The Obstacle is the Way

Hey it’s May 🙂 

Seeing that some of you might be sitting your final exams soon, here is my motivational gift to you. Hope this helps and all the best in your exams/interviews/projects you are working on!

I’m rooting for you,

May xx

How this book helped me survive final year of vet school, and continued to help me in my early new graduate veterinarian years. Here are 3 takeaways from this book to assist you in your vet journey.

A situation is neither good or bad, it’s the thinking that makes it so. In the book, he discusses how our perception can help us or make us feel unnecessarily worse. How we, as human beings, like to add emotion or label something objective with our own biasness and perceive things based on our personal past experiences. For example, when I am facing an essay deadline, I tend to associate my negative self belief of ‘oh I hate essay deadlines because I feel like I suck at writing’, when in reality to a neutral person, it is simply a date where you need to submit an assignment, but somehow along the way, a lot of stress is tied to it. During my first months of being a vet, when facing a dog spay, I tend to catastrophise and worry that everything will go wrong, whereas if you think about it objectively, it is, like any other routine procedure, with routine steps you can take and things to prepare yourself to avoid any errors (like any other procedure). In the book, he provides a crude example of how vintage wine is literally old grapes. Seems funny when you put it that way.

This made me realise that as long as I’ve given my best, that is all that matters. No use overthinking it until it morphs into a form of decision paralysis, just take action, the very first step and go from there. In my final year, I faced multiple job rejections and took a huge hit to my ego. There I was, thinking I was graduating from one of the best schools in the country, with great communication skills (or so I’d like to think), so that interviews would be a breeze. I was very wrong. I had mindlessly applied for a few jobs without proper thought, and rightfully so was rejected for those jobs. I wasn’t doing my best, to be honest, and if I looked inwardly I took my circumstances for granted. I remained stuck for quite a while thinking things will get better, until they didn’t and then finally took some action to get through that obstacle.

After some introspection and seeking advice from professionals (university mentors and people who work in HR), I was able to see where my shortcomings were and how I can start working on that.

Finally, he mentions that we should prepare for none of it to work. Despite our best intentions and preparations, we may still fail. And that is ok. That is part of life. How we deal with our failures, is what determines whether we will come out of the other side stronger. The importance is taking action after that failure, there is always something we can do to move, navigate, go above or under to go through the obstacle. And if there isn’t something we can do for ourselves, then we can look to see if we can help others.

To conclude, this book made me realise that failures or rejections are great data points, that help you inform yourself on where you are going wrong, and what you can do about it to get better. That really, an obstacle is a huge opportunity for yourself to level up and come out stronger. So lets not let that crisis or obstacle turn to waste, instead convert it into energy and skills that can transform you into a better person.

There were many more valuable lessons in this book, if you’re interested in reading you can find it here: https://amzn.to/3UsEpSa (aff. link)