Dr.Paul Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon from USA, who suffered a cancer and died in 2015. We are going to look at key lessons that will help us improve our lives.
When it comes to swimming, the pool is the classroom. The coach will tell you how to be comfortable in water, how to control breath, how to keep the body floating in the water, how to use different strokes, how to swim longer and shorter distances and so on.
The coach and staff will monitor you closely and will do everything to make you safe while learning to swim. Basically, the risk is minimum when learning swimming in a pool with your coach.
Now, assume that you are swimming in an unknown river and suddenly the water level increases due to heavy rains. Now, you have to swim for survival under very difficult weather conditions. In swimming pool, the coach will correct your mistakes and takes every step to make you safe while learning. But in real life, no one will be there you to protect you and the conditions may not be as smooth as a swimming pool. One mistake can cost your life.
After college, we have to decide which field to choose for our profession. We either decide based on how we see the world or based on the influence from our parents and friends
Most people will choose their jobs based on pay, work environment and hours.
As doctors, we starts private practices and looks for ways to making more money within short time period rather than and staying late in hospitals and treating the people in real need
As Lawyers,we take the highest paid cases rather than defending an innocent person who is labelled as guilty.
As Marketing managers, we create marketing strategies that tricks the custom into buying something they don’t want rather than making them aware of a valuable product or service that brings value to their life
Assume you are going to the gym everyday and doing workout for few months consistently. Suddenly you have to go aborad for 2 weeks and comeback. Now, do you think you will be able to start the usual workout straightaway?
For most people, it would be tough to get back into the usual routines immediately.
When we do something every day, we get familiar with it and it becomes a habit. So we can do it without thinking about it. But once we stop it for a while and start it again, we have to start from scratch until we make it a habit again.
How do you spend your day?
Most people spend most of their time on their job. It could be working for someone or working on your business. These people work 8+ Hours daily on the job. However, how much effective work is done within these 8 hours is highly questionable. Usually, our daily work is filled with few important tasks and many not so important tasks.
When your boss asks you to complete 5 hours report in 2 hours, you somehow find way to complete it by prioritizing.
In real life, we think we have lot of time. So, we do many not so important tasks until we have been assigned a deadline to complete the important task. Similarly, if we know that we have only few months to live, we only choose the things most important to us and complete the important tasks quicker. Suddenly, we find ways to work effectively, spend time with family, spend time on hobbies, meet friends, take care of the loved ones, within the same time we had earlier.
Assume that you are practicing to throw an arrow at a target 100 meters away from you. You are throwing 100 times a day. You have to throw all the 100 arrows to the center of the target on each day to achieve perfection.
Initially, you will be able to hit the target few times within the 100 attempts of the day. As you continue practicing each day, the number of times you hit the target will increase. Even you improve each day and get skilled enough to hit 100 times, the result will be affected by external conditions such as weather, condition of the arrows and other similar factors. So, hitting the target 100 times a day would be an extremely difficult task.
However, you will get used to the external conditions and improve your target hitting skills each day. Even though you can’t hit 100 times on a daily basis, with each day you will get closer to hitting 100 times.
In this article, we looked at 5 life lessons from the book. The book contains the heart wrenching story Of Dr. Paul Kalanithi. You will find many more lessons from his story and how he lived a meaningful live even When suffering from Cancer.
We strongly recommend you to read the book. You can click Here to purchase the books from Amazon.
(The points discussed in this article and examples are our views about the points discussed in the book)
