A little of a lot or a lot of a little

What has been on my mind lately is that a little bit of a lot might be better than all in on just one.

Let me explain.

My studying lately with medical school. I have learned that a little bit of flashcards, a little bit of listening to video lectures while working out at the gym, a little bit of textbook readings from assigned class stuff, and a little bit of practice questions kind of merge together and help you put everything together from different contexts. When I was studying mostly from flashcards, I would occasionally lose the bigger picture and have less of an understanding of how things fit together in real life. When you watch high-level videos that cover a lot of information, you get this larger picture but a lot of times it can be discouraging when information is too hard to learn or when you need to watch the video several times in a row because you forget the stuff so quickly (which the active recall of flashcards help with). Also, it’s really important to be able to become a detective in practice questions and sift through a bunch of needless information to find patterns, which is something you totally don’t get from videos or flashcards. (In fact, from my experiences the practice questions may be of the highest importance in the study methods since that is actually what you’ll be graded on one day for step 2). Initially practice questions were quite challenging, but I think our minds are quite remarkable. For example, being on clerkships and going through incredible amounts of information in group discussions on rounds initially is overwhelming because your brain is not used to taking in so much. On almost every rotation except surgery (I think the sleep deprivation may have had something to do with it) the deluge became more a trickle though as you no longer examined the pigments of a painting up close with a magnifying glass but began to describe the shapes and larger color schemes of the enigmatic smile looking at you. In the same way your brain, albeit very slowly, adapts to sifting through lots of wording in practice questions to find the answers. Even doing research in medical school is complementary to your studies and development as a doctor because the skill of finding high-quality information quickly in primary data is something that is actually quite helpful when you are on clinical rotations and need to support some of your clinical decision making. Uptodate (highly recommend paying for or obtaining a subscription) is stellar for such support while you are working feverishly in the morning on pediatrics to come up with a treatment plan for the three patients you’ve seen. However, having basic research skills is very helpful in unexpected ways because sometimes Uptodate won’t have the statistics you need to help bolster the probability that your patient has strep pharyngitis that became invasive to pneumonia. In essence, mediocrity at scale might have unexpected benefits to the whole and just might make you great one day in a particular area you can’t predict.

The book Range comes to mind. One quote that I really liked was, “The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment.”

I think this cognitive entrenchment is fascinating. In fact, this might be one of the most important things to guard for in your own life, as it may limit your effectiveness in clandestine and severe ways. One example from my life is when I was having a lot of knee pain running in undergrad, and I wasn’t quite sure of what was causing it. I had almost totally committed myself to running and not lifting, because I enjoyed running so much. I think this is a good example of physiological and cognitive entrenchment where I wasn’t able to improve my running times as a result of not being able to run enough as a result of having frequent knee tweaks as a result of not having sufficient quadricep strength as a result of me having the idea that I didn’t need to lift weights as a result of me not caring so much about my physical appearance and how muscular I was.

(Big breath in). When I started biking indoors at home more, though, I noticed my knee pain gradually disappearing and the intermittent tweaks no longer crescendoing on mile four or five. This was further helped by me starting to do squats and leg extensions at the gym and losing a little bit of weight too. When I also started doing some upper body exercises at the gym at a very pedestrian pace, something you initially think would have absolutely no relation to running speed at all, I also felt myself feeling stronger and more energetic on runs. These examples are rather trivial, but are from the valuable and brief episodes of my life, which as a single mere human being is the storybook I can most effectively draw from for wisdom apart from the Bible which I think advises in more unique and profound ways than any other communication form. Mutualism is everyone’s favorite topic to discuss in elementary school and likewise synergism in life is a beautiful thing and is a function I think is valuable to try and maximize in your short time on this earth.

Key point: Not necessarily throwing all your eggs 🪺 in one basket is a way to help prevent getting into ruts in life, where intentions may be the best but the natural blinders of our situations prevent us from reaching the full potential we might otherwise have gone to.

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” John 10:10 NRSV