• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

33 Charts

  • About
    • What is 33 Charts?
    • Bryan Vartabedian MD
    • Sponsorship
  • Blog
  • 33mail
  • Foci
    • Social/Public Media
    • Physicians
    • Patients
    • Hospitals
    • Information
    • Process/Flow
    • Technology
    • Digital culture
    • Future Medicine
  • The Public Physician
Physicians

You Are Not Your Job

August 9, 2016 By Bryan Vartabedian · Reading Time: < 1 minute

IMG_6204The world has taken to Twitter to disclose their #firstsevenjobs. In fits of nostalgia, we’re jumping in to line item our sequence to now. Mastermind Austin Kleon weighed in that you are not your job. He suggests that we may be defined on some level by our history.

I suspect this to be true in a physician’s work.

What third year medical student has any idea of what she’s getting herself into? In our mid-twenties we commit to a path rooted in an ideal. Along the way we find only those options exercised by the generation before us. In the end we take one of a few jobs and hope that it meets the imagination of our post-juvenile core clerkship self.

Years later some doctors find that they can’t see beyond the next shift or exam room. Burnt out and locked in they know one thing and see few options other than their job. The paralysis is in part due to what I call medicine’s culture of permission.

But true to Kleon’s suggestion, I suspect our true work may be identified in our past or just beyond the narrow clinical spaces where we land. This isn’t about leaving medicine but coupling it with our true purpose.

It took me this long to begin to get my hands around what drives me. My biggest job now is reconciling my work with the skills that I’ve spent the better part of my life refining.


Tapping in to your creative self? I might suggest a look at Austin Kleon’s brilliant Steal Like an Artist.

Related Articles

  • The Spark
  • Doctors and the Endemic Culture of Permission
  • Communications: A New Job for Physicians

Related Articles

  • The Spark
  • Doctors and the Endemic Culture of Permission
  • Communications: A New Job for Physicians

Primary Sidebar

Bryan Vartabedian, MD

Bryan Vartabedian is a pediatrician at Baylor College of Medicine / Texas Children’s Hospital and one of health care’s influential voices on technology & medicine.
Learn More

Popular Articles

  • The Fate of Fired Cleveland Clinic Resident Lara Kollab
  • Cures Act Final Rule – How It Will Change Medicine
  • 12 Things About Doximity You Probably Didn’t Know
  • Should Physicians Give Their Cell Phone Number to Patients?
  • Doximity Dialer Video – Telemedicine’s Latest Power Player

Sign up for 33mail newsletter

The most interesting stuff in medicine curated each week

Featured Articles

Reactive and Creative Spaces

100,000 Connected Lemmings

Doctors and social media: Damned if you engage, damned if you don’t

Health Care and the Visibility-Value Continuum

The Case for New Physician Literacies in the Digital Age

  • Facebook
  • Google+
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Footer

What is 33 Charts?

With a mashup of curated and original content that crosses the spaces of digital health, media, communication, technology, patient experience, digital culture, and the humanities, 33 charts offers unique insight and analysis on the changing face of medicine.

Founded in 2009 as a center of community and thought leadership for the issues doctors face in a digital world, 33 charts was included in the National Library of Medicine permanent web archive in 2014.
Learn More

Foci

  • Digital culture
  • Digital Health
  • EHR/Health IT
  • Future Medicine
  • Hospitals
  • Information
  • Patients
  • Physicians
  • Process/Flow
  • Quality
  • Social/Public Media
  • Technology

Copyright © 2022 · 33 Charts · Terms · Privacy