I'm A Physician — If You Can Master These 3 Skills, You'll Achieve All Your Goals In Under A Year
How to achieve the things you want the most in a year's time.
sturti | Canva I’m in medical school. And while I’ve always been a good student, I wasn’t necessarily an extraordinary student. Nonetheless, last year I decided to aim for an All-India-Rank 1 in my upcoming entrance exam. The results of this exam will decide what residency I get into and what college I study from.
To pass the exam, I have to work smarter than everyone else — because hard work alone cannot get me there for two reasons:
- Most of my competition is already working as hard as they can.
- There are only 24 hours in a day — meaning that hard work has a ceiling and that it cannot scale.
Hence, to work smarter than every other student in my field, I started searching and brainstorming obsessively to find ways to be more efficient. In a simple sentence, my goal statement was this: “My one hour of studying should equal someone else’s four hours.”
Now, I realize that there's no way to measure this. All I’m saying is that this is a good mental goal to go after — because it forces you to look for alternative ways to go about achieving your goals in under a year. It forces you to build a mindset of efficiency and a tendency to look for the smartest way to do anything. Simply because hard work does not scale but smart work does.
If you can master these skills, you'll achieve all your goals in under a year:
1. Rank the actions you can take based on their ROI
To achieve any given goal, there are an infinite number of actions you can take. And this is where the problem lies. While all actions might move the needle to some degree — not all actions move it significantly.
Research by the International Encyclopedia of Education explained that an ROI is the general name for a confirmatory analysis in which you analyze a region selected before examining whole-brain results. It's a rigorous way to test if the expected brain areas are activated as predicted by the hypothesis while controlling for potential false positives due to the large number of analyzed voxels.
For instance, to be a digital writer, you can take many actions. You can spend an hour learning better vocabulary to sound smarter. Or you can spend 30 minutes every day coming up with better ideas for your reader.
In theory, both of these will move the needle and help you be a better writer. But the return on investment of the latter will be much more than that of the former. Hence, you could also say that while studying advanced vocabulary will theoretically help you be a better writer, in the practical world, it’s stupid because there are many better things you can do with your time.
Since your time is limited, you only want to focus on the actions that will move the needle the most. You only want to take actions with the highest ROI. Let me give you examples:
As I mentioned before, the syllabus for a medical student is unfathomable. This means that the person who tries to study everything ends up studying nothing. Hence, I decided to master the most important topics first and ignored everything else. Let me tell you exactly how I did that.
The conventional method of studying looks like this: A student studies an entire chapter first and then solves questions for the chapter. I reversed the process and tried something that’s called pretesting.
I solved the questions first. And then, I studied the chapter. So while reading the chapter, I spent extra time on topics from where questions were asked and ignored the topics from where no questions were asked (at least for the time being). This helped me focus more time on important topics and less on trivial topics.
Let me share another tangent to this: In India, we have 19 subjects in medical school. I used to spend a lot of time studying the subject of surgery because I believed it was an important subject — which it is. However, after I started giving tests, my test analytics told me that I was already outperforming my peers in surgery by a lot. But I lagged in some other subjects like anatomy and biochemistry.
The moment I found this out, I stopped studying surgery and started studying biochemistry. The reason was obvious enough: One hour of studying biochemistry was more beneficial to me than studying one hour of surgery.
Simply put — while there are a lot of things you can do, you should not try to do everything. Instead, focus on the very few actions that move the needle the most with relatively least effort on your end. These are what we call high ROI actions.
Here’s how you can do this:
- Step 1: Think of every possible action you can take towards your goal and jot them down.
- Step 2: Rank them based on their ROI. Research and take the advice of experts in your field to do this.
- Step 3: Focus most of your energy on the actions at the top of the list.
That’s how you tackle infinity. Another thing to keep in mind is that this list is dynamic, and not static. For instance, what’s high ROI today, might not be tomorrow.
2. Make other people’s weaknesses your biggest strengths
Yuri A / Shutterstock
A chain is only as strong as the weakest link. — English Proverb
There are 19 subjects in medical school, but not all are created equal. Some are inherently easy, and some make students want to pull their hair out. For instance, dermatology is a pretty easy subject because it’s small and there’s not much to memorize. On the other hand, biochemistry is one of the toughest subjects in medical school because most of it needs to be memorized.
Understandably, as a subject, Biochemistry is a common weakness for the majority of medical students. Hence, to get ahead of the competition, I decided to make Biochemistry and other memorization-heavy subjects my strength. Here are a few actions I took in that direction:
- I bought a subscription to Pixorize. This platform helps medical students learn subjects like biochemistry with much more ease by creating visual mnemonics in the form of sketches. They create a scene and sketch for every topic — and walk us through them with the help of videos. Of the batch of 100 people in my college, only I own a subscription to Pixorize. And hence, I reap the rewards.
- I read a lot of books on memory techniques by grandmasters and record holders in the field. This helped me develop a skill that enables me to turn a common weakness — memorization — into one of my strengths.
Over time, these actions helped me gain an extremely unfair advantage over my competition. An advantage so big, that most of them will never be able to catch up. Leveraging complementary skills, where you actively identify and utilize the gaps in others' abilities to fill your strengths, creates a more well-rounded and effective performance, particularly in collaborative situations.
A study published in the Journal of Psychology found that recognizing the value of diversity and actively utilizing others' limitations to enhance your capabilities fosters a more cooperative and productive environment when done ethically.
Similar common weaknesses exist in any field. For instance, in fitness, while most people may consistently go to the gym, it’s much more difficult to look after their diet. To turn this common weakness into a personal strength, I’ve taken specific actions:
- Practicing and being good at delayed gratification. I (almost) never eat something the moment I feel like eating it. I always try to create a gap between instinct and action so that I have better self-control.
- Never keep junk food at home. Because it’s much harder to resist eating something calorie-dense if it’s sitting in your house.
- Deleting food delivery applications from my phone.
Whatever goal you want to achieve, figure out the common weaknesses in the journey — and turn them into your strengths. You’ll advance much more quickly than the masses.
3. Stand on the shoulders of giants
This is my preferred method of jumpstarting my growth in any field.
- Stand on the shoulder of giants: Whatever goal I want to achieve, I buy a digital course or a book that will teach me exactly how to achieve it. I suspend my disbelief and don’t try to figure out whether their advice works or not. I simply follow their advice verbatim for weeks or months and give their method a fair try.
- Decode: If their advice works, I try to decode their actions to understand the underlying principles.
- Code: Once I understand the principles, I code other actions based on the same principles.
That was a bit confusing, so let me elaborate with an example. When I wanted to build muscle and lose fat, I bought a $50 course by Jeremy Ethier instead of relying solely on YouTube videos. I prefer paying for courses because they provide a step-by-step guide and remove all the guesswork.
When I started reading the course, many things didn’t make sense to me. For example, the workouts were shorter than I expected. Before that, I was working out for longer — and still not gaining results. I thought to myself, “How will cutting down my workouts help?” But I suspended my disbelief and followed the course verbatim.
Sure enough, I achieved great results. Turns out, I was making some crucial mistakes earlier — like not tracking the weights I lift and not progressively overloading — which is why I was not getting results even with longer workouts. However, with a proper method laid out in the course, I was able to get better results with relatively less effort.
Then, I tried to decode the underlying principles of his advice in the program. For instance, Jeremy’s leg workout helped me build great legs. Here’s what his suggested workout looked like.
- 3 sets of the barbell squat with the rep range 6–8, followed by a slow set of barbell squats at 70% weight of the normal sets for 8–10 reps. In this slow set, he recommended taking 4 controlled seconds to bend my knees and one second to lift the weight for every rep.
- 4 sets of Bulgarian split squats at 8–10 reps.
- Followed by a few other exercises for my hamstrings and calves.
Dusan Petkovic / Shutterstock
Of course, it’s possible that my legs grew better than other body parts due to genetic factors. But it’s also possible that it’s because of the peculiarities of the workout. Assuming it was the latter, I tried to decode his suggested leg workout and came up with two underlying principles:
- Slow, and controlled reps at a lower weight than normal working sets help in hypertrophy.
- Exercises that target muscles one side at a time are great to iron out asymmetric power and hence, yield greater overall power over time.
After figuring out these principles, I tried to apply them to my other workouts.
For example, I added an extra slow and controlled bench press set after my normal working sets. I did some unilateral pressing exercises on machines to help ensure symmetric power in my pecs. I applied the same principles to my other workouts as well.
Unsurprisingly, I’m witnessing better results. This mental model is helping me grow faster than others because it eliminates many common mistakes that others make.
For instance, most people don’t believe in buying courses and prefer doing and learning stuff themselves. However, I believe that if you can afford it, buying a digital course has no downside — and an incredible upside. You get to learn from experts at an affordable price, and you skip the time it takes to figure it out yourself.
Another mistake people make is being critical of the advice of the giants or the mentors they choose. They think they know better which makes it difficult for them to follow the advice of people who’ve already achieved what they want to achieve. Stupid.
The mental model I shared above — Stand on the shoulder of giants — decode and then code — allows you to get better results faster, understand the basic principles on a very intrinsic level because you witness the results yourself, and then allows you to expand your growth by further application of those principles.
I truly believe that you can achieve your goals much faster than others by realizing that you can hack your growth by betting on smart work.
However, before even thinking about working smart, you have to figure out how to take action consistently. There’s no place for smart work if there’s no action. Once you’ve figured out how to take consistent action, use these mental models to accelerate your growth:
- Rank the actions you can take based on their ROIs and focus your efforts only at the top of the list.
- Figure out how to convert people’s weaknesses into your greatest strengths.
- Stand on the shoulders of giants — decode their advice to understand the underlying principles — and then code other actions based on those principles.
Akshad Singi, M.D. is a writer and doctor whose work has been published in Better Humans, Medium, Business Insider, Mind Cafe, and more.