I.II.V – S.W.S.D.
I.II.V
S.W.S.D.
“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life” goes this famous saying that pops up on my Facebook feed from time to time. Good stuff. Tear-jerking really. A bit vomit-inducing, perhaps. Scratch that – definitely vomit-inducing. I’m this close to needing a barf bag. Seriously, this close.
The self-righteous, pompous, arrogant SOB who came up with this should be given an enema with molten gold. Okay, that might be a little excessive, I suppose. But it truly does sound like something a really crappy motivational speaker would say. “Nothing’s impossible!” … “If you believe, you can achieve!” … “Find a penny, pick it up and all day long you’ll have good luck!” … What’s that? Oh, right, sorry. I’m mixing up clichés. Though in all fairness, the latter’s just about as realistic as the ones before it. Or at least that’s the way I see it. I know I may be coming off like a bitter, old grumpus. I should be tending to my own lemonade stand right about now instead of being such a downer. But humour me for just a few minutes. Or a couple of hours – I don’t know how fast you can read.
I went into medicine thinking that passion and drive would be enough. It only took a few months in med school to change my whole perspective. I was doing something I loved, something that fulfilled me and filled me with a sense of satisfaction unlike any other. Medicine was what got me going – the thing that drove me and gave me a reason to be alive. Even so, it took a toll on me, one I couldn’t have possibly imagined before starting my studies.
I remember, before going into medicine, telling my friends who’d complain about their course that they were living the dream – that it was just five years, that they’d fly by and that they should be grateful for this time ‘cause they were still in the sheltered world of academia. God, I wanna beat that Marius up to a pulp. No wait, scratch that. That Marius deserves the molten-gold enema. Seriously. You can’t say those things unless you’re in it or you’ve been through it already. Whilst time does indeed fly by, it certainly doesn’t feel that way when you’re in the midst of it.
When faced with a gargantuan workload that promised to tear me apart, passion didn’t quite cut it. I mean, sure, it made the whole thing a more enjoyable experience and I was way more productive than I would otherwise have been, but attributing everything to my drive would be trivialising all the effort, all the hours of hard work, and all the blood, sweat, tears, and coffee that had got me there.
Despite my love for medicine, I felt my passion being extinguished more times than one. Much like what had happened to me a few years back, I ended up studying things just for the sake of exams. There was one thing going for me this time though – I knew better. I knew these were all just hurdles that needed jumping. If I had to study for what felt like endless hours just to get through the system, then fine, so be it. I wanted to become a surgeon and that’s what I had to do in order to become one. No use in complaining.
And so I came up with what later became my mantra. One that by now some of my friends are more than tired of hearing: SWSD – Stop whining, start doing. I know, right? How clever, so catchy. In my head, huge crowds were already lining up to get their hands on personalised T-shirts with this slogan. Well, I’ll have you know that all my ambitions to dominate the world with such a brilliant acronym turned to dust pretty quickly. A Google search later revealed I wasn’t as original and witty as I thought I was. Not to mention the T-shirts were already being mass-produced. Just in case you don’t believe me, here’s some free advertisement to put some more salt in my wound.
But life goes on, and futile though my existence would be with my entrepreneurial endeavours cut short, I found it really works. Why? Cause it’s stupid simple. It’s direct and there’s no room for any BS. What’s the use in whining? Up until that moment of realisation, I had always been a professional whiner. Worst of all, I had never even noticed it before. I’d complain about anything and everything. “It’s too hot! It’s too cold! I have so much stuff to do! I have nothing to do! I’m so hungry! I’m too full!”
It was exasperating. And it’s not just that I was wasting precious time moping around instead of investing it into making my situation better. It’s also the fact that negative thoughts give rise to negative actions. I know I now sound like one of those motivational speakers I was nagging about earlier, but it’s true. Maybe not everything’s possible, but you can certainly influence most situations. And attitude plays a huge role in this. So yeah, if you believe, you can achieve… most things.
In attributing all my achievements to passion, I realised I was doing myself a disservice. That’s when I also started taking pride in my work and accomplishments – small and inconsequential though they might have been in the grand scheme of things.
Those tiny accomplishments – from deciding to upend my life to pursue something that made me happy, to actually making that first step and getting into medicine – were the result of sheer determination and perseverance. That’s how I managed to get to where I wanted to be. And while “where I wanted to be” is nothing but a blip on Ellen DeGeneres’ radar, “where I wanted to be” was where I chose to be – which is something pretty extraordinary if I may say so myself.
I stopped comparing my achievements to everyone else’s. I knew mine paled in comparison to Newton’s discovery of gravity. No argument there. But can you imagine if all of us were to start off with that achievement as the standard? God, we’d be spending our entire lives under trees trying to get hit by apples.
So what I’m trying to say is this: it’s the little milestones that count. And those little milestones require hard work too. I stopped whining and started doing, and every once in a while I’d take a moment to look back on everything I’d managed to achieve and appreciate all the work I’d put in to get there.