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.
Some people believe holding on and hanging in there are signs of great strength. However, there are times when it takes much more strength to know when to let go and then do it.
To inquisitive minds like yours and mine the reflection that the quantity of human knowledge bears no proportion to the quantity of human ignorance must be in one view rather pleasing, viz., that though we are to live forever we may be continually amused and delighted with learning something new.
The melancholy joys of evils pass'd, For he who much has suffer'd, much will know.
Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.
Poirot," I said. "I have been thinking." "An admirable exercise my friend. Continue it.
I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.