I am in a mid-medical school crisis.
I often find myself anxious about what is the right thing to do.
With a bit of both medical and technical skills, I find myself to be Buridan’s donkey. When I learn medicine, I lament that I am not solving problems at scale; when I improve my software programming skills, I wonder what is the point of writing beautiful code if all I want is prototyping; when I delve into statistical algorithms, I worry that I am not doing things that are immediately applicable to my medical career.
And it dawns on me that I have been asking myself the wrong question.
The problem with goal setting
As a society, we are too used to asking ourselves “do I need to do X or Y or Z”. It is good to be selective, but the caveat lies in what we are being selective for. Many people, including me, have an extrinsic goal in mind. “do I need to do X to build my perfect CV, or is it better to do Y”. Some try to internalise that goal, so the question becomes “does doing X help me become the person I want to be”. Although the latter is often more praised, here are the problems I have had with both goals.
First, it is important to recognise that there is not that much difference between an extrinsic and intrinsic goal in this case. In career development, self-identity is always condensed into a few pages of a CV in the first pass. Unless one is an eternal idealist, the reality is going to force someone to look at their CV from time to time and collapse the two goals into one.
Second, goals bring anxiety because of uncertainty. This problem is especially pertinent to emergent careers. There is no job advertised for someone medically trained and technically savvy. And I am not going to apply for these jobs until 5-10 years down the road. Therefore, it is extremely challenging to try to project that long-term vision into our daily prioritization of what to focus on.
Third, goals are denials to our present self. If we need to do X/Y/Z to become the person we want to be, it implies the present us are not good enough. Again, perhaps such goals will be good motivators in the short-term, but to live in self-denial for years or decades? I do not think it is a healthy way to approach life if the only way to pursue a higher aim is to dislike our current status.
The alternative question
So, rather than asking who we want to be, how about changing the question to “what problems do I want to solve”.
I find this question helpful because it takes the pressure off me. I no longer scream “me me me!” when I reflect on this question. It is also more concrete. I stop imagining the nebulous me in ten years and fantasizing how he will fit in the job market then. Instead, I focus on the real pain that people are experiencing, and I know I can take action to address them NOW.
I find status games are often played as a means to an end. “If I am at the top of this exam/first author in this paper/…, I will have a better foundation for achieving my goals”. While it is important to be recognised, it is not everything. Often, it is good enough to be in a position to quickly learn the skills needed to solve a particular problem. It is best to be recognised as the expert for real skills and not just external validations.
To help me answer the question of “what problem”, I have come up with the following criteria
- difficult, so solving it improves our skills and career capital
- interesting, so we are having a fun time solving it
- impactful, so others can benefit from the solution, and they can be motivated to join us
To me, this problem is about how to make data more useful in medicine. So I know I need medical knowledge to understand the health/disease, coding skills to write maintainable software, and statistics to interpret the findings. I also need to join and foster a like-minded community to pursue this grand aim. It is no longer about improving the current imperfect me; it is about delivering a better solution to the world. Yes, I still need to improve myself to achieve that aim, but I no longer do it for my ambiguous self-interest.
After all, I think it is an application of memento mori (remember that we have to die). What is the point of maintaining a perfect image of myself that is going to dust? I will focus on solving a tiny part of the problem for our civilization that outlives me (hopefully 😛).
Reflections on 20 March 2021:
I thought about this for a bit and I think one element that is lacking in the problem-solving approach is continuity. My favourite quote from Andrew Solomon’s TED talk is “forge meaning, build identity”. It feels like we somewhat still need an overarching “identity-building” approach to recognise why we are solving the problems we want to solve and to seek meaning in life.
