Sorry, but I wanted to be completely honest. There were a few guys like me in my medical school. There needs to be a counterpoint to the doom and gloom reports of "no life" and "living hell".
(Not a med student, but I double majored in two different engineerings so I had a pretty tough road)
Honestly I think people over rate how difficult school is.
I was definitely in the camp of 'it's so fucking hard, I have no life, it's horrible' etc etc etc. And I'm a smart guy. Guess what, when I actually went through and figured out how much time I was spending working, it wasn't that much. If you clear out the procrastination and bullshit and just sit down and work hard while you are working, it's not bad.
Then you actually have free time.
I struggled with this for years, but working at 50% effort for twice as many hours is a horrible way to go about things because you end up living a miserable life.
At my graduation they announced the valevictorian. It was one of my friends. We had no idea. He never talked about grades. He never bitched about work. He went out drinking nearly every day of the week. He spent a lot more time chasing women than chasing grades. But when he went to the library to work, he worked.
Remember, 6 hours a day of hard work is worth a lot more than 12 hours of half assed work, and thats what he did. That leaves 18 hours a day to enjoy yourself.
"but working at 50% effort for twice as many hours is a horrible way to go about things because you end up living a miserable life."
For how long? The years of college and graduate school?
Misery is not working hard enough and then ending up being one of those people unemployed in later years. (Which I agree can happen to anyone obviously.)
"6 hours a day of hard work is worth a lot more than 12 hours of half assed work"
True. But you will never be able to work as long and as hard as you can when you are young. The fun comes later.
And once you have a family and kids all bets are off as
far as how much you can work.
Look different things are important to different people.
But in life (as in entrepreneurship) you never know the thing that you do that will eventually benefit you. You have to learn and do as much as you can. I can trace things now that are of great benefit today that I did 15 years ago by foregoing a summer and actually summers of fun.
It's easy to look back (even roentgen at 800k) and say "look it all worked out for me and I was able to party". But we don't really have much data to support that strategy (an outlier as pointed out by verisimilitude) and in fact it doesn't really make sense that you can put in half the work and do AS WELL as putting in more of an effort without completely wearing yourself down.
