Monday, October 22, 2012

Why Settle for Being Good, When You Dream of Being Great?


This past week I feel like I’ve been walking through the time capsule of physical therapy school.  Last Thursday as I walked out of our building I passed by the now second years working for the first time with their neuro patients, some of the same ones as we worked with last year. Then as I walked outside I passed all the first year students experiencing what it’s like to walk with crutches or a walker in an outside environment. I laughed with my friends as we reminisced back to when we were completing that same task. It’s really been hitting me here lately just how far we have come in the last couple of years of physical therapy school. Sometimes I feel like it is so easy to look over how much we have actually learned. Ok ok enough of the sappy memories and on to the practical stuff.
Today we had one of our favorite professor’s lecture for the last time. Almost every time she had lectured for us in the past the first 5 minutes of class she always gave us a little life lesson, whether it was a quote or some lesson she learned from personal experience. Then today at the end of class she handed us a four page handout of all those life lessons she had shared with us over the last 2 ½ years. And I have decided to share my favorites here:

     - When she lectured us in Neuroscience:

o   There is one thing we can do, and the happiest people are those who do it to the limit of their ability. We can be completely present. We can… give all our attention to the opportunity before us.                              Mark Van Doren
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          - When we were trying to memorize all the millions of details of the spinal cord pathology:
o   Success is neither magic or dumb luck; it stems from a great deal of consistent hard work to perfect every detail. It is even a little mundane…. Win, go back to work, win again.
o   A loss is a crossroads, not a cliff. Winners make mistakes and encounter troubles all the time without falling off the edge
Both by Confidence by Rosabeth Moss Kanter
        
             - Intro to Pediatrics
o   10,000 hours. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.
o   Practice isn’t the thing that you do once you’re good. It’s the thing that you do that makes you good.
Both from Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

I feel like my professors favorite book was “The Last Lecture”, by Randy Pausch (this one is definitely on my To Read list, just haven’t gotten there yet). One of my favorite “Food for thought” sessions is an excerpt from this book:
                “Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.”

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