Life Advice Journey before destination Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination.This is one of the ideals of the Knights Radiant, as told in Brandon Sanderson’s incredible The Stormlight Archive (I’m halfway through
Productivity Force yourself to start If you want to start something, don’t wait, just start. Writing a personal statement or an essay? Great, just start typing and force yourself to write something. It doesn’t matter if
Life Advice Overthinking I want to share a story today.As some of you might know, I’ve recently started my first job as a junior doctor (we’re now around a month into it). Naturally
Medical School Changing direction A few months into my 4th year of medical school (ie: the first clinical year), I remember talking to one of the consultants on the ward. He asked our group what we wanted
Life Advice Be content to be thought foolish Here’s a quote from one of my favourite Stoic philosophers, Epictetus:If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.This fear of being thought foolish lies at
Productivity What pencil do you use? You’ve probably heard of Stephen King. He’s like, the world’s most best-selling author of all time. He apparently attends lots of writers conferences where he does Q&As. Sometimes,
Life as a Doctor "It's busy, but really fun" We had a housewarming party last night - lots of our friends came over and we had lots of chats and snacks, and played around 3 hours of Avalon.Paul, one of my
Life Advice The Trichotomy of Control Let’s talk about control. In a recent video (Life Advice - 50k subscribers Q&A), I alluded to the Stoic idea of how there are only two things we can control
Life as a Doctor Don't believe the hype Black Wednesday is nearly here. It’s the first Wednesday of August when doctors throughout the UK start their new jobs. Supposedly, this influx of inexperienced doctors leads to a 6% increase in
Medical School Dealing with Bad Grades I've had a few messages from students who were disappointed by their exam results and wanted some of my wannabe-life-guru advice on how to deal with the sadness they were feeling. Let's tackle the symptom first, and then the disease.
Productivity The Parable of the Pottery Class There was once a pottery teacher called Brian. One month, he decided to split his class into two groups. Group A had to make a pot every day for 30 days (so 30
Medical School A whole lot better I was chatting with a medic friend over breakfast this morning. He told me a great story that I thought I'd share with you. A few days ago, he was on the ward
Life Advice How to get stuff done I was chatting with a friend a little while back. He’s a final year medic at Cambridge, goes to the gym like every day, is pretty ripped, plays rugby for the university
Life Advice Hustle vs Chill I'm writing this post from a lovely cafe in Heidelberg, Germany. I'm here with some friends on a bank holiday mini-break - we're trying to take full advantage of our 3 weeks left
Medical School Diminishing Returns I went to a ball last night. In classic Cambridge style, it started at 9pm and was due to finish at 5am. We arrived an hour early, did a photo shoot (it's on
Medical School Climbing a Mountain It’s been an interesting week. I’ve officially graduated and left medical school (check out the pics on Instagram), we’ve had family over from Pakistan for the celebrations, and yesterday got
Medical School Staying in Touch This is our very last week of medical school. It's been 6 years, we've finished all our placements, we had our Graduation Ball last night and now we've just got one more week
Life Advice Consistency is King I’ve just arrived back in Cambridge from a weekend in Dorset on a ‘wilderness medicine’ expedition. There was a group of 22 of us, we stayed in this really nice cottage, went
Life Advice Time Management It’s been a pretty interesting week. I turned 24, found out I passed my final year exams, gave a presentation about the YouTube channel to the Cambridge clinical school faculty, and yesterday
Life Advice The antidote to fear This post discusses my favourite non-pharmacological solution to stress/fear/anxiety that I hope you’ll find useful. Unsurprisingly, I’ve had a lot of messages from students about to sit exams who
Life Advice Future-Self Thinking You know that feeling when you have a reasonably fixed opinion on a topic that you haven’t really thought about extensively? And then when that opinion gets shattered and it makes you
Life Advice Motivation is a myth I’ve had a lot of messages recently from (mostly) students asking about how to motivate themselves, especially during exam season. The quandary goes along the lines of “I know I should be
Life Advice Hedonic Adaptation Hedonic adaptation is (according to Wikipedia) as follows: Hedonic adaptation is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or
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Entrepreneurship Why and how you should learn to code This is the first in a series of posts where I’ll be sharing stuff I’ve learned from 5 years of running a pretty successful medical education startup whilst being a medical
