I know a pharmacist who is on in years. I once spoke to him about how he motivated
himself over his career. This is his story:
“When I graduated from pharmacy school a long time ago, I was married and had a family.
I was excited about being a pharmacist. I loved all the exciting things that were happening
in medicine and keeping up with all the latest information. However, basically, I was a
workaholic and would fill in for my friends who owned their own pharmacies in our town. I
worked at a local hospital, so I would have every other weekend off and sometimes a day
during the week. I had a relief job most every Saturday.
It was on one of those weekend relief jobs that something happened that changed my
paradigm or worldview. The pharmacy was a little local store that had been in existence for
many decades, it was currently operated by the son of the business owner, and he was a
high school friend of mine. The job was routine in those days, we mainly refilled
prescriptions on weekends, with a few occasional new prescriptions. Sometimes someone
would come in with a cough or cold, or minor pain of some kind looking for advice on what
to get OTC. It was fun for me, and I enjoyed the laid-back atmosphere. The store hours on
Saturdays were 9 am to 6 pm. This one Saturday, the technician (a high school student back
then) and I were preparing to close the store and count the register to balance the cash
transactions for the day (there were not a lot of credit cards used in those days, mainly
cash). Of course, as it always happens, someone came into the store at 5:58 pm, two
minutes before we closed. I was tempted to say that we were closed, and they would have to
come back. But I noticed the man was holding a little baby, maybe six months old, on his
shoulder. The man looked like he was a construction laborer, and the baby had diarrhea
coming out of its diaper. When I hesitated to say anything, the man said he had been at
work all day, and when he came home, he found his wife very sick herself as well as the
baby. The wife had managed to get the baby to the doctor but was too ill herself to get the
medication for the baby. I stood there for a moment and looked at them. This father was holding his child on his shoulder with a soiled diaper. I thought about myself,
wanting to get home to see my family and to be with them. I knew it would take at least 10-
12 minutes to fill the prescription and then go over the instructions with the father. The
medication was for paregoric liquid which is dosed very carefully in children according to
body weight and using a dropper. I knew I had to be careful and explain everything to the
father in detail and in addition, make sure he knew how to draw medication in a dropper.
And then we would still have to close out the register. We were going to be substantially late
closing the store that Saturday.
However, something happened inside of me; at that moment in time, pharmacy and
medicine was not about lab values, doses, and interactions. It was about the fact that what
I, as a pharmacist, affected the lives of the people I served in a wonderful and meaningful
way. I changed that day. So, when I would sometimes get down about the profession, I
would remember that father and child, and the mother at home, and the effect I had on
their lives, though in a small way, at that moment, bringing comfort to their lives.
So, my motivation over the decades has been that I really did affect people’s lives in a
positive way. The motivation came from within me, not from the outside of me. That is a
much better motivation when you want to do something as opposed to you feeling you
must do something. Internal motivation is pleasant, and external motivation is usually
unpleasant. Anyway, that is my story of how I have remained positively motivated all these
years. It only took a moment in time to change. Look for your moment in time!”
P.S.- By the way, that pharmacist was me. WG
What do you think?