The passion for learning
“In the case of most things, you see how many things must be learned before you can become a doctor, or a pilot. How much more so in the art of living.” Marcus Aurelius
In my previous blog post, I mentioned that the best students I encountered in med school weren’t the most intelligent or the ones with the best ability to memorize complex information. The most successful students were the ones with a passion for learning certain topics and those determined enough to follow through with their plans and deal with everything that med school throws at them. I followed the methods of many of my colleagues and concluded that these two qualities make the best students and, in my opinion, the best doctors later on.
The passion for learning
Why question anything if life is currently good for you? Why change anything if you are currently happy?
Most of us spend our lives not understanding the complexity and beauty behind the world that surrounds us. Whether it’s medicine, technology, nature, or, even our emotions and social interactions. We choose not to understand anything too deeply because we don’t have to.
Our society is incomprehensibly large and too complex to grasp. One of the many great things about our society is the fact that each of us has a specific role. If you work as a doctor, you probably don’t have to know how to fix a car because there are people you can pay to fix it for you.
Even in medicine, when you become a doctor, you have to choose a specialty since knowledge in medicine itself is incredibly complex and too big to grasp.
To quote my father:
“You can become a doctor, a scientist, or a university professor, but you have to know how to change a car tire. You never know when it will come in handy.”
That notion itself is pretty understandable because if you can change your own car tire, you will save some money, but much more importantly, you will be somewhat independent in doing that task, and you won’t need to call anyone to do that certain task for you.
If you want to succeed in a certain field, you need to have a lot of deep knowledge in that specific field, but you should also aim to have a wide range of basic knowledge across multiple other fields. That type of knowledge or skill is called the T-shaped skill.
While it is true that knowing many things in life is pragmatically good for you, it is of utmost importance to teach our children to learn things just for the sake of learning.
One of the rarest qualities seen in adults but far more often seen in children is a passion for learning.
It is not a rare event to see a kid flip over a rock or disassemble a toy to find out how the toy works. Sometimes during our growing and maturing years, most of us lose that quality. The people who manage to keep that quality even after maturing are the true scientists who do science for the sake of science itself. For the sake of learning and moving past the horizon of the things we know.
One of my best mates in college wasn’t the sharpest in my class, but was sure enough one of the most successful I met.
The true reason why he was able to not only ace all of his exams but also understand many topics on a deeper level than most of us is his child-like drive to explore everything that interests him.
In three years, he asked more questions than some of my colleagues did in their entire lives. He would constantly ask questions about whether he understood the subject well or barely understood it at all. At first, I thought that he was trying to get noticed by professors and senior students to get better grades, but as time passed by, I saw him disagreeing with many professors to find the right answer. In some instances, he even entered into heated arguments with someone much more knowledgeable than himself because he couldn’t bear the feeling of not knowing something he considered important.
That childlike drive to quench the thirst for knowledge is an extremely useful quality in med school. After all, it is far easier to memorize something you consider important than to memorize some useless fact that you will never need in the real world.
In the case of my colleague, he considered almost everything important, thus allowing him to remember much of the stuff he learned in med school.
But the true question is whether that passion is innately granted to you or do you develop it sometime during your lifetime.
While it is true that some people (like my colleague) inherited the ability to be interested in everything around them, it is undeniable that every one of us seeks the truth in some form or another. That hunger for truth is written in our DNA. It is in our nature to explore and understand everything that surrounds us. It is one of the key reasons we came out of the cave and invented the wheel, or how to use fire properly, but also one of the reasons for our ultimate misery if we fail to understand our nature.
We can conclude that every human being is born with exceptional curiosity for the outside world, and the only difference between each of us is the ability to keep that curiosity along the way.
One of the reasons why many of us lose that interest in seeking knowledge can be explained as a part of the Ultimate misery of humankind theory.
The Ultimate misery of humankind is a theory that proposes the fact that humans cannot be happy in our current state, and that our true happiness comes from constant progress.
Once we figure out that we cannot be happy without constant progress, we tend to ignore our curious nature and stop questioning the world around us, thus losing our child-like curiosity but forming a sort of bubble around us to keep us happy.
Many of the greatest scientists in the world are people who understood the nature of humankind and never lost that curiosity for the unknown, even if that makes them almost always unhappy.
They know that we cannot be happy without a proper meaning, or in other words, a never-ending push towards discoveries to better the experiences we share in this life.
Summary:
Success in medical school stems not from intelligence or memorization but from passion for learning and determination. The most accomplished students are deeply curious and resilient, often maintaining a child-like drive to understand the world around them.
This passion is linked to the concept of T-shaped skills—having deep knowledge in one field (like medicine) while maintaining a broad understanding across others. Such breadth fosters independence, adaptability, and better problem-solving.
Curiosity is innate in all humans, but many lose it over time due to societal comfort or the illusion of happiness through stagnation. True fulfillment comes from constant progress and exploration—a pursuit embraced by the most dedicated scientists and learners.