In pursuit of excellence l Lover of consistency & conciseness l Interests: surgery, education, pharma & wherever health meets technology.👩🏾⚕️🏌🏾♀️🏃🏾♀️🏎
Major cheat code for life: Become difficult to rush. The world will pressure you to rush into everything. Rushed decisions. Rushed conversations. Rushed relationships. Rushed timelines. There's immense power in rejecting that trend. Slow down. Create space to think clearly.
Barack: You told me all those years ago that you couldn’t promise me the world, but you could promise me an interesting life. Of course, you outdid yourself and managed to give me both.
Eight years in the crucible, and not once did you melt from the heat. Not once did you let it harden you. Instead, you used it to reveal your truest essence: your stubborn optimism and unflinching courage, your dazzling brilliance and unpretentious decency, your ferocious work ethic and absolutely unshakable moral fiber.
The African continent doesn’t need more entrepreneurs. It’s full of them.
What it needs is a specific class of entrepreneurs called industrialists: business people who build value-adding firms in export-oriented job creating sectors, not rent capture.
"I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business." - Warren Buffett
Speed is essential to be at the top of your game...but speed without clarity and direction is nothing.
Take the time to think.
This brother was the last surviving link to the Jazz Age, the Harlem Renaissance, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Dizzy, Coltrane, Ella, Charlie Parker, Monk, all the way up to the Marsalises, Joshua Redman and Christian McBride in the present day.
Rest in Power. 🎼🎶🎷
Just live day by day. It's like driving at night. You only need to see as far as your headlights reach. You don't have to spot your final destination from the start. Keep going with what's lit in front of you, and the rest will come as you move. You're seriously underestimating the universe's ability to surprise you and turn things in your favor. But that only happens if you stop overwhelming yourself by trying to figure out your entire life all at once.
I recently found this note to myself:
No sense in thinking small. Don't water down your vision. A remarkable amount can be accomplished if you are willing to think longer term than most and work hard each day.
"Develop the strength to do bold things, Not the strength to suffer." - Machiavelli
Putting up with garbage isn't heroic,
Taking action against it, is.
I sat next to a junior partner at a true biglaw firm at an awards dinner a few weeks ago.
It was a great reminder for me.
She had literally just made partner.
She was accepting a “Dealmaker of the Year” award on behalf of the senior partner she works for.
He wasn’t even there.
He was nominated for a several billion dollar deal that, according to her, she did all the work on.
It’s was 8:30 at night and her son was home with the nanny with a fever.
Her husband was traveling for work.
She told me she really wants to have a second child.
But she just doesn’t see how it would work.
At one point, I said, “You can have it all.”
She sighed and said, “I know… you can’t have it all.”
I laughed and said, “No, you misheard me.”
“I said you CAN have it all.”
A collision of two very different world views.
Then she said something I can’t stop thinking about:
“I was working on this big deal [blah blah blah] and I didn’t even have a summer last year.”
By the way, all of this is 110% true. I’m not fudging a single detail.
On the ride home, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It felt like it was a message from God reminding me to be grateful for what I have.
Ignore the people self-soothing.
Ignore the people who were never really in biglaw giving you misinformation.
When I talk about biglaw, this is the biglaw I’m talking about.
(Btw, she was *amazing* and I wish her the very best. I hope one day my phone rings and it’s her looking for a new job!)
And I don’t begrudge hard work. We work really, really hard.
But there has to be limits!
And it’s why, as a startup law firm, we recruit talent way disproportionately great to what we should.
The lie of biglaw is that the sacrifice is temporary.
It tells you:
Grind now.
Miss the summers now.
Delay the kids now.
Let someone else get the award now.
Eventually, you’ll earn your freedom.
But for a lot of people, the reward for surviving biglaw is just more biglaw.
Be very careful climbing a ladder that only rewards you with more ladder.
The moral of the story:
Success is not success if it requires you to outsource the life you actually wanted.
Your job as a physician isnt to ramble about outcomes or list every possible Rx option. Your job is to provide context, inspire confidence, show empathy, listen, and understand your patients needs. That’s what makes you a physician. That’s what makes you special ❤️
One of my favorite aviation phrases:
“Superior pilots use their superior judgement to avoid having to demonstrate their superior skills.”
It’s true for any proceduralist btw.