It's About the Destination, Not the Journey: A Reflection on Perseverance in Healthcare
I recently watched The Brutalist, a three-hour and 35-minute film produced by A24 that profoundly impacted me. It made me think about perseverance and our sacrifices to reach our goals.
We often hear the saying, "It's about the journey, not the destination." But what if, sometimes, it's actually the other way around? In The Brutalist, a character offers a different perspective: "It's about the destination, not the journey." This idea struck a chord with me, not just personally but also in the world of healthcare.
In the film, Lázló is deeply disappointed when he finally reaches his destination, but that isn’t always true. While reaching a goal may not always meet our expectations, it can be incredibly fulfilling and rewarding.
For new graduates in nursing and medical residents, the journey to proficiency is filled with endless learning, uncertainty, and navigating differing opinions on guidelines and best practices. Doubt can creep in—wondering if you're making the right decisions, interpreting things correctly, or keeping up with the ever-evolving field. The journey itself is often full of frustration and mental exhaustion. But why do we keep going? Because we have our eyes on the destination—helping patients, improving outcomes, and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in modern medicine.
The truth is that healthcare professionals often endure high-pressure environments, differing viewpoints, and the constant need to adapt. There are moments of doubt and uncertainty, but we persist. Ultimately, it’s not about how hard the journey is—it’s about why we take it in the first place.
The reward is in the destination: the patient who walks out of the hospital after weeks of intensive care. This family gets to hold their loved one again, knowing our efforts contributed to something bigger than ourselves. That’s what makes it all worth it.
So, as we continue in this field, let’s remind ourselves that we don’t have to love the journey all the time. We have to believe in where it’s leading us.
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Acknowledgments:
Here is a list of tools and resources that assisted in creating this article and others. I developed three custom GPTs for specialized research: AI ECMO Expert, ECMO Specialist Handover Practice, and Micro Definitions (MD-GPT). These tools were instrumental in gathering and analyzing information from key sources.
Special thanks to the AI platforms and tools that facilitated this research:
OpenEvidence (Daniel Nadler and Zachary Ziegler, OpenEvidence)
GPT-4o/o1, Claude 3.5 Sonnet/Opus, Perplexity, Gemini 1.5 Flash
Grammarly for editorial and proofreading assistance (can't live without it)
Leonardo AI, DALL-E3 AI Image Generator, Microsoft Designer, and Adobe Express for generating images and visual content