Assume a job interview

Toward a perfect answer.

Why not med?

- Because I have felt that going in med would not allow me to achieve my full potential. Once one gets accepted into med, one is pretty much assured to get a job, so there isn't much stimulation. In Law, on the contrary, one must be the best in order to secure a job, so the continual competition throughout the years would allow me to keep aiming for the top.

Why would there be no competition in med?

- I guess it's something psychological, in the sense that once you know that as long as you do moderately well, you are pretty much assured to be employed. So there isn't much of an incentive to get better results. In order to get a job, that is.
On top of that, if I had gone into med, it would have been mainly to satisfy my parents. So once I would have been a doctor, I would probably just have sat around, thinking, here, I am a doctor. Isn't that what you wanted? But in Law, there's the added pressure that I have to prove to my parents that I made the right choice, and that I was able to achieve something, and I wouldn't have been satisfied unless I had something great to show them.

Can't you compete against yourself?

- Competing against oneself sounds very nice on paper, but in practice, I find it pretty useless. It is much better to have a tangible target. It is very easy to be satisfied when competing against oneself, since any slight improvement is considered a success. I find it much more productive to have something to aim for, rather than just to be "better" than myself. Say I can only run 1 mile, and my neighbour can run 10 miles. I think it is more productive to tell myself, "tomorrow, I will run 10 miles", rather than to say "tomorrow, I'll run a bit more than a mile".

It all sounded so well in my head...