I explore topics that have applications to medicine, but are not typically covered by medical school curriculums. Among these are happiness, meaning, self-education, personal knowledge management, decision making principles, information dashboard design, as well as mindfulness, exercise, and sleep.
I’ve seen seeing how many others (Nat Eliason, Derek Sivers, etc) share their notes to the world, and I wanted to do the same.
Tools of Titans
The lessons from this book can help medical students and residents to chase high-altitude goals, stay calm in stressful situations, and dig deep about personal values and what makes us happy. This book is a collection of short interviews, outlining the stories, habits, and lessons from some of the most inspirational achievers, thinkers and doers of our time. This is one of my most gifted books.
Show Your Work
Nobody becomes a physician overnight. This journey takes years filled with failures, successes, and “Ah-ha!” learning moments. The more we share these moments with others, the more we: (1) Help others learn, and (2) Connect ourselves to others who share similar interests. In the end, this book will augment your learning, boost your creative work, and create meaningful connections with others.
Make Time
The road to becoming a doctor is busy and stressful. As a result, time can go by feeling like a blur. When you look back at your week last week, how did you spend your time? This book offers several high-impact, immediately useful strategies to help us use our time in ways that feel more meaningful.
Hell Yeah or No
This book taught me a lot of simple decision making principles that I have applied to my learning is a resident. I learned how assuming I’m a below average resident might actually help me learn more, what sand dollars can teach us about working with medical students, how disconnection can help improve our productivity, and how “I don’t know” might actually be the smartest answer in some situations in medicine.
Keep Going
I was introduced to this book by one of my residency program directors, and it is without a doubt one of my all-time favorites. I learned how to make lists - Lists of things I’ve learned, things I want to learn, stories from residency, and reflect on what my mind pays attention to. I learned how to craft my “Bliss station” for my creative work, to spend more time away from a screen, and to detach myself from results and keep the playfulness in my creative work. In summary, I learned to create things that make myself and the people around me feel more alive.
The Productivity Project
This book taught me how to become clear on my values, and set my goals and daily actions to align with them. Simple tricks like the “Worry List” help me reduce stress as a resident and direct all of my focus to a particular task. Lastly, this book provides a list of stress-relieving activities that I’ve commonly referenced to help me feel more restored between shifts in the Emergency Department.
The Functional Art
What can an airline safety card teach us about Emergency Medicine? This book taught me how understanding what the brain wants to see can help us greatly improve our data visualization in the EMR, take a systematic approach to interpreting X-Rays and EKG’s, and design medical algorithms that are clear and easy to follow.
Show & Tell
For many medical students and residents, giving a case-conference presentation can be a nerve-racking process. This short but powerful book introduces a set of tools for making extraordinary presentations. I learned how to organize medical content, build a case-based story line, create effective visuals for each key point, and channel this fear into fun.
Anything You Want
What’s your compass? Many people imitate others, spending decades pursuing something that someone convinced them they should want, without realizing that it won’t make them happy. Derek Sivers describes lessons he learned building a company by accident, selling it for $22 million, and donating all of it. Life isn’t about money - It’s about digging deep on your interests, spending time working on projects that make you happy, and creating useful things for others.
Creativity Rules
The concepts I learned in this book have led me to a number of my current projects. Although many people traditionally label themselves as “Creative” or “Not creative,” this book illustrates how creativity is a valuable skill that can be taught. Creativity can be enhanced by honing our ability to observe, identify challenges, reframe problems, and connect and combine ideas. This book taught me to keep diversifying my input, including new travel, books, music, films, etc to keep the imaginative mind in flow. Whenever I find something interesting, I ask, “What would this look like applied to Emergency Medicine?” The subsequent output of ideas has been a lot of fun to consider.
How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big
This book taught me how to match mental state with a particular activity to begin a shift in a positive and adaptive state of mind. I also learned a list of surprisingly simple phrases that help me make challenging conversations with consultants and patients feel 100x easier.
Future Posts:
Grit
What does an ER doctor do? According to this book, the three following types of responses are very different in their underlying purpose. One resident might answer, “I get to treat emergent conditions.” A second might say, “I get to help patients when they need it most.” And a third might say, “I provide a safety net for my community.” The first resident has a job. The second has a career. The third has a calling. Residency is tough - This book taught me to how to see the meaning in our work, to work with a deep sense of purpose, and to have the grit to keep moving forward when times get tough.
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
This book has had the single largest impact on my life in terms of career happiness. The book argues that happiness is not something you inherit, but a highly personal skill that can be learned, just like fitness or nutrition. It sounds ridiculous, and even I was skeptical when I started reading. A happy person isn’t someone who’s happy all the time, but rather someone who interprets events in such a way that they don’t lose their innate peace. We’re born, we have a whole set of sensory experiences (lights, colors, and sounds), and then we die. How we choose to interpret them is up to us. We think of ourselves as fixed and the world as malleable, but it’s really our mind that is malleable and the world that is largely fixed. This book also touches on other topics that I’ve applied to my career as a resident, including mental models, decision making principles, anxiety, desires, status games, and habits.
Think Again
The field of Emergency Medicine is constantly changing. New point-of-care testing, bedside ultrasound techniques, and digital communication systems are a few of many examples. This book illustrates the importance of keeping an open mind, understanding the limits of our knowledge, questioning our assumptions, and how to stay curious enough about our practice to actually change it. Example after example, I learned how great thinkers and achievers don’t let expertise or experience cloud their thinking. Instead, they prize mental flexibility, humility, and curiosity (over foolish consistency) to make innovative contributions to their field.
Four Thousand Weeks
In medical training, it’s easy to fall into the trap of “I’ll finally be happy when… [I get into medical school, I’ll be an attending, I pay off my loans.. etc]. Life is a succession of experiences, valuable in themselves, which you’ll miss if you’re completely focused on where they might be leading. The average lifespan is only about 4,000 weeks long, which isn’t that much time. In the grand scheme of things, the Universe has been around for ten billion years. It will be around for another ten billion years. These 4,000 weeks are just a firefly blink in the night. If we fully understand the futility of what we are doing, our little anxieties and stressors seem to melt away, and we can focus our time on meaningful activities that we intrinsically enjoy. You’re going to die one day, and none of this is going to matter. So enjoy yourself. Do something positive. Make someone happy. And appreciate the moment.
Vagabonding
This book is more about life than it is about travel. I learned so much that applied to my intern year in Emergency Medicine: How to keep an open mind and embrace uncertainty on a new rotation. How humor and humility can help us handle negative events. How simply listening to the environment and observing can help us identify interruptions, workflow inefficiencies, and areas for team improvement in the Emergency Department.
When
Residency and medical education are full of “When” decisions. What type of lectures are best to be scheduled first thing in the morning, and which are better for later in the day? Regarding studying, what time of day is best to work on practice questions? Does the timing of an interview with a residency applicant affect our first impressions? This book illustrates the science behind how perfect timing can result in greater productivity, reduced stress, and higher job satisfaction.
The Organized Mind
People at the top of their professions, in particular those known for their creativity and effectiveness, use systems of attention and memory external to their brain as much as they can. This book inspired me to make my list of Epic “dot” phrases to use as a checklist of critical diagnoses to consider for each chief complaint. Each “dot” phrase serves as a checklist, even if I later dictate in my own text to delete it.
Principles
Any employee (and any medical resident) actually has two jobs: The actual job, and the job of managing other’s impressions of how they’re doing their job. There’s so much to learn in Emergency Medicine, and juggling the two is terribly counter-productive. This book details techniques for giving feedback on the basis of open-mindedness, transparency, and clear communication. If applied, these concepts could massively accelerate the learning of medical students and residents, while also building more meaningful relationships with mentors and peers.
Little Bets
How do we improve resident wellness and on-shift learning in Emergency Medicine? Rather than starting with a big idea or whole project in advance, this book shows how well-known innovators make a methodical series of little bets, learning critical information from lots of little failures and small but significant wins. Medical education values correct answers more than provocative questions, and as a result we are educating people out of their creativity. This book showed me how to reflect on the “small wins” of residency, how to ask more provocative questions (not just “why” but also “why not?”), and how we can contribute more to our field of Emergency Medicine by pursuing our intrinsic interests rather than external measures of achievement.
The Practice
Shipping. Creative. Work. Shipping, because it doesn’t count if you don’t share it (hence, this website). Creative, because as Emergency Medicine physicians, we’re creators, problem-solvers, and leaders who all have unique creative skills that give us the potential to improve our specialty. Work, because it’s more than a hobby. This book is for people who seek to teach, to innovate, and to solve interesting problems. Art is the generous act of making things better by doing something that might not work. Being creative is a choice, and creativity is contagious. This book gave me the push that I needed to create this website.
Atomic Habits
This book taught me how to use “habit-stacking” to finish my charts faster, how to design a work environment for it’s intended purpose, and how small changes to our daily habits can have a massive impact on our life over the course of six-months to a year.
The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life
How do we find our niche within Emergency Medicine? We are frequently told to be true to ourselves and pursue our deepest desires, but what if we don’t know what our goals and desires are? We all enter Emergency Medicine with unique life experiences, skills, and interests. This book taught me if we pay close attention to our personal patterns and emotions, we can identify what we really care about, and leverage this information to open up new possibilities for our careers.
Start With Why
I learned so much from this book about the importance of culture in a residency program, how communication is more about listening than it is about speaking, and how great leaders create an environment of trust where ideas can be explored. I learned how great organizations become great when the people inside feel a sense of camaraderie and trust. A strong sense of culture creates a sense of belonging and acts as a psychological safety net. Great residency culture is one where residents and attendings come to work knowing that their colleagues and the organization as a whole will look out for them, resulting in reciprocal behavior for the organization.
Creative Calling
This book taught me how creativity isn’t a talent, but rather a tool for problem solving and innovation. The field of Emergency Medicine is always evolving, and this book taught me that we can contribute most to our field by combining our interests with thoughtful creative problem solving.
Belong
Medical school and residency are tough. During these busy years, it can be hard to maintain our relationships with friends and family. This artfully crafted book illustrates the importance of our friendships on our health, and provides tips and tricks to deepen our relationships even when life gets busy. This book taught me how navigate the pro’s and con’s of social media, how to deepen connections with our peers (both near and far), how to be present and listen, the art of meaningful conversation, and make ordinary events with friends more adventurous and playful.