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.
Knowledge is power. Information is liberating.
One of the basic causes for all the trouble in the world today is that people talk too much and think too little. They act impulsively without thinking. I always try to think before I talk.
A buddha laughs too, but his laughter has the quality of a smile. His laughter has the feminine quality of grace. When an ignorant person laughs, his laughter is very aggressive, egoistic. The ignorant person always laughs at others. The contented person, the person who knows life a little, laughs at himself - at the whole play of life itself. It is not addressed to anybody in particular. He just laughs at the absurdity of it all... the impossibility of it all.
Speak only that which will bring you honor.
The world does not require so much to be informed as to be reminded.
Hard work keeps the wrinkles out of the mind and spirit.
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