True Dat...

My neighbor also happens to be the Chief of the ICU at the hospital affiliated with my medical school. He spoke to the med students today about something very important. His talk was a little esoteric, in that I'm not certain that all of the medical students really GOT it. I knew the importance and the truth of the things he said, perhaps because I am a little older and have had enough experiences to know he's dead on... but truthfully, 10 years ago I would have been bored bored bored by what he said and would have grabbed the free lunch and snuck out the back door. Which many people did.

He made his point in a round-about way, discussing various philosophers, readings he found thought provoking, pearls of wisdom, and discussing the merits of minimalism. I knew what he was getting at, but the dots weren't real close together for the younger folk. The point isn't something you can only "get" if your older, but rather it's about the experiences you've had... which often come only with time.

Here's the gist of what he meant (or how I interpreted it at least):

It's essential to surround your life with things which are truly meaningful to you, not with things that are disguised as meaningful. Medicine can truly be meaningful and by keeping it in balance with other valuable practices you can lead a wonderful life in which you are happy and feel that you hold value in society.

The thing about medicine is that it is really easily to get consumed by it. In order to be the best of the best, you must invest so much of your identity in what you are doing that you can lose sight of other things that are important in your life. Namely, family, spirituality, health, art, your home, etc. And because medicine often affords you wealth, many physicians fill their lives with meaningless material items, mistakingly thinking they are valuable (homes, cars, boats, vacations, etc.).

So I think his point was not simply to bash all those ferrari wielding docs, but rather to prompt future physicians to really define what they consider success... rather than getting sucked along in the current of power, money, prestige, etc. that naturally seems to follow many physicians. If you define success in terms of material possessions and wealth, etc. that's fine... but know your definition of success before you set out to attain things you never really wanted in the first place.... thus missing out on those things that really create meaning and value for YOU.

Worth a ponder for sure.