| (no subject) |
[Oct. 9th, 2008|11:40 pm] |
Seth Godin's article on effort as a choice made me think a bit about medical school and the suffocating feelings of insecurity within me. The article discusses outliers (those who are seemingly head and shoulders above everyone else intellectually, financially etc.) and the damaging feelings of self-loathing that result from constantly watching them; one quote that struck me from the article was:
"I think we've been tricked by the veneer of lucky people on the topof the heap. We see the folks who manage to skate by, or who get somuch more than we think they deserve, and it's easy to forget that:</p>a. these guys are the exceptions
and
b. there's nothing you can do about it anyway. And that's the key to the paradox of effort: While luck may bemore appealing than effort, you don't get to choose luck. Effort, on the other hand, is totally available, all the time. "
It's easy to find outliers in medical school - 100% of the people in a medical class passed high academic standards and worked hard to get there. It's easy for me to worry that I'm not studying hard enough or parsing my coursework correctly because there are so many people who have a demonstrated history of kicking ass. Even with luck involved, the outliers here succeed in no small part to long evenings spent impaling textbooks on their brainstems.
For me to whine about others' stellar performance is prodigal and gets me nowhere. The more medical students I talk to, the more I realized that they have the same dumb problems I do - passing their classes, worrying about groceries in the fridge, time management, being outshined by their peers. Even among the top performers I hear others talk the same talk I do - wishing that they had the intelligence or work ethic of their peers, constantly feeling like they don't belong. In reality, most of them are already there; they just need to listen to themselves.
I guess I'm not the only one. But for me to have thought that I was was an illusion in the first place.
***
This feels like the sort of entry I would have posted in high school, but then I realized - I've never really confronted myself on my own insecurities. I step around them carefully, a delightfully myopic waltz that brings them back every few years or so. I'm certain that this is a problem that will plague me for the rest of the year if I don't get it under control - and I think it can be channeled into something very productive. I need to stay humble, not let ego get the best of me, and (most importantly) keep my mouth shut.
I've got an entire museum chock-full of insecurities, though - and trying to deal with them all at once would tear me apart. Slowly. |
|
|