Happy Sunday friends! 🎃
This month for rounds, I have a simple question for you:
How do you define success? 🤔
I ask because this question has been popping up for me a lot. Lately, I've been having a hard time feeling productive 😪. I jot down tasks in my planner, check them off ☑️, but at the end of the week I feel like I haven't gotten anything done.
It's been frustrating. 😾
But then, I reflected on how I was defining success 💭. For me, success was checking off every single item for the week and then putting a giant slash through that page in my planner ❌, never to be looked at again 📖.
In the past that had been easy to achieve, but with all the recent changes in my life, I quickly realized that bar was set for a different time 🕐.
Sometimes the way we define success sets us up to feel like we’ve failed 😔, even when we haven’t. When this happens, I have found that taking a step back to re-examine the situation can often provide a lot of clarity 🖼️. Here are some examples of what I mean:
- You didn't get the score you wanted on the anatomy exam, but you did pass 🩻
- You didn't match into your #1 choice for residency, but you did match 🏅
- You find out the patient you saved passed away the next day, but you did give a family extra time with their loved one ❤️🩹
I feel confident using these examples because I have experienced every single one of them. Call it a silver lining 🥈, heck maybe even call it a micro-win, but sometimes success runs far deeper than we might think or expect 😮.
While reading this, some situation or result you've been struggling with may have bubbled to the surface 🫧. If so, I challenge you to redefine your success. Was the standard you were using to measure unfair for you? Was the end result still a very positive one, even if it wasn't quite what you expected? You'd be surprised how quickly simple questions like that can reshape your entire perspective 💡.
As for me? I'm trying to worry less about slashing through pages and focus more on progress I can feel good about 🌈. Some weeks it’s a big win 🏆. Some weeks it’s just showing up and doing my best 🤷🏽♂️.
Both count.
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