I was lucky enough to talk to the anesthesiologist for our ACL surgery today. He was a young doctor—around early to mid 30s. He told me, “I started college and enjoyed the freedom. I did poorly my first two years causing me to go to med school in New Orleans.” Little did he know, I was also doing extremely poorly my first two years of college. However, I saw this anecdote as motivation and a new will to chase my dreams into a reality. Even though he had to attend a lower tier medical school in a modest location, he ended up in a well establish hospital in Southern California—not to mention in anesthesia. The main premise of this story is to help you realize there is always multiple ways to get to where you want to go. You may have to work harder coming from a less prestige school or job, but it matters where you finish. It’s easy to get caught up in your surroundings. You are constantly surrounded by a false reality where it seems that everyone is ahead of you in life. In order to help with overthinking, I came up with three simple statements that should constantly being going though your head.
- Find Your Purpose
We spend so much of our lives living other people’s lives. Are you doing something because your family wants you to or because you want to? I instead rearrange this mindset into one where I use my family name as motivation. I have lines of generations who have sacrificed their lives living in the “lower” class to live the life I live today. People like me aren’t supposed to be doctors. My story is bigger than myself, and so is yours. If anything or anyone is pushing you to do something besides you, you are not meant to be doing that. Life is too short to be living someone else’s life. If you don’t know what you love, find it. A simple rule I like to follow is that if a certain idea persists in my head for multiple years on end this is my calling to do that certain thing.
2. Accept Your Anxiety
Once you find your purpose, everything follows. Slow down, enjoy life, and the process of your work. It’s easy to compare yourself to your peers in your line of work, but they’re them and they’re not you.
3. Don’t Stop
At such a young age, I have failed many times. But you can’t let failure deter you from your goals. These failures can play games in your head—causing doubt and even more overthinking. The will to constantly do something despite failure is what makes successful people—knowing that you’ve failed one thousand times and you are willing to fail one thousand and one times. As a person who overthinks, this unfortunate trait will never go away. But, you must overpower those thoughts by coming back to point one. Keep going, push though, maintain consistency, and allow hard work to speak for itself.
Robert Quiroz 