 Trying to be a doctor is by no means easy. The long hours, difficulty subjects, and constant exams, it takes a lot. But in addition, there's an underlining psychology of the medical journey that no one talks about. It can determine if you have a good or bad experience. Hey friends, today's episode is inspired by a recent book that I'm just loving called The Psychology of Money. And the book nicely breaks down the mind games that we don't even know are happening when it comes to things like finance, investing, saving, but really can make the difference in your ultimate result. And as I was reading the book, I find myself saying, this sounds a lot like the medical journey. Let's break down the psychology and those mind games that you don't even know are happening, but can make the difference between success and failure. So number one is the one hour extra fallacy. Every single student falls for this trap. I was definitely one of them when I was back in medical school and over all the students that we've worked with over the past seven years, pretty much everyone makes this mistake. And the one hour fallacy is being able to look at your schedule and saying, I need all of these to be able to study and get that A or grade that I ultimately want on this quiz or test for these classes. But in reality, if you ask yourself after the quiz or test, did an extra hour on that material make a difference? And usually the answer is no, but a problem arises when the student can't admit that that hour is likely not gonna add very much value to their grades, but that hour can make a big difference in the overall sanity and wellness. This means an hour that could have gone to more sleep, exercise, just spending time on your hobbies that you desperately wish that you again, realize will not make a difference in your scores. As soon as I accepted that the duration of how much I was studying, all of it didn't necessarily go to the performance that I ultimately got. Then I could start looking at my study time of saying, okay, how much of this could I dedicate to working out, spending time with my family, doing a hobby like making videos for you guys so that I can be happy the next time I study. And as a pro tip, if you really want to experiment with this fallacy, go ahead and look at your study time. Maybe you find that it's 10 hours, cut it by 20%. That'll be eight hours. Use that two hours to do something else that you really just want to do. Maybe it's sleep more, maybe it's catch a basketball game, play some video games, watch a movie, read a book, again, take a nap. All of those are perfectly fine, but you'll realize that your results probably won't change. And more importantly, what you do during now, that remaining eight hours, is gonna make a big difference on how you study going forward. Number two is the missed question avalanche. Now I learned about this fallacy literally as I was taking the most important exam in medical school for me, which was USMLE step one. That's like your first licensing exam you take as to be a doctor, but that score, now it's pass, fail. But at that time, that score determined what options you had for your specialty. So if you got a low score, you pretty much weren't able to get into a competitive specialty. So that test was very important. I took maybe the first two blocks of 60 questions or whatever it may have been and just felt demoralized of how hard it was. And I knew that I had five or six more sections ahead of me that I probably was gonna struggle with. And I literally had to go to the bathroom to take a break and look myself in the mirror and say, you know what, from now on, we're gonna look at every question of saying, you're either gonna know the answer and you're gonna fist pump of how hard you work to be able to feel confident enough to answer that. Or you're gonna say, this question's hard. You probably were gonna get it wrong anyways. Let's do your best to make ahead and take an educated guess. Worst case that's not gonna happen is you're gonna miss the question like you expected best case scenario. You managed to get points on a question that you granted where you're gonna get wrong in the first place. Now there's a flip. You go from a point losing mentality that means somebody who literally will miss a question but then likely miss the next few questions that they were completely capable of doing but they got in their own way. They got in their own head. Versus somebody who says, you know what, every question is going to be an opportunity to raise my score. Some questions are gonna be hard regardless. I'm not gonna look at those as missed opportunities. I'm just gonna move to the next one and get the points that I truly deserve. Number three is the solo dummy fallacy. Now this is one of my favorites because every person has this. Even as a full-time physician, I feel like I am the dumbest person in the room and I clearly tricked everybody to get to this part. Now every single person on their medical journey has this at some point. Even as a full-time physician, I have days where I feel like I'm in the room and I am the biggest idiot and no one knows about it. I just tricked people to think that I'm smart enough to be a doctor. Regardless of where you are in your journey, you're gonna feel like around your peers, you are the dumbest or you're just not capable of enough. That's not true. Some people are just better at hiding it than others. That doesn't mean that we don't have our struggles. You're likely gonna do better on a class that you just absolutely love that your classmates who used to be performing at the top of the top are now just gonna be a little quiet because they're struggling and that is okay. Everyone is going to have their hills and valleys. So if you find yourself in the valley, just know you just have to work yourself out of it. Eventually, you'll be at some form of a mountaintop for your level of success. But my no means are you struggling as a solo venture. Everyone else in the journey is having a hard time at different places. Understand that and make sure you just work through it until your next success. Number four, this is the big one and that is the great dependency success fallacy. A lot of medical students' pre-meds fall into this where they feel like I have to get that 4.0, I have to get that A, I have to get that board exam score that I'm proud of that isn't that X percentile. Problem is, is once you get into the parts where truly matter, where you're sitting in front of an interviewer trying to get you to residency or your first full-time job as a doctor, wherever it may be, no one really cares about your grades. You got into that seat because your grades. People want to know more about you, your experience, make sure you're a true human being and likely if you're sitting in that seat for an interview, the other people have also gotten good grades. Most students tend to forget that yes, your grades are important, they're just part of the equation. However, you have to understand that your CV and your experiences and your self reflections of what you want to do really make a big difference. I say this a lot on this channel that my success is much higher than a lot of my peers who had much higher potentials than me. People who are more brilliant than me weren't able to get to where I am currently, but mainly it's because I took that time to say, what did I get from these experiences that are gonna make the difference for this opportunity I'm gonna go after? When I can sit in front of an interviewer and talk about my experiences because I've thought about it and they understand, okay, this guy is genuine, authentic and by the way, he's done well in school. It's much easier to take that student versus somebody who just says, I have an A, a 4.0, a biology degree, so will every other student who's likely gonna sit in that interview chair, just like you. Everyone's worked hard, yes, your grades matter, but the best way to both enjoy the experience and have your experience speak for itself is to really think about your experiences and ask yourself what the next one you're gonna take based off of the good and the bad from what you've had. The more reflections you do, your grades are going to be able to speak to somebody who's hardworking, but your experiences are going to be able to speak to that person they're gonna get for that role, that residency spot, that scholarship, you name it. Number five is probably my personal favorite as a full-time doctor and that's the idea of memory versus patterns. Medical school makes you feel like you have to memorize everything, right? The idea of drinking out of a fire hydrant is one that's oversold. But honestly, if you had to ask me how much I remember from medical school, pretty little. But this is the part that I learned as a full-time doctor and definitely later on in my time during residency as I was a senior physician. That is that I learn more through medicine. I'm a better doctor because I can identify patterns through repetitions and taking care of patients. It's almost like you doing a flash card through your biochem, cell bio class, anatomy and finally being able to identify structures that initially you're like, how do I even save this inside? It became easy because you put in the reps. Similarly, being a doctor or being in the medical journey is less about the memory and more so about giving yourself enough reps to get that pattern recognition. For example, if a patient comes to me hypotensive, I'm not thinking about all of the little enzymes or diseases they could be having. I'm saying here are the four categories that I know likely will cause a patient to have their blood pressure drop. Maybe they're infected. Maybe their heart's not working well. Maybe somebody's medication actually was overdosed or they took too much of it or they're having something like a blood clot. I'm thinking about all of those things in conjunction to that patient's history and it's gonna determine what I do for them in terms of short-term management but also how I work it out. Now as I do more and more reps, I'm gonna have patients who fall to that crack. My framework may not work for them. I'm gonna make an adjustment so that next time a patient comes in with a low blood pressure, I'm gonna say, okay, remember to also do this because you forgot about that for your other patients but maybe you'll catch more patients doing this framework. All about pattern recognition. More reps, all the doctors that are brilliant are less so because they have memorized X amount of enzymes or X amount of facts because they just had so many reps and experiences of the patients underneath them that they look like it's natural because it is. And so the closing thought on that is to understand that it is okay of struggling to memorize whatever. My girl, farm, I did. I've definitely forgotten more than you've probably learned on your medical journey that is normal. And then when you transition into taking care of patients just to really just focus on learning and identifying patterns that you can use over time to help the next patients you'll take care of. Next is the ceiling phenomenon. Now this is something that was actually inspired from the book Psychology of Money which is the idea of having a ceiling based off of how much money somebody else has. And the book nicely says that your ceiling of peer comparison is so high that you'll never reach it. In the same aspect, your ceiling of how you compare yourself to your peers and colleagues saying X, Y, and Z is doing this. They're able to balance research and how much time they're spending in the gym and class and doing well, I wanna be like them. And eventually you're just gonna keep pushing yourself to end up being like a person that was never your goal in the first place. Understand again that all of your peers are struggling. Some people have higher ambitions than others but being a doctor first of all is awesome. The last person in the medical school that graduates is also called a doctor just like the top 1% is. You don't have to necessarily worry about being the crème de la crème. No one really asked me where I went to medical school, where in my class I graduated, what TPI I've gotten. They just wanna know that you've worked hard which again by going through the medical journey is a clear definition of who you are but don't compare yourself to your peers. Use them as motivation of saying, I would love to have this quality that this person has in my own journey and expectations. This person is hardworking, they're disciplined. They go to work out every single day but that's important. I'm going to be inspired by their discipline and implemented into something that I consider to be important in my own life. Next is the principle of control versus performance. Often when your life gets chaotic and you feel like you're juggling multiple things at a time, maybe that's you right now, there's going to be a part of you that is overwhelmed and that is natural. But often what happens for most students especially the ones that we work with is that continues. They never happen to get out of this paralysis of just overwhelming anxiety of how much things are going on and they never actually get to the performance. The real difference between a top student and a student who is just overwhelmed when life throws its multiple lemons is that the top student could say, it's gonna be a tough week, month, year, et cetera. I'm gonna work on the next important thing that I need to do and actually start performing. I'm gonna start putting in the work. Not everything is going to be in your control. You're not gonna be able to control how hard a test is when you show up for it but you are capable of what input and hard work you're gonna put in to try your best to prepare for it. Once that test is over, you move to the next action, the next performance. And so the mind game here is that students are so overwhelmed by their lack of control because of how many things that they're juggling that they forget that the one thing they can control is actually putting in the work and starting performing on the next most important thing. Once you start doing that consistently, you will find that, oh, I'm actually having that control I ultimately wanted. Now guys, if you enjoy that breakdown, all I really ask is hitting that like subscribe button if you're listening to on YouTube and checking out some of the free resources that we have for you down below. My most important and favorite recommendation is the Med School Success Handbook. This is a document that I'm literally updating on a weekly basis. That's now filled with my 40 plus tips that I would just love to give you on studying productivity, time management motivation, so much more, life as a doctor. I wish that somebody had given that to me on my first day of medical school. I'd love to give you that document. It'll be linked down below. If after listening to this episode, you feel like you're interested in our mission to help you succeed on your medical journey but doing it with less stress, definitely check out some of our programs down below. The two that I would recommend is our Med Elite Academy as well as some of our coaching programs. Both of them have the ability to work with myself and our study coaches and give you access to pretty much everything that we've made over the past seven years to help people like you succeed on their journey. So again, check those out if you're interested, if you're not, no worries, no shame. Let me know what questions you guys have in the comment section down below. Again, if you're listening to on a podcast, hit that subscribe and follow on your favorite listening platform. And if you enjoyed this episode right here, then go ahead and check out this one right here on all of the study methods that I use in medical school to get a 3.9 GPA as well as this one right here on everything that you need to know to be a top one present student. Go ahead and enjoy these. And as always, my friends, thanks for allowing me to be a part of your journey. Hopefully I was a little helpful to you guys and yours. I'll catch you guys in the next one, peace.