How this book helped me get into medical school 🏥

Hi guys, I’m jumping straight to the point. One major reason why I got into medschool while simultaneously studying hard to complete high school with excellence, is a book you might recognize: Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Many of you may already be familiar with this book, as it’s been a bestseller since its release in 2018. Why? There are many reasons why, but in my opinion, mainly because its practical use in real life. For those who are not aware what this book is all about, here’s a short rundown:

Atomic Habits is a self-improvement book serving as a guide on how even the tiniest changes have the ability to accumulate into newly gained discipline and automated behaviours (habits). There are some stages and laws one must follow to understand how our mind functions and how our power station, the brain, constructs new habits to achieve goals and maintain them afterwards.

Who is this book for? 👥

This book shines the brightest in circumstances, where people want to form new, beneficial habits but just can’t seem to get away from their negative ones. But generally said, I’d say this book is a good read for almost anybody. It just teaches so many valuable lessons, which are applicable for quite everyone in every stage of their respective lives.

My Top 3 Quotes 💭

"This is the feedback loop behind all human behaviour: try, fail, learn, try differently. With practice, the useless movements fade away and the useful actions get reinforced."

"Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations."

"If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead."

My key takeaways 🧩

Aggregation of marginal gains 🏔

Progress is not linear. What do I mean by this? The path of change is rocky; it fluctuates relentlessly. At the beginning, the line may even be a constant, because most changes you’ve made barely have any effect on your daily life. What’s more, external factors you naturally are exposed to like scepticism, wavering motivation, and the struggle to hold yourself accountable tear on your optimism that everything will work out. After all, if these changes are not quickly transforming into noticeable results, you will begin to question if it’s even worth it to continue.

But that’s the point: don’t give up. Even miniscule adjustments of your daily life, which might seem insignificant, will compound into healthy, beneficial habits if they are continued over longer periods of time. From what I’ve experienced, all those tiny changes I’ve made over the past couple of months (and even years for that matter) to free up time and space for my study schedule have helped me to maintain a stable and balanced workload even after achieving my goal of passing the exam.

My mind got used to things like waking early, spending the first hours of the day with studying rather than being on my phone scrolling through Socials, genuinely falling in love with reading, eating healthier etc. Basically, it allowed me to utilize my time as efficiently as possible by slowly adding and adjusting to small habits I’ve set myself out to complete.

Time is your friend ⏳

Time is a double-edged sword. The more time passes, the more you will stick to your current habits, disregarding if they’re positive or negative.

This is the driving force of why habits could unlock your personal potential. If you start shifting your routines into the “right” direction you want your life to head to, time becomes a tracker for how far you’ve come.

Progress, like mentioned before, is very slow at first but picks up its pace once you become used to doing it on a daily basis. Conversely, if you don’t swap habits you dislike, but deem as too insignificant or unchangeable, time will be failing you.

The same way positive habits could compound into discipline and help you reach your goals, persisting with negative habits will allow them to amass into a deep sea of dissatisfaction, lack of motivation, lack of self-trust and discontent pressuring your self-esteem and most importantly, your mental health.

Sky is the limit 🌠

We all know that saying, right? I think it perfectly describes how you want to aim for 1% of improvement every day. In the past, I always thought “being 1% better is not possible, you’d reach the 100% and come to a stop”, which is not exactly true. The “1% better each day” doesn’t mean you’ll hit the 100% and stop improving; rather, it’s meant to be an endless scale which compares to unlocking your full potential. Truth is, you never stop improving, because nobody is/can be perfect, but you must decide which version of yourself you are happy to live with.

Know what you desire 🧭

Stick to your ideals. Being determined to change “bad” habits into “good” ones is obviously easier said than done and naturally requires tons of self-discipline and beliefs, which hold true to yourself. What does it really mean to change into a “better person”?

Generally, it means to improve within certain aspects of life, but these points are different for everybody; that’s what makes humans unique. Being a better person means to become an improved version of yourself, so this would heavily depend on who you are as a person, how you act, how you feel etc: basically, your whole identity.

To now become a “better person” you’d want to behave and live like the version you’re searching for, i.e changing your lifestyle and habits according to the goal → It’s not “I want this so I do this”, instead, it’s “I AM this person, so I naturally BEHAVE and LIVE like I am this person”.

Just from this change of thought alone, you’d feel more prepared to endure the process of adjusting to newly formed habits and sticking to them once satisfying results show. But: don’t ever try to alter your own identity into something you aren’t - you just can’t become it. Think of it like this: you want to get fit, although you hate nothing more than sports. Despite this, you start educating yourself about nutrition and exercise and strictly follow a diet plan, a workout schedule (adjusted to your needs) and so on. After sticking to your harsh regiment for an extended amount of time, you reach finally reach your dream physique. This is what discipline looks like.

On the other hand, you can’t see a drop of blood and feel uneasy whenever you see an injury or a wound. However, because of today’s pressure exerted from social-media, you want to study hard to become a doctor, because why not try? You start hustling for a spot in medschool and eventually enter your clinical rotations. This is where it hits you: you start feeling unwell because of your innate fear of blood and wounds and start questioning yourself if you even want to continue. But that’s okay. You must decide and find out who you are and what you want your future self to be like and shape your habits accordingly.

The importance of getting started 🏃

Example: Being bombarded with tasks and work and repeatedly telling yourself “no, I surely will finish them until that deadline, I’d wait a couple more days” and then not finishing or barely finishing them would result in tons of unnecessary stress which eventually would lead to yourself believing that you are too deep into procrastination and that you’d never be able to work efficiently without stress, because that’s the only thing you did over the last months or even years. The thing is, you will stop trying. The core message is to embrace change and to actually START doing something. Telling yourself you’d never be able to finish this and that because you know you will procrastinate and then not even try to improve on it, will leave you dissatisfied and tear on your mental health sooner than later. You just have to collect the courage and discipline to START; the momentum you’ll gain from the boost of change and feedback/results will translate into a step in the right direction.