There’s lots of reasons being a doctor is still an amazing job. My job requires me to spend my days meeting new people and talking to them. From many conversations with others and from my own days on this earth, I’ve put together this list. Here’s how to live a better life.
Better Life Tip #1: Take A Few Trips. Make A Few Memories.
One of the most impactful people in my life was a vascular surgeon with whom I worked for a year doing clinical research. There was no reason he had to take on a young resident at that point in his career, but he did.
As I got to know him, I found out he was fighting cancer. He would have chemo in the morning and come to his office right afterward. Sometimes he brought me to clinical case conferences. He taught me how to write a paper and how to give a presentation. I thought he was incredible to be so devoted to work. He was the opposite of mentally weak.
Close to the end of my time with him, I was planning a trip to Europe. My husband had just finished residency. As I was planning this multi-country, multi-city trip, he told me he’d never been to those places. He couldn’t say why anymore, but he’d never been to Paris. He knew some people who had timeshares there, but, well. I was astonished.
It’s not that we had saved a large slush fund to take this trip. Only, we wanted to go somewhere to celebrate the completion of medical training. We were thinking of road-tripping to a national park, but something got into our heads to go to Europe. Neither of us was working, so we booked an extra-long (to us) two-week trip on a credit card. We took our 11-month-old baby to see Notre Dame and the Mannequin Pis. We ate crepes on a lawn in Paris and saw Van Gogh in the original in Amsterdam.
Soon after that, I went back to residency. And then one evening while I was getting into bed during a night call, I got a text message. My mentor had passed away. He’d had pneumonia and had gone on a ventilator and never come off.
I’m not sure if he had any regrets. He definitely lived a full life. Many people loved him and miss him still, me included.
But among the things he taught me was that our days are numbered, life is finite, and I had better live it.
Better Life Tip #2: Remember that only you have to live with your choices.
Sometimes we choose what’s right for us. And sometimes we choose what we think might please someone else, sometimes against our own desires. This is madness. And yet it’s perfectly natural because the quintessential people we seek to please are our parents!
I am grateful for my parents and for our culture. There’s no way I would be where I am if not for their hard work, their ideals, and their love. But as an adult, I don’t always choose what they would choose for me, if I were still a child.
Don’t get me wrong- I don’t always get it right. But I don’t regret most of the choices I have made in life, even if some of them were hare-brained and bound for trouble in retrospect. It turns out I’ve made some good choices in spite of myself. For example, I got married after less than three months’ courtship to someone they’d never met. That was probably the best choice of my life.
But I’ve made some solid mistakes. And I have all the comfort of having made those mistakes myself. You know what’s worse than making a choice you regret?
Regretting a choice you made to please someone else. How mournful we are when we choose poorly trying to make someone else happy! Very often, the other party is not suitably grateful we chose against our own will. Don’t make choices to please others if it will make you unhappy. Live your own life.
Better Life Tip #3: Pay Attention To The Ones Who Matter
As we get older, life gets fuller. We’re pulled in many directions. There’s the tiny hands and insistent cries of our children asking for our attention. Phones chiming, distracting. The soft, seductive voice of our ego, urging us to reach higher. Distant echoes of our old friends who we’re beginning to forget.
Youth is an empty cup, but adulthood brims over.
What I mean is that as we grow older, we cannot accommodate everything and everyone. And unless we are intentional about our time, we may not be pleased with how that time is allocated. We might not even notice it happening.
From the depths of motherhood, I will tell you this: work life was not designed to balance the demands of family. It’s very hard to put your family first when you have a demanding career. It’s not right, but it’s reality for many of us.
This is the crux of it all. If my days are numbered, I don’t want to spend the majority of my waking hours trying to earn my bread. That’s why I strongly believe the FIRE people have it right. Think less about work, and more about the ones who matter. When you’re constantly working, you don’t even have room to realize what you’ve missed.
Thanks for reading.
Have you got any tips on how to live better?
