Some career advice from the archives of an otherwise defunct blog from venture capital billaionaire Marc Andresseen:
In my opinion, it’s now critically important to get into the real world and really challenge yourself—expose yourself to risk—put yourself in situations where you will succeed or fail by your own decisions and actions, and where that success or failure will be highly visible.
By failure I don’t mean getting a B or even a C, but rather: having your boss yell at you in front of your peers for screwing up a project, launching a product and seeing it tank, being unable to meet a ship date, missing a critical piece of information in a financial report, or getting fired.
Why? If you’re going to be a high achiever, you’re going to be in lots of situations where you’re going to be quickly making decisions in the presence of incomplete or incorrect information, under intense time pressure, and often under intense political pressure. You’re going to screw up—frequently—and the screwups will have serious consequences, and you’ll feel incredibly stupid every time. It can’t faze you—you have to be able to just get right back up and keep on going.
That may be the most valuable skill you can ever learn. Make sure you start learning it early.
This is one of the things about a career in medicine that is very hard to do early on without going outside the school-industrial complex. In the olden days, medical students did more stuff. In many cases, contemporary students are essentially not permitted to have ownership of anything. Curating the skill to deal with responsibility, decision-making admist uncertainty, and dealing with suboptimal interactions and results is probably the biggest differentiator between a happy and unhappy approach to practicing medicine.