 Today I want to share with you ideas that come from some of the most successful people in the world and help you understand how you can use them on your day to day in med school. Let's get into it. Hey guys, welcome back to channel. In case you're new here, my name is Lakshman, internal medicine physician, and here on the empty journey we make content to help people like you succeed on whatever journey you're on by doing it with less stress. Now by far, one of my favorite subjects to make content about even beyond studying and productivity has to be about things such as motivation and self progress and improvement. And so today I'm going to scratch my own itch by sharing some of my favorite thoughts from a book I'm recently reading called tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss. Now if you're unfamiliar with the book, the subheading pretty much says it all, which is the tactic, routines, and habits, billionaires, icons, and world-class performers. And while a majority of these individuals are not in medicine or a physician, some of their ideas and beliefs still correlate nicely into becoming a student or being on your medical journey. So I'm going to share with you some of my favorites that I made sure that I bookmarked while I was reading it. And if you're interested in checking out the book yourself, I'll put a link down below. And if at any point in this episode, if you find yourself saying, I like how this random stranger on the internet is able to correlate random ideas to help me succeed on my medical journey and you want more where that came from, then if you click down the link down below, you'll be able to get access to our absolutely free Med School Success Handbook. This is a free document that I'm updating on a weekly basis that includes some of my favorite lessons and principles that I've learned over my past six to seven years in medicine. Hopefully they can help you do the same. So if you guys want to join the 7,000 other students who have already checked it out, go ahead and click out the link down below. Now ID number one comes with this quote, which is what might you do to accomplish your 10-year goal in the next six months if you had a gun to your head. Now very few of us will be in a life-or-death situation and will be able to realize how much we're over-estimating or prolong a specific goal that we may be able to acquire anytime even in this year. Look at that in your own medical school experience. If you're trying to be a cardiologist or going to surgery, there are going to be many, many steps and many goals that you may be prolonging throughout the rest of your medical school. Maybe you find yourself saying, I'm going to go ahead and finally get some shadowing opportunity next semester or I'm going to finally get into that research project next year when I have more time after I pass step one, after I pass step two, after I get through this rotation. You realize that you're always pushing the can down a few months, hoping that that future self is finally going to be motivated to accomplish the goal. But sometimes if you ask yourself, OK, I have to get this done in the next two months, where particularly I gave myself a year, you will change your thinking of saying, what small steps do I need to take now? If you find yourself saying, I want to get into research by the end of this semester, well, how about you change that goal and say, I'm going to get it done this month. It's going to change your style of thinking and move through the first steps, which is to find people that are ideally going to let you join and work on their projects. That nicely flows into idea number two, which says that if you set your goal ridiculously high and fail, you'll still fail above everyone else success. This is probably one of my favorite lessons I've learned throughout medical journey and a quick story to illustrate that when I was applying to medical school, I really had one school in mind and that's just because it was close to home and it was good enough for me to get a proper training. I had no aspirations or no belief that I could actually get into a competitive med school, even though I had the grades, GPA and MCAT score to do so. And really, just out of pure luck, I clicked all of the schools in my state, despite me thinking that some of them were just too competitive for me to even have a chance to and coincidentally, I got an interview at one of them and I got an acceptance letter just two weeks later, and that's ultimately the med school and the residency program that I ultimately went into. Now, that was me aiming high simply by luck. I simply hit a check mark. But somebody on the other side of an admission committee said, this person is worthy enough to come to our school and that really changed my mentality throughout medical school because I found myself trying and striving to achieve more and more things. And sometimes I'll have to know it wasn't successful, but simply making those attempts, if I made 10 attempts and only got three successes, that's still three more successful than somebody who was never willing to put themselves out there. So if you're on a medical journey right now, go beyond that threshold, that doors of opportunity that are very obvious and go for those levels that you don't even think are obtainable, because sometimes you will achieve them. Other times, even if you fail, you'll still be well beyond your previous success threshold. Now, principle number three is a quote from Chris Saka, who's an investor in companies like Twitter, Uber, and Instagram and many more. And the quote goes, I needed to get out of my own inbox and back to my own to-do list. Now, a lot of times many of us, including myself, become victim to our to-do list and the request of other people, whether it be our text messages or DMs or emails, we often find other people asking for our attention and try our best to immediately respond. But then we realize that a majority of our day and attention has not been towards our own progress. And so one of the best things you can do for yourself is at the start and end of your day, be away from those notifications, be away from your phone, try to use apps so you can turn your notification off or you do not disturb and don't check your emails during those times and then use those periods for your most important task or your most relaxing task, depending on how much time of the day you are. You will feel like your day is finally within your control instead of controls of so many other individuals. Principle number four comes from one of my favorite historical figures and Steve Jobs and his quote goes, life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact and that's that everything around you was made by people that were no smarter than you. Now Jobs was applying this in a much more innovative sense but the same principle applies in medical school because we're so used to looking at people around us and saying, that person is so amazing. I don't know if I can get there. We do this with our peers where we focus on how smart they are and how smart we're not. We do this with our attendings and saying, how can I be like you in five to 10 years? So that doesn't seem possible. We do this with people who are giving us lectures or giving us presentations and find yourselves mentally asking, like how do you know so much? How can you possibly have this level of success after just a few years? In full disclosure, I do this with my co-residents and my attendings where I find myself mentally saying, how can I be as smart as you when we spend the same amount of time, you're just so much at a higher level. And so this quote is a good reminder that you are also good enough and if you want to get to those levels it requires the same level of hard work that that individual also put to get there. Sometimes I realize that I'll look at a co-resident and that person is just freakishly smart, such an amazing doctor. And then after you're getting over feeling discouraged and the difference between us two, I also start to focus on how much hard work they put in learning those specific topics. If I work with someone in ICU, I'm not an ICU level doctor. It's not a topic that I really enjoy it, but what I work with a co-resident who really enjoys it. I can say, okay, clearly this person has right up on these topics. They've practiced more on these patients. They've offered to take more rotations in these areas. I understand why they're better than me in here. I should use that opportunity to learn and improve, but I shouldn't use it as a reason to discourage myself because again, I am good enough. Now next principle is from Tony Robbins that says, it's not what you know, it's what you do consistently. Now as you're watching and listening to this episode, likely none of the principles I've talked about are really that foreign to you. You've heard something of likes, but you may find in yourself saying, yep, I do that or I compare myself to my peers or you may be watching a video on how to study or how to study for step one or anything here on YouTube or on a podcast. Majority of the information is not new. So again, the principle is that if all we needed was just new information that all of us would be billionaires with six pack abs, but it's not really more information. It's selectively picking the information that you want to put action into doing it consistently. So as a medical student, sometimes in saying, here is a resource, here is a study method that I found to be effective. I'm not going to look into the corners of Reddit or student forum or Cora or YouTube. I'm gonna do this, I'm going to evaluate if it works and then I'm gonna move to the next step. Now the next four principles are some of my favorites, but they also coincidentally come from the same chapter within the book from Derek Sivers. So principle number one is when you think of, answer the blank, what's the third thing that you think of? Now the reference from the book comes from the question, when you think of somebody famous, who's the first person that comes to mind? And Derek Sivers nicely responds that it's not really about the first or the second person that I think of, but who's the third person? Like after I get past the very instantaneous thought that my brain already has of some famous people like Einstein or Edison, who's the person that next comes to my mind? And I really like this for the use of medical school because often we have an tendency of saying answers that immediately come to our mind without giving us some thought. And this really gets me in trouble when I'm on the rotations or when I'm working as a full-time physician where I have basic answers to a lot of things, but don't have a level of depth for many things. And so sometimes you just have to take a pause and say, okay, what's the first, second or third answer? Or a good way to use it as a student is saying patient comes in with a shortness of breath. What is the third and fourth likely differential diagnosis? You may say something like pneumonia or heart failure, but what's next? Is it a pulmonary embinism? Is it anxiety? Like come up with those kinds of things will really start to get and work on your creativity as a full-time physician and a medical student. So again, start asking yourself what's the third blank that you think of? And now we'll start to broaden your thought process on everything, whether it's differential diagnosis, management, diseases, and hopefully that helps you out. Now the next principle that is a little bit controversial is the idea that the standard pace is for chumps. Now these words come from Derek Sivers, not me, he said, don't get mad at me, but I do enjoy and really believe in this is that often we go with the flow of the average individual. And I argue that you are more than average. If you're watching these videos and trying to make an improvement, most students are not in that state. And so you should also be in a situation where you're asking yourself, okay, how can I get into the top X percent? Not for grades, but just in terms of hormones, in terms of mentality, in terms of desire to improve. All of those will start to say, okay, if again going back to the start of our episode, if a majority of people are going to try to accomplish this in two years, how can I do this in six months? If a majority of people are gonna try to do a research project within the end of the summer, how can I work on two of them and start to get one of them already rolling within the next two to three weeks? You start to think of every goal and objective that you have at a much different pace and you will start to find that your level of success will be rapidly much quicker than any of your classmates. Again, you may fail, but you'll likely fail beyond the threshold of your original definition of success. Principle number three from Derek Sivers is the idea that busy often means out of control. I get this from a lot of the students that I work with one-on-one. When they show me their schedule, I'm like, holy crap. Like, how do you have time for any of this, much less your own life, your personal life, and you have a family? Like, you have no time for this. You're busy, you're not in a sense of control. But when you compare that to somebody who feels like they're in a sense of control, even though they may have a busy schedule where they start at 8 a.m. and they may end at 6 or 7, the person who feels like they're in a sense of control understands that each and everything within their schedule was done purposely. So just as an example, if you're in medical school and you're doing things like using multiple resources or alternating between a lot of different study strategies because all because you feel like you have to, that doesn't mean you're busy, you're just out of control. So a good way to do this is to look at each thing you're doing and how much value does this give me? If the answer is like, eh, not that much. Ask yourself how you can completely remove it or minimize it into your schedule. And again, look at your Monday through Friday, Saturdays and Sundays and feel like everything that was there had a purpose in place. And if it didn't, make sure that you don't try to repeat the process in the future. And again, just as a reminder, if you want more help on your medical school journey, check out some of the free resources including the Med School Success Handbook where I go over all my favorite lessons from medical school constantly updating that. And if you want more help for things like studying, check out our study rehab course, absolutely free. Text me the three things you can do today to get better grades and less time. And the final principle from Derek Sivers' idea that we are whatever we pretend to be. When I look at my own personal journey throughout medical school particularly, I realized that my first and two years were really me believing that I was an imposter. But I didn't belong there. I was not smart enough. I was getting seized, stressed, studying way too much. It wasn't until I started to figure things out or the grades started getting better and saying, I belong. I started sharing ideas on the internet and here we are. And now fast forward six years of doing the MD journey. There's a few things that I realized. One, I know I'm not gonna be the best student. I'm not gonna be the smartest doctor. I may not be the best care provider. That is okay. I can pretend to be each of those things and that's gonna dictate what habits I try to practice under each of those sectors and that is gonna lead me to be a better student, a better physician, a better care taker than I previously going to be. So again, pretend to be the person you always wanted to be and you'll be surprised of how close you actually get. For those guys are some of my favorite ideas and quotes from the Tools of Titans book. Hopefully you guys enjoyed today's episode. If you did and you want me to make more of these motivational contents, take in from ideas, use from things not from medical school, make sure you let me know. Add them in the comment section down below because again, I love making this content but I'm also influenced by the things that you click like and comment on so make sure you let me know. If you're watching this on YouTube, make sure you hit that like button. It really helps support the channel and if you haven't done so already, hit that subscribe and notification bell. If you're listening to this on a podcast form, make sure you hit that subscribe and follow on your favorite platform as well as leaving an honest review on iTunes. And as always, my friends, if you have any questions, you know where to find me, add them in the comment section down below. All those free resources that I mentioned including the Med School Success Handbook as well as the study rehab course are all linked down below in case you're interested and as always, thanks for being a part of my journey. Hopefully that was a little help to you guys on yours. If you did enjoy this video, check out this video on how you can use Anki Like a Pro as well as this video on how I study medicine as a full-time position step-by-step. Enjoy these and I'll see you guys in the next one. Take care my friends, peace.