Somewhere in the middle of my second preregistration post, the equivalent of a modern FY1, I finally made my mind up. General practice it was going to be. In those days, extraordinary as it may seem now, vocational training for general practice was not compulsory. If you wanted to be a GP, you could simply apply for a partnership straight after registration, something that quite a few people in my year at medical school seemed happy to do. Crazy! Like you, on the day that I qualified I felt pretty confident that I knew enough to be able to do the doctoring, and after about ten minutes in my first job I realised that the depths of my ignorance were almost unfathomable. And when it came to having to know the range of topics that would be involved in life as a GP, then panic really set in...