Streaky jordanmarsh6, July 19, 2021April 5, 2023 My first block in medical school was cardiology; I started it all off with that bulging thing in the middle of each our chests. It was rough. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed learning about the heart. I finally kind of started to understand the thing that had been keeping me alive for 27 years. I noticed a troubling trend in my studying though: I tried to understand each subject perfectly. For example, we were assigned towards the very beginning of the block to learn about cholesterol transport. This is a big topic. There are some mechanisms by which cholesterol is deposited around our body (bad for the most part), and some mechanisms by which the body transports cholesterol back to the liver to get rid of it (good for the most part). We’ve all likely been affected by a loved one or someone we know having a heart attack, and I felt like this process was the foundation of that. Seemed important! I spent basically my entire first week of medical school trying to understand it perfectly. I thought I was working so hard. And really, I was working pretty hard, but just in the complete wrong way. I never saw a question on any quiz or test the first month of medical school on cholesterol transport. I spent so much time on it, at the expense of everything I else I was supposed to be learning. Enter Anki. Anki is a flashcard app. It’s based on something called “spaced repetition”. I won’t dig too much into those details right now, but a crucial thing is important for you to understand: Anki has cards become “due” each day. If you skip a day, those cards will be added to the next day, and the next day, and so on. There is some med school student out there (bless his or her heart) that made a master Anki deck of 32,000-ish cards that has basically everything you need to know in med school. Basically every med school student I know uses Anki. Anki taught me to move fast. I sought to understand the basic idea of the concept and then move-the-heck on. Once I started using it, I was able to cover a lot more ground and have something to say about medicine besides freaking cholesterol transport. I tell you this story because of a nifty little feature on Anki’s app: it’s streak count. Anki kept track of how many days in a row you did your cards. It only required you to complete one card for your streak to stay alive that day. I remember one Saturday night when I hadn’t completed at least one card on Anki that day. I was in bed at 10:30pm half-asleep when it dawned on me that I hadn’t done it. That little streak was such a motivator for me, I dragged my sorry butt out of bed, got to my computer and did one stupid flash card so that my streak would stay alive. There is a shocking amount of motivation we can derive from simply keeping our streak alive, while there is also a shocking amount of pain we endure when our streak ends. There is a habit formation app dedicated to nothing else but keeping track of your streaks. I used it, and frankly I really liked it. Again, it’s not perfect. Remember how I told you that initiation and renewal ceremonies were not a silver bullet? I did my initiation ceremony and promptly forgot about it a couple weeks later. Streaks are no different. I’ll have you know that my streak on Anki broke at 104 days, and I haven’t been able to get it back up to that point since. Remember the habit formation cycle? Inspiration -> Motivation -> Plans -> Action When it comes to motivation, i’ve talked about initiation and renewal ceremonies as a central principle of finding motivation to accomplish stuff. I want to add streaks to that list. Keeping track of if we have done something each day and watching that number grow is a powerful motivator to keep getting that number to grow. Self Improvement