What is it "to learn"?
To be a carpenter takes more than just owning tools and having a workshop; like any successful professional, being a carpenter takes passion and drive. It takes a commitment to learn and improve.
I was talking with a woman last night, and her story helped to explain this one. She started out as a neurologist in China, where, at the time she graduated, you worked in the hospitals. Medicine was considered a service, and you couldn’t make much money from it. She worked in a hospital in Beijing, and was talking about her experiences there.
She loved it – all the time there were new and different cases, not like in a private practice in Canada, where you see the same people every day, maybe a little cough, some common sicknesses – no. In this hospital, there were many different cases, some that not even the chief of the department had seen before. That’s what she liked about working there; you were always learning! The chief was a professor as well, and sometimes you get doctors from the United States coming in to give seminars, so you were always learning! She loved these challenges, much more than doing the same thing all the time. She loved learning new things, and bending her mind around new challenges.
Twenty years ago (in China at least, if not in medicine in general) neurology was NOT a big thing; most of the profession was focusing on the heart. She was focusing on the brain and the neurons. She emphasized that one of the key points in her learning and her positive experience in the hospital was her ability to be flexible. She was able to learn to think laterally to solve problems, and that helped her to learn a lot.
It was an environment there of learning, yes, but the stakes were high. She made a point of discussing the importance of residency before you could open a practice. If you don’t have the residency, you don’t have the experience; you can’t think in your own way, and you can’t solve problems. You can’t always just translate from the textbook. To highlight the importance of experience, and being able to solve problems outside of the textbook, she used a very potent example. One time a patient came in while she was still learning, and she diagnosed him as having bleeding in the brain. He had lost consciousness, as she said, it was deep. So she went “the textbook route”. She did a spinal tap to get some blood, to see if it was dirty or clean. Se was also doing emergency treatment … but he died before she could finish. What the chief of the department said to her afterwards (he came in after the spinal tap, but before he died) was that you did everything you were supposed to do – you did everything right. The only thing is that if there is bleeding in the brain the pressure will be so great that to remove blood from the bottom of the spinal cord will reduce pressure in the spinal cord, and the greater pressure in the skull will kill the person.
She was so upset by this whole situation – it was a human life at stake, and no-one told her to do things that way, she did things by the textbook way, but the lesson she learned there was that the textbook way is not always the way to do things. She learned right there that there is no substitute for experience; no substitute for someone more experienced than you are looking over everything you do, correcting you, guiding you. You need that interaction in the beginning, or you may not learn very important lessons, not just cased based, but in how to solve problems, and how to think.
Someone comes into the hospital with a condition that no-one knows. As the resident, you do the best you can to diagnose the patient. The Chief of the department can go in and look at the patient too, they will check all the tests you did, and look at the patient, and give their opinion. It still may not be right, but they will still have more experience than you. They will have seen many more iterations of different diseases and conditions, and may be able to diagnose them better than you can.
Being a carpenter, like being a doctor … or more accurately being an apprentice, like being a resident, takes a constant yearning to learn and challenge yourself more to reach for new things and new experiences, new chances to grow. Once you stop learning in any particular job, it’s time to move on.
