It has been a month since I last blogged. To be honest, blogging has not at all been on my mind up until this past week when my “summer break” finally started (I use that term loosely because I am, like many of you guys, working this summer, but it’s a break from school nonetheless).

The last month of medical school at UofT was the most hectic! May started off with our Brain and Behaviour final exam (passed!), followed by our Clinical Skills final exam (a practical exam known as an OSCE – probably the most fun exam of the year), then our Determinants of Community Health final, and finally, our Pharmacology exam (good thing this exam was only covering the last two weeks of school!). Without a doubt, we had more exams in our final month than any other month during the year – but I guess that made finishing all the more sweet.

Medical school was a brand new educational experience for me. While it is similar in many ways to undergrad, there are of course many huge differences. I definitely had to make adjustments, and when I couldn’t, had to deal with heavy lessons (that hopefully I better take into account during my 2nd year of medical school). The following are a few things I wish I could’ve told myself before starting the year.

Pace Your Studying

This might sound obvious to those of you who already do this, but there are a lot of medical students who got through undergrad learning everything they needed for an exam the night or two before. I still procrastinated a lot this year, but as everyone knows, procrastination makes things really difficult (stress, exhaustion, etc.). If I could do things over again (and if I could muster up the motivation), I would spend one or two days a week reviewing everything covered that week. That doesn’t even mean necessarily studying hard; at the very least it means familiarizing myself with the material so that when I do need to study for the exam, I will have the key concepts already ingrained in my memory. Of course, there are students who study/review everyday or every other day. Do what works for you so that you aren’t cramming so much at the end.

Practice Clinical Skills Regularly

Our final OSCE required us to know all the practical clinical skills we learned throughout the past year (history taking, physical exams, etc.). The week leading up to the OSCE, many of us put in a lot of heavy review and practice. When I look back at it now, clinical skills was relatively easy – if you put in the practice. Many of us didn’t practice regularly, which led to a lot of practice in the week(s) leading up to the OSCE. But once you have the stuff done pat, it’s basically muscle memory. I wish I practiced more regularly so that my clinical sessions during the year would have gone more smoothly, and then I could have just walked into the OSCE with little practice required. Moreover, you will be using these clinical skills all throughout clerkship, residency, and for some physicians, the rest of their lives. It’s arguable that if there is one thing you should make sure you know inside and out from 1st year of medical school, it’s the clinical skills stuff.

Ignore the Rush and Take Your Time

It’s easy to get caught up on the rush of choosing your residency. Although you don’t apply for residency programs until your 4th year of medical school, it helps to begin exploring early. However, given the competitive nature of the process (with some programs being significantly more competitive than others), it’s easy to get caught up in the rush of trying to position yourself to have a strong application. Research, networking, extra-curriculars – it’s easy to feel pressured and scared to fall behind when you see some of your classmates getting involved and building their C.V.’s to a specific specialty from day 1.

That being said, I think it’s more important to realize that the choice you make for residency is huge – where you end up significantly determines much of your medical career. You might feel pressured to decide very early on and start working towards something specific without fully exploring your options. It doesn’t help that a lot of opportunities become available early on in the school year. It is so easy to, for example, apply for a research position early on in the year and then realize months later that you would never want to work in that field ever (and then wish you had waited to apply for a completely different research position, or spend your summer doing something completely unrelated to research entirely). I myself felt like I changed my mind constantly throughout the school year in terms of where I saw myself being in medicine.

So take your time, explore, and don’t get swept up in the rush.

Learn How You Learn Best

Feel free to take initiative in your learning. Some people learn best by coming to class. Some people never come to class and just watch the recorded lectures later online. Beyond mandatory things, don’t feel obligated to do things a specific way. You know what works for you!

Take Advantage of Everything Being a Medical Student has to Offer

A friend of mine recently shared the following quote with me: “school really begins at 3pm” (or the case of UofT med school, 5pm, haha), basically referencing how much of our education comes through additional opportunities outside the classroom. Medical students have relatively easy access to the medical world in terms of shadowing, electives, research, etc. Often times it’s as simple as just asking.

Summer Plans

I’m really enjoying my summer break so far. I’m doing a research project at a hospital right now full time, but it’s not stressful which is great for me. Spending my time seeing lots of friends and pursuing side projects.

In an attempt to make myself more productive this summer, I set up a personal planning document listing my goals for the summer, and coming up with the necessary action plans to achieve them. I’m going as far as setting end of month goals, and then coming up with an action plan each week for what I need to achieve those goals. Having this plan has made me a lot more organized, and thus, more likely to get things done because I always know what needs to be checked off on my list.

Unfortunately, my goals might be a bit too ambitious. My goal last week for this blog was to write 3 times. Fail. Oh well, here’s to a more productive week!

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Taking a simple case, you get lucky when your medical school interview is conducted by a physician who turns out to be life long buddies with one of your referees, or perhaps you get unlucky when you realize your interviewer and you are complete opposites.

Or maybe you were lucky (in the way that I was) to only have two organic chemistry passages on your MCAT when it was your weakest area. Some people in my situation may have gotten unlucky with three passages. Some were luckier with just one passage.

I would say that most medical school applicants realize this type of luck and only refer to these recent type of events when discussing the luck involved in applying.

However, the actual reality is that “luck” runs much deeper and much further back, to the point where it is hidden to many of us.

I’m lucky that I never got into a serious accident or developed a serious illness. I’m lucky that I had certain experiences in my life that helped develop an early interest in medicine and led me to where I am today. I’m lucky that I have had very supportive family and friends. Change any one of these things, things that we don’t normally consider “luck” related, and I might not be in medical school. In fact, changing any of these things would have prevented medicine from even being an option in the first place.

I hope this post doesn’t make you cynical about life and make you think you have no control. It’s true that you can’t necessarily control luck, although it is true that sometimes you can manage/reduce the variance involved. For example, if you study hard, then it shouldn’t matter whether you get one or two or three organic chemistry passages on your MCAT.

I like luck, variance, and randomness because in a way it’s beautiful and I’ve learned to embrace it. I embrace it because it’s a powerful concept, and it’s powerful because it’s misunderstood.

Understanding the existence of variance helps you detach yourself from emotional situations that were out of your control. It helps you realize that sometimes no matter if you put your best foot forward, some things are out of your control. And if you understand that, what’s there to cry about?

For instance, say my expectation for passing my previous exam was 95%. And let’s say I fail. Why should I be surprised? I knew I was going to fail 5% of the time. Sure it sucks if it happens, but it’s easier to take in when you accept the reality of the possibilities that can happen and how often they happen. Many people seem to have difficulty coming to terms with the idea that supposed to getting something 95% of the time doesn’t equate to deserving it 100% of the time.

Don’t just accept it – embrace variance, and you will learn to live with reality much easier.

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While I don’t have any specific role models that I look up to, one of the things I have come to admire are people who are masters of their trade – those considered “great” in their respective fields.

One of the things I have come to realize is that a key characteristic such individuals have in common is that they are fearless. To be more specific, what I mean is that they are not scared to lose.

I think it’s important to make this distinction between being fearless of losing and simply being fearless because fearlessness is all too often misconstrued as foolishness when it need not be.

Yes it is true that there is foolish fearlessness. For example, a fearless person who takes a test without studying is foolish. Fortunately, that’s not the type of person I am talking about and clearly not the type of fearlessness I am advocating for.

A master who is fearless is one who recognizes the failures or losses he may experience, but chooses to not focus on them. Instead, he focuses on succeeding.

There are many reasons why being fearless is critical to being successful, but there are two that stand out to me.

Focusing on Failure Prevents you From Taking Advantage of Opportunities to Succeed

For many of us, our upbringing is one focused on being as cautious and risk adverse as possible. The problem with this perspective is that this it often causes us to overemphasize the consequences of potential failure and ignore the upside of success (thus leading to missed opportunities). Sometimes this occurs to the point where it leads us to make irrational decisions because we’re so foolishly obsessed with being safe and secure, even in situations where risk is relatively low and can (and should) be managed.

Imagine if I told you I’d be willing to make you a wager on a flip of a coin giving you 4:1 odds on $25k. That is, if you win the flip I give you $100k, but if you lose, you give me $25k.

Some people are going to focus on the loss and instantly decline, imagining how much it would suck to lose money they could have spent on a new car. And that’s all they focus on.

Successful people will look at this situation from a more objective view. They will realize that there is a 50% probability of losing $25k, but a 50% probability they will win $100k. Since successful individuals are also awesome at basic probability, they will further realize this wager has a long term positive expectation of $37.5k ( 0.5x(-25k) + 0.5x(+100k) = +37.5k). That is, if you were to keep making this wager over and over again, you would on average win 37.5k with each bet.

But it doesn’t stop there. They will ask, more questions: Can I afford to lose $25k the 50% of the time it will happen? If so, will the benefits of winning $100k half the time outweigh the negatives of losing $25k half of the time? How much value do I place on having another $75k at this very point in time?

By focusing on the true expectation of the situation, and realizing that both successes and failures are natural processes of life, there’s no reason why we can’t theoretically succeed every time.

However, that is where managing risk comes in. My point is that you can’t let fear of the consequences of failure or losing prevent you from making good decisions. If you only looked at the consequences of losing, you would miss out on the potentially balance-altering benefits of winning.

It’s easy to see this when I lay out numbers for you. However, our fear of losing often shrouds our ability to accurately assess the probabilities of outcomes and what our long term expectation for going forward would be.

Often, visualizing losing accelerates the process from learning about an opportunity to not trying – even before a real assessment of expectation can be made.

For instance, I frequently get emails or comments from students asking me if they should apply for X scholarship because they think they don’t have a shot at winning. Already, they are picturing themselves losing. But let’s look at the possible outcomes. They don’t win the scholarship, and lose some time putting together the application. Or they win win the scholarship and help cut a chunk of their post-secondary expenses out of the way. I mean, to me, as long as you have the time, the decision seems pretty clear. Yet I still see numerous students obsessed with potential failure. Remember, you can’t win if you don’t apply.

Or imagine you are a guy walking down the side walk and notice a cute girl you’ve never met before. You think about stopping to talk to her, and if the conversation is good, maybe ask her out. But you visualize how embarrassing it will be if she gives you a weird look and walks by, or if she talks to you but eventually kindly rejects you. You imagine failure and end up walking by. At no point do you stop to compare the outcome to potential success. Instead, consider the possibility she’ll be super cool and say yes and you end up having ridiculously awesome chemistry with her. If you lose, you feel like an idiot for a few seconds with a girl you will probably never see again. Or if you win, you feel awesome and meet someone who might eventually be someone really important in your life.

In either of these situations I’m not saying there would be a positive long term expectation for someone in your shoes. All I’m saying is don’t miss out on making the assessment simply because you only see failure and not success.

It Does You No Good to Expend Mental Energy on Visualizing Failure

Simply put, it does you no good to waste energy thinking about losing when you could be using that energy to improve your chances of succeeding.

You can either spend that half hour today thinking about how sad your life will be if you bomb that medical school interview, or you could spend that time thinking about how to better approach the “Why Medicine?” interview question.

While taking the test, you can either visualize yourself repeating the course, or you can give your full attention to tackling the difficult calculus problem right there in front of you.

Some people argue that thinking about failure helps make the fall less painful if you indeed do lose. If that’s true for you, then you need to improve the ways you accept loss – thinking about loss over and over again isn’t going to do that for you. You need to realize that failure and loss is a natural part of the process. Everyone is going to have cycles of success and failure. You’re often going to need to fail a bunch before you succeed. Recognize potential failure, but don’t dwell on it.

If you’re going to spend time visualizing the consequences, at least visualize yourself winning. It’s difficult to win when you don’t actually believe you can. I mean, what’s the point in trying if you can’t win, right? You will naturally not try your hardest if you don’t believe you will win.

Do what I do. Delude yourself into believing you are capable of succeeding so that you see purpose in trying your best. Of course, this does not mean deluding yourself into believing your are destined or certain to win (remember, we have to still be realistic).

Fearing Loss is Not a Motivator, but Hating Loss Can be a Good One

“I hate to lose more than I love to win.”

The above is a famous quote by Jimmy Connors, one of the greatest male tennis players in history, and a feeling that strongly resonates with me and probably many of you included.

In fact, studies have shown that we experience up to twice as much pain from a loss than the pleasure we gain from an equivalent gain.

For me, nothing motivates me more than losing at something. If I lose at something, I want to know why, and I want to prove I’m capable of succeeding. If I win, then well, it just validates what I already believed before hand.

You see, thinking about losing can be a healthy and helpful thing, as long as you can use it to your advantage. If you’re going to think about losing, use it as a motivator to help you succeed.

Don’t avoid failure by not trying. Avoid it by succeeding.

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I woke up at 7:50am on this beautiful Saturday morning after sleeping at 2am. I was exhausted from the entire first week of medical school, and I was looking forward to finally sleeping in. Of course, my biological clock is apparently broken now, and I woke up around the same time I normally would to get to class. Damn. I actually turned on my laptop to write a blog entry complaining about this, but then the internet wasn’t working, and I realized I should probably at least try to “sleep in” or else I’d be grumpy the rest of the day.

So what to say about the first week of medical school. I think I said this last time, but the days are long. I’m not used to being in school for 9am to 5pm with only a one hour break. But more than that, it’s the fact that I’ve been in lecture most of the time that’s getting to me. I’m going to be frank and say that I don’t think I’m a school person. I think I used to be when I was younger, but something changed, and now I find it hard to sit still in class. It’s one thing if I was extremely fascinated with what we were being taught (for instance, I guess I could watch TED lectures for seven hours a day if I have to), but I’m going to be honest and say that I’m not interested in, for example, human anatomy. I guess that’s okay though – I mean, even one of our professors came in and said he hated anatomy when he took it here.

But it didn’t make me feel better during our anatomy labs, where we are dissecting cadavers. Some of my peers are more into it, excited about learning some of the different veins or arteries, and walking around to check out the other cadavers. Me, I’m not as excited – I’m just not all that passionate about the human body. I’m just trying to get through the lab if I’m being completely honest.

And so for a short while, I started to feel a bit bad and it made me start to question why I’m even here in medical school. I am clearly not at all interested in the basic sciences they are teaching me so far, and some of my peers clearly have an enthusiasm for the human body that I do not.

But the more I started thinking about it, the more I realized it was okay. I remember that I didn’t come to medical school to learn histology or anatomy. While I knew I would have to do those things in my journey to be a physician, that’s not what I was looking forward to. Maybe I’m looking too forward, but I’m excited about being a physician some day. That’s what excites me more than anything else in this whole process.

I mean, we all have different reasons for wanting to be a physician, and along with those, we will have different interests. I want to be a physician for the intellectual challenge, for the dynamic team environments, and for the privilege to impact people’s lives in a positive way, among other things – but needless to say, a genuine interest in the human body is not at the top of the list.

What does this mean? Honestly I don’t think it means anything, and I don’t think it should. Do I think I will be a good doctor? I believe I will, or else I wouldn’t be in medical school right now. I wouldn’t be here right now if I didn’t genuinely think I would be happy being a physician and that I would be good at it.

I think sometimes we forget that there isn’t just one way to look at something or go about doing something. We get too caught up in trying to figure out the right or wrong way to frame something that we ignore the reality that sometimes there is no right and wrong and there is just different.

So I don’t like sitting through lecture learning human anatomy and I don’t get excited about identifying the location of the lateral thoracic artery – that’s okay. I still believe I will make a darn good doctor and a few months of anatomy isn’t going to discourage me from trying to live up to those expectations.

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The other day, someone asked me if I could write an article on shadowing. While I don’t have any real advice for finding mentors to shadow besides “just asking”, I remembered an article I wrote a few years ago about my experience shadowing a physician, and why I thought job shadowing as a whole is important and something every student should take the time to explore. I dug up the article, and I hope you guys find it helpful…

I observed intently as Dr. Rutka took a deep breath before sharing the grave news with the mother. Her son, who has had epilepsy for years, requires brain surgery to remove a tumour that the doctor believes to be causing his seizures. However, there are huge risks involved, especially if the boy has a seizure during surgery. I felt a lump in my throat as the mother hammered the doctor with questions in a hysterical manner, clearly concerned over the health of her son. My eyes gazed in admiration at the powerful calm in Dr. Rutka’s voice as he consoled the mother. His compassion for the boy and his family resonated throughout the room. I began to wonder if I could keep the same poise and composure if I were in Dr. Rutka’s position. I was sure it was situations like these that make a career in medicine difficult, stressful and often heart wrenching.

A few patients later, I watched attentively as Amro, a neurosurgery resident, performed a routine check up on a young girl who had brain surgery just a few months before. Although he was still in training, Amro showed obvious passion for the long career in neurosurgery that lay ahead. The girl’s mother watched Amro in awe, saying, “when I think about how many lives you’re going to save one day, I can’t help but feel inspired”. I couldn’t help but smile and share in the special moment. It was then that I realized in spite of the blood, sweat and tears of a career in medicine, moments like these made everything worth it.

The opportunity to shadow a world class pediatric neurosurgeon at the Hospital for Sick Children doesn’t come along everyday. In the last few years, my interest in medicine – particularly in pediatrics and neuroscience – have grown. Still, I wanted to make sure that the health care environment was right for me. The privilege to learn from Dr. Rutka over the current school year comes from a career mentorship program run by Youth in Motion, a Canadian organization striving to help shape the futures of our youth. Youth in Motion develops and implements career mentoring programs that connect youth with adults in their choice of career.

“Career mentoring is a highly valuable and worthwhile experience for youth. It enables them to explore a career field in a unique and personalized format,” says Akela Peoples, President and CEO of Youth in Motion. “Dialoguing with someone in the workforce enables students to get important and relevant questions answered, provides an opportunity to learn directly from someone who has travelled a particular path before them and, most importantly, facilitates the transfer of unfiltered information.”

Observing Dr. Rutka’s work has only enhanced my aspirations to enter a career of medicine, and I now hope to work at the Hospital for Sick Children someday. It is fortunate that this “shadowing” experience reinforced my aspirations; indeed, I could just as easily have detested the hospital environment. If that were the case, imagine how dreadful it would be if I had gone through the endless years of education and training to become a doctor, only to realize it wasn’t the career for me!

For aspiring entrepreneurs like David Wen of Surrey, British Columbia, connecting with the CEO of a company created a life changing relationship. “Mentors are people who truly care for your well being, since their success is not dependant on yours,” says Wen, whose mentor has allowed him to witness many aspects of business, including sales pitches. “They are like honest and determined salespeople who do not work on commission.”

James Valitchka, already an 11 year old best-selling author hailing from Ottawa, Ontario, believes that you can never be too young to seek out a mentor for advice. “It’s really important to have a mentor to talk to about life and the future,” claims Valitchka, who has been paired up by Youth in Motion with a businessperson and one-time author. “They keep you encouraged and their advice can stop you from making mistakes. They share their experiences with you and make you a better and smarter person.”

As students, you are in the midst of a journey of discovery and reflection, trying to determine your direction in life. Like many before you, you might feel absolutely sure that you will become a lawyer, surgeon, web designer or teacher. At the same time, how can you be so sure that defending criminals in court, performing brain surgery, designing websites or teaching high school is something you would be happy doing? The fact is you won’t know until you try. And while shadowing won’t let you experience the job directly, you will better understand the field.

Having career mentors becomes ever so important for those of us about to embark on a brand new journey – the transition into adulthood. For some of us, the distance ahead is as clear as the sky; for others, it is a blurry mixture. There are those who have planned their entire lives out for the next fifty years, and for the rest of us, every thought, action and decision is perhaps spontaneous. Yet no matter how prepared you are for the future, you need to step in the shoes of those careers yourselves – and there is no better way to do so than by actually learning from individuals in the field.

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I have always done well in school my whole life. Throughout both elementary and high school, I had rarely gotten close to a failing grade in anything. And even the few times I did, the weight of those assignments or tests was not that significant, and as you eventually learn, high school marks don’t matter that much once you reach a certain point.

When I got to university, I had planned on taking school a bit more seriously. Unlike high school where you have numerous tests, assignments and exams per course (and thus, failing a single test probably does not affect your final mark too much), university courses tend to be composed of fewer components that are worth more. As a result, messing up even one test could now significantly hurt your final mark. For example, the microeconomics course I took last year had two tests (25% each) and one final exam (50%). The final exam itself had just 40 multiple choice questions, meaning that each question was worth 1.25% of my final mark!

However, the bigger reason why I wanted to take my university academics more seriously is because I was interested in eventually applying to medical school. While medical schools differ on how much they value GPA, the fact of the matter is that given the competitive nature of the process, it makes sense to do your best. You will never know when that extra point might just be the difference between an acceptance and a rejection.

Nonetheless, the reality is that university is more difficult than high school. And while I wasn’t expecting it, I did hit a rough patch during the fall of my first year. There was a particular week where, back to back, I got the two worst marks I have ever received in university so far – 60′s on both a physics and chemistry test. I was partly upset because of how it could affect my final marks in the course, but I think I was even more hurt because I expected to do better than that.

However, did this mean I was now a C-student in my physics and chemistry courses?

Expectation and the Long Run

The short answer is no, not necessarily. What you achieve on a single test is not a perfect indicator of your ability – that’s why you normally have more than one evaluated component to a course. The idea is that the more times you need to be marked, the greater the probability that your scores will converge on your long-term expected mark. So while it may be possible for you to fail or ace a single test due to unforeseen circumstances or random luck, it is way more difficult to do so over many tests.

For example, say you and I decide to flip a single coin. You pick heads, and as it turns out, the coin lands heads. Does this mean you are way better at flipping coins than I am? Not necessarily. Something working out once or a few times doesn’t mean that it is always going to turn out that way.

Why do you think major sports leagues tend to have multi-game playoffs? For example, in both the NHL (hockey) and the NBA (basketball), the playoffs involve teams playing a best of 7 series (i.e. the first time to win four games moves on to the next round). The idea here is to reduce variance by having teams play more than once.

Although it is possible that a technically worse team could defeat a better one in a best of 7 series, that is less likely to occur than in a best of 1 series. The fact that one team loses a single game does not mean it is a worse team than the other – so many factors could have affected the result (e.g. injuries, mental lapses, etc.). Even if one team is so much better than the other that it should win 90% of the time, that still means the better team should also lose 10% of the time. It is nearly impossible for a team to have a 100% success rate against any other team in competitive sports.

In the same way, just because I got 60% on my two tests, does not necessarily mean that I am a long-term 60% student in first year chemistry and physics. However, in the same way, achieving 90% on those two tests isn’t enough proof to suggest that I am not a long-term 60% student either. In either case, the sample size just isn’t large enough.

As it turned out, thanks to some luck and hard work, I was able to pull off A+’s in both those courses. Although those results are by no means definitive of my abilities, I think it is pretty safe to say that my long term expectation in first year physics and chemistry courses is closer to an A than to a C. While analyzing a random test result during the year might say otherwise, one of the things you must constantly remember is that the long-term is always more important. That’s why your final mark, which takes into account an entire year or semester’s worth of evaluated components, is what you find on your transcript and some random single test is not.

If you studied hard and fell sick the morning of one of your exams, what more could you have really done? Imagine a hypothetical scenario where you had to take the same type of exam everyday for a year. Perhaps when healthy, you would average 90% on the exam. However, when sick, you would average 20%. And let’s say that you always get sick 10 days a year (out of 365 days). In that case, if this exam occurred on any random day, your long term expected value for this specific exam would be [355(0.90) + 10(0.20)]/365 = 0.88 = 88%. So while your expected mark for this exam is 88%, it is very possible to have a bad, sick day where you actually achieve ~20% and there was nothing you could have done about it.

If you do fall sick on the day of your exam and do poorly, it helps to ignore the short-term result and realize the fact that over time your hard work will pay off, and that if you had to do this exam again, you do extremely well it most of the time. Your university years will be full of tests and exams, and understanding your long term expectation in the process will go a long way to keeping your self-confidence stable no matter what unfortunate circumstances are thrown your way.

Problems with Being Results-Oriented

Sometimes you are going to fail miserably in the short term; on the other hand, sometimes you will do absolutely fantastic. Realize that whether you succeeded or failed is not as important as understanding why that result happened – this is an important concept that results-oriented individuals have trouble understanding.

Being results-oriented refers to basing one’s understanding of events primarily on the specific results. The major problem with being results-oriented is that it relies on the false assumption that results are constants. People who are results-oriented tend to think only in terms of absolutes, with ideas such as “events will or won’t happen” instead of “events are more likely or less likely to happen”.

For example, say you are travelling by passenger plane and it almost crashes. A results-oriented person on that flight would immediately say flying is too dangerous and never fly again. Instead of trying to figure out exactly why that specific flight had problems, a results-oriented person just takes that single horrifying event and assumes all other flights will be like it.

While that example might seem absurd to some of you, I would bet that many of you are results-oriented in every day aspects of your life.

Say you are taking a course with a final exam that involves writing an essay. You are given four topics beforehand, and are told one of them will be used on the exam. Obviously, the smart thing to do is prepare for all four topics. However, maybe you were lazy or low on time, so you decide to only prepare for Topic 1. As it turns out, Topic 2 is used on the exam. More often than not, you will leave the exam saying: “I knew I should have studied Topic 2!” Yet the fact of the matter was that Topic 1 was equally likely to have shown up on the exam as Topic 2.

Imagine if you were results oriented with everything in your life. If you failed one test, you would just go ahead and quit school – if you can’t pass one test, then maybe you can’t pass any of them. Or if you didn’t get into medical school your first try you would just give up and think you weren’t capable. Or, worse, if you survived jumping off a building once you would think you are immortal and try it again – okay that was a bit extreme, but I just wanted to illustrate the problems with results-oriented thinking.

Results-oriented thinking is illogical. It’s like thinking that because you rolled a six with a die once, you will keep rolling six for the rest of your life.

It’s important to not let the results of events affect your decisions. Just because you over studied one time for a test does not necessarily mean you should start under-studying now. Or just because you do poorly on one test does not mean you can’t do better on the next.

Once you realize this, it becomes much easier to deal with failure and frustration.

If you work hard, in the long-term, the results will come.

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As you learned in the first two parts of this series on success, my first Independent Study Project (ISP) for my gifted program was on the Brain and Nervous System, and I was able to achieve success by mimicking a technique I had observed from older students. However, the following year in Grade 6, every other student started creating board games to achieve their synthesis objective. If I used the board game idea again, that aspect of my project would be no different from anyone else’s.

Mimicking Can Lead to Saturation

Essentially, what we saw from then on out for the next few years was a saturation of board games at the annual ISP show case. Instead of being something new and cool to check out, it became almost expected – in a way, it became almost standard to have one.

The problem with this type of saturation is that the value for going this route decreases. There is nothing special about a product that is being made everywhere and by everyone. In the same way, once everyone started churning out board games to achieve the synthesis objective, the impressiveness of a board game I produced would decrease relative to its value the year before – when I was the only student who made one in my class.

We can see this type of situation developing all the time. Take any great product that’s the first of its kind in the market. Demand will be super high and supply will be low because only one company is making it – as a result, the value of the product is high. Conversely, once competitors enter the market with similar products, the value of each of these products decreases because the supply has increased. Eventually, the market becomes saturated with similar products.

In Grade 6, I decided to do my project on Flying Machines – essentially looking at the development of aircrafts through history and how they functioned. But once I realized that the ISP showcase would be saturated with board games, I decided to completely avoid that route and look for a new cool idea.

PowerPoint

The year was 1999, and my family had just started using Microsoft Office 2000, which came with a slew of really cool software. One day my brother was playing around with the Office 2000 software and opened up PowerPoint.

Now, all of you probably use PowerPoint slideshows today for many things, such as presentations. And as guys know, I even use PowerPoint now in making my videos. Back then, however, PowerPoint was a pretty new tool for us (and I think it was pretty new to most people overall). I’m not sure if PowerPoint was a standard tool in high schools yet, but it definitely wasn’t being taught or promoted in elementary schools.

I didn’t know what it was, but I saw my brother fumbling around with it and trying out some cool animations, and I thought it was pretty darn cool. So I started playing around with PowerPoint whenever I could. I didn’t use the Help function or try to read up on it because I found it much more fun to experiment and learn through trial and error.

After creating a bunch of random slides and testing the cool animations and sound effects, I realized PowerPoint could be used for my ISP. In terms of the evaluation of my ISP, my project would stand out again because just like the previous year, I would be using a method that was relatively original compared to everyone else.

When I finally did my presentation on Flying Machines using PowerPoint, all of my friends were amazed by how cool the presentation looked. Nowadays, I think that sitting through a presentation with flying bullets and laser sounds could get kind of annoying, but back then when you’re eleven years old, things like this are pretty awesome.

More than even my friends, my gifted teacher was absolutely astounded by the work I had put in teaching myself to use PowerPoint – as a gifted teacher, this was the kind of initiative by his students that he loved to see. I not only got a perfect mark on my ISP (something I never heard had been achieved before), but my gifted teacher asked me to create a workshop to teach my peers the basics of using PowerPoint.

Innovation

Eventually, as expected, everyone else started using PowerPoint. And of course, once I got to high school, PowerPoint became the standard for presentations. In the same way as before with the board game, presentations now became saturated with the PowerPoint format.

The important idea to take away from this is that I was able to benefit the most from the board game concept and PowerPoint format because I was the innovator – I was the one who introduced these ideas into the “market”.

Anytime you are the first one to do something, you reap more benefits of success than those who follow later on and eventually saturate the market. When no one else was making board games or using PowerPoint, I stuck out as a success. I was successful because I was different and ahead of the time.

Original and creative ideas lead to innovation, and now more than ever, innovation is almost necessary to stay competitive. Innovators are the ones leading the waves of success because they are able to take advantage of their innovations before these ideas become common place.

Imagine if companies stopped doing research and development. Imagine if they stopped trying to improve their products. What would happen? Whoever generated the next great idea would take over the industry. This concept doesn’t just apply to businesses and companies; it’s a concept that is universal to any type of success.

That is one of the problems with pursuing success through mimicking. Unless you are able to recognize the next big wave of success, you often get involved way too late, when the market is already saturated. I saw this with both board games and PowerPoint – once everyone started doing them, those ideas just weren’t “impressive” anymore.

It’s not like I worked any harder to learn how to use PowerPoint or spent more hours building my board game than any other student would have done. The value in those ideas came from being the first person in my community to introduce them to everyone else.

Becoming the Authority

In terms of achieving success in something, you want to be the first one in. And you can’t ever be the first one in if you’re just mimicking other people’s successes. In general, you can only be the first one in if you’re innovating.

Also important is the fact that it’s usually the first success who becomes the notable authority – the leader of that field or idea. It’s these authorities who eventually become the most trusted individuals in the industry. Imagine a brand new type of computer coming into the market. Who are you going to trust: the company that first made it, or the companies that copied it?

If you’re not the first one in, and you are providing a product or service that is no better than what’s currently out there, where does your value come from? Why should anyone switch from the product their currently using?

There is a plaza near my home which has a super market, small restaurants, and other stores. There is a certain restaurant location in the plaza that almost seems cursed. Any restaurant that tries opening up in that spot over the last several years has closed.

Actually, I don’t really think the restaurant is cursed. In my opinion, the problem is that any of the restaurants that have opened up there have not given potential customers any reason to switch from other restaurants in the plaza that they regularly eat at. The plaza already has a very popular Chinese cafe. Yet for some reason, a bunch of other Chinese cafe’s with similar menus keep trying to open up and this formula keeps failing. They don’t seem to recognize that because they weren’t the “first ones in”, and aren’t offering any new or different food services, they are not giving customers any reason to stop going to their current restaurant.

Adaptation

The reason why innovators are always able to be successful is because they understand the system and forces at work so well that they are able to constantly adapt to the changing environment. They are able to see new problems forming and come up with original solutions before anyone else. In order to both see these problems and figure out solutions to them, you must first understand the system in which these problems occur.

I have done well in school my entire life, and it’s not just because my natural skill set is inclined towards the school environment. A lot of my school success is due to my understanding of the education system. I have developed a very good understanding of professors and teachers, and most of the time, understand the motives behind the way they teach and evaluate. By understanding what drives educators, I am able to adapt in the academic environment, from the way I approach tests to how I prepare my assignments. No two educators approach their work the same way, and through my understanding, I am able to adjust accordingly.

If you don’t understand the system you live in and cannot adapt to changes, you will have to wait for someone else to figure those things out. And sometimes it’s just too late.

Rock, Paper, Scissors: The Whole Picture

If anything I’ve written so far in this series has not made sense, maybe an analogy would help. If you’ve read my article on ranges, you’ll know that I love using rock, paper, scissors (RPS) analogies to explain ideas.

In Part 1 of this series, we learned about the barriers preventing people from being successful at things – such individuals lack the knowledge of what it takes to be successful at something. Furthermore, they do not have a deep understanding of the system – in this case, they have no idea how the game of RPS works. We can imagine such a majority of people as poor RPS players always throwing rock.

In the minority, we have the successful, innovative RPS players who always throw paper when they compete against the unsuccessful players, and thus they always win – more importantly, these players know how the game of RPS works and understand why they are throwing paper.

Perhaps, as time goes by, some of the losing players recognize that the winning players are always throwing paper against the weaker players. Even though they don’t understand why throwing paper is good, they are smart enough to realize that if it’s working for the successful players, it’s probably the right thing to do. So this group of players starts mimicking the successful players, and throwing paper every time they compete against the weak players.

However, the number of players throwing paper now starts to increase. The field gets saturated with paper. The innovators soon realize that throwing paper is working less and less since so many more players have started mimicking their techniques (i.e. they now find themselves throwing paper against other paper way more often, resulting in a draw).

Because they understand the system and can adapt, the innovators will realize that they need to make changes to their strategy – they need to keep throwing paper against the oblivious majority, but need to start throwing scissors against the mimicking group that is now throwing paper all of the time.

Eventually, the group that can mimic success will catch on and start throwing scissors themselves – the problem is that the group that mimics will never be able to beat the innovators because they cannot adapt. That is, they can only wait for a new technique to become popular and then copy it. So while they are still ahead of the masses, they can’t reach as great a level of consistent success as the innovative, adaptive players.

So What Does this Mean for You?

If you’ve read this far, it probably means you are pretty resourceful and open-minded. I would imagine that most students reading this blog are fairly successful in their own endeavours, but are looking for that extra little push forward. I would think that many of you have become quite good at identifying successful techniques and adding them to your own arsenal, but may not have tapped into your entire creative potential yet.

All I’m saying is this: if you ever want to really get good at something and stay at the top, you have to spend the time really understanding the system you’re in, and subsequently, have the drive to identify new problems and design solutions.

I am definitely not an innovator in everything that I do. I learn a lot by observing other people, analyzing what drives them, and figuring out why their methods work.

That being said, for the things that matter the most to me, I strive hard to look at those issues from as many angles as possible, so that I can understand them to the fullest. If I want my efforts to really matter and impact the most people, I have to stay ahead of the curve.

* * * * * * * * * *

Read the other parts of the The Secret to Consistent Success series here:

• Part 1: Not Knowing How To Succeed
• Part 2: Resourcefulness and Mimicking Success
• Part 3: Adaptation and Innovation

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To better explain what I mean by this title, let’s go back to the story in Part 1 of this series. As I was saying, the Grade 5 gifted students were not expected to achieve the higher objectives in their projects, such as synthesis. In the end, I was one of a few students who were able to achieve the synthesis objective. For my project on the Brain and Nervous System, I decided to create an original board game where the players must learn about and better understand the nervous system in order to move ahead in the game – that is, I was communicating the information and ideas I learned in a new and original fashion.

Of course, this idea was no accident. It’s not like I was sitting around one day contemplating how to achieve the synthesis objective and the idea of a board game just popped into my head. I already knew the board game would be an acceptable idea for the synthesis objective – I had seen with my own eyes that it was.

Recall those previous two years where I went to my brother’s class’s ISP showcase. I had observed their projects and the ideas they used to complete their ISP objectives. For whatever reason, many of them chose to use board games to achieve their synthesis objectives. And while the board game idea was nothing to marvel at from an older student’s point of view, for my class that was new to the whole ISP thing, it was completely unheard of.

I was able to achieve a near perfect mark on my ISP because I was successful at completing more of the objectives than most of my peers. And I was able to do so because of my ability to observe how previous students were successful and implement those same solutions for my own problem. Not surprisingly, the other students in my gifted class caught on pretty quick, and almost everyone created a board game to achieve the synthesis objective in their ISP’s the following year.

Many Solutions Are Already Out There

If you think about it, many of the problems we face today are nothing new – they have been solved before by someone else. However, while most people can’t solve the problem on their own, of this group, only a few are resourceful enough to research how this same problem has been solved in history, and then simply mimic that solution and achieve success.

A lot of the answers are already out there, but only the successful individuals know where to look. Thanks in large part to the Internet, how-to advice for success is often just a click away.

Most of the successful individuals I have met are like sponges for information. They have a thirst for knowledge of “how-to’s” for success. Don’t believe me? Think again – you are likely such a person.

Many of the readers of this blog found it through the Student Awards website. You may not realize it, but you are part of a minority of students with both the desire and resourcefulness to actually seek out scholarship/application information and advice. Most students don’t even get as far as a search engine.

It won’t surprise me at all if many of you end up doing well in school, or the scholarship/admissions process. The fact that you take the time to read this blog means you were resourceful enough to find it, and have the drive to soak up anything relevant I have to offer.

Recently, I have been receiving some great news from some of you. A few of you have recently become TD Scholarship finalists and have attributed some of your success to the advice I have provided on this blog. While I can’t say for certain that my blog has truly been useful, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a correlation between the readers of this blog and success rate in the scholarship hunt. Those of you who believe this blog is helpful obviously recognize that I was fairly successful in the scholarship process, and it is definitely smart of you to analyze what worked for me (and what didn’t), and use that information to your advantage.

Public Speaking

To further prove my point, I want to share with you how my own resourcefulness allowed me to develop as a speaker. I wasn’t a naturally born speaker. In fact, I used to stutter sometimes and speak way too fast. Yet over the past several years, I have been invited for quite a few public speaking opportunities, including keynotes, panels, and workshops at conferences, as well as speeches at events.

The reason why I love speaking is because it moves people, both mentally and emotionally. It makes people think. It inspires and motivates people. I know this is true because it works on me – I love watching great speakers.

I can still remember one particular speaking opportunity where I was putting some newly developed speaking skills to work. It was late August 2004 – I had just created SMARTS and was delivering a presentation to students at the OSClub summer science program, trying to motivate them to get on board with my new project. After the presentation, a bunch of students came up to me, asking: “Where did you learn to speak like that?”

As I was saying, I had just developed some new public speaking skills. No, I didn’t take a course or have a mentor or anything. I just observed.

A few weeks before that presentation, I had attended a leadership conference run by Leaders Today – a youth leadership organization co-founded by Craig Kielburger. I had seen Craig speak before, and I personally think he’s a phenomenal speaker. At the time, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, so I decided to analyze him closely when it was his time to present at the conference.

As I watched Craig speak, I noticed a lot of the little things he did. It’s a bit hard to explain, but he frequently changes the dynamics, speed, and phrasing of his voice with very well-timed hesitations (you should be able to find clips of some of his speeches if you do a quick search). The overall result of his public speaking style is that it comes off as very passionate and inspiring. While most renowned speakers are famous for their content, many of them lack the skill in speech phrasing and dynamics that Craig has mastered. While Craig may not be any more passionate about his beliefs than any other speaker, at least to me, he sure comes off as more passionate when he speaks. I don’t know whether Craig normally speaks like that or if it is something he has developed, but suffice to say, I have never seen anyone control this aspect of speech as well as he does.

After recognizing those speech skills that made Craig so successful, I started trying to implement similar dynamics and phrasing in my own speeches and got great feedback at most events. It was amazing how my words were the same, but changing the way I said them made a huge difference.

It amazes me when I read about public speaking advice or recall some of the speaking workshops I’ve been to, and how none of them have ever shown videos of really good speakers to use as examples. I have never been to a public speaking workshop where the facilitators actually analyzed what made great speakers so moving. Does anyone actually do this? I’d be really curious to see if anyone has ever made a workshop like that.

Most of the workshops seem to focus on basic fundamentals of speaking – stuff like volume, articulation, clarity, etc. Of course, these fundamentals are important. But it’s almost as if people believe there is no value in trying to observe really good speakers or that most people could never speak like them – both ideas I pretty much disagree with.

Really, It’s Ridiculous How Much Information is Out There

Seriously, it really is ridiculous. If you have a desire to learn and a decent work ethic, there is enough information out there for you to be pretty successful at almost anything.

I had never maintained a blog before this summer. Yet with a few Google searches, I was able to find an absurd amount of information and easy instructions for setting one up. You’d think people would charge for information, but it seems like for many of us, it’s human nature to be happy to share.

Yet despite this, many people still seem to deny the fact that they can achieve so much more than they currently are. You don’t always need to have some insane raw talent to be pretty successful at something – often, you just need to be resourceful, and have the work ethic to apply what you’ve learned.

For instance, while I do believe I have the right natural skill set for school, most of the skills I’ve developed for non-academic activities came from researching and observing other successful people, and using trial and error to see if I could develop those same skills.

Whenever I get interested in the success of others, I don’t spend my entire day gawking at that person and telling myself: “Wow, that’s amazing… but I could never do that.”

Instead, I ask myself: “That’s cool, I wonder how he did that?” Then I hop on Google and start doing searches, or I talk to people who have insight into those things.

Since a kid, I have been fascinated by magicians and illusionists. I found it pretty cool that they could do things that appeared to make no sense. I think many people are the same way – they see a magic trick, and think to themselves: “How the heck did they do that?” But most people I know don’t do what I do next – if I’m really dumbfounded by the magic trick, I actually go on Google and look it up. You’d seriously be amazed at how a vast majority of famous magic tricks and illusions are decoded and broken down on the Internet.

The same goes for many skills or activities you might want help on and don’t know where to look. Trust me though, quite often, it is available for free. The only cost is your time and effort.

That being said, resourcefulness and mimicking can only get you to a certain level of success. If you desire success at the highest level, you’re going to have to do some of the initial work yourself.

Part 3: Adaptation and Innovation >>

* * * * * * * * * *

Read the other parts of the The Secret to Consistent Success series here:

• Part 1: Not Knowing How To Succeed
• Part 2: Resourcefulness and Mimicking Success
• Part 3: Adaptation and Innovation

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I don’t claim to know the meaning of life because I don’t know whether such a thing exists, and even if it does, I don’t know how one could discover it. Every type of opinion on the meaning of life is essentially a belief – an idea that you might live your life around but not necessarily have concrete evidence to prove that it is true.

What can I say? I am a scientist by nature. I believe in logic. I like rational arguments. I like having reasons for things.

And for those reasons, I find it hard to believe that we could ever find a true meaning of life: Why are we here? What is our purpose?

To believe that there is a true meaning of life implies that this meaning must be universal and applicable to everyone – yet how could we ever find such a thing?

Fate

Some people believe in fate or destiny – the idea that everything that is going to happen was meant to be.

I don’t like to believe in fate because it implies that I really don’t have free will. It implies that I am not really making decisions because it was already pre-determined that I was going to take those actions.

If you believe in fate, how could you ever blame someone? A criminal could argue that it was fate for him to commit a crime, and since all of this was pre-determined, it’s technically not his fault. Yes it would be fair to jail him since he is a danger to society, but if you believe in fate, how could you justify blame?

If you believe that everyone on this earth was born with a set purpose, does this not suggest at least some aspect of pre-determined events? Then again, I guess you could argue that we may all have a purpose but we don’t necessarily all complete our “life mission”.

If you were to vanish right now, would your life have mattered?

I am content knowing that I will never know what the true meaning of life is, if there even is one. What I do know is that if you choose to, you can lead a meaningful life.

It seems by nature that humans are social creatures. So to me, we have the most meaning by impacting the lives of others. And in that sense, it’s hard to lead a meaningful life if you live a solitary life.

If you were all alone on an island, with no contact with other humans, how could you ever impact someone’s life? To the rest of humanity, you essentially never existed.

Thus, you can’t lead a meaningful life if you live a solitary one. That being said, at least for humanity’s sake, leading a meaningful life is not necessarily better than leading a solitary one.

Positive Impact

It’s true that many of history’s tyrants have led meaningful lives, though their actions are not things I would personally encourage. And although it would be wrong to downplay the impact of their lives on humanity, it doesn’t mean they led lives we should aspire to.

Personally, I want to live a positively meaningful life. I want to impact people in a way that makes them happy and improves their lives. If I am ever remembered for something, I would want to be remembered for doing something positive.

I think deep down everyone wants their life to matter. Not necessarily that they existed for a reason, but that their existence mattered.

And if you choose to positively impact those around you, then your life definitely matters.

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