther and farther. The young man thought the guru was crazy but played along. When they were deep enough, the guru grabbed the young man’s head and held him underwater. Just as the young man was about to pass out, the guru lifts the young man’s head up and asks him “When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you will be successful.” He then draws analogies between an asthmatic having an asthma attack wanting to breathe—does not care about parties, TV, or anything but air. Eric Thomas declares that when “most of say we want to be successful, but you don’t want it bad. You just kinda want it. You don’t want it badder than you want to party; You don’t want it as much as you want to be cool.”

As a pre-med student, I think this is extremely applicable. There are some that want it as bad as they want to breathe. And there are those who kind of want it. Those who ‘kind of want it’ are the people in it for the money, the prestige, their parents, or because they didn’t know what else to be. (I am not saying solely going into medicine because of passion—money is an important consideration.) The point is that these are the people that do not have their whole heart set in and be willing to do what is necessary to achieve the end point. As Eric Thomas said in his story, these people are not willing to give up partying or drinking—short term considerations—for their long term goal of being a doctor. They don’t really want it. They kinda want it. Some are smart enough that their kind-of-want-it attitude will suffice, but for others, it does not. And a portion of those that don’t make it, don’t have backup plans and are left few options that they like after graduation (another post, another time).

“Wait, cdl, what you are suggesting is that we all be gunners.” No, I am not. Gunners are those sabotage others or refuse to help others because it may hurt their position in the class. What I am saying is that if you truly deeply want to be a doctor, you would willing to give up a portion of the “college experience,” to study, volunteer, or whatever to have good enough extracurriculars, GPA, and MCAT to gain acceptance into medical school. “Wait, cdl, you are saying we can’t have a life as pre-medical student.” Maybe, it depends on how much the “college experience” is worth to you and how much you are willing to trade for success. For most people, pre-med track requires a bit more studying than the average major, but a social life still strong. For the select few, parties every night and all nighter before the exam will suffice. Life sucks but life isn’t fair. For others, being a doctor isn’t worth sacrificing a couple of hours every week, and that is okay because it differs from person to person how much success is worth to them. Just don’t complain if you don’t want to put in the time because in the end, it is all about how bad do you want it.

There will inevitably be people who simply cannot hack it in the pre-medical track. No matter how much they study, they cannot pull off the A’s or B’s in the necessary classes. Before you are quick to put yourself in that group, these people are far and fewer than you may assume. Those who study for hours and still do not pull off the necessary grades are probably studying the inefficiently or the wrong way. For those who truly cannot cut it, there are other options just as appealing. To have the wisdom to know when to change and when to persist is up to you.

Clarification and Update

So my previous approach to blogging was to try to produce carefully thought out pieces of work. This would often including writing a draft of the piece and going over the piece to add ideas and remove ideas. In theory, that process is what writing should be. However, the unfortunate consequence is that writing a piece takes a long time--often pieces do not get created as a result of this hesitation. I am highly critical of my own work and go through a piece many times to try to organize ideas as clear as possible. I often remove much of what I intended to say in the revision. These combined factors (time and self-doubt) have resulted in much unsaid. In other words, trying to perfect my writing has prevented me from writing. This goes against the goals I set out for this blog: to improve quality and speed I can produce writing as well as to share my thoughts.
Needless to say, editing and revision are important for published works. The process works to clarify ideas to make sure you are communicating what you mean to say. If you can clarify or distill your true meaning, then you have complete understanding. To clarify what one truly means is often much more difficult than it seems. When you can distill your arguments to the core issue, it is incredibly empowering skill; you can make decisions or communicate with much more clarity and efficiency. Everyone can do it--it is the epiphany that everyone looks for. The caveat is that the process is long and difficult. Most people give up and make less informed decisions before that level of clarity is reached. In many daily cases, the differences between levels of clarity is trivial. However, if the process is not practiced enough, the ability may not be there when you truly need it (ex. major decisions).
If my writing seems jumbled and all over the place, it is because I am trying to actively develop the ability clarify and organize ideas faster. This means working faster and more efficiently to challenge how I think. Much like how an athlete must push himself outside his comfort zone, I am trying to do the same. The intended result is more frequent, clearer, better organized posts. Some of the short run implications include jumbled ideas, grammar mistakes, spelling errors (that spell check does not catch), and possibly crap work. It will also mean I will try to produce more posts. I will see how this method works over the next few months and will qualitatively look at my results later.

Winter Break, Workaholism, and Lethargy

It has been two weeks since I have been home for winter break, and there is only about a week and a half left. I have done remarkably almost nothing, which may or may not be a problem. One of the problems is that I have felt compelled to do something productive this whole break which has somewhat taken away from my break. It does not help that I actually have some work to do. It also does not help that I have been sleeping at 3am-4am and waking at noon. When I wake I am tired; when I try to sleep early, my mind is racing.

Trent of a Simple Dollar states that there are 4 types of work: important and urgent, important and not urgent, urgent and not important, and not important and not urgent. For me, important and urgent tasks include emailing professors, finding/applying/LOR/Transcripts for internships that are time sensitive. Important and not urgent tasks, include working on this blog, less time sensitive applications/looking for summer programs, ordering textbooks, studying organic chemistry. But lately my time seems to be occupied by not important and not urgent tasks (ex. internet surfing) and excess games.

Part of the purpose of winter break is to recover from Fall semester, so I can hit Spring semester running. But the other part of me feels that winter break is to get a step on next semester (little bit of orgo reading) and to cover things that I won’t have as much time to do during the semester (ex. finding internships/research/summer activities). So far this break I have sunk a lot of time into looking for internships, summer activities, and potential professors that I can work with in the spring. I have also spent a lot of time playing video games—something I feel is not too terrible but is not great. The problem remains that for all the hours I sunk into looking for internships, summer activities, and potential research professors, I have produced almost no results. And results are everything.

I have emailed one professor, completely half of an application to a program that I decided is not worth applying to, and did half a chapter of organic chemistry. If there was a plot of results vs time (as a very loose measure of effort) it would have flat-lined this past week. Ideally, the slope would be positive with a steep slope. The disparity between time vs. results suggests inefficiency. Economy of time and effort is critical, especially as a pre-med student. I hope to break free from this inefficiency rut soon. There is too much to do before school starts. In fact, in creating this blog post, I was hoping to get the snowball rolling on getting stuff done. We’ll see how that works out. 

Introductions

Hey this is cdl here. A little about myself: I am a sophomore business pre-med student at a large 4 year research university—I do attend a top 10 undergraduate business school (according US News—if that means anything at all). I am on track to take my MCATs during the spring of my junior year; I do intend to graduate in 4 years despite the non-overlapping nature of business and science courses. I also do not intend on taking a gap year between medical school (assuming I get in) and graduation. For me, I am certain I want to be a doctor and am not studying business as a ‘backup’ career. My reasons for my somewhat unconventional (but has been done numerous times before me) will be clarified in another post.

Some miscellaneous things about me: I am somewhat of a fitness nut but am not too crazy. I am a former swimmer that has moved on, but nevertheless, remaining in good shape remains a high priority for me. I am interested in healthcare systems, productivity, personal development, and sciences as well. I think part of my motivation in starting this blog is also to solidify or clarify some of my interests as well goals, aspirations, life philosophies, and ideas. I have always been a thinker and, perhaps by some delusional thinking, solidifying my ideas in writing will force me to make some ideas more tangible. I do want to preserve some degree of anonymity for various reasons and thus will censor certain details. Some more reasons I am beginning this blog:

1. To document my experiences in my ultimate goal of getting into medical school and becoming a doctor

2. To improve my writing skills which has always been a weak point for me…for some, you may have noticed already

3. To vent/muse/share my thoughts and observations on life/philosophies…of which I have many

4. To post miscellaneous topics that I find interesting

I will try to establish some sort of regular schedule but most likely this will be more of an opportunistic blog, meaning I’ll update if I have something interesting to say. I am currently on winter break where there are more opportunities and time to write, but I suspect that when school resumes, updates will be less frequent. It seems as though the word “I” has been used too many times already, and I have never been great at expounding my thoughts (hence one of the reasons for this blog). I started this post without a real direction besides the clarify purpose of the blog, so I’ll stop here.