As a surgeon you have to have a controlled arrogance. If it's uncontrolled, you kill people, but you have to be pretty arrogant to saw through a person's chest, take out their heart and believe you can fix it. Then, when you succeed and the patient survives, you pray, because it's only by the grace of God that you get there.
Interpretation
Surgeons need a balanced confidence to perform life-saving operations, knowing that their skills must be tempered with humility and gratitude.
In this quote, Mehmet Oz emphasizes the necessity for surgeons to possess a certain level of arrogance or confidence to undertake the daunting task of performing surgery. This 'controlled arrogance' allows them to believe in their abilities to save lives, while at the same time recognizing the fragile nature of life and the role of a greater power in their successes. Ultimately, it highlights the balance between self-assuredness and humility that is crucial in high-stakes professions such as medicine.
In practice
In a graduation speech to medical students, to inspire them about the balance needed in their future careers.
What we have now is doctors who are actually better technically at what they're doing in their specialty than 30 or 40 years ago, but we lost the relationship, when the doctor would look people in the eye and say, 'I care about you. We can do this together.'
As we get better at understanding how little we know about the body, we begin to realize that the next big frontier in medicine, is energy medicine. It's not the mechanistic part of the joints moving. It's not the chemistry of our body. It's understanding for the first time how energy influences how we feel.
Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.
A man finds he has been wrong at every stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right.
I might believe I had unusual talent if I did not know what good music was; I might enjoy half an hour's practice a day if I were busy and happy the rest of the time. You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed! I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning.
We have the means of evangelizing our country, but they are slumbering in the pews of our churches.
Every day, have a little bird on your shoulder that asks, 'Is today the day? Am I ready? Am I doing all I need to do? Am I being the person i want to be? Is today the day I die?
Passion is a rather frightening thing because if you have passion you don't know where it will take you.
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