Summary
- My 5-year plans always seem to fail 2 months in – I should stop pretending that they’ll work.
- Plans for the sake of plans are addictive.
- This urgent and empty ambition is built-in.
- It’s not good to miss the forest for the horizon.
- Right now, I’m thinking less in terms of time and more in terms of direction.
- This shift in perspective has felt freeing.
- I feel the freedom to focus on the tasks right in front of me, and not worry as much about the ones in years to come.
- I’m no longer trying to build towards a specific end goal, instead, I’m just trying to become competent.
My 5-year plans always seem to fail 2 months in – I should stop pretending that they’ll work.
Somewhere in the depths of a folder on my computer is an excel spreadsheet called the ‘Plan of Action’. It’s a document I first made in about 2018, and inside is a year-by-year account of lofty goals, including: getting the Rhodes scholarship, going to work in Antarctica as a doctor, and even applying for astronaut training.
This document has been failed on a yearly basis and reworked on a almost yearly basis – almost always at 2am in the midst of an existential crisis – and I don’t think I’ve ever ticked the box on a single goal.
Plans for the sake of plans can be addictive.
I think I’ve used the concept of a 5-year plan as a crutch. More broadly, I think I’ve used excessive forward planning as a bandaid to present stressors. Throughout university I recall looking up the intricacies of career paths and training programs even in the final 24 hours before an exam; spending time learning about which university I should do my MPH at or which sub-specialty I should choose in 14 years’ time instead of learning about hepatocytes and the tensor tympani. It could probably look like an oddly positive or optimistic outlook, but in retrospect I think it was a form of escapism and a way to distract myself from the task at hand. It meant that I was approaching tasks and opportunities without intention, and squandering what could be gained.
This urgent and empty ambition is built-in.
I recognise now that, ever since the end of high school, I’ve felt an unrelenting urge to have my next steps figured out. It has been hard to see this for what it is when it’s a trait of those around you as well: there aren’t enough grains of sand on earth to count the number of times that medical students ask each other what specialty they will go into. It’s a habit that we form on day one of the course, and answering the question imparts a sense of comfort: as if telling people that we will be something is enough to make it happen, as if just saying we will be something means that we already are. For some, these goals seem to be set even before that first day – “I want to study medicine because I’ve always wanted to be come a surgeon like Christina Yang.” Much rarer is the response, “To be honest, I don’t know. I just want to be good at the job, do well in medical school, and try and enjoy it all.”
I think this search for certainty is borne from the inherent need for competition throughout the medical training cycle, which demands that you come out on top at every stage between high school and the future consultant job: from getting into medical school to applying for particular rotations to applying to first jobs to applying for unaccredited jobs to applying for training programs to applying for accredited jobs to applying for fellowships and so on and so on and so on until death do you part.
It’s not good to miss the forest for the horizon.
Since moving to a non-clinical job, I’ve realised how tiring the fervour of this outlook can be, and I realise that a lot of my bandwidth has been previously wasted on needless planning. It feels now like the opposite of not seeing the forest for the trees: not seeing the forest at all because you’re so fixated on the horizon. When I think back to medical school, it feels like my concern was often less with the content to be studied or the exam around the corner, and more with what I would be doing in a few years’ or a few decades’ time. That’s why I’ve spent needless hours as a medical student trying to figure out:
- Which specialty I should use as a way to get to a career in space medicine.
- Rather than actually studying properly and putting myself in the best position to do any specialty, I spent hours asking myself whether I should do anaesthetics, emergency medicine, or family medicine before ever having done a single full-time placement.
- How to get a prestigious scholarship like the Rhodes scholarship.
- Rather than seeking out the scholarship because it was a natural progression of work or research, or seeking to embody the qualities and traits of a high-performing scholar, I was too busy planning how my career would look after I’d won the scholarship.
This feels crazy self-absorbed to put on paper. Put another way, I think was more concerned about what my career as a doctor would look like, without giving fair focus to the study that would put me in the best place to be the best doctor I could be. None of these goals or ambitions are inherently bad – they were just empty and I didn’t actually drive towards them. I used thinking about them and planning for them as substitutes for actually fulfilling them.
Right now, I’m thinking less in terms of time and more in terms of direction.
The decision to move to a non-clinical job has required accepting uncertainty and a lack of visibility on the future. There is no well-trodden training path I can look up and no clear-cut list of tick-box requirements to enter into the arena. Even more starkly different is that there is no clear end goal: there is no obvious consultant/boss equivalent.
Without a calendar or a map that I can point to for reference, I’ve had to start building a compass to guide me. The idea of the compass is to make decisions not because they work toward a specific, sub-specialised end goal, but because they satisfy a set of principles. This has required some introspection, and right now, ‘North’ feels like some combination of these three factors, as well as some overarching principles that I think will most likely make a certain job or role a good personal fit for me, have some meaningful impact, and be fulfilling:
- I want to work on issues that affect a lot of people
- I want to contribute my relative strengths to solving those issues
- I don’t feel the need to end up with a specific title or position, so long as I am doing as much as I can to meet those first two criteria
I’m trying to avoid being ‘pulled up’ from some distant lofty goal, and instead trying to embrace work that is satisfying and that ‘pushes me up’ towards distant and lofty goals that are aligned with principles rather than a predetermined decision of what something might feel like.
At the outset this has felt a little dizzying and I still occasionally give in to the internal pressure: over the past year I’ve still spent time looking up postgraduate degrees and I’ve reached out to learn more about Public Health Training in Australia. But, I’m increasingly capable of reminding myself that these aren’t actually the things that best fit my aims or best satisfy my principles right now. Whilst they tick some boxes, the opportunity to work at a start-up public health NGO is incredibly unique, and the texture of the experience I have with LEEP means that going back to study or to a more rigid training program wouldn’t be the most exciting thing I could be doing right now – I write about why I think that’s important here.
This shift in perspective has felt freeing.
It has been a swift contrast to the feeling of needing to push for progress in clinical work. Whilst still working as a doctor I was on the doorstep of specialty training and moments away from needing to pick a program and work towards CV requirements. In my current non-clinical job, I have only one priority: support the elimination of lead paint.
Even its deconstructed form, that priority is not ultimately centred on me or my future achievements or aspirations; to eliminate lead paint I just need to support governments to regulate lead paint and support manufacturers to stop using lead in their paint. No-one I interact with in the course of my work cares what my background is, what publications I have, or whether I had specialised in something before joining LEEP. All that matters to them is the work I’m doing right now.
Even if I shift my sights forward, the end goal isn’t becoming a specialist in removing lead from paint (sadly there is no Royal Australasian College of Lead Paint Reformulation and Lead Paint Regulation to satisfy my latent need for achievement), the end goal is just simply removing lead from paint.
For the present, all that matters is that I do what I can to remove lead from paint. For the future, all that matters is that I will have done everything I can to remove lead from paint. So the only future thing I need to concern myself with is getting better at removing lead from paint.
How do I do that?
For once, I have to really have to focus in on what I’m doing right now, rather than what I could be doing in the future. I need to improve at the things that I actually do every day, and strive to be as competent as I can be.
I feel the freedom to focus on the tasks right in front of me, and not worry as much about the ones in years to come.
I feel far less pressure to be thinking five steps ahead. I don’t need to worry right now about what masters I need to apply for or when I need to next publish some research for the sake of CV points. It’s not even encouraged that I seek out a postgraduate degree — officials from governments, representatives of IGOs and executives from paint companies are all already happy to engage with LEEP, so there’s no need for me to build up credibility by doing something with traditional career caché. It just wouldn’t satisfy a cost/benefit analysis.
This approach is also unconstrained by specific expectations. It means that I can truly keep choosing to do something so long as it: (A) is exciting, and (B) is in line with my compass.
I’m no longer trying to build towards a specific end goal, instead, I’m just trying to become competent.
Having seen the back-end of a hospital ward, an e-commerce brand, and a non-profit, I feel somewhat certain in thinking that competence, communication, and a few other soft skills are pretty transferrable. Accepting that they are valuable, it’s exciting to think that focussing on what I’m doing right now will be a way to develop them further and leverage their potential to get things done.
This shift of focus onto my skills and habits right now is actually the source of a huge confidence boost, because my confidence now isn’t in the future possibility of what I will become (i.e. it’s not some ego-in-waiting that I will become a high-flying doctor), instead it is founded in the living proof of things that I know I’ve been able to achieve and the small successes I can win each day.
This is a reminder of something that is becoming increasingly clear to me: that it doesn’t hugely matter – to some extent – what it is that I’m doing, so long as I just focus on becoming competent at what I’m doing right now and just get good at getting stuff done. This is a universally useful trait; whether you’re transplanting hearts, building bridges, selling t-shirts, scrubbing toilets, or trying to get lead out of paint, the best thing you can do is learn how to just get the job done. This is an attitude and a way of thinking and something I’m actively trying to work on. It is absolutely learn-able.
So long as I keep roughly walking towards ‘North’ on the compass, and just focus my energies on juicing as much as I can from every opportunity, then I can hope to grow and to contribute meaningfully to projects that excite me.
Competence, rather than aspiration, will become my proof of concept and my source of confidence: achievements won and lessons taught by failure are a far sturdier backbone than any idea I’ve ever had about what I might one day become.
anecdotal evidence 