Akshad’s Life Update: Here’s Why I’m on a Break From Writing
Everything Happens For You, Not to You
This is something I deeply believe in.
I like to believe that whatever shitty things happen to me in life, they’re actually blessings in disguise. Of course, there’s no way to know if it’s true. In fact, it might be just a defence mechanism I’ve developed to cope with life. But that’s okay with me. After all, we’re nothing but the stories we tell ourselves.
Now, if I’m being honest, nothing extremely terrible has ever happened to me. I’ve never been a victim of the horrors people face in this world like hunger, poverty, rapes, assault, wars, etc. But I’ve had my share of lows in life, like each one of you.
To my count, three times I’ve been super-low in life. And in retrospect, each one of those yielded me traits that I’m extremely grateful to have.
The birth of empathy
I was a decent kid in school. I was good at sports and was the kind of kid teachers liked to have in their classes. But… I was not all that happy. That’s because I never felt important to anyone.
The people that I used to hang out with didn’t treat me all that well. They just never made me feel that I mattered. In fact, they actively said and did things that conveyed that I did not matter.
Sure, I was a part of their “group” but I was rarely invited to outings. And even when I was, it felt like nobody would miss me if I wasn’t there.
I felt like an outsider among my own friends. And that’s just… a horrible thing to feel. I remember curling up in my bed and crying when I saw them posting snaps of their outings — outings that I wasn’t invited to. I mean, they didn’t even try to hide the fact that they didn’t invite me.
At the moment, I hated all of it. I was at my lowest. But in retrospect, it’s one of the best things to have happened to me. Because they made me understand what it’s like to suffer — what it’s like to be in pain.
And because of that, I have an above-average capacity for empathy. I have a higher capacity to recognize the subtle and obvious ways people around me are suffering, and a very strong inner itch to make their pain go away. Because I truly know how bad it can get, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.
That’s why I’m grateful to the people who made me suffer. They gifted me my most valuable trait.
How I became confident
How those guys treated me made me a person with high empathy, but wrecked my confidence. I felt I was absolutely worthless. I felt like I’ll never amount to anything, and that I’ll always be the person who didn’t matter. I felt terrible.
After high school, I started exercising. I used to go to the park every day to run and do pushups. I was losing weight, and life seemed to get better. But then, I got involved in a road traffic accident and broke both my hands — one of them needing surgery.
Why? Because life is a bitch.
My hands were messed up. I was in the hospital. And man, hospitals can get depressing. Hello there, Rock Bottom! Again, I was back where I started. And yet again, life started to not make sense anymore.
During my stay, a batchmate came to visit me in the hospital. He did it because just a few years back, I had paid him a visit when he was sick. He thought he’d repay the favour.
And that changed everything.
Post my recovery, we started hanging out more often. We started going to the park to run every day. And in time, he became my best friend. I finally felt like I mattered to someone. That helped my confidence.
Eventually, I gained enough courage to cut off from my old friends. I never had the balls to do it all these years because I had nowhere to go. But when I realised that I deserved better, I pulled the trigger.
From there, my confidence only went up. And it happened only because I broke both my hands. So yeah, I’m pretty grateful for that as well.
Discovering my inner Grit
After that, my life did not slow down for a bit. I lost a lot of weight. I got into medical school. I started dating the most beautiful girl in my college — she was a year senior to me. I started writing on Medium where I made extraordinary friends from around the world, started making decent money and learned so fucking much in the process.
It was insane. For five years, my life only went up. That was until last June when it all came crashing down.
My girlfriend, who I was with for over 3.5 years, broke up with me.
The breakup sucked — as they do. I felt horrible. More so because I hadn’t felt this low in a long time. I was not used to this anymore. I was used to feeling happy, high, great, confident. What the fuck was this? I didn’t want to feel whatever the fuck I was feeling.
I wanted it to stop. I wanted to stop being hurt.
So there’s this book called ‘Can’t Hurt Me’ by David Goggins. It had been sitting on my kindle forever. But I never felt like reading it. However, post my breakup, I wanted to stop being hurt, and hence, I read the book. Literally, because the title read, “Can’t Hurt Me.”
So I did. And it fucking changed everything.
The book is the memoir of David Goggins — a retired Navy SEAL, ultramarathon runner, former Guinness world record holder and so much more. The lessons he shared in his book transformed my life.
In the book, he talked about true human potential, and how to find peace in life. And it led me to realise my true potential. It opened my eyes, and I saw that I was dishonouring my life by not living the way I was capable of.
And that was it. No more.
I decided that I’m going to work as hard as I can and live the life I’m supposed to live. And I got to work.
What I’m Working on Right Now
After finishing the book, I decided to set a bigass goal that I felt would do justice to my potential. So I decided that I’ll aim for an All India Rank 1 (AIR1) in an exam called INICET that I’m going to be writing about 15 months from now.
So this exam is the Indian equivalent of the USMLE. The score in this exam decides what field you’ll specialise in as a doctor.
INICET is one of the toughest exams in the world. Primarily because there are a lot of people writing this exam and very few residency seats to compete for. And if you’re looking to get a good residency in a decent college, the odds are basically peanuts. You have to work insanely hard just to crack the exam, let alone ace it.
After deciding to ace the exam, I started studying a lot. But I knew that hard work alone wasn’t going to cut it. I figured that I needed to do an insane amount of smart work to reduce the amount of work needed to be done and then work as hard as I possibly can to conquer the exam. That should do the trick, I thought.
So I started reading books on better learning, including books on how to sharpen your memory because we have a lot of stuff to memorize. As I kept discovering better ways to learn, I had a sad realisation.
I realised that we were never taught how to learn efficiently. I realised that our brains have an extraordinary capacity to learn and memorize, but nobody told us how. Time and again our teachers told us that revision and rereading is the key to learning when research has time and again proven that they’re in fact the worst ways to learn.
Memory champion Dominic O’Brien once memorized the random sequence of 2808 cards after looking at them just once. Once. And students, including me, struggle to remember the side effects of a few drugs after reading about them several times.
I’m not an idiot. And Dominic isn’t a genius. He’s just someone who has a trained memory. He just learned how to use his brain to its utmost capacity.
Becoming a great doctor is more than just about learning though. It’s also about how you live life. It’s about how you learn to find the time to devote to learning. It’s about how much you can sacrifice. It’s about standing strong in the face of uncertainty and keeping on pushing to be the best version of yourself.
After setting an almost impossible goal, I had to figure all of this out. I had no other option. And that’s what I’ve done over the past six months.
- I’ve learned a lot of ways to learn better.
- I’ve trained myself to memorize a lot of information with relative ease.
- I’ve learned a lot about avoiding distractions and staying focused.
- I’ve learned to sacrifice good for the great.
- I’ve learned how to hustle, while also maintaining my sanity.
Overall, I’ve learned how to be an excellent student. The kind of student an aspiring doctor should be. I’m happy for myself. However, what makes me sad is that what I’ve learned isn’t common knowledge at all, even though it should be.
So there’s this platform in India called ‘Marrow’. Some of the best doctors in our country teach on it and collectively, they have truly revolutionised the medical education system of India. And I love love loveeee Marrow. It’s made medicine so fucking interesting for me.
So my aim right now is to get an All India Rank 1 in my exam next year and then, from a position of power, approach Marrow to take me on as a Mentor who can teach students how to work hard, and learn with much greater efficiency than the traditional learning system.
(Inventing a job for yourself, instead of applying for an existing one, always seemed very fascinating to me.)
Of course, I could teach all of this on Youtube as well. But the thing is, all this knowledge exists on the internet already. However, not everyone seeks it out. Very few people actually seek out wisdom on the internet. Most use it for Netflix.
By becoming a teacher/Mentor on Marrow, my aim is to make all of this knowledge part of the curriculum for medical students in India. Only when it’s part of the curriculum will it reach a majority of the students. And ultimately, lead to better doctors in India.
To be honest, the immensity of my goal scares the crap out of me. I mean, I’m literally a nobody right now. I’m just a sleep-deprived medical student typing/dreaming on a 6-year old MacBook refusing to go to sleep even though it’s 3 in the morning.
And I’m aiming to impact the healthcare system of an entire country with a population of over 1 Billion? Fuck. I’m gonna wet my pants.
I’m scared. Super-scared. But to be honest, I’ve also never been more peaceful. Because I feel like I’m truly spending my time doing something I believe is for the greater good.
And hey, there’s a very high possibility that all of this remains nothing but a dream. I might fail. There’s a frighteningly high possibility that I’ll fail. But that’s okay. I’ll be able to bear that.
That’s because, over the years, I’ve trained myself to become detached from the results. I’m gonna do what’s in my control. And what’s in my control is to give in every single drop of blood, sweat and tear that I have to the endeavour at hand. And that brings us to why I’m taking a break from writing.
Why I’m Taking a Break From Writing
If you’ve made it this far, thanks a ton.
The backstory was kind of important. Not necessarily for you to read, but for me to type out.
And call it egocentric thinking, but I believe that I’m born to do truly great things. Clad with extraordinary empathy, confidence and grit — the traits I mentioned above — I believe that I’m the perfect person to strive to impact a country’s healthcare system.
Even if I’m not, I’m at least gonna give it my best try.
And that’s why I’m taking a break from writing. You see, I have my whole life to be a writer, but only over a year to chase the dream I mentioned above. Every single minute of this one year is precious, and I want to devote each one of it to my studies. And hence, I don’t have the time to write like I used to before.
Writing is my first love. There are just no words to describe how much I love writing. It’s too overwhelming to even talk about it. And among the many, many, many, lessons writing has taught me, one lesson that stands out is the importance of sacrifice.
To choose something, you have to sacrifice something else. And right now, I am choosing to go after that AIR rank 1, and for that, I have to sacrifice writing for a while.
But that’s okay. I know Writing understands. In fact, no one’s ever understood me better. She knows that it’s temporary. She knows that she’s my one true love. And that I’ll be back home to her soon.
The time I’ve spent on this platform as a writer has been exquisite. I’ve learned so much, and hopefully, passed on some of the lessons to my readers as well. To this day, every once in a while, I get emails from readers about my articles, and they make my day.
And even though I’m not gonna be writing for the next 15 months, when I do return, I intend to work very hard to discover the most profound wisdom to raise the consciousness of every person who reads my work.
If you’re someone who’s read, clapped on, commented on or shared my words, I’m eternally grateful to you. And I hope I continue to spread wisdom, inspiration and hope in the future as well.
If you feel like having a conversation with me, please feel free to reach out to me at akshadwrites@gmail.com.
Until then, adios.
— Akshad.
