W
CHAPTER 11
Escaping Tunnel Vision
Reconsidering Our Best-Laid Career and Life Plans
A malaise set in within a couple hours of my arriving. I thought
getting a job might help. It turns out I have a lot of relatives in Hell,
and, using connections, I became the assistant to a demon who pulls
people’s teeth out. It wasn’t actually a job, more of an internship.
But I was eager. And at first it was kind of interesting. After a while,
though, you start asking yourself: Is
this what I came to Hell for, to
hand different kinds of pliers to a demon?
—
JACK
HANDEY
hat do you want to be when you grow up? As a kid, that was my
least favorite question. I dreaded conversations with adults
because they always asked it—and no matter how I replied, they
never liked my answer. When I said I wanted to be a superhero, they
laughed. My next goal was to make the NBA, but despite countless hours of
shooting
hoops on my driveway, I was cut from middle school basketball
tryouts three years in a row. I was clearly aiming too high.
In high school, I became obsessed with springboard diving and decided
I wanted to become a diving coach. Adults scoffed at that plan: they told me
I was aiming too low. In my first semester of college, I decided to major in
psychology, but that didn’t open any doors—it just gave me a few to close. I
knew I didn’t want to be a therapist (not patient enough)
or a psychiatrist
(too squeamish for med school). I was still aimless, and I envied people
who had a clear career plan.
From the time he was in kindergarten, my cousin Ryan knew exactly
what he wanted to be when he grew up. Becoming a doctor wasn’t just the
American dream—it was the family dream. Our great-grandparents
emigrated from Russia and barely scraped by.
Our grandmother was a
secretary, and our grandfather worked in a factory, but it wasn’t enough to
support five children, so he worked a second job delivering milk. Before his
kids were teenagers, he had taught them to drive the milk truck so they
could finish their 4:00 a.m. delivery cycle
before the school day and
workday started. When none of their children went on to med school (or
milk delivery), my grandparents hoped our generation would bring the
prestige of a Dr. Grant to the family.
The first seven grandchildren didn’t become doctors. I was the eighth,
and I worked multiple jobs to pay for college and to keep my options open.
They were proud when I ended up getting my doctorate in psychology, but
they still hoped for a
real doctor. For the ninth grandchild, Ryan, who
arrived four years after me, an M.D. was practically preordained.
Ryan checked all the right boxes:
along with being precocious, he had a
strong work ethic. He set his sights on becoming a neurosurgeon. He was
passionate about the potential to help people and ready to persist in the face
of whatever obstacles would come into his path.
When Ryan was looking at colleges, he came to visit me. As we started
talking about majors, he expressed a flicker of
doubt about the premed track
and asked if he should study economics instead. There’s a term in
psychology that captures Ryan’s personality: blirtatiousness.
Yep, that’s an
actual research concept, derived from the combination of blurting and
flirting. When “blirters” meet people, their responses tend to be fast and
effusive. They typically score high in extraversion and impulsiveness—and
low in shyness and neuroticism. Ryan could push himself to study for long
hours, but it drained him. Drawn to something
more active and social, he
toyed with the idea of squeezing in an economics major along with premed,
but abandoned that idea when he got to college.
Gotta stay on track.
Ryan sailed through the premed curriculum and became a teaching
assistant for undergrads while he was still an undergrad himself. When he
showed up at exam review sessions and saw how stressed the students were,
he refused to start covering the material until they stood up and danced.
When he was accepted to an Ivy League medical school, he asked me if he
should do a joint M.D.–M.B.A. program. He hadn’t
lost his interest in
business, but he was afraid to divide his attention.
Gotta stay on track.
In his last year of med school, Ryan dutifully applied to neurosurgery
residencies. It takes a focused brain to slice into the brain of another human.
He wasn’t sure if he was cut out for it—or if the career would leave any
space for him to have a life. He wondered if he should start a health-care
company instead, but when he was admitted to Yale, he opted for the
residency.
Gotta stay on track.
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