It's almost impossible to keep up. Sometimes I wonder if my inability to remember things has to do with overload from SHEER VOLUME. Example: I just finished reading the book Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
. This is in tandem with reading a lot of work by Cal Newport tangentially related to some of the content of that book. Key focus : the importance of understanding where you come from and the high value of hard, hard work. So, reading that book, reading Cal's blog entries and reconsidering my work habits, goals and senses of who I am - a lot of lifestyle redesign going on. Most of it is rather subtle. Most of it is just changing attitudes. But, doing this work is alongside everything else. What's everything else, right now? Seeing patients (increasing numbers - hurrah), doing the stuff that goes along with having a business (bookkeeping, lots of marketing work, inventory, paperwork, billing insurance, dealing with legal stuff), being an active member of a wonderful family and the dad of a fantastic 13 year old, working out regularly, attending to my spiritual cultivation, dealing with all the normal household stuff (budgeting, planning, cleaning, gardening, taking care of animals, etc etc) and somehow still finding time to be an intern for a "business guru," being an observer at the clinic of one of the greatest Chinese medicine practitioners of our time and still making time to study! It's just a lot, and it's always been a lot - so it's hard to remember the flavor of one day as differentiated from the last.
The exercise I intended to do - writing every day - is a noble concept. But, I'd just be writing so much every day! The best I can hope to do is write when I can, and enjoy that.
This is particularly the case given the preliminary outcomes of the "lifestyle design" I mentioned above. One of the points that is made in the book (and in various ways by
Cal Newport) is the path to mastery of a skill or profession. It is really this which has intrigued me, being a mastery junkie. The major point is that it takes 10,000 hours of practice, in general, for a person to master a skill like, say, playing the piano. This is a point Malcolm makes, and it is something found in the literature about psychology and learning. 10,000 hours is a long time. When it comes to Chinese medicine, the matter is more complicated than in playing the piano - I'd wager. There are simply more skills involved, and some of the practice requires an elusive resource - patients. Cal extends the idea a bit (not on his own - with the help of other writers) to suggest that it's not just random practice that is necessary, but the right KIND of practice. What's needed is called "deliberate practice." If you want to read more about it, I suggest you follow one of the links in Cal's name above. The essence is this - the practice needs to be pushing the edges of your knowledge (reasonably difficult), it needs to have clear metrics (what will getting better look like?) and you need to be able to measure yourself against that metric somehow (with supervision, or...) and most of all - it needs to be regular. It's suggested that perhaps only 5000 hours of practice like this may be sufficient in certain skills.
So, what would a "deliberate practice" schedule for Chinese medicine look like? This has been my obsession for the past few days. I'm still not quite there. I will of course accumulate practice with patients, and that's really probably the best venue for deliberate practice that I have available. It's hard (if you don't rest on your laurels) it has reasonable metrics (the patient improves) and someone to measure your progress (the patient). But there's more than that. More than anything, this work just reminds me that, as a health practitioner and as the inheritor of a storied tradition like Chinese medicine, I have a responsibility to constantly push myself, constantly be devoted to the task of learning and improving. My patients rely on me to do this, and I will not let them down.
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