Success
Appreciation, Niceness, and Generosity – Why Being Kind is Best
Last night I was at dinner with a couple of friends. A good friend of mine from class was sitting across from me, and at one point, the topic of generosity came up. The discussion helped elucidate a concept that I’ve always believed, but never really put onto paper, so I guess now is a [...]
Hidden Luck
Luck, variance, randomness – whatever you want to call it, it has an undeniable influence on the course of events. 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 [...]
The Fear of Failure and Why You Need to Stop Being Afraid to Lose
I think far too often in too many things we focus on just one side of the coin. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be counter productive if you’re looking at the side that prevents you from succeeding, and succeeding big. While I don’t have any specific role models that I [...]
Why You Should Job Shadow
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 [...]
Why You Need to Think Critically about Advice and Who You Get it From
Sometimes I read advice online for medical school admissions from medical students that I think is fundamentally wrong. Of course this would seem counter-intuitive – how could someone be wrong about advice if they got in? Consider a game of rock, paper, scissors (yah yah, how many times have I used this example now?). Imagine [...]
Understanding Expectation and Avoiding Being Results Oriented
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 [...]
The Secret to Consistent Success – Part 3: Adaptation and Innovation
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 [...]
The Secret to Consistent Success – Part 2: Resourcefulness and Mimicking Success
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 [...]
The Secret to Consistent Success – Part 1: Not Knowing How To Succeed
At the elementary school Gifted program I attended for four years, one of the most important and time-consuming activities every year was the Independent Study Project (ISP). The ISP consisted of picking any topic of interest, and using all of the Bloom’s Taxonomy cognitive objectives as guidelines for understanding, thinking, and communicating about the topic [...]
It’s Okay to Look Like an Idiot
When I was in Grade 4, I was identified as “gifted” by my school board. As a result of that, I started going to a separate gifted program at another school for one day a week from Grades 5 to 8. It was a great program that allowed me to explore many neat things not [...]
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