Think Again

Partway through his residency, the grueling hours and the intense focus
began to take their toll, and Ryan burned out. He felt that if he died that
very day, no one in the system would really care or even notice. He
regularly suffered from the heartache of losing patients and the headache of
dealing with abusive attending surgeons, and there was no end in sight.
Although it was his childhood dream and our grandparents’ dream, his
work left little time for anything else. The sheer exhaustion left him
questioning whether he should quit.
Ryan decided that he couldn’t give up. He had gone too far to change
course, so he finished the seven-year neurosurgery residency. When he
submitted the paperwork for his credentials, the hospital denied him
because he had placed the dates on his résumé on the right instead of the
left. He was so fed up with the system that, out of principle, he refused to
move them. After winning that battle with bureaucracy, he added another
feather to his cap, doing an eighth year of a fellowship in complex,
minimally invasive spinal surgery.
Today Ryan is a neurosurgeon at a major medical center. In his
midthirties, he’s still in debt from student loans more than a decade after
graduating from med school. Even though he enjoys helping people and
caring for patients, the long hours and red tape undercut his enthusiasm. He
tells me that if he could do it over, he would have gone a different route.
I’ve often wondered what it would have taken to convince him to rethink
his chosen line of work—and what he truly wanted out of a career.

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We all have notions of who we want to be and how we hope to lead our
lives. They’re not limited to careers; from an early age, we develop ideas
about where we’ll live, which school we’ll attend, what kind of person
we’ll marry, and how many kids we’ll have. These images can inspire us to
set bolder goals and guide us toward a path to achieve them. The danger of
these plans is that they can give us tunnel vision, blinding us to alternative
possibilities. We don’t know how time and circumstances will change what
we want and even who we want to be, and locking our life GPS onto a
single target can give us the right directions to the wrong destination.