(upbeat music) - All right, Jesse, that's what we got for sponsors. I think we have time for one more caller. Who do we have here for our final caller? - All right, final call. We have Walker. It's basically about your tagline, do better, do less, know why. And he's also has a question about the journey of his medical student career.

- Okay. - Hi, Cal, my name's Walker. And I've actually had the privilege of you answering a few of my questions on the podcast before. They were extremely helpful, so thanks for that. My questions today arise as a bit of a related set of questions to that. Namely that philosophically, how do you square the maximum of doing better, doing less, and knowing why with the journey of a pre-medical student?

I ask this because if you ask any pre-med students, traditional or not, they can attest to the slew of expectations proposed by admissions committees, advisors, et cetera, that require you to excel in the classroom and work, research, clinical and non-clinical volunteering, and perhaps curing cancer and winning an Olympic gold medal on the side.

How does that square with your maximum? Is it a contradiction? Does it hold up as an exception to the rule? Curious to your thoughts on this. And then specifically, how might you advise someone in my situation working full-time and trying to fit in all of these goals and accomplish them and achieve them?

Thanks. - Well, Walker, it's a good question. We're talking about admissions here. We're talking about academic admissions and how that fits with the old motto of my website, and I would say sort of the new motto of the deep life writ large, which is to do less, do better, know why.

Two points about pre-med. Number one, in the vast majority of cases, the thing that is vastly most important is your grades and MCATs. Get good grades, get good MCATs. That's what's gonna matter for almost any medical school, especially for you. You're working full-time and you wanna go back to med school.

That's basically what you have, the knobs you have to turn. Yeah, your grades, those are probably already set. You wanna get good MCAT scores, and you get good MCAT scores by practicing on actual tests, deliberately improving your skills until you can get the score you want under time conditions.

There's no shortcut for actually practice, get better, practice, get better, until you can consistently hit the score you want. So that's probably what you need to do. Does that take a small number of med schools off the table? Probably. There are a small number of med schools where there is such selective admissions that everyone might be, you could fill a whole class with people who have pegged their grades and MCATs, so they have to use other factors to differentiate.

Well, that's probably not gonna be the med school where you're gonna go. That's fine. Go to a good med school, pick up the skills, create a good career as a doctor. Now let's step back and say you're in a situation where you wanna try to get into one of those top med schools and you think stuff beyond just your grades and MCATs are gonna matter.

Well, I wrote a whole book about this for college admissions but the same ideas apply to, let's say, medical school admissions. Now that book was called "How to Become a High School Superstar" or "How to Be a High School Superstar." I forgot which verb it was. And it got into what makes people impressive.

And it was looking at it from the standpoint of college admissions, but again, I think this is similar to these type of highly competitive med school admissions. And it said, again, put aside grades and test scores are 99% of the battle, so that's destiny. But beyond that, what can you do?

And the answer came down to, guess what? Do less, do better, know why. This idea, we write these storylines that somehow the quantity of things we do is impressive because, wow, it's so hard to do a lot of things, but that does not correctly characterize how we assess impressiveness.

You're gonna be assessed more on the thing you do best and how interesting or unexplainable it is. Do less things, do the things you do at a really high level and have a really good reason for doing it is what's gonna play. That's what's going to impress people. Not that I did seven different things.

And so there's a lot of ideas in that book about how to do this. First of all, it tells you to become interesting. You have to be an actual interesting person, which means you probably have to do less 'cause you need time to read and explore and go to talks and have thoughts and develop interests that are non-artificial.

And that's hard for a lot of people, but doing less is the foundation for becoming more interesting, which allows you to get some attention. And when it comes time to do better, the book talks about when you have an interest, you follow that particular interest to interesting places. And you can't plan it all out in advance, but you do it really well, that opens up opportunities.

You take one of those opportunities, you do that really well, that opens up new opportunities. And what you really wanna try to do, according to that book, is trigger what is called the failed simulation effect. Eventually get to a place where people say, I can't even understand how Walker did this.

Like I wouldn't even know how to go about doing that. And that triggers a much more bigger burst of impressiveness than instead trying to go into a direction with an incredibly well-defined competitive structure, like being an athlete, and saying, okay, my goal is to win that structure and be an Olympic athlete.

Yeah, one person succeeds at that, so good luck. It's much better to go this failed simulation route, where instead you say, yeah, you know, I wrote a book, and like have this podcast and wrote a book. Like, I don't even know how a young guy writes a book. That's really impressive, even if it was actually in terms of net effort, way easier than becoming an Olympic athlete.

So that book gets into a lot of these type of ideas. So don't just assume you know really what makes people impressive beyond their test scores and grades in these contexts. Usually people construct these stories as a self-defense mechanism. I mean, Walker, what you were saying there, the way you listed what you have to do to med school, to me just felt a little bit like self-defense.

Let me just list things I know like it would be implausible for me to do, so there's some protection there. Impressiveness is a squirrelly subject, my friend, it's not as cut and dry as in clearly defined competitive structures, how high are you? Or in terms of sheer difficulty of number of things you did, how many did you do?

There's room there for creativity and unusual and uniqueness and that's the path that most people need to go. So get your grades and test scores, that'll determine your score. If you're one of the few number of people where you actually have to add activities, it's better to be an interesting person who did less, but did the things they did really well and took them to interesting places.

It's a more interesting life and it's more refreshing and interesting to those admissions officers. So a lot of thoughts to say about those types of admission processes, but we have a lot of learning to do on it. So that book is a good place to start, but for you Walker, if you're working full time, don't worry about it, get your MCAT scores good, go to a good school, try not to take on too much debt, you know, do very well in that med school so you get matched into a good residency.

Good things will happen from there. (upbeat music)