Redefining success as a medic

We’re well into 2026 and at this point, many people are reviewing their resolutions and goals for the year to track progress. For medics, some of those goals look vastly different to our peers outside of work.

Medicine tends to attract ambitious, high-achieving people, and presents a linear path of achievements. Pass the exams to get into medical school, graduate and get into your chosen specialty, then enjoy your success as a consultant. It sounds simple.

Hence being ‘successful’ felt much easier earlier in life, and earlier in this career. 

Somewhere along the way life becomes complicated by expectations of audits and publications, portfolio building and post-grad exams. The competition for these has grown to unprecedented levels, and as achievements become more difficult to attain, so the check points to track your progress become fewer and further between.

I realised that still, we were not all on the same level when it came to opportunity, awareness of expectations and freedom to make bold career choices. Emails go unanswered, study leave gets rejected, the study budget itself is nonexistent. Suddenly the career you aspired to seems much further away and much less attainable. 

Every career has its own challenges, yes, but when discussing this with non-medic peers, the confusion is almost immediate: ‘Aren’t you already a doctor?.. What else do you need to do?’ It feels silly to complain that you are not where you want to be in life, when you are somewhere in the career you have worked towards for a significant portion of your life. This part of your career is a necessary stepping stone to learn and make progress, but how do you explain that the next stone keeps moving further away.  

Simultaneously, life goes on. There are relationships to build, finances to organise, homes to buy, and a personality to try not to lose. Medicine has a way of making itself the centre of attention. There is always another career milestone to reach, meaning personal milestones end up taking a backseat. The sunken cost fallacy pushes medics to continue at 100mph because if you slow down or take a break, the path gets that much longer or the opportunity will be lost. The real and imagined pressures of making any sort of progress often lead to burnout.  

Familiarity with the job can breed disrespect for yourself. Frequent, long, unsociable hours are “just part of the job”, rather than a detriment to your wellbeing. Constantly breaking bad news and managing complex diagnoses is “not a big deal”, rather than an occasionally traumatic aspect of the job. In the race to reach the next part of training, you forget how far you have come since starting work. You may have quite literally saved multiple lives, delivered babies, and talked people through the best and worst days of their lives. The knowledge, experience and self-confidence you gain is only recognised in the ‘Experience’ part of your CV or in that one interview question you spend weeks preparing for. But if the interview never comes, or you haven’t enough points to apply, when do you acknowledge your progress?

With specialty applications well underway in this current climate, I’ve found that this is a good checkpoint to review not only my career but my life as a whole. Call it frontal lobe development or just growing up, but my epiphany at 25 was that I need to be a more well rounded person. I may have accidentally made medicine my entire personality and it was coming to my own detriment. I love my job and find it incredibly fascinating, but was finding myself much less so. Becoming a doctor was not my only goal in life but somehow overshadowed the rest. While my chosen specialty is not the most competitive to enter, the potential toll of the job on personal wellbeing over the course of a career is not to be underestimated. The culture of medicine can make it feel as though your worth is measured by how much of yourself you are willing to sacrifice for it, and I cannot allow myself to believe this. 

I work hard at becoming a good doctor, and I must work at least equally hard at becoming a good person. 

So I asked myself some questions:

• What expectations do I hold for others but fall short of, myself?

• Do I live out my faith as I want to?

• Am I learning about other important areas of my adult life; relationships, finances, wellbeing; as much as I am my job? 

I approached my 2026 goal-setting with these questions in mind, considering aspects such as health, finances and personal development (which I like to call ✨enrichment✨) and considering how I can be more intentional about investing in them. 

Here’s what that looked like in practice:

• Scheduling time for things outside medicine (not just fitting them in “if there’s time”)

• Actively learning about finances and long-term stability

• Having honest conversations with seniors about life beyond medicine

I stopped defining success solely by how I felt my career was progressing, and more by my contentment with my life as a whole.

Since F1 have often asked registrars to share their thoughts on contentment in life. As with many things, the experiences of those more senior can be invaluable to change perspective and even to avoid mistakes. I know that if I’m not intentional about it, work may easily become the only metric by which I measure my life.

My career may last another 40 years, but my life may last much, much longer.

I have to be happy with how I live it.

Written by Dr Cynthia Sumah