Monthly Archives: December 2024

Full moon tonight.

I wonder how much of our awe for the natural world has been lost due to the introduction of electric lights.

It’s easy to feel self-sufficient when everything is warm and bright around you. Take that away, and the majesty of the world and its Creator becomes apparent. People in ancient times must have looked up in wonder at the seemingly infinite number of stars in the vast night sky above them. Getting caught in a sandstorm in the desert must have been terrifying. What must it have been like to experience thunder, lightning, and hail when you’re out in the open?

I’m not saying we should go and get ourselves into these situations on purpose. Rather I am lamenting the fact that people nowadays often have a false sense of security just because of some minor creature comforts that they have in their environment.

Everything appears to be under control, we think. But it only takes one event, a natural disaster, or a health crisis in the family, to jolt us back into the realisation that we are helpless but for the mercy of Allah S.W.T.

In my line of work, I see this practically every day.

If anything, it acts as a notice for me to look after my own health. More importantly, it also reminds me that “to Allah we belong, and to Him we shall return”.

About three months ago, I made the somewhat surprising decision to leave academic medicine for private practice. Moving from the former to the latter has not been easy; I have, in effect, been forced to re-learn completely how to practice medicine.

Throughout all this, I have also been reading about how to deal with drastic changes in your life. The question is this: Why do some people succeed and others fail at making these changes?

A few weeks ago, I read about this set of rules somewhere, I think it must have been in one of James Clear’s newsletters. Here are the rules:

1. Know precisely what you want
2. Determine the cost of what it will take to get it
3. Don’t bargain over the price

These rules have helped me greatly in navigating the transition from academic to private practice. Whenever I’m struggling with insurance forms, or admissions procedures, or difficult queries from patients, I understand that this is the cost of learning how to master the craft. More importantly, I tell myself that what matters is that I learn something new every day.

In other words: Progress, not perfection.

Making some sort of progress, no matter how small it may seem, is way more important than trying to get everything perfect every single time.

Don’t bargain over the price. It is precisely this ‘price’ that will differentiate you from 99% of other people who were not willing to pay it in order to get to the required level. If you understand that anything worth doing inevitably requires a great amount of sacrifice, then you no longer fret so much about the effort required to achieve excellence.