From Perfectionism to Sportsmanship

Medical school has been a bit of a growth process for me. I grew up very insecure with my own abilities. Like many in medical school who won't admit it, I am a perfectionist. The yard-stick by which I measured myself was always far too long. I looked at my achievements and especially at my failures, and I always compared them to the person who was the absolute best at whatever it was I was doing. I always said "they can do it, why can't I?", and so it went. The cycle in which I would beat myself up until I got things absolutely perfect, and kept challenging myself further and further until I would inevitably fall. I would take a semester of classes in college that was for me, a realistic load, and do amazingly well. Then the next semester, I would challenge myself to something I thought was a little impossible because I thought achieving the impossible was the way to prove to myself that I was worthy of the title "smart." I would spend the days that were close to my exam terrified of failure because of course, my identity as "smart" hinged on success. I would then proceed to fall on my ass. Yes, my ass. Now ashamed of myself, I would then pick myself up and start all over again.

Basically the admissions committee in medical school wants to know if you can weather mental and physical abuse for about 7 years of your life, maybe more, and come out alive. Apparently I met the criteria. However, needless to say that while my attitude got me into medical school, it was not healthy. Especially in medical school, where everyone was either as good as me, or better at jumping through those hoops to get where we all are now. I was already feeling worn-out when I started medical school (a story for another day) due to circumstances in my life. This coupled with my way of coping with challenges destined me for burn-out in my first year.

So here I am, after a year off of school in the middle of my second year, after having learned many, many lessons. The reason the title of this post is called "From Perfectionism to Sportsmanship" is because I have noticed a few common themes that run through my insights about success in medical school, or in any other challenging situation that constantly tests your limits, and one of them is the attitude that athletes take.

Athletes often have to imagine that they can do the impossible. They are constantly trying to overcome limitations, and achieve more with their natural ability than they could envision before. They can't afford to get down on themselves, because that means loss of valuable practice time. They have to use limited resources and limited time to achieve all this. Given such conditions, they have got to have the healthiest attitude towards failure than anyone else. I know that the world of athletics has its share of problems, but you have to admit, there are lots of similarities. When I do badly on an exam now, its painful, yes, but I say to myself "you have to lose if you want to be a winner." Med-students commonly say that "medical school is a marathon, not a race." I dont know about you, but I think we sound a lot like athletes.

I think approaching medical school from the perspective of athletics also has taught me something about intelligence. When training for a sport, you have to budget your energy, and your resources so they last you as long as possible. You have to use the time you have to get as much as possible from it. Therefore, problem solving becomes very important. Now, when people told me I was smart in college, I would always say "academic achievement isn't about how smart you are. Its about how lucky you are, and its about how motivated you are." and I concluded so because I knew a lot of people who were smarter than me that weren't making grades like mine because try as they could, they couldn't prioritize school to the degree that college course-work demanded. Some were even floundering because of circumstances in their life. However, circumstances or not, society would allow their grades to place them in the "smart" or "not smart" category. I still believe such thinking is quite silly, and I still agree with my previous conclusions about academic success to a degree, but with some caveats. Yes, its true that your grades are not an adequate barometer for measuring your ability to digest difficult to understand material that is presented to you. But, your grades, to a degree, do measure another kind of intelligence, and that is the problem-solving ability I alluded to earlier. I've realized that successful students are amazingly good at, in a time-crunched situation, organizing themselves, or coming up with ways to use the resources they have effectively so they can glean as much from them as possible in the given amount of time. Or, they are really great at getting in the teacher's head and looking at materials and figuring out what it is they are supposed to emphasize in their studies. Some are really great at getting tips or ideas from peers or professors. Its kind of like being able to create a good training regimen, and being able to fine-tune it as you go along for maximal results.

So anyway, wish me luck world, as I put my heart and soul into training for this marathon. I'll meet you at the finish-line, and hopefully when I'm done, I'll be a better person, and a better doctor than I ever could imagine.