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The Celebration of Busy Needs to End: How Overwork is Stealing Your Success
How it took a nearly deadly error to convince one surgeon that his most important patient was himself.
Your well-being is the foundation of everything else in life.
I subscribed to the theory that overwork and exhaustion showed my value until I learned that the opposite was true.
You think that taking breaks and going on vacation is the reward for your hard work and success. But the opposite is true; your health allows you to do meaningful work and succeed. Take that health for granted, and you will lose your ability to work hard and succeed.
Regular rest is the key to high performance not the reward for it.
My Story
Overwork and little or no rest were expected throughout my surgical residency. I trained in the “bad old days” before restrictions on resident work hours required time away. We worked seven days a week, including holidays. Regular calls meant that every third to fourth day was a 36-hour shift.
I’m not convinced this is the best way to train a newly minted doctor into a surgeon, but I do know that it teaches you how to function on very little sleep or at least how to trick yourself into believing you can.
But residency is a sprint. You can “gut it out” for five years. Just put your head down, keep showing up and push through to the end.
Surgical practice is something else entirely because you can’t sprint through a thirty-five-year career. That was a lesson I had to learn the hard way.
After a long four days on call.
Monday afternoon turned into Monday evening, and I was still at work trying to deal with all the problems I had acquired from my previous four days on call. I had been busy working days and called in at night. I was so busy that late on Monday, I was finishing up with a patient who had been admitted the day before.
He was an elderly man who had come to the emergency room with a confusing pattern of upper abdominal pain. I had been asked to perform an upper endoscopy to see if it might be a stomach ulcer.
