Nick Hutchison reviews Brian Lima's memoir about the son of Cuban immigrants who became a doctor by rejecting "work smart, not hard" for a blend of both. Lima's core idea: control what you can control, and compound effort outworks everything else.
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Hello, Book Thinkers family. Today's book tip is going to come from Heart to Beat by Brian Lima, MD. I really enjoyed reading this book. I thought it was wonderfully written, and I gotta give a lot of props to Brian. When he reached out and said, hey, can you give this book a shot? I said, sure. I didn't know what to expect, but I was blown away. Whenever I'm going to read a book and I know that I'm going to do a video on it, I try to underline or highlight a couple different passages that I may be able to talk about. Sometimes that's harder to do, but in this book there are 30 or 40 different passages that I could have selected from. I really found a lot of value here. Some of the core principles that this book talks about and portrays— well, I guess one of them more specifically would be the fact that the American dream is still alive and well. Brian was the son of Cuban immigrant parents, and he faced every obstacle along the way, but slow and steady can still win the race. Somebody who against all odds can still win the race and become super successful in whatever field that they want to be in if they apply unmatched hard work to every situation they come across. I identified a lot with some of the earlier stuff that Brian talked about. He was a football star in high school, but he outworked everybody in the classroom, graduating at the top of his class in high school, but also being a captain on the football team. And you don't find a lot of people like that. People like that have something special up here. Work Ethic. And in this book, Brian says that he hates the term work smart, not hard, because if you want to be outstanding, you need to work smart and hard in every situation. So a couple of the other things that I identified with in this book— Brian referenced some of my favorite books that sit right behind me, books that I've done reviews on, such as Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins or Relentless by Tim S. Grover. He also talked at the end of the book a little bit about Aubrey Marcus and his book Own the Day, Own Your Life. Those are some of my favorites, and I would encourage anybody to read this book who wants to be patient, wants to understand that things can happen in the long run. A lot of times people in my generation, specifically millennials or Gen Xers, we want things to happen instantaneously because we see all of these overnight success stories on social media. Brian is a testament to the fact that slow and steady will win the race. If you outwork everybody around you. And I found that very motivating. I would put this book in a motivational category for me, something that's going to challenge me to break through those barriers in the same way that David Goggins can by yelling at you. Brian can as a testament to his own story. So I thought it was fantastic. The passage that I did select to read to everybody today, I thought was also very interesting, and it kind of goes with this theme. That mediocrity is not going to suffice. It's a little bit of a long one, but I'll kind of break it up by reading it in chunks. So to start, Brian says, at the end of the day, that's all you can do— control what you can control and let the chips fall where they may. That's a principle that I've learned through studying some of these fantastic Stoic philosophers over the last couple years, like Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus, and they really preach this. Anything that's not in your control, forget about it. Don't let it stress you out. Don't let it worry you. Focus on what's in your sphere of influence, and then you have more of an opportunity to be successful and to optimize your output every day because you're not wasting time on things that are not important. Then he goes on to say, that's how I've managed to keep my sanity and not wither under the pressure of expectation, internal or external. We all know that there's a lot of pressure today from society, whether it's your parents or your peers or your colleagues, whatever Whatever the case may be, everybody has high expectations for you. And whether you're one of the best cardiac surgeons in the world or whether you're a book Instagrammer, somebody's going to have negative judgment of what you're doing and offer their opinion. So I think that that's a very important principle as well. Then he goes on to say, I realized early on that I was, that I was just a constant in a multivariate equation of life. I could control my contribution to the equation like the C in E= mc², but the final outcome for any given scenario is going to depend on those other variables. But taking it a step further, and this is the home run hitter for me, this is why I circled this one 1,000 times, but taking it a step further, I knew that if I really brought the heat and maximized my contribution, it may very well dwarf the impact of those other variables and have the major say in how things turned out. So in this vein, complacency kills. If you can only control what's in your sphere of influence, understanding that there are other things out there that may impact Your outcome, what might, you know, however you define success in life, you can only control so many things. There are other variables out there. But if you can triple down so hard, if you can outwork everybody else on the things that are in your control, then the other factors might not even matter. You might win 99 times out of 100 just because you've dwarfed those other variables. And that's what's so exciting to me. If you put your nose to the grindstone and you keep moving forward and let that activity compound over time, like Brian for 20 years. in some of the most insane institutions in the world as far as competitive competition goes, you can come out on top and you can be super successful, happy, and fulfilled in life. So this book was about those principles, and Brian did tell— or Brian did talk about these principles through the narrative of his own personal journey, which I thought was a lot of fun. He kind of makes some jokes and stuff throughout the book like, ah, here's another cliché story that I'm going to tell you, but I found a lot of value in those. So Brian, you wrote a very good book. I really enjoyed it. I'm going to share this book with a lot of my friends and family. Hopefully everybody that's watched the video and made it this far finds a reason to get this book as well, because I thought that it was a great book overall. I love all of the lessons that I learned here, and I'm going to apply them to my life. It's another kind of chip on my shoulder, another motivating factor to keep me going and be patient, to wait and wait and wait while I'm working a million miles an hour. Gary Vee talks about this all the time. It's the clouds and the dirt. You've got to keep the high level, but You also need to keep your nose down and work. And that's what's so motivating to me. So with that, everybody, I hope you've had a fantastic day. I hope you enjoyed this video. Go read something like this book. Have a great day. Bye. Bye.
