How Do I Accomplish My Outside Goals as a Medical Student?

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.580 | - All right, Jesse, that's what we got for sponsors.

00:00:07.760 | I think we have time for one more caller.

00:00:09.960 | Who do we have here for our final caller?

00:00:11.680 | - All right, final call.

00:00:12.640 | We have Walker.

00:00:13.960 | It's basically about your tagline,

00:00:16.240 | do better, do less, know why.

00:00:17.800 | And he's also has a question about the journey

00:00:20.480 | of his medical student career.

00:00:22.640 | - Okay.

00:00:23.480 | - Hi, Cal, my name's Walker.

00:00:28.120 | And I've actually had the privilege of you answering

00:00:30.320 | a few of my questions on the podcast before.

00:00:32.880 | They were extremely helpful, so thanks for that.

00:00:35.840 | My questions today arise as a bit of a related

00:00:40.040 | set of questions to that.

00:00:41.640 | Namely that philosophically, how do you square the maximum

00:00:48.920 | of doing better, doing less, and knowing why

00:00:54.640 | with the journey of a pre-medical student?

00:00:57.960 | I ask this because if you ask any pre-med students,

00:01:01.560 | traditional or not, they can attest to the slew

00:01:04.840 | of expectations proposed by admissions committees,

00:01:08.800 | advisors, et cetera, that require you to excel

00:01:11.640 | in the classroom and work, research,

00:01:13.960 | clinical and non-clinical volunteering,

00:01:16.560 | and perhaps curing cancer and winning

00:01:18.200 | an Olympic gold medal on the side.

00:01:20.640 | How does that square with your maximum?

00:01:22.400 | Is it a contradiction?

00:01:24.160 | Does it hold up as an exception to the rule?

00:01:27.480 | Curious to your thoughts on this.

00:01:29.160 | And then specifically, how might you advise someone

00:01:33.000 | in my situation working full-time and trying to fit in

00:01:36.480 | all of these goals and accomplish them and achieve them?

00:01:40.720 | Thanks.

00:01:41.560 | - Well, Walker, it's a good question.

00:01:44.600 | We're talking about admissions here.

00:01:47.360 | We're talking about academic admissions

00:01:49.120 | and how that fits with the old motto of my website,

00:01:53.720 | and I would say sort of the new motto

00:01:55.400 | of the deep life writ large, which is to do less,

00:01:57.880 | do better, know why.

00:02:00.240 | Two points about pre-med.

00:02:01.600 | Number one, in the vast majority of cases,

00:02:05.280 | the thing that is vastly most important

00:02:07.320 | is your grades and MCATs.

00:02:08.560 | Get good grades, get good MCATs.

00:02:11.560 | That's what's gonna matter for almost any medical school,

00:02:15.400 | especially for you.

00:02:16.240 | You're working full-time and you wanna go back to med school.

00:02:19.360 | That's basically what you have, the knobs you have to turn.

00:02:22.680 | Yeah, your grades, those are probably already set.

00:02:24.520 | You wanna get good MCAT scores,

00:02:25.840 | and you get good MCAT scores by practicing on actual tests,

00:02:28.520 | deliberately improving your skills

00:02:29.880 | until you can get the score you want under time conditions.

00:02:32.880 | There's no shortcut for actually practice, get better,

00:02:36.080 | practice, get better,

00:02:36.920 | until you can consistently hit the score you want.

00:02:39.680 | So that's probably what you need to do.

00:02:41.280 | Does that take a small number of med schools

00:02:44.440 | off the table?

00:02:45.280 | Probably.

00:02:46.520 | There are a small number of med schools

00:02:47.960 | where there is such selective admissions

00:02:50.640 | that everyone might be,

00:02:53.160 | you could fill a whole class with people

00:02:54.600 | who have pegged their grades and MCATs,

00:02:55.800 | so they have to use other factors to differentiate.

00:02:57.560 | Well, that's probably not gonna be the med school

00:02:59.320 | where you're gonna go.

00:03:00.400 | That's fine.

00:03:01.400 | Go to a good med school, pick up the skills,

00:03:04.280 | create a good career as a doctor.

00:03:06.200 | Now let's step back and say you're in a situation

00:03:09.240 | where you wanna try to get into one of those top med schools

00:03:11.160 | and you think stuff beyond just your grades and MCATs

00:03:13.560 | are gonna matter.

00:03:14.400 | Well, I wrote a whole book about this for college admissions

00:03:17.200 | but the same ideas apply to,

00:03:20.720 | let's say, medical school admissions.

00:03:22.360 | Now that book was called

00:03:23.200 | "How to Become a High School Superstar"

00:03:25.720 | or "How to Be a High School Superstar."

00:03:27.080 | I forgot which verb it was.

00:03:28.560 | And it got into what makes people impressive.

00:03:30.960 | And it was looking at it

00:03:32.640 | from the standpoint of college admissions,

00:03:34.040 | but again, I think this is similar

00:03:35.400 | to these type of highly competitive med school admissions.

00:03:37.640 | And it said, again, put aside grades and test scores

00:03:40.480 | are 99% of the battle, so that's destiny.

00:03:43.120 | But beyond that, what can you do?

00:03:44.880 | And the answer came down to, guess what?

00:03:47.400 | Do less, do better, know why.

00:03:50.440 | This idea, we write these storylines

00:03:52.840 | that somehow the quantity of things we do is impressive

00:03:56.440 | because, wow, it's so hard to do a lot of things,

00:03:58.240 | but that does not correctly characterize

00:04:00.760 | how we assess impressiveness.

00:04:03.080 | You're gonna be assessed more on the thing you do best

00:04:05.200 | and how interesting or unexplainable it is.

00:04:08.560 | Do less things, do the things you do at a really high level

00:04:11.400 | and have a really good reason for doing it

00:04:13.160 | is what's gonna play.

00:04:14.480 | That's what's going to impress people.

00:04:16.760 | Not that I did seven different things.

00:04:19.440 | And so there's a lot of ideas in that book

00:04:21.440 | about how to do this.

00:04:22.520 | First of all, it tells you to become interesting.

00:04:24.640 | You have to be an actual interesting person,

00:04:26.480 | which means you probably have to do less

00:04:28.400 | 'cause you need time to read and explore

00:04:29.800 | and go to talks and have thoughts

00:04:31.000 | and develop interests that are non-artificial.

00:04:33.680 | And that's hard for a lot of people,

00:04:34.800 | but doing less is the foundation

00:04:36.200 | for becoming more interesting,

00:04:37.400 | which allows you to get some attention.

00:04:40.680 | And when it comes time to do better,

00:04:43.080 | the book talks about when you have an interest,

00:04:44.840 | you follow that particular interest to interesting places.

00:04:48.040 | And you can't plan it all out in advance,

00:04:49.640 | but you do it really well, that opens up opportunities.

00:04:52.200 | You take one of those opportunities,

00:04:53.840 | you do that really well, that opens up new opportunities.

00:04:55.920 | And what you really wanna try to do,

00:04:57.560 | according to that book,

00:04:58.440 | is trigger what is called the failed simulation effect.

00:05:01.080 | Eventually get to a place where people say,

00:05:03.040 | I can't even understand how Walker did this.

00:05:07.200 | Like I wouldn't even know how to go about doing that.

00:05:09.600 | And that triggers a much more bigger burst

00:05:11.600 | of impressiveness than instead trying to go

00:05:13.560 | into a direction with an incredibly well-defined

00:05:16.320 | competitive structure, like being an athlete,

00:05:19.040 | and saying, okay, my goal is to win that structure

00:05:22.000 | and be an Olympic athlete.

00:05:23.240 | Yeah, one person succeeds at that, so good luck.

00:05:25.960 | It's much better to go this failed simulation route,

00:05:28.080 | where instead you say, yeah, you know, I wrote a book,

00:05:31.680 | and like have this podcast and wrote a book.

00:05:34.400 | Like, I don't even know how a young guy writes a book.

00:05:36.400 | That's really impressive,

00:05:37.320 | even if it was actually in terms of net effort,

00:05:39.840 | way easier than becoming an Olympic athlete.

00:05:41.520 | So that book gets into a lot of these type of ideas.

00:05:45.000 | So don't just assume you know really

00:05:49.320 | what makes people impressive beyond their test scores

00:05:51.800 | and grades in these contexts.

00:05:52.880 | Usually people construct these stories

00:05:55.320 | as a self-defense mechanism.

00:05:56.600 | I mean, Walker, what you were saying there,

00:05:59.320 | the way you listed what you have to do to med school,

00:06:01.080 | to me just felt a little bit like self-defense.

00:06:02.800 | Let me just list things I know like it would be implausible

00:06:05.360 | for me to do, so there's some protection there.

00:06:07.720 | Impressiveness is a squirrelly subject, my friend,

00:06:10.040 | it's not as cut and dry as in clearly defined

00:06:15.000 | competitive structures, how high are you?

00:06:17.200 | Or in terms of sheer difficulty of number of things you did,

00:06:20.200 | how many did you do?

00:06:21.760 | There's room there for creativity and unusual and uniqueness

00:06:24.360 | and that's the path that most people need to go.

00:06:26.720 | So get your grades and test scores,

00:06:28.000 | that'll determine your score.

00:06:29.520 | If you're one of the few number of people

00:06:30.720 | where you actually have to add activities,

00:06:32.560 | it's better to be an interesting person who did less,

00:06:35.440 | but did the things they did really well

00:06:36.880 | and took them to interesting places.

00:06:38.040 | It's a more interesting life and it's more refreshing

00:06:42.000 | and interesting to those admissions officers.

00:06:44.000 | So a lot of thoughts to say about those types

00:06:46.680 | of admission processes,

00:06:47.680 | but we have a lot of learning to do on it.

00:06:49.160 | So that book is a good place to start,

00:06:50.840 | but for you Walker, if you're working full time,

00:06:53.440 | don't worry about it, get your MCAT scores good,

00:06:55.640 | go to a good school, try not to take on too much debt,

00:06:58.640 | you know, do very well in that med school

00:07:01.360 | so you get matched into a good residency.

00:07:02.960 | Good things will happen from there.

00:07:05.800 | (upbeat music)

00:07:08.400 | [MUSIC]

How Do I Accomplish My Outside Goals as a Medical Student?

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