In the background beyond my laptop, taped and pinned to my office’s wall, are a cadre of motivational quotes. Some in black ink. Some in blue. Some old. Some new. Half from Sam Presti. I rotate them weekly in a starting lineup, switching on mood, season, task, etc. When a quarterback goes to business school, then medical school, then ultimately becomes a psychiatrist to not have to be a psychiatrist, this is what it looks like.
Motivational quotes are helpful:
1) They make me feel better
2) When lost in these woods of reinventing my career, I usually don’t know what to do. The terrain is foreign. It smells funny. There are bears. I dig into my pockets for a compass, a buck knife, clarity, anything. Often, I pull out a quote.
This morning, “When I had no roof, I made audacity my roof” appeared in my hands. Yanked from my wall’s starting rotation years ago, discovered initially as an epigraph in Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Robert Pinsky’s opening line from “Samurai Song” was all the courage I needed to take the next step, today, knowing that someone else has been here before, that someone else knows what this feels like, and that someone else made it out of these woods.
To livin’ a life we love,
Ryan Fightmaster, MD
