Tools of Titans
Author: Tim Ferriss
How much I would recommend this book to other medical students/residents: 10/10
Buy it on Amazon: Link
Who is this book for? Anybody looking for habits that have helped others stay calm in stressful situations, identify values, boost confidence and delineate stepping-stones to pursue high-altitude goals.
Why is it awesome? This book outlines the stories, habits, and lessons of some of the most inspirational achievers, thinkers and doers of our time. Applying the lessons from this book will motivate any student or resident to chase high-altitude goals, stay calm in stressful situations, and dig deep about personal values and what makes us happy. This is one of my most gifted books.
“You Belong Here” (in Medical School, Residency, etc)
This one is taken from the interview with Glenn Beck.
Who is Glenn Beck?
Glenn Beck (FB/TW: @GLENNBECK, GLENNBECK.COM) Glenn’s platforms—including radio, television, digital (TheBlaze.com), publishing, etc.—receive somewhere between 30 and 50 million unique visitors per month. The goal of my podcast is to push listeners outside of their comfort zones and force them to question assumptions.
A Life-Changing Conversation with a Yale Professor:
In his early 30s, Glenn spent a semester at Yale as a theology major and felt out of place. “[My professor] reached across the table, and he grabbed my hand and he said:
“You listen to me for a second, would you? You realize you belong here, right?”
That endorsement, and as stupid as it seems, opened up my whole world. Because it was the first time somebody said, ‘You’re smart enough. You can do it.’ . . . That changed my world. I wish it hadn’t, in some ways. I wish it didn’t mean so much to me. But I’ve learned from that, now in my position, to say that to people. Because there’s something stupid in us that just makes us feel like we’re not good enough, we’re not smart enough.”
My thoughts:
I think this is such a powerful statement that all medical students need to hear more often. I know medical school was an incredible challenge for me, and I know if somebody told me this I probably would’ve remembered it forever. Next time I notice a medical student or resident having a difficult time, I’m going to make sure to tell them, “You belong here.”
Worrying in Medical School
Taken from the interview with Jason Silva.
Who is Jason Silva?
Jason Silva (FB: JASONLSILVA; THISISJASONSILVA.COM) is host of Brain Games on National Geographic Channel. The show was the highest-rated series launch in National Geographic history. During the interview, he discusses his path to pursuing his creative work, flow states, and the ups and downs of his career.
Advice to your 30-year-old self?
“I would encourage my younger self to just not be afraid, right? To realize that a lot of things that were—I don’t want to say crippling anxieties, but—definitely ever-pervasive fears in my life growing up were unnecessary. A lot of time was wasted, a lot of energy was wasted, being worried.”
Tim Ferris:
Across all guests, the most common answer to this question is some variation of “It’s all going to be alright.”
My thoughts:
Man, I can really relate to this one. I spent so much time worrying in medical school - About each exam, the USMLE Step 1, the Match, the list goes on. Talking with my classmates, I know I’m not alone here. I wish I would’ve read this advice before starting medical school. Because in the end, all the guests in this book were right - It all works out in the end. Even if it seem like it’s not in the moment, it does.
Empathy for Angry Patients
This tidbit is taken from the interview with Alain de Botton.
Who is Alain de Botton?
Alain de Botton (TW: @ALAINDEBOTTON, ALAINDEBOTTON.COM) is many things, but I think of him as a rare breed of practical philosopher. His books have been described as a “philosophy of everyday life” and include Essays in Love, Status Anxiety, The Architecture of Happiness, The News: A User’s Manual, and Art as Therapy. In 2008, Alain helped start The School of Life in London, a social enterprise determined to make learning and therapy relevant in modern culture.
“When people seem like they are mean, they’re almost never mean. They’re anxious.”
My thoughts:
This reminds me a lot of angry/frustrated/upset patients in Emergency Medicine. For a patient, the Emergency Department can be a stressful place. Of course, many patients are anxious about their symptoms, test results, prognosis, plan moving forward, etc. Next time I have a patient who seems to be mean, I’m going to ask myself - Are they mean, or are they anxious?
When someone is upset, ask yourself:
“When dealing with anyone who’s upset, he always asks, ‘Has this person slept? Have they eaten? Is somebody else bugging them?’ He goes through this simple checklist. . . . When we’re handling babies and the baby is kicking and crying, we almost never once say, ‘That baby’s out to get me’ or ‘She’s got evil intentions.’”
My thoughts:
Same as above. I try my best to ask myself all of these questions in the Emergency Department when dealing with anyone who is upset.
On Medical Students Asking Questions
This tidbit is taken from the interview with Malcolm Gladwell.
Who is Malcolm Gladwell?
Malcolm Gladwell (TW: @GLADWELL, GLADWELL.COM) is the author of five New York Times bestsellers. He has been named one of the 100 Most Influential People by Time magazine and one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers. He explored how ideas spread in The Tipping Point, decision-making in Blink, the roots of success in Outliers. In his Revisionist History podcast, Gladwell examines the way the passage of time changes and enlightens our understanding of the world around us.
How Malcom learned to ask questions:
His father, a mathematician, taught Malcolm to ask questions upon questions:
“My father has zero intellectual insecurities. . . . It has never crossed his mind to be concerned that the world thinks he’s an idiot. He’s not in that game. So if he doesn’t understand something, he just asks you. He doesn’t care if he sounds foolish. He will ask the most obvious question without any sort of concern about it. . . . So he asks lots and lots of ‘dumb,’ in the best sense of that word, questions. He’ll say to someone, ‘I don’t understand. Explain that to me.’ He’ll just keep asking questions until he gets it right, and I grew up listening to him do this in every conceivable setting.
My thoughts:
How cool would it be if we could incentivize this type of question-asking for medical students? I can think of probably over one hundred occasions throughout medical school (and even residency) when I wanted to ask a question, but I hesitated in fear of looking “dumb.” I think this will always be a challenge if our rotations are graded purely on performance and “knowledge” as this directly discourage asking the “dumb” questions - But it makes me wonder, how cool would it be if we could incentivize this type of question asking?
creativity and emergency medicine
This is taken from the interview with Robert Rodriguez.
Who is Robert Rodriguez?
Robert Rodriguez (TW: @RODRIGUEZ, ELREYNETWORK.COM) is a director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, editor, and musician. He is also the founder and chairman of El Rey Network, a new genre-busting cable network. Rodriguez has written, produced, and directed many successful films, including Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, the Spy Kids franchise, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Frank Miller’s Sin City, Machete, and others.
More on Creativity…
“When people say: ‘You do so many things. You’re a musician, you’re a painter, you’re a composer, you’re a cinematographer, you’re the editor. You do so many different things.’ I go, ‘No, I only do one thing. I live a creative life. When you put creativity in everything, everything becomes available to you.’
“How you journal things, how you cross reference, how you present things, how you inspire your crew, how you inspire other people around you, how you inspire yourself—it’s all creative. And if you say you’re not creative, look at how much you’re missing out on just because you’ve told yourself that. I think creativity is one of the greatest gifts that we’re born with that some people don’t cultivate, that they don’t realize it could be applied to literally everything in their lives.”
My thoughts:
I believe there is a lot of creative work in medicine and Emergency Medicine. For example, the art of establishing rapport, taking a patient history and crafting questions, orchestrating a team of people in the trauma bay, formulating a differential based on limited information, presenting our patient to our attendings and communicating with other physicians over the phone. The list could go on even further if I broke each of these examples down into details.
How we phrase the questions we ask in critical moments to get key information. For example, when taking a history on patient with a headache, a few key questions can help clue in the possibility of a sabarachnoid hemorrhage. Instead of, “Did your headache start suddenly?” we ask “How long did it take from when the headache began until it reached maximum severity?” The first can give vague responses, and then second is very specific. There are many similar examples to this, and this is just about communicating with patients. How we present this information to our attendings, how we interact with the team, how we comunicate information over the phone, how we solve problems with limited information - It’s all creative. Creativity is a massive part of Emergency Medicine.
On Enjoying the Once-in-a-Lifetime Experience of Medical School
This is taken from the interview with B.J. Novak.
Who is B.J. Novak?
B.J. Novak (TW: @BJNOVAK, LI.ST) is best known for his work on NBC’s Emmy Award–winning comedy series The Office as an actor, writer, director, and executive producer. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Book with No Pictures. Last but not least, he is co-founder of li.st, a new way to create and discover lists about anything and everything.
Advice to his younger self:
B.J. was very anxious during the first season of The Office because he was always trying to write something extra on the side that he never had time to finish. He really didn’t stop to enjoy the incredible, once-in-a-lifetime experience of The Office. B.J. wishes he had told himself back then that it was a very special time in his life, and that he should own it and enjoy it, instead of being so nervous, for what ended up being no reason at all.
My thoughts:
This really reminds me of medical school. Throughout the first two years, and well into my rotations, I felt like I was anxious at just about all times. When I was studying, I was anxious about missing out on other things or being a bad friend or not reaching out to my family enough. When I was doing something I enjoyed (working out, being on the lake, spending time with friends, etc) I frequently found myself feeling anxious about not being a good student and comparing myself to how much my classmates were studying. I think the reality is that it’s impossible to 100% fully feel like we are on top of our studies in med school, or being 100% present in our non-work life, and as soon as we can embrace that reality we can feel less anxious about not living up to this impossible expectation of ourselves.
How this book impacted my medical school and residency career:
Tim describes a situation that reflect his feelings after he was near finished writing this book. I felt very similar feelings after reading it:
Tim Ferriss:
One morning, my researcher, who I’d brought from Canada to work on the book in person, stopped me at the refrigerator, where I was grabbing some food and cold water: “You’re so calm. How are you so calm when you have a million things flying around?” I thought about it, and he was right. There was a lot up in the air. I was on the final sprint of my book deadline, there were perhaps a dozen unexpected business fires to manage, my dog had just been badly injured, our car had died, and I had various family members and houseguests coming and going. It was a three-ring circus, and I was the plate spinner.
Historically, I’d been an anxious, short-fused mess on book deadlines. So what was different? I then realized and explained to him: In the process of reading and rereading he lessons in this book, I’d absorbed much more than I’d realized.
It is my hope that when you read and reread this book, you will feel the spirit of these titans with you. No matter the hardship, challenge, or grand ambition before you, they are here. You are not alone, and you are better than you think.
