 Today's video is brought to you by Picmonic. Since I can remember, I've always been a fan of high performers through all walks of life. Athletes like Kofi Bryant, LeBron James, Tom Brady, Michael Phelps, to a masters in other realms of life such as Magnus Carlson in chess or Einstein in physics. But today I want to talk about the lessons that you can learn from all these high achievers and high performers on how to do the same as a high top-performing student. Let's get into it. Hey friends, welcome back to the channel. In case you're new here, my name is Lex, and I'm an internal medicine physician. And here on the channel, I'm going to teach you how to make content and videos to help people like you succeed on really whatever journey you're on but doing it with less stress. In today's episode, we're going to talk about how to become a top-performing student using six principles that other high achieving performers and athletes and you name it, use in their day-to-day life. Let's get into it. A principle number one is you have to be aware of your dense. Now, this is a principle that I lived by since my early years in college. It basically says that just how we say that there's no such thing as a perfect circle. Each every circle has its own level of imperfection, as well as how we say that there's no such thing as perfect human being. All of us are imperfect in some form or fashion. Still, just like that circle, you can make it a little bit more round, a little bit more perfect. You can do the same thing for your individual traits that requires you to understand where your smooth and rough patches are. For example, in the Rumble Sports, if you look at athletes like Kobe Bryant, he specifically said that there was a playoff series where he realized that after playing so many games, he realized the ball wasn't just going as far as hitting the front of the rim. And I basically told him, okay, one of my dents, one of my rough patches is my conditioning isn't great because my legs aren't ready to perform after so many games in the season. And so after identifying that one of his dents was simply not being conditioned enough to be ready for playoff and finals level basketball, he decided to spend an entire summer focusing on just that. In the same way as a student, it's very easy to say, I am an imperfect student. I don't get grades well enough. I don't understand something as well as Sally or Jim, but that's usually not the way that you should approach it. Instead, you should look at your circle as a student, ask yourself, where are the biggest dents? Is it that you can't retain information or that you're not productive or you struggle with timing on exams? Once you figure out, this is my biggest dent of my imperfect circle, then you can start to say, I'm going to try to buff this one out and make it a little bit more round, a little bit more perfect. And this is exactly what talk performance students do. Not only are they good at saying, this is something I'm good at. This is something I'm not great at. Even within their weaknesses, they can stratify to say, this is the biggest weakest point that if I fix, things would start to look a lot much smoother. Principle number two is understanding the most important lever's concept. Now a lot of times when I'm working with students one-on-one to help fix their studying, sometimes we'll have a student that says, I know what I should be doing. Then I have some things that I think I should be doing. And then I'm doing this. There's a big discrepancy between the move somebody's making and the moves that they think should be correct. And by no means is it easy nor is the student's fault. There are so many proverbial levers, things that we can do and pull to feel like we're going to have some sense of progress. The problem is, is that we don't give enough attention to saying which of these levers before doing anything is going to make the biggest move and dramatic change in our life, whether it be a studying, whether it be productivity, or our life as a student. And so you have to understand that the principle that there's a lot that you can do, but there's much less that you should do. And then you have to ask yourself which one you're going to work on next. And just to show you guys a way you can understand what your next most important lever is going to be, one of the things that I like to do, especially within my notes database, and I made a separate video about this as well. Maybe I'll make another cool notion step by step for students is to actually have a priority list that you can actually look. Now this is a copy of one, so by no means is everything accurate, but essentially what you can do is you can add both your schoolwork and your personal things, your academic things. For me, I have stuff that I do journey here. And I can essentially say, okay, for each task, or if I think of a new one, one, how important is it to do? How much of an impact do I think it's going to make, as well as when I want it to be do buy. And then if I do this for all of the activities down here, then I can start to sort based off of obviously due dates, because if something has a due date, then I have to have to do that first. And then I can move on to doing the things that have the biggest impact or importance. So as you guys can see, as I start to give things a different number, it starts to move differently up on my scale. That way, if I come to these the next morning and saying, what is the next most important thing I need to do? Well, it's to make sure I get my TA license or work on the next level up your setting program. If you guys are interested, that'll be linked down below. I should be coming out by the time this video goes live, as well as looking for a new place to get them moving and potentially for my job, recording new videos. But if I realize that I actually don't care about recording videos for you guys, it's just not true, but I love y'all. But you would go down and then I would move on to the next thing. But having this kind of system allows me to do things such as, well, I don't really know how important or impactful doing a research project is, but I need to reach that faculty by the four, it's automatically going to move it to the top of my list. So even if it doesn't really have a high score, et cetera, because it has a due date, it's going to move to everything that doesn't really doesn't have something. So again, I understand what my most important levers in my life are. But if instead I say actually doesn't need a date at all, but it is very important, then it's going to move across the line accordingly. But having some kind of system where I can see everything that I need to do, if I wanted to filter it more, I could using notion where I can say, I'm just going to show all of the things that in the category of going to the personal activities, or I only want to work on things that are academic, or if I want to see things that I'm going to be doing for the YouTube channel, et cetera, then those will be here. But this way, whenever I wake up during the morning routine, I usually will go to a list like this and say, this is the next thing you're going to be working on, Alex, this is where the lever moves the biggest. And to close off this principle, it's important to remember that, yes, it's important to find those important levers, but at the same time, you don't necessarily have to be 100% correct. As long as you're finding the levers that look like they're going to make the biggest change, pick one, move forward, and then see what the changes are going to be. So in your life as a student, the next most important lever may be studying for an upcoming exam, looking at the review slides, doing practice questions, or if you're trying to figure out what kind of career options you're going to pick, you may say, I'm going to do this research project, or send some emails to get some shouting opportunities, all of those can be right. As long as you do one, you'll start to read the benefits of that actually, and then you can move on to the next thing. Now principle number three of a top performing student is being beyond the greats. Particularly in medicine, I can typically tell a student who is doing things because they just want to have the high marks or have the prestige of doing really well academically, but not necessarily being so much about the career they're going into. But on the flip side, the students who are doing the best and also look like they're going to have the best future career ultimately is going to be happy, are the people who are truly focused on what matters. So in medicine, it's about learning things that you can take care of the patients effectively, as well as using those late and mid parts of your 20s to say it's not only going to be about medicine. For me, I wanted to become a great doctor, but I also wanted to make sure that all those other skills I needed to know when I was 30s and 40s, things like finance, how to cook, how to make sure I was eating well, how I was resting well, how to have a great relationship with the people around you. Those things were also building up because then when I'm my 30s right now in 28, I'll be happy because yes, I got the grades that I wanted. I gave some focus there. Most importantly, I became the best doctor for my patients today, as well as in the future. And then finally, I was able to take care of the things that are most important for me, as well as the people around me going forward. So if you're early on any academic journey, particularly a medical one, remember that you are not going to remember your grades. Most of us don't remember the scores on our board exams, much less that we quiz or test. Make sure you do your best, obviously, but don't labor if you do well. Then move forward. If you don't do well, focus on principle number one. Ask yourself what dent you have to fix and then go forward from there. Principle number four and something consistently I found across every top performing student that has been top performing students for a long time, is that they give their personal health some priority. Now, this obviously includes all core parts of personal fitness, including finding your preferred form of working out, whether it may be going to the gym, going for a run or playing an individual sport, as well as things such as finding those eating habits that are going to make you healthy for the long run and remain energetic. And finally, and most importantly, getting the adequate amount of rest, while you're still trying to become a top performing student. Principle number five has to be one of my personal favorites, which is to having predictable progress. Often I can tell the difference between a student who's going to consistently do well, compared to the student who's going to have pills and valleys in their academic and school career. And it's usually because student A usually knows these are the first, second and third steps I need to do on a daily and weekly basis to find progress in these areas. So for example, when you're studying, while it may seem like there's lots of things to do, it really breaks down the core minimum. Step number one is I need to gather information using this method. Step number two is that I need to review it. And step number three is I need to do it predictably. That means I have to put in my calendar, et cetera. Having a student that could say these are the three things I have to do for my studying before an exam or a quiz to make sure that that student is going to constantly improve. And then step number four for that student may happen after every quiz or your exam, where they ask themselves, where can I get more attention, more efficiency, more utility in my time, or what type of things can I take away? And then they can carry out their first, second and third. And you can do this with every aspect of being a student. For example, if you're trying to grow your extracurriculars and go into career development mode, then I'd just say you want to become a cardiologist. Step one, maybe finding as many possible faculty members who may have an interest remotely related to yours. Step number two, then maybe working on a few research products around the same time. So if one has a low period, you can start working on the next one. Step number three, maybe getting a few shadowing opportunities that you can do after a few weeks, a few months. And then you can feel like, okay, my research is there. I have people who can mentor me. And I have some shadowing experience, which I can finally put into my application for being a cardiologist when it's time to apply for residency or medical school or fellowship. Regardless of what type of things you're trying to progress into, there's very clear steps of what type of things you should be doing first, second and third. And then it's becomes a very repetitive process towards more and more success. And before we get into the final two principles that high performing students have, we have to talk about today's sponsor, which is Big Monarch. Now, since we're talking about high performing students and what they do, one of them is to have a resource that is your go-to. And if you're on your medical journey, one of the best resources I can recommend is to use Picmonic, because there's hundreds and hundreds of videos for pretty much every topic that you would need on your medical journey. For example, if you're a brand new student in medical school or nursing school and you're going through your anatomy block, while you may hope that your class material is good enough, you can use your resource like Picmonic to actually use any of the videos and go to, okay, like what section am I currently learning? Well, let's talk about cardiology, anatomy. I actually want to know about the coronary arteries or the arteries in the legs or the veins and then be able to click to any of these. So I love cardiology. So I can simply say, let's learn about the coronary arteries. And then as you can see, each topic has a deep dive where they have a very short, very effective and memorable video where different components of the videos are meant to help you memorize different things regarding that topic. And after you go to the video, you can do high-performing activities, such as reviewing and quizzing yourselves based off of the actual images and questions that you may be asked on your quizzes and exams. So once again, one of the most impactful levers that you can pull as a high-performing student is finding a go-to resource that makes entire learning process so much easier. And if you're interested in setting up our friends at Picmonic, I'm also gracious if you throw an extra 20% discount if you use the code theMDJourney at checkout. Once again, thank you for Picmonic for being today's sponsor. Now, I know at the start of the episode, I talked about six habits that you can use, but I want to give you one more plus a bonus that I personally use in my own medical journey. So principle number six is to understand that glass is always filling up. Now, we've all heard of the principle of looking at a glass and saying, this is half full or half empty. I don't really care too much about that analogy itself, because it really tries to point if you're a pessimist or an optimist. But instead, thinking about that your glass is, regardless of how you look at it, always filling up. So every experience you have where most of us in our student life, whether a quiz is hard, or a test is hard, then the experience in medical school, like with a patient or here with a faculty member, is difficult. Often our first inclination say that sucks. But usually you can say the glass is always filling up with some kind of lesson that you can then use going forward. If you do that, the things that seem to be suckable, the other things that just aren't going your way, seem to always have a purpose of how they can help you in the future. If I have an experience in medical school, for example, with a patient that doesn't go my way, instead of saying, oh, the glasses have empty, you know, patient sucks, just got to move on, that was a poor situation, instead can look at the lessons that I can take away from that encounter to ideally help me in future encounters. If the test doesn't go my way, instead of saying, you're stupid, Lux, which I've definitely done, I can say, what are things that got in my way? Is it because of the material it wasn't the way I studied for, or were there questions that just simply I wouldn't have been ready for, regardless of what technique or approach I did? And this is just one of those exams you just have to take a lot. Using this glass as always filling up analogy really helps taught performing students, because one, they remind themselves that you are one of the best of the best and constantly become better, and the glass will always constantly fill up, but you're going to do it more so if you always think of every experience you have as a learning opportunity. And that was a mouthful, so I need to take a quick drink. And I definitely spilled some of that on my scraps, moving on. So I know throughout that episode, I promised an extra principle for those of you guys that made to the variants. And first of all, thank you. And principle number seven is understanding that your definition of hard work is constantly going to change, and to be okay when more work is asked of you. Now, as you probably know from personal experience, if you look back just three to four years, the things that you consider to be hard back then, probably don't even bother you at the moment. The same thing exists during your academic or medical school journey wherever you're in. When I was in medical school, I thought medical school was going to be the hardest thing ever, and then I do a third of your medical school and fourth, and then I do the first year of residency. Everything is harder, but if you start to understand that your definition of hard work will change, and that means your definition of how much you can actually accomplish, because things start to become normalized and how difficult they are, the more you'll be able to accomplish. Where on the flip side, a student who's caught on, this is the peak of what I'm capable of doing when they're a brand new medical student, that person doesn't have as much of a potential compared to the student who says, this is hard, I accept it, this is going to suck. I'm going to grind it out until this just becomes a normal part of how hard I'm willing to work, and that person slowly starts to develop a new ceiling for what they're capable of. One of my favorite principles that I always try to keep in the back of my mind is that all of us have a door of opportunities that we all kind of know we'll be able to achieve if we put a certain amount of work in. But usually that ceiling is just the obvious things that we can achieve if we put in a certain amount of work. But if we break through that peripheral ceiling, you'll be able to see the potential of how many things you're truly capable of. As you go through the year in your academic career, the things that top students realize is that yes, if I put in a certain amount of hard work, things will become much more capable for me, and my potential will continue to progress forward and forward. And that is why you see the people who are doing great things back in high school and college, medical school, wherever they may be, continue to do things that continue to inspire and motivate you to do the same. But that starts with a reminder and the acceptance of the principle that during the phase things will get harder, eventually normalized, but that's required for you to achieve even more things and more success. But those guys are the top performing habits and principles that top performing students use. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this episode. If you did, let me know in the comment section down below. If you did enjoy the video and felt you got some value out of it, all I ask you in return for the form of a thank you is just quickly hitting that like button. It gets the video in front of more people, helps grow the channel. That's all I really ask. If you're new to the channel or if you haven't joined the community already, consider hitting the subscribe and notification bell to be notified when new videos go out live. If you listen to this on a podcast, consider hitting subscribe and follow on your favorite listening platform. With that being said, friends, if you did enjoy this video, check out this video on how you can use Anki like a pro step by step, as well as this video right here on all the different ways that I learned medicine as a full-time physician. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this. Until then, thanks for being a part of my journey. Hopefully that was a little help to you guys on yours. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.