Last fall, Shelly wrote an entertaining about Med Student Awesome that was inspired by the Book of Awesome.

The guy who wrote that book is Neil Pasricha, and a few weeks ago I stumbled upon a talk he gave at a TED event:

It’s a fantastic talk and I encourage you to all to watch it. In his talk, Neil shares his 3 A’s to living an awesome life: attitude, awareness and authenticity.

Attitude

While all three of those A’s are important, the idea of attitude has really resonated with me recently. In the past few weeks, I had two of the most off days I had in a long time. By off days, I mean days where so many things go bad that your perspective on life becomes temporarily shifted towards great negativity. Without going into details, I was unhappy and that unhappiness spread to the way I looked at every single thing in my life.

My life is completely awesome and I am super grateful for everything. But when I was unhappy and my attitude was extremely poor, I looked through everything with a telescope of negativity. I began to focus on every negative thing in my life and ignore all the positives. Instead of looking at how much I had accomplished in my research, and I focused only on how much I had left to do. I saw only failure when really it was failure surrounded by success.

Our reality is whatever we perceive it to be. I finally came to the realization that my life was only disappointing because I viewed it through a telescope of disappointment. We have to take the good and the bad, always, and neglect neither. Our attitude in times of both good and bad significantly affects how we react to both success and failure.

The busier you are, the worse it is when everything goes wrong

Many of us in medical school place a lot of pressure on ourselves to succeed in our careers. That includes doing well in school, being productive in research, building a strong CV – much of it towards making ourselves competitive for residency applications and progressing towards our desired careers. But as students we have limited control, and with so many events happening at once, a bit of bad luck means everything can come crashing down at the same time. Your research supervisor ignores you for weeks, you do poorly on an exam, the community project you try to run falls apart – when you are a busy medical student with many events, there is a greater chance of many bad things happening at once. This can lead to worse days than you experienced in undergrad.

Being opportunity-seeking, even in bad situations

Bad luck comes and goes and unfortunately we can’t predict its path. What we can do is adjust our attitude so that we can react in a way that keeps our spirits up and let’s us keep our head in the game. When things go wrong we can feel bad for ourselves and whine to everyone around us (we all do this, myself included, and I do think venting is healthy). That being said, once we let those frustrations out, we need to look ahead.

Admit to yourself, well we’re in a crappy situation now and we can’t change what happened, but how can I make the best decision going forward? Sure this sucks, but what if I just look at it as an opportunity for me to figure out a new challenge and strengthen my decision making skills? What if I look at this as a chance to make myself a smarter, stronger and more motivated person?

Yah yah, easier said than done. But if we can even tweak our attitudes even a little bit to look at bad situations opportunistically, overtime we can become better at handling bad situations and get back on the horse more quickly.