One of the people who taught me to be a surgeon back in the early days, in the mid-nineties, was Iain McVicar.
When I first arrived in Nottingham at the major hospital, he was a senior registrar, and he quickly became a consultant months later.
He didn't directly teach me how to be a surgeon, but he taught me about being a surgeon, and I learned many things from him, particularly on reflection.
A couple of years ago, he died far too young, very sadly, in a bad way (not that there's a good way).
One of the things I remember about Ian was when I first met him, he told me that he'd saved a bottle of really nice whiskey to use to celebrate when he became a consultant.
He had done dentistry, and then surgical training and then medicine and then surgical training, and so didn't get his consultant job till he was about 36 or 37.
Years later I spoke to him about that bottle of whiskey, and he still had it.
The problem was that there was no finish line in being a consultant; he kind of evolved into the role; it never really became a start-finish thing; it became more of a grey area.
It's a metaphor, this, isn't it, for how we set targets for ourselves, or goalposts or finish lines. We imagine that when we hit a specific point, everything will be OK or everything will be better, but so many times that's not how it works.
It's a gradual process to being better or improvement or happy or any of those things; you don't go from one day to the next and flip on your head.
I'm reminded also of the book Happier by Ben Tal Ben-Shahar; he talked about when he was a young guy training and training and training to be a national squash champion, and when he finally made it, it just wasn't all that.
It all comes back to the fact that if you're not enjoying the process, you'll not enjoy the outcome.
It doesn't mean that the process has to be all sweetness and light, but it can't be something that you hate all the time to be rewarded by some small nugget at the end.
“If you're not enough without it, then you definitely won't be enough with it”.
It's always worth remembering, often in the distance there is this bright shining object that we think we can grasp with two hands to make it all better.
If your relationship is terrible now, it's likely that it'll still be terrible at Christmas.
Blog Post Number - 4586
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