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Not Quite What I Was Planning

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Years ago, I read a beautiful book called Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure edited by Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser. The premise, based on Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn,” is that contributors summed up their lives in six words. Famous participants include Margaret Atwood and Stephen Colbert, among others.

I thought about the book last year when I was at my medical school reunion. A dozen of us sat around a round table and talked about what we had been up to for the last 30 years. After we finished, we concluded that the overriding theme was that all of us were doing something different than what we thought we would be doing. I found that concept refreshing, and I suspect it might reassure current students who feel burdened with big decisions. This year, “Not Quite What I Was Planning” is the theme for my college reunion’s Class Panel. 

Check out the book!

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Grit is Not Enough

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University of Pennsylvania professor Angela Duckworth wrote the best-selling book Grit about the power of passion and persistence in predicting success (her TED talk on grit has over 18 million views), but to her credit, she admits to being nearsighted in her new book Situated,which I’m reading now. 

MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient Duckworth asserts in Situated that your environment – workspace, geographic location, mentors, friends, and even the culture you immerse yourself in— counts as much as (or more than) grit in determining success, and she offers many compelling studies to support her point.

According to Duckworth, instead of focusing on sheer willpower, you should situate yourself among people and in places that make your goals easier and temptations harder.

The book is a good read, and its thesis is worth serious contemplation when deciding where to go to medical school, train, and start your career.

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Time to Take a Reading Break

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I hope each of you has a moment of downtime over this holiday season. One of the ways I relax is with a good book. Here’s a piece I wrote for Student Doctor Network regarding great books for doctors in training.  

In addition to the list, I want to add another strong recommendation: Pulitzer Prize Finalist Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air. Get ready to cry your eyes out, while appreciating beautiful prose and insightful content. Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer when he was a senior neurosurgery resident at Stanford. He chronicles his short life in a book that’s hard to put down. 

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Four Thousand Weeks

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I’m currently reading a fantastic nonfiction book called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. Four thousand weeks is how much time the average human has on this earth. That doesn’t sound like a lot.

I’d highly recommend the book to those of you who are productivity geeks, folks who are trying to be as efficient as possible with their time – all the time. I’m certainly one of those people.

Unlike other authors, Burkeman recommends that you surrender to the fact that you cannot get everything done and that traditional time management strategies, which are supposed to help you multitask, will fail and cause anxiety. He recommends recognizing that our lives are finite and that we should be in the moment. The author does a fantastic job of persuading even someone like me how important it is to recognize that even if you get your list done, there will always be more items on your next list. 

I’m not much into self-help, but I do recommend this intelligent book.

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A Novel Approach: Reading throughout your Rotations

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I had a thoughtful advisee years back who told me about an interesting plan she had made for herself: As she rotated through different specialties during medical school, she read a book appropriate to each field. For internal medicine, she read “Being Mortal,” by Atul Gawande. For neurology, she read the classic “The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat,” by Oliver Sacks. For surgery, she read “When Breath Becomes Air,” a beautiful book by Paul Kalanithi. The list goes on.

I was impressed by this contemplative approach to third and fourth year. So many of us are understandably focused on Shelf Exams and letters of recommendation that we don’t give ourselves a chance to comprehensively reflect on our subject matter and patients’ experiences.

If you have a moment, please check out a few book recommendations I have for those in the medical field. Perhaps my advisee’s stellar plan can be one that other medical students adopt. (You’ll see that I strongly recommend Cutting for Stone. Dr. Abraham Verghese has a new book out that I’m reading right now called The Covenant of Water.)

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About Dr. Michelle Finkel

Dr. Michelle Finkel

Dr. Finkel is a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Medical School. On completing her residency at Harvard, she was asked to stay on as faculty at Harvard Medical School and spent five years teaching at the world-renowned Massachusetts General Hospital. She was appointed to the Assistant Residency Director position for the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency where she reviewed countless applications, personal statements and resumes. Read more

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