Sincerely, I have come to love learning for the sake of learning. Because it's never just for the sake of learning - there's always a patient, an actual human being, at the other end of that process. I wrote an article about it on KevinMD a while back, and I'll just paste in a little excerpt because I think it really explained my sentiment well:
"As physicians, we are trusted, privileged, honored with the most valuable and precious commodity in society: an individual’s health. Sure, the nurse practitioners, respiratory therapists, psychologists and others can give accurate and appropriate medical advice, but when questions get difficult, the MDs are called in. We are called not because of our ability to declutter, but because of our ability to retain, analyze, and consider the minutiae. We are called because we spent years learning the low-yield. Many health care providers can tell you that mitochondria make energy for a cell, but when a patient wants to know why her son has strokes, I’ll be glad I can explain mitochondrial cytopathies like MELAS."
It's definitely hard to practice this on a daily basis because even in med school we get totally focused on the 100% like you said, but it gets much easier once you are seeing patients every day and remembering why we learn all this crazy stuff...
