Three years ago, I hired a life coach because I was miserable and didn’t want to feel miserable anymore. Together, we completed a litany of self-help exercises, filling notebooks with my audacious dreams and ideas.
One such dream was to open a mountain “hiking hut”. Essentially, a bed and breakfast for hikers that enjoy yoga and eating organic food. At present, I have zero interest in opening a “hiking hut”. Then though, I was hiking and traveling with my fiancee, and anything outside medicine sounded like ecstasy. In dry-erase marker, I had “hiking hut” written in all-caps across my bedroom mirror for months. Most days, the “hiking hut” idea got me out of bed.
Slowly, a personal drive enveloped my life, and a dormant ambition quaked under years of passivity. Soon enough, my room was cleaning itself. I was on time for work. I was back in the gym. My time mattered again, and the months flew by. Then, when the time came to formally leave medicine, to finally start my own life, I was already gone.
I’d left medicine the day I wrote “hiking hut” on the mirror, not the day I mailed in my resignation.
If we’re lost in a career where we see no path forward to purpose, let us simply aspire. The ideas do not matter. Their probably of success is inconsequential. What matters is our willingness to be audacious. What matters is that the ideas are ours. The rest will take care of itself.
To livin’ a life we love,
Ryan Fightmaster, MD
(P.S. I just released a new YouTube video, How to Tell Your Parents You Don’t Want to Go to Medical School, where I illustrate why it’s so paramount to take responsibility for your own wants and dreams, whether you’re becoming a doctor… or not, and whether your parents accept you… or not.)
