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:
- Know precisely what you want
- Determine the cost of what it will take to get it
- 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.
Imran Idris 