MD story

Sharing my story in understanding adult life inside and outside medical field

[lifelong-learner-md]

Changes in a workplace

It is consistently hard to initiate, and people are always skeptical when they hear about it.

Because changes need to be done with care and careful consideration.

To make a change without considering the people inside the system, most of the time, those changes will be stopped or even fail.

In the workplace, the problems are not only the change itself but also the lack of internal motivation of people involved and the rarity of a good system that can assure anyone from the hierarchy level can contribute to the change.

To initiate a change in the workplace, we need to have a clear vision, a feasible and suitable solution, and an easy goal. That way, the change will not be seen as an intimidating attempt but more like an exciting challenge instead.

Inspired by Adam grant podcast

[lifelong-learner-md]

In the 1st official month as a resident, so many things to gulp down and a lot of life adjustments needed to be done, and more new relationships flourished from my new social circle.

I am so thankful for what I have blessed, yet I am still pursuing a thing that said meant to be for everyone; I want to have a relationship.

The one that I enjoy till the day I leave this earth.

[lifelong-learner-md]

Daily Magic

People can have magical life only if we apply some principles that successful people in history implement in their life.

Today I will share 2 of them inspired by the book 5 AM Club.

To have magical life, you need..

1. Be kind to yourself, and your relationship with people around you will be enhanced.

Be comfortable with your thoughts because many great thinkers feel very comfortable in solitude. Great thinkers wisely use their solitude time by focusing on themselves and capitalizing on their potential to produce magnificent inspiration. So if you want to be just like them, start to be kind to yourself and utilize your solitude time wistfully.

2. Appreciate miraculous experiences more than material possession.

In this capitalist world and with all the flexing culture, it's easy for us to be trapped in seeking material satisfaction and only pursue physical happiness. Unfortunately, material possession only gives us temporary pleasure and urges us to keep going and never be satisfied.

But the real magnificent life worth living is the one with abundant self-grow opportunities. That kind of life will put us into perspective on how far we have improved compared to our beginning. Hence, we feel proud, confident, and hopeful to be alive and experience the miracle that life has to offer.

[lifelong-learner-md]

How people learn new things

Learning secondary materials that are biologically not suitable for our learning nature could be challenging. As people get older, they lose the ability to learn new things naturally or less consciously. In the book called "uncommon sense teaching," the author explained that the human brain learns new things through 2 different pathways. The first one is the declarative pathway, where the pre-frontal cortex learns to internalize material consciously after direct instructions. Humans develop a better ability to use this learning pathway as they get older.

In contrast, the second pathway, called the procedural pathway, empowers the hippocampus through deliberate practice to deepen the understanding of new information in our brain; as a result, students can use this knowledge to solve practical problems. This knowledge brings us to active direct learning, where students learn the study material through two-ways learning techniques that engage both the conscious declarative pathway and the unconscious procedural path. Thus they can learn more effectively and efficiently.

[lifelong-learner-md]

The importance of external motivations in good habit maintenance

To complete the habit loop, we need to have the feeling of success as a signal that tells the brain that the habit paid off and that it was worth the effort because people tend to repeat activities that make us feel good. As James said, "The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change" is: What is rewarded gets repeated. What is punished is avoided. Receiving these immediate rewards is particularly crucial during the early stages of forming a habit. The reward is the last chain of our habit loop, and it's vital because the ending of any experience is part which we remember the most.  You want a reward for a job well done. 

Having the reward would serve as external motivation; however, we need to avoid overusing it. We need to ensure that those external rewards still align with our desired identity. The key is not to lose sight of our desired identity, and whenever possible, to choose an external reward that reinforces the type of person we wish to be. Eventually, as intrinsic rewards like a better mood, more energy, and reduced stress kick in, you'll become less concerned with chasing the secondary bonus. The identity itself becomes the reinforcer. Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit. 

What also helpful when we try to build a habit is to see it grow. Just like the external reward principles where we feel the immediate benefit of our behaviors, seeing the progress in our habits can also keep our motivation high. We can do it by creating a habit journal and using the "never break the chain." mantra to maintain our habit. That is, once you start tracking your habits, you don't want to break the chain of crossing off each day or filling in each cell. No matter how you do it, these strategies provide proof of your progress.  In addition, habit tracking offers visual proof of your hard work.

[lifelong-learner-md]

"When rain falls, it flows downhill. If desired, you can collect the rain in a bucket and carry it uphill, but the natural tendency of water is to flow toward the lowest point.

Most situations in life have a tendency—a direction in which things want to flow. You can choose to go against the flow (just as you can choose to carry water uphill), but your results tend to be better when you find a way to work with the gradient of the situation.

Position yourself to benefit from the external forces at hand and you will get more from the same unit of effort. Energy is conserved and results are multiplied."

(Hat tip to Tom Morgan for inspiring.)​

[lifelong-learner-md]

The environment is a big part of habit building. To build a good habit, you need to focus on building your environment to give you all the support. The cue for a routine that you try to develop must be obvious, and action to that cue should be less challenging. The principal is to make the environment supportive of the activity you want to make a routine.

Of course, it will not just stop only for one-time activities. We also need to consider the continuity of our future habits as well. We do this by prime our environment to have a continuous cycle of good habit. This way, you not only try to change your present behavior but also for your future.

Speaking of the future, we often rely on motivation to create a habit. It’s tough because most good habits only show the result in the far end and make the motivation to do daily routines fade, and we need some strategies to tackle that.

First, bundle the good habit with fun activities that can give you enjoyable moments while doing the routine. Second, we can make a commitment device that can help us commit our future selves to creating the habit. With these strategies, hopefully, the habits that we try to build can sustain and last longer.

[lifelong-learner-md]

Great thinkers don’t harbor doubts because they’re impostors.

They maintain doubts because they know we’re all partially blind and they are committed to improving their sight.

They don’t boast about how much they know; they marvel at how little they understand.

Think again

[lifelong-learner-md]

What is your great source of motivation to start writing this book?

Trying to reach out /point of connection to other people through this book...

Desire for connection!

[lifelong-learner-md]

If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, you need to make the cue a big part of your environment.

Make sure the best choice is the most obvious one. In the long-run (and often in the short-run), your willpower will not beat your environment.

You can alter the spaces where you live and work to increase your exposure to positive cues. Making a better decision is easy, natural even, when the cues for good habits are right in front of you.

[lifelong-learner-md]

“The world contains far more information than any single person can learn in their lifetime.

The question is not whether you are ignorant, but what you choose to be ignorant about.

Few topics are worth your precious time. Choose what you pay attention to with great care."

[lifelong-learner-md]

How to arrange successful goals?

Clear goals can make some people eager to achieve them while other can feel intimidated by it.

The key lays on how we set our goals, easy goal can make us take success for granted while very hard goal can make us loss hope. Applying the 80% principle where we aim for 80% success rate for our goals as indication of good enough goals. This type of goal can help you build motivation and enter the viscous cycle where your success help you develop higher confidence and as result aiming for higher goal.

Of course, you need to break down your goal into daily actions to make your ambition more believable and attainable. This way, you can avoid procrastination and give yourself plenty of time to develop creative thinking in solving your problem to get closer to your goals. For goal-setting to be life-affirming, the objectives pursued have to feel deeply meaningful to you. These goals should not set only to fulfilled social expectation to yourself.

Lastly, always be prepare for worse case scenario to achieve your goals. Imagining the possible challenges in advance and planning our response would prepare us for better decision when the adverse event actually come. As wise people said “Better safe than sorry”.

[lifelong-learner-md]

I attempt to post daily on my blog, yet sometimes life happens that prevents me from doing so. So let me share with you a tiny tip that I got from my better habit course from James Clear today. After introducing the 2 minutes concepts last time, now James teach me about how to insert the habit to my life.

The principle is simple, namely implementation intention. Since the activity that we want to make a habit is not yet automatically circulate in our system, we need to plan that activity deliberately. Therefore, we need to make our intention specific and achievable. The key is choosing the right time and place. Try to imagine yourself doing that activity when the time and situation allow you to have a higher rate of success.

Scientists have found that if you make an implementation intention, you are more likely to follow through with your plans and stick to your habits

For the start we can fill this sentence:

I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].

Example: I will run after putting my sport shoes in my backyard.

#James Clear #Atomic Habit

[lifelong-learner-md]

The art of decision making

To make an effective decision, we need to approach decision-making with two steps process; first thinking then deciding.

The thinking process before taking any decision needs to be done thoroughly considering the short and long-term consequences. We should consider the problem in the vast time range and layers of levels. A problem could have multiple levels that may impact someone's life differently, whether in population or personal levels. Understanding problems by considering their development over time could make us aware of the non-immediate impact of our decision. Moreover, when gathering additional pieces of information, we should aim to increase our probabilities to get a good outcome. Be careful to differentiate probabilities and possibilities. When we can successfully synthesize our problem through different perspectives, we can generate more effective solutions for our problem.

After problem synthesis and figuring out several solutions, we need to decide on the best solution. We should have principles and algorithms that will navigate our decision-making to do this. Nevertheless, we also need to be wise by always considering the loss and benefit in delaying decision-making for gathering more information. Before deciding, try to have a thoughtful disagreement with a believable person that you trust. So you can rest assured that your decision may have a lower chance of failure because it has been through careful thinking-deciding processes.

With good practice, making a good decision will be an intuitive process; thus, it will be more efficient and accurate.

(Source: Principles by Ray Dalio)

[lifelong-learner-md]

2-minutes habits help to establish sustained atomic habits. Because they reinforce the identity, you want to build in an easy and manageable manner. Just by showing up at the gym for five days in a row—even if it’s just for two minutes—convinces yourself that you are the type of person that doesn’t miss daily exercise as your new identity. You’re taking the most straightforward action that confirms the kind of person you want to be.

[lifelong-learner-md]

Keep learning and you will be happy

[lifelong-learner-md]

Enforcing habit loop for children

I recently subscribed to the "30 days to better habit" course by James Clear, and I got a lot of helpful insight. Today, I want to share one of the excellent insights from that course: how to implement tiny habits in young children.

To develop a good habit in children, you must understand that you need to modify the children's environment to make the habit manageable and stick.

The 1st step is to make the cue is obvious. In children's cases, you can use a specific area for a particular habit, such as a reading zone that decorates in their favorite color, or we can stack it with fun activities. So children could make a positive association and have the urge to initiate the habit.

The second step is to make the craving attractive, meaning that you should make the children crave for specific activity because they find it appealing. For example, for a particular activity such as wearing pajama, we can give them more authority to choose the pattern they want. (you need to be super creative for this step because most good habit is not fun activities).

The third step is to make the reaction easy by providing a supportive environment. Parents' biggest influence on their children is deciding what kind of environment their kid experiences. Surrounded children with a supportive environment can help good habit development in children. For example, to build a good reading habit in children, we should provide the children with a supportive reading environment to reinforce reading habits.

Last step to make sure that the habit sticks in the long term are to make the reward feel satisfying. The easiest way to implement this is by praising the child for whatever good habit they manage to do. Parents need to focus on a positive attitude and avoid criticizing children for their bad habits when they manage to do desired behaviors.

(Source: Atomic Habit)