 Life as a medical student early on was freaking brutal. With the amount of hours required for studying, with the amount of information expected to be mastered, test after test coming my way, stress levels were through the roof. Now I heard about these scary stories coming into medical school but I thought I could beat them. I was wrong. My first semester absolutely sucked. That is until I fix these things. So in today's episode we're going to talk about how I in medical school optimize my life to be as efficient as possible and how you can turn, can use those to help you on your medical journey. Let's break it down. Hey friends, welcome back to channel in case you're new here. My name is Lux. I'm an internal medicine board certified physician and now currently a cardiology fellow here at MD journey. We make content to help people like you succeed and question on your medical journey but doing it with less stress. Today I'm going to talk about just those core things that really made the biggest difference in terms of optimizing my performance overall as a medical student. The first and the last thing that we'll talk about are things I still do to this day as a cardiology fellow. Number one is turning your weaknesses into systems. Now every student regardless of what journey you're on has parts that just give them the biggest issues. For most students, especially the ones that I work with, it happens to be some form of issues with studying or learning. You just don't know how to take the amount of information and take it to something that you can retain going into a test or exam. But while studying and learning is one common weakness for most students, it's not the only one. In fact, there's students who do really well in terms of retention but suck at other important aspects of being an effective medical student. Things including time management, motivation, managing your stresses and everything outside of life as well as taking care of yourself. And so one of the most important things to do as a medical student is early on identify what are the biggest things that I suck at that if I was just a little bit better at, things would become easier. And yes, most students will point to their studying as something that they consider to be a weakness. Perfect. Identify what is the biggest thing that you feel like, if I got to do this a little bit better, maybe it's, I wish I could memorize this syllabus chapter better, or I wish I can go into test day with less anxiety. If that part improved, my grades would improve. Ask yourself what simple systems would you implement to make that anxiety go down to make that syllabus chapter a little bit more digestible. We have tons of content here on the empty journey to help those little parts and systems, whether it comes retention, gathering of the information or going into test day. And if you have any questions, drop them in the comments section. But the biggest thing is first identifying where is the weakness and asking yourself, where is the system? I'll give you guys an example of exactly how I implemented this for my study. Going into about three months into medical school, my typical system was going to lecture, writing things and outline, making my outline look a little bit prettier and coming home and trying to review my outline as best as possible. And during my first semester of medical school, it was very easy for me to be studying for multiple classes at one time, including anatomy, biochem, cell bio, histology. Thus, I had more outlines than I actually had time to review. I knew I needed to improve that system. I told myself if I could somehow turn my retention system into something that was quick and easy that I could repeat instead of having to read these crazy long outlines, my learning would improve. And this is ultimately how I went into the flashcard system that made my job and life in medical school a lot easier. It's actually the most popular episode that we have here on YouTube, so I'll link it down below as well as right here in case you guys are interested. But that is just one example of me asking, where am I studying and am I struggling? For me, it was taking the information from lecture and actually getting into some form of review. And so I turned it to flashcards in a way that was very effective, very easy. For some students, it's about, I struggle with going from my review to actually remembering it two to three weeks later when the quiz or test comes around. Ask yourself what kind of skills and techniques you could use. And again, we have tons of content to be able to help you. And a lot of those will be in the description down below. But again, being an optimal medical student is not just about studying well. And when you're identifying your weaknesses, ask yourself questions such as, how good is my time management? How good is my planning ahead for two or three weeks where I can make sure that the big and small things on my to-do list are always getting done? How well am I keeping up with my motivation and minimizing my stress levels? How well am I managing outside stressors of my life? Those are all big boulders in our medical school journey that we want to make sure are moving versus kind of keeping us stuck in one place. And so just as another example, just like most medical students, I struggled with motivation within the first few months because I feel like I had no time for myself. And so a simple system that I took was saying, well, how about I do the things that I actually care about at least once a day in parts of the day and just schedule them before I do any of my studying? So my workouts were put in for six or seven a.m. in the morning before I went to school to go study. Thus, I was able to get my workout in and I felt like something that was important to me was taken care of and then I was able to be a medical student. Some simple shift right there but my motivation went up, my physical fitness went up, and again a simple implementation of how I turned in a weakness into a system that allowed me to be an effective student as well as fit. So that gets us to number two, which is understanding how important it is to get wins in the morning. Now, most medical students, if you think about it, will wake up, do their morning routine, whatever, go to school or wash their online lectures, digest and do their routine to get that information whether it's typing notes, highlighting, writing things, and flashcards on their PowerPoint. But their day actually doesn't start until like 3 p.m. or 4 p.m. when they get home ready to try and attempt to review that information or prepare for whatever quiz or test they have coming up. From the time they wake up to the time that you actually get home ready to do some actual active work, there's a lot of room for error for things to just demotivate you and just derail you. You can have a quiz or test or a practical in the morning that just drains you, maybe demotivates you from wanting to study. You just have a poor experience in the morning and if you come home hoping that you're going to make your optimal results and work get done, you're just so dependent and at whim for that first half of the day, which for most students is very boring because it's very electro heavy. So on the flip side, one simple thing that I did as a medical student was simply ask, could I wake myself up 30 to 60 to 90 minutes early and get some wins done for the day? We already talked about how I scheduled my workouts in before going to be a medical student and going to study. So that was one thing that I was able to do in a 20 to 60 minute workout that's got my fitness in. That was one win. And then usually I would go into the most effective study strategy that I felt like helped my retention. Again, for me, that's flashcards. I'll talk about exactly the technique that I use. If you guys are interested, I'll be linked down below. But just doing 10 to 20 minutes of flashcards didn't have to be crazy, but I felt like during that 10 to 20 minutes section, my retention went up. I learned things better. Maybe I reviewed things that I missed the night before in the morning up and then I went to get my workout in and then I went to go study or do lectures. Now, if I use the same principle and the same schedule, even if the rest of the day was utter crap, if the lecture sucked and I was demotivated when I got home and my studying was just like not there. I knew for a fact that my fitness had been taken care of and I had gotten some studying done during the morning. Usually this allowed me to build some momentum going into the afternoon, understanding what I already had accomplished in just a few hours in the morning and saying, why not just continue to do that and feel that high from that experience? Or two, saying, even if the day doesn't go amazingly well, you've already become victorious by all the work that you've got done before most students are even waking up for the day. So if you're the kind of student right now who is waking up and essentially immediately becoming a medical student because you do your routine and you go to school or you digest lectures, ask yourself how you can slightly increase your wake-up time to ideally get a few wins done before you go into medical school mode. Now, one of the most important things that I felt that helped me on my medical journey is being reflection focused. If you're going to go through a journey as tough as medicine, where you have so many tests, so many stressors, and so much years of sacrifice that you put in, you want to as well make sure that that experience is not just dependent on the next exam or the next grade. If you're going to go through a journey as tough as medicine is, with all the years of sacrifice, with all the hard work and information you have to learn, the exams, and just the amount of stress that you have to put yourself through, what's the point if you're just trying to get to the next test or the next exam grade? From personal experience, I can for sure say that how fondly and how positively I see my medical experience is much more dependent on not just accolades of the grades that I was able to get, but much more dependent on the experiences and the reflections of those experiences that just took time to actually partake in. Whether it was cool interactions with patients, building cool reports with them, learning about really cool diagnoses and actually seeing them in the clinics or on revolutions, seeing some amazing surgeries, really memorable experiences with my colleagues, my friends, and my mentors, those are all the things I said, I want to make sure that I remember this, what were the big takeaways, and those are still experiences that I remembered today. But even with that level of reflection in those takeaways and how positively I see medical school, I know that there are so many experiences that unfortunately felt the crack. Because just like other students, at times I was finding myself focusing also on the wrong things, whether it was the next exam that ultimately didn't matter, or the accolades that I thought were going to help my CV. In reality, the experiences that I could have just taken away by focusing more on the patients that I interacted with, the pearls that my attendings was teaching me, there's so many mis-opportunities that would have made the experience much more rich. So just take a second and ask yourself each day, what were the big takeaways? Were the experiences that I want to remember? Were the good things? Were the bad things? Were there some of the things that I want to make some adjustments for going until tomorrow? How could I make every day as a medical student a little bit more rich? And if you do this more often than not, I promise you that regardless how hard the journey may have been for you, how hard it was to become a doctor or to learn medicine, all those reflections and those experiences are going to make you feel like, yeah, that was worth it. Now I want to talk about something that I use to optimize my life as a medical student back then, and I still do as a cardiology fellow today. Now most students, including myself early on in medical school, are making very day-to-day optimizations or very bite-sized movements and things that ultimately don't move the needle at all. Examples of this could be going through a tough class, realizing that the resource you're currently using may not be doing the trick and ultimately switching to something else, hoping that it moves a needle. But in reality, if you just took a step back, you realize that it's not the resource that's the problem, it's the fact that you just don't get enough repetitions of that hard information to ultimately give yourself time to retain it. But if you're so into the day-to-day, you can't see the forest from the trees. This is why having a weekly optimization system is crucial as a medical student to make sure you're always making progress. An example of what this looked like for me as a medical student is every single week on a Saturday I would usually reflect on the week and ask, what went well? What type of things am I trying to improve? And what is one to two small actions I can take this upcoming week to make that improvement? I usually just meant that if I didn't get a grade that I wanted, maybe I could adjust either the resource or how I learned it or how I can increase the repetitions, but make some true actual moves, implement them for a week and reflect. But if there was other elements of my life that I was struggling with, maybe it was my time management, maybe it was my outside relationships, I would say these are the two things you're going to try this upcoming week to make improvements of these aspects of your life, come back and reflect next week. Imagine doing this for four years. You can easily start to surpass not only your version from the week before, but all of your other classmates who are only focused on saying, how do I get to the next exam? How do I get to the next quiz or the next evaluation? You're asking questions not only about tomorrow or the next week, but how you can constantly use each experience you've had from the weeks and the years behind you to ultimately become such a version of yourself that you won't even recognize in two to three years. And so the biggest takeaway for this entire episode guys is always be looking for progress. Understand that doesn't matter how low or far ahead you think you are of the rest of the pack. You always have room for improvements and if you only compare yourself to one person make sure it's the version that you were yesterday. Ask yourself what small things you can make improvements on, whether it's your study, your motivation, your physical health, etc. and ask yourself those systems, what can you implement, how can you get those wins in the start of the day, how can you make sure that you optimize yourself on a weekly basis, and how can you become more reflective of all those experiences you have so each every day goes in with a little bit more motivation compared to the version of you a month or two ago. And the final thing that I leave you with is that sometimes there's a frustration when you're trying to optimize something like your studying and things are still difficult. Remember that something being hard doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It just may mean it is a tough task in general. Climbing Mount Everest regardless of the amount of training you do is probably never going to get easy for the majority of us and that is okay. You acknowledge that that is going to be a difficult task. Understand that the medical journey is exactly the same. Optimize as best as you possibly can, focus on that progress, and then ask yourself if it's tough just go ahead and grind through it just like you've done every other element in your life this far and enjoy the results. And if you enjoyed this episode then enjoyed the tips and the strategies you want more. We have tons more where all that came from. Go ahead and check down below one of my favorite free resources that I'm updating on a weekly basis is called our Medical School Success Handbook. This is a guy that we're constantly updating on a weekly basis with tips and strategies on things that I wish I knew my first day of medical school and I'm giving them to you to help make sure that your journey is a little bit more successful. And if you're interested at all in any of our programs or interested in working with me and my team one-on-one go ahead and check out some of our programs including our Meta Lead Academy which includes Lifetime Group Coaching with again myself and all of our study coaches as well as our Med Ignite Consulting Program and seeing how you can work with one of our coaches one-on-one to help improve things like your study. But if you made it to the end of the episode my friends all I ask is go ahead and drop a comment with your questions your thoughts about this video and this episode what did you think? If you did enjoy this and you're watching on YouTube hit that like and subscribe button supports the channel if you're listening to this on a podcast hit that likes follow or subscribe on your favorite listening platform. If you enjoyed this episode again go ahead and check out that episode of how I used Anki and flashcard systems to make medical school a lot easier as well as this episode right here on all the study strategies that I used to get that 3.9 GPA ultimate in medical school hopefully this helps you out as well. But as always my friends thank you so much for being a part of my journey hopefully I was a little helped to you guys on yours and I'll catch you guys in the next one. Peace