It’s been a while since I started my GP training. It’s nice working in a setup where you know you have weekends off. Going 80% Rota has helped keep mental health sane. I look forward to the weekends because even though getting any day off is nice, getting the weekend off along with everyone else is nicer. Feels like being part of a community. Going to work and coming back during peak hours is nice. Probably because the traffic I face is UK’s and not Indian traffic where the mental stress of driving is a job in itself.
Knowing that in 3 years (or in my case, at 80% workload 3.75 years), I’ll be done with this and hopefully graduate to become a full-fledged GP is reassuring. What’s more reassuring is the fact that I get time to think on the creative front. There’s a concept of limited attention reserve. What tasks I allocate my attention to, decides what tasks I ignore. Cognitive exhaustion is a real thing.
Medicine is an exhausting career line. You have to make cognitively draining decisions throughout the duration of your work. And in turn you’re rewarded with a middle-class salary, and a reassurance that if you were to hang up your hat tomorrow, someone would be ready to replace you at the drop of that hat.
So there you have it, 10 hours of your day working to get paid an hourly salary. Why not take time out to work on something that pays not in number of hours, but in degree of impact. OfCourse a senior doctor has more impact than a junior, but the salary ceiling that exists for doctors, plagues even the most senior ones. If, however you were to find something else with a much higher salary ceiling, and work in that line with the same cognitively draining degree of effort, you have a higher chance of earning more than the senior doctors.
Discovering this line of work early and spending time on it from an early age will also provide you with the benefit of compounding. Something that medicine as a career doesn’t offer.
Shoot for the moon, even if you miss it, you’ll be among the stars. Don’t shoot for the palm trees or you could get stuck in the grass. -Abhinav the Wise.