Frozen in Muskoka

The Next Steps Always Seems to be Inevitable

And there's another problem. May be you never really wanted to be a cardiac surgeon in the first place. It just kind of happened. It's easy, the way the system works, to simply go with the flow. I don't mean the work is easy, but the choices are easy. Or rather, the choices sort of make themselves. You go to a place like Stanford because that's what smart kids do. You do to medical school because it's prestigious. You specialize in cardiology because it's lucrative. You do the things that reap the reward, that make your parents proud, and your teachers pleased, and your friends impressed. From the time you started high school and may be even junior high, your whole goal was to get into the best college you could, so now you naturally think about your life in terms of "getting into" whatever's next. "Getting into" is validation; "getting into" is victory. Standford, then Johns Hopkins medical school, then a residency at the University of San Francisco, and so forth. Or Michigan Law School, or Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey, or whatever. You take it one step at a time, and the next step always seems to be inevitable.

-- What Are You Going to Do With That?, William Deresiewicz

Lost in Toronto