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- You Are Not Your Job
Hey guys!
I hope you are all having a fantastic week.
A few weeks ago, I had one of the worst shifts I've ever experienced as a doctor while working a weekend on-call. How it works on this particular on-call shift is that you begin the morning with a long list of patients who were unwell enough that their usual ward doctors felt they needed to be reviewed over the weekend. In addition to getting through these patients, you also hold an emergency bleep, where you receive all the emergency calls and cardiac arrests across the hospital. A few hours in, I found myself with an unmanageable workload, with my bleep going off every half an hour for very sick patients who needed my full attention. I finished the shift 13 hours later and got home at 10 pm, feeling as though I couldn't give my patients what they deserved and that I didn't have the time to treat them with the same care and attention that I would give my own family. This was quite unmotivating and disheartening, as I’m sure you can imagine.
I went to bed feeling much the same way and woke up the next morning with not much else feeling different. This continued during the morning until I realized that I am not my job, and I am not responsible for circumstances outside of my control that might make it difficult to achieve the level of work I wanted. This certainly wasn't the first time I thought this way. I remember back in school when I would get my test results back and wouldn't score as highly as I wanted. I would sometimes spend the rest of the week feeling worthless for a similar reason. So, in this week's newsletter, I wanted to remind you that you are not your job, nor are you your test result that is written on a piece of paper. In addition to your career aspirations, you are also a partner, son, father, person of faith, and so on. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that there are other aspects of our personality that make up our character and identity. Just because you fall short in one particular area, which sometimes might be out of your control, doesn't mean that you fall short in the rest of who you are.
Realizing this, I then returned to the kitchen with my partner, made a cup of coffee, began a new conversation, and had a fantastic rest of my day. I'm sure this is not a permanent solution, and I will probably find myself in this situation again on my next on-call shift. However, I hope to approach it with my best efforts but also a new sense of understanding that I will only give this aspect of my life a limited amount of mental energy.
I hope this little experience helps you approach this coming week with a different perspective. Have a fantastic week and see you in the next one.
👍🏾 Things I’ve enjoyed this week
Steam Deck [tech gadget] - This is hands down the best piece of tech that I bought in the last five years because of my busy schedule. I often don't get the time that I want to game, and as some of you might know, I absolutely love gaming. Having this little portable device means that I've been able to get in more time playing fun games with my friends while being on the move. Total game changer.
Portable BBQ bucket [kitchen accessory] - I bought this yesterday for about £10, and it made us an absolutely fantastic dinner. It's a very small bucket that allows you to add in charcoal, and you can carry it to the beach or park. Perfect size for 2 to 4 people and definitely worth the money during the summer.
IKEA chair [furniture] - This is a nice little sofa that I added to my new studio setup. It's affordable, good to look at, and super comfortable. Very happy with it.
Portable mini fan [tech gadget] - The last few days in the UK have been quite warm, and having this little fan with me at my desk and at the gym has definitely improved my quality of life. Highly recommended and I will probably buy a few more to put in my bag and separate rooms.
📹 The latest video in case you missed it:
📚 Highlight of the week
Teaching and Love - Jess Cotton
Connected to this for the Greeks is a sense that the point of a relationship is to be a forum in which two people can help each other to increase the number of admirable characteristics they each possess: it is to help them become the best version of themselves. The Greeks held to a fundamentally pedagogical view of love; they understood that a relationship gives us a ringside seat on one another’s flaws and potential – and therefore believed that both partners should take it in turns to act in the role of teacher and student – attempting to educate the other to become a finer person within the safe and encouraging confines of love’s classroom.
Relationships by The School of Life
The only person to whom we can expose the multiple grievances we accumulate is the person who is closest to us: the one we love. This blessed person becomes the recipient of all of our accumulated rage at the injustice and imperfections of our lives. It is of course the height of absurdity to blame them. But this is to misunderstand the rules under which love operates. We simply cannot and therefore don’t usually get angry with the people who are really to blame for hurting us. Rather, we get angry with those whom we can be sure will tolerate us for blaming them. So we get angry with the very nicest, most sympathetic, most loyal people in our vicinity, the ones actually least likely to have harmed us, but most likely to stick around while we blame them for having done so. The words we mutter to our lovers undoubtedly sound mean.
How I Productively Make Friends
“In my experience, high-achievers focus a great deal on becoming the person they want to be at work—and far too little on the person they want to be at home.”
Resurfaced to me by Readwise
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