 After 12 years of grade school, three years of college, four years of medical school, I've been a student in most of my life and also read a crap ton of textbooks. But here are the best habits that I've picked up outside those textbooks and those quizzes. Habit number one is the perfect circle of session. Now the same way that we say that there's no such thing as a perfect circle, we also say that there's no such thing as a perfect human. But all of us have imperfections and dents and things that we actually care about. For example, I'm not the best doctor, I could be a better husband, I could be a better son, I could be a better dog care, there's my dog sitting right there. And those are things that are actually priorities to me, so I can focus on how can I actually bluff out and make those dents a little bit more perfect. And this is a habit that I picked up in college that got me away from being a perfectionist and trying to be a perfectionist in the things that matter the most to me and having a lot more drive and focus towards those priorities, which included my personal fitness, my personal relationships, as well as things like academically and hobbies that I cared for. And for each of these pillars, I always ask the question, what can I do to make this even better? And this perfect circle of session really helped me understand that if I'm saying that these things are a priority to me, I can't be a 24-7 student, I need to be able to give attention to all of them. Habit number two is the technique of speed listening. Now being obsessed with doing things faster, you're still getting the same results, initially speed listening was something I was using to get through those boring and slow talking professors in college. But now it's transitioned into a technique for me to absorb tidbits and knowledge at rapid speeds. So for example, my morning drive to the hospital is about 20 to 25 minutes, plus an additional 10 minutes to actually get into the hospital. So if I'm listening to a podcast at two, two and a half speeds, I can go through tons and tons of knowledge on pretty much any topic that's important to me, whether that be medicine, whether it be business, whether it be personal fitness or personal progress. And because of speed listening, I become addicted to how quickly you can absorb amazing pieces of knowledge that now I try to find other mundane tasks that I'm doing on a daily and a weekly basis and try to include it there. So for example, next week I'll be running a half marathon. I mean, some of my runs on my trainings end up being anywhere hour, hour and a half to maybe up to two hours. So now instead of listening to music, I actually listen to podcasts and audiobooks that I speed up at two, two and a half X. And essentially it's amazing people that want to share their knowledge, but I'm able to absorb it in half the amount of time. Having number three is the second brain technique. Now, after so many years in school, I realized that I am not smart enough, unfortunately, to remember everything that I've learned, but I would like to. And instead the brain is much more a collection system than it is a tool that you always try to memorize from. And thus having a system where you can collect your ideas you can come back to is super crucial. And one of my favorite tools that I use on a daily basis to help with this is Notion. Now, just to show you an example of what this looks like, I'm a full-time internal medicine physician, and there are going to be tons of topics that I have to learn with the various organ systems that I need to make sure I remember, but sometimes it doesn't make sense to hope that I remember. Instead, I'd like to collect it into a place just in case if I don't. So if I'm taking care of somebody with heart failure, it makes sense to go ahead and try to collect all the different topics that I'm learning about heart failure, or if I'm learning about somebody with, for example, a procedure like tips, and I don't remember all the details, I can add these in. The nice thing about a second brain technique, and the nice thing about using something like Notion is that if I ever learned more about heart failure, I can just add it into my bucket of heart failure with the notion and then come back and refer to it, versus hoping that, oh brain, please hold on to that piece of knowledge. So as I've gotten older, as I've gone through more schooling, I've become much more humble on how smart I am, instead saying it's much more nice to myself, my brain, to just collect all the things and then come back to it. If I remember it without looking, great, but if I need to, it's there, and I don't have to do the re-learning process all over again. And I use the second brain method for pretty much everything, whether it's medical topics or books that I'm reading or podcasts that I'm going through, but I also use this for personal tasks. So if my wife is telling me something that I need to do for upcoming home that we're about to move into, instead of just hoping that I remember, it makes much more sense to collect it into notion and having a daily system where I go through my to-do list and saying, oh, here are all the things that I wrote down that I need to do in the next week, next month, the next two months. So yes, our brains are smart, but we're not that smart. Sometimes using technology to make a process a lot more simpler is something that's more gratifying. And I have a number four is delayed gratification. Now being in school and in medical school all the way up to the age of 25, I've pretty much been in school trying to get the grades and stay away from the medical debt. And throughout the process, as I was spending hours and hours studying, I was also sitting on social media or my peers at my same age or getting new houses, starting families, having kids, having beautiful cars and saying, man, I wish that could be me. But then I realized that the benefit of delayed gratification is that whenever I would have a level of success, that dopamine hit wasn't as high. And I was always focused on going to the next thing instead of being super excited for something and then let down when the feeling was over. And so my personal experience, I'm much more excited of rolling a bunch of snow and making it a huge snowball versus getting the huge snowball ASAP. And that's allowed me to have a greater appreciation for the things that take time. For example, in investing where initially I started with absolute zero and my wife and I got married, to now just three years down the process where we have a six figure investment portfolio, things like fitness where I could barely run a mile several years ago. I just ran my first marathon in December of 2021. I'll be running a half marathon a week from now, as well as things like business. For example, the YouTube channel has been here for six to eight years. It took me forever to grow this thing. And I hope that you guys are getting benefit from this content. But just in the span of the last month as the making of this episode, we got 3,000 subscribers within a month where it usually takes me three to four to five months to get that same amount. And so again, being in school as long as I have the idea of delayed gratification saying if you put the work in, things will be enjoyable. And then when you get another level of success, you continue to put the work in because there'll be something else down the line. You'll also get to enjoy it just as well. Habit number five is being obsessed with process. Having gone through so many years of school, I have failed so much that I realized that I have no control over the output whatsoever. I have no control over what test questions the professor is going to ask me or how hard of a topic they expect for me to learn. All I control is how I show up every day, whatever I put in, how to study, how I ask myself, well, personally, I can do to improve and not what personally I can do to change the test questions or the grades around. And a concept and a measuring stick that I hold myself against that hopefully you guys can take away is that if I show up a majority of the time with above average effort, I'll be okay in the long run. And going back to the start of the episode when we talked about the priorities that you try to buff out and minimize the amount of dents, I realized that when I do show up with above average effort consistently, and all those aspects of relationship, fitness, academics, as well as business and personal growth, all have happened just perfectly fine. And if you enjoy these takeaways and this breakdown, then you also enjoy this full breakdown on how I got a 3.9 GPA in medical school where I break down every study strategy as well as the ones that are most responsible for those good results, as well as this one on how I stayed motivated throughout the process of medical school and things that you can use on whatever journey you're on. But as always, my friends, hopefully you guys enjoyed today's episode. Thank you for being a part of my journey. Hopefully that was a little help to you guys on yours and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.